How I find $130K/month AI SaaS Opportunities hiding in plain sight

today I'm going to talk about how to find winning AI SAS startup ideas they're going to be great businesses they're going to create a lot of Enterprise Value lot of cash flow the ones that are worth 10 to 30 to 50 to $70,000 a month and I'm going to be sharing my practical framework for identifying these hidden opportunities in Enterprise software so we're going to cover how to spot repetitive pain points added intelligence to manual processes and build solutions that customers will pay pay for immediately so hope you enjoy this [Music] episode So today we're

going to talk about how do you come up with winning AI SAS startup ideas there's just a lot of opportunity right now to be building SAS because uh sass is kind of imploding and there's uh just a lot of uh opportunity to go and use platforms like bolt lovable cursor uh repet um and start building audiences marrying that software together um and start building businesses but the question is how do you come up with great ideas and today's episode is all about how do you come up with great AI SAS startup ideas if if you

don't listen to the show a lot it's like how do I trust this guy well we have a I'm a co-founder of an agency called LCA and we're literally working with the biggest SAS and AI companies to help them build and design uh SAS products um software products um so I know a thing or two about how to do it and I developed this framework um that I wanted to share with everyone um and originally I was like this was just for myself it was just a framework for myself thinking about like okay how do

I know if this is going to be a good startup idea in SAS but then I was like I really do want to share it with you all um I think that it'll be really cool to see what you build with this so I'm gonna in this episode I'm going to go through my exact framework for how to come up with these ideas um and a plan for you basically and H and and how you can build an AI SAS business uh in 30 days how I would do it if I were you um and

at the very at the you know at the at the worst case this is just going to get your creative juices flowing around SAS ideas so let's get into it I call it uh the export button theory of AI opportunity so the way I think about it is this every export button in software represents a business opportunity so think about this when a user clicks export what are they saying to us uh they're basically saying this software doesn't need doesn't do what I need to so I'm taking my data elsewhere to do manual work so

each export represents a workflow breakdown a paino manual labor that could be automated and a potential 10 to 30k a month feature so this was a huge aha moment for me is okay if there's an export button there's basically a workflow here there's basically a pain Point there's basically manual labor that could be automated and there's generally at least a $110,000 a month feature that could be created now you might end up not wanting to go and create that business for uh a variety of reasons but that that opportunity does exist so let's talk about

the five step framework for finding these opportunities so the first is uh identifying repetitive pain points so um this sounds obvious but you know a lot of people don't do this watch how people actually use enterprise software in their daily work so look for these patterns so I've broken it out into pain pattern an example and an AI opportunity so let's let's go through this a pain pattern is exporting data to reformat it so for example you're going from Salesforce to excel to PowerPoint so there's obviously an AI opportunity here to do automatic report generation

go through another example pain pattern copying pasting between tools for example jira tickets which is a bug tracking software owned by atlassian uh two slack updates where's the AI opportunity automated status syncing let's do another one pain pattern building the same report weekly I'm sure you've all you know I'm sure a lot of people listening this are the people creating the reports I've created reports in the past I've got reports in the past um for example a Monday dashboard export the AI opportunity is self-updating reports um let's go through one more um pain pattern maintaining

spreadsheets by hand example manual manual inventory tracking AI opportunity intelligent inventory system so when you look at how people actually are using enterprise software and by the way how do you do that well one is you can just ask people right um You can just be like how do you use this software um and the second the second way is you can just in your in your everyday job you might be listening to this you work a 9 to-5 and you might be realizing wow like this is such a uh I could this could be

automated um there's an export button here this could be automated um sure I'm getting paid to do this and um I want to keep my job but maybe there's a bigger opportunity in creating that startup 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 uh this is a real world example of an anonymized it uh just because you know I don't

want to share the revenue number of this particular their company but it's $130,000 a month AI SAS company that built their entire business by noticing Financial analysts were exporting QuickBook data to excel just to reorganize it for management so they built an AI Le uh layer that generates executive ready reports directly super simple and we're going to talk more about QuickBooks uh towards the end and some opportunities there uh so that's number one you know identifying the repetitive pain points um I've talked in the past about other tools that you can uh use um to

figure out pain points I talked about a tool called um gummy search um which goes through Reddit and and figures out pain points um you can go on X and just start searching um so you don't necessarily have to ask people or be one of those people to come up with uh one of these patterns um you can also just go online start searching and seeing what on platforms like Reddit X Instagram what are people complaining about um and and figuring out what are the different pain pattern example and a opportunities um sounds simple it's

it's simple enough I think okay so this is where it gets uh really fun so number two you're going to want to add intelligence to manual processes so every manual task is an LL llm opportunity waai to happen so for example you turn exports into instant insights stripe export goes into an AI powered Revenue analysis opportunity size 50 to 100,000 Mr all day let's go through another one converting messy data into clean reports uh example so CRM data into AI formatted uh presentations opportunity size 80 to 120,000 Mr uh generate analysis automatically example when you

