0:02 Choosing the right SAS idea can be the difference between making 10,000, a h
0:06 100,000, or even a million dollars a month and making nothing at all. But I'm
0:09 not here to give you another list of hypothetical SAS ideas. Cuz that's not
0:14 what you need. What you really need is to know how successful founders actually
0:19 found their idea and how you can steal their tactics to find your own idea
0:23 today. So, here's what I did. I surveyed over 200 SAS founders making at least
0:28 $1,000 a month. some making well over $100,000 a month to uncover the exact
0:33 methods they use to find their winning ideas. This is something no one else on
0:38 YouTube is doing. People are talking out of their opinion and limited experience.
0:42 But on this channel, I like to get some data and provide you with some insights
0:46 that you can't get anywhere else. So, in this video, I'm going to break down the
0:50 top eight ways these founders discovered profitable SAS opportunities, and I'll
0:54 give you examples for each. I've seen these methods work in my own companies
0:58 and across the hundreds of startups I'm invested in as well as the thousands of
1:03 SAS companies that I've seen started in the broader Tiny Seed Micromp and
1:07 Startups to the Rest of Us ecosystem. There's a lot to cover in this video, so
1:11 let's dive in. Method number one was used by a shocking 48% of founders that
1:17 we surveyed and honestly didn't surprise me at all. For years, I've said, "Don't
1:22 tell me your idea, tell me what problem it solves." And for almost half of the
1:26 successful founders we surveyed, that problem showed up right where they were
1:31 already spending 40 hours a week. Method number one is finding a problem at your
1:35 day job. So this is where you spot a problem while working your regular job.
1:39 Either as a developer frustrated by bad tools or as a subject matter expert who
1:43 knows your industry's pain points. You already have context. You have
1:47 credibility and access to potential customers. One example of this is Alex
1:51 Yumichev, the founder of Jetbit, which is a help desk ticketing system. Alex
1:55 told us, "While working my full-time job, I realized that many existing tech
1:59 support and customer support apps were missing the boring features that real
2:04 teams actually need. Things like SSO, Active Directory integration, user
2:09 provisioning, on-prem, self-hosted deployment for Windows, and many other
2:13 features. The sleek, modern tools had none of that. And the ones that did have
2:16 the boring features looked like they were straight out of the '9s. Cluttered
2:21 UIs, endless checkboxes, painfully complicated setup flows. And while the
2:26 market was very saturated, I took that as a good sign. The market was there.
2:31 Attacking a big competitor can be a benefit on one hand, stealing cool
2:34 marketing ideas from the smaller companies on the other. Maybe you've
2:38 spent years working in an industry and you're a subject matter expert. you know
2:42 all the headaches inside and out like Zach from Upstream Edge. Zach told us,
2:47 "I provide a desktop application for forecasting and valuing oil and gas
2:51 wells that include sophisticated engineering and financial analysis
2:56 tools. 100 times faster speed and higher level features compared to alternatives
3:00 are what differentiate my product. I worked in the oil and gas industry as a
3:04 petroleum engineer for a decade and my frustration with the current tools led
3:08 me to learn how to build new tools to solve our daily problems. I had a
3:12 burning desire to see better software and I decided to make the product I
3:16 thought the industry needed. Then there's Lee Daido, the founder of
3:20 Doommite. Lee told us it's the fastest way to get looping video on a public
3:24 screen. I started working at a company called Bright Sign in 2012, who is the
3:29 market leader in digital signage media players. It's a very hardware focused
3:33 industry and I repeatedly kept seeing the same problems over and over when it
3:38 came to operational software. Just nobody was thinking about user
3:41 experience and I kept socking away my ideas until one day 10 years later I
3:45 thought it was time to jump. Consider jobs you've had even a long time ago.
