I think if you are in tech, at some point you have heard about building a “micro SaaS”. A single purpose software as a service application, specifically focused on solving a niche problem.
Given you are reading this right now, there is also a good chance you are following one of the popular serial founders.
I myself have been a huge fan to many for years now, building my own micro SaaS products for a bit over past 3 years. This is reflection on those years, and the hard truths that I believe any future founder should know about before they commit.
Understanding the success of serial founders
When in the world of micro SaaS we are talking about serial founders it doesn’t mean having their 3rd startup, often they are on their 10th or more that they “actively” run. One of the commonalities is their social presence. They are not simply building startups, they are evangelist for why you should build your own. They build in public, and they share their success.
Why is social presence so common among them? Their products are less about the product themselves but more about the brand of the founder. They are not selling the SaaS as much directly, rather rely on the founder and their audience to drive sales, reputation and really cross sell across other products.
The reason I quoted actively is the main thing most people don’t initially see unless they follow them for months and years, across various launches. The pattern becomes clearer and clearer with time, new product launched, founder is excited for their next new thing, older products slowly get abandoned, they are no longer their main business rather something they successfully moved away from, they are there to slowly die.
To add to products being left out to die, there is also the type of the products. They don’t simply sell software products, rather they are often starter kits, courses on building SaaS or tools specifically tailored at other current & future founders. The latter is often their biggest revenue driver, and the actual startups are means to keep you engaged.
To be clear – the above is who you see most often on social media, but there are many great serial founders, like John Rush (LinkedIn) or Rob Walling of Microconf (Youtube) who are absolutely worth your time and I highly recommend you check out.
Reality of a second job
It starts of very slowly, you initially think I’m going to put some time over the weekend into this and be done with it in no time. First week passes, you are excited about the next cool thing you are going to bring to life. Things are moving fast, you feel like you’ll be done in a month.
A month passes, you swear to yourself you are very close to launching this product. Then your brain steps in and there is new idea how to improve this, you work on the new feature, scope creep comes in, 3 months pass, no motivation left, release nowhere in sight.
This happened to me too many times to count, my github is a graveyard of abandoned projects that started as niche, and grew into fully blown SaaS that companies with 100 people wouldn’t dare to take on.
This is also the biggest mistake you will likely make as someone stepping into the world of micro SaaS. Instead of focusing on your niche market, letting the builder and inventor inside of you take over and create a vision of a perfect product.
As your scope increases, you will continue to be demotivated, it slowly becomes a second unpaid job you absolutely hate, but what do you do? You came too far to just give up now. You keep on going for few more weeks, put additional several hundred hours into it, but in the end it will not be the perfect you envisioned and you’ll never be satisfied.
If you are like me and also have a full time tech job this will slowly start taking a toll on you, 18 hour long days of coding and building products, keeping your brain engaged, you become less effective, your health will suffer so will your product.
How to actually launch
I will not just complain about how hard it is, here is the mental models I’ve learned and abilities I’ve gained through experience, that I hope you can learn from me. Let’s build a mental toolkit to help you succeed.
Reducing scope:
This is your primary tool that will take you the farthest. Think of your idea:
- what is the core of the product?
- what is the value?
- what is the absolute minimum you have to build for someone to use your product?
What you don’t need for launch:
- payments – make it free, you will not be an overnight success, gain insights – that’s your payment
- automated email campaigns
- perfect customizable dashboards
- award winning UI & UX
Let’s look at an idea together: image optimization API (resizing, compression)
Most would think to themselves that they need:
- customer dashboard / API key generation functionality
- way to bill customers for their usage
- usage tracking & customer analytics
- customization on compression ratio, output formats etc.
- workspaces to allow businesses to have multiple people manage API keys
- whatever great feature you can think of!
Using the tool in your new toolkit:
- What is the core of the product? image optimization
- What is the value? reduce image size / resize
- Minimum for someone to use it? API
Okay, cool! Now instead of complicated SaaS platform, you are building a simple API you can launch on RapidAPI.com! Existing marketplace with potential customers. You ditch the customization, provide opinionated API that always uses WebP as target format, static compression rate based on best practices and allows user to enter new dimensions, that’s it!
How long will it take you? Probably a week or two max and you are live!
