When I was introduced to programming, I fell in love with it. The idea of changing the world just by sitting in a room in a corner of the world fascinated me.
I always loved to work on side projects. I loved building products to solve own problems I faced every day. At any point, I always had a side project I was excited to work on. I did this for many years but I never shared it with anyone except for a few close friends of mine.
I kept working on many side projects over the years. I even put them proudly on my resume. But I never really built something which was solving an actual problem. I did this for years. I built products that were fun to work on.
Eventually, I came across the concept of micro saas products and bootstrapped companies. If you're a SaaS enthusiast but don't think can build a typical startup, you should check out what micro SaaS startups are.
Basically, you build a small SaaS product that solves a very niche problem and earn tens of thousands of dollars (or a hell lot more if it goes well).
The main goals behind a Mirco startup are: - solving a small but a real problem - working on products you love - still making a lot of money - freedom from working for someone else - staying small (typically 1-5 people)
Story of Landr: When the pandemic hit the world in 2020 I had plenty of time at my disposal. So I decided to work on that "one cool idea" I had for some time. The idea was to make "yet another website builder". But I decided to solve this problem a little differently.
Even though many drag and drop tools were available for nontechnical people to build websites, I thought people still needed to have great design skills to develop a good website using these tools.
So I built a simpler tool that involved taking user inputs through a series of forms and generate websites from a user-selected template available on the tool. I named it Landr.
Users can input details like: - product features - sections - pricing - newsletter details - embed video links - images etc Sounds simple right?
This is not generally how you build SaaS products, especially when your goal is to build a successful SaaS product generating thousands of dollars of income per month. You need to follow the right approach which generally involves doing the below steps in order:
- Market research - Ideation - Validate Idea - Build MVP product - Launch - Get user feedback - Add additional features - Launch again - Market it more
As you can see I didn't do any of the critical steps before starting to code the product. Doing market research is very important to understand which market has the potential to get into.
I skipped all these critical steps and jumped right into coding the "cool idea" I had. If you want to learn how to build a successful SaaS business online, take a look at the eBook that we released recently which I co-wrote along with my friend: sunilkumarc.gumroad.com/l/kgtSS
I spent months building the complete product end to end all by myself. I was the only one who was deciding what features should be present in the product without any user involvement.
I even made a launch video myself. I have never edited videos before. But I was committed enough to giving it all I had for the launch. The launch in fact did go well and it achieved #5 Product of the Day.
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