45 vetted ideas with market research & scoring
Ideas with documented revenue examples. Each idea is scouted, analyzed, and scored across 6 dimensions so you can find your next profitable build.
In January 2024, a solo founder launched a SaaS idea on Twitter with just a Carrd landing page and a Google Form. Within 48 hours, they had 2,000 signups — but no way to track referrals, send automated emails, or know which signups came from where. They scrambled to set up Mailchimp, connect Zapier, and manually track referral links in a spreadsheet. By the time their product launched, half the momentum was lost.
Sales teams live and die by their pipeline. Every morning, thousands of SDRs open Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Hunter.io and run the same searches. They pay $99-299/month per seat for data that's often stale, bounced, or straight-up wrong.
Cold email remains the highest-ROI outbound channel in B2B — agencies report $36 returned for every $1 spent. But there's a brutal catch: Google's February 2024 spam crackdown means any domain without proper warmup gets nuked. A sales team at a 50-person startup bought 10 new domains for outbound, started sending immediately, and watched all 10 land in spam within 48 hours. That's $500 in domains and 2 weeks of pipeline generation — gone.
Consider the math: a Shopify store with $80K/mo in revenue and a 70% cart abandonment rate is losing $186K in potential monthly sales. Email recovery recaptures maybe $9K of that (5% recovery rate × 20% email open rate). SMS recovery, with its 98% open rate and 19% average conversion rate for abandoned cart messages, could recapture $35K+ — nearly 4x email. For a store paying $29/mo for an SMS recovery tool, that's a 1,200x ROI.
Every indie hacker has the same 3 AM nightmare: a cron job that processes payments silently died two days ago, and 47 customers never got their invoices. Jake, a solo founder running a $4K MRR email tool, discovered his nightly sync job had been failing for 11 days — only after a customer tweeted about missing data. He was paying $0 for UptimeRobot's free plan, which monitored his homepage but knew nothing about his 8 background workers.
In March 2024, a three-location pizza restaurant in Ohio received a demand letter from a serial plaintiff law firm: their website violated the ADA because images lacked alt text, forms had no labels, and the menu PDF was unreadable by screen readers. Settlement demand: $15,000. The owner had never heard of WCAG. Their web developer had used a template with zero accessibility consideration. This is happening to 4,600+ businesses per year, and the number is climbing 20% annually.
A dental practice gets 3 new Google reviews per month despite seeing 400 patients. Their receptionist sometimes remembers to ask, sometimes doesn't. Meanwhile, the competing practice across the street has 340+ reviews because they automated the ask: after every appointment, patients get a text with a direct link to leave a Google review. The result? The competitor ranks #1 in local search and gets 3x more new patients from Google.
Every SaaS founder has the same inbox problem: feature requests scattered across email, Slack, Intercom, and Twitter DMs. Some get tracked in spreadsheets. Most get forgotten. Then customers churn and say "you never listen to feedback."
When Notion went down in February 2023, their status page got 10 million hits in an hour. That's the power of a status page — it's the one thing your customers check when something feels wrong. Yet most indie SaaS products either don't have one or use a janky GitHub-based solution that screams 'we don't take reliability seriously.'
Otter.ai was the first to crack AI meeting notes at scale, reaching 25M+ users and raising $63M. Then Fireflies.ai came along, followed by Fathom (which hit $10M ARR in record time), and now there are dozens of AI note-takers. The market is clearly massive — but there's a problem everyone's ignoring: privacy.
When Figma raised their prices 60% overnight in 2024, the design community erupted. But Sketch's product team didn't find out for 3 days — by then, dozens of Figma users had already switched. In a market where pricing changes can shift customer behavior overnight, most companies still track competitor prices by... manually checking websites once a quarter.
On November 7, 2025, Shopify dropped a bombshell: Stocky, their free inventory management app used by thousands of merchants, would be discontinued on August 31, 2026. Within hours, r/shopify exploded with panicked posts. One merchant wrote: 'Stocky is being discontinued in 2026. How are you planning to handle inventory after that? It is expensive enough and we are tired of having to purchase an app for the most basic functions.' The post got 47 upvotes — a clear signal of widespread pain.
