Making $$$ with MicroSaaS (I might delete this)

Category: Entrepreneurship and Business Development

Tags: Business GrowthEntrepreneurshipMicroSaaSNiche MarketsStartup Ideas

Entities: Bank Statement ConverterBrexCart SaverGrant GuruLevels.ioMicroSaaSPermit SyncPeter LevelsPod ScriptorSalesforceSpec Sheet

Transcript

00:00

Today we're going to go over the most comprehensive micro SASS 101, how to build one, what that looks like, examples. I'm going to give away some startup ideas.

I'm going to talk about growth flywheels. I'm going to talk about user journeys.

I'm going to talk about the playbook. This is something

00:16

that people charge tens of thousands, if not more, of dollars for. But today, I'm going to give it away for free because I couldn't find anywhere on the internet where it was in one place.

So, my hope is that by the end of this episode, you have a really good idea around how to

00:32

build a microSAS business, what that actually even means, what's the difference between SAS and Micros. Um, and just get your creative juices flowing so that you can actually go and use AI to build some of these microSAs businesses.

uh either if you have a

00:47

full-time job and you just want to you know build something on the side uh if you just want to learn or if you want to go all in and make microSAS uh your main thing. So let's get right into it.

01:02

[Music] >> So you know the first question is what is a microsass? Um, so the difference between a microSASS and a full-on SAS is that a

01:18

microSASS is focused on a niche. So it's the target is is extremely niche.

Think of Salesforce. It's targeting basically everyone.

A microSASS is a particular niche audience. Um, and uh it also has a niche product like it's just kind of a

01:34

feature of a feature. Um, and it's also focused on profitability, whereas, you know, a successful microsass might get you 10, 20, 30, 50k a month of profit.

Um, and it's also focused on it's also

01:49

for, you know, you could be built with a solo or tiny team. Why build one?

It doesn't cost a lot of money to build. Uh, typically these microass have 80 to 90% margin.

uh from a lifestyle perspective, you know, uh we're going to get into it, but you know, some of these

02:05

things are uh you know, they run on not that much, you know, it doesn't require 120 hours a week type thing. Um you can have 100% of the equity for for you and your team.

And there's beginning to become this uh you know, marketplace uh

02:21

or liquidity for exits for some of these things. So, let's talk about some examples.

My favorite recent example is this company, Bank Statement Converter, because it's so literally simple. Uh this is a business that's doing $40,000

02:38

a month of MR solo founder and it's literally exactly what it sounds like. You uh the world's most trusted quote unquote bank statement convertible.

Easily convert PDF bank statements from thousands of banks worldwide into a

02:53

clean Excel format. So this is this is the whole thing, right?

And you know, why does it work? Well, I think it works because, you know, the domain is good.

It it it it, you know, does a thing very well. It's a pain point that people have.

Uh and it's just very very simple.

03:10

So that's an example of what a micro SAS could be. Uh, another one, this one's at uh, 24K MRR is this whole idea around projecting in the future your financial net worth.

03:26

Um, and it's just a nice way to visualize it. Uh, they're pricing, I think, you know, $109 a year.

So, you're talking about, you know, under $10 a month. Um, and that's the whole business.

It's just, you know, projecting your financial future. So, it

03:41

you can see, right? You can see that these are sort of a feature of a feature.

This would be a part of a bigger thing, but they fully focus on it. And in the age of AI, you can actually build um a startup um that is a feature of a feature or micro micro SAS

03:58

because it's just quicker, easier to build with tools like cursor etc. Um clean voice 20k a month MR.

So, you know, edit your podcast in 10 minutes automatically. So,

04:14

it it's just the features around, you know, removing your background noise, filler words, long silence, mouse sounds, right? So, 15,000 podcasters use it.

A lot of, you know, I'm a podcaster and or, you know, have a podcast. Um, so, you know, I have I I have I felt

04:31

this pain point. I felt this painoint.

So, um you're you're starting starting to notice that a lot of these um ideas have like very good brand, very big pain point clear. Um and you can, you know,

04:47

if if it works, you can expect, you know, the five to six figure a month MR range if it works. Right?

Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Not everyone who's going to start a micro SAS is going to work, just like not everyone who's going to start a startup is going to work.

the odds are against you. Um,

05:04

but if you know, if you stick with me to the end of this and and if you know, you you actually ship products and you learn, um, it's going to increase your likelihood of success as you see what works and what doesn't work. So, we're

05:19

going to talk by at the end of the episode about some of the Micros. I'll give it away.

