From Launch to Series A: Having the Right Infrastructure & Monitoring in Place (2/10)

10 Prios Before You Reach 10k MRR — SaaS SMBs Ed.

About this series

This series of articles are drafted from our experience at Point Nine Capital on the top priorities for early-stage SaaS companies.

Note that though more relevant for startups who focus in SMBs first and then go upmarket, the priorities are general enough to apply to most SaaS companies.

In case you missed, here the first one

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Priority 2: Having the Right Infrastructure & Monitoring in Place

At this early stage you don’t have much traction — so why would you bother about collecting data on such small numbers? Why would you think about scaling issues without actually having issues? … Surely this sounds like over-engineering? Is it a waste of time? Not exactly…

We all want to go fast…

Infrastructure: the basic physical and organisational structures and facilities needed for the operation of an enterprise

Setting the right infrastructure in place allows you to differentiate what’s working and what’s not working. That’s important even if it’s at a small scale!

Consequently, without the right monitoring tools, you’re flying blind on how that infrastructure is performing.

And you can also fail monitoring …

This doesn’t mean you can’t succeed without it, but it just gets harder to manage your future. Without monitoring your tech infrastructure, it’s harder to manage scaling issues; without marketing tools, how do you know your customer’s acquisition cost? Without finance, how do you know how much money is left? And so on.

Without investing time and effort setting that right early, you have some “debt”. And debt needs to be paid. The later you do it, the more expensive it tends to be…

In the next sections, you can find a (non-exhaustive) list of areas to look after early on: