Can You Make $10K/Month MicroSaaS? (The Truth)

28 Jul 2025 · 40 min · 10 chapters

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In short

Defines micro SaaS vs broad SaaS, why micro SaaS can be built by solo/tiny teams with high margins, and provides a growth flywheel + user-journey playbook. Includes a “micro SaaS playbook in public” and multiple stealable startup ideas.

Guests

No guests mentioned; the host speaks throughout.

Key claims

Micro SaaS targets a niche audience and niche product “feature of a feature,” prioritizes profitability (often 10–50K+ profit/month), can be built quickly (e.g., 48-hour MVP), and grows via audience/community, word of mouth, referrals, SEO, and retention (“kill churn with value”). Charge from day one; ship weekly/daily improvements.

Notable examples

Bank Statement Converter (~$40K MRR, solo). Financial net worth projection (~$24K MRR, ~$109/year). Clean voice podcast editor (~$20K MRR). BoringMarketing.com audience origin (Twitter). Namesnag.com (AI expired-domain finder built in public; first dollars in ~1 hour). Micro SaaS ideas: PermitSync, PodScripter, SpecSheet, CartSaver, GrantGuru.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Defining Micro SaaS

0:58 to 2:26

Understand the key characteristics and advantages of micro SaaS.

“So, you know, the first question is, what is a micro SaaS?”

Examples of Successful Micro SaaS

2:26 to 4:50

Explore real-world examples of effective micro SaaS businesses and their success.

“My favorite recent example is this company, Bank Statement Converter, because it's so literally simple.”

The Growth Flywheel for Micro SaaS

4:50 to 6:48

Discover the growth strategy for building a successful micro SaaS business.

“sugarcoat it, not everyone who's going to start a micro SaaS is going to work.”

Understanding User Journeys

7:58 to 11:39

Learn about the typical user journey for a micro SaaS product and its implications.

“So usually there's a manual workflow that people are doing that's painful.”

Building a Micro SaaS in Public

11:39 to 16:53

Understand the process and benefits of building a micro SaaS in a public manner.

“From an affiliate perspective, what I'm seeing is approximately 20 % of, you know, you can give 20 % of your revenue to affiliates.”

Understanding Churn and Value Creation

16:54 to 22:25

Discover strategies to retain users and provide ongoing value in your micro SaaS.

“In the beginning, you're going to have a lot of churn.”

Micro SaaS Ideas: Permit Sync and Pod Scripter

22:26 to 28:01

Explore practical micro SaaS ideas and their potential business models.

“The version one asks you three questions.”

Exploring MicroSaaS Ideas

28:01 to 32:30

Learn about various MicroSaaS business ideas and their potential benefits.

“Once MRR hits$10 ,000, roll out topic clustering that auto generates evergreen YouTube playlists and newsletter digest, maybe at$49 a month.”

Grant Guru: Simplifying Grant Writing

32:31 to 35:56

Discover how to streamline the grant application process for nonprofits.

“It renders WebM with FM MPEG and emails via Shopify's marketing API.”

Keys to Success in MicroSaaS

35:57 to 39:22

Understand the strategies for building successful MicroSaaS businesses.

“It's not like you're just going to follow this playbook and it's just going to work.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Today, we're going to go over the most comprehensive micro SaaS 101, how to build one, what that looks like examples. I'm going to give away some startup ideas. I'm going to talk about growth flywheels. I'm going to talk about user journeys. I'm going to talk about the playbook. This is something that people charge tens of thousands, if not more, of dollars for. But today I'm going to give it away for free because I couldn't find anywhere on the internet where it was in one place. So my hope is that by the end of this episode, you have a really good idea around how to build a micro SaaS business, what that actually even means, what's the difference between SaaS and micro SaaS.

0:38and just get your creative juices flowing so that you can actually go and use AI to build some of these micro SaaS businesses, either if you have a full-time job and you just want to, you know, build something on the side, if you just want to learn, or if you want to go all in and make micro SaaS your main thing. So let's get right into it.

