In the early 2000’s, you could throw up a calculator. A todo list. A forum. An affiliate marketing page (a blog). A favicon generator. An image combiner. A love calculator. A timer. Etc…Now a days, the kinds of product required to be “minimally viable” is beyond what an average developer can program by themselves, in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some niche cases, but just think about it. What are you going to build, that doesn’t already exist, and how are you going to market it, make people pay for it, afford it yourself, and offer a seamless experience? We have every social media site. Every video streaming site. Every audio streaming site. There isn’t a single tool I personally use, that I can’t just google, and find 20 companies offering it with a generous free-tier.
It’s kind of like comparing the person who invented the fork, to the person who invented the air fryer. in 2023, you can’t just bend some sharp metal, an make a MVP. Shit’s gotten harder, and harder, and harder.
I thought that by focusing on a niche and taking dedicated actions, I thought that it’s possible but after reading this, I reflected on how many such cases I have actually seen and now I’m a bit insecure. wonder how you guys are thinking.
There are still many simple apps to be built, but they are more niche and often require a deep understanding of the business domain.
For example I launched a basic crud app that got to $100k/year in revenue. The key is finding a problem that many people still tackle in excel and then turn it into a SaaS app.
For example, in the industry I worked in people have to do safety report and rules checks. These were always done on paper, then typed into excel, and then moved into a DB. We just made simple form where user selects the rule, makes a note on it, hits submit. boss required 50 rule checks a day, so we added a counter that showed them 1/50, 2/50, etc.
Whole thing was built in less than a month. So, they are out there, but you need to know that customer really well.