And I I've been thinking about like you know what makes the growth flywheel of a successful uh microsass and I've you know summarized it into this. So first you're going to

05:36

actually build an audience uh or a community and or a community. So, for example, when we first started boring.com, um, you know, it was just a Twitter account where we talked about automating marketing with AI workflow and agents

05:53

and over time we built the business around it, but it literally started off as a X account. So, you could do the same.

So, you can start by building the audience and community. From that you're going to learn about an the acute pains

06:08

of that audience and community from that you know well obviously you're going to build something you're going to build the startup right and then it's going to generate some word of mouth you're going to start creating recurring revenue and then you're going to reinvest that recurring revenue into the audience and community right so you're going to do

06:25

things like IRL events you're going to do things like promoting posts that work you know for example maybe this post worked a lot you can see it got two 2,000 likes how do you put paid ads against that and then get people to sign up to your startup.

06:42

That's you know to some in summary exactly how to think about the growth flywheel of your uh microsass. Real quick I need to tell you about something that's helping me sleep better at night as an entrepreneur.

I was

06:58

running multiple companies with money scattered everywhere. zero spending visibility and making growth decisions pretty blind.

I knew there had to be a better way and my friend told me about Bracks. So, I switched and now I have

07:14

mission control for every dollar. Spend management and visibility, virtual cards for my team, and earning cash from the same day Treasury product.

I was leaving so much money on the table, but not anymore. I have a financial operating

07:32

system for our businesses to make decisions so I can spend smarter and move faster and it's been a total gamecher. I'm loving Brex so much.

I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the

07:47

pod. If you're building something real, you need a complete financial operating system like Brex.

It'll help you sleep better, too, and you can't be mad at that. So let's talk about uh the user journey of a typical micro SAS product.

So

08:05

usually there's a manual workflow um that people are doing that's painful. So for example we talked about the you know the bank statement converter converter.

People were doing this across you know a bunch of different companies and it's it's annoying to do right. So there was

08:21

that manual workflow that people were doing. Um and people look for a fix.

Often time they go to Google or chat GPT or Perplexity to find the fix. They find that micro SAS.

Um that's why having a good domain name is really important. Um

08:39

now by the way a lot of people are going to say well you know all the dotcoms are taken and stuff like that. Well, like you know, not all of the dotcoms are taken, first of all, and also like these long ones that like sound like super long, bank statement converter.

You

08:56

would be surprised how many of them are not taken. Uh they have a wow moment.

Uh like they use the product, it works. Of course, you need to create a high quality product.

Um usually there's some trial to value. Um, so maybe it's, you know, a

09:13

free trial for a few days. They see it works and then you start paying $19 a month.

They're hopefully delighted and they tell some of their friends or you have, you know, you you incentivize them to share it with their Slack for maybe free credits and stuff like that. That

09:28

creates the referral info influx which creates growth. And the other thing it creates when when you share it and and and people are sharing it on on Twitter and Instagram and places like that, it helps with your SEO.

Over time it compounds. And what does that look like from a numbers perspective?

So you can

09:44

think of it as like well you start getting 10,000 you start by getting 10 visitors a month but then it gets 100 a thousand 10,000 site visitors. But let's just use you know as an example 10,000 site visitors a month.

1,500 of them do free trials. That gets it to 300 active

10:01

users that are paying about uh 150 paying subscribers paying $19 a month. So you end up getting about 30 advocates.

And a lot of people focus on these paying subscribers, but you really want to think about how do you get the top of the funnel? And that's where this

10:16

uh audience and community piece is so important because if you build an audience and community and you become a creator of some sort um you know, you can definitely earn a lot of attention. Um, and a lot of people, a lot of people say like to me at least, they're like,

10:32

"Well, you know, easy for you to say like you guys created this zero to 78,000 uh, you know, boring marketer community. Um, you know, it's easy for you to say that like, yeah, of course you get 10,000 sites visits when you post

10:47

something, but the reality is we started this account, you know, a year and a half or two years ago. Um, and we started from zero.

So, it is totally uh totally possible to do. Um, and if you look at it from a financial perspective, like you know,

11:04

it's going to suck in the beginning, like you're going to be making $0 or10 $10 a month or $100 a month. Um, but it compounds.

