- SaaS businesses come in all
different shapes and sizes. Some SaaS companies are
aiming to become platforms for massive companies. On the other hand, you have SaaS companies that are just tools
for very specific users and run very lean. There's no right or wrong answer. SaaS ideas, SaaS
opportunities are abundant. Here's a big question though. If you wanted to be a solo founder and you wanted to build one
of these lean SaaS companies, how do you go about it? What are some great ideas in this space? And how do you actually
accelerate that path to product market fit? In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through my key principles on building one of these companies, and I'm gonna give you five
key ideas that I developed here at the secret location
where I'm at a conference, meeting incredible people. So you can actually either be inspired by one of these ideas, or
you can apply the principles to develop your own idea and build your own SaaS business as a solo founder. Intro. (upbeat music) What's up, everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, and on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you're new to
this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies
and tactics from the trenches, and sometimes from
Whistler, British Columbia, on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So if you're new, be sure
to hit that Subscribe button and that bell icon. That way, you'll get notified every single time I drop an
episode with the TK energy. Now, if you're already
part of this community, if you're part of this channel, part of my SaaS go-to-market
coaching programs, my people, welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. If you've been watching
this channel for a while, you'll notice that I'm in
a slightly different spot. I'm actually at Whistler,
British Columbia. I'm at the secret conference where we're talking about
macroeconomic trends. There's some incredible people here. Couple cool things about this. One, there are little
to no tech people here. It's people from all different industries, it's business owners, it's entrepreneurs, and it's also about eight billionaires that are meeting with us and telling us about
the macroeconomic trends that are happening so that
we can actually prepare for what's ahead. It's an incredible conference. The good news about this is
because there's no tech people, I'm spending a lot of time
with real business owners and real industries. We're talking about
things like tech and AI and where the economy's going and all the shifts that are happening. So having talked to a
number of these people, it was abundant to see all
these incredible SaaS ideas that could be created based
on the domain knowledge these people have in their space. So in this episode, I'm
gonna do two things. One, I'm gonna walk you
through my core principles on building one of these
lean SaaS businesses. We call them micro SaaS businesses that you can build as a solo founder. But just to bring it home, I'm
gonna give you five key ideas that came up organically as I've been meeting incredible
people at this conference. So if you're excited to
dig in, go ahead and smash that like button for
the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. Let's dig right into it. So my last SaaS company, I
started as a solo founder. And I started, believe it or not, as a micro SaaS business. Micro SaaS business is a
specific tool being used for specific people, and
you just wanna run it lean. Now interestingly enough, micro
SaaS companies can graduate to full SaaS companies, and
that's what happened to me. I started as a micro SaaS business, and I ended up raising money
from Andreessen Horowitz. We ended up scaling the company. We had over a hundred thousand
users, and then we exited it. Just because you started micro SaaS doesn't mean that you can't
graduate to big boy SaaS either. You can also stay as micro SaaS. That's the cool part about it. Now, having gone through that journey, there's some key principles
that you have to follow to make one of these micro
SaaS lean businesses work. They essentially include
some key components. Number 1, you wanna charge
at least $30 a month. I'm a big believer that if you're solving a business problem, they
should be willing to pay at least a dollar a
day for that daily use, which means about $30 a month. And so that's my baseline. Bunch of good things come out of this. If you can charge $30 a month, it means that you actually
get enough per user, and you can actually spend
that on ads down the line. You can actually drive to profitability, versus the $9 a month product where the economics never work out. You never have enough money
to spend from the users that are coming in to
actually grow the user base. So I always start at $30 a month. And it also kind of forces me to make sure that I'm solving an important and urgent problem for these people. They'll actually pay $30 a month. Because if they're not
gonna pay $30 a month, it's not important and
urgent enough of a problem. The second thing I always look for is I always try to build products that have a single player mode. It means that for these useful tools, I want them in the product. I want them using it. I want them swiping their credit card, which means that they
should get value from it without having to convince
anyone else to use it. That's what I call single player mode. So they should be able
to get into the product and get value from it very quickly. And I always wanna architect the products and engineer the product
so that they have that versus having to convince
IT or their coworkers or getting permission from their boss. So that's super important as well. And then I always offer
some sort of a free trial. I never wanna have a freemium offering because then it just