1:08So, you know, the first question is, what is a micro SaaS? So the difference between a micro SaaS and a full on SaaS is that a micro SaaS is focused on a niche. So it's the target is extremely niche. Think of Salesforce. It's targeting basically everyone. A micro SaaS is a particular niche audience. And it also has a niche product. Like it's just kind of a feature of a feature. And it's also focused on profitability, whereas, you know, a successful micro SaaS might get you 10, 20, 30, 50 K a month of profit. And it's also focused on it's also for, you know, you could be built with a solo or tiny team.

1:54Why build one? It doesn't cost a lot of money to build. Typically, these micro SaaS have 80 to 90 percent margin from a lifestyle perspective. You know, we're going to get into it. But, you know, some of these things are, you know, they run on not that much. You know, it doesn't require 120 hours a week type thing. You can have 100 percent of the equity for you and your team. And there's beginning to become this, you know, marketplace or liquidity for exits for some of these things. So let's talk about some examples. My favorite recent example is this company, Bank Statement Converter, because it's so literally simple.

2:34This is a business that's doing$40 ,000 a month of MRR, solo founder. And it's literally exactly what it sounds like. The world's most trusted, quote unquote, Bank Statement Convertible easily convert PDF bank statements from thousands of banks worldwide into a clean Excel format. So this is the whole thing, right? And why does it work? Well, I think it works because the domain is good. It does a thing very well. It's a pain point that people have. And it's just very, very simple. So that's an example of what a micro SaaS could be. another one this one's at 24k mrr is this whole idea around projecting in the future your financial net worth and it's just a nice way to visualize it they're pricing i think you know 109 a year so you're talking about you know under 10 a month and that's the whole business it's just you know, projecting your financial future.

3:41So you can see, right, you can see that these are sort of a feature of a feature. This would be a part of a bigger thing, but they fully focus on it. And in the age of AI, you can actually build a startup that is a feature of a feature or micro micro SAS, because it's just quicker, easier to build with tools like cursor, et cetera. um clean voice 20k a month mr so you know edit your podcast in 10 minutes automatically so it's just the features around you know removing your background noise filler words long silence mouse sounds right so 15 000 podcasters use it a lot of you know i'm a podcaster and or you know have a podcast.

4:28So, you know, I have, I have, I've felt this pain point. I felt this pain point. So you're starting, starting to notice that a lot of these ideas have like very good brands, very big pain point, clear. And you can, you know, if, if it works, you can expect, you know, the five to six figure a month MRR range, if it works right now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, not everyone who's going to start a micro SaaS is going to work. Just like not everyone who's going to start a startup, it's going to work. The odds are against you. But if you stick with me to the end of this, and if you actually ship products and you learn, it's going to increase your likelihood of success as you see what works and what doesn't work.

5:18So we're going to talk at the end of the episode about some of the micro SaaS ideas. I'll give it away. And I've been thinking about like, you know, what makes the growth flywheel of a successful microsas. And I've, you know, summarized it into this. So first, you're going to actually build an audience or community and or community. So for example, when we first started boringmarketing.com, you know, it was just a Twitter account where we talked about automating marketing with AI workflow and agents and over time we built the business around it but it literally started off as a x account so you could do the same so you can start by building the audience of community from that you're going to learn about the acute pains of that audience and community from that you know well obviously you're going to build something you're going to build the startup right and then it's going to generate some word of mouth you're going to start creating recurring revenue and then you're going to reinvest that recurring revenue into the audience and community right so you're going to do things like irl events you're going to do things like promoting posts that work you know for example maybe this post worked a lot you can see it got two two thousand likes how do you put paid ad against that and then get people to sign up to your startup up.

