What Are Two Main Things That SaaS Startups Need to Think About? Algolia CEO & Co-Founder Nicolas Dessaigne explains

What are two main things that all SaaS companies need to be sure to think about? While there is likely a laundry list of such items, a culture of creativity and security should be top of mind, at least according to Adam Fitzgerald, Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS, and Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder and CEO of Algolia.

The two technology leaders shared the SaaS Monster stage at Web Summit on November 6, espousing the importance of each.

While many organizations strive to foster a culture of creativity, not many are successful. Per Fitzgerald, companies that want to build such a culture must realize that creativity can come from anywhere. “You must look both inside your organization and to your customer base—90% of the AWS roadmap is driven directly from customer feedback,” he said. “Along with that, we often see products created from internal innovations that are then spun out. Amazon Kinesis is a great example of just that.”

Dessaigne echoed a similar sentiment. “Good ideas can truly come from all places. Our decision to support integration with the Laravel framework illustrates this quite well. We were initially alerted to Laravel by an intern, who suggest we learn more about it. In the end, we doubled down on that to become the de facto search option for Laravel.”

Along with creativity, security should be taken seriously at all SaaS companies. That said, it’s not a one-way street. Fitzgerald pointed out that while security is top of mind at AWS, they employ a shared responsibility model, where the customer is empowered with the tools needed to secure their resources how they see fit.

Dessaigne took a bit of a different stance, arguing that more often than not it’s better to buy a security solution versus building it. “The product is the lifeblood of any company. For security, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to build a better solution than a company whose lifeblood is security”.

Watch the full session below (it’s session nine in the playlist):