100 Million Dollar Business Ideas

B2B web applications in need of disrupting.

My focus day-to-day is the Small business to business market and because that’s not consumer and you’re not producing the next Facebook you can’t get into the billions of dollars. But if building a business which makes money from day one interests you, read on.

Accounting Software

There is a huge market for the next level of usable accounting software for small businesses. FreeAgent are doing the best in terms of a great User Experience but they miss a lot of automation. It’s a huge market with the largest SaaS player — Xero — having a Market Cap of over NZ$4Bn.

WordPress Hosting

Delivering high-quality WordPress hosting at a good value with a great user experience is still yet to be done. WPEngine had something going for it but now it’s just falling behind — I suspect some new executives are putting the bottom line before the users goals and they’re losing out. Their pricing is also ridiculous. The service is good but it’s not worth the price their putting on it. We need an alternative which is seamless with 100% user focus.

Website/Application Conversion Optimisation

Again another example where the incumbents are falling a little short. Optimizely is a great company their product hasn’t tracked with the times though. There is a need for a better value and easier to use A/B testing which integrates with users so you can split test users beyond the IP segmentation they’re currently doing. There is a need for tracking users activities and conversions (similar to KISSmetrics) for logged-in A/B testing.

Event Management

Eventbrite has got too big for it’s boots. The world needs a super simple event management platform. Something which literally allows you to create an event and sell tickets if you’re charging. Eventbrite makes this hard with dozens of options. Keeping things simple, doing less and saying no to feature requests will make you money. Be the event management app which people go to when they ‘just want to create an event’.

Cloud application testing

There are lots of complex options for testing your web app. There is a need for a simple record and click system. Lets say you run a CRM app and you want to test that you can add a customer. You would go through and record yourself logging in adding a customer. The system would record that and you highlight at the end the customers name appears here. You point and click to highlight the customer name. You can then have those tests run every time you update your code or every day or every minute or on demand. If the service fails it will notify you. It’s a simple concept but incredibly technically challenging. It’s doable though and much needed. And in complex web apps it makes testing for bugs really easy.

I just want these products to exist. I’ll put them out there. I’m working on the WordPress hosting one but I welcome any competition. If you’re a developer and want to build any of the above and need some design/UX help — give me a shout — patrick@28clouds.com.