Alexis Bouchez

~ / startup analyses / 99 Small Focused Software Ideas

99 Small Focused Software Ideas

Small focused software does one thing well. One screen, one purpose, one buyer. Buildable in a weekend or a month. No config screen, no onboarding flow, no settings menu with 40 toggles.

These are 99 ideas I keep coming back to, grouped by the kind of person who would actually open their wallet. Each one could be a standalone product, or a stepping stone towards a bigger thing. Pick the one that makes you laugh and build it Saturday.

2. 1. Developer tools

Devs pay for things that shave friction off the loop. Keep them tiny, keep them local, keep them keyboard first.

  1. Regex Workbench: desktop app that takes natural language and generates a regex, with live match highlighting on your test strings. Save presets per project. Menu bar.
  2. Cron Explainer: paste a cron expression, get a plain English explanation plus the next 10 fire times. Reverse mode too. One page, no accounts.
  3. curl to Code: paste a curl command, get equivalent code in fetch, Python requests, Go net/http, Rust reqwest, PHP. For the person debugging an API at 2am.
  4. .env Interviewer: CLI that reads your codebase, finds every process.env reference, and walks you through filling a .env file. Outputs .env.example too.
  5. Rebase GUI: tiny desktop app that does one thing, interactive rebase. No staging, no diff view, no commit history. Drag, squash, reword. Keyboard first.
  6. Clipboard Chef: clipboard history that auto detects code snippets, pretty prints them, and lets you fuzzy search by content. Menu bar.
  7. JSON YAML TOML Exchanger: paste one, get the other two. Add JSON Schema and it validates. One URL, no account.
  8. API Diff Viewer: two HTTP responses in, a semantic diff out. Ignores timestamps and UUIDs. Great for staging vs prod regressions.
  9. SSH Bookmarks: menu bar icon listing your saved hosts. Click to open a terminal with the right identity and jump host. Reads ~/.ssh/config.
  10. Log Tail Dashboard: point it at a folder of log files, get a live multi pane tail with filtering. No Kafka, no ELK, just local files.
  11. Container Status Bar: tiny menu bar app showing running Docker containers with start, stop, and logs shortcuts. Rancher Desktop but only the status bar.

3. 2. Writers and indie hackers

Writing tools are a crowded market. The wedge is doing one weird thing better than Notion. No database, no sharing model, no comments.

  1. Focus Writer: distraction free markdown editor with a word budget instead of a word count. Set a target for today, watch the bar fill. Saves to a folder.
  2. Git Writing Streak: points it at any folder under version control and turns your commits into a writing streak calendar. Shames you into daily writing.
  3. Changelog Committer: you edit CHANGELOG.md. On save it commits and publishes to /changelog on your site. No CMS, just a file and a cron.
  4. Blog From Folder: drop a markdown folder, get a deployed static blog. One command. Themes are a CSS file.
  5. Quote Vault: bookmarklet that saves highlighted text plus URL plus date to a plain text file or a static page. Nothing to sync, it's your file.
  6. Outline Keyboard: keyboard first outliner for blog drafts. Tab indents, Shift Tab unindents, Cmd J reorders, Cmd Enter converts to full draft.
  7. Tweet to Thread: paste a long post, get a clean thread split at natural breakpoints with character counts and preview cards.
  8. Screen Study: bookmarklet that takes a full page screenshot and uploads to your own private gallery. Design inspiration without Pinterest.
  9. Reading Log: tiny static site where each page is a book with your notes. Markdown source, one folder per book.
  10. Voice to Draft: menu bar recorder. Hit hotkey, talk, stop. A file appears in your drafts folder with a clean transcript via local Whisper.
  11. Daily Note Indexer: reads a folder of daily notes, extracts mentions of people, projects, and tags, and generates per entity pages. Zero config, plain markdown.

4. 3. SaaS creator workflow

You review SaaS; these are the tools you wish existed inside your own workflow. Eat your own cooking.

  1. Review Shot Editor: takes a product screenshot, adds a clean device frame plus your handle and a caption. One click, ready for Twitter and LinkedIn.
  2. Beehiiv to Site: syncs beehiiv posts to a folder of markdown files so your static site can render them, with no API keys in the frontend.
  3. Podcast Clip Puller: point it at a YouTube video, it finds the 3 to 5 most quotable moments via transcript scoring and exports short clips ready for Reels.
  4. Thumbnail Studio: pick a layout, drop in a product logo, write a title. Get a YouTube thumbnail tuned for SaaS reviews. Batch mode for the 20 thumbnails you make each month.
  5. Newsletter Crosspost: write once, ship to beehiiv, Substack, and your own blog with consistent OG tags. No HTML gymnastics.
  6. Submit Tracker: one CSV of every directory and launchpad with submission status. Dashboard shows what is left and when to follow up.
  7. Referral Code Factory: generate per subscriber referral codes, track signups, email the referrer on conversion. One SaaS, one page, no Drift.
  8. Feedback Wall: scrapes your Twitter mentions and your Palmframe feedback into one wall you can sort by sentiment and ship publicly as testimonials.
  9. Launch Day Kit: fills out your Product Hunt, IndieHackers, HN, and Reddit posts from one markdown file with product info.
  10. Pricing Page Comparator: paste URLs of 3 competitors, get a side by side markdown table of their tiers and features. Weekly cron flags changes.
  11. Preorder Collector: landing page with a wait list that takes a $1 Stripe hold to prove commitment. Export to CSV.

