Guide:
Hello everyone! The second issue of "Micro-SaaS Wealth Creation Weekly" is now available, thank you for your attention and reading! This weekly magazine is aimed at independent developers and early entrepreneurial teams, reporting their main product forms - the latest information and experience sharing on how micro-SaaS is realized. The so-called micro-SaaS is "SaaS for niche markets". It is characterized by the fact that it is generally operated by individuals or small teams, with relatively low R&D and operating costs, and it focuses on serving customer groups in a certain segmented vertical field.
For the content of this weekly magazine, first of all, we will recommend five high-quality micro-SaaS products. Based on the pragmatic and referential goals, we have compiled relevant product responsible The latest interviews and other materials of people, I hope to give a practical and useful reference to the majority of independent developers. In addition, in the "Developers Create Wealth School" column, TK Kader, a senior SaaS entrepreneur, will share with you three basic principles for the success of micro-SaaS wealth creation.
Inventory of micro-SaaS recommended projects
01
Grammarly: A unicorn bred to help people write "small essays" , with a market value of 13 billion US dollars
Product name: Grammarly ( Grammarly: Free Online Writing Assistant )
Product revenue: $72 million in annual revenue, $13 billion valuation
Creative features:
Although micro-SaaS is based on a small vertical niche market, under the influence of global network interconnection and resource implosion, its market prospects should not be underestimated once the drumbeat of development is hit. Grammarly is one of the best micro-SaaS. As a tool to correct grammar and help people write "small essays", in December 2021, the third round of financing was 200 million U.S. dollars, with a valuation of 13 billion U.S. dollars, ranking among the global unicorns of Crunchbase No. 35 on the leaderboard.
Grammarly is an AI English writing tool that integrates spell checking, punctuation correction, grammatical error correction, tone adjustment, duplicate checking, and writing style suggestions. Grammarly was founded in 2009. The two founders, Lytvyn and Shevchenko (left and right in the picture below), are both Ukrainians. They are now billionaires worth billions by helping people write "small essays".
The idea for Grammarly came from one of their previous ventures: MyDropBox, a plagiarism-checking tool for academic plagiarism prevention. According to Lytvyn’s recollection, a series of “serious thinking” about text plagiarism was triggered during the operation process. The conclusion is that many students plagiarize their papers just to make the paper look more decent and help them get good grades, and by extension People in the workplace have a similar mentality: better writing and expression skills can bring more opportunities for success. In short, the selling point of demand here is: writing is competitiveness and productivity. Grammarly was born, and currently provides three types of services: Grammarly For Individuals, Grammarly For Businesses, and Grammarly For Education, which are aimed at individuals, businesses and schools respectively. So far, Grammarly has been able to detect and respond to nearly 300 types of writing errors, even including adjustments to make the content more readable.
User Acquisition:
Grammarly is currently used by 30 million people and 50,000 teams every day. These come from the following channels operating: 500,000 applications and websites (including email applications, numerous web browsers, social media and Microsoft Word).
Grammarly's market route is firstly aimed at colleges and universities to achieve quick profits. Since 2012, it has been targeting the TOC market, expanding social media promotion channels such as Facebook and Twitter, and launching a plug-in strategy for free value-added models. In 2020, it will enter the enterprise market. What needs a lot of writing here is the "plug-in" strategy, which is the key strategy to help Grammarly break through 30 million DAU.
This strategy started with the release of the Microsoft plug-in in 2014, and then extended to email, Twitter and other writing channels to provide real-time writing guidance. Chrome extensions have been downloaded over 8 million times on the Chrome Webstore. At the end of 2021, Grammarly released the SDK, which will further open the door for developers to embed Grammarly functions in products. During the four years from 2015 to 2019, Grammarly's DAU increased 20 times to 20 million.
R & D technology:
Natural language processing, machine learning, etc.
Experience sharing - find paying customers as soon as possible to control costs
Create products based on application scenarios to help you easily find paying customers;
Improve products based on customer feedback and revenue.
Find paying customers as soon as possible without investment to control costs. (Note: Before free promotion around 2014, Grammarly insisted on paying first to ensure cash flow in the start-up stage)
02
Potion: Quick Website Builder Helps Me Make $4900+ Monthly
Potion: Quick Website Builder Helps Me Make $4900+ Monthly
Product name: Potion ( https://potion.so/ )
Product income: monthly income of 4900+ US dollars
Creative features:
Potion is a tool that quickly turns Notion content into a complete website. Founder Noah Bragg said, I originally used Notion to build a website, but as many people feel—the method is too complicated! This made me see the need - quickly build a website based on Notion! So summing up Potion's features is "You need a website, but don't know how to build one? Well, Notion is easy to use, here's a way..." Boom! Done and dusted! Specifically, quickly and easily transform your Notion content into a complete website with custom domains, styles, and efficient SEO, no installation required, instant updates and live, auto-generated beautiful URLs from page titles, auto-preview images, and more.
Noah Bragg believes that building an independent business on an existing platform (Note: Notion) is a good way-no need to compete with large companies.
User Acquisition:
The first 75 clients were publicized on Twitter. In the topic community of Twitter, if you see a suitable target, you will build a relationship and publicize the customer cooperation plan by replying to their pictures and texts.
In addition, Noah Bragg believes that opening up the process of entrepreneurship and R&D in public is also conducive to meeting like-minded entrepreneurs and potential customers.
R & D technology:
Working with React, Next.js, Node.js, MongoDB and Vercel. Noah Bragg pointed out that due to hosting hundreds of websites, there is currently a bottleneck in Vercel management, and the efficiency is a bit slow.
Experience Sharing - Entrepreneurship requires long-termism
Entrepreneurship requires patience and taking your time. Business operations always take a while. If you put too much pressure at the beginning, you will often kill a good idea in the bud.
03
NotionForms: Form builder lets me work 1 hour a day, easily earns $182K a year
Product name: NotionForms ( https://notionforms.io/ )
Product revenue: $182,000 in annual revenue
Creative features:
The function of NotionForms is to provide the form building integration of Notion (a work platform integrating notes, tasks, knowledge base, and database). Currently, there are 26,000 users and 850 paid subscribers.
The founder is Julien Nahum, who used to work in SDE at Amazon Web Services. After resigning in May 2021, he started freelancing and tried some small projects. It coincided with Notion’s open API, which brought back his memories of the tool Airtable—this is a no-code tool for creating collaborative databases, a cool feature is that data can be converted into tables in seconds, shared anywhere, etc. In view of the fact that the Notion database is very similar to Airtable, Julien Nahum decided to "follow the gourd" to make a table generation integration tool based on Notion's API.
User Acquisition:
During the cold start phase of the project, Julien Nahum spread the word mainly through social media, such as posting in every Notion community he could find, such as Facebook groups, Reddit and Twitter. It was a tough time, making Julien Nahum look like a "spammer" for a while, but fortunately, the product was free and popular. Currently NotionForms has a Facebook group with nearly 2,000 members, and a Youtube channel (13,000 views) that showcases product tutorials. More than 70,000 unique users visit the NotionForms website every month.
At present, the biggest contribution to the growth of NotionForms users is that the product itself has the genes suitable for "viral spread"! Because users create forms and share them - responders know about NotionForms. When users add form links to their sites, they essentially create backlinks to NotionForms, which is great for SEO! In terms of product design, each free form has a "powered by NotionForms". The experience in this area is summarized here: that is to say, when you give users the ability to share products, such as providing users with the convenience of embedding products into their websites, users can help you with marketing! Currently, “virality” is responsible for over 55% of NotionForms’ user acquisitions.
Operational Technology:
Stripe for payments, Profitwell for retention of payments and financial metrics, Crip for customer support and email, Amplitude for application analytics, Google Analytics for website traffic analysis and event tracking, Github for code storage and code building, etc. , AWS for cloud infrastructure, DevOps and monitoring, Slack for communication and alerts, and others that use software or platforms for: roadmaps, CMS, task planning, coordinating contractors, etc.
Experience sharing - making mistakes is also the way to learn
Don't be afraid to make mistakes: the most important thing is to get started. Entrepreneurship is not like a job, there is no right way to do things. This is the only way to learn!
be quick. Show the product to users as soon as possible to start getting some feedback.
Be flexible. Don't lose momentum when a project fails.
Build publicly. It's good for meeting like-minded people, and being in a community helps keep you motivated.
04
PDFLiner: Online PDF Editor That Made Me $500,000 a Year
Product name: PDFLiner ( https://pdfliner.com/ )
Product income: monthly income of 40,000+ US dollars
Creative features:
PDFLiner is a platform for working with PDF files (creating and editing files, adding electronic signatures, filling out forms), a secure shared document system (document sharing, locking and unlocking PDF) and electronic document management system (cloud storage, form catalog, PDF conversion) .