6:41That's, you know, to some in summary, exactly how to think about the growth flywheel of your micro SaaS. Real quick, I need to tell you about something that's helping me sleep better at night as an entrepreneur. I was running multiple companies with money scattered everywhere, zero spending visibility and making growth decisions pretty blind. I knew there had to be a better way and my friend told me about Brax. So I switched and now I have mission control for every dollar. Spend management and visibility, virtual cards for my team, and earning cash from the same day treasury product. I was leaving so much money on the table but not any more.

7:30I have a financial operating system for our businesses to make decisions so I can spend smarter and move faster and it's been a total game changer. I'm loving Brex so much I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the pod. If you're building something real you need a complete financial operating system like Brex. It'll help you sleep better too and you can't be mad at that. So let's talk about the user journey of a typical micro SaaS product. So usually there's a manual workflow that people are doing that's painful. So for example, we talked about the bank statement converter. People were doing this across a bunch of different companies and it's annoying to do, right?

8:20So there's that manual workflow that people were doing and people look for a fix. Oftentimes they go to Google or ChatGPT or Perplexity to find the fix. They find that micro sass um that's why having a good domain name is really important um now by the way a lot of people are going to say well you know all the dot coms are taken and stuff like that well like you know not all the dot coms are taken first of all and also like these long ones that like sound like super long bank statement converter converter you would be surprised how many of them are not taken. They have a wow moment, like they use the product, it works.

9:04Of course, you need to create a high quality product. Usually there's some trial to value. So maybe it's, you know, a free trial for a few days, they see it works, and then you start paying$19 a month. They're hopefully delighted and they tell some of their friends or you have, you know, you incentivize them to share it with their Slack for maybe free credits and stuff like that, that creates the referral influx, which creates growth. And the other thing it creates when you share it and people are sharing it on Twitter and Instagram and places like that, it helps with your SEO. So over time, it compounds.

9:41And what does that look like from a numbers perspective? So you can think of it as like, well, you start getting 10 ,000, you start by getting 10 visitors a month, and then it gets 100, 1 ,000, 10 ,000 site visitors. But let's just use, as an example, 10 ,000 site visitors a month, 1 ,500 of them do free trials. That gets into 300 active users that are paying about 150 paying subscribers, paying$19 a month. So you end up getting about 30 advocates. And a lot of people focus on these paying subscribers, but you really want to think about how do you get to the top of the funnel. And that's where this audience and community piece is so important.

10:19Because if you build an audience and community and you become a creator of some sort, you know, you can definitely earn a lot of attention. And a lot of people, a lot of people say, like, to me, at least they're like, well, you know, easy for you to say, like, you guys created this zero to 78 ,000, you know, boring marketer community. You know, it's easy for you to say that, like, yeah, of course you get 10 ,000 sites visits when you post something. but the reality is we started this account you know a year and a half or two years ago and we started from zero so it is totally uh totally possible to do um and if you look at it from a financial perspective like you know it's going to suck in the beginning like you're going to be making zero dollars or ten ten dollars a month or a hundred dollars a month um but it compounds i just want to let you know that if you build a good product and you're building a good audience and you're adding to both those things, both from an audience and a product perspective, your month one, you know, you might do$200 a month.

11:24You might three, you might do$2 ,000,$6 ,000,$7 ,000. If you reinvest these profits into ads, affiliates, and new features, it does compound assuming like, you know, competition doesn't get super competitive and assuming you continue to actually reinvest. From an affiliate perspective, what I'm seeing is approximately 20 % of, you know, you can give 20 % of your revenue to affiliates. You incentivize them with 20%. You can use platforms. I'm not, I'm not like involved with any of these companies, but you can use platforms like Rewardful to help manage that. I see a lot of micro SaaS has used this product.

