Why SaaS Ideas Don't Matter

[@seunoyebode]

I guess this is the video Tobe mentioned in 15:49 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/iHnRfJl-dph-fsk Edit - it is in fact this video - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qaq3eIx8obt7o5Y

[@tobebuilds]

That's the same speaker, but here's the video I was referring to: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qaq3eIx8obt7o5Y

[@gj4king1]

thanks

[@zjh976183]

You immediately know when somebody is speaking of the reality not storytelling.

[@WillMain3]

I agree with scratching other’s people itches. But the whole point of scratching your own itch isn’t to launch a successful business, it’s to gain the motivation or confidence to start that very first thing. Like you said, perfectionism is fake, it’s okay to be imperfect by starting your first project scratching your own itch and showing yourself you can do something.

[@thatryanp]

For sure. You're talking about a hobby project. Definitely choose something that you love, or that's useful to you. That's the whole point, right? I built an AI plugin for Obsidian canvas. Open source, I use it all the time, others appreciate it, great on the resume. Will never make a dime of revenue

[@bramburn]

@@WillMain3 I agree there a whole topic on this. Might cover it in my writings

[@saleemali594]

Gay

[@nobytes2]

@@thatryanpanything can make revenue if you consider that during design phase, you just need something people are willing to pay for if it solves A problem people will pay no matter what

[@tobebuilds]

It took me a long time to understand your perspective, but it makes sense.

[@angeloaad]

I usually don’t comment on vids but man this video packed so much value, as someone who’s majoring in computer science and has the entrepreneurial mindset this really helped me thank you!!

[@rddd89]

This is better than most YC content I’ve seen because you give concrete examples. I’ve always thought I should building something unique, but I’ve realized that originality is not a selling point. I agree about scratching other people’s itch. You’re more likely to find real problems to solve that way.

[@Musa_Supreme]

Respectfully, the top 3 SaaS' businesses to waste time building are: (0) social media platform, (1) job board, & (2) another to-do app. You're not solving any problems that have not been poured over 40,000 times before and joining entrenched giants with budget to buy & bury your product as soon as you are on the radar. This is not the year 2000. If you quit a well paying job, to build these types of apps it will be the delusion of grandeur that you need to assess. The proper way to build applications, is find the pain points by talking to customers, or find the behemoth and take one feature of their enterprise software and build the F out of that. Plus do your best to make it sticky ie something that the user might check into weekly or ideally, daily. Theres lots of other things to contend with and think of (like marketing) but thats the nuts and bolts of this thing. Just because you can write code doesn't mean you can get that product in front of the audience that needs it right when they need it.

[@S3Tint]

Thank you for the video, only a couple mins in and I can relate with your findings. I own a SaaS business, 1.7k MRR so far but been building it for years solo also. I love the content, keep it up!

[@alterego5985]

this hits like a ton of bricks. I've been thinking about this video since I saw it yesterday. It made me rethink my whole SaaS operation and strategy. Thank you so much

[@heysander]

Great video. Totally feel you. I am in the process of selling my first SaaS, to create space for a new venture. Currently focussing fully on a new SaaS. Started building in december and the current product is so far from the initial idea. Got first customers in from the get go but was a long search for product-market-fit. This we hit last week. You feel when its there 🙂 Now time to scale.

[@GigaFro]

Love your video :) Quit my big tech job as well and am a year in with $0 revenue. Seeing videos like these helps with the loneliness! Looking forward to your next one :)

[@dmiradakis]

Keep pushing, friend. 2+ years in at ~$1.4K MRR. Took over a year from day 1 of building for me to finally get my 1st customer.

[@batlin]

I'm almost 2 years in, also with 0 MRR. Learning a lot tho.

[@PartSerenity]

This a great video. No hype, no sales, just really good content. Thank you!

[@thatryanp]

This is straight up preaching. Business idea fantasy thinking is universal. I experience it in myself and my peers weekly. Opportunities, not ideas. Customer knowledge, not cleverness

[@leonsview]

Fantastic video, Tobe! I‘m currently researching about the ideation process of solopreneurs as part of my thesis, and you managed to cover many of the insights I gained in 12+ interviews in just a 17min video - respect!

[@WebDevSid]

Never stop doing these videos brother. Many unique perspectives and interesting takes. Just earned a sub!

