28+ Most Profitable Micro-SaaS Business Ideas For 2023 [With Examples]

If you're reading this, you likely want to start a SaaS, or learn what it takes.

But... building a SaaS can be daunting (and expensive).

Which is why in recent years, a new trend has emerged: the micro SaaS.

But... what exactly is a micro saas?

Micro SaaS businesses are tiny but powerful tools that do just one thing (or a few things) well for a very specific group of users, with minimal startup costs.

The main indicators that make up a micro-saas:

1. it is a software product that does one thing
   
2. It solves a very specific pain point for a very niche audience
   
3. It solves this problem with minimal features
4. It involves minimal costs, team, and outside funding.

I found 52 of the most successful micro-SaaS businesses in the world.

And oh boy, some of these are making CRAZY money.

I’ve gotten tons of data, like:

• How many hours did they spend on building the product?
• How long did it take them to go from idea to money?
• How do tech founders successfully find customers for these products?

And much more.

This is a goldmine of the most profitable, simple software tools on the internet.

Here they are:

1. Analyzify - ($144K/year)

Erman Kuplu started Analyzify, in 2020.

DataPack, the founder's productized offer for data-analytics-related projects, had received too many requests from Shopify stores. So they decided to create a standalone product for the Shopify market.

What does the tool do?: Data tracking app for Shopify merchants
How much money it makes?: $144K/year
How long did it take to build?: 210 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Mixpanel ($96M/year)

2. Mailman - ($360K/year)

Mohit Mamoria started Mailman, in 2020.

This founder has built 25+ side projects. Most of them failed but a few brought in some revenue. After failing small and big over two dozen times, he had one product that investors wanted to invest money in, and after five years of growing it, sold it, and took some time off from making stuff. He started advising and investing in startups, especially crypto startups.

To find time from all the chaos happening in his inbox, he wrote a small script that would make sure that emails landed in his inbox only every four hours, in batches. Nothing comes in between. He used this script to find time to find good ideas that he could be building next.

That’s when he saw a tweet from Andrew Wilkinson (Dribble owner), and he immediately emailed him with the script and a video tutorial. His reply was, “What if we make this into a business?”

What does the tool do?: Gmail tool that allows you to decide when and what emails should land in your inbox
How much money it makes?: $360K/year
How long did it take to build?: 90 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: ZenDesk ($1.3B/year)

Want access to the full report, with all the data?

We documented 58+ micro-saas businesses into a spreadsheet, so you can search, sort, and filter by:

• Industry
• How they built their product
• Pricing strategies
• Main acquisition channels
• and much more...

Join Starter Story to get access to all the data

4. Tweet Hunter - ($2.64M/year)

Tom Jacquesson started Tweet Hunter, in 2021.

These two founders worked on launching a product every month. And every time, the tech co-founder brought in a few early sales because he had a small but high-quality audience on Twitter. The marketing founder tried too, but failed.

At the time, they had built up a database containing thousands of tweets that they were using for another product. So he thought he could maybe use the best-performing content as inspiration for his own tweets.

The tech co-founder made a very quick prototype, and… it worked! Writing became better and quicker, and he achieved a higher engagement.

That was the first version of Tweet Hunter: a searchable library of high-performing tweets.

What does the tool do?: Twitter tool focused on helping users build and monetize their audiences.
How much money it makes?: $2.64M/year
How long did it take to build?: 7 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: HootSuite ($150M/year)

5. SiteGPT - ($180K/year)

Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu started SiteGPT, in 2023.

In March of this year, Twitter got filled with a lot of AI content. So they founder started to wonder if there was any way he could make use of AI to help customers of his previous product. That’s when he thought – every one of his customers has a blog, so why not add a way for people to chat with those blogs? That’s how everything started.

His other product was doing relatively well at that time (around $4k MRR). But as he started working on this feature, he realized that the potential for this was so huge, that there wasn't any reason to limit it to his current customers. Anyone who has a website could make use of this. That’s when he decided to launch this feature as an entirely different product.

