What is the Best Solo Startup Idea? Part 1. How to Get People to Pay

Having ideas is among the most essential qualities for a startup founder to have – Sam Altman

The odds for startup success are against you if you are a solo developer. Yet, the right startup idea can boost your chances of longer survival in this business game.

But how do you know what this “right” idea is before even starting?

Check your startup idea against three critical areas:

1. The Problem – Will people pay every month for your software to solve their problems?
2. The Market – Can your startup become a leader in some market niche?
3. Yourself – Do you have time, money, energy, and expertise to put your startup idea in motion?

Part 1. The Problem – People are willing to pay for your software monthly to solve a problem.

TEST 1. THE STARTUP IDEA SHOULD SOLVE A REAL PROBLEM.

People will use your software and pay only if you solve a serious and real problem for them. People will pay even for an imperfect solution as long as it makes their life easier. The only caveat? It should be much better than other available alternatives.

How do you identify these problems?

You could look for

• Your (or people you know) experience – pain using other tools
• Social media or forums posts complaining about something
• Processes where people waste time or do tedious work
• Important tasks that are missing a good tool for effective work

Many successful startups turned to solve problems that their founders found when working on other projects. And so, the best problem to solve is a problem you have experienced. It will give you insights, motivation, and first-hand expertise. On another side, a problem that you know only as an outsider will give you a hard time when creating a good solution (e.g., a medical app if you’ve never worked in medicine).

Examples of companies finding opportunities while working on other projects or businesses include:

• Intercom: acknowledged poor messaging with website users
• Slack: identified gamer’s need to communicate
• Shopify: noticed bad e-commerce for founder’s own online ski shop
• Mailchimp: saw the need for email marketing service for their smaller clients
• Stripe: wished to eliminate the pain of using online payments on the web with several side projects.
• Everhour: looked to fix their poor time-tracking for customer’s work
• Complice: wanted to help friends achieving their goals
• Snappa: missed an easy graphic design tool for social media images

It is always a pleasure to solve a real problem and develop ideas around it. It is engaging as people will come and try, use, ask for more, and give back their own ideas. But, beware of a dead-end if your idea is trying to solve a problem that nobody is complaining about or wishing for. There is a high chance that nobody needs it!

TEST 2. THE STARTUP IDEA, SOLUTION, AND BUSINESS SHOULD BE SIMPLE AND SMALL.

People nowadays have a very short attention span and very little patience. To become your customer, they should get how your idea solves their problem only in a few seconds. They should be able to start using your software in minutes and achieve the desired results within an hour. Otherwise, your potential customers will leave and continue searching for another solution.

How can you know if the idea and solution are simple?

Try to explain your idea to anybody, including your grandma. Your idea is as good as people understand it quickly. A simple idea and solution can be explained in under a few minutes, maybe with a simple drawing on the napkin. And you want to receive nods and smiles after you finish. You definitely don’t want to see people staring at you in confusion after a 20-minute back-and-forth.

Very successful startups have simple ideas and solutions:

• Typeform created a simple command-line style form for surveys – which were easy to engage. Their beautiful conversational surveys have had a huge success in the crowded survey app space. Today, the company’s recurring revenue exceeds 10 million.
• Calendly built a simple scheduling tool wherein anybody can set availability rules and share Calendly links for people to schedule. At present, they serve more than 5 million users per month. 
• Everhour embedded a widget into the GitHub page to tack time and show estimates for time spent working on an issue. Now, the company has more than 1 million in annual revenue. 

So, you can conquer markets with simple small ideas. But the complex and big ideas and solutions will overwhelm your users and you as a solo creator.

Focus only on one simple problem, but solve it very well. The aim is to simplify everything – the concept, marketing, and implementation. You will always have a lack of time and resources – and only a simple business model and idea will allow you to survive.

TEST 3. THE STARTUP IDEA SHOULD BE DEEP AND SPECIFIC.

A deep idea solves the core of the problem, not only symptoms. These ideas are difficult to replace with workarounds or be copied by competitors. This idea sticks better in the customer’s minds and makes them dependent on your solution.

How do you find such deep ideas?

For example:

• You might know some internal problems of the industry that you worked in.
• You created a solution for your needs that can be useful for other people.
• A frustrated expert complaining about her work. She wastes time on ridiculous difficulties and inefficiencies every day.
• A business owner once told you about doing something essential for the business that needs a huge effort every time

Consider for example the re-invention of messaging for business in distinct ways:

• Slack made more than a better chat platform – they changed how people communicate about projects in teams.
• Intercom turned on-site chat into a business channel between app users and product teams.

How can you measure the depth of your idea and solution?

First, find out which level your idea solves the root problem on.

You can use the Five Whys method, which – as an example – for a Slack idea/solution search process, could be something like this:

• Why do people complain about emails in my company? It is not a great tool for our internal communication.
• Why? There are always delayed responses and missing emails. We get overwhelmed with many messages and cannot find relevant ones.
• Why? Messages clog the inbox and archive, and there is no easy way to organize them. Team email responses and threads spiral out of control.
• Why? We need easy team communication on topics and projects. Are there better ways to find messages arranged by problems, features, or domains? We miss a convenient organizing system for internal and external information.
• Why? We need a central communication space for the team to include everything in our projects. Collecting all relevant information and documents from different sources will boost our productivity.