So, I just want to let you know that if you build a good product and you're building a good audience and you're adding to both those things, both from an audience and a product

11:20

perspective, your month one you, you know, you might do $200 a month, you might three, you might do 2,000, 6,7,000. If you reinvest these profits into ads, affiliates, and new features, um it does compound assuming like you know competition doesn't get super

11:37

competitive and assuming you continue to actually reinvest. Uh from an affiliate perspective, what I'm seeing is approximately uh 20% of uh you know, you can give 20% of uh your revenue to affiliates.

Um you

11:54

incentivize them with 20%. Um, you can use platforms.

I'm not invol I'm not like involved with any of these companies, but you can use platforms like Rewardful uh to help manage that. I see a lot of microsasses use this product.

You know, I I tried to visualize like what is the micro SAS

12:10

playbook look like uh from a visual perspective. So, you start by finding the the itch, right?

So, solve your own problem if you can because you'll know it most intimately. Focus on niche.

Don't focus on broad and then validate

12:25

it with a tweet. Um once you're building that audience, you can actually say like, "Hey, would anyone want something like this?" Um it's kind of crazy, but there was a guy I want to bring him on the pod.

Josh Pigford. So, this guy Josh Pigford, he was on

12:42

ideaber.com, which I give away one free idea every single day on this product. Um sign up if you haven't already.

But he was on he was on it and he saw he he basically saw the idea of the day. He said, "I'm

12:58

building it." It was a micros idea. He called it name snag.

It was basically an AI agent that finds profitable expired.com domains. And he just starts building it in in public and it just like it got it went completely viral.

Um he says, "Saw Greg Eisenberg's post

13:15

yesterday. Sighed realized I was going to have to build it.

Woke up this morning at 4:30 a.m. as I do.

started building. 12 hours later, we're live.

Say hello to namesag.com and snag a killer domain for your next idea. And then says, he says, "How long until the

13:31

first dollar comes in?" And it didn't take long. 1 hour.

That's long. Then he goes, I think he says, "Then it goes to $1,000." Make that $1,000.

And that was just a few hours. So it just when when you're

13:49

building in public like this like people uh people are rooting for you and of course you need to iterate on the idea and add and and remove and change the positioning but this is very much the playbook of of how to build a uh

14:06

microsass and public. So you're going to want to build you know a weekend MDP.

Of course, you could spend a lot of time and make it perfect, but you're not going to want to do that. You're going to want to, you know, vibe code or hire a freelancer or do both to

14:23

time uh constrain it to 48 hours. In Josh's case, he actually did it in like 12 hours, but I think that for most of us, um, you know, 48 hours is is a good amount of time.

Um, and then you're not going to want to hire people right away,

14:39

right? you're going to want to make, you know, build the confidence that you can build something and scale it.

Um, so just automate as much as you can and then just tweet, you know, tweet your progress daily. Um, you know, open up your dashboard and revenue.

Um, you

14:54

know, maybe share some of that. Um, create feedback loops and have that distribution first mindset, right?

Like just share things on IGX, LinkedIn. Um there's a there's a two guys that I think do this really well.

So this is

15:10

this guy Yonyi, he just he every day he just posts, you know, day 415, day 414, day 413. Um and he's just talking about his startup journey.

And sometimes it's good and sometimes, you know, self admittedly, he's just like, I'm just

15:26

going to do my daily video. and he, you know, he just talks about whatever his he's learning in the arena and it got him to 176 uh 76,000 followers just from doing that.

Um so it's totally possible. There's also a guy named Jack Fris um

15:43

who does a really good job. I've had him on the pod before where he does a similar thing where he just, you know, this is he he basically just talks about what he's learning from, you know, started off in his mom's base, but now he's making $20,000 a month from his

15:58

micro sass. So, uh I think short form uh is super super smart to do.

Um it's I I'm I'm actually horrible at like looking at a camera and doing short form. It is a skill.

It will take you

16:14

time. Um, but I think that if you can master it and it probably is going to take you 60 days to get good at it.

Um, and just do it every day and just share what you're learning in real time and you can actually repurpose some of that chore form and put it on X in LinkedIn.

16:29

So, that's something I definitely recommend you do. Um, from a pricing perspective, like if you can do recurring revenue because you know that's obviously the best.

You know how much money you're going to come in tomorrow uh come in next month. Charge from day one.

A lot of people create uh free products for their micro SASS

16:46

because they don't feel confident in it. I would say charge from day one.

