Growing Your SaaS Idea Into a Healthy Tree

I want you to do something before you read a single word further: schedule four hours of your day—any day in the next week, but make it within seven days. Seriously. Block out those four hours in your calendar, phone, or however you plan your life. Turn off notifications, and dedicate it to what you’re about to read. No cheating, no half measures. I’ll wait.

Done? Good. Because if you don’t carve out the time to act, all these words are just going to float off into the ether. Then what was the point of writing this.

Now, let’s get into it.

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1. The Seed of an Idea (A.K.A. The Problem)

Here’s the blunt truth: if you don’t have a problem, you don’t have an idea. Full stop. “Idea” in the SaaS world equates to a problem plus a solution. I call that the seed.

Most fresh entrepreneurs mistakenly think that “idea = solution.” Nah, it’s idea = problem + solution. If no one is actually struggling with something—if they’re not annoyed, frustrated, or anxious—then your solution is a shiny object solving absolutely nothing. And nobody pays for that. Like this ATM pin generator. Cool animations though.

Solve Your Own Problem

The easiest way to get into problem-space? Solve your own problem. That daily frustration that makes you want to toss your keyboard out the window is golden. Because guess what? You intimately know the pain. You’ve lived with it; you understand every nuance. There’s a massive difference between building a product because you think people want it versus building one you know you want yourself.

• List out your daily annoyances: the friction points in your day-to-day that make you grit your teeth or let a sigh out at the thought of it. Sometimes it’s as small as transferring data between two clunky programs. Other times it’s an industry-wide headache that’s practically medieval in how outdated it is.
• Pay attention to complaints: your friends, family, colleagues—especially the ones who share your professional or personal circles. When people complain, they’re essentially inviting a solution. That’s your problem statement. Although I would advise to focus on your own problem first because using the problem-space of another person has the overhead of you needing to constantly interviewing them to extract the nuances and tiny details.
• Check if this problem is unique: sometimes you’ll find out that you’re the only one who can’t stand a certain inconvenience. If you’re a market of one, it’s not really a business. But if you talk to five people and three of them say, “Yeah, [insert your same problem] drives me crazy bro!” then you might be onto something. Keep in mind The Mom Test to avoid confirmation bias! I write about how to properly conduct customer interviews here.

Write It Down

I’m willing to bet 80% of you reading this right now have had at least one million-dollar idea in your lifetime—yes, even if you don’t think so. But guess what kills those ideas? You don’t write them down. The best ideas vanish quicker than mom’s cooking when all my brothers are home.

We have a shared Discord channel at Startino called “The Dump-yard,” because we dump every random spark of an idea there. Once a month, we comb through it, half-laughing at the ridiculous ones, and half-scheming about the promising ones. The key is to get them down now and evaluate them later (or right away if you prefer). Because trust me, they won’t come back with the same clarity if you don’t.

Unleashing Your Creative Mind

While capturing ideas is crucial, generating them requires a specific mental state. Let's explore science-backed methods to enhance your creative thinking:

1. Embrace Non-Linear Activities

According to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, "divergent thinking" - the ability to explore unconventional connections - flourishes during non-linear activities. This includes:

• Walking or light exercise that doesn't demand intense focus
• Doodling or free-form sketching
• Simple, repetitive tasks that allow your mind to wander

2. Strategic Rest

Counter-intuitively, doing nothing can be your most productive creative time:

• Music producer Rick Rubin famously practices lying still for 3-5 hours daily (without sleeping) to boost creativity
• Yoga nidra sessions (20-30 minutes) in the middle of the day can reset your nervous system
• Brief diversions from problem-solving can improve creative performance by 40-60%, according to the studies summarized in this article by Greater Good Magazine.

3. Balance Exploration and Execution

Creativity isn't just about constant ideation. As Dr. Huberman explains, it requires alternating between:

• Exploration Mode: Relaxed, open-minded state where new connections form
• Execution Mode: Focused work to develop and refine ideas

4. Cross-Pollination

Some of the most innovative solutions come from combining concepts across different domains, like mixing ant keeping (as pets) with AI… Get creative!

• Connect principles from diverse industries that you’re familiar with.
• Look for patterns that bridge seemingly unconnected areas.

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2. Pre-validating the Problem: The Healthy Seed

Now you’ve got the seed, but is it healthy? Does it have the potential to grow? Or is it a barren seed that’ll never sprout?

