How to Build Micro-SaaS Products at Lightning Speed

From $3 trillion in 2022 to an estimated $10 trillion by 2030, the global SaaS market is booming. But big companies aren't the only one's reaping the benefits.

What is Micro-SaaS?

In today's age of software, we've seen the rise of the solo founder, with individuals bootstrapping profitable software companies targeted at niche markets. And many doing so without relying on some pre-existing audience. Sure it's a helpful boost, but time and time again developers build successful products with 0 followers and $0 marketing budget to start.

Side Project to Real Business

Why should we really even care? Think about some of the software products you use all the time:

• Twitter
• GitHub
• Product Hunt
• Gmail
• Slack

All were simply born as side hustles, are now worth millions or billions, and are used 24/7 at global scale. Building a successful software business means freedom, and hopefully lots of recurring revenue. Whatever the scale, you can sell your business, not your job. Plus, building and making money with your own products is like a video game. Fun. And addicting.

Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

So you have an idea, and want to build a SaaS product. Now you have to ship something, find where your potential customers hang out, and show them. But what exactly should you build, how should you build it, and what else should you keep in mind throughout the process?

Product Validation

Before spending ages building out every little feature you think might be cool, you need to figure out if you have an idea worth spending your valuable time pursuing. Will people pay for your product? Is the total addressable market large enough to generate meaningful revenue? Do you have a healthy margin structure lined up? If you can answer yes to those three questions, it's time to start taking your idea a little more seriously.

Now, reframe your outlook on this product's future and success. This game is hard and that's reality. The default outcome for you isn't profitability, it's failure. Your goal in product validation should be to disqualify your idea fast, rather than focusing on fancy new feature development. The last thing you'd want is to spend a whole year building something, just to find nobody will use it.

Time to Market (TTM)

Speed to market is critical in the early days, regardless of the kind of product or business being started. Thirdweb CEO Furqan Rydan credits lots of their success today to getting to market quickly, finding users, and building from there. What'd he do exactly? He followed the Scooter-Bike-Car framework.

Your product is at point A right now, and you've got nothing. Your goal is to get to point B. Instinct may tell you to start building a car to get there, particularly as a developer. So you start building the wheels, the axle, the body and engine. Why not just start with a scooter and make progress toward point B right away? When you come to a hill and the scooter can't make it over, build a bike so you can pedal. Then, a car so you can drive. The name of the game is speed.

In taking the journey this way, you'll gather feedback from users along the way and begin to better understand the important problems your potential customers are facing. If your SaaS product can actually solve these problems over time, its probability of success increases exponentially.

SaaS Boilerplate

Alright, now you need to get a scooter and start pushing. But solo founders often run into some pretty tough problems trying to build stuff fast. Being alone means responsibility for everything from software development, to marketing and sales, to customer support and more. Managing time efficiently while releasing a minimum viable product to market quickly is difficult. It requires some technical knowledge and background, often combined with a very limited amount of financial resources. But you can streamline this process to make it a whole lot faster and easier by using a SaaS boilerplate.

A SaaS boilerplate, or starter kit, is a template SaaS application that developers and founders can build on top of. They're typically in the form of an easily customizable codebase, built using a particular language or web framework, and include a built-in feature set common to standard SaaS applications.

Why PySaaS?

PySaaS is the pure Python SaaS starter kit. Gone are the days of needing to become a multilingual web development god to get started in micro-SaaS. With PySaaS you'll save months of time implementing standard functionality, and can build your entire stack in pure Python:

• User Authentication and Account Management
• Payment/Subscription Integration with In-App Billing Management
• Landing Page with Pre-Built UI Components
• Built-In Headless Blog CMS
• SEO Optimization with Page Metadata
• Multiple Database and Easy Hosting Options
• REST API Integrations
• Developer Experience with a Clean, Scalable Project Structure
• Free Updates and Priority Support

PySaaS provides a baseline to get started launching unlimited commercial projects, all in Python, at the cost of half a day's work for a developer. Now, enough talk. Go get started building your scooter.