Issue#98: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around Marketing Automation
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Recent Micro SaaS News in 2 minutes
(This saves you hours of time and keeps you up to date on what's going on in Micro SaaS)
Plausible Analytics, an open source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics hits $188,000/month in 3 years. Read this earlier interview of the founder Marko Saric on FounderBeats.
Notion2Sheets by Lean Zubrezki crosses $6K MRR. Lean’s earlier interview on FounderBeats here
Max Prilutskiy reached $1,500 MRR with notionlytics, page analytics for Notion workspace.
Handle.horse , a tool to get notified when a twitter/X handle becomes available, by Marc Köhlbrugge reaches $2,800 MRR.
Bogusz Pękalski hits $1.3K revenue/month for MailingR , a tool for paid newsletter, membership site or newsletter referral program.
iCodeThis, providing daily coding challenges, grows to $5.3K in monthly revenue
Liinks by Charlie Clark crossed $20K MRR with 4200 paying customers.
Malcolm grows the productivity tool Intend to $8.4K in monthly revenue.
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Cool classifieds:
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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 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.
Let’s see some of the players around Micro SaaS products around Marketing Automation.
⛳ ⛳ Current players
Quuu: Provides audience-specific quality curated content on auto-pilot for increased social media engagement. Crossed $61K MRR.
Plunk: Developer-friendly email platform for saaS that brings together marketing, transactional and broadcast emails into one single, complete solution. Reached $650 in monthly revenue.
Churnfree: Helps SaaS, eCommerce, and subscription-based businesses to retain more customers and reduce churn rate by building personalized retention flows. Reached monthly revenue of $20K.
tinyEinstein: An AI-powered marketing manager that helps Shopify store owners automate key marketing activities with almost zero time investment.
Customerly: Helps save tons of time by automating repetitive tasks and communications with customers.
RADAAR: A unified social media management platform to visually plan content, publish automatically, engage with followers, and get reports. Reached $10K in monthly revenue.
ReferralHero: A platform for building viral, lead-generating referral programs. Reached $18,000 MRR with 6,000+ customers within 4 years of launching.
VoicePen: Converts audio, video, voice memo and websites to blog posts in minutes with AI. Got 65 paying customers and reached $1,600 in revenue within a month of launch.
PodSqueeze: Helps generate shownotes, timestamps, newsletters and more for podcast with one click. Reached $10K MRR.
Bento: Email & automation for fast growing startups to retain customers, grow revenue, and scale through better email and conversational marketing.
Rewardful: A simple way for SaaS companies to set up affiliate and referral programs with Stripe and Paddle. Reached $191K in annual revenue.
Senja: Automates video and text testimonial collection. .
Choppity: AI-powered tool to rapidly turn long podcast videos into social media clips. Reached $140 MRR in 37 days and has now hit $1.6K in monthly revenue.
Mention Tools: A social listening tool for tracking brand mentions and keywords to help find new customers. Reached $1.2K in monthly revenue.
Userlist: Email Automation that meets the Challenges of B2B SaaS. Lets users onboard, engage, and nurture customers and marketing leads.
Ocoya: Social media, content marketing and copywriting - using AI.
Devi AI: Automates leads monitoring, outreach, content & scheduling. Crossed $400 MRR.
JournalistCafe: Generates high-quality articles that fuel business. The underlying AI is trained on content from leading publishers. Reached $4000 MRR.
CartStack: Cartstack takes abandoned cart remarketing to the next level, by sending targeted messages to buyers at all stages of the conversion funnel. Estimated annual revenue is currently $630k.
Tolt: Affiliate Marketing software for SaaS startups.
StoryChief: Helps editorial teams, social media managers, and agencies collaborate better, and distribute their content faster across multiple platforms.
Syften: A keyword monitoring tool for the web’s leading communities.
DrumUp: DrumUp mines through tons of content across the web in real time, and uses sophisticated algorithms to recommend fresh stories most relevant to users’ audience. Reached $30.6K in annual revenue.
Encharge: Marketing automation for sending emails based on what people do on your website. Automates your marketing process across the user journey. Estimated annual revenue is $5.5M.
Endorsal: Collect, display and share customer testimonials & reviews on autopilot.
JournoLink: Press releases are published to multiple news channels. Provides instant notifications when journalists are looking for stories relevant to users. Estimated annual revenue is 7M.
Ortto: Builds personalized multi-channel journeys to engage audience with targeted messages and automate repetitive actions.
Flowpoint: a SaaS platform that helps business owners or marketing professionals optimize website conversion rates, drive engagement, and retention through AI-powered web analytics.
Tugan.ai: an AI-powered tool that generates marketing emails, newsletters, and social media content from an article or YouTube video.
