What's New: The power of niche, mini-SaaS products

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Are you sleeping on niche, mini-SaaS products?

• There are tons of great opportunities to build in a niche space with little competition. Here's why smaller may be better!
• Many founders struggle with talking to their customers. These tips will help you effectively interview your users to get the most helpful product feedback.
• Founder Tanmay Ratnaparkhe hit $200,000 in AppSumo sales with his AI content generator tool, Predis.ai. Below, he shares his learnings on the best way to run lifetime deals, including setting the best pricing structures.

Want to share something with over 95,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

💪 The Power of Small Scale Products

by Rachel Joss

For solo founders, the sky is the limit when it comes to hitting a desired MRR goal. Niche audiences talk, and there is great potential for word-of-mouth growth with a niche product. Here's why you should consider keeping things small!

Smaller is...better?

Small audiences have problems that are deemed insignificant and not profitable for larger companies to solve. This is great news for solo founders, since there are a ton of opportunities to build in a niche space with little competition. If you choose an interesting niche with profit potential, you can build multiple products ranging from small to large over time, and serve a particular market over and over.

Think about the communities you're already a part of. You already know some of their problems, and can probably think of solutions to them. If you're searching for a problem to solve, lurking in niche Facebook Groups (and other platforms and forums) for posts that are requesting help is a way to find a good one!

Growing slowly and steadily

Five years ago, I built a small script for a colleague that owned an Etsy shop. It was just a script behind a Google form that helped Etsy sellers post their listings to their social profiles. I decided to start collecting sellers' emails when submitting the form so that I could build an audience and send updates, and I even charged some sellers a one-time fee to have their listings run daily.

I eventually committed to building a SaaS frontend for the existing script tool, along with other utility tools to help sellers grow their shops. I'm currently preparing to release the first polished version of the app, and start marketing to my audience to sign up. They can try the free version, or upgrade to Pro.

I work on this for about five hours per week after work (and after the kids go to bed)!

The motivating factor

The Polymerist, a weekly newsletter about the chemical industry, recently hit over 1K email signups. Founder Tony Maiorana has been able to steadily increase MRR:

I've started to bring more consistency to the monthly revenue of the newsletter, and I've been typically hovering somewhere between $80-$500 MRR for the last few months. Having a slew of products on Stripe has been fantastic.

Knowing that people will pay me just a bit of money to read this stuff is really motivating, and it gives me hope that when I start to put things behind a paywall, people will actually sign up.

As our customer base continues to develop on Stripe, we are examining the great data that comes with it. At this point, I just need to put some more thought into how I go full-time!

2.5K true fans

Shay, founder of HelpStay, a platform that connects travelers with volunteer opportunities abroad, believes that niche products can help you curate your true fans:

I came across the article 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly many moons ago. It helped bring clarity to my bootstrapping journey.

It's been 16 years, and the general premise of the article still holds true: You need X amount of true supporters spending X amount with you, to give you X revenue each year.

In our case, we require 2.5K members spending ~$40 per year to hit ~$100K ARR. We're not there yet, but we're definitely heading that way!

(You can find a conversation about an updated version of Kevin's article in this thread.)

Cold emailing win

Jim Huffman soft launched One Day Design in April, and recently hit $11K in sales. One Day Design helps users build a landing page in 24 hours:

We soft launched it for three weeks to get feedback from visitors and feedback on our sales calls, and are planning a bigger launch later down the line. We acquired three customers from our subscription product (via Stripe!), and we just closed a custom client for $7K. That put us over the five figure mark!

The next milestone we're going after is hitting $25K in sales. Once we get five subscriptions with no churn, we'll do our official launch. So far, cold emailing and hitting up our existing network from our agency has worked for us.

Do you focus on niche, mini-SaaS products? Share your experience!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

📱 Pearpop is launching a live subscription comedy series on TikTok.

🤝 Workers are turning to Slack communities to find their next job.

📺 Paramount+ is pulling ahead in the streaming wars.

👋 Amazon's retail CEO is resigning after 23 years.

🏛 New York state has passed the first ever "right to repair" law for electronics.

🗣 How to Interview Your Customers

by James Paden

I’ve done a lot of customer development interviews in the past, and each round results in new learnings and improvements.

I recently interviewed 15 people to learn about how they do high-level project management. You can check out the actual learnings on the Building Burndown blog here. Here's what I learned about interviewing this time around!

Create a template and update it after each interview

I made a list of assumptions, then used The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions to create a list of questions that would hopefully validate or invalidate them.

My biggest learning was that I should religiously update the template after every interview. Previously, I liked to keep the interviews sort of the same, because it made comparisons easier. But I've discovered that updating the template after every single interview maximizes your learnings, and helps with having your assumptions validated or invalidated.

For example, I added a series of questions to my Burndown interview template on how and why project managers do estimation. I also started asking about how quickly they know a project is behind schedule (the answer is typically: "Really soon, because all of our projects are behind!").

Sometimes, I take the edits back out if the new line of questioning isn’t useful. However, most of the time, I’m iterating my way towards deeper learnings.

Don't ask for advice

Asking for advice in emails resulted in instant offers for paid consulting, and replies scolding me for wasting their time.

Instead, I’m more upfront about the nature of the conversation. I call it an interview. If it’s a topic they’re interested in, or a pain point that they’re feeling, they’ll usually agree to spend time discussing it with me.

Ask what they like

I learned this trick from my wife, who learned it from the management transition book, The First 90 Days. Don’t ask people what’s important to them. That question is too open-ended and loaded. Instead, ask what they like or dislike about XYZ. That will naturally tell you what is important to them.