12:06You know, I tried to visualize like, what is the micro SaaS playbook look like uh from a visual perspective so you start by finding the the itch right so solve your own problem if you can because you'll know it most intimately focus on niche don't focus on broad and then validate it with the tweet um once you're building that audience you can actually say like hey would anyone want something like this um it's kind of crazy but there was a guy i want to bring him on the pod josh pigford so this guy josh pigford he was on ideabrowser.com which i give away one free idea every single day on this product um sign up if you haven't already but he was on he was on it and he saw he basically saw the idea of the day he said i'm building it it was a micro sass idea he called it name snag it was basically an ai agent that finds profitable expired.com domains.

13:06And he just starts building it in public. And it just like it got, it went completely viral. He says, saw Greg Eisenberg's post yesterday, sighed, realized I was going to have to build it. Woke up this morning at 4.30 a.m. As I do, started building. 12 hours later, we're live. Say hello to namesnag.com and snag a killer domain for your next idea. And then he says, how long until the first dollar comes in? and it didn't take long one hour that's long then he goes i think he says then it goes to a thousand dollars make that a thousand dollars and that was just a few hours so it just when you're building in public like this like people uh people are rooting for you and of course you need to iterate on the idea and add and remove and change the positioning.

14:01But this is very much the playbook of how to build a micro SaaS in public. So you're going to want to build a weekend MVP. Of course, you could spend a lot of time and make it perfect, but you're not going to want to do that. You're vibe code or hire a freelancer or do both to time, uh, constrain it to 48 hours. In Josh's case, he actually did it in like 12 hours. But I think that for most of us, um, you know, 48 hours is a good amount of time. Um, and then you're not going to want to hire people right away, right? You're going to want to make, you know, build the confidence that you can build something and scale it.

14:44Um, so just automate as much as you can and then just tweet, you know, tweet your progress daily. You know, open up your dashboard and revenue. You know, maybe share some of that, create feedback loops and have that distribution first mindset, right? Like just share things on IGX, LinkedIn. There's like two guys I think do this really well. So this guy, Yoni, every day, he just posts day 415, day 414, day 413. And he's just talking about his startup journey. And sometimes it's good. And sometimes, self-admittedly, he's just like, I'm just going to do my daily video. And he just talks about whatever he is he's learning in the arena.

15:33And it got him to 176 ,000 followers just from doing that. So it's totally possible. There's also a guy named Jack Fricks, who does a really good job. I've had him on the pod before, where he does a similar thing where he just, you know, this is he basically just talks about what he's learning from, you know, started off in his mom's basement, but now he's making$20 ,000 a month from his micro sass. So I think short form is super, super smart to do. It's, I'm actually horrible at like looking at a camera and doing short form it is a skill it will take you time but I think that if you can master it and it probably is going to take you 60 days to get good at it and just do it every day and just share what you're learning in real time and you can actually repurpose some of that short form and put it on x in LinkedIn so that's something I definitely recommend you do from a pricing perspective like if you can do recurring revenue because that's obviously the best.

16:37You know how much money you're going to come in next month. Charge from day one. A lot of people create free products for their micro SaaS because they don't feel confident in it. I would say charge from day one. You can always do discounts over time. And then kill churn with value. In the beginning, you're going to have a lot of churn. Churn, by the way, what I mean by that is retaining your users. so the hardest part about a micro sass is people go and they cancel and you don't want them to cancel so how do you stop them from canceling well you give them more and more and more and more value such that uh you know you're you're killing churn over time so don't be scared if your churn is high over time what that means to you is just you need to go and create more and more value and your job as the ceo of this thing is to prioritize the things that will add as much value.

