Issue#9: Building $1K-$10K MRR micro saas products around Keyword monitoring tools
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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.
What does a keyword monitoring tool do and why are these tools getting popular?
Let’s make it easy. A keyword monitoring micro saas tool just monitors for a keyword in a given set of forums (for example - Twitter, Reddit, etc) and alerts you as soon as the tool finds a mention about your keyword.
This keyword could be your brand name or a keyword related to a niche you are working on.
For people who know “Google Alerts”, this is somewhat similar but is more targeted towards platforms like Hackernews, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, etc.
So why are these tools getting popular?
With the advent of technology, it has become increasingly easy to build products resulting in more and more people building products. With so many products floating around, it's always tough to get customers specifically when you are just starting.
So, it would be a natural choice for founders to know where their audience is talking on the internet and engage in the conversation. The earlier the founder starts engaging in a conversation the more views the founder gets in a Twitter thread or an online conversation.
Some players in this niche
F5Bot : F5Bot is a free service that emails you when your selected keywords are mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters.
Syften : Get new users for your startup without spending a dime
PMAlerts : Social media monitoring made simple
AlertCamp : Effortless social media monitoring
NotifierForReddit : Get notified instantly when your brand is mentioned on Reddit
Mentionlytics : IntelligentSocial Media Monitoring
Mention : Build your social media strategy by listening to conversations around relevant topics for your brand
Notify : Whenever your startup gets mentioned on web get notified on Slack or Email
LittleBirde : Follow comments and users on Hacker News, Reddit and lobste.rs for keywords of your choice and post them to Slack in real time.
Talkwalker : Talkwalker Alerts monitors every single mention of your brand and keywords across the internet - including news platforms, blogs, forums, websites and even Twitter.
Negative Nancy says: Google alerts already kind of failed experiment.
Me: That's true because Google alerts made it too generic that nobody wanted. Google alerts didn’t have any intelligence and there is a delay between the actual post and your notification as Google primarily depends on the crawler but not on the APIs of these forums. The keyword monitoring tools we are talking about here are primarily built on APIs provided by the platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Hackernews, etc.
Negative Nancy says: Anybody can do a quick search of keywords across a couple of forums manually everyday morning.
Me: The problem is not being able to find the results. The problem is how quickly can the user be notified. It isn’t possible to do it manually by anyone unless someone hires a virtual assistant.
Some niches
There is a thin line between keyword monitoring for engaging in a conversation vs keyword monitoring for brand reputation management. Pick your niche carefully and double-down on what you want to build.
Simple keyword monitoring: Simple keyword monitoring micro saas product that monitors most happening websites like Hackernews, Indiehackers, Lobsters, Reddit, Twitter. The saas tool should be able to notify the users via email. A good add-on would be to integrate the notification system with Slack, Telegram, etc. Most users would love to be notified on Slack or Telegram. Keyword monitoring solution gets more users only when the tools monitor more places. So, add as many platforms as you can monitor. For inspiration see Syften and PMAlerts.
Intelligent mentions: There is a big problem with the mentions or keyword monitoring. The results are often purely based on the “keyword” text and could sometimes be of no use. For monitoring the Brand names, a simple keyword monitoring tool may work. But for a founder who is looking at certain keywords, receiving a false positive that is not in context of the founder’s saas product. For example, a founder building something related to “Airtable” wouldn’t be interested in questions in Reddit that is directed towards Airtable pricing questions. So, if you could add some kind of intelligence and rank the mention on a scale of 5 that fits the context for the founder, that would be a killer feature. To start with you can start doing this manually as well. (Ever heard of something like - “Doing things that don’t scale”) .