Picking a SaaS idea in the age of LLMs
I'm trying to ship 10 SaaS projects this year and honestly the hardest part isn't building. It's choosing what to build.
Coding agents made code cheap, but validation is still painful. So I wrote down the filter I'm using before I commit to anything.
Roughly: can I get to MVP in 2 weeks. Is there an obvious place to promote it (a subreddit, an ad audience, a platform like RapidAPI). Will I get a real signal within 6 months. And is it different enough from my other projects that I'll actually learn something new.
I wrote up the whole thing (criteria, the workflow, a couple of diagrams) over here if you wanna see it: https://codesolo.substack.com/p/how-to-pick-a-saas-idea-in-the-age
Curious what your dealbreaker is when you look at a new idea. Mine's time to signal. If I can't tell within 6 months whether it's working, I don't start.
My dealbreaker is different from yours and I keep going back and forth on whether it's right — I care less about time-to-signal and more about whether the first 10 users will actually talk to me. If I can't picture who they are and where I'd DM them tonight, I don't start. Six months feels generous in the LLM era because cloning cycles are like 3 weeks now.
The part of your filter I'd push back on a little: "obvious place to promote it" can be a trap. A clear distribution channel often means the audience is already saturated with AI wrappers fighting for the same subreddit. I've watched a few launches die that way — perfect ICP on paper, but the channel was burnt.
I'm Shirley, building ZooClaw (AI agents for solo founders) and wrestling with the same idea-selection problem in real time. What's been your hit rate so far on the projects you've shipped?
Time to signal is the right dealbreaker. But the question I now ask before that is, who is already paying to solve this badly?
If someone is using a spreadsheet, a Zapier hack, or a VA to do something that should be software, that is a better signal than any market research. The pain is proven. The budget already exists. You are just building a better version of what they are already doing.
The 10 projects approach is interesting too. We build mobile apps at our agency and the clients who shipped something narrow and specific almost always outperform the ones chasing a broad market. The niche ones find their audience faster and get real feedback before they run out of runway.
Curious, are you validating the distribution channel before building or after MVP?
The filter is mostly right, but “can I build it in 2 weeks?” is probably the least important part now.
That used to be a real constraint.
Now it mostly just filters for what is easy to ship, not what is expensive to ignore.
The stronger screen is usually:
does the problem already cost someone enough that they are solving it badly right now?
That tends to predict distribution, urgency, and willingness to pay better than build speed.
Fast MVPs are useful.
But “easy to build” has become a weak proxy for “worth building.”
That’s the part LLMs changed most.