Here’s how to check:

1. Direct Line of Contact: Are you, or someone close to you, experiencing this problem for real? That personal experience or proximity to users is crucial. If you can’t directly observe or talk to someone suffering this problem, how do you truly know it’s worth solving?
2. Time, Money, Headspace Saved: Ask yourself, “If I had a magic wand and this solution existed, how much time, money, or mental energy would it save me?” Try to quantify it—5 hours per week, or $1,000 per month. Hard figures ground your idea in tangible value which will be helpful later for pricing the SaaS.
3. Why Wouldn’t People Use This? This is a fun, twisted exercise. Ask yourself why it might fail. Are people too comfortable with their current solutions (even if they’re bad)? Are they cost-sensitive? Is there skepticism around changing habits or trying new tools? If you can’t find any reasons it wouldn’t be used, you’re likely missing something big. Be brutally honest. They will be when you ask for their credit card.

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3. Market Research: Evaluating the Environment

“Market research” sounds intimidating. Let’s cut the fluff: market research is literally just finding enough people with the same pain and figuring out if they can and will pay in order to make your business model work.

• How many potential customers could use this app? If your target niche is so tiny that the total addressable market is 200 people, it’s tough to build a sustainable business. You can do it if each of those 200 pays you handsomely. While that’s not typical, it could actually be quite a decent strategy. It’s called Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a focused B2B strategy where companies target a small number of high-value accounts (like enterprises) with personalized solutions and marketing efforts, resulting in larger deal sizes despite a smaller customer base.
• How much would each customer pay? This is a guesstimate, nothing more. But it’s a crucial number to sanity-check. A beauty with SaaS products is that its always value-based pricing (compared to cost based like services). For example, if your SaaS automates a tedious manual process that costs a business $1,000 per month in labor, charging $200-300 monthly is reasonable since you're providing significant cost savings. In the SaaS industry, it's expected that you'll deliver 3x - 10x the value of what you're charging (I would just pick 5x).

Notice I’m not giving you any fancy formula. Start with simple logic and back-of-the-napkin math. That alone can save you months of building something that has no real market.

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4. The Competition: Neighboring Plants

Look, if you’re in a room and you’re bragging “I have zero competitors,” that’s either a really good or really terrifying sign. Think of competitors like other trees in your forest. Having no trees around you could mean you've discovered untouched fertile soil (good!), or you're trying to grow in a desert where nothing survives (terrifying!).

Just as trees compete for sunlight, water, and nutrients, SaaS companies compete for customers, market share, and resources. But here's the thing about forests: multiple species of trees can thrive in the same space by finding their own niches. Some grow taller to catch the sun, others develop deeper roots, and some specialize in surviving in the shade.

If There Are Competitors

You don't need to reinvent the wheel to create a successful SaaS. Sometimes the best approach, especially for beginners, is to take an existing solution and make it marginally better for a specific niche. Just like a local restaurant can outperform McDonald's in their neighborhood by catering to local tastes/budget, your SaaS can succeed by serving a targeted audience better than the big players.

Ask yourself:

1. What can I do at least 1% better? That 1% difference could mean the user experience, a crucial feature, or a specific integration that no one else bothers with. It could be better customer service. It could be better marketing. Your SaaS doesn't need to be the tallest tree in the forest to succeed. You just need to find your own space to grow and flourish. What has everyone else overlooked?
2. What’s their business trend? Are they on a downward spiral, or are they growing steadily? Are they brand new or established giants? Trends reveal potential market direction and how hard you’ll have to fight.

Competition means there’s already some water in the well. You just need to see if you can draw from it more efficiently (or supply more water, if we’re dragging the analogy).

If There Are No Competitors

This is both thrilling and suspicious. If you can’t find even a single tool or solution that touches on the same problem, you might be the first genius in the game—or the only person who cares.

• Extrapolate your worst-case market scenario: imagine a doomsday scenario where only a fraction of the potential users adopt your solution. Is it still profitable enough to meet your goals? If the gloom-and-doom scenario is enough to sink you, maybe this seed shouldn’t be planted just yet.

I’m not saying bail at the first sight of adversity, but do the math. If you’re still wearing rose-tinted glasses during this process, snap out of it—cold, pessimistic numbers, even if they’re guesses, are your friend.

