I indicate, I’m an optimist, but this one was borderline surrealist. And yet, that’s exactly what occurred! My micro-SaaS product, WhatsApp Chat Button, was launched on April 24th, 2019 on the Shopify App Store. I built this product as well as Sankalp Jonna. How did we do it? I’m glad you asked!
In my previous post, I described “What is micro-SaaS?”. In this post, I’ll explain why I picked micro-SaaS. I used to be consumed because of it. It’s a social thing – you work for startups, you reside in the startup capital of India, you read startup blogs and you also discuss ideas with your friends in sociable gatherings.
So of course your mentality becomes one which is constantly seeking and evaluating potential “unicorn” startup ideas. I never paused to consider that the entire world around me is building small, local, profitable businesses around me. I began to appreciate the beauty of a business. I accepted that not everyone also, and not all the right time, does one have to aspire to build a unicorn. I could just create a business. And having never actually run a business before in my life, micro-SaaS appeared like the perfect launchpad into the world of business. Sankalp and I spent months discussing these questions before both of us bought into this idea, and believed in it, and made a decision to interact towards it therefore.
My friend Shashank operates a flourishing and highly-profitable Shopify application called PushOwl. His trip, his learning, his success trained me and influenced me and made me have confidence in Shopify as a system. He also helped me appreciate just how HUGE the e-commerce market is (have you heard about Amazon?). In 2017 Back, I tried my hand at building an online store.
Dropshipping was the 🔥 back then, and I needed in. 500/mo in income, but after multiple copyright violations (that’s what goes on when you source-common products from Aliexpress) and a lack of general understanding of how an e-commerce business is made, I shut it down. Aftwards, I took enough time to understand what makes a very important e-commerce business.
I could understand and relate with people who started out of their homes, packaging their own products and selling to a distinct segment audience, making a livelihood out of their business. I wanted to allow and support these people truly, especially considering that I’m endeavoring to do a similar thing. In the last section, I highlighted how “will there be an acquisition channel we can tap?” can be an important question.
- I can do well on any standardized test, even if I know nothing at all about the topic matter
- 8 weeks – 1-5.5 hours of lecture per week
- Competitive cleverness
- Is the name legible at that scale
- No one else is claiming an exemption for you on their 2011 tax return
- USA Today: Starting a Business: What it Takes
- Remove all the interruptions
Turns out, Shopify’s app market place is a potential answer. All these tiny reasons and more made Shopify the most apparent choice for us. In the first section, I outlined the questions that need to be responded to truly have a shot at creating a successful business. Let’s apply them to Shopify. Browsing the app store was a perfect way for us to comprehend what problems e-commerce store owners face, and value.
Shopify breaks things down by category and sub-category, giving you an extremely granular idea about the different types of problems you could solve. Additionally, you could enter keywords on the Search pub, and that could offer you more ideas about what problems to solve. I used Shopify’s search autocomplete as a heuristic for sufficient demand. After all, why would Shopify’s search team include a keyword in autocomplete if it didn’t have enough demand?
Before narrowing down, we do a very general strategy by researching the whole app store. I personally visited every single page on the Shopify application store, under every sub-category and category, which helped me in making a mental map of the ecosystem. It also gave me ideas about how to evaluate any particular idea.