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1 | Micro SaaS Report – Starter Story | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2 | Business | What They Do | Industry | Platform | Type of Product | Target | Price Range | Business Model | Free Plan | Pricing Details | Revenue | Monthly Website Traffic | Revenue Per Traffic | Time To Money | Founders | Employees | Year Started | Dedication | Market Insights / Trends | Larger Incumbent | How They Came Up With The Idea | How They Built The First Version | Growth Channels | Growth | Growth | Tech Stack | Tools | Full Case Study | |
3 | Gumroad | Super-simple e-commerce tool for digital content creators | E-commerce | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | Free | Subscription | Yes | Gumroad is free to use, they charge a 10% fee of the sales | $21,200,000 | 22,620,000 | $0.08 | N/A | 1 | 17 | 2011 | N/A | sell digital products | Etsy ($2.6B/year) | Sahil loves building stuff. He really enjoy the process of taking a problem and coming up with a solution, and then shipping a prototype of that solution to see how good his concept was. Before finishing college he had already shipped a dozen products. Most of the time, they weren't that great. But sometimes something works out really well, and then he has to decide if he actually wants to work on the idea some more. Very rarely, the answer is yes. That was the case with Gumroad. The question at its core was really compelling to him: How easy could one make it to sell something? | The first version was built in just one weekend back in April 2011. Sahil had learned Python while working at Pinterest, and was able to hack together a basic CRUD application. The whole of Gumroad was a single main.py—one Python file. It was deployed on Google App Engine so he didn't need to know how to do anything related to ops. | Their main strategy in the early days: sending out a lot of emails. That's really it. They scoured the web for people who could benefit from a product like Gumroad, and then told them about it. Literally thousands of times. "That's the only way, really, when you're young and no one cares or knows who you are, to get folks to use your product." "Over time, they needed to do that less and less. But until you have a lot of customers or some other force that can supply some momentum, there's nothing better than knocking on doors. My sense is that people really just don't want to cold email people, and are looking for an out. If that's you: stop! It doesn't exist! Just hunker down and dedicate some time to finding people, reaching out to them personally via email, phone, whatever, and being okay with it sucking for a while." | Email List | | - Notion | I Started Gumroad as a Weekend Project and Now It’s Making $350k/Mo - - Gumroad in Q2 2023 | ||
4 | GMass | A platform to send cold emails and email marketing campaigns with Gmail | Sales | Gmail | Extension | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | 3 plans priced at $19, $29, and $49 respectively | $5,400,000 | 678,203 | $0.66 | 2 weeks to build and launch on Product hunt resulting to sales within 24 hours of launch | 1 | 1 | 2015 | They spent 2 weeks to build the product and launch it on Product Hunt | gmail email marketing | Hubspot ($2B/year) | During his previous business venture, Wordzen, the founder recognized the necessity of sending personalized emails to small groups. After researching available options, he was not satisfied with the solutions offered. Therefore, he developed GMass as an internal tool to aid in managing his business. Although Wordzen failed to gain much traction, GMass proved to be successful and was featured on Product hunt, giving him the validation that he needed to make the decision to pursue this as a business. | His backend programming skills were weak at the time, so he came up with the specs of how he wanted it to work and handed it off to a backend developer contractor. In a week, the contractor had done his part, and then the founder spent the next week building the first version of the Chrome extension. | Initially, he posted his Chrome extension on Reddit's /r/startups subreddit, which led to it being featured on Product Hunt and listed on the Chrome Web Store. The Product Hunt listing resulted in a few downloads and tests. Another successful strategy has been publishing content to his blog, where he focuses on email marketing techniques and concepts that he finds interesting. | Online Directories | - Slack - Asana - Trello | How I Launched A $200K/Month Gmail Mail Merge Tool | |||
5 | Tweet Hunter | Twitter tool focused on helping users build and monetize their audiences | Social Media | Desktop/Web App | B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | Tweet Hunter plans start at $48/mo | $2,640,000 | 616,255 | $0.36 | It took them one week to reach $150 of MRR. One month to hit $600. After 3 months, they were at $3,500 | 2 | 0 | 2021 | N/A | twitter growth | HootSuite ($150M/year) | These two founders worked on launching a product every month. And every time, the tech co-founder brought in a few early sales because he had a small but high-quality audience on Twitter. They marketing founder tried too, but failed. At the time, they had built up a database containing thousands of tweets that they were using for another product. So he thought he could maybe use the best-performing content as inspiration for his own tweets. The tech co-founder made a very quick prototype, and… it worked! Writing became better and quicker, and he achieved a higher engagement. That was the first version of Tweet Hunter: a searchable library of high-performing tweets. | The core idea was simple: users should be able to search for a topic, and in return get relevant tweets that overperformed. So they built a very basic search field and tweet tiles. Overall, the building of the MVP took about a week and $50, including the domain name. It was a “viral tweet search engine”. No schedule, no automation. They didn’t take any early validation steps. Didn’t ask people if “they were facing that problem” if “they would be interested in X” or “how much they would pay for Y”. They felt very strongly that the only way to validate a product is through revenue. Their focus was on building a non-optimal MVP as quickly as possible and try to get sales. If they could do that, it’d be an indicator that they could do 10x better with a more advanced product. | They've launched a bunch of free side products that are related to Tweet Hunter in the problem they help solve, and for which Tweet Hunter makes a logical next step for serious users. Some examples include: a tool that unretweets everything you’ve ever retweeted; a tool to find the best times of the day to tweet. They also have made a lot of free tweet collections on specific topics. Some of them were launched on Product Hunt, and a few keep bringing in traffic today. Another key strategy was paying influential people they feel it's a good match for their brand. They’ve developed a network of people who love the product and support us. Similar to this, they managed to enlist 450+ affiliates who promote their product for a commission. | Influencers | - React - Chakra UI | - Twitter, Gmail, Slack, and Telegram: communication - SendInBlue: email marketing - Stripe: payments - Retool: internal tools | My "Failed Tweets" Inspired Me To Launch A $492K/Year Twitter Growth Tool | |||
6 | Prerender.io | Allows search engines to crawl SEO-friendly versions of React, Angular, and Javascript websites | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $199 - $399 | Subscription | Yes | Free, $90/mo, $290/mo | $2,640,000 | 86,206 | $2.55 | Bootstrapped from zero to $2.5 million in ARR just over 5 years | 1 | 4 | 2013 | Worked on this on the side until the monthly profit was close enough to quit his day job and have Prerender.io become a full-time thing. | SEO app | Screaming Frog ($7.2M/year) | Came up with the idea when he kept running into the problem where the projects he was building were not showing up on Google. | Started out hosting the open source software and charged customers for how much they used the hosted service, which enabled Prerender.io to be profitable from day one. | With Prerender.io being a developer tool, many blog posts were written about Prerender.io because they could show our open source code and then just include a link to our hosted service at the end. Those early blog posts helped give them a huge boost in SEO. For the first few years, they put zero money into advertising, and to this day most of the traffic is completely organic. | SEO | Content Marketing | - Redash - Sentry | - Helpscout - AWS - Chargebee - Slack | How I Bootstrapped My SaaS Company To $2.5M/Year In 5 Years As A Solo Founder | |
7 | Carrd | Single-page responsive site builder | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Offers a free plan and three paid options priced at $9, $19, and $49 per year; based on the number of sites you can build | $1,200,000 | 16,400,000 | $0.01 | Carrd.co grew to over 12,000 users in less than 6 months–1,100 paid–which translated in $4,000 MRR | 2 | 10 | 2016 | AJ was known for and dedicated most of his time to creating HTML5 themes for WordPress, and built and grew Carrd on the side | website builder | WordPress ($1.5B/year) | Before launching Carrd, AJ had built a strong following for his site template designs and themes for platforms like WordPress. He had also developed skills with back-end code, databases, and interface design. Unlike the “reluctant founder” (someone who has a pain point, can’t find a solution, and decides—often in exasperation—to build it themselves), AJ wasn’t wrangling any particular problem. Initially, he thought about Carrd as a side project that would showcase his skills to prospective employers. | Something else that worked well for Carrd was having to exist within a strict set of constraints. From day one, AJ knew that he wanted the project to be a one-man show. He realized this was a tradeoff because it meant he wouldn’t be building something on the scale of a Wix or Squarespace. To keep the scope manageable, he had to pare it down and keep it simple. “What you don’t build is as important as what you do build,” AJ says. “If you set your sights too high, you’ll create all kinds of problems that are too complex for one person to manage.” In other words, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Putting constraints around what he could and couldn’t build turned out to be a positive thing for both AJ and the product. Not only did it make it possible for him to keep working on the project, it actually suited Carrd’s ultimate audience who were looking for a simple solution, not something with every imaginable bell and whistle. | The tipping point came with his Product Hunt launch. He already had an existing “starter following” from back in his theme days, and the viral growth from Product Hunt pushed the project into overdrive. Even now, AJ’s recipe for awareness and distribution is very organic, very product led. He hasn’t really done any marketing, relying instead on word of mouth and low-key viral elements within the experience like the branded URL and a “Made with Carrd” link that appears in each free website footer. | Product Hunt | -JS -AWS | The SaaS Company That Accidentally Grew to 800,000 Users - Carrd: How to make $4k/mo from a side project | |||
8 | Plausible | Easy to use and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | Plans start at $9 and $19 per month, and grow as the pageviews increase | $1,200,000 | 487,738 | $0.21 | First line of code was typed on December 2018, on January 2019 they launched their public beta, got the first paid subscribers by May 2019, and took them one year to hit $1K MRR. | 2 | 0 | 2019 | Both founders work full time on the project | website analytics | Google Analytics | Both founders had similar experiences with Google and its products. They went from big fans, using several of their tools for many hours every day, loving them and recommending them to my family and friends, to becoming more aware of Google’s size, its business model, and how their dominance negatively impacts the web. | Their marketing is a bit different and a bit unconventional compared to the normal way of doing things in the startup world. They don’t do any paid advertising, don’t use pixels and other tracking to do retargeting around the web, they don’t do any experiments on website visitors, don’t have an affiliate program and don’t pay anyone to promote or recommend Plausible. They focus on content marketing and community engagement. Publishing regularly on their blog and engaging on different social media platforms and niche community sites. Their posts are longer and well-researched pieces on the different topics that are relevant to their product and audience. They always create content with their audience in mind. What questions do they have? What issues are they trying to solve? One of their very first posts was titled 'Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website' which got traction immediately as it did great on communities such as Hacker News. That first post has been read by about 65,000 people until now. | Content Marketing | | - Elixir/Phoenix - PostgreSQL - Clickhouse - TailwindCSS - Netlify CMS | - Fastmail: email - Paddle: payments - Element: internal chat tool - GitHub: feature requests, development, and product roadmap | How we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS - Bootstrapping a privacy-first Google Analytics alternative to $4k/mo | ||
