Issue#51: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS around Survey & Research Platforms
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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 how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
We are in a time where people are paying for quality research and quality content. We are not talking about the Survey/Research tools but we are talking about the platforms for Survey/Research. Let’s see some Micro SaaS startups in this space.
PeopleFish: Market Research for Startups Survey real consumers with PeopleFish. Get the feedback you need to launch amazing products & services.
UnbundlingReddit: Receive monthly hand-crafted reports on a given subreddit. Discover how they talk, what they do, & what they want.
GummySearch: GummySearch helps you leverage online communities on Reddit to ideate, validate, and find customers for your business quickly.
MarketResearchForStartups: The market research toolkit for data-driven innovators. Survey real consumers. Get the feedback you need to launch amazing products and services.
SurveySays: Get same-day feedback from your target audience SurveySays is an answers platform that gives you the feedback you need to launch amazing products & services.
NbriiMarketResearch: Market Research Surveys identify the current and forecasted characteristics and demographics of an area or industry in which a product or service may be offered.
Conjointly: A powerful end-to-end solution for insights teams who need fast and reliable market research.
Zappi: Zappi is the ad and innovation testing platform built by brands for brands. Zappi’s online technology gives you easy access to better research methodologies so you can test more, learn more, and ultimately make better decisions.
FlexMr: FlixMr’s mission is to empower research, product, and marketing teams. It helps clients to act decisively, stay close to customers and embed agile insight at the heart of every decision. The estimated annual revenue is $4M/year.
Aytm: Some of the best things about AYTM include targeting capabilities, delivery deadline guarantee, and access to over 60,000,000 respondents around the world. Aytm offers real-time quotes to get you started the instant you're ready. The estimated revenue is $10M/year.
FuelCycle: Connecting brands with their customers, prospects, and users to uncover real-world actionable intelligence. Estimated revenue is $24M/year.
Voxco: Trusted by the Top 50 Market Research firms & Global Brands in 40+ countries. Estimated revenue is $11M/year.
Confirmit: Researchers all over the globe choose Confirmit's technology to support unique and sophisticated research projects, such as market segmentation, brand trackers, ad/product testing, loyalty/advocacy analysis, customer and employee experience programs. Estimated revenue is $100M/year.
GLGInsights: GLG Surveys assembles target populations, while GLG Qualitative convenes focus groups, workshops, and discussion panels. GLG Integrated Insights offers market assessments, competitive analyses, and voice-of-customer studies. Estimated revenue is $100M/year.
Cint: Cint accelerates your digital insights gathering. The industry-standard technology for automated insights gathering that transforms the way you run digital survey-based research. Estimated revenue is $40M/year.
Pulse: Pulse helps you identify your goals for the survey and write strategic questions. The final report includes narratives explaining research methods used, the population being studied, and graphs to help better analyze the data collected. Estimated revenue is $1M/year.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who made $50K in Life Time Deals and other sales with Reddit research platform.
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🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who made $1.6M in 6 years averaging at $25K MRR with market research platform
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who has an estimated annual revenue is $4M/year with research and insights platform .
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who has an estimated revenue of $30M/year with advertising and testing platforms for brands.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who started in 2016 and profitable company with 10 employees by building end-to-end solutions for insights/market research
Negative Nancy says - “I don’t think I need a survey that goes to 300 people. My gut feeling is always correct”
Me -Businesses don’t run on gut feeling. They run on data. That is the reason companies pay a lot of money to understand users’ perceptions towards something. That is one of the reasons you see those ‘Survey Ads’ on Youtube where companies pay a lot to understand people's perception/knowledge on something. Research is not always surveying 300 people. Companies are doing ‘Market Research’ by surveying thousands of people.
Negative Nancy says - “But Research platforms can fake the results and reports without actually running the survey across the requested audience segments”
Me - That is not always the case. Check for earlier reports, talk to the founder on how the survey will be executed. Get details about how they would reach the targeted audience (this would be mostly via ads on various platforms). But yes, validate and proceed.
Deep-dive & Some niches
People need research. Startups need research. Research and surveys are major points from Enterprises to Startups and help channelize efforts. That is one of the reasons you see those ‘Survey Ads’ on Youtube where companies pay a lot to understand people's perception/knowledge on something. The survey could be anything - “Have you heard of Brand XYZ in last 6 months?”, “Have you come across an Ad for XYZ in last 3 months”, “What do you think is the best brand for Ecommerce” etc. Some companies facilitate this process to run surveys, compile research reports for companies and high-worth individuals.
There are many types of research reports. As per Conjointly, below are a few types of market research reports.
Pricing research: Measure the impact of price changes on the demand of a product and determine the optimal price for your new products.
