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B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

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Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#41

Post by heyoo »

dstick wrote: post #2

Correct me if I'm wrong but unless you're already an established brand that people actively seek out, or part of the first X listings in a category of a thing everyone wants (i.e. SEO, Ads, accounting for webshops), wouldn't you already be too late on these market places?

No. I created an app in one of these (a year ago). I have 5 serious competitors. Each are decent apps that have been in the game longer than mine - mine is not necessarily better, just with a slightly different angle.

It has about $3.5k MRR, is still growing and I spend maybe 5-10 hours a month on it.

Also, I had no brand before that.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#42

Post by wim »

dstick wrote: post #2

Correct me if I'm wrong but unless you're already an established brand that people actively seek out, or part of the first X listings in a category of a thing everyone wants (i.e. SEO, Ads, accounting for webshops), wouldn't you already be too late on these market places?

Yes, this is definitely something to keep in mind. Especially when bootstrapping (what the post seems to be aimed at), building integrations with a marketplace can be a significant time investment, at the expense of working on other marketing or product improvements. Established marketplaces for popular categories are going to see diminished returns pretty quickly.

For example, we were one of the first to integrate with the Google Workspace Marketplace when it launched many years ago (called Google Apps Marketplace back then). It brought us a lot of leads in the early days. Today, discoverability has become a real problem. The "luck"-component in being featured in any search result or when browsing the marketplace is now so large that I'm not sure if for new products it would still outweigh the work of building the integration and keeping up to date with inevitable breaking API changes.

Overall it can be an amazing channel for growth though, so it's mostly about carefully picking one where customers might find you, rather than just going for something that looks promising because it's big. There's a big first-mover advantage when launching on a newish platform (and as the list proves, there's many new ones).

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#43

Post by cosmodisk »

Workaholic_87 wrote: post #40
cosmodisk wrote: post #26

I work with Salesforce,so I'm quite familiar with the ecosystem. I think a lot people on HN would have a hard time believing the kind of apps that exist on AppExchange and the number of companies that are willing to spend money on them.

I work at one of the mammoth consulting firms doing Salesforce implementation work for Fortune 50 enterprises, and you would be amazed at the amount of client value derived (and the # of licenses sold) utilizing the AppExchange

I do know that the value can be huge- we are using a number of them in our org too. Heck,I even wrote some smaller Lighting components myself( working on another as I type), which boosted productivity quite a lot.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#44

Post by abinaya_rl »

I've been curating remote jobs from hundreds of remote job boards and directly sending it to job seekers to help during their job search. I'm trying to see how can I use this data to do B2B sales. Is there a market place that I can submit the remote jobs data that can be helpful.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#45

Post by chinathrow »

krm01 wrote: post #33
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned remote work, I'm curious for your opinion on nomadlist?

Their numbers seem to be going up as well: https://nomadlist.com/open

As well as the numbers for Remote OK. Up and to the right.

https://remoteok.io/open

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#46

Post by cosmodisk »

mattmanser wrote: post #37
cosmodisk wrote: post #26

I work with Salesforce,so I'm quite familiar with the ecosystem. I think a lot people on HN would have a hard time believing the kind of apps that exist on AppExchange and the number of companies that are willing to spend money on them.

I've not worked with Salesforce for a long time, but it used to have the worst language I've ever used. Some sort of crazy Java/SQL hybrid. And the dev tool for it was written in Adobe Air. Is it still like that or have they moved on?

Yes and no. Apex, the backend language,is still probably 5-7 years behind where JAVA/.Net is, but considering the type of development that is being done with it, it's not that bad. Then,on the from end it's all JavaScript and their component based Lightning framework. Tooling? I'm working with VSCode and there's some relatively recent CI/CD related stuff that makes the process better.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#47

Post by purerandomness »

bilekas wrote: post #18

Can someone please tell me what is an 'indie hacker' ?

An ecosystem of people who are building bootstrapped, non-VC-funded products.

Patrick McKenzie (patio11), who famously built and sold his "Bingo Card Creator", and blogged about the process, is a "prototypical" Indie Hacker.

The ecosystem consists of communities like [1] and [2], podcasts (search for "Indie Hackers"), and conferences like [3]

[0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/

[2] https://getmakerlog.com/

[3] https://microconf.com/

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#48

Post by start123 »

I would add Bitly in Marketing as well. They have more than $100 million revenue per year. Link shortening has got a bad rap but there is plenty of demand for branded links.

I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform.

My service https://blanq.io has tried to address these but I feel there is plenty of space left for more players to enter in. It is relatively easy to get started and scale the service. The barrier of entry is quite low.

But you would need to differentiate your platform - there are like a 1000 clones of Bitly that pretty much do the same.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#49

Post by melomal »

dgb23 wrote: post #28
melomal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who spends their free time building a single SaaS tool for other indie hackers needs. Then struggling to gain any traction and deciding to repeat the process over and over.

Wait, why is it exclusively „other indie hackers needs“?

Indie hackers generally have a low/no budget.

So other indie hackers will say that a specific part of a CRM, for example, is all that would be needed, they create that SaaS and sell it for $5 per month or free (a fraction of the price of an established brand). Rinse and repeat. It's easy because indie hackers appreciate small bugs and issues and are not as demanding as someone who is paying $50 per month, working with a large corporation that needs support 24/7 etc.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#50

Post by melomal »

riknox wrote: post #32
dgb23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, why is it exclusively „other indie hackers needs“?

It's not exclusively, but you find a lot of "indie hackers" come up with business opportunities based on following/reading/speak to other indie hackers and then market to other indie hackers and so the cycle continues

Bingo!
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