Give Me 36 Minutes and I'll Teach You How to Find $1M SaaS Ideas

Choosing the right SaaS idea can be the difference between making $10,000, $100,000 or even a million dollars a month and making nothing at all.

But I'm not here to give you another list of hypothetical SaaS ideas, because that's not what you need.

What you really need is to know how successful founders actually found their idea and how you can steal their tactics to find your own idea today.

So here's what I did.

I surveyed over 200 SaaS founders, making at least $1,000 a month, some making well over $100,000 a month to uncover the exact methods they used to find their winning ideas.

This is something no one else on YouTube is doing. People are talking out of their opinion and limited experience, but on this channel I like to get some data and provide you with some insights that you can't get anywhere else.

So in this video, I'm going to break down the top eight ways these founders discovered profitable SaaS opportunities, and I'll give you examples for each.

I've seen these methods work in my own companies, and across the hundreds of startups I'm invested in, as well as the thousands of SaaS companies that I've seen started in the broader, TinySeed MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us ecosystem.

There's a lot to cover in this video, so let's dive in.

Method number one was used by a shocking 48% of founders that we surveyed, and honestly, didn't surprise me at all.

For years, I've said, don't tell me your idea, tell me what problem it solves.

And for almost half of the successful founders we surveyed, that problem showed up right where they were already spending 40 hours a week.

Method number one is finding a problem at your day job.

So this is where you spot a problem while working your regular job, either as a developer frustrated by bad tools, or as a subject matter expert who knows your industry's pain points.

You already have context, you have credibility, and access to potential customers.

One example of this is Alex Umechev, the founder of JITBIT, which is a help desk ticketing system.

Alex told us, while working my full-time job, I realized that many existing tech support and customer support apps were missing the boring features that real teams actually need.

Things like SSO, active directory integration, user provisioning, on-prem, self-hosted deployment for Windows, and many other features.

The sleek modern tools had none of that, and the ones that did have the boring features look like they were straight out of the 90s.

Cluttered UIs, endless checkboxes, painfully complicated setup flows.

And while the market was very saturated, I took that as a good sign. The market was there.

Attacking a big competitor can be a benefit on one hand, stealing cool marketing ideas from the smaller companies on the other.

Maybe you've spent years working in an industry, and you're a subject matter expert. You know all the headaches inside and out, like Zach from Upstream Edge.

Zach told us, I provide a desktop application for forecasting and valuing oil and gas wells that includes sophisticated engineering and financial analysis tools.

100 times faster speed and higher level features compared to alternatives are what differentiate my product.

I worked in the oil and gas industry as a petroleum engineer for a decade, and my frustration with the current tools led me to learn how to build new tools to solve our daily problems.

I had a burning desire to see better software, and I decided to make the product I thought the industry needed.

Then there's Lee Dito, the founder of DitoMite. Lee told us, it's the fastest way to get looping video on a public screen.

I started working at a company called Bright Sign in 2012, who is the market leader in digital signage media players.

It's a very hardware-focused industry, and I repeatedly kept seeing the same problems over and over when it came to operational software.

Just nobody was thinking about user experience, and I kept socking away my ideas until one day, ten years later, I thought it was time to jump.

Consider jobs you've had, even a long time ago. The problem I just mentioned was something Lee experienced a decade earlier.

Think about those tedious, repetitive tasks that are currently being human automated, and that could be turned into software.

The next example is similar, and that it's automating a task that this consultant did for their clients.

Ahmed Babakir is the co-founder of Blue Gamma, which is interest rate forecasts for finance teams.

Ahmed told us, my co-founder and I used to work at a consultancy, where clients would ask us for interest rate data, sometimes multiple times a day.

As a recent graduate, my job was to pull the data, format it, and send it over in a spreadsheet every time.

After leaving the company and learning about startups a year later, we realized it was a repetitive problem that software can solve very easily.