confuses in the early stages on whether I'm providing real value. So I always wanna start off with, look, it's $3 a month. I'll give you a free trial. It's super easy to get started. And it's single player mode, meaning you get value right away. That's my bare minimum for these products that I go put into the market. And the last piece that I do
that just simplifies everything is I always go for a specific customer. Even if I think a lotta
different people can use it, I try to focus on a
specific type of customer that can actually get value for it. That way, I can market to
them and be specific to them. So for example, with my last company, ToutApp, I just
hyper-focused on salespeople because that's where we
got the most movement. And it was $30 a month, and
you could just do a trial and get into it. Over time, we started going
after full sales teams. At the upwards, it was like $299 a month. We were doing enterprise deals. We just started with
these basic principles, which you can, too. Okay, so with those
principles out of the way, let's actually see how we apply
this to real concrete ideas. And as I mentioned, I'm
at this secret conference. I met incredible business
owners and entrepreneurs and also a bunch of really smart people that are talking about
where the economy's going. So we were in this mindset of talking about what is happening
in these industries that these folks are in,
where are things going, and how do we actually apply
things like AI and software? In a way, a lot of my
conversations were around, "Hey, if I give you a magic wand and you could just build
the software of your dreams for your business, what would you build?" That's kinda where these conversations and these ideas came from, which is why I think
they're really interesting. My hope for you is that one of these ideas are interesting to you, and
you'll just run with it, or it'll inspire you
to apply this framework and also develop your own idea. Either way, it should be win-win. So the first idea that came up, again, remember we always wanna
target specific users. So these ideas came up as I
was talking to specific people from specific industries,
and we were talking about specific problems and
opportunities that they have. The first one came up
while I was checking in was a psychologist. And when I was talking to psychologists and we were talking about software and we were talking about
AI and the dream thing that they could build, what
she mentioned was like, "Look, I have a lot of client notes. I write down a lot of client notes. And one of my things that I have to do is kind of piece together the progression of a client's journey." So you have this raw input of notes. And what we found was it
would be really interesting, especially now with AI and
the way it can consume data, is if you could take all those notes and you can actually start
to figure out the patterns that exist on behalf of the psychologist. So the psychologist is in it. They're tryna understand
the different patterns and apply the training,
but a large language model could consume all those
notes and start to understand the progression of the
notes and what's happening with specific clients or
across the client base. Now obviously, there's some nuances here. There may be some privacy things. There may be some API things. But the broad idea of taking these notes that are being created and
using software to analyze them, there's something very powerful there. And it follows these key principles of you could charge $30 a month. There is a single player mode, and it is for a specific user base. So this was really, really powerful. This is kinda how I got
the idea for this video. I knew I needed to film it,
and we never miss a beat even when I'm traveling. And I'm like, "Oh, this is cool. I can develop some of these ideas from these natural
conversations I'm having with people out in the field." So that's how this first one came about. The second one, I met a bunch of people that run transportation
and logistics companies. And so if you are
focusing on transportation and logistics companies, these are people that are running companies
that have buses or trucks, and they need to actually
figure out how to schedule these and coordinate these
and move things around. And you start to think about those, then you can actually
start to think about, well, these companies are actually
all run very differently. They're regional companies. They all have their own ways
of running their businesses. They all have unique use
cases, but they also run on either very old
software, aging software, or seriously, just paper. So when you start to get
into scheduling and logistics and starting to understand their
business and their metrics, there are lots of opportunities for building a single user
tool for these end users to help them run their
business more effectively. Now, this is one of those
cases where they are, in a lotta cases, running on paper, and you can transform them to digital. And you can solve specific
problems that they have. And you can solve specific problems, so therefore, you can
start as a micro SaaS tool. But also, there's really
opportunities here for this micro SaaS idea to
grow into a large platform over time as well, if you wanted to. But very clear, for this specific space in terms of transportation and logistics, there's just a ton of
opportunity out there for moving people from old
stodgy systems and paper to actually digital ways
of actually managing their business. That's the second idea. The third one came up
when I met some people that were a little bit more on finance. So I met a couple of accountants, and we were talking about
how their business runs. And you know, one of the running
themes in this conference is, hey, how do you think tech and AI, particularly this AI