3:48 The problem I just mentioned was something Lee experienced a decade
3:52 earlier. Think about those tedious, repetitive tasks that are currently
3:56 being human automated and that could be turned into software. The next example
4:00 is similar in that it's automating a task that this consultant did for their
4:05 clients. Ahmed Babakir is the co-founder of Blue Gamma, which is interest rate
4:10 forecasts for finance teams. Ahmed told us, "My co-founder and I used to work at
4:14 a consultancy where clients would ask us for interest rate data, sometimes
4:19 multiple times a day. As a recent graduate, my job was to pull the data,
4:23 format it, and send it over in a spreadsheet every time. After leaving
4:27 the company and learning about startups a year later, we realized it was a
4:30 repetitive problem that software could solve very easily. Or maybe at your day
4:34 job, you see a colleague doing repetitive work that you know could be
4:38 streamlined, like Steve from Ludy, formerly Metro Retro. Ludy is
4:42 collaboration software focused on development teams, helping them with
4:46 retrospectives, refinement, planning, and so on. Steve told us, "I created an
4:51 early prototype of a canvas-based retro tool as part of a hackathon at my last
4:55 real job. The idea came from watching the PM write up the notes after every
4:59 meeting by hand." So, now let's take a step back and look at what makes this
5:03 first method of finding a problem at your day job work. The first is you
5:07 already have deep context around the problem. You've lived it. You know the
5:12 workarounds. You understand why existing solutions fall short. The second is you
5:16 have built-in access to potential customers and beta testers. These are
5:20 your colleagues, your industry contacts, and so on. The third is that you
5:24 understand the buying process. You know who signs off on purchases, what budget
5:29 cycles look like, what objections come up. And the fourth is that you can
5:32 potentially validate the idea while still employed, reducing your risk. But
5:36 there are three things to watch out for with this approach. The first is make
5:40 sure the problem exists beyond your specific company. your employer might
5:45 just be uniquely dysfunctional. So, validate your idea outside of your
5:49 little bubble. The second is check your employment agreement for IP clauses.
5:52 Some companies claim ownership of anything you build while you're
5:56 employed. And the third is be careful not to use proprietary information or
6:00 customer data from your employer to build your product. I also wouldn't use
6:05 any of my employer's hardware like a laptop. I would have a personal laptop
6:09 that I worked on and as I mentioned, I would check that IP clause and be really
6:12 clean about it. So, with this method, I'd be asking myself three questions to
6:17 try to get my juices flowing. The first is, what tools do I use on a daily basis
6:22 that frustrate me or my co-workers? The second is, what manual process or
6:27 processes exist today that I think should be automated by software? And the
6:32 third is, are the incumbent tools in this industry actually old and clunky
6:37 and not changing or are they actually pretty good and I just don't like them?
6:41 So, there were a lot of companies that use this first method. As I said, it was
6:45 almost 50%. But I don't want to spend this whole video talking about it. So, I
6:49 put together a completely free resource over at robwalling.com/idas.
6:53 I'll tell you more about that later. But one thing I want you to notice is that
6:57 all of these folks were solving problems that people would be willing to pay for.
7:01 In the next category, the founders knew that there would be a customer ready to
7:05 pay because they copied an existing idea or an existing product. This was about
7:10 10% of our respondents. In some cases, founders saw how much their employer was
7:14 spending on a solution and thought, I could do that cheaper or I could do that
7:18 better. Or you might notice a large space with a hated competitor. Well, I
7:22 didn't participate in this particular survey. I did exactly this when I was
7:26 building Drip. And we did it by accident, if I'm being honest. We had
7:30 built a little email capture widget and the ability to send sequences of emails
7:34 to people that signed up. What we quickly realized is there was market
7:38 pull. There were people talking about marketing automation and email
7:43 automation features that didn't exist in the less expensive email service
7:46 providers. And every tool that had these features was really expensive, had
7:51 annual contracts, software wasn't great, and they required you to talk to a
7:56 salesperson. So, we started building some of those features. And while we
8:00 didn't copy any existing products, we did enter an existing category. And
8:04 there were already paradigms in place that we certainly slotted into. And it
8:09 made selling and marketing our tool a lot easier because when people arrived
8:14 at the homepage drip.com, they could see, oh, this is this type of tool. Why
8:18 is it different? And that's all I had to communicate. I didn't have to
8:21 communicate what we were doing and how novel we were. I just had to say, we are
8:25 either an email service provider or at some point we were an email automation
8:29 software and then we became lightweight marketing automation. And then I just
8:34 had to tell you why are we better or different than all the other incumbents?
8:38 And there were a lot of big clunky incumbents that people didn't like. And
8:41 that in addition to the fact that we executed really well was the reason that
8:45 Drip grew so quickly and resulted in a life-changing exit for me back in 2016.
8:50 Another example of using this approach comes from Tim Leland, the founder of
8:54 T.Y. t. is an all-in-one URL shortener and QR code platform. It's built for marketers,
9:02 developers, creators, and teams. And Tim told us, "I was working for a company on
9:06 an online giving product, and we were tasked to build a text to give feature.
