How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

It seems to me that $20/year could be a good lowest tier price, especially for products targeting individual customers (as opposed to businesses). There are successful solo founder projects in that range (notably pinboard.in, $22/year).

The best part (and the part relevant to your comment) is that this just opens a Chrome window and you can open (cmd-N) as many windows into the same slack team as you want, and it behaves like you expect a Mac app to behave: cmd-tab goes between teams and cmd-backtick goes between windows of a single team.

I gather that there are some Mac apps or extensions or something that let you gather windows of _any_ app into tabs, so you could likely use one of those here to get tabs instead of windows.

Supposedly Chrome is getting rid of support for Chrome Apps, I think that's what these things are called (?). If so, I'm going to be impacted when it finally goes away.

Threading suddenly works in a non-stupid way, search suddenly works, and you can manage your own windows.

at a game studio of 300 i would wander amd chat with the various non-coder teams and just watch their workflows. for the tech artists a big blocker was gui access to enums in shaders (custom engine). i just set several of them up to compile the engine and taught tyem how to link enums to the editor gui, saved them many weeks of wait time. saw the lighting bake loop would take 1 year to run fully and a local test loop was 8 hours. asked my boss for time and rigged up a cluster of 64 ps4 dev kits and brought that down to 45 minutes, going from less than one local iteration a day to 9, and less than one a year to 3 a week for full bakes (cluster would bake when it wasnt helping am artist).

at super large mega corp i do similar, constantly meeting people for coffee and understanding more than just my cog. Eventually I got good enough at it and a reputation for improving things that I just get pushed/pulled at problem/opportunities areas, but you have to work up to it.

while none of this is doing a startup, if youre not curious, youll never see the myriad of things that could be improved with software, nor will many non tech folks, or really anyone who doesnt think "outside the box" as the olds say. challenge for devs is understanding where that tech is worth it and how to sell it, and not become that angry dev who is just yelling at everyone and politics for not taking every one of their half baked ideas as words from on high.

An example from my day to day in a large corporation: we have to enter time weekly: how much time did you spend on project X, Y or in training/meetings/etc. Sure there is software that does this, but it's terrible There are many issues with it that should be trivially solvable.

Now, I will admit that time tracking software is a huge field with lots of strong competition, so this may not be a field you'd want to enter, but it's an example of the problems you would come across during an average workday that are ripe for better solutions.

Try meeting people not in your field. Yes, it will take effort. Yes, it will be uncomfortable. Because of those challenges, fewer people have explored that space - so there are still fertile grounds for new products.

Resptfully disagree. There are a lot of non-trivial problems that do not have good solutions. If you look for niche manifestations of hard problems, you can both find something with appropriate scope AND a good value proposition. You also don't need to solve problems, just make them better/easier.

Was the original remote app enabled? If not, now you have a potential product for those people who would rather use an app than the manual remote. Are spare remotes hard to get or expensive? There's another market that might want to buy from you, especially if the AC unit that is old or obsolete.

Spare parts/retrofits with new features is big business. There's a good chance that if you dug into this particular problem you'd find that it could be profitable. Not quit-you-day-job profitable, but at least enough to bring in a few extra $k per month.

Of course you won't strike gold on the first person you talk to. Be smart about it, talk to people who work in an industry you would like to serve (doctors, lawyers, marketers, mechanics, etc.) and figure out the inefficiencies in their day to day life. It's not as hard as you've made it out to be.

Starting a business is a gamble. If you don’t have some risk tolerance, starting a startup is not the right path.

It's up to the recipient if they find it useful or not.