Think micro

I want to build another new product in May, and this tweet by Tony gave me pause:

There are apps on the internet charging you money JUST ONLY to remove background. The app maker makes $10K+/month from it. Meanwhile, any macOS comes with this feature and you can do that with just two clicks. Something to think about for indie hackers. – @tdinh_me

I’m definitely overthinking things.

Every time I think about what to build, my mind goes to the kind of products I see on X. Fully formed, well featured, carefully crafted. And I’d wonder if I can even build that, and most of the time I stop myself from thinking further…

But most of these products started out with just 1 compelling feature. Like Tony’s Typingmind. It started as simply a UI layer on top of ChatGPT, so that he didn’t have to keep logging in to use it. The compelling feature was simply being login-less!

How cool/crazy is that?!

And the main point of his tweet was that it doesn’t always need to go beyond that single feature. It can stay simple and micro, and still grow to $10k monthly revenue. Even while the same feature is absolutely FREE elsewhere.

So really, the barrier to earning some wifi money can be surprisingly low.

If we know where to look.

Single feature micro SaaS > Big hairy ambitious SaaS