What does the tool do?: AI tool to create and train web chatbots.
How much money it makes?: $180K/year
How long did it take to build?: 15 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: OpenAI ($1B/year)

6. SuperLemon - ($348K/year)

Preetam Nath started SuperLemon, in 2019.

After 2 failed startups, the founders set their sights on working on something people want and are ready to pay for. Their priority even before they had decided on the idea for the product was to find an audience, a group of people who faced a problem, and who currently pay for a software tool to solve their problem. App marketplaces were a way to mitigate some of this risk.

They had some prior experience with building a Shopify store, and also had a friend who built a $20k/mo Shopify app without any employees.

To find problems worth solving, they browsed the entire Shopify app store, which at the time had 3,000+ apps. Going through every single app, jotting down interesting ones, especially ones that had poor reviews indicating that they could do a better job at solving the same problem, and picked 5 out of the 100s of those ideas they identified, based on their goals and constraints:

• An existing problem that people were already paying for
• Existing apps weren’t doing the best possible job at solving customer’s needs
• The app had the potential to grow to at least $3k in MRR, which after costs would allow the founders to live comfortably in Bengaluru

What does the tool do?: Plugin for Shopify eCommerce stores to chat with their customers and also send order-related notifications via WhatsApp
How much money it makes?: $348K/year
How long did it take to build?: 30 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Intercom ($250M/year)

7. Taplio - ($1.08M/year)

Tibo Louis-Lucas started Taplio, in 2022.

Since these are the same founders who built Tweet Hunter, they thought they could replicate their Twitter success on Linkedin. Instead of growing their initial product, they decided to create a different and copy-paste their whole previous strategy.

What does the tool do?: Linkedin content generation and scheduling tool
How much money it makes?: $1.08M/year
How long did it take to build?: 14 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Sprout Social ($359M/year)

8. Widebundle - ($480K/year)

Mat De Sousa started Widebundle, in 2020.

He used Shopify Facebook Groups and communities to read people’s problems and questions, add comments, and start conversations. It’s a long job that only a few people want to do, but it works.

At some point, Matt found 3 people who wanted the same thing but it didn’t exist in the Shopify App Store. They wanted features from a bundled app that didn’t exist. And if 3 people want it, maybe there are more.

What does the tool do?: Shopify app that helps merchants create bundles and offers
How much money it makes?: $480K/year
How long did it take to build?: 14 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Ecwid ($11M/year)

9. Buttondown - ($180K/year)

Justin Duke started Buttondown, in 2016.

Justin built Buttondown to scratch his own itch — all of the other email tools he tried were either super-heavy (like Mailchimp or ConvertKit) or wanted to own his entire blogging presence like Medium or Substack. There wasn’t anything that just let him drop in a <form> tag into a blog and automatically send out emails, so he decided to build something just like that on a hunch that other people shared his use case.

What does the tool do?: A simple newsletter software
How much money it makes?: $180K/year
Who's the larger player in the space?: Mailchimp ($800M/year)

10. Leave Me Alone - ($120K/year)

Danielle Johnson started Leave Me Alone, in 2018.

These founders also run a web development agency. Leave Me Alone was born because they took their own advice and stuck to solving their own problems. Both were spending a lot of time sorting through emails, so they went searching for a service that would help them find and unsubscribe from the unwanted ones.

Found a few that would help for free, but a closer look revealed that they didn’t charge because they were selling all of their user's data for marketing. Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of their email data being exploited, they decided to build their own solution.

What does the tool do?: A service to easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails.
How much money it makes?: $120K/year
How long did it take to build?: 7 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Spark ($2M/year)

11. Carrd - ($1.2M/year)

AJ started Carrd, in 2016.

AJ got the idea for Carrd out of a desire to branch out from his routine work of designing and coding website templates. This routine work had become too easy and almost monotonous, prompting him to seek a new challenge that would leverage his extensive skills in a fresh way.

He realized that while he was looking for something different to do, he still wanted to stay close to his core expertise in web design and development. He wanted to build for a simple idea that could serve a broad audience.

This drive to innovate within his domain, coupled with his recognition of users' desires for simplicity and efficiency in web building tools, spurred him to develop Carrd.

