Getting to a first version is the easy part. Getting to a platform people pay for is the work.
Plenty of SaaS products never make it past the demo that impressed everyone in the room. The demo handles one user and one happy path. The platform has to keep a hundred customers' data properly apart, get billing right every month, cope with people signing up at three in the morning, and carry a support load that only grows.
That gap is where the real decisions live, and it is where software built only to look good in a pitch tends to fall over.
Building the product
In SaaS platform development the software is the business. Multi-tenancy, billing, onboarding and the unglamorous reliability underneath them are what decide whether the product scales or stalls once real customers arrive.
Owning the product
You are commissioning an asset. The IP, the code and the infrastructure are yours from the first day, so the value you build up stays with your business rather than sitting inside someone else's account.
01From an idea to a working MVP
We start with the workflow, not the wireframe: event storming and story mapping with the people who understand the market, then the smallest version worth shipping. Often that means turning a proprietary process, sometimes one buried in a complex spreadsheet, into software real customers can log into and use.
02Multi-tenancy and data isolation
Keeping each customer's data properly separate is the difference between a product businesses will trust and one they will not. We design tenancy, roles and permissions in from the start. On Duwio, every subscriber gets an isolated workspace with its own secure area for gallery delivery.
03Billing, subscriptions and onboarding
The commercial plumbing that has to be right every month: subscription logic, payments through a gateway such as Stripe, invoicing that can integrate with accountancy software like Xero or Sage, and sign-up and onboarding flows that get a new customer to value without a phone call.
04Scaling, hosting and running it in production
Serverless functions and containers on AWS, global content delivery through CloudFront, automated backups and continuous monitoring. Duwio runs a containerised stack on Amazon ECS with RDS, S3 and CloudFront, Lambda for background jobs, and AWS Backup and CloudTrail underneath. We build it, and we keep it running.
05A product built to be owned and grown
It all runs in your own AWS account, and you hold a copy of the platform, the code, the infrastructure and the pipeline. We build for the long term, so most of our SaaS clients keep us developing and running the product for years, adding billing automation, reporting and new capabilities as the customer base grows. There is no lock-in in that: you can take it elsewhere at any point.
We built these from an idea, and we still run them.
The platform usually runs serverless or in containers on AWS. We are an AWS Select Tier Services Partner and we run a Well-Architected review on every engagement, so the product is built on a foundation that can grow without the bill or the risk getting away from you.
Duwio
A multi-tenant SaaS platform for image management, built with Spacesuit Media on an AWS Well-Architected foundation and now trusted by Nissan, Envision Racing and OX Delivers.
MHM Culture Segments TagTool
A platform used by arts organisations worldwide, with audience segmentation and survey integration. Built from inception and still run by us.
GT World, for SRO Motorsports
A React Native product carrying live video, timing and team data to GT racing fans across every series worldwide.
We're so confident in Duwio that we made Spacesuit the ultimate test case. We've moved our entire archive of 600,000 high-res images from our legacy platform into a Duwio workspace. Duwio really is a better way to manage images.
We build the smallest real thing first, then grow it with you.
- 01
Prove
We take the idea to a minimum viable product that real people can actually use, not a prototype that only survives a controlled demo. Enough to put in front of customers and find out what they will pay for, before the big money goes in.
- 02
Build the platform
Then the parts that turn an app into a product other businesses trust with their data: multi-tenancy that keeps each customer isolated, billing and subscriptions, onboarding, roles and permissions. This is the work that decides whether the product holds up under load.
- 03
Run and grow
We stay. Scaling as customers arrive, billing automation, reporting, new media types and features the roadmap keeps generating. In most of our engagements the people running the platform years after launch are still us.
The things founders ask us first.
Do you take equity, or is this a normal paid engagement?
Usually a normal paid engagement. But we build long-term relationships and we are open to sharing the risk in the right cases, whether that is an equity stake or a share of the recurring revenue. When everyone is invested in the product succeeding, the outcome tends to be stronger.
Will we be locked in?
No. Everything runs in your own AWS account and you hold a copy of all of it, including the infrastructure definitions and the deployment pipeline. You can take it elsewhere whenever you want, and an engagement that only holds together because leaving is painful is not one we want.
Can you just build the MVP and hand it over?
We can, and the code and infrastructure are yours to take whenever you want them. But we are set up for the long haul, and most of our SaaS clients keep us running and growing the platform for years, because the interesting problems arrive after launch rather than before it.
Will it scale when the customers actually arrive?
That is what the Well-Architected review at the start is for. Duwio was built to grow, and Spacesuit Media proved it by moving their entire archive of 600,000 high-resolution images onto the platform, which now serves brands including Nissan and Envision Racing.