The Startup Ideas Podcast - Can You Make $10K/Month MicroSaaS? (The Truth)

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

On today’s episode I share a comprehensive guide to building micro SaaS businesses, which are niche-focused software products that can be developed by individuals or small teams. I explain the difference between traditional SaaS and micro SaaS, share real examples of successful businesses generating $20K-40K monthly revenue, and outline a step-by-step playbook for validating ideas, building MVPs, and growing through audience building and SEO. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:08 - What is a MicroSaaS? 02:25 - Examples of successful micro SaaS businesses 05:35 - Growth flywheel explanation 07:57 - User journey and funnel metrics 12:06 - Building in public strategy 18:28 - MicroSaaS Frameworks 21:58 - MicroSaaS Ideas 1: PermitSync 25:33 - MicroSaaS Ideas 2: PodScriptor 28:52 - MicroSaaS Ideas 3: SpecSheet 32:30 - MicroSaaS Ideas 4: CartSaver 33:58 - MicroSaaS Ideas 5: GrantGuru Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://www.brex.com/sip Key Points: • Micro SaaS businesses focus on niche markets with specific products, typically built by solo founders or small teams • Successful micro SaaS businesses can generate $10K-50K monthly profit with 80-90% margins • Growth comes from building an audience first, identifying pain points, creating solutions, and reinvesting revenue • Pricing strategies typically include free trials converting to monthly subscriptions or usage-based models The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Today we're going to go over the most comprehensive microsas 101, how to build one, what that looks like, examples. I'm going to give away some startup ideas. I'm going to talk about growth flywheels. I'm going to talk about user journeys. I'm going to talk about the playbook. This is something that people charge tens of thousands, if not more, of dollars for. But today I'm going to give it away for free because I couldn't find anywhere on the internet where it was in one place. So my hope is that by the end of this episode, you have a really good idea around how to build a microsas business, what that actually even means, what's the difference between SaaS and microsas, and just get your creative juices flowing so that you can actually go and use AI to build some of these microsas businesses, either if you have a full-time job and you just want to, you know,

build something on the side, if you just want to learn, or if you want to go all in and make microsas your main thing. So let's get right into it. it. So, you know, the first question is, what is a microsass? So the difference between a microsas and a full-on SaaS is that a microsas is focused on a niche. So it's the target is is extremely niche. Think of Salesforce. It's targeting basically everyone. A microsas is a particular niche audience. And it also has a niche product. Like it's just kind of a feature of a feature. And it's

also focused on profitability, whereas, you know, at a successful microsas might get you 10, 20, 30, 50, 50K a month of profit. And it's also focused on, it's also for, you know, you could be built with a solo or tiny team. Why build one? It doesn't cost a lot of money to build. Typically, these microsatts have 80 to 90% margin. From a lifestyle perspective, you know, we're going to get into it, but some of these things are, you know, they run on not that much, you know, it doesn't require 120 hours a week type thing. You can have 100% of the equity for you and your team. And there's beginning to become this, you know, marketplace or liquidity for exits for some of these things. So let's talk about some examples. My favorite recent example is this company

bank statement converter because it's so literally simple. This is a business that's doing $40,000 a month of MRR solo founder. And it's literally exactly what it sounds like. The world's most trusted, quote unquote, bank statement convertible, easily convert PDF bank statements from thousands of banks worldwide into a clean Excel format. So this is the whole thing, right? And, you know, why does it work? Well, I think it works because, you know, the domain is good. it does a thing very well.

It's a pain point that people have. And it's just very, very simple. So that's an example of what a microsas could be. Another one, this one's at 24K MRR, is this whole idea around projecting in the future your financial net worth. And it's just a nice way to visualize it. They're pricing, I think, you know, $109 a year. So you're talking about, you know, under $10 a month.

And that's the whole business. It's just, you know, projecting your financial future. So you can see, right? You can see that these are sort of a feature of a feature. This would be a part of a bigger thing, but they fully focus on it. And in the age of AI, you can actually build a startup that is a feature of a feature or micro SaaS. because it's just quicker, easier to build with tools like cursor, etc.

