Issue#40: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Challenges & Habits
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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 in this space.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making more than $200K in revenue per year with Maker/Ship challenges.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $2K in revenue per month with one-off sales by creating a habit to built audience.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $7K MRR with Front-end coding challenges.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is made $3000 in just 6 months by creating 12 Products in 12 Months challenge.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $20K/month in revenue with writing challenges.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who received offers for 6 figure dollar acquisition for their community around NoCode Challenges.
Ship30for30: Build a writing habit and start writing online in 30 days Ship 30 for 30 is a cohort-based course teaching you the fundamentals of writing online. But instead of just learning passively, you will put your learnings into practice by writing and publishing every day for 30 days with 500+ other writers.
PublicLab: Grow an audience with your authentic & transparent voice Content, courses, and community to help you become a public entrepreneur. Built by Kevin to help people build a habit around ‘Building in Public’.
FrontendMentor: Improve your front-end coding skills by building real projects Solve real-world HTML, CSS, and JavaScript challenges whilst working on professional designs.
LaunchMBA: Over 12 months you will launch 12 online products that each have the potential to become business.
750Words: Every month you get a clean slate. If you write anything at all, you get 1 point. If you write 750 words or more, you get 2 points. If you write two, three, or more days in a row, you get even more points. It's fun to try to stay on streaks and the points are a way to play around with that.
100DaysOfNoCode: Bring your ideas to life in 100 days. No coding required. 100DaysOfNoCode is an online community connecting you with the people, content, and habit-fueled system to build great things.
NaNoWriMo: Writing a novel alone can be difficult, even for seasoned writers. NaNoWriMo helps you track your progress, set milestones, connect with other writers in a vast community, and participate in events that are designed to make sure you finish your novel.
GoLifeLog: Write towards your goals 100 words a day about your goals, whatever they might be. Write to think, plan, imagine, aspire.
Gumroad Challenge: Gumroad created the 14 Day Product Challenge to help you create a product in the two weeks.
MakerPad Challenges: Makerpad Challenges are fun opportunities for leveling up and learning new skills by building things primarily using No-Code tools.
90DaysofProse: Make writing a habit. Write for at least 10 minutes a day for the next 90 days.
FlashFictionChallenge: The Flash Fiction Challenge is a competition that challenges writers around the world to create short stories no longer than 1,000 words based on genre, location, and object assignments in 48 hours.
ContentUK: Kickstart your content creation habit in 30 days. Develop a daily content creation habit. Meet other content creators for support and accountability.
KickAssLetters: Join +400 Founders, Parents, and Challenge-seekers leveling up through growth challenges.
DoYou: The 30 Day Meditation Challenge. The 30 Day Meditation Challenge is your way to finding complete balance and total zen.
DailyLogoChallenge: Each day you get an email with a fun new logo design challenge. Share your designs for community feedback on Instagram and Dribbble.
10MinuteNovelists: The 365 Writing Challenge from 10MinuteNovelists is a subgroup of novelists. It’s an organized group of writers who encourages and supports each other as they try to write consistently for a calendar year.
AceFrontend: Only practical coding challenges to hone your skills. Ace Front End has complete and practical coding challenges, with a detailed walk-through of a perfect interview solution.
Codier: Explore and attempt front-end coding challenges. Discover and be inspired by front-end code creations on Codier.
CodeWell: Improve your HTML and CSS skills by practicing on real design templates. With Codewell, you can browse high quality. Figma templates that you can use to sharpen your HTML and CSS skills.
365Project: The year-long photo-journaling project. Join the community that takes a photo each day for a year. Improve your photography skills and record the day-to-day moments of your life.
100DaysOfFitness: Gives you the structure, inspiration, content, personalized support, and accountability to learn how to start your fitness journey and bring your fitness goals to life.
DailyUI: Become a Better Designer in 100 Days Daily UI is a series of daily Design Challenges Inspiration and Surprise Rewards.
UXChallenges: Practice with real-world exercises for UX. Train yourself in crucial skills and tools.
Memorisely: Sharpen your UX/UI skills every month. Memorisely monthly UX/UI challenges are a super fun way to level up your UX/UI skills with a community in over 150 countries.
Negative Nancy says - “I can set up my own challenges. For example, I can set myself a target to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. I don’t need help.”
Me - Possible. But the chances are that you get bored and may stop mid-way. Taking challenges are a part of public/private groups brings more accountability and attention to your work.
Negative Nancy says - “Running a profitable product around challenges and habits is time-consuming”
Me - It is certainly time-consuming when you start. But as you make progress, there is a lot of stuff that can be automated with proper email sequences. Over a period, once you establish a certain process, it becomes easy with not so much manual intervention required except for cohort-based recurring calls or weekly online meetups, etc.
Deep-dive & Some Niches
The goal is to train a skill in the process of challenges and building habits. These public challenges (or private challenges) and habit-building mechanisms brings in accountability with a little bit of hand-holding. The words “challenges” and “habits” are extremely powerful and get the best out of an individual. Also, this includes running ‘cohort-based courses’ as well but for a strictly stipulated time.
Making things time-bound will help people plan things properly and reach their target based on a plan. Don’t forget Parkinson’s Law.
For monetization, either you can charge your customers as they sign-up for the challenges, or you can get sponsors and charge the sponsors. You can do both too at times by doing sponsored challenges.
Another way to help people take on the challenges is through live boot camps and live Q&As. Note that there is a difference between traditional online courses and ebooks when compared to challenges. Courses could be passive and are not time-bound. Challenges are active, time-bound and give that adrenaline rush and satisfaction when challenges are solved. When you do challenges as a group/cohort, it’s more fun.
