Play indie / micro-SaaS: boring niche, recurring revenue
Builders who can ship and market. Coding is the easy half. Distribution is the boss fight.
First dollar: Often 3-18 months. Many never clear ramen. Plan for unpaid build + marketing time.
Exact steps. Ship the smallest unit of paid value before you gold-plate.
Talk to people who already spend money. Prefer boring B2B niches over consumer toys. Scrapers, compliance, reporting, recovery tools beat 'AI journal'.
Landing page + Stripe or email waitlist before a full build. If nobody clicks, you saved months.
One core job. Auth, billing, the workflow. Launch in public. Instrument usage.
SEO, directories, communities, partnerships, or content. Ads optional. No channel = no SaaS.
If you cannot reach ~1k MRR with honest effort, shelf it. Portfolio of small bets beats one sunk-cost zombie.
Not the median. These are rare winners so you can study a real decklist.
70+ launches; PhotoAI + NomadList carry the portfolio
Testimonial.to + PDF.ai after ~5 failed side projects
TypingMind (~$137K MRR), DevUtils; sells products as assets
ShipFast boilerplate + ~15 micro-SaaS
SiteGPT; dozens of free SEO tools feed the paid product
Portfolio of tiny $1-2/mo mobile apps, fully solo
Related decks if this one is working or if you need a stronger wincon.
What you do on paper: Build a small software product solving a narrow problem, charge recurring subscriptions (MRR), and grow via SEO/content/communities. Solo or tiny team. The grind is distribution and churn, not coding. Most products are abandoned before reaching ramen profitability.
Frequency: Tens of thousands of indie founders; only low thousands sustain a full-time income