<< Back to Chapter 3: Finding Micro-SaaS Business Ideas
In June 2011, I was doing freelance work for several e-commerce companies and a few of my clients asked me to build them a store locator for their site. I ran the idea of turning that into a Micro-SaaS through the meat grinder and determined it had potential. Once you get an idea that looks worth doing, you should carve out time to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as soon as possible. Getting hung up on an idea that you never execute is worse than having no idea at all.
About three weeks later, I had a flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires. Somehow I was able to book a first class flight with frequent flyer miles by adding a stopover in New York, so I was looking at 30+ hours in a comfy first class seat or an airport lounge. I decided to build the entire first version of the product on that flight. So the moment I got on the flight, I put on headphones and fired up the text editor. Thirty hours later I landed in Buenos Aires. The first thing I did was go straight to my hotel and pass out for ten hours because I had about a dozen glasses of free champagne and eight cups of terrible airline coffee.
But as soon as I woke up I deployed the site and my Micro-SaaS was live.
I emailed all of my previous e-commerce clients and within 48 hours we had five customers paying five dollars a month. Storemapper went from a sketch of an idea to paying subscribers in less than 72 hours.
This is a classic testament to Parkinson’s Law: that work will expand or contract to fill the time allotted to it. If you give yourself an unlimited time horizon to launch a product you’ll likely never finish it. Setting a defined period of time, and drastically cutting whatever you need from the scope to make it happen, is the best way to launch a small product.
This chapter is going to focus primarily on the concepts of shipping a Micro-SaaS MVP. I frequently get more tactical questions looking for specific resources on how to learn to code, or which frameworks to learn, and so on. I learned to code almost five years ago now and the software world moves quickly. Many of the resources that I learned from are now stale or defunct. I’m not an avid programmer. I think of myself as an entrepreneur who codes or someone who likes to quickly hack together something that works and is valuable. I don’t stay that up to date on the actual programming community and I’m just not the best person to answer specific questions on what resources to use to learn to code at this point.
I want add my opinion to a common debate in the world of minimum viable products. Should you pre-launch or build a working product first? Pre-launching usually means some kind of effort to build a launch email list by blogging about the topic, reaching out directly to potential customers, doing consulting and case studies or basically anything else besides writing code. The goal is to build trust and a list of potential customers so that you can have a big launch and quickly get to a decent level of recurring revenue. The big benefit from this, aside from having your first customers ready on day one, is that you can refine the idea with your target market and get closer to product-market fit without having to write code.
I think that products that are pre-launched are more likely to succeed, BUT I believe that pre-launching is not the right strategy for most people.
The main reason is that pre-launching is a long game. It requires patience and commitment and you don’t know if this is a viable business idea yet. Yes, a well pre-launched product will probably do better all things being equal, but all things are not equal. It’s a huge time investment to pre-launch a product. Your primary mission at this point in the game is not orchestrating a splashy product launch. Rather you want to get to paying customers, and thus real feedback, as fast as possible. Pre-launching just delays this.
Another common reason not to bother with a pre-launch is that the target market for most good Micro-SaaS ideas is just not interesting enough to pre-launch with a blog or podcast. We still don’t really have a blog for Storemapper because there just aren’t that many interesting aspects to store locators. It does a job, simply and cost-effectively, which is the best kind of Micro-SaaS. There is probably a correlation between ideas that are too boring to blog about and good Micro-SaaS ideas.
My recommendation for most entrepreneurs is to follow the tips in the rest of this chapter to massively pare down the scope of the MVP and just launch it fast.
The idea of what counts as an MVP has been the subject of considerable debate since Eric Ries popularized the term in the Lean Startup. A full discussion could be (and probably is somewhere on the internet) its own ebook series. But my opinion is that for Micro-SaaS an MVP should actually do the job it purports to do.
The publication of the Lean Startup has lead to a rash of tactics that supposedly allow you to learn whether customers would buy your product without the hassle of actually building a working product. The most common variation is simply building a landing page with a demo video explaining how the product works and asking people to input their email to “sign up” – then after they submit their email, surprise, you tell them the product is not quite ready yet, or they are on the waitlist, and you’ll notify them when the product is ready. You use that data on email signups to decide if you have “validated” the idea.
The Lean Startup introduced these ideas as an alternative to the dominant methodology for venture-backed startups prior to the book’s publication in 2011. Startups at the time would raise millions of dollars on an idea, spend a year or more building a perfectly working version of the software and then run a huge product launch campaign. Most of the time it was only then, after a year or more and millions of dollars spent, that they would discover nobody actually wanted the product. Lean tactics are a compelling alternative to that VC startup approach, but Micro-SaaS products are not even remotely in the same category.