17:30So you're playing an infinite game. You want to ship weekly improvements, if not daily. And you want to stay, you know, outsource as much as you can, like build on top of giants is basically what I mean by this. So use, you know, you don't want to recreate things from scratch. Use things like, you know, throw things on the cloud, use things like Shopify, you know, Shopify, if you need to use things, you know, just build on top of stand on the shoulders of giants. and uh and i you know you know what's missing from here is also just like be kind with your customers like just try to like as you're building this audience you know you're gonna have haters and stuff like that but like kill them with kindness um try to add as much value to as people as possible set up you know tweet notifications it in your niche and just respond to people give value and over time you're gonna add five to ten followers a day on your audience and people are going to hear about whatever it is you're building your micro sass a few more uh frameworks that i want to get into and then we'll get to some of the ideas and how to build them um but uh the market gap heat map uh basically you want to focus like if you're thinking about okay what micro sass you know should i create you want to create you want to basically focus on the quadrant of high demand there's a lot of people that want this thing and there's few tools you don't want to focus on high demand and many tools this is kind of a trap because this ends up getting focused you know it gets bombarded by vc-backed startups and then you you have a huge churn problem and it's just hard to earn attention so i would say like try to focus initially on high demand few tools and then over time like you can expand your product like for example you know the back bank statement converter guy can go and expand into other you know other conversions uh not just bank statements and then he can go into a more um high demand area but initially it makes sense to go into a high demand future area you can use tools like google trends to to find out uh you know where uh where their demand is and you can go and see that um and then you can also you know i go to ideabrowser.com um and see you know the trend section where we have different trends and you can basically just scroll and see like okay you know what is trending right now you know where do I see an opportunity to create, you know, some micro SaaS, you know, some micro SaaS product.

20:16The other thing is a lot of people end up building incredible micro SaaS, but they basically, they do the hard work around getting attention. They get this, they get 25 ,000 followers on X. People know of them, but they're in a space that people have low willingness to pay. So you want to focus on high pain and high willingness to pay. You don't want to focus on low pain, low willingness, high pain, low willingness, and low pain, you know, high status, right? So when you come up with your idea for your micro SaaS, just come back to the problem pay matrix and make sure that you know that people have a high willingness to pay for this product.

21:01So another way to think about it is if you think about micro SaaS, you want to innovate in a niche and you want it to be high polished. If you think about a plugin, what is a plugin? A plugin is like a Shopify app. You're like built on top of someone's ecosystem. You're a WordPress app. It's niche, but it's low polish. um what's a diy script that's almost like a github github repo it's like super broad low polish and then big box sass is like where the sales forces of the world uh play in microsoft and stuff like that you want to focus on innovating over here and not so much my uh market dominance not broad so it's niche it's high polish you've innovated on it in some capacity and that innovation could either be from a product perspective or even just a marketing and positioning perspective and that's uh that's where you want to be okay let's talk about a few uh micro sass ideas that anyone could steal my hope here is that this just now that you understand a little bit about okay what is a micro sass how to think about what type of micro sass idea i want to do what makes a good one uh a little bit of a playbook let's just talk about some ideas that probably could work that fit the bill and anyone could steal these and um and i hope you do honestly so the first idea is called permit sync and the the you know idea is that a lot of you know homeowners hit the wall when they their city's permit office asks for drawings and affidavits and inspection dates they never heard of the pain is paperwork paralysis not hammer skills So you can basically start by scraping public permit checklists for the 50 most active American cities, drop them into a structured database.

22:55The version one asks you three questions. So you do like almost like a quiz. So the city, the project type and the square footage, and that spits out a PDF packet. Correctly named forms an auto filled address and the next step checklist. You can ship this in 48 hours. I would use something like Next.js, Supabase, PDFKit, and then test it on a local Facebook group, like a home reno group. By the way, people think Facebook groups are dead. There's still a billion active users in Facebook groups. So you can test a lot of these micro sass ideas on Facebook groups. The moat is localization. So every week you can have out two more jurisdictions.

23:36You can integrate, integrate edge cases like the, you know, San Jose wild force, wildfire compliance forms, etc. And you can price it for like$99 one time fee for a project, plus maybe an optional$19 a month SMS status line. This is something that a lot of micro SaaS products do is they have a fee and then there's some upsell. So think about when you're building whatever it is, you know, whatever micro SaaS you're building, what is your pricing and then what is your upsell? And then how would you actually grow this? Well, you can post short form, you know, looms or videos, demos titled how to pass an inspection in San Francisco, how to pass an inspection in Miami.

