6 Micro SaaS Ideas You Can Steal

so you want to start a SAS to change your life in some way you either want some side income while you continue working your day job or you want to quit the day job altogether and work for yourself that's why on this channel we dive deep into the reality of what it's like to build and grow SAS companies they're incredible they can be life-changing and in today's video I'm going to talk about six micro SAS ideas that they steal if you stick around to the end you're going to hear a special bonus idea that would be an extreme technical challenge but it could turn into something much larger than a microsass I'm Rob Walling a Serial entrepreneur I've written four books on building startups and invested in more than 125 companies a couple notes before we dive into the ideas today I'm looking specifically at micro SAS ideas so these are mostly step one businesses in my stair step method often microsass ideas are a single feature or they're built into an existing ecosystem like say the Shopify or the Heroku add-on marketplaces and today's video will almost solely focus on microsask these are things that are faster to build and faster to get to Market but usually they have a built-in ceiling where they're not going to become a million dollar business but if your goal is to get to 5K a month or 10K a month microsass can be a good way to go second point is no validation has been done on these ideas so in your shoes I wouldn't just go out and start building I would definitely think about how to evaluate these ideas talk to customers etc etc and lastly people have already started reaching out letting me know that they are tackling some of the ideas that we've released on this channel please feel free to comment below with a link if you find success with any of these ideas it's inevitable that there will be success stories coming out of the ideas shared in these videos and once again I'd like to give a shout out to nugget.1 and its founder Justin Vincent for allowing me to share these ideas that we pulled from nugget so let's dive in six ideas today plus our bonus the first idea is a piece of software to effectively separate colors for t-shirt screen printing as a reminder all of these ideas are requested by real people who are experiencing trouble or difficulties at their day job and they have a problem that they want to solve so this one was submitted by a screen printer and they say I print custom t-shirts for people for businesses events what have you and I cannot find software that will effectively separate colors for me to use in the printing process when you print a t-shirt it has several colors that need to be separated before you print most of the tools out there are just macros for Photoshop and not an actual program that will separate the colors so you can print the options available are very expensive or essentially just plugins for Photoshop which make it not only expensive but needlessly complicated one example is simple steps which cost 300 for the plugin for coreldraw so not only do you need to pay 300 but you also need to buy coreldra if there was a program that could separate colors not be reliant on another piece of software rely on a free tool like which is open source software and it was affordable it would be great for a lot of startups and Veterans alike these ideas never cease to amaze me in their detail and in the fact that there are still so many small problems that are unsolved by software today if you're going to run with this idea I would start with conversations go to where screen printers hang out are they on Facebook do they have Reddit groups do they have private slack groups do you need to do cold Outreach whatever it is finding out if this is a problem for more than just this one screen printer is exactly where I would start idea number two is grammarly for SC EO the requester writes I'm a freelance writer and web editor my biggest concern when writing is search engine optimization while I understand the concepts I don't fully grasp how to improve my articles and posts for SEO so that they rank better in search engines or found when someone does a search what I need is software that works a bit like a grammar checker I don't want software that helps me game the system rather I need software that can read what I've written understand context but also offer tips or improvements for SEO it should be able to tell me if I've overused keywords and what alternative keywords I can use it should be updatable so that when Google changes its algorithm it knows what Google is focusing on this one was posted a couple years ago so a I'm curious if this doesn't exist today that's probably where I'd start but B if it does exist is it any good and with the wave of AI that's coming out with chat GPT Jasper copy.ai all the AI tools that are helping people write and be better at things like SEO and grammar I'm curious if this tool is easy to build today or if it's such a commodity that it would be hard to Stand Out Among the competition idea number three is Wix for Architects the poster writes I am an architect I would love to have a better way to display my projects currently my only options would be to hire a web designer or use a blogging service my proposal is a program that professionals can use to Showcase their work which can be heavily customized to accommodate the specific industry and the needs that come with that I wouldn't build Wix or Squarespace I would think about building a template with maybe a custom widget for displaying floor plans there are people selling premium Squarespace templates now Squarespace has a Marketplace but it appears to only let you hire people and not sell templates which is kind of a drag but Wix does have a Marketplace so that could be a nice positioning for this and frankly to look at what are the top 5 or 10 website builders that exist and which of those have marketplaces that would allow you to build an architect focused template that you could then resell it's almost the definition of a step one business is to find a small small Gap in one or more marketplaces and fill that gap for a very specific industry and maybe you'll find that there's Architects there's interior designers there's photographers I'm sure there's a kajillion photographer themes out there but I always say that doing things in public creates opportunity and so getting into one or more of these marketplaces is likely to lead you down a path that maybe you do discover that longer term you want to build an entirely new CMS and maybe you build that on an open source piece of software like WordPress or an equivalent or maybe down the line your step three business is in fact a full CMS for Architects but I wouldn't take that leap from the start but to keep this micro sass it's simply building a theme or a template on an existing CMS idea number four is a crisp add-on for help Scout and this one is anonymous it actually comes out of the Tiny Seed slack