You can always do discounts over time. Um and then kill churn with value.

In the beginning, you're going to have, you know, a lot of churn. Churn.

By the way, what I mean by that is uh retaining your users. So the hardest part about a micro

17:03

SAS is people go and they cancel and you don't want them to cancel. So how do you stop them from cancelling?

Well, you give them more and more and more and more value such that uh you know you're you're killing churn over time. So don't be scared if your churn is high over

17:19

time. What that means to you is just you need to go and create more and more value.

And your job as a CEO of this thing is to prioritize the things that will add as much uh value. So you're playing an infinite game.

You want to ship weekly improvements if not daily.

17:34

Um, and you want to stay, you know, out outsource as much as you can. Like build on top of giants is basically what I mean by this.

Uh, so use, you know, you don't want to recreate things from scratch. Use things like, you know, throw things on the cloud.

Use things like Shopif, you know, Shopify if you

17:51

need to use things, uh, you know, just build on top of stand on the shoulders of giants. And, uh, and I, you know, you know, what's missing from here is also just like be kind with your customers.

Like just try to like as you're building this audience, you know, you're going to

18:07

have haters and stuff like that, but like kill them with kindness. Um try to add as much value to as people as possible.

Set up, you know, tweet notifications it in your niche and just respond to people, give value, and over time you're going to add 5 to 10 followers a day on

18:22

your audience and people are going to hear about whatever whatever it is you're building your micro SAS. a few more uh frameworks that I want to get into and then we'll get to some of the ideas and how to build them.

Um but uh

18:38

the market gap heat map uh basically you want to focus like if you're thinking about okay what microas you know should I create you want to create you want to basically focus on the quadrant of high demand there's a lot of people that want this thing and there's few tools you

18:54

don't want to focus on high demand and many tools this is kind of a trap um because this ends up getting focused uh you know it gets bomb bombarded by VCbacked startups and then you you have a huge churn problem and it's just hard

19:11

to earn attention. So I would say like try to focus initially on high demand few tools and then over time like you can expand your product like for example you know the back bank statement converter guy can go and expand into

19:27

other you know other conversions uh not just bank statements and then he can go into a more um high demand area but initially it makes sense to go into a high demand few area. You can use tools like Google Trends to to find out uh you

19:44

know where uh where their demand is and you can go and see that. Um and then you can also you know I go to ideabrowser.com um and see you know the trend section where we have different trends and you

20:01

can basically just scroll and see like okay you know what is trending right now you know where do I see an opportunity to create uh you know some micro SAS um o you know some micro SAS uh uh product. Um, the other thing is a lot of people

20:18

end up building uh incredible micro SASS, but they they basically they they do the hard work around getting attention. They get this they get 25,000 followers on X.

People know of them, but they're in a

20:33

space that people have low willingness to pay. So, you want to focus on high pain and high willingness to pay.

You don't want to focus on low pain, low willingness, high pain, low willingness, and low pain uh you know high high

20:49

status, right? So when you come up with your idea for your micro SAS, just come back to the problem pay matrix and make sure that you know that people have a high willingness to pay for this product.

So another way to think about it um is

21:06

if you think about micro SAS, you want to innovate in a niche and you want it to be high polished. If you think about a plugin, what is a plugin?

A plugin is like a Shopify app. You're like built on top of someone's ecosystem.

You're a WordPress a WordPress app. It's niche,

21:23

but it's low polish. Um what's a DIY script?

That's almost like a GitHub GitHub repo. It's like super broad, low polish.

And then big box SAS is like where the sales forces of the world uh play in Microsoft and stuff like that.

21:38

You want to focus on innovating over here and not so much m uh market dominance, not broad. So it's niche, it's high polish, you've innovated on it in some capacity.

And that innovation could either be from a product perspective or even just a marketing and

21:54

positioning perspective. And that's uh that's where you want to be.

Okay, let's talk about a few uh microSASS ideas that anyone could steal. My hope here is that this just now that you understand a little bit about okay, what is a micro

22:10

SAS? How to think about what type of microsass idea I want to do?

What makes a good one? Uh a little bit of a playbook.

Let's just talk about some ideas that probably could work that fit the bill. And anyone could steal these

22:26

and um and I hope you do honestly. So the first idea is called permit sync.

And the the the you know idea is that a lot of you know homeowners hit the wall when they their city's permit office asks for drawings and affidavit and

22:42

inspection dates they never heard of. The pain is paperwork paralysis, not hammer skills.

