Startups.email - Issue #4
Discover the secrets of SaaS success: How Wildmetrics, Notion Forms and Datafetcher earned over $130,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue despite huge platform risk!
If you want to succeed with your SaaS or any other business, you should start by building a business with a huge platform risk. A platform risk is when your whole business idea is dependent on another company - for example, you can build a Twitter tool that is dependent on the Twitter API, or you can build a tool that is dependent on Notion, Airtable, Shopify, or any other commercial platform that can switch the lights off for your business.
It might sound counter-productive, but from my analysis of over 500+ successful bootstrapped businesses, I can tell you that the highest chance of success lies in businesses that are heavily dependent on other platforms. These businesses are simply some sort of an extension - if Twitter misses any features, just build a tool for that. If Shopify misses any features, just create an app for that.
But as I said, there is a risk of losing the entire business if it is built on another platform.
For example, Super Send ($5,150 MRR) has built an outreach tool for LinkedIn and they got a cease & desist letter, so probably they need to change their platform. Yesterday, the founder of SiteGPT ($9,849 MRR after 5 weeks) received a letter from OpenAI lawyers that he needs to remove GPT from his domain name since it is against their terms and conditions. Many Twitter apps had to shut down because the Twitter API changed their price from $0 to basically $42,000/month.
This is the real platform risk - you build an app that is heavily dependent on an API and they simply change the rules and you might have to shut it down.
But why should I build an app that has a huge platform risk, you ask? Because these big platforms have a huge amount of users. Notion has over 20 million users, Slack has over 25 million users, and Shopify hosts over 4 million stores. You can treat each of the platforms as its own huge market. And by building an application that solves a specific problem - for example, for Slack - you have a good understanding of the market size; in Slack's case, it's 25+ million users and if you get listed on their app store, you can get free traffic. Which I have done multiple times for other platforms.
Now let's take a look at some recent examples of businesses with a high platform risk and high reward.
Notion Forms ($23,300 MRR)
The basic idea is simply to create a form from a Notion table that can be hosted anywhere on the internet. If you work with Notion, you know how handy it is to have everything in your platform. In this case, Julian was able to create a $20k+ MRR business just within two years. Another example is from Dominik - he has created Helpkit ($5,000+ MRR) which is also based on Notion. Helpkit turns your Notion into a help site - you basically can create your help center from inside Notion. Another tool called Super.so was able to get from 0$ to $1k MRR in 30 days with zero marketing budget. As you can see, all of these tools are heavily dependent on Notion, and they all have huge platform risks, but believe it or not, the platform risk has another benefit - it reduces the risk of missing the market.
Datafetcher ($20,155 MRR)
Datafetcher imports data from different data sources into Airtable. You can import data from Google Search Console into Airtable and run some analysis with it. Andy launched the tool over two years ago and is now making $20k+ MRR. Again, we see that Datafetcher is heavily dependent on Airtable and Airtable could shut down the API access for a specific business at any time, but the reward is higher than the risk. Airtable has 300k+ active customers - all of these customers create a market that anyone can enter with a solution that solves a specific pain. As with Datafetcher, the pain is that people want to import data from different sources with a no-code solution.
Wildmetrics ($88,564 MRR)
This is probably the coolest startup that I have recently discovered. Many of you don't know this, but I spent 15 years working with data, analytics, and everything related to visualization - I truly love this area. Wildmetrics is a customer analytics tool for Stripe. You can basically connect your Stripe account and get funnel reports, churn analysis, cohort analysis and more. As with the example above, Wildmetrics has a huge platform risk with Stripe, but at the same time, Stripe creates a huge untapped market on its own. If you don't know, Stripe has an app marketplace where you can list your app as well. So, you can list your app and get tons of free traffic from their app marketplace to your own application you built for Stripe.
There is this proverb: "He who does not risk will never drink champagne." Every risk brings many benefits with it. So, go risk and build an app with high platform risk.
Here are all the other startups that were added recently:
• Typingmind: Launched in March 2023, Typingmind is a custom AI chat interface designed for teams, communities, and organizations. It generates $2119 in MRR.
• ScrapingBee: Launched in September 2019, ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that handles headless browsers and rotates proxies. It generates $125000 in MRR.
• AI2SQL: Launched in February 2022, AI2SQL allows users to easily write efficient and error-free SQL queries without knowing SQL. It generates $2029 in MRR.
• Typebot: Launched in April 2020, Typebot gives users powerful blocks to create unique chat experiences. It generates $4780 in MRR.
• Podsqueeze: Launched in January 2023, Podsqueeze generate shownotes, timestamps, newsletters and more for podcasts with one click. It generates $6625 in MRR.
• Parqet: Launched in January 2020, Parqet allows large and small investors to visualize and analyze portfolios in a combined way. It generates $85805 in MRR.
• Pika Style: Launched in February 2022, Pika Style quickly creates beautiful website and device mockup from screenshots. It generates $2300 in MRR.
If my newsletter has caught your attention, please don't hesitate to show your support with a ❤️ and a comment 💬