Micro SaaS Ideas You'll Want to Steal | Hacker News Reader

Micro SaaS Ideas You'll Want to Steal

budibase.com

36 pointsbudibase14 comments

1. CRM for freelancers, there are so many tools already and becoming anything more than a me too would be luck.

2. Content Planner - it seems to me that should be a job role, akin to *Editor and not so much a SaaS. Of course, it would help if much more online content had an editor anyway. So many grammar/usage/spelling errors these days.

3. Instagram Post Automator - I'm surprised it doesn't already exist. Much like CRM variations.

4. OKR - I'm not sure how you'd outcompete incumbents here, but of the options so far probably the most interesting.

5. Coffee/Tea round app - Probably easy enough to make, not sure if even $2 would be a reasonable price and actually make any money.

6. Bookmarks For Designers - Interesting idea... a more generic Bookmarks for X as a trended social graph of sites for a given subject would be cool overall. I know that I bookmark a lot of things and then never get back to them. When I finally do, it's been forked twice, and 2/3 abandoned for yet another renamed clone/fork of what I was looking for. Something like the original Yahoo would be pretty cool to see again.

I'd like to get something started for side income myself, but honestly a bit lazy about it, and more insecure about keeping it separate from my personal self in terms of liability.

Direct Instagram publishing through the Graph API is reserved only for certain Facebook premium marketing partners. Facebook did this through a beta program over a year ago then stopped handing access to other organizations. They may offer it in the future bit it's closed for the moment.

Shame... one could do something people could run on their own desktop with puppeteer or similar, but even then would have a bit of risk for failure.

Interestingly, there’s a whole underground industry of services that provide this functionality by having banks of automated Android phones (not sure if physical or virtualized) to post on behalf of the user through the mobile Instagram app. Problem is you have to give them your direct Instagram credentials, and you run the risk of Instagram detecting this and banning your account (has happened.)

AFAIK this still can be fully virtualized, but you run heavy risk of a sudden spam detection change and resulting permanent bans.

Source: done it.

A problem with some of my own "micro" SaaS ideas: what happens when a service that I encouraged people to put their data into and depend upon, turns out to not be financially viable for me to keep operating?

(All the microstartup ideas, I'd have to bang out, unfunded, and throw against the wall, to see what sticks.)

Change the pricing plan, and/or revenue model? Or discontinue the service, preferably with a timely notice and with good support for people to get their data out.

Very interesting; great ideas. I need to start coding :) I can’t believe that there is no freelancer CRM out there. What type of functionality would set this apart from ‘normal’ CRM? Hours / billing?

There is at least one freelancer CRM that I know of (https://cushionapp.com/), but it's definitely not a crowded space.

There's also Pancake (https://www.pancakeapp.com/), Thrive Solo (http://thrivesolo.com/), Duet (https://duetapp.com/), Invoice Ninja (https://www.invoiceninja.com/), Flowlu (https://www.flowlu.com), Plutio (https://www.plutio.com/), and Freelance Suite (http://freelancesuite.com/), and those are just the ones I've tried.

Highly competed, but few seem to have staying power.

What makes these ideas "micro"? They seem like normal SaaS to me.

They're not seventh-round worthy, perhaps.

Could really do with the freelancer CRM actually, i haven't seen anything out there thats not targeted at enterpise.

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