As we dive into 2024, the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace. With emerging technologies and shifting market demands, entrepreneurs and developers have exciting opportunities to create innovative solutions. This blog post explores 8 promising SaaS ideas that are ripe for development this year.
From AI-powered productivity tools to niche industry platforms, these concepts address real-world needs and have the potential to disrupt their respective markets. Whether you’re a startup founder or an established company looking to expand, these ideas could inspire your next successful SaaS venture.
In This Article:
Idea 1: Client portals for Wix
Idea number one is client portals for Wix, which we found on Reddit.com
The poster writes:
I am a freelance and full time agency art director. My current portfolio is on Wix. I would love to set up a client portal or hub on my site that allows clients to access files, folders, submit project requests, as well as receive invoices and send payments, ideally with their own individual logins. Have any of you had success doing this on Wix or other sites? Totally fine if it’s a plugin, if it works well enough. I’ve heard of CRM services like Salesforce and HubSpot, but they may be too expensive for what I’m trying to do.
In fact I think they are too expensive. Client portals for Wix. This would be one that I would take a peek. Does it exist? Is it any good? Does it have good ratings? This could be a great step one business idea.
Idea 2: Support ticket system for ClickUp
Number two is a support ticket system for ClickUp and we found this on the ClickUp forums where people can make requests for new features.
What you can tell from this ticket is that ClickUp doesn’t have a native support ticket system and there’s a 5 year old feature request with 2500 upvotes with their users basically begging for a solution. So ClickUp has offered kind of a pseudo solution, but users appointed. It’s basically a workaround and many, many people are unsatisfied with it.
So it feels like there’s a lot of market pull here for someone to create a great step one business, although this would have a lot of platform risk, so it’s definitely something I would think about as a step one business.
Idea 3: Architecture plans, review and commenting tool
Idea number three is an architecture plans, review and commenting tool.
You might think of this like frame.io for architectural drawings. We found this one on Reddit and we’ll link it up in the description. The poster writes:
My firm has expressed interest in making the switch to digital for all of our in house drawing reviews. This is for check prints, squad checks, shop drawing reviews, et cetera. We’re a pretty small firm of mostly contractors. I’m one of five engineers, so I was looking for alternatives in place of the larger enterprise software suite. Bluebeam seems to be the most common, but I think that may be a bit excessive for our needs. I imagine most of us would just use normal pen and highlighting tools, with the occasional text box here and there. We currently use Nero for our PDF needs, but the review tools are terrible. Edge has a nice pen tool, but the highlighter is only for embedded text
And the op asks what do you use? He’s asking in an architecture group and then they wrap up with while working from home last year, most of us just use Nitro, Adobe with a mouse, but that was hell. There are obviously other tools on the market that can kind of do this, but if you read this post, there isn’t a great solution for this. And Bluebeam, the alternative that they mentioned starts at $240 a seat. So if I were to build this, I’d be thinking about can I build a streamlined tool that does this and exactly this? To where perhaps I could undercut one of these bigger players.
Idea 4: In person event venue setup planner
Idea number four is from nugget.one. Thanks to founder Justin Vincent for letting me use one of his ideas in this article. This idea is an in person event venue setup planner. The poster writes:
I am a stagehand at a rental performance venue. On an almost daily basis we have to communicate with rental customers who describe in writing or on the phone the setup they desire for the stage and the venue upon their arrival. Many times what they ask for isn’t sufficient for their actual needs, or they were picturing something different in their heads, or we were picturing something different based on our knowledge and our equipment. I would like an app that can be front loaded by us with the amount, types and capacities of equipment available to rent everything from sound shells to a dance floor to the number of chairs, risers, microphone spotlights coordinated with the amount of time and personnel it would take to accomplish each setup.
But obviously only we would see that part, customers could drag and drop items onto a diagram of our stage so we would have a visual of exactly how they want chairs and risers and microphones placed.
We would use this multiple times weekly in our rental setup. I would even wanna store certain companies or renters that rent often from us, so everyone in the shop would know what they want even if they hadn’t worked with the customer before. This would save us a lot of time and therefore a lot of person hours and money.
Idea five and six are around the ever popular and fast growing no code ecosystem.
Idea 5: Version control for no code
Idea number five is from Twitter and it’s version control for no code. This is from JBGeoff on Twitter.
He requested version control for low code.
SaaS apps should be in the form of UI plugins that can be embedded into other SaaS apps. Features view history set versions, create branches, collaborate with others, initiate rollbacks webhooks for integrations I think this is a great idea.
Is it even possible to build? How hard to build? I don’t know.
Idea 6: Automated testing for no code or low code applications
Idea number six is automated testing for no code or low code applications. When we write code, we have unit tests, integration tests, system tests, all kinds of tests in we didn’t used to and the code was brittle. Things would break. We would introduce errors and bugs as we changed it. No code and low code have not solved this yet. Someone will.
Maybe it’s the no code platforms themselves, or maybe it’s an indie developer like yourself who builds a plugin and solves this for their users.
Idea 7: Low setup product analytics
The 7th idea before we get to the bonus comes to us from Nick Swan on Twitter and it’s low setup product analytics. Nick Swan, the founder of Seotesting.com, chimes in. He’d like to see a product analytics tool that you don’t need a consultant to set up and run. Just install the JavaScript snippet.
It tracks all page visits and all actions taken. You tell it the final event you want to happen, for example, a subscription thank you page and it tells you the common pages, actions used and visited so that you can figure out what actions successful users take to see value in your tool.
Bonus idea
I’m going to give you an 8th bonus idea. The bonus idea for today comes from Justin Duke on Twitter. He requested:
An API that lets me post a payload of HTML, a device type, and a target app, and it returns a screenshot of that HTML rendered as an email on that device in that app.
This reminds me a bit of Litmus, which is a tool that allows you to view emails and maybe even web pages on multiple devices. But he’s added a bit of a twist to it, and it might be something you want to tackle.
Conclusion
As we look ahead to 2024, the SaaS landscape continues to evolve, offering entrepreneurs and developers exciting opportunities to innovate and solve emerging business challenges. Whether you’re passionate about AI-driven analytics, sustainability solutions, or remote work tools, there’s no shortage of potential in the SaaS market. The key is to identify a genuine need, validate your idea, and execute it with precision and user-focus.
Remember, success in SaaS isn’t just about the idea—it’s about creating value, addressing pain points, and continuously adapting to user feedback. As you embark on your SaaS journey, stay agile, keep learning, and don’t be afraid to pivot when necessary. The next big SaaS success story could be yours!