9:11 To do this, we had to shorten the URLs since SMS messages are limited to 160
9:16 characters. We looked at bit.ly saw it was thousands of dollars to use a custom
9:20 domain to create short links. So, to save money, I built a simple in-house
9:24 URL shortener over the weekend that we could host ourselves." This got me
9:28 thinking other companies may want a more affordable option, but they don't want
9:32 to build it in-house. Another example of a founder who used this approach is
9:35 Lilia Tobin. She started Big Mailer, which is an email marketing platform
9:39 with a focus on multibrand management for agencies and franchises. Lilia told
9:44 us while working on our previous BTOC startup, we had grown our email list to
9:49 more than 300,000 subscribers. All the available email solutions seemed too
9:52 expensive for a product update newsletter of our size. So, we built an
9:56 in-house solution powered by Amazon SCES. Then, we thought others might have
9:59 a similar need and decided to make it into a standalone tool. Another option
10:04 might be to port an existing product to a new country, language, or geography.
10:09 We had a couple respondents who copied an idea that seemed to be working in the
10:13 US and they translated it to the needs of different geographies. One example is
10:18 Checkout Joy, which provides custom checkout pages for e-learning businesses
10:21 that connect local payment processors with LMS platforms. The founder, Maring
10:26 Dwet, told us, "My wife had a membership business and couldn't easily accept
10:30 payments from their LMS platform. No Stripe where we live and very limited
10:34 PayPal usage. Locals don't want to pay in USD, but that was all the LMS
10:38 offered. I was researching solutions and realized that there are potentially
10:41 thousands of businesses with the same issue. So, I built a quick MVP with our
10:45 local payment processor and got them live within a week. We could see an
10:48 immediate bump in conversions for them, and it made it easy to do business and
10:53 quickly get funds into their local bank account. Another founder who took this
10:56 approach is Simon Thompson, the founder of Huru.ai, which is an AI answering service to help
11:02 local Australian business owners manage phone calls, especially during weekends
11:07 and after hours. It has local Australian voices and sensibilities. Simon told us,
11:12 "I saw examples in the US, such as Rosie AI, doing the same thing, and figured
11:15 there would be a need for the same type of service, but specifically with
11:20 Australian accents and sensibilities. I also guessed that it wouldn't make sense
11:22 for the major players in the US to build Australian accents into their platform
11:26 and go to market in Australia, at least not anytime in the near future." So,
11:30 what makes this method work? Well, four things. The first is you have proof of
11:35 demand. Someone else already validated that people will pay for it. The second
11:38 is you can learn from the incumbent's mistakes by reading their negative
11:42 reviews and support forums. You can see what they're doing right and see what
11:45 they're doing wrong because they pioneered it. The third is you can
11:49 differentiate on price, user experience, specific features or a particular niche.
11:53 And if the incumbent has been around for a long time, they've often raised prices
11:57 and gone up market. And that can leave a lot of opportunity. The fourth is if the
12:01 market is large enough, even a small slice can be a great business if you're
12:04 a mostly bootstrap founder. But there are also four things to watch out for
12:08 when using this approach. The first is copying a product in a small market
12:12 means you're fighting for scraps. This approach works best when the market is
12:17 big. The second is make sure you have a real differentiator. It's not just we're
12:22 newer. That's not enough. So when we use the word copy, what we really mean is
12:25 enter an existing category where there are already other players. I still think
12:29 you need to get in and position yourself in a corner of the market that isn't
12:33 being served very well. The third thing to watch out for is the incumbent has a
12:38 head start on brand recognition, on SEO, integrations, customer trust, marketing,
12:42 all kinds of things. And the fourth is be honest about why you think you can
12:47 win. All just execute better is not a strategy. And just copying an existing
12:52 player is very unlikely to work. So the questions to ask yourself are number
12:55 one, why are customers unhappy with the current options? Is it price, features,
13:00 support, usability, or something else? The second is, is my differentiation
13:04 something customers actually care about or is it just interesting to me? The
13:08 third is, can I reach customers through a channel the incumbent isn't using well
13:11 or where there's some type of opportunity? And the fourth is, is there
13:15 a specific segment of the market that's underserved and would love a product
13:19 built just for them. Method number three is discovering a problem through
13:24 freelancing. About 10% of the founders we surveyed took this approach. Examples
13:29 include Ben Walker, the founder of Drum, which is an ERP for small to medium
13:33 consulting firms. Ben told us, "I was consulting as a custom software
13:37 developer, and found that I was building very similar functionality over and
13:41 over. I felt that if I could build a very basic version of what I was
