Software product development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive process. My goal for today is to make you think twice before creating any software product. First of all, let’s go through the stages of the software product development process:

• Planning - defining the project goal, identifying the scope, involved stakeholders, and available resources
• Analysis - defining functional and non-functional requirements, time and effort estimates, work breakdown and assignment
• Design - defining software architecture, user experience and user interface
• Implementation - actual coding work
• Testing - verifying the resulting product corresponds to functional and non-functional requirements, and meets UX/UI designs
• Deployment - delivering the resulting product to the end-users As you can see, there are many steps involved.

Furthermore, for a new SaaS product, the process is always repetitive, since more and more new features can be added to fulfil user feature requests, changes of the target market, and other external factors. If your goal is to automate some internal process instead of selling your software product to other businesses, it might not be feasible.

Oftentimes, buying an existing solution makes more sense than creating a new one. After more than ten years in
software development, I have my list of things that I would never build from scratch unless there is a particular reason:

• CRM – Customer Relations Management. Popular solutions like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce are customizable enough for virtually any industry and target markets. Marketing Automation Tools – similar to CRMs, there are so many great tools out there, like MailChimp, MailJet, ActiveCampaign, SendPulse, GetResponse.
• Website and Landing Pages – use a tool provided by your marketing solution, opensource CMS like WordPress(I’m not too fond of it as a software engineer, but still it’s better than creating your own CMS), visual page builders like Wix, WebFlow, or Unbounce.
• ERP – the level of ERP systems complexity is so high, and even ready-to-use solutions require a substantial amount of configuration and customization. Doing an entirely new ERP system from scratch is rarely feasible.
• e-Commerce Websites – similar to ERP, existing e-Commerce platforms provide many standard features for product catalogs, discounts, and promotions, checkout, and may be extended and customized to suit the needs of a specific organization. Magento, Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP C4 Commerce are great examples of such tools.

The only exception is when you want to build a new platform that will be sold to end-customers. In this case, meticulous market research is required, and still, it should be built on top of something.