Or maybe at your day job, you see a colleague doing repetitive work that you know could be streamlined, like Steve from Loody, formerly Metro Retro.

Loody is collaboration software, focused on development teams, helping them with retrospectives, refinement, planning, and so on.

Steve told us, I created an early prototype of a canvas-based retro tool, as part of a hackathon and my last real job.

The idea came from watching the PM write up the notes after every meeting by hand.

So now let's take a step back and look at what makes this first method of finding a problem at your day job work.

The first is, you already have deep context around the problem.

You've lived it, you know the workarounds, you understand why existing solutions fall short.

The second is you have built-in access to potential customers and beta testers, these are your colleagues, your industry contacts, and so on.

The third is that you understand the buying process, you know who signs off on purchases, what budget cycles look like, what objections come up.

And the fourth is that you can potentially validate the idea while still employed, reducing your risk.

But there are three things to watch out for with this approach.

The first is make sure the problem exists beyond your specific company.

Your employer might just be uniquely dysfunctional, so validate your idea outside of your little bubble.

The second is check your employment agreement for IP clauses, some companies claim ownership of anything you build while you're employed.

And the third is be careful not to use proprietary information or customer data from your employer to build your product.

I also wouldn't use any of my employer's hardware like a laptop.

I would have a personal laptop that I worked on, and as I mentioned, I would check that IP clause and be really clean about it.

So with this method, I'd be asking myself three questions to try to get my juices flowing.

The first is what tools do I use on a daily basis that frustrate me or my coworkers?

The second is what manual process or processes exist today that I think should be automated by software.

And the third is are the incumbent tools in this industry actually old and clunky and not changing?

Or are they actually pretty good and I just don't like them.

So there were a lot of companies that used this first method, as I said it was almost 50%.

But I don't want to spend this whole video talking about it.

So I put together a completely free resource over at robwalling.com/ideas.

I'll tell you more about that later, but one thing I want you to notice is that all of these folks were solving problems that people would be willing to pay for.

In the next category, the founders knew that there would be a customer ready to pay because they copied an existing idea or an existing product.

This was about 10% of our respondents.

In some cases, founders saw how much their employer was spending on a solution and thought I could do that cheaper or I could do that better.

Or you might notice a large space with a hated competitor.

While I didn't participate in this particular survey, I did exactly this when I was building Drip.

And we did it by accident, if I'm being honest.

We had built a little email capture widget and the ability to send sequences of emails to people that signed up.

What we quickly realized is there was market pull.

There were people talking about marketing automation and email automation features that didn't exist in the less expensive email service providers.

And every tool that had these features was really expensive, had annual contracts, software wasn't great, and they required you to talk to a salesperson.

So we started building some of those features.

And while we didn't copy any existing products, we did enter an existing category and there were already paradigms in place that we certainly slotted into.

And it made selling and marketing our tool a lot easier because when people arrived at the homepage drip.com, they could see, oh, this is this type of tool, why is it different?

And that's all I had to communicate.

I didn't have to communicate what we were doing and how novel we were.

I just had to say we are either an email service provider or at some point we were an email automation software and then we became lightweight marketing automation.

And then I just had to tell you why are we better or different than all the other incumbents.

And there were a lot of big clunky incumbents that people didn't like.

And that in addition to the fact that we executed really well was the reason that Drip grew so quickly and resulted in a life changing exit for me back in 2016.

Another example of using this approach comes from Tim Leland, the founder of T.ly.

T.ly is an all in one URL shortener and QR code platform.

It's built for marketers, developers, creators and teams.

And Tim told us I was working for a company on an online giving product and we were tasked to build a text to give feature.

To do this, we had to shorten the URLs since SMS messages are limited to 160 characters.

We looked at Bitly and saw it was thousands of dollars to use a custom domain to create short links.

So to save money, I built a simple in-house URL shortener over the weekend that we could host ourselves.

