Niche SaaS: Bar Surveys to $2M ARR Leasing Platform

Steve Carroll sent his co-founder into New York bars to ask strangers how they paid their rent. Some women thought it was a pickup line - until they saw the Typeform survey. That scrappy approach got them 1,000 survey results and enough conviction to build a niche SaaS product for the rental market.

In this episode, Steve reveals how Findigs pivoted from a consumer rent payments app to a B2B niche SaaS leasing platform after brand partners kept asking for access to renters at the point of move-in. That shift to vertical SaaS, combined with an ML-powered tenant screening engine, helped Findigs reach $2M ARR with just 12 people serving 60,000 units.

Carroll's journey from consumer payments to industry-specific SaaS proves that the best niche SaaS ideas come from listening to adjacent stakeholders, not just your core users. Findigs differentiated in a crowded vertical software market by integrating alongside existing tools instead of replacing them.

Key Lessons

• 🎯 Validate with niche SaaS customers, not just users: Carroll's bar surveys showed consumer demand, but the real business insight came from calling landlords already receiving Findigs payments - revealing the leasing pain point that became their core product.
• 📉 Onboarding mismatches kill niche SaