A go-nowhere article with a lofty click-bait title aimed at promoting the site it sits on using survivorship bias examples to prove what he's promoting works. I guess that's one way to grow, but still.<p>It's just called being an entrepreneur and starting a business without getting funding. You get to choose how big or small you want to get it and you realize that you don't have to make it big, you can live a comfortable lifestyle if you want to.<p>The little problems are learning how to entrepreneur successfully, have the money and energy to do so, and getting lucky enough to find the right idea, right market, right timing with the right messaging.<p>It all seems so easy when you see someone making a boring, bland, basic ass tool collecting $1MM ARR, but you can't just easily do the same. It's possible, but good luck.<p>You also learn that you don't have to sell a recurring service or even software at all, you can just sell "stuff" and people will buy it if there is a desire.
I got lucky and built a Micro-SaaS that grew to a healthy ARR.<p>At least, I assume I got lucky. I’ve only done this once. Twice? I have yet to attempt.<p>I remember the early days of painful uncertainty and minuscule MRR before I really understood my market. Could I break through that “fog of startup” a second time?<p>Whether you’re on the venture treadmill or your aspirations are smaller (but every bit as valid, IMHO), building a great business — solving a real and pressing problem, communicating that solution to the right people at the right time, and capturing some of the value created — well, it’s never easy.<p>I appreciate the aspirational tone of the article, but I don’t feel that it captures… any of this? To me, anyway, it feels important to at least acknowledge that much of the work is unglamorous grind whose outcome is always in doubt.
I'm surprised to see this on the front-page. It really doesn't seem to have much substance, just aspiration-porn driving sales of their product. I was hoping to read about how to get started, pitfalls to watch out for, etc.
This is a strange amplification, for sure. But so is every other success story.<p>I’ve had two successes that were only tangentially connected. The first was consulting, then building my own app, now I’m entering selling hardware.<p>I went from building industrial BLE sensor apps for $/hr, to selling licenses for a niche electron app (talking to hardware, label printers), and soon I’ll be selling physical hardware (label printers) bundled with my app.<p>Each success let me bootstrap the next. I’m still solo, and plan to grow to 7-figures over the next 18 months. Buckle up!<p>You can read a bit more about the label printing solution I’ve built at <a href="https://sourceforge.net/articles/qa-with-label-live-how-we-made-printing-from-excel-spreadsheets-easy-and-fun/" rel="nofollow">https://sourceforge.net/articles/qa-with-label-live-how-we-m...</a>
I tell myself that eventually I'll quit my job and 'micro-found' something simple that generates enough income that, combined with investments, will be sufficient. I've built a fair share of demos for ideas but it's hard to take them to a full product. Very few ideas I have seem good for this model (niche, executable w/ a small team) and the barriers to entry for software businesses have gone up considerably - it's hard to be a 'generalist' since the popular tooling is now built for specialists and the tech has gotten considerably more complicated, mostly due to evolving standards, customer expectations, and security requirements.
I run a SaaS.<p>The value of the business is not necessarily in the code (any decent coding team could recreate the software bar a bunch of edge cases in a few months), but moreso in the relationships I have in the industry I'm in.<p>These relationships can't be copied or stolen readily. And if someone was out to steal them - I'd see them coming.
I actually think micro-SaaS is an oasis.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Niche to find what you can build that's larger, but I think staying niche as a goal is a challenge.
