Issue#78: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around SaaS Ecosystem - Part 1
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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.)
Kai launched MrScraper, a visual web scraper, in November 2022. It has now crossed $1700 ARR
ZeroToFounder book by Upen has made $5K in sales with purchasing power parity enabled- see the details on IndieHackers
KTool by Daniel Nguyen by crosses $700 in MRR - See his earlier interview on FounderBeats
The landing page builder, Unicorn Platform hits $16K MRR With 1000 paying customers. See the interview of the founder Alexander Isora on FounderBeats
Angus Cheng hits $7K MRR from Bank Statement Converter - convert PDF bank statements into Excel (XLS) format.
Video course teaching how to build a SaaS product with Bubble hits $10K in sales as shared by the founder.
Beam Analytics, a Google Analytics alternative that is GDPR Compliant built by @TheBuilderJR and @lenglee, crossed 200 users after launching in January this year.
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 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 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.
SaaS has so many things attached to it. Sometimes, most founders think building a SaaS product is the only way to start making revenue but SaaS comes with a bigger ecosystem. Let’s see what models around this ecosystem are making considerable revenue or getting traction and look at what models can be built on top of these insights.
This is Part-1 of this topic/niche.
Let’s see some of the products around this ecosystem.
SaaSCamp: Coaching program that helps you quickly find paying users and grow your MRR. Programs cost 10 times less than the market value your SaaS will reach by the end.
Founder Shortcuts Program: Matt Gary runs a special program for founders to 10x their revenue, and brand and helps create a content flywheel. The program also helps create repeatable frameworks to get organic leads to attain peak performance for founders.
PitchGround: PitchGround is a SaaS marketplace that helps founders sell Life Time Deals and brings in additional revenue for SaaS founders.
100in100: 100in100 is a public challenge to join and try to reach 100 paying customers in 100 days.
ServerlessPage: Build a SaaS faster with React Serverless SaaS is aiming to be the perfect starting point for your next React app to build full-stack SaaS applications. Save time and skip implementing authentication, payments, teams, and more. Making $1200 MRR.
GetLatka: Revenue, valuation, and customer data on SaaS companies built from founder audio clips. Crossed thousands of dollars in revenue.
MicroAcquire: MicroAcquire is a founder-friendly startup acquisition marketplace that helps SaaS founders sell their SaaS products. Profitable with thousands of dollars in revenue.
IndieMaker: Buy & Sell Side-Projects, SaaS, Domains and Social Media Accounts IndieMaker is a community marketplace with 14,224+ members where makers sell their side-projects, unused domains, and online businesses.
InnovatorsCanLaugh: Innovators Can Laugh is for aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t have a clear roadmap and want to understand how fun, and difficult, the path to successful innovation can be. Unlike ordinary entrepreneurial-related podcast, the podcasts interviews fresh faces of European entrepreneurship and innovation.
UseGravity: Build a Node.js & React SaaS app at warp speed. Gravity is a leading Node.js & React SaaS boilerplate. You can get all features you need in a single install. Making $100K per year.
The Launch Checklist: Launch Like A Pro On Product Hunt With These 80+ Actionable Tips From Expert Entrepreneurs
ScrapBook: Scrapbook is a database of 280+ high-quality SaaS tactic ideas for every step of the funnel, from acquisition to retention.
Startup Growth Kit: A collection of Notion docs and templates to grow your startup or indie project! Get hundreds of places where you can post your startup, and hundreds of guides about launching on Twitter, Product Hunt, Reddit, and more.
SpreadTheWorld: Xavier created an info product by curing the list of communities where people can post about their products and get users. Xavier identified that this is an everyday problem for most founders. So, he simply started collecting data about various forums/communities and made a list with that data. But instead of building the list on a complex tech stack, he just used Airtable and provided access to this list via Gumroad purchase. This helped him to spend less time going to market and rather spend those efforts in marketing his info product. Xavier made more than $9000 USD in less than 5 months from this info product. He, in turn, used these audiences to sell his next info product UserBooster which is already profitable and making hundreds of dollars.