So you can basically start by scraping public permit checklists for the 50 most active American cities. drop them into a structured database.

The version one asks you three questions. So you do like

22:59

almost like a quiz. So the city, the project type, and the square footage, and that spits out a PDF packet, correctly named forms and autofilled address, and the next step checklist.

You can ship this in in 48 hours. I would use something like Nex.js,

23:15

Superbase, PDF Kit, and then test it on a local Facebook group like a home rena group. By the way, people think Facebook groups are dead.

There's still a billion active users in Facebook groups. So, you can test a lot of these microsess ideas on Facebook groups.

The moat is

23:32

localization. So, every week you can have out two or more two more jurisdictions.

You can integrate integrate edge cases like the you know San Jose wild force wildfire compliance forms um etc. All right.

And you can price it for like $99 onetime fee for a

23:50

project plus maybe an optional $19 a month SMS status line. This is something that a lot of Micros uh products do is they have a fee and then there's some upsell.

Um so think about when you're building whatever it is, you know,

24:06

whatever micros you're building, what is your pricing and then what is your upsell? Um and then how would you actually grow this?

Um, well, you can post short form, you know, looms or videos, demos titled, how to pass an inspection in San Francisco, how to pass

24:22

an inspection in Miami, and then you get SEO for, you know, San Francisco permit help. Um, you try to get builder forums to link back.

Um, so I think there's a big SEO play uh for for this.

24:41

Um, you know, long-term county clerks will change forms. I acknowledge this.

So, treat that churn as an opportunity. Upsell them to a $299 a year contract here with automatic jurisdiction updates and multi-address dashboard.

So, this is

24:57

to me like a pretty fun uh like fun micro SAS idea to do, especially if you're into renovations. Um, I like the business model.

I think that the growth loop makes sense around the SEO. Um, and it's going to compound.

And for people

25:14

who say like, "Oh, SEO is dead. SEO is dead." No, SEO is not dead.

It's still generating tons like billions of dollars of of of commerce. And if you do good SEO, it's going to rank you well in chat GPT anyways and perplexity anyways.

So,

25:31

uh, that's idea number one. Idea number two, and this is one that hits home to me, is called Pod Pod Scriptor.

Uh, so podcasters burn two to three hours at least per episode episode polishing show notes and clipping Tik Tok teasers. So

25:48

basically like 60-second teaser clips. So the wedge is every every every RSS feed holds enough metadata to automate 80% of that grunt work.

So you build a web hook that triggers on new episode publication, pipes audio into a

26:04

diorization model, titles each timestamp, then feeds the outline and punchlines into a text to video template, captions and b-roll. So um you know you can ship an MV MVP targeting ankor.fm users which are Spotify users.

26:20

They drop the RSS URL, get a Google doc and three MP4 vertical clips in a Google Drive. Obviously, it has to be high quality, right?

But I would use something like this. Um, and how you monetize it, you make the first episode free because you need to show value and

26:35

we talked about that earlier. You know, you want to show value early on, but then, you know, $29 a month up to eight episodes and then you can go usage based beyond.

So, I included this idea here because I think usagebased as a business model for Microsoft is Microsass is going to get more and more common. Um,

26:53

and for it depends on what you're building, but you know, you might realize like MR or or recurring revenue monthly just might not make sense for what your microSASS idea, but a usagebased might be the wedge to get you

27:09

get a lot of people to use your thing. Um, and you you know you can use chat GBT and you can use Manis and you can use Perplexity to pro project do financial projections to see if it makes sense.

Um, like with your cost and stuff

27:25

like that, but I I anticipate that usage base is only going to get more and more popular and something that a lot of you should look into. Um, and then you know from a the growth engine perspective, the OMG,

27:41

here's my free clip tweet is your growth engine. So you embed a tiny watermark in the bottom right.

Um, you integrate it with Dcript, Riverside, and Cap Cut marketplaces for distribution and you do a weekly leaderboard top podcast that gains 10K views using Pod Scriptor and

27:57

that drives FOMO. So, uh, you know, thinking like that.

Not only does that drive FOMO, but it's interesting, right? It, uh, it's giving value back to the community.

