7 SaaS Ideas That Will Take Off This Year 🚀

0:00you asked and we listened turns out our SAS ideas videos are some of the most popular on the channel so I'm back again today with seven more SAS ideas I'm surprised no one's built yet I'm Rob Walling I've started six companies I've written three books on building startups and I'm actually wrapping up my fourth right now and I'm an investor in more than 100 startups I want to kick this video off by giving a shout out to my longtime friend Justin Vincent who is the source of all of today's ideas he runs a website called nugget at nugget.1 and he gave me permission to share these

0:34business ideas that I pulled from his database of approximately 4 000 startup ideas as always I want to say no validation has been done on these ideas they have been requested by real people so before I went out and built one of these I would absolutely take some steps to validate maybe I'd run them through the 5 PM idea evaluation framework I've mentioned several times if you go to startups for the rest of us.com you can find the episode where I I talk through that and download the PDF so let's dive into our first idea a delivery route management system this person says I'm a delivery Courier with a route of

1:10approximately 450 stops there is currently no software available in the Canadian iOS Market that will allow me to put in all of the addresses and mark off as I deliver each one there are many options for trucking companies but they are not able to handle small routes like mine my dream application would have the ability to input routes manually the ability to track routes by GPS memo and voice features for each stop flagging a tool for addresses and he talks about a few other requirements now here's the kicker of this idea he says I only make a hundred dollars a week doing this route so the app would need to be less

1:45than five dollars to be feasible in my budget having an application like this would meet those needs and would allow me to have a smoother more efficient route so what do we think about this I think delivery route management systems are crazy fun to build if you're a builder but in this case the price point is such that this might not be one that you want to approach I think that my next steps for this would be to find out if there is a place where folks who do these low-cost routes hang out and to consider to reach out to them and to figure out if this is a need that anyone

2:14else has because this is something that one person asked for and are they willing to pay a subscription or do they really just want to pay a five dollar one-time fee because obviously that's a non-starter at that point because the audience for this is not large enough idea number two is smarter call desk management software the commenter writes I work in a business it help desk when a problem is called in we create a ticket for the issue and all communication goes through that one big issue that seems to come up is when people have a ticket in for a long time it seems to become forgotten

2:44by both the person who put it in and the person at the help desk I feel a good solution that could be implemented is a simple automatic system that could see when those original tickets were put in and after a set period of time could begin regularly notifying those people that they still have a ticket in and whether there is anything new or if the ticket is still needed so with this idea I wonder is this just an add-on to an existing ecosystem you know there are a lot of help desk ticketing software out there already do they not do this it feels like a pretty obvious feature to

3:13me so if they don't is there a way to just build an add-on and make this a step one business that maybe you can add on to jira or any of the other help desk software that's already out there to me this one is a research play where I'm going to go out and look at the top five or ten help desk systems and I'm gonna see do they already do that this because I don't want to build an entire help desk system just to add this tiny feature to it it's not going to be worth the effort and you're going to spin up a whole business org and try to compete

3:39against these massive software companies in order to just have differentiation on this one feature and in almost all cases that's not a great idea our third idea is shift management software for food vending teams the commenter posts I work in the food industry I would love an app that would help me allow employees to schedule from home it'd be great if I could count the people I have for a shift and be able to show me what positions are covered for example do I have two sandwich makers in the morning a speaker person a grill operator Etc I would want to be able to copy over one

4:09week into the next and have a place where I could put projected sales so I would know if I'm using too much labor I look for apps in the Google Play Store none of these were sufficient many of them were too time consuming and a mess selling into the restaurant space or the fast casual space it is a market it can be challenging to get in to me this is also another research play of what exists today just because there's competition doesn't mean you should build it but has this person just not found the right app and and it already exists and you building this isn't going

4:39to help or do you have any type of in or connection to the food industry and if all the apps really aren't that good do you have a unique Insight that could help not only solve this person's problem but potentially be a level up compared to the other apps that are on the market our next idea is self-serve scheduling for cleaning businesses the commenter says I've owned a small cleaning business for years we've never had a simple way to schedule jobs what would be great is for my regular customers to go to a website schedule the day and time they want us to visit and it would match that up with when we

