From Code to Recurring Profit - Developers Blueprint to Building a SaaS

This month I published my first book on Amazon about how to go from Code to Recurring Profit - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CWPRF2XQ

I started building my own SaaS in 2017 after hitting $100k in high ticket sales just using Facebook Messenger.

Now that SaaS covers 13 social platforms and we're heavily adding automations and AI to further modernize based on the latest expectations from the market.

Meanwhile I realized AI and SaaS business model are the trend and researched a lot about it.

The concept of Micro-SaaS and stories of Product Hunt launches are very inspiring so this is the framework and SaaS Micro-Businesses that use AI.

To find your idea use the Hedgehog Concept:
3 Sections - Passion, Skill, What Makes Money

Passion for example:
Gaming
Startups
Web

Skills for example:
Coding
Marketing

What Makes Money:
Newsletters
Subscriptions
Ads

Then combining 1 element of each of the 3 sections you'd get:
Gaming Coding Ads
Startups Coding Newsletters
etc

You get the drill! ;)

Now for some examples of AI based SaaS!

FORMULA BOT

(started as Excel Formula Bot but had a cease & desist from our buddies Microsoft)
The founder started in 2022, hit 20k in just a couple of months.
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.

SITEGPT

AI tool to create and train web chatbots - $180k revenue

In March, 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.

AIRTRACKBOT

Telegram chatbot designed to search for cheap flights and track their prices - $84k revenue

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.

CONCLUSION

These are some examples I found that give AI use cases that anyone can apply to their industry/expertise.

I hope this give you some insights into what works and what the journey looks like.

If you do buy my book please give some feedback! I used AI to write it, with a lot of editing. Writting it required a lot of research and I actually implemented some of the concepts I found during that research which ended up becoming a game changer for my SaaS! :)