Every SaaS founder in India has the same nightmare: months of building a beautiful product, and zero paying customers on launch day. Here's the process that prevents that.
SaaS is the most attractive business model for India startup founders right now — and for good reason. Recurring revenue, low marginal cost, scalable without proportional headcount. The math is compelling. The problem is that most SaaS products built in India never get to the point where that math matters, because they never get to a real user.
They get to a staging server. They get to a demo. They get shown to friends and colleagues. But paying subscribers — people who find the product on their own and hand over money to use it — never appear, because the product was never built with a clear enough value proposition to attract them.
This is the SaaS problem in India. Not technical ability. Not ideas. The gap between "we built a product" and "we have a product people pay for" is where most SaaS startups in Kerala and across India disappear.
The 100-day SaaS process is designed to close that gap.
Why SaaS Is Different From Building Any Other Product
Before we talk about the process, it's worth being clear about what makes SaaS product development genuinely different — and why standard software development advice doesn't quite apply.
SaaS lives and dies on retention, not acquisition. A software product someone buys once can survive mediocre UX. A SaaS product someone pays for every month cannot. If users don't come back, the recurring revenue model collapses. This means the core user flow — the thing a user does every time they open the product — has to work exceptionally well before anything else matters.
SaaS requires a pricing model from day one. This is where many India SaaS founders get stuck. They build first, figure out pricing later. But pricing isn't just a number — it signals who the product is for, how it compares to alternatives, and what problem it considers itself to be solving. Getting this wrong after the product is built is expensive. Getting it right during the build shapes better decisions throughout.
SaaS onboarding is a product feature, not an afterthought. The moment a new user signs up and tries to use your SaaS product for the first time is the most critical moment in the business. Most teams build the core features first and bolt on onboarding at the end. This is backwards. Onboarding should be designed alongside the core feature, because it determines whether anyone ever uses that feature.
"The biggest mistake SaaS founders in India make is building a product and then figuring out who it's for. The ones who move fast do it the other way around — they know exactly who they're building for, and every feature decision follows from that." — Krishna Kumar, KSoft Technologies, Kerala
The 100-Day SaaS Build: Phase by Phase
The 100-day process for SaaS is structured differently from a general MVP build. SaaS has specific requirements — recurring billing, onboarding flows, user management, retention mechanics — that need to be accounted for from the start. Here's how the 100 days break down:
Phase 1 Days 1 – 14
SaaS Discovery — User, Problem, and Pricing Model
This phase goes deeper than a standard product discovery. For SaaS specifically, we need to answer four questions before a single line of code is written: Who exactly has this problem? How often do they have it? What do they currently pay to solve it (even imperfectly)? And what would make them switch to a new product and stay switched? The output is a written brief that includes the user profile, the core problem, the v1 feature scope, and a proposed pricing model. The pricing model in particular gets tested against real potential users before the build starts.
Phase 2 Days 15 – 28
Architecture Decisions & Scope Lock
SaaS products have shared infrastructure concerns — multi-tenancy, authentication, subscription billing, role management — that need to be decided before the build starts, not retrofitted later. This phase locks the technical architecture and the feature scope simultaneously. What goes in v1, what gets deferred, what the data model looks like, which third-party services are used (payment gateway, email, analytics), and what the onboarding flow looks like end to end. Scope is locked here. Changes after this point go to a v2 list.
Phase 3 Days 29 – 56
Core Feature Build — The 4-Week Sprint
Four weeks of focused development on the core SaaS feature set. Two-week sprints. By the end of sprint one (day 42), the core functionality works end to end — a user can sign up, do the main thing the product is supposed to do, and see a result. Sprint two (days 43–56) adds the supporting features: billing integration, user management, email notifications, and the first version of the dashboard. Weekly demos throughout. Nothing added to scope.
Phase 4 Days 57 – 70
Onboarding Build & Retention Mechanics
This is the phase most SaaS teams skip, and it's why most SaaS products fail at retention. Two weeks dedicated entirely to the new user experience: the signup flow, the first-use experience, the moment a user first sees value ("the aha moment"), and the emails or notifications that bring them back. For India-specific SaaS products, this phase also covers payment flow testing with UPI and card options, and — where relevant — regional language considerations for non-metro users.
Phase 5 Days 71 – 85
Beta with Real Users — Paid Beta Preferred
Real users, not colleagues. Ideally paying users — even a small beta fee separates people who are genuinely interested from people who are just being polite. This phase generates the most valuable information in the entire 100 days: what confuses new users, where they drop off, what feature they ask for that you hadn't thought of, and whether the pricing feels right when real money is involved. Every insight from this phase goes into a prioritised v2 roadmap.
