Micro-SaaS and Soloprenuers
The next hot development trend you haven’t heard of… yet
In a World…
Where the big tech dream seems to be over and VCs are being more careful with how they invest. Some will cut some of their risky bets, tens of thousands of jobs will evaporate overnight and the remaining employees are forced to pick up the slack leading to burnout, quiet quitting and career cushioning. Thousands of highly skilled entrepreneurial developers are making the bold move to strike out on their own and make a go of starting a business, or two, or three.
I see a trend starting now and extending into 2023 and that is the trend of the Soloprenuer and the Micro-SaaS. With the plethora of developers unceremoniously being shown the door and the rest realizing that working for some eccentric billionaire isn’t what it’s cut out to be, I bet we’ll see a ton of innovation in the tech industry in the form of one-dev-companies solving niche problems and building on those niche solutions to solve other niche problems. While the hyperscale companies will still exist, we’ll see a democratization of solutions that meet the needs of underserved markets enabling them to deliver value and potentially become the next unicorns.
What is Micro-SaaS Anyway?
Other than the hottest new business trend you’ve never heard of, a Micro-SaaS is essentially a small SaaS product that solves a very focused problem for a niche target audience. While the hyperscale startups of the 2010s go chasing the whole pie, a Micro-SaaS, like Efraim Diveroli, in War Dogs, is going after the crumbs and there are a lot of crumbs.
With Micro-SaaS there’s still an exit possibility depending on how the business evolves, but the main play is a sustainment model. A solid soloprenuer strategy is to have a handful of these Micro-SaaS products in play and to spend more time in products that are doing exceptionally well.
For example, rather than offering a full blown Identity and Access Management solution, one might offer a single function, say authGrant('google', scopes, user, redirect) which is running on a lambda and handles the code exchange to yield and persist tokens. You pay me a tiny price per invocation or on a subscription basis and now you don’t have to spend time configuring redirect URLs, writing the same auth code handling logic over and over, and you can focus on the API integration logic you wanted to work on in the first place.
My Micro-SaaS — Indexter is another example of this model where the only problem I focus on is helping you find your documents in your private knowledge repositories. I don’t expect it to scale to the moon but if I can get a handful of smaller shops to buy in, I can sustain my operations and make a little for myself.
The one obvious drawback to running a Micro-SaaS is you’re 100% on your own and the success or failure of your product is on you. Running a Micro-SaaS is not for the faint of heart and if you’re a developer who thinks marketing is for the arts majors and product management is just scheduling meetings, you won’t do well. You need to understand just enough marketing to tell a compelling story and get people interested, and you need to understand enough product management to understand the customer, the problem, and the priorities.
Just Enough Development
The point of Just Enough Development is to do just enough to generate enough passive income to cover overhead and make a little profit. The primary benefit of a Micro-SaaS is that it can be developed, operated, and maintained by a single person in the span of a few weeks.
The beauty of Just Enough Development is you can make decent money without…
- 8 bosses, meetings, or other coordination overhead
- Kubernetes, Dev-ops, or On-Call
- Scaling issues (although, if you’re hitting those you should consider flipping the bit and just be a regular SaaS… nothing wrong with that)
Because your total addressable market, and your problem space is small, you can invest extra time and energy into several Micro-SaaS products to spread your investment out.
All Aboard the Hype Bus
Normally I don’t make predictions on this type of stuff. I haven’t said peep about web3 or crypto or no-code because these are all really flashy things that don’t represent a cultural shift in how we view work and meaning. Millenials and Gen-Z are taking a left turn when it comes to how we view our relationship with work and who should own the product of our blood, sweat, and tears. There’s a strong desire in the younger generations to control their own destinies and I think Micro-SaaS and soloprenuership are the vehicles to at least shift the narrative.
I expect as technology becomes more approachable, these micro business models will be more ubiquitous. If I were going to make a bet, it’d be on the companies who are all in on supporting soloprenuers over large enterprises, people selling shovels in the next gold rush, and not necessarily the heavy expensive mining equipment here.
⚠️Shameless Plug⚠️ Obviously, don’t take investment advice from me, a non-millionaire. I’m just a humble engineer and proprietor of Indexter — a Micro-SaaS looking to help you get the most out of your documentation and shared context.
