Micro-SaaS Alternatives to BigTech/VC | Hacker News Reader

Micro-SaaS Alternatives to BigTech/VC

microfounder.com

151 pointsraunometsa30 comments

Hi HN

I started this crowdsourced list to find small internet products made by solo developers (or tiny teams) that can be used as alternatives to BigTech/VC-funded startups.

E.g. you can use Tally (by two devs, $14K MRR) instead of Typeform ($190M funding, 600+ employees)

or Plausible (by two devs, $83K MRR) instead of Google Analytics.

I added a link to a form where you can send me suggestions to alternatives, happy to add to the site!

Thanks, Rauno

Open articleView on HN

This would be a list by many buyers, especially in the enterprise, of companies to avoid. If you want to help the indie startup it is probably better to remove their revenue numbers. Most buyers are concerned if the product they invested in will be around in a couple of years.

It appears these business owners speak publicly about their revenues.

So they clearly want people to know.

(But totally agree on your point)

Nice page! A small suggestion: use section or category names.

For example, instead of 'Buffer', the category or section could be called 'Social media tools'. Same for the other sections e.g. 'Analytics', 'Cold email tools', and so on.

Also, Zendesk and Freshdesk are both in the same category of help desk software but are listed separated on the page.

Thank's for this! I've been building a list of bootstrappers to follow on Twitter and added a bunch of these folks to said list [0].

[0]: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1553077166270709760

Appreciate the site, but I don’t see the point of including their revenue. On the contrary, lower revenue would make me want to choose the higher revenue option - being able to make money is a sign of competence after all.

Team size and age of the startup are better metrics imo.

no, it's a sign on product market fit at best and being good at marketing at worst.

"No"?

Having found product market fit is a sign of competence. Being good at marketing is, too. Signs of.

it just means your target market doesn't have anything better. sure it can mean competence, but it can also mean you're an early stage in a niche space (a lot of app startups where I live gain a lot of traction and backing, only to dissolve into obscurity once people realise there's a market there)

The one thing that keeps me from using smaller competitors is that I don't have a guarantee they won't shut down. I need to know for sure that whatever I integrate with is going to last longer than I do. Even though there's a lot to dislike about the big players, I can rest easy knowing they will outlast me.

"Get MicroFounder OS to see the full list

A developer's operating system to becoming a microfounder"

Vexing parse

See also the IndieHackers list of products sorted by revenue: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...

This is a great idea but the list seems incomplete. For example, where are the email marketing tools? Mailchimp / Intuit, Convetkit, SendFox, and so many more. There are many other markets / verticals not covered here.

Lists can't be Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. We've taken that out of the title now.

What’s the rationale to use stuff by a smaller organization?

I never got this.

I only ever want stuff I can limp along standalone with until we find something to replace it with. I got seriously burned by a small SaaS help desk app about 15 years ago. Turns out they had three customers, no investors and were burning $20k a month on operational expenditure

People love underdogs. Plus smaller orgs are typically more responsive to your needs. They are less likely to kill your account with impunity.

Are two devs the most popular? I wonder how many Dev/PM Dev/Sales combo exist given that non overlapping skill sets can leverage each other.

A dev/sales combo is great for many products! I’d be a bit concerned that a PM in a dev/PM team wouldn’t have much to do, though.

Good site and this is a good page to see alternatives. How many new startups do you add to your site monthly?

The alternatives may be too small

Who's gonna pick (gamble on) a SaaS that's doing < 500$??

That's exactly the kind of thing an early adopter would choose - provided the benefit-set of the product made sense.

IMO this list should focus on the differentiator rather than team-size or MRR.

I'd be happy to push a "micro" SaaS doing 100k a month built by a small team as an alternative to BigTech/VC for projects I may be involved with, not so much a 500$ month PoC

Shameless plug - CallTrackingMetrics , husband wife team - zero funding

Not here. OP has a form on the site where you can submit your startup.

Why are there so few competitors to Zendesk I wonder?

There are more. It's not a complete list. Heck, one Zendesk alternative was created because of a comment here on HN.

https://freshdesk.com/general/the-freshdesk-story-blog/

Thanks for sharing!

Micro Services - https://m3o.com

I don't think microservices are relevant here. This is about "micro companies" -- organisations with a very small team and (typically) bootstrapped by their founders rather than large organisations with VC funding.

Raises hand. That would be me. Bootstrapped for 4 years. Eventually raised some funding. Focused on open source Dev tools and then used it to build this API platform.

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