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E99: Why Micro SaaS is my New Favorite B2B SaaS Strategy

by Sean Boyce

I’m borderline obsessed with the Micro-SaaS strategy for B2B.  Allow me to explain why that includes a story about how I struggled to use my refrigerators water dispenser.

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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is this new topic or strategy that I’m borderline obsessed with, that I’ve been referring to as micro SaaS. Now, if you haven’t heard this terminology before, how I describe it is not thinking of your B2B SaaS product as a fully featured application.

That can get complicated or heavy at times. It’s thinking of the most important feature in your B2B SaaS application and then turning that into the application itself. Let me explain a little bit more. So, in my opinion and in what I’ve observed out in the wild. Software just gets way too complicated, usually way too fast before you know it.

I see a lot of software out there turn into basically Salesforce, if you’ve ever used Salesforce before or experienced it, you know what I mean? They have so much going on. It’s hard to tell anymore what Salesforce does or doesn’t do because it seems to me that they have something for everything, in my opinion.

If you have, if trying to beat all things to all people, you’re nothing to. And what I mean by that is it becomes so overwhelming for people to figure out what it is your software does that they get frustrated or quit, they become overwhelmed and they really just don’t have the they, they don’t have the ability to kind of continually figure that out, so they give up.

So that’s why, I mean, it ends up becoming nothing for anyone because a lot of people quit. So that. Has become ever more present in the B2B SaaS world as well, too. As products evolve, software becomes more mature, features become more intense and overwhelming, and I think that is a risk to the success of B2B SaaS companies at scale.

So what I’ve dove deep into in recent weeks and months, and in fact at the moment, I’m actually building multiple micro SaaS products, which has. Really exciting and I wanna share those details with you moving forward as I continue to record these episodes so that you can learn from what it is I’ve been doing, what is working, what isn’t working.

I could share those strategies with you and you can incorporate them into whatever process you may be investing in at the moment. Perhaps it’s a product of your own that you’d like to build or are currently building, or maybe you’re even working at a company with a more complicated piece of software.

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Regardless of which of those buckets you may fall. This is a strategy I feel like has benefit for everyone cuz I’ve been in all those positions myself. Right now I’m building Micros applications, but I’ve worked on heavy, complicated, big software product teams. In fact, I consult to them still now and the strategies that I’m learning and I’m deploying.

Using this concept of micros would help even the most complicated software products. Because the, the universal philosophy that I’ve adopted and I continue to pursue and push the boundaries of is software can never be too simple. You can’t make software too simple if you continuously work to make your software simpler, but effective.

I often experience some of the, some of the best experiences that I have with software are the simplest but most effective pieces.  because again, I feel like too many people are trying to do too many things with their software, and before you know it, you lose people. , there’s an interesting story I’ll share with you,

So my wife and I just moved into a new apartment, essentially in Philly and in it we, a new refrigerator came with the unit. Great, right? So w. Simultaneously, we’re both trying to figure out how the water dispenser on the refrigerator works , and you’d think because of how many years I’ve spent in usability that things like this would just be intuitive for me at this point, but you’d be wrong  trying to use this thing.

We both got it wrong and she’s much brighter than I am. She is a PhD, so it’s the obvious when you approach the fridge, what’s obvious is that there’s one lever and if you put the a glass against that, It dispenses ice. So if you’re not expecting ice and you’re expecting water, it’s sprays ice everywhere,

So I think we’ve all had kind of that experience, but the, the trick that came into play was like there’s a touch screen on the fridge, for example, and I am on there and I’m looking for like, how do I switch this to water? Because that’s the ingrained experience. That’s what I’m used to with these products.

But there isn’t an option for that. Why? Because there’s a second dispenser. Or second lever that dispenses water. They’ve separated the water dispenser and the ice dispenser  levers in terms of where you press the glass against. And the water one is like almost camouflaged, like it’s like built in to the extent where you almost don’t notice it, but what you can notice is the ice dispenser lever

So I simultaneously made the mistake myself and then witnessed her do the same and then had to explain it for her. So anyway, my point is like something simple like. , it causes tons of usability issues if it’s not intuitive or you’ve made it overly complicated, and I see this with software all the time.

So anyway, I encourage you to do a little bit of digging on micro SaaS. I’m gonna be creating a lot more content around it, and I’m hoping it’s gonna help you be more successful in B2B SaaS.