13:44 building my clients, but build it as a standalone tool, I should be able to
13:48 find some early customers and iterate." John Reynolds, the founder of Civic
13:52 Review, which is permitting software for local government, told us, "I was a
13:56 freelance software developer and I was asked to build our product permitting
14:00 software by municipalities. I was asked three times and on the third time, I
14:04 decided, okay, these guys can't find a SAS solution that fits their needs. I'll
14:08 just make my own and sell it so I don't have to keep rewriting the same
14:12 software." There's also the chance that you discover a problem to solve that's
14:16 not something you've been asked to build multiple times, but rather it's a tool
14:20 that you need in order to be more efficient in running your agency. Colin
14:24 Bartlett, the co-founder of Status Gator, which is a status aggregator,
14:28 told us, "I was working on a bug ticket for a customer all day and then finally
14:32 came across the status page for the Facebook ads API and it had a warning
14:37 about there being intermittent failures. Turns out that was the bug. It annoyed
14:40 me that I did not even know the status page existed. Plus, the app interfaced
14:46 with like 10 other ads APIs. I thought it would be really nice to have all that
14:49 on one screen and get an email when the status changed. So, I built Status Gator
14:54 for myself. Note that it's important if you're going to do this that you think
14:58 very carefully about the intellectual property. in a lot of consulting and
15:02 employment agreements, you will sign away anything you build at the job and
15:07 anything you build in your free time, even on your own computers at home. So,
15:11 you you want to be very diligent about this and have all your eyes dotted and
15:16 tees crossed. Another example is Dump Truck Dispatcher, founded by Joe
15:20 Walling, no relation. Dump Truck Dispatcher streamlines the operations
15:24 and logistics for bulk hauling companies. And Joe told us at the time I
15:28 ran a custom software development company. I had a client who wanted this
15:31 type of software. I kept the IP in return for charging them less for the
15:35 software. So let's look at four reasons why this method works. The first is you
15:39 see the same problems across multiple clients which validates that demand
15:44 exists beyond one company. The second is that clients are literally paying you to
15:47 understand their problems. You're getting paid to do market research and
15:51 customer development. The third is you build real expertise in the domain as
15:55 you're getting paid. And the fourth is you can sometimes fund early product
15:59 development through your agency or freelancing revenue. But four things to
16:03 watch out for include agency work is demanding. Finding time to build a
16:07 product on the side is genuinely hard. Number two is make sure IP ownership is
16:11 clear in your client's contracts before you productized anything like in the
16:16 case of dump truck dispatcher. The third is that the transition from freelancing
16:20 agency custom work to actually thinking like a product owner is harder than it
16:24 looks. You have to learn to say no to feature requests. And the fourth is
16:29 don't build a product so tailored to one client that no one else wants it. So I
16:33 have four questions to ask yourself if you're going to take this approach. The
16:37 first is what functionality have I built three or more times for different
16:41 clients? What internal tools have I built to make my agency more effective
16:45 or efficient that others might want? Do I have a clear path to transitioning
16:49 from agency revenue to product revenue, or will I be stuck doing both forever?
16:53 And the last is, are my clients in an industry I actually want to serve long
16:58 term? So, real quick, if you found any of this helpful so far, can you please
17:01 give this video a like and subscribe to the channel? My team and I are working
17:05 really hard to bring you content like this. We put a ton of time and energy
17:09 into making sure the content is super valuable for you. And when we see those
17:13 metrics on YouTube, the likes and the subscribes, it helps us know that we're
17:17 on the right track. So, those first three methods all assume you have work
17:21 experience to draw from. But what if you're early in your career or you want
17:25 to look beyond your current industry? Method number four is solving a problem
17:31 for a spouse, friend, or colleague. And about 8% of respondents said this is how
17:36 they found their startup idea. In this case, you're going to want to go on the
17:39 hunt and try to find problems. So, you'll want to reach out to your
17:43 network. Maybe you talk to your spouse or maybe you talk to your friends to see
17:47 what problems they have in their day jobs. John's sister is the founder of
17:52 Quill Therapy Solutions, which he describes as software that generates
17:55 progress notes and other forms of documentation for mental health
17:59 therapists in an ethical and privacy focused way without recording therapy
18:03 sessions. John told us how he came up with the idea. He said, "My wife is a
18:08 therapist and she 100% thought of the idea. She saw me working on a different
18:12 idea that relied on AI to rearrange information and she basically said, hey,
18:16 could you do that for progress notes instead?" and she was right. One way to
18:20 approach this method is to have a chat with someone who has deep experience.
