[Journey] Launching a micro-SaaS and getting $

Ilkbam

Ilkbam

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Hello guys, I don't post often here but I will do this post to get some motivation, I have been reading a lot about SaaS businesses online.

I never saw a post about SaaS businesses here, they are quite lucrative and not "shady"

Ok, so what is a SaaS? It's an online product that people pay for; they don't own it, it's hosted on your own servers, and you can charge them one-time, monthly, or annually for it.
Think about Netflix: you pay each month to access the content.
But a SaaS doesn't have to be paid-only, it can be a freemium, like Spotify, where you can access the content but have to pay to unlock some features, the issue here will be that your free offer is too good and people never buy the product (WinRAR)

How am I gonna compete with those big companies ? I will not compete with them, I will launch a "micro-SaaS" that only does a specific task in a specific niche where I can get enough clients organically.

Example of a micro-SaaS
Search "Remove background image" on Google and you will see a lot of websites like this :
https://www.remove.bg/
This website is a money printing machine, let's see the stats:
56M monthly visits
Base pricing of $32/month
Typical freemium conversion rates range between 1 and 10%.
Click to expand...
Let's take the worst case here, 1% of conversion.
Monthly revenue = 560,000 * $32 = $17,920,000
Crazy, isn't it ?

Of course, we are never gonna get that many visits.

My previous journey was to get $100/month with an affiliated website, it got $550+/month.
I got 100k users a month in like 6 months
What if instead of doing an affiliated website, it was a SaaS and I was doing a subscription of $9.99 for the tool ?
Again, let's take the worst case here, 1% of conversion.
Monthly revenue = 1,000 * $9.99 = $9,990

This is why I want to start my SaaS journey, I have been programming for 6 years now, mainly TypeScript / Node and half the tools I see online are not that hard to remake.

What's my plan ?
I don't have a following, forget the instant "product launch" effect where you get a lot of sales instantly, this will be long, boring and exhausting journey to rank a freemium tool on Google.
I will do cold email outreaching to some potential clients, maybe it could work out.
It doesn't have to be perfect, I don't want to spend months on this, the time you spend on a project is meaningless

When launching a SaaS, you have to fix your own problems because you actually know how to fix them correctly.
I have been using an online tool for months now and it's outdated, it's an old 10 years old website that gets 150k months visits.
The niche isn't that saturated and the tool can be done in a week.
I started making my own clone a week ago and it works, of course I don't have all the fancy features yet to make people buy a subscription.
I don't know how to handle all the life-cycle of a SaaS, you have to accept payments, send the emails when needed, make a customer portal, handle the edge-cases (user deletion, subscription change etc)..

To accept payments, I use "Stripe", it does the complicated stuff for you, create the invoices etc, but it isn't that efficient
For example, I wanted to added a pricing table to accept payments based on several plans, I saw a no-code tool to do it for me
https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/pricing-table
It seems perfect right? Look at the limitations :
  • Account creation—The pricing table call-to-action takes customers directly to checkout. It doesn’t currently support adding an intermediate step (for example, asking the customer to create an account on your website before checking out).
Click to expand...
You can't have a login/sign-up wall before the payment, because that stuff is handeld by yourself, not Stripe, it can anything (JWT, 0Auth, Clerk, your own?) -> You can't use their no-code tool.

So, what do you guys think, is it a waste of time to try to speedrun my own SaaS? I have some time but my motivation goes up and down all the time, is there anyone that has done something like that? Thanks
 
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Nothing goes wasted when you try to launch your own platform. You learn a lot through the process and if you share it with us on this journey thread, we too will learn from your experience. :D

Good luck on your journey.
 
Go for it man, you will regret more not doing it than doing and failing.

Also if you have succeeded at bringing in traffic previously, you have good experience already and have decent chances of making this a success.

Good luck!
 
I'd say go for it too & see if it works... only one way to find out.