5:11have employees available selling to cleaning services can be a challenge they are very price sensitive the margins are not great and they have high turnover in addition you're choosing customer paying over competitor pain in the sense that they're going to be mostly non-technical users my biggest question here is can you charge enough to justify building this app and if your ambition is to make five thousand ten thousand a month then maybe this is something that you want to entertain I do think the price sensitivity and high churn is going to potentially be an issue but this would be one where I'd be looking at how can I contact and reach

5:47cleaning companies at enough scale how can they find me in enough scale to make the low price point worth it our next idea is invoicing software for Bakers commenter says I work for a small business business that is a bakery we have a lot of orders that come in each day usually requiring five to ten hours of work to complete their cakes pies platters of cookies Etc when we get the order we put the invoices into an electronic system it collects the money but since their custom orders we often guess how much to charge the customers based on the amount of Labor and materials as well as a 20 profit it

6:19would be great if there was software that could help me get a better estimate of what the cost would be if I input minimal details about the product so this isn't just an invoicing system it's an estimating system as well and there are a lot of industries that need estimating software and to use a broad proposal or invoicing or estimation system doesn't work because it's not strongly typed to that problem in my opinion this starts with some research does something like this already exist and if it doesn't then it's contacting bakeries and asking is this a problem what have you done to solve this problem have you looked for software like this

6:51or is pen and paper fine and you're going to need to have 10 20 30 conversations to get enough data to figure out if other folks have this Pro problem and then start exploring what would it be worth if that problem were solved for them what would they be willing to pay the next idea is an aircraft maintenance logging platform commenter says I work in aviation a pain point in my career is that we have paper logging that we physically write in and sign and he goes on to describe that when he does maintenance he'll write a line and then sign underneath it along with his AP number which I'm sure is an

7:23acronym that people in aviation know and he says see how this can be abused anyone could come along copy my number copy my writing style copy my signature and they've just made a false entry under my information if you're in aviation I'm fascinated to hear if this is still how it's done on small airfields so in my shoes if you have any ties to Aviation or even if you don't I would be looking to have some conversations to find out do most of them still use pen and paper and do they have any desire to switch to software because with Aviation being such a regulated industry I do think there

7:55might be some resistance to moving towards software to do something like this especially with maintenance where if you mess this up you could potentially have a plane crash which is obviously a big deal but it does feel like this commenter's problem is a major pain point this is definitely an aspirin that I can imagine some people wanting to fix alternatively I can imagine some folks saying this is the way we've done it for 50 years why would we change and the last idea of today is merger and acquisition data room software so it's m a data I work on mergers and acquisition there are a number of deal Management

8:27systems but most are missing necessary items a great deal management system it's also known as a data room should be mostly project management that allows all stakeholders to interface through the system and work on the deal due diligence and complete tasks with transparency to all stakeholders it should have the abilities to redact files within the system and incorporate document signing technology the system should be able to essentially be white labeled by the intermediary the competing systems are expensive and every professional shop doing large numbers of transactions each year need to have it I would pay for it of course there are a lot of M A deals and there's

9:05a lot of money flowing around and there is data room software to me this would be a lot of conversations of finding out are you actually unhappy obviously this commenter is unhappy with his or her data room software but how many M A Brokers investment bankers don't like the data room software they're using if the argument is just that it's too expensive I'd want to see what those cost because if it's 15 000 a year and you feel like you can build an amazing data room package sell it for 10K that's still a pretty good margin as long as the sale process is not arduous and it's

9:36not months and months of phone calls and procurement there is absolutely money in this market the question is do people need it do they actually want to switch and to do that you're going to need to have a lot of conversations that's it for our seven SAS ideas hope you enjoyed the video if you did I love it if you'd hit the like subscribe to the channel we're going to be putting out another ideas video here in the next month or two and we're going to try to have a regular Cadence thanks for joining me I'll see you next time [Music]