For the last 8 months, I have been building a SaaS for b2b. Basically, it is a service to analyze a user’s customer list and give insights and generate prospects for conversions.

I am a developer who specializes in backend development and machine learning algorithms.

I have built the entire service as an API. It can manage users, upload and manage customer lists, run a basic analysis (using analytical means as well as ML), generate insight reports on the customers to provide demographic/behavioral/psychographic information, generate new prospects using ML based on the profiles, and a host of utility functionality.

I am currently working on the MVP front end.

I am aiming to provide these services to small and medium businesses as they would otherwise never have access to these. During all this I talked to many friends and businesses to try and validate the idea and though many like the idea most have difficulty understanding all parts of it. Those that do understand are willing to pay but how much they are willing to pay is all over the place and most do not understand using all the services continuously. However, these could be aberrant.

As I get further and further along, I am having a lot of trepidations. For one I am not a business-minded person, so it is difficult to figure out exactly how to market it. I also don’t know how to get investors or funding. For another, I am losing faith in it being profitable as it seems many businesses would not pay a recuring fee as they might only want to do it occasionally and the entire cost of the endeavor is high.

For a project like this it would be about $350k to $500k per year and I am not sure if I can even find funding or investors. That cost includes data acquisition (this system needs a very large accurate dataset that is updated regularly), hosting for the service as well as the ML processing power, development costs, marketing, and possibly salespeople.

So, it comes down to this.

Do I try and pivot and offer only a very small portion of this service, say just the first analysis part? The advantage of that is the cost savings as I could build the MVP on my own and it does not require the large dataset. The disadvantage is that I am not sure if people would subscribe to the service if that were all that was offered.

Or do I try other options?

Move on to another idea?

Try to get a partner or partners and give them major equity (but who would do that)?

Just give it away and have someone else finish and work on it? (I fervently believe this is a good product that fills a niche that is missing – giving these services for small businesses)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.