A freelance consultant needed to send 3 contracts per month. DocuSign wanted $25/month minimum. HelloSign charged $15/month. For someone sending a handful of documents, these prices felt absurd — especially when the free tools looked unprofessional or required signers to create accounts. They ended up using a PDF editor and hoping the typed signature would hold up legally.
Most people think live captioning is a solved problem. It's not. Otter.ai charges $16.99/month and sends your audio to the cloud. For a deaf employee in a corporate meeting, that's a privacy and compliance nightmare. For an event organizer, it's a monthly cost that never ends.
LinkedIn's organic reach is absurd right now. A well-crafted post from a founder with 2,000 followers can get 50,000 impressions — try doing that on Twitter or Instagram. The platform has become the primary distribution channel for B2B SaaS, consulting, and professional services. Yet the tooling is stuck in 2019.
When Gumroad announced its pricing change in 2023 — dropping flat monthly plans in favor of a 10% transaction fee — creators revolted. A Notion template seller doing $5,000/mo in sales was now paying $500/mo to Gumroad instead of the previous $10/mo flat fee. Twitter erupted with 'Gumroad alternative' threads that collectively received millions of impressions. Lemon Squeezy, a bootstrapped alternative, reportedly gained 10,000+ new creators in the weeks following the announcement.
Running a weekly podcast is essentially running a mini media company. Every episode requires recording (1 hour), editing (2-3 hours), and post-production content: show notes, timestamps, blog post, newsletter excerpt, 3-5 social media quotes, and audiogram clips. For a solo podcaster publishing weekly, that's 8-12 hours per episode. The content repurposing alone — show notes, blog, social — takes 2-4 hours that could be spent on the next episode or marketing.
A taco truck owner in Austin finally moved from paper tickets to a tablet-based POS. Orders started flowing faster, but the kitchen was still chaos — handwritten tickets getting lost, cooks yelling across the truck, wrong orders going out. She looked into kitchen display systems and found Toast KDS required the full Toast POS ecosystem. Square KDS was $20/month per screen but only worked with Square. Fresh KDS looked promising at $19/month but the reviews mentioned sync issues.
When Loom's engineering team sat down to build their link preview feature in 2022, they estimated 2 weeks of work. Three months later, they were still wrestling with headless Chrome memory leaks, sites that loaded differently every time, and a $340/mo AWS bill just for the screenshot workers. They eventually gave up and bought an API.
A DTC candle brand spends $5,000/month on Facebook ads. They have 3 ad variations, all written by the founder in 20 minutes. One performs okay, two are burning money. A professional copywriter would charge $2,000 to write a proper test set of 20 variations — that's 40% of their monthly ad budget gone before a single impression.
Maria runs a brand design agency with three employees. She sends 12 proposals a month, each taking 3 hours to create in Google Docs. That's 36 hours — nearly a full work week — spent on proposals instead of client work. She formats pricing tables that break every time she adjusts a line item, exports to PDF (which strips the interactive elements), emails it to the prospect, then checks her inbox obsessively for 4 days waiting for a response. She has no idea if they even opened it.
A solo developer ships a Next.js app on Friday evening. By Monday, 47 users have hit a TypeError that crashes the checkout flow — but he has no idea because he doesn't have error tracking. No Sentry, no Bugsnag, nothing. He finds out when a customer tweets 'your checkout is broken.' Estimated lost revenue: $2,300 over the weekend.
In February 2024, Tony Dinh announced TypingMind had reached $500K in total revenue — just one year after launch. The indie hacker community celebrated. A simple ChatGPT wrapper with prompt libraries, personas, and local storage had become a legitimate business generating $45K MRR. Tony shared: 'I launched just hours after ChatGPT went live. Speed matters.'
A solo veterinarian opened her first clinic in a suburban strip mall. She inherited the previous owner's copy of Cornerstone, IDEXX's legacy practice management software — server-based, Windows-only, with a UI that looked straight from 2005. Training took weeks. The annual license renewal came with a $3,600 invoice. She looked for alternatives and found Digitail, modern and cloud-based, but pricing required contacting sales and seemed designed for larger practices.
When Shopify announced Stocky's discontinuation, a merchant posted on r/shopify: 'Stocky was so bad that we went back to paying for inventory software. Cin7 is what we use. But I do not love it either.' The post got 15 upvotes. Another replied: 'You need an enterprise grade IMS at that point. Shopify inventory management and reporting are embarrassingly bad.' 23 upvotes. The frustration is palpable.
