Your Next SaaS: Hosted Wordpress on Heroku
Here's an idea from the recent issue of Unvalidated Ideas:
Hosted Wordpress for Heroku (Tier: C)
The bet is simple -- fans of Heroku actually want all costs for their startup funnelled through Heroku, where possible. Many companies rebrand their offering for the Heroku market despite the fact that users could easily purchase directly.
There's a semi-captive market here -- and these users are even less cost sensitive than those on AWS (Heroku is well known to be more expensive than AWS). The user base of Heroku is probably somewhat bi-modal:
- Cost-sensitive devs trying their best to squeeze the Heroku free tier or a couple 1X dynos and pay no more (they're on Heroku for the convenience)
- Enterprises know heavily value not doing their own ops/simplifying their stack (or just haven't moved to AWS yet) & legacy Heroku users
Heroku has stumbled a lot recently mostly due to a big bad incident, losing people to Render, Fly.io and others if HackerNews/Reddit are predictive.
But enough about Heroku, let's talk about Wordpress. It's ubiquitous -- it powers around 40% of the internet. Almost every company that finds product-market fit on Heroku will require some sort of managed site for news, press releases, and (more likely) content marketing.
Right now technical teams at those companies are using solutions like Pressable, WPEngine and others.
This is only a C tier idea because there is fierce competition in the Wordpress hosting space, but the semi-captive heroku market somehow has no choice for Wordpress inside the walled garden. An unexpected positive about the fierce competition in the Wordpress hosting space is that many providers are very open to reselling -- this cuts your operational costs to nearly zero.
There's also a risk (almost a certainty) that mid to large customers move off of Heroku for providers like AWS (who are often actually cheaper for raw materials sans expertise). The risk is less technical and more about billing -- a simple off-ramp and transition between Heroku and your own billing system would probably be enough.
If you liked this idea...
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