The LazyStartup is an exciting project still being built by @ZakRoyDev. Zak set a goal to build in public and get to $500 MRR. Because the project is still being built, the website is short on details, but there's lots to learn, anyway.
Value Proposition
Situation: Market research is an onerous but vital component of launching a successful business venture.
Complication: According to the ARK newsletter in December 2021, the cost of training artificial intelligence (AI) is halving every 9 months, so applying AI to new use cases is terrific.
Question: Can combining market research with artificial intelligence take an onerous burden off of startup entrepreneurs and provide terrific value at the same time?
Customer Segments & Relationships
The LazyStartup business model points directly at early stage entrepreneurs looking to validate startup ideas. This is a nice tight niche market that receives plenty of attention. Competition will include marketing agencies looking to expand their offerings as traditional advertising and SEO continue to disappear.
Of the four buyer types, the LazyStartup website is pointed most almost exclusively at the Action Taker — the person who can take action (CTA: Join Waitlist) without knowing many details. For the Researcher type, there is a single example image and CTA to "Discover More" that didn't work for me. While the Group Buyer type is usually helped with social proof like testimonials, at this stage LazyStartup could provide social proof of the existence of the pain points entrepreneurs face. Providing a sense of how much time (and therefore money) an entrepreneur can expect to save would be a powerful appeal for the Bargainer type.
Costs & Revenue
The main costs for an SaaS are development and maintenance of the software, and server costs. As a bootstrapped enterprise, most of these costs will be as sweat equity.
The pricing model is not public yet, but major revenue streams could be
- pay per use — common for SaaS and provides an easily understandable payment model for users.
- freemium — a certain level of usage is free and heavier usage paid.
- subscription — ongoing monthly access to the platform.
Free is the price most likely to drive the reach the fastest. Fast reach growth is a double-edged sword at the beginning. Not only does it bring more people in quickly, if anything goes wrong (and what is ever perfect?) people hear about the disaster faster, too.
Freemium is a good mix of growing reach and revenue at the same time and works by creating reputation (quality delivered consistently) and relationships (as opposed to 1-time usage). Since freemium usually does little more than cover costs, though, subscription would be the ultimate model for which to aspire.
Subscriptions, taking monthly payments for ongoing service, might be hard for a business targeted to startup entrepreneurs. Once an idea is positively validated, the entrepreneur will not want or need to validate more ideas. Instead, they'll move into building mode. So, targeting Angel Investor with a stable of startup entrepreneurs with a subscription services might make more business sense.