Second, look for alternatives. A deep idea has no simple alternative to the way it solves the problem. You can confirm that

• no similar affordable software exists
• competitors are not good at solving the problem
• no easy manual approach is available (e.g., Excel),
• experts offer expensive solutions without self-serve tools.

Yet, the startup idea should be very specific at the same time to fit your very limited capacity.

You should excel in a very narrow problem space to create, market, and compete at the same time.

For example, Hubert Palan missed having a good way to organize product feedback working as a project manager. Scattered spreadsheets, bug tracking, and docs didn’t give a big picture and resulted in a lot of work. Productboard’s founder started to build a small tool but addressing a deep idea that helps product managers answer the question, “What should we build next!?”. Today, Productboard’s investment value is $350 million.

If your idea is still not deep and specific, keep re-targeting your idea until you find a sweet spot. Look for the place without a good alternative for the unresolved narrow core problem.

TEST 4. YOUR STARTUP IDEA SHOULD BRING BIG VALUE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

Solving an important problem for customers is not enough. They will look at how you do it and what the result is for them.

Why should they select you from other choices? What value does your solution bring?

Attract customers with both:

• Savings: how does the idea make their current situation better and more efficient. Does it save time, money, or mental energy?
• Innovation: what do they get from you that other alternatives do not have. Do you offer something that stands out in the market, and that will make them much better at work?

An example of this is Segment. They provide an analytics solution connecting users with other platforms. It collects and unifies your data and sends it to analytics platforms and other channels, e.g., Google Analytics, Slack, SendGrid, HubSpot, and Intercom. Their innovation was enabling inter-platform navigation instead of working in analytics silos. They saved a lot of customer’s time to connect and analyze data.

You must be 5x cheaper or 5x better. You won’t have the time or resources to make the high touch sales to walk a customer through the incremental value of a 25% improvement. Your product must be obviously, hilariously cheaper or better because you will have a hard enough time just getting the right customers to your landing page. Tyler Tringas, Micro-SaaS Ebook

Savings and Innovation will be a cornerstone of your marketing and user conversion. Your potential customers will measure your idea on both sides of the value in the first encounter. Your idea should beam right away – work and life are much better and efficient with your solution.

TEST 5. THE IDEA REQUIRES A MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION AND PROVIDES ENDLESS VALUE.

People should pay for using your idea from the beginning and, ideally, do so monthly.

You can also consider other business models besides the monthly or annual subscription. For example:

• Traditional one-time buy,
• Bundling with paid products
• Ad-funded: native ads from related products or job advertisements are popular as in Dribble.
• Community-based fee: users pay to access a great community around the product as in Nomad List. 
• Sponsorship: larger companies support your project, or you ask for donations.

The subscription business still is the best as it brings a nice and steady income every month. This model aligns with your desire to produce excellent software that meets users’ needs. It focuses on long-term user engagement and improvements to keep people happy. This is better than relying on tricky business tactics or depend on others for revenue. Other models can force you to spend a lot of time on deals, marketing, or sales instead of creation.

How can you ensure that people will pay and continue doing it every month?

Your idea should make each user rely on your solution often for a long time.

The software should deliver value time and again. Users should get the value from the start in order to stay. With time, they should get increasing benefits for everyday personal or business activity.

People using your software should produce valuable assets. They should change their behavior by ingraining your software into their core activities. It should be difficult to pull a plug and leave behind a lot of invested effort and convenience.

There are also powerful psychological forces that could keep people paying for subscription:

• Loss aversion – people care more about losses than gains 
• Endowment effect – people place greater value on things they already own 
• Status quo – people prefer things to stay the same by sticking with a decision made before. 

You can positively use these forces to make people:

• create and own tangible things (data, work/art artifacts, processes)
• empowered by relying on your software (friendly features, automation, insights)
• change their connections (integrate with systems, provide better services to customers)

People will continue their subscriptions if their everyday life is better with your software. Ideally, money should become a secondary factor in their decision to stay.

Successful companies do it right:

• Slack supports everyday team communication and keeps your conversations and files.
• Shopify creates an essential platform for your business.
• Mailchimp delivers your mail campaigns and stores users and statistics, becoming part of your marketing machine.

The subscription business is well aligned with web-based SaaS (Software as a Service).

This is the best combination for solo startups producing endless value. Check these benefits:

• Deliver features and fix problems fast. You have full control over user experience and deciding your release cycle as compared to desktop software or mobile apps.
• Online support is easier as many online tools as analytics are easy to integrate.
• Browsers become an excellent independent platform with rich APIs. Finally, environments and OS are no longer a big pain, and you can have a presence everywhere.
• You can host all the data and artifacts, thus creating a heavy reliance on you as a provider of persistent value
• You can add mobile apps, public APIs, desktop software, and integrations later. They could be a great compliment, but the SaaS web app gives you a strong initial web presence for your startup.

Consider the subscription revenue model from the beginning. Re-think your idea if it doesn’t fit with recurring subscriptions. This model will give your solo startup a sustainable way to operate and grow.

The next post covers How to Win the Market for your solo startup. ➡