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š§ Are all the good SaaS ideas already taken?
Why competition shouldn't scare you and the top ways to differentiate your SaaS product...
Happy pre-Friday š
āAre all the good SaaS ideas taken?ā
- Anonymous founder
Today Iām going to convince you to just go ahead and build that product or feature youāre thinking of.
Even if youāre up against strong competition.
This week in IdeaHubā¦
Competition is a good thing: Beehiiv shows us it never hurts to be late to the partyā¦
Niching down: How to start small and differentiate your product.
The underrated differentiator: One thing every big SaaS is failing at that you can guarantee to beat them on.
Letās jump inā¦ š
ā”ļø ShipFast - a Next.JS boilerplate you actually want to use.
Countless hours saved on authentication, payments, databases, SEO, DNS and everything you need for your next SaaS.

1. Competition is a good thing
When Beehiiv launched in 2021 war had long been raging in the email marketing space.
MailChimp had already amassed more than 10 million customers and been acquired by Intuit for $12 billion.
Plus - ConvertKit entered the race in 2013 and was already delivering over $2 million in MRR.
And countless other smaller platforms either failed or were acquired along the way:
ExactTarget, TinyLetter, iContact, Campaigner, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Emma, Mad Mimiā¦
Would you build an email marketing platform knowing this is what you were up against?
If youāre like me - probably not! But if youāre Tyler Denk and the Beehiiv team, you make it workā¦
a little building in public update with @beehiivā¦
8 weeks since launch and we've surpassed 1,000 users without spending a single dollar on acquisition
and we've got some huge product updates en route for the next several weeks š¢š¢š¢
ā Tyler Denk š (@denk_tweets)
8:21 PM ā¢ Jan 25, 2022
So the moral of the story is:
No matter if youāre up against the likes of MailChimp or a handful of $1K MRR bootstrappersā¦
ā¦build something people love and nobody can stop you.

2. Niching down
Say you have some experience in email automation, maybe youāre a fan of what Beehiiv are doingā¦
You canāt go head to head, so what do you do?
Pick an underserved customer segment
Refine the core features to solve a specific set of problems
Market your solution to the nichĆØ
For example: āBeehiiv for Indie Hackersā.
With unique integrations to communities like ProductHunt and revenue visibility platforms like BareMetrics.
This would help us share our #buildinpublic journeys, and celebrate when we cross new revenue milestones or launch a new product.
But you can also nichĆØ down through features, keeping the customer base the same, and focusing on solving a smaller more specific problem.
For example:
Email Marketing ā Cross-promotions ā Finding cross-promotion partners.
You could build a platform that allows creators of any guise to find and collaborate with others and grow their audiences.

3. The underrated differentiator
As big SaaS platforms grow, they all encounter one problem at some point or another:
Itās difficult to scale customer service.
Itās why so many incumbent SaaS platforms get a bad rap from their customers.
In the last few years, customer service around the world has disintegrated.
You will thrive if you have a caring demeanor, prompt response times, and a solutions-oriented approach.
"Surprise & delight" is a massive differentiator.
ā Justin Welsh (@thejustinwelsh)
1:36 PM ā¢ Sep 3, 2023
So whatever youāre building - obsess over your customerās experience.
Forget transactional emails and write everything from scratch.
Engage with as many as you can on X and create a relationship where they feel like they can reach out whenever they want.
Make them feel special and reap the rewards. Youāll see:
Increased organic feature suggestions and feedback
Word-of-mouth will become a measurable growth tool
Youāll learn 10X more than just watching your Stripe dashboardā¦

š Youāll want to read thisā¦
š„ Developreneur - emails help you sharpen your product engineering and solopreneurship skills. Actionable tips & tricks as well as super cool curated finds in under 10 minutes a week.
The Story of ConvertKit - How a UI developer turned entrepreneur quit his job and scaled his SaaS to over $3 million in MRR.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 - the agenda has just been released, see whatās in store at the SaaS Stage this year!
Join 400+ indie hackers learning how to build products with weekly discussions straight to your inbox
āI would recommend IdeaHub to those who are intrigued by entrepreneurship and want to build their own SaaS products.ā
āItās helped me understand the full product process from idea generation, validation, building an MVP and the road to first sale.ā
āI find the discussions really exciting and the feedback loop to apply them to my own products is invaluable.ā
- Mitchell, Senior Data Engineer (and Indie Hackerā¦)
P.S. Check out the official IdeaHub Reddit community where you can share ideas with other builders
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