Issue#90: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around Sales
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Micro SaaS News this week in 2 minutes
(This saves you hours of time and keeps you up to date on what's going on in Micro SaaS)
Ilan Cohen shares his journey on FounderBeats on reaching $1K MRR in just one month from a Micro SaaS providing real estate data.
ScreenshotOne, A screenshot API by Dmytro Krasun **has reached monthly revenue of $2.5K. See the founder’s earlier interview on FounderBeats
Joshua Tiernan founder of NoCodeFounders, achieves $300k ARR following a decade of zero income in his bootstrapped journey.
Treblle.com , an API management tool reached $10K/month revenue.
Louis shares how he accidentally created AudioPen, a generative AI tool that's made $73,000 in 2 months.
DataReportive.com, a reporting service powered from your databases, hits $4.3K monthly revenue.
Peedu Tuisk reaches 11K users after one year of launch of hardy.app - a weight lifting and gym workout routine app.
Kirill and Artyom hit $11K/month revenue from Skinive.com - an app to identify the risks of skin diseases using smartphone camera
scrapingfish.com, a webscraping API hits $5K monthly revenue**.**
Let’s see today’s Newsletter around a Micro SaaS niche.
No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am 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, and 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 players around SaaS tools for Sales.
⛳ ⛳ Current players
Leadgraph: The search engine for B2B sales. Narrow 250 million global companies down to perfect ICP using both familiar and advanced enterprise-grade filters. Reached monthly revenue of $20K.
AdNabu: All-in-one feed management software for Shopify. Increase sales from all online marketplaces. Reached $243K in revenue.
Ravyn: AI sales tool for capturing insights to grow revenue - uses AI to automatically capture, categorize and track clients' insights, directly from users’ notes. Ravyn hit $553.3K in revenue in 2022.
Sales Cookie: automates every aspect of sales commissions - from participant enrollment to incentive plan design. Sales Cookie reached $389.1K in revenue in 2022.
SecondNature: conversational AI for sales training. It provides a “virtual pitch partner” that uses conversational AI to have actual discussions with sales reps, scores them, and helps them improve on their own so that they can ace every sales call. Raised $15.5M in funding. In 2022, SecondNature hit $4.4M in revenue.
LevelEleven: Drive the behaviors that lead to sales and customer retention with personalized scorecards, real-time TV broadcasts, and data-driven coaching. The estimated annual revenue is $112k.
Socialhead: Socialhead provides a full-featured solution that helps online businesses grow sales better and easier on Shopping Channels.
Awarathon: A dynamic tool for video-roleplay-led sales coaching. The virtual training environment leverages AI to help sales teams make effective, winning pitches
Lemlist: Personalize cold emails, automate follow-ups, and engage with leads across all channels with Lemlist. Sales automation and cold email software in one tool. The estimated revenue is $8M/year.
ReConvert: Shopify upsell app on Shopify. Used by 40,000+ merchants on Shopify.
Warmly: Bring personalization to every call. Add tailored elements like shoutouts that are catered to each individual and company you're meeting with. Founded in 2020, Warmly has raised $4.9M in funding. It reached $1M in revenue with 30 customers in 2022
ElevateHQ: sales commissions software built for growing sales teams. Takes away the grunt-work behind manual sales incentive calculation and allows companies to experiment with spiffs - that work for every rep - and not just top performers. Founded in 2021, ElevateHQ raised $1.1M in funding.
SellScale: SellScale uses generative AI to send out hyper-personalized outreach to prospects. Lets users generate, send, and tune outbound that converts.
Showell: a sales enablement platform that simplifies managing, finding, presenting, sharing, tracking, and analyzing your sales content. Showell hit $3.2M in revenue in 2022.
Luna: Uses AI to suggest new high-quality leads every day and send them personal emails. Before reaching out to a lead, Luna scrapes the website and social media profiles of the prospect, as input for the emails.
GetAccept: GetAccept’s digital sales room empowers revenue teams to increase
win rates by engaging and understanding buyers from opportunity to signed deal.Sybill: Users get accurate sales call summaries automatically generated by Sybill's AI and pushed to Slack/CRM. Includes next steps, areas of interest, pain points and more. Writes a draft follow-up email and also captures non-verbal reactions in a report. Founded in 2020, Sybill received $1.6M in funding.
Walnut: Boost your sales experience with tailor-made sales demos. Learn which features your prospects use to optimize your demos accordingly. Track top-performing demos to close more. Walnut's estimated annual revenue is $12.6M
Momentum: a sales execution platform that uses automation and AI to improve data hygiene and deal visibility for revenue teams.
LeadConnect: Linkedin Outreach Automation Platform Automate your lead generation efforts with personalized multiple Followups. Sync prospect details to Hubspot automatically with a click.
Klenty: Use Klenty for your Sales Outreach. Send personalized sales emails, automate your followups. Estimated revenue is around $5M/year.
ReachOut: an AI-powered platform that auto-generates personalized one-on-one videos that allows users to engage with prospects at scale.
MagicSalesBot: Company growth events and lead data in one place - reached $1,500 MRR.
SalesScreen: Gamification platform for motivating a company’s sales force.
Calixa: Gives a Sales team the product insights and workflows they need to prioritize, close, and grow accounts.
🙅♀️🙅 Pessimists
Negative Nancy says - ‘E-Commerce sales tools are too big for me’
Me - Pick on a niche in the eCommerce segment. You can pick as small as a plugin for Etsy, Shopify, or Magento. It doesn’t have to be a big complex solution. Start small and understand the ecosystem.
Negative Nancy says - “Why not just send as many emails as possible to thousands of prospects instead of using specific sales outreach tools?”
