Yes, I Built a $70k Micro-SaaS in Only 6 Days, Here’s How

Yep! This isn’t a clickbait title.

Whether you’re a developer looking to become an indie hacker, or simply interested in SaaS and micro-SaaS businesses, this story may provide the inspiration and guidance you need to stop thinking and start shipping!

This story is about a micro-SaaS I created in 2019.
Since then, I’ve created 4 additional micro-SaaS and 2 SaaS.

If you want to skip the back story, go to the next title.

But first, what is a SaaS and a micro-SaaS?

A SaaS is a web-based application that allows you to accomplish specific tasks without the need for downloading software.

Typically, SaaS services are accessed via a subscription or pay-as-you-go business model.

A micro-SaaS is a specialized version of a SaaS for a specific niche (groupe of people) or a specific task.

How to get a micro-SaaS idea?

A friend of mine asked me how long it would take to create a web app that would read the content of a zip file.

I told him that there wasn’t enough context, I needed to know more:

• What is in the zip file?
• How should the content of the zip be displayed?

We just knew each other, so he didn’t want to disclose his idea, as it was a niche idea that could make a lot of money (which it did later, $70k).

The only thing he told me was that the zip contained JSON files I had to read and display as a list of posts.

I told him that it would take me 4 hours for a basic version.

He was shocked…

He had been waiting for already 3 months for a friend of his to do this.

I told him there could only be one of two reasons if his friend had not finished yet:

• His friend didn’t want to do it, but wouldn’t tell him
• His friend is not the right developer for this kind of task

After more discussion, he told me the full idea and asked if I could build it. He would do the marketing and we would split 50% of the possible income.

I can’t disclose the URL of the micro-SaaS, but this was what it did.

My friend discovered an app that allowed users to export their data for analysis, but the data was in JSON format, and unless you’re a developer or a tech person, you don’t know what JSON is.

He was sure people would pay to view the JSON content in a nice UI.

I loved the challenge so I said yes.
There we had it, a single problem to solve!

The key takeaway from this, is that it’s possible to build a micro-SaaS that resolves 1 single problem within a larger service, app, or platform.

When using a service, consider identifying a single problem that you could solve for its target audience.

You could solve it through a Chrome extension, a MacOS widget, a plugin on the platform or an external web app depending on the problem.

How did I code this micro-SaaS in 6 days?

As you may have understood, this micro-SaaS is just a viewer.
The user flow was the following:

1. The visitor gets the link to export his data from the app
2. He upload’s the zip on our web app
3. The web app extract’s the JSON and formats it
4. The web app show’s only the first item and blurs the rest
5. The web app asks to pay to see the remaining data unblurred
6. The visitor pays and sees the data

Here’s where most developers get things wrong!

Many developers often rush to select their preferred technology stack without fully considering the project’s context.

My target audience was non-technical, there was no need for a complex backend as most of the tasks could be done on the frontend.

• I created the frontend with Vue JS, because I’m fast with it
• I used JSZip to unzip and extract the JSON file
• I used the frontend version of Stripe Checkout for payment
• It’s was a one-time purchase, so I used the localStorage to store that the user had paid.
• I added Google analytics to compare the visits vs sales conversion

You may be thinking:

If it’s frontend only, the user can change the price or even not pay at all.

But you’re wrong! If the user know’s how to change the price on the frontend, he would know how to read JSON and thus does not need out web app in the first place.

I made this first version in 2 days (12h) and hosted it on Netlify for free.
We set a one-time payment of $5 to view the full data with no blur.

After 400 sales ($2k), I noticed there may have been an issue, so I added error logs in Google analytics for free as events.

This took me about 1 day (6h) with the debugging.

After 1 200 sales ($6k), we analyzed our analytics and realized that our target audience was often young. We thought that some may not have access to a credit card, so we added PayPal as a payment option.

It took me about 1 day (6h), the frontend version of PayPal was hell.

We had now reached more than 6 000+ sales ($30k+), and I had only worked 4 days (24h) in total.

It was more profitable than my freelancing business 😂

And then… It broke, no more sales…

The JSON structure had changed, so our viewer couldn’t work anymore.

We lost 3 weeks of sales before noticing…

As soon as we had the new JSON structure, I wrote a new parser and added French locales with Vue-i18n, because we had a lot of French users.

This took me 2 days (12h), localization + new parser.

This micro-SaaS ran on autopilot for 14 months and generated a total of $70k before the app people got the zip from was shut down.

During that whole time, I spent a total of 6 days working on it.

How did we promote the micro-SaaS?

Well, promoting was “easy” here.

We used Google keyword planner to find out if people were searching:

• How to see the content of XYZ
• Recover data from XYZ
• XYZ viewer…

As you guessed, XYZ is the app where people would get the zip from.

We then made a YouTube video in both French and English targeting these keywords and showing how our micro-SaaS worked.

We also did some Google Ads on those keywords for 2 months, but then the YouTube video took off, so there was no need to spend money on ads.

So what are the steps to create a micro-SaaS?

Since then, I have tried to launch a ton of micro-SaaS.
Sometimes on my own, sometimes with the same friend.

It all narrows down to one question:
Are people ready to pay for the problem you solve?

Here’s my 5-step framework:

1. Find a niche and a problem, not 2, not 3, just 1 problem
   Join communities and observe there issues (fb, discord, twitter…)
2. Confirm there’s a need to solve that problem
   - Check keywords on Google/YouTube
   - Look for competitors and what people don’t like about them
3. Ship fast and iterate rather than thinking too much
   You must iterate based on your users, find the 20% of features and actions that give 80% of the results.
4. Use the right stack for your target and context
   - You don’t always need a big backend, sometimes you don’t need a backend at all as I demonstrated.
   - There are simple stacks that fit most cases because:
   YOU ARE NOT FACEBOOK!
   - These technologies can solve most micro-SaaS needs:
   - Firebase, Supabase, any headless CMS, Stripe & SQLite
5. Analyze and log when you can
   Analyzing is one of the most important parts of a micro-SaaS.
   In this micro-SaaS, I logged everything in Google Analytics:
   - when the zip upload started
   - when it stopped
   - when people clicked on “pay” …
   Every action can be analyzed later to compare and see what is going wrong.

Well, this is the end!

I hope the journey of my first micro-SaaS helped you.

Want more tech content? Subscribe to my newsletter
https://links.maisonfutari.com/get-notified

Mata ne またね