Issue#42: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Remote Work & Digital Nomads
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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.
Remote Work/Digital Nomad Lifestyle and related ecosystem are getting bigger day by day with more companies adapting to remote work culture. Let’s see some of the companies and products in this space.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making more than $100K in revenue per year with Remote working community.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making more than $1M/year with Remote Job boards and as a solo-founder.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who makes $20M/year with flexible remote job publishing site
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which YC company got funding to build remote tools
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is at $80K/month with async standup meeting tools.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $400K/year with a community for nomad workers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $600K/year with async audio and video tools
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company is making $80K/year with tools for casual conversations, water cooler conversations
WeWorkRemotely: We Work Remotely is the largest remote work community in the world. With over 3M visitors, this is the best place to find remote jobs.
RemoteOk: Job board for remote jobs. About 1000K folks look for remote jobs here.
Tandem: The virtual office for your team Connect effortlessly with your distributed team. See who’s around, talk, and collaborate in one click.
AtCafe: Decide where to work from. A simple and flexible tool for hybrid teams.
Remote: Managing remote businesses more productive for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and digital nomads.
FourDayWeek: Four Day Week only advertise roles that genuinely offer exactly that. All the jobs you see on this are flexible in some way. Remote, with reduced hours, flexi-time, or, of course, four-day weeks.
Hailey: Hailey connects your remote team through conversations, challenges, and asynchronous mini-games in Slack.
Remotive: Hand-screens thousands of live remote jobs from hundreds of remote companies.
RemoteCo: All things related to remote working. Jobs, tips, blog posts - all related to remote working.
FlexJobs: Job site to find remote, work from home, and flexible job opportunities, running since 2007.
NoDesk: NoDesk informs about remote work and connects the global workforce. Companies of every size, from new startups to the largest distributed companies, use NoDesk to grow their remote teams.
4DayWeek: Find a 4 day work week software job. Join hundreds of people getting weekly alerts for 4 day work week jobs.
Remote.Com: International payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance for businesses big and small remote teams.
RemoteTeam: RemoteTeam is an all-in-one operating system that provides HR solutions to remote teams.
Standuply: Run asynchronous standup meetings via text, voice, and video answers for remote teams.
Weet: Asynchronous communication to record quick videos of your screen and your webcam for better training & collaboration for remote teams.
NomadList: Community of thousands of remote workers living across the world in true nomad style.
RemoteClan: Ecosystem around remote working. Weekly updates on remote jobs, Comprehensive research on companies, and stories around remote work.
Firstbase: Remote infrastructure for global teams. From startups to large enterprises, businesses of all sizes use Firstbase to set up, manage, maintain and retrieve all the physical equipment their remote workers need to do great work at home.
OysterHR: Hire, pay, and provide benefits to your team across borders. Manage HR and payroll, and automate compliance across 180+ countries—all in one platform. Received $20M in funding.
Deel: Flexible international hiring. Deel helps companies with international payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance in 150 countries—all through one powerful dashboard. The estimated revenue is $18M/year.
Omnipresent: Compliant employment for remote teams in 150 countries. Seamless worldwide onboarding, payroll, and benefits. Real-time support from a team of international experts. Raised $15M in funding.
CheckTimezones: See timezones across different cities in one single snapshot. Schedule meetings easily with cross-border teams.
ChatFox: Casual conversations, water cooler conversations, ice breaker chats, and birthday fun - all for remote teams.
HiTeam: Everything you need to track and manage remote working. Drive openness, commitment, and ownership through a transparent Daily Team Commitment Board.
Nailted: The employee engagement platform for modern People & HR teams to deliver the best employee experience. The estimated revenue is $120K per year.
HeyTaco: Build stronger, happier remote teams. HeyTaco sparks conversations and builds stronger relationships with its fun and unique kindness currency called ‘tacos’.
GeekBot: Thousands of teams that use Geekbot to automate standups, surveys, and daily reports. The current revenue is $1M ARR.
Disco: A culture platform for remote teams Enable values-driven work, foster team appreciation, and build engagement. The estimated revenue is $12M/year.
Donut: Build meaningful human relationships. Discover new rituals for your team that foster camaraderie, collaboration, and community. The estimated revenue is $4M/year.
Skuad: A platform to build, pay, and manage globally distributed teams. Hire exceptional talent anywhere in the world while Skuad handles the difficult tasks of managing global payroll, compliances, and taxation. The estimated revenue is $10M/year.