wave, is going to impact how you do business? And so that was a really great way to engage in conversations,
just start to understand what are their problems and
what are their opportunities, and if they had a magic
wand, what would they solve? And by the way, if you are a solo founder honing in on your idea,
this is a great way to really hone in on your idea. Go to a conference where
just normal business people are hanging out and go deeper into understanding their
problems and engaging with them because they can't code. They can't build. However, they're living in it. So if you gave them a magic wand and say, "Hey, what software would you build?" they would tell you all kinds
of really interesting ideas on what they really want
to exist in their world. So with these accountants,
one of the big things that started coming up is their system of record is QuickBooks. QuickBooks is what they live in. That's where all the data goes in. That's where the transactions take place. They classify things. The P&L is there. The depreciation is there. All these things are
tracked in QuickBooks. Now, one of the things that's
underutilized out there is the QuickBooks API. When you actually hook
into the QuickBooks API, just like kinda the Salesforce
API or the HubSpot API, you get full access to a business's data. And more, for some reason, there are so many MarTech
and sales tech products being built that hook onto the CRM APIs. There aren't a lot hooking
into the QuickBooks APIs. And one of the biggest
things that accountants need help with, particularly
with AI and with analytics, is actually looking at all of that data and drawing out insights. That's one of the biggest
ways they add value to clients beyond just the bookkeeping and the taxes. Getting strategic about what's
moving in their business, what are the opportunities, how do they manage their money better. And so one of the key
opportunities that came up is if you hook into the QuickBooks API and you actually start to apply AI. And even just basic data analysis, you can start to deliver
a number of insights and predictions to these accountants that they can then take to their clients. This is one of the core
ideas that kept coming up. You have end users, and
you have service providers providing business services. These service providers
and business services like accountants, lawyers, anyone that's in the middle, are actually huge target
users for SaaS companies. If you can actually go to them and give them a piece of software
or an AI-enabled software that helps them serve their clients better so they don't completely
get disrupted by AI, they're gonna buy from you. It gives them an advantage. And that's super powerful
because I think that before, SaaS can just eliminate
these business services and just go to the end users and say, "Hey, look, we'll just automate this. Just buy this robot." There's a huge wave of enabling these business service people to actually deliver their services better using software and using AI. So that's my third idea. Target accountants. Hook into the QuickBooks API
and deliver proper insights, and use AI to actually do predictions. There are lots of really interesting ideas that you can solve for
so these accountants can serve their clients in a better way. Okay, those were the first three, and I will recap in the end
and go through the principles. There's number 4 and number 5. But before I go into that, let me just pause here for a second. We start to see the power in this. There's two things that
really excite me about this. One, I think that we are entering a really exciting phase for SaaS. You have AI coming together, but also there's so much of the world that still runs on old software or paper, and we really haven't completed what we would call their
digital transformation yet. And so in a lotta ways,
there's more opportunities than ever before in SaaS,
particularly as you go after specific users
and specific industries. And that's where this model really shines. And when you have these
kind of specific use cases, you don't need to build
massive SaaS companies. A solo founder could operate
this company with a core team of three to four people as they scale. And you maybe never
need to go beyond that, and they could be wildly profitable, and then you can exit that
for a really great multiple to a larger company. So there's so many incredible
opportunities that open up. The second thing that's really
cool is because there's AI, even if there is Gen-1
software in these industries, you can actually create the
next generation of software or software that overlays the
old school software with AI. And that creates a huge value proposition to these users as well. So many things are really coming
together, which is exciting for folks like us that are
building software companies of all different sizes. The beauty of this model,
this micro SaaS model, is you can start small. You can be a tool. And then if your customers
keep demanding more from you, you can always graduate to
a massive software company. Or even more powerful,
your software company can be exited to a
massive software company because they need to add that capability. Either way, it's win-win
for you as a solo founder. Now, if you're also in this stage and you're like really
developing your idea and you really wanna stress test it, I have a resource for you
that you can download. You don't have to go anywhere right now. I'll tell you about it at
the end of this episode. I'll link to it below. It's my 10-point SaaS business checklist. It's 10 questions I always
ask before really writing code so that you don't waste eight months building the wrong product. And also if you're watching this, chances are you are
getting value from this if you're still watching. So please smash out like button