This is not the end of your journey, rather the beginning, but your product is already live, congratulations! Now what’s next?
Build value:
You didn’t spend the time before launch to build fancy infrastructure around your product, rather you chose established platform to launch quickly and gain your first (even if unpaid) customers. What’s next for you?
If you don’t already have users. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and do the thing every engineer hates which is sales. You don’t have to go and cold call people hoping to find someone who can use your service, instead write value added content. Explain why you built the tool, how it differs from others, don’t try to sell them, provide value.
It will take months for your content to get engagement, stay consistent, keep creating more and more, realistically you are looking at 6-12 months of lot of effort, for not many users if you don’t immediately hit great market that’s in desperate need of your product. This is okay! Expect it and baseline your expectations on this, it’s not a failure, it’s a step towards success.
While you are searching for your first users, look at Reddit, look at X.com and figure out what people don’t like about existing solutions, join discussions and hear them out – this is your unique edge, large company will survey their users and apply feedback to accommodate most of them, but you are building a “micro” product, what do the niche users say that don’t have voice with large companies?
Continue looking for feedback even if it’s not directly on your product and iterate. Extend your simple service (maybe on someone else’s platform), create more content, gain engagement, gain more users.
Refine experience:
One of the key points I would make here is to focus on your users. While initially you provide the value of the service, as you gain users you will need to retain them. Best way to do that is to hear them out, find every single issue they might have with your service (especially technical) and fix it. There is no better killer to your software business than building something overly complex your users can’t understand or something that doesn’t work as expected, has low uptime, doesn’t work smoothly in general.
Dogfood your own product. When you created the idea it was something you’ve seen as necessity, make sure you are your own user ideally across as many surfaces as possible and look for the daily annoyances, however small they might be and make sure other users will not experience them.
Cashing in:
In our example we used RapidAPI, they handle API keys for you and monetization. Maybe this is the end for you, and that would be perfectly fine. Ending here gives you back time, you iterate strictly on the API level while the platform takes care of the rest. With your free audience you have proven that the product has market that needs it, it’s time to enable monetization and start selling access.
If you’d like to take your product beyond a side hustle, you might want to consider building your own platform, do know that this will take a significant investment. Even if you build all of it by yourself you are not simply committing the time to build it but maintenance for the rest of the life cycle of the product. That being said this comes with some perks. While you are now putting significantly more time in, you are also improving your margins by ditching possible platform fees where you hosted your product, you are keeping your user base strictly to yourself (adding future cross sell opportunity) giving you an edge with how you market to your users and building a future proof product.
If you’ve reach the point of launching your own platform here is the thing, either the product makes enough to become your full time job, or you should hire help. If it’s not making enough, you will be sad to lose the money, but what you are holding as the founder is not the profit, but rather the equity and especially if you are bootstrapped (which pretty much all micro SaaS are) this is your financial win.
Additional tips:
If you made it this far, congratulations on launching your new product! While it might seem enticing when you see the growth to keep pushing and go all in, please make sure to consider following that I didn’t include in detail to make this slightly shorter (if you want to hear more about any just write a comment & follow for follow ups!) :
- rest days, if you take a vacation actually vacation, don’t simply do your second job
- set time commitment limits for your business, don’t let it get out of hand
- find hobby if you don’t already have one that has nothing to do with software! (can’t stress this enough)
- actually spend time outside, and take care of your health (both mental and physical)
- if you fail, take several weeks of break – don’t simply start with the next thing, nobody will steal your idea
- your idea doesn’t have to be unique, you just have to execute well on it
- focus on your users and their experience – this will take you really far
- don’t get too attached, you never know what comes next (see below)
My recent launch
Very recently (mid December 2025) I’ve launched my latest product deadend.ai – it’s still in it’s very early days but without the lessons mentioned above I don’t think I would have ever managed to launch it. There is 3 of us currently maintaining it, and due to my recent full time job change, I’ll have to stop my involvement with the product – that being said I’ll follow this up with more details from my journey, the transition, more technical content on the architecture of the service and overall how we’ve been approaching the launch, if you are launching a product yourself and struggling, or simply want to get some feedback, leave a comment below the post, or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or X.com and I’ll be glad to give you my 2 cents 🙂
Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experiences and research. The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent those of my employer, or its affiliates.
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