take customer support tickets and then you make them into sentiment Trends uh that opportunity size is $3 to $70,000 Mr so these are literally million-dollar businesses um by just adding intelligence to manual processes you'd be surprised how many manual processes uh happen in workflows um that if you just added some intelligence to it you're looking at you know million dooll businesses do one more um so uh if you uh surface patterns humans Miss so the example here is sales calls recordings and then into closing pattern detection that opportunity size at least $100,000 Mr so um

you know what the case study I put here that that came top of mine was uh just notion AI right notion AI started as a simple tool to help users write better content but their real growth came when they focused on automating specific specific document types that users were manually creating over and over so they saw what people were creating over and over again and then they're like oh how do I automate that um that's you know seeing uh how that blooms and adding intelligence to those manual ual processes uh is something that's uh going

to help basically create winning startup ideas so that's that's number two on on uh on the framework so let's talk about number three and this is actually missed a lot of people missed this point they actually a lot of people understand one and two but they missed uh three so three is identifying data silos that need bridging so every organization has valuable data trapped in silos so you got to find places where reports need manually updating dashboards go unexamined because they're outdated analytics are trapped within one Department key metrics exist in different systems that should

talk to each other critical insights are buried in spreadsheets so this is the way I think it'll it'll be easier uh to think about it like this look for phrases like this quote unquote I need to pull this data every week I wish I could see this alongside that I have to manually check if these match we keep this in a separate spreadsheet so these are just a few examples um when you see examples like that I need to pull this data every week there's definitely some data Silo that's going to need bridging so these

are aha moments um another example of this a real world example a B2B SAS company built a at Le it's it's at least 250k mrr business by creating an AI later AI layer that connects customer success data with sales data automatically identifying upsell opportunities that were previously missed in handoffs between teams in B2B in Enterprise there's so many handoffs that are happening between data uh and teams and that's where you know this number three that's where the opportunity exist and people will pay for that so that's number three uh on the on the framework number

four is finding missing connections between tools so check this out watch for places where people say I wish these two things work together so uh think about it like this system a a is an HR System and system B is payroll the manual work is Rec reconciling employee data so the AI opportunity is to automatically sync with anomaly detection um and that's going to create a lot of value G to give another example system a over here is a sales CRM and system B over there is a marketing automation the manual work well is lead

status updates so the AI opportunity here is bir directional sync with AI prioritization I'm going to give one more example uh system a project management system uh system B time tracking the manual work is the manual time allocation AI opportunity here is automatic work categorization so you get you get the idea basically where where where there's places where people say I wish these two uh things work together um that's you know aha moment for uh an opportunity so we're going to go to number five and uh it's it's start small grow naturally right so the

most successful AI SAS businesses pick a specific Niche that big players are ignoring example industry specific document processing you don't do document processing processing you do a specific industry I always think about it like this think about uh you know horizontal a product that's horizontal then you think about a niche and then you think about a sub Niche so for example um you know the legal category is pretty horizontal uh the divorce category is a sub niche of legal the um prenup category is a is the sub Niche right so you have legal divorce sub

uh and prenup so uh thinking about how you can build an AI SAS startup think about a very very small problem you know for example how do you how do you create a uh AI ver you know AI version of prenups easy for people right that's that's an example um and uh I think that yeah the biggest ones just because you're competing against if you just look at the recent YC batches right like if if a YC batch is 250 companies and at least 200 of them are are AI SAS businesses um you're competing against

very highly funded businesses so you want to start a very Niche and then make your way expanding from there so focus on one painful workflow um make it you know I'm just going through you know the most successful businesses the most successful AI SAS businesses are Niche they focus on one painful workflow they make it 10 times better with AI they let the AI suggests NE next actions and they charge immediate and they charge immediately if you're solving real paying people will pay from day one a mistake a lot of people make is they make

it free um you don't you don't need to you definitely don't need to and and it gives you the optionality for the people who do want a bootstrap they can they could bootstrap um and it let users pull you into adjacent problems um you want that to happen when when when someone asks you can your tool also handle this related issue that's amazing I know it might not feel good because you're like oh no you know I I started this business it's this this SAS idea it's too small no no no you're onto something it

means that you can expand you know land and expand from there I wanted to give some other ideas Beyond exporting the export button right so now whenever you see an export button you're going to be like wow Greg told me that there's you know a a good idea here um and now you have a framew work to go and actually go create these ideas but there's more buttons that you're going to see uh in software now um that can also give you ideas on what to build so one one button and and these are all

manual buttons by the way these are manual buttons that you're going to see on software that are going to give you an idea for how to come up with winning startup ideas so generating report okay you've seen that button before right what's the opportunity well it's automatic Insight generation Market size is $25 billion another one manual button schedule meeting AI opportunity context aware scheduling Market size is $ 1.8 billion manual button upload CSV I know you've seen that before intelligent data processing is the AI opportunity you've got you know $3 billion $3.2 billion market cap