Clean voice, 20K a month MR. So, you know, edit your podcast in 10 minutes automatically. So it's just the features around, you know, removing your background noise, filler words, long silence, mouse sounds, right? So 15,000 podcasters use it. A lot of, you know, I'm a podcaster and or, you know, have a podcast. So, you know, I have, I have, I felt this pain point. I felt this pain point. So you're starting starting to notice that a lot of these ideas have like very good brands, very big pain point, clear. And you can, you know, if it works, you can expect, you know, the five to six figure a month MR range if it works, right?

Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. not everyone who's going to start a microsas is going to work, just like not everyone who's going to start a startup, it's going to work. The odds are against you. But if you know, if you stick with me to the end of this and if, you know, you actually ship products and you learn, it's going to increase your likelihood of success as you see what works and what doesn't work. So we're going to talk by at the end of the episode about some of the microsas ideas. I'll give it away. I've been thinking about like, you know, what makes the growth flywheel of a successful microsas.

And I've, you know, summarized it into this. So first, you're going to actually build an audience or community and or community. So, for example, when we first started boringmarketing.com, you know, it was just a Twitter account where we talked about automating marketing with AI workflow and agents. And over time, we built the business around it, but it literally started off as a X account. So you could do the same. So you can start by building the audience of community. From that, you're going to learn about the acute pains of that audience and community.

From that, you know, well, obviously you're going to build something. You're going to build the startup, right? And then it's going to generate some word of mouth. You're going to start creating recurring revenue. And then you're going to reinvest that recurring revenue into the, audience and community, right? So you're going to do things like IRL events. You're going to do things like promoting posts that work. You know, for example, maybe this post worked a lot. You can see you got 2,000 likes. How do you put paid ad against that and then get people to sign up to your

startup? That's, you know, to some, in summary, exactly how to think about the growth file of your microsauce. Real quick, I need to tell you about something that's helping me sleep better at night as an entrepreneur. I was running multiple companies with money scattered everywhere, zero spending visibility and making growth decisions pretty blind. I knew there had to be a better way and my friend told me about Brex. So I switched and now I have mission control for every dollar.

spend management and visibility, virtual cards for my team, and earning cash from the same-day treasury product. I was leaving so much money on the table, but not anymore. I have a financial operating system for our businesses to make decisions so I can spend smarter and move faster. And it's been a total game changer. I'm loving Brex so much. I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the pod. If you're building something real, you need a complete financial operating system like Brex. It'll help you sleep better too, and you can't be mad at that. So let's talk about the user journey of a typical microsas product. So usually there's a manual workflow that people are doing that's painful.

So for example, we talked about the bank statement converter. People were doing this across a bunch of, you know, a bunch of things. of different companies and it's it's annoying to do right so there's that manual workflow that people were doing um and people look for a fix oftentimes they go to google or chat gpt or perplexity to find the fix they find that microsas um that's why having a good domain name is really important um now by the way a lot of people are going to say well you know all the dot coms are taken and stuff like that. Well, like, you know, not all of the dot-coms are taken, first of all. And also, like, these long ones that like sound like super long bank statement converter, you would be surprised how many

them are not taken. They have a wow moment. Like, they use the product. It works. Of course, you need to create a high-quality product. Usually there's some trial to value. So maybe it's, you know, a free trial for a few days, they see it works, and then you start paying $19 a month, they're hopefully delighted and they tell some of their friends or you have, you know, you incentivize them to share it with their slack for maybe free credits and stuff like that. That creates the referral in flux, which creates growth. And the other thing it creates when you share it and people are sharing it on Twitter and Instagram and places like that, it helps with your SEO. So over time, it compounds.

And what does that look like from a numbers perspective? So you can think of it as like, well, you start getting 10,000, you start by getting 10 visitors a month, and then it gets 100, 1,000, 10,000 site visitors. But let's just use, you know, as an example, 10,000 site visitors a month, 1,500 of them do free trials. That gets into 300 active users that are paying about 150 paying subscribers paying $19 a month. So you end up getting about 30 advocates.

