What is MicroSaaS? To Me, It's Quite Simple. It All Comes Down to Beer 🍻

This is my first post on Reddit as Founder & CEO of WebinarVault, a live MicroSaaS. I've been inspired by r/microsaas, so I figured I'd share what MicroSaaS means to me.

I'm a broadcast video tech software veteran. My industry, with thousands of vendors, has been largely decimated by big tech.

Big tech in the 2020s has become both greedy and complacent about product—just like big beer was in the 1980s. (Dating myself here—Sam Adams, anyone?)

So, especially here in California where I live, in Boston, and truly all over, a movement exploded: "craft breweries" or microbrews.

The central premise? Scale helps profits, but not product. Indeed, the reverse is often true.

I've been coding with an offshore developer for years, but LLMs are obviously game-changing. I've launched something pretty spectacular leveraging OpenAI, and I hope you'll check it out: WebinarVault.ai.

My goal is to build for a relatively small, smart community of curious executives and product marketing professionals who can improve both the product and share techniques that help everyone.

Three Key Ideas That Define MicroSaaS for Me

1. Stay Focused on Core Users

I'm a strategic and product marketer at heart. This function encompasses everything from competitive intelligence to product promotion, giving me plenty of room without competing with Loom, Zoom, or Gong.

This isn't meeting notes or a sales tool per se (though creating clips is core sales enablement that product marketing should own). This product is a place to store recorded webinars to boost activities from competitive intelligence to clipping to creating portals for external or internal audiences. (It's not for live webinars!)

2. Priced for Fairness

Taking a page from Mark Cuban's "cost plus for drugs" innovation, I'm doing my best to charge cost plus for my SaaS. I have no plans to raise VC, and if that changes, I'll eat crow.

I'm inspired by two stories:

Story One: Meco App. I pay $5/month, and this thing syncs with my email, manages hundreds of subscriptions, and totally cleaned my inbox. He's got me for life! 😂

Story Two: I just spoke with a highly successful founder who raised $3M a couple years ago, built a great AI tool, and is now closing shop. His starting price? $40. Meanwhile, Descript charges $15/month for a huge feature set.

So I'm going with option A: $5/month.

Value proposition: If you load four one-hour webinars into the system, you can digest them all in about 10 minutes after processing. If you're paid $50/hour, that's 3 hours and 50 minutes saved—a 10x return!

See a highlight? Clip it and send it to your boss. Do that once a week and you'll add another reason for them not to lay you off.

I also have a higher-priced option at $14/month with more storage and an embeddable portal widget (limited at first—it's an MVP that needs work).

3. No "Team Upsell"—Empowering Individual Workers

I hate how startups get venture capital and immediately pivot to "team collaboration", which seems to be the business model best able to 'scale' and lock-in profits. I feel Evernote suffered from this approach.

These are profitable models, but let's face it, they largely empower employers. I want this tool to empower workers - I want it to empower me.

Future workers need to arm themselves with small, cool, diverse SaaS tools that operate at the mom-and-pop level. That's my goal.

That's it for now—three things that define MicroSaaS for me and why I think they're just like the microbreweries of the late 80s and 90s.

Thanks for reading. Give WebinarVault a whirl and let me know what y’all think.