I need Ideas!

I find Micro SaaS Ideas Newsletter to be an awesome resource for getting research backed ideas.

I would suggest forgetting about the idea-first approach.

Instead, pick a very specific market segment (aka an audience) that you want to serve.

If you're very specific, then you can figure out where they hang out and talk which in turn allows you to research them.

What you wanna do is called ethnography. This means embedding yourself in a culture to study them as they live their lives. In your case, you should embed yourself in the culture of your audience to figure out what their problems are.

They should naturally emerge and become obvious to you.

I hope you're seeing how this is very different from the selfish typical noob entrepreneur POV which is "I'm interested in X, now how do I get people to pay me for that."

This is much more of a "serving" type of approach. "I'd like to help these specific people, now how can I best serve them?"

So it's all about them and not about you.

The next few steps would be to start helping them for free. E.g. like I'm doing with you right now.

That allows you to start being seen as an authority in your space and you can then start to build up a list of people that trust you.

The last thing is the solution which should be the easiest. All that's left is to simply make an offer. "Hey, you're struggling with Y, I'm making Z for $V, would you be interested in that?"

If you've done a good job identifying the problem, you should be able to start getting some sales and then you iterate the product over time with customer development.

I have an eBook as well as a course where I go over this in greater detail but this is what you need to know in a nutshell.

Pick a business that you are familiar with or worked in. Then give away something for free by creating a facebook ad that leads to a landing page to collect emails.

Email people on that list and talk to them and get input / ideas on the saas business. Another way to get ideas is to join facebook groups.

I post one idea every day here - https://twitter.com/this_startup

Like others have said... go for something you are interested in and then look up the existing players.

Honestly, the absolute easiest way to find winning ideas is to look at reviews of tools that exist, finding gaps, and building something that delivers the solution for one to two gaps. Boom. Done.

I would say start with a personal need or a personal interest. There are many ways to approach the ideation phase, but it would be most helpful to start with what you are familiar with. What products do you use on a daily basis - is there an inconvenience or inefficiency you can solve for?

Next, think about your personal skill sets - what are you good at? Could you leverage a skill or an audience to build something that users want? It has been the biggest learning for me to spend more time with my potential audiences and do some customer discovery.

For instance, at Geeks and Experts you can schedule a free consultation with some domain experts and brainstorm business ideas with them. You can get feedback, pick their brain or just share your journey and get inspiration.

You can check out my newsletter. We cover opportunities in AI and also all the news. I am giving away 17 AI Business ideas I came up within the last few months. Sign up here

There is a huge gap in accounting software for SaaS businesses. Every SaaS founder I talk with has some sort of complaint about the accounting side of things.

The revenue and billing side have amazing solutions. Stripe is probably one of the best products ever developed for SaaS. Then we also have amazing tools like ProfitWell and BareMetrics to report on the revenue data.

BUT all of that amazing tooling completely falls apart once you try to tie in bank accounts, and expenses(accounting). Right now you pretty much only have Quickbooks, and Xero. Neither are built for SaaS, and have pretty bad integration with Stripe.

Someone needs to come up with an opinionated accounting for SaaS. It needs to have Stripe as the main revenue input. It should route Stripe Products into specific buckets on the PnL. It should also handle annual plans and properly allocate the revenue in a standard accrual practice. Same behavior if you purchase other software on annual plans.

If you made one that was good, I guarantee you’d scoop up a huge market share.

Might be a hard industry to break into, but learning about and dealing with incorporation and legal jargon was an absolute nightmare early on. Maybe there's some ideas in there?