This gold rush started -at least for my generation- with the App Store.<p>The reach of the internet is so great that even simple ideas are still raking in thousands of dollars per month.<p>I remember sitting at a dinner table with new acquaintances, and my -now ex- girlfriend saying it’s baffling how seemingly simple apps [1] even make <i>any</i> money. They were making twice her monthly salary at the time :D<p>[1] <a href="https://fadel.io/" rel="nofollow">https://fadel.io/</a>
I don't know, it is hard for me to just say "go with it", maybe I'm getting old.<p>Businesses like this are a dream, but it's also a risk. To me seems like the next goldrush, and those mining and rushing to the gold are usually the ones to lose as well.<p>I feel anxious and not sure if I want to support such movement.<p>There's a second thought: I don't think paying 10/15 small SaaS each with their own instability, billing issues, risks. Imagine running just an ecommerce like this [0]. This is not the future I want to see for internet businesses. You shouldn't need a plethora of small suppliers to just run a blog with payments. Or most things.<p>Isn't it fragile to a platform to just take it all?<p>I feel conflicted.<p>[0]: Interesting comment from an e-commerce entrepreneur - <a href="https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1543740260265361408" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1543740260265361408</a>
I built 7 products until I had a product with product market fit with decent revenue. I could not solve the marketing / ads riddle yet. But I have about 25% revenue growth per month starting from a low level. Now I am making a 8th app. I started while I was working as an employee. Obviously I made more money. now I have way more time and flexibility which is a massive gain of freedom plus any potential revenue growth. Basically I exchanged employment risk with business risk which is fine for me.
I'm far less interested in 'ARR' or 'MRR' than I am 'how long will this actually sustain?' And for this sort of stuff, the answer is nearly always "several months, or maybe a few years, or until Corporation X spends a month adding it as a feature to their app".<p>It's really just one notch above the drop-shipping 'dream'.
Most of these micro-SaaS are in shovels business if this was a new gold rush dream. I've observed this space for years, the only saas that makes money is marketing tools / analytics. It's true that B2B is boring, it does not have many types of app. I don't have number but my perception is that this long tail has a big chuck of shovels business. And I'm very skeptical about "niche" vertical type of app, I think it's tooooo small market share even if you told me that some market is really big that 1% is enough for small fish.
This is something I'm excited about, as I have the time & interest.<p>One concern I have though, is coming up with an idea I'm passionate about enough to run with.<p>Where are these business ideas found? A Ubiquiti host is great one, for example.
little do they tell you about the product-market fit lottery and how hard it is to win a bagger. i worked on one saas for years that yielded nothing. i worked on another that took literally a few weeks to make and somehow its gaining traction.<p>i literally did nothing different. sometimes i ponder whether capitalism really is the result of dice rolling and the participant thinks they have greater influence than they really do.
I built a CMS in Dot Net core completely built and integrated into entity framework. i was super excited, the UI admin interface mimicked gits workflow, instantly diffing anything you type. supports complex properties, enumerables, nested forms.<p>it was "almost done".<p>but I came to the conclusion and insight that I should be enjoying the journey as much as the end goal, and as such I stopped development.<p>for now.
I loathe to say this, but it might not be good for the economy because it fails to take into consideration division of labour.<p>A 'niche product' is usually be more economically better provided by a slightly more generic product, or a 'product feature' at by BigCo or SME.<p>Of course there are always going to be 'hyper niches' with very, specific and applied technology, but I don't feel this is the case.<p>I think most of these micro saas just have customers that 'like them' and 'pay a certain amount' 'because' and not really fully taking into consideration the added complexity, cost, overhead, resiliency.<p>In China, they have hugely complex manufacturing supply chains - yes - you need the little 'mom and pop shops' to provide that hyper niche component - but with generic SaaS it's not the case really.<p>All of that said, the theory falters a bit when you have A) Big Corps and SMEs that languish and fail to provide features, or have monopoly pricing power (though the later is not usually the case, usually the price is near $0) and B) Surpluses are not shared aka if we all used BigCo and SME SaaS, they'd 'keep' all the surpluses and so everyone else is resigned to working at Starbucks. The $1M SaaS is basically a way to leverage power extract some surplus at the cost of overall efficiency.<p>Again, legitimately hyper-niche solutions notwithstanding.<p>I don't know what the answer is, but it's worth contemplating what this means structurally. At least it's not completely vapid 'Social Influencing' and scammy value destroying Crypto/NFTs.
That's the dream, but I'm always skeptical about how easily it replicates. We see the success stories, but we don't see the thousands of people who tried and failed to get anything to take off at all