Creating an email sequence and nurturing the subscribers(challenge takers) is extremely important. Use tools like ConvertKit and MailerLite to automate this email sequence. Gumroad started heavily relying on “challenges” to help creators create something - an ebook, video course, curated lists that people pay for. That’s the power of ‘challenges & habits’. It gets people hooked to a process.
While you do this, also build a community around folks taking these challenges and keep access to the community forever and let them participate in discussions even after the challenge/habit-building period.
Let’s see some of the niches that you could see to implement. This is not the most comprehensive list as obviously this list could vary based on what interests you, but pick up your interest and see what you are best at and then build your own ‘Challenge/Cohort course/Habit building mechanism’
30 days challenge around creating eBooks: Content creation is getting popular as people are finding more time because of the paradigm shift in lifestyles. People are willing to pay for quality content. So, help people build an ebook around what they know. Make sure to time-bound this, maybe to 30 days or 60 days. But in most cases, for something like this, 30 days should be enough for the first cut. Throughout the 30 days, make sure you do a Q&A at least a week for everyone to gather and meet online. If that is not possible, at least make sure you are accessible async via email or Twitter for any questions. Now, while creating a traditional ebook, there are a lot of things one needs to know. But to start writing an ebook on Gumroad, all they need is a login and start writing content. If nothing, users can start writing the draft on a plain Google Doc as well. Create an onboarding doc and publish all these things like ‘Where to start’, ‘Step-by-step process’, ‘How to brainstorm for ebook ideas’ etc. Create micro-milestones and make sure users email you or to the group once they finish a micro-milestone and then together as a group, you help users put their first book for sale and help them make their first sale. But for you to understand this process and to get some credibility, it is highly recommended that you first publish a book by yourself in 30 days and put those learnings in one place. This is the process and philosophy I mentioned earlier in one of my Tweets.
Vlog/Youtube/Podcast Challenges: There are several types of popular content people consume or pay for. Video/Audio content is something that most people love and helps users build an audience quickly with quality content. Now for people to start creating vlogs, Youtube, Podcasts, they need some help with where to start, the initial set of tools, and a little bit of hand-holding without going off the road. Putting them accountable by mapping them to a specific group also makes them mandatorily publish vlog every day or so. Don’t make too strict rules but make sure users are moved out of the challenge if they get more than 3 strikes (each strike could be something a deadline they missed). After 30 days or 60 days of challenge, this converts as a regular habit and by providing community access you alumni can stay connected and learn from each other and new members as well.
Health/Meditation/Yoga Challenges: People are paying increased attention to health and are subscribing to more workshops around health, meditation, and Yoga. If you are into this domain, see to create a 30-day or a 60-day challenge to show up every day and follow some small challenges. You could extend this to running, jogging, playing too. Ask people to post a screenshot or a video and this will help them stay on the goal and finish the challenge and convert it into a habit.
Writing Challenges: Writing isn’t just writing an ebook or a traditional book. Other forms of writing include blog writing, tech writing, journal writing but the overall point is to start the habit of writing every day. You can create a writing tool (a distraction-free writing tool) to help this as well. Either you make a tool or send an email or alert via Telegram message, the point here is to force the user to write 750 words every day maybe for 3 months or so. 750Words makes $20K/month by helping people to write at least 750 words per day. Ship30for30 makes $200K per year helping people to write.
Coding/Tech challenges: There is an ever-growing demand for tech including front-end, back-end, designing, etc. Create challenges around any of these. FrontendMentor helps people to learn front-end skills and makes close to $100K per year. It certainly takes time when you start afresh with no credibility, but with quality daily and weekly challenges, you can get some traction. Pick your strong area. You could niche further down to a specific programming language too but assure that you are there for help when people need help in those 30 days or 60 days. Some examples could be “30 days Python challenge”, “Learn Data Science in 30 days with daily exercises and challenges” etc.
Cloud challenges: There is a huge demand for people working on the cloud in the tech industry. Create a unique 30 days or 60 days challenge that helps people learn cloud. You can also convert this into a “60-day challenge to attain your first Cloud certification”. There are many cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle. Each of these platforms provides more than 10 certifications. You can niche down to a specific cloud provider for the challenges or to a specific certification too. But create quality challenges. Start with simple challenges and progressively increase the toughness of the challenge. Be there for regular follow-up and help. Some people don’t like the concept of certifications and for people like those, you could make the challenge generic too where they build a small product on top of the cloud. The point here is to help your subscribers learn the skill in a time-bound fashion.
30-60-90 days Micro SaaS challenge for Developers: Help people build a Micro SaaS product in 30 days (or maybe try 60 days if 30 days sounds too aggressive for your audience). Building a Micro SaaS product needs a lot of stuff specifically for first-time builders. Help them through this challenge to find a good Micro SaaS Idea, find the tech needed, tools selection, help them to select databases and any performance issues. Provide them pointers for some starter kits like DivJoy, Gravity that can cut down the time to build the product. Throughout the process, help them also make their first sale and guide them on how to build a landing page in parallel to product development, and help them validate the distribution channels. Help them start with a landing page/small prototype and validate with a sign-up form and take to signed-up users before building the full product.
ZeroToOne for Twitter: Create a challenge that helps people get followers and engagement on Twitter. If you have ever used Twitter, followers with no engagement are of no use. This gets much harder when you have less than 10 followers with no credibility. The best way to get followers and engagement on Twitter is by showing up daily and ‘giving value’ to users. There are several articles and posts on how to do this but yet not everyone gets this and drops too early. Create a challenge around this where you help users post to Twitter daily and provide the content inspiration. You could use OpenAI/GPT-3 to automate this at scale or just use a manual process to find inspirational content. See TweetHunter that automated a little bit of this but you can still build a 30 day or 60 days challenge around this and help get users to get followers, maybe something like “Zero to 500 Twitter followers in 60 days” challenge or so.
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