This got me thinking other companies may want a more affordable option, but they don't want to build it in-house.

Another example of a founder who used this approach is Lillia Tobin.

She started BigMailer, which is an email marketing platform with a focus on multi-brand management for agencies and franchises.

Lillia told us, while working on our previous B2C startup, we had grown our email list to more than 300,000 subscribers.

All the available email solutions seemed too expensive for a product update newsletter of our size, so we built an in-house solution powered by Amazon SES.

Then we thought others might have a similar need and decided to make it into a standalone tool.

Another option might be to port an existing product to a new country, language or geography.

We had a couple of respondents who copied an idea that seemed to be working in the U.S. and they translated it to the needs of different geographies.

One example is Checkout Joy, which provides custom checkout pages for e-learning businesses that connect local payment processors with LMS platforms.

The founder, Merring DeWet, told us, my wife had a membership business and couldn't easily accept payments from their LMS platform.

No Stripe where we live and very limited PayPal usage.

Locals don't want to pay in USD, but that was all the LMS offered.

I was researching solutions and realized that there are potentially thousands of businesses with the same issue, so I built a quick MVP with our local payment processor and got them live within a week.

We could see an immediate bump in conversions for them, and it made it easy to do business and quickly get funds into their local bank account.

Another founder who took this approach is Simon Thompson, the founder of HuRu.ai, which is an AI answering service to help local Australian business owners manage phone calls, especially during weekends and after hours.

It has local Australian voices and sensibilities.

Simon told us, I saw examples in the U.S. such as Rosie AI doing the same thing and figured there would be a need for the same type of service, but specifically with Australian accents and sensibilities.

I also guess that it wouldn't make sense for the major players in the U.S. to build Australian accents into their platform and go to market in Australia, at least not anytime in the near future.

So what makes this method work? Well, four things.

The first is you have proof of demand. Someone else already validated that people will pay for it.

The second is you can learn from the incumbents mistakes by reading their negative reviews and support forms.

You can see what they're doing right and see what they're doing wrong because they pioneered it.

The third is you can differentiate on price, user experience, specific features or a particular niche.

And if the incumbent has been around for a long time, they've often raised prices and gone up market and that can leave a lot of opportunity.

The fourth is if the market is large enough, even a small slice can be a great business if you're a mostly bootstrap founder.

But there are also four things to watch out for when using this approach.

The first is copying a product in a small market means you're fighting for scraps.

This approach works best when the market is big.

The second is make sure you have a real differentiator.

It's not just we're newer, that's not enough.

So when we use the word copy, what we really mean is enter an existing category where there are already other players.

I still think you need to get in and position yourself in a corner of the market that isn't being served very well.

The third thing to watch out for is the incumbent has head start on brand recognition, on SEO, integrations, customer trust, marketing, all kinds of things.

And the fourth is be honest about why you think you can win.

"Just execute better" is not a strategy.

And just copying an existing player is very unlikely to work.

So the questions to ask yourself are number one, why are customers unhappy with the current options?

Is it price, features, support, usability or something else?

The second is my differentiation something customers actually care about or is it just interesting to me?

The third is can I reach customers through a channel the incumbent isn't using well or there's some type of opportunity.

And the fourth is is there a specific segment of the market that's underserved and would love a product built just for them.

Method number three is discovering a problem through freelancing.

About 10% of the founders we surveyed took this approach.

Examples include Ben Walker, the founder of Drum, which is an ERP for small to medium consulting firms.

Ben told us I was consulting as a custom software developer and found that I was building very similar functionality over and over.

I felt that if I could build a very basic version of what I was building my clients, but build it as a standalone tool, I should be able to find some early customers and iterate.

John Reynolds, the founder of Civic Review, which is permitting software for local government told us.

I was a freelance software developer and I was asked to build our product permitting software by municipalities.

I was asked three times and on the third time I decided, okay, these guys can't find a solution that fits their needs.