And a lot of people focus on these paying subscribers. but you really want to think about how do you get the top of the funnel? And that's where this audience and community piece is so important. Because if you build an audience and community and you become a creator of some sort, you know, you can definitely earn a lot of attention. And a lot of people, a lot of people say, like, to me, at least, they're like, well, you know, easy for you to say, like you guys created this zero to $7,000, you know, boring marketer community.

you know, it's easy for you to say that, like, yeah, of course you get 10,000 sites visits when you post something. But the reality is we started this account, you know, a year and a half or two years ago. And we started from zero. So it is totally, totally possible to do. And if you look at it from a financial perspective, like, you know, it's going to suck in the beginning. Like, you're going to be making $0 or $10 a month or $100 a month. But it compounds. I just want to let you know that if you build a good product and you're building a good

audience and you're adding to both those things, both from an audience and a product perspective, your month one, you know, you might do $200 a month. You might three. You might do $2,000, $6,000. If you reinvest these profits into ads, affiliates, and new features, it does compound assuming like, you know, competition doesn't get super competitive and assuming you continue to actually reinvest. From an affiliate perspective, what I'm seeing is approximately 20% of, you know, you can give 20% of your revenue to affiliates.

You incentivize them with 20%. You can use platforms. I'm not involved with any of these companies, but you can use platforms like rewardful to help manage that. I see a lot of microsasas use this product. You know, I tried to visualize like what is the microsas playbook? look like from a visual perspective. So you start by finding the edge, right? So solve your own problem if you can because you'll know it most intimately.

Focus on niche. Don't focus on broad. And then validate it with the tweet. Once you're building that audience, you can actually say like, hey, would anyone want something like this? It's kind of crazy, but there was a guy. I want to bring him on the pod. Josh Pigford.

So this guy, Josh Pigford, he was on Idea Browser.com, which I give away one free idea every single day on this product. Sign up if you haven't already. But he was on it. And he basically saw the idea the day. He said, I'm building it. It was a microsas idea. He called it namesnag. It was basically an AI agent that finds profitable expired.com domains.

And he just starts building it. in public. And it just like it got it went completely viral. He says saw Greg Eisenberg's post yesterday side side realize I was going to have to build it woke up this morning at 430 a.m. As I do started building 12 hours later we're live. Say hello to namesnag.com and snag a killer domain for your next idea. And then says he says how long until the first dollar comes in? And it didn't take long one hour. That's long. Then he go, I think he says then it goes to $1,000. Make that $1,000.

And that was just a few hours. So it just, when you're building in public like this, people are rooting for you. And of course, you need to iterate on the idea and add and remove and change the positioning. But this is very much the playbook of how to build a microsass in public. So you're going to want to build, you know, a weekend MVP. Of course, you could spend a lot of time and make it perfect, but you're not going to want to do that. You're going to want to, you know,

vibe code or hire a freelancer or do both to time constrained it to 48 hours. In Josh's case, he actually did it in like 12 hours. But I think that for most of us, you know, 48 hours is a good amount of time. And then you're not going to want to hire people right away, right? You're going to want to make, you know, build the confidence that you can build something and scale it. So just automate as much as you can. And then just tweet, you know, tweet your progress daily, you know, open up your dashboard and revenue, you know, maybe share some of that, create feedback loops and have that distribution first mindset right like just shares things on igx linkedin um there's a there's like two guys that i think do this really well so this is this guy yoni he just he every day he just post you know

day 415 day 414 day 413 um and he's just talking about his startup journey and sometimes it's good and sometimes you know self-admiddly he's just like i'm just going to do my daily video and he you know he he just talks about whatever his he's learning in the arena and it got him to 176,000 followers just from doing that. So it's totally possible. There's also a guy named Jack Fricks who does a really good job. I've had him on the pod before where he does a similar thing where he just, you know, he basically just talks about what he's learning from, you know, it started off in his mom's

