Issue#39: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Dashboards & Data Tools
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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 profitable tools that can be built around data and dashboards. (Most of these are purely no-code solutions and doesn’t need the users to write complex code)
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who crossed $5K MRR with 150 paying customers and growing rapidly using Airtable.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company crossed $7M/year with nocode dashboards.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which SaaS product is profitable and serving millions of requests per month.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company is at $1200 MRR by providing data tools for Google Sheets.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company is making more than $2K MRR by helping build internal dashboard tools.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $40M/year with charts and data.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $5M/year with charts, maps, and tables.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who received $3M in funding to help users with SQL queries and business automation.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $5K MRR with Twitter dashboards.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $1K MRR with Google Sheet APIs.
DataFetcher: Import data from anywhere to Airtable. Connect Airtable to any API using the Data Fetcher app.
Retool: Build internal tools, remarkably fast. Stop wrestling with UI libraries, hacking together data sources, and figuring out access controls.
SheetDB: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into a JSON API Connect Google sheets to CRM, API, Website, WordPress, any application or tool.
Sheet.Best: SheetBest turns spreadsheets into REST APIs. Connect a Google sheet or a CSV to anything.
Ubiq: Reporting & Analytics for MySQL,PostgreSQL. Easily create reports & dashboards. Analyze data using drag & drop. Apply powerful filters & functions. Share reports with others. Supports local, remote, or cloud data.
Loopple: With Loopple, you can build your next Bootstrap Dashboard easily using drag and drop.
UIBakery: Rapidly build dashboards, support apps that your users will love. Create, host, use data-powered internal tools made with predefined building blocks. Add custom JavaScript code as well.
ChartMogul: The best teams in SaaS use ChartMogul to measure, understand, and grow their recurring revenue in beautiful dashboards.
DataWrapper: Enrich your stories with charts, maps, and tables. Create charts, maps, and tables from various data sources.
FlowDash: Turn any database query into a business process. Transform any SQL query into an internal tool for your team with built-in task tracking, automation, and collaboration.
DataBox: Databox pulls all your data into one place, so you can track performance and discover insights in real-time. Estimated revenue is $8M/year.
GeckoBoard: Create dashboards and easily share your key data, metrics, and KPIs in a clear, compelling way. Estimated revenue is $7M/year.
WhatAGraph: Marketing professionals use Whatagraph to track campaign results across different channels. Build customizable visual reports and let data insights lead the way. Estimated revenue is $1M/year.
Grow: Lead with data. Make it simple to connect your data, surface insights, and make data-driven decisions. Estimated revenue is $10M/year and also received $16M in funding.
Sheet2API: Turn any Spreadsheet into an API. Works with Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel and Excel Online spreadsheet as well to turn data into a fully-fledged API. No coding required.
DashThis: All your marketing data in one automated report. An automated marketing reporting tool created to help marketers save hours of work and create their reports. Estimated revenue is $4M/year.
FusionCharts: Build beautiful web & mobile dashboards and Javascript charts. Build interactive and responsive charts. Estimated revenue is currently $12M/year.
Slemma: Powerful editor allows users to build, filter, and edit charts effortlessly. Robust chart wizard enables you to build reports from scratch or edit pre-built templates. Estimated revenue is $2M/year.
Vizzlo: From the simplest pie chart to complex data visualizations, Vizzlo can help you build graphs and visualizations. Seamless plug-ins for PowerPoint and Google Slides, cloud support, and desktop apps. Estimated revenue is $2.5M/year.
ChartBrew: Analyze all data in one place. Chartbrew lets you create powerful dashboards and interactive data reports by connecting all your services in one place. Made $2K in revenue in less than a year.
KlipFolio: Bring all your metrics together in one place. Choose from 100s of curated Instant Metrics—no coding required. Estimated revenue is $7M/year.
DataPine: Build interactive dashboards from data coming from multiple data sources. Estimated revenue is $5M/year.
Ilo: Dashboards for Twitter data. Ilo effortlessly surfaces helpful tweet metrics so you can understand and grow both engagement and followers.
BackupFire: Back up your Firebase projects. Secure your Firestore and authentication data in minutes. Backup all or selected few Firestore collections and Firebase Authentication users.
Coupler: Data integration tool for teams. Coupler automatically syncs information between apps to create live dashboards and reports, transform and manipulate values, collect and back up insights in one place.
Baremetrics: Make it easy and accurate with metrics, dunning, and engagement tools for SaaS & subscription businesses. Currently making $150K per month.
Negative Nancy says - “I can query the data manually as and when I need. Why worry about the dashboard?”
Me - Manually connecting to the database, running the queries, and exporting the results is not a scalable approach particularly when you value your time. Also, it’s practically not possible to share the reports without downloading and sending via email/shared drive. That is where ‘Dashboards’ can make things easy.
Negative Nancy says - “While most people are interested to build dashboards, not everyone knows how to write queries and code.”