Automata: Turns videos into blogs, blogs into Twitter threads, and 150+ other content transformations.
AiTrillion: All-in-One sales & marketing automation platform for eCommerce Estimated annual revenue is $7.8M.
CareCart: Recover abandoned carts, capture emails, & increase revenue through powerful web push notifications & abandoned cart email campaigns. 1K+ reviews on Shopify App Store.
ReferralCandy: A referral program that provides a complete set of building blocks to support all referral marketing models. Estimated annual revenue is currently $5M.
[Note that some of the products also has a sales layer on top of marketing to help improve sales. Also some of the products are more into sales ecosystem with marketing add-ons.]
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who reached $249.6K in annual revenue for an email automation tool.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which AI-based content marketing and copywriting tool reached monthly revenue of $25K.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which testimonial collection tool reached $8,500 MRR
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who reached $480K annual revenue with 5K customers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which keyword monitoring tool reached €6K MRR in 2022.
🙅♀️🙅 Pessimists
Negative Nancy says - “Founders can hire people for marketing”
Me - Hiring for marketing is possible but not a scalable solution. You can certainly hire someone to send 1000 cold emails but imagine doing the same for sending 1Millions emails. Founders are looking for out-of-the-box solutions and automations to improve their marketing.
Negative Nancy says - “Marketing is not the only way. Founder can simply try direct sales.”
Me - Agreed. Founders either need marketing or sales to make money from their products. There are millions of products making money from marketing and that’s still a huge market.
🤿🤿 Deep-dive && 💡💡 Some niches
From $4,438.7 million in 2020, the global marketing automation market size is projected to reach $14,180.6 million in 2030, at a 12.3% CAGR between 2020 and 2030. The major reasons for the rising demand for these solutions are the growing practice of digital marketing and rising number of people using social media. Moreover, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are adopting these solutions to achieve marketing efficiency and cut costs. This is as per the ResearchAndMarkets report.
AI-Powered Tool to Automate Content Repurposing:
Create Video/Audio Content Repurposing Tools tools primarily meant for audio and video creators. The tool should be able to cater to various publishing platforms like TikTok, Youtube, Twitch, and Live Streaming platforms. Publishing to video platforms often involves a few requirements like adding subtitles, removing a few filler words, trimming the video, adding logos, watermarks, etc. Create a content repurposing tool that automates most of this and automatically distributes to various video and audio platforms via platform APIs for those content platforms. While publishing to various audio and video platforms is half of the game, getting the video stats, data of comments, and likes/dislikes into a neat dashboard will make it much easy to decide on what platforms the content publishing is working on. Create a Micro SaaS solution around these problems and automate most of these flows. See Repurpose for inspiration. You can also build tools for converting a simple audio(podcast) to a subtitled video with background pictures based on pre-configured settings. Or you can build tools that help convert a podcast or a full length videos into short clips to post on Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube etc. Adding AI layer to these tools help build better content for founders.
Below are some players in this space building various solutions to different types of content.
Choppity: Uses AI to rapidly turn long podcast videos into social media clips so that founders can grow their audience. Reached $140 MRR in 37 days and has now hit $1.6K in monthly revenue.
Automata: Helps turn videos into blogs, blogs into Twitter threads, and 150+ other content transformations.
VoicePen: Converts audio, video, voice memo and websites to blog posts in minutes with AI. Got 65 paying customers and reached $1,600 in revenue within a month of launch.
Tugan.ai: Helps convert an article or Youtube video URL to instantly generate newsletters, Tweets, Threads And LinkedIn Posts with AI.
PodSqueeze: Helps generate shownotes, timestamps, newsletters and more from founder’s podcast. Reached $10K MRR.
Referral Program Automation:
There are various solutions you can build in this space.
Pre-launch waitlist Automation Referral System: This is gaining a lot of attention these days. Implement a micro saas solution that handles the waitlist activity for new saas companies. Most saas companies want to create a multiplier effect by asking to subscribe to get early access and keeps users on the waitlist. As the user shares the invite to more people, his/her waitlist number improves. For example, if a user signs up for early access and is on a waitlist queue with 400 people before him/her. This will act as a token number while waiting in line for access. If the user shares his/her unique invite link and lets more people join from his invite link, the user gets moved up in the queue from 400 to 200. Building a simple micro saas around this functionality can bring in a lot of attention as this creates a viral effect. See Waitlist API for inspiration.
Referral Programs with automated payments: Create a referral program software (as a micro-saas) that pays the referrers. The direct monetary benefit is more attractive. Have a system like Paypal or Stripe to make money transfers. For example, if there is a saas that charges a customer about $150/m, that would be $1800/year. Assuming each customer stays 2 years, the LTV(lifetime value) of each new paid user would be $3000 - USD 4K. In these cases, some B2B companies would like to pay monetary benefits, and having an automated payment system based on a referral system is a clear winner. This model is close to an Affiliate system model.
