Hi there, and thanks for reading my blog and for your feedback 💚! It’s making a huge difference, in that it forces me to make my thinking clearer and it makes this “journey” less lonely.

In my last post, I wrote about deciding to drop the field of employee engagement. As next steps, I proposed to:

• Write up my checklist for an idea worth exploring
• Try more ways to find micro-saas ideas.

I also want to share a few personal reflections. So…on today’s menu, we have:

🐸Amuse-bouche: Snippets from my personal yearly review from 2022

🦐Appetizer: How’s it going, Stefan?

🥗Salad: My checklist for an idea worth exploring

🍽️Main course: More ways to find micro-saas ideas, and this week’s progress

🍨Desert: Next steps

🎇Snippets from my review for 2022

For the third year in a row, I take 2-3 days at the end of the year to reflect on the past 12 months. In this review, I think of what I learned then set some goals for the coming year.

So here are my biggest learnings for 2022:

• Making things: I learned to take criticism (feedback?) better (less personally). My last boss had a never-ending supply of feedback, which made this learning possible. It really takes a lot of tries and iterations to make something great. So the energy that goes into frustration about not getting right the first time is much needed in those next iterations.
• Freedom: I long for freedom. Lately, in my career, I long for creative and financial freedom. But I am as free or as captive as I want to be (mostly). Freedom is often a choice between fear transforming into a) inaction and then into sadness or b) into anger or curiosity and then into action and joy. Freedom is in your head.
• Committing: It’s hard to know what you want until you try a few things. Or until you lose something that you used to discount. When you realize what you want, commit. Go all in.

My biggest failure for 2022 was how short a time I spent in my last job. There was still so much to learn. However, leaving a toxic environment was important for my health. And this allowed me to finally jump into…this 😊

Moving on to 2023, there are 3 main goals that I want to focus on:

1. Build a business that brings me EUR 2k in monthly revenue
2. Run a marathon in under 4 hours
3. Grow my existing friendships and make new ones

🤗How’s it going, Stefan

Thanks for asking! I’m thinking of making this a permanent section in the blog. This way, I can keep the complaining isolated, and you can skip it. Win win!

It’s hitting me that after 1 and a half months of work, I don’t yet have something solid to jump on. Having missed my previous deadline (December 2022) for settling on an idea and starting to develop it is creating some anxiety. So I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself to find a problem worth solving. That’s creating anxiety, which I turn into procrastination - you know, because it’s impossible to fail at scrolling on LinkedIn.

Rationally, I understand that no matter what I’ll start, it will probably look completely different after a few months and again after a few years. Hell, the first few things will probably fail miserably. Emotionally, I’m not there yet. But I feel like there is some progress though. My inner voice is becoming less self critical and more kind. It takes work, but it’s working….you can quote me on this.

So…new deadline: whatever best idea I have by the end of January, I’ll run with it.

☑️My checklist for an idea worth exploring

My goal for this business is to reach a comfortable semi-passive income, while building it (mostly) alone. The business model that I think fits this goal best is SaaS, or more specifically, micro-Saas.

SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which means selling software that customers pay for on a monthly basis. Salesforce, Contentful, Notion are SaaS-es. Micro-SaaS is… a smaller SaaS. It offers one or very few features, for a niche segment of customers, and is typically augmenting an existing, larger SaaS. Think of plugins, addons and extensions.

I prepared a checklist to guide me in selecting an idea that’s not 💩 wrapped in 🍬. The checklist tries to make sure that the problem exists, that it’s worth solving, that I know who has it. Also, I should at least be able to imagine building a solution.

• Problem - exists and is worth solving
  • There is money already being spent to solve problem (other soft, consultants, etc)
  • It’s a top problem (touches making money/acquiring customers, drastic cost saving, significant automation)
  • I can find more than 20 people that confirm the problem exists, and they represent more than 60% of the people I talked to
  • I can estimate more than 50k potential customers
• Customers - do I know who has the problem?
  • Customer segment well defined (Managers - not well defined; Data engineering team leads in companies with 200-1000 employees - well defined)
  • I like the customers in this segment
  • I know where to find customers in this segment
• Solution
  • I can imagine a way to build a 5x better/cheaper solution
  • The solution can be built on a top of a growing platform

🤯More ways to find micro-SaaS ideas

…and how it’s going so far

1. Steal from freelancers

What this means is browsing through freelance job websites like Upwork, Freelancer and Guru, and finding common patterns in the jobs that are repeating themselves.

I’ve done this for 2 days. Results: 0️⃣

2. Find problems on Reddit (and other communities)

I wrote about this in my first post. People complain about things and ask questions on Reddit, so it’s a good source for problems. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, this can be a huge time sink. I’ll come back to it in a few days/weeks.

I tried this for a day. Results: 0️⃣. But then I found GummySearch, which automatically synthesizes information on Reddit. So I’ll come back to it.

3. Find inspiration in SaaS idea newsletters

There’s a ton of other people like me looking for ideas to build. Which is why there are also newsletters and blogs that write about specific (micro-SaaS) ideas (e.g. Business Brainstorms, and MicroSaasIdea). My approach here is select 1-2 idea from each issue, and give it my own twist. I also try to use them to create prompts for brainstorming more ideas

This is my approach at the moment. Some results:

**Idea dump**
- Turn Notion templates into analog products (not SaaS)
- Copy Substack newsletter issues to your website
- Uber for moldovan contractors (plumbers, etc) (marketplace, not SaaS)
- Shared shopping cart for couples on Shopify stores
- Turning books ands self improvement methods into mobile apps (not SaaS)
- Consultants on demand to help you on your powerpoint deck now (productized service)
- One dashboard to monitor and reply to customer reviews from different platforms (in Slack?)

4. Make an analytics tool for a large growing platform

This can help e.g. LinkedIn professional users analyze their performance. A few tools exist (e.g. Hootsuite) in this space, especially for social media. The trick is to find growing platforms that are still underserved.

5. Automate manual tasks - based on interviews

Find small business owners ➡️ Ask them about their most annoying recurring tasks - how do they deal with them currently, how much would they pay to have it done for them automagically

6. Niche down big SaaS

Take some very broad business pain points that are currently addressed by big SaaS companies - contact management, lead generation, sales pipelines, time tracking, billing and invoice management, scheduling, planning, etc. Cross that with a specific professional/industrial/functional niche.

➡️Next steps

Keep brainstorming using the approaches above