Sell painkillers, not vitamins

Clever platforms starve. Boring painkillers get to $50K MRR.

The 2026 micro-SaaS playbook compresses to one sentence: pick a person, end their worst weekly meeting with a spreadsheet. Hundreds of customers are enough.

The formula

• Vertical + one workflow + clear ROI (hours or euros, not vibes).
• A buyer reachable through a single channel — one community, one keyword set.
• A deadline that creates urgency: a regulation date, a season, a renewal.
• Subscription or per-outcome pricing; 70–90% margins live in billing recovery, vertical compliance, and table-killer reports.

The anti-pattern

A $10B market where you are a thin wrapper loses to a $2B market where you own the data loop and know where the buyer scrolls.

Validation before code

One evening to write the problem sentence. Two days mining competitor reviews for verbatim complaints. Two weeks until someone offers you money for a product that does not exist yet. Skip those steps and you are just building your own hobby with extra steps.