[@Warren_Lifts]

Finally somebody who is giving solid business advice without selling a stupid course

[@jakeunderland5258]

Liked and subscribed!!! You hit all of the points that I learned the hard way in my entrepreneurial ventures during school. Thankfully i moved to a company where many of these things are established knowledge but man was the revelation that i was doing everything so wrong a hard swallow. Still have friends who chase a thousand ideas without spending a minute of their time actually talking to users or discerning their true intent.

[@RiYo8]

I am in my 10th month of building my SAAS project, my idea is already validated but building a SAAS is really difficult. I literally cry (in tears) looking at the work that is pending everyday. It is so f. hard to complete things, integrate, polish it to the level of sell-ability. Lastly, all this effort and no surety of success may is too much to handle.

[@Soya8827]

Did you tried using ai tools?

[@RiYo8]

@@Soya8827 Almost every minute for everything.

[@m_aziz_008]

You are right, my experience and understanding points the same direction! Kudos for putting the word out there !!

[@kdietz65]

Great video. The examples that you gave, while sound, have the problem that they are already dominated by large players with access to big capital, and may not always be exploitable by a solo entrepreneur. So, I would add to the attribute of what makes a viable SOLO SaaS business, market fragmentation. You want to look for a highly fragmented market where different users have different needs, and thus, no one single gorilla company has managed to dominate it. Then you can focus on a niche set of users or a niche feature set. Examples would be: project management software, documentation software, defect tracking, quality management, enterprise application integration software, report generation, pretty much any kind of software development tool, that kind of thing. Try to find something people are doing today with spreadsheets, and make an app for it. I'm talking about self-funded, bootstrap, solo entrepreneur ideas. If you're going to raise venture capital, then it's a different calculus.

[@houdaifabouamine]

thanks for this insightful comment!

[@Xcution888]

Great talk man. I believe you are talking real life scenarios. I hate all those get rich quick vids about earn millions by building a saas with no code. Which in reality they are making a KZbin vid like that as advertising content for themselves so they can earn money from KZbin.

[@eyoo369]

Most of those videos aren't true. No VC is going to drop money on a SaaS where the owner never wrote a line of code. VC's nowadays want to invest in engineering types and not in sleazy snakeoil types.

[@gedw99]

So true !! I would add that it can be highly useful reach out to family members and friends that work in a specialised vertical market and doing some due diligence on what aspects are liked to work in their domains . It’s can be a huge increase in finding a problem to solve and have a friend that is your business analyst .

[@jamess.2491]

The most important part is validating the idea. If you don’t have empirical evidence than your idea is valuable to someone, don’t start building.

[@Darklaki1]

this is one of the best videos I've ever seen on KZbin. Cheers man

[@DesignJoel]

Super tactical advice, sharing this definitely helps those aspiring such as myself, I hope you continue to make videos on your maker journey

[@stephanemartin3159]

16 min went by quickly. Well done for getting the message across quite simply and forward. Lots of content is just clickbait nowadays. Thank you for sharing your insight and experience

[@reddixskrull2451]

Hi, I really enjoyed your video. Minor critique at 08:20 you had a hard cut in the video. It really confused me and I replayed the video at this point a few times because I thought I have technical problems. Everything else in this video is very good. I think for some people it helps to orientate, for me it was more like a pep talk motivating to keep on developing my ideas that are more valuable and have more qualitative datapoints that lead to the idea even if they are more boring then the fun “maker/hacker sass pocs”!

[@SuperNovaJinckUFO]

I love these straight-to-the-point, no bs videos! Good work! I'm subbed now :)

[@fulldeploy]

One thing I will say tho is that historically, consumer products tend to scale the farthest and create more wealth than B2B. In fact many B2B companies will one day need to “cross the chasm” where they must appeal to a wider audience (eg: consumers). If we look at the comparison between Slack vs Discord, it’s clear that Discord has the legs to go the farthest since it’s fundamentally a consumer app, whereas Slack appeals to businesses. I’m starting to now see even businesses adopting Discord over Slack, but Slack can’t necessarily adopt the average consumer because they’ve cornered their brand as a business app from the beginning. This is the one danger of B2B.

