Issue#8: Building micro saas products around Slack ecosystem
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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.
With 10+ million daily active users, Slack is where more work happens every day, all over the world
Slack is valued at $28 billion.
Slack has more than 2000 apps built on top of it. Some of these are making more than $100K ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
Sahil Lavingia, Founder & CEO of Gumroad is bullish on Slack. Shail says he would probably build something on top of Zoom and Slack if he were to start today.
Slack provides a robust ecosystem and a good set of APIs to build apps around it.
Some players in this space
FounderPhone - Create a shared customer support inbox for SMS and calls in Slack for you and your team
Karma.bot - Build stronger, happier teams. Set goals, track performance and reward excellence on Slack. Making $200K/year revenue.
Standuply - Digital Scrum Master for Slack and Teams. Making $90K Monthly recurring revenue.
MailClark - Smart Shared Inbox Managed in Slack or Microsoft Teams. Received $1.3m funding. Acquired by SendInBlue.
Geekbot - Thousands of teams that use Geekbot to automate standups, surveys, and daily reports. Making $1M ARR.
Clerk.Chat - SMS for Slack.Bring your business phone to Slack and start text messaging your customers in real-time. Confirm appointments, ask for reviews, offer promotions, the possibilities are endless. Making $2.6K monthly recurring revenue.
Troopr - Conversational Project Management in Slack for remote teams
Polly.ai - Capture instant feedback on Slack and Teams with Polly
SimplePoll - Simple, native polls right within Slack. Grew to 600K monthly active users.
ConcludeApp - Deploy conversation apps in minutes in Slack, without writing code
Finisher - Streamline Recurring Processes. Finisher for Slack lets you design and enforce clearly defined workflows to facilitate more effective and transparent team collaboration.
Negative Nancy says: Market for Slack apps is saturated.
Me: With 10+ million daily active users, there is a lot of opportunities out there.
Negative Nancy says: These apps need Slack approval and are always at the mercy of Slack.
Me: This has been the case with all platform-based apps built around platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc too. As long as you follow the process, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Some niches
Handling Standup/Scrum calls using Slack chat: With companies going remote and having employees across different timezones, it is often a tough challenge to run daily standup calls or scrum calls for Project managers, Scrum masters. Building a Slack app that solves this problem would make lives easy for most managers. The concept is simple - instead of logging into a Webex meeting or a Zoom call to discuss the status of tasks every day at a given time, enter the same information in Slack by tagging the app and let the Slack app do the consolidation of the status. Saves a lot of time and reduces complexity for teams working across different timezones. See Standuply making $90K monthly recurring revenue by building a Slack app around this. Also, see Geekbot -making $1M ARR with a similar Slack app.
Gamification of Karma, Accolades: Whether is sending accolades or giving Karma points for instant recognition, the concept remains the same. Someone helped you and you want to thank them. Instead of sending an email and buying something from an online store and sending, this process can be automated as a Slack app. Employees should be able to send accolades (or some points if there is a point system) to their colleagues for their help. See Karmabot.chat making $200K per year on this. This can be well improved by adding e-commerce integrations to give gift cards or gifts directly from companies pre-approved list or your items. Build add-ons that send a summary to managers for a unified view of employees' karma points.