I'll just make my own and sell it so I don't have to keep rewriting the same software.

There's also the chance that you discover a problem to solve that's not something you've been asked to build multiple times, but rather it's a tool that you need in order to be more efficient in running your agency.

Colin Bartlett, the co-founder of Status Gator, which is a status aggregator, told us.

I was working on a bug ticket for a customer all day and then finally came across the status page for the Facebook Ads API, and it had a warning about there being intermittent failures.

Turns out that was the bug. It annoyed me that I did not even know the status page existed, plus the app interfaced with like 10 other ads APIs. I thought it would be really nice to have all that on one screen and get an email when the status changed, so I built Status Gator for myself.

Note that it's important if you're going to do this, that you think very carefully about the intellectual property.

In a lot of consulting and employment agreements, you will sign away anything you build at the job, and anything you build in your free time, even on your own computers at home.

So you want to be very diligent about this and have all your i's dotted and t's crossed.

Another example is Dump Truck Dispatcher, founded by Joe Walling, no relation.

Dump Truck Dispatcher streamlines the operations and logistics for bulk hauling companies.

And Joe told us, at the time, I ran a custom software development company.

I had a client who wanted this type of software. I kept the IP and returned for charging them less for the software.

So let's look at four reasons why this method works.

The first is you see the same problems across multiple clients, which validates that demand exists beyond one company.

The second is that clients are literally paying you to understand their problems.

You're getting paid to do market research and customer development.

The third is you build real expertise in the domain as you're getting paid.

And the fourth is you can sometimes fund early product development through your agency or freelancing revenue.

But four things to watch out for include agency work is demanding, finding time to build a product on the side is genuinely hard.

Number two is make sure IP ownership is clear in your client's contracts before you productize anything, like in the case of Dump Truck Dispatcher.

The third is that the transition from freelancing, agency, customer to actually thinking like a product owner is harder than it looks.

You have to learn to say no to feature requests.

And the fourth is don't build a product so tailored to one client that no one else wants it.

So I have four questions to ask yourself if you're going to take this approach.

The first is what functionality have I built three or more times for different clients?

What internal tools have I built to make my agency more effective or efficient that others might want?

Do I have a clear path to transitioning from agency revenue to product revenue or will I be stuck doing both forever?

And the last is are my clients in an industry I actually want to serve long term?

So real quick, if you found any of this helpful so far, can you please give this video a like and subscribe to the channel.

My team and I are working really hard to bring you content like this.

We put a ton of time and energy into making sure the content is super valuable for you.

And when we see those metrics on YouTube that likes and the subscribes, it helps us know that we're on the right track.

So those first three methods all assume you have work experience to draw from.

But what if you're early in your career or you want to look beyond your current industry?

Method number four is solving a problem for a spouse, friend or colleague.

And about 8% of respondents said this is how they found their startup idea.

In this case, you're going to want to go on the hunt and try to find problems.

So you'll want to reach out to your network.

Maybe you talk to your spouse or maybe you talk to your friends to see what problems they have in their day jobs.

John's sister is the founder of Quill Therapy Solutions, which he describes as software that generates progress notes and other forms of documentation for mental health therapists in an ethical and privacy-focused way without recording therapy sessions.

John told us how he came up with the idea.

He said, my wife is a therapist and she 100% thought of the idea.

She saw me working on a different idea that relied on AI to rearrange information and she basically said, hey, could you do that for progress notes instead?

And she was right.

One way to approach this method is to have a chat with someone who has deep experience.

Yoi Sigurdsen is the founder of CrankWheel, which is a screen-sharing, web conferencing and video platform for sales.

And Yoi told us, so my co-founder, Gilsey, had been working for years in various sales jobs, mostly sort of hybrid telephone and in-person sales like insurance and banking, telecoms, that kind of stuff.

And we started brainstorming about what's missing from that kind of space.

We rediscovered a lot of sales enablement tools that already existed.

