Framework
Superhuman for X: charge prosumers $19/mo for a slick tool
Shaan lays out Cron app's thesis: take a massively-used tool (Google Calendar, 500M users), build a much slicker version, and capture the top few percent of power users at $19/month.
“their thesis is, look, the market for calendar users— for just— if you just take Google Calendar, is 500 million people. And what they're trying to do is take the top, you know, set of prosumers, right? So professionals, people who really care about efficiency, people who are heavy power users of the calendar app And they're trying to say, can we get the top X percent? They said top 20%, but really it's gonna end up being the top 2% of people to pay $19 a month to have, you know, their Google Calendar on steroids.”
Steal thisTake a tool with hundreds of millions of users, build a far slicker UI, and charge the top few percent of power users a monthly subscription.
Number
Calendly: $30M/yr, bootstrapped, founder from Nigeria
Sam cites Calendly as Cron's nearest competitor: a $30M/year company bootstrapped out of Atlanta by a founder who moved from Nigeria, arguing the category is more defensible than skeptics claim.
$30M
Annual revenue · USD/year
“Calendly is a plugin for Gmail. It's a $30 million a year company that's bootstrapped out of Atlanta, started by a guy who moved here from, I think, Nigeria.”
Idea
Rip off Cron, stay scrappy, pay yourself $5M/year
Sam pitches cloning Cron (a slick calendar app) cheaply and scrappily instead of raising venture money, arguing a bootstrapped builder could net themselves $5M a year.
“Their website, if you go there right now, kind of shows how the product works, and I would just completely rip it off and scale, but be far more scrappy because I don't think these companies out here are scrappy. And I think that someone could build it and be able to pay themselves $5 million a year in net income.”
Steal thisClone a slick prosumer SaaS product cheaply, skip venture capital, and optimize for owner net income instead of growth.