Issue#20: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS around Email products
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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 more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
Whether you love it or hate it, you can’t ignore emails. Emails are here to stay. So are the products around Emails.
📈📈 Some stats
👉 [Pro] See who is making $1.4M with email automation tools
👉 [Pro] See who made $1M in revenue in first 3 years
👉 [Pro] See which Gmail CRM is making $7M/year
👉 [Pro] See which mail merge SaaS is making $200K/month
👉 [Pro] See which email extraction SaaS is making making $0.4M/year
👉 [Pro] See who is making $1500/m with email unsubscribe automation
👉 [Pro] See who is making $8K/m with email signature SaaS solution
👉 [Pro] See who is making $1M/year in revenue with email automation
👉 [Pro] See which SaaS is making $3.5M/year with cold email automation
👉 [Pro] See who is making $5M in annual revenue with cold email outreach
👉 [Pro] See which SaaS is making $1.5M in revenue with inbox workflows
….. 👉 [Pro] See another 25 other Micro SaaS solutions around Emails.
Negative Nancy says - “Products like Slack replace email”.
Me: Slack is synchronous. Email is asynchronous. Each has a different purpose. More than 270 billion emails are sent every day.
Negative Nancy says - “There are hundreds of free apps for email clients. No one will pay for a paid email client”.
Me: SuperHuman charges $30/m for a better email experience.
Negative Nancy says - “Gmail is free. No one pays for a paid email service anymore”.
Me: Hey charges $99/year for email service.
Deep-dive
Emails are here to stay no matter how many tools like Slack are created. Emails run on an asynchronous model for a purpose.
There are still a large number of problems that need to be solved in emails. Let's deep dive and see some niches.
Some niches
Interactive & Dynamic Emails: The biggest problem with emails is they are not able to display dynamic content - charts, embedded forms, embedding dynamic images, and other dynamic elements. You can embed forms certainly but you must have seen that the moment you clicked the form, it takes you to a browser to fill the survey/feedback in the form. Imagine if someone could send a Typeform or MonkeySurvey to fill and you can complete the survey right inside the email without leaving the email. Create a Micro-SaaS tool to solve this problem and give a better experience to the email users with interactive and dynamic emails. Users should be able to add interactive controls like dropdown, radio buttons, submit buttons, text boxes using our Micro-SaaS based UI too.
You can build something like this using AMP DEV. Carousels and accordions are supported too. Right now, this just started picking up. More companies will build products around this.
More than 270 billion emails are sent every day, it is the pillar of many consumer and enterprise workflows. However, the content that is sent in an email message is still limited – messages are static, can become out of date, and are not actionable without opening a browser. AMP email seeks to enhance and modernize the email experience through added support for dynamic content and interactivity while keeping users safe.
Embedding AMP within an email is simple, add a new MIME part with a content type of text/x-amp-HTML as a descendant of multipart/alternative. It should live alongside the existing text/HTML or text/plain parts. This ensures that the email message works on all clients.1
Building email SaaS on AWS SES: Create a Micro-SaaS tool around “sending emails”. While you can set up your Email using Open source products, the easier and cost-effective solution is to build something like this using AWS SES. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application. You can configure Amazon SES quickly to support several email use cases, including transactional, marketing, or mass email communications. Amazon SES's flexible IP deployment and email authentication options help drive higher deliverability and protect sender reputation while sending analytics measure the impact of each email. With Amazon SES, you can send email securely, globally, and at scale. 2
Using AWS SES, you can build Micro SaaS tools around marketing emails, transactional emails, and Bulk Email communication. Users can certainly do their own AWS SES setup but setting up AWS SES on the AWS ecosystem isn’t easy for most people and AWS SES doesn’t have a great Web UI. Its completely build for API integration. You can use AWS SES API and build a Micro SaaS product around emails - marketing emails, transactional emails, or bulk emails. Start with an open-source product or a quick document on how others can start setting up AWS SES for their needs and then slowly as more people start interacting build a Micro SaaS tool around this.
Make sure to provide add-ons that track email open rates and provides unsubscribe functionality along with reports to show the email/subscriber's data.
This is similar to how transactional email systems or email marketing tools work. For example, just by using AWS SES, you can build something like Mailerlite, Mailchimp, SendInBlue, etc. Alternatively, you can build these with an open-source email system as well.
Offer a low-cost version where a user does some work to set up this and also create a higher version of SaaS that automates the entire process. You are providing two variations of the same product based on the user’s paid plan.
Email to Blog: Blogging products are getting bloated with many features. Build a simple “email to blog” automation-based Micro-SaaS tool. Create a simple Micro SaaS tool that gives a dedicated email address. Every time a user sends an email to this email address, your tool should automatically create a blog post with the email content. You can use Email Subject for the Blog’s title. Create more add-on that works with WordPress, Ghost, and other CMS platforms that can be configured inside the tool’s dashboard. The product should give a pleasant experience to the user. Most content creators spend a lot of time answering questions via email. If users can just forward these emails to an email alias that can create posts out of these emails, this saves a lot of time and helps repurpose content. Add more controls like right after an email is sent to this alias, create a post and send the link back to the user email to preview, approve or reject the post with unique links.
This is going to be a big game-changer for content creators who frequently answer a lot of questions via email. Even for normal users also, this should help by giving a pleasant experience with no distraction. It should do one thing - “Send Email. Create blog post”. You can use AWS SES and AWS Lambda to build something like this. More details are covered in the “Technical Chops” section on how this can be implemented without building a complete server set up by yourself.
Extract Email Data: Create a Micro-SaaS tool that can process incoming emails and takes action from the content. The action could be anything ranging from extracting pdf contents (for expense reimbursement), creating support tickets, analyzing the email for sentiment analysis to see if the user is happy, sad or neutral. For example, if you create a system that automatically creates support tickers, you can add integrations to any of the existing CRM solutions or Support desk software. If you want to build expense management system-related functionality, you can just create a product that lets users send the receipts to a certain email id and your tool should be able to process those attachments and add them to the CRM system for expense reimbursement. The point is to have the ability to read the email data and automate the actions based on the email data.
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See 40 profitable players in this Micro SaaS niche (Pro version)
See another 10 niches for Micro-SaaS tools around Emails (Pro version)
See Technical chops for implementing for Micro-SaaS tools around Emails (Pro version)
See Marketing chops for implementing for Micro-SaaS tools around Emails (Pro version)
See Cost analysis for 100 users (Pro version)
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