Issue#38: Building $1K - $10K MRR products around Blogging & Writing

Upen

Mar 31

👋👋 Hi - I picked up a couple of ideas from my own profitable Micro SaaS Ideas Newsletter and made them profitable.

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Who am I? - Quick notes about me:

Building Siteoly (Profitable with 4000 free users and a few paid users)
Writing Newsletters at Micro SaaS Ideas (Profitable with 7000 free users and a few paid users)
Info Product - The Micro SaaS Handbook/Kit (Profitable with a few pre-orders)
Now working on a new website builder Flezr (Started accepting waitlist)
A couple of more projects (Info products, Cohort based learning ideas) are in the pipeline too.

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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 how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

Let’s see some of the interesting products around Blogging & Writing.

Proseful: Focused, beautiful & free blogging. Proseful is a simple blogging platform, designed to help you stay focused and showcase your content in style.

DynaBlogger: The simplest way to start a blog. DynaBlogger is a fully managed blogging platform that helps you focus on your content.

SuperBlog: Superblog is a blazing fast alternative to WordPress and Medium blogs. You can focus on writing content instead of SEO audits, speed, and design. Crossed $500 MRR in less than a year.

YoopBlog: Blogging is as easy as emailing. Turn your email client into your favorite publishing assistant.

Swish: Swish provides everything needed for a high-quality blog, all working in the background for you.

CrossXPost: Share your content across multiple platforms in one click. No more tiresome copy-pasting. CrossXPost helps bloggers and Solopreneurs to share their content to social platforms from one place.

Exegesis: A writing app for capturing and sharing disorganized, non-linear, creative thinking.

RoamResearch: A note-taking tool for networked thought. As easy to use as a document. As powerful as a graph database. Roam helps you organize your research for the long haul.

NeuralText: Find the right words faster. NeuralText saves you time, energy, and thinking-power by automating your writing process. ‍ Helped hundreds of SEOs and copywriters work smarter.

Reedsy: Where beautiful books are made. Reedsy is a combination of editor, designer, or marketer who can help bring your book to life.

WriteFull: Writefull helps your students and researchers with their academic writing, which is critical to their success at university.

ProsaicBlog: An intentionally simple blogging platform. Prosaic is an independent publishing platform that makes it easy for anyone to create a personal weblog on their own domain.

BloggingForDevs: BloggingForDev teaches how to grow your blog as a developer without an existing audience.

HeyWorld: With Hey, blogging is as easy as emailing. Write something wonderful in email and publish it as a blog automatically.

BloggingGuide: Blogging Guide is an online community of writers. The content is crafted to help new bloggers monetize their online writing. Also, provides in-depth coverage of all digital publishing platforms, to help writers and marketers stay ahead of the curve.

Svbtle: Svbtle is a publishing platform designed from the ground up to work the same way your brain does. The platform includes everything you need to organize, develop, and share your thoughts, stories, and ideas with the world.

Moogle: Blogging for those who want to use Gmail to write blog posts. Write and post to your blog from Gmail.

1MB: The easy way to host your website or blog. Easily create a website or blog in just a few clicks.

Writesonic: High-quality articles and blog posts at the push of a button. Unleash the power of AI to generate 100% original content that reads like it was written by a human.

ContentBot: Use the world's most advanced AI to write for you. Blog content, landing pages, ad copy, and so much more. Used by more than 12K users.

Bloggi: Create a blog in seconds Literally. A simple but powerful editor that lets you write without distractions.

Papyras: Powerful platform to blog, create email forms, track and maintain your companies content marketing efforts.

BearBlog: A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform. No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets.

Notelet: Create a website or blog with Notion. Write in Notion, publish to the web. Custom domain, analytics, themes, and more.

Feather: Notion to Blog in minutes Complete blogging platform with Notion as your CMS. No coding required.

Affilimate: All your affiliate data in a single dashboard. Affilimate helps digital publishers collect affiliate commissions and content analytics in one place so you can optimize conversion and grow your revenue.

Dorik Blog: Build your own blog without writing any code. Fully customizable design with drag and drop editor. (Not yet launched). Dorik is a website builder already used by thousands of people and now Dorik is launching a No-Code Blogging too.