5. 4. Local first and privacy

Small apps that respect your filesystem. No sync server, no login, no telemetry. You own the bytes.

  1. Encrypted Drop: a single binary that spins up a URL where friends can upload files encrypted with your public key. No server state beyond the files.
  2. Pass Vault GUI: menu bar GUI on top of pass or age. Lists entries, copies passwords, auto clears clipboard after 20 seconds.
  3. Dotfiles Sync: small CLI wrapping Git plus GPG for syncing dotfiles across machines. Ignores the files you should not sync.
  4. Self Hosted Shortener: one binary, SQLite backend, auto generated OG image per short link, admin page is a static HTML file behind basic auth.
  5. Offline Bookmarks: no cloud. Optional Git sync. Full text search on page content, not just titles.
  6. TUI RSS Reader: CLI reader that stores read state in a local file. Keyboard navigation, one pane at a time.
  7. Menu Bar Weather: shows your local weather in the menu bar. No account, no tracking. Pulls from a free forecast API.
  8. Local Fonts Browser: scans your fonts folder and gives you a preview wall of what you own with a copy path button.
  9. Expense CLI: expense add 4.20 coffee and it lands in a dated ledger file. Monthly summary command. Export to CSV.
  10. Invoice From YAML: write invoice.yml, get a PDF. Templates in HTML and CSS. Headless Chrome on the backend.
  11. Time Ledger: track hours by project from the terminal. time start client, time stop. Weekly reports in your inbox.

6. 5. Monitoring and ops

These pay because they either save you from an outage or give you one number per day that you actually look at.

  1. Static Site Uptime: cron pings your static site every 5 minutes and emails you on failure. Single VPS, single config file.
  2. Dead Link Cron: crawls your site weekly, emails you the 404s. No dashboard, just the email.
  3. SSL Sentinel: give it your domains, get email alerts at 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before cert expiry.
  4. Domain Watcher: tracks the registered status of domains on your wish list. Pings you when one drops.
  5. SEO Page Audit CLI: seo audit https://example.com prints a scorecard in your terminal. Title, meta, headings, alt text, core web vitals.
  6. Page Weight Diff: on each deploy, stores total bytes shipped per page. Catches the day a new image blew up your JS bundle.
  7. Sitemap Sanity: checks your sitemap.xml against crawled URLs. Lists missing URLs and ghosts.
  8. Robots Lint: tiny web page, paste your robots.txt, get validation and warnings. Strong SEO referral traffic.
  9. One Metric Dashboard: pick one KPI (MRR, signups, checkout conversion) and show it huge on a full screen. No Notion, no ClickUp.
  10. Deploy Log Digest: summarizes your Vercel or Netlify deploys from the last 7 days into an email: failed deploys, bundle size regressions, slow builds.
  11. Cost Lens: small tool that reads your AWS, Vercel, and OpenAI bills and draws one monthly line chart. Alerts when you are on track to blow past a budget.

7. 6. Data and scraping

You have already shipped HAR extractors for LinkedIn and X. There is a category here.

  1. HAR to CSV Universal: not tied to one site. You provide a mapping (JSON path expressions), it outputs CSV rows from the traffic. The LinkedIn and X extractors become templates.
  2. Reddit Archive: paste a thread URL, get a clean markdown archive with OP, top comments, and media saved locally. Good for research.
  3. HN Digest Mailer: daily email with top HN posts grouped by topic and summarized. One paid tier.
  4. YouTube Transcript CLI: yt transcript <url> dumps the transcript to stdout. --summary adds a Claude TL;DR.
  5. PH Exporter: exports any Product Hunt category into CSV with launch dates, upvotes, creator handles, links. Market research gold.
  6. IH Revenue Pulse: monitors IndieHackers for revenue changes on products you follow. Weekly digest.
  7. OSS Activity Scanner: give it a GitHub org, it tracks commit velocity, open PR count, and issue velocity across all repos.
  8. Founder Lookup: paste a domain, get founder names and public profiles from public sources. No shady scraping.
  9. Tweet Archiver: point it at your own Twitter handle, get a local JSON and markdown backup of everything you posted. Weekly cron.
  10. Job Board Unifier: aggregates a handful of niche job boards into one filtered feed. Static deploy, RSS output.
  11. Static Scrape Runner: write a scraper in JavaScript, deploy as a cron on a small VPS with a dashboard showing last run status. Kind of like a tiny Apify.

