Indie Hackers are Choosing Between Info Products, SaaS, and Micro-SaaS

You've got a newsletter, right? They're trending these days. So are podcasts, for that matter. And so are Micro-SaaS products. And so are no-code tools. And so are…

The point here is that if you've been feeling overwhelmed at all the different product categories that seem to be blowing up, you're not alone. Most indie hackers starting out today are facing a tyranny of choice.

Rob Walling of TinySeed just joined Courtland on the Indie Hackers podcast to talk through the pros and cons of entering the various verticals. TinySeed is an accelerator for bootstrappers, so Rob's developed a bird's eye perspective of the evolving marketplace.

Here are a few of Rob's insights into three of the most popular product categories among indie hackers today.

Info Products

Info products are one of the fastest avenues to income generation for solo founders, and many entrepreneurs have scaled them to multi-millionaire businesses.

Rob advises the "build an audience first" approach for info products. Yet:

No matter how big your audience is, you’ll tap it out.

Also worth noting: info products rely heavily on the knowledge, experiences, and content-creation skills of the founder. So it's difficult to transfer or sell the company in the future without solid talent transition mechanisms.

SaaS

Meanwhile, on the SaaS side, the mythic dream of "create a widget that makes money while you sleep" is not the reality that most founders encounter. There is a lot of effort and maintenance required after launch.

SaaS subscriptions sell for very different reasons than info products. The service is a tool for ongoing work.

According to Rob, building an audience first is not particularly effective here. Sustained growth for a SaaS product relies on "flywheel" marketing tools, such as cold e-mails, stellar SEO, network effects, and integrations.

One big upside with SaaS? The ease with which the founder can transfer or sell the product down the road, converting recurring income into capital gains.

I'll be sharing plenty more insights like these from experienced indie hackers. Drop your email below if you want to keep up:

Micro-Saas

Here's Earnest Capital founder Tyler Tringas's definition of Micro-SaaS:

A SaaS business targeting a niche market, run by one person or a very small team, with small costs, a narrow focus, a small but dedicated user base and no outside funding.

Rob suggests that the best opportunities for Micro-SaaS products may lie in physical industries where they can address highly specific pain points. These industries are often slower to adopt new technology, so the key to selling into them is to offer SaaS capabilities that improve their processes.

In Rob's words:

Do you want competitor pain, or customer pain?

Competitor pain is what founders face in a saturated marketplace, continually striving for functionality and feature parity with competing products.

Customer pain offers advantages when working in a less-crowded space. But companies have to be prepared for a hefty support burden, since buyers are likely to be non-technical and are typically very price-sensitive.