Issue #122: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around AI SaaS Starter kits, Interactive training videos, AI-powered competitors Monitoring, Edutainment Platform and More - Part 2
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🎉 ✨ Micro SaaS News this Week
(This saves you hours of time and keeps you up to date on what's going on in Micro SaaS)
Shri crossed $1K MRR from Guidejar, a tool to create interactive product demos and guides. Listing on appsumo for 3 months fetched him 1000+ paid customers. After ending the appsumo campaign, it took Shri around 4 months to reach $1K MRR.
Scrollsequence by Hanzla reached $7.8K/month revenue. Scrollsequence is a Wordpress animation plugin that transforms any video into an immersive web experience
iCodeThis by Florin generated $60,000 in revenue in 1.5 years. iCodeThis provides coding challenges that are designed to improve HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills. Presently, it’s making $2k - $3k per month.
Sergey made $325 from lifetime deal sales (16 sales) of Screen Charm before building the product. It’s a Chrome extension for professional browser recordings.
Mac grew Castanet to $60K monthly recurring revenue in 2.5 years. Castanet is an automated B2B lead generation tool for LinkedIn. It was launched in 2018 and was later acquired on reaching $61K MRR with about $3k in expenses.
Eddy reached $400 in revenue for Blog Recorder. It’s an AI voice blogging tool that acquired 100 users in one Week after launching in June 2024
Beji by Kitze crossed $9K ARR and $800 MRR. Beji is a productivity app that combines habits, todos, journaling, meal tracking, calendar and more.
RivalSense by Martins and Arturs reached $5K/m in revenue. RivalSense is an AI tool that curates competitor insights relevant to user's’ business. They recently acquired their first enterprise customer.
Dan crossed $1.1K/month revenue with Shipixen, an app to generate customized boilerplates for websites, blogs, directories etc.
Ive hit $547 MRR in the first three weeks of Sintelly sales. Sintelly is AI-driven therapy chatbot app.
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Micro SaaS Ideas for SaaS Founders
⛳ 💡 SaaS Starter kit for building AI apps
SaaS starter kits or boilerplates are gaining traction. They provide a pre-built foundation for devs to quickly launch their products saving them time and resources. A remarkable success is of ShipFast, a NextJS boilerplate that made $63K in revenue in 60 days. It’s now making $80K/month in revenue.
As the interest in AI application development continues to increase, there's a growing opportunity to create a specialized SaaS boilerplate specifically for AI apps. Choose the framework and tech stack you are most comfortable with and has a growing demand. Beyond the standard starter kit features like auth and user management, payments, landing pages, CMS, emails, SEO etc. provide integration with popular AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stable Diffusion etc. Include built-in support for vector databases like Pinecone, Weaviate etc. needed by many AI apps. Provide tracking of key metrics like response times, token usage by AI models etc. in the admin dashboard. You can also provide re-built wrappers for common AI APIs to simplify integration.
BuilderKit is a good example of a NextJS AI Boilerplate that has reached $6K in revenue with $3K of that generated in just three days following its Product Hunt launch in July 2024. Another inspiring example is Startkit.Ai by James and Danielle which is used by 75 developers.
⛳ 💡 Micro SaaS for creating interactive training videos
Build a simple tool that lets users turn regular videos into engaging learning experiences. The idea is to empower users to easily add interactive features to any video. These can include clickable buttons that trigger custom actions, hotspots that reveal additional info when hovered over and branching logic that let viewers choose their own path through the content. This will help users build educational videos with interactive quizzes and learning resources. The users can share these interactive videos via a link or embed in their website. Also provide an analytics dashboard to help track engagement metrics, quiz scores and viewer interactions with the videos.
For inspiration, consider Mindstamp which provides a powerful solution for creating interactive videos has an estimated $3.6M annual revenue. Pictory, an AI video creation tool with estimated $8.3M/year revenue includes an interactive video quiz maker.
⛳ 💡 AI-powered competitors Monitoring Tool
Keeping tabs on competitors is crucial but time-consuming. An AI-powered competitor monitoring tool tackles this issue by automating this. The goal is to help busy founders and teams stay informed about their competitors without having to spend hours each week manually researching. Users should be able to set up detailed monitoring profiles for each competitor, specifying exactly what types of updates they care about. The tool would automatically track competitor websites, social media and other online sources for content updates, news, new features, jobs openings etc. The key is presenting this info in an easily digestible format. A weekly or daily AI generated email digest could summarise and highlight the most important competitor updates. Or users could get real-time Slack notifications for urgent updates.
An inspiration in this space is Kompyte that provides competitive intelligence at scale. It was acquired by SEMrush and generates an estimated annual revenue of $2.4M. RivalSense also solved this problem and reached $5K in monthly revenue
⛳ 💡 Edutainment Platform for a niche Skill
People love learning via challenges, interactive media and gamification. Build an edutainment platform for a niche skill like Python, generative AI for productivity, video editing or any other specialized area. This approach combines the best of education and entertainment to create an engaging and effective learning experience. By focusing on a specific niche skill you can create a platform that offers daily challenges, interactive tutorials and community. Gamified elements like badges, and leaderboards can keep users motivated, while progress tracking tools help them monitor their learning journey. Elevate is one such app with 50 million users that helps to improve cognitive skills such as focus, processing speed, memory, and math skills through personalized, interactive games and exercises. iCodeThis is making $2k - $3k per month by providing coding challenges for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It generated $60,000 in revenue in 1.5 years.
⛳ 💡 Products around Headless Commerce
If you have never heard of ‘headless e-commerce’, start here. In its simplest form, headless commerce is a separation of the front end and back end of an e-commerce application. This architecture offers brands freedom of expression to build whatever and however, they want. Most importantly, it enables brands to enrich the customer experience. The concept is simple - instead of using the same frontend, ‘headless commerce’ stores provide only the back-end functionality that a store requires and provides APIs to access this data. For example, a typical online store required functionalities like ‘create a product’, ‘update a product’, ‘create invoice’, ‘initiate a payment’ etc. Your SaaS solution provides the complete backend functionality in the forms of APIs and your customers would use these APIs and build their own frontend based on their choice. This is getting extremely popular and solutions like these are adopted by more companies. See here for an example. Swell solving a similar problem raised $3.4M in funding.
⛳ 💡 Micro-Saas for Asynchronous Podcasting
Asynchronous podcasting is a method that encourages conducting audio interviews where the host and guest record their responses at their own convenience. Instead of scheduling a live interview where both parties need to be available simultaneously, asynchronous podcasting allows for greater flexibility. The host can share a set of interview questions or prompts with the guest, who then records their responses on their own time. Similarly, the host records their questions separately. These recorded segments are later edited and combined to create the final podcast episode. This async process eliminates the need for coordinating schedules across different time zones or dealing with conflicting availability. Both the host and guest can participate in the interview when it suits them best. Asynchronous podcasting allows for more thoughtful and focused responses. Since the guest can record their answers without time pressure, they have an opportunity to carefully consider their responses, resulting in more insightful and engaging content. Create a Micro SaaS product that help facilitates asynchronous podcasting. Rumble Studio is one example that allows companies, creators and agencies to create audio content at scale, using asynchronous interviews.
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📈⚡ AI Trends this Week
Meta released Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks
Mistral released a new flagship model, Large 2, which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning.
OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o mini, their most cost-efficient small model.
OpenAI offers free GPT-4o Mini fine-tuning to counter Meta’s Llama 3.1 release
Adobe rolls out more generative AI features to Illustrator and Photoshop
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