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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

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This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

People talk to people. People need communities for quality discussions. Communities are the rising trend.

Current players

Circle.so: The modern community platform for creators Bring together your discussions, memberships, and content.

Tribe.so: Powerful community platform integrated into your product to increase user engagement, drive retention, and boost customer lifetime value.

Crowded: Create and share content with your community. Launch your modular and powerful community-driven website.

PeerBoard: Plug & play community platform.

Zapnito: Community software platform built to showcase expertise.

Hittly: Forum software to support, listen and build lasting relationships with your customers.

HiveBrite:Building blocks for creating great communities. Powerful online community platform that provides top organizations with all the tools they need to build, manage, and engage their community.

Una.io: Launch your own network. UNA is free to download and use on your own server with community support and paid plans.

Podia: Turn your passion into income. Everything you need to sell online courses, webinars, downloads, and memberships without worrying about the tech.

Comradery: Build a community that's truly your own Comradery is a customizable platform that’s built from the ground up to help you and your community thrive.

Panion: Build a branded community with more meaningful connection directly into your website.

Playgroup: A powerful platform to start and grow your community

ConnectPlus: Unleash your community's potential Next-gen virtual community app for professional groups and networks.

HoneyCommb: The world's premier community platform Give your audience, organization or community of any size their own online, modern, social space. Launch iOS, Android and web apps with minimal cost, effort & time.

AlmaBase:World’s most loved alumni management software

Discourse: Civilized discussion for your team, customers, fans, patrons, audience, forum, advocates, supporters, friends, community

Flarum: Forums made simple. Modern, fast, and free.

DiscipleMedia: A new era for community builders. Bring your people, memberships, and content together in your own fully-branded and private community platform.

Negative Nancy says “Online communities aren’t mature and doesn’t lead to quality discussions”

Me - Communities like weekendclub.co has members making thousands of dollars with their SaaS products and helping each other with quality discussions.

Negative Nancy says “It is tough to run an online community/cohort”

Me - It is tough and that's why we are talking here about tools that could make this process easy.

Negative Nancy says “Online communities will be dead post covid”

Me - In fact, “online communities” grow much bigger as people were able to see how easy it is to get online and talk.

Deep-dive

Communities aren’t new. They exist for a long time in the form of local communities, friends groups, study groups, religious groups etc.

One-to-one conversations with community members bring accountability.

These days there is a community around pretty much everything. There are hundreds of communities that are run for various topics like NoCode, Book writing, Newsletter Writing, Parenting, Community of people building communities, etc.

With more and more people willing to be part of online communities and paying for quality discussions, this is going to be an upward trend of communities.

Some niches 

• Tools to handle/run cohorts: Cohorts are the next big thing in building communities. We have a few communities doing cohorts already at 100DayofNoCode, LaunchMBA, WeekendClub. Build a simple Micro-SaaS tool to run these cohorts that includes taking notes, tracking attendance, sending reminders, sending Zoom invites. As an add-on, provide a way to capture the screenshots as the calls progress and store the screenshots. That would be like a complete tool to run cohorts across communities. This can be extended further with feedback/survey links as well they can be automatically sent to cohort participants. The tool should be simple with just a login and simple dashboard to create cohorts (with options like “Add cohort”, “Delete Cohort”, “Archive cohort” etc), add/remove members to cohorts, add/update schedule to the cohorts.

• Tools to matching community members for one-to-one convo: People love one-to-one conversations. No matter how many online group cohorts you do, people still love to have that one-to-one conversation with like-minded people. Build a tool around this that maps the community members with like-minded people based on their interests, current MRR, location, and time zones. Start with a simple tool that lets community owners/founders add their members and more details on the frequency of the one-to-one conversations. Now our new micro-SaaS tool should be sending emails to these members with a simple form to get more details on the interests, current MRR, location, timezone, and how frequently he/she is looking for a one-to-one conversation with a different member each time. The tool should also capture the preferred time block for each user. Once this data is available from various users, the micro-SaaS tool should match these members intelligently and send invites, follow-up surveys along with “ready-to-tweet” text with a hashtag. As an add-on, the tool should also send weekly updates to the founders on how many active one-to-one conversations happened in a week with a “read-to-tweet” text with hashtags. For example, our ‘Micro SaaS Idea’ grew to 3K subscribers, and to introduce one-to-one conversations among our 3K members, we need an automated tool.

• …. get another 10+ additional niches from Pro version.

Pro Version

See another 10 niches around online communities (Pro version)

See Technical chops for implementing various niches around online communities (Pro version)

See Marketing chops for implementing various niches around online communities (Pro version)

See Cost analysis for 100 users (Pro version)

Also get 18 additional SAAS niches Pro versions from last months Pro news letters