let me guess you think every good micras idea is already taken well that's just not true and in this video I'm GNA prove you wrong in fact every day at starter story I find a new micro SAS idea making 10 30 and 50k per month I've personally built micras products myself I've talked to hundreds of successful micras Founders through starter story in this YouTube channel and I've personally spent thousands of hours analyzing these businesses and what makes them successful and you know what I realized all of these successful businesses always have the same five traits
the difference between a micras that makes millions and one that makes zero is actually much simpler than you think and that's what we're going to talk about today so in this video I will break down the five key things that make all micras businesses successful including how to build on the next Trend platforms that actually work and why this right here changes everything and more by the end of this video you'll be able to take any micro SAS idea analyze it and be 10 times confident on how successful it will be so whether you're looking
for a brand new idea or trying to figure out if your current idea is a waste of time then this video is for you oh and stick around until the end because I'm going to be breaking down a real world example of a micro SAS bringing in over $440,000 a month this is the $1 million micras Playbook let's go okay guys so just to give you a little bit more context on on this video this discussion is based on a 16-page master document I wrote about how to find a million dooll micras idea I spent
over two weeks finding the data studying examples and pulling it all together and you can actually download this Master Doc right now and follow along with me just go to starterstory.com slms it's 100% free to download you don't even need to put in your email it's all yours download it and follow along I'm going to be going over this in this video okay let's talk micro SAS ideas I'll try to share you know everything that I've learned from studying tons of micro SAS businesses what SAS ideas or what specifically micro SAS ideas win why they
win and all of it of course like we do a starter story is all backed by real case studies and data we're not going to be talking about tactics or growth strategies or anything like that I think that stuff is important but it's not really what we do in week one of the academy and I want to make this super Niche down this is just talking about ideas think more about ideas what's a good idea what's a bad idea is my idea good and you know what does it mean to have a good idea and
uh let's get into it so first of all what is a micro SAS micro SAS is a SAS product with pointy features that serve a very specific customer at the end of the day a micro SAS is just a SAS but it's usually you know an early version or a first version of it or something with you know one or very minimal features if your goal is to build a SAS which I think is a great business model why because you're likely a solopreneur and that means that you don't have the time or resources to
build a product with 10,000 features so instead go build a product product that has pointy features we're going to talk all about pointy features today and you'll ship a lot faster and you will give yourself the opportunity to fail and learn from it if you don't do this you risk building but never shipping which is the disease that we try to avoid when you take the academy build something that it does everything for everyone has a bunch of features nobody uses it nobody pays for it and that's exactly what we want to avoid okay so
I've done a ton of research on this our team has done a ton of research on this and based on our research and why I thought that these win I boiled it down to five things so let's do that right now let's go through those okay number one in nearly every fast growing successful micras business has this capitalizes on a growing Trend a missed opportunity or a change in the world this is a one thing I noticed in nearly all micras businesses that I that I've researched that I've talked to people I've talked to through
the YouTube channel seeing successful people online and what they built especially for fast growing ones so let's let's break down what these are a growing trend is a new industry or a trend that's great gaining popularity that can be a lot of different things but maybe think about a Google Trend or something like that is something that's growing and maybe used to not be popular or ever heard of and now it's getting bigger number two a missed opportunity so maybe an underserved Niche or an unsexy Market that is either too small for bigger companies to
cover or is just mostly completely missed and number three on some change in the world and that usually somewhat relates back to number one which is a growing trend but a lot of the successful businesses that I'm going to share with you today they capitalized on some change in the world and you know it could be something as big as Co or it could be as small as you know this new technology is getting popular change creates new problems and when there's new problems it means there's not really great solutions for those problems what I
noticed about a lot of the successful micras businesses is they went and solve those problems and those problems weren't really solved well or solved at all and that's why they grew fast so I'll share three examples of this for the growing Trend I'm going to share one example of a flashy startup marketing technique every startup was doing this marketing thing and everyone wanted to try it this guy went and built a solution that helped startups do that and he grew really fast I missed opportunity we're going to talk about a business that serves Amazon FBA
sellers which I think is a somewhat of a underserved niche in relative terms you know maybe developers who build micras businesses they don't want to build for Amazon FBA for I don't know the exact reasons why but to me I don't really see a whole lot of that it doesn't get that kind of attention that you might see on Twitter of you know what is the latest AI thing right Amazon FBA sellers the third thing is the change in the world so I'm going to show you an example of a change in the world really
really just a change in social media a change in the social media algorithms that changed uh basically a lot of businesses and created a ton of businesses I'm going to show one specific example of a business that capitalized on that change in the world um when there wasn't good solutions for the new problems that it introduce or the opport Unity that it introduced that's the biggest one so I do want to highlight that I think pretty much every single business I'm going to cover hits on that one but then this one is also really big
