Free resource
The SaaS MVP checklist.
Most SaaS projects that run over budget do so because of decisions that were never made at the start: who the users are, how tenants are separated, how billing works and what is out of scope. These 40 questions are the ones we work through with every client before writing code.
Use it on your own, share it with your co-founder, or bring it to a discovery call and we will go through it with you.
1. Problem and scope
- Who is the first paying customer, specifically (role, company size, industry)?
- What single job must the MVP do well enough that they would pay for it?
- Which features are explicitly out of scope for version one?
- How will you know the MVP worked (signups, paid conversions, retention)?
- What is the deadline, and what is driving it?
2. Users, roles and permissions
- Which user types exist (owner, admin, staff, customer, super-admin)?
- What can each role see and change? Write it down as a permission list.
- Can one user belong to several accounts or locations?
- Do you need an internal admin panel for your own team on day one?
- Do you need audit logs of who changed what?
3. Multi-tenancy and data
- Will you have more than one customer organisation? (If yes, you are multi-tenant.)
- Shared database with tenant scoping, or a separate database per tenant?
- Do customers need custom domains or subdomains?
- What data must be isolated, exported or deleted on request (GDPR)?
- How will you back up and restore a single tenant?
4. Billing and pricing
- Per seat, per location, per usage, or flat plans?
- Free trial, freemium, or paid from day one?
- Which payment provider (Stripe, Paddle, local gateways) and which currencies?
- What happens when a payment fails or a plan is downgraded?
- Do different plans unlock different modules or limits?
5. Integrations
- Which emails are transactional, and which provider sends them?
- Do you need SMS, push notifications or WhatsApp?
- Which third-party APIs are essential for version one?
- Do any integrations use webhooks that must be verified and retried?
- Will you integrate AI models, and how will you control their cost?
6. Security
- How do users sign in (email and password, magic link, SSO, social)?
- Are passwords hashed and sessions or tokens stored securely?
- Is every API request authorised on the server, not just hidden in the UI?
- Are forms rate-limited and protected against spam?
- Are secrets kept out of the code repository?
7. Infrastructure and quality
- Where will it be hosted, and in which region?
- Is there a staging environment separate from production?
- Are deployments automated and repeatable?
- Is error tracking and uptime monitoring in place before launch?
- Are slow tasks (emails, reports, imports) handled by background jobs?
8. Launch and growth
- Is analytics set up with clear conversion events?
- Do key pages have titles, descriptions, structured data and a sitemap?
- Is there an onboarding flow that gets a new user to value quickly?
- How will customers get support (email, chat, help centre)?
- Who owns the code, documentation and infrastructure accounts?
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Related: SaaS development · Cozira case study · Pricing