Issue#74: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Freelancer ecosystem - Part 2
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We are excited to share the latest Micro SaaS news and Micro SaaS Ideas to help you on your journey as a SaaS founder. Let's explore what's new this week!
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Micro SaaS News this week in 2 minutes
(This saves you hours of time and keeps you up to date on what's going on in Micro SaaS.)
Twitter has announced that from February 9, they will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.
maven.com, the platform for live learning/cohort-based courses, is now open to the public for building courses. Earlier, teaching on Maven was invite-only and it remained in private-beta for 2 years.
TweetHunter.io, bootstrapped about 18 months ago, has been acquired for $1.4 million dollars upfront payment plus additional payment based on output for next 2 years between 3 founders.
Gary Darna, founder of a productized service for e-commerce operations management called Micromerch, reaches 14+K MRR in only 10 months! And he’s using a no-code stack. Check out his interview by FounderBeats
Sergey Bunas made a GPT-3 Chrome Extension for Twitter in one day and earned $1143 in 2 weeks! He shares his story here.
Mustafa Ergisi hits $1151 MRR and 128 active subscribers for ai2sql.io - an AI tool, powered by Codex for generating SQL queries.
tally.so has now reached $42.8K MRR. See the interview of Marie Martens, co-founder, on FounderBeats when Tally was at $25K MRR about 5 months ago!
Our pro member Christian Helvin has released artistembed.com - a tool that lets you generate your own free artist music widget in seconds.
shiftpro.io is an employee shift scheduling management platform, launched by our Pro member Yobiela, got 7 sign-ups in two months.
spellbound.cc is an AI writing app for Mac launched this week by our Pro member.
OpenAI's can now detect text if its written by AI https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/.
Let’s see today’s Newsletter around a Micro SaaS niche.
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.
This is ‘Part-2’ of the ‘Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Freelancer ecosystem’
Let’s see some of the products in this niche.
Folyo: Leads for Freelancers, made easy. A unique way to get leads for freelancers to go bid and grab projects faster.
TiinyHost: For freelancers & agencies, TiinyHost is a perfect for sharing quick updates with clients. Just a simple, hassle-free way to host prototypes.
Prospero: Close more deals 3x faster with professional proposals. Create beautiful proposals with ease. Impress clients and win more projects. Got acquired in 2018.
PayPod: Online Invoicing Software for Freelancers. Create Invoices & Quotes to download as PDF or send by email.
Flexiple: Hire Pre-Screened Freelance Developers & Designers Flexiple is a network of top freelance developers and designers with hourly rates ranging from $30 to $100.
TimeCamp: Time tracker that allows teams, managers, and freelancers to measure time spent on tasks and projects.
WaveApps: Simple bookkeeping and payment solutions for small business owners.
LancerLot: All-in-one dashboard with resources on sales, marketing and operations to help people grow as a freelancer or small agency.
GrabStar: Collect Reviews from Your Clients & Build a Better Portfolio Make your freelance profile more trustworthy and professional.
FreelancerClub: A career path for creative freelancers. On a mission to support freelancers through learning, collaboration and paid freelance jobs.
Cluee: Freelancer life organized. Freelancers can track time in projects, finance and payments with one app. Organize contracts, invoices and cashflow beautifully with Cluee.
Prelo: Lead generation simplified. Where solopreneurs can find tech startups with big budgets.
NotionFreelance: Manage entire freelance process, with Notion. All-in-one operating system to manage and grow freelance business in Notion.
UnicornFactory: Hire New Zealand's best freelancers. UnicornFactory helps connect you to Kiwi freelancers who are good at what they do to help you take the next step in reaching your business goals.
WeAreIndy: Freelancing made simple Indy helps you manage your freelance business. Send proposals, sign contracts, track billable hours, create invoices, and receive payments all in one place.
AirtableInvoiceMaker: Create quote & invoice PDFs super fast With a complete Airtable tool made for freelancers and small agencies.
