💡 SaaS Ideas to Build Right Now, Before Someone Else Does ⚠️

0:00in this video i cover six sass ideas to build right now before someone else does stick around until the end where i talk about several places you can go to find almost endless inspiration for new software product ideas i'm rob walling i'm a startup founder with multiple exits the author of three books about building startups and an investor in more than 100 companies before we dive into any of the ideas i want to remind you that just coming up with a sas idea and going and building it is usually not the right process usually you go out and find people that want this and are willing to pay for it you try to

0:29pre-validate it through conversations but lists of ideas are interesting they are fun to hear and these are ideas that i have seen needed in the wild whether by my own companies or companies in the tiny seed and the microconf ecosystem but i would caution you against rushing into your basement and spending six months building this thinking that it's pre-validated because they aren't so with that let's dive into idea number one podcast workflow management i'm the host of three podcasts and what we found is that we were always duct taping things with baling wire and using google docs with sometimes dropbox then we moved to notion we had trello for a

1:02while and these days we have built basically a completely custom solution inside airtable it's a no code solution so air table plus dropbox and then i actually have questions that come in through video ask into a trello board so we literally have still have four tools and some emails going around to produce our podcast brilliant sas founder out there could come into this space which at this point is a pretty hot space but i haven't seen anything for podcast production project management and i'd imagine there is a founder out there who could have a vision for this right and bring this all under one umbrella and

1:34make the process more efficient idea number two is an applicant tracking and rating system specifically focused on either startup accelerators or accelerators plus universities and you can tack on some other niches beyond that i run a startup accelerator called tinyseed it's for bootstrap sas founders and we have tried out two different systems for our applicant tracking because we get several hundred applicants whenever we do a batch opening we wanna go in we wanna rate them and then we have conversations with them we choose some to make offers we have to reject others and there are systems out there that do this systems like submittable is one example and

2:09there are several others that we've looked at and what we found is between the the poor ux the bugginess and the inability to filter and you know run reports the way we need has really made it so we have to do a lot of exporting to excel in order to do the work we want and the pace of product development on these products just doesn't appear to be that great but i think someone who could build a tool like this with good ux and still keep it relatively expensive this is not a cheap space it's not a cheap tool to purchase i think someone could come in and have

2:38decent success in the space idea number three is pricing pages as a service so this is probably more of a micro sas idea but you can imagine how many sas founders or any type of startup founders are building pricing pages then are never split testing them and have to wire up all the stripe code and take so many more steps to get a pricing page in line and you and i both know that there are best practices tools like this bracing grids for wordpress pricing grids for other ecosystems but i have not seen one that is a sas built for sas companies and so you would basically

3:09hook it in to their stripe account and everything else would be done for them the danger of course is that some days stripe builds this themselves but that's why i was saying it's a micro sas because there is platform risk but i still think it's an intriguing idea idea number four is zapier for x where x is a niche that is not currently being integrated into zapier so think of going deep into medical or legal or construction or architecture and engineering interior design there are all these niches where those tools are not connected via zapier and i'm intrigued by the idea of going into these niches and figuring out how to

3:44connect these tools in a basically a no code way in a way that hasn't been done today because zapier if you think about it it is a general tool it has a lot of of marketing technology and they have hundreds and hundreds of integrations but they don't go deep into these niches because there probably wouldn't be enough usage to justify and you know doing an integration so in your shoes if i had expertise in a particular space i would consider is there a need for zapier for x idea number four is essentially a competitor to intercom and drift so it's chat plus support plus probably some other stuff the reason

4:16this comes up is because i don't know how many sas companies that i talk to especially early stage startups that are frustrated with these tools these tools now have tended to move up market as they do they sell at high price points and they sell to enterprises and i believe that there is quite a bit of room in the bottom of this market and it doesn't mean you have to be super cheap infusionsoft was charging four and five hundred dollars a month i built a startup called drip that competed with them didn't mean i had to have to charge ten dollars a month but there was

4:41definitely room in that 50 to 300 range for us to undercut them on price while we built a brand and i know that there are a lot of folks that are unhappy with intercom due to price increases and i think there's room in this space this would not be micro sas and it would probably not be the first sas i built because it's going to be extremely competitive but if you've stair-stepped your way up and you're ready to get into a competitive large space that's a proven market i would consider this idea and the sixth sas idea is an investor update and reporting dashboard the reason this comes up is because there

5:11are a lot of venture funds and accelerators that raise a bucket of money from investors and then they invest them into startups and they have to do two things they have to get monthly updates from those startups and then they have to provide consolidated updates about fund performance or about things that are happening with the fund and and the companies in these batches then they have to report to the investors on fund performance asks from those companies you know there's just a lot of stuff so there's a few jobs to be done with this you want to be able to get updates from the startups that

5:41you've invested in from your portfolio companies and you want to have a dashboard that your investors could log into and then even a way to send monthly investor updates but as far as i know there is no tool that does this and when i have talked to other venture investors and accelerators everyone's building their own custom thing or cobbling it together and now i want to dive into a couple places you can go to find almost endless inspiration for new sas ideas the first is anytime you see a business using excel to solve a problem in an ongoing fashion it's probably an opportunity for a sas application the

6:13second is no code just the no code space in general i think that there are so many tools being built in that space and there's so much potential but if you are a no code expert can become a no code expert or can talk to no code experts and find out where the edges are and where things are you know falling off or need extra tooling i think there's a lot of opportunity in that space and the third and final is to look at b2b sas marketplaces figure out some tools that have been built into these marketplaces that are not already in other marketplaces so we're gonna link in the

6:42show notes an article that has 68 b2b sas marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers if you have expertise in one of these areas or you just want to open all the marketing marketplaces and figure out where are the opportunities here like sift through them and be oh this is a great idea and that appears to be doing well it has a lot of ratings does that app that's in the shopify app store also exists over here in the woocommerce app store where is that app in the mailchimp app store also available in this other you know competitor of mailchimp app store and so this approach is definitely more like

7:11building step one of the stair-step approach right it's building that small first app to get to the point where you have financial freedom such that you can focus on bigger ideas but i'm a big believer in these sas app stores these marketplaces and even though there's platform risk they take so much of the headache away from you as the founder in the early days that i believe it's valuable to look at them as opportunities if you enjoyed this video i'd love it if you'd hit the like button subscribe to the channel we have videos coming out like this every week hope you enjoyed those sas ideas i'll see you in

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