These SaaS Product Ideas Make Growth “Effortless”

If you’ve tried to build and grow a SaaS product business, you know that “effortless” is not the word.

But there is one factor when choosing your SaaS product idea that can make long-term growth come much easier with far less effort than the alternatives.

So in this article, I’m going to unpack what this “X Factor” is when choosing your SaaS product idea.

And we’ll walk through a bunch of real product examples that use this factor to their advantage to drive growth month after month.

Now you’re probably tuning into this because you’re like me. I’m a full stack founder, product designer, and developer, and I’m constantly thinking about what that next product that I’m gonna build and launch is going to be.

So if that’s you, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter and tell me what you think about this.

Choosing ideas wisely (really) matters

Anyway, here’s the thing about choosing a product idea. Choosing wisely really matters.

Because even once you’ve validated your idea, and even once you’ve landed your first customers, and maybe even after you pass a thousand dollars in revenue… You’ll still run into challenges that could potentially stall or even kill your ability to grow.

I’m talking about things like churn, customer acquisition, competition, funding, and so many other things that could make growing a SaaS business difficult.

Now of course, with a lot of effort, we can overcome these challenges and make our business work.

But what if we could reduce, or maybe even eliminate the amount of effort required to overcome these plateaus? What if, at the very start of our SaaS business, we can even prevent many of those challenges that could come later?

I think that’s possible. And it happens at the idea stage.

Because in my experience, having built and grown and sold several product businesses, and failed with several products, whenever I came upon one of these growth challenges, I often think, boy this growth problem would be a lot easier to solve, or wouldn’t be a problem at all, if only I chose my product idea more wisely.

And so that’s led me to a list of criteria that I look for when I’m evaluating product ideas. Because each criteria on this list can map to a potential growth challenge in the future.

Product idea criteria

Let me give you a few examples of what I’m talking about, and then I promise that one of these is that “X Factor” that could make growth effortless. I’ll get to that.

Price point

Let’s take Price point as the first example. How much can I charge for this product? Well if I choose a product where the market expects a low price point, then I’ll need a lot of customers in order to grow this business. If I choose a product that I can charge more for, then it’ll take fewer customers to grow my revenue. Of course, if I’m charging a lot per customer, then losing one customer can also bring pretty painful swings in revenue.

Competition

OK let’s take another one. Competition. How many competitors are there in this market? Choosing a product where there are a lot of competitors, could actually be good! It’s a sign that it’s a very active market with lots of demand, and that always makes growth easier.

Of course, heavy competition also makes it harder to convince customers to switch away or compete on features or price.

Now this list of criteria for product ideas keeps going, so I’m certainly going to cover more of these in future videos. Subscribe :)

But here’s the one I want to focus on here, and the reason why is that this one factor when choosing a product idea can actually make growth effortless in ways that the other factors can’t.

Set it and forget it.

But seriously, this “set it and forget it” factor is totally underrated. I think too many of us overlook this one when we’re choosing our product ideas.

Think about it: What’s the number one challenge that SaaS businesses need to overcome in order to see sustained growth?

Churn. That’s the rate at which customers cancel their subscriptions.

In order to keep your SaaS business growing, you need to make sure your customers are not cancelling.

OK, what’s the most common reason why customers cancel? They stop using your product.

OK, why would customers stop using your product?

Maybe they don’t have the problem that your product solves, or never did. But if that were the case, then you probably wouldn’t get many customers buying your product in the first place.

More likely, your customers found a different solution to their problem, and they like that one better.

OK, now what would cause a customer to buy your product, use your product, and then choose to use a different product instead?

There are all sorts of reasons why this could happen, of course:

• Maybe they found this other product’s interface easier to use.

• Maybe it fits their workflow better.

• Maybe their team or their clients like it better.

• Maybe it just works better.

Now what if we could eliminate this risk of customers using our product, and then choosing to use a different product instead?

What if our customers don’t even need to actively use our product in order for our product to be worth their money?

What if our customers could buy our product, and then…

Say it with me…

Set it and forget it!

Can this work for software?

OK, now you might be thinking, “hey, we’re not building rotisserie chicken ovens here. We’re making apps here. This ‘set it and forget it’ concept doesn’t apply to us.”

Welp, you would be wrong. Because our product ideas absolutely can be “set it and forget it” ideas, where customers don’t really have a good reason to stop paying for our product, which leads to steady, long-term growth. Some might even say, effortless growth.

