Simply put, I asked an industry contact for referrals to my consulting business, and built a service to address the common needs of the new clients.
For years I'd moonlighted as a backend developer; I'd meet graphic designers who were making amazing-looking websites but were in over their heads when it came to integrating database or API functionality into a client's project since they were more into design than coding. I would code up an integration and bill them for a few hours of effort. This would always lead to an hour or two of future maintenance, but wasn't a reliable revenue generator.
On one project, the client required an web integration with an ERP system so their website could reflect inventory status; the ERP vendor provided an API but it was rate limited and couldn't support production web traffic volume, so I coded up a cache layer and a few custom reports. During the process, I discovered that the API documentation was incomplete so I ended up corresponding with the CTO in order to complete the work.
After that project was over, I hoped to leverage my newfound familiarity with the API to win more business, so I asked the CTO to forward any of his customers that needed integrations beyond the scope that his company usually supports. After a few referrals, I was able to see some common patterns of needs not supported directly by the 3rd party API and was able to develop a service to support those use cases. Referrals from the CTO of the ERP company carry weight with my clients, who in turn have been happy enough with my service that they have also been a source of new leads.
The combination of 2nd and 3rd party referrals has continued to generate new clients for me almost every month, and since my infrastructure costs are relatively fixed, every new client is gravy.
Long term, I will need to automate more of the onboarding process in order to scale up the number of new clients I can onboard in a week. And there are many other considerations as a business grows. But doing good consulting work and then asking clients for referrals was the pattern that allowed me to find the market for the niche SaaS that I developed.
For years I'd moonlighted as a backend developer; I'd meet graphic designers who were making amazing-looking websites but were in over their heads when it came to integrating database or API functionality into a client's project since they were more into design than coding. I would code up an integration and bill them for a few hours of effort. This would always lead to an hour or two of future maintenance, but wasn't a reliable revenue generator.
On one project, the client required an web integration with an ERP system so their website could reflect inventory status; the ERP vendor provided an API but it was rate limited and couldn't support production web traffic volume, so I coded up a cache layer and a few custom reports. During the process, I discovered that the API documentation was incomplete so I ended up corresponding with the CTO in order to complete the work.
After that project was over, I hoped to leverage my newfound familiarity with the API to win more business, so I asked the CTO to forward any of his customers that needed integrations beyond the scope that his company usually supports. After a few referrals, I was able to see some common patterns of needs not supported directly by the 3rd party API and was able to develop a service to support those use cases. Referrals from the CTO of the ERP company carry weight with my clients, who in turn have been happy enough with my service that they have also been a source of new leads.
The combination of 2nd and 3rd party referrals has continued to generate new clients for me almost every month, and since my infrastructure costs are relatively fixed, every new client is gravy.
Long term, I will need to automate more of the onboarding process in order to scale up the number of new clients I can onboard in a week. And there are many other considerations as a business grows. But doing good consulting work and then asking clients for referrals was the pattern that allowed me to find the market for the niche SaaS that I developed.