Customer growth

One of the main reasons software companies shift to a SaaS business model is the opportunity to grow faster. SaaS makes scaling easier by streamlining customer acquisition, reducing operational costs, and opening doors to new market segments. But to truly support this growth, the application’s architecture should be aligned with the business model across several key dimensions.

Tenant identity management defines how users are authenticated in a multi-tenant SaaS application. Poor implementation can limit your ability to serve specific market segments. For example, if your customers are organisations, your identity management system should be able to federate with their corporate identity providers. Beyond that, your identity management must also comply with local regulatory requirements.

Tenant onboarding is a core SaaS capability that directly influences customer acquisition. The design of this process often depends on the expected onboarding volume. For example, a company that onboards a single new customer every few years may need a very different approach compared to a business that onboards thousands of customers annually.

Tenancy model defines how tenant resources are deployed. In traditional software, applications are often installed separately for each customer. Many providers shifting to a SaaS model move these applications into their own infrastructure but keep the same approach. The problem with this deployment model is that it increases operational efforts and makes it difficult to serve smaller customers, which limits growth. To scale and reach new market segments, the tenancy model needs to be carefully aligned with the overall market expansion strategy.

Tenant resource management ensures that resources for all tenants are provisioned efficiently and kept consistently updated. Keeping operational efforts under control is a key part of this. Since the SaaS model relies on the provider managing resources, a high level of automation is essential. Without it, the application quickly becomes unmanageable as the customer base grows.

Tenant operations are crucial for effectively managing a growing customer base. If poorly designed, operational processes can quickly become a bottleneck for scaling. To keep pace with growth, operations and support teams need robust tools to monitor performance and access tenant-specific logs and traces. Without this level of efficiency, manual or ad hoc approaches can easily collapse under the weight of expansion.

Once a well-architected SaaS application is fully developed, the cost of onboarding each new customer decreases significantly. This efficiency enables rapid scaling and higher profit margins, allowing a SaaS business to realise its full growth potential.