Issue#30: Building $1K -$10K MRR Micro SaaS products around around Curated Content & Curated Lists

Upen

Feb 3

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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.

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.

The ‘Creator economy’ niche is growing rapidly and there has been no better time to start creating content. If possible ‘create content’, if not ‘curate content’.

One of the biggest advantages of curation lists/content is it draws a highly interested audience for a given topic. This is also a part of the “Building Audience First” strategy.

Let’s see some of the players around Curated content and Curated lists. Most of the below curators are making thousands of dollars in revenue by curating content - either one-time curation or recurring content curation.

IncubatorList: Find the best startup program among the world's 550+ best startup accelerators, incubators and investors.

Swipe.Page: Swipe is the best way for SaaS companies to increase conversions, signups, and revenue. Unlock a database of 200+ tested conversion strategies that have generated $10M in revenue.

MarketerCrew: A weekly newsletter with top discussions around various communities. Get the weekly email that makes marketing enjoyable. Stay informed on the latest news, tools, and insights

GetCommunityList: Find hundreds of Communities to Promote your Product Finding the right communities takes hours and manual googling sucks. With Community List, instantly find relevant communities with all the data you need in one place.

PressHunt: A curated list of journalists, reporters. Press Hunt saves you hundreds of hours by aggregating data on over 750k journalists, reporters, and podcasts in one place, complete with their coverage focuses and contact info.

UserBooster: The Notion dashboard that helps you build your launch strategy

SpreadTheWord: 400+ places to post your startup to help you get your first users and start growing. Save hours of research for the next acquisition channel.

GrowMySaaS: The best way to grow your startup. Unlock a database of 150+ growth and conversion strategies for early-stage SaaS startups.

Curated Twitter Templates: 100 Twitter Templates curated in Google sheets that can be swipe files for Twitter growth.

Swipe Convert: Swipe files to improve SaaS conversion, signups, and revenue.

ScrapBook: Scrapbook is a database of 280+ high-quality SaaS tactic ideas for every step of the funnel, from acquisition to retention.

Startup Growth Kit: A collection of Notion docs and templates to grow your startup or indie project! Get hundreds of places where you can post your startup, hundreds of guides about launching on Twitter, Product Hunt, Reddit, and more.

InfluenceWeekly: The weekly report the Influencer Marketing industry reads every Friday. Delivers every week to 10K subscribers.

Jona: Jona offers curated lists of journalists across 50+ categories and countries.

Negative Nancy says - “Why to pay money for curated content while I can search for content from Google search?”

Me - You can certainly spend time and dig for the information and remove the noise but it takes time. Curated content/curated lists work for people people who value time.

Negative Nancy says - “Even though I have enough knowledge and can curate good content lists, it takes time to build software to sell it and I can’t code”

Me - Just use Google sheets/Airtable/CSV files and use Gumroad to set up. You can set up a payment/store using Gumroad in less than 2 minutes. Even Stripe now allows creating quick links for payments. Flurly also lets you do the same without writing code.

Negative Nancy says - “Curated lists/info lists usually are one-time sales but I am looking for recurring revenue model”

Me - Along with curated lists, also provide access to a community (that runs on Discord, Telegram, Circle.so, etc) for a low yearly/monthly fee. Some curated content models also provide recurring revenue (see next sections for more info).

Deep-dive

The ‘Creator economy’ niche is growing rapidly and there has been no better time to start creating content. If possible ‘create content’, if not ‘curate content’.

(This isn’t completely about Micro SaaS but still about profitable niches)

One of the biggest advantages of curation lists/content is it draws a highly interested audience for a given topic. This is also a part of the “Building Audience First” strategy.

By working on curated content/lists that interest a niche audience, you are building the biggest wealth of ‘audience’. If these audiences are happily paying for your lists/content that is curated, then there are high chances that these audiences could turn your paying customers.

Attracting sponsorships would be much easier as you have a niche audience interested in a specific topic.

Some thought-process when you want to build/curate content.

Supporting project for your SaaS: One-time curation effort that will help build an audience for your SaaS business.
One-time revenue + building audience: Need one-time curation effort
Recurring revenue + building audience: Needs recurring effort in curation
Free list + Sponsored revenue: You create a curated ebook, list, document, and provide that for free while your Sponsors pay you for ads. For weekly curated content models, you can work with sponsors for weekly ads.

See more here for some inspiration

Tip: Increase the dollar value of the sale by also creating a community around the niche you are serving and providing access to the community for a little extra price. Make sure the community is active enough so that your users can spread word of mouth.