What does the tool do?: Single-page responsive site builder.
How much money it makes?: $1.2M/year
How long did it take to build?: 180 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: WordPress ($1.5B/year)

12. Gumroad - ($21.2M/year)

Sahil Lavingia started Gumroad, in 2011.

Sahil loves building stuff. He really enjoyed the process of taking a problem coming up with a solution, and then shipping a prototype of that solution to see how good his concept was. Before finishing college he had already shipped a dozen products. Most of the time, they weren't that great.

But sometimes something works out really well, and then he has to decide if he actually wants to work on the idea some more. Very rarely, the answer is yes. That was the case with Gumroad. The question at its core was really compelling to him: How easy could one make it to sell something?

What does the tool do?: Super-simple e-commerce tool for digital content creators.
How much money it makes?: $21.2M/year
How long did it take to build?: 2 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Etsy ($2.6B/year)

13. Tally Forms - ($840K/year)

Marie Martens started Tally Forms, in 2019.

The founders were working on a previous startup, which aimed at help hotels to connect with travel influencers, but then COVID hit and travel stopped abruptly.

That's when they decided to work on Tally, another idea they had in the backlog.

Why Tally? As makers and frequent form users, they were unsatisfied with the existing tools out there. They either force you in a specific format or bombard you with countless limits and paywalls.

They wanted a simple, yet powerful form builder that allows you to create any type of form without breaking the bank. They set off building Tally—a new type of form builder for makers and no-coders.

What does the tool do?: Simple form builder for makers and no-coders
How much money it makes?: $840K/year
How long did it take to build?: 60 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Typeform ($75M/year)

14. Plausible Analytics - ($1.2M/year)

Marko Saric started Plausible Analytics, in 2019.

Both founders had similar experiences with Google and its products. They went from big fans, using several of their tools for many hours every day, loving them and recommending them to my family and friends, to becoming more aware of Google’s size, its business model, and how their dominance negatively impacts the web.

What does the tool do?: Easy to use and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.
How much money it makes?: $1.2M/year
How long did it take to build?: 180 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Google Analytics

15. Kiwi Sizing - ($432K/year)

Samping Chuang started Kiwi Sizing, in 2018.

The founder of Kiwi Sizing used to run a dropshipping store that sold dog clothing and pet accessories, but he always struggled with setting up size charts for the pet products.

He faced two main issues when it came to sizing: each product had different sizing, and the vendor only provided sizing in centimeters.

As a result, he had to manually convert each number from centimeters to inches using Google search, which was a time-consuming process. At the time, there were two size chart apps available on the Shopify app store, but neither of them offered unit conversion features.

This meant that he had to waste hours adding up to 20-30 new merchandise each week. The business started because the founder, being an engineer, was highly motivated to create a tool that could help him automate this tedious process.

What does the tool do?: Fit recommender and size chart Shopify plugin
How much money it makes?: $432K/year
How long did it take to build?: 365 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Monki ($50m/year)

16. Client Portal - ($132K/year)

Laura Elizabeth started Client Portal, in 2016.

The founder worked previously as a freelancer. She faced difficulties in finding a suitable platform to manage her clients' project assets. Despite trying different project management tools, the quality of these tools proved to be subpar, which led to her using email as the primary mode of communication.

Determined to find a better solution, she decided to create her own platform. She developed a page on her website that allowed clients to log in and access all the project assets that had been collected. She shared her experience with others about the portal and how it had helped her manage customer projects. After receiving a lot of encouragement from her peers, she eventually decided to sell it.

What does the tool do?: A lightweight project management tool for WordPress.
How much money it makes?: $132K/year
Who's the larger player in the space?: Copilot ($11.6M/year)

17. GMass, Inc. - ($5.4M/year)

Ajay Goel started GMass, Inc., in 2015.

During his previous business venture, Wordzen, the founder recognized the necessity of sending personalized emails to small groups. After researching available options, he was not satisfied with the solutions offered. Therefore, he developed GMass as an internal tool to aid in managing his business. Although Wordzen failed to gain much traction, GMass proved to be successful and was featured on Product Hunt, giving him the validation that he needed to make the decision to pursue this as a business.