where someone asked does anyone use a help desk system that integrates both email and chat and also has basic chat bot scripting abilities we use help Scout which does okay with email and chat but it does not have chat bot capabilities or Integrations and several people suggested crisp which has really good chat bot support but crisp itself is a whole support platform and the original poster didn't want to move over to Chris they want to use help Scout and potentially integrate with crisp so maybe this idea is a crisp add-on or integration for help Scout maybe this idea is chat bot functionality that works with help Scout and realize does this have platform risk of course it does is help Scout probably working on chatbot functionality I would guess eventually they're going to roll it out so there is a danger here but there's also a need and it's something that would require a little more investigation idea number five is canva for charts and graphs the poster writes I work as a graphic designer and specialize in data heavy information Graphics my design work often incorporates different types of charts bar charts Pi line charts among others but currently there is no designer friendly charting software on the market sometimes I use Excel to format charts but the visuals are not aesthetically pleasing I typically use Adobe Illustrator which is the design industry standard for charting but even this program is lacking options I've researched options but nothing exists that is geared towards design and Aesthetics everything is geared towards analytics and tracking so is this a full-blown canva or do you build some type of template theme add-on for canva or figma or one of these other platforms much like the Wix for Architects above Do you want to build a full software platform or would you prefer to build an add-on to an existing ecosystem for microsass I would do the latter but obviously this requires a bit more research before taking the leap and idea number six is better analytics for square the poster writes I'm a small business owner that uses Square as point of sale and sale recording squares analytics are often disappointing I wish a tracked where clicks on the online store came from gave more detailed sales analytics while comparing month-to-month sales and other information another example we sell some items on consignment and at the end of the month I have to comb through all the transactions to find items sold by a particular artist in order to do their disbursements I wish you could sort sale items by the item or category and see how well particular groups of items did once again an add-on to an existing ecosystem I think of this a little bit like the metrics providers for SAS that were built on top of stripe barometrics profitwell chart Mogul and the rest now it's been a couple years since this was posted so obviously there have been a couple things that square has built that the poster requested but there's still a lot that can be done with square analytics the question is how do you get distribution can you get in the Square app store Marketplace or will it be more of a Grassroots effort of hanging out with Square Merchants on Facebook and the private slack groups on Reddit and getting enough traction there that you build a brand and try to build up your SEO and your referral Marketing in a second I'm going to give you the bonus idea that I think is technically complicated but could get a lot bigger than a micro sass before I do that if we're not connected on Twitter I'm at Rob Walling and I'm tweeting a few times a week sometimes with threads but I'm tweeting several times a week on all things SAS building growing and launching startups much like you would see on this channel and also at microcomp so if you're thinking about bootstrapping or mostly bootstrapping your SAS company you're going to want to follow at Rob Walling and microcomp let's connect so the bonus idea is a system to convert Daw files from one program to another the poster writes I'm a music composer mostly for film and broadcast media and music production a Daw is digital audio workstation and it's a program that's used to record arrange edit mix or monitor a digitally produced music project currently there are many Daws Pro Tools logic pro Cubase and many others they've all developed different processes to store and compile data and this data is usually retained in a sort of package or project folder at this point there are no Dow programs between which project data is compatible that is to say I cannot take a logic pro project file and open it with Pro Tools this can make it very time consuming and often impossible for musicians Engineers or Studios to work together when they arrange their production through different Daws the solution is software that would be able to convert DW project files between different programs this would save a significant amount of time and transfer and would allow anyone with any level of technical skill to use the DW of their choice without fear of limitation professionally obviously a deep Niche idea that you would only experience if you worked in the industry I think this is a very complex technical challenge because these are proprietary data formats that each piece of software is using and I don't know that it's in their best interest to allow you to convert between these tools but it sounds like this is a pretty generally known pain point that a lot of folks in this industry might have so once again after doing a bit of validation and maybe getting five or ten Early Access customers I would take a look at perhaps what two most popular Daws are and take a crack at building a proof of concept that could convert from one to the other you may find out that it's virtually impossible and that the formats change every time they update the software and that this isn't worth it but it's one of those ideas where if you can solve this technical problem it feels like given the amount of money that people spend in these industries on their tools you could charge pretty hefty price for it if you enjoyed those six micro SAS ideas hit the like And subscribe to the channel we're putting out a video every week on topics like this we give away business ideas I talk about how to come up with ideas how to validate them how to launch build and grow your startup see you next week [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: MicroConf

Views: 84,679

Keywords: MicroConf, Saas, micro saas ideas 2023, micro saas business ideas, micro saas startups, micro startups, saas ideas, saas business, saas business ideas, saas ideas 2023, saas ideas to make money, saas ideas startup, simple saas ideas, finding saas ideas, new saas ideas, saas creative ideas, software as a service ideas, b2b saas ideas, best saas startup ideas, saas product ideas, get saas ideas, saas opportunities, saas idea, saas business model, tech startup ideas

Id: MBPfFTh71SM

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023