[@adoraduca]

indeed, consumer markets are much bigger, but also also have less opportunities (less problems to solve). That's because consumer products covers peoples base needs, and you can imagine there aren't to many and there's much less variation between individual needs. Because you are basically addressing the needs of a biological entity replicated in billions of instances. But with businesses is different, there are a lot of variations, businesses differs a lot be the industry and specialisation in the industry. Therefore in B2C are fewer big opportunities and in B2B a lot more of small opportunities. So we see the positive correlation between risk and the opportunity size, something we expected actually. Big risk big opportunity, Small risk small opportunity. To sum up B2B is a better choice for a small entrepreneur.

[@eyoo369]

I disagree with this. Sure if you wanna scale in users to have far more reach. Businesses have no issue spending 100 - 10.000 dollar on software licenses per month but getting a consumer to pay just 9.99 a month will come with much more friction. Also your revenue-per-customer is gonna be relatively lower and your costs are much higher on servers and call centers to service all the consumers. If you look historically.. B2B companies have always had the most revenue outearning every B2C business model with the exception of Amazon. If you just look at the revenue of B2B tech companies / services like Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft Enterprise, Accenture, Cisco, AWS. They are all into the 60- 100+ billion revenue range. Then compare that to B2C tech companies like Spotify (13 billion), Netflix (33 billion), DuoLingo (550 million) Would you rather operate a business where you need to satisfy 100.000 consumers or just 50 business customers for the same revenue and a lot less overhead / pressure?

[@tobebuilds]

I agree that B2C products tend to have a larger TAM (total addressable market). However, B2C markets are often highly competitive, where the biggest companies in a space may have venture funding. It's easier to find a profitable niche in B2B than B2C, because B2B prices are high enough for a bootstrapped business to break even without having to first acquire a large number of customers.

[@funkdefied1]

B2B is absolutely the way. Your example may prove my point. Discord has a market cap of $15B, but Slack’s market cap is $26B.

[@fulldeploy]

@@funkdefied1 Market caps are artificial since it’s based on stock prices and acquisitions. Meta has a $1.3T market cap, but that’s not because everyone loves Facebook. It’s because Meta made most of their wealth through acquisitions (IG and WhatsApp). Market caps do not equal total addressable markets or demand. Another similar example is Google, they have far more acquisitions under their belt than Meta.

[@richard3353]

Listen and talk to clients. Build things that increase the likelihood people will pay for it (scratch other peoples itches). Know their problems deeply so that you can solve them using new or existing software. Love the rest of your points and thanks for the reading recommendations!

[@chaetom]

quality stuff Tobe! keep em coming

[@Dikodance]

Hello from Russia. Thank you for the video! It’s very interesting! I am scanning customer needs on freelance platforms. There are plenty of ideas that clients are willing to pay for.

[@massivesuccess4258]

What's the idea let's collaborate

[@Dikodance]

I have come across many requests for highly specialized but not complex CRM. Now I am developing an engine for developing such systems. Without it, such systems will be very expensive to support. This is my pet project. I managed to make one system on it and implement it at my main job and at one event agency. I am open to cooperation. I develop in php and vue (but now I want to migrate from php to fastapi)

[@massivesuccess4258]

@@Dikodance what's your insta id bro

[@booyakashaWagwan]

Great video! Way more practical and down to earth than what most startup astronauts are pushing.

[@emlincharly]

I honestly was not going to click on this video since I've seen so many like it before. I just wanted to leave a comment to note that I'm glad that I watched it and I got some really good takeaways from your experience.

[@starsandsoul]

Excellent video. Thanks Tobe. The insights in here would be worth charging for.

[@alex-ander-13]

Thank you so much Tobe for sharing out this resource of resources!

[@lucas.aguilar]

Awesome!! Thank you very much for sharing this knowledge!!!!!

[@wordpressadvisor]

Great video! Different stuff than the usual copy/paste ideas on Twitter in the indie hacking space. Talking with customers is a good idea. I'm a freelancer and I'm used to talk with clients, but I never figured out a process on how to actually meet and talk with customers, despite I'm familiar with the idea for 3 years now :D I have some anxiety about the risk of making people lose time on a call with me

[@macchocolateatable]

Reminds me of a lot of the advice in Millionaire Fastlane! Nice vid!

