4 microSaaS ideas you can build to make $100k/month

sorry good to have you you're a a fountain of startup ideas and I need I you got some you told me you have some ideas is that right a lot of ideas um where do you want to start let's see I think the ideas that I have are combination of things I would pay for and I know a lot of people would pay for things that I think basically reflect everything that I've learned about building Sublime so I'm just going like I could do like startup ideas on easy mode for you because I've done a

lot of things on hard mode um and then I generally like my general sense of where startup ideas are today is like you have to be as close or as far as possible from AI so I think I've got a lot of ideas that are like in the heart of it and a lot of ideas that are overlooked because they're just like so far um from AI but we could start with the one thing that I was thinking about last night that I would pay for in a heartbeat okay let's start there okay so the

gist of it [Music] is franchise for parental controls so hear me out so I've got three kids ages three seven and nine the two older ones have iPads have had iPads since Co companies like Apple make it so hard to control like I I think I have set up like Band YouTube shorts or you know all these things so many times and these kids continue to outsmart me I think of myself as pretty tech savvy but I can't figure this out like these interfaces are like an airplane cockpit of features they're really hard to figure

out and I think that a couple things like one is like screen time is not good or bad it depends on what's on the screen but parents can't [ __ ] control what's on the screen so so I think people are willing to pay for somebody to come into my house like a physical person that asks me what my preferences are and like resets basically like our family screen Dynamic ideally the kids are there it's like hey here are the rules and like you cannot use YouTube shorts or this or that and it depends like

some families will be different but I think the business is you essentially like have one person create a ton of educational content and then license a bunch of people to do stuff and I don't know I think parents have like very little like they're very price elastic when it comes to this stuff because you're basically paying for peace of mind and would you pay is it like a one-time fee or is there a subscription element to it I I think that I think there would be like a one-time setup fee but I think where the

business could be interesting and recurring is there's like as kids get older there's things like you know they need like a green light is like a credit card or like Circle to track where they are things like that so you could become an affiliate these licensed people could become an affiliate and like recommend stuff or like hey you know like maybe your kid is like really into this thing so like like they should have this app so I think there could be some recurrence and definitely like affiliate Revenue but I think that the idea of

like a reset like a family reset people would pay like $2,000 for I think if I was starting this idea I would call it doctorscreen time.com and I would actually start by building like the media business so basically start by creating content just all around screen time [Music] and you know your first goal is like how do I get to 100,000 followers of parents who uh are looking for to consume content to basically curb screen time or just make uh you know time well spent with respect screen totally like I don't know if you are

familiar with Dr Becky a good inside she's built a huge business started off as a media business yeah can you can you like I don't think everyone knows about her so Dr Becky is just this like incredibly uh influential parent that built a media business and now has a an app that people pay I like a lot of money for and it has like I think tens of thousands of paying customers but it like you said it started off as a as a media business but I think there's not like she goes broad it's recurring

isn't it it's recurring it's a subscription business it's recurring but I actually think like that's the typical like software business where it's like a media company and then you know you build like a Content app of content content to Commerce content to Commerce like Playbook but I genuinely think so I am a big fan of um I don't know if you know the Zumba Fitness business so the founder of Zumba actually I don't know anything about the business I just know Z the founder is one of my closest friends like build a business in my

Miami the idea was born in a Shabbat dinner that I was part of um but I love the business because essentially what they did is like it's a very Capital light business they have I think 15,000 Fitness instructors these days that pay a monthly fee to get music and like choreographies and to be a part of the brand and so I think that like there's like a physical presence to that that I think is like really cool relative to just like I I just can't like like see more Becky from good inside content anymore like