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5. Reaching Your First Customers: Planting the Sapling

So you validated the seed; it’s healthy. Now you need to plant it in the real world—get it in front of actual humans who have the problem. You could build the greatest SaaS ever, but if you’re launching into a vacuum, you may as well be building a private art exhibit on Mars.

• Networking and Community: Are you connected with the people in your target industry? Do you hang out in any forums, Facebook groups, or subreddits where these folks congregate? If they’re on Reddit, you might want to check out our tool called Reletino that allows you to find leads in real time across subreddits through an AI agent.
• Partnering with Distribution Channels: Is there a creator, influencer, or organization that already has an audience of your ideal users? You can be the innovative solution, and they can get a cut of the revenue or a boost to their reputation. Think of the relationship like planting in soil that’s already fertile.
  • For instance, Cal AI—a popular AI fitness coaching app—partnered with 150 fitness influencers to showcase their product through social media. Their strategic influencer partnerships helped them reach $1M in monthly recurring revenue within months of launching, while maintaining efficient customer acquisition costs. Their success came from offering exclusive features and commission structures that incentivized influencers to authentically promote the product to their engaged audiences.
• Ads: Paid ads offers a fast and highly scalable way to get traffic - you can reach thousands of potential users overnight. If you go down the ad route, do it methodically—set a budget, define your core demographic, and then test small before going all out. Think of ads like oil. If you put oil on dry wood, nothing happens. If you put oil on burning wood, it spreads like wildfire. Make sure your product and messaging are primed before pouring money into ads, or you'll just be throwing cash into the flames.

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6. Building It: Sprouting into a Sapling

Finally, the hard part for people that can’t code and the euphoric phase for a programmer: crafting the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). But hold up—your core product isn’t just code and design. It’s also how you market it and how you sell it.

Skills You’ll Need

1. Design & Development: This is the obvious part—someone’s got to code the thing and someone else (or the same person if you’re scrappy) has to design it in a way that doesn’t make users’ eyes bleed. If you can’t code and you don't have a tech buddy, consider using Bolt, an AI-powered development platform that helps you build web applications directly in your browser by simply chatting with it. But if you’ve used Bolt extensively, you’ll know how much trouble it has after reaching its complexity-limit. Take it from these guys on Reddit. One day…
2. Marketing: Building your entire SaaS in stealth mode, then emerging to a big marketing push is a fairy tale empowered by Apple’s product releases. Successful entrepreneurs start marketing early—share your process, tease updates, gather sign-ups, and use that initial user base for feedback.
3. Sales & Partnerships: If your SaaS is B2B (business-to-business), you’re going to need someone who’s not scared to pick up the phone or send that pitch email. Partnerships can fast-track your distribution but require skillful relationship-building. Even if you’re doing B2C (business-to-consumer), 1-on-1 demos drastically help gain initial traction. People buy from people they like, if you can do a good job in the demo, they’re much more likely to buy.

Timeline Estimation

• MVP Development: This could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Resist the urge to jam every possible feature into your first launch. Strip it down to the 1 - 2 must-have features. In software, we multiply time estimates by 3. This article by David HH. explains why. In our opinion, if it takes more than 2 months to build an MVP, its out of scope. I know most people reading this will still think “oh but this feature is needed!” for some features. I can’t convince you otherwise here. It’s at your own risk.
• Partnerships and Marketing: Should ideally happen prior to development. Don’t wait until your MVP is ready to start talking to potential partners, influencers, or beta users. Let them shape your product. Collaboration fosters early buy-in. Build a PoC using Bolt within a day and use that to convey your idea, like we did for one of the projects we worked on, you can check out the PoC we made here.

I can’t stress enough that “shipping” matters more than “perfecting.” Bloating and polishing your MVP is like polishing a seed before you plant it—makes zero sense. Get it into the dirt, water it, and adjust as it grows.

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Final Words: Plant the Seed or Let It Rot

If you’ve made it this far, it means you’re at least somewhat serious about launching a SaaS. Or you like reading about launching a SaaS. Either way, I’d say you’re already ahead of the people who keep “thinking” about it but never block out time to do something.

The difference between a good startup and a good idea is execution. That’s why I insisted you schedule those four hours. Take that time to follow the steps I gave you. And if it doesn’t work out—if your seed never sprouts—try again with the next one. Because every single great tech business started exactly where you are: with nothing but a seed and the will to plant it.

Now get planting.

Best of luck founders o7

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