18:25 Yoyi Sigson is the founder of Crank Wheel, which is a screen sharing, web
18:29 conferencing, and video platform for sales. And Yoy told us, "So my
18:34 co-founder Gily had been working for years in various sales jobs, mostly sort
18:39 of hybrid telephone and in-person sales like insurance and banking, telecoms,
18:42 that kind of stuff. And we started brainstorming about what's missing from
18:46 that kind of space. We rediscovered a lot of sales enablement tools that
18:49 already existed. And I'd been working on real-time communications in Google
18:53 Chrome at Google. So, I innocently asked him at some point what people use when
18:57 they're on the phone with a prospect and they need to show them something. As it
19:01 turned out, they didn't use anything because it's too complex for a lot of
19:05 prospects and you don't want to take a good sales call and ruin it with some
19:08 tech issues. That's how the idea for Crank Wheel was born. What makes this
19:13 method work are the following four things. Number one, you have a direct
19:17 line to someone experiencing the problem. Instant access for interviews,
19:21 feedback, and iteration. Number two, you can deeply understand the problem
19:25 without having to cold call strangers, at least initially. Number three, your
19:29 relationship creates accountability. You're more likely to follow through
19:32 when someone you care about is counting on you. And number four, they can
19:35 introduce you to others in the field for validation and early sales. But there
19:39 are things to watch out for. The first is your spouse or friend might have a
19:43 unique problem that others in their field don't share. So you want to
19:47 validate beyond them. The second one is they might be too nice to tell you your
19:50 solution isn't good. So push for honest feedback. The third is mixing business
19:55 and personal relationships can get complicated. So you're going to want to
19:59 set expectations early. And finally, you still need to understand the market.
20:01 Their expertise plus your building skills isn't enough on its own. If
20:06 you're going to attempt this method, you're going to want to ask yourself
20:09 four questions. The first is what does my spouse, partner, or close friend
20:14 complain about in their day job? The second is, do I think they can introduce
20:18 me to other people who potentially work in the same field and have the same
20:22 problem? It'd be nice to have five intros, for example. The third question
20:26 is, am I building this to solve a real problem that I think can be a great
20:31 business, or am I doing it to solve the problem of a person that I care about?
20:34 And the last one is, do I have the patience to learn an industry that I'm
20:40 not already familiar with? Method number five for finding startup ideas is to
20:46 find a problem online. And only 3% of respondents used this approach. So this
20:50 is where instead of going to people you know, you are looking for ideas in
20:55 forums, in online groups, whether it's Facebook or Reddit or private Slack
20:59 groups you're in. Maybe you're lurking in support forums looking for problems
21:03 that aren't already solved. And this method often gets touted online, but
21:07 it's really hard to do as evidenced by the fact that only 3% of folks who
21:10 responded to the survey actually used it. It didn't show up much in our
21:13 research and only a handful of respondents had used this method. Couple
21:18 examples are Tu Akanola who is the founder of Stream Thing. Stream thing is
21:22 a Shopify app to enable buyers to select a specific delivery date, for example,
21:27 for gift purchases. Tou told us, "Someone had recently asked me to help
21:31 set up a Shopify store, and I noticed they had an open API, so I decided to
21:34 build a Shopify app. I comb through the Shopify support forums to find issues
21:38 that merchants were complaining about. Once I came up with a short list, I
21:41 looked in their app store to find which apps addressed the issue. I prioritized
21:45 issues that had apps with lots of reviews, but also a lot of negative
21:49 reviews. This helped identify problems that were pervasive, but not well
21:53 addressed. Another example is Rammy Kufos, the founder of hover code, which
21:58 is a dynamic QR code generator. Dynamic meaning the scan destination can be
22:02 edited after printing and you get analytics. So Rammy told us it was a
22:06 mixture of having somewhat of a hypothesis or interest and keyword
22:10 research. I found QR codes interesting generally and after chatting with a
22:14 friend who works in marketing, I started to think that marketers were still in
22:17 the early stages of making use of QR codes and there was still opportunity. I
22:21 did some keyword research with hrefs to see if there was demand for QR code
22:25 tools and saw huge search volume which was enough for me to get involved in the
22:29 space. What makes this work? Well, there's there's a bunch of things, but
22:33 let's cover four. One is you can discover problems in industries you've
22:36 never worked in. Public forums give you unfiltered access to real frustrations
22:41 and complaints. You can validate demand through search volume, number of
22:44 complaints, or size of communities. And lastly, negative reviews of existing
22:48 products are a gold mine for differentiation. But there are things
22:51 you should watch out for. The first is people complain about a lot of things
22:54 they wouldn't actually pay for. The signal to noise ratio can be low. You
22:58 lack the context that insiders have. You might misunderstand the problem or the
23:02 market dynamics. The third one is this method takes a lot of time and patience.
23:05 Most people give up before finding anything good. And lastly, selling to
23:09 people you've never met in an industry you don't understand is genuinely hard.
