At The Nabob we love SaaS and the digital businesses that can be built with them.
Therefore, today we bring you a special 9 recurring business ideas based on software.
Creating a SaaS (Software as a Service) can be one of the best business ideas you can
carry out for these 3 reasons:
- They are super-scalable: it allows you to get clients without you having to keep an eye
on the business and without having to expand your staff. In our opinion, it is the best
business to run alone. As long as it is not a complex SaaS, of course. - They are predictable: it allows you to know how much money you are going to earn
each month according to the subscribed clients you have thanks to the MRR (Monthly
Recurring Revenue). The more paying subscribers, the higher the MRR and ARR (Annual
Recurring Revenue). - They are “easy” to sell: thanks to the stability and independence that these business
models achieve, it is possible to sell functioning SaaS businesses to other companies
easily with a price that comes from taking the MRR or ARR and multiplying it by 4-12
according to age, vertical, growth, etc.
However, not everything is so pretty. The most difficult thing about a SaaS is the following:
- Get the first 100 paying subscribers: There are many subscription services and it is
increasingly difficult for consumers to start paying for a new service. - They are fragile models in their beginnings because they tend to be easily replicable.
- Software maintenance and improvements: it must be taken into account that the same
software serves all clients. Any change or alteration in operation can affect them and they could easily unsubscribe (cancel their subscription). For these reasons, the well- known enemy of SaaS tends to increase: the Churn Rate (customers who started paying, but have stopped doing so).
Having said that and now, we are going to talk about SaaS business ideas that you can set up. Some are powered by AI and some are not. What is clear is that they are all very innovative business ideas.
To start, here is a video that I made myself telling you how I made a SaaS with little programming knowledge and more extra ideas as a bonus:
9 SaaS business ideas to set up in 2024
SaaS #1. CannyHQ, user feedback
Canny is a cloud software where users and clients can make their feedback public and
vote on suggestions or opinions already published by other users. This allows companies
to collect this information, filter the most popular ones and organize their roadmap
according to the most demanded needs.
You can see a real example here: Popular SEO software Ahrefs uses Canny for its product development.
Data:
How could you replicate this idea (MVP)
An MVP could have the following functionalities:
- Obtain feedback publicly and allow users to vote and comment on the best and worst options.
- Change log (changelog). That users can see the new developments/functions that have been implemented from among those voted.
- Not so important for a v.1.0. It would be the option to organize your roadmap within the tool itself. But since most companies already have a program to organize their next developments (Trello, Jira, Notion, Google Drive…), perhaps it would be better to opt for developing integrations and for each one to manage it in their usual tool.
To save hours of development, you can use “pre-made” options or scripts like Upvotex on CodeCanyon. The only drawback is that they are not 100% updated and there may be some errors that, if you are not a programmer, can cause you a lot of headaches.
To end
Most startups or digital companies invest in tools to obtain feedback from their users. In addition, there is now a trend towards transparency and a tool like Canny not only allows the company to obtain feedback, but also makes it participate in its development. This makes users and customers more loyal when they are part of that company. They have a voice and a vote, and never better said.
This system is aimed at obtaining feedback from companies, but it could be used for content creators. A YouTuber or streamer could use it to get new content ideas and have their users vote on the ones they find most interesting.
