Micro-SaaS

Source
TL;DR	Pick one painful problem for one specific customer in an “unsexy” niche too small for VCs. The lack of competition — not clever features — is what lets a solo founder hold 90%+ margins and $10K–$50K/month.

What it means

Deliberate smallness: a “pointy-feature” app solving exactly one bottleneck for a narrow customer.
The moat isn’t tech — it’s that the market is too small to be worth anyone bigger’s time.
Nick’s design rule: “Your app should be the best one for one specific person. It will be an absolute disaster for everyone else” (how-i-built-it-16k-month-micro-saas).

The opportunity is the boredom.

Bo: unsexy areas (compliance, taxes) leave “asymmetric opportunities with real demand, high willingness to pay, minimal competition” — $1.7M ARR, 6 employees (i-make-1-7m-year-in-the-most-boring-niche-imaginable).
Less glamorous niche = thinner competition.

One pointy feature beats a platform.

Lewis: rivals “try to do too many things and end up distracted” — Audio Pen does one thing, $15k/month (the-app-i-built-in-12-hours-makes-15k-month).
Vikash: one task (PSD mockups), $12k/month (how-i-grew-my-plugin-to-12k-month).
Angus: one conversion, $40k/month at 97.5% margin (i-make-40k-month-with-this-one-website).

High pain = high price.

Ethan charges combat athletes + parents for weight-cutting protocols (i-left-college-to-build-this-niche-app-now-i-make-20k-m).
Lancer: $79–$500/month agency plans (i-built-a-10k-month-ai-agent).

Economics only work because building is cheap (vibe-coding).

Mike distributes all profit to co-founders past $10k MRR (i-built-3-saas-apps-to-200k-mrr).
Tibo runs 5 apps as risk diversification: “If OpenAI kills one of my products… it’s not the end of the world” (the-100k-mrr-saas-playbook).

Native channel is search, not social — B2B buyers search, they don’t scroll.

Leans on seo-growth + word-of-mouth. Mickey: Late to $40k MRR on Google SEO alone, then $1M ARR adding day-zero Google Ads (zero-to-40k-month-with-one-marketing-channel-no-social-, i-make-1m-year-selling-access-to-apis-i-dont-own).
Increasingly that search is answer-engine search — being recommended by ChatGPT/Claude (ai-search-optimization).

Or let the product be the channel — product-led-growth.

Tally gives the form builder away free; the viral “made with Tally” loop drives ~1.8M users and $5M ARR with a team of 10 (i-make-5m-year-giving-my-saas-away-for-free). Self-serve simplicity keeps a tiny team viable.

The caveat: small markets have a ceiling.

Narrowness that kills competition also caps revenue — most plateau at $10K–$50K, hence portfolio plays (Mike, Tibo) to compound past it.
The solo founder is the single point of failure — Angus: only “write code for business-aligned features,” stop refactoring for fun (i-make-40k-month-with-this-one-website).

Do this, not that:

Pick a niche so boring VCs ignore it — not a sexy crowded one.
Ship one pointy feature — not a platform.
Win on search and support — not virality.
Diversify across apps to beat the ceiling — and a capped-out app becomes a sellable asset (app-flipping).