9 | Taplio | Linkedin content generation and scheduling tool | Social Media | Desktop/Web App | B2C | $49 - $99 | Subscription | No | Three plans: $39, $52, and $149 per month | $1,080,000 | 1,041,000 | $0.09 | Thanks for following Tweet Hunter's playbook, Taplio started generating revenue in just a couple of weeks | 2 | 7 | 2022 | They split their dedication between Taplio and Tweet Hunter, which combined bring in around $3.5M in ARR | linkedin growth | Sprout Social ($359M/year) | Since these are the same founders who built Tweet Hunter, they thought they could replicate their Twitter success on Linkedin. Instead of growing their initial product, they decided to create a different and copy paste their whole previous strategy. | Their building process essentially consisted in replicating Tweet Hunter full database and functionality. | Their marketing strategy consists on establishing partnerships with influencers and creating lots of small online tools. This serves many purposes: helps to create buzz on social media and Product Hunt, boosts their SEO, and creates a free first touchpoint for many users that eventually might turn into paid customers of their main product. | SEO | Influencers | - React - NextJS - Vercel | - Carrd - Bubble | How We Built A $3.5M ARR LinkedIn Tool That Will Be Acquired For $10M-$15M | ||
10 | Rootd | A mobile app that helps people manage their panic attacks | Wellness | Independent/Standalone | Mobile App | B2B + B2C | $99 - $199 | Subscription | Yes | Three Tiers: $9.99/month, $79.99/year, $199/lifetime Customer Plan for Companies | $1,000,000 | 5,000 | $16.67 | Grew to 2M users in 4 years | 1 | 0 | 2019 | From the beginning, Rootd was a full-time project. From initial plans on paper to full app development, the main feature of Rootd has been to help people manage panic attacks | mental health app | Calm ($355M/year) | The initial idea for the app came from personal experiences with panic attacks and trying to find a mobile app to help (but found nothing to directly help). Did extensive research on techniques and strategies to manage and overcome panic attacks. Took her graphic design skills, new-found understanding of panic attacks, and got to work creating a resource tailored toward her demographic. | The initial concepts, designs, and app mascot were created in a notebook using notes, illustrations, and wireframes. Turned those paper notes into a mock-up using Photoshop. And then found a student developer to build the app for Google Play and App Store. She launched the app on World Mental Health Day and focused on the niche of “panic attack relief” . The main feature of the app was there from the beginning (a big red button to press when experiencing a panic attack), but more and more features have been added since launch. | Grew by having an intimate understanding of the problem users were experiencing and by building the solution users wanted. Established a strong and loyal customer base by personally responding to reviews and customer support Organically grew by optimizing the app for targeted keywords, descriptions, screenshots, app reliability, and more. Created targeted marketing in the lead up to World Mental Health Day (October) and International Women’s Day (March). Lastly, building a GREAT app has meant being featured in the App Store and large publications such as Women's Health, Time Magazine, and Healthline. | App Store | PR/Media Outreach | - Creative Cloud - Figma | - Trello - Google Suite - Mailchimp - TikTok | I Built An App That Helps People Manage Panic Attacks [2M+ Users] | |
11 | Tally | Simple form builder for makers and no-coders | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $49 - $99 | Subscription | Yes | 99% of Tally's features are available to free and paid users. The paid plan costs $29/month or $290/year | $840,000 | 4,730,000 | $0.01 | Started building in the summer of 2020, released an MVP in September. Launch on Product Hunt in March 2021 and by October 2021 they had crossed $5K MRR and 11.000 users | 2 | 3 | 2019 | The founders worked on Tally full time after their previous startup was severly hit by COVID. | online form | Typeform ($75M/year) | The founders were working on a previous startup, which aimed at help hotels to connect with travel influencers, but then COVID hit and travel stopped abruptly. That's when they decided to work on Tally, another idea they had in the backlog. Why Tally? As makers and frequent form users, they were unsatisfied with the existing tools out there. They either force you in a specific format or bombard you with countless limits and paywalls. They wanted a simple, yet powerful form builder that allows you to create any type of form without breaking the bank. They set off building Tally—a new type of form builder for makers and no-coders. | They launched an MVP in September 2020 and started asking for feedback from makers, Indie Hackers, and start-ups on Twitter and in Slack communities. | Their main acquisition for a while were: - Product Hunt (Looked for similar products on PH and reach out to the people who upvoted or commented) - 'Powered by Tally' badge on free forms - No-code communities | Product Hunt | - Node.js - TypeScript - Express - Sequelize - MySQL - React - Next.js - Styled Components - Cloud Run on GCP | - Notion | Year 1: Getting our first users and launching on Product Hunt - Bootstrapping to $10K MRR through product-led growth - Reaching $60K MRR with a team of 4 | ||
12 | CASTANET | A LinkedIn outreach automation tool | Sales | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $199 - $399 | Subscription | No | Three tiers: $99/mo, $199/mo, $399/mo | $732,000 | 6,242 | $9.77 | 4 weeks to first sale | 1 | 0 | 2018 | Came up with the idea after seven years of trying different ideas, and a bunch of different SaaS apps, most of which went nowhere. | outreach app | LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($1B/year) | Started reaching out to people he knew who either owned a business or had higher-up positions in a business in order to brainstorm business ideas. A consistent theme that came up was lead generation. There's always a big demand for good leads and sales people are willing to pay. | Built the initial MVP in 4 weeks using AWS, Webflow, and GitHub. | The majority of customers were generated through the tool itself, creating awareness and leads on LinkedIn. Initially, he created these outreach campaigns and conducted demos with people almost daily, often multiple times a day. Eventually, he built a white label and welcomed 4 resellers that referred customers for a commission. | Email List | Affiliates | - AWS - Webflow - Github | - Slack - First Promoter | How I Built A LinkedIn Outreach Tool That Generated $61K MRR Before Getting Acquired | |
13 | Gorilla ROI | Google Sheets add-on that connects Amazon Seller Central to Google Sheets | Productivity | Google Sheets | Addon | B2B | $199 - $399 | Subscription | No | Their pricing has two categories: small/medium size seller plans (Starter, Pro, and Mega) starting at $97/month, and enterprise plans ranging from $347 to $797/month. | $500,000 | 41,265 | $1.01 | About one year to get to $5,000 in MRR | 1 | 2 | 2018 | They started working on the idea in March 2018 and launched 6 months later in September | amazon data to google sheets | Zapier ($140M/year) | Jae and his wife started an Amazon business, but they soon faced the challenge of losing money due to their reactive approach towards issues. They found themselves running out of stock because of poor inventory forecasting decisions, incorrect product mixes, and overpaying fees. Additionally, a lot of their data analytics was manual, resulting in a waste of 1-2 hours just to collect data. To tackle this problem, they created Gorilla ROI, which automates data collection into Google Sheets. Their mission was to simplify the process of getting disorganized data into spreadsheets in a clean and organized way. | The founder began by conducting keyword research and scouring through forums where his ideal customers were known to hang out. This was to determine whether the problem he was trying to solve was valid. By doing so, he allowed the user base to determine the direction and development of the product via feedback and requests. Moreover, he posted his idea on Amazon forums and Reddit and received immediate feedback, which was enough to give them confidence. Google Sheets was the perfect platform for this project since no UI was required. This meant that he did not have to hire a designer, and it also sped up the development time by 4x. In that regard, what would have taken 1 year with a designer and developer took only 2 to 3 months to launch. | After receiving feedback from users, the company continued to add more customized data for its users. If a user suggested a good idea, the company quickly updated or added new features within a week, pushed it out, and let people know about it. The company acknowledged and thanked the user who brought up the idea, which built up a lot of credibility as users realized that their opinions were valued and their requests were being fulfilled. The SEO process and inbound marketing have been the main drivers of acquiring customers. On the SEO side he focused on creating epic articles that answered everything in extreme detail that would require the average person to spend two or three years of selling to learn the ins and outs. Additionally, there has been an increase in word of mouth as a large number of people are on Facebook, and Amazon groups have been recommending the company’s products. | PR/Media Outreach | SEO | - Appsumo - Zapier - Slack | Link #1 - Link #2 - Link #3 | ||
14 | Widebundle | Shopify app that helps merchants create bundles and offers | E-commerce | Shopify | Plugin | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | Just one plan available, $18/mo | $480,000 | 19,579 | $2.04 | Built a first working version in 14 days. Once it was launched, reached $3K in MRR. And by December they already hit $10K | 1 | 5 | 2020 | A first version was ready and working in 14 days | shopify bundle | Ecwid ($11M/year) | He used Shopify Facebook Groups and communities to read people’s problems and questions, add comments and start conversations. It’s a long job that only a few people want to do, but it works. At some point, Matt found 3 people who wanted the same thing but it didn’t exist in the Shopify App Store. They wanted features from a bundled app that didn’t exist. And if 3 people want it, maybe there are more. | The widget was coded using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. He used Shopify API with the “script tag” endpoint so that the widget could be loaded into Shopify stores. It wasn’t that complicated, learned how to do it in 2017 and Shopify became better at creating documentation. Started with the widget and not the dashboard because it was not important initially. It allowed him to show people he was working on something. They didn’t care about the dashboard. They cared about how it will appear on their Shopify Store. Then he finished the dashboard, and in 14 days, a first version was ready and working. | The first users were the ones from the Facebook Group, and then he kept contacting people who commented and posted in the communities. They slowly grew that way, and after a couple of months they started to have real traction when they launched the business with influencers and the Shopify App Store. By offering a 30% for every user referred, they had influencers posting on Instagram, sending emails, creating Youtube videos, etc. about the app. | Influencers | - Northflank for the servers - Sentry for bug tracking - Github for version control | - Mixpanel: to track data - Notion: to structure processes - Slack to communicate with the team - Klaviyo for emails - Loom for video recording - Crisp for customer support | Failing Thrice, Then Building A $40K/Month Shopify App By The Age Of 25 | ||
15 | Kiwi Sizing | Fit recommender and size chart Shopify plugin | E-commerce | Shopify | Plugin | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | A free plan and 2 Paid plans; Premium $6.99 and Ultimate plan at $12.49/month | $432,000 | 308,021 | $0.12 | Once launched, it brought in $10k by the end of the year | 1 | 1 | 2018 | This product started just as a side project. The founder spent around 10-15 hours each week after work building the tool. Success in the first year motivated the founder to continue investing time in the project. | shopify size | Monki ($50m/year) | The founder of Kiwi Sizing used to run a dropshipping store that sold dog clothing and pet accessories, but he always struggled with setting up size charts for the pet products. He faced two main issues when it came to sizing: each product had different sizing, and the vendor only provided sizing in centimeters. As a result, he had to manually convert each number from centimeters to inches using Google search, which was a time-consuming process. At the time, there were two size chart apps available on the Shopify app store, but neither of them offered unit conversion features. This meant that he had to waste hours adding up to 20-30 new merchandise each week. The business started because the founder, being an engineer, was highly motivated to create a tool that could help him automate this tedious process. | Kiwi Sizing started as a basic size chart app that allowed customers to create size charts and provide their measurements in centimeters, which were then automatically converted to inches. At the time, it was more advanced than other solutions available on the Shopify app store, making it a better option for merchants who were dropshipping from Chinese vendors. The founder was confident in their ability to create a better user experience. | The founder placed a great emphasis on increasing the number of app reviews as a means of measuring the success of the business. This strategy not only had a direct impact on the app's search ranking and download rate, but also contributed to its overall growth. The founder also hired professionals to handle SEO, ads, and content marketing, which proved to be a wise investment, leading to an increase in organic traffic and MRR revenue. | SEO | PR/Media Outreach | - SendInBlue - Freshdesk - Datadog - AWS | How I Developed A $36K/Month Ecommerce Sizing Plugin | ||
