Evaluating Modest SaaS Business Ideas
greaterdanorequalto.com
greaterdanorequalto.com
- Is this an exciting product?
- Does this solve a significant enough problem that people will pay for it?
- Will customers regularly use and see value from this product?
- Does this product provide value to companies at broad stages of their life cycle?
- Does this product align with your values?
- Do you like your potential customers?
- Will you be able to stay motivated to work on this product?
- Can you build this product in a reasonable amount of time?
- What is your moat?
- Is this product easy to distribute?
- Is downtime a life-or-death emergency?
- Will you spend a lot of time doing customer support?
- Will this product be all-consuming?
- Does the person who gets the most value out of your product control the credit card that will be used to pay for it?
- Do your potential customers regularly pay for products, ideally for this kind of product?
- Is your market a large one with a lot of upmarket competition?
- Is there demonstrated demand for a downmarket competitor?
- Is the market still growing?
- Is it easy to reach your audience?
- Is there a powerful distribution channel available to reach this market?
(i run a paid creators community where we discuss this stuff)
It can sometimes be very clear when you sit in the right part of the industry or community to have some kind of intuition on the matter. If you are in such a position you may have a fairly decent upper hand, and you could squander it if you wait for data or some Deloite report to tell you you're in a growing market.
It's also going to depend on how big your scope is. Are you looking to enter the "Toys" market or the "Specific kind of fidget spinner toy" niche? If it's just toys, then there's probably some general data to go by. If it's a specific niche you're probably going to be flying somewhat blind by necessity as there won't be any data yet.
Finding a customer category that regularly spends money on the kind of software you're intending to build can make it signficantly easier to actually sell them software.
Go to Capterra or G2 and read what actual paying customers say about your competitors and other SaaS products. It's eye-opening.
However, even in the "encouraged" reviews you can still discover what problems people solve with certain class of tools and how much money they're ready to pay for them.
Pros: We love everything about this software! Especially A, B, C, D, E, F and G features!
Cons: It's always so difficult to wait for the next monthly patch! But it's so worth it!
I wrote genuine thoughts on the product but given it has been offered to me and not someone else, there is a clear selection bias.
We can see too that most of competitors' reviews are clearly inauthentic. Also, in the B2B space, a public endorsement is infrequently given for various reasons. Being in cybersecurity makes it an awkward ask too - especially after SolarWinds got a lot of flack for publishing their client list on the website [1].
However, it would have to be done - as that prospect has made it clear. We are sticking by our guns though and will get there eventually with genuine reviews. But TBH, the path is not clear.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/15/22176053/solarwinds-hack...
I can only speak for my own experience, but Capterra offered me and my customers something like $20 gift cards for the first 100 reviewers and I sent 500 emails with this offer and maybe had 1 reviewer bite and then later said he never received a gift card.
But my app has 15 reviews and I asked maybe half of those users to write a review after they first emailed me with a testimonial/praise.
The other just keeps harassing my for leaving a review on a piece of software that I was working for at the time. Never got a gift card either....
IMO look at how many 'competitors' are in a category on those sites. Finding a category with <50 competitors can provide some great opportunities, probably niche though.
Alternatively, don't develop an IoT door lock that will lock people out of their houses if the intern accidentally fucks up in production.
A discord bot which warns users when they share links to pirated site and remove it. (I moderate a small discord server).
I extracted the API part and put it on rapid API to see if there is any interest because I have little idea where to look for customers and how to talk to them.
https://rapidapi.com/searchableland-no-piracy-team/api/pirac...
I have also been looking for alternatives. I searched for them before but nothing came up so I had to build a list and heuristics myself. Maybe there isn't much of a need otherwise I would find a product.
That said, maybe this is an idea you can niche _up_ with? Instead of just one form of moderation, could you take the basic tech and use it to moderate a whole bunch of nasties that admins don't want to waste time dealing with? You'll want to make sure that the a _paying_ market exists for such tools first, obviously, but it's a potential option.
Either a monolithic tool for handling moderation automation in general seems good, or better yet a marketplace where I can buy automation plugins for Discord in general, both for moderation as well as other administrative or entertainment tasks.
Most problems with links on Discord are solved with a gradual expansion of new user permissions.
A product can still find success even if there isn't a great answer to "is there a moat?" or "is the person who benefits also the one who pays?" -- but the road is a lot harder.
Yes, brand and reputation and credit card details and scale advantages and first mover.
But are these a "moat" or just "stickiness" factors?
Scale advantages are the exception. If the costs of your product or service drop dramatically with scale, then you can lower prices to a level where you still make a profit but competitors can't compete.
The complicated most is the logistics network. That is definitely a moat against new entrants, but not against large existing logistics networks like Uber or DoorDash.
This is a big one, after you get your project off the ground.
In my last startup, downtime of a few minutes led to torrents of emails and customer complaints, as the service was time sensitive.
This was easily the most stressful part of the job.
> Finding a customer category that regularly spends money on the kind of software you're intending to build can make it signficantly easier to actually sell them software.
I want to point out that this applies to the market, and not necessarily the product. An oft-repeated suggestion is to charge more, but free products are great for lead-gen. Case-in-point: indiehackers.com is not a paid product, yet it sold for 7 figures. Traffic from a targeted, lucrative demographic is inherently valuable, and one of the easiest ways to get this traffic is with a free product.
When starting out, the biggest risk is 1. making something that no-one wants 2. making something people want, but not being able to reach those people. The easiest way to derisk these categories of mistakes is to simply copy the market (ie. what problem to solve) and acquisition channels of competitors, and differentiate on product.
On moats: Markets with moats are typically already dominated by incumbents with moats. For indies it's better to target markets without moats, precisely because you're in the position of a "fast follower"