24:24And then you get SEO for, you know, San Francisco permit help. You try to get builders forums to link back. So I think there's a big SEO play for this. You know, long term county clerks will change forms. I acknowledge this. So treat that churn as an opportunity. Upsell them to a$299 a year contract here with automatic jurisdiction. updates and multi-address dashboard so this is to me like a pretty fun uh like fun micro sass idea to do especially if you're into renovations um i like the business model i think that the growth loop makes sense around the seo um and it's going to compound and for people who say like oh seo is dead seo is dead no seo is not dead it's still generating tons like billions of dollars of of commerce and if you do good seo it's going to rank you well in chat gpt anyways and perplexity anyways so uh that's idea number one idea number two and this is one that hits home to me is called pods pod scripter uh so podcasters burn two to three hours at least per episode episode polishing show notes and clipping TikTok teasers.

25:48So basically like 60 second teaser clips. So the wedge is every, every, every RSS feed holds enough metadata to automate 80 % of that groundwork. So you build a web hook that triggers on new episode publication, pipes audio into a diarization model, titles each timestamp, and then feeds the outline and punchlines into a text to video template captions and b-roll so um you know you can ship an mbp targeting anchor.fm users which are spotify users they drop the rss url get a google doc and three mp4 vertical clips in a google drive obviously it has to be high quality right but i would use something like this um and how you monetize it you make the first episode free because you need to show value and we talked about that early.

26:36You want to show value early on. But then$29 a month up to eight episodes, and then you can go usage-based beyond. So I included this idea here because I think usage-based as a business model for Microsoft is going to get more and more common. And it depends on what you're building, but you might realize like MRR or recurring revenue monthly just might not make sense for what your micro sass idea but a usage based might be the wedge to get you get a lot of people to use your thing um and you you know you can use chat gpt and you can use manis and you can use perplexity to project project do financial projections to see if it makes sense um like with your cost and stuff like that but i i anticipate that usage space is only going to get more and more popular and something that a lot of you should look into um and then you know from uh the growth engine perspective the omg here's my free clip tweet is your growth engine so you embed a tiny watermark in the bottom right um you integrate it with descript riverside and cap cut marketplaces for distribution and you do a weekly leaderboard top podcast that gains 10k views using pod scripter and that drives fomo so uh you know thinking like that not only does that drive fomo but it's interesting right it uh it's giving value back to the community so think about like whatever it is whatever microsoft you're building like how can you do a weekly email that keeps you top of mind that you can ultimately create an ad unit that says like upgrade that adds a lot of value.

28:23Once MRR hits$10 ,000, roll out topic clustering that auto generates evergreen YouTube playlists and newsletter digest, maybe at$49 a month. And you probably could exit this business at a four to six X ARR. Okay, maybe it's three X, maybe it's seven X. But in that range, I think that a lot of the vertical specific tools like Avimeo, which is publicly traded, cap cut etc would would buy something like this idea number three is called spec sheet so this is a bit of a more boring idea than in my opinion the first two but listen you know bank statement converter was boring too so you know it's making forty thousand dollars a month so sometimes sometimes you got to be boring so the idea is this b2b buyers go through these long pdf spec sheet sometimes they're like 30 pages hand copying line items into an excel grid to compare chips apis or sas tiers tiers so and this this is happening it might not happen it might not you might not think it's happening because you work at a startup or something like this but in big companies this is happening all the time and the large pain point here is there's decision delay so if you can build a drag and drop up uploader with three competitor pdfs in a sortable web table you can use something like lang chain and taboola to extract fields then you normalize with a synonym that um throughput for example versus requirements that is going to be so valuable for people you can use next js super base cloud run worker uh to go and build this out um and you you know the first version you obviously want to be a super tight scope like Like compare feature flag platforms and then landing page seeded with three public PDFs.

