Issue#79: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around SaaS Ecosystem - Part 2
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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)
‘Learn Azure’ App by Denis Kazakov hits $40000 in Just 4 Months. See the interview of the founder where he shares his insights and strategy.
Surjith S M made 195 Sales and $2000+ revenue in 24 hours after launching his first info product ‘Tailwind CSS Notion Handbook’
Jacky Tan crossed $16K MRR and $200K ARR with CraftMyPDF and APITemplate.io
Sidebird by Lilian gets 1000+ users in 8 months.
TypingMind, a UI for ChatGPT by Tony Dinh, crosses $10K in revenue in less than 2 weeks after launch.
Pika by Rishi hits $2K MRR. See this earlier interview of Rishi on FounderBeats
Scrollsequence, a wordpress animation plugin, is generating $5K+ per month.
Thomas Sanlis crossed $4K revenue with Uneed, the tools directory.
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-2 of this topic/niche.
Let’s see some of the products around this ecosystem.
SaaSWrites: SaaSWrites is a growth marketing hub of blogs, resources, and tools. Helps users grow their SaaS with curated growth tactics in easy-to-digest learning nuggets.
CherryRed: Cherry Red Content is a content studio for founders. Creates all forms of B2B SaaS content including marketing emails, in-depth SaaS blog posts, technical how-to-guides for SaaS, market trends for the SaaS, etc.
GrowthLab: A cohort course to land your first 10 paying customers and help build a system to get more customers.
AppSumo: AppSumo is the platform 1.25M+ entrepreneurs trust for everything they need to create fulfilling businesses. A marketplace for SaaS products that sell Life Time Deals.
SaaS Starup Kit: Golang Startup Kit for SaaS Open-source project of Go code to bootstrap your software-as-a-service startup.
JoinSecret: JoinSecret helps you instantly save 1000s of dollars on the best online tools and join a global community of founders. Currently at $18K MRR.
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. DraftDev is making $60K MRR with the technical writing for a fixed monthly cost.
SaaSPegasus: The Django SaaS Starter Kit. Pegasus ships with a gallery of common SaaS use-cases, ready to use in your own project. Making $50K/year.
DivJoy: React code base generator that works with Material UI, Firebase, Stripe, Vercel and Mailchimp. Making $40K+ in annual revenue.
GrowMySaaS: The best way to grow your startup. Unlock a database of 150+ growth and conversion strategies for early-stage SaaS startups.
User Booster: Built by Xavier, User Booster helps people to get their first users. UserBooster is a Notion Dashboard to build your launch strategy and leverage online communities. User Booster made hundreds of dollars even though it’s a one-time purchase but still, Xavier is leveraging this audience by building a community at m4m (Marketing4Makers).
Negative Nancy says - Fractional CTOs, CFOs, and CMO roles don’t make sense. Do they really exist?
Me - The keyword ‘Fractional CTO’ has close to 1000 searches per month with a CPC(Cost Per Click) of $44.64 USD. This shows the demand for this role. With every company going into cost-cutting mode, fractional CTO is gaining attention.
The keyword ‘Fractional CFO’ has close to 2400 searches per month with a CPC(Cost Per Click) of $42.95 USD.
The keyword ‘Fractional CMO’ has close to 2200 searches per month with a CPC(Cost Per Click) of $29.23 USD.
This clearly shows the demand for such roles. See more related info in the next sections.
Negative Nancy says - “It’s better to build a SaaS and make revenue recurring than working on an info product around SaaS”.
Me - SaaS takes relatively more time and is not for everyone. Making a profitable Info product also gives you a good runway with a little bit of cash when you want to build your SaaS as typically SaaS needs more time and money. Also, not all info products are one-time revenue generators. Once you have enough audience for your info products, you can upsell other products, sell your consulting time and build a SaaS product too for your audience who purchased your info product. This way info product can act as pre-validation too for your SaaS.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Let’s see some of the niches in this space.
SaaS Starter Kits/Boilerplates - Technical: SaaS Starter Kits/Boilerplates are programming replacements for what templates used to be for HTML pages. With web development starter kits, you can save hours by not spending time developing common features like user profile, billing, authentication, etc. Most of these are high-value products. All you need is a handful of customers. Make sure to have enough Unit Test cases. As you add more features, one of the daunting tasks could be to add more unit test cases to make sure nothing breaks. The cost of running a business something like a ‘starter kit’ or ‘starter templates’ is almost always zero. As the actual code runs on the end customer infrastructure like AWS, Vercel, Netlify, GCP, or Azure, there is no cost associated with you whether you have 100 customers or 1000 customers. With a model like this, the profit margin is close to 100% as there are no running costs as the customer base increases. For inspiration, see ServerlessPage crossed $1200 MRR. UseGravity crossed $100K per year. SaaSPegasus makes $50K/year. All these help SaaS founders build products faster.
Deals for Founders: Create a website that helps founders and makers to get deals on good products. You don’t need to build a lot of tech around this and you don’t need a lot of tech knowledge to build this. All you need is to work with companies who are interested in providing discounts, deals, and free credits for founders and helping align the interest between the founders and companies. An MVP for a product like this can be built with a simple stack like Airtable, Softr, Pory, etc without spending thousands of dollars. JoinSecret in this space is making $18K/month by helping founders and builders.
Access to SaaS Metrics/Insights: There are a lot of revenue data and insights that get shared on Twitter and other forums. Record these data points, compile them in one single place like an Excel sheet or Airtable and give access to this data to others. This is a good model to execute and GetLatka has been doing this for some time with slightly bigger companies by interviewing the founders and collecting the data points from external sources. Create something like this where you compile the SaaS metrics and insights from founders and provide the access to this data to other people. These kinds of data points around MRR, ARR, TTM, Churn Rate, Number of customers, etc are extremely valuable and worth a lot for SaaS founders looking for insights about other products.
SaaS Fractional CTO/CMO/CFO Roles: Fractional roles are the new trending topics around founders and SaaS. Fractional, or part-time, employees are professionals who share their time and services among many companies. They may work in-house as well as for external clients; however, they typically have a fraction of the time allotted to full-time, in-house employees. Gumroad has successfully implemented this concept of fractional employees where most of the team runs this way. You can try two models in this. One model is offering the service where you will be acting as the shared/fractional CTO/CMO/CFO. The other model is creating a list of jobs around these fractional roles in the form of job boards that specifically publish fractional roles.
The keyword ‘Fractional CTO’ has close to 1000 searches per month with a CPC(Cost Per Click) of $44.64 USD. This shows the demand for this role. With every company going into cost-cutting mode, fractional CTO is gaining attention.
The keyword ‘Fractional CFO’ has close to 2400 searches per month with a CPC(Cost Per Click) of $42.95 USD.
The keyword ‘Fractional CMO’ has close to 2200 searches per month with a CPC(Cost Per Click) of $29.23 USD.
The below data shows the exponential growth in the demand for these roles.
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Technical chops
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Marketing chops
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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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