Issue#92: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around Image Based Tools
Welcome to the 121 new subscribers who joined this week.
Today our Micro SaaS HQ ecosystem is one of the biggest ecosystem exclusively meant for Micro SaaS builders/founders.Sponsor This Newsletter:
👉 Now you can sponsor this newsletter now and reach 24,000 people connected to Micro SaaS ecosystem. We have builders, founders, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, no-code founders reading this newsletter that’s the best ecosystem for SaaS.
Want to sponsor this newsletter? 👉 👉 Check here
We are excited to share the latest Micro SaaS news and Micro SaaS Ideas to help you on your journey as a SaaS founder. Let's explore what's new this week!
👉 Get your Pro subscription today - Get access to hundreds of Micro SaaS Ideas, updates on Micro SaaS trends, and access to a closed community of founders, builders and makers.
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)
Sébastien Dubois sold over 500 copies of the Obsidian Starter Kit, reaching $700 in monthly revenue
HyperSuggest, a keyword research tool by Sebastian reaches $2K in monthly revenue
Sai Krishna reached $5K MRR for superblog. See his earlier interview on FounderBeats.
Designfly.io by Brad grows to $2.9K in monthly revenue.
Databerry.ai by Georges Petrov hits $50K ARR, 100 paying customers and ~1.8K GitHub Stars.
Web3Forms, Contact Form API for Static Websites by Surjith reached $5000+ ARR . Surjith’s earlier interview on FounderBeats is here.
Mustafa Ergisi gets 300th customer for ai2sql.io
Hieu Nguyen reached over $7K for GasbyAI in the past 30 days.
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 Image based tools and plugins.
⛳ ⛳ Current players
Snappify: Creates beautiful images of code with powerful design features. Crossed $1.1K MRR.
TinyKiwi: an easy to use image editor to create beautiful images of users’ work for sharing on social media. Crossed $70 MRR with 14 Paying Users in 5 Months. Acquired by FeedHive in Jan 2023.
Pika: Instantly turns boring screenshots into beautiful images.
ScreenshotOne: A site screenshot and HTML rendering API. Crossed $400 MRR in 9 months.
Logology: Get a designer brand identity for your startup. Automatically. Made $40K in 36 Months
Make Logo AI: AI logo generation tool. Currently at $3.9K in monthly revenue.
Picture It: Live previews for Shopify Art stores. Reached monthly revenue of $1.2K.
Whiteout: An iOS app to easily markup text in photos and pdfs. Redact, highlight, erase, underline, blur, pixelate, etc. Reached $1.1K in monthly revenue.
Glorify: High converting product images fast, easy and at scale. No design skills needed.
Xnapper: an app to snap beautiful screenshots instantly.
Spyne: AI photography and editing for car images.
Mugshot Bot: Automate link preview images for every page on your blog without fussing with design tools or wading through thousands of stock photos.
Stillio: Stillio automatically captures website screenshots at regular intervals. Estimated annual revenue is currently $560k.
Looka: AI-powered platform to design a logo and build a brand. Received $5.5M in funding
Gleek: a text-to-diagram tool that turns descriptions (in its own unique syntax) into diagrams.
IconifyAI: Lets users create professional app icons with AI in seconds.
Imagify: Image optimization tool. Users can compress images from the online app, API or directly from within CMS.
PhotoRoom: PhotoRoom is an AI-enabled image editing app and API that lets users create studio-quality product pictures. PhotoRoom's estimated annual revenue is currently $1.4M. Received $19.1M in funding. The app got 40 million downloads on iOS and Android and 7 million monthly active users
DynaPictures: a cloud-based solution for dynamic image generation. Connect your preferred data source like Google Sheets to auto generate personalized images
Feed Image Editor: Improves the image advertising of e-shops to increase the number of clicks. Lets users create custom graphic templates, schedule them in campaigns, and export them to various ad systems.
Pixc: Pixc makes it quick and simple to get professional-level editing for product photos. Pixc's estimated annual revenue is $2.8M.
Bannerbear: Bannerbear helps users auto-generate social media visuals, ecommerce banners and more with their API and integrations. Current annual recurring revenue is $580K+.
MagicStudio: A set of AI tools to create amazing product photos, remove backgrounds and more.
Placid: creative automation toolkit to generate images, videos & PDFs from dynamic templates.
AvatarAI: Create profile pictures, pet portraits, dating photos, professional LinkedIn photos and more. Crossed thousands of dollars in revenue in less than 2 months.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which tool for screenshots reached $2.4K in monthly revenue.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which AI-based image tool made $1000 in less than 5 days.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who hit $700 MRR in 7 Months and has now crossed $2K MRR with a tool for enhancing screenshots
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which AI-powered logo design tool has hit $840K in revenue.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is currently at $2.7K in monthly revenue with a tool for product images
🙅♀️🙅 Pessimists
Negative Nancy says - "I don't believe in using AI for image generation. It's not as accurate as human-made art."
Me - See AvatarAI that crossed thousands of dollars in revenue in less than 2 months. It’s built on AI. More examples: Looka - AI-powered platform to design a logo and build a brand. Received $5.5M in funding and hit $840K in revenue. IconifyAI - Lets users create professional app icons with AI in seconds. Made $1000 in less than 5 days.
Negative Nancy says: Generating images, and profile pictures take a lot of GPU power and this could be a blocker to attaining GPU computing power from cloud providers.
Me: Leverage tools like Replicate that handle the backend for you. You don’t have to acquire GPU computing power by yourself. Replicate will do that for you and runs your AI model on the cloud just as an API.
Negative Nancy says - Most of these tools needs some good dedicated infrastructure
Me - That is correct and sometimes there may be a need to install some tools as well. With multiple cloud vendors available, you can just create a virtual machine in less than 5 minutes and start using the dedicated infrastructure.