30:16And founders and executives and leaders of companies are just going to feed this product more and more PDFs. And every upload improves your synonym map. So it's another reason why I wanted to include this one is you might have a data moat with your Microsoft. And I love data moat businesses right now. So if you can think about ways to get more data, make the experience better, then that's going to help you with your churn problem later on. Pricing, you can do something like$49 a month. Now let's talk about growth. So people love slides, especially in the corporate environment. So you can do an add a copy to keynote button that renders a pretty two column comparison with your logo footer.

31:04Every deck shared in a board meeting is another backlink. And then the long tail SEO, for example, launch darkly versus split in 2025 is yours within the quarter. So something like this could get to 20K MRR. And you can I actually think it can get a lot bigger. You know, for later, you can resell the anonymized aggregate stats via an API. So you can say like, oh, you have this data around. Okay, 70 % of feature flag buyers choose uses-based pricing. That's unique data that someone would buy. And I just tweeted about this also, like this whole movement around paying for data. You know, I talked about Cloudflare.

31:49They just launched pay per crawl. Websites can now charge AI crawlers for scraping content. So I think you're just going to see more of this over time. So I'm particularly interested in micro SaaS. that uh that have this data advantage and i think by the way people are going to buy businesses just for their data and that's another opportunity like you can go and buy if you can buy a micro a micro sass with data maybe they're going to value it at 2x arr or 1x arr but if you can sell the data you can increase uh increase that arr pretty simply we're going to go through two more ideas idea number four is cart saver so shopify stores lose 70 of carts there's all these generic complete purchase emails but what if you had 11 labs which is the voice ai cloning and you use canvas api to auto record a 30 second personal video for any cart more than a hundred dollars so the app grabs the shopper's first name a product shot and a founder's voice with an mp3 overlay which is so cool and it's like hey jane notice you love these sneakers here's 10 off link below and it's a video um you can even say like hey this is an ai generated version of me but i still think it's really cool and there's an arbitrage opportunity to do this this would this would crush so you create a shopify app uh you know using rails and that triggers on checkout and update webhook.

33:25It renders WebM with FM MPEG and emails via Shopify's marketing API. So you can do something from a pricing perspective, do like 1 % of recovered revenue. And then how you would grow this thing is you just create a Twitter account, an X account that's all about growing. It's all about like abandoned carts and growing revenue. And then you do a lot of like side-by-side A-B graphs around how people increase conversions. And then the last idea, which I grabbed from ideabrowser.com, is called Grant Guru. So I don't know if any of you have submitted a grant, but it is talk about painful. Like talk about painful.

34:17It takes so long. It's so intense. So people really, really do. They try to avoid it or they just give up. But if there's something called Grant Guru and it asks five prompts, like your mission, your impact, your stats, your budget, and then drafts these full proposals matching the foundation's language style and brand, that would be huge. and hopefully make the world, you know, give people the opportunity to do, you know, their life's work and stuff like that. So you can pilot with US-based art nonprofits. The way I would do it is I would scrape 100 winning proposals. I'd train a style transfer template.

34:58I'd build an MVP in Django and Stripe. I'd output it in Doc X with auto-generated cover letter and budget table. And then early users send feedback on tone, fine-tuned by org charts, arts, environmental youth. Pricing, you can do something like$149 for the full proposal or subscribe for$99 a month unlimited. And then growth, you can do publish a public funded via Grand Guru leaderboard. Foundations love success stories and applicants trust proven track records. There's also like no one talks about these stories of how they get the the the these grants. So if you had like a Twitter account that showed this, I think that would be really interesting to people.