Me - That’s exactly what we need to solve here. Many founders and companies don’t want to spend engineering efforts to build dashboards and play around with data, we need simplistic no-code tools that does the work.
Deep-dive & Some niches
No-code Dashboard builder from data: Create a Micro SaaS solution that connects user’s data sources, pulls the data, and creates a dashboard with that data. Tools like these are primarily used by founders, marketing teams who don’t want to spend a lot of time coding to build these dashboards. So, the tool should be as automated as possible with drag and drop controls to select data sources, column names, types of graphs, and ready-made templates. Once the users create the dashboards from the data sources, make sure your tool is able to pull the data regularly and lets users publish the dashboard to their team or for public consumption. For dashboards published with public access, your tool should provide a sharable link that anyone can use. Make sure to support as many data sources as you can.
Internal Apps on top of data: Create a Micro-SaaS tool that connects data from various data sources and builds apps (not just dashboards). This is in lines of HoneyCode, Retool, AppSheet, etc. The apps should have login, roles, permissions, access controls so that users can view, edit and delete data as needed. As mentioned earlier, these are not simple dashboards and these are full-blown apps that pull the data, display it on the screen, provide options to edit and save to the database. Tools like these are typically called ‘Internal apps’ and can be used by back offices, staff inside the company who needs access to live data with editable options. Make sure to support multiple databases like Airtable, Google sheets and also support raw database connections like JDBC connections to support SQL databases. Also, see to support NoSQL databases as well like MongoDB, GCP Firestore, etc. Retool beautifully connects various data sources including GCP Firestore.
Dashboards on top of Billing/Subscription data: While there are tools for general dashboards, there is a need for billing/subscription-specific tools that can create and show the billing/subscription data. Make things as easy as possible for the user. Integrate multiple payment providers like Stripe, Paddle, PayPal, Gumroad, etc, and connect this data to user data to display required data for businesses. This correlated data (from payment providers to user data in the database) will help the founder understand the churn, average revenue per customer, profit per user, cost of operations, etc. The key here is to add multiple payment providers and payment processors like Stripe, Paddle, PayPal, Gumroad, Recurly, ChargeBee, Google Play Payments, Apple Appstore payments, Shopify payments, etc. As an add-on integrate this with email campaign data and also show the average CTR and open rate for the emails. Along with this, you can also show Analytics data by integrating with Google Analytics, Fathom Analytics, Plausible Analytics, etc.
Data Importer/Exporter/Data Connectors/Data Syncing tools: These are tools that can import the data from outside of the database into the database. For example, sometimes users need to import data from external systems to a SQL database. Or sometimes the data need to be moved from a SQL database to an external system like Google Sheets or Airtable. Create a tool that can make data import/export easy between different data sources. You can also think of building Universal connectors that support a few data sources and targets. This Universal connector should be able to connect/import/export data from any combination of the source to targets.
Data to API: The cost of data is getting extremely cheaper with the growth of cloud services and this led to a massive amount of data being saved at companies. While developers can write code to connect to the data sources and create an API to read, write, update and delete the data, this still needs a considerable engineering bandwidth to do at scale for multiple data sources. For non-tech founders, this also increases the cost as they need to hire devs to build this. Create a Micro SaaS tool that can create automated API for the data sources. Try to support as many data sources as possible. The tool should let users select a data source like a MySQL database, Postgres database, or non-traditional data sources like Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, etc, and gives an API to access the data from these data sources without writing any code. Make the tool to support simple excel sheets as well, where users can drag and drop an excel sheet and the tool creates an API to read this excel sheet. This way, users can easily dump the data from any database/tool and can create an API out of that excel sheet/spreadsheet data.
Data to charts: Create a Micro SaaS tool that can connect to any data source and can build charts out of this data. Users should be able to select the data source, select column names, provide the type of graph (like Piechart, Bar graph, etc) and the tool should be able to display the graph from the live data. As an add-on, provide an option to share these graphs publicly or privately. If a user wants to share privately, provide an option to enter the emails of the users that the graph needs to be shared. Create a private link for the graph and send the private access link to the users. You can further improve this by adding one-time password authentication or can create a specific password for each user to log in and see the chart. Provide an ‘embeddable javascript’ code also to display these charts on external websites.
Automated Infographics from Data: Create a Micro SaaS tool that can read the data from data sources and can create infographics based on this data automatically. You can either provide pre-configured templates that the user can choose from or can actually build this using AI solutions like OpenAI/GPT-3. Your customers can then use these infographics to share with employees or share on social media. Make sure each infographic goes through the proper approval process before it gets published to everyone. The infographics should be able to take the pre-configured logo, company, etc so that the poster can have this info. Alternatively, you can also build a tool where users can create standard infographics templates and map the placeholders to data from connected data sources. So, regularly, the data from the data sources can be pulled and the fresh infographic will be created and goes for approval.
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