WTF is MicroSaas?
What is Microsaas? To Me, It’s Quite Simple. It All Comes Down to Beer 🍻
So this is my very first-ever post on Reddit in my new capacity as Founder & CEO of a live microsaas called WebinarVault. (This is a re-posting.)
I’ve been inspired by this Reddit thread ("r/microsaas") so I figured I’d come here to share what Microsaas means to me …
I’m a broadcast video tech software veteran. My core industry with thousands of vendors has been largely eviscerated by big tech.
And big tech in the 2020’s has essentially become both greedy and complacent about product, just like big Beer was back in the 1980’s. (I know - dating myself. Sam Adams anyone?)
So, esp here in Cali where I live, in Boston, also truly all over the place, a movement exploded known as “craft breweries”. Or microbrews.
The central premise? Scale helps profits - but not product. Indeed, the reverse can often be true.
Now, truth is, I've been coding with an offshore wiz for a long time.
But the LLMs are - obviously - super different.
I’ve been able to launch something pretty spectacular on the back of Open AI and I hope you check it out and give me some feedback! (WebinarVault.ai)
And my hope and goal is to build for a relatively small and smart community of curious executives and product marketing professionals that can improve the product and the other non-product techniques that users of the tool can help everyone out with.
With that said, here are a few key ideas for me about the definition of #microsaas
- Stay focused on Core Users.
I’m a Strategic and Product Marketer at heart.
Now, that function encompasses activities from comp intel to product promotion so I have plenty of room to roam without trying to compete w loom or zoom or gong etc.
Also, this is not meeting notes. Not a sales tool, per se. (Although, creating clips - that's core sales enablement that Product Marketing should own.)
This product is a place to put Recorded Webinars to boost a wide range of activities form comp intel to clipping to creating portals for external or internal audiences. (It's not for Live!)
- Priced for fairness. Taking a page from Mark Cuban's 'cost plus for drugs' innovation and I'm going to do my very best to charge cost plus for my SaaS. I have no plans to raise VC and if that changes I'm going to have eat crow on it.
Inspired by two stories.
One: Meco App. I pay like $5/mo and this thing syncs w my email and manages hundreds of subscripts and totally cleaned my inbox.
He’s got me for life! 😂
Second story. Just spoke w a highly successful guy that raised $3M a couple of years ago, built a great AI tool, and now, he’s closing shop.
Starting price for his tool?
$40 😱
Descript charges $15/mo for a huge set of features.
So I’m going w option A. $5/mo.
If you load 4 one hour webinars into the system you can digest them all in about 10 minutes after they have been processed.
If you are paid $50/hr, that’s 3 hours & 50 mins of time saved. 10x return and
then some!
If you see a highlight, clip it and send to your boss. Do that one time a week and you will add another reason for them to not lay you off.
Then I have one higher priced option at $14/mo which includes more space and also an embeddable portal widget. (Pretty limited at first - needs more work but it’s an MVP…)
- No “Team Upsell”. It’s about Empowering Individual workers.
I kinda hate the way all these startups get VC and then immediate it’s about “team collab” Evernote was ruined by this crap.
Ofc, these are immensely profitable models but they empower
employers; I want to empower employees.
Future Workers need to empower themselves with a bunch of small, cool, diverse saas tools that operate at the mom and pop store level.
That’s my goal.
Okie dokie - that’s it for now.
Three Things that Define Microsaas for me - and why I feel they Are just like the microbreweries in the late 80’s & 90’s
Thanks for reading. Give WebinarVault a whirl and let me know what y’all think.
