Building a Bootstrapped SaaS 101 - Coming up with ideas
What's in an idea?
Around two years ago my second eldest son was 3 years old － He had a sleep regression and decided that he needed me to be in the room while he went to sleep. He was still napping during the day, which meant (as I’m sure many parents can relate), that every night I’d be stuck quietly in the dark for an hour or two waiting for the sweet release of sleeping kids.
After weeks of doom-scrolling socials, I decided I’d start taking my laptop in so I could at least watch Netflix on a bigger screen. I got sick of Netflix, so instead figured I may as well make something.
This was perfect quiet creativity time - no distractions, no noise, no expectations of being productive or do other work, nowhere else to be.
The question was, what would I make?
Ideas phase - eyes wide open
The ability to generate ideas can seem like a magical creative talent that some people have and others do not. I don’t believe that’s true. What I believe, is that ideation is a muscle － one that gets stronger with use, and most people can get better at it quite quickly.
Years ago, I read some advice (might have been Seth Godin?) about how to come up with ideas, it’s worked for me over the years, and once the tap is turned on, you’ll never turn it off.
Seth’s(?) advice was this;
Every single day, write down 10 different business ideas in a list.
It doesn’t matter if it’s derivative, boring, or plain stupid, just write it down.
Don’t critique the ideas, just put them down.
Once a week, review the last week of ideas - and think about them. How would they work? How would you find customers? If it’s stupid, why’s it stupid?
As you practice this exercise, you'll initially hit a wall of creativity. This is why allowing crappy ideas through your filter is crucial. Eventually, you'll start evaluating everyday businesses and opportunities you might have previously overlooked.
But when this happens, you start to look around at businesses you interact with every day, and you start evaluating opportunities you’d never have given a second chance before.
The idea for Dubble came from this muscle - I was looking for opportunity.
Listen to what people say
The idea for Dubble actually slapped me in the face pretty hard.
In the same week I had two or three close friends casually mention two products to me that they’d found really useful for their SaaS businesses. They turned out to be two fairly early stage competitors - vying for the same market, “Tango” and “Scribe”.
They were in broad strokes very similar products - they allowed you to “record” your actions in a Chrome Extension, and then automatically turn those actions in a written step-by-step document, with cropped screenshots and a pretty sharable page. These “guides” or “workflows” or “documents” - whatever you want to call them were really handy for documenting and communicating processes.
At the time a lot of their messaging was positioned against video - the primary value prop was that docs created with these tools were faster to make, edit and update than conventional methods which were either;
Hand writing documentation, manually taking screenshots and pasting it all into a word doc. Slow, painful and laborious.
Recording a demo video with a tool like Loom - which requires you to be on show a bit more, and if you have to edit it, you’re better off just re-recording the entire thing.
This to me seemed like they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Yes, recording a video can be more effort than not, but for the person who actually has to consume the content, video is often way more informative and useful than having to read a whole bunch of written instructions or figure out what’s going on in a mess of screenshots.
The seed of the product idea for Dubble was essentially, what if Scribe/Tango and Loom had a baby?
What if you had one tool, readily available where depending on the needs of what you want to communicate you could easily switch between a full screen recording, with web cam and audio, all the way down to just taking screenshots, and end up with both a high quality written guide and a video walkthrough.
Dubble is a tool for asynchronous communication, that is specifically optimised for communicating how to do something.
Think of use cases like;
New employee systems training and onboarding
Writing help docs for SaaS products, or communicating short, targeted demos of how to achieve something to customers (Dubble work just as well for an audience of 1 vs an audience of 10,000).
Internal team communications - e.g. developers testing out PR branches and leaving UI feedback.
To me, this was a really cool idea, and it sounded like a heap of fun to build. It also ticked a bunch of items off my list of what makes a great opportunity to me.
Established, growing market － Dubble isn’t inventing a completely new industry, so there are potential customers that are “problem aware”, and some that are even “solution aware”. This means that as a bootstrapped business we don’t need to spend time and money to educate the market before we can start selling to them.
Strong vertical use cases － while long term Dubble could be used to serve many many different industries and use cases (i.e. it may well eventually be a horizontal product), there are some really obvious primary use cases to serve first.
Well-funded competitors － this one might seem a little counter intuitive, but when I see news like Tango raising a 14M series A, and Scribe raising a 25M Series B it genuinely makes me so excited. Funding in the space indicates a few really interesting things as a bootstrapped business playing against the money.
There’s a compelling story being told. Others are seeing enough success, and are communicating a believable vision to a large opportunity that can be captured.
The clock is on. These businesses need to burn their spend, grow their businesses, and aim for venture sized returns in the next 5 years or so. To do that they’ll hire staff, over pay for ads, create tonnes of content, and slowly shift their focus up market to the Enterprise deals they inevitably need to sign to reach IPO or strategic acquisition nirvana. This creates so much down stream opportunity for lean, bootstrapped businesses that can keep costs down, continue to focus on serving smaller businesses, and lean into self serve Product-Led Growth motions to expand their market share over time. Will that mean Dubble will grow as big as the other players? Maybe, maybe not - but it will grow, and it will grow in a way that is far more capital efficient.
Familiarity - I’ve had my success so far building Paperform - a high quality bootstrapped SaaS business that primarily serve SMBs, and is in a highly saturated competitive landscape. Dubble looks like a very similar game.
Enterprise potential - I’m a big believer in self serve Product-Led Growth as one of the most efficient growth models for SaaS businesses. Once the business is established though, it’s even better if the space has appeal to an enterprise market, that you can layer on an efficient sales assisted motion to expand up market.
So that’s how I picked the idea of Dubble! If you have any questions, feedback or things to add drop a comment below, or hit me up on X.
Next time, I’m going to write about validating your B2B SaaS ideas - don’t forget to subscribe!