Does Remote Working Accelerate or Slow SaaS Growth

Software as a service (SaaS) is one of the hottest trends around. It’s already changing the world, but starting a SaaS company comes with its own unique complications not present in other business models. 

One of these is how you integrate staff into your company in terms of remote vs. local employees. 

Many SaaS founders will be completely fresh to the hiring process, and that’s why it’s doubly important to carefully consider how aggressively you integrate remote employment into your business model.

There’s a lot to learn if you want to properly make use of a telecommuting model, but it can be worthwhile for SaaS businesses.

Strength: Remote Communication Platforms

Even if you work in a traditional office environment, there’s a decent chance you could get most of your tasks done without ever having to speak directly with a colleague or boss. 

Emailing has given way to chat platforms like Slack, and the cleverly amorphous and adaptable format of these platforms allow for nuanced communication channels are as broad or specific as you need. 

Add in sharing platforms like GitHub and Google Drive, and you’re left with an easy means for remote employees to communicate essentially with the rest of the office without having to ever meet in person.

Weakness: Processes Ill-Suited to Remote Communication

There may be a lot of great remote platforms out there today, but they only work as effectively as your office model will allow. 

With SaaS being a relatively new phenomenon, many founders are using more traditional business models to support an organization that won’t benefit from them. 

You can’t hire remotely without starting with a remote-first philosophy in place. 

That means putting policies in place where remote platforms are your sole, or at least primarily, a pipeline of communications and employing policies for how these platforms should be used. 

Without these policies implemented, companies that split the difference between remote and local employees will likely see the latter group left out of the loop, and companies that are purely remote may never get off the ground.

Strength: Lower Overhead Costs

SaaS companies often live and die on the whims of investors, and a high valuation can be as much a liability as an asset for a startup because of the expectations that come with it. 

Even the most promising SaaS companies need to be careful with their finances and one of the biggest costs comes from maintaining an office. 

It’s expensive to rent out a commercial property, but the appeal of the office itself is becoming a more important tool for companies competing for talent. 

The desirability of the option to work from home can be a great recruiting tool that costs significantly less than maintaining daycare, games rooms, or catered lunches in an office space.

Weakness: The Risk of Developing Too Quickly

An office space may be costly, but it establishes an easily definable bar for how much your company can grow in the short term. 

You can only fit so many employees in a single office space. Finding the right balance of growth is especially important for a SaaS company, but you can easily lose track of how large your staff is growing if they’re scattered all around the world. 

While you may want to develop new features as quickly as possible and expand your reach out aggressively, the financial costs can be heavy. 

There’s also management to consider. 

Managing individual teams internally and making sure that they’re all on the same page in terms of the big picture can be a difficult enough task, and it becomes harder when you have a glut of employees at multiple remote locations. 

While that may speed up your growth in the short term, the costs of catching up can cause your company’s development to stagnate in the long term.

Strength: More Diversity in The Hiring Process

Convincing that brilliant software engineer out of Montreal to leave their life behind to move to your office in Atlanta can be a difficult sell, and a costly one. 

Providing them with a job offer they can take without having to move is exceedingly more enticing. 

Integrating remote working into your company model opens up the entire world for recruitment, but having employees strategically located around the world can be an asset in its own right. 

If you’re looking to expand your user base into Southeast Asia, having employees there who understand the culture can be a huge asset. 

Remote working reduces the cost of creating new branches around the world while still giving you the advantages of geographic and cultural diversity. 

SaaS may be a digital model, but you’ll still need feet on the ground to engage in face-to-face conversations, and a remote model expands your capabilities on that front significantly. More diverse and more qualified candidates can produce the results quicker.

Weakness: Difficulty Maintaining Healthy Communications

Having a global workforce that can expand the talent, reach, and communications of your SaaS business may sound like the dream, but it comes with some practical complications. 

The most obvious one is the difference in time zones. 

Maintaining a relatively consistent work day is hard when your staff is scattered around the world, and there are also language and cultural barriers to consider. 

When you’re in crunch time, reaching out from your San Diego office so a Mumbai technician can help you with a critical bug in your platform can be a make or break situation. 

And keeping track of short-term milestones can be difficult for a manager who has to coordinate in four different time zones. 

It’s not an insurmountable obstacle. 

While concentrating as many remote workers as possible in bordering time zones can be a huge benefit, more geographically diverse teams can still coordinate decently well by focusing on chat, email, and reports.

So Does Remote Working Accelerate or Slow SaaS Growth?

The answer is, unfortunately, a very situational one. 

A well-operated SaaS company that relies solely or primarily on remote workers can run circles around a more conventional operation. 

It can save a lot of money that can help your company grow at lightning speeds, and the remote tools available today can provide a superb means for communication when handled well. 

But that doesn’t mean it won’t be difficult. 

Running a SaaS company is difficult enough on its own, but if you intend to employ remote workers, you’ll need to make some extra effort to make sure that everything is organized and running smoothly.