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Software Ideas Newsletter

ISSUE #10

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Opportunity 1:
Hotjar

"I would be surprised if there was a CRO or UX team that hasn't heard of Hotjar. It's a great little tool, especially given the price, but it doesn't allow enough flexibility to be your main on-site research tool. It's really good for starting out and doing some basic research. Sweet and simple! I guess marketers could benefit the most from this!"
- Ioana G. [1]
Most people in the bootstrapping / SaaS space are familiar with Hotjar. It's the number one tool for capturing user sessions and playing them back as videos.

If you're new to the space, you may not be familiar with the origins of Hotjar. Hotjar, in fact, started as a downmarket software idea!

They wanted to take the concept of re-creating user sessions as a video, something only available to at the enterprise level, and make it widely available to the general public.

They decided to do this with a freemium model, which makes sense. When you're bringing a product to the general public, you'll need have marketing locked down. 

Today though, most people are familiar with Hotjar and what it can do. So what opportunities are there to compete?
Background [2], [3]:
Estimated revenue: $16.4M
Number of employees: 90
Funding raised: $0
Founded: 2014

Price [4]:
$99/month to $989/month

Opportunity Size:
Level 2 - Indie Hacker
This is an opportunity that is of moderate ambition, relying on a minimum market size to drive out bigger competition.
Hotjar's software focuses on four core features:
  • Heatmaps: Views of your website pages where they turn red where users frequently click
  • User recordings: A tool that reconstructs the html/css on your page, combined with mouse and keyboard data from the user, to show exactly what the user saw
  • Funnels: A big-picture view of how users are going between pages, in terms of percentage
  • Forms: On-site popups that ask users for feedback and insight
These tools combined aim to provide a better insight into the customer experience than traditional tools, which often just provide quantitative metrics.
In this week's issue, we'll identify one of these four features that's ripe for disruption.

We'll also talk about how we can position a business towards our unique take on that feature, who we would target, and what an MVP would look like.

If you want to unlock this week's issue: you can sign up here!

We'll also discuss:
  • What the Gamification market looks like in 2020, and where a bootstrapper could find an opening.
  • A modern software company that's raised almost $100M in funding, and how a very ambitious founder could beat them.
Hope to see you in the premium newsletter!

Thanks for reading!

Talk to you next week!
Kevin Conti
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