💡💡 Deep-dive & Some niches
Design Tool for Improving Product Images:
E-commerce vendors often struggle to create high-quality product images that accurately showcase their products. This is a problem because customers rely on these images to make purchasing decisions, and poor quality images can lead to lost sales. Designing these images can be time-consuming and difficult for vendors who may not have a background in graphic design. Also, doing this at scale takes huge efforts too. A Micro SaaS product that provides a design tool for improving product images can help solve these issues by providing an easy and efficient way for vendors to create professional and attractive product images that will help drive more sales. This solution can also be converted into an API only version too if you don’t want to handle the UI part of the application. See PhotoRoom API for some inspiration. Glorify is currently at $2.7K in monthly revenue. PhotoRoom's estimated annual revenue is currently $1.4M. Received $19.1M in funding. The app got 40 million downloads on iOS and Android and 7 million monthly active users. There are also tools that are specific to E-commerce platforms like Shopify. For example, Pixc’s Shopify app estimated annual revenue is $2.8M.
Some good tools in this space: Glorify, Spyne, PhotoRoom, MagicStudio
Automated Website Screenshots:
Automated capturing of website screenshots can be a useful tool for many businesses, but it is not without its issues. One major problem is that the automated process may not accurately capture the entire website or may capture it in a way that is distorted or unclear. This can lead to incomplete or inaccurate representations of the website, which can be problematic for businesses that rely on these screenshots for marketing, design, or other purposes. Other issues are the automation may not be able to capture dynamic elements of a website, such as pop-ups, hover-over animations, or videos. Normal automated capturing of website screenshots may not be able to capture websites that require authentication, such as login pages or secure portals. This can be a problem for businesses that need to capture these types of pages for internal or external purposes. Create Micro SaaS products that solve these problems at scale. Note that some of the current solutions around this are also able to handle authenticated sites as well by using the passed parameters in the API to login. For inspiration - see Stillio’s estimated annual revenue is currently $560k. ScreenshotOne crossed $400 MRR in 9 months. ScreenShotAPI crossed $5K MRR
AI Tool for App Icons
Designing app icons may seem like a simple task, but it can be just as complex as creating a logo. App icons serve as the visual representation of an app and can greatly impact a user's decision to download or engage with the app. This means that designers need to carefully consider the design elements, color scheme, and overall aesthetic of the app icon, just like they would for a logo. In addition to the design considerations, there are also technical requirements for app icons. App stores have specific guidelines for app icon size, resolution, and format, which can be different for different platforms. Designers need to ensure that the app icon meets these requirements while also being visually appealing and consistent with the app's overall branding. IconifyAI solved this problem to a larger extent by letting developers generate logos by using AI technology. It’s mostly one time payment. But the App market is huge. With some SEO, this should reach to more App developers. You can also see the growing trend here. For inspiration, see IconifyAI that made $1000 in less than 5 days suiting perfectly for a Micro SaaS. If you are more into tech, may be providing an AI wrapper for this and letting other businesses use the AI wrapper could be a business by itself.
Personalized AI Story Generator using Kids’ photos:
A personalized AI story generator using kids' photos is an exciting way to introduce children to the world of storytelling. By incorporating technology and personalization, it can help foster a love of reading and imagination in children, while also providing a fun and engaging activity for them to enjoy. Children can feel a sense of ownership and connection to the story, as it is tailored specifically to them. Additionally, the use of AI technology can help develop children's imagination and creativity by introducing them to new storylines and characters. Create a Micro SaaS product that uses AI to analyze the photos and generates a story that incorporates elements from the image, such as the child's facial expression or the background scenery.
Some players in this space: StoryWizard, OnceUpOnABot, BedTimeStory, StoryBird
While these tools are primarily into AI generated space, generating a whole story from the kids photo would be more engaging to the kids.
Meme generators:
Memes have become a popular way to increase engagement on social media platforms. Users enjoy using memes to express their thoughts and feelings, and it can help them connect with their followers or friends. Creating a simple Micro SaaS product that allows users to generate memes can be a great way to tap into this trend and provide a fun and easy tool for users to engage with. To create a decent meme generator, you can start by creating a library of about 100 templates that users can choose from. These templates can have placeholders for both images and text, allowing users to easily customize the meme to their liking. This will make it easy for even those with no design skills to create a professional-looking meme. See Kapwing Meme generator for inspiration. For some social media influences, memes are generating huge traffic. Also, you can also add AI flavor to the whole meme generation process to make it more scalable with variations and choices for the users.
Some players in this niche: Memix, SuperMeme
🔒 👉 [Get access to 1000+ additional ideas and more additional ideas in this niche and across all niches from Pro version with data points, revenue information].
💻 💻 Technical chops
Learn technical pointers on how to build products around this niche.
👉 🔒[Pro access]
📢 📢 Marketing chops
Learn Marketing pointers on how to start marketing the products for this niche. This should give you a marketing head start.
👉 🔒[Pro access]
💳 💳 Cost Analysis for 100 customers
Learn how much it costs to build a product in this niche and cater to 100 customers.
👉 🔒[Pro access]
Pro Version
See all profitable players in this Micro SaaS niche (Pro version)
See another 100% ideas for Micro-SaaS tools around Image Based Tools (Pro version)
See Technical chops for implementing for Micro-SaaS tools around Image Based Tools (Pro version)
See Marketing chops for implementing for Micro-SaaS tools around Image Based Tools (Pro version)
See Cost analysis for 100 users (Pro version)
Also get 90+ SaaS niches Pro versions covering 1000+ ideas from Pro news letters
👉 The report you're reading now was available to Pro subscribers 8 weeks ago. By upgrading to Pro, you'll gain early access to every edition, staying ahead of free subscribers. Get your Pro subscription today.