B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers
rocketgems.com
rocketgems.com
The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay.
We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.
We still have many fingers in many pies. If that revenue stream went we'd be able to bring up $1M a year from one or more of the other marketplaces within 12 months, which is enough to keep us in the black.
Ie. Building this thing where your platform gets essentially free product research data and can decide you are a feature they will build themselves at any time?
Are there agreements in place that provide meaningful protection against this?
The biggest opportunities seem to be in the edtech space, remote working and any other type of category which facilitates remote work.
If you are looking for opportunities, try to map out where your skills and interest can contribute in a remote / wfh economy.
I’ve seen a number of companies scramble to keep up with growth. Others doubled revenue.
I want to build a B2B SaaS for remote work this year and next week I will start interviewing potential customers.
Is it still like that or have they moved on?
My email's in my profile.
Looking at a couple of comments here, I'm seeing some eye popping figures from folks who pulled off using channel marketing for their SaaS. It's very heartening to see.
Imagine having 10 paying customers giving you $80 per month. You need to provide some level of support, deal with charge backs which can get you MATCH banned so payment processing becomes near enough impossible, update the product and market it too.
So, um, no.
One of my present products has over 10,000 users (b2c rather than b2b), we get a support email every couple of months.
Really depends on your product I guess, or you've never actually done it and are pulling figures out of your ass.
It has about $3.5k MRR, is still growing and I spend maybe 5-10 hours a month on it.
Also, I had no brand before that.
Also, how did you start marketing it/getting your first users?
For example, we were one of the first to integrate with the Google Workspace Marketplace when it launched many years ago (called Google Apps Marketplace back then). It brought us a lot of leads in the early days. Today, discoverability has become a real problem. The "luck"-component in being featured in any search result or when browsing the marketplace is now so large that I'm not sure if for new products it would still outweigh the work of building the integration and keeping up to date with inevitable breaking API changes.
Overall it can be an amazing channel for growth though, so it's mostly about carefully picking one where customers might find you, rather than just going for something that looks promising because it's big. There's a big first-mover advantage when launching on a newish platform (and as the list proves, there's many new ones).
Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus live ecommerce which seems to be the areas that are really thriving right now.
Even if covid passes organizations will still be looking for tools that makes them resillient to that kind of disruption again.
So plenty of areas to dig into.
(P.s. If you have ideas and are looking for product design or seed capital just DM me would love to talk with you)
"Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus a live ecommerce"
With regards to the non-desktop workforce: 70% of the workforce doesn't sit behind a computer and thus really don't benefit from working from home in most cases and thus we are working on a few projects in that space.
We did a test project https://www.realwork.ai which is a tool for frontline workers built for the people in the field rather than the backoffice and allow them to communicate and mange the distributed physical work they do. We are currently looking at expanding that into more of a linkedin type of network combining the tool with the ability to find work or find workers to hire.
With regards to the educational space we are building a LMS built more like an API that allow learning institutions or organizations with the need for employee education, certificate or compliance to easily manage their students/employees education. While we offer things like video and course-building tools the idea is to allow for our customers to use the best tools for the job so ex. we support not just our own video platform but also zoom, MS teams etc.
And last but not least.
Because we built a whole video platform we are looking at another area which is live ecommerce such as the whole unboxing trend with things like collector cards as we know a few people in that space.
We are then working with founders or potential co-founders in those industries and try to see where we can find product market fit.
Is it supposed to work ATM?
We are already listed on Slack marketplace and I can say that it allowed us to onboard several first users and still we are getting organic installs every day.
But one should mention that in order for such marketplace listings to be efficient you still have to work on SEO and other marketing channels.
I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform.
My service https://blanq.io has tried to address these but I feel there is plenty of space left for more players to enter in. It is relatively easy to get started and scale the service. The barrier of entry is quite low.
But you would need to differentiate your platform - there are like a 1000 clones of Bitly that pretty much do the same.
I will need to double down on marketing efforts in coming days. But I do see there is a need.
A few more you might add are package managers, such as NPM. If you have a dev focused company and provide SDKs, those are great places where your users can find you.
Anyone using Heroku Marketplace as well? Any ideas how did you approach promoting your add-on? Thanks.
I once had the impression that an indie hacker is a one person dev shop that sells a software product instead of their time.
But lately, I saw many people use that term for business people on the look for the next hustle.
Even if someone starts out as a "one person dev shop", they eventually become a business person, out of necessity.
So other indie hackers will say that a specific part of a CRM, for example, is all that would be needed, they create that SaaS and sell it for $5 per month or free (a fraction of the price of an established brand). Rinse and repeat. It's easy because indie hackers appreciate small bugs and issues and are not as demanding as someone who is paying $50 per month, working with a large corporation that needs support 24/7 etc.
People define it differently, but generally I think of indie hackers as people, usually technical, who are building or are aiming to build smaller tech businesses. They generally either bootstrap or raise small amounts of money. A lot of indie hackers are would be happy with a business that makes 5-10k USD per month per founder
Patrick McKenzie (patio11), who famously built and sold his "Bingo Card Creator", and blogged about the process, is a "prototypical" Indie Hacker.
The ecosystem consists of communities like [1] and [2], podcasts (search for "Indie Hackers"), and conferences like [3]
[0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
Many indie hackers are trying to avoid having a boss and/or trying to avoid selling time for money (as others have said), but some do want to grow relatively large businesses. I believe that DHH and Base Camp in general in its early days would have been considered “indie hackers”.