Me - This would negatively impact your email scores. Every time someone marks your email as spam, your spam score increases and this would in turn increases the chances of your emails landing in spam. That is why you need cold email tools that can help with targeted outreach with the required automation.
💡💡 Deep-dive & Some niches
Sales Commissions Software:
Companies often struggle to manage their commission payouts manually, which can lead to errors, disputes, and unhappy sales reps. By building Sales Commissions Software, you can provide the required solution that automates the process, streamlines workflows, and helps companies keep their sales reps motivated. To build Sales Commissions Software, you need to understand the commission structures and calculations used by different businesses. So, if you are new to this, please spend time studying how the traditional sales commission process works. You'll also need to integrate with popular sales platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho. Your software should allow companies to set up and customize their commission plans, track sales performance, calculate commissions accurately, and generate reports. Additionally, you can add features like gamification, leaderboards, and real-time dashboards to keep sales reps engaged and motivated.
Companies are usually willing to pay for tools that simplify their operations and help them grow revenue. You can adopt a subscription-based pricing model and charge a monthly fee based on the number of sales reps or the volume of sales. To give you some examples, ElevateHQ founded in 2021, raised $1.1M in funding. Sales Cookie reached $389.1K in revenue in 2022.
AI-Based Sales Training:
With ChatGPT/OpenAI coming into every business, bringing AI into Sales will make things easy for businesses. As businesses look to enhance the performance of their sales teams, AI-powered solutions are becoming more popular for their potential to personalize and scale training programs. To create a Micro SaaS product in this niche, you'll need to have a good understanding of the sales training process and the obstacles that sales reps face. The software can utilize AI algorithms to assess sales reps' performance, pinpoint areas of knowledge deficiency, and recommend personalized training content. The AI-based Sales Training software can provide several features to help sales reps improve their skills and productivity. For instance, you can design personalized training modules based on each rep's learning pace and style, gamify the training experience to maintain engagement and leverage data analytics to identify patterns and areas for improvement. There are players in this space without AI components as well. For example, Showell is the all-in-one sales enablement platform to manage, present, share, and track sales content. Showell hit $3.2M in revenue in 2022 but without AI component. SecondNature built an AI-based conversational sales training solution, for sellers and sales leaders, who want to blast through sales quotas. SecondNature raised $15.5M in funding and 2022 it hit $4.4M in revenue.
Upsell/Cross-Sell App for an E-commerce Platform
An Upsell/Cross-Sell SaaS App for an E-commerce Platform helps online retailers increase their sales and revenue by suggesting additional products to customers during the checkout process or on product pages. Upselling involves recommending higher-priced or upgraded versions of the same product, while cross-selling involves suggesting related or complementary products. Create a Micro SaaS for this functionality. The SaaS should provide an easy-to-use interface for creating and managing to upsell/cross-sell offers on the eCommerce platform. The Upsell/Cross-Sell SaaS App can offer several features to help eCommerce businesses increase their sales and revenue. For example, you can provide personalized product recommendations based on customers' browsing and purchase history, display targeted upsell/cross-sell offers at strategic points in the customer journey, and provide analytics to track the success of upsell/cross-sell campaigns. To make it more easily consumable, you can further niche down this to popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, etc. See ReConvert which is used by 40,000+ merchants on Shopify. The objective was to increase the average cart value by recommending products that were complementary to the ones in the customer’s cart (cross-sell) and/or better than the ones in the customer’s cart (up-sell). Create a Micro SaaS to help with this and remember to start small by creating a plugin for any of the major e-commerce ecosystem platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. Once you get enough traction, you can also plugin in the AI engine to it and expand to other platforms. Wiser , an AI-driven personalized product recommendations app for Shopify is currently empowering more than 3000 Shopify stores all over the world.
Personalized Sales Videos:
Personalized sales videos are a highly effective sales tool. Personalized videos have a much higher click-through rate than generic, non-personalized videos. This is because personalized videos are tailored to the recipient and are more engaging and relevant to their needs, increasing the chances of them taking action. The demand for personalized videos is growing rapidly and customers expect a personalized experience. Personalized videos are a brilliant way to deliver that rich experience. Many businesses, especially those in the B2B space, are recognizing the effectiveness of personalized videos and are looking for solutions that can help them create these videos quickly and easily. Many businesses struggle to create personalized videos, either because they don't have the expertise or the resources to do so. By building a Micro SaaS that offers an easy-to-use platform for creating personalized videos, you can provide a solution that solves a real pain point for these businesses. Sendspark and Pitchlane are two good examples of this niche. In 2022, Sendspark reached $490.7K in revenue. LemList is another example of this niche generating millions of dollars in revenue. Also, see SellScale , Luna, and ReachOut powered with AI in the same space.
Automated Email Sequence for outreach:
Create a tool that automates a sequence of emails to follow up with cold emails. Most of the time people don’t reply due to their priorities and a few follow-ups are required in a typical ‘cold email’ world before you hear back a reply. Automate this process of follow-ups. The tool should send a pre-configured email, wait ‘X’ number of days, if there is no reply, send a follow-up email, and then wait for ‘Y’ number of days to do another follow-up. Create templates that users can pick and start automation. Make sure customers can customize most of this including the number of days to wait before the next step, the subject text, email content, etc. The tool should detect the email replies too and send notifications to customers once the cold lead is converted to a warm lead so that customers can continue the discussion. You can further automate this and take the automation up to a level where a demo or a meeting gets booked. Once a reply is received, the tool can be configured to send something like ‘Hey, Thank you for your reply. I can answer more questions and take you through a demo. You can book a quick meeting slot at https://demomeeting.xyz.com”. Tools like these are powerful and save a lot of time for cold email outreach.
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💻 💻 Technical chops
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📢 📢 Marketing chops
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💳 💳 Cost Analysis for 100 customers
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