16 | Sniply | URL shortener that adds a custom CTA button to any page you share | Social Media | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | 3 subscription options priced at $9, $29, and $59/ - based on usage and team members | $420,000 | 18,271 | $1.92 | N/A | 3 | 3 | 2014 | N/A | link shortener | Bitly ($15M/year) | Co-founder Michael Cheng had his eureka moment when he came up with the idea for Sniply was when someone asked him how much ROI he was gaining from the time he spent on social media. The answer was... zero. | Designing and prototyping Sniply was the easy part for them. The founders who made Sniply were all software engineers with years of experience in big tech, and the actual nuts and bolts of Sniply as a product weren’t that complicated. They started with the basic functions of a link shortener then added additional features to make it unique and valuable to marketers. They built a CRO tool, not just a link shortener. | By far their biggest source of lead generation has been their inbound marketing efforts - namely the Sniply blog content that they share on Twitter. The Sniply blog mostly offers thought leadership about the content marketing space, but with a mix of top-of-funnel SEO content and the odd company update or milestone celebration. This has worked well because the thinking behind Sniply is a little controversial. A few media outlets have criticized Sniply on ethical concerns for being used to steal other people’s traffic. These claims are inaccurate and demonstrate a lack of understanding of how Sniply works, but the buzz does get people talking. | Content Marketing | PR/Media Outreach | - WordPress - AHrefs - Google Search Console - Metabase - Intercom - ChurnKey - SEMRush | We Created A $420K/Year Tool That "Redirects" Website Traffic | ||
17 | Mailman | Gmail tool that allows you to decide when and what emails should land in your inbox | Productivity | Gmail | Plugin | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | An $8/month subscription | $360,000 | 68,984 | $0.43 | They acquired 800 customers in 12 months (~$7K/month with their current pricing) | 2 | 5 | 2020 | One of the founders owns several agencies for designing and marketing. They went from idea to launch in 3 months. | gmail tool | ZenDesk ($1.3B/year) | This founder has built 25+ side projects. Most of them failed but a few brought in some revenue. After failing small and big over two dozen times, he had one product that investors wanted to invest money in, and after five years of growing it, sold it, and took some time off from making stuff. He started advising and investing in startups and especially crypto startups. To find time from all the chaos happening in his inbox, he wrote a small script that would make sure that emails land in his inbox only every four hours, in batches. Nothing comes in between. He used this script to find time to find good ideas that he could be building next. That’s when he saw a tweet from Andrew Wilkinson (Dribble owner), and he immediately emailed him with the script and a video tutorial. His reply, “What if we make this into a business?” | Andrew owns several agencies for designing and marketing. As soon as they shook hands, they were working on Mailman’s branding and UX/UI. Within a couple of weeks, they had the first designs ready. And from there, they coded and put life into those designs over the next few weeks. Also, before they could launch publicly, they had to go through Google’s Security Assessment program. Every product that works with Gmail has to go through it. | Once they had a working product, they expected Google's security assesment to take a couple of months. So, they decided to build a waitlist meanwhile. Andrew tweeted about this new project he is involved with and given his Twitter followership of 160k+, they got thousands of people on the waitlist overnight. Starting from the top, they sent out invites to ~50 people every day. Of those 50 invites, about 25 would sign up, and he’d schedule a 10-minute call with them to walk them through their Mailman account. This short call helped him understand what they were looking for, and plan future features. While trying to scale, they realized Mailman is a brilliant solution to a problem that most of our users do not realize they have. So their biggest challenge was to accept the fact that people are not searching for the solution to their inbox problems. They spent thousands of dollars on search ads to learn this lesson. So they shifted gears and started using social media and influencer marketing to spread awareness of the problem. Only when someone is aware of the problem, they’ll look for a solution, for which they've invested in SEO to make sure Mailman comes up when they search for a solution. | SEO | - AWS: cloud - Laravel Forge: product deployment - Webflow: landing page - Ghost: blog | - Transistor.fm: podcast - Veed.io: to create video content - Crisp: support and onboarding | We Built A $360K/Year Gmail Plugin That Helps People Manage Their Inbox | ||
18 | SuperLemon | Plugin for Shopify eCommerce stores to chat with their customers and also send order-related notifications via WhatsApp | E-commerce | Shopify | Plugin | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Two plans, priced at $0 and $15 per montly, plus a usage fee | $348,000 | 79,285 | $0.37 | 30 days to hit $400 MRR. | 2 | 0 | 2019 | They spent 2 full weeks to build and submit and MVP to the Shopify app store. | shopify live chat | Intercom ($250M/year) | After 2 failed startups, the founders set their sights on working on something people want and are ready to pay for. Their priority even before they had decided on the idea for the product was to find an audience, a group of people who faced a problem, and who currently pay for a software tool to solve their problem. App marketplaces were a way to mitigate some of this risk. They had some prior experience with building a Shopify store, and also had a friend who built a $20k/mo Shopify app without any employees. To find problems worth solving, they browsed the entire Shopify app store, which at the time had 3,000+ apps. Going through every single app, jotting down interesting ones, especially ones that had poor reviews indicating that they could do a better job at solving the same problem, and picked 5 out of the 100s of those ideas they identified, based on their goals and constraints: - An existing problem that people were already paying for - Existing apps weren’t doing the best possible job at solving customer’s needs - The app had the potential to grow to at least $3k in MRR, which after costs would allow the founders to live comfortably in Bengaluru | Since they were building an alternative to existing apps on the Shopify app store, they did not have to start with a blank canvas. The purpose of the MVP was to validate whether they should continue pursuing this idea, or if they need to try something else. So they only included the absolute minimum set of features with which they could launch a free app and hopefully gain traction. But they also made sure that early users could; - Achieve their primary objective when installing such an app (aka add a WhatsApp chat button to their store) - Customize the bare minimum necessary to make the chat widget their own (the text inside the chat button) Additionally, they learned from reading 100s of reviews on other apps that Shopify merchants greatly valued ease-of-use. If they could click one button to achieve their objective, that’s the best solution. And so they focused on designing an app where merchants only had to enter their phone number and click on a button labeled “Enable”. | Their goal was to acquire users organically, so they made sure the app store optimization was right. That included a clear and specific name that matched the user’s search terms; and a crisp listing page with catchy screenshots and description text The MVP of the app was titled “WhatsApp Chat Button” because that’s precisely what users wanted to add to their store. Hence the URL of the app ends with /WhatsApp-chat-button. In 40 days, they had 2,000+ users, got featured on the Shopify app store, and launched the first paid plans. In the following 30 days, they crossed $400 in MRR, and validation was complete. They knew they were on to something. To this day, they haven’t explored other channels of growth or customer acquisition. No ads, SEO, or partnerships yet. Their takeaway when it comes to user acquisition is to build one major channel of customer acquisition that works brilliantly for you (for them, the Shopify app store), that’s better than having 5 channels that are somewhat working. | App Store | | - AWS - Python / Django - ReactJs / Polaris - Redis - Golang | - Notion: product roadmap and feature ideas - Metabase: analytics - Google Analytics: website and listing page - Webflow: website - Mailgun: transactional emails - Ngrok - Ipdata | How We Developed A $29K/Month WhatsApp Plugin For Shopify | |
19 | WP Courseware | Learning Management System Plugin for WordPress | Software | WordPress | Plugin | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | No | Per site licensing with pricing between $159 and $279/year | $288,000 | 7,932 | $3.03 | N/A | 2 | 0 | 2012 | The founder was working a full-time job and this was just going to be a side hustle to supplement his income | wordpress lms | Teachable ($26M/year) | Back in 2011, the founders started creating an online course when they realized that there was no learning management system (LMS) plugin available for WordPress. Despite this obstacle, they went ahead and launched the course anyway, using tags and categories within WordPress to make it appear legitimate. It became apparent that they had stumbled upon an opportunity to create something bigger and better. Without much thought and zero validation, they decided to take the plunge and launch an LMS plugin business for WordPress. | The founder had some coding experience, but he had never built a plugin from scratch. This prompted him to hire a developer. He searched for a PHP/JavaScript developer in the UK who was developing plugins for WordPress on a contract basis. After signing a non-disclosure agreement, they split the cost of everything, making it financially feasible on an individual level and totally possible to bootstrap. The founder gave the developer a basic outline of what they were looking for, with the understanding that they wanted an MVP to get to market as quickly as possible. The developer took their outline and ran with it, ultimately delivering an excellent end product. | The initial release of WP Courseware was done as a Warrior Special Offer on the Warrior Forum, which had a large user base and provided the necessary initial traffic boost. The plugin was then launched via ClickBank to quickly gain a team of internet marketers who would promote it. In addition, they created blog content and published guest posts to increase organic traffic, which was a huge help. The team also gained a significant boost when they were noticed by a prominent influencer in the WordPress space. They also collaborated with other plugin developers to create integrations that allowed for cross-promotion. To further expand their marketing channels, they paid more attention to their YouTube channel and produced a lot of new content such as tutorials and strategic learning videos. They also started building a following on Instagram. | Online Directories | Influencers | - PHP - JavaScript | - Clickbank - YouTube | How Building My Own WordPress Solution Evolved into $24K MRR | |
20 | Excelformulabot | Generates text instructions into Excel formulas within seconds with the help of AI | Productivity | Google Sheets | Addon | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | A Pro Plan with a subscription fee of $9/month | $276,000 | 236,205 | $0.10 | The revenue generated during the launch week amounted to thousands of dollars | 1 | 0 | 2022 | Grew the site, while working a FT job, and hit $20K in just a couple of months. | excel formula bot | OpenAI ($1B/year) | In May 2020, the founder began exploring the field of AI, having noticed its growing popularity. He created a few Excel formulas using the OpenAI platform and received an 85% accuracy score from the feedback. With his background in analytics and expertise in Excel, he knew he could refine the model's output and develop a highly precise AI model. Later that day, he searched Google for an AI-based Excel formula generator, but fortunately, found none. It was at that moment he realized he had something truly exceptional. | Realizing that he was not the only one who would find an AI application that provided Excel formulas useful, the founder decided to expedite the development process. He created a basic application that lacked a paywall, login, or any advanced features. The app consisted of an input field where users could type their instructions, a button to generate the formula, an output field where the formula would appear, and a button to copy the formula. Next, he shared the website on the Excel subreddit, where users provided valuable feedback and recommendations for the product. This feedback was utilized to develop the site into what it is today. | In the beginning, the website was shared on the Excel subreddit, which triggered its social virality. The website gained widespread attention on various social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. Initially, much of the site's traction was due to TikTok influencers promoting it as a website that felt like it was illegal to know. Most of the traffic to the site comes from word-of-mouth recommendations through colleagues, friends, and social media influencers. Organic search, mainly by people searching for "excel formula bot," and direct traffic account for the majority of the site's traffic. | TikTok | - Bubble.io | - SendinBlue - OpenAI - Stripe | Link #1 - Link #2 - Link#3 | ||
