Achieving Scalability with AWS | West Loop Strategy

Background: A commercial real estate start up and drone space leader, faced significant scaling challenges due to rapidly growing clientele and projects.

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‍Challenge: The first-generation MVP platform was unable to support the increased workload, leading to inefficient operations and delayed project search times.

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Objective: Reengineer the platform for scalable efficiency and enhanced client reporting capabilities.‍Consultation 

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Agility – This term summarizes the broader goal of SaaS. Successful SaaS companies are built with the idea that they must be ready to continually adapt to the market, customer, and competitive dynamics. Great SaaS companies are structured to continually embrace new pricing models, new market segments, and new customer needs.

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Operational efficiency – SaaS companies rely on operational efficiency to promote scale and agility. This means putting into place a culture and tooling that is focused on creating an operational footprint that promotes frequent and rapid release of new features. It also means having a single, unified experience that allows you to manage, operate, and deploy all customer environments collectively. Gone is the idea of supporting one-off versions and customizations. SaaS businesses place a premium on operational efficiency as a core pillar of their ability to successfully grow and scale the business.

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Frictionless onboarding – As part of being more agile and embracing growth, you must also place a premium on decreasing any friction in the tenant customer onboarding process. This applies universally to business to business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) customers. No matter which segment or type of customer you support, you still need to be focused on time to value for your customers. The shift to a service-centric model requires the SaaS business to focus on all aspects of the customer experience, with specific emphasis on the repeatability and efficiency of the overall onboarding lifecycle.

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Innovation – Moving to SaaS isn’t just about addressing the needs of current customers; it’s about putting in place the foundational elements that allow you to innovate. You want to react and respond to customer needs in your SaaS model. However, you also want to use this agility to drive future innovations that allow you to unlock new markets, opportunities, and efficiencies for your customers.

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Market response – SaaS moves away from the traditional notion of quarterly releases and two-year plans. It relies on its agility to give the organization the ability to react and respond to market dynamics in near real-time. The investment in the organizational, technical, and cultural elements of SaaS creates the opportunity to pivot business strategy based on the emerging customer and market dynamics.

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Growth – SaaS is a growth-centric business strategy. Aligning all the moving parts of the organization around agility and efficiency gives SaaS organizations the ability to target a growth model. This means putting in place the mechanisms that embrace and welcome the rapid adoption of your SaaS offering.

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Process:Comprehensive assessment of the existing platform and identification of bottleneck issues.Outline of scalability and reporting challenges.

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Proposed AWS Solutions:A complete replatforming and migration using AWS’ serverless tools, including Aurora Serverless database.Implementation:

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Delivered a multi-tenant client reporting and reengineered platform in six months.

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Outcomes:Enhanced the platform’s speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.Introduced a truly multi-tenant system where clients can access exclusively their data.

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Key Metrics:Highlight the reduction in search times and reporting inefficiencies, and the cost-saving from avoiding expensive contract renewals.

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Summary:West Loop Strategy's AWS solutions significantly upgraded the client's  platform, empowering them to handle growing projects and clients efficiently.

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We Encourage other startups facing scaling issues to explore customized AWS solutions with West Loop Strategy.

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