In this post, I’m going to talk through 7 profitable micro SaaS ideas you can build right now to start generating $10,000 a month or more in revenue. If you stick around to the end of this post, you’ll hear a fun bonus idea that’s mostly B2C, but for the right person, I think would be an amazing fit.
I want to give a thank you to founder of nugget.one Justin Vincent. All the ideas in this post were pulled from nugget.one and i appreciate Justin let me use them.
I wanna preface these ideas with three things.
- No validation has been done on these ideas, so I leave that as an exercise for the viewer.
- You shouldn’t reach out to me about these ideas. None of them are mine. None of them are my pain points.
- With each of these ideas, it’s likely there are already tools in these areas.
But if anything, that kind of validates the problem. It can imply that there’s an existing market and a need for this. And also, you have the advantage of a second mover.
So you can go look reviews of these products, you can talk to their users, you can go to Facebook groups, you can go to communities that use these existing products that may already solve this problem to find out where they’re dropping the ball, find out what could be done better. Not all ideas need to be zero to one.
In fact, most should not be. If you want to build a million or multimillion dollar micro SaaS product, the odds of there being no competition is really low.
Idea #1. Slack for medical teams
So with that, let’s kick off with our first idea slack for medical teams.
I work at a research lab that often works with private patient information. It’s incredibly difficult to communicate with my teammates online because we’re not allowed to share any patient info over text or phone. It would be great to have a chat app that uses an encrypted service, but still functions like a normal messaging app, something that would get approved by the IRB.
And as a note, the IRB is the institutional review board and they approve or disapprove of things that are used in experiments and in the study of humans and human behavior.
Going back to the submission:
Encrypted chat isn’t difficult to do, but to have something dedicated for research purposes would be really nice to have.
I really like ideas like this that you could only see if you were deep in the space. If you’re not a researcher, if you’ve never run into that problem of wanting to be able to text someone or send an email with some information and knowing that you can’t legally do that, then you wouldn’t know a problem like this exists. And I’m pretty sure Slack has a HIPAA compliant version that you can pay for, but that doesn’t mean there is not room for a dedicated tool like this that would be purpose built to solve this exact pain point.
Idea #2. Project management software for roofers
Idea number two is project management software for roofers.
Even though the word roofer is hard for me to say, say I think this is an interesting idea, so let’s go to the submission I currently work for a roofing business and due to having multiple employees, a Gantt chart or cascade diagram management system would be great to coordinate staff and set out each individual task that has been estimated for it could also show the next job for workers based on location and price. I use smartsheet, but it’s not custom and thus it’s not easy to use specifically for our trade.
At tinyseed, we’ve invested in several startups that make software for the construction niche. Construction is one of those industries that, while a bit tech averse, really hasn’t had a ton of great tools built for them, and we’ve had a few founders who used to work in construction and then decided to build a tool.
We’ve also had one or two who didn’t really have any ties to construction, but instead got in the Facebook groups, went to the in person events, talked to contractors, talked to those people running roofing businesses or electrical contractors, and figured out what it would take to get them to use and pay for a piece of software. And if I wanted to pursue this idea, those are the next steps that I’d be looking to take.
Idea #3. Automated qualitative data platform for customer feedback
Idea number three is an automated qualitative data platform for customer feedback.
The submitter says:
I work in a tech industry startup for e learning. The big pain point is that we receive thousands of pieces of customer feedback, but we don’t have a way to automatically process them. Instead, a human has to categorize and tag each piece of feedback to understand the demands and needs of our users. I would definitely pay for software that uses natural language processing, NLP, if you’re familiar with it, to categorize our feedback. There are products out there that do this, but inadequately or for way too much money.
This is an interesting problem. If they don’t do it well, it implies it might be hard to do.
There’s a bit of a technical hurdle there, or if there is way too much money. I wonder if it’s expensive to do. Let’s say they’re charging $50 or $100,000 a year to do this and you can build a tool where your cost is not tremendous and you can come in at half the price. It’s a really intriguing idea.
Back to the submission.
There has to be a better and cheaper way to tag open ended qualitative customer feedback. I’ve tried searching for terms like customer feedback, qualitative coding. Right now we have a contractor review every piece of customer feedback manually and tag it.
I wonder if this is a specific tool for customer feedback or should this be for any type of qualitative data that comes through. Think about if you’re a restaurant and you get a ton of reviews and you’re trying to figure out which ones are positive and which ones are negative. I know that we backed a company called Localizer that does this, that helps folks with Google reviews and Yelp reviews, and they built an engine to do just that to interpret incoming reviews because it’s, it’s the same problem. It’s tens or hundreds or thousands of pieces of content and you don’t want to have to manually review each one.
To me, it feels like there’s an obvious need here to interpret qualitative customer feedback. I wonder if that’s just one angle though, you know? Are there multiple verticals here where you could build a tool that maybe you start with customer feedback as the angle, but then you add on other use cases or other verticals as it gains traction. It’s a really interesting one.
Idea #4. Tool to manage SSL certificates
The submitter says:
I work for an Internet service provider in systems engineering. We currently use an in house wiki to keep track of approximately 30 ssl certificates, including where they’re purchased from, what servers they’re used on, and when they expire? 30 certificates may not sound bad until you factor in that. About ten of them are wildcards and therefore used on many services or servers.