23:14 Some questions to ask yourself are, am I finding the same complaint repeated by
23:18 many people, or is this just a one-off gripe? Would people pay money to solve
23:22 this, or do they want to vent? Can I actually reach these people to sell to
23:25 them, or are they scattered and going to be hard or expensive to find? And am I
23:30 willing to invest the time to deeply understand an unfamiliar industry before
23:34 I start building? Among our respondents, there were a couple of people who had
23:37 grown nice marketplace businesses. And if you're interested in building an
23:41 add-on for an existing platform, my team has pulled together a list of over 75
23:44 marketplaces at microcom.com/marketplaces. In addition, you can look at Reddit
23:50 communities related to specific industries or professions. You can look
23:53 at Facebook groups for niche professional communities, support forums
23:57 for existing products where you want to look for repeated complaints, review
24:02 sites like G2, Capterara or App Store reviews, and finally keyword research
24:06 tools like Hrefs, Semrush or even Google's keyword planner. So I have one
24:11 realworld example from someone who completed the survey and in this example
24:15 they actually noticed something while they were out in the real world. So
24:19 Steven Gladney is the founder of Order Nerd and Order Nerd aggregates
24:23 third-party online ordering apps like Door Dash, Uber Eats, GrubHub into a
24:27 single platform to make it easier for restaurant owners and staff to manage.
24:33 Steven told us we already had our team, a sales guy and a developer, and we're
24:36 actively hunting ideas. One day, my co-founder was at a restaurant and saw a
24:40 wall of tablets and began talking to the staff about it. The pain in their voice
24:44 was palpable. I laugh because Pam, when you when you hear a painoint like that,
24:48 it's it's often a good sign. He texted me a photo and said, "It might be the
24:52 beer talking, but I think this is the problem we need to solve." Given that I
24:56 had previously sold to restaurants for 5 years, and he had over a decade of
24:59 experience working with third party APIs, we knew we were the right people
25:03 to tackle this problem. Obviously, this is a unique example that might be hard
25:07 to replicate, but it's a good reminder that by remaining curious and observant,
25:11 you might find an idea in a place you wouldn't expect. Method number six is to
25:16 scratch your own itch. And this one was made so popular in the early and mid
25:23 2000s by base camp by DHH and Jason Frerieded because they scratched their
25:27 own itch and it worked for them. And so they would often talk that maybe that's
25:32 the best way to start a startup. And while it's certainly not a bad way, only
25:38 16% of our respondents did this. This is where you build something to solve your
25:40 own problem and you discover that other people have the same issue and you can
25:46 find them and they will pay for it. So there's a lot that has to come into
25:50 play. So there's a lot of things that have to line up in order for this to
25:53 work. You can't just say I have a problem therefore that's validation.
25:56 It's not. You validated that you will have one customer paying you $0 which is
26:00 yourself. So when I think about scratching my own itch, which is I I've
26:04 done I built drip was originally software to scratch your own itch. And I
26:10 took that idea and went and asked 17 other founders that I knew if they had
26:13 the problem and when I got 10 or 11 yeses then we started building. So if I
26:16 was going to do scratch my own itch, I would want to validate there are other
26:19 people out there with this issue. Examples of founders who scratched their
26:24 own itch include Olga Huer, the founder of Dialogue Shift, which is an AI
26:28 application for hotels. It's chatbot, phone AI, email AI. Olga told us, "We
26:34 came up with the idea as hotel guests ourselves, frustrated by how difficult
26:37 it was to get simple information about what, where, and when things were
26:40 happening during our stay. Our initial thought was, how great would it be to
26:43 just send a WhatsApp message and instantly get answers to all our
26:47 questions about the hotel? For example, when is the next yoga class? Till what
26:50 time is breakfast served? Can you send me the daily program?" One more example
26:55 is from Scott Brownley, the founder of Simple Booklet. simple booklet is
27:00 marketing communication and support collateral presentation that includes
27:04 distribution and tracking across the web. Scott told us, "I had sold an
27:08 earlier business in the early 2000s, then went sailing with my wife for 11
27:11 years around the world. Getting access to information about places was
27:15 difficult and usually was in the form of paper brochures, lookbooks, and guides.
27:19 I really just wanted to scan a QR code or get it on my tablet or phone to
27:24 access. And since every print brochure started as a PDF, how could we make that
27:28 more accessible? What makes scratching your own itch work? Well, first of all,
27:32 you understand the problem intimately because you've experienced it yourself.
