Getting your pricing right is critical to the success of any SaaS company, but finding a model that works can be tough. Price too high, you won’t close enough deals - your business will fail. Price too low, your business model will be unsustainable - your business will fail. To add to the complication, when you’re a new startup your goals are evolving.
We’re a small startup (10 people at time of writing) with big ambitions, particularly when it comes to our product. With so many things we want to do, it’s important for us to be structured the way we approach our work, without being so process-driven that we lose all the benefits of being small and nimble. As we’re still new, and the team is growing all the time, very little is set in stone.
We wrote this article in response to a question asked in our Slack Community. Click here to join hundreds of technology leaders discussing best practices for incident response! ✨ We know a thing or two about incident response. As such, we're often asked to advise when companies are designing their incident response processes. A common question is "How do you design your incident severity levels?". It's a great question given how central they are to incident response!
Based on our newfound data feet, we’ve started consistently tracking the adoption rate of our latest features. As it happens, we’ve been impressed with the results! For example, we were delighted to see that our new tutorial flow was completed end-to-end by 35% of our users (against an industry average of less than a quarter for 6-step product tours like ours). I know, I know: being at such an early stage means it is arguably easier to hit customer needs on the head.
There’s no one-size-fits-all incident response process. Depending on your organisation’s shape and size, you’ll have different requirements and priorities. But the same three pillars form the core of any good process, whether it’s for the largest e-commerce giant or a scrappy SaaS startup.
The role of an engineer at a startup is a tangled web: as well as writing code, you have to be your own product manager, QA tester, customer support and designer. But there’s another hat that you have to wear which you might not have thought about: copywriter. All products have copy, from welcome messages to text on a submit button. At incident.io, we have to put on our copywriting hats every time we add a new feature.
If you’re working at an early stage startup and looking to get some good incident management foundations in place without investing excessive time and effort, this guide is quite literally for you. There’s an enormous amount of content available for organisations looking to import ‘gold standard’ incident management best practices – things like the PagerDuty Response site, the Atlassian incident management best practices, and the Google SRE book.
