Issue#25: Building $1K -$10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Domains, Files & Hosting
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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.
Let’s see some players around ‘Domains, Files & Hosting’
WeTransfer: Share your biggest files and deliver your work on-brand and in style. Track downloads, control access, and add custom branding. You can send up to 20 GB of work in one go.
Imgur: The fastest way to upload images and share images. Also provides direct links to embed anywhere.
Sedo: Platform for domain buyers and sellers with features like domain parking for additional revenue.
Uppy: Sleek, modular open source JavaScript file uploader Uppy fetches files locally and from remote places like Dropbox or Instagram
TiinyHost: The simplest way to share your web project. Making about $1K MRR in less than a year.
FileStack: The File Handling Service for Developers Powerful APIs that allow you to upload, transform and deliver any file into your app.
ShuBox: Upload, transform, optimize, and convert files & images from your web app, directly to Amazon S3.
StaticApp: One-click solution for your static website. Drag-n-drop an archive with a web page or a website.
Negative Nancy says - “Managing multiple domains from multiple vendors is pure chaos”
Me - That is why we are going to talk about a solution around managing multiple domains from multiple DNS providers.
Negative Nancy says - “Connecting my Github to a DevOps system is easy. Why do we need simple hosting solutions”
Me - Not everyone needs complex systems. Complex systems have an overhead of complex setup.
Negative Nancy says - “Most cloud providers already have APIs for hosting, uploading, etc. Why do we need another solution?”
Me - While most cloud providers have required APIs, they still need a decent learning curve to hook up even small things. Building wrappers around the cloud makes it easy for everyone to consume cloud services, hosting, etc.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Over the years, the cost of storage and bandwidth has drastically gone down. With more cloud vendors coming into this space, the cost will go down further over the next few years.
FileTransfer built on S3: Building a file transfer service for the transfer of large files. While there are services like Dropbox, Google Drive to transfer smaller files, there are no easy solutions to transfer much bigger files as easily as a ‘drag and drop’ sender. Build a Micro-SaaS solution that lets users drag and drop large files and add the recipient’s email to send the file. Use services like AWS S3, GCP Storage to leverage low storage and bandwidth costs. If you further cut down your costs for storage and bandwidth, try reviewing Bunny.net that charges about 1/10th of big cloud players like AWS and GCP. The model is something similar to what WeTransfer is doing. But note that, for larger files, set the file deletion dates to avoid accidental costs. Provide add-ons by providing team access, password-protected features, etc.
ImageHosting that runs on the cloud: No matter how many image hosting servers exist, there is still a need for another one. Cloud vendors like AWS, GCP make it extremely easy to host images and connect to a content delivery network. Create a Micro-SaaS product that lets the users log in and upload their images and get their URLs. Make sure the tool is extremely smooth to drag and drop the images. Provide add-ons like custom domains, automated image resizing based on devices, automated image-resizing based on query parameters. For example, an add-on like ‘connecting custom domains’ will let users get their URLs with their specific domain names. If ACME.com wants to use the tool, ACME should be able to connect their custom domain like ‘images.acme.com’ to the uploaded images so that all images will be served with the base path of ‘image.acme.com’. Make sure all image URLs support HTTPS/SSL. Other features like automated resizing of images based on query parameters should let users pass parameters like ‘width=200px’ and ‘height=500px’ and our Micro-SaaS tool should be able to render the image with specified dimensions. The tool should be able to do this dynamically or should be able to support predefined width and height combinations. If it's not possible to dynamically support width and height based on query params, you can pre-process the images for the required width and height (provided by the user inside the dashboard) and make the images ready to be served by calling the image URLs.
Converting CSV files to consumable APIs: There are many times there is huge data in excel files that need to be converted into consumable APIs. For example, if there is an excel file with about 1 million rows and you want to convert this into an API, typically you would need to load this entire data into a database and then need to connect your API calls to the database to fetch the data and send in response. But this process is usually costly and cannot easily scaly without spending a lot of money. Build a Micro-SaaS tool that solves this problem - “Upload the CSV files and provide APIs that can read the CSV file and render the results in response”. But creating an API and querying a CSV file is a tedious process and consumes a lot of CPU/Memory specifically as the file size grows. For example, if you want to query a ‘where’ condition for two columns in your CSV file, you would need to read through all the files and match the ‘where’ condition, and doing this at scale for 100K rows isn’t easy. But with the use of ‘AWS S3 Select’ you can do this easily. All you have to do is upload the CSV file to AWS S3 using APIs and then use ‘AWS S3 Select’ SDK and call the AWS S3 Select APIs. AWS S3 Select can query thousands of rows and can give the results in a split-second. For example, you can query a 'where' condition for 100K records in about 300 milliseconds. The beauty of AWS S3 Select is that it supports gzip feature as well. This means you can compress your S3 file, upload it to AWS S3, and AWS S3 Select works smoothly. Make sure you go through the documentation on AWS S3 Select and the SDK samples as well. So, the final Micro-SaaS tool should let users upload massive CSV files and just create automated APIs to fetch the data in milliseconds. Note that this is an extremely powerful mechanism to build APIs without using a database. Also, not that AWS S3 Select also supports JSON and parquet format files. If you further need to pre-process a file to add any extra columns for easier fetching of data, you can leverage solutions like AWS Lambda that can read and process these files from AWS S3 location.
Hosting simple CSVs as DBs for quick analytics: This is the same as above but instead of providing consumable APIs for fetching the data, this Micro-SaaS tool talks about building analytical solutions and building graphs on top of CSV data. The core architecture remains the same as above by using AWS S3 Select but instead of sending the data back to the user in the form of a response, this time you will need to pass this data to a chart display module like chartjs and render analytics and graphs around the data. Note that you can always use AWS Lambda to process the files loaded onto S3 and upload the file back to S3.
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