I've done this at the CTO level in a non glamorous industry (construction). We spent about 3 months understanding the business top to bottom before building the software. We then took the best of the SaaS software that wasn't flexible enough and layered on what was needed with an eye towards massive growth. There's no way it would have ever got done correctly and be as stable/maintainable as it is now without that time up front. As others have said, you need someone who is vested in the business. Otherwise the dev team frankly won't care. You can't just throw some random devs at a problem like this one.