too build for large platforms with big built-in customer bases so another thing I noticed from my research is that many successful micros businesses are just simply built on large platforms often these platforms have millions or hundreds of millions of users which are these companies or your potential customers and often the founders were able to validate their idea from Reading Forum posts and even acquired some of the users from those Forum posts directly large platforms that we're going to talk about today I'm going to show you businesses built on all these we're going to talk Shopify
which has 2 million Merchants Amazon FBA which has 1.5 million sellers on the platform and Twitter which has 118 million businesses According to some research I did of uh how many businesses use the platform and a reminder that you know to serve these I just it's a simple calculation is yeah Shopify has 2 million Merchants but you're not going to be able to build something for 2 million Merchants all you have to do to build a business a million dollar business is build something for 250 out of 2 million Merchants I don't know what that
percentage number is but it's 0.25 and or one or whatever it is and charge them $80 a month we're going to talk about pricing a little bit lower and that would be a $20,000 mrr business which would make $240,000 ARR without a typical SAS valuation these are very very rough back of the napkin numbers is a million-dollar business so think about that what I think is interesting about micras businesses how they price their products and I'm going to show you all the examples of that okay number three I think nearly every micro SAS does this
and it's kind of just built into the name it does something micro is every micro SAS is a pointy solution and a pointy solution is a narrowly focused produ product or service that solves a very particular problem for a very specific group group of users or customers micro SAS micro SAS it's already in the name right in other words these products generally do one thing they don't do 20 things and nearly all the products I'm going to show you here have pointy solutions they are very very pointy Solutions and some of the examples I'm going
to show you today is literally one zapier integration so zapier you know it has I don't know thousands of different uh Integrations that you can connect all these different things there's one guy who took one zapier integration between two different products and it makes $40,000 Mr it's obviously more you know advanced than what you could do with zap year but that's how pointy it is it's only between two different softwares and that's pretty limited right but it makes $40,000 a month which is $500,000 a year then I'm going to show you one Shopify Edge case
a very very pointy feature on Shopify Edge case I like I like the word Edge case too that makes $55,000 Mr and then I'm going to show you a niche caching Service uh which is like a developer term for making websites faster and it makes $220,000 mrr and it does something very very very pointy I think those are all cool things just to give you a little tease of what you're going to see okay real quick before I share the final method there's something I need you to know this video right here and all the
information in it means nothing unless you actually do something with it the one thing that separates successful people from everybody else is simple taking action instead of just thinking and talking and ideating about what makes a million-dollar micros ass idea I want to help you build something real this is exactly why I launched the starter store micro SAS Academy it's a community of people dedicated to taking action and building real actual businesses every day we help thousands of people find an idea build that idea and ship it and actually validate it in the real world
regular people just like you taking action every single day and bringing a real business to life so if you're finally ready to build that idea join starter story Academy just click the first link in the description below to get started now let's go back to the video talk about micras ideas number four they serve a very specific customer if we're talking about in number three we're talking about pointing which is the solution provided let's talk about who it's provided for in nearly all examples micras businesses serve a very very specific customer to break it down
into example instead of serving businesses they serve businesses who have a website or care about their website but more specifically they serve businesses who have a website built on a JavaScript framework but more specifically they serve businesses who have a website built on a Javas script framework and they suck at SEO that's kind of like how specific their customer base is and this business here makes $2.5 million a year serving just this audience right here and it may even be more specific some more examples of this is Amazon FBA sellers who are also data junkies
that has one specific customer that I'm going to show you that makes $500,000 a year or something like that Shopify Merchants who need a very edge case feature and I'm going to show you an example of digital agencies who specifically only serve VC startups who just rais money I'm going to show you those examples but that's just to show you how specific the customers can be okay number five as always hopefully you've taken some of the course in week one of the academy which is about solving painful problems all these successful businesses micras businesses and
all successful businesses are rooted in solving painful problems and all painful problems for businesses which we're going to talk about today not c not consumers usually relate back to two problems we're not making enough money as a business and we don't have enough time as a business these are really the two core problems and really you could it down to just one which is money because time is money right cost centers and that sort of thing so in this in this doc I'm going to break down a more specific problems of what they solve but
again they always relate back to these two things so if anything please anal if you already have an idea or you're thinking of an idea analyze your idea under this lens those are the core things that I found from our research and you know just talking to Founders for many many years now and uh seeing what works for micro s okay a couple more things that I found nearly all micras businesses are B2B so uh all the examples I'm going to show you are B2B one of them is maybe some of them maybe one are
like more prosumer and prosumer is like not consumer it's like you know I'm an executive at this company but I'm using it for individual use uh or maybe I'm a solopreneur or something like that uh but mainly all the examples are B2B I they're just targeting businesses rarely you see B Toc work for micro sess and I think without going into too much of the details is like consumers are very do not like subscriptions they don't really want to buy something that does one small thing like what what do we buy as consumers we buy
