Are you just paying attention to trends in your area of expertise or are you following trends in multiple areas, how do you keep up with them.
Maybe you can tell more about your previous Saas products, because I'm really interested in your approach.
Thanks
I look outside of my own areas of interest or expertise. I follow a lot of industries/small businesses outside of tech. I also pay attention to what my son and his friends are into and have launched a couple of content sites based on that.
For the SaaS products: 2 were niche Real Estate products one of which is still running and profitable, 1 was a Facebook apps when Facebook pages were hot, 1 was a Twitter app during the early days of Twitter, 1 was catered towards solar companies. All at their height made over $10k monthly rev, some more than others. I launched others though that were bad bets that I lost money on. I hate losing money though so if I don't see something turning a profit within a few months, I move on.
I have also launched niche content sites around popular games, tv shows, etc., one of which I grew to $20k monthly rev at its height and grew the opt in list on another to 300k+. These niche content sites don't last very long though because once that game, tv show, hot topic, etc. is no longer hot, you stop making money. They are fun to run while they last.
Lastly, I would probably consider myself a better marketer than programmer. Programming for me is a means to build out a product. I don't love it but I don't hate it either. I view it as a tool to accomplish what I need to do. I am pretty good however at advertising and knowing how to reach a target audience. I also try and track as much as possible so I can make educated decisions based on data. I am not much of a risk taker. I heavily rely on data to make decisions.
This does take some investment upfront but allows me to gather data and test conversions quickly. Based on the data/conversions/feedback from these sources, I fine tune and tweak.
After a few weeks, you will have a ton of keyword and search data from your PPC ads and Google Webmaster tools. If I see some low hanging fruit search terms from that data, I will then invest in trying to get them ranked organically.
Make sure and setup a Google & Bing webmaster account and analytics. I have also developed my own software that I use on all my sites that captures a ton of other data that I want to see. Google Analytics isn't always accurate and doesn't always give me exactly what I want to see to make educated decisions.
It's one of the lies that became "truth" in some parts of the Internet.