for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves you when
you do that, and so do we. We put a lotta love and
effort in these videos. Even when I'm on the
road, I never miss a beat. A, because I love doing this, and B, we really wanna
help as many SaaS founders build incredible companies as possible. Smash our like button for
the YouTube algorithm. Alright, idea number 4. So I idea number 4, I
met a bunch of lawyers. They run law firms. There's solo law firms. And one of the interesting
things that I found is beyond law, like there's a lot of interesting SaaS companies
building stuff for lawyers. But there's two parts to being a lawyer. One part is actually doing the law. So got it. And there's lots of AI companies
that are heavily funded, that are doing really
interesting things in that. But if you take a step back,
there's this other part that is not getting as much attention. The other part of running a
law firm is the relationships. Building client relationships
and making sure clients stay with you, and making sure that
you're there for your clients at the right time, making
sure that you get referrals from clients, there's this
entire business side of law. What I found is lawyers
are hugely underserved when it comes to this. So one of the ideas that came up is sort of a CRM 2.0 for lawyers. Thinking about lawyers, they need to manage
relationships in a unique way. There's different trigger
events for their clients. And so the re-imagining CRM
specifically for lawyers and specifically for
managing the relationships based on all the data that
exists in their business can be an incredibly powerful SaaS idea. And also for a very specific audience, lawyers and maybe smaller law firms. So that was my idea number 4 that came up as I was talking to folks. And I think there's something really here. And I chose lawyers, and that's how I kinda
came up with this idea. However, this could be applied
to any number of other roles as well where you can go super
niche and build the CRM 2.0 or the relationships 2.0. I think that's gonna be a huge theme for SaaS in multiple industries. And then finally, number 5, which is kind of one of
my most favorite ideas, which is why I left it towards the end. And I think there's massive,
massive opportunity here, and you can take this in
so many different ways. I met a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners just like me. So for these folks, entrepreneurs, one of the biggest things that
they have been working on, they've been struggling on working in the business versus on the business. And you'll experience this as a founder. There's always this pull
between, do I write code and create a feature and
do sales and marketing, or do I think about fundraising or where this company's going
and what my exit strategy is and how things are working? There's in and on. And there's always this constant battle. Do I just do the feature or
respond to that customer, or do I go look at the spreadsheets and really look at the broader
view of where the business is going and what the data's telling me and how to move it forward? And that's one of the
tough things that exists for every entrepreneur, every founder. And that's actually an opportunity. One of the things that came up is, you know, we have a lotta data. As founders, you'll have a lotta data. A lot of these entrepreneurs are running profitable companies
in different industries, in different verticals. And they have profitable
companies, and they have data, and they have significant
revenues and customers, but they don't always have the time to take a step back and
look at the business. This is where there's a huge opportunity. So one of the things that
came up is it would be cool if there was a business health checklist. If you could hook into
as many data sources on this entrepreneur's business. Maybe you compound some of this. You look at their CRM. You look at their QuickBooks. You look at their Stripe data. And based on that, you came out with a business health
checklist where for them, you constantly monitor
the core macro metrics for their business. That could be really powerful. And you can always imagine
the website, right? It's like, "Hey, entrepreneurs, are you working in the
business or on the business? We'll analyze all your systems, and we'll send you a predictive
report every single week on the key business health metrics. And that'll allow you to figure out where you need to focus." Like 30 bucks a month, I would buy that. I would try that out. That was my idea number
5 for entrepreneurs, help them work on the business
versus in the business and create a business health checklist based on all the data
that you can tap into for their business across all the systems where they have it all spread out. Okay, so let's recap. So the core principle for building these lean SaaS companies,
especially as a solo founder, we call these micro SaaS businesses, is you wanna make sure you're
charging at least $30 a month. You wanna make sure that you
use a single player mode. You wanna make sure that
they get a free trial, and it's for a very
specific type of customer. This helps you stay
disciplined and focused and helps you actually go super niche and essentially get to revenues faster. That's what I would recommend. Based on that, here are
some key ideas that came up while I've been at this
incredible secret conference. Number 1, psychologists
analyze their notes, figure out the patterns. And again, you can abstract
this out to analyzing notes and deciphering patterns
for any type of profession, but you should always pick
one and go deep in it. That way, you're not kinda
neither here nor there. Number 2, look at transportation companies and look at their logistics
and their scheduling. So many opportunities
because they're still running on paper in so many cases. Number 3, accountants. Accountants have a lotta
