After identifying the problem you want to solve with your SaaS application, check if anyone else needs help.
Divide the pre-validation stage of your SaaS application idea into two steps:
- Has anyone from your known communities asked about a solution to the identified problem?
- Are there solutions on the market that do not solve the issue in the best possible way?
case study
I am not a member of too many communities, so my preliminary research was limited to a Discord channel for #aidevs course participants and Reddit. The question about an application for managing prompts was raised a few times. I concluded that I am not the only person interested in such a tool.
Next, I started looking for existing solutions, mainly using Google and Reddit’s search engine. Here are the results:
- There are at least a dozen simple tools aimed at the mass user of ChatGPT. Their functionality is limited only to storing the content of the prompt without the ability to edit its API parameters, versioning, and testing in different models.
- I came across a very nice tool called PromptClip, but it is only available in a desktop version for iOS.
- I also found a tool called Prompt Knit, which has a significant part (but not all) of the functions I need, including storing prompts, tracking changes, and testing.
Summary: Recurring posts about the previously identified problem and the existence of several imperfect tools to solve it prove that the issue can potentially be an attractive market for building my own SaaS application.
In the next stage, I will prepare a preliminary list of features for the tool being built.