Issue#95: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around API Ecosystem
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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)
Our Micro SaaS HQ Pro member Lynn Lin and her team launched WeShop AI , 10x Model & Product Photos with AI Studio.
Baptiste Arnaud crossed $13K MRR with Typebot. Read his earlier interview on FounderBeats
ImprovMX, a tool for receiving and sending emails with custom domain name by Cyril and Antoine, reaches $19K in monthly revenue
Al Salah reached 15K MRR with instatus.com, a tool to create status pages.
Goutham Jay crossed $700 MRR today with famewall.io. See Goutham’s earlier interview on FounderBeats
Maciej Cupial crosses $8K MRR with Calendesk.com, an appointment scheduling software built for businesses
Spell.so by Rafal hits $1K MRR
Marc Lou crosses $1500 MRR with Indie Page, Linktree for entrepreneurs
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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 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 players around Micro SaaS products around API ecosystem .
⛳ ⛳ Current players
Quick API: QuickAPI empowers builders to make micro-SaaS out of the products they've built without coding. Reached $380 in monthly revenue.
Treblle: Treblle makes it simple for developers to understand what's going on with their APIs and the apps that use them. Reached monthly revenue of $10K.
Moderation API: An AI-powered API for content moderation.
Insomnia: Lets users build better APIs faster and collaboratively with a dev-friendly interface, built-in automation, and an extensible plugin ecosystem.
Web3Forms: Contact Form API for static websites. Got 20 paying customers in 20 months.
Commerce Layer: an API-first commerce engine that makes it easy to go headless.
JobtitlesAI: Machine-learning API that sorts job titles into categories. Reached $1.4K in monthly revenue.
Crawlify: Extract e-commerce product data at scale automatically The Product API uses advanced AI technology to extract complete data from any e-commerce product page.
Scrapingfish: a web scraping API.
WunderGraph: For building Serverless APIs focusing on providing a good developer experience.
Blobr: For building an API developer portal. Displays APIs like products and lets users manage access, filter content, monitor usage and monetize APIs. Received €6.2M in funding.
Bannerbear: Bannerbear helps users auto-generate social media visuals, ecommerce banners and more with their API and integrations. Current monthly recurring revenue is $50K+.
WHOIS lookup api: offers a rapid and precise WHOIS lookup tool that enables users to retrieve domain registration information for an extensive range of domain names. Reached $600 in monthly revenue.
html2pdf.app: HTML to PDF conversion API service for developers. Crossed 50 paid customers within 1.5 years of launching.
LoginLlama: AI powered API to detect suspicious logins on your product
Rutter: Rutter connects to to 40+ commerce, accounting, and payment platforms with one API. Rutter's estimated annual revenue is currently $1.9M.
Shotstack: A cloud based video editing API
Meta API: a low code API integration platform, which lets companies create their workflows with the ability to manage authentication, maintenance and performance of their integrations. Received €700K in funding.
ScreenShotAPI: Use ScreenshotAPI to capture full-page screenshots of any website. Parallax, lazy loading, scroll to view. Choose between a variety of output formats including WebP, JPG, PNG, and PDF.
ScrapingBee: Web scraping API handles headless browsers and rotates proxies.
ScreenshotOne: A site screenshot and HTML rendering API.
The Companies API: The enrichment API to search 54 million companies & their employees.
NoCodeAPI: Connect APIs without code. Connect to Google Sheets, Airtable, Google Analytics, Twitter, Telegram, Open Graph API, MailChimp, 50 + apps without any backend.
AbstractAPI: A suite of APIs. Serving billions of calls to 1,000,000+ developers and end users worldwide.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which web scrapping API crossed $500k ARR in less than 2 years of launching.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which AI-powered API reached $3K MRR in 12 Months.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $5K in monthly revenue from a web scrapping API
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which developer tool for building APIs reached monthly revenue of $12K.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who crossed $400 MRR in 9 months with a screenshot API.
🙅♀️🙅 Pessimists
Negative Nancy says - “People use Google sheets as a spreadsheet for manual data entry. No one uses Google sheets for all these complex things like databases, API, building websites, etc”
Me - When Google sheets started, it was meant for simple data entry. But this evolved over time and now Google sheets are at a point where they can be used as a database or CMS(Content Management System) solution for most cases. Google sheets are robust, come with APIs and an in-built version control system.
