We recently had Rohan Gilks on the Builders Build podcast talking about a whole variety of things from cleaning businesses to SaaS to Reddit. Rohan really embodies the spirit of “Builders build” and has built some big businesses, but one that caught my eye on the episode was Trip Launch. This is the perfect example of how to successfully build a six figure niche SaaS (software as a service) business – with very little effort.
Let’s break it down.
Rohan and his circle regularly booked big group trips to the Bahamas. During one of these bookings, he noticed that all these groups, of easily 100 people, all used crappy processes to manage their bookings.
The groups were using brutal spreadsheets and a painstaking # of hours from the organizers to try and wrangle all this info about:
- reservations
- payments
- collections from attendees
- and the like.
Rohan wasn’t an event organizer or a travel agent, he was just a “user” of a crappy process.
There are plenty of group travel booking tools. There are travel agents who will set this all up for you and charge too much. But… there was no travel booking tool for Barbadians booking large group trips to the Bahamas.
The tool itself is a simple one. You could build this from scratch, spin it up with No Code platforms like Softr. It’s a simple database CRUD app. Since there are a lot of ways to build the app, we won’t get into that here. Let’s get into finding users.
If Rohan did nothing but use this tool for the group trips he’s part of, it’d get exposure to hundreds of people in his target demo just off that – great organic start right there. But he took it a step further and found this community where it lives: Facebook Groups. He joined groups in the niche and made friends with page admins, and he bought sponsorships and banner ads in the groups. Think about this:
- A community of people talking about X
- Who share the same shitty experience booking group trips
- Present them a tool to make it way better
What’s even better?
In addition to a small fee for using the tool to organize your trip, users book several portions of the app to book their travel, hotels, etc. These purchases likely all involve affiliate fees and aren’t exactly small. That means the app is taking a tiny cut of hundreds of peoples accommodations every time an organizer uses it to book a trip.
The end result is a tool that adds tons of value to a small community, and makes 5 figures a month doing so.
As they say: Builders build.
Thanks for reading. You can find links to the full episode on your favorite platform here.
– Colin
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