SaaS Business Ideas
The most important thing when starting a new business is the market.
You can have a mediocre kebab stand but if you have a starving crowd, you’re pretty much guaranteed to make money.
This is why understanding your customers and their needs is so important.
You can have the best software engineers in the world working on a problem that doesn’t exist that will ultimately get overtaken by mediocre software engineers that are working on an actual problem, ideally with a big TAM.
Going back to the kebab stand analogy, you will more likely get sales if you identify customers that have an urgent problem. They’re hungry (the problem) and they need to eat immediately (urgency).
Once you identify your market and their urgent need, validate that this is actualy the case by getting pre-sales or at least registrations.
If you’re planning to bootstrap, then this is even more useful because you’ll already have some cash flow (if you’re operating with presales) and you know that you’re building something that the market has already told you that it wants. You’ll generally have a higher chance of doing this if you’re working within a micro-niche. The tolerance of pricing and prepayments can also be higher.
Compare this to raising a bunch of money, developing a ton of features, only to find yourself hunting for a market that actually needs your product. The biggest reason why start ups fail (over 40%) is because there’s no market need for their product.
So if you’re lucky, you’ll end up finding a product market fit but, more likely, you’ll need to make some (possibly very major) pivots to try and accommodate the actual needs of your identified market.
If you’re just starting out, you can start in reverse and find your starving crowd first.