Pick your first SaaS
Chapter 1 — choosing among ideas with a scorecard instead of a coin flip.
You don't need a better idea. You need a way to compare the four you already have.
The real question
"Which idea is best?" is unanswerable. "Which idea can I prove or disprove cheapest and fastest?" is answerable this week. That reframe is the whole chapter — because solo founders don't fail from picking the wrong idea out of four good ones; they fail from picking the most fun one and discovering three months later that nobody wanted it.
Score what you've got
Rate each idea on the twelve signals that actually predict micro-SaaS outcomes — four groups:
- Market — can you reach these people? Does the pain demand a fix now? Do they already pay for solutions?
- Product — could you ship a useful v1 alone? Is the value testable before it's built?
- Momentum — do you have any existing evidence (waitlist, pre-sales, usage, audience)? Do you have founder fit — the skills and stubbornness for this market?
- Risk — technical risk, dependency risk (one API away from death?), distribution risk (can you say exactly where your first 10 users come from?)
Score honestly — a 2 you admit beats a 4 you flatter — and compare. When two ideas tie, the tiebreak is always the same: which one can you prove cheapest and fastest?
The shortcuts that aren't
- "I have an unfair advantage" — usually means a skill, not a market. Skills build; markets buy.
- "Nobody else is doing this" — usually means there's no demand, not no competition. Competition is evidence of a market; absence is a warning.
- "It's a bigger market" — irrelevant at your scale. A $50k/year SaaS doesn't care how big the TAM is; it cares whether 40 people will pay $99/mo.
What this looks like in practice
Put every candidate in one place — the half-finished ones included — and score them side by side. That's literally the Portfolio
- Opportunity Score pattern: a ranked list instead of whichever idea shouted loudest this week. The score isn't a verdict; it's an ordering that tells you which one earns the next chapter's validation effort.
Next: Validate before you build.