I'm not going to pay for the app I already have enough um so I just feel like there's an opportunity to like to have like a business in a box type of thing where you like arm these like screen time polices or whatever uh doctors and just like I don't know like it's a it's a great like side hustle income totally quick break in the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out

their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out

the link to Startup empire.co in the description so I actually think there's a huge Trend around business in a box companies so um we're sitting here in Miami all everything that everyone sees here like with the mics and the cameras and our whole setup that was actually there's a company that sent us all this stuff so you can rent all your podcasting stuff in a box they send you a box you pick it up at FedEx but what was missing in my opinion is um do we do we want to name drop the the name

of the company lens rentals is the company it's like a podcast business in a box yeah but if I was running lens rentals I would have upsold for sending like a doc a podcast doctor to come and actually set up everything make sure all the levels are correct make sure the shot is the frame is there like that's what was what was missing and if I was lens rentals I wouldn't be called lens rentals I would be called podcas inab box.com which by the way the domain is available amazing yeah in fact we should probably

just buy that domain I mean I think there like it's it's a it's so genius to abstract away the complexity of starting anything like bundle a bunch of things together narrow the choices and like just present them to you uh I have another actually business in a box idea that I I'm not the right person to do this but what like the question that I've been asking myself is what becomes scarce in an AI world and I think what becomes scarce is like people doing stuff with their hands like this we have a generation of

people that grew up scrolling they and like the the tactile Joy of like making something physical I think is going to come back and there's a business in New York that I went to about a year ago it's called happy medium and essentially it's this like Art Cafe where basically like they it's a super cool brand they partner with Brands like glossier and like to do brand activations but essentially like they uh have like Pottery um you know like like uh figure drawing like painting all sorts of like crafty things their tagline is amazing I

think it's something like be brave enough to be terrible so so it like tries to appeal to not like you to the amateurs really but the problem is is it's not scalable it's like it's a business that has real estate and they've they have one location I think they're Venture backed but I think that this I like you could do this like a business in a box where you essentially partner with with local artists Etsy sellers whatever arm them with the supplies the educational um stuff like even like I don't know you could probably like

do it at like restaurants during off hours or like homes or whatever but like I think you could build an modern cool consumer brand around like people doing stuff with their hands if you look at the space there's like Michaels and like a like even just like Color Me mind is I think the like brick and mortar like they're all dated and boring and I just think that the status symbol in an AI AG is like you know it's just going to be like I disconnected from the information flow and I like did something with

my hands 100% I also think that there's probably there's probably a business that you can create like a status business whereas like I've been off my phone for seven days and I get this badge and I can like you know there's Al there's something there also like offline is the new luxury and what do you do with that exactly yeah but I yeah I just really feel like and even like and like thinking about doing stuff with your hands like if you think about the Industrial Revolution what that did is like it automated a lot

of physical labor but what AI is doing is it's automating a lot of White Collar jobs and so I think a lot of like trade jobs where there used to be a lot of stigma around like you don't want to do trade jobs it's not perceived as like a status job it's actually going to be the opposite like plumbers electricians like these people are making a lot more money and their jobs are a lot more safe than you know your average like Junior copywriter working at an agency in New York City totally so I just

I I don't know I feel like we're just on the cusp of this like you know like the the the status like what is like has status is changing and like doing things with your hands like doing things away from your computer that has status and and so I like I think the craft thing is like a Leisure thing but I really do think and I see that like at certainly in Miami people like it's so hard to find like Tradesmen it's so expensive construction cost are through the roof and I always think about uh

whether you could apply the business model of Lambda school if you like remember where it's like zero tuition you know like train these train these people but then you make a cut of like their revenue once you find them a job like what have you build like a modern brand around like Tradesmen but like I don't know just like Elevate the status of it because there's like real money in these jobs and there's a huge shortage most of the people in these trade stops are actually retiring in a couple years it's a huge problem actually

so basically is the idea lamb the school for trades people I think so I think there's like an opportunity to be like choose a vertical whether it's like painting Landscaping Plumbing electricians like I don't know like woodworking whatever train these people find them jobs and then get a cut of like their income um but I think like the like you have to build a compelling brand that elevates the status of these things I think if I was going to do that idea which by the way is a big idea in a good way uh I

think that Not only would I want to train these trades people but I'd want to arm them with here's how to get customers so basically what I would do would be like okay you're now trained to be a uh you know call it an electrician and I'm going to I'm going to do all the Facebook ads for you I'm going to create the website for you and then you take a cut for that and then you take a cut for the training that's where I think a lot of the yeah I mean these businesses operate

