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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I actually think micro-SaaS is an oasis.

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people building small businesses to leverage a tiny opportunity in the market. Build a feature that no major player has captured yet.

This is good for the user for a time. But then they end up with a ton of tiny subscriptions, and trying to link them together to make a complete product. All these tiny companies competing for eyeballs, to get the marketing to be recognized on top of the other tiny companies building similar tools.

And what's the goal of almost all of these little tools? To make a small difference in the efficiency of somebody running their business. Minor efficiencies, not game changers for the most part.

Then one of the big players comes in and adds the feature to their main product. Poof, everything somebody worked long and hard for disappears.

Niche to find what you can build that's larger, but I think staying niche as a goal is a challenge.

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I'm going to play devil's advocate and suggest that there are many potential customers who can't afford the "main product" but will do fine with just a few features of it at a significantly lower cost that a smaller business can provide.

It's entirely possible to make a living from crumbs as long as there are enough of them.

> Then one of the big players comes in and adds the feature to their main product. Poof, everything somebody worked long and hard for disappears.

It depends a lot on how you market yourself.

Basecamp is a good - admittedly cliche, though - example. Now they have Hey. It's an email client for $100/yr. And they continue to make millions, despite sharing the market with giants.

The reason people use their services is not only because of the features. They also build a relationship.

One doesn't stay married because there's no other potential partner around with better features. It's because there's a deeper relationship, a bond. Might be stretching now? Perhaps...

> Then one of the big players comes in and adds the feature to their main product. Poof, everything somebody worked long and hard for disappears.

There's a lot of wisdom in the statement above, but you also have a point... which I think you went much too far with.

Basecamp is not a relationship; it's a brand, but it's much weaker than, say, Apple, Ferrari, Nike, etc.

See, Basecamp was what all the kool kidz were using. And the Basecamp founders were soooo koooool! They even wrote a book! Oh yeah, and they used "the hot new technology" red choo-choo trains, er, uh, I mean Ruby on Rails.

Hey, if people can feel passionately about sugar-flavored water with bubbles in it, they can feel passionately about software... I guess.

Buuuuut the inherent problem is this: you can show off your Apple, Ferrari, Nike, etc. to your friends and to the girls/women you want to impress.

Basecamp, not so much. Basecamp seems like a dying brand to me. I don't see why anyone would begin using Basecamp these days because it's waaaaay overpriced.

But for a 40 year old who started using it 18 years ago, sure, he might have enough money, nostalgia, and, well, laziness, to keep using it.

I doubt Basecamp has many users under the age of 30, and probably never will. And I doubt it has many new users. At the end of the day most software doesn't have a social aspect to it; these days I assume Basecamp essentially is seen as a commodity (like a pillow case) by most people, even those who use it. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are outliers which are extremely popular and have network effects.

> Then one of the big players comes in and adds the feature to their main product.

You can also position yourself to be an acquisition target.

I don’t think the goal is to be totally sustainable indefinitely, if I ran a micro-SaaS product, I would fully expect a bigger player to add that feature one day. The goal, IMO seems to be to get something working and generating ARR with as little overhead as possible. If you can make $100k/yr with 4 hours per week of work, that’s a huge win even if it doesn’t last forever.

You can still work a 9-to-5 and enjoy the benefits those come with as well as having supplemental income. Because you’re still in a career as a employee at this stage, a big player coming to eat your lunch isn’t going to be financial ruin, only a lifestyle change if applicable.

The bigger goal (for me at least) is to get enough cash in an index fund where the money you need each month is exceeded by monthly gains of your investment portfolio.

>> I actually think micro-SaaS is an oasis.

Did you mean "mirage" instead of "oasis"?

Now it makes sense.

Yeah. I agree. I often tend confuse the terms "mirage" and "oasis" in my own mind. After all, they are both things one might perceive in a hot desert, although the first is not real; whereas, the second is real.

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