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How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

mikealche.com

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Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#31

Post by jerrre »

ogjunkyard wrote: post #27
jerrygoyal wrote: post #21

> A good ballpark to get started is creating three plans around $47, $97 and $249 each. just like that. really? no matter what kind of SaaS you're running?

I thought the same thing. Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year. Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.

You could also take that as a signal it's not a good market to be in?

Depending on how easy it is to find customers, and your goals/options regarding to scale of course.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#32

Post by kureikain »

If you want to compete with the big players, you have to solve the most important pain point and work upward from that small use base.

My case: I work on https://hanami.run (will soon move to https://mailwip.com due to hanamirb.org conflict) and email forwarding is very competitive. Big and old players are all over the place because at the end of day, setting up email forwarding isn't hard and many open source project did it, heck you can spin up AWS lambda for incoming email in no time.

The pain point is: email will drop sometime, time to time no matter how good an email forwarding service is because they have to scan spam, have false positive, or because of strict DMARC/SPF rule. And I have no tools available to help me out there. So I focus strongly on my maillog features with many level of privacy:

- no log at all: defaut

- only log spam email: give you another chance to read email on our UI

- log meta data

- log meta data + subject

- log whole email

Then, next steps is regex forwarding. Again, I learned this from reddit, forum search of those use base.

Basically I focus on those small features that big player doesn't have.

Then I was able to obtain a very small user base who has issues with big providers. Then I work upward from there to spin out given now that I had a working and good product that people are willing to pay for.

The rest is just iteration.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#33

Post by ezekg »

ogjunkyard wrote: post #27
jerrygoyal wrote: post #21

> A good ballpark to get started is creating three plans around $47, $97 and $249 each. just like that. really? no matter what kind of SaaS you're running?

I thought the same thing. Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year. Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.

Honest question -- are you trying to build a sustainable business on $20/yr per customer? That sounds very ... challenging.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#34

Post by skeeter2020 »

axegon_ wrote: post #22
omarhaneef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was implicit: you find a problem you deal with on a daily basis. This is probably why there are so many more startups pitching development tools than, for instance, something to make the lives of truckers a little easier. If you work as a regular engineer, you must come across dozens of daily problems any of which are not properly solved by your current tools. Even simple things like following up consi…

Most problems we all face on daily basis are completely trivial and those which aren't are often solved by someone. Which is something people often overlook and end up making products which no one really needs. Here's an example - I broke the remote for my AC earlier this year but I managed to salvage the codes and program a wifi-enabled ESP32 to communicate with the AC over wifi remotely, I made a crazy stupid UI fo…

>> Most problems we all face on daily basis are completely trivial and those which aren't are often solved by someone.

Resptfully disagree. There are a lot of non-trivial problems that do not have good solutions. If you look for niche manifestations of hard problems, you can both find something with appropriate scope AND a good value proposition. You also don't need to solve problems, just make them better/easier.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#35

Post by ogjunkyard »

jerrre wrote: post #31
ogjunkyard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same thing. Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year. Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.

You could also take that as a signal it's not a good market to be in? Depending on how easy it is to find customers, and your goals/options regarding to scale of course.

In this case, serving the market is about scale and no-touch/incredibly-low-touch sales. The companies not charging anything are making money on the backend through data, analytics, and sale of information to 3rd parties. There's definitely money to be made, it just depends on who you are asking for that money from.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#37

Post by thih9 »

ezekg wrote: post #33
ogjunkyard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same thing. Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year. Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.

Honest question -- are you trying to build a sustainable business on $20/yr per customer? That sounds very ... challenging.

Could you elaborate?

It seems to me that $20/year could be a good lowest tier price, especially for products targeting individual customers (as opposed to businesses). There are successful solo founder projects in that range (notably pinboard.in, $22/year).

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#38

Post by philsnow »

cvhashim wrote: post #10
omarhaneef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was implicit: you find a problem you deal with on a daily basis. This is probably why there are so many more startups pitching development tools than, for instance, something to make the lives of truckers a little easier. If you work as a regular engineer, you must come across dozens of daily problems any of which are not properly solved by your current tools. Even simple things like following up consi…

Here’s a midly annoying problem I’m currently facing with Slack. Getting annoyed of jumping between DM’s and channels where I end up losing track of a channel I may have needed open or was going through. I feel like having tabs in slack would fix this? Not sure if it makes sense for the app to have this feature but something I’ve been thinking about.

I cling to using Chrome's support for shortcuts-as-apps: go to whateverteam.slack.com, hamburger menu -> "More tools" -> "Create shortcut..." -> "[X] open as window". At least on Mac, it creates a .app in "$HOME/Applications/Chrome Apps" that works like any other app: it shows up in the cmd-tab switcher, you can open it with spotlight, etc.

The best part (and the part relevant to your comment) is that this just opens a Chrome window and you can open (cmd-N) as many windows into the same slack team as you want, and it behaves like you expect a Mac app to behave: cmd-tab goes between teams and cmd-backtick goes between windows of a single team.

I gather that there are some Mac apps or extensions or something that let you gather windows of _any_ app into tabs, so you could likely use one of those here to get tabs instead of windows.

Supposedly Chrome is getting rid of support for Chrome Apps, I think that's what these things are called (?). If so, I'm going to be impacted when it finally goes away.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#39

Post by panorama »

artemonster wrote: post #28
foogazi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if I am a… Why does advice have to apply to every scenario ? What if you are a paraguayan field worker and this is not actionable for you ? Anyways, I’d suggest you talk to others around you and see if you spot the pain points in their day

>Anyways, I’d suggest you talk to others around you and see if you spot the pain points in their day This is not a predictable tactic that would yield a viable SaaS idea, this is a gamble "go dive into the ocean, maybe you will find treasure"

This tactic is exactly how I found our idea.

Of course you won't strike gold on the first person you talk to. Be smart about it, talk to people who work in an industry you would like to serve (doctors, lawyers, marketers, mechanics, etc.) and figure out the inefficiencies in their day to day life. It's not as hard as you've made it out to be.

Re: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

#40

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

artemonster wrote: post #16
omarhaneef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was implicit: you find a problem you deal with on a daily basis. This is probably why there are so many more startups pitching development tools than, for instance, something to make the lives of truckers a little easier. If you work as a regular engineer, you must come across dozens of daily problems any of which are not properly solved by your current tools. Even simple things like following up consi…

"you find a problem you deal with on a daily basis". Nope, not necessarily. Depends on where you work. If you are a cog in a big company, slaving away your 9-5, then no. You would NEVER get an idea that some finance folk would love to get an excel addin where you can click together in a simple GUI a data fetch from API, or whatever.

I think you need to look more closely. There are often problems all around, but they've been "solved." Thing is, very often the solutions suck and are wide open for improvement.

An example from my day to day in a large corporation: we have to enter time weekly: how much time did you spend on project X, Y or in training/meetings/etc. Sure there is software that does this, but it's terrible There are many issues with it that should be trivially solvable.

Now, I will admit that time tracking software is a huge field with lots of strong competition, so this may not be a field you'd want to enter, but it's an example of the problems you would come across during an average workday that are ripe for better solutions.

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