Presence: Fewer meetings. Faster remote teamwork via voice. Talk walk-talkie style without interruption—via live silent captions that turn into asynchronous voice notes.
CadenceWork: Delightful bonding activities for remote teams. Plan, organize, and facilitate small-group events for your team that build meaningful connections.
Yac: Async voice and video messages let you share ideas & talk to your team. No more scheduling or late-night calls.
Echo: Voice messaging for teams with automated transcription. Echo fits perfectly between typing and "jumping on a quick call”. Designed for remote teams and working from home.
Negative Nancy says - “Why is remote work tough? I can send an email, set up a meeting, and just wait for a reply instead of making it complex with tools.
Me - Remote work is not just asking for status emails from employees. Remote work is more about bringing culture and make everyone connected and happy. Remote workers often work in different time zones and removing unwanted meetings from the daily work would greatly benefit remote workers. For all these things, email and meetings wouldn’t fit exactly. We need better tools.
Negative Nancy says - “If its tough to hire cross-border full-time employees, I will probably bring in freelancers without worrying about health and insurance”
Me - Having full-time employees on the payroll vs hiring freelancers is a different discussion. Both are never equal. The concept of remote work makes it more complex.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Tool to improve Remote work culture: Building remote work culture isn’t an easy task. Remote workers often feel disconnected from the rest of the team. People miss real-life breakout rooms, casual conversations, water-cooler conversations, etc. Create a tool that eases out these things remotely. See Donut to get a view of this. Tools like these bring new hires close to the company culture and remote work culture. You can build this on Slack and also provide add-ons that run on other IMs like Microsoft Teams. Target IMs used by popular Enterprise customers.
Remote Jobs Portal: Job portals have been popular all the time. There is tremendous growth in the number of people looking for remote jobs. As most companies are going either for pure remote working or for the hybrid model, there are more positions than ever for remote jobs. Create a job board exclusively for remote jobs. Also, niche down as much as possible. For example, you can niche down as “Remote NoCode jobs”, “Remote Non-Tech jobs”, “Remote Cloud-related jobs”. Don’t start building a job board. For MVP, see to use Airtable and stitch a simple job board using No-Code tools. Once you see some demand, build a solution as needed. To beat the current players in this space, do something differently. Rather than just charging companies for ‘job posting ad’, work with companies one to one and filter candidates and send the details to them.
Async Workstyle: Create tools for async work style. Anything that could cut down the meetings and live events comes into the async work style. This could be around quick voice messages that can convert to text and send the messages to other person or anything related to the async way of working. Anything that can improve the asynchronous communication for teams across time zones will come into this. This will be something in lines of Yac and Echo that make async work easier for remote teams.
Solving Hiring challenges for international teams: Local hiring vs international hiring is totally different when companies look to hire for full-time positions. For outsourced work and freelancer positions, it may not matter much where the freelancer gets paid per hour and companies don’t need to worry about healthcare, insurance, or local government regulations. But for recruiting full-time positions, there needs a lot of work to be done to provide health and insurance benefits, ideas about local employment laws, taxes, background checks, etc. Create a solution that makes international hiring easy. See Deel for some inspiration.
Automate standup meetings for remote teams: Conducting a daily standup meeting for remote tasks is an uncomfortable task for team with remote employees because of varied timezones. Create an automation tool that just sends a reminder every day at a specific local time for the remote employee. The tool should be able to just take a text-based input for the work updates or should be able to take voice bites for the updates related to work. An add-on that can convert the voice bite to easily consumable text would help managers consolidate the status. Now as most teams are on Slack, start building a Slack app around this but extend this automation to other platforms as well for GSuite (for teams using Enterprise Gmail), Microsoft Teams, etc, Amazon Chime, etc.
Tools for remote employee appreciation: A pat on the back often encourages employees and makes them feel recognized for the work they do. Appreciating people on office premises or at a team gathering is easy. But when it comes to remote teams, often you neglect to appreciate other’s work or you wait for a team meeting to appreciate others. One prominent example that you could think of in this space - HeyTaco - Makes thousands of dollars in revenue. Create tools that work on top of Slack and other popular IMs that can make this process better and easier. Improve the fun quotient by publishing weekly and monthly leaderboards on who is at the top of receiving the appreciation. Basically, gamifying the appreciation process for remote teams to make everyone feel connected and recognized for their efforts.
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Cost Analysis for 100 customers
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hey upen how do I reach you out?