I love building software, hence why I am always brainstorming new ideas and concepts, however, I'm always short of time - so I am never going to build these.
Nonetheless, maybe these will be useful to someone out there looking to make the leap from software development to building your own company.
There are very few original ideas out there, mine probably already exist in some form or the other - I have not thoroughly researched them though, but I'll leave that to you.
Here we go...
1) MySQL Query Optimizer
When you scale MySQL to thousands or even millions of rows -
bad queries can cause a ton of problems, including slowing down your app and driving up hosting costs.
A tool that operates on the network level or some kind of code adapter, scanning queries and finding potential problems will be very useful. This tool can then also suggest ways to improve bad queries and aggregate bad queries to show their frequency and impact on overall performance.
You could use the MYSQL "EXPLAIN" function and extend this further to parse the information and present it in some GUI.
2) Demand aggregator
If you ever tried to launch a SaaS or open-source product, you will know the pain of marketing - for us developers, marketing doesn't come naturally.
We don't have thousands of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter followers or want to be an influencer, but then how do you promote your products on a tight budget?
This is where a "Demand Aggregator" will come in handy, I'm not sure how practical it is at this stage but could be super useful.
This tool will scan search engine results using an API of some sort or scraping to analyze keyword and competition data.
Thereafter, it will scan social platforms like Quora, Stack Overflow, Twitter (X), and so forth.
Feed this data into some sort of AI model or use OpenAI APIs and build dashboards to help SaaS founders determine how viable a product is and which channel they should focus on to market their products.
Furthermore, it can also alert founders of questions on Quora and other such sites that are related to their SaaS product. This then allows the founders to not only help the community but also market their SaaS to people who are showing interest in that industry.
Maybe also throw in a few extra features like cold email scraping and post syndication - so they get a blog and can sync articles to dev.to and other platforms.
Commercial products that only do one or two aspects of these are charging $100+ a month, so there's great revenue to be made here.
3) Painless email
Designing emails is such a pain because they still use tables. Develop a CLI tool that can convert rich tailwind/bootstrap emails into regular html table layouts.
Then provide a dashboard, where you can catch dev test emails. So the app generates SMTP credentials that work with regular SMTP clients, but instead of the mail being delivered to the end user - it's caught in some test box.
The UI will then also provide various replica email clients such as Gmail, Outlook, and so forth. This will make it much easier for devs to test on various email clients.
4) Fast forms
Build a React [or whatever framework you like] tool that can generate forms, tables, and CRUD quickly.
A natural language prompt e.g. :
"Generate me a CRUD for managing products. Fields: title, description, photos, sale price, price, category. Enable all sorting and export options."
Using this prompt, you can then generate clean code for all the CRUD views including sorting and filtering, as well as database operations.
This product doesn't have to be AI-driven, you can always have some sort of CLI argument structure or JSON/YAML config file.
The goal is to be able to scaffold boring parts of web applications quickly.
5) Build a passwordless service
Did you know that there is an API to facilitate passwordless auth?
You can ask the browser to verify the user by fingerprint or some other biometric data. This now allows for more secure logins and no need to remember weirdly long passwords.
Since this technology is fairly new and not that easy to implement, most developers have either never heard of it or won't bother implementing it at this stage.
You can build some sort of paid package for major frameworks like Laravel, Django, Next.js, etc... that will scaffold all the boilerplate code needed to implement WebAuthN.
A few providers are offering auth as a service but the biggest problem is that you are now handing over one of the most critical parts of your application to some third party.
Having a package that you can charge for (maybe every year) but allowing the user the freedom to store and manage their auth data on their servers will be a sure winner.
6) Docker to production
Build a tool that will take docker-compose files and convert them to Podman or something that can be used in production.
For example, if I have a LAMP app - Linux, Apache2, MySQL, and PHP. I can upload this docker-compose.yml file through an interface of some kind and it creates servers for you or connects to Digital Ocean and other providers to spin up instances.
7) AI Support
Everyone knows about ChatGPT by now, but did you know there are other models like "Mistral" or "Falcon" - you can view a full list of open-source models here or on huggingface.
Pick one of these models or just a sentence transformer model. Smaller sentence transformer models can run on CPUs and don't need large dedicated servers to operate.
Anyway, back to the concept. Build a trainable API in which customers can either purchase an on-prem/dedicated server instance or rent a shared instance.
This service will allow them to post documents to the API to train the model. On their website or helpdesk - they can include a widget that allows staff or the general public to ask the bot questions.
The bot then can respond with scoped answers specific to their business. This can be used for internal onboarding of new staff or as a support desk to help customers while they wait for a real person.
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Conclusion
Hopefully, these 7 ideas will be useful and help you launch a very profitable business soon.
However, just be careful - as a developer myself, I know how tempting it is to just want to build something. This is a bad idea because you could end up wasting weeks or months.
The SaaS industry is very competitive. The first thing to do before attempting any new venture - is to do some market research.
Build a landing page that explains your idea and how it will benefit the end customer, and ask them to enter an email address to get notified when the product is ready.
If you can get 30-50 interested people, it's a good sign that this is a potential market.
Furthermore, you could post a question on Twitter(X), Quora, or Reddit and see if there's interest.
Top comments (3)
Probably the first problem can be solved by Releem
releem.com/
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing these ideas.
"Build a passwordless service" - this one sounds promising!