Phase 6 Days 86 – 100
Public Launch & First Subscriber Acquisition
Launch with a specific plan. For B2B SaaS targeting Indian SMEs: a LinkedIn outreach sequence to a defined list of potential subscribers. For B2C SaaS: one content channel (SEO, a specific community, a WhatsApp group network) activated before launch day. For SaaS targeting NRI or Gulf markets: a targeted outreach through diaspora networks. Day 100 ends with the first paying subscribers on a recurring plan — not just signups, not just trials, paying subscribers.
Not sure if your SaaS idea is ready to build?
Book a free 30-minute SaaS clarity call with Krishna Kumar. Walk away knowing exactly what to build first — and what to skip entirely.
Book Free SaaS Clarity CallThe SaaS Mistakes India Founders Make Most Often
Having worked on SaaS product builds across India and internationally, the same mistakes appear with remarkable consistency. Here's what to watch for:
Building features instead of flows
A feature is a capability. A flow is what a user actually does from start to finish to get a result. SaaS founders consistently over-invest in building features and under-invest in building complete, working flows. A product with three features that work end to end from signup to result is more valuable at launch than a product with twelve features that all require some workaround or manual step to complete.
Ignoring churn from day one
Churn — users who stop paying — is the number that kills SaaS businesses. Most India SaaS founders don't think about churn until it's already happening. The 100-day process builds churn-reduction mechanics into the product from phase four: retention emails, in-product prompts, usage tracking that flags users who are becoming inactive. These aren't complex — they're just decisions that need to be made during the build, not after launch.
Under-pricing for the India market
There is a tendency among India SaaS founders to price very low because they're worried Indian customers won't pay. This creates two problems: it attracts customers who aren't committed (and who churn quickly), and it makes the business unsustainable before it can prove itself. The right question isn't "what will Indian customers pay?" — it's "what problem is this solving and what is that problem currently costing them?" Price from value, not from assumed affordability.
Building for everyone
The most common version of this mistake in Kerala specifically: a SaaS product designed to serve every industry, every company size, and every use case simultaneously. The result is a product that solves nobody's problem particularly well. The SaaS products that grow fastest in India have a sharply defined initial target — a specific type of user in a specific situation — and expand from there once the core is proven.
What Type of SaaS Works for the India Market
Not all SaaS categories are equally well-suited to the India market at this moment. Based on what's actually gaining traction, the highest-opportunity categories for Kerala and India SaaS founders right now are:
- SME operations software — inventory, billing, payroll, compliance tools for India's enormous small business sector. Most existing solutions are either too expensive, too complex, or not localised for Indian regulatory requirements.
- Vertical SaaS for Kerala-specific industries — tourism, ayurveda, cashew processing, rubber, coir, construction, and healthcare administration. These sectors have real operational pain and very few purpose-built software solutions.
- AI-augmented workflow tools — products that take a task that currently requires significant manual effort in a specific industry and automate or assist it using machine learning. The bar for "AI-powered" products is high in international markets but early in India — there is genuine first-mover advantage.
- Compliance and regulatory SaaS — GST filing, labour law compliance, FSSAI documentation, environmental reporting. India's regulatory burden on businesses is significant and most businesses handle it manually or through expensive consultants.
- Tools for the NRI market — property management, remittance tracking, family financial oversight, document management for people who have assets and family in Kerala but are based abroad. This market is large, underserved, and willing to pay.
The Technical Stack Question
One question that comes up in almost every SaaS discovery conversation: what technology should we build on?
The honest answer is that for an MVP-stage SaaS product, the stack matters less than most founders think. What matters is that the team building it is experienced with the stack, that it can handle the core requirements (multi-tenancy, real-time if needed, mobile performance), and that it doesn't create expensive migration work when the product scales.
For most B2B SaaS products targeting Indian SMEs, the stack KSoft Technologies typically recommends at the MVP stage prioritises development speed and reliability over architectural elegance. The time to optimise architecture is after you have paying customers telling you what they actually do in the product every day — not before.
The three decisions that actually matter at the architecture stage: how you handle multi-tenancy (shared database vs separate schemas), which payment gateway you integrate first (Razorpay for Indian customers is almost always the right starting point), and whether mobile is a day-one requirement or a phase-two addition.
Kerala as a SaaS Launch Base
There's a specific opportunity for Kerala-based SaaS founders that isn't talked about enough: the ability to use Kerala as a live test market before expanding nationally.
Kerala has a relatively tech-literate SME base compared to many Indian states. The NRI network means there are business owners with international exposure and willingness to adopt software solutions. The state government's digital initiatives have created infrastructure and, in some sectors, regulatory requirements that create natural demand for compliance software.
A SaaS product that works — genuinely works, with paying subscribers and measurable retention — in the Kerala market has a compelling story for national expansion. Kerala is small enough to navigate quickly but sophisticated enough to be a real market signal, not just an easy early adopter base.
Your SaaS Product. 100 Days. Real Subscribers.
Stop building in isolation. The right process gets you to paying subscribers faster than the biggest budget spent on the wrong architecture.