A Step-by-Step Blueprint for Your First $15k/mo Micro-SaaS

I wasn’t even looking for a business idea. I was just scrolling through Reddit looking for investing ideas on a subreddit called r/SecurityAnalysis.

People there share analytics and investing letters. For a investor like me, the community is just great.

In finance, some of the most valuable intelligence comes from the quarterly letters written by top investment managers. They are detailed strategy guides from the best players in the game, explaining exactly what they’re buying and why. The problem? They’re scattered all over the internet.

So, this community started a mega-thread to collect them. It’s a user-built library of financial genius.

And it’s a complete and utter disaster. This glorious mess is our business opportunity.

Would you like to read more ideas in depth? Follow me on my substack here. Clue #1: The Pain doesn’t scream Imagine walking into a library where all the books are tossed into a giant pile. That’s this Reddit thread. The original post is a massive, manually updated table of links to PDFs. The comment section is a chaotic free-for-all of people dumping more links.

This chaos is the first signal. When people work hard to do something that software could do better, a business is born.

The evidence is right there in the comments. There are dozens that looks just like this:

Greystone Value’s Q4 2024 Letter Mentioned: SYZLF, IVFH, LMB, NRP, BELFB

Full pitch on NRP

This user found a piece of treasure, pulled out the most important bits (the stock tickers), and shared it. It’s a generous act of organization. But once posted, it’s lost to the endless scroll. The value evaporates in hours.

Then you see comments like this:

Is Greenlight Q4 out? Thanks!

This is even more revealing. This person is actively hunting. They know a specific document exists, and they’re asking the community to spend their time helping them find it.

The pain point couldn’t be clearer: Discovery and organization.

These investors are drowning in high-value information. They need a librarian, a search engine, and an archive. Instead, they have a messy comment thread.

The Solution: A Google for Investor Letters The mess is the blueprint. Let’s build FundLetter OS.

FundLetter OS is a Micro-SaaS with one, laser-focused job: It aggregates, indexes, and makes searchable investor letters.

A user can type in a fund manager’s name, a stock ticker like $TSLA, or a concept like "AI in healthcare," and instantly get a list of every letter that mentions it, with the relevant paragraphs highlighted.

This is a perfect project for a solo founder for three reasons:

It’s hyper-focused. You aren’t building a Bloomberg Terminal. You’re building a search engine for PDFs.
The moat is the work. The core technology is straightforward. The real challenge — and competitive advantage — is the data collection.
The customers are concentrated. They are all gathering in one place (that Reddit thread!), publicly working to solve the problem for which you can offer a solution.

The Step-by-Step Blueprint to Build It An idea is fun. A plan is what gets you paid. Here’s how you actually build this. The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) What’s the absolute minimum you need to solve the core pain? Forget fancy features.

A Simple Letter Database: A back-end that stores the Fund Name, letter date, a link to the original PDF, and any mentioned stock tickers.
The Magic Search Bar: This is the heart of the product. It must search the full text inside every single PDF. A tool like Elasticsearch is built for this.
A Clean, Chronological Feed: The homepage is simply a list of the latest letters added. This gives users a reason to check back often.
Basic User Accounts: Allow users to sign up and “favorite” a letter to save it for later.

That’s it. No charts, no social features, no AI summaries — yet. Just a tool that saves a busy professional hours of manual, frustrating work. The Real Challenge (It’s Not the Code) Let’s be honest: building the MVP isn’t the hardest part. The final boss battle is the data pipeline. How do you find and import all these letters consistently? This is less of a software problem and more of an operational one. You’d need a system (or a virtual assistant) to:

Scrape r/SecurityAnalysis and other similar forums daily.
Monitor the Twitter/X accounts of well-known investors and funds.
Regularly check the “Investor Relations” pages of hundreds of fund websites.

Getting the first 500 letters is a manual grind. Keeping the database updated is the real, long-term work. This is the moat around your business. Anyone can copy your code, but few will do the boring work of keeping the library stocked.

The “No-Brainer” Pricing Keep it dead simple. One plan. $29 per month. We justify this by anchoring it to value. A financial analyst or portfolio manager bills their time at hundreds of dollars per hour. If your tool saves them one single hour a month, it has already delivered a 10x return. A single good idea they discover could be worth thousands. For this audience, $29/month is an impulse buy. But First, The $0 Validation Plan 🕵️‍♀️ Before writing a single line of code, you must confirm that people will actually pay for this. This is the validation phase. Step 0: The “Fake It ’Til You Make It” Test

Create a simple newsletter on Substack or Beehiiv. Call it “The Weekly Fund Letter Digest.”
Every Friday, manually go find the 5–7 most insightful, newly released investor letters.
Write a two-sentence summary for each and link to the PDF.
Go back to that original Reddit thread and post a genuinely helpful comment: “Hey everyone, I know it’s hard to keep up with all the letters posted here. I’m curating the best 5 into a free weekly email digest to save you time. You can subscribe here if you’re interested.”
Your only goal: Get 100 true fans. This test costs you $0 and a few hours of work, and it will prove whether people value curation.

If that works, you move on to the “Concierge” MVP. Take the first 50 letters from the Reddit thread, manually organize them in an Airtable or Notion database, and offer this searchable database exclusively to your newsletter subscribers in exchange for feedback.

✋Wait — don’t build this blind.

This article covers the concept, but the difference between a fun side project and a profitable SaaS is the data.

I’m currently compiling a Deep-Dive Blueprint series for this type of Micro-SaaS ideas. It will include: 🚦 The Success Score: A calculated probability of success for this specific niche. 🔍 The Search Volume: Actual keyword data to see how many people are searching for this solution right now. ⚔️ The Competitor Breakdown: A deep look at who else is doing this and where they are failing. … and many other goodies.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/the-micro-saas-corner/a-step-by-step-blueprint-for-your-first-15k-mo-micro-saas-74f6b902de77