data in QuickBooks. QuickBooks has an API. So tapping into that and
creating insights and patterns and reports that they can use
to serve their clients better, super powerful. Number 4, lawyers. Lawyers, lots of software
for lawyers to do the law but not a lot to manage
their relationships, which is 50% of the business. So think about CRM 2.0 for lawyers. How to manage their relationships
based on all the data that's coming from the
law side of the business. And you can abstract this out as well to other verticals as well
if you don't like lawyers. And finally, entrepreneurs, they always struggle with
working in the business versus on the business. So look at tapping into all the data and creating a business health checklist that they can actually tap
into, opt into and say, "Cool, here's my checklist. I'm gonna get it every week. It's gonna help me figure
out what I'm missing, what the blind spots are. And that way, I can work on the business with the help of AI." Super powerful. So those are the core principles
and the five core ideas that I wanted to share with you today. I can't stress this to you. You know, my entire week has been focused on thinking about macroeconomic trends. There were eight billionaires
here, incredible speakers. 24 speakers, eight billionaires, and they taught us about all their views of where the world is
going, what the trends are, and what's going to
happen with the economy. So it was incredible. It helped me really zoom out. And while there are a lot
of crazy things happening, there's so much opportunity,
particularly with AI, particularly with technology. And that's our world. That's what we're here for. And we have this opportunity to build incredible software companies and to serve incredible
businesses and verticals. And the amazing thing is, even
for a simple micro SaaS idea, you're like, "Oh, it's
just a micro SaaS idea, it's not a massive platform," there's still a hundred thousand people that will be in your target
audience, or a million people, or hundreds of millions of people. Like who knows? Depending on the vertical that you choose. And they can just use your
software and pay $30 a month, and it doesn't cost you any
more to deliver that software. Software is an incredible business model. The opportunity is so
incredible, and it's wild that we can build these
software companies. We can build them as a solo founder. I'm an engineer as well. I'm a solo founder. One of my software companies right now, I have a co-founder that I've
worked with over 10 years. And so it's cool to have a co-founder, but prior to that, I've
always been a solo founder. But now, you have AI
helping you write the code. You can launch the code. You have AI helping you do
the sales and marketing on it, and you're also embedding
AI into your product to help your customers. So it's an incredible time. There's so many incredible opportunities. But one of the things
that's super interesting is the principles are the same. These principles of $30 a
month, single player mode, pretrial and specific user
and customer, start there. Get your threshold and expand from there. It's still true, even
from my last SaaS company. It's an incredible time, and
I think that you're gonna get so much upside when you build one of these kind of businesses. So there's no better industry to be in than software right now. And so I'm really excited
for this community and this challenge. Everyone that's building
incredible software companies. So now you know my framework. You have my five ideas. You are hopefully getting
jazzed up and like, cool. I really wanna build one of these ideas or an idea I just came up with. One of the things I recommend
is you go through 10 questions to really stress test your idea before you waste eight months building it. So this is why I created my 10-point SaaS business checklist. It's completely free. Just go to tkkader.com/saas-checklist, tkkader.com/saas-checklist, and you can grab your copy. It's 10 questions that I
encourage you to go through before you write a line of code to make sure that you're
building the right company and you can have a plan of
action to stress test it. And what this does is it
shortens the amount of time it takes to get to product
market fit and revenues. I used this checklist to
launch two SaaS companies in the last 12 months. Yeah, 12 months. And we took both of them to
product market fit and revenues, and now they're applying the principles that I teach in my
go-to-market program to scale. It's an incredibly powerful checklist, and I encourage you to spend even an hour to really flush out. Also, if you got value from this video, please smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when
you do that, so do we. We put a lotta love into these videos. I drop an episode like
this every single Sunday with actionable strategy and
tactics from the trenches, literally and figuratively speaking, on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit the Subscribe
button and that bell icon and you'll get notified every
single time I drop an episode. If you have a fellow founder,
if you have a team member, if you have a buddy that you
wanna start a company with, if you're part of a Slack
group, a WhatsApp group, or a community of other SaaS founders, please share this video with them. Wanna serve as many SaaS
founders as possible to build incredible SaaS companies. That's my mission here in Unstoppable, and it would mean the world to us. And lastly, remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours
is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK, and I'll see
you in the next episode. Grab a copy of that 10-point
SaaS business checklist. I'll see you in there. Take care, everybody. (gentle upbeat music) Secret location. Let's go.
