Examples of small SaaS businesses?

[loop101]

I seem to have some mental block regarding SaaS businesses. The examples I see, tend to be huge affairs (like Dropbox), ones that seem to be done to death (like time-tracking), or ones that are silly (random inspirational quotes). As a long time consumer, as opposed to creator, maybe I am just more familiar with consumer products, and not what products a creator/business would need (assuming SaaS is typically B2B).

Are there any examples of small SaaS enterprises created by solopreneurs that were/are successful?

 

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[Byakko]

I seem to have some mental block regarding SaaS businesses. The examples I see, tend to be huge affairs (like Dropbox), ones that seem to be done to death (like time-tracking), or ones that are silly (random inspirational quotes). As a long time consumer, as opposed to creator, maybe I am just more familiar with consumer products, and not what products a creator/business would need (assuming SaaS is typically B2B).

Are there any examples of small SaaS enterprises created by solopreneurs that were/are successful?

Checkout OpenALPR, basically they provide you a service to extract license plates from pictures. I`m not sure if this was made by only one person or not, but it could have been.

Sent from my HUAWEI P7-L10 using Tapatalk

 

[daru]

They pop up every now and then on Hacker News

Here: HN Search powered by Algolia

 

[loop101]

Checkout OpenALPR, basically they provide you a service to extract license plates from pictures. I`m not sure if this was made by only one person or not, but it could have been.

Sent from my HUAWEI P7-L10 using Tapatalk

Doh, that was one of the things I was thinking of doing, lol. I have looked in to doing video analytics prodcuts

They pop up every now and then on Hacker News

Here: HN Search powered by Algolia

That Algolia link is cool, thanks.

 

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[Joaki]

I own a “smaller” saas software company I guess you can call it. Not so much the software that’s small but rather the team.

We’re a group of 3 in house developers and 2 outsourced.

Check it! Contact Flow - Email Marketing & Sales Automation Software

We’re doing well

 

[sinj]

Check out indiehackers

You will find many bootstrapped solo entrepreneurs with SAAS business showcasted there.

 

[eliquid]

Im working on my 7th SaaS and I fit exactly what you are asking as I have been solo before ( but now currently have 1 partner and 0 employees ).

See my sig for my ask me anything SaaS thread.

You can get ideas anywhere and everywhere. If I were to start you off in places to look, it would be places like Product Hunt, Beta List, Hacker News, Reddit, Launching Next, and Angel List.

Don't get hung up on the solo person part.

You can make something like DropBox on your own if you wanted and had the skills. All it is, is a folder in the cloud. Sure they have some new features now like for photos, PDFs, etc... but its story was sharable files which you can do easily now with 3rd party apps put in the cloud.

The main thing is, what value can you give a hungry market where you can collect recurring income from?

If you can answer that, everything else is irrelevant.

.

 

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[sdbrownlie]

In the SEO industry there are a fair few niche SAAS products that do pretty well (and my team loves):

Garrett French's Citation Labs (notably link prospector)
DeepCrawl
LinkResearchTools
Serpwoo
Buzzstream

There's dozens of competitors to those on that list too - most of which are making solid money for the number of employees they have (some of which, of course, aren't).

I'm sure other industries are similar too - the key thing seems to be a trend in the 'reason for founding' stories - a lot of the peeps were in the industry already and saw a frustration/problem they were facing and solved it for themselves first.

I had the pleasure of chatting with one of the founders of those a while back who had an interesting thought about ideas for SAAS products for businesses - "anytime you see someone using a spreadsheet you have an opportunity to build a tool if there's thousands more like them." After one of his webinars, I saw him interviewing someone who was walking through a manual process, and a month later they'd added features to their tool to replace that process with the tool so he clearly lived by his messaging...

ps Hey @eliquid great to see you on here too!