8 Boring but Profitable SaaS Ideas

The world is obsessed with AI right now, with many entrepreneurs building startups on the cutting edge of tech.

However, it's not always a good idea to go all-in on new tech. Sometimes it's a temporary wave that people eventually get bored with, sometimes it gets completely over-saturated with competition in too narrow a space, sometimes the market consolidates around one or two major players.

Therefore, it can be a good thing to be focused on a more "boring" space. A product with demand that isn't going to shift with trends, that has healthy competition but isn't a total feeding frenzy, and has space in the market for many players to co-exist or niche down into unique segments.

Here are 8 such SaaS ideas:

CMS

There will always be a need for humans to organize content in some kind of system. Whether that is blog posts, a product inventory, podcasts, you name it. There are lots of well known tools that cater to wide segments of the market such as Wordpress or Ghost.

However, there's plenty of room in this space to niche down. For example, targeting specific types of content e.g. Twitter Threads. Or specific types of use case e.g. a headless CMS that can plug into any front end, or a specific front end framework that you are really familiar with.

Newsletter Manager

As long as we keep using email, email marketing is here to stay.

There are just about a million ways you could execute a tool that helps you organize a list of contacts, helps you build an HTML email, and then delivers the email to those contacts. Your special sauce here could be the builder, could be analytics, could be plugging into existing contact database tools, etc.

Site Builder

Make it super simple for people to build a website and you're pretty much guaranteed to be providing value to someone, somewhere.

There are of course tons of website builders out there already. Webflow, Squarespace, and these are big companies too, how do you compete?

One way would be to go super simple. Carrd nailed this with their block-based approach to building simple one-page sites.

Another way would be to specialise in certain niches and offer designs / features that are specific to that niche. There are a couple of companies doing very well in the "website builder for Churches" space, for example.

Physical Business Management Tool

Most physical businesses benefit from running on some kind of software. For many that means a huge excel sheet with lots of customizations, but there could be an opportunity to create something with a UX / features more tailored to the individual use case of the business.

Think of tools that help you do things like, gym management, dental appointments, pet hotel bookings, etc.

Forms

People always need to build forms to gather data from other people. Could be surveys, could be RSVPs to a party, could be customer feedback etc.

A form builder tool is one of those things that seems easy at first (could build it in a weekend right?) but quickly goes down a rabbit hole once you start looking at features like branching, payments, custom validations etc.

There's room in this space for form builders of all kinds - super simple ones and technically advanced ones. You can further differentiate by industry, or even by creating a unique UX like Typeform did.

Project Management

This is probably the 2nd biggest category for SaaS with thousands of products out there dedicated to it.

Here you differentiate via UX, via method (e.g. Kanban), via industry, and more. For example I use Shortcut to manage the development of my SaaS products. Why? Mostly because it has some helpful specific features related to software development, that other tools don't have.

Lead Generation

This space is a bit more of a hybrid between service and tool, but it's one of those evergreen segments that won't go away. Businesses will always be willing to pay for leads and there's excellent scope here for niching down into specific industries since the product itself is so general-purpose.

CRM

Probably the biggest SaaS category. There is some overlap with other SaaS tools in this list, as ultimately a CRM is a contact manager that lets you slice / automate / integrate the list as needed to fulfill a use case.

The beauty of CRM as a category is that it can be used by nearly every type of company out there, with each industry requiring certain specific tweaks to make the solution more effective. To deliver that you can either be a behemoth, does-everything, deeply-customizable tool like Salesforce, or you can tailor your product to a use case. Try typing "crm for" into Google and look at the autocomplete for some ideas. ChartMogul just launched a CRM for B2B SaaS for example.

Final Thoughts

The key for any of these to actually work as a business though would rely on two factors.

Targeting a Niche

As I've mentioned in the article, you have to niche down. Don't compete with big companies with a general purpose solution.

Building for a specific industry vertical would be the most basic way of targeting a niche. Don't just build a CMS, build a CMS for tiktok agencies! Or a CMS for remote teams (for example, but I don't know what that means in execution!).

Another way of targeting a niche would be to align with specific platforms with large user bases e.g. Airtable, Notion, Wordpress etc. Have your SaaS plug in and complement that platform with functionality it doesn't currently have, and take advantage of the built-in userbase.

Personal Interest Level

I've said this before but you need to have a personal level of interest in your SaaS to have the energy to keep working on it. The difference between success and failure is often simply a function of how willing you are to keep working at it. If you're not interested in your chosen space, the less you'll work on it, the less you'll talk to customers, and the less you'll market your product - someone else will win.

The best is if you have some personal interest level and personal experience to go along with it, e.g. you're going after a niche and you have worked in that niche before.