Issue#54: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS around Simple Automations
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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.
Simple Automations? Why not build something as big as Zapier or Integromat? You can certainly build Zapier or Integromat and get acquired like this. But that’s risky as you need to put in a lot of effort and energy towards this. Instead of that, let’s take a simple approach that has low risk to validate the product-market fit and then double-down as needed.
So, basically - “Simple Automations” are tools that automate one thing at its best instead of doing zillion things. Simple Automations concentrate on one single tool and provide various integrations for the same.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who made $2500 in sales with Life Time Deals with Quora Growth Hacking tool.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which IndieHacker's Twitter product is used by hundreds of users.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who received 500K funding in less than 6 months on Reddit Growth Hacking tool.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who crossed $4000 MRR with Airtable automation app.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who crossed $1200 MRR with automation of podcast website creation.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which product reached $10K MRR in 6 months with document automation.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who crossed 9000 users and made $300K in revenue with Text-To-Speech automation.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is at $300 MRR with 12000 installs for a Notion automation.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which product crossed $2K MRR with automation around A/B testing.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is at $15K MRR with 40% MoM growth around Ads automation.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is at $1K MRR by automating LinkedIn Outreach.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which email automation product is making $200K/year with about 2000 paying customers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is automating custom domains and has handful of paying customers.
Let’s see some of the tools around Simple Automations.
QAPop: An automation tool for Quora that finds the popular questions with maximum ROI and also automates the 'answer draft using AI.
BlackMagic: Twitter automation tool that automates dynamic Twitter Banners for Twitter profiles.
Howitzer: Howitzer is the first direct marketing automation tool for Reddit. Howitzer helps you find potential leads on Reddit, and send personalized Reddit DMs and chats, at scale with automation. Founded March 2021, received 500K funding in less than 6 months.
DataFetcher: Import data from anywhere to Airtable. Connect Airtable to any API using the Data Fetcher app.
Messaged: Emails automation but exclusively for SaaS. Messaged is a no-code required email marketing automation platform with a prebuilt lifecycle and transactional email sequences for SaaS businesses.
EavesDrop: Automate finding customers without ads Eavesdrop monitors the largest online communities 24/7 and notifies you when an opportunity to acquire new customers arise.
OnPodium: The easy way to create a professional, interactive and automated website for your podcast. Automatically update the website when a new episode is released, so your website is always up-to-date effortless.
BlkBox: Intelligent automation for Facebook. Designed for Scaled Performance. Built by ex-Facebook engineers, BLKBOX unlocks the Facebook Ads Auction by automation. Currently at USD $1.3M ARR.
Ousia: Create SEO niche content for thousands of keywords 100x faster. Automate content creation for niche sites. Recently launched and got good hype with a good number of signups.
DocTranslator: Translate any Word Document, Excel File, Adobe PDF, PowerPoint Presentation, or InDesign file into over 100 languages.
Listnr: Automatically generate high-quality Text to Speech voices from some of the best cloud providers in the world.
Notion2Sheets: Keep your databases from Notion automatically in sync with Google Sheets. Use Sheets formulas to send data to Notion, create recurring tasks and even connect cells with Notion blocks for dynamic dashboards.
ABTesting: Automate A/B Testing. Boost conversions on landing pages with the help of AI. The easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to A/B test.
AIHello: Automate Amazon PPC for Businesses. For Sellers, Agencies, Private Labels, and Brands.
SalesLoop: Salesloop removes hours of manual LinkedIn research and automates finding interested prospects quickly.
Warmbox: Automatically increase your email inbox reputation & increase your email deliverability.
Approximated: Automatically add custom domains to any SaaS application. Automate SSL provision on the fly.
SaaSCustomDomains: Automated custom domains solution for offering branded custom domains to customers. Trusted by 200+ customers.
Negative Nancy says - “People could very well use Zapier, Integromat, etc. that can do a lot of things. Why do they use simple automation tools that just do one thing?”
Me - Not everyone likes complex tools that can do zillion things. Most people need a simpler tool as long as it fits their needs. For example, DataFetcher that automates importing data into Airtable makes $4K MRR. It doesn’t automate a lot of tools but just automates data importing to Airtable.
Negative Nancy says - “Simple automation tools may not have exponential growth”
Me - Starting with simple automation tools will help you make your first dollar and help you get your first paying customer. Once you have a good customer base and a decent product-market fit, you can pivot as needed by talking to your audience. This also mitigates your risk by investing less time into a small product before investing a lot of time and energy. The goal is to “Start small → Understand the process → Think Big → Automate & Repeat.”
Deep-dive & Some niches
Automation of importing data into Airtable: Airtable is growing at an exponential rate. With robust APIs and integrations coming around Airtable, it has become an easier choice for most people to store data. People use Airtable for various reasons. While Airtable has a lot of APIs and good GUI to import data into Airtable, there is still a need for direct integration from various tools. For example, people may just want to call an API and send an Excel sheet via API that needs to be imported into Airtable automatically every day. Some people may need to import data from Shopify to Airtable on an automated schedule. Some may way to import data from Notion to Airtable. So, there is a great need for a simple automation tool around Airtable that can do a lot of things but all around Airtable. Instead of supporting a lot of tools to which the data can be imported, pick a single tool and provide various automation around that. DataFetcher has done a great job in automating this process by picking ‘Airtable automation’. DataFetcher is profitable at $4000 MRR.