Negative Nancy says - “Most people need only one or two APIs. API Bundling will not work”
Me - People’s requirement changes dynamically. Having more options is always preferred for one bundle price point.
💡💡 Deep-dive & Some niches
No-code/low-code workflow Automation/API Bundles:
API Bundles, API Packs, API Combos, API Stacks - Pretty much all refer to the same thing - Bundle multiple APIs into one simple micro-saas solution and lets users use whatever API they want under a single plan..
For example, create a bundle of APIs that can help it easy to use communication tools like Telegram and Whatsapp. For example, I am using NoCodeAPI’s Telegram hook to receive alerts on my Telegram about my Micro-SaaS activity. Certainly, I can code using Telegram API but NoCodeAPI platform made it easy for me by just giving me a single API without any nuances. This can be extended to all communication tools like Telegram, Whatsapp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Slack, etc. The user would be just authenticating to your micro saas app using OAuth2 or using API keys and your product just give the user a consumable API to interact with these platforms.
The same concept can be implemented across multiple API bundles and combination of multiple platforms as well. See NoCodeAPI and Meta API for inspiration.
Meta API received €700K in funding. NoCodeAPI is profitable and got acquired.
Micro SaaS around Google Sheets/Airtable API:
A Micro-SaaS tool that reads data from Google Sheets and renders a website from this data. For a typical website, you would need a Navbar with links, a header with image and text, a body with data, and a footer. Create multiple sheets each in a single Google spreadsheet and name them as Navbar, Header, Body, Footer, etc. Navbar will hold the data related to Navbar. The header will hold data related to Header. The same is the case with Body and Footer sheets. Now, your tool will read all the data and configs from these sheets and renders the website. The only difference between the website builders and this type of website builder is that this runs on Google sheets while others run on the database. By using Google sheets as DB, you are eliminating the need for DB and UI and thereby saving a lot of time to go to the market and get the MVP/SaaS product ready.
While this is just one example, there are many other products that can be built using Google Sheets. Some examples are SheetBest, SheetDB, SpreadSimple, Siteoly, Flezr
The same hold true for Airtable API ecosystem as well. Some popular products in Airtable AI Ecosystem are Softr, Pory etc that help create webapps on top of Airtable Data.
Rupert Hoffschmidt-McDonnell got 100 users in 45 days for DocsAutomator, a no-code tool to turn Airtable data into Google Docs and PDFs.
Data Fetcher: Crossed $20K MRR https://datafetcher.com/blog/airtable-gpt4-api-integration
Stacker.app - Received $1.3M funding
Micro SaaS around Notion API:
Data Sync Micro SaaS: Micro SaaS that helps building a simple sync application that takes the data from Google sheets/Airtable/Stripe or from anywhere and adds it to a Notion document/table. We are talking something in lines of Zapier but primarily built around Notion.(This needs API access unless you want to build using any unofficial APIs). See Notion-Automations for inspiration.
Connecting Notion page to the custom domain: This is the same as what super.so is doing. But considering there is a lot of market for Notion and everyone trying to jump to Notion, there is still a lot of market to address. There are multiple ways to build these micro saas. See FruitionSite on how a solution for this can be built using Cloudflare workers. Add more value to your micro-saas product by improving the SEO of the pages. Currently, Notion isn’t doing a great job with SEO for its users. If you can add extra capabilities to empower Notion content with SEO and custom domain, it would help a lot of Notion users and users would be happy to pay.
Bullet.so - a notion-based website builder - reached $12.5k in sales, within the first month of its launch.
Noah Bragg sells Potion for $300K after building it solo for two years.
HelpKit.so: Turns Notion docs into a hosted self-service Knowledge Base for customers without coding. Crossed $3K MRR with 130 paying customers in less than a year.
NotionForms.io: a form builder for Notion. Reached $10K MRR
Superblog.ai - $5K MRR
Micro SaaS based on OpenAI/ChatGPT APIs.