When Julia started her recipe blog in 2022, she did everything right — keyword research, quality content, proper on-page SEO. Eight months and 120 articles later, she wanted to know which posts were actually ranking. The cheapest option? Ahrefs at $99/mo — more than her blog's total revenue. She tried Google Search Console, but it only shows averages, not daily positions, and comparing against competitors is impossible.
A startup CTO deploys a new billing system on a Monday. It's been tested in staging but production is different. Within an hour, 15% of customers see broken invoices. The team scrambles to write a hotfix, test it, and deploy — total downtime: 3 hours. If they'd had a feature flag, they could have toggled the new billing off in 10 seconds.
A SaaS company has 340 reviews on G2, 120 on Capterra, 85 on Trustpilot, and scattered mentions on Twitter and Reddit. Their marketing team wants to use the best quotes on the website but nobody's read all 545 reviews. A negative review on G2 went unanswered for 3 months — a prospect mentioned it during a sales call: 'We saw that unresolved complaint on G2 and it made us nervous.'
A 10-person web design agency manages 15 active clients. Each client has a Google Drive folder, a Slack channel, email threads, and Asana tasks. When a client asks 'what's the status of our project?', a project manager spends 20 minutes gathering updates from 4 different tools before responding. Multiply that by 15 clients and you've got a full-time job that produces zero billable work.
A solo real estate agent posted on r/realtors: 'They are ridiculously expensive and do not do what I want. I ended up getting HubSpot; it is free and I am loving it. I do not like any of the real estate CRMs because they only focus on lead generation.' Another replied: 'Follow Up Boss was bought by Zillow, and who wants to give Zillow MORE access to your data? I hated every minute of the free kvCore we got at a previous brokerage.'
A concrete subcontractor in Phoenix runs three job sites simultaneously. Every evening, his superintendents text him photos and notes about the day's work — scattered across iMessage threads. When a dispute arose about whether reinforcement was installed correctly, he spent hours searching through 6 months of texts to find the relevant photos. The lawsuit cost more than the original job.
A social media manager at a 20-person startup manages content across Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Her workflow: a Google Sheet with post ideas, a Notion board for approvals, Buffer for scheduling, and Canva for graphics. Four tools, zero integration, and she spends Monday morning just copying content between them.
In January 2024, a French e-commerce site received a €150,000 GDPR fine. Not for a data breach — just for loading Google Analytics before getting cookie consent. The fine was 10x their monthly revenue. This isn't rare: EU data protection authorities issued 2,000+ fines in 2023, and cookie consent is the lowest-hanging enforcement fruit.
A developer launches a new side project and needs a contact form. They could build one from scratch (backend, email service, spam filtering — 2 hours minimum) or use Typeform ($25/mo for basic features). For a side project making $0/month, neither option makes sense. They end up with a mailto: link and miss 60% of potential contacts because nobody clicks mailto: links in 2026.
In January 2026, a Shopify merchant posted on r/shopify: 'Apparently, Disputifier — the app I trusted to handle chargebacks automatically — had a massive API leak. I have poured months of work, time, and money into my store, and now it feels like it is all slipping through my fingers.' The post sparked panic among merchants who had integrated chargeback automation into their operations.
A Shopify store selling handmade candles gets 500 visitors/day but only 1.2% convert. The founder adds a social proof popup showing recent purchases — 'Maria from Chicago just bought Lavender Dreams — 2 min ago.' Within a week, conversion jumps to 1.8%. That's a 50% increase in sales from a $9/month widget.
A SaaS company launches a beautiful landing page. Traffic starts flowing from a ProductHunt launch — 2,000 visitors in 24 hours. But only 12 sign up (0.6% conversion rate). The page has clear copy, strong testimonials, and a free trial offer. What's missing? The page feels static and empty. Visitors can't tell if 5 people or 5,000 people use this product. They see the testimonials but wonder if they're fabricated.
