Small technology changes create profitable bootstrapped products

How do small technology changes create profitable bootstrapped products? Let's start with an example of such a change:

Example 1: Apple Lock Screen Widgets

The change:: When Apple released iOS 16 on September 12 this year, one of the biggest new features were lock screen widgets.

The opportunity: This change propelled widgets to the top of the App Store According to AppFigures, with some of the most popular widget apps seeing a 169%-2400% increase of daily downloads.

This change also spurred a new wave of lock screen widget apps and tech publications were more than happy to give free press to many of them.

Look out for: When new platforms (like Apple, Facebook) add particular features, that usually creates opportunities for countless small projects to be created around those features.

Example 2: Cloudflare R2

Wanna create an image hosting website? Sure, you can host all images on a service like Amazon S3, but be prepared to pay $0.09 for each GB transferred.

What if a user uploads an HD image that goes viral? An average image can be as big as 2MB (or more):

The last thing you want to do with a side project is monitor for unexpected costs.

Let's say gets viral and gets 100,000 requests. That's 200,000 megabytes or 200 GB. That's ($0.09 * 200 =) $18 just for a single image. Ouch.

The change: This was a problem until Cloudflare R2 appeared. On September 28th, 2021, Cloudflare announced an S3 competitor (called Amazon R2) where you effectively pay $0 for transfers and only pay for storage.

This caused Amazon to respond and offer the first 100GB of bandwidth for free. But again, after that you still pay $0.09. Still not ideal for a bootstrapped project or a side business which can take off.

On September 21st, 2021, Cloudflare made R2 available to everyone. The only major cost is $0.015 per GB stored (and some minor costs per 1 million request). The rest is free.

The opportunity: This change opened up a whole lot of opportunities for indie hackers like me and you to create products that previously we were simply too afraid to create:

• An image hosting service
• Backup creation/storage tools
• Anything related to file uploads where you'd expect high bandwidth (think: Dropbox, big document sharing services, etc.)

The nice thing about all this is that we could be predictable around the pricing. We could create pricing tiers where we charge per-storage (like all big providers do) not not per-bandwidth.

Look out for:" Once in a while, big PaaS providers release an update that makes it possible to build SaaS applications that weren't possible before.

Example 3: Generative AI development

The change: Here I'm talking about GPT-3, DALL-E 2 (and competitors like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney) and upcoming text-to-video projects like Google's X and Facebook's Y.

I published a post last week on how DALL-E 2 (and its competitors) are already disrupting 15 different industries. This just less than a year after its initial release. Here's the current growth of one website which is built on top of a DALL-E 2 competitor (called Stable Diffusion):

GPT-3 has already started to disrupt industries like novel writing, writing marketing copy and, well, eliminating the writer's block.

Look out for: AI is on a fast track to replace many aspects of many professions. Those changes will come as APIs and the people who'll win will probably be creative founders who adopted that API around a market need.

Technology changes like these happen all the time

• A big plaform makes a change that opens up a new wave of apps (Apple with iOS 16)
• A developer platform creates something that makes it affordable to create something that previously was very expensive to build (Cloudflare RS).
• Someone creates an AI platform that enables a whole range of things that previously weren't possible (Open AI with GPT-3/DALL-E 2).

So the important question is:

How do you identify those changes first ?

There are several things you can do:

• Keep an eye on major platforms for new features. (platforms like Meta and Google have newsroom where they post their latest features.)

• Alternatively , you can follow people who monitor the big players (like Stacked Marketer and Matt Navarra).

• Subscribe to RSS feeds of blogs that power the majority of today's web (Cloudflare has a blog, AWS has a blog too). Hacker News features the most important changes regularly on their website.

YouTube handles = the next lucrative bootstrapped opportunity?

Minor changes can also create potentially lucrative bootstrapped ideas.

One such recent change is YouTube adding handles. In other news, they've finally introduced usernames::

If you've been in the domaining industry and/or social media for long enough, you may recognize the opportunity here. Premium domain names sell for thousands each day. So do Instagram handles.

I can see indie hackers creating small tools in the future that will:

• Enable YouTube creators to easily find good available handles for their channel
• Someone making a tool that will grab the premium handles and then resell them. Or create a marketplace for people to buy/sell handles.
• A tool that will watch to see if your desired handle is "released" and becomes available again.

When you first read about this YouTube change, you probably thought to yourself, "Meh, nothing special." However, if you think a little harder, you will see a lot of opportunities.

This is just one such change. There are tens of different changes like this happening every week.

The opportunites is here. You just need to go out and grab code them.