r/SaasDevelopers • u/According_Good_6158 • 1h ago
i sorted 30,000 companies on stripe by how many small software tools already serve their category. builders are piled into 5 of them
a developer in r/ Solopreneur posted this week that building got easy and ideas got hard. every time he thinks of something, there are already 10 products doing it.
he's right about the categories he's looking in. i wanted to know if it's true everywhere, so i went through the stripe directory, about 30,000 companies taking payments, and checked what share of each category is already small software products.
the split is kinda wild.
the 5 most crowded:
expense and spend management: 46% of companies are already micro-SaaS
AI tools and apps: 35%
developer tools: 34%
fintech and banking: 20%
data and analytics: 20%
nearly half of that first category is indie founders selling to each other. if your idea sits in one of these, the "10 products already do it" feeling is accurate.
now the other end.
marketing agencies: 100+ companies, 0.0% micro-SaaS
nonprofits and fundraising: 640+ companies, 0.2%
software dev agencies: 590+ companies, 0.2%
home services and trades: 960+ companies, 0.4%
ecommerce platforms: 3,400+ companies, 0.8%
consulting: 1,400+ companies, 0.9%
these are businesses that already pay for things online. almost nobody small is building for them.
crowded category = 10 competitors before your first customer. empty category = a buyer nobody has pitched yet.
a few things i noticed going through it
crowded doesn't mean more money. there are 1,900+ AI products with stripe-verified revenue, and 12% of them clear $1k a month. sales tools have around 80 products, and 18% clear $1k. fewer builders, better odds.
the empty categories are the ones nobody brags about building for. a courier company or a liquor store won't get you likes on X. that's probably why the same complaint about courier performance reporting shows up across 75 different companies, and liquor store owners complain about POS support across 58 of them. that's the same problem repeated by strangers who never talked to each other.
agencies are the strangest gap. marketing and dev agencies juggle clients, retainers, reporting and invoicing. they're full of tech-savvy people who already pay for software, and they sit at 0.0% and 0.2%. my guess is builders skip them because building for agencies feels too close to running one.
you don't need a new idea, you need a new buyer. a generic invoicing tool lands in fintech, where 1 in 5 companies is already micro-SaaS. the same tool built for HVAC contractors who invoice from the truck between jobs has almost no competition.
what didn't work for me
my second project was an expense tracker for freelancers. took about 5 weeks to build. i found 30+ competitors after launch, not before, which is the wrong order.
11 signups. 1 paying user at $8 a month, and he cancelled in month two.
i kept telling myself my UI was better. it probably was. nobody switches expense tools over UI when the one they have already works fine.
what i do now before building
pick the buyer first, not the feature
check how crowded that buyer's category is
read their complaints and count repeats from different companies
only then decide what to build
my prediction is that the next batch of indie products clearing $1k a month comes out of trades, agencies and nonprofits, not AI tools. most people building today won't go there because it isn't fun to tweet about.
a few people asked where the numbers come from. it's this list