And I'd been working on real-time communications in Google Chrome at Google.

So I innocently asked him at some point what people use when they're on the phone with a prospect and they need to show them something.

As it turned out, they didn't use anything because it's too complex for a lot of prospects and you don't want to take a good sales call and ruin it with some tech issues.

That's how the idea for CrankWheel was born.

What makes this method work are the following four things.

Number one, you have a direct line to someone experiencing the problem.

Instant access for interviews, feedback, and iteration.

Number two, you can deeply understand the problem without having to cold call strangers at least initially.

Number three, your relationship creates accountability.

You're more likely to follow through when someone you care about is counting on you.

And number four, they can introduce you to others in the field for validation and early sales.

But there are things to watch out for.

The first is your spouse or friend might have a unique problem that others in their field don't share, so you want to validate beyond them.

The second one is they might be too nice to tell you your solution isn't good, so push for honest feedback.

The third is mixing business and personal relationships can get complicated, so you're going to want to set expectations early.

And finally, you still need to understand the market.

Their expertise plus your building skills isn't enough on its own.

If you're going to attempt this method, you're going to want to ask yourself four questions.

The first is, what does my spouse, partner, or close friend complain about in their day job?

The second is, do I think they can introduce me to other people who potentially work in the same field and have the same problem?

It'd be nice to have five intros, for example.

The third question is, am I building this to solve a real problem that I think can be a great business?

Or am I doing it to solve the problem of a person that I care about?

The last one is, do I have the patience to learn an industry that I'm not already familiar with?

Method number five for finding startup ideas is to find a problem online and only 3% of respondents used this approach.

So this is where, instead of going to people you know, you are looking for ideas in forums, in online groups, whether it's Facebook or Reddit or private Slack groups you're in, maybe you're looking in support forums looking for problems that aren't already solved.

And this method often gets touted online, but it's really hard to do, as evidenced by the fact that only 3% of folks who responded to this survey actually used it.

It didn't show up much in our research and only a handful of respondents had used this method.

Couple examples are, Tolu Akanola, who is the founder of StreamThing.

StreamThing is a Shopify app to enable buyers to select a specific delivery date, for example, for gift purchases.

Tolu told us, someone had recently asked me to help set up a Shopify store, and I noticed they had an open API, so I decided to build a Shopify app.

I combed through the Shopify support forums to find issues that merchants were complaining about.

Once I came up with a short list, I looked in their app store to find which apps addressed the issue.

I prioritized issues that had apps with lots of reviews, but also a lot of negative reviews.

This helped identify problems that were pervasive but not well addressed.

Another example is Rami Kufash, the founder of HoverCode, which is a dynamic QR code generator.

Dynamic meaning the scan destination can be edited after printing, and you get analytics.

So Rami told us, it was a mixture of having somewhat of a hypothesis or interest and keyword research.

I found QR codes interesting generally, and after chatting with a friend who works in marketing, I started to think that marketers were still in the early stages of making use of QR codes, and there were still opportunity.

I did some keyword research with Ahrefs to see if there was demand for QR code tools and saw huge search volume, which was enough for me to get involved in the space.

What makes this work? Well, there's a bunch of things, but let's cover four.

One is you can discover problems in industries you've never worked in.

Public forums give you unfiltered access to real frustrations and complaints.

You can validate demand through search volume, number of complaints, or size of communities.

And lastly, negative reviews of existing products are a gold mine for differentiation.

But there are things you should watch out for.

The first is people complain about a lot of things they wouldn't actually pay for.

The signal to noise ratio can be low.

You lack the context that insiders have.

You might misunderstand the problem or the market dynamics.

The third one is this method takes a lot of time and patience.

Most people give up before finding anything good.

And lastly, selling to people you've never met in an industry you don't understand is genuinely hard.

Some questions to ask yourself are am I finding the same complaint repeated by many people, or is this just a one-off gripe?

