Micro-Saas Business Opportunities

Here are some interesting business ideas from the Digital Assets newsletter with some advice on how to implement them. This article is worth a read if you are struggling to find a good startup idea.

Here are the ideas:

CRM for Freelancers
“Solution – Enter freelancer CRM to handle all of the sales and admin tasks that most freelancers don’t enjoy. Keep the functionality easy and simple. Functionality to filter on contacts, pipeline, and tasks. Integration with email marketing would be another great idea.”

KPI Tracker
“Link/KPI tracker. It will allow the user to create a link for a promotion and then track specifically how that link performed.”

Team Communication/Zaps
“Zoom is clearly the leader in online meetings and chatting, and now they just introduced Zaps. I think this can be huge going forward into 2020.”

Bookmarking Extensions (devs and designers)
“As a developer, I bookmark tabs all the time so I can reference back to them. It would be awesome to add some notes as I read, and have more of a better user experience than just a long list of bookmarks in Chrome.”

Content planner
“Solution – A simple, easy to use a content planner that multiple people can edit and view, and sends alerts to the people working on it when it starts to get close to the time it needs to be sent out and after it is sent out.”

There are some good ideas here that are worth exploring.

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Subscribe to everything, own nothing

“A transient lifestyle could be well-suited to uncertain times.”

“Furniture subscriptions, in particular, have gone up in popularity recently due to a large swath of the population suddenly working from home.”

This article has some great examples on the shift away from ownership. We don’t need to own cars with services like Uber and Lyft. Short-term rentals can be found on AirBnB. We don’t need offices because of co-working spaces. We can now subscribe to software, monthly retail boxes, clothing, and even furniture. Most of these ideas would be impossible to imagine a decade ago.

Business Opportunities: Exploring the extremes of trends like this can help you discover new opportunities. With the rise of remote work and digital nomads, there will be home office equipment rentals, corporate retreat rentals, outsourced tech support, etc.

More homeschooling will lead to children’s toy subscriptions, learning materials, etc.

I have an idea for subscription websites. Outsource all the design, edits, and maintenance for a monthly fee. It would take away all the hassles of building, editing, and backing up your website.

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Guide: Make money building Shopify Micro-SaaS Apps

Here is a long guide on building your first micro-SaaS business on the Shopify platform. Preetam Nath walks you through how to search through Shopify’s app platform to spot potential opportunities.

Business Opportunity: With the pandemic, Shopify has seen massive growth this year. There are many opportunities to help businesses get set up and sell effectively on Shopify.

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The Business Genius of Nathan Latka

One of the most interesting entrepreneurs I’ve discovered recently is Nathan Latka of GetLatka, FounderPath, and the now-defunct venture-backed Heyo.com. He is also the best-selling author of How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital.

Courtland Allen interviewed him on IndieHackers recently. Nathan’s interview on the Pomp Podcast is also worth listening to.

Any one of those accomplishments would be interesting in itself, but how they are all connected is where Nathan’s genius really lies.

Nathan Latka’s Business History

In high school, Nathan Latka started selling Facebook pages and later turned this into Heyo.com. He raised $2.5million for the company when he was 20 years old. The business was eventually sold at a loss but Nathan found even bigger opportunities.

After realizing how hard it was to get backlinks and mentions by bloggers and the press, Nathan realized the importance of building his own distribution channel.

Some of the genius business decisions Nathan has made:

Boldness is powerful.

He started a podcast interviewing SaaS founders where he really digs in to get comprehensive financial details in short 15-minute episodes. He got early interviews because he promised he was going to have 1 million downloads in the first year.

Quantity matters.

He publishes a daily podcast but batches these interviews into 2 or 3 days a month. 30 podcasts a month = thousands of podcasts over the years. And, they only take a couple of days a month to do.

Different is good.

Nathan compiles these SaaS metrics into a monthly print magazine that he sells for $30 per month.

The product is the promotion.

CEOs that agree to purchase large numbers of copies of the magazine to get their picture on the cover that month. Playing on their egos is a brilliant marketing and sales tactic.

Leverage other people’s audiences.

To launch the podcast, he offered to start with the first 10 CEOs to agree to promote the new podcast to their lists.

Again, the product is the promotion.

He leveraged his audience and connections with businesses to write a book. He offered companies a mention in the book if they’d pre-buy copies. This lead to $30k in pre-sales before he even had a title.

Thought leaders get opportunities.

The connections he’s built with the CEOs he interviews has lead to numerous other opportunities like his new financing company, FounderPath, that will loan SaaS companies cash at reasonable interest rates.

Data is a competitive advantage.

His company has built a custom dashboard where companies can log key business metrics. Companies that are doing well get cheaper interest rate loans.

Your Brand Matters

Most of his sites are branded under his own name, which helps to make him a top thought leader in the SaaS space.

Success = Good Ideas with Great Execution

Nathan Latka has made some brilliant business decisions and backed them up with unrelenting execution. Very impressive.