This step-by-step guide assumes you already know what service you want to create and who your customers will be. If you don’t know yet, start at steps to start a new business and return here when you have that information. Otherwise, you might end up building something that you’re not able to sell and it could turn out to be a huge waste of time and effort and money.
We’re going to refer to web application, product, service, or software as a service here to refer to different aspects of the thing that you’re building. Here’s what they mean: Web application is a technical term for an application that users access with a browser. Product is a business term for something of value that you produce and for which customers pay. For example, apples and bananas are products that you grow, cars and doors are products that you build. If you make software and sell a copy of the software, that’s a product. Service is a business term for something of value that you do and for which customers pay. In a web application, you’re not selling the application itself but you might sell access to the application, that’s a service. Or you might sell the results of using the application, which could be a product or a service depending on what those results are. Software as a service is a business term for a web application where you sell access to it and then the customer can do things with it and you take care of all the ins and outs and they can quickly start getting benefits from it without having to do a bunch of steps like downloading it, installing it, setting it up, securing it, etc. These things can all be done in combination, you’re not limited to choosing just one thing.
Design the application. You need to exit this step with a clear understanding of what the application does for customers and how it will work. If the business is successful, you’ll be able to improve the product over time. If the business is not successful, you might lose all the time and effort and money invested in building the application. For these reasons, when you’re just getting started you need to figure out what is the minimum viable product (MVP) that you can build and sell to start the business.
Choose and register a domain name. This should be related to some aspect of what your web application does or to the benefit your customers get from it or to your business name. You might also want to register some variations of it to catch typos or people who assume everything ends with “.com”. There are many registrars (companies that help you find and register an available name). You can try GoDaddy or Namecheap to start.
Get DNS hosting. DNS is the system that maps domain names to where the website is located. It’s also used to get secure website certificates and for integrations with vendors for different aspects of your business. For websites that have customers world wide, DNS is used to help them find the server that is closest to them. Make an account at LibertyDNS. You can use it for multiple domains.
Get web hosting for your marketing website. The marketing website is where you tell people about your web application and tell them how to buy your service. It can be a “static” website, which means a collection of files you upload, or it can be a content management system (CMS) which is itself a web application that lets you point and click your way to creating the marketing website.
If you haven’t already designed a logo for your web application or company, get that started.
Create an account at BrandProfile and upload your logo images there. Set up your brand color palette. These will be used on other services automatically so you don’t have to keep uploading the same brand information everywhere.
Generate the “favorites icon” for your web application. If you already have a logo image, there is a free “favicon” generator here: https://www.favicon-generator.org and here https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/favicon-generator/ and here https://favicon.io/favicon-converter/. Be careful when searching for a favicon generator because there are plenty of free generators run by malicious people who try to sneak in a download of something else or show malicious ads.
Design and publish your marketing website. Marketing takes time so this website will help you to identify your audience while you build the product. Start by building a “journey” page to connect with your audience and share what your product or service is about and how it will help them.
Add visitor tracking metrics so you know how many people arrive at your journey page daily, weekly, and monthly. Later you will also compare this to the number of people who arrive at each step in your sales process. You can install Matomo on your server and use it free or use the cloud-hosted version for a monthly fee.
Add an opt-in form to get news like product releases or pre-sales. You might be able to start delivering value by email before your product is ready. Create an account at LibertyBase and create your form. Connect it to your BrandProfile to get your logo and colors on there.
Get web hosting for your web application. In some cases you can put the web application together with the marketing website. However, we recommend against doing that because the people updating your marketing website will likely not be the same people building your web application, and keeping those things separate minimizes the chances of mistakes and security problems. For example, if a security vulnerability is found in your CMS, you don’t want hackers to be able to take over your entire web application from there. Create an account at Digital Ocean. You can create a custom virtual server there that your developer will set up, or create a pre-configured virtual server with a website-building app that your developer can then build on, for example WordPress.
Get database hosting for your customer data. Many web hosting companies allow you to create a database there and use it in your application. However, they don’t do any database management for you and it’s easy to set it up insecurely. Also, your database needs might evolve as your web application becomes successful, and a web hosting company will not be helping you with that. Create a database for your application at LibertyBase.
Get authentication for your web application. From the very first version, you’ll need to be able to restrict who can get in there to use it and test things. This part is actually very easy because there are companies that provide authentication as a service and you (or your developers) can easily add this important functionality to your web application. Make an account at Xentri. You can use it for multiple web applications.
Build and continuously improve until you have a minimum viable product. As you do this step, invite a few people to try it out without money changing hands, just to get their feedback. Make improvements and get more feedback until it’s something people would pay for.
Get a customer portal for your web application. The customer portal is where customers will pay for the product, see their invoices or statements, ask for support, agree to terms of service, and access product documentation. There are various companies that provide some or all of these services. Make an account at Cygnia. It’s designed to integrate seamlessly with web applications.
Launch your minimum viable product. Charge money for using it. Continue to improve it with customer feedback.