like fax machines like 1985 type stuff so I think there's a lot of vertical SAS but like you said it's a huge idea if I was just getting started I would literally find somebody to license these people find like companies that are actually hiring instead of like them doing this like freelance to start um but it's a Hu I think it's a huge idea and I also think it's like one that like tech people don't touch this stuff but I think a lot of the ideas that I have that are more like in the heart

of tech like they're just going to be less valuable when an AI can do that yeah I mean I honestly think that's the biggest question I'm wrestling with is just in an if AGI happens which you have to assume it will uh what becomes a commodity and what becomes scarce yeah somebody said posted on Twitter lesson like what happens like what you know how do people choose one soft or the other in a world where like AI can do absolutely everything and I don't know my my take on it is my answer was like founder

worldview I genuinely think that the motivation and the vision and the intention behind something is something you can't fake it's it's a little bit woo woo it's a little bit wishy-washy but I think that's how I think that's how people make decisions um it matters like why are you building this like I don't think people the humans are not like rational like we were talking econ 11 you know like people make decisions based on emotions and I don't know I I think it's like far less utilitarian than people's what other ideas you got okay so

here's here's something I've learned building Sublime is I think so I think there's two types of Founders broadly speaking I think there's Founders that operate less like business Executives and more like you artists they have a creative vision and they're manifesting it and they're not really solving a problem they're just manifesting a creative vision and the kind of like counter point to that is like Founders that are iterating and validating and like you know here's a hypothesis and I'm going to tweak it and like iteratively get to product Market fit and I definitely think I'm

the former like Sublime is the former it's you know in some ways like I I had this idea fully formed in my head about like building a Sublime internet and I had to kind of work backwards to reverse engineer that idea because the reality is that most people don't care about their mission they care about what can you do for them today and so I'm I've sort of been in that process of like how do you take that big vision and like pce meal it into specific value props but I say that because I think

that you know like Sublime for me is like the missionary thing it's like the multi-decade project it's going to like take me decades but it's like the mo is so profound uh but I think there's a huge opportunity to do the opposite of that which is do one thing do it well and and I have two ideas one of which I'm building the other of which I would build uh if somebody in this podcast wants to help um but essentially or actually maybe let me frame it with an anecdote that I think is fantastic so

AKO Marita was the designer for the Sony Walkman and he had an opportunity when he was designing the Walkman to add a record button on the Walkman for 50 cents all it would do is ADD 50 cents to the cost of making the thing but he decided against it he said adding a record button would basically like generate ambiguity about what this is for this is a device to just play music it does nothing else and I you know I just think that that's such a profound lesson for Founders that want to I don't know

like I'm going to build you an AI co-founder like no like build an AI that will do one specific thing so so I have two ideas that are inspired by that that are just very simple do one thing and do it right the first I have a prototype of this but essentially it's capture insights from podcasts with a screenshot so let me let me tell you more so a lot of ideas are stuck in audio formats that are just hard to capture tell me about it right U preaching to the Right audience here um so

how do people get around this today a couple things they do so one is like they download other apps where with like convoluted uis where you can like highlight from podcast but the vast majority of people are still doing Spotify Apple podcast so that's just like a tiny fraction of an audience like I I think that's a bad idea like to build an entire podcast player like no make sure that you operate within the big players the other thing people do is like after you know if I'm listening to a podcast on the car on

the way here if I liked some insight from an episode that you did I'll go home I'll use one of these like apps to generate the train transcript I'll highlight it copy paste it into my notes whatever too much work okay so here's what we realized a lot of people take screenshots of Spotify for like to just look at the timestamp they never go back to look at it's a lot of e of work to say like okay minute 8:36 like so what we did with AI is like you take a screenshot from Spotify or

apple podcasts we use OCR optical character recognition to figure out what's the name of the podcast what's the episode what's the timestamp then we go and look at like do like speech to text to figure out like all right what was the text around that time and the cool thing is like you actually don't have to set a beginning and end like we we understand the context based on this conversation and the screenshot like more or less they were talking about like ACO Marita's story of simplicity so here's the transcript and here's the audio clip