21 | Upvoty | A web app for collecting and managing product feedback | Business | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $49 - $99 | Subscription | No | Three tiers: $15/month, $49/month, $99/month 14-day free trial available for each subscription tier | $240,000 | 118,846 | $0.17 | Reached $1,000 MRR in 2 months | 1 | 0 | 2019 | Initially a side hustle to solve their own problem that scaled as they gained more customers | user feedback app | Survey Monkey ($218.8M/year) | With a background in building online businesses, the founder needed a customer feedback solution for his own business. The founder did not find any suitable tools for his SaaS platform, so he decided to build Upvoty on the side to “scratch his own itch.” | Because of his background building a different startup, the founder decided to launch an MVP in 1 day. He built a simple landing page in Wordpress and started asking people if they were interested in the product. Within a few weeks he had a few hundred subscribers and started to design the first prototype of the product. He built and launched Upvoty to beta users within 6 months. 2 months later, he went live with Upvoty on Product Hunt and immediately had 10 paying customers – instant validation. | Launched a landing page with an explainer video and within 2 months, he had over 300 sign-ups for the beta list. Most of which came Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Makerlog, and platforms such as BetaList. Continued to grow the list via content-marketing (e-books), sponsored podcast interviews, and promoted with his YouTube and Instagram following. Added a ‘Powered by Upvoty’ mention and link in our feedback portal. They get referrals from our own product because the customers of their customers also wanted to use the feedback software. | Content Marketing | Online Directories | - WordPress for our website - EmailOctopus for email marketing - Asana for our project management - Stripe for payments - Front for email - Drift for website chat and support - Sendgrid for transactional emai - Google Analytics for usage data | Why I'm Building A Side Project On Top Of My Already Successful Business | ||
22 | ReferralHero | Allow businesses to create highly customizable referral programs unique to their customer base | Marketing | Independent/Standalone | Widget | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | No | Three tiers: $69/month, $169/month, $299/month | $216,000 | 16,526 | $1.09 | $1,000 in sales on day 1 (via Product Hunt) | 1 | 0 | 2018 | Started as a side project and built the MVP four days later. Within a week or two had 10 paying customers. Stayed as a side project/hustle for 12-18 months | referral program software | Referral Factory ($1.1M/year) | He was working for startup in the event analytics space. A customer suggested a feature for attracting more attendees for events. The idea was to allow people to jump higher in the queue by inviting (or referring) more people to the event. Several months later, remembered the idea and decided to build an MVP referral program as a widget instead of a web application. | Developed on Ruby on Rails and used APIs for emails, analytics, and nearly everything else Put the app on Heroku. Working on it, he learned about the importance of shipping quickly to get real-life feedback. He said, “until you get people paying for your stuff you don’t have a business, you have an idea.” | Shared the MVP with a few friends, and had 10 paying customers within a few days. Later, he launched on Product Hunt and offered a massively discounted lifetime sale, which resulted in hundreds of sign-ups and $1,000 in sales on day one. Partnered with other products for giveaways. Focused on content marketing and SEO to drive traffic to the website since day one. | SEO | Product Hunt | - Ruby on Rails - Heroku | - Helpscout - Zapier - Google Sheets - Todoist - Calendly - ProfitWell | How I Created A $18K/Month Referral Marketing Software | |
23 | Plasfy | All-in-one easy-to-use online design software | Graphic Design | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Pasfy has a free plan, and also two paid versions priced at $9 and $12/mo | $180,000 | 20,902 | $0.72 | Acquired 1,000 paying customers within just one month of the launch. | 1 | 0 | 2022 | 3 months to create the alpha version, while working on their parent company at the same time | graphic design software | Adobe ($15B/year) | The founder had experienced a personal frustration with available design tools. And he observed those larger platforms in the market, despite lacking some of the essential features, had achieved immense success. He shared my vision with their email list, which mainly consisted of graphic designers (the parent company sold graphic design templates mainly for Photoshop), and received overwhelmingly positive responses, it became clear that he wasn't alone in his frustration. | In terms of time, it took approximately three months to develop an alpha version of the software, complete with its fundamental features. Following that, he collaborated closely with around twenty five of their most valued customers, who served as beta testers in a private Skype group. For software development, he collaborated with four skilled developers from different countries: Poland, Croatia, India, and Morocco. Instead of an hourly wage, these freelancers were compensated with a lump sum for their work, for instance, $x amount for the implementation of a specific feature. The reason is that he previously had a bad experience with paying by the hour. | To spread the word, he initially leveraged the power of email marketing, directly reaching out to their highly relevant and targeted email list which we had built up over the past several years selling our initial graphic design bundles. Since launch these are some of the marketing strategies that have worked best for them: - Partnerships with leading marketplaces and websites, operating on a revenue share model. This was great as there was no up front investment required and they only paid the partner with each sale that was made. - Giveaway Promotions. They forged partnerships with SAAS-themed Facebook groups and ran exciting giveaway promotions. It was an interesting experience to collaborate with these communities and offer a limited number of Plasfy Professional accounts for free, with the condition that users would give our platform a try. This has yield incredible results for our business. | Email List | Marketplace | - WordPress - Woocommerce - Cloudways - Sendgrid - Freshdesk - Vimeo - Slack - Skype | Frustrated With The Existing Design Tools, I Built A $180K/Year Design Software | ||
24 | SiteGPT | AI tool to create and train web chatbots | Customer Support | OpenAI | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $400+ | Subscription | No | Two plans, priced at $99 and $999 per month. Plus an optional $50/mo addon to remove branding | $180,000 | 79,462 | $0.19 | In less than a month after launch, SiteGPT crossed $10k MRR. After just 6 months it has hit $15k MRR | 2 | 0 | 2023 | SiteGPT started as a side project and as one of the features of founders previous main product | ai chatbot | OpenAI ($1B/year) | In March of this year, Twitter got filled with a lot of AI content. So they founder started to wonder if there was any way he could make use of AI to help customers of his previous product. That’s when he thought – every one of his customers has a blog, so why not add a way for people to chat with those blogs? That’s how everything started. His other product was doing relatively well at that time (around $4k MRR). But as he started working on this feature, he realized that the potential for this was so huge, there wasn't any reason to limit it to his current customers. Anyone who has a website could make use of this. That’s when he decided to launch this feature as an entirely different product. | Building an entire chat platform was so much more difficult than the founder initially expected. At that time, this ChatGPT use case was not that popular and there were no resources available; so he built everything from scratch. But he knew the problem was there, he had the UX that he wanted the users to experience. So decided to build a very bare minimum version of it in 2-3 weeks and launch it. The only feature it had was the core feature – you add your website link and then a chatbot will get created and trained on all the content on your website. That’s the only thing the chatbot did at the time of launch. The goal was to improve it later only if necessary. But it was important for the founder to launch it first and see if anyone would use it. | During the pre-launch stage, the founder leveraged his 10K followers Twitter audience to share the process and attract some attention. Following this same strategy, his launch consisted in sharing a tweet. Within the first hour of launching he already had a few customers. Around 15k people visited his website that day. A few days later, he also shared the project on Hacker News, where it also got a lot of attention and reached the front page. Lastly, he launched on Prodcut Hunt, where it ended up being the #1 product of the day and the #4 product of the week. | Online Directories | - Remix - Cloudflare Workers - Fauna | - Paddle: payments and taxes - ChartMogul: subscription analytics | How My AI Side Project Grew To $15K MRR In Just A Few Months | ||
25 | Buttondown | A simple newsletter software | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $49 - $99 | Subscription | Yes | 6 different plans that range from free to $139/mo, based on the number of subscribers | $180,000 | 257,732 | $0.06 | Landed the first handful of paying users on launch day. | 1 | 1 | 2016 | Buttondown was very much a nights-and-weekends project for the first few years; it takes a lot of up-front effort to launch a SaaS, especially one in such a competitive space where there are a lot of table stakes. | newsletter software | Mailchimp ($800M/year) | Justin built Buttondown to scratch his own itch — all of the other email tools he tried were either super-heavy (like Mailchimp or ConvertKit) or wanted to own his entire blogging presence like Medium or Substack. There wasn’t anything that just let him drop in a <form> tag into a blog and automatically send out emails, so he decided to build something just like that on a hunch that other people shared his use case. | Thanks to a good selection of similar apps to understand what the table stakes were — there were a lot of evenings spent in competitor’s workflows to understand what worked well and what worked poorly with their approaches. (Something he still does) Even then, there was a huge swath of decisions he had to make in the early goings of a SaaS: branding and color scheme, technical stack, initial core features, voice, API contracts, the list goes on. By default his approach is to do less and to be extremely surgical with what gets built. He eschewed flavor-of-the-month frameworks in favor of ones that he was experienced with (Heroku, Django, Vue, Sass); he stuck with system default fonts instead of trying to find the perfect font face. This is even reflected in the interface. Buttondown’s initial interface was very minimalist, with an emphasis on what he cared about most: performance, Markdown, and “getting out of your way”. The app has grown much more powerful and complex since, but he's still oddly proud of these initial screens even if they represented a much less mature vision. | Once the product was ready, he posted on HN and Product Hunt and hit the front page on both, but it wasn’t some meteoric success. It got around thirty thousand unique visitors, out of which only came around five hundred registered users and maybe ten paying customers. | Online Directories | Content Marketing | - Heroku - Django - Vue - Sass | Bootstrapping A [Profitable] $15K/Month Simple Newsletter SaaS With No Experience | ||
26 | CraftMyPDF | They offer API-based products which allow businesses to generate PDF documents and images from reusable templates | Business | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | Yes | Four tiers: Free, $35/mo, $85/mo, $259/mo. | $180,000 | 15,395 | $0.97 | 9 months to $15K/MRR | 1 | 0 | 2020 | Full time, took 3 months to build initial product, 9 months later released the newest flagship product. | pdf tools | Adobe ($15B/year) | He took on some freelance work that required generating PDFs during the pandemic. While there were various online services available for this task, he found that none of them offered a user-friendly template editor. As a result, he decided to develop my PDF generation services with a template editor. | Decided to build a product around 4 ideas: - Only do one thing and not try to be an “all-in-one” solution - Be able to be built in 3 months - Target B2B market - Subscription-based Purchased a SaaS boilerplate for $300 to keep the development timeline within 3 months. The SaaS boilerplate included modules like user management, payment integration, and libraries. | SEO has been the main source of traffic for our services. Created blog posts on a monthly basis to boost visibility on the search engine results pages, making it easier for customers to find their services. | SEO | | - AWS for hosting - Make.com for process automation | - Notion to organize tasks, planning etc - MindMeister for mind mapping - Lucidchart - ChartMogul | I Faced This Problem Firsthand And Built A $15K MRR PDF-Generation API Tool | |
27 | FormCraft | A premium WordPress form builder | Software | WordPress | Plugin | B2B | $1 - $49 | One-Time Payment | No | One-time licensing $30 | $160,000 | 5,000 | $2.67 | Made over $1,500 the first month | 1 | 0 | 2013 | Building and launching the first version of FormCraft took around 6 months. | wordpress forms | Typeform ($75M/year) | As he was learning and practicing coding, he stumbled upon CodeCanyon.net and decided to explore the form builders available on their marketplace. To his surprise, he found a form builder plugin with an outdated interface that was selling quite well. He thought to himself that he could create something better, so he began working on his own project. | It took around 6 months, to create and release the initial version of FormCraft. Although it wasn't particularly feature-rich, the primary objective was to gauge people's responses to a form builder that had a more contemporary user interface. | After introducing the plugin on the CodeCanyon marketplace, he simply let it be. There was no additional effort put into marketing it. The plugin's growth has been organic, with users discovering it either through the marketplace or by hearing about it from others. | Marketplace | | - CSS - Javascript | -CodeCanyon | How I Supported Myself Full Time by Building a WordPress Plugin | |