35:42And then you can run webinars with grant coaches and then they become affiliates earning 20 percent. These are some of the ideas. And I bet you as you're going through it, if you're taking notes and stuff like that, you kind of understand now, like, OK, there was a pain point. there's like a wow moment there's a trial they tell their friends there's a media component right there's like this building of audience piece um these are focused on high margin um they're not they're low capex they don't require a lot of money oftentimes they require less than 500 to build the first version um they're extremely niche at first like you you don't like a venture-backed company is going to raise a billion dollars to go and build this and it's focused on profitability so it's not for everyone right micro sass is not for everyone um it's really for people like the solo founder um who wants you know a lifestyle business who finds this interesting and you can end up building like a bunch of these too right like if you look at you know uh levels io peter levels he's probably the most famous indie hacker like he's got that's what he has like a bunch of these you know 139k a month 40k a month 36k a month 22k a month 16k a month so you can build a portfolio of those i call that being more of a multi-preneur having multiple products um but you know if you're just starting out you want to start with one proof that you can get to 10k a month 20k a month um and then over time you can go and build others or you can actually buy others.

37:20Like I said, this isn't easy. It's not like you're just going to follow this playbook and it's just going to work. There is going to be a lot of pain and there's going to be a lot of zigs and there's going to be a lot of zaggings. But if you can figure out how to build audience and community and you can figure out how to build products that actually speak to the pain, then you're iterating and you're building audience. You're getting more and more people and your product's getting more and more value. your retention is going more and more down, your engagement is going more and more up, your word of mouth is going more and more up.

37:51And it could be extremely life changing. So I hope this was helpful for people. I tried to make this as concise, but comprehensive as I possibly could. I put a lot of work into this. If you like episodes like this of the Startup ideas podcast please please like and comment so i know to do more of it um and i mean that because uh otherwise uh otherwise i won't do it you know i want to create the i want to i want to uh i want to create value for you for you and the last thing i'll say is you know i i like thinking about this idea radar so i think that if you're building a startup startup idea um there's your the passion on the left-hand side and then you have monetization on the potential and sometimes like you know the what you're passionate about does have monetization um potential but you know usually the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle um so you know you want to you want to build something that you're you're passionate about that you think that you're going to have fun building every day um and you want to build something that has monetization potential because that's going to get you to create something that's sustainable and it's going to get you to come it's going to get excited exciting for you and it's going to place you and you know it's a leaderboard at the end of the day right like making money as a leaderboard how much how well are you doing and how much value are you creating so um hope this was helpful i had fun doing this i think there's a huge opportunity to build micro sass right now um and i can't wait to see what you build and if you're looking for ideas there's only one place to go.

39:37IdeaBrowser.com, absolutely free to go and get an idea of the day. Enjoy.

From the publisher

On today’s episode I share a comprehensive guide to building micro SaaS businesses, which are niche-focused software products that can be developed by individuals or small teams. I explain the difference between traditional SaaS and micro SaaS, share real examples of successful businesses generating $20K-40K monthly revenue, and outline a step-by-step playbook for validating ideas, building MVPs, and growing through audience building and SEO.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:08 - What is a MicroSaaS?
02:25 - Examples of successful micro SaaS businesses
05:35 - Growth flywheel explanation
07:57 - User journey and funnel metrics
12:06 - Building in public strategy
18:28 - MicroSaaS Frameworks
21:58 - MicroSaaS Ideas 1: PermitSync
25:33 - MicroSaaS Ideas 2: PodScriptor
28:52 - MicroSaaS Ideas 3: SpecSheet
32:30 - MicroSaaS Ideas 4: CartSaver
33:58 - MicroSaaS Ideas 5: GrantGuru

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Key Points:

• Micro SaaS businesses focus on niche markets with specific products, typically built by solo founders or small teams
• Successful micro SaaS businesses can generate $10K-50K monthly profit with 80-90% margins
• Growth comes from building an audience first, identifying pain points, creating solutions, and reinvesting revenue
• Pricing strategies typically include free trials converting to monthly subscriptions or usage-based models

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com
The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com

Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about

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