basement, but now he's making 20,000. dollars a month from his microsauce. So I think short form is super, super smart to do. It's, I'm actually horrible at like looking at a camera and doing short form. It is a skill. It will take you time. But I think that if you can master it, and it probably is going to take you 60 days to get good at it and just do it every day and just share what you're learning in real time. And you can actually repurpose some of that chore form and put it. on X and LinkedIn. So that's something I definitely recommend you do. From a pricing perspective, like if you can do recurring revenue, because, you know, that's obviously the best. You know how much

money you're going to come in tomorrow, come in next month. Charge from day one. A lot of people create free products for their microsas because they don't feel confident in it. I would say charge from day one. You can always do discounts over time. And then kill churn with value. In the beginning, you're going to have, you know, a lot of churn. Churn by By the way, what I mean by that is retaining your users. So the hardest part about a microsass is people go and they cancel and you don't want them to cancel. So how do you stop them from canceling? Well, you give them more and more and more and more values such that, you know, you're killing

churn over time. So don't be scared if your turn is high over time. What that means to you is just you need to go and create more and more value. And your job as the CEO of this thing is to prioritize the things that. that will add as much value. So you're playing an infinite game. You want to ship weekly improvements, if not daily. And you want to stay, you know, outsource as much as you can.

Like build on top of giants is basically what I mean by this. So use, you know, you don't want to recreate things from scratch. Use things like, you know, throw things on the cloud. Use things like Shopify, you know, Shopify if you need to use things. You know, just build on top of stand on the shoulders of giants. And, you know, what's missing from here is also just like be kind with your customers. Like just try to like as you're building this audience, you know, you're going to have haters and stuff like that. But like kill them with kindness.

Try to add as much value as people as possible. Set up, you know, tweet notifications in your niche and just respond to people, give value. And over time, you're going to add five to 10 followers a day on your audience. And people are going to hear about whatever. it is you're building your microsas. A few more frameworks that I want to get into, and then we'll get to some of the ideas and how to build them. But the market gap heat map, basically you want to focus,

like if you're thinking about, okay, what microsas, you know, should I create? You want to create, you want to basically focus on the quadrant of high demand. There's a lot of people that want this thing, and there's few tools. You don't want to focus on high, demand and many tools. This is kind of a trap because this ends up getting focused, you know, it gets bombarded by VC back startups and then you have a huge churn problem and it's just hard to earn attention.

So I would say like try to focus initially on high demand few tools and then over time, like you can expand your product. Like for example, you know, the bank statement converter guy can go and expand into other, you know, other conversions, not just bank statements. And then he can go into a more high demand area, but initially it makes sense to go into a high demand futile area. You can use tools like Google Trends to find out, you know, where their demand is, and you can go and see that.

And then you can also, you know, I go to ideabrowser.com. and see, you know, the trend section where we have different trends. And you can basically just scroll and see like, okay, you know, what is trending right now? You know, where do I see an opportunity to create, you know, some micro SaaS, you know, some micro SaaS product? The other thing is a lot of people end up building incredible microsasas, but they basically, they do the hard work around getting attention. They get this, they get 25,000 followers on X. People know of them, but they're in a space that people have low willingness to pay. So you want to focus on high pain and high willingness to pay. You don't want to focus on low pain, low

willingness, high pain, low willingness, and low pain, you know, high status, right? So when you come up with your idea for your microsass, just come back to the problem pay matrix and make sure that you know that people have a high willingness to pay for this product. So another way to think about it is if you think about microsas, you want to innovate in a niche and you want it to be high polished. If you think about a plugin, what is a plugin? A plugin is like a Shopify app. You're like built on top of someone's ecosystem.

You're a WordPress app. It's niche, but it's low polish. what's a DIY script, that's almost like a GitHub repo. It's like super broad, low polish. And then Big Box SaaS is like where the sales forces of the world play in, Microsoft and stuff like that. You want to focus on innovating over here and not so much market dominance, not broad. So it's niche, it's high polish, you've innovated on it in some capacity.

And that innovation could either be from a product perspective or even just a marketing and positioning perspective, and that's where you want to be. Okay, let's talk about a few microsas ideas that anyone could steal. My hope here is that this just, now that you understand a little bit about, okay, what is a microsas, how to think about what type of microsatist idea I want to do, what makes a good one, a little bit of a playbook. Let's just talk about some ideas that probably could work that fit the bill. And anyone could steal these.

