Micro-SaaS Week - Building a $30k/Month Business in 14 Months - SuperLemon

Today's episode is part of our Micro-SaaS edition of the Trends Series.

Micro-SaaS Newsletter

Our guest today is Preetam Nath from SuperLemon who also recently started new product called DelightChat.

Preetam Nath
SuperLemon
DelightChat

This is our longest episode yet and this was after cutting out at least 30 minutes of Siddharth and Preetam discussing life philosophy, finances, and other stuff. 

Preetam and his co-founder built SuperLemon as an app for the Shopify store. The reason they became well known in the software development  circles is because they were able to scale up a simple idea of a WhatsApp integration into the Shopify ecommerce store. This generated $30,000 or about 20 lacs per month of recurring revenue in less than 14 months.
The team was just the two of them and they accomplished it without any external funding. 

In this episode, we go in detail through how Preetam thought about building and then built Super Lemon but also talk about the factors that are the foundation of success for a Micro-SaaS company such as finding your niche, thinking about distribution and much more. 

SaaS has become a very popular term the last few years. it stands for software as a service - you can just think of it as a subscription model for software. so let's say that somebody is giving you value on a regular basis and you want to pay them on a regular basis for the value they are providing. that is a subscription – Preetam has a great blog article called Subscription is Eating the World. Now just think about the most basic software that you get as a subscription on your web browser or anywhere else. Netflix comes to mind - they provide a service off TV shows and movies on a regular basis and I pay them around ₹500 a month. On the business side you can think about Office 365 where you pay around ₹200 a month for access to the entire office software suite.  

So saas is just software for which I pay a monthly fee. Micro SaaS, or Niche SaaS or Vertical SaaS is just a SaaS product which is looking at a very small niche. For example if your ambitions are to earn only $3000 or 2 lacs per month as a side business then you can make a focused product for which you charge $30 per month and all you have to do is find 100 people love what you made. Considering that the Internet now has 5 billion users, It is much easier now to find a niche and figure out how to serve those people. it doesn't hurt that you will be charging in dollars.

Micro-SaaS Is referred to as the modern lifestyle business Which is set up by its founders to earn a certain amount of money and no more. It gives you the money that you need to enjoy the lifestyle that you want without the stresses of scaling up start up. 

Lastly, I’d like to just make an open call for anyone who’d like to help us write our Trends newsletters on any topic that interests you. Next week, we’re looking into Ayurveda and then Electric Vehicles, Direct to Consumer. Email us  at theindiandream20@gmail.com

Preetam Nath's Blog on Micro-SaaS
How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20k users in 14 months
Guide: Make money building Shopify micro-SaaS apps
The Mom Test by Rob