and you basically have this library of like insights from podcasts so that the time you spend like listening to podcast is not wasted do you think I I I absolutely love it so I believe that screenshots are the new bookmarks so um and a lot of people I know to screenshot this this podcast and they they'll send me a DM and they'll be like hey at minute 2 minute you know 35 you said this um it also kind of reminds me of how I use Twitter bookmarks so I'm a bookmark person but I never go

back to the bookmarks um and it's too bad cuz uh the reality is the interface on X is not conducive to remembering and capturing insights so if I'm you by the way this is exactly what I'm building because based on what I know about Sublime and like the mission um around capturing insights and get you know becoming more creative and stuff like that uh it it it feels like if I were you I'd create a bunch of micro apps that do one thing really well and then become top of funnel exactly so that's exactly well

and that's why I led with a story of Simplicity because we could have built this within Sublime but it's like you said like people's mental model when they use Twitter is like scrolling for the ephemeral it's not archival so I I just think people have a mental model of how they engage with products and you have to do just one thing and do it well yeah so this is we're what do you think of the name podcast magic podcast magic you have a better name I mean I'm a name guy you know um I I

don't have one off the top of my head that's better than doctor podcast you and doctors it's a doctor type of morning um but why I don't love it is I feel like the trend around the Sparkles for AI and like the magic of AI will lose it's starting to lose like it's its magic so to speak so I just wonder um I wonder like you know what makes Google such a good SE uh search engine is it's a verb yeah so I wonder like what's the verb yeah for yeah for doing you know a

screenshot of a podcast right so like is it a pod shot like maybe it's pod shot and it's like oh I just did a pod shot and sent it to you that's not bad actually P shot there we go we um so yeah so I guess the thing um for that idea I think it's starting small like people are going to say like screenshots are the future so do screenshots of this or that but it has to be strictly limited to podcasts I think for it to work yes cuz that way I think the advantage

of doing something so specific is distribution you like there is no better place to distribute this in podcasts whereas if you're doing like you know screenshots of a million things it's less relevant to a podcast so you're talking about an Insight that I want to double down on which is or double click into which is kind of the future of building startups is not by building a startup it's by building a micro startup so the old way of building a startup was you had this big idea and you went and go built this big idea

and you iterated your way to product Market fit but I actually think now especially with AI and how easy it is to build it makes sense to be like okay I want you know here's my big Vision here's what my startup could look like in 5 10 years this is like draw out but then being like okay how do I unbundle my startup so you go through an unbundling process and then you write out what are the 5 to 10 Micro startups yes and then from that you prioritize around which ones do I think have

the highest likelihoods of going viral or spreading yes and then from that you prioritize what are the easiest way you know this it yeah what's what's what's the effort estimate for for this startup versus that startup and then you do something with low effort estimate yes and then your job like as a startup Builder is is You're Building multiple of these basically yes well what what what I love about what you're saying is that I I think the key is like to have that 10-year Vision in your head and work backwards because the real I

think a lot of Founders fall in love with I'm going to build an Empire a One-Stop shop uh you know a collection of products but users don't think that way they think about like a job to be done but for Sublime specifically so I remember if you you remember the Rome craze from like the no taking days I remember the founder saying something like we're not competing with Evernote we're competing with Google but as somebody who's been building and living and breathing this space it's impossible like from a product architecture perspective to become that if

you don't really have that Foundation from day Zero like Sublime from Day Zero we were so conscious about every decision we made because we felt that even though we don't pitch it as this like over time because of the multiplayer Foundation this becomes like the world's best curated inspiration engine for ideas but you had to bake that into the foundation even though if I start like pitching Sublime as like an inspiration engine and a personal it just becomes too overwhelming also people don't look for an inspiration engine people don't look for an inspiration engine it's

like not that's a mistake a lot of Founders make is they they write out their 10-year vision and it's like I'm creating the inspiration engine and then go look at Google Trends data like no one is right so right so but but I think it's still useful to know how this like ecosystem will work but I think to your point I think the most effective thing a Founder can do I mean there's the meme of like first Founders think about products second Founders think about distribution I think that's spot on I think you need to