So, think about like whatever it is, whatever microess you're building, like how can

28:13

you do a weekly email that keeps you top of mind that you can ultimately create an ad unit that says like upgrade um, that adds a lot of value. Once MR hits $10,000, roll out topic clustering that autogenerates evergreen YouTube playlist

28:30

and newsletter digest maybe at $49 a month. Um, and you probably could exit this business at a 4 to 6x ARR.

Okay, maybe it's 3x, maybe it's 7x, but in that range, um, I think that a lot of the vertical specific tools like, you

28:46

know, a Vimeo, which is publicly traded, Cap Cut, etc. would would buy something like this.

Idea number three is called spec sheet. Um, so this is a bit of a more boring idea than in my opinion the first two.

Um, but listen, you know, bank statement

29:03

converter was boring, too. So, you know, and it's making $40,000 a month.

So, uh, sometimes sometimes you got to be boring. So, the idea is this.

B2B buyers go through these long PDF spec sheets. Sometimes they're like 30 pages handcopying line items into an Excel

29:19

grid to compare chips, APIs or SAS tiers tiers. So, and this this is happening.

It might not happen. It might not you might not think it's happening because you work at a startup or something like this, but in big companies, this is happening all the time.

And the large pain point here is

29:35

there's decision delay. So if you can build a drag and drop up up uploader with three competitor PDFs in a sortable web table, you can use something like lang chain and tiboula to extract fields.

Then you normalize with a synonym map um throughput for example

29:53

versus requirements that is going to be so valuable for people. You can use nex.js superbase cloud run worker uh to go and build this out.

Um and you you know the first version you obviously wanted to be s a super tight scope like

30:08

compare feature flag platforms. Um and then landing page seated with three public PDFs.

Um and you know founders are just going to founders and executives and leaders of companies are just going to feed this product more and

30:24

more PDFs and every upload improves your synonym map. So it's another reason why I I wanted to include this one is you might have a data moat with your micros.

So and I love data mo businesses right now. So if you can think about you know

30:40

ways to get more data make the experience better then that's going to help you with your churn problem later on. Pricing you can do something like $49 a month.

Um now let's talk about growth. So you know people love slides especially in the corporate environment.

30:55

So you can do an add a copy to keynote button that renders a pretty two column comparison with your logo footer. Every deck shared in a board meeting is another backlink.

And then the longtail SEO, for example, launch darkly versus

31:11

split in 2025 is yours within the quarter. So something like this could get to 20K MR.

Um and you can I I actually think it get a lot, you know, bigger. um you know for later you can resell the anonymize

31:27

aggregate stats via an API so you can say like oh you know you have this data around okay 70% of feature flag buyers choose usagebased pricing that's unique data that someone would buy uh and I just tweeted about this also like this whole movement around uh

31:46

paying for data you know I talked about uh cloudflare they just launched pay-per crawl websites can now charge AI crawlers is for scraping content. Uh so I think you're just going to see more of this uh over time.

So I'm particularly interested in Micros

32:03

um that uh that have this data advantage. And I think by the way people are going to buy businesses just for their data.

And that's another opportunity like you can go and buy if you can buy a micro a

32:18

micros with data maybe they're going to value it at 2x ARR or 1x ARR but if you can sell the data you can increase uh increase that ARR pretty simply. We're going to go through two more ideas.

Idea number four is cart saver. So Shopify

32:35

stores lose 70% of carts. Um there's all these generic complete purchase emails.

Um, but what if you had 11 Labs, which is the voice AI cloning, and you use Canvas API to autorecord a 30 second personal video for any cart more than

32:52

$100. So, the app grabs the the shopper's first name, a product shot, and a founder's voice with an MP3 overlay, which is so cool.

And it's like, "Hey, Jane, noticed you love these sneakers. Here's 10% off.

Link below." And it's a video. Um, you can even say

33:08

like, hey, this is an AI generated version of me, but I still think it's really cool and there's an arbitrage opportunity to do this. This would this would crush.

So, you create a Shopify app uh, you know, using Rails and S3 that triggers on checkout and update web

33:24

hook. It renders webm with FMPEG and emails via Shopify's marketing API.

So you can do something from a pricing perspective do like 1% of recovered revenue and then how you would grow this thing is you just create a Twitter

33:41

account an X account that's all about growing uh it's all about like abandoned carts um and and growing and growing revenue and then you do a lot of like sidebyside AB graphs around how people increase conversions

33:58

um and then the last idea uh which I grabbed from ideabarabrowser.com is called grant guru. So uh I don't know if any of you have submitted a grant but it is it is talk about painful like talk

34:17

about painful. It takes so long it's so intense.

