The New American Micro-SaaS Dream

I loathe to say this, but it might not be good for the economy because it fails to take into consideration division of labour.

A 'niche product' is usually be more economically better provided by a slightly more generic product, or a 'product feature' at by BigCo or SME.

Of course there are always going to be 'hyper niches' with very, specific and applied technology, but I don't feel this is the case.

I think most of these micro saas just have customers that 'like them' and 'pay a certain amount' 'because' and not really fully taking into consideration the added complexity, cost, overhead, resiliency.

In China, they have hugely complex manufacturing supply chains - yes - you need the little 'mom and pop shops' to provide that hyper niche component - but with generic SaaS it's not the case really.

All of that said, the theory falters a bit when you have A) Big Corps and SMEs that languish and fail to provide features, or have monopoly pricing power (though the later is not usually the case, usually the price is near $0) and B) Surpluses are not shared aka if we all used BigCo and SME SaaS, they'd 'keep' all the surpluses and so everyone else is resigned to working at Starbucks. The $1M SaaS is basically a way to leverage power extract some surplus at the cost of overall efficiency.

Again, legitimately hyper-niche solutions notwithstanding.

I don't know what the answer is, but it's worth contemplating what this means structurally. At least it's not completely vapid 'Social Influencing' and scammy value destroying Crypto/NFTs.

I don't know, it is hard for me to just say "go with it", maybe I'm getting old.

Businesses like this are a dream, but it's also a risk. To me seems like the next goldrush, and those mining and rushing to the gold are usually the ones to lose as well.

I feel anxious and not sure if I want to support such movement.

There's a second thought: I don't think paying 10/15 small SaaS each with their own instability, billing issues, risks. Imagine running just an ecommerce like this [0]. This is not the future I want to see for internet businesses. You shouldn't need a plethora of small suppliers to just run a blog with payments. Or most things.

Isn't it fragile to a platform to just take it all?

I feel conflicted.

[0]: Interesting comment from an e-commerce entrepreneur - https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1543740260265361408

A go-nowhere article with a lofty click-bait title aimed at promoting the site it sits on using survivorship bias examples to prove what he's promoting works. I guess that's one way to grow, but still.

It's just called being an entrepreneur and starting a business without getting funding. You get to choose how big or small you want to get it and you realize that you don't have to make it big, you can live a comfortable lifestyle if you want to.

The little problems are learning how to entrepreneur successfully, have the money and energy to do so, and getting lucky enough to find the right idea, right market, right timing with the right messaging.

It all seems so easy when you see someone making a boring, bland, basic ass tool collecting $1MM ARR, but you can't just easily do the same. It's possible, but good luck.

You also learn that you don't have to sell a recurring service or even software at all, you can just sell "stuff" and people will buy it if there is a desire.

I actually think micro-SaaS is an oasis.

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people building small businesses to leverage a tiny opportunity in the market. Build a feature that no major player has captured yet.

This is good for the user for a time. But then they end up with a ton of tiny subscriptions, and trying to link them together to make a complete product. All these tiny companies competing for eyeballs, to get the marketing to be recognized on top of the other tiny companies building similar tools.

And what's the goal of almost all of these little tools? To make a small difference in the efficiency of somebody running their business. Minor efficiencies, not game changers for the most part.

Then one of the big players comes in and adds the feature to their main product. Poof, everything somebody worked long and hard for disappears.

Niche to find what you can build that's larger, but I think staying niche as a goal is a challenge.

This is a strange amplification, for sure. But so is every other success story.

I’ve had two successes that were only tangentially connected. The first was consulting, then building my own app, now I’m entering selling hardware.

I went from building industrial BLE sensor apps for $/hr, to selling licenses for a niche electron app (talking to hardware, label printers), and soon I’ll be selling physical hardware (label printers) bundled with my app.

Each success let me bootstrap the next. I’m still solo, and plan to grow to 7-figures over the next 18 months. Buckle up!

You can read a bit more about the label printing solution I’ve built at https://sourceforge.net/articles/qa-with-label-live-how-we-made-printing-from-excel-spreadsheets-easy-and-fun/