Business Entrepreneurship

Running a SaaS Business

A practical operating course for building, managing, and growing a subscription software company

Running a SaaS Business logo
Quick Course Facts
18
Self-paced, Online, Lessons
18
Videos and/or Narrated Presentations
6.0
Approximate Hours of Course Media
About the Running a SaaS Business Course

Running a SaaS Business is a practical operating course for building, managing, and growing a subscription software company. This course helps students understand how SaaS companies create value, generate recurring revenue, retain customers, and make better Business decisions using evidence, metrics, and operating discipline.

Build And Grow A Stronger SaaS Business

  • Learn how SaaS Business models work, from positioning and subscription mechanics to value creation and revenue capture.
  • Develop practical skills for pricing, packaging, acquisition, onboarding, retention, and customer success.
  • Use core SaaS metrics such as MRR, ARR, churn, NRR, CAC, LTV, and payback to diagnose performance and guide decisions.
  • Build an operating mindset for Running a SaaS Business with better forecasting, team alignment, and responsible scaling.

A practical operating course for building, managing, and growing a subscription software company.

This course gives students a complete view of how a SaaS Business operates across product, market, pricing, growth, customer experience, finance, and scale. Instead of focusing only on startup ideas or software features, it teaches the systems needed to turn a subscription product into a durable Business.

Students will learn how to choose a market, define a clear customer segment, position a SaaS product, and validate product-market fit with real evidence. The lessons also cover recurring revenue models, contracts, subscription mechanics, pricing strategy, packaging, add-ons, trials, freemium, and self-serve conversion.

The course also explains how growth and retention work together in a healthy SaaS company. Students will study acquisition funnels, sales-led motions, demos, qualification, onboarding, activation, customer success, support operations, feedback loops, and service quality so they can improve both conversion and long-term customer value.

By the end of Running a SaaS Business, students will be able to evaluate SaaS performance with confidence, forecast revenue and cash flow, understand runway, structure teams, set an operating cadence, and make stronger strategic tradeoffs. They will leave with a practical Business framework for managing SaaS growth with more clarity, discipline, and measurable results.

Course Lessons

Full lesson breakdown

Lessons are organized by topic area and each includes descriptive copy for search visibility and student clarity.

SaaS Foundations

3 lessons

This lesson explains the basic economic engine of a SaaS business: creating recurring customer value through software, then capturing a fair portion of that value through pricing, packaging, retention…

Lesson 2: Choosing a Market, Customer Segment, and Positioning Strategy

20 min
This lesson teaches how to choose a SaaS market, define a specific customer segment, and craft positioning that makes the product easier to understand, buy, and recommend. It focuses on practical oper…

Lesson 3: Recurring Revenue Models, Contracts, and Subscription Mechanics

17 min
This lesson explains how SaaS companies turn product access into recurring revenue. It covers the core mechanics of subscription pricing, billing frequency, contract terms, renewals, upgrades, downgra…

Product and Market Fit

2 lessons

Lesson 4: Defining the Core Product, Use Case, and Value Proposition

19 min
This lesson defines the foundation of a SaaS product: the specific customer, the urgent use case, the core workflow, and the value proposition that makes the product worth paying for every month. You …

Lesson 5: Validating Product-Market Fit with Evidence, Not Assumptions

21 min
This lesson teaches SaaS operators how to validate product-market fit using observable evidence instead of optimism, anecdotes, or vanity metrics. It focuses on the practical signals that show whether…

Pricing and Packaging

2 lessons

Lesson 6: Pricing Strategy for SaaS Products

22 min
This lesson explains how SaaS pricing strategy connects customer value, market positioning, unit economics, and packaging. It focuses on practical decisions founders and operators make when setting or…

Lesson 7: Packaging Plans, Features, Limits, and Add-Ons

18 min
This lesson explains how SaaS companies turn pricing strategy into clear packages customers can understand, buy, and expand over time. It focuses on plan architecture: which features belong in each ti…

Growth Systems

3 lessons

Lesson 8: Building a SaaS Acquisition Funnel

20 min
This lesson explains how to build a practical SaaS acquisition funnel that turns defined target buyers into measurable pipeline, trials, demos, and customers. The focus is on funnel architecture, chan…

Lesson 9: Product-Led Growth, Trials, Freemium, and Self-Serve Conversion

21 min
This lesson explains how product-led growth turns the product itself into a primary acquisition, activation, conversion, and expansion channel. Students learn how to design trials, freemium plans, usa…

Lesson 10: Sales-Led SaaS: Pipeline, Demos, Qualification, and Closing

22 min
Sales-led SaaS is not just hiring account executives and asking them to close deals. It is an operating system for turning qualified market demand into predictable revenue through clear pipeline stage…

Customer Journey

3 lessons

Lesson 11: Onboarding, Activation, and Time to Value

19 min
This lesson shows how to design SaaS onboarding around one practical goal: getting the right customer to a meaningful first outcome as quickly and reliably as possible. It separates signup, setup, act…

Lesson 12: Customer Success Systems for Retention and Expansion

21 min
This lesson explains how SaaS companies use customer success systems to retain accounts, increase product adoption, and create ethical expansion opportunities. It focuses on the customer journey after…

Lesson 13: Support Operations, Feedback Loops, and Service Quality

17 min
This lesson explains how SaaS companies design support operations that protect customer trust, surface product insight, and improve service quality over time. It focuses on the customer journey after …

Metrics and Economics

2 lessons

Lesson 14: Understanding MRR, ARR, Churn, NRR, CAC, LTV, and Payback

23 min
This lesson explains the core economic metrics used to operate a SaaS company: MRR, ARR, churn, NRR, CAC, LTV, and payback period. Students learn what each metric measures, how to calculate it, and ho…

Lesson 15: Diagnosing Churn and Improving Retention

22 min
This lesson teaches a practical retention diagnostic process for SaaS operators. Students learn how to separate logo churn, revenue churn, contraction, expansion, voluntary churn, and involuntary chur…

Finance and Operations

2 lessons

Lesson 16: Forecasting Revenue, Cash Flow, and SaaS Runway

20 min
This lesson teaches a practical forecasting workflow for SaaS operators: turning subscription metrics into revenue projections, translating revenue into cash flow, and using the result to estimate run…

Lesson 17: Team Structure, Operating Cadence, and Cross-Functional Alignment

18 min
This lesson explains how SaaS operators design team structure, operating cadence, and cross-functional alignment so the company can execute predictably without slowing down. It focuses on practical op…

Scaling the Business

1 lesson

Lesson 18: Scaling Responsibly: Expansion, Enterprise Readiness, and Strategic Tradeoffs

24 min
This lesson helps founders and operators scale a SaaS business without treating growth as an automatic good. It focuses on expansion timing, enterprise readiness, operational strain, and the tradeoffs…
About Your Instructor
Professor Amanda Davis

Professor Amanda Davis

Professor Amanda Davis guides this AI-built Virversity course with a clear, practical teaching style.