[@NamanJain-cc9fr]

I really like the video. I really struggle with talking to customers part so I'm gonna read your book recommendations and watch that video. However, I'd like to mention that you explicitly said boilerplates are a bad deal. There's a very famous indie hacker who has a boilerplate which does $70K/month. His name is Marc Lou. For some of us, That kind of money is retirement fund within a year. I think what you said is golden advice though. Subscribed :)

[@fulldeploy]

Amazing talk. This talk was much needed for all first time founders. Subscribed!

[@SacrificialGoat94]

Thx mate. Smart and to the point not flashy like other content creators.

[@golosbezdoka]

thanks for sharing, man. subbed. going back to coding my awesome product :)

[@shenghongzhong]

thank you so much for putting this together! God bless you

[@mass13982]

Subscribed! Excellent points and great resources. Please keep sharing. Thanks.

[@LeighBriody]

Insane value with no bs , subbed

[@calvint678]

Start up a discord my man. Need more black tech inspiration like you in my life

[@chissupa1]

I will save to come and rewatch it, every month ....thank you

[@jamestian-o1d]

Thanks a lot Tobe, I find your presentation very informative as I'm just starting to do it.

[@n45hch2]

Hi Tobe. Wanted to give you a heads-up that there may be misaligned cut-off between 5:22 and 5:24 ('"procrastination" missing).

[@luqmandv]

Very informative video, been looking for this insight. Thanks man!

[@LuizFerreiraBr]

This vídeo Is truly amazing, please keep the good work

[@theharrisonmiller]

Great advice, man. I've watched this video like 5x by now. So curious, what other niches did you explore before settling on Shopify merchants?

[@subomioluwalana]

Great video! But I couldn't just help to point the quick irony that two examples out of the Examples of Viable SaaS businesses were founded based on the founders scratching their own itches -- Shopify and Sentry.

[@zacclifton5479]

Good for putting yourself out there! Glad to see you moving forward after eating biscuits with you at Microconf!

[@tobebuilds]

@@zacclifton5479 It was great meeting you!

[@Nova-m8d]

Competition doesn't exist for a saas app unless you make it exist by targeting the same traffic source.

[@RobWalling]

This is a great breakdown, Tobe. Thanks for sharing with the community and congrats on hitting $10k! 🎉🎉

[@tobebuilds]

Thanks, Rob! I recommended your book "Start Small, Stay Small" at the end. It was a great read early in my journey

[@rustiverse]

brave video and valuable info for new comers. Nice.

[@foju9365]

Amazing presentation. Very good advice. Thanks!

[@Piliponful]

I agree with all the comments, actually very valuable content, thanks

[@JWCat757]

Appreciate this no BS advice - very helpful!

[@siddharth_kashyap_A]

Thanks! Your video was very informative for anyone who want to do a startup. 👍

[@SacredCASHcow]

if youre happy with 10-20k mrr then shopify works! thats called a lifestyle business and it's great. but you do need big revolutionary ideas as well if you want to be a bigger company

[@Kanar1e]

Great points. Especially regarding talking to people and scale 💯

[@simonsmashup]

Building fun app is good for practice skills, but if you want to make money you gotta listen to the market for demand.

[@lofiVibe4769]

Great insights! Can you make a video about talking to customers? I've identified problems but not sure how to actually get people to talk to me to validate them. What are some of the effective ways of doing that?

[@dannyelo4]

This information is gold to me, thank you brother

[@HassanAhmed-om8op]

Great video, would love to chat about an idea (LOL) seriously, it would be sorta towards niche consumers and I will definitely (not would) pay for it. You might think it's BS, but I'd love to elevator pitch it. It may actually solve (or start to solve) the problem you discuss here. Whether you reach out or not, thanks!

[@SpooningTreesap86]

@11:07 👀 this is a problem even established companies do, my current company does this constantly despite being around for decades

[@PriitKallas]

This is so good... I keep telling people that

[@clufmench7282]

This video is really amazing. Thank you for sharing

[@liohaan]

Thx,Tobe! I appreciate the content you have put together.

[@yazy971]

Thanks for speaking the reality and truth

[@ablamill8357]

I went from an idealistic SaaS app back to use my SaaS app only to sell software / design services on top

[@_Karanjot]

Great video, practical and simple.

[@idanmasas]

Great video man. Really liked it.