Claims and messages testing: Product claims communicate why consumers should choose your product and why it stands out in a world of fierce competition.
Feature selection: Identify which product features are most important to consumers, and test to see which have the greatest potential
Range optimization: Find optimal levels for specific products in your portfolio and perform optimizations of specific features.
Subscription models, It’s crucial to understand your audiences, study their relationships with brands, and invest wisely to optimize conversion.
Usage and Attitude Understand the market, identify trends, and find potential opportunities with a Usage and Attitude study and Segmentation.
It is not that you always need to run survey’s but sometimes it could be doing all the research by yourself (as a service) & submitting a report. For example, UnbundlingReddit unbundles subreddits and sends ad-hoc reports.
People want end-to-end research help on several things. Start small and pick a niche you want to target or you are interested in.
Let’s see some niches we can target in this space.
Market Research Platform for Startups: Similar to Enterprises, market research is also required for Startups. There is a clear gap with companies approaching Enterprise customers and not a major setup of companies concentrating on Startups. PeopleFish found this gap and started catering ‘Market Research’ for Startups. For your inspiration - PeopleFish made $1.6M since 2016 in 5 years averaging at $25K MRR. The market can still accommodate a lot of platforms in this space. You can either pick ‘Market Research for Startups’ as a general theme or you can further niche down to ‘Education startups’, ‘Medical Startups’, ‘B2B Startups’, ‘B2C startups’, ‘Micro SaaS' startups’, etc.
360-degree ‘Idea Research report’ for Micro SaaS founders: One of the biggest time-consuming things for startup/Micro SaaS founders is the initial analysis of the market. For example, as a founder if you want to analyze a product idea - you need to do a lot of things like analyzing the competitors in the given niche, the revenue of the competitors, for what keywords are the existing websites ranking, how many answers on Quora were contributing to the traffic for existing competitors, how often the founders of competitors post on social platforms like Reddit, etc. Like this, there are a lot of things. Without proper research, your startup is bound to fail unless you get lucky or you may end up putting a lot of effort to make it successful. Create a platform where founders can pay and get a one-time report of the competitors in a given niche. You can create a form where the user will input the idea roughly, ask for more details like the niche, example of current known competitors, etc. Before you start your research get on a call with the user and set the expectation. Then start your research and create a report out of this research. This is an underrated mechanism but surely adds a lot of value to founders.
Research and Unbundling of Reddit/Quora: Reddit is a great source for traffic and leads for many startups when utilized carefully. Many people make mistakes by overly promoting their products and getting banned on various subreddits and thereby losing a major chunk of traffic sources. Create a simple solution (manual approach though) where you can create a report of how a certain subreddit works, what are the best times to post to a subreddit, what is the average sentiment of the posts to that subreddit, the top format of the posts that people upvote in that subreddit upvote the most, possible amount of traffic by posting to the subreddit, etc. This is a piece of important information to double down on Reddit. See UnbundlingReddit for inspiration. The same can be extended to other platforms like Quora, IndieHackers, etc as well. Or you can start with one and provide others as add-ons.
Automate Youtube Ads/Facebook Ads/Other Ad platforms for Surveys: Companies want to run survey ads on platforms like Youtube/Facebook with native ads. We are talking about those survey questions you see on Youtube and other websites. But companies either do not have the skills/time to do this on their own. Create a platform where you can do this for them either manually or with automation. Start with a manual approach and understand the customer's needs. A typical scenario would-be customers who want to survey things across various customer segments. The survey could be anything - “Have you heard of Brand XYZ in last 6 months?”, “Have you come across an Ad for XYZ in last 3 months”, “What do you think is the best brand for Ecommerce” etc. So, as a platform provider, you need to capture these questions, convert those into survey questions and push those as ads on Youtube and other platforms based on customer requirement for audience segment (criteria like audience location, age, profession, etc - some ad platforms provide segmentation at this level). Once you have enough customers and see decent traction, convert the manual approach into an automated solution by using various APIs from these ad platforms.
Market Research As a Service with White-label/Agency Model: This is the same as any Market research company except that you provide this as a white-label service for Agencies. Agencies typically have a high-paying client base and an additional service they can provide will bring in a huge revenue as they have a readily available customer base who may need this service. But unfortunately, almost all agencies operate at 100% efficiency and may neither have the skills nor time to start doing Market Research. You can work with these agencies and provide ‘Market Research’ as a white-label service where agencies customers will see the entire effort/research as coming from agencies. This is a great opportunity and a win-win-win for everyone involved. As agencies charge a lot to customers, agencies will be happy to pay a share for your service. For inspiration, see MarketResearchForStarups implementing this model for agencies.
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