And I hope you do, honestly. So the first idea is called Permit Sink. And the idea is that a lot of, you know, homeowners hit the wall when their city's permit office asks for drawings and affidavits and inspection dates they never heard of. The pain is paperwork paralysis, not hammer skills. So you can basically start by scraping public permit checklist for the 50 most active American in cities, drop them into a structured database. The version one asks you three questions.

So you do almost like a quiz. So the city, the project type, and the square footage. And that spits out a PDF packet. Correctly named forms and auto filled address and the next step checklist. You can ship this in 48 hours. I would do something like NextJS, SuperBase, PDF kit, and then tested on a local Facebook group, like a home reno group. By the way, people think Facebook groups are dead.

There's still a billion active users in Facebook groups. So you can test a lot of these microsess ideas on Facebook groups. The moat is localization. So every week you can have out two or more, two more jurisdictions. You can integrate edge cases like the San Jose Wildforce, wildfire compliance forms, etc. And you can price it for like $99 one-time fee for a project. plus maybe an optional $19 a month SMS status line. This is something that a lot of microsas products do is they have a fee and then there's some upsell.

So think about when you're building whatever it is, you know, whatever microsize you're building, what is your pricing and then what is your upsell? And then how would you actually grow this? Well, you can post short form, you know, looms or videos, demos titled how to pass an inspection in, San Francisco, how to pass an inspection in Miami. And then you get SEO for, you know, San Francisco permit help. You try to get builders' forums to link back. So I think there's a big SEO play for this. You know, long-term county clerks will change forms. I acknowledge this. So treat that churn as an opportunity. Upsail them to a $299,000.

a year contract here with automatic jurisdiction updates and multi-address dashboard. So this is, to me, like a pretty fun, like fun microsas idea to do, especially if you're into renovations. I like the business model. I think that the growth loop makes sense around the SEO. And it's going to compound. And for people who say, like, oh, SEO is dead. SEO is dead.

No, SEO is not dead. It's still generating tons, like billions of dollars. of commerce. And if you do good SEO, it's going to rank you well in chat GPT anyways and perplexity anyways. So that's idea number one.

Idea number two, and this is one that hits home to me, is called pod scriptor. So podcasters burn two to three hours at least per episode polishing show notes and clipping TikTok teasers. So basically like 60 second teaser

clips. So the wedge is every, every, every RSS feed holds enough metadata to automate 80% of that groundwork. So you build a web hook that triggers on new episode publication, pipes audio into a diarization model, titles each timestamp, and then feeds the outline and punchlines into a text of video template, captions and Broll. So, you know, you can ship an MVP targeting anchor.fm users, which are Spotify users, they drop the RSS URL, get a Google Doc, and three MP4 vertical clips in a Google Drive. Obviously, it has to be high quality, right? But I would use something like this. And how you monetize it, you make the first episode free because you need to show value. And we talked about that earlier. You know, you want to show value early on. But then, you know,

$29 a month, up to eight episodes, and then you can go usage based beyond. So I included this idea here because I think usage-based as a business model for Microsoft is microsas is going to get more and more common. And it depends on what you're building, but you know, you might realize like MRR or recurring revenue monthly just might not make sense for what your microsas idea. But a usage-based might be the wedge to get you get a lot of people to use your thing. And, you know, you can use chat, TPT, and you can use. use menace and you can use perplexity to project, do financial projections to see if it makes sense, like with your costs and stuff like that.