Would people pay money to solve this?

Or do they want to vent?

Can I actually reach these people to sell to them?

Or are they scattered and going to be hard or expensive to find?

And am I willing to invest the time to deeply understand an unfamiliar industry before I start building?

Among our respondents, there were a couple of people who had grown nice marketplace businesses.

And if you're interested in building an add-on for an existing platform, my team has pulled together a list of over 75 marketplaces at microconf.com/marketplaces.

In addition, you can look at Reddit communities related to specific industries or professions, you can look at Facebook groups for niche professional communities, support forums for existing products where you want to look for repeated complaints, review sites like G2, Capterra, or App Store reviews, and finally keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or even Google's keyword planner.

So I have one real-world example from someone who completed the survey.

And in this example, they actually noticed something while they were out in the real world.

So Stephen Gladney is the founder of Order Nerd.

And Order Nerd aggregates third party online ordering apps like DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub, into a single platform to make it easier for restaurant owners and staff to manage.

Stephen told us, we already had our team, a sales guy and a developer, and we're actively hunting ideas.

One day, my co-founder was at a restaurant and saw a wall of tablets and began talking to the staff about it.

The pain in their voice was palpable, I laughed, because when you hear a pain point like that, it's often a good sign.

He texted me a photo and said, it might be the beer talking, but I think this is the problem we need to solve.

Given that I had previously sold to restaurants for five years, and he had over a decade of experience working with third party APIs, we knew we were the right people to tackle this problem.

Obviously, this is a unique example that might be hard to replicate, but it's a good reminder that by remaining curious and observant, you might find an idea in a place you wouldn't expect.

Method number six is to scratch your own itch, and this one was made so popular in the early and mid-2000s by Basecamp, by DHH and Jason Fried, because they scratched their own itch and it worked for them, and so they would often talk that maybe that's the best way to start a startup.

And while it's certainly not a bad way, only 16% of our respondents did this.

This is where you build something to solve your own problem, and you discover that other people have the same issue, and you can find them, and they will pay for it.

So there's a lot that has to come into play.

So there's a lot of things that have to line up in order for this to work.

You can't just say, I have a problem, therefore, that's validation.

It's not. You validated that you will have one customer paying you $0, which is yourself.

So when I think about scratching my own itch, which is, I've done, I built, Drip was originally software to scratch your own itch, and I took that idea and went and asked 17 other founders that I knew if they had the problem.

Then when I got 10 or 11 yeses, then we started building.

So if I was going to do scratch my own itch, I would want to validate that other people out there have this issue.

Examples of founders who scratched their own itch include Olga Hugheser, the founder of Dialogue Shift, which is an AI application for hotels.

It's chatbot, phone AI, email AI.

Olga told us we came up with the idea as hotel guests ourselves.

Frustrated by how difficult it was to get simple information about what, where, and when things were happening during our stay.

Our initial thought was, how great would it be to just send a WhatsApp message and instantly get answers to all our questions about the hotel?

For example, when is the next yoga class?

Till what time is breakfast served? Can you send me the daily program?

One more example is from Scott Brownley, the founder of Simple Booklet.

Simple Booklet is marketing, communication, and support collateral presentation that includes distribution and tracking across the web.

Scott told us, I had sold an earlier business in the early 2000s, then went sailing with my wife for 11 years around the world.

Getting access to information about places was difficult, and usually was in the form of paper, brochures, lookbooks, and guides.

I really just wanted to scan a QR code or get it on my tablet or phone to access.

And since every print brochure started as a PDF, how could we make that more accessible?

What makes scratching your own itch work?

Well, first of all, you understand the problem intimately because you've experienced it yourself.

You're motivated to solve it because it genuinely bothers you.

You can be your own first user, which speeds up iteration.

And your passion for the problem often comes through in marketing and sales.

But there's a few things you want to watch out for.