28 | Analyzify | Data tracking app for Shopify merchants | E-commerce | Shopify | Plugin | B2B | $400+ | One-Time Payment | No | One-time $749 purchase with lifetime access and support | $144,000 | 5,000 | $2.40 | 350 Shopify stores and $12K/month in 7 months. | 1 | 3 | 2020 | 6 months to develop and launch the first version. | shopify analytics | Mixpanel ($96M/year) | DataPack, the founder's productized offer for data-analytics-related projects, had received too many requests from Shopify stores. So they decided to create a standalone product for the Shopify market. | In the beginning, it only seemed like a 1-month project for them. The app would inject data layers, Google Tag Manager codes into the store - and provide a tailored Google Tag Manager container for the merchants to import. It seemed that simple. They already had everything from the productized service - they just needed to turn it into a product. The coding, creating data layers, making it globally work with most Shopify themes, and preparing Google Tag Manager containers took more than 3 months. Every time they tested the app on a new store, they found more elements that were not working as expected. Shopify is a simple environment for merchants and end-users, but unfortunately, it can be different for developers and partners. The apps and themes constantly conflict with each other. Making the app compatible with all those elements was a challenge. | Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was recently launched, and Shopify didn’t have a native integration with GA4. The videos on YouTube about the topic only showed basic implementation. None of them covered e-commerce features. They decided to make a freemium version of their product where a user could make GA4 work in their store—at no cost. The video started to receive 20-30 views, 8 -10 leads per day. And finally, we received our first sales. That single YouTube video kept performing great and dominated search results. After 2 months, they launched a video series: Shopify Google Tag Manager Course. And that changed everything. The videos started to get 300+ daily views and were ranked well in search results. | YouTube | | -Ruby on Rails - Google Tag Manager | - HelpScout: Help center - Notion: internal knowledge base and product management - Vimeo: record and share client & internal videos | Our Analytics App For Shopify Reached $12K MRR In Just 7 Months | |
29 | Client Portal | A lightweight project management tool for WordPress | Productivity | WordPress | Plugin | B2B | $199 - $399 | One-Time Payment | No | User-based licensing starting at $199 for single site and $399 for multi site. | $132,000 | 8,726 | $1.26 | A weekend after launch, the app attained $10K in sales | 1 | 0 | 2016 | The founder worked on the project full-time and even hired a programmer to help with the coding bit. | client portal | Copilot ($11.6M/year) | The founder worked previously a freelancer. She faced difficulties in finding a suitable platform to manage her clients' project assets. Despite trying different project management tools, the quality of these tools proved to be subpar, which led to her using email as the primary mode of communication. Determined to find a better solution, she decided to create her own platform. She developed a page on her website that allowed clients to log in and access all the project assets that had been collected. She shared her experience with others about the portal and how it had helped her manage customer projects. After receiving a lot of encouragement from her peers, she eventually decided to sell it. | At first, she didn't have the ability to create a WordPress plugin herself. So, she made the decision to hire someone to do it for her. Rather than investing her money into the development process, she decided to launch presales of the Client Portal to validate the need for the product and fund its development. The presales were a success, so she proceeded to hire a developer to turn the Client Portal into a plugin. | Speaking at conferences helped her build her brand and expand her network. There she met the right people who were important for her business. She also appeared on podcasts that targeted freelancers and agencies where she mentioned Client Portal briefly, but her focus was on providing valuable insights to freelancers. At the end of the podcast, she directed listeners to a free email course that discussed freelancing in more detail. After completing the email course, she would pitch Client Portal to them with a discount. | PR/Media Outreach | SEO | - HelpScout - RightMessage | How I Built A $7K/Month WordPress Plugin Because I Needed The Product | ||
30 | Leave Me Alone | A service to easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails | Productivity | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | They offer two subscriptions at $8 and $14 per month. Additionally, the app can be used during 7 days for a $6 payment | $120,000 | 55,676 | $0.18 | Since they were developing the product openly, many beta testers joined way before the product was ready and later became paid users | 2 | 0 | 2018 | As owners of a web development agency, they've built and run several projects like this one on the side | email organizer | Spark ($2M/year) | These founders also run a web development agency. Leave Me Alone was born because they took their own advice and stuck to solving their own problems. Both were spending a lot of time sorting through emails, so they went searching for a service that would help them find and unsubscribe from the unwanted ones. Found a few which would help for free, but a closer look revealed that they didn’t charge because they were selling all of their user's data for marketing. Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of their email data being exploited, they decided to build their own solution. | The first prototype of Leave Me Alone was built in 7 days. Motivated by their small success being open with a previous project, and mindful of their failures, they took a different approach to build this startup - they wanted to share everything, get early validation, and iterate. So they picked a name, put together a quick landing page, and started sharing it around on social media. Writing the code is the part of building a product that they're are most familiar with. They built a basic prototype that focused on the core functionality - showing users their subscription emails and letting them unsubscribe easily. The first version only supported Gmail and only showed emails received within the past week. | The best thing that has worked for them is building in the open and being transparent about everything they do. They've been able to build a community of people invested in them and their journey to build this product who want to see them succeed. This has helped them to stay on track, remain accountable, and provided an invaluable support network when things have been tough. They attribute a large proportion of their success to the communities they're a part of who help to share updates, promote launches, and give them the motivation to keep going. The biggest ones are Makerlog and Women Make, but they also are very active and receive lots of support on Twitter, and Indie Hackers. All of their traffic is organic; from social media, blog, and word of mouth. They blog about a variety of topics including changes to the product, privacy, remote work, and coding. These are shared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn using Buffer to post twice a week. Twitter is their biggest driver of traffic, and it is also where they are most active. Recently they started reaching out to other blogs to write guest posts for each other to bring readers different knowledge and expertise. Regarding SEO they publish blog articles that target keywords such as “how to unsubscribe” or “how to block emails”. These have done well because they are long-form content that provides step-by-step instructions for unsubscribing that are actionable and useful to the reader. The other big SEO improvement was identifying the best-performing long-tail pages and making them more helpful for readers. Pages such as “how to unsubscribe from X emails” where X is a common mailing list such as Quora, eBay, Amazon, etc. | Content Marketing | - Metomic: cookie consent - Simple Analytics: analytics - Sentry: error handling - Mailgun: email tools - Airtable | How This Traveling Couple Built An App That Helps You Unsubscribe From Unwanted Emails - Updates We Made That Took Us From $500/Month To $10K/Month In 3 Years | |||
31 | GoFullPage | Full page screen capture Chrome extension | Productivity | Chrome | Extension | B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | A premium update costs $1 a month | $120,000 | 124,552 | $0.08 | N/A | 1 | 2 | 2012 | The founder was creating a solution to an issue he had been experiencing, and it quickly turned out to be a stand-alone project. | screenshot tool | Evernote/Skitch ($50M/year) | The founder was tasked with creating and printing a poster for an upcoming event. However, he had designed it as a webpage, and soon realized that webpages do not always translate well to physical prints. In an effort to find a solution, he searched the Chrome web store for an extension that would take a full-page screenshot. Unfortunately, all the extensions he tried failed to properly stitch the various sections of the page together. So, he decided to take matters into his own hands and developed his own Chrome extension to properly screenshot entire web pages. | — | Coles posted the initial code on github, exposing the application to a potential audience. He then wrote a blog post announcing its release. | Github | SEO | Link #1 - Link #2 - Link #3 | |||
32 | Merch Wizard | Helps sellers on Merch by Amazon create a database of their products with Airtable | E-commerce | Amazon | Extension | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | Yes | Two plans: $0/forever to $15/month (or $150/year) | $120,000 | 7,810 | $1.28 | 1 year to generate the first $3,000 | 1 | 0 | 2018 | Started as a side hustle and made $3,000 in one year via a simple Chrome extension. Then spent 90 days developing and validating an improved chrome extension. Used beta testers and power users from previous apps to gain feedback and launch. | merch by amazon | Twilio ($3.8B/year) | After working for 20 years as a developer, Rick realized he wasn’t fulfilled by his career and decided to try making passive income on Amazon. Learned about Merch by Amazon – a place for sellers to list their Print on Demand Products (e.g. speciality designed mugs, hats, stickers, apparel, etc.) across Amazon Marketplaces. The user interface for Merch by Amazon was clunky, frustrating to use, and time consuming. Rick decided to use his software development skills to create chrome extensions to help frustrated sellers. Specifically aiming to help sellers manager their portfolio of products and designs across the marketplace. | He built an audience and email list by giving away free apps and chrome extensions to fellow Merch by Amazon sellers. He then created his first paid product – a one-time payment chrome extension called Merch Batch Editor, which helped sellers edit batches of all their products quickly and easily. He built this over a weekend and made $3,000 over the course of a year. He then decided to go all-in on creating a flagship product called Merch Wizard. This new app would combine the functionalities of his previous apps, but this time with a trusted audience of users and beta testers to help validate the idea. | Started by creating a free Chrome extension to fix his immediate frustrations with Merch by Amazon. Found users with the same frustration, built an email list, and gave away his extension for free. Validated the MVP product beta testers and power uses of previous apps and built pre-launch hype on social media and his email list. Also shared about the app in relevant Facebook Groups Created affiliate relationships with Merch by Amazon Influencers, used Facebook and YouTube to host live demos and q&a for the app. Existing customers recommended his app on forums and groups when people asked about tools to solve specific Merch by Amazon problems. Continued to attract and retain customers by hosting the first European-based conference for his niche’s audience. This helped build trust with his community, network with influences, and meet his users in-person. | Email List | Influencers | - Gumroad - Airtable - Wordpress - WooCommerce - Zapier - MailChimp - TextExpander - Slack - JIRA - BitBucket | I Developed A Niche Chrome Extension For Amazon Merch Sellers That Makes $120K/Year | ||
33 | ConvertCalculator | An SaaS tool to create online calculator widgets | Marketing | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $49 - $99 | Subscription | Yes | Free, $15/mo, $35/mo, $65/mo, $100/mo | $96,000 | 109,645 | $0.07 | Got first customer within 2 weeks of building the MVP. Posted on Quora and converted a few leads. | 1 | 0 | 2017 | Started his first business in university and created 10 projects over the next few years (all failed). In 2017, a client asked him to build a calculator feature, which he turned into his product. | online calculator | Flutter ($2.5B/year) | Came up with the idea when a client asked him to build a price quote app. He searched Quora and Reddit for potential demand, and found there were lots of people looking for a similar app. Decided to build it in a week and landed his first paying customers 2 weeks later. | Built the first verion on a plane heading to Portugal, and then started soliciting customer feedback to continually improve the product. | SEO has been a big driver for growth. Main strategy for SEO was creating landing pages for every single use case of the product, such as lead generation, quote building, and order forms. | SEO | | - Heroku - MongoDB - MeteorJC - React - TailwindCSS | - MailerLite - Email Octopus - Trello | How I Turned A Client Request Into My Own $5K/Month SaaS Product | |