27:36 You're motivated to solve it because it genuinely bothers you. You can be your
27:39 own first user, which speeds up iteration, and your passion for the
27:43 problem often comes through in marketing and sales. But there's a few things you
27:47 want to watch out for. The first is you might be a market of one. I referenced
27:51 this earlier. Just because you have this problem doesn't mean enough other people
27:55 do to make a business. The second is you might build what you want rather than
27:59 what the market wants. So stay open to feedback. The third use case might be
28:03 too niche or too specific to your situation. And the fourth is founders
28:07 often underestimate how different their needs are from typical customers. So
28:11 questions to ask yourself. Number one, how many other people have this exact
28:15 problem? Can I find them and talk to them? Am I a representative user or am I
28:19 an edge case? Would I pay more money to solve this problem or do I just find it
28:24 mildly annoying? And lastly, can I separate my personal preferences from
28:28 what the market actually needs? Since we did all this research, I'm actually
28:31 going to take a lot of it and put it in a new book I'm working on on finding,
28:36 choosing, and validating your idea, finding product market fit, and
28:40 launching a profitable SAS business. If you want early access to chapter
28:44 previews, launch updates, that kind of thing, hop on my email list,
28:48 robwalling.com/e. Method number seven is taking advantage of an emerging or a fast growing
28:55 technology. This is every developer's dream where AI becomes a thing or DHTML.
29:01 You remember Ajax in like what 2006 where suddenly you could do stuff in a
29:04 browser you couldn't do before and you see it and you think what can I build
29:07 with this? And while it's every developer's dream to play with that new
29:11 technology, it's very rare, at least according to our survey, that people
29:15 actually turn these into businesses. Only 3% of respondents went this route.
29:19 And when I say an emerging technology, this can be AI, it can be a brand new
29:24 API, it can be a new platform like when I think Facebook opened up for
29:28 development and uh you know Squarespace, HubSpot, like all these marketplaces,
29:33 Shopify. When these open up, you can look for practical applications before
29:37 the market gets crowded. Examples of this include Rahm Shingal. He's the
29:42 founder of WA Notifier, which is an all-in-one WhatsApp marketing tool for
29:46 businesses. Rahm told us, "I used to run a WordPress agency and setting up email
29:50 marketing forms was one of the recurring things we used to do for businesses in
29:54 Western countries. With WhatsApp gaining momentum and WhatsApp marketing starting
29:58 to pick up, I made an assumption that if email and email marketing is big,
30:02 WhatsApp marketing can also become big. This was especially for businesses in
30:06 countries where WhatsApp was popular and a primary channel for communication like
30:11 India, GCC countries, South America, etc. And then right around 2000 when I
30:15 was looking for SAS ideas, WhatsApp opened up their gates for new API
30:19 partners. So the timing was right and that's how I got started. Another
30:23 example is from Alex Charles, founder of Genext AI. Gent AI is applied AI add-ins
30:30 for Microsoft Word expanding to other AI applications. Alex said, "I worked as a
30:35 consultant, an economist, and used the Microsoft Office suite heavily. Soon as
30:39 Chat GPT came out, I realized it would be extremely useful if connected to
30:42 Office and if it could reduce hallucinations." That's how the idea
30:45 came about. Then there's Thiago, the founder of Pod Squeeze. Pod Squeeze is
30:49 an application we actually use to help produce my podcast startup for the rest
30:52 of us. It's an all-in-one solution for the production and promotion of
30:57 podcasts. So, you upload audio or video and it generates social media posts,
31:02 clips, summaries, transcripts, and more. Thiago said, "I had my podcast. I got
31:06 really frustrated with all the post-p production work. In other words,
31:10 creating the show notes, promotional content. So back then chat GPT had just
31:13 been released and we thought that even if the AI transcripts made mistakes, GPT
31:18 was smart enough to get that content and generate good text assets. That's how we
31:22 started. So what makes this work? Well, first of all, early movers can establish
31:25 themselves before the market gets crowded. New technology often creates
31:29 new problems that need new solutions. The third is you can ride the wave of
31:33 attention and interest in the technology itself. And lastly, customers are often
31:37 more forgiving of rough edges when the technology is new. But there are some
31:40 things to watch out for. First is timing can be extremely difficult. If you're
31:45 too early, the technology isn't ready or the customers aren't educated. If you're
31:49 too late, then you're one of dozens or hundreds of competitors. The second
31:52 thing is the hype cycle can mislead you. Just because people are talking about a
31:56 technology doesn't mean they'll pay for whatever you're building. The third is
31:59 the technology might not mature the way you expect, leaving you with a product
32:04 built on shaky foundations. And lastly, big players can also move fast in hot
32:08 spaces. So you might get crushed by well-funded competitors. The questions
32:12 to ask yourself are, is this technology actually ready for real world use cases
32:17 or is it still experimental? Second one, are businesses already spending money in
32:21 adjacent areas or is this entirely speculative? Do I have a unique angle or
32:25 insight or am I just chasing hype? And lastly, can I build something useful
32:30 quickly before the window closes? And my eighth and final method for finding SAS
32:35 ideas is building on an existing product. 4% of respondents told us this
32:40 was their approach. So this is where you're working on one product and you
32:43 discover a bigger or a better opportunity, maybe an internal tool with
32:48 outside demand or an adjacent problem that your customers keep mentioning.