Automate Twitter Banners: Twitter allows users to update their banners via APIs. This will help people to display their banners dynamically. There are various use cases for this. For example, authors on Twitter may want to display their book sales data dynamically on Twitter. Founders want to display their MRR data dynamically on the Twitter banner. People may want to display other stats via an API call to their database. There is a huge demand for this as everyone is trying to build their audience on Twitter and this is one of the best ways of building credibility and thereby driving more followers. BlackMagic automated this for Twitter. BlackMagic has become extremely popular and is used by hundreds of users.
Reddit Automation: Reddit needs no introduction. Reddit is one of those few platforms which has a discussion group (subreddit) for almost any topic in the world. Some of these subreddits have thousands of users. It’s not easy to look for the active members in a subreddit manually. The audience in these niche subreddits is like a goldmine. Create an automation tool that can get the list of active users and send a Direct Message (DM) to these users via automation. Reddit has APIs to send DMs to Reddit users. Sometimes users may want to get the list of people who upvoted/commented on a specific post. Create automation around this that can extract this information by querying Reddit. Howitzer, founded in March 2021, did great work in this space by automating most of this and also received 500K funding in less than 6 months.
Quora Automation: Quora is one of the most popular tools that drive a lot of traffic. But one of the biggest issues around Quora is often finding the best questions you should put your efforts on. For starters, Quora is the world’s most popular Q&A platform where users ask questions and anyone can answer. The better the answer, the higher the number of upvotes, thus giving more traffic for the links in the answer. Create a Micro SaaS tool that can automate this and give this data of the questions vs the number of current answers vs the number of views for each answer etc. The tools should tag the questions for certain keywords and search topics. When a user searches for interesting topics, the tools should be able to recommend the best questions he/she can answer that would give the highest referral traffic. Users can certainly start answering every question around a topic but this would relatively take more time. Heard of the 80/20 rule? 80 % of traffic is driven by 20% of questions. Help the user find that 20% of questions to answer and drive more traffic. But note that, there is no official Quora API yet, and it’s often not easy to scrape Quora content. So, you should be using power tools to get this data or maybe use browser extensions so that the queries/quick scraping can be done on the client-side or use anonymous IPs to scrape the content. Scraping content is against Quora principles. So, see the legitimate way how you can just index the data without actually scraping the whole content. Tools like these will help build backlinks and generate traffic over the long run. QAPop did great work in this space and made $2500 in sales with Life Time Deals. As a growth marketing channel to support this, you can build an Influencer discovery platform around Quora writers so that founders can search for Quora writers around a given topic.
Automate advertising on Social Media platforms: Almost all social platforms provide a native display of ads. For example, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit - all of these platforms have an advertising system that allows people to bid/pay for displaying the ads. Logging in to each of these systems and adding advertising content - like Title, Description, Links, and entering bid data could be a tedious task. Create a SaaS platform that can publish ads to multiple social platforms from one single place. See RevealBot for some inspiration. RevealBot automated Facebook Ads, Snapchat Ads, and Google Ads - all in one platform. RevealBot estimated revenue is more than $1M/year.
Automate A/B Testing: A/B testing is something when used properly, gives a ton of insights. But most people are lazy to try various variants of the same website copy and see the results/metrics. This is because of the efforts this process needs to try with different headline texts, intro texts, etc. Automate this process. Automatically generate various versions of a given website and render those different variations to a different audience via A/B traffic splitting. Make sure your tool also carefully captures the required metrics too. For example, if you can capture data like ‘how much time each visitor is spending on one variant vs other” along with metrics like bounce rate, click-through rate, etc for multiple variations, it’s going to be good automation for a lot of users. For inspiration, see ABTesting that crossed $2K MRR.
Automate Custom domains/SSL generation for SaaS Apps: If you have ever written a SaaS application that needs custom domains, you might have known the pain it takes to set up SSLs for custom domains. Every time, the customer connects a new domain to your application via the ‘custom domains’ feature, you need to automatically generate an SSL for the newly added domain. You can certainly do this with multiple tools like LetsEncrypt, CaddyServer, ZeroSSL but all of those tools need you to have some experience with servers and take a good amount of time. On top of that, you should be careful taking the backups of all the generated SSLs and also make sure you are well within the rate limits of these vendors. If you add all domains with a wildcard entry, then people will spam you and can easily bring your SSL process down by abusing the service by sending a lot of connection requests. So, the process of adding custom domains to SaaS applications and generating SSLs dynamically is cumbersome. Approximated solved this problem with great automation and is profitable with a handful of customers. See Approximated for more info.
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