Um so people really really do um they try to avoid it or they just give up. But if there was something called Grand Guru and it asked five prompts like your mission, your impact, your stats, your budget, and then drafts

34:33

these full proposals matching the foundation's language style and brand, that would be huge. Uh, and hopefully make the world, you know, m give people uh the opportunity to to do, you know, their their life's work and stuff like that.

So, you can pilot with US-based

34:52

art nonprofits. Uh, the way I would do it is I would scrape a hundred winning proposals.

I'd train a style transfer template. I'd build an MVP in Django and Stripe.

I'd outputs and I'd output it in doc X with autogenerated cover letter and budget table. And then early users

35:08

send feedback on tone, fine-tune by org charts, arts, environmental youth. Pricing, you can do something like uh $149 for the full proposal or subscribe for $99 a month unlimited.

And then growth, you can do publish a public

35:24

funded via grand guru lead leaderboard. Foundations love success stories and applicants trust proven track records.

There's also like no one talks about these stories of how they get the the these grants. So if you had like a Twitter account that showed this, I

35:39

think that would be really interesting to people. And then you can run webinars with grant coaches and then they become affiliates earning 20%.

Um, these are some of the ideas. And I bet you as you were going through it, if you're taking notes and stuff like that,

35:54

you you you kind of understand now like, okay, there was a painoint, there's like a wow moment, there's a trial, they tell their friends, there's a media component, right? There's like this building of audience piece.

Um, these

36:10

are focused on high margin. Um, they're not they're low capex.

They don't require a lot of money. oftentimes they require less than $500 to build the first version.

Um they're extremely niche at first. Like you you don't like a ventureback company is going to raise

36:26

a billion dollars to go and build this and it's focused on profitability. So it's not for everyone, right?

Microsass is not for everyone. Um it's really for people like the solo founder um who wants, you know, a lifestyle business who finds this interesting.

And you can end up building

36:43

like a bunch of these too, right? Like if you look at, you know, uh, Levels.io, Peter Levelvels, he's probably the most famous indie hacker.

Like he's got a that's what he has like a bunch of these, you know, 139K a month, 40K a month, 36K a month, 22K a

36:59

month, 16K a month. So you can build a portfolio though of those.

I call that being more of a multireneur, having multiple products. Um, but you know, if you're just starting out, you want to start with one.

Prove that you can get to 10K a month, 20K a month. Um, and

37:15

then over time you can go and build others or you can actually buy others. Um, like I said, this isn't easy.

It's not like you're just going to follow this playbook and it's just going to work. There is going to be a lot of pain and there's going to be a lot of zigs and

37:30

there's going to be a lot of zaggings. But if you can figure out how to build audience and community and you can figure out how to build products that actually speak to the pain, um, then you just you're iterating and and you're building audience.

you're getting more and more people and your product's getting more and more value. Your

37:46

retention is going more and more down. Your engagement is going more and more up.

Your word of mouth's going more and more up. Um, and and it could be extremely life-changing.

So, I hope this was helpful for people. I tried to make this as concise but

38:04

comprehensive as I possibly could. I put a lot of work into this.

Um, if you like episode episodes like this of the Startup Ideas podcast, please please like and comment so I know to do more of it. Um, and I mean that because uh

38:21

otherwise uh otherwise I won't do it. You know, I want to create I want to I want to uh I want to create value for you for you.

And the last thing I'll say is, you know, I I like thinking about this idea radar. So I think that if you're building a startup

38:38

uh startup idea um there's your the passion on on the left hand side and then you have monetization on the potential and sometimes like you know the what you're passionate about does have monetization um potential but you know usually the sweet spot is somewhere

38:54

in the middle. Um so you know you want to you want to build something that you're you're you're passionate about that you think that you're going to have fun building every day.

Um, and you want to build something that has monetization potential because that's going to get you to create something that's sustainable and it's going to get you to

39:10

it's going to get excit exciting for you and it's going to place you, you know, it's a leaderboard at the end of the day, right? Like making money is a leaderboard.

It's how much how well are you doing and how much value are you creating? So, um, hope this was helpful.

39:25

I had fun doing this. I think there's a huge opportunity to build micro SASS right now.

Um, and I can't wait to see what you build. And if you're looking for ideas, there's only one place to go, ideally free to go and get an idea of the day.

39:43

Um, enjoy.