Negative Nancy says - “Blogging platform exists for a long time. Why again now”?

Me - The world of blogging and content consumption has evolved over the years and people are consuming content more than ever. This led to the creation of multiple platforms and tools to help to create content much easier and faster.

Negative Nancy says - “Blogging just text content isn’t fun”

Me - That’s correct. We are going to talk about multiple tools around text content, audio content, and video content. In fact, even for text content, you can use the most advanced form of markdown content - MDX (covered more in the next section why MDX is special for content writers)

Deep-dive & Some niches

MDX Blogs: If you have ever written blog content, you must have heard of Markdown language. Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. But Markdown comes with its own disadvantages. Except for the basic things, you really cannot control with dynamic options. Now, with the introduction of MDX, you can use custom React code inside the blog. MDX is an extension of Markdown that allows you to import and use custom React components. Create a simple platform with readily available MDX/React components that can make writing more fun for bloggers. MDX is an extremely powerful feature to create complex React components and use them in blogs. See here for more information
Notion to Blog: If you haven’t heard of Notion, check here. Notion is getting increasingly popular because of its simplistic writing control. Create a Micro SaaS that connects user’s Notion documents, pulls the data from Notion documents, and publishes the content as a blog on a custom domain. Make sure to add more features like “showing related articles” under every article. Features like these will increase the page views and decreases the bounce rate of blogs.
Toolkit/Community for Bloggers: Similar to any other profession/skill, blogging also needs a community where people ask for help. Create an ecosystem or a community where you can help bloggers. Niche down as much as you can. For example, BloggingForDevs is a targeted community exclusively for ‘devs who want to start blogging’. BloggingForDevs is profitable and into $2K MRR in 1 year of the launch.
Distraction-free Blogging/Minimalistic Blogging: Create a distraction-free blogging platform. Most of the current blogging platforms are bloated with a lot of plugins and analytics. Create an easy-to-use blogging platform with no bloated plugins that help in distraction-free writing. This also improves the loading time of the blogs as you only display the text content. See BearBlog for inspiration. As the blog grows, add a simple commenting system (again - not a bloated one but just a simple text comment-based option).
Affiliate Tracking Tools for Bloggers: Bloggers write content for mainly two reasons other than building the audience. They write content either to charge for the content or to make money by adding affiliate links/sponsorship links. Sponsorship links are slightly different compared to affiliate links. Sponsorship links are primarily one-time payments from an advertiser where affiliate links are links that could generate some revenue (sometimes recurring revenue based on products) when someone clicks on the link and stats using/paying for the product. Most bloggers write about a lot of affiliate products and get money. Create a Micro SaaS tool that helps bloggers track these affiliate links and revenue coming from each of these links. This will help the bloggers to understand where to put more effort and advertise based on which products give more affiliate revenue. See Affilimate for inspiration.
OpenAI/GPT-3 based Blogging: OpenAI/GPT-3 is one of the most advanced platforms for generating AI-based content. In short - your new automated content will be generated based on any previous samples you provide to the tool. You can also fine-tune the content by providing more samples around the tone of the content, category of the content, etc. While your tool may not need to provide a full blog post, it should help the author/write to remove the ‘writer’s block’ and provide some content to start with. Note that OpenAI/GPT-3 access is not yet open for everyone. You can request access here.
Platform to hire Bloggers/Tech writers: Hiring Bloggers/Tech writers via platforms like Upwork/other freelancing platforms is not easy as the platform as these platforms are primarily meant for software development. Create an exclusive platform for people to hire bloggers and technical writers. Also, make sure to provide a way for clients to provide reviews to the hired bloggers. This helps in maintaining the quality of the platform. If making the payments and handling the review systems looks complex, start small - start with a list of 50 to 60 tech writers and work with customers and charge a one-time access fee for clients to access this data. As you see more clients coming in, make the one-time fee to monthly subscription and keep adding more bloggers/tech writers. As you progress, convert the platform into a marketplace. When you start, have a one-to-one conversation with the initial clients and understand why they want to use your platform.
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