But I anticipate that usage base is only going to get more and more popular and something that a lot of you should look into. And then, you know, from a, the growth engine perspective, the OMG, here's my free clip tweet is your growth engine. So you embed a tiny watermark in the bottom right. You integrate it with Descript, Riverside and Capcom Marketplaces for distribution. And you do a weekly leaderboard top podcast that gains 10K views using Podscripter. And that drives FOMO. So, you know, thinking like that, not only does that drive FOMO, but it's interesting, right? It's giving value back to the

community. So think about like whatever it is, whatever microsize you're building, like, How can you do a weekly email that keeps you top of mind that you can ultimately create an ad unit that says, like, upgrade, that adds a lot of value? Once MRR hits $10,000, rollout topic clustering that auto generates evergreen YouTube playlist and newsletter digest, maybe at $49 a month. And you probably could exit this business at a four to six X ARR. Okay, maybe it's 3x, maybe it's 7X. But in that range, I think that a lot of the vertical-specific tools, like a Vimea, which is publicly traded, Cap-cut, et cetera, would buy something like this. Idea number three is called spec sheet. So this is a bit of a more boring idea than, in my opinion, the first two.

But listen, you know, bank statement converter was boring too. So, you know, and it's making $40,000 a month. So sometimes you've got to be boring. So the idea is this. B2B buyers go through these long PDF spec sheets. Sometimes they're like 30 pages, hand copying line items into an Excel grid to compare chips, APIs, or SaaS tiers. So, and this is happening. It might not happen.

It might not, you might not think it's happening because you work at a startup or something like this, but in big companies, this is happening all the time. And the large pain point here is there's decision delay. So if you can build a drag and drop up uploader, with three competitor PDFs in a sortable web table, you can use something like Langchain and Tabula to extract fields. Then you normalize with a synonym map, throughput, for example, versus requirements. That is going to be so valuable for people.

You can use NextJS, SuperBase, Cloud Run Worker to go and build this out. And the first version, you obviously wanted to be a super tight scope, like compare feature flag platforms and then landing page sheeted with three public PDFs. And, you know, founders are just going to founders and executives and leaders of companies are just going to feed this product more and more PDFs. And every upload improves your synonym map. So it's another reason why I wanted to include this one is you might have a data moat with your Microsoft. And I love data mode businesses right now. So if you can think about, you know, ways to get more data, make the experience better,

then that's going to help you with your turn problem later on. Pricing, you can do something like $49 a month. Now, let's talk about growth. So, you know, people love slides, especially in the corporate environment. So you can do an add a copy to keynote button that renders a pretty two-column comparison with your logo footer. Every deck shared in a board meeting is another backlink. And then the long-tail SEO, for example, launched darkly versus split in 2025 is yours within the corridor. So something like this could get to 20KMRR.

And you can, I actually think can get a lot bigger. You know, for later you can resell the anonymized aggregate stats via an API. So you can say like, oh, you have this data around. Okay, 70% of feature flag buyers choose uses based pricing. That's unique data that someone would buy. And I just tweeted about this also, like this whole movement around paying for data. You know, I talked about Cloudflare. They just launched pay per crawl.

Websites can now charge AI crawlers for scraping content. So I think you're just going to see more of this over time. So I'm particularly interested in microsas that have this data advantage. And I think, by the way, people are going to buy businesses just for their data. And that's another opportunity. Like, you can go and buy, if you can buy a microsathex with data, maybe they're going to value it at 2x ARR or 1x ARR. But if you can sell the data, you can increase that error pretty simply. We're going to go through two more ideas.

Idea number four is cart saver. So Shopify stores lose 70% of carts. There's all these generic complete purchase emails. But what if you had 11 labs, which is the voice AI cloning, and you use Canva's API to auto-record a 30-second personal video for any cart more than $100. So the app grabs the shopper's first name, a product shot, and a founder's voice with an MP3 overlay, which is so cool. And it's like, hey, Jane, notice you love these sneakers.

Here's 10% off. Link below. and it's a video. You can even say, like, hey, this is an AI-generated version of me, but I still think it's really cool, and there's an arbitrage opportunity to do this, this would crush. So you create a Shopify app, you know, using Rails and S3

that triggers on checkout and update WebHook. It renders WebM with FMMPEG and emails via Shopify's marketing API. So you can do something from a pricing perspective, do like 1% of recidors. covered revenue. And then how you would grow this thing is you just create a Twitter account, an X account that's all about growing, it's all about like abandoned carts and growing and growing revenue.