[@ralphpichler6635]

Bro you seem really likeable, thanks for the value...I am gonna leave a sub here! :)

[@security_threat]

Very well laid out learnings and insights. Amazing! Amazing keep sharing! I am also a ex-swe from “that search engine company” trying to start my own thing.

[@tarek7451]

This is extremely useful. I really hope you could make more of these videos.

[@mischavandenburg]

Not in the saas space but still enjoyed the presentation. Keep it up!

[@VincentHendriks]

Great talk Tobe, thanks for sharing! :)

[@KOAppianing]

You just got a loyal fan 🎉

[@ddmozz]

I'm not sure if B2B is viable for a solopreneur in 2024. All the low-hanging fruits have been taken, and now you have to go too niche or some big player will eat your lunch. Basically, your whole product is someone else's feature. Or, you rely too much on one single platform or API and you can get rug pulled at any given time. I've seen this happening with people who relied too much on Reddit's API, or the Chrome extension store, etc. And if you want to go big, you're already surrounded by behemoths that have billions of dollars to burn. And there's just so many real-world business solutions to be conceived. And, let's not even talk about ChatGPT and AI as a commodity instantaneously making thousands of solutions redundant. Anyway, great video!

[@barsenovic]

thank you my man! excellent advice, honestly

[@santhanamss]

This was a very sensible point of view

[@monkeywrench1951]

Thank you, very down to earth information. Following.

[@nicolasrudloff4909]

Thank you, I like the bit where you say learn by doing. Maybe you come across more problems to solve while actually coding something?

[@jannatulnayeem7289]

please share how did you get shopify idea using twitter? Create an explorative video.

[@henryjohnson6936]

Great video bro. keep it up!

[@tobebuilds]

Thanks for the watch

[@miw14programmer11]

The thing I feel is the most important take away I had when developing is always keep in mind that we are making a business, and our objective is delivering a product. The product just happens to be software. The big three things I learned when making SAAS's are always have a product easy to use, meaning in a less than five clicks the user can do what they need to do or see, payment gateway is correctly utilized where a user can pay and track their subscription, and finally the biggest being have a customer service component, mainly having an email connected to your domain or parent company. The customer should be able to pay for the service easily, use it easily, and contact you easily. The whole point of SAAS is not for you to push a engineering dream in making something "cool", but to create a business that has little to no friction for your customers.

[@mahmoudabuzamel7038]

Thank you Tobe, this is invaluable set of advices.

[@azpwnz7]

Thank you Tobe! Great and very helpful video for me right in time🤝

[@tobebuilds]

Best of luck with your SaaS journey!

[@sprightly106]

Hi @tobebuilds at 4:34 you said that making a LinkedIn profile will get your potential customers to appear in your DMs... Can you elaborate on how to make that happen, please? I'm a SWE too so I only get recruiters in my DMs. Thanks!

[@tobebuilds]

If you have "Founder" in your LinkedIn job title, you will get TONS of cold outreach

[@dubyadubyaeee]

Am I going to take advice from someone who tried to replace twitter? Software Engineers need to understand their role is to be a technical CO founder. I have always been a businessman, I did my Computer Science degree and instead of becoming a Software Engineer I opened an agency which makes reoccurring revenue and the SaaS is going to be a huge problem solver. The solution I came up with is because I’m not a two dimensional Engineer, I’m a businessman first and foremost.

[@soyaleye]

This was surprisingly VERY enlightening. Qq though, are you saying social media app ideas are tarpit ideas and should generally be avoided ? Please make a follow up video into your experience building your social media app.

[@tobebuilds]

Thanks for the suggestion

[@TRICOLORista]

Great stuff. Zero BS

[@bramburn]

I have to disagree on scratching your own itch. That only works if you're building something to compliment your own tasks for a business or task. If you're scratching speculative itch for your own b2c problem its extremely hard.

[@prashantsoni672]

Loved your talks Tobe. Keep it up,

[@Peter-bg1ku]

You look like you have finally landed after flying the programmer lala-land plane for long lol. Great video, thanks.

[@Peter-bg1ku]

I agree on the issue of visibility.

[@XOXOshuffle]

i find that extremly helpful, thank you for sharing

[@rainerllera3097]

brother you need to post more, you make pretty good content

[@tobebuilds]

Working on it!