think about like what is the headline that will make this thing go viral and I think the headline for a pod shot app is like a lot clearer and better than like a you know headline for like a Missi driven thing that will maybe appeal to VCS but not really to a consumer that's like scrolling um Tik Tok or whatever so I I think that Founders need to like like like think of the headline first what is that what is like and then work backwards you know if you have this big Vision okay how do

you piece meal that into a headline for a micr product that could go viral and then build that 100% And then you and the beauty is you can test that you can test those headlines like create some ads see you know see what resonates with people before you go and you know raise millions of dollars and or or spend your own money and time to go build a big software product yeah I mean I I the the whole like test things thing with that it's like I don't really know how to do that yeah I

feel like I don't know I feel like everything I want to do needs to have a high bar for Polish so I don't really know I don't really know how that could be um effective at telling you if it's going to work or not if if it's not done to the degree of Polish um that like ultimately the thing would have so I I struggle with the with the like you know like test with an ad so how to test with ads I would say is you still need to build your micro app or or

startup but what you can test is the positioning so you know you can do a uh you can do an ad where it's like you know find your creativity or you can do an ad that's like screenshot your uh or or get insights from podcasts and you can see like what resonates and then from that you could do conversion rate optimization on your main product yeah that that's you know the The Lean Startup old school book at this point but like The Lean Startup by Eric GES talks about um how you don't need to actually

build anything you can put a landing page you can send traffic to it and based on that you know you can figure out what to build um I don't think that works anymore I I think that it's like why would you do that in an AI world where building isn't the hard part yeah you know I I think that worked maybe a long time ago when like idea to like production took like 18 months yeah but if it takes 18 days it's kind of I also think that work should like the bar for consumers is

so high these days we've been spoiled with Incredible software like every time I use Uber and C like this is like we are just so spoiled that the bar for Polish like nobody wants a minimum viable product people want something awesome people want something that moves them that like is emotionally compelling and I think you can do that in cheap ways but I think you need a fantastic copy I think you need like somebody that like understands like humans and emotion and I just don't think that it's like a optimization thing I think it's like

an emotion thing it's it's tough I think you know some people like you talked about you know art versus science basically earlier some people get to the positioning and the product via taking out ads putting their money where their mouth is and iterating their way to success and some people are and that's like science yeah and some people are more like I need to go and like go a journey to like go and figure this out and it's more of this like intuition s question so yeah well so my my resolution for this year is

like take less feedback like I just want like every time I have a dilemma for like a product question I ask 10 people I get 10 different answers it takes me further from myself I I think there's like you said there's two you could succeed both ways you have to know who you are exactly and I know that I just need to like dial up on my intuition and like just like tunee out the noise and I I think especially with Sublime where I am building the product I wish I had the more I hear

other people's opinions the further I get from like what I actually want so I think last year I overdosed on feedback I did over a thousand onboarding calls and this year I want the opposite I just I wan to I want to create things that have more Edge like the language that might you know like it might polarize some people but it's okay you know I just think that there's no room today for like the Bland you know you just have to like stand for something and you can't do that like if you take feedback

from everybody you're reverting to the mean h how many how many customer feedback calls do you think you'll take this year so we actually like promised the first a th paying customers that they'd have a one-on-one onboarding call so we got our first thousand customers so in theory I owe no more onboarding calls I still I mean I still like to talk to people you know I think that like being a Founder is like this very like schizophrenic experience where you're going from like abstract figma screens to like you know like it's so I think

talking to people it reminds you that there are like people on the other side of things that are like benefiting from what you do so I think it's important um but I I don't know I just think that what what I want this year is like more time to go deep and like just come up on the other side with stuff that's weirder you know I want to hear I want to hear your other idea that you have but before we do that I want to tell you a quick story of something that happened to

me so um I saw that a really well-known founder with a many multi-billion dollar exit and a mainstream technology product F started following me on X and I reached out and I said and he started a new startup recently and I reached out and I'm like hey I like what your new startup is doing by the way you know uh I'm very excited about it and he was like oh uh lay checkout should use our software and I was like okay and he's like let me connect you with my team and then I see on

