My current list of early-stage ideas

23 Nov 2021

“It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open.” ~ Seth Godin

The field is wide open at this stage but I have various ideas for SaaS and SaaS-adjacent products. I am happy to share them here on the basis that writing them down helps me to think critically: ideas are cheap and execution is everything.

So without further ado:

1. Some sort of admin product or concierge service for … campsite owners

• Campsites are small owner-operated businesses and are easy to approach
• Early signs (lately I’ve been spending time cold-calling these guys) indicate “admin” or “volume of communications” to be pain points. There are lots of booking tools on the market but managers have told me they still spend “hours a day” or “1/3 of their time” handling bookings, answering questions etc. during peak season
• Our service would route phone calls, email and live chat to our team (possibly offshore) who would take bookings and deliver a managed diary to the on-site team

2. Some sort of pricing tool for … electricians / tradespeople

• The HGV crisis, Brexit and COVID have created price volatility for raw materials and parts for electricians (and presumably in other trades)
• Our product would be a pricing or quoting tool which allowed the trader to put together a quote with up-to-date prices for the materials required, and line items for their own labour etc.
• An early, minimal version of this could bypass the software angle and have our team – I keep saying “our team” and clearly there isn’t a team yet, so I guess I mean “me” – receive the info via a voice call from the trader and put the quote together by looking up the prices manually (ie. “concierge MVP” in the terminology of The Lean Startup)

3. Some sort of remote admin service for … tradespeople

• There are many SaaS products for small trades businesses but they are all DIY tools that would require the user to sit at a computer. We know that tradespeople are time-poor and possibly many of them not enthusiastic about admin or computer-based activities
• Therefore perhaps there is scope for taking some of this undesirable desk-bound admin off their hands
• Diary management, quoting, invoicing are all repetitive, replicable tasks which could be carried out by a remote personal assistant (I hate the term virtual assistant)

4. Some sort of recurring revenue model service for … website owners

• A powerful early inspiration for this whole project was Dan Norris and his startup project WP Curve (and his book The 7 Day Startup). WP Curve offered all-you-can-eat website maintenance for USD99 per month (or some such amount) and grew very fast before being sold for a large sum to GoDaddy. Cheers to that!
• Life at Ugli has improved considerably since we begin focusing on recurring revenue. Previously we’d offer things like “3 years free hosting” to get the initial project over the line, these days it’s almost the other way round. The initial project (ie building someone’s websites) is far more competitive and painful, while the ongoing work (ie looking after someone’s existing website) tends to be both more fun and more lucrative. Also a predictable revenue stream, even a modest one, is a many-splendoured thing.
• Website owners, on an ongoing basis, tend to require:
  • Hosting
  • Backups
  • Security updates & patching
  • Website maintenance, bug fixes & content changes
  • SEO (consultations, ongoing work and position reports)
  • Content creation (see #6 below)
  • Server health checks & reports
  • Ongoing testing/reporting for persistent errors
  • Periodic redesign work
• Some or all of these services could be “productised” into a replicable, monthly deal and offered to owners of websites, perhaps websites in a particular category (e.g. Drupal, WordPress, or e-commerce). Processes would be documented and the work off-shored to enable rapid scaling.

5. Some sort of staffing/HR tool for … restaurant managers

• Brexit and COVID have made it very hard to hire and keep staff in the hospitality industry and staff turnover is high
• Each new staff member requires training in various areas and a series of certifications (e.g. first aid, food hygiene) and in a fast-moving restaurant setting it can be hard to keep track of who has received which ones.
• A simple SaaS / micro-SaaS product could simplify this process and show at-a-glance information
• A later development could be to connect to training suppliers from within the product or even buy in and resell the training

6. Some sort of content creation machine for … website owners

• Content is king and presumably always will be. Google’s algorithm will continue to improve, delivering high-quality results to search users. How do you become one of those results? You show Mr. Algo that you are high-quality, which means you publish plenty of good, relevant content that people love to read and share. But what business owner has the time to produce all this content? That’s where we come in.
• It seems to me there’s a healthy gap between the cost of having text – even of a high quality  – produced and the value of that text to business owners and website operators.
• Alongside text creation, more value could be added in the form of strategy, editing, publishing and deployment, image sourcing etc..

7. Website builder service for … any of the above audiences

• As a web designer and indeed website owner many of my early ideas were along the lines of “could we build a website builder tool for ___”.
• One could avoid being forced to compete with the massive low-cost DIY platforms (Wix etc.) by including an onboarding service or a “done for you” element. Or just attentive customer service in general (for which the DIY platforms are not famed).
• Niching it down would not only make marketing easier (despite the smaller market) but would mean the product could focus on the particular website needs for the ___ industry.
• Industries I have considered include
  • Restaurants
  • Campsites
  • Tradespeople

Conclusion

None of these ideas purports to be a solution to a validated problem, not yet. But I am working towards distilling this list into something I can run with.

The only thing (apart from recurring revenue) that the above ideas have in common is that they represent a group with which I have some small connection.

Admittedly the above is a list of keys in search of a lock (but they’re not keys I have built yet). My next (backwards?) step will be to evaluate the locks they match and see if any are particularly tempting.

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