And then you do a lot of like side by side AB graphs around how people increase conversions. And then the last idea, which I grabbed from ideabrowser.com, is called Grand Guru. So I don't know if any of you have submitted a grant, but it is talk about painful. Like talk about painful. It takes so long, it's so intense. So people really, really do,

they try to avoid it or they just give up. But if there's something called Grant Guru and it asks five prompts, your mission, your impact, your stats, your budget, and then drafts these full proposals matching the foundations language style and brand, that would be huge. And hopefully make the world, you know, give people the opportunity to do, you know, their life's work and stuff like that. So you can pilot with U.S.-based art nonprofits.

The way I would do it is I would scrape 100 winning proposals. I'd train a style transfer template. I'd build an MVP in Django and Stripe. I'd output it in Doc X with auto-generated cover letter and budget table. And then early users send feedback on tone, fine-tuned by org charts, arts, environmental youth. Pricing, you can do something like $149 for the full proposal or subscribe for $99 a month unlimited. And then growth, you can do publish a public funded via Grand Guru leaderboard. Foundations love success stories and applicants, trust, proven track records.

There's also, like, no one talks about these stories of how they get the, the, the, these grants. So if you had like a Twitter account that showed this, I think that would be really interesting to people. And then you can run webinars with grand coaches and then they become affiliates earning 20%. These are some of the ideas. And I bet you as you're going through it, if you're taking notes and stuff like that, you're, you kind of understand now like, okay, there was a pain point. There's like a wow moment. There's a trial. They tell their friends.

There's a media component, right? There's like this building of audience piece. These are focused on high margin. They're low cap-ex. They don't require a lot of money. Oftentimes they require less than $500 to build the first version. They're extremely niche at first. Like, you don't, like a venture back company is going to raise a billion dollars to go and build this.

And it's focused on profitability. So it's not for everyone, right? Microsoft is not for everyone. It's really for people like the solo founder who wants a lifestyle business, who finds this interesting. And you can end up building like a bunch of these too, right? Like if you look at, you know, Levels I.O. Peter Levels, he's probably the most famous indie hacker.

Like he's got, that's what he has, like a bunch of these, you know, 139K a month, 40K a month, 36K a month, 32K am on. 22 KM on, 16 KM on. So you can build a portfolio of those. I call that being more of a multi-printer, having multiple products. But, you know, if you're just starting out, you want to start with one,

prove that you can get to 10KM-on, 20-KM-on. And then over time, you can go and build others or you can actually buy others. Like I said, this isn't easy. It's not like you're just going to follow this playbook and it's just going to work. There is going to be a lot of pain. And there's going to be a lot of zigs and there's going to be a lot of zaggings.

But if you can figure out how to build audience and community and you can figure out how to build products that actually speak to the pain, then you're iterating and you're building audience, you're getting more and more people and your product's getting more and more value, your retention is going more and more down, your engagement's going more and more up, your word of mouth is going more and more up. And it could be extremely life-changing. So I hope this was helpful for people. I tried to make this as concise but comprehensive as I possibly could.

I put a lot of work into this. If you like episodes like this of the Startup Ideas podcast, please, please like and comment. So I know to do more of it. And I mean that because otherwise I won't do it. You know, I want to create value for you for you. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, I like thinking about this idea radar. So I think that if you're building a startup idea, there's the passion on the left-hand side and then you have monetization on the potential. And sometimes, like, you know, what your passion about does have monetization potential.

but, you know, usually the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. So, you know, you want to build something that you're, you're passionate about that you think that you're going to have fun building every day. And you want to build something that has monetization potential because that's going to get you to create something that's sustainable. And it's going to get you to get exciting for you. And it's going to place you, you know, it's a leaderboard at the end of the day, right? Like making money as a leaderboard.

How much, how well are you doing and how much value are. you creating? So hope this is helpful. I had fun doing this. I think there's a huge opportunity to build microsass right now. And I can't wait to see what you build. And if you're looking for ideas, there's only one place to go. Ideabrowser.com, absolutely free to go and get an idea of the day. Enjoy.