So you’ve had this awesome game-changing consumer app idea for years, and now you’ve finally gathered the chutzpah to make your mobile app dream a reality. You’ve consulted all your friends and family and even gone as far as running it past a few people in the industry. Everyone agrees—it’s a great idea. But a lot more goes into a successful app than just an idea and the development work.

Many consumer apps of all sizes and budgets fail because they overlook key factors that directly impact the success and sustainability of their app. Here are some companies we, at Process Street, have found that did almost everything right—and failed as a result of one mistake.

Ignoring the impact of even one of these five details will prove harmful—if not fatal—to your consumer app.

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This article comes excerpted from Hiten Shah’s SaaS DNA Project: The Anatomy of a SaaS Marketing Site, a 30,000+ word research study on how users actually browse and experience SaaS marketing sites.

Hiten Shah has built products on the web for over 10 years, including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and now Quick Sprout. He breaks down everything he’s learned about building companies in his weekly email newsletter here.

When it comes to price, customers want to know two things: what they’ll pay, and what they’ll get in return. But too many SaaS companies overcomplicate their pricing pages.

Your pricing page converts traffic into customers. But that only happens if visitors instantly understand what they’ll get from each of your plans, the value it will provide, and how much it’s going to cost them. Otherwise, they’ll never sign up for your service.

In a comprehensive look at SaaS pricing pages, we studied 30 different SaaS websites through 90 different user interactions, totaling over 1,800 minutes of user testing. With help from UserTesting.com, we guided participants to each company’s pricing page and instructed them to read through the plans the company offered.

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On April 18th Zapier announced their newest integration with the Swedish smart button called Flic. I’m not known to go insane when finding out about apps and integrations , in fact, a year ago I probably didn’t know what an app means (no, I’m not kidding). But working for a SaaS startup has made me put on my techy pants and actually follow the news and trends.

However, nothing prepared me for this!

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With legions of social activists paving the way, we’ve been dealing with the lack of workplace diversity in America for over a decade. And although you’d think that tech startups—with their productivity solutions and their open office spaces—would be at the forefront of the gender equality movement, the numbers tell a different story.

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Everyone on the 9-5 grind fantasizes about working fewer hours. It’s one reason why Tim Ferriss’ The 4-hour Workweek shot to the top of the bestseller list when it came out in 2007. It offered people a chance to live the dream.

So why isn’t everyone doing it today?

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We all hear those stories of super successful entrepreneurs who get a crazy amount done before the sun rises. They shared with us their morning routine tips on how they can meditate, exercise, and get work done while most of us are still sleeping.

And yet, entrepreneurs have some of most hectic and erratic schedules around. They often don’t work your typical 9-5 in an office, and their calendars involve a ton of meetings, managing employees, lots of travel, and working on the weekends. Because they’re not necessarily doing the same thing every day, it can be hard to establish a daily routine.

We interviewed ten top SaaS entrepreneurs to hear about how they’ve developed a routine in the midst of a chaotic life, and where it’s gotten them. What’s more, it’s not particularly easy to stick to a routine—even if you know it works. A lot of founders often struggle to do their ideal morning routine and they fall short of this idealized entrepreneur.

But that doesn’t stop them from trying. Here are some of their morning routines, and the tips and tricks they use to adhere to them and gear up for a successful day.

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Customer success has the unique distinction of being both the #1 driver of revenue retention in SaaS companies and SaaS companies’ best kept secret. According to Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, customer success is where 90% of revenue is. For such an important topic, though, the dialogue around customer success is terrible.

Most conversations about customer success tend to be very high-level, with little in the way of concrete, actionable advice. Too many think pieces, not enough case studies. With this in mind, we thought we’d take a different approach to the topic.

We talked to 5 SaaS companies whose customer success processes have lead to sustained growth, reduced churn, and improved customer relationships, and we asked them a simple question: What is the one tool your customer success strategy could not do without?
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When you’re planning blog posts, it can be hard to keep coming up with good ideas, let alone a good title.

Sure, you have a couple in the pipeline, and some other topics you’re itching to write about. But looking at the calendar a couple months down the line, you’re coming up blank. How is it that some places churn out insightful and well-written content every Wednesday at noon?

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The following post is a guest contribution from Steve Klein the co-founder of StatusPage.io.

How long does engineer onboarding last at your company? 1 week? 2 weeks? A couple months? Regardless, it’s a process you think about in the short term, right when a new employee starts. Once it’s done, it’s done, and you can go on to thinking about the million other things that are going on in your company. Right?

Wrong.

The effects of employee onboarding last way beyond when a new person starts working and impact your whole company. If your onboarding isn’t effective, in just 1 or 2 generations of hiring you’re dealing with a team that’s shockingly less productive than it could be — and costing you a lot of money.

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When Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise wants something done, he points his finger and orders someone to “make it so.” This catchphrase is what the retail giant Amazon almost called itself: “MakeItSo.com.”

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, right?

While there’s no finger-pointing involved, this is basically how home delivery services work these days. We browse through a catalog of options, we pick one, we press a button, and poof—it becomes a reality. Whether it’s a box of paper towels, a new book, or a hoverboard, you can get it delivered pretty quickly.

And though this technology seems really like something straight out of Star Trek, the processes underlying it actually go back hundreds of years, for as long as humans have been trying to make home delivery services work.

But the systems and processes that Amazon has become synonymous with really rely on an appetite created by a name that was once a retail giant that cast a shadow as large as Amazon’s: Sears, Roebuck & Co. In fact, Amazon’s success can largely be credited to their ability to perfect processes that Sears innovated and honed throughout the 20th century.

And where Sears failed, Amazon is still succeeding…

…for now.

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