uh sorry uh Market size um manual button reconcile data real-time data harmonization um another manual button create template well what if you had Dynamic template generation with AI totally doable depending on what it is manual button formatting document I know you've seen that AI opportunity oneclick formatting with brand rules all these manual buttons compile data as a manual button that you can do automatic data aggregation as the AI opportunity review changes what's the AI opportunity well it's AI powered change significance detection um so all that to say is when I first came up with this

concept around the export button I started seeing it then I started seeing all these other manual buttons all over and they're also going to lead you down the rapbit hole of really really good AI startup ideas um also I've never I've actually never used QuickBooks but um we were looking at buying a business and they were using uh QuickBooks and I started going through it and I I realized that you know QuickBooks uh QuickBooks users export 250 million Financial reports annually it's actually massive each export is about 45 to 90 minutes of manual formatting and

Analysis and the average value of that to that accountant and bookkeeper time think about it is about $75 to $150 so the total addressable Market is 12 to18 billion annually so the QuickBooks there's a just all you know just putting it out there for people there is a ton of startup ideas in the QuickBooks export gold mine so um focus on here's how to think about right it so focus on specific financial reporting use cases so cash flow forecasting tax preparation we talked about going Niche you know this is where you can go Niche build

AI that automatically generates management ready Financial Insights create dashboards that eliminate the need for exports altogether charge 15 to 25% of the Professional Service time they replace so you know that's what you got to do you know that's the format that's the sort of framework for the QuickBooks export go gold mines that's a specific um you know platform that there's just ton of exports that are happening and there and there's a lot of opportunity there so um okay so you know you might be listening to this and you're like okay I've got a few ideas

or this is getting me to think in a different way but how do you actually get started so if you were going to go and create um a AI startup uh SAS startup uh what how should you think about your first 30 days so this is just one way to think about it so your first few days day 1 to five select a specific Enterprise software with high export volume so research you know communities forums XS social media with pain points join these groups to understand the workflows and I honestly would actually create a um

create an an audience on one of these social platforms like probably X honestly so actually go and create uh like if you're targeting um the divorce Community or or the divorce people interested in divorce or people interested in um Financial Planning and stuff like that go and go and create an audience for people interested in that days 6 to 10 interview power users about their export Hab habits so you know what do they do with the exported data how long does uh post export processing take what value would automating this create um and you know

just reach out to them try TR try to get them you know some time you might have to pay them realistically or or or or something you might have to give them something but you know you're trying to learn about who they are obviously if you are the power user right like if you know that's ideal that's obviously ideal but if you if you don't you can interview people uh to get that Insight uh days 11 to 20 you can build that minimal bi uh prototype obviously I would suggest using something like v0 uh something

like lovable something like bolt something like repet something like cursor so using some of these AI coding platforms to get get it out there um and then you connect it to the original data source you perform the top one to two post export functions you deliver the results in a usable format and then the last nine days Days 21 to 30 it's getting three to five beta users and charging them immediately so I ideally you know wait while you're while you're going through these days you're still Tweeting and posting and you're trying to get audience

uh audience people uh into what you're doing right so you reach out to these people you try to get them on the on the product you price based on time saved 20 to 30% of manual labor costs you focus on quantifiable Roi times saved accuracy improved and then collect testimonials focus on business outcome so you give them a deal you know give them a deal say hey we're I'm going to give it to you for 80% off but need a testimonial and think about video testimonials those work work the best not just text because people

are just glancing over at testimonials these days and they're like is this even real like who is Johnny right but if you do a video and put it on on your website that's going to help with conversion um and uh actually helps you know deepen your relationship with that customer so what is the point of this whole podcast episode my my final thoughts on this is the best AI opportunities aren't where everyone is is looking they're hiding in these mundane repetitive tasks that knowledge workers are doing every single day every export button every manual update

every data Rec reconcil reconciliation task represents a potential 1 million ARR business waiting to be built um I think that the winners won't be the companies that create the most imp impressive AI demos they're going to be the ones that understand these boring painful workflows of specific user groups and transform them with AI so I hope this got the creative juices flowing you know I mean even me just like going through this again I'm just like there's so much opportunity right now and uh you just you just got to go and find these painful boring

workflows and go Niche start building your audience build very simple prototypes and uh and keep iterating so um hope this was helpful um I will if people comment on the YouTube and they want access to this uh document I could uh package it up for people so that they can download it um just let me know in the comment section I read every single YouTube comment um and uh and read every single Spotify and apple review the startup ideas podcast hope this has been helpful uh people charge for this but not me this is free

for you um I live to serve and I love to see you out there winning creating businesses um so thank you for your time and uh I'll see you on the internet [Music]