Let’s run through some examples of real product ideas that fall into this “set it and forget it” category.

There are actually different levels of this. So I’m going to break this list into 3 buckets:

There are “the purely set it and forget it” ideas, where our customer can install it, and never need to touch it again. Forever. I call this the “holy grail” of SaaS Product ideas.

One notch below that one is the “Set it, use it, and leave it” ideas. This is where customers sign up, they use our product off and on, but it still pays for them to remain subscribed even during periods of low or no use.

And there are the “set it, forget it, let others use it” ideas. Probably most of our B2B product ideas fall into this category, where the person who buys it doesn’t really use it day-to-day, but their teammates do and their clients do.

So I asked on Twitter (or X) for examples of these “set it and forget it” product ideas. I also looked at my own list of SaaS products that I “set and forget” and still pay for.

Product ideas that are 'set it & forget it'

Here's a few that I came up with.

Starting with some “purely set it and forget it” ideas:

Monitoring tools

Up-time status monitoring tools

Uptime and status monitoring tools that are customer facing: Like Statuspage and many others, which gives customers visibility into whether your site or your tool is currently online or if there are any incidents.

Or server monitoring or error tracking tools. Sentry, Honeybadger, one that I use is called AppSignal, and bunch of others.

Email sending tools

Like Postmark, Sendgrid, Mailgun and others. Not talking about email service providers, that’s in the next bucket, but these are the email sending infrastructure that many apps use.

For example, my SaaS app, Clarityflow, sends a lot of email notifications to our users when they send and receive async messages. We use Postmark to make sure those emails get sent and delivered, and that largely runs in the background.

Integration tools

Zapier, Make and many others.

Now these do require quite a bit of work to set up and design your automations, but once you’ve done that, these automations just run and you don’t need to actively log in and use Zapier or Make every day.

Ecommerce cart abandonedment

In Ecommerce, there are many tools that do “cart abandonedment”. My friend’s product, Recapture.io, is a good example of this. That’s a tool that plugs into your shopping cart, detects when a shopper adds something to cart but doesn’t check out, and it’ll automatically email them to try and get them to complete their purchase.

Dunning tools

These are tools that plug into your payments account like Stripe, and automatically send your customers emails whenever their card is declined. I paid for the tool Stunning for years and almost never needed to log into it.

'Set it, use it, leave it' ideas

OK now let’s look at the next bucket of product ideas, which I call “Set it, use it, and leave it”.

Again, these are tools where you do need to use it a bit at first, and maybe sporatically over time, but it still pays for you to remain subscribed even when you’re not using it.

Hosting providers

Web hosting and server providers like AWS, Digital Ocean, Godaddy, Netlify, WP Engine, and so many others. You do need to build a website, and have a need for it over time. But you don’t need to always log into your hosting control panel, or even need to work on your website. As long as you have the need to have your site remain online, then you’ll keep paying for your hosting provider.

Podcast hosts like Transistor.fm and Castos also fall into this category. Even if you’re not actively podcasting anymore, if you want your show to remain available to audiences, you’ll need to keep your podcast hosting subscription active.

Another one are anlaytics tools.

You’ve got website analytics tools like Plausible and Fathom.

And tools that track your app’s useage like Mixpanel and Amplitude.

And tools that track your business performance, like Chartmogul or Profitwell or Baremetrics.

Now, you do need to log in and look at these tools periodically in order to get the insights and value from them. But even when you’re actively monitoring your metrics, you still want these tools to collect data so that when you look at them in the future, all of your metrics history is there. That’s why it pays to keep your subscriptions to these analytics tools running indefinitely.

'Set it, let others use it' ideas

And now that last bucket, which I call “Set it, forget it, but others use it”, applies to so many products, especially in B2B SaaS.

Think about Helpdesk tools like HelpScout, HelpSpot, or ZenDesk.

Project management tools like Basecamp or Asana.

CRM tools like Salesforce, Less Annoying CRM, and Close.

The person buying these tools—often the founder or manager—isn’t the person who logs in and uses these tools every day. That probably breaks these out of the truly “set it and forget it” category, but I wanted to mention it because this often has a similar effect where the tool becomes engrained in the company’s operations and the switching costs become higher, making it less likely for companies to cancel service.

So I hope you see now that when you’re choosing your product idea for your SaaS business, that “set it and forget it” factor can be a game-changer for growth in the long-run.

Hey if you liked this article or the video version, consider subscribing to my newsletter or YouTube channel so that you won't miss the next one.