HelloBonsai: Everything needed to run freelance business. Bonsai’s all-in-one product suite with smart automation lets you focus on passion, not paperwork.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $1100+ per month from invoice generation tool
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company’s estimated revenue is $25M per year from tool for bookkeeping & payments
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who started making $2K+ per month in less than 2 years with platform for hosting and sharing work files.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company’s estimated revenue $9K per month from the time tracking tool.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company is making $1 million per year in revenue from network of pre-screened freelancers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who crossed $2500 MRR by providing leads to freelancers.
Negative Nancy says - “Freelancers can build the tools themselves and are not usually inclined to pay for tools”
Me - Freelancing is not just about coding. Not everyone is a code/builder to build tools by themselves. In most cases, it may not be worth it for freelancers to spend their time and build tools. They would usually make more money by spending that time on a client project. As long as the tool saves time/money or helps in making more money, freelancers would be happy to pay.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Let’s see some of the niches around the Freelance ecosystem - The tools needed by Freelancers or the tools used by Freelancers.
All-In-One tool platform for Freelancers: Freelancing involves a lot of things like sending proposals, sending invoices, tracking projects, joining calls with customers, sending daily progress, and collaborating with clients and other freelancers. Create a SaaS that provides multiple apps - all under a single platform. The apps should be able to do everything a freelancer needs in day-to-day tasks. Instead of paying for each platform separately, this will help freelancers to get all tools under a single platform. For example, see Cogency which created a single platform with multiple apps. Cogency has about 2000 active users by March 2022 and has a good conversion to paid users. As an add-on to such a platform, create a feature that helps freelancers to build a portfolio. The feature should enable users to build a beautiful portfolio. It should be able to showcase its past work and accomplishments.
Productized services set up by Freelancers: This is an underestimated revenue channel by most freelancers. “Productized service” is a process of bundling your service in the form of a product for a fixed price and promised effort. In short - you promise what would be done in a fixed time (maybe hours, days, months) or you promise what would be done for a given task and you charge a fixed price for that without hourly billing. Productized services make a lot of money with a minimum number of customers too. Usually productized services charge around $800/m - $1500/m. Even with 10 clients, this will be a doable business provided you have a lot of knowledge in that specific technology, niche, language, framework, and process. Pick what you are best at. Some examples are ‘Productized WordPress development & maintenance’, ‘Productized Frontend development’, ‘Productized Backend development’, ‘Productized Data Analytics’, etc. If you don’t have the required skill set but you have enough contacts in the niche, get a co-founder on board with the required skill set.
Client Testimonial Capture/Portfolio builder Tools: One of the best ways to establish credibility for a freelancer is to show the past project experience and show client feedback on the projects executed. Most clients highly rely on freelancers’ testimonials and work experience before awarding a freelancing project. Create a SaaS solution that creates a portfolio for freelancers with past projects, sends automated emails to clients to enter feedback, and then creates a beautiful testimonial page for the freelancers. Things like these will eventually improve the chances of getting new projects for freelancers. Improve further by adding features to provide video testimonials as well. For example, see Testimonial which crossed $100K ARR in less than a year with video-based testimonials.
Freelance/Gig alerts Monitoring System: Keyword monitoring services are not new but a keyword monitoring service that can monitor platforms like Upwork will help freelancers bid for projects much faster. See here about Syften launching a keyword monitoring for Upwork. Freelancers are always on the lookout for leads, clients, and projects. A SaaS tool that can monitor freelance tasks across various Freelancing platforms and send a notification to the users will significantly improve the chances of getting projects for freelancers. This will also save a lot of time for freelancers. Instead of manually looking for freelance tasks, the alerting system can be used to directly click the links and bid as needed. In a long run, you can extend the platform to monitor multiple keywords across multiple platforms not just for freelancers.
🔒 👉 [Get access to 800+ additional ideas and more additional ideas in this niche and across all niches from Pro version with data points, revenue information].
Technical chops
Learn technical pointers on how to build products around this niche.
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Marketing chops
Learn Marketing pointers on how to start marketing the products for this niche. This should give you a marketing head start.
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Cost Analysis for 100 customers
Learn how much it costs to build a product in this niche and cater to 100 customers.
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