Issue#41: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Billing, Subscriptions & Revenue
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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.
Let’s see some of the products around Billing, Subscriptions & Revenue. (Some of the opportunities and examples mentioned are not purely Micro SaaS though)
BillFlow: Build your Stripe billing flow with no code in minutes. Embeddable billing pages that help SaaS businesses set up customer-facing billing interfaces easier & faster. Estimated revenue is $500K/year.
Chargify: Billing built for B2B SaaS Companies. Specialized billing and data management tools that give the competitive edge. Estimated revenue is $14M/year.
Zoura: Remove your billing headaches & allow you to focus on the growth & development of your business. Billing built for B2B SaaS.
ChargeBee: Subscription Billing & Revenue Operations for fast-growth B2B SaaS. Get the operational sophistication to achieve, sustain, and scale recurring revenue.
Gumroad: Makes creators paid easily for their content via one-time payments and subscriptions.
Invoiced: Put accounts receivable on autopilot. Get paid faster, waste less time and provide a better payment experience with the Invoiced Accounts Receivable Cloud.
Octane: Octane is a drop-in metered billing system that gives you the flexibility to bill how you want. Create price plans that bill on consumption with zero code. Include base rates, add-ons, discounts, trials with a click of a button.
Recurly: Recurly is the subscription management and billing platform that drives transformational growth. Purpose-built for recurring revenue companies.
Churnkey: Churnkey exists to make your SaaS business more money. Understand why customers leave, see which deals they take, and figure out how to improve your product.
Pabbly Subscriptions: Start Selling Products in 5 Minutes for Free. Most software charges a hefty transaction fee on each sale. Pabbly is free starts with 0% transaction charges.
FastSpring: Easily integrate our checkout, manage all products and subscriptions, auto localize, and auto collect VAT + regional tax. Intelligent payment routing for maximum success rates.
Stunning: Recover more Stripe failed payments with Stunning. Leader in Stripe failed payment recovery for subscription businesses.
PaddlePress: PaddlePress Pro allows you to create a feature-rich membership website on top of WordPress. You just need a WordPress website and Paddle account to set it up.
CheckoutPage: Sell products and services on your landing pages with an amazing checkout Set up in less than 10 minutes, without code & no technical experience needed.
InvolveMe: InvolveMe Payment Pages are quick drag & drop template lead pages that collect payments instead of leads. You don’t need a website to accept payments.
Inai: Set up your payment stack without spending months of developer time. Improve conversion at the checkout by up to 10% and enhance your customer experience through quick and easy integrations.
Outseta: All-in-one membership software. Outseta gives no-code creators the tools to monetize their website, SaaS product, or online community in minutes.
MoonClerk: Set up one-time payments and recurring payments in less than 5 minutes. Makes the checkout process simple and beautiful.
Askky: Helps you automatically build predictive models to find out which of your users are most likely to convert or churn in your app.
FuseBill: Automate your subscription billing. Accelerate payment recovery. Reduce churn.
ProfitWell: Price Intelligently, a product from ProfitWell, is the industry-standard software to get your subscription pricing on the right track to unlocking 30% more growth.
Thryve: Built for SaaS companies, Thryve uses a custom AI model to analyze user data to determine whether a user is at risk of churning and then notifies you, so you can step in and retain them.
ChurnBuster: Eliminate passive churn. Churn Buster preserves customer relationships, elevates your brand, and retains more customers long-term. Recover more failed payments.
Weav: Weav helps businesses keep the customers they’ve earned – by providing unique customer insights, automatically reducing churn, and helping convert upset customers into advocates.
RetainKit: RetainKit predicts which customers are at risk of canceling and why, so you can act to retain them.
BurnChurn: Stop Losing Users. Provide automated options to reduce churn and track exit feedback. Measure your progress reducing churn and retaining users through an intuitive and easy-to-understand dashboard and track MRR, user churn, revenue.
Hydra: Hydra scans user backgrounds, product use, behavior & conversations with A.I. to predict the likely outcomes. Quickly figure out who is likely to buy, upgrade or churn.
SubscriptionFlow: Power the realm of subscriptions with AI-fueled subscriptions. Deploy the right AI technology for your subscription business.
Spiffy: Maximize Sales with conversion-optimized checkouts. With over a billion data points and nearly $500M in sales, Spiffy is creating intelligent checkout pages and improving how you get paid for services and digital products.
Negative Nancy says - “Stripe, Paypal, Paddle and many other platforms has enough APIs to write my own billing and subscription management system. Why do I need more tools for subscription or billing management?”
