Issue#71: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS around News, Comments, Reviews & Search
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Micro SaaS News this week in 2 minutes
Zapier has announced integration for OpenAI GPT-3 and DALL-E. See this thread to know what people are building.
Twitter will soon start releasing unused handles. Marc Köhlbrugge built Handle Horse that continuously monitors your desired handle and notifies you the moment it becomes available for registration.
Our Pro Member Korede Onamade launched statementai.io , gpt-3 powered essay and statement letter generator for graduate and scholarship applicants
Eelco Wiersma has sold over 100 ‘SaaS UI’ licenses since March this year! We interviewed him on Founderbeats when he reached $8K in 6 Months.
Notion will use OpenAI’s new embeddings to improve Notion search beyond today’s keyword matching systems. OpenAI announced a new embedding model this week which is significantly more capable, cost effective, and simpler to use.
Senja, a tool to collect testimonials by Wilson, hits $1K MRR in about a year. See Wilson’s earlier interview on Founderbeats when he was at $450MRR in 9 months.
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.
Let’s see some of the products around News, Comments, Reviews & Search (File search, Social Media Search)
CrowdPanel: Engage with your audience. Embed comments or reviews to allow your consumers to interact with your content in minutes. Built by Prajwal.
NewsData: The Platform to search, collect and track worldwide news. Get live breaking news or search historical news data for the past 2 years from 3000+ sources using NewsData.io API. Collect the data in JSON or Excel Formats.
FeedCheck: FeedCheck brings customer feedback from online stores right into your boardroom.
DailyDev: All developer news in one place. Get a feed of the hottest developer news personalized to you. Read more quality articles. Stay up to date. Save time. Raised pre-seed fund and is funded by 5 investors.
Powr: The easy way to build a professional Comments, Ratings, and Reviews app for any website, with no code.
GummySearch: Reddit audience research at fingertips. Quickly discover customer's pain points, what solutions they need, and what they are eager to pay for.
OmniSearch: AI-powered search for online course creators. Allow students to search through all course content - even audio and video files - to find precisely what they’re looking for.
KeepTheScore: Score keeping made simple. Track points for competitions, sports and teams. Allow people to interact. Each board has the ability to add user comments, including uploading animated gifs or other images.
QAPop: Search for the Quora platform. An automation tool for Quora that finds the popular questions with maximum ROI and also automates the 'answer draft using AI.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $2K+ per month with a social tool for tracking competitions.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who made $2500 in sales with Life Time Deals from an automation tool for a social platform.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company crossed $10K per year in revenue from AI-powered search for online course creators .
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who made $50K with LTDs (Life Time Deals) from a tool for Reddit.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company’s estimated revenue is $7M per year from their no code review app
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who crossed $200 MRR in 3 months from an engagement tool.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company, founded in 2016, is making $10K+ per month from customer feedback tool
Negative Nancy says - “I can search in Reddit directly from the Reddit website. Why do I need a separate app for Reddit Search?”
Me - The search option on Reddit is only a text-based search. The search we are talking about here is more about insights, pain points, sentiments about topics, and trends from Reddit conversations. Insights/Searches from Reddit and any other social media platform are extremely powerful to know the sentiments of topics and trends.
Negative Nancy says - “Does adding comments option help anyway for customers? Why build solutions for comments functionality?”
Me - Ever heard of user-generated content? User-generated content is typically the content added by users on your page. This will have a good impact on SEO purposes. Providing the feasibility for people to comment on websites will also increase the time the user stays on the site. This in turn increases the average user time spent on each page, decreasing the bounce rates. All of these eventually improve the page rank of the website and helps with better SEO.
Deep-dive & Some niches
SaaS for Reddit Search/Insights: Reddit has 100K communities and 50 million daily active users with more than a million conversations each day. There are a lot of insights one can infer from Reddit. The conversations if properly analyzed can tell us users’ pain points, sentiments, and trends on various topics. Creating a SaaS solution that analyses these conversations every day across Reddit and pushes them to a centralized database that users can search. Tag the search results by the community, by topic, etc. The tools should make it easy to find new insights, trends, pain points, and product ideas from various Reddit conversations in various communities. GummySearch has done an amazing job in this space and crossed $50K in sales with Life Time Deals.
SaaS for Reviews Management: Many marketplaces capture customer reviews for various products. For product owners, it’s extremely difficult to gather all these reviews from various marketplaces like Shopify, WooCommerce, G2, TrustPilot, etc. Create a SaaS to make this easy so that product owners can see all their reviews in one place, create tickets for internal teams to take action, see the dashboard, get alerts for every new review, etc. As this is a tedious process to gather all these reviews into one place, most product owners/companies would be happy to pay for this. The more integrations you have, the higher the price you can charge. For example, FeedCheck in similar niche charges about $300/month for this. Founded in 2016, FeedCheck crossed $120K ARR.
SaaS to Search across documents/videos: Searching through documents is easy but searching through complex media like audio, and video is extremely tough and is nearly impossible with most of the solutions. Create a SaaS to solve this problem. The SaaS solution should be able to index the text from a normal document, and the transcribed text from audio and videos too. Most of the solutions cannot index the audio content and video content and usually index only the title text, description text, etc. For every uploaded document, the SaaS should be able to convert the audio into text, index the text content and then use it for search indexing the audio/video content. This is specifically useful for course creators, and companies that publish a lot of audio and video content. For inspiration, see Omnisearch which crossed $1K MRR with a similar solution. For extracting the text from audio/video, you can use cloud-based solutions like AWS Transcribe, Google Speech To Text, etc.
News APIs: Some many mobile apps and products need up-to-date news constantly. Create a Micro SaaS that provides News API for other apps to get the latest news, historical news, country-based news, top headlines by country, etc. The SaaS should just provide consumable APIs with access keys/secret keys so that news agencies and other apps can just call the API and get access to news. In turn, these companies will use this new inside their apps. As this will be usually a high-volume product, make sure to put access/request limits in place based on the paid plans. See NewAPI for inspiration. Products like these are usually high-value products that charge anywhere between $500/m to $2000/m per customer. You can provide add-ons to get more data around popular hashtags, and trending topics as well based on a given region. You can see to use NewAPI and repurpose the content to provide region-specific news to local apps/websites.
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Technical chops
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Cost Analysis for 100 customers
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