31 vetted ideas with market research & scoring
Explore curated SaaS side project ideas — each one scouted, analyzed, and scored across 6 dimensions so you can find your next profitable build.
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.
Every SaaS team ships features. Almost none of them communicate it well. The typical flow: developer merges PR, product manager writes a Notion doc, marketing eventually posts something on Twitter two weeks later. Meanwhile, customers keep asking for features that already shipped.
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.
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.
Freelancers don't want accounting software. They want to send an invoice, get paid, and move on. But every tool on the market — FreshBooks, Wave, QuickBooks — forces them through a full accounting setup before they can generate a single PDF.
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.
Dr. Sarah runs a dental practice with 12 staff. Every year, she needs to renew DEA registrations, update OSHA training, file infection control reports, and track 23 other compliance deadlines. She manages this with a paper calendar and sticky notes. Last year she missed a state inspection deadline and paid a $4,500 fine.
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 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.
Open any link on Twitter, Slack, or Discord. The ones that get clicked have rich preview cards with custom images. The ones that get ignored have a blank white rectangle or a generic logo. Social sharing cards are the silent conversion driver nobody optimizes.
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.
Tax season is freelancer anxiety season. You know that sinking feeling: opening a spreadsheet in March, trying to reconstruct what you spent over the past year, praying you kept enough receipts. Then paying an accountant $400 to tell you that you owe more than expected.
You built the feature. You shipped it. But nobody told you whether it actually helped. Most SaaS products have a blank space where customer feedback should live — no widget, no prompt, no signal. They rely on support tickets (which only capture complaints) and NPS surveys (which capture numbers, not insights).
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.
#BuildInPublic isn't just a hashtag anymore — it's a growth strategy. Founders like Pieter Levels and Danny Postma proved that sharing revenue numbers publicly generates trust, followers, and customers. But right now, everyone is doing it manually: screenshots of Stripe dashboards, cropped Plausible charts, or hand-updated Notion pages.
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.