Me - Well, Yes. But it takes time and every time you change a price model or pricing tier, it needs you to add changes to code or make changes in the database. This basically creates inertia to experiment often. Tools like BillFlow automated some of it for Stipe and it doesn’t need you to write any code. Saves a lot of bandwidth on engineering efforts and helps you concentrate on your core product offering.
Negative Nancy says - “Why do I need churn-related tools? I simply email my canceled customer for feedback.”
Me - Handling churn is not just about taking feedback from customers who canceled the subscription. There is a lot to it. For example, ‘churn prediction’ will help you predict who is going to cancel your product and help you stay in touch with the customer to understand any pain points. These tools also help automate sending discount coupons or displaying discount coupons on-screen when a customer tries to cancel the product. There is a lot to it. (More info in next sections)
Deep-dive & Some niches
No-Code Billing/Subscription management for Paddle: While there are many billing and subscription management tools for Stripe, there aren’t many tools for Paddle. Paddle is growing rapidly and expanding to many countries. Create a solution around Paddle that can create a Billing/Subscription management without writing any code. Users should be able to connect their Paddle account and be able to set up billing pages, pricing tiers from a control panel and just use that inside their SaaS solutions. This is in lines of BillFlow but for Paddle.
Predict ‘about to churn’ customers: The easiest way for any SaaS with paid subscribers to make more money is by reducing the churn. Create a Micro SaaS solution that can help predict which users can churn based on their activity and usage of the SaaS application. A product like this can control the churn percentage and can improve revenue. Also, let the SaaS owners choose a few parameters to define ‘about to churn’. For example, one of the possible parameters to assess churn could be -“user hasn’t logged into the tool for X number of days”. While some SaaS needs the users to log in every day and check, some SaaS doesn’t need every user to log in every day. Other parameters could be, “is a user using API credits actively” etc. While there are some general parameters to assess ‘about to churn’, you should also let SaaS owners define an ‘about to churn customer’. (See next section on how this can be implemented). Other add-ons for a product like this could be ‘automated discounts’ for customers who would likely churn or automated emails to keep them warn and request feedback/improvements.
Churn feedback automation tool: Create a tool that handles ‘Churn feedback’ for the SaaS businesses. The solution should have a simple GUI tool to design a simple feedback form and apply brand settings (like Brand color, Logo, etc). The tool should output a direct link or an embeddable script SaaS founders can integrate into their SaaS in the cancellation workflow. Any time, a user tries to cancel a subscription, this automated script will show a popup and ask for more info and feedback. Alternately, the user could be directed to a link provided by your app. Before the user submits the feedback, the tool should be able to show some pre-configured discount coupons and asks if the customer is okay to continue with an X % of discount or so. This method reduces the churn to a great extent. Make sure your product is fully configurable with brand logo, brand color, adding/deleting discount coupons, feedback questions, etc.
WordPress Plugins for handling payments/subscriptions: Create a plugin that can convert a WordPress site into a subscription-based site. For example, people should be able to install a WordPress site, then install the plugin, and then they should be able to convert the entire site into a subscription site so that only paid users can access the site. Improve this by letting website owners configure what pages need to have secured access instead of locking the whole site. Support multiple payment providers like Paypal, Paddle, Stripe. Site owners should be able to configure the data about payment providers inside the plugin settings.
Automated subscription management portal: Create a complete membership software that lets customers create an entire subscription site that handles login, payments for their users without the need to write any code. This is useful for people who have an audience and want to build a community or create content with restricted access so that only paid users can access it. See Outseta for inspiration which executed a similar model. The tool should let website owners create pages without writing code and then website owners should be able to write content, upload audio/video, and provide access to all of this to the paid audience only. The tool should also take care of auth, access, subscription, renewals, and cancellations.
Billing/Discount automation with PPP: If you have never heard of PPP, it stands for Purchasing Power Parity. In its simplest terms, it offers location-based pricing as not everyone earns a US-based salary. Based on the country of the visitor, it offers discounts dynamically. See ParityBar for example. Users can also build this on their own by using solutions like IPStack to detect the IP and then find the country. Based on the country, query the pre-configured discount code and display the discount code on the screen. But it will be too much work as you will not know or may not have a list of purchasing power/GDP data of various countries. Create a solution around this for SaaS products and let your customers integrate this into their SaaS solutions. Make sure to support APIs for any integrations required.
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Subscription Management Platform for Paddle is really in need.