the you know okay so we schedule a time and I see on the calendar invite that the founder is on the call it's literally like a sales call and he's coming to the call and I was so shocked because like I couldn't believe that this billionaire was taking sales calls with essentially like random people from the internet and that inspired me to for 2025 to take more more sales calls more customer Journey so it it the the reason I bring that up is every founder depending on where they are in their cycle they may be

like I need more feedback or less feedback and it's important to know where you are totally it's interesting I mean I I I feel like one of my kind of like mantras in life is like both are true you know like I think people like don't Embrace Nuance yeah it's like you either believe in feedback or you don't and it's like no it's pretty Nuance like I took I spent all of last year getting feedback now I need to like go deep and like I don't want to stay at the surface of calls I need

to go deep I need to actually think about what all of these calls mean and like how do you I combine that those calls with like my intuition so I don't think it's like people that like my resolution is to take less feedback doesn't mean I don't believe in feedback it just is about where where am I in you have one last idea for us I have one last idea so again the theme is like do one thing and do it well so the I the the broad idea is take an article a link a

presentation a long piece of text anything and convert it into a meme so I so I my flavor of content on the Internet is substack like that is where I naturally Thrive it's long form written content I've you know I have like 30,000 readers on substack but again it's like people that are like super engaged with long form and it's great but it's like harder to grow you know how many people are going to devote 20 minutes a week to reading what I say memes are this like unit of like cultural transmission that in a

Time crunched World say so much and so little and think that people that are creating like presentations long form videos like they would die to have like whatever they're trying to say be conveyed into like a the format of a meme um like I just genuinely think that no idea will become mainstream if it's not like captured in a meme and so I think the idea is like it's yeah it's a GPT rapper of sorts but you have to train it on a model of like a lot of memes culturally relevant memes and the user

experience like the value proposition is like be funny you know like how do you communicate your idea in a way that's like funny in like short form right so anyone that's creating long form content like um like would love to have a meme and I've tried this on Claude I've tried this on chbt but it's it's pretty generic so I think if you train it on like this curated library of um of like culturally relevant memes and it has a bias for the present which um Chachi PT and CLA don't have I think there's just

like a a product UI experience it's just like do one thing do it well past a link type text upload file whatever we ingest it generate embeddings for the thing understand it and then like you know I hear a lot of ideas and this might be one of my favorite ideas I've heard in a long time I'm serious this is let's do it this is like the Insight is correct I think uh there's so much there's so much Insight trapped into long form that could be put into short form and how that's being done today

is that people are taking long form video and turning into short form Clips but they're not taking long long form text and turning into memes I think that there's a Nuance to memes like certain memes resonate with certain communities and um so there you know you don't want you don't you don't want to mess up the meme right and you want to like you want to make sure that you're getting uh the most like you don't want to post a meme when the meme is done like that format there's a cultural like relevance that you

have to stay like in tune with ex so that's that's going to be that's going to take iteration to to get to like prime time but if if if you're able to create this if someone ends up building this this is like a you know a 10 million a year plus SAS business well it's it's interesting if you think about an interesting comp is uh Google's notebook LM where there was it was a pretty broad product where you could converse with your knowledge in some way but what actually made it go viral this tool was

the ability to convert anything it could be like text or presentation like any sort of document into a podcast and so I just think that this idea of like convert like take X like X to me you know and like the key is like you can adjust all this stuff with like you know a like how do you convert and understand the meaning of like the document um and then train it on the other side so it's got some curation but it's really a GPT rapper I love it product experience I love it sorry this

has been fun you got to come back again yeah anytime you have to come back on again I'm a big like ideas person but um yeah I think right now I I like my playbook right now is like have this like multi-decade project like my life's work and then launch micro productss I think that's right it's it's it's making me it's making me rethink some stuff in in my own in my own stuff uh so thank you yeah thank you this is awesome and where where could people learn more about you and Sublime so I'm

on Twitter um at s aut I'm on substack I write a Weekly Newsletter and then I'm on Sublime sublime. apppp I love it I should I should get on there yeah we today you're not we're not leaving this all right I'm going to be on there all right all right thanks Craig thank you see you next time [Music]