Issue#56: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products for Founders, Makers & Builders - Part 2
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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 micro opportunity 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.
This is Part-2 of “Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products for Founders, Makers & Builders”.
Let’s see some profitable products that are typically used by profitable Founders & Makers who value their time.
DesignJoy: A design agency with a twist. Unlimited design subscriptions to scale your business.
DesignDash: Unlimited Web Design Subscriptions for Growing Startups. Get unlimited web design requests and revisions. No expensive hourly billing or contracts, cancel anytime. Made 120K ARR with productized service model for ‘Webflow design service".
Headlime - Marketing copy that writes itself, powered by GPT-3. Made thousands of dollars in revenue and got acquired.
DraftDev: Technical marketing content for software startups for a fixed monthly cost. DraftDev creates blog posts and tutorials designed to reach software engineers for a fixed monthly cost.
CopyAI - GPT-3-powered Copywriting. 30K users signed up. Crossed $2.4M ARR. Raised $11M in funding.
ManyPixels: Get Your Graphic Design Team in a few clicks. Your on-demand unlimited graphic design service for a fixed monthly cost. ManyPixels makes more than $600K in revenue per year.
GetRhys: Your on-demand SaaS marketing consultant. An on-demand, skilled and experienced SaaS marketing consultant ready to solve your critical marketing bottlenecks for just $395/pm.
Penji: Hiring a designer should be simple.Unlimited design projects. Fast turnaround. and fixed monthly rate. Currently at $4.2M/year in revenue.
DesignPickle: Let Design Pickle handle all of your creative design needs for a fraction of the cost of traditional graphic design services. Currently at $18M/year in revenue.
Kapa99: Unlimited graphic design projects. Unlimited revisions. One flat rate, starting at $249/month. Kapa99 makes $120K per year.
HatOfWizards: SaaS wizards, on-demand, for just $795/pm. Get access to marketing, paid search, SEO, conversion experts for a fixed monthly cost.
HiScribble: An on-demand content marketing team to write & grow your blog on autopilot starting at $250/mo.
Scribly: Scribly.io is a content marketing agency offering scalable content marketing services for every business type. Boost traffic and generate leads, all for a simple monthly fee. No contracts. No hiring. No hassle.
RipplePop: Get Your Own Dedicated WordPress Developer For Daily WordPress Tasks and Projects for a fixed monthly cost.
WPBuffs: 24/7 WordPress website management and support services that power digital growth - all for fixed price. Makes $1.2M/year in revenue.
FounderCafe: Co-work with founders from Stanford, YC, Harvard, & more.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which founder is making $300K per year as a one-man team.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which founder is making $60K MRR with technical writing
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is Making $6K MRR with on-demand marketing consulting.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is at $4K MRR with 120 paid members around community for top tier university alumni
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $30K per month with Wordpress development
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $400K in revenue per year with content writing.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $30K per month with Wordpress development
Negative Nancy says - ‘Most founders like tech-heavy solutions. I can’t code. So I can’t build a tech-heavy solution.’
Me - Pick a niche that fits you. If you can’t code but can write content, create a productized service for content writing. Or create a small community of founders and establish one-to-one connections like FounderCafe that is currently at $4K MRR with 120 paid members. You don’t always have to be tech-savvy. Play to your strengths.
Negative Nancy says - ‘I am just starting up. Most founders may not trust my product.’
Me - Everyone starts at zero. Build a connection with the founders rather than selling the solutions when you start with zero audiences. Start building credibility by slowly helping people, answering questions. Don’t spam. It may be a slow start when you are just starting up and it won’t take a lot of time to build credibility. Once you have a few paid customers, ask for testimonials and use those testimonials aggressively.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Founders purchase SaaS solutions that help them either to save time or make more money. These are the only two reasons founders spend money on SaaS solutions. Let’s see some of the products that are typically bought by founders, makers, and builders.
Scheduling Social Media Posts: This is a great revenue-generating opportunity. There are hundreds of tools around this. Yes, there is demand with more people looking for automation around posting content to multiple social media channels at once. Create a SaaS solution that lets people publish to multiple platforms like LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - all at once. Also, make sure you support creating an automated calendar to schedule the content beforehand instead of posting daily manually. The current tools around this are making thousands of dollars per month. Planoly makes around $11M/year in this segment.
Simple keyword monitoring: Simple keyword monitoring micro saas product that monitors most happening websites like Hackernews, Indiehackers, Lobsters, Reddit, Twitter. The saas tool should be able to notify the users via email. A good add-on would be to integrate the notification system with Slack, Telegram, etc. Most users would love to be notified on Slack or Telegram. Keyword monitoring solution gets more users only when the tools monitor more places. So, add as many platforms as you can monitor. For inspiration see Syften and PMAlerts that are profitable.
Blog Writing As A Service: No matter how great a product is, it still needs a lot of blog content to reap SEO benefits. Everyone needs blog content for their products and it is not always easy to produce blog content. Create a business around blog writing and charge a fixed monthly fee for a certain number of blog posts. Scribly and a few other players did this and can achieve $300K to $500K in revenue with blog content writing. Services like these charge $1K per month per customer. So, all you need is to get 10 customers to reach $100K ARR. As an add-on service, provide keyword analysis, SEO analysis, SEO reports, etc for higher pricing tiers.
Growth Hacking as productized service: Growth hackers are needed everywhere. With technology becoming much closer to people and with current development tools and solutions, more products are coming into the market than ever. All these founders need growth hackers to improve product sales. There are multiple types of growth hackers. You can further niche down this to e-commerce growth hacker, SaaS growth hacking separately as well with different pricing tiers.
Small group of profitable founders: Create a small closed community of verified profitable founders building SaaS solutions. Most communities are either too loud or have zero engagement. This is because when the community is small, no one cares and bothers to engage. When the community is large, people just spam. Create a community that solves this problem and keeps the connections warm. Create one-to-one connections for founders. See FounderCafe for inspiration that is currently at $4K MRR with 120 paid members.
Tech Writing As A Service: Blog content writing is different from technical content writing. Technical content writing needs a lot of tech skills and is more of a technical product. Also, for a technical content writing business, it is not always 'blogging content' that gets requested by customers. Sometimes customers can request an ebook, whitepaper, or some other publication format. See to support multiple formats. Technical content writing is charged more compared to normal content. For example, DraftDev is charging $5000 per month and is currently at $50K MRR in just a few months. What if you don’t have people with enough skillset? Not a problem. In most cases, a customer of this category will wait for 3-4 weeks to start working with you. Once you are done with an onboarding call, you will have enough time to look for a resource. To look for the resource you can either look in your network or Freelancing sites or even here.
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Technical chops
Learn technical pointers on how to build products around this niche.
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Marketing chops
Learn Marketing pointers on how to start marketing the products for this niche. This should give you a marketing head start.
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Cost Analysis for 100 customers
Learn how much it costs to build a product in this niche and cater to 100 customers.
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