Micro-SaaS

Micro-SaaS is a subscription software product built for a narrow audience and run by one person or a very small team. The distinguishing choice is that staying small is the strategy rather than a stage: no funding round, no headcount plan, no ambition to own a broad market.

The economics work because the niche is too small to interest a funded competitor while being large enough to support one or two people. A product serving a few hundred customers at a modest monthly price is a poor venture outcome and an excellent personal one.

Typical characteristics: a single well-defined job, integration with a platform that already has the customers, self-serve pricing with no sales calls, support handled by the founder, and infrastructure kept deliberately boring.

For launches this matters in two ways. The audience is reachable, because a narrow niche has identifiable communities, and positioning should stay narrow. The instinct to broaden the pitch to sound bigger makes a micro-SaaS harder to find, not easier, since a vague description competes with everything while a specific one competes with almost nothing.