Ask for the decision maker

While this is a fairly obvious question within a sales cycle, it’s a new question to my customer development repertoire. Particularly within large organizations and B2B tools, it’s common for the purchasing decision maker to be different from the end user. For example, in our other product, the DocRaptor HTML-to-PDF API, developers care about our documentation quality and having libraries in their programming languages. But the CTOs making the decisions care about our SOC2 and HIPAA compliance.

Frequently share internally

I used to do a round of interviews and look for commonalities, then share with the rest of the team. Now, I share the raw interview notes more frequently, especially in the early stages where I’m less confident in my takeaways. It’s noisier, but people have different perspectives and see things that I missed. Additionally, our CTO shared that he really enjoys the interview updates because they make him feel more engaged in the customer research process.

At a minimum, share each interview with at least two other people. If you’re a solo founder, find a buddy!

Finding customers to interview

A quick note on finding customers to interview: Take a look at TestingTime or Stickybeak. I've used both previously. Both seemed pretty startup budget friendly.

Stickybeak is interesting because it uses Facebook and Instagram to serve ads to recruit people based on your criteria. The challenge is that it uses a chatbot interface, limiting some of the options that you have in terms of questions.

My best source so far has been User Interviews. It costs a lot of money, but it also saves a lot of time. Time-to-knowledge is the most important thing to me. User Interviews can do both B2C and B2B interviews with screening options. Not every interview is worthwhile, but 80% of them have been. The other 20% are just me doing a bad job screening out people with roles not compatible with my problem.

What are your tips for customer research interviews? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🥴 How to completely screw up a successful product. Posted by Ahmed Saleh.

👀 The good times are over
for VC-funded startups. Posted by Jessica Hertsberg.

💘 You only need 100 true fans. Posted by Maaike.

🚬 A toolbox to help you quit smoking. Posted by Nazli Gulenc.

🕙 Is brainstorming ideas for a startup a waste of time? Posted by Eugene Zolotarenko.

💻 Link to where you blog about your startup journey. Posted by Courtland Allen.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

💵 Tanmay Ratnaparkhe Hit $200K in AppSumo Sales

by Tanmay Ratnaparkhe

Hi all! I'm Tanmay Ratnaparkhe, and we have been working on Predis.ai, an AI content generation tool, for more than a year now. We launched the AI content generator on October 25, 2021, and we cut it close by launching our AppSumo deal on October 30, 2021. We ended up selling $200K+ worth of deals on AppSumo, and made $100K in revenue:

Here are our suggestions on how to successfully run a lifetime deal (LTD)!

Pricing an LTD

These basic parameters will help you decide on price:

1. Limit by features: You can decide to offer limited features in the base stack, and all features in the top stack. This works best if you have some advanced features that may be more useful for agency users.
2. White Label access: This is a favorite of a lot of agency owners, as it helps them make money from your product. A good example is Cheatlayer, where they give White Label access to users who stack 10 codes. If you can show users that they will be able to make much more than their investment, they will jump onboard!
3. Unlimited usage: This option makes a lot of sense if your support costs are extremely low, and if you are running the LTD to make money. This is also something that excites the most amount of people.

Be very careful when deciding the deal structure, as you won't be able to change it later without facing backlash! It might be tempting to offer an unlimited deal to see a lot of traction upfront. But answer these questions before you price the deal:

• How are you planning to spend the money?
• Will you be able to convert some of the LTD customers into monthly customers?
• Will you be able to leverage LTD users to spread the word about your product?
• Will you be able to sustain and actively develop the product for at least three years?

Our high-level learnings

I covered a lot of the tactical implementation advice here. Let's dive into our high-level learnings:

1. Build a community: Try to talk to as many users as possible. This might mean reaching out to users on Facebook Messenger, sending emails, and getting on calls. Create a Facebook Group and invite users to that. This is very important, and is a very good way to increase your user base.
2. FOMO sells: Our LTD was live for almost six months. The two events where we sold the most were the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, and the last three days of the LTD closing date. We generated a lot of buzz through FOMO, and the AppSumo Deal Ending Timer helped put things over the top.
3. AppSumo Marketplace vs. Plus Exclusive: We were not seeing any large uptick in sales through our Marketplace deal, so we decided to go for the Plus Exclusive deal to increase exposure on the main page. The Plus Exclusive deal was more expensive for us, and it did not move the needle significantly. We were promised by AppSumo that typical Plus Exclusive deals see triple the amount of sales as the Marketplace deals, but this did not work out for us. Do your research before listing to make sure that you're getting the biggest bang for your buck.
4. Show up every day: Make sure to answer questions on AppSumo (or wherever you're launching), and respond to reviews within a few hours, if possible. Keep talking about the product updates everywhere; be shameless and post in all LTD groups.
5. Your objective needs to be clear: Set just one objective, and optimize the process around this. For us, we wanted to onboard and get feedback from as many users as possible. We allowed users to book a call with us through Calendly as part of the base workflow, and also made sure that we proactively reached out to them through in-product chat, email, and Facebook Messenger. Educate users on how can they make money out of your deal.

Wrapping up

Don't sell the roadmap. It's best not to make large promises; just sell what you have. Selling a six month roadmap would probably be fine, but selling a two year roadmap is not recommended. Product priorities might change, and you don't want to have a ton of people banking on old promises.

One thing that isn't discussed as much is the ability to keep your emotions in check. You will come across some users who will be very demanding and unreasonable. Whatever happens, take a deep breath and be professional in your replies. Just apologize and move forward. Remember, you have a company to build!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Rachel Joss, James Paden, and Tanmay Ratnaparkhe for contributing posts. —Channing