OpenAI API access provided wide range of capabilities for users to build various applications.
Here are some Micro SaaS products that are making money already.
Generate Tweets - One of the biggest problems for people posting on Twitter is the ‘writers-block’. After posting a few tweets, it often becomes tough to ideate and posts new content. Create a new SAAS product based on GPT-3 API that reads your previous tweets and analytics data for the tweets and automatically generates tweets based on this data which gives a high level of Twitter engagement. Sometimes GPT-3 can go crazy, so always provide an option for users either to “Auto-approve” tweets or provide “manual approval” for Tweets to post on behalf of users. Provide an add-on to generate the images also for Tweets. Usually, tweets with media attachments gather more attention. Based on the generated Tweet text, pull a gif from publicly available gifs or autogenerate media/images using Image APIs that take an image and text and output the image with text overlay. For example, BannerBear API can be used to autogenerate the images. TweetHunter heavily used OpenAI API to generate Tweets.
Mac/Windows Apps that run on OpenAI API: A Mac or Windows app that uses user’s own GPT-3 keys to generate text, help with formulas, summarizing text. This is against to the normal trend where the tools don’t ask for user’s GPT-3 keys. Creating a wrapper on top of existing GPT-3 functionality for Mac or Windows users will help them use and leverage GPT-3 based on their usage. Infact you can bring the entire functionality/options available in GPT-3 console to Mac/Windows through a native app with this wrapper without a need for the user to login to OpenAI/GPT-3 website. See Elephas that crossed $1K MRR and $10K in Life Time sales.
Generate questions from text using OpenAI API: Create a Micro SaaS product around knowledge testing or improvement. The product should be able to take a lot of text and generate questions based on the content. The tool should be also able to generate Flashcards so that it would be easy for the audience to go through Flashcards. This is a big space and can be niched down to domain-specific knowledge as well. But the base point remains the same - Read the content and auto-generate questions and flash cards. Generating quizzes and questions from a given text is not easy and often takes a lot of time. Create AI based Micro SaaS tool that can generate quizzes, and questions automatically based on the input text. This can be heavily used by a lot of organizations, colleges, schools, and other academic institutes. For inspiration, see QuestGen which can generate quizzes from a given text in one click using AI. QuestGen is built with NoCode tools like Bubble and is currently at $1200 MRR.
Generate Excel/Google Sheets formulas using Open-AI/GPT-3 API: Excel is used by millions of users and there are thousands of people who struggle with Excel and Google Sheets formulas. There are several courses available online charging a good amount of money to teach Excel which means it is a validated problem. Create a SaaS that helps people generate working Excel formulas based on the natural language text. See ExcelFormulaBot which can transform text instructions into Excel formulas in seconds with the help of AI. ExcelFormulaBot crossed $3300 MRR in less than a year.
Generate Profile Pictures using APIs based on uploaded pictures: People often love to see them in various kinds of profile pictures with different variations and styles. Generating these images manually takes huge money and time. Create a Micro SaaS product on top of DreamBooth explicitly for profile pictures with different variations like Products like AvatarAI and ProfilePictureAI have crossed thousands of dollars in revenue in less than 2 months with products in this space. Below are a few samples generated by ProfilePictureAI tool. You can just use Replicate and build this with API calls and commands.
Chatbots that run on OpenAI APIs:
There are many Chatbots that are created out of OpenAI functionality. These Chatbots simply scrape the website content and build a chatbot automatically that helps users to direct to right answers by leveraging the OpenAI APIs on top of the scraped content. This is a good starting point to learn more on this. Popular products like SiteGPT uses PineCone
More examples using OpenAI API:
InsertChatGPT, a tool to create white-label ChatGPT chatbots trained on your data, hits $30K MRR
Chatbase.co crossed $64,000 MRR in 6 months and now has 2K paying customers
TypingMind.com, a UI for ChatGPT , crossed $10K in revenue in less than 2 weeks after launch.
GPTMyDay , an AI tool to plan your day, reached 300 users with a month of launch
BBLY hits $3K MRR within the first month of launching.
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💻 💻 Technical chops
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📢 📢 Marketing chops
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💳 💳 Cost Analysis for 100 customers
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