Issue #4 : Building micro saas products around Social Proof products
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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.
This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
Social proof is a psychological and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behavior in a given situation.
What is Social Proof?
For example, if you’re walking down the street looking for a place to have your dinner. The street is busy with a bunch of restaurants. Would you pick a restaurant that has people inside eating or an empty one?
You would be likely picking the one that has people eating. It has to do with a little psychological phenomenon called social proof. You tend to follow the action of the masses.
Now let's see how it works in an online world. Unlike in real-world where you can see users eating in restaurants, in the digital world, it is not possible to do so. We need a mechanism to do that and that is called “Social Proof”
Some samples below.
Social Proof saas product industry is a big business.
Let’s see some of the products built around Social Proof.
Fomo.com : $1.2M per year revenue & 5K customers. Founded in 2016.
Nudgify : The Customer Friendly Social Proof App
Useproof Pulse:
New players: (launched in last 2 years)
ProveSrc : About $1m per year revenue. Started in 2018. ProveSource helps 25,000+ websites boost trust, credibility, conversions and sales using social proof
Negative Nancy says: It is tough to build integrations for multiple third-party systems.
Me: Most systems have standard API methods and documents and can be implemented straight away. Systems like Zapier, Integromat can be utilized to read and connect data from various sources.
Negative Nancy says: It is tough to reach the B2B audience who are interested in such a product.
Me: In fact for a product like this, it is easy to prospect possible users interested in your product. See the “Marketing chops” section on how you can find the B2B users for your niche.
Some niches around Social Proof saas tools
The whole point of building a Social Proof tool is to show the power of your users' actions and get more users by displaying those actions. It relies on the core principle of “crowd brings more crowd”
For example, if a user is browsing your site to buy a product and suddenly he/she sees a small popup on the screen that says - “Sam from SFO purchased this product 2minutes ago” - Imagine the kind of confidence your current user gets. This is as same as a retail store where the crowd pulls more crowd. You would be more inclined to visit a crowded store than a store with no buyers.
This isn’t new. This is another form of social share that shows other user's actions to drive more actions by the current user.
While the existing tools are great, what else can we add to make it more niche.
Shopify Social Proof: Building a social proof tool around Shopify sales. Show an alert every time a Shopify sales is made. Show an alert with the number of people browsing the current product. Or show a small popup with the number of people browsing this product in the last 30 minutes. More than 600,000 businesses from 175 countries use Shopify for sales.
Woocommerce Social Proof: Woocommerce is a growing e-commerce platform. Create a plugin to show the activities by other users. Display alerts as soon as a sale is made. 5 million times the Woocommerce plugin is installed.
Magento Social Proof: Magento acquired by Adobe is a growing e-commerce platform. Create a Magento social proof module to show the activities by other users. Display alerts as soon as a sale is made. More than 250,000 merchants worldwide use Magento as their e-commerce platform)
Gumroad Social Proof: Gumroad is a fast-growing digital selling platform. Building social proof tools around Gumroad sales could a killer feature Gumroad sellers would look for. Maybe on top of the social proof create an add-on that summarizes the sales total/stats for every 6 hours and posts to social media automatically.