UPDIVISION CEO Andrei Iordache: This Mistake Is Killing Your SaaS

In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business.

A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.

Andrei Iordache is the CEO and co-founder of UPDIVISION, a software development company with over 14 years of experience. Together with his co-founder, Eugen Tudorache, Andrei built UPDIVISION from scratch, growing it into a company with over 50 employees and clients across 12 countries and 10 industries.

Besides client work, UPDIVISION has also built their own apps in collaboration with Creative Tim (a UI tools vendor with over 1M monthly users) and Backpack for Laravel Backpack is a very popular admin panel builder with over 1.5M downloads.

What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?

We’ve been building software since 2010. So we had a lot of companies – startups and mature businesses alike – come to us saying: “We have this great idea or we need this tool to streamline operations”. And they would provide long documents telling us that they are in a hurry, so we should start coding ASAP.

And we would! We’d spent months coding and then on the demo day the client would not be impressed. The software worked, but it was not what they had imagined.

It took us a long time to realize, I believe it was in 2017, that a word document with a list of features is not enough to provide a clear picture of the finished product. Only the final design, done by a professional UX designer, can serve that purpose and get the buy-in from all the stakeholders.

From that Aha-Moment we switched to Design Driven Development with extraordinary results. We succeeded in building an amazing UX/UI team and doubled the size of our company several times since then.

UPDIVISION’s step-by-step process

1. Conceptualization and Planning

Product Discovery: This phase involves defining user flows and creating detailed UI/UX that aligns with the app’s goals. Plus writing user stories. Based on all of this, the development effort can be accurately estimated.
Project Roadmap: A reliable roadmap outlines feature prioritization, task organization, milestones, and timelines. This ensures that all stakeholders have clear expectations and a structured path forward.

2. Development

Coding and Implementation: Once the design and planning stages are complete, the development team begins coding. SCRUM – a popular agile methodology – is used to ensure everything stays on track.
Testing. Apart from writing automated tests, the app is thoroughly tested manually.

3. Launch and Continuous Improvement

Launch and Feedback: the app is launched with a focus on gathering user feedback. Scaling and Growth: UPDIVISION will provide guidance on scaling the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) without losing early adopters.

What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?

We don’t just follow specs. We spend time thinking about the users and the business needs and then deliver a product that works. I’m always proud to hear clients say “I would have never thought of that!”

We have also developed our proprietary conceptual UX framework called UFOs. It’s a structured UI/UX design methodology based on extensive experience and clients feedback that helps UPDIVISION build more user-centered designs that effectively addresses real-life challenges.

“A strong point for us is their responsiveness and ability to come up with viable solutions.”
Ali El Rhermoul, Co-Founder & CTO, Beamable

From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful SaaS product? What made you realize the importance of each one?

Luck and a lot of marketing money 🙂

And common sense – things like, listening to users and their pain points.

We once had a client that spent 4 years with us working on the MVP and not once talked with his potential users. Of course, once he launched he had to scrape a lot of features that he thought would kill. That is one of the biggest trapps of the founders – they believe they know better than the end users. That and they have to add just one more cool feature before the launch.

Never believe you know better than your end users

Your users know what they need, what works best and what doesn’t. Talk to them and listen to their feedback. In the past we used to ask “How” a lot. But asking “why” starts much more productive discussions and triggers brainstorming sessions.

One more essential thing: do the MVP design first and stick with it during development. If you don’t do that you risk creating an app with bad UI and awkward UX. Plus, you would really not be able to accurately estimate when the app will be completed.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people making when building their product or service? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Rushing into code is a big mistake. As I’ve already said, we’ve been taking a design-first approach, where we build an app’s entire design before heading into code. This way, you can finalize an app’s concept and entire user flows before spending months coding it. You can reiterate easier & faster and it helps brainstorm ideas. You essentially get to see the finished product way before it’s live, which can help you see what works and what doesn’t.

On the other hand, when heading straight into code, you risk ending up with a bad UI/UX, projects can take much longer as there are a lot of unanswered questions, and you risk launching a product that doesn’t truly serve your audience.

Other common mistakes:

Spending all your money on development thinking your product will sell by itself
Build everything from the start. There is a reason the first iteration is called MVP
Thinking you know better than your customer
Reinventing existing products or services. You have to come up with something new.

Based on your experiences, what trends and technologies are currently underestimated or overlooked, but can significantly impact your industry? How are you going to adapt?

Everyone talks about AI. And it will play an important role as a development tool.

It will not replace the developer, but the developer will have to work with it and embrace the productivity increase. We have already started to use tools like Copilot and ChatGPT – but at the moment we allow only senior developers to use them. A junior developer doesn’t yet have the capacity to understand the code that an AI provides and that leads to poor code overall and inhibits learning.

Want UPDIVISION to assess your app for free?

Andrei generously offered a free UI/UX assessment to all Website Planet’s readers, complete with actionable advice on how to improve your app.

Interested?

👉 Email [email protected]