Tip: Create multiple lists in the same niche and try to bundle multiple curated books/lists into a single sale. For example, if you are selling one curated list for $49 and another curated list for $39, try to combine both and sell for $69.

Some niches

Swipe Files for ‘X’: Swipe files are extremely popular in the marketing, advertising, and copywriting world. Analyze how companies are improving on marketing, advertising, and copywriting and in turn improving user acquisition and sales. List the techniques in an Airtable sheet. Bonus points if you can show examples of companies using these techniques and seeing results. You can extend this to pretty much anything - ‘X’. You can extend this swipe file concept to create ready-made techniques for a lot of other things too. For example, you can create a swipe file for ‘writing and improving newsletters’, ‘starting with Twitter zero followers and growing to thousands of followers on Twitter. The concept remains the same. A list of proven techniques to improve certain things in a given niche can be curated in the form of a swipe file. Create a Swipe file, put it on Gumroad, market and sell it to the related audience.
Curated List of B2B companies in ‘X’ niche: Cold emailing isn’t dead. Many B2B SaaS founders look for a quality list of B2B companies to cold email and target these companies to sell their SaaS. Make sure you tag companies based on revenue, location, number of employees, etc. If you can map this data with BuiltWith, it will further help founders to use this data. The better the data quality/quantity, the easier it will be to sell this content.
Curated List ‘Growth Hacking techniques’: This is the same as a swipe file for marketing and advertising except that this is primarily targeted at growth hackers. There are many growth hacking techniques, growth hacking communities, growth hacking tools. Combing all of this and curating something around ‘Growth hacking techniques’ would benefit a lot of founders looking to implement growth hacking techniques.
Curated/Vetted list of people who know/can do ‘X’: This is an extremely growing and important niche. In short - make a list of experts in a given field who can do a specific thing. This could be anything. For example, making a list of people who can build SaaS products and looking for a marketing co-founder. Making a list of ‘Technical content writers’ and connecting this list to SaaS companies who need technical content will help both the content writers and companies. You can charge money for the list. Some more examples, are ‘Making a list of React developers or Javascript developers interested to work remotely’, ‘Making a list of WordPress developers’, ‘Making a list of virtual assistants’. By building lists like these, you can start building ‘Productized services’ around these niches. For example, if you have a list of 100 technical content writers, you can start building something like Draft.dev, and these services are usually high-value transactions and highly profitable. You can apply this technique to a wider variety as well for different categories. Bonus points - if you can talk to these people who are being added to the list and get more data from them & get consent it would double the value of the list.
A curated list of ‘Places to post about new SaaS startup’: Every day, there are hundreds of people building thousands of products. Marketing these products has become a major challenge for creators. Until a few years ago, building products is relatively tougher than marketing products. Now, this got changed. Marketing a product is getting tougher day by day. To solve this, founders need a curated list of places (that are active) to discuss and post about their products. As an add-on, if you could further drill down on this and add tags/extra data on the number of subscribers in a subreddit, number of followers in a Facebook group, number of users in a Slack group, and also mention how active is a given community on a scale of ten, it would make it much easier for founders to use this list. You can also do the same for ‘Curated List of communities’
A curated list of ‘Incubators, VCs, Angel Funding companies’: Create a curated list of Incubators, VCs, Angel Funding companies. There is a lot of market for this where most founders need a consolidated list where they can apply and look for funding.
Tip: Instead of just creating the list of companies, incubators - provide more intelligence to data by curating data around how much time each application takes for funding for a given company, what are the previous companies that got funded by a given VC, etc. The more the data, the easier it would be to sell.
A curated list of weekly interesting SaaS posts from various communities: Most people will not have time to browse through each community and read the content. Create a mechanism and create a newsletter that curates the list of interesting posts from various communities like IndieHackers, Reddit, Hackernews, etc. See MarketerCrew for inspiration.
Weekly posts on certain topics: Curating weekly posts on certain topics that gained traction and got popular in a given week and sending those to email subscribers. For example, many cloud enthusiasts want to learn about various cloud platforms - like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. Curate best articles from the web from the current week and send those to subscribers. Make sure you watch out for all related communities like Medium, Techcrunch, Lobste.rs, etc. There are some tools to automate these by using certain keyword monitoring tools. Use those tools, filter with some human touch, and curate weekly newsletters, and send to users. Bonus points - if you can also read the links and summarize the content in 4-5 lines. This can be replicated to pretty much any niche - Best articles on painting, Best content on animation, Best content on Javscript, etc. Once you have enough audience, start looking for sponsors.
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