🗞 What's New: Untapped AI niches for SaaS founders

Feel like you're too late to jump into the AI game?

• 3 untapped niches with large markets include dream interpretation, image interpreters, and image generators. Try your hand at AI with these!
• Looking to ship fast with no-code? Separate your backend and frontend development, don't worry about usage, and always store your data.
• 3K users for a Web3-based MVP. Stefan Savevski used a contest to jumpstart growth, then kicked it up even further with a sweet signup bonus.

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by Emmanuel Sunday

I come from an SEO background, and run Dreamerbro, where I share experimental SEO information. If you want to take advantage of the AI trend, here are untapped niches to go after!

1. Dream interpretation AI

Semrush reports a monthly search of 3K for the search term “dream interpretation AI” and its variations. This is from the US alone:

The parent term “dream interpretation,” and its variations, have ~300K US searches, with a lot of search gaps. All you need is a percentage of this traffic to have a successful product.

Here's what you need to execute this well:

• A strong monetization strategy: Since the niche technically has low buyer intent, it could take a little marketing to monetize properly, especially to its full potential.

• Differentiation and strong execution: You need to stand out.

• A clear SEO strategy: Most sites in the niche don’t write blog articles. That’s a big overlap that you could take advantage of.

2. AI that interprets images

There are surprisingly just a few apps that do this well, or at least rank for it on Google.

This is a query that a subscription with GPT-4 would have annihilated, but it’s behind a paywall! That’s a gap for SaaS founders. The biggest site in this niche is Pincel, and it’s only 14 months old!

What you need to succeed:

• A clear execution strategy: If you’re going after this idea, you definitely don’t want to restrict yourself to just the “interpreting images” niche. Go beyond! You may want to be the AI editor for all things images (image generator, face recognition, etc.), most of which are underserved if you niche down.

With further research, I was able to extract a couple of SEO keywords that are goldmines. For instance, “AI hand fixer” has over 560 searches, and “AI weight loss photo” has 410 searches.

3. Image generator

If you approach this, you need to really niche down. “AI tattoo generator” has 16.6K searches a month. "AI baby generator" gets 16K+ searches on Google monthly, with little to zero competition.

A lot of these categories under "image generation" have little competition. Here's a few more:

• AI Disney posters: 6K searches monthly.

• AI Pixar posters: 4.7K searches monthly.

If this was helpful to you, check out more at my SEO newsletter, Dreamerbro!

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Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Tamir Bashkin

As a no-code founder, I've spent the last five years developing MVPs with no-code. I focused on getting them to market as soon as possible. Here are eight tips to speed up your process and find customers faster!

Separate your backend and frontend development

I use Make for developing the backend, and Bubble for building the frontend.

While this might create more work, it makes your products much more powerful from the start.

Don’t worry about usage

In the beginning, you aren’t going to have lots of users.

So, when you start, don’t worry if your implementation isn’t “effective.” Focus on going to market, not minimizing costs.

In your first year, don't pay for almost any software

Microsoft lets you use GPT-4 for free with $150K in credits for two years.

AWS provides you with $10K in credits for all its services. Translation (which is expensive), serverless functions, and many other tools are included.

Almost all startup vendors offer free, or heavily discounted, startup plans for their apps.

Never skip Figma

Whatever you do, don’t start developing your frontend without having a UI designed first.

You’ll spend days going back and forth if you jump right into development.

I use Visily first to create the wireframes, then hand it over to a designer in Fiverr. You can also use UIzard to generate your screens.

Figma to Bubble is life-changing

You can import a Figma design into Bubble and generate all of the objects automatically.

You only have to spend five hours per page to sort out the responsiveness, which is much faster than building from scratch.

Store your data from the start

Store every user action or data piece you can find, even if you don’t know what to do with it. I use Segment for tracking events.

It’ll be important in the future!

Research before developing

I've built a few products that nobody wanted. After doing my homework, speaking with customers, and checking the feature request forums, I approached it differently. As a result, I built a CRM plugin that is now at $2K+ MRR.

Search the feature requests forums to find ideas

If you’re looking to build a plugin for an existing platform, search the feature requests forums to see which features have been on the list for a long time.

Find those with many votes or comments about them, which the vendor didn't develop and isn't planning to. Then, build the plugin, and let people know in the thread!

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by Stefan Savevski

We're building a platform, CryptEarn, that connects Web3 gaming investors and gamers. Think of it as Upwork for Web3 gaming.

Here's our road to getting 3K+ Web3 native users for our MVP in five weeks!

The contest

We had a small community on Discord with about 800 people, and we started an referral contest. The person with the most referrals would win a reward. The results shocked us! Within a week, our community grew to 3.4K members, which is when we revealed the MVP.

On the first day, we had more signups than we thought we'd get, and our website broke down. We fixed it immediately, and saw how users interacted with the MVP.

By the first week, we had 120 new users. We got these users organically by connecting with a community manager who really liked our idea, and offered to help us find our first users.

By the second week, we had 518 users. For the second week, we tested the power of referrals and word-of-mouth. We gamified the process of interacting with CryptEarn, and asking for feedback by introducing tasks. It worked, and got us more users.

Next, we offered a 30 cent signup bonus through Jumptask, a Web3 platform with 6M+ users. That took us to over 3K.

Troubleshooting

Here are some of our behind-the-scenes adventures:

• Our referral contest got botted, and we had to disqualify and ban members.
• Users tried to abuse our platform to get the most points.
• We did 130+ meetings to explain our idea, ask for feedback, and see how users interact with the website in real-time.
• We spent the first week of our launch waking up every 15 minutes to help onboard users and resolve support tickets.

Lessons learned

Feedback is worth more than gold. Invest in getting quality feedback, and you'll be in great shape!

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Emmanuel Sunday, Darko, Tamir Bashkin, and Stefan Savevski for contributing posts. —Channing