My next SaaS ideas

My last day at my day job is tomorrow. I quit after 3.5 years as a Lead Developer and Head of Product. Now that my side projects are making more than my day job consistently, I've taken the leap to work on them full-time.

Now that I have 40 extra hours every week, I'm going to have the opportunity to tackle some new SaaS ideas that have been swimming around and percolating in my head for the past few months and years.

A podcast-blog platform

Two years ago I had an idea for a membership platform that would tie in a creator's different channels (social accounts, blog, newsletter, podcast etc) under a single membership.

I named it Bunch, but I never actually started on it, due to the apparent complexities of charging for access across a number of different external platforms. Bunch memberships were supposed to enable paid access to private content.

In the past year I've worked a lot with Ghost and have seen time and time again that the lack of podcast hosting is an issue for some people. At the same time, Ghost has a killer blogging and newsletter editor.

In the past few months, I have been thinking about creating a private-first blogging/podcasting platform for creators and companies, which would enable free or paid memberships access to private content. It would need full podcast host features (recording, uploading, feeds, analytics) AND publishing tools for web and email content.

I've already named this next version of Bunch: Kuulo.

This would be a B2B tool and priced +$50/month.

A YouTube sharing tool

When I started my YouTube channel recently, I quickly decided that I would create a custom link on my own domain, which I would use to share my channel on social media. The link is danrowden.com/vlog/.

I created a simple HTML page with a Javascript redirect, but crucially with custom OpenGraph metatags and an image, meaning that the preview looks something like this:

The standard YouTube link appears like this (zero customisation options):

My idea is to allow YouTubers to create custom links for their channels or videos, with custom (large) thumbnails, titles and descriptions. And on their own domain, too! (something like videos.youtubername.com/title-of-video/)

There could be many different links for each video or channel for sharing on different platforms or for sharing with different messaging, and each link would get its own click analytics.

A referral/affiliates tool for Paddle-powered SaaS

I've been using Paddle to power payments for my projects for almost ten years. It's a great alternative to Stripe for products based outside of the countries Stripe doesn't serve, as well as having it completely taking the burden of charging and remitting tax off a developer's shoulders.

I've been struggling to find a referral or affiliates platform with a) a good Paddle integration and b) solopreneur-friendly pricing (most are typically $60+/month).

So I'm planning to build one.

The integration with Paddle would listen for new subscriptions being charged in Paddle and record affiliate/referral signups. It could then gift free access or apply coupons to subscriptions in Paddle for those referrers, or allow monetary payouts via PayPal.

I have an immediate need for a tool like this, to help power referrals in ilo, Gloat, Subsail and Cove, which all use Paddle for payment and subscription processing.

But what do I build first?

Follow me on Twitter to watch me build these out.