Headless API based referral software: ‘Headless’ has been a common term these days. Build a Headless API based referral software system that just provides a set of APIs and handles data for customers. There will be no UI or dashboards but it's all APIs. For example, a B2B customer already having a lot of codebases, and an existing legacy system can just integrate a referral system by calling the APIs provided. You will need to provide an API pretty much for everything. For example, below are some APIs that can be provided to the customers. Make sure each customer has his/her API access keys (like an API key+ secret key) and customers should be able to call the APIs for any action needed in the referral pipeline.
API to create a new referrer
API to create a unique referral link
API to add loyalty points to a user
API to remove a user from the referral network.
API to check the count of referrals
… etc
Using these APIs customers should be able to integrate a referral system into their existing saas.
ReferralHero reached $18,000 MRR with 6,000+ customers within 4 years of launching.
ReferralCandy’s estimated annual revenue is currently $5M.
Content Curation Automation Tool for Social Media Marketing
Growing social media followers is not easy. It typically needs daily content to be posted that closely resonates with the followers. Often it is tough to get this kind of high-quality content to share. As a result of the need for content to post daily, many marketers will outsource the task to a digital marketing agency or freelancer. However, they often find that they are not getting the results they expected. They begin to wonder if it is worth the expense of social media management services. This is the exact problem Quuu was solving by finding relevant content to be available for companies so that they can share the same with their audience. Note that Quuu doesn’t write the content. Quuu only curates the content from the internet and shares that with companies based on pre-configured topics companies are interested in. Quuu crossed $61K MRR with about 10000 customers. You can further niche down this model to generate/curate content for specific industries and segments like ‘tech content for Developers’, ‘ Sales content for sales team’, ‘Real estate content for realtors’, etc. By further niching down, you can produce better content and charge more. Create a Micro SaaS that automates this for companies based on pre-configures topics. The tool should be able to search the internet, crawl websites, tag the topics, and then be able to filter the content based on companies’ interests and send curated/filtered links to companies via a login dashboard. As an add-on, provide further integrations to automatically publish these to companies’ social media channels with some approval mechanism in place. The approval mechanism is required so that companies get a chance to not accidentally publish competitor content, embarrassing content, etc. The tool should also have enough checks in place to not send the same content multiple times to the same company as this could negatively impact the followers to see the same content being shared multiple times.
Micro-SaaS for Monitoring Keywords/Brand Mentions
Simple keyword monitoring Micro SaaS products that monitors most happening websites like Hackernews, Indiehackers, Lobsters, Reddit, Twitter helps users to market their products better at the right time at the right place. The SaaS tool should be able to notify the users via email as and when a discussion happens about a specific topic that was chosen by the customer. 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. There is a big problem with the mentions or keyword monitoring. The results are often purely based on the “keyword” text and could sometimes be of no use. For monitoring the Brand names, a simple keyword monitoring tool may work. But for a founder who is looking at certain keywords, receiving a false positive that is not in context of the founder’s saas product. For example, a founder building something related to “Airtable” wouldn’t be interested in questions in Reddit that is directed towards Airtable pricing questions. So, if you could add some kind of intelligence and rank the mention on a scale of 5 that fits the context for the founder, that would be a killer feature. To start with you can start doing this manually as well. (Ever heard of something like - “Doing things that don’t scale”).
Mention Tools hit $1.2K in monthly revenue.
Syften reached €6K MRR in 2022.
Devi AI crossed $400 MRR. Helps Monitors keywords in Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter & Reddit.
Micro-SaaS for Affiliate Management:
Affiliate management can significantly bolster marketing efforts by expanding a company's reach and driving more qualified traffic to its products or services. Through an affiliate program, businesses can partner with influencers, bloggers, and other affiliates who promote their offerings to their own audiences. This approach leverages the affiliates' established credibility and audience trust, resulting in increased brand visibility and credibility. Additionally, affiliates are motivated by commissions or incentives, driving them to actively market the products, thus boosting sales and revenue. Affiliate marketing also allows for a cost-effective marketing strategy, as businesses only pay commissions for actual sales generated by affiliates. But running an Affiliate program needs a lot of work behind the scenes to generate unique URLs for Affiliates, track sales, generate reports. Running an affiliate program manually is tough because it requires extensive time and effort to track and manage affiliate activities, commissions, and payouts. Micro SaaS solutions like Tolt, Rewardful are some of the prominent solutions in this space and automates the flow to a large extent. Rewardful reached $191K in annual revenue.
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💻 💻 Technical chops
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💳 💳 Cost Analysis for 100 customers
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