The first is, you might be a market of one. I referenced this earlier, just because you have this problem doesn't mean enough other people do to make a business.

The second is, you might build what you want rather than what the market wants, so stay open to feedback.

The third, your use case might be too niche or too specific to your situation.

And the fourth is, founders often underestimate how different their needs are from typical customers.

So, questions to ask yourself.

Number one, how many other people have this exact problem?

Can I find them and talk to them?

Am I a representative user or am I an edge case?

Would I pay more money to solve this problem?

Or do I just find it mildly annoying?

And lastly, can I separate my personal preferences from what the market actually needs?

Since we did all this research, I'm actually going to take a lot of it and put it in a new book I'm working on, on finding, choosing, and validating your idea, finding product market fit, and launching a profitable SaaS business.

If you want early access to chapter previews, launch updates, that kind of thing, hop on my email list, robwalling.com/emails.

Method number seven is, taking advantage of an emerging or a fast growing technology.

This is every developer's dream where AI becomes a thing or DHTML, remember Ajax and like 2006 where suddenly you could do stuff in a browser you couldn't do before.

And you see it and you think, what can I build with this?

And while it's every developer's dream to play with that new technology, it's very rare, at least according to our survey, that people actually turn these into businesses.

Only 3% of respondents went this route.

And when I say an emerging technology, this can be AI, it can be a brand new API, it can be a new platform, like when Facebook opened up for development and, you know, Squarespace, HubSpot, like all these marketplaces, Shopify.

When these open up, you can look for practical applications before the market gets crowded.

Examples of this include Ram Shengala.

He's the founder of WA Notifier, which is an all-in-one WhatsApp marketing tool for businesses.

Ram told us, I used to run a WordPress agency and setting up email marketing forms was one of the recurring things we used to do for businesses in Western countries.

With WhatsApp gaining momentum and WhatsApp marketing starting to pick up, I made an assumption that if email and email marketing is big, WhatsApp marketing can also become big.

This was especially for businesses in countries where WhatsApp was popular and a primary channel for communication like India, GCC countries, South America, etc.

And then right around 2000, when I was looking for SaaS ideas, WhatsApp opened up their gates for new API partners.

So the timing was right, and that's how I got started.

Another example is from Alex Charles, founder of GenTextAI.

GenTextAI is applied AI add-ins for Microsoft Word, expanding to other AI applications.

Alex said, I worked as a consultant and economist and used the Microsoft Office Suite heavily.

Soon as ChatGPT came out, I realized it would be extremely useful if connected to Office and if it could reduce hallucinations.

That's how the idea came about.

Then there's Tiago, the founder of PodSqueeze.

PodSqueeze is an application we actually use to help produce my podcast Startups for the Rest of Us.

It's an all-in-one solution for the production and promotion of podcasts.

So you upload audio or video, and it generates social media posts, clips, summaries, transcripts, and more.

Tiago said, I had my podcast, I got really frustrated with all the post-production work.

In other words, creating the show notes, promotional content.

Then ChatGPT had just been released.

And we thought that even if the AI transcripts made mistakes, GPT was smart enough to get that content and generate good text assets.

That's how we started.

So what makes this work?

Well, first of all, early movers can establish themselves before the market gets crowded.

New technology often creates new problems that need new solutions.

The third is you can ride the wave of attention and interest in the technology itself.

And lastly, customers are often more forgiving of rough edges when the technology is new.

But there are some things to watch out for.

Timing can be extremely difficult.

If you're too early, the technology isn't ready, or the customers aren't educated.

If you're too late, then you're one of dozens or hundreds of competitors.

The second thing is the hype cycle can mislead you.

Just because people are talking about a technology doesn't mean they'll pay for whatever you're building.

The third is the technology might not mature the way you expect, leaving you with a product built on shaky foundations.

And lastly, big players can also move fast in hot spaces, so you might get crushed by well-funded competitors.