If you have some working-prototype of a clone. Would think getting that out there first, for it to start getting indexed online & potential (repeat) visitors is more important than the feature-parity with the other tools & payment stuff.

If it's a Micro-SaaS: Saw another member mention paid rapidapi plans (no affiliation, never used them). Don't think it would be no-code solution, but maybe they could handle that end of things. Then if things work out, start building the more complex customer portal internally later.
 
I think it's worth giving it a shot! Your previous success with bringing in traffic gives you a good chance of making it work. Good luck!
 
Sounds interesting!
Currently I’m also in the process of developing my own SaaS Webapp, which isn’t really micro, but also not the biggest out there. I’ve done like 100-200 hours of work the past 2 months (still working full time besides that) and have most major features completed.

I’m still deciding if I should build it in public to gain some traction/interest from the outside, but because it is quite niche, I’m doubtful that building in public will have any impact.

Would love to hear more from your SaaS in the future! I will definitely be following this journey.
 
Stifl said:
Sounds interesting!
Currently I’m also in the process of developing my own SaaS Webapp, which isn’t really micro, but also not the biggest out there. I’ve done like 100-200 hours of work the past 2 months (still working full time besides that) and have most major features completed.

I’m still deciding if I should build it in public to gain some traction/interest from the outside, but because it is quite niche, I’m doubtful that building in public will have any impact.

Would love to hear more from your SaaS in the future! I will definitely be following this journey.
Click to expand...
Nice! I was also wondering if building in public could be a good idea but I'm too afraid to fail lmao
 
This sounds like a great idea.

Ilkbam said:
forget the instant "product launch" effect where you get a lot of sales instantly, this will be long, boring and exhausting journey to rank a freemium tool on Google.
Click to expand...
You got that part right. It is a long, tedious journey but well worth the effort.

Best of luck!
 
So far, I’m concerned about whether it should be a one-product website or a list of tools in my niche.

For example, instead of using the name "remove.bg", they could have used something like "media.com" and put the remove bg feature inside "media.com/remove-background"
a website that does this is https://www.photoroom.com/background-remover

They rank the website for a whole set of tools, that's a good approach but I see one downfall: The website will not have a one product landing page anymore, could be harder for the people to understand what it does, especially when mail outreaching. When you are doing dropshipping, it's way easier to sell on a one product webpage than a catalogue.
 
Ilkbam said:
So far, I’m concerned about whether it should be a one-product website or a list of tools in my niche.
Click to expand...
If the plan is to build more tools, make it a brandable niche name. Then do sub-directory for each of the tools off of the parent.
  • While only one tool exists, the homepage of the parent brandable site could be basically dedicated to it. Say the upload form on homepage leads to a <form action="/background-remover"> subdirectory at the beginning.

If its each separate domain per tool, then each domain will have to have separate marketing, outreach & link building efforts. Thinking especially for ranking, it's easier to concentrate everything to one site, than many IMO.
 
1. do you follower any sass or indie maker forums/blogs? any you would recommend?
2. what's your dev stack going to be?
3. whats your plan for tackling this?
Ilkbam said:
I don't know how to handle all the life-cycle of a SaaS, you have to accept payments, send the emails when needed, make a customer portal, handle the edge-cases (user deletion, subscription change etc)..
Click to expand...
4. will you be launching on producthunt and the like?

again good luck
 
lfgPeople said:
1. do you follower any sass or indie maker forums/blogs? any you would recommend?
2. what's your dev stack going to be?
3. whats your plan for tackling this?

4. will you be launching on producthunt and the like?

again good luck
Click to expand...
1. I follow indie hackers on Twitter and read some posts on Reddit, it's r/saas or something like that
2. very similar to the T3 stack but without the bullshit (grpc, zod)
3. Learn how to make a SaaS, make the product fast, add a blog section, write articles on my niche, email outreach to some people, pray
4. no it's a boring micro saas so nobody will care
 
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