I analyzed 140+ micro-SaaS opportunities. Here are the 5 signals I now use to decide what’s worth building.

I analyzed 140+ micro-SaaS opportunities. Here are the 5 signals I now use to decide what’s worth building.

For years I thought my bottleneck was execution.

It wasn’t.

I’m a software engineer. I can build fast. Especially now, with AI-assisted coding, shipping an MVP is more accessible than ever.

My real bottleneck was something else:

spending way too much time trying to figure out what was actually worth building.

I’d get excited about an idea, spend days or weeks researching competitors, checking pricing pages, reading Reddit and community threads, trying to understand whether the market was too crowded, too niche, or just too weak.

Sometimes I’d talk myself out of it.
Other times I’d start building and realize halfway through that the market signal was much worse than I thought.

After repeating that loop too many times, I changed my process.

Instead of asking:

"What would be cool to build?"

I started asking:

"What small software markets already have money moving, but still feel overpriced, overbuilt, or underserved?"

That shift changed everything.

Over time I started collecting and comparing these opportunities more systematically, and a few patterns kept repeating.

The 5 signals I now use to decide whether a micro-SaaS is worth building

1. People are already paying for the problem

I no longer want "interesting ideas."
I want markets where buyers already spend money.

If nobody is paying yet, I’m much less interested.
If people are already paying for a frustrating or bloated solution, that gets my attention.

2. The incumbent’s pricing feels too high for smaller buyers

One of the strongest patterns I kept seeing was this:

A product works.
The market is real.
But the pricing drifted upward until it stopped making sense for indie founders, small businesses, or lighter use cases.

That’s usually where the gap starts.

3. There’s a narrower segment being ignored

A lot of products don’t lose because they’re bad.
They lose because they’re too broad.

When I see a market where the incumbent serves "everyone," I start looking for the smaller, clearer niche that would prefer something simpler, cheaper, or more focused.

4. The MVP is realistically shippable by one person

This is a big one.

Some opportunities look attractive on paper but are operationally terrible for a solo founder.

So I now ask:

Can one person build a useful first version in a few weeks without needing a huge data moat, sales team, or deep integrations on day one?

If not, I usually skip it.

5. The demand is visible in public signals

I trust ideas more when I can see evidence outside my own excitement.

That can mean:

• repeated complaints in communities
• obvious pricing frustration
• strong positioning gaps
• a market with existing tools, but weak love from smaller customers

I still validate directly when possible, but public signals are often enough to know whether something deserves deeper investigation.

What surprised me most

The strongest opportunities were rarely the flashy ones.

They were usually boring categories with very clear commercial intent:

• workflow tools
• review tooling
• lead capture
• analytics gaps
• internal ops software
• niche utilities hidden under bigger "all-in-one" products

Not exciting at first glance.
But often much stronger than chasing novelty.

What changed for me

I stopped asking:

"Is this idea exciting?"

And started asking:

"Is this a market where a smaller, clearer, more affordable product could realistically win?"

That simple change saved me a lot of wasted weekends.

I originally built this research workflow for myself because I was tired of restarting the same analysis from scratch every time I had a new idea. Eventually I turned it into MicroGaps, where I keep the strongest opportunities organized as full reports instead of scattered notes.

A few of them are free, because honestly most builders don’t need more inspiration.
They need a faster way to decide:

build or skip.

Curious how other people here make that call.

What’s your filter for deciding whether a micro-SaaS idea is worth building before you commit real time to it?