Most SaaS products fail for the same reason: they build too much before they have users, or too little before they have scaling problems. The fix is sequencing. Start with the smallest product that solves one painful job for a specific kind of customer, and structure the code so it can grow without a rewrite.
The most important early decision is multi-tenancy. Shared database, shared schema with a tenant column, or schema-per-tenant each trade simplicity against isolation. For most products, shared schema with careful indexing gets you to thousands of customers. The mistakes that hurt later are usually in data modeling and access control - make tenant isolation explicit in every query from the first commit.
Billing is normally the second big decision. Stripe-style subscription handling covers plans, trials, invoices, and failed-payment recovery if you model it once and centralize. Auth and roles come next: email/password plus social logins cover 90% of products, and role-based permissions are simpler to add early than to retrofit onto user data.
Finally, instrument from day one. Usage analytics, event tracking, and error monitoring are not post-launch chores. They are how you decide what to build next. A SaaS that knows which features actually get used ships faster because it stops guessing.
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