8. 7. Solo CRM and outreach

Everyone hates CRMs. Solo founders just need a text file and a reminder.

  1. Markdown CRM: every contact is a .md file with YAML frontmatter. Your history with them is plain text. Search with grep. That is the app.
  2. Today Followups: reads your markdown CRM and shows the 5 people you should email today based on last contact date and tags.
  3. Cold Email Ledger: CLI that logs every email you send with outcome tags (reply, meeting, close, dead). Per template conversion rate.
  4. Reply Coach: drops into your mail client; takes the thread and a one line intent, drafts the reply in your voice.
  5. Thank You Drip: after every meeting, sends a thank you email at a delay you set. Pulls the name from your calendar event.
  6. Birthday Ping: reminds you to wish business contacts happy birthday. Reads from your contact markdown files.
  7. Intro Stream: paste two LinkedIn URLs, get a clean intro email. Explains why these people should meet.
  8. Meeting Note Template: starts a markdown note when a calendar event begins, saves it to the right folder by person and project.
  9. Event Check In: give it an attendee list for a meetup. Tap names as people arrive. Exports the "actually met" subset for followups.
  10. Deal Board: pipeline view from a single markdown file. Columns by stage, cards by deal, edit inline.
  11. 30 Day Outreach Plan: one CSV of prospects, one page per day showing who to email. Green check when done.

9. 8. AI helpers

Tools for people who already use LLMs heavily and want less friction around the parts LLMs don't do for them.

  1. Prompt Library: a Git backed directory of your prompts with tags, variables, and one click copy. Never reinvent the same prompt twice.
  2. Chat History Browser: lists your Claude and ChatGPT conversations from export files with full text search. Solves "where was that one idea".
  3. Spec Writer: a wizard that walks you through turning a fuzzy idea into a markdown spec through Q&A. Output is a README you paste to your agent.
  4. Weekly Review Agent: reads your git commits, calendar, and email for the week and drafts your weekly review. You edit and publish.
  5. LLM Cost Tracker: a local proxy that intercepts your API calls and tallies spend per model per project. Alerts at budget thresholds.
  6. Daily Journal Prompter: each morning, a new question from Claude based on yesterday's entry. Reply saves to a dated markdown file.
  7. Meeting Recorder: records a meeting locally via Whisper, saves a transcript and summary in one markdown file in the right folder.
  8. Context Pack Builder: for a Claude session, picks the 5 most relevant files from your project and bundles them with a README into a context pack.
  9. Projects Backup: exports all your Claude Projects to local markdown files weekly. Git commits them for history.
  10. Agent Dog Food Loop: runs your own product through an AI agent that pretends to be a new user every day and reports what broke.
  11. Eval Notebook: small tool to collect, dedupe, and tag examples for evals and fine tuning. One CSV output.

10. 9. Odd and niche

The weird ones. If none of the above excited you, maybe one of these will.

  1. Terminal Idle Game: a goofy idle game you leave running in a tmux pane. Ticks while you code. Great marketing vehicle for a dev tools brand.
  2. Dear Diary: CLI that opens an age encrypted text file, lets you type, saves. One command: dear. That is it.
  3. Goal Graveyard: public page listing your abandoned goals with dates and honest postmortems. A site about integrity, not accomplishment.
  4. Mood Stamp: one emoji per day. A year later, a heatmap of your mood. No social features.
  5. Pair Timer: pomodoro tool with sound cues tuned for pair programming. Each round switches driver automatically.
  6. Screenshot Gallery: watches a folder for new screenshots and turns them into a self hosted gallery with keyboard navigation.
  7. Habit Switch: one switch per habit, one day at a time. No streaks, no shame. You flip it or you don't.
  8. Quote of the Day API: hosts your own curated quotes, serves them via JSON for other sites. A widget for an about page.
  9. Monorepo Name Generator: generates package names from a theme (planets, rivers, weather) and checks npm availability.
  10. Sleep Log: type your wake time and a 1 to 5 rating. Long term chart. Nothing else.
  11. Postcard Sender: upload a photo, write a message, a real paper postcard gets printed and mailed via a paper API. One page, Stripe checkout.

11. Meta pattern

If you line all 99 of these up, the pattern is the same. Replace a feature inside a bloated SaaS with a single purpose tool. Save the user a config screen. Own the file, not the account. Make the first use happen in under 30 seconds.

The right one to build on a given Saturday is the one where you can already picture the first user's face. If you can't, skip it and pick another. There are 98 left.