Why are you not building your own SaaS? As a software developer, we have a “superpower” that gives us an unfair advantage in creating digital products that require very little initial capital investment to start earning revenue, thus you should be trying to start your own SaaS as soon as possible.
The job market is always up and down, even if you don’t build a SaaS that will help you quit your 9-5, at least you have some sort of back-up income stream.
Anyway, lecture aside, sorry 🥺, marching on… Here’s a little idea you could probably turn into a small browser extension or full on SaaS business.
The problem
I watch a lot of YouTube, sometimes I watch one particular type of video for some time but do not want to see the same content consistently. For example: recently we had a local election and I was following that for a while, but now the election is over, yet YouTube still fills my homepage with content for this even though my interest in the topic has died down.
Another example is during the day I may watch some coding-related content that’s serious and requires a good level of concentration.
At night on my TV, I don’t want to watch serious coding stuff but I may still be interested in the video just not right now (I know there’s a play later or something button).
Possible product idea
Build a Chrome extension that can do the following:
Collect my daily interests via a none-intrusive way.
Scrape YouTube and build a tab of videos based on my current time of day interests.
Be Cognisant of the time of day and week, and adjust the content accordingly. You may need to use AI for this.
Allow me to bookmark videos, and then send me an email reminder 8am or the next morning. Probably should be configurable.
This is just a random idea with no research behind it, so you should do some product market research and determine if it’s worth building first before actually writing a single line of code!
How to monetize
I am not sure if there is a big enough market for paying customers for Chrome extensions, but you can try to offer a small subscription for this service.
Alternatively, just get enough users and place banners (in a non-intrusive manner) on the custom homepage and maybe the email. If you get tens of thousands of users, you probably can easily hit $10k with banner ads.
If you new to SaaS and have no idea where to start, don’t worry! I wrote a comprehensive guide here.