Netflix we buy Spotify these are not micro SAS things right it's hard for us to justify as a consumer as a you know just a user to pay money for something really really pointy but as a business it makes sense because we make money from it or it saves us time as a business pricing let's talk about that I said we were going to talk about that most successful micro SAS businesses at least the examples I've been looking at and just generally what I've noticed is they charge at least $50 a month uh with some
examples in here charging $100 a month and some even charging $200 a month for the base plan and that's not the average that's for the base plan and I think that makes a lot of sense uh if you're building micras because it is a smaller Market you want to serve a a lower amount of customers with a more pointy solution some other things I somewhat noticed but wouldn't necessarily say that this is like core important things is some of them Le LED open source to for marketing reasons uh to get customers some of them leverage
like really really basic free plans or free newsletters uh and then more specifically on that really smart free product strategies and I I really want to say smart because what I saw is that they were super calculated when you do make your product free you want to be careful to and make sure that it's super calculated so one of the examples I'm going to share with you is like you basically get nothing with a free product we'll talk about that example uh and yeah just be careful of putting your product free because that usually doesn't
work okay let's walk through it now we're going to go over that the product we're going to go over the problem they solve most importantly the solution they built why I think they won and the certain circumstances around why they won and how you could potentially reverse engineer the reasons why they won how can you take what they did right and apply it to 2024 2025 as you guys build your stuff okay this one is really cool it's called cyber leads this is a a database of leads that digital agencies can use for outreach basically
you once a month you get this download of uh companies that just raise money uh VC money and you know what their email is and you reach out to them so you can try to sell services to them database of leads that digital agencies can use for outreach so they can close deals and get customers this is the website here uh yeah you get this like air table of businesses that raise money it's pretty simple the problem that the customer would voice says we don't have enough leads you know we don't have enough customers because
we don't have enough leads we're not getting on enough calls with people we're not closing enough deals and if we could only have leads then we would be a successful business that is like the um you know if we could if we can find leads whatever that is the the pain or the problem the painful problem that nearly every business or at least every service business probably experiences if we can get more leads and we have a good funnel then we had no problem closing these but goes back to the core problem is we're not
making enough money we're not making enough leads we're not getting enough calls we're not closing enough deals and we're not making enough money we could be making more money and more profit why did this micro SAS win four things Niche down customer they are not leads for anyone it's leads for digital agency so you're a design agency or an ads agency and you serve even more specific as digital agencies for startups I would add you are selling services to chiropractors there maybe there's an opportunity for or Le chiropractor leads I don't know something like that
right this is is very nich down customer which I think he learned the hard way uh in niched down as he continued to launch talk to customers so when he first launched he didn't just have this realization I don't think it took him some time to do that probably again he capitalized on a trend or opportunity and a little bit of details behind how he found the business is that he actually discovered this from a Reddit post just kind of like jerking around on Reddit he found this post and it was in some subreddit about
uh you know you know how to sell services or something I don't know I don't remember exactly where it was but the realization that he had which was quoted here from the case study is that businesses flush with new funding so people that just raised money companies that just rais money from VC raise $5 million $1 million $20 million they got this money they're eager to scale and they're willing to invest in new solutions to their growth challenges this was the edge right this is this is what he realizes this kind of somewhat missed opportunity
or just very very Niche opportunity if he could capture information and deliver to someone in an easy to digest format such as a spreadsheet then he can make a lot of money two other interesting things about his business is he this is one of the free plan things that seem to work pretty well is he built his business around a recurring newsletter so you could join I think there was that screenshot in there of what you get if you join you get like 10 leads if you join for free and then the rest is really
expensive I thought that was pretty smart and basically you get nothing it's really just a marketing tactic and again it's the money thing too so he he knew he how Niche it was $200 a month for the base plan so all he needs is five customers to have $11,000 a month and 50 customers to have $10,000 a month I think that's there's something there too he did it with a full-time job almost everyone on here did this with a full-time job or at least as a solopreneur and he did a lot of the work manually
until he got pmf I thought that was actually pretty interesting so how you can reverse engineer this I think any business built around leads is really powerful and kind of untapped in in a way and it's a great place to start especially if you're not technical you know technically it is just a spreadsheet that he was giving to people there wasn't it wasn't a big code thing there's another good video on starter story which you can check out the link on this which is a business built around leads they're not really a micro SAS but
now they're doing $5 million a year and it's purely like a leads type of business they help you do Outreach and that sort of thing I think there's a lot of money to be made in leads so I think that's cool if I wanted to reverse engineer this I'd probably go on subreddits related to service businesses so design agency subreddits Ad Agency subreddits dentist Services agencies whatever it is look at the top post and see if you can find any insights like Alex did his Insight was that businesses flush with cash are ready to spend
and you know see if you could bottle that up into a service so what's working in terms of closing clients is there some new trend that's happening how could you bottle that up into service and make it easier for uh other businesses to capitalize on that opportunity that's happening