What does the tool do?: A platform to send cold emails and email marketing campaigns with Gmail.
How much money it makes?: $5.4M/year
How long did it take to build?: 14 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Hubspot ($2B/year)

Want access to the full report, with all the data?

We documented 58+ micro-saas businesses into a spreadsheet, so you can search, sort, and filter by:

• Industry
• How they built their product
• Pricing strategies
• Main acquisition channels
• and much more...

Join Starter Story to get access to all the data

19. Upvoty - ($240K/year)

Mike Slaats started Upvoty, in 2019.

With a background in building online businesses, the founder needed a customer feedback solution for his own business.

The founder did not find any suitable tools for his SaaS platform, so he decided to build Upvoty on the side to “scratch his own itch.”

What does the tool do?: A web app for collecting and managing product feedback.
How much money it makes?: $240K/year
How long did it take to build?: 60 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Survey Monkey ($218.8M/year)

20. ReferralHero - ($216K/year)

Manuel Frigerio started ReferralHero, in 2018.

He was working for a startup in the event analytics space. A customer suggested a feature for attracting more attendees to events. The idea was to allow people to jump higher in the queue by inviting (or referring) more people to the event.

Several months later, remembered the idea and decided to build an MVP referral program as a widget instead of a web application.

What does the tool do?: referral marketing software
How much money it makes?: $216K/year
How long did it take to build?: 365 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Referral Factory ($1.1M/year)

21. Rootd - ($1M/year)

Ania Wysocka started Rootd, in 2019.

The initial idea for the app came from personal experiences with panic attacks and trying to find a mobile app to help (but found nothing to directly help).

Did extensive research on techniques and strategies to manage and overcome panic attacks.

Took her graphic design skills, and a new-found understanding of panic attacks, and got to work creating a resource tailored toward her demographic.

What does the tool do?: A mobile app that helps people manage their panic attacks.
How much money it makes?: $1M/year
How long did it take to build?: 90 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Calm ($355M/year)

22. CASTANET - ($732K/year)

Mac Martine started CASTANET, in 2018.

Started reaching out to people he knew who either owned a business or had higher-up positions in a business in order to brainstorm business ideas. A consistent theme that came up was lead generation. There's always a big demand for good leads and salespeople are willing to pay.

What does the tool do?: A LinkedIn outreach automation tool.
How much money it makes?: $732K/year
How long did it take to build?: 120 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($1B/year)

23. CraftMyPDF - ($180K/year)

Jacky Tan started CraftMyPDF, in 2020.

He took on some freelance work that required generating PDFs during the pandemic. While there were various online services available for this task, he found that none of them offered a user-friendly template editor. As a result, he decided to develop my PDF generation services with a template editor.

What does the tool do?: They offer API-based products which allow businesses to generate PDF documents and images from reusable templates.
How much money it makes?: $180K/year
How long did it take to build?: 90 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Adobe ($15B/year)

24. Prerender.io - ($2.64M/year)

Todd Hooper started Prerender.io, in 2013.

Todd Hooper, a software engineer, came up with the idea for Prerender.io after experiencing the problem of JavaScript websites not showing up on Google. Worked on this on the side until the monthly profit was close enough to quit his day job and have Prerender.io become a full-time thing.

Came up with the idea when he kept running into the problem where the projects he was building were not showing up on Google.

What does the tool do?: Allows search engines to crawl SEO-friendly versions of React, Angular, and Javascript websites
How much money it makes?: $2.64M/year
How long did it take to build?: 30 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Screaming Frog ($7.2M/year)

25. Merch Wizard - ($120K/year)

Rick Blyth started Merch Wizard, in 2018.

After working for 20 years as a developer, Rick realized he wasn’t fulfilled by his career and decided to try making passive income on Amazon.

Learned about Merch by Amazon – a place for sellers to list their Print on Demand Products (e.g. speciality designed mugs, hats, stickers, apparel, etc.) across Amazon Marketplaces.

The user interface for Merch by Amazon was clunky, frustrating to use, and time-consuming.