34 | Live Helper Chat | Open source live support chat application | Software | Independent/Standalone | Chatbot | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | It has 4 plans that go from $0 to $16 per month | $90,000 | 16,505 | $0.45 | Worked on it on his spare time and monetized through donations for 3 years. | 1 | 0 | 2009 | Worked on it on the side for 6 months and started receiving donations. | open source chat tool | RocketChat ($7.8M total revenue) | Everything started more than 10 years ago. When the founder was working in a small web agency and one of their clients asked for a live support script. Since they couldn't find any good open-source alternatives at that time - he decided to build one in two weeks during his holidays | First product versions were built using jQuery and Foundation CSS framework and Zeta Components. | Having an open-source project it was something new for this founder, he didn't know how to promote it. This is what he did: - Create an official website – Github was created just 4 years after the project's launch in 2013 - Posted links to my project on some scripts repositories. E.g hotscripts.com and alternative.to - Llet Google do the rest Today, Github is the main acquisition channel and where almost all users find the product. To keep developers engaged, he's created a Discord community that has 1,5K members. | Online Directories | Online Directories | - React - AngularJS - VanilaJS - Zeta Components - Eclipse - PHPStorm | - Skype - PayPal - Google Keep | I Built A Live Chat Tool In My Spare Time And Now Make $90K/Year | |
35 | AirTrackBot | Telegram chatbot designed to search for cheap flights and track their prices | Travel | Telegram | Chatbot | B2C | Free | Affiliates | Yes | The tool is free to use, it generates revenue through affiliates when a user purchases a deal through on of its links | $84,000 | 5,000 | $1.40 | N/A | 1 | 0 | 2017 | N/A | telegram chatbot | OpenAI ($1B/year) | The idea came to the founder because he was tired of the tedious and time-consuming process task of manually checking airline websites daily, to see if fares dropped. To solve this, he decided to create a chatbot that could automatically tracked flight prices and sent him notifications on Telegram when prices change. He was confident that many people like him could benefit from this. After a month of development, the first iteration of the product was released. | The initial ideas was to start with a local version of the bot to find and track flights carried out by the two largest European low-cost companies — Wizzair and Ryanair. Since neither of the companies had a public API, he used the Kiwi.com API. This allowed him to immediately create a global product that became useful to users from all over the world. When building the product, it was essential to launch the product as quickly as possible to validate the idea and obtain initial results. The initial version of the bot was far from perfect, as it was a simple Telegram bot with limited functionality, lacking features such as a roundtrip search option and currency selection, etc. Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, he was still able to successfully capture the attention of potential users and generate interest in the product. | The first marketing action was to list AirTrack on popular bot catalogs. It was completely free and got him about 50 users per day. A few days after the public launch, the bot had nearly 300 subscribers, and it seemed like a cool result. As the topic of chatbots was trending at the time, he decided to reach specialized media outlets that covered chatbot-related topics. Then, he leveraged his brief experience working in some media outlets, where he learned how to approach journalists and how to pitch a product so they would be interested in writing about it. Sent a press release to tech media and was featured in some of them. That caused a chain reaction and some mainstream online newspapers caught up with the news, and helped him reach 10,000 users. After that, the bot went viral in Ukraine. It got dozens of mentions in mainstream media. In particular, AirTrack was mentioned by the largest Ukrainian TV channel during prime time. That was the confirmation that he had created a product that will be useful for many people. | Online Directories | PR/Media Outreach | - Trello: manage project workflow - Paddle: payment processing - Xolo Leap: business management | How I Built And Grew A Telegram Bot With 1M Users | ||
36 | Data Fetcher | Imports data from anywhere into Airtable without code | Software | Airtable | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $49 - $99 | Subscription | Yes | Plans priced at: $0, $24/month, $49/month, $99/month | $80,000 | 29,401 | $0.23 | Grew to 190 paying customers and $6,500 in MRR in one year | 1 | 0 | 2020 | Prior to launching Data Fetcher, Andy taught himself to code in order to get a career in software. He developed multiple software projects. The two notable projects were: - Verbly for learning Spanish conjugations, which landed on the front page of Hacker News - And Influence Grid, a directory of TikTok influencers. Influence Grid was his first success – scaling to $3K MRR and sold for $55K | airtable integration | Zapier ($140M/year) | In 2020, Andy learned about a Google Sheets add-on called API Connector, which imports your data into a simple google sheet. Around the same time, Andy noticed the rise in popularity of Airtable. Since Google Sheets and Airtable were close in compatibility, Andy decided to build a similar type of data integration tool for Airtable. Andy’s 3-step method for coming up with ideas is helpful context for understanding how he came up with the idea: - Find a platform that is already growing massively. - Look at already successful tools for more mature platforms. - Build an equivalent tool for the new platform. | Around the time Andy had the idea, Airtable had opened their app marketplace to third party developers. Airtable also used React.js, a programming technology he was familiar with. Andy spent 1 month developing the first version, then 3 months getting it through Airtable’s app marketplace review process. While developing the app, Andy would tweet about it and collect emails of people who were interested. When the app was live, he used this email list to create awareness and find his first few customers. He went on to launch the Data Fetcher on Product Hunt, which drove even more customers. | Grew the initial awareness and potential customer by sharing the development process on Twitter. Once the app was live, he used Product Hunt to attract more customers. At the time of his launch, 70-80% of customers found Data Fetcher organically via the Airtable app marketplace. Now, he continues to grow through a no-code blog and YouTube channel which teaches people how to use Data Fetcher in various instances. | App Store | - JavaScript - React.js | - Heroku - MailerLite - SendGrid - Airtable - Gitbook - Hygraph | How I Built An Airtable Plugin That Lets Users Manage Their Data Better [$80K/Year] | ||
37 | SaasRock | A Remix-based boilerplate platform with out-of-the-box SaaS features to launch your MVP. | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B + B2C | $199 - $399 | Subscription | No | Two priced tiers: $199 or $499/month | $52,000 | 5,000 | $0.87 | $3K in 1 month | 1 | 0 | 2022 | Has been working on this as a side hustle since March 2022 and built it to $2K/month in 6 months | saas framework | Bubble io ($69M/year) | Alexandro came up with the initial idea for SaasRock after 8 years of being a developer. He built multiple web apps using C#, Vue, .Net, and Tailwind CSS. Alexandro felt like his web development process was too slow because of the multiple stacks he was using. He migrated my Vue2 app to Vue3, then to React, and then to Svelte to create a similar boilerplate but with different frontends. With this in mind, he started looking for tools to speed up his web development process. | He built the first version of SaasRock in 7 days after finding Remix.Run – a full-stack JavaScript framework for building web apps. He tweeted about his building process and was retweeted by Remix.Run’s account, which netted 1,066 downloads (and potential customers). He released v0.0.1 for free for 24 hours. 24 hours after launch, he increased his price to $299 and reached 19 customers in 1 month. 2 months later, he switched his pricing model from $299 to two tiers: - $99/month for core features - $149/month for core + enterprise features He got his first $99 subscriber just two days after launch and has grown to $2,778 MRR | Started a Discord Server around his product and collected timely feedback and comments from the community. He uses Discord to share about upcoming feature releases and to show social proof for potential customers. Used Twitter to build his MVP and gain email subscribers. Now, uses YouTube as a platform to share about building a SaaS with SaasRock. | Discord | YouTube | - Remix - Tailwind CSS - Prisma | - GumRoad - Stripe - Loom - Canva - SimpleAnalytics - Postmark - ConvertKit - Fiver | I Turned My 'MVP Template' Into A Business That Now Makes $4,380/Month | |
38 | Nureply | AI powered cold email software | Sales | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | No | Three pricing tiers: $69/month for core features, $154/month for core features + AI integrations, and a $30K lifetime offer for Fortune 500 companies | $48,000 | 21,259 | $0.19 | $4K MRR in 4 months | 1 | 0 | 2022 | Started collecting emails for prospective customers pre-launch and had 20 paying customers before going live | ai email marketing | Hubspot ($1.7B/year) | Wanted to find alternative solutions to finding customers. And did not want to only use paid advertising or cold outreach on LinkedIn. Learned about email marketing and started exploring how to use it to attract customers. After realizing he was writing the same outreach nearly every day, he wondered if he could build an AI-based tool for emails. With a background in Machine Learning (ML), AI topics, and a working knowledge of GPT-3/OpenAI, he started developing an AI-based email marketing tool. | He created a very basic landing page to collect emails for launch Sent email outreach to 100s of potential customers before creating an AI-powered model to help with more personalized outreach Hired 5 virtual assistants to collect data about potential customers and write more human-like email sequences. He then used all this data and writing, fed it into a custom AI model, and created the first iteration of NuReply – all within 35 days. | Started to collect emails on Facebook Groups, Twitter, and by reaching out to Email Marketing Agencies. Collected 750 emails in the first 30 days from prospective customers. 30 of the 750 prospects responded to test his product And 20 of the 30 testers became paying users (all before fully going ‘live’). | Email List | - OpenAI | - Upwork - Buttondown (for email campaigns) - Stripe | How This AI Email Marketing Tool Reached $4K/Month In Just 4 Months | ||
39 | BudgetSheet | Google Sheets Extension that imports bank transactions and tracks balance updates over time | Finance | Google Sheets | Addon | B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | BudgetSheet Pro is $8/month or $79/year | $42,000 | 5,000 | $0.70 | It took about 9 months to acquire paying customers | 1 | 0 | 2018 | After two months, he had a good first release on the Google Workspace Marketplace. | google sheet budget | Smartsheet ($355M/year) | Vance, the founder, had tried many personal finance and budgeting apps, but he was left frustrated with them. He found it easier to manage his finances using a spreadsheet. However, he realized that this was a common problem that many people faced and needed a solution. Thus, he decided to address it himself and developed BudgetSheet. | BudgetSheet is full stack TypeScript. The whole website, API, and webservice are built with Next.js and deployed to Vercel with AWS Lambda functions for serverless API endpoints. The PostgreSQL database is hosted on AWS in the same region. | Before launching his product, Vance was able to garner early users and fans through a Reddit post he made in the /r/personalfinance subreddit. Shortly after the launch, Vance also advertised his product on BetaList by purchasing a paid listing for $199 and providing a coupon code. Additionally, he paid $149 for a pinned post on a large Facebook group for Google Sheets and Spreadsheet enthusiasts. Furthermore, Vance listed his product on DEV.to using free credits he had. | Online Directories | - Next.js - PostgreSQL | - Vercel - Gumroad - Google Apps Script | Link #1 - Link #2 - Link #3 | ||