These 30 certs cover a variety of services like LDAP, HTTP, Mail, and a myriad of other functions, probably to the tune of 100 to 200 actual deployments. It would be nice to have dedicated software to keep track of these and warn via email, SNMP, or some other mechanism at custom intervals that certificates need renewing. It’d be even better if this could be set to randomly poll the method used. It’s really clever, LDAP, HTTPs, IMAP, etcetera and make sure the cert is good for that server or service.
I have tried looking for solutions for this. Unfortunately most of the options are for enterprise only environments and only built for Windows IIS or only track HTTP. Currently we’re manually solving this with a wiki, but it’s cumbersome and prone to error.
This is a really interesting problem and I wonder, there have to be other people and businesses out there that have this.
I’m wondering if a prototype of this couldn’t just be built with no code. Aside from the the part where he says going out to the LDAP and HTTP and HTTPs and hitting servers, that’s potentially something you could do with low code where you build the basic interface that does the create read updates, leads, tracking, emailing. Like all that is so easy these days with bubble or airtable or any of these systems.
And then if you dipped into code just a bit or hired a developer to dip into that, you could potentially add that piece. But that was really a nice to have if you want to know the truth. The core of this idea I don’t think hinges on having that functionality from the start.
Idea #5. App for roofing, mock ups and visualization
The submitter says:
I work in construction sales. One of the biggest customer reasons for not making a decision to buy is they cannot envision the color. In fact, according to HomeAdvisor, color is the most important decision when remodeling. There is software that lets you create a mockup of siding options by taking a picture of the home and superimposing different sightings. But there is no software for roofs. Instead, we’re forced to hold up little pieces of shingles to the roof and hope that they’re able to envision it. Not only do I think this would increase sales, but it would also increase customer satisfaction and their comfort level.
Another one for roofers. As I said before, the construction industry is an often neglected vertical that people aren’t diving into. It’s a customer pain type of situation. This is almost like a wedge to build something more valuable.
Because just to build it as a sales tool, this is not something you can charge a ton of money for, right? There’s value, but not thousands and thousands a year in value. But what can be interesting is allowing them to do the mock up and then tying that into the engineering. Like is this something that you can then use to do your ordering on? Or you can literally design the project on here and it’ll do a 3d rendered mock up, but you can also then use that during your ordering, during the construction phase, the planning phase, and all other aspects of a project because that becomes a lot more valuable.
Idea #6. Centralized job alerts for Upwork, Freelancer and so on
Submitter says:
I’m a freelance web designer. I have to constantly look for clients and it’s a difficult task. There are multiple freelancing websites that help me find potential clients. Upwork, freelancer.com are two of many. I would love software that would check for potential jobs on those websites at regular intervals and keep me posted so I can apply to them as soon as they become available.
I bet there are systems out there that do this. What I wonder is, are they any good? And if you go into the Facebook groups, into the freelancer forums, if you talk to freelancers, do they use them? And if not, why not?
This sounds like an interesting, fun technical problem to solve. I guess it’d be a lot of scraping of things and there’s a bit of platform risk and kind of outrunning.
As similar I would be sure to do quite a bit of validation before building something like this. Freelancers are notorious for being cheap and for churning because they stop freelancing or they go out of business or they get a full time job. So do I think this is a $10 million business? No, I don’t. Do I think it’s an interesting product that solves a pain point that this person obviously has. Yeah, just might be an interesting product to build.
Idea #7. Platform to speed up the paperwork process of car sales
And my 7th and final idea for today is a platform to speed up the paperwork process of car sales.
And I’m going to say up front, we had to buy a car in the past few months after our old one got totaled and the process for picking out and choosing the car was fine. It was great. We had a checkbook.
We were literally writing a check in it. It took over an hour just to get through the paperwork. Super interesting and frustrating that in this modern day we weren’t just signing everything on iPads or giving them our information once and having it propagate to all the forms.
It was all on paper and it was a ton of stuff printed out and I was surprised that it took this long. But here’s the post from the submitter:
I worked in the car sales industry for several years and the one thing that is still not streamlined is the paperwork process. I believe if a company created either software or an application that utilized data that you have already collected and pre printed it onto paperwork were required for car purchases, it would save a ton of time, both for the companies who sell the vehicles and also for people buying them. The paperwork process is easily one of the worst parts for car buyers and it’s commonly quoted in complaints and bad reviews. I have tried looking for a solution. I was not able to find anything.
My first question is, does this need to be on paper at all? Or can you get a Microsoft Surface or an iPad Pro and just do everything electronically? But even if you can’t, being able to take the information once and put it on all these forms, you know, I think of all these payroll providers that started doing that basically made the process of filling out these PDF forms automated enough. And if I was going to tackle this problem, of course, as always, I’d have conversations with more people. Definitely know there’s a pain point here. What I don’t know is why hasn’t it been solved? Is it truly just a technical challenge or is there some other reason that this isn’t getting any better?
Conclusion
The SaaS market continues to offer lucrative opportunities for entrepreneurs. These seven ideas represent just a fraction of the potential in this space, each capable of generating $10,000+ in monthly recurring revenue. Success hinges on execution, market fit, and delivering real value to customers.
As you consider your options, focus on areas where you have expertise or passion. Remember, the most successful SaaS businesses solve real problems and continuously improve based on user feedback. By focusing on these principles, you’ll be well-positioned to build a thriving SaaS business that can achieve and exceed the $10k MRR milestone.