32:51 This obviously wasn't a huge group. It was 4%. But we did have a number of
32:55 respondents who were working on a product at various levels of success and
32:58 then in doing so discovered a bigger opportunity. It's worth noting these
33:03 weren't necessarily pivots but new products altogether. So Ivana is the
33:07 founder of authored up which is LinkedIn content creation and analysis integrated
33:13 via Chrome extension. And Ivana told us we were working on a startup for hiring
33:16 managers and recruiters. We had a product developed but we were working in
33:19 a vacuum not talking to potential customers. No mom test. After we almost
33:23 finished the product, we wanted to get feedback in beta users. We tried
33:27 networking, sending LinkedIn DMs and pitching. We realized we can try
33:31 creating content on LinkedIn, but we couldn't find simple tools to help us
33:34 out. And that's when we built this internal tool. Rafal, who's the founder
33:38 of Super Data, which is an API that lets developers and no code makers easily
33:42 extract data from websites and platforms like YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, and ex
33:47 Twitter. Rafal told us, "It's my own itch, which turned into a business. I
33:50 needed to scrape YouTube transcripts to add a feature to my other product. Over
33:55 time, I also used this scraper to build other small products. It became de facto
34:00 an API servicing multiple apps. At some point, I decided to make a small
34:02 experiment and try to monetize it on rapid API. And from there, it
34:06 snowballed. And lastly, we have Ruben Gomez, the founder of Sinewell. Sinewell
34:10 provides easytouse document signing with enterprisegrade security and compliance
34:15 at an affordable price. Reuben told us the idea came from running another
34:18 business and seeing/hearing about the dissatisfaction of customers with
34:23 solutions in the e signature space and trying ourselves to give them good
34:27 options for that part of their workflow. So what makes this approach work? The
34:30 first is you're already in the market. You're talking to customers and you're
34:33 seeing real problems. You have momentum, skills, and sometimes revenue to fund
34:37 exploration. The third is you might discover that a tool you built for
34:40 yourself has broader demand. And the fourth is the new opportunity often
34:43 leverages what you've already learned. Things to watch out for include chasing
34:48 shiny objects. It's a real risk. Make sure the new idea is actually better and
34:53 not just more exciting. The second one is splitting focus between two products
34:56 can kill both of them. Third is you might be running from hard problems in
34:59 your current product rather than toward a real opportunity. And the fourth is
35:04 sunk cost in your current product can cloud your judgment. So I have four
35:07 questions I think you should ask yourself if you're going to take this
35:10 approach. Number one, is this new product idea genuinely bigger and
35:15 better, or am I just bored with what I'm working on? Number two, can I validate
35:19 this quickly without completely abandoning my current product? Number
35:22 three, do I have the resources to pursue both of these ideas, or do I have to
35:26 make a really hard choice? And number four, what would have to be true for
35:31 this new idea to be worth the switch? So, as a recap, here are the eight
35:35 methods that the successful founders we surveyed used to fund their profitable
35:39 SAS ideas. Let me leave you with one number, 72. That's the percent of
35:44 founders who found their idea through their work. Be it day job frustrations,
35:48 expensive tools they knew they could build better or cheaper, patterns from
35:52 agency clients, or opportunities discovered while building something
35:56 else. 72%. That means your SAS idea might be right under your nose. But you need to know
36:02 what to look for. And that's why my team and I created the 9-to-f5 audit. It's
36:06 totally free. It includes even more founder examples we couldn't fit in this
36:10 video. And it walks you through thought exercises to help you discover SAS
36:14 opportunities hiding at your workday. You can get your free copy at
36:17 robwalling.com/idas. I hope you find it helpful. Once you found your SAS idea, the next step is
36:23 validation. And that's exactly what I cover in this next video. If you found
36:27 this video helpful, I'd appreciate it if you give it a like and subscribe to the
36:30 channel. Thanks to all the survey participants for helping out with this
36:33 project. Thanks for watching and we'll
