Ideas
I have been working on building my first SaaS product and considering lot of different ideas to pick one from. None of them very original, mind you. But, they this is my first time building a Full Stack Web App and I want to convince myself first that I can do this.
Now, I was looking around IndieHackers for inspiration and came across this post where a fellow Hacker is also at the same stage.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/software-engineer-looking-for-reliable-saas-ideas-53bf541346
The comments in this post are amazing and shows why this community is amazing. There are all kind of very good suggestions. I especially like the ones where they talk about selling shovels and taking something existing and improve on it. I think for a first time builder, combining these two things can be a winning strategy.
Ultimately what I choose to build as my first web app will be decided by below criteria...
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Can it be sold as subscription?
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Can I do it? I mean, I do have expertise in other software fields but I am completely new to Full Stack Web development. Let's be honest - I am not going to be inventing a new JavaScript framework anytime soon:-)
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Does it involve integrating with 3rd party APIs? How hard is it? Being a newbie, this is going to be a bit tough for me right now.
So few ideas, not necessarily of my own...
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Something for the no-code audience. No-code is getting major traction. Lots of people, who do not know how to code and want to build apps are looking for easy ways to do that. I have been impressed with what Glide.io has done. Now, I do not have the motivation or the skills to build something like that. However, maybe I can build something that helps people build simple web apps from just bunch of text files or even a spreadsheet. I think I was something few years back that was done on top of Dropbox. The only problem here would be I might have to integrate with 3rd-party APIs and I don't think that's my cup of tea yet.
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I saw this API product where if you give it a tweet URL, it will give you back a short video of that tweet being typed, one character at a time. I see lots of people cross-posting posts between different social media platforms. For example, they take a screenshot of a tweet and then post it on Instragram as a pic. I like the video idea because it has been shown that short videos have much higher user engagement then static content like text or screenshot of text. Maybe this can be converted into a end product but it will involve integrating with the API i mentioned above.
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Something that monitors web apps for availability to long term service and business interruption. I once built a project as part of my corporate job, where we wrote bunch of things for a client to monitor that the all parts of dot com was running all times, including server stuff like db, disk space etc and it then used to send alerts to a pager that was the IT guy. Maybe a modern version of this.
4 Subscription based classroom built on top of zoom? During the lockdown, my kid attended some paid classes where the payment and video class part was completely seperate. i felt there was need for a integrated solution.
Now, these are not necessarily unique and there may be solutions out there that serves this need in some way, if not 100%. But, hey, Google was not the first search engine(it read somewhere it was 22nd). Not that, I am capable of building a Google.
I am going to do some research on these and maybe few others and see what I can do and maybe build something with a different angle to what is already there.
My main focus is to demonstrate to myself that I can build something usable that people consider good enough that they will pay for it.