The questions to ask yourself are, is this technology actually ready for real-world use cases, or is it still experimental?

Second one, are businesses already spending money in adjacent areas, or is this entirely speculative?

Do I have a unique angle, or insight, or am I just chasing hype?

And lastly, can I build something useful quickly before the window closes?

And my eighth and final method for finding SaaS ideas is building on an existing product.

4% of respondents told us this was their approach.

So this is where you're working on one product, and you discover a bigger or a better opportunity.

Maybe an internal tool with outside demand, or an adjacent problem that your customers keep mentioning.

This obviously wasn't a huge group, it was 4%, but we did have a number of respondents who were working on a product at various levels of success, and then in doing so, discovered a bigger opportunity.

It's worth noting these weren't necessarily pivots, but new products altogether.

So Ivana is the founder of Authored Up, which is LinkedIn content creation and analysis integrated via Chrome extension.

And Ivana told us, we were working on a startup for hiring managers and recruiters.

We had a product developed, but we were working in a vacuum, not talking to potential customers, no Mom Test.

After we almost finished the product, we wanted to get feedback and beta users.

We tried networking, sending LinkedIn DMs and pitching.

We realized we can try creating content on LinkedIn, but we couldn't find simple tools to help us out.

And that's when we built this internal tool.

Rafal, who's the founder of SupaData, which is an API that lets developers and no code makers easily extract data from websites and platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X/Twitter.

Rafal told us, it's my own itch which turned into a business.

I needed to scrape YouTube transcripts to add a feature to my other product.

Over time, I also used this scraper to build other small products.

It became de facto an API servicing multiple apps.

At some point, I decided to make a small experiment, try to monetize it on RapidAPI, and from there, it snowballed.

And lastly, we have Ruben Gomez, the founder of SignWell.

SignWell provides easy to use document signing with enterprise grade security and compliance at an affordable price.

Ruben told us, the idea came from running another business and seeing the dissatisfaction of customers with solutions in the e-signature space.

And trying ourselves to give them good options for that part of their workflow.

So what makes this approach work? The first is, you're already in the market.

You're talking to customers and you're seeing real problems.

You have momentum, skills, and sometimes revenue to fund exploration.

The third is, you might discover that a tool you built for yourself has broader demand.

And the fourth is, the new opportunity often leverages what you've already learned.

Things to watch out for include chasing shiny objects.

It's a real risk. Make sure the new idea is actually better and not just more exciting.

The second one is, splitting focus between two products can kill both of them.

Third is, you might be running from hard problems in your current product rather than toward a real opportunity.

And the fourth is, sunk cost in your current product can cloud your judgment.

So I have four questions I think you should ask yourself if you're going to take this approach.

Number one, is this new product idea genuinely bigger and better or am I just bored with what I'm working on?

Number two, can I validate this quickly without completely abandoning my current product?

Number three, do I have the resources to pursue both of these ideas or do I have to make a really hard choice?

And number four, what would have to be true for this new idea to be worth the switch?

So as a recap, here are the eight methods that the successful founders we surveyed used to find their profitable SaaS ideas.

Let me leave you with one number, 72.

That's the percent of founders who found their idea through their work, be it day job frustrations, expensive tools they knew they could build better or cheaper.

Patterns from agency clients or opportunities discovered while building something else.

72%.

That means your SaaS idea might be right under your nose.

But you need to know what to look for.

And that's why my team and I created the 9-to-5 Audit.

It's totally free. It includes even more founder examples we couldn't fit in this video.

And it walks you through thought exercises to help you discover SaaS opportunities hiding in your workday.

You can get your free copy at robwalling.com/ideas.

I hope you find it helpful.

Once you found your SaaS idea, the next step is validation.

And that's exactly what I cover in this next video.

If you found this video helpful, I'd appreciate it if you give it a like and subscribe to the channel.

Thanks to all the survey participants for helping out with this project.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.