The origin of this product idea comes from the professional experience of the founder Dmytro Serhiiev: in the process of working as a webmaster and Amazon seller, document management and digital signatures are often used in business cooperation. Therefore, the MVP stage of this product focuses on document filling and electronic signature. It is an excellent, cloud-based, no-installation PDF reader, editor, form filler and form designer. Accessible from any device - just drag the PDF into your browser to edit. Dmytro Serhiiev said that before the release of the product, he will try his best to find testers, including joining several entrepreneurial websites such as Betalist that are only for beta testers, including looking for testers on LinkedIn and Facebook, etc. The goal is to use data and feedback to Business is doing better.
User Acquisition:
PDFLiner currently has 80,000 users and has a 5/5 rating on G2Crowd.
Mainly through the following methods:
1. Search Engine Optimization
Generate backlinks from external websites (press releases, reviews, guides, interviews), main steps:
First, search relevant websites, blogs and mass media with keywords.
Second, find valuable mailboxes from these sites.
Third, use automated tools, send out emails, and get a lot of collaborative responses, such as sponsored content, link exchanges, and guest posts.
2. Email Marketing
Send out product newsletters (product updates, promotions, etc.), the mailing list currently has 80,000 subscribers.
3. Paid Advertising
Using customer data on Facebook and Instagram ads, Google AdWords builds audiences.
4. PDFLiner membership program (beta)
The pay-as-you-go form encourages users and customers to bring in new sales leads.
R & D technology:
The front-end development uses React and NodeJS, and the back-end uses PHP.
Experience Sharing - Three Lessons and Two Suggestions in Entrepreneurship
Three lessons:
1. Accept failures often, but more importantly, learn from them.
2. Business opportunities exist in the problems of existing consumers.
3. Act fast once you receive MVP-based feedback: development, marketing, team, business metrics, etc.
Two suggestions:
1. Take every feedback you receive (especially from customers) seriously.
2. Trust colleagues and employees, let them do their work, and focus on strategies and experiments.
05
SocialBu: Comprehensive social media management platform, guaranteed me a monthly income of $12,000
Product name: SocialBu ( https://socialbu.com/ )
Product income: $12,000 per month
Creative features:
SocialBu is a comprehensive management platform for social media, which can publish and manage social media content such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My business, etc., and conduct related data and business analysis. The founder Usama is a freelancer engaged in software development. In the early days, he optimized a Facebook scheduling tool for the purpose of simply writing better code. There is no shortage of interested people. Inspired by this, Usama decided to make a comprehensive social media management and analysis tool - SocialBu.
The main customer groups of SocialBu are social media managers, marketing agencies and small businesses. They can manage all social media accounts, posts, conversation management, team writing, etc. in one software, and also provide automation functions for various scenarios, such as RSS Feed posting, autoresponders and comments, web-hook integration, and more.
User Acquisition:
Launched in February 2019, initially by participating in Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups and other social media online communities to find the first batch of users, it took about 6 months to see the results, and the monthly income increased from the first month $22 went up to $500. Usama believes that the "biggest lesson" here is that you should be fully prepared before launching, such as building an email list, and publishing in a way that is enough to bring traffic and registration.
The next way to bring in traffic is to launch a "lifetime discount" strategy for small businesses. Since it has helped shape the product, it has also accumulated a certain amount of funds. In addition, Usama has also placed advertisements on some social media, and Google business is the most cost-effective. At present, SocialBu has a total of about 20,000 registered people. Now the cost of acquiring each new customer is 50-70 US dollars, but generally there are 4-5 times the return.
R & D technology:
Front-end: VueJS, Bootstrap; NativeScript for mobile applications; Back-end: PHP, Laravel, and NodeJS.
Experience Sharing - Seven Experiences of Entrepreneurship
consistency is very important
Knowing when to give up or when to turn is also important
Before you start working on a product/idea, you should ensure market fit.
Product releases should be frequent; no need to wait for the "perfect product"
Never miss a single lead or interested client; even if you don't have a product ready, at least create an email list
Read a lot (books and experiences of other founders)
Build the right team and make sure roles and jobs are well defined
Developers Create Wealth School
01
Video sharing | Three key rules for the success of micro-SaaS wealth creation
This is TK Kader's sharing video. TK Kader is a senior SaaS entrepreneur and business strategist. In 2018, he cooperated with a SaaS PE company and contributed to the largest SaaS acquisition of the year: the sale of Marketo to Adobe for $4.75 billion. In this video, TK Kader focuses on micro-SaaS entrepreneurs and summarizes the three core principles of micro-SaaS entrepreneurial success:
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Focus on a small big niche (you have to focus on what I call a little big niche)
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Your product features can be used by users on a daily basis (you absolutely need to have a daily use case)
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Unify the product's expected values and user needs. (The third one is you wanna take those two things and actually align it with a desirable result and a value proposition)
Three success rules for micro-SaaS wealth creation