Negative Nancy says - Communities are distractions for founders.
Me - Often founders go through a lot of stress. They are often focused on growing a business, building traction, and making sure the customers feel good about using their product. But all this stress builds up over time and I think it's important that founders have a community with people to talk to who are also going through similar struggles and exchanging tips and advice with each other. Having a community will help founders eventually reduce their stress with discussions around related topics, help build traction for their products, and anything else that can help make it easier for founders to focus on building products.
Negative Nancy says - It needs a lot of tech expertise to build a marketplace for SaaS products/Life Time Deals.
Me - Disagree. Building a marketplace needs zero tech knowledge. You can just start with a simple Google sheets/Airtable sheet to start with. On top of that, once the product establishes and needs a full-blown site, there are a lot of ways to build marketplaces without investing heavily in tech by using products like Softr, Siteoly, Pory etc.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Let’s see some of the niches in this space.
SaaS Tech Content Writing: Create a productized service but for writing content around SaaS technical content. There is a big gap between generic content for SaaS versus technical content for SaaS. The technical content could be in the form of a blog post, guide, or eBook. 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.
Marketplace for selling/buying SaaS businesses: This is my favorite of all the marketplaces and is easily the most profitable if executed well. See MicroAcquire is doing exceptionally well. Trust is important in this niche where sellers get the confidence that there is not a lot of work required to sell a SaaS and buyers shouldn’t feel like a burden to buy and acquire a saas business. IndieMaker is also doing a fairly decent job in establishing a marketplace for sellers and buyers. Make it easy to validate the data for SaaS business. The major problem for buyers would be to validate the data. If you as a marketplace owner could pre-verify this seller data using APIs or via manual review (connected via screen share and verifying), this brings in more confidence for the buyer and this acts more like a vetted marketplace than a simple “anybody can sell” marketplace. As the marketplace grows, you can add anybody and everybody to sell and then display if the data is verified or not, etc. You could charge a one-time access fee on top of the sales commission or you could charge a monthly fee as well. But with everyone building more and more SaaS companies, it makes a good bet to start this marketplace. Reach out to VCs operating small funds and see if you can connect them to SaaS owners who want to sell. For example, XoXo VC is always on the lookout to buy new SaaS companies. To build the supply side, get onto ProductHunt and see who launched their products last year and see how they are performing. This could be as simple as reaching the founders on Twitter and DM for MRR data and see if they have any interest to sell the product/SaaS. Make a list of the interested founders who want to see an offer and then reach out to small-time VCs to crack a deal. Once you the required contacts, set up a formal marketplace where people can register, sell and buy. For more inspiration, see Microns that crossed $1K MRR in less than a year.
Community for SaaS founders to improve mental health: People need help. People need suggestions. People need someone to talk to. Create a community around mental health where you can write detailed posts about how to keep up with mental health, what tools can improve mental health, techniques to improve mental health, and mental models around Mental Health. Nesslabs To build credibility arrange weekly calls, and bring in speakers who could talk in detail about mental health. People are at a point where they are happy to pay for quality content around Mental Health. For example, see NessLabs is a community that crossed $100K ARR in less than a year by helping people with mental health. Nesslabs helps to make the most of your mind by building a lab for a mind with neuroscience-based content and conversations. It has about 30K member community around mental health for founders.
Forums Insights Tools to find new SaaS Ideas: Finding new ideas is often a tough process for any founder. There are many insights people find from discussions on forums like LinkedIn, Reddit, IndieHackers, etc. But to go through all these discussions and gain insights manually is a cumbersome process and takes a lot of time. Create tools that help SaaS founders gain insights from forum discussions. For example, see GummySearch which pulls Reddit data and helps quickly discover customer pain points, what solutions they need, and what they are eager to pay for. GummySearch made $50K with LTDs (Life Time Deals) Create tools that help SaaS founders gain insights from discussions on various forums. This will save a lot of time for founders to browse and learn from insights.
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