Mike runs a 3-truck pool service in Phoenix, servicing 200 residential pools weekly. His tech stack is a nightmare: Skimmer for route tracking, QuickBooks for invoicing, a whiteboard for scheduling, and text messages for customer communication. When a customer asks about their pools chemical history, he digs through paper logs. The Pool Magazine 2026 survey found 68% of pool companies are actively shopping for all-in-one solutions - theyre tired of the tool sprawl. The field service management market is hitting $9.87B by 2031, and pool service is one of the stickiest verticals (customers need weekly service, low churn). The gap: existing tools are either generic (Service Autopilot), dated (Pool Brain), or enterprise-priced (ProValet). A modern platform at $39-79/mo with AI-powered chemical dosing recommendations, smart route optimization, and a customer portal showing service history could own the 1-5 truck segment - the sweet spot where operators are tech-savvy enough to adopt but too small for enterprise tools.
In 2023, a mid-size e-commerce company's main domain expired on a Saturday because the renewal email went to a former employee's inbox. They lost 72 hours of sales — roughly $180,000 — while fighting with their registrar to restore it. The CEO later admitted they managed domains in a shared Google Sheet that nobody had updated in 8 months.
Picture Sarah, a mobile pet groomer in Austin, managing 40+ appointments weekly across the city. Shes juggling three apps: one for scheduling, one for route planning, and a spreadsheet for pet notes and owner preferences. Her enterprise-grade alternatives like Gingr cost $150/mo - overkill for her solo operation. Meanwhile, generic field service tools like Jobber dont understand that Maxs golden retriever needs the dematting brush and Bellas poodle is anxious around clippers. The pet grooming software market is hitting $1.8B by 2033, growing 15% annually, yet 70% of solo groomers are stuck with generic tools or paper. The opportunity is a clean, mobile-first platform at $29-49/mo that speaks groomer - pet profiles with grooming histories, smart route optimization, automated reminders with pet photos, and stripe-integrated tipping. Winner-take-most dynamics favor the first modern player to nail the mobile groomer workflow.
The mobile detailing market is exploding. Post-COVID, car owners prefer on-site convenience and pay premium for ceramic and PPF. The r/AutoDetailing subreddit has 500K+ members with frequent software complaints. Housecall Pro makes $150M+ ARR but has terrible reviews. The opportunity: route optimization, before/after photos for social proof, package upselling, and weather-aware scheduling. Mobile-first for van-based businesses.
Jade runs a 4-artist tattoo studio in Brooklyn. Every week she deals with the same chaos: deposit tracking across Venmo, Cash App, and Stripe with no unified view. Multi-session sleeve projects where clients forget what was discussed. Guest artists visiting for conventions who need commission splits. Health consent forms that technically need to be digital but are still printed and filed in a cabinet. The 800K+ tattoo artists in the US are underserved by software. Generic salon tools like Fresha dont understand deposits for custom art or multi-session tracking. Tattoo-specific tools exist but are either calendar-only (TattooGenda) or clunky (Tattoo Studio Pro with its 2015 UI). The gap is a modern, mobile-first platform that nails the tattoo workflow: consultation notes with reference images, deposit tracking, multi-session projects with progress photos, digital consent forms, and easy commission splits for guest artists. At $29-49/mo, this is a sticky, low-churn vertical where artists rarely switch once workflows are established.
QuickBooks has been raising prices aggressively - from $350 to $1250/year in some cases. Reddit r/Accounting and r/smallbusiness are full of contractors asking for alternatives. The catch: bookkeeping software is complex to build correctly - tax compliance, bank reconciliation, reporting. Wave offers free but lacks features; FreshBooks and Xero still feel like overkill for a plumber who just needs to invoice and track expenses. High demand but hard build.
HVAC contractors on Reddit consistently complain about ServiceTitan - powerful but overkill for 2-5 tech operations. They need simple equipment tracking, warranty alerts, and service contract management without the $500+/mo price tag. The opportunity is a focused tool at $39-79/mo that does equipment tracking exceptionally well: QR codes on units, warranty expiry alerts, service history per customer, and contract renewal reminders.
Construction contractors lose thousands in tools every year. Enterprise asset tracking like Asset Panda is overkill for a 5-person crew. The opportunity: dead-simple QR check-in/check-out with GPS for high-value equipment, accessible from any phone. No IT expertise required. But the market is stable rather than explosive, and pricing power is limited.