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E101: Defining Micro SaaS

by Sean Boyce

Micro SaaS is my favorite design pattern.  I want to talk about why it’s so powerful by first defining it for you.

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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is defining what micro sass is. So in a few episodes ago, I talked to you about why micro SaaS is one of my new favorite strategies, and I’m working on building multiple micro sass businesses simultaneously at the moment. And I’m gonna continue to keep you posted as I’m building.

Because I’m putting a process together that I want you to be able to follow as well to achieve success building B2B SaaS using this micro SaaS essentially design pattern, right where your SAS is gonna fit into this mold. But first question is, what is the mold? How do you define micro saas? Well, there’s some other content on the web out there about this topic, but I don’t love it.

So I’m gonna work on my own version and hopefully that is easy for you to understand. If you have any questions about that, of course you can always reach out to me. To me, what Micros is, is looking at a, and I’m gonna compare it to what most people are typically doing today with SaaS, in that they’re building more complicated, fully featured software applications available over mobile or the web or whatever.

But it’s a typical software as a service, and B2B is a real common one. So that’s, Now. There’s a lot of problems with that though, and that’s why I think micro SaaS is so exciting because it simplifies everything. If you simplify everything, you can speed everything up. And in today’s world where everything moves at light speed, especially with what we’ve seen from the world of AI now, and open AI and chat G P T and all these developments coming out and all the other bigger players getting involved, that process I feel is only going to accelerate.

I want you to be able to be more agile in responding to the changes in the market. That way you can get out ahead of the competition. That can give you a leg up when you’re competing against some of these larger companies, these other startups that have a ton of funding and a lot of resources. The one thing that you will always have over them if you are a smaller, more agile organization, is that flexibility, the ability to respond.

You’re going to be able to be faster than them. There’s a simple analogy there. It’s like a tugboat versus a cruise ship, right? Which one can turn faster? Well, the tugboat can turn on a dime, and that’s what’s gonna give you the advantage. Now we need to lean into those advantages, uh, because trying to compete against a, a cruise ship in pretty much every other category, it’s gonna be really difficult to say the least.

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But let me get back to my original point in defining what micro SAS is, how I see it. It’s comparing those typical B2B SaaS products and businesses against. A much simpler version of that. So what do I mean by that? I mean, in a typical B2B SaaS product, you have a whole multitude of features and workflows and all kinds of things being managed in there.

The micro SaaS variation of that is to take the key feature out of an application like that and turn that into the application. So that’s how I define micro saas. Micro SAS is built around one feature or one work.  and from the perspective of your customer, your user, your buyer, whomever, right? Whatever problem you’re solving for them, you offer one solution and that is your entire application, right?

You can. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t have other things like authentication and billing and all that kind of stuff. You still have those, right? But I’m not considering those core pieces of unique functionality that doesn’t really go into your value proposition. So your unique value pro. Is focused around this one key feature or this one key workflow that you’re helping your customer or your user with.

That’s micro saas. And if you’re going beyond that, you’re not leveraging the strategy correctly. And I can’t tell you that despite how direct I’m being about what this is and what it isn’t, people still are going way beyond that. It’s like, well, what if we had this or what if we had that? Wouldn’t it be nice to have this as well?

You. , you are taking away all of the advantages of this model and this design pattern. And I’ll tell you, in most of those instances, people are thinking about it in those terms for relatively obvious reasons, because we are natural innovators, right? We want to provide and add as much value as possible.

The problem is you’ve probably yet to validate even the key feature. As such, you need to focus on keeping your experiment really.  because if you’re adding to that, it’s gonna make it more difficult to validate. It’s gonna convolute the user experience. It’s gonna, again, you’re getting in the direction of the cruise ship again, and that’s not where we compete, right?

We compete on a much smaller level because we’re faster, more flexible, more agile. So don’t give away your competitive advantage. Leverage the Micros design pattern in order to succeed in B2B SaaS.