Startups.email - How to find a profitable idea?
Generate buzz and pre-sales for a future product — learn the fork pattern and find profitable SaaS ideas in minutes. Massively increase your chances of success!
This week I want to focus again on the topic of how to find a profitable idea for your startup. This is the most asked question on Twitter. There are multiple ways to come up with a profitable idea; I call them the "startup patterns." The startup patterns are a simple step-by-step approach that you can use to come up with your next profitable idea. I know of six startup patterns to come up with profitable ideas, and I'm using them all the time. Let me show you a concrete example:
A Twitter buddy of mine, Luca, validated an idea with a single tweet 👇
I'm pretty sure Luca has sold at least 50 lifetime licenses without even having a product. In this example, the fork startup pattern was applied to find this idea.
The fork startup pattern - how does it work?
Step #1: You need to identify similar products with $10K - $100K range MRR that do the same thing, for example, Chatbase.co ($59,005 MRR) or SiteGPT.ai ($15,000 MRR). Use our category filter on startups.email.
Step #2: Then you identify the core component of the products. In our case, Chatbase as well as SiteGPT do one thing - they create a chatbot for your website. This is their core component.
Step #3: You take the core component and integrate the core component into other SaaS products that have a userbase of minimum 5M+ users. This is what Luca has done here. He forked the original successful idea from Chatbase and applied it to Notion (5M+ active users).
Now I give you a bonus. I have used a fork pattern to brainstorm and came up with multiple ideas in one minute, e.g. a chatbot for Trello (5M+ active users) or a chatbot for Airtable (300k+ high profile customers).
Now, let me show you some of the latest SaaS statistics added to our database:
Helpkit.so ($10,000 MRR)
Helpkit is a support portal for content from Notion databases, built by the brilliant founder Dominik. I had the pleasure of chatting with him when he was starting Helpkit, and now he has been working on the product for two years. We know of many other successful standalone support products like Zendesk, which has a revenue of over one billion dollars. In the case of Helpkit, we see a successful application of the fork pattern, wherein a support product was integrated into Notion. There are many other successful examples of profitable businesses around Notion, making it a safe bet when launching a new business. Another benefit is that these types of products can be easily sold on acquire.com.
Tallyforms ($60,000 MRR)
With Tally, you can create fast and easy forms for all different purposes. The form creation market is huge, but it has one downside: it's very hard to compete. Tally has built an amazing product, which is one way you can outcompete the market. A safer bet is to use the fork pattern and apply it to the form creation market. For example, Notioforms does $23k in MRR; with Notionforms, you can create forms and store the information inside Notion. There are over 50 marketplaces or SaaS companies similar to Notion where you can try to apply the fork pattern to come up with a profitable idea.
Reflect.app ($20,134 MRR)
This is another note-taking app with AI integration. The note-taking market is huge; it has huge potential, and you can literally start a business here and generate millions in revenue. However, one downside of this market is that it is very risky; there is much higher risk of failure in comparison to, for example, building a form-creation app for Notion or another chatbot for Trello or Airtable. I always advise people to think twice before trying their luck in such markets, unless they have at least $500k in venture capital to burn.
More successful startups 👇
• GrowthAssistant: Embeds the best offshore Growth Marketers into companies to scale business; launched December 2019; $500,000 MRR
• Tiny Host: Simplest way to host & share web projects; launched July 2021; $7,888 MRR
• Omni.us: Close High-Quality B2B clients automatically; launched October 2021; $19,389 MRR
• Reflect: Notes with an AI assistant; launched September 2020; $20,134 MRR
• Tailscan: Build, design and debug Tailwind websites in the browser; launched September 2022; $502 MRR
• Tallyforms: Simplest way to create forms; launched August 2020; $60,000 MRR
• Inboxs: Conversion-focused Twitter DMs; launched April 2022; $1,130 MRR
• Palettebrain: Unlock the power of ChatGPT across Mac applications; launched April 2023; $4,927 TTM
• Helpkit: Easily build Knowledge Base with Notion; launched July 2021; $10,000 MRR
• Nexbot: Ultimate AI writing companion; launched October 2022; $11,043 MRR
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