40 | Storeo | iOS app for making Instagram Stories longer than 15 seconds | Social Media | Mobile App | B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Available for free or $9.99 Paid plan | $32,400 | 3 days to attain 10 in app purchases and 100 downloads | 2 | 0 | 2017 | They took around 150 hours to design and build the production version and launch it in the App Store | instagram stories app | HootSuite ($150M/year) | Brandon had a friend named Martin who worked in marketing for construction contractors. Martin often created Instagram Stories for his clients but found that the 15-second time limit was never enough for him to convey everything he wanted. To work around the time limit, he had to manually split up the videos using a desktop editing app. This approach, however, was very time-consuming. Martin realized there must be an easier way and had an idea for an app that could automatically split longer videos into 15-second Instagram Story segments. He shared his idea with his friend Brandon, a software developer, was confident he could build the app. The two friends decided to start a business together. They agreed that Brandon would build the app, while Martin would handle sales and marketing. Any profits from the app would be split 50/50 between them. Brandon immediately started building the app based on Martin’s idea. | Brandon was aware that React Native was the perfect choice for building the app as it allowed for building the UI using Javascript - a language that he was proficient in. Initially, he had to learn React Native, which took him about 20 hours to understand the basics and develop a basic prototype. He spent another 130 hours designing and building the production version, which was then launched on the App Store. Prior to the launch, they conducted a beta test with approximately 20 people, who really appreciated the app and identified a few bugs that Brandon and Martin weren’t aware of. | Martin shared the Storeo app with his 12,000 Instagram followers initially. During the first weekend, the app was downloaded 100 times, and 10 in-app purchases were made. Martin also focused on building relationships with influencers and people with large followings, which was an effective way to spread the word. Many of these individuals shared information about Storeo on their Instagram accounts and blogs, resulting in increased visibility. Further, Storeo was featured in several prominent blogs, including Buffer, Later, and SocialMediaExaminer. | Influencers | SEO | - React Native - Javascript | Brandon built a simple Instagram utility app as a side project and earns $2,700 per month in passive income. | |||||
41 | T.LY | URL shortener | Productivity | Chrome | Extension | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | The pricing for T.LY starts at $5 up to $50 per month | $31,200 | 6,185,000 | $0.00 | Took 7 months to acquire first paying customer. | 1 | 0 | 2019 | This was a side project and building the MVP was pretty straightforward taking a few days. | link shortener | Bitly ($15M/year) | After reading that Google would be shutting down its URL shortener service in March 2019, the founder saw an opportunity to develop a link shortener service that could fill the gap. He also recognized that there was a demand for a link shortener API for use in his day job, specifically with a texting application. Realizing that other companies would also benefit from this service, he decided to build his own shortener API. | The minimum viable product (MVP) featured an API that could shorten and expand links. Additionally, the API was incorporated into the Link Shortener browser extension. After successfully setting up the API, the developer began to work on a user interface that would allow users to sign up, manage their URLs, view private statistics, customize the ending for shortened URLs, add their own domains, and more. | T.LY is a link shortening service that promotes itself every time a user shares a shortened URL. As more users use the product, they experience a consistent monthly increase in website traffic. The founder has also documented his journey on Indie Hackers. Through regular updates and sharing tips and tricks, he offers insight on how to create a successful browser extension. | SEO | Online Directories | - Laravel - VueJS | - Cloudflare | Link#1 - Link #2 | |
42 | Starfish Reviews | WordPress plugin for generating 5-star customer reviews | E-commerce | WordPress | Plugin | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | Yes | Tiered pricing plan based on the number of sites and funnels; $47/mo, $119/mo, and $247/mo | $30,000 | 5,000 | $0.50 | Took 3 months to attain total to 8 customers and $792 in sales | 1 | 0 | 2017 | They have dedicated full-time to work on the product improving features and increasing viewability organically. | woocommerce reviews | Sprout Social ($359M/year) | The founder was running a freelancing business on WordPress; designing, building, and managing WordPress websites for small, local businesses. He often received questions from his clients about how to improve their online ratings and reviews. However, he found out that most of the “reputation management” companies were charging a minimum of $300 per month for their services, which was too expensive for most of his clients. He decided to look for a WordPress plugin that could provide the same functionality but couldn’t find one. As a result, he built the same functionality for one of his clients, who was able to get over 100 four- and five-star reviews on their Google listing in just six months. Impressed by the success, he developed a plugin that would be easier to deploy. | The founder built a prototype to prove the concept. Afterward, he approached a developer and offered a revenue-sharing arrangement of 20% to partner in building a WordPress plugin. The developer would write the code, while the founder designed the UI. As a fan of The Lean Startup, the founder mapped out the minimum viable product features for the plugin and included some wireframe mockups made in Balsamiq. The developer built version 1.0, which they tested on multiple hosting setups with different PHP and alpha versions of WordPress. Soon after, they released version 1.1. | A special "Black Friday + Launch" deal was offered with lifetime licenses and the Webmaster (unlimited) license priced at $99. Later, they approached various websites that listed WordPress deals and asked if they could include their deal. The offer was also shared through some social media channels, with the most traction coming from a few Facebook Groups. A member of the Lifetime Tech Deals Fans forum saw the deal and mentioned it on the platform, which led to the founder receiving new order notifications via email. Within two weeks of the promotion, 30 people purchased the deal, resulting in a total of $3,613 in sales. | Marketplace | Influencers | - Help Scout - WooCommerce - MailPoet | Building and Growing a WordPress Plugin for Managing Online Reputation | ||
43 | Findymail | An email finder tool with an automation layer designed to help B2B salespeople build lead lists faster for cold outreach | Sales | Chrome | Extension | B2B | $99 - $199 | Subscription | No | Three tiers: $49/mo, $99/mo, $249/mo | $30,000 | 148,186 | $0.02 | 4 months to $2,500/MRR | 1 | 0 | 2022 | Started building apps when he was 16. In 2020, create SEOwl, an SEO monitoring tool. In 2022, created Scrappybird, a Twitter email scraper. Findymail was built off the Scrappybird idea in late 2022. | email finder tool | Zoominfo (1.09B) | Built an email finder tool for Twitter called Scrappybird. He realized it was too niche and expanded to the lead generation space – Findymail. | The first version of the product was the most basic an email finder could get two text fields to enter someone’s name and a button to get the email address of that person. Slowly added features like automation, file enrichment, etc. but the core of the value is that first email finding / verifying algorithm which gives high-quality data. | The thing that drove the most significant growth is cold email. He used his other product Scrapybird to get emails from people in the cold email niche on Twitter (eg. followers of niche influencers or competitor tools). He also used Scrapybird to get emails from high intent showing tweets. Also grew through Affiliates, Ads, and Linkedin | Affiliates | - Netlify | - Google Analytics - Stripe - Scrapybird/Findymail - Linkedin Sales Navigator - Instantly - SavvyCal - CloseCRM - EmailOctopus | My Side Project Hit $2,500 MRR In Just 3 Months | ||
44 | ScreenshotOne | A simple API to turn any website URL into a screenshot | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $49 - $99 | Subscription | Yes | Plans priced at $0, $14, $48, and $148 per month; based on usage | $26,400 | 48,362 | $0.05 | Going from idea to launch product with paying customers took him 5 months | 1 | 1 | 2022 | Took the opportunity to start working on it during a paternity break in his career | api business | Twilio ($3.8B/year) | Tried to build his first product, a simple Twitter analytics tool. A few people used it. But he wasn't passionate about it. So this founder decided to get back to his roots. He was a server-side developer and had a tremendous experience in building APIs. Sat and wrote down all the problems he could think of, and came up with new ones. Everything looked boring, but he didn't want to be stuck for years in search of ideas. So, decided to pick up one randomly—screenshot API. He decided that it could be validated on the go and see if there was demand. | He started by building a dashboard app where potential customers could try the product, see usage history, upgrade plans, and configure notifications. It was pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rendered by Go. The first version of the product was hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet, then when it started to grow, he moved to Render, then to Google Cloud Platform with autoscaling. And recently, spun up a new Kubernetes cluster to reduce the cost usage on Google Clould Platform. | His approach was to find 2-3 channels that can constantly bring in customers. And there is no other way to do it than to experiment and see what works. SEO, Google Ads, and Twitter worked well for him. But he also tested Reddit, Indie Hackers, Twitter Ads, directories, LinkedIn, and other platforms. They all worked to some extent, but he tries to focus on those that can repeatedly attract customers. For SEO, he works on quickly creating content, getting some traffic, analyzing it and updating the content. On Twitter, in the early days, he would aggressively promoted his product and mentioned it everywhere. But it felt awkward, so he ditched that approach and focused on helping people—just solving their problems, supporting them, answering their questions, connecting people. That helped users become aware of him, and his product. | SEO | - HTML - CSS - Go - Next.js | - Google Sheets - Pirsch Analytics - Crisp IM - Apple Notes - Trello | Quitting My Cushy SDE Job To Build A Screenshot API [$2.2K MRR] | ||
45 | tiiny.host | A simple way to host & share your web project online | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Four tiers: Free, $5/mo, $13/mo, $31/mo | $24,000 | 159,423 | $0.01 | Got first 200 users off Reddit and Indiehackers in just a few weeks | 1 | 0 | 2019 | Taught himself web development in his teens and studied Computer Science at university. Built Tiiny Host as a side project w/o a ton of research. | web hosting app | Bluehost ($44.2M/year) | Wanted to create a simpler and easier way to host web development projects. He wanted the project to be as easy to use as possible, with as few clicks as possible. | Built the initial app in 1 month (part-time) and by himself. The very first version of Tiiny Host was deliberately very simple and basic. Did a soft launch on Reddit, Indiehackers, and online slack commuities. | Tried all these channels in the first 9 months: YouTube Videos, Sponsored YouTube Videos, Reddit, Slack communities, Product Hunt launch, blog posts, lifetime deals, startup directory listings, linking with tutorials for related products, and building in public. Among them, SEO was the most successful driver of growth. | SEO | YouTube | - Google reCAPTCHA v3 - Spam protection - Amazon Web Services - Platform hosting - Sentry - Bug tracking | - Crisp Chat - Instant Messaging support - HotJar - User Experience analytics - Google Analytics - Website analytics - G Suite - Company email - Email Octopus - Email marketing - Stripe - Payments | How I Turned My Teenage Hobby Into A Profitable Static Web Hosting Service | |
46 | Instatus | A service where you can create a status page to show your current website status and notify your customers about outages | Software | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Free, $20/mo, $300/mo | $24,000 | 91,281 | $0.02 | N/A | 1 | 2 | 2019 | Worked as a software developer and quit his job in 2015 to start his own thing. Chose the idea for Instatus because it was a simple MVP to build and businesses were already paying for similar products. | website status app | BetterStack (1.4M/year) | Came up with the idea because people were already paying for similar types of products. It seemed like a zero-risk idea because the MVP was easy to build. | The first version was named Sup and got nearly zero customers. His first customer churned, so he had to do a relaunch on Product Hunt under the new name. Spent about 3 months launchung the original version. | Used Google Ads for marketing and targets brand keywords. Also focused on changing branding to attract modern technology companies. | SEO | | - Vercel: frontend hosting - AWS: backend hosting | - Slack: customer support - Apple Notes: tasks & notes | I Quit My 9-5 Job And Built A Profitable SaaS Tool | |
47 | Messenger for Desktop | A simple Facebook Messenger desktop app | Social Media | Desktop/Web App | B2C | Free | Subscription | Yes | Free product | $18,000 | 5,940 | $0.25 | N/A | 1 | 0 | 2015 | It began as a side-project and once it got traction, it became a full-time small business. | facebook messenger | Facebook Messenger ($116.61B/year) | Messenger for Desktop came to life when Facebook introduced their new web app messenger.com. The founder of Messenger for Desktop envisioned a standalone app that would enable users to access Messenger without having to open a browser. He went ahead and developed a prototype, which he later made open source and uploaded on GitHub. The app gained immense popularity, with hundreds of stars, indicating its usefulness not only to the founder, but to many other users as well. | The founder used a framework called nw.js to create the first version of Messenger for Desktop. After creating the app, he made it open-source and published it on GitHub. Then, he added more features such as customizable themes, auto-updates, and support for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Once the app was complete, he posted it on Product Hunt, and software directories such as CHIP.de began to reach out to him. | The majority of the traffic was generated through search engine optimization. The product was shared on various platforms, including Product Hunt, Hacker News, and several news websites. It gained a viral effect as users started re-uploading it on download portals and even made YouTube reviews simply because they liked it. 45% of the traffic was through Direct and Organic Search, while 40% was through Referral sources, mostly from download portals such as Softonic. The remaining 5% came from Social media. | SEO | Online Directories | - nw.js - PHP - JavaScript - Java | - GitHub - Product Hunt | How I Developed A $1.5K/Month Facebook Messenger App For Desktop | ||
