If you’re here to disrupt the digital market of the next generation, you need to come up with something truly innovative. Look into Blockchain, NFTs, Web3, Augmented Reality, the Metaverse. There are so many billion-dollar unicorn tech startups still to be created in this space. And if this is what you really want, you need to find another article.
Because I have absolutely no idea how to build one of those. And also, being the founder of one of those companies, I actually think it kind of sucks. Instead, I’ll give you 5 quick ideas for a micro sass that you can build and launch all by yourself.
I’m sharing everything I learned about SaaS, tech and entrepreneurship. So, first of all, let’s just get the definition straight
Straight
A micro-sass is a product that focuses on very specific needs, typically in a small niche market. It’s a product that’s often created, marketed and managed by a single person or a small team at best. So if you’re an aspiring solopreneur, but you don’t feel like courses or e-books is your thing and you have an edge towards the more technical side of things, then you should definitely consider launching a micro-sass.
The first idea,
- Building a tool on top of Webflow: Webflow is huge. It has a massive amount of users and it’s growing rapidly. You probably know WordPress and you might also know that some people became millionaires from developing popular WordPress plugins. It looks like Webflow is heading in the same direction and in a few years we’ll have a thriving ecosystem of Webflow templates, plugins, and third-party tools. Let me show you what I mean.There are actually a few tools out there already and there are VC backed and everything. This is Member Stack. It’s a no-code authentication system you can use to create login flows, integrate gated content behind paywalls and much more.
The next idea,
- Jet boost: it’s a utility system for Webflow that gives you pagination, searching, sorting lists, and a lot of other healthy utilities to manage your CMS collections in Webflow.
There also this one,
- Wist: This tool is insane. You can basically use this to turn your Webflow site into a fully fledged dynamic web application without having to code. It uses a lot of common concepts from programming but in a drag-and-drop user-friendly kind of way. Super cool! No doubt, there are already business doing great in this space. Webflow just announced logic which is basically a small sapier integrated directly into webflow. This opens more new opportunities to build webflow based applications.
Here’s a super quick idea,
- Webflow is script management: I often end up adding small libraries and dependencies and custom code sections and sometimes I also want to do a little bit of JavaScript to customize some things. And this is very tedious. So a platform that can manage my script tags and custom code snippets across all pages in an elegant way and perhaps feature a proper code editor like Code Sandbox or an extension to VS Code. That’s definitely something I’d pay for. And that’s just one example. There are countless other things you can build on top of Webflow.
No-code website builder or automation service for a specific niche
No-code website builder or automation service for a specific niche. tools like Webflow, Squarespace, Sapier, if this then that and so on, they’re very generalized. So a great idea is to make simplified versions of these tools but from very specific niches. For instance, you could create a landing page builder for yoga studios, or hair salons, or fitness centers, or any other niche market.
Find out what websites in a particular niche all have in common, and then create a landing page builder that helps them set up such a website in minutes. The same with automation tools. You can build a sepio for a specific niche market that covers a lot of integrations that savior currently does not have one great example I can think of is accounting software.
There are a few big ones out there but it seems like all countries and jurisdictions have their own local tool that are tailored to local laws and regulations. For instance when I lived in Denmark I used a software called De Niro. Now I’m in Switzerland and I use a software called Bexio. Both of them have an API but none of them ideas that would be relatively straightforward to turn into a micro sass.
But in order to get a SaaS business started, you need more than just an idea. You need a name for your business, you need a marketing plan, you need to estimate and calculate startup costs and if you want to go down the same path as member stack and jet boost and get funding you need to pitch your startup idea to investors. Yeah launching a startup is hard even if it’s a micro sass but today I want to your life a little easier.
I would pay for in a second
A hosted learning management system with an API and a simple JavaScript library. I’ve actually been looking for a tool exactly like this recently, and I simply can’t find it. And the closest solution I found was this, Tutor LMS, which is a WordPress plugin. It’s exactly what I was looking for, except I don’t wanna build my page on WordPress.
So I think there’s a great opportunity here. Build a similar platform to this, but instead of WordPress, offer a REST API and a JavaScript library so I can easily create my own frontend in and then next js or something like that.If it would integrate with Webflow using their CMS, even better. And then we’re basically back to the first suggestion again.
To Build a platform on top of Netlify CMS
So, if you’re not already familiar with Netlify CMS, it’s a free and open-source content management system that uses Git behind the scenes. We are using this with Feedhive, the startup I’m running, and it’s really cool. When our content writer has finished a new blog, it generates a markdown file that creates a pull request in GitHub for me to review.
In this way, GitHub becomes the database for all our blog posts. It’s literally a folder with markdown files. And we love that. It’s scalable, we can generate static websites from it, we fully own all our content, and we can use all the features of GitHub, like version control, PRs, approval, and so on.
However, their UI… I don’t want to use bad words here, but let’s just say that we often have a very frustrated content writer on our team. The editing experience is really, really lacking. And here’s where the opportunity comes in. Build and host a platform with an outstanding UI-UX that features a modern, fast and responsive editing experience and takes care of all the configuration of setting up Netify CMS.
So all you need is to sign in with GitHub, pick your repository, go through a few questions and you’re ready to go. And then you can still use GitHub as content storage and you can still use pull requests, versioning, and so on and since you would not have to worry about databases and managing domains ,hosting ,cname and all of this it would be an extremely low cost SAS to run. Charge a few dollars per month for the solution. I would 100 % pay for it.
Pricing pages
Build a platform you can use to manage and generate pricing pages. So you integrate it with StriperPaddle and you should be able to easily set up pricing plans, choose between different pricing models, set up parity pricing, local currencies and so on.
I imagine a tool like this coming with both some basic layouts and the ability to theme and style, but also an API and a JavaScript library so you can easily integrate this into a custom frontend. Then you should be able to track and run A-B tests directly from the platform, But as far as I know, they won’t have A.B. testing and tracking. And my impression is that it’s going to be similar to their hosted checkout, which sure, you can customize a little, but it’s going to still look generic and stripy.
So, I think there’s still room for a product like this, and who knows, if you can roll fast on something like this, one of the big guys, like Stripe, might want to acquire it. I think nailing the right pricing model and the right pricing page is a form of art when it comes to SaaS. And it’s oddly under-prioritized by many SaaS founders, so a tool like this would definitely helped making the pricing page itself a bigger deal and reduce friction in setting it up.
So as you might have noticed, these five ideas are much more about tapping into existing markets and established products and adding additional features or removing additional friction.Thanks for reading this!
