Business

What Are Good Markets for Bootstrapped SaaS? If you see that significant forces are terraforming a market, creating an opportunity where there was none before, that is a good sign. Whenever a new kind of technology or process gets traction in a field that has not seen much change before, it will create little points of friction. Some of them will be critical. These will be the ones that warrant creating a SaaS business. ...

Monopoly markets dominated by a few major players severely limit your options. Markets where years of relentless competition have produced numerous underdogs are dangerous. Even fully competitive markets offer little hope, as you cannot compete against established giants. These markets are typically filled with very similar competitors, battling over prices and minor differences. This saturation makes it difficult to enter such markets, and even existing businesses within them struggle.

Enterprise markets are hard to sell into for a small company, although it’s not impossible. Purchasing decisions take a long time, there are a lot of requirements even to be considered, and contracts tend to be custom and require a lot of work. Many enterprise customers won’t buy from small companies out of fear they will vanish within a few years, and that fear is not unfounded. In fact, even for your own bootstrapped business, I would recommend against using services offered by companies smaller than yourself. You will be better off looking for a market that is comprised of small to medium-sized businesses and self-employed freelancers. ...

When markets shrink, that is often a sign of deterioration. Whenever the number of agents and purchasers in a market decreases, business growth stalls. People cut costs and unnecessary expenses get reduced. All businesses in that market will suffer.

Identifying a Critical Problem: Focusing on the Right Issue After identifying your target audience, you can begin searching for their pain points. The beauty of niche markets lies in the fact that the issues they face are specific and shared among members of the niche. Addressing a common issue will benefit many individuals. You already have the right people; now you simply need the right problem.

When you’re starting a bootstrapped SaaS business, you have to find a painful problem to solve. For that, you have to find an audience first. But how do you figure out if the audience is big enough to support your business today and five years from now?

You are looking for painful problems, and you want to solve the most painful of them all. You also need to validate that this is an actual problem that people need to have addressed. Sometimes, we just want to complain, but we don’t want to change our ways. You will need to find a problem so painful that we just have to deal with it.

A few weeks into teaching on a full-time schedule, she noticed things that started as nuisances but quickly became painful problems. The teaching part of her job was great and fun, but certain formalities took way too much additional time.

So, we released it to the public, built a landing page, and waited. Nothing happened. One or two people signed up for the free trial, but there wasn’t much else. We hadn’t done any marketing, and we hadn’t made any sales. The service just sat there, idling.

We found out that many other teachers did the same when they started talking about their self-built solutions in their online communities. Teachers began to share their templates through Google sheets. It was clear that this was a shared problem in a very tight-knit community. There was a sizeable market with an apparent, shared, and critical problem. The problem was solvable, but no one had yet built anything to make it noticeably easier. ...

And then, one day, everything changed. In a comment to a Facebook post about how teachers dealt with feedback, Danielle dropped the link to our product with an explanation of how she used it. Teachers started to respond, asking for more details; they checked out the program and came back to share their newly found discovery on social media.

that fueled the growth of our business from its first few users to thousands of customers a couple of months later. It was surreal, but we had tapped into a highly active tribe. Once we understood that, we didn’t need to do much when it came to marketing our product: our users would do most of that for us.

For many of our customers, teaching from home was a side hustle. Using our product enabled many of them to turn this into a full-time source of income. We priced our service to be affordable and easily justified. We even increased our prices by 50% a year into running the business, and it continued growing nevertheless.

Tech founders—and I count myself as one—focus on products because that is what we use to solve our problems. After all, when you run into a challenging task, what do you look for first? An in-depth scientific explanation for the epistemological essence of the task? Or a tool that will do the job for you seconds after you install it?

In the Preparation Stage, the focus will be on finding an audience, their biggest problem, and a solution that solves that problem in a way to make people pay for it. You will find out how to price your product initially and start selling.

Tech founders—and I count myself as one—focus on products because that is what we use to solve our problems. After all, when you run into a challenging task, what do you look for first? An in-depth scientific explanation for the epistemological essence of the task? Or a tool that will do the job for you seconds after you install it? ...

Many successful bootstrapped businesses start with an audience, a specific niche. They find their customers’ critical problems and provide valuable solutions that people gladly pay for. Their product is centered around continuously providing value to new and existing customers. Audience, problem, solution, and product can be looked at individually.

Successful businesses are built by addressing critical problems for an audience willing to pay for solutions to their issues. The Preparation Stage is when you make these foundational choices. Once in motion, a business has certain inertia that makes these decisions difficult to alter. While pivoting your business into new markets can be the right move at times, it requires additional effort. This is why it’s wise to invest significant time upfront to get things right initially. ...

A business would be nothing without customers. You can have the best product in the world, but you won’t be able to build any meaningful business if there is no one to pay for what you offer. Who am I helping? You will discover how to find the perfect niche and make sure it can support your business in Step One: Your Audience. Why do they need help? Learn how to find and validate their critical problem in Step Two: Their Problem. How can I help them with that? Find a good solution and make sure it fits into your prospective customers’ workflow in Step Three: Your Solution. What can I create to help them that way? You’ll learn how to create an easy-to-maintain and reliable product in Step Four: Your Product. ...

where do you find those paying customers? The first step to building a business is answering that question, and for bootstrapped founders, there is one critical component: finding the perfect niche.