48 | Blurweb App | Browser extension to hide sensitive info during live recording/screen sharing | Productivity | Chrome | Extension | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | The Blurweb App offers three pricing options starting from $24/year for the Personal plan, $47/year for Professional plan, and $97/year for a Team plan | $18,000 | 7,415 | $0.20 | N/A | 1 | 0 | 2020 | He worked on the Blurweb app during a 3-day break on Diwali 2020. After launch and validation, he now works on it full-time. | blur screen | Loom ($50M/year) | The founder of the Blurweb App started teaching code on YouTube but realized he was revealing a lot of sensitive information like emails and API keys. Whenever he had to make a screen share video he spent hours trying to add blur and buying video editing tools. He thought that there had to be a better solution than this. Although he did not talk to many people to validate the idea, he believed that if he needed it, other content creators might need it too. | He started working on the app during the Diwali festival of 2020, taking advantage of the three-day break from his full-time job. He was determined to build and launch the app on the same day, so he worked tirelessly until late afternoon. By the end of the day, only packaging and creating a landing page remained. Eventually, he found time to complete the remaining tasks and successfully launched the MVP within 2-3 weeks. The MVP only had the main feature of clicking to blur and remove all, as he didn't want to spend a lot of time and wanted to launch right away to let people decide if he should work on it further. | In order to generate his first sales, the founder shared information about it on Facebook groups. He focused on several groups, including those for teachers, SaaS, and digital marketing. People responded positively, expressing their appreciation for the product and sharing how much time it could save. Some even gave video interviews, stating that it was worth using the app just once. To further boost sales, the founder launched the blurweb app on the Appsumo marketplace, which proved to be highly beneficial due to the massive traffic the site generates. | Marketplace | - HTML - CSS - JS | - Firebase - Mailerlite - Gumroad | I Built A Tool That Helps Blur Sensitive Information [With Just $5] | ||
49 | Baxter | Browser extension that helps Gmail users organize their inboxes | Productivity | Gmail | Extension | B2B + B2C | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | The subscriptions start at $4.17 per month, paid annually | $12,000 | 10,709 | $0.09 | 9 months to hit $1,000 MRR | 1 | 1 | 2022 | They spent 7 months to build the product, dedicating their full-time to the process. | gmail email organizer | Spark ($2M/year) | The founder was having a tough time managing his Gmail inbox when he came up with the idea of a dashboard. He then interviewed dozens of regular American adults to see if the idea was appealing. Soon, he found out that the majority of people preferred a simple tool rather than a dashboard. This motivated him to build Baxter. | The founder had tried several tools to manage his inbox, but nothing proved to be effective. So, he decided to take a different approach. He contacted some machine learning experts and convinced some willing participants to grant him access to their inboxes, which provided the initial dataset. After that, he hired a developer who presented a demo making him excited by what they achieved with the entire dataset. He then signed a contract with them, and a few weeks later, he had a product that automatically labeled his emails, something that was not available elsewhere. Now it was time to get other people to try it. | The founder used a launch-by-acquisition strategy to increase growth. He purchased a Gmail Unsubscribe extension that had excellent SEO ranking for high-volume keywords on Google search, leading to hundreds of daily installs. He directed users of the extension to install Baxter for additional functionality, added a pop-up that encouraged Gmail Unsubscribe users to upgrade to Baxter and released an updated version of the extension. He then pushed the updated extension to the Chrome web store, resulting in dozens of daily installs of Baxter. The acquisition of Gmail Unsubscribe paid for itself in under a year, as Baxter generated over $10,000 in revenue. The launch-by-acquisition strategy proved successful, resulting in a source of ongoing organic users for the business. | SEO | Marketplace | - Chartmogul - Strapi - Slack | How A Non-Technical Founder Started A Profitable Chrome Extension For Gmail | ||
50 | Treendly | Helps user discover rising trends they haven’t heard of | Business | Independent/Standalone | Desktop/Web App | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | Yes | Two Tiers: $0/mo and $49/mo. Customizable enterprise tier. | $12,000 | 65,109 | $0.02 | N/A | 1 | 0 | 2019 | Created the core feature of Treendly out of side feature of another one of his SaaS products. | trends app | Ahrefs ($100M/year) | While working on another SaaS product, he wondered about what non-essential feature he could take out from an existing product and put into another market where the feature is essential. He was already running one of my other software products, where he collected e-commerce data. One of the features of that product was trend-spotting for e-commerce merchants. And so Treendly was born from a side-feature of that other product. | Gathers the data for the product from different sources. He then categorizes the signals and weighs them so that they can represent just the best rising trends. He took a weekend and build the SaaS. Then, I put it on the market the following week. And if the product makes money, he keeps it. If not, he scratches it. He scoured the web for clues left by competitors’ customers in order to build this product around their weaknesses. | Placed Treendly in a couple of media articles and even a physical book early on. These placements drive a lot of sign-ups per week. He also have a free course on how to spot trends, a free newsletter, a free Chrome extension, and most recently, a Telegram bot which are all low-cost ways to bring more awareness to Treendly. | PR/Media Outreach | Content Marketing | - PHP - Bulma – a simple CSS framework. - DigitalOcean – for servers. - Git – for version control - Buddy, DeployHQ and/or Deployer – to automate deploys - RollBar – for error tracking - CloudFlare – for dos protection - Hyperping – to monitor the health of my sites - Sqreen – for web security - Namecheap – for domain names - Datatables or FooTable – for tables! | - Stripe – to collect payments. . - tawk.to – Isimple in-app chat - Hotjar and Google Analytics – for insights - Mailgun – for transactional emails - Cerberus for responsive templates - Mailchimp and/or Mautic for marketing emails - Trello – for public roadmaps and user feedback - Headway – for changelogs | I Bootstrapped A $12K Trend-Spotting Tool [From Estonia] | |
51 | DocPress.it | A free Google Docs add-on that exports Google Docs to WordPress blogs | Productivity | Google Docs | Addon | B2B + B2C | $49 - $99 | Subscription | Yes | A free plan, and paid plans that range between $9 and $69 per month, based on the number of artciles exported | $9,600 | 5,000 | $0.16 | It took about 2-3 weeks to have the first version ready and launch | 1 | 1 | 2022 | He paused work on other projects and focused on creating the software ful-time | google doc export | JetPack Workflow ($852.2K) | The founder collaborated with various guest writers for the blogs but faced difficulties in publishing their articles from Google Docs to WordPress. He had to manually save images separately, and copy-pasting the content didn’t work correctly, depending on the article, it took 30 minutes to format it with the necessary headings, images, and other elements. To automate these tedious processes, he started working on Google Docs add-ons. | He carefully examined every step of the WordPress publishing process that was consuming too much time. He brainstormed ways to automate the process and jotted down a list of features that would be required. After conducting further research, he decided to hire an experienced programmer who specialized in Google Apps script to create the necessary add-on. | The founder launched on AppSumo and gradually gained sales. Additionally, they worked on SEO and published blog posts weekly to boost organic traffic. | Marketplace | SEO | - SocialChamp - MailerLite - Slack | I Built A Tool That Makes It Easy To Export Google Docs To WordPress [1,000+ Users] | ||
52 | Wheely Sales | A lucky wheel prize popup for e-commerce sites | E-commerce | Independent/Standalone | Plugin | B2B | $49 - $99 | Subscription | No | 3 paid plans; $29, $99, and $299 per month respectively | $7,200 | Grew from $0 to $600/month in just 4 months | 1 | 0 | 2018 | It took just over 1 month working full-time to code up the initial version of Wheely Sales | wheel prize | OptinMonster ($1.5M/year) | After conducting some thorough research, the founder noticed that the lucky wheel popup format had started appearing and was proving to be highly effective in converting traffic. Spin-a-sale and Wheelio, two popular apps available on the Shopify app store, had received hundreds of excellent reviews. However, the founder realized that these apps were only compatible with Shopify, leaving other major platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Squarespace unprovided for. This was enough validation to inspire them to build Wheely Sales - a solution that is compatible with any website or platform and fills this gap in the market. | It took just over one month of full-time work to code the initial version of Wheely Sales. The pop-up wheel itself was created using plain old JavaScript files and assets. However, the app initially lacked some functionality which prompted the founder to overhaul the code so that it could be fully customized to match any customer's brand colors, logos, and text. Finally, he turned all of this into a super simple one-line script that can be easily installed on any website in just two minutes. | The founder initially attracted customers through email outreach and participation in forums and Facebook groups. Specifically, they targeted websites with adjacent plugins that helped with conversions and opt-ins. | Email List | - javascript - Express.js - MongoDB - MeteorJS - React | - Google Analytics - MailChimp - Webflow | How I Coded A Website Plugin Making $600 Per Month | ||||
53 | ReplAI | Chrome browser extension that generates human-like Twitter replies | Social Media | Chrome | Extension | B2B + B2C | $49 - $99 | Subscription | No | Usage based pricing starting from $0.9 for 10K characters per month | $3,492 | Reached $1,143 in 2 weeks. | 2 | 0 | 2023 | They created the first version of the extension in 4 hours. | twitter ai | HootSuite ($150M/year) | The founder’s friend had experience creating courses focused on audience growth on Twitter. He was aware of one of the main ways to grow your audience on Twitter, which was to reply to tweets from more famous people. As this was a common issue faced by many people, they decided to create a solution that guaranteed consistent, speedy, and creative replies | The extension consists of two main parts: the extension front-end, which contains a single Javascript file, and the back-end, a simple node.js server hosted on Heroku that contains the logic for creating GPT3 prompts. The initial version did not have a paywall or a limit on the number of replays. The team wanted to test their hypothesis as quickly as possible and let users test the product without any limitations. | When the extension became available in the store, his co-founder wrote a tweet with an example of using the extension, the tweet went viral and gained 95k views, 140 retweets and attracted the first 400-500 users. | App Store | - javascript - node.js - REST - OpenAI GPT-3 | - Heroku | How I made a GPT-3 Chrome Extension for Twitter and earned $1143 in 2 weeks | ||||
54 | SuperJack | Squarespace extension to sync ecommerce data to Google Sheets | E-commerce | Squarespace | Extension | B2B | $1 - $49 | Subscription | No | Monthly subscription plan starting at $19/mo | $1,404 | 30 days after launch they hit $117 MRR | 1 | 1 | 2020 | After about 2 weeks he had a functional product | squarespace google sheets | Zapier ($140M/year) | The founder discovered that many merchants using Squarespace forums and Facebook groups were requesting to receive orders directly to a Google Sheet without the need for manual exporting every day or week. After conducting some research, he came across a no-code tool that allows users to connect and automate repetitive tasks using different APIs. He recommended the tool and realized the high demand for it, which led him to create his own tool. | The last time he hired a web app developer, the project didn't go well because he didn't provide clear requirements for the developer. Additionally, he didn't have a wireframe to show how the app should look like. This time, he learned from a course he had taken that taught him how to write specs and create wireframes for developers. With the help of this knowledge, he hired a freelance developer who successfully developed the app in just one week. | The founder utilized existing channels and networks like Sqsp themes to grow his business faster. He taught existing users and audience the benefits of using his new application. He also plans to create more content promoting the tool. | Online Directories | SEO | - Squarespace - Convertkit - Canva | On Developing A Squarespace Extension For Ecommerce |