Rick decided to use his software development skills to create Chrome extensions to help frustrated sellers. Specifically aiming to help sellers manage their portfolio of products and designs across the marketplace.

What does the tool do?: Helps sellers on Merch by Amazon create a database of their products with Airtable
How much money it makes?: $120K/year
How long did it take to build?: 90 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Twilio ($3.8B/year)

26. FormCraft - ($160K/year)

Nishant Agrawal started FormCraft, in 2013.

As he was learning and practicing coding, he stumbled upon CodeCanyon.net and decided to explore the form builders available on their marketplace. To his surprise, he found a form builder plugin with an outdated interface that was selling quite well. He thought to himself that he could create something better, so he began working on his own project.

What does the tool do?: A premium WordPress form builder
How much money it makes?: $160K/year
How long did it take to build?: 180 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Typeform ($75M/year)

27. WP Courseware - ($288K/year)

Ben Arellano started WP Courseware, in 2012.

Back in 2011, the founders started creating an online course when they realized that there was no learning management system (LMS) plugin available for WordPress.

Despite this obstacle, they went ahead and launched the course anyway, using tags and categories within WordPress to make it appear legitimate.

It became apparent that they had stumbled upon an opportunity to create something bigger and better.

Without much thought and zero validation, they decided to take the plunge and launch an LMS plugin business for WordPress.

What does the tool do?: Learning Management System Plugin for WordPress
How much money it makes?: $288K/year
How long did it take to build?: 120 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Teachable ($26M/year)

28. GoFullPage - ($120K/year)

Peter Coles started GoFullPage, in 2012.

The founder was tasked with creating and printing a poster for an upcoming event. However, he had designed it as a webpage and soon realized that webpages do not always translate well to physical prints.

In an effort to find a solution, he searched the Chrome web store for an extension that would take a full-page screenshot. Unfortunately, all the extensions he tried failed to properly stitch the various sections of the page together. So, he decided to take matters into his own hands and developed his own Chrome extension to properly screenshot entire web pages.

What does the tool do?: Full page screen capture Chrome extension
How much money it makes?: $120K/year
How long did it take to build?: 7 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Evernote/Skitch ($50M/year)

29. Excelformulabot - ($276K/year)

David Bressler started Excelformulabot, in 2022.

In May 2020, the founder began exploring the field of AI, having noticed its growing popularity. He created a few Excel formulas using the OpenAI platform and received an 85% accuracy score from the feedback.

With his background in analytics and expertise in Excel, he knew he could refine the model's output and develop a highly precise AI model. Later that day, he searched Google for an AI-based Excel formula generator, but fortunately, found none. It was at that moment he realized he had something truly exceptional.

What does the tool do?: Generates text instructions into Excel formulas within seconds with the help of AI
How much money it makes?: $276K/year
How long did it take to build?: 360 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: OpenAI ($1B/year)

30. Gorilla ROI - ($500K/year)

Jae Jun started Gorilla ROI, in 2018.

Jae and his wife started an Amazon business, but they soon faced the challenge of losing money due to their reactive approach towards issues. They found themselves running out of stock because of poor inventory forecasting decisions, incorrect product mixes, and overpaying fees. Additionally, a lot of their data analytics was manual, resulting in a waste of 1-2 hours just to collect data.

To tackle this problem, they created Gorilla ROI, which automates data collection into Google Sheets. Their mission was to simplify the process of getting disorganized data into spreadsheets in a clean and organized way.

What does the tool do?: Google Sheets add-on that connects Amazon Seller Central to Google Sheets
How much money it makes?: $500K/year
How long did it take to build?: 180 days
Who's the larger player in the space?: Zapier ($140M/year)

Want access to the full report, with all the data?

We documented 58+ micro-saas businesses into a spreadsheet, so you can search, sort, and filter by:

• Industry
• How they built their product
• Pricing strategies
• Main acquisition channels
• and much more...

Join Starter Story to get access to all the data

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story

Join Starter Story

See exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue

• 4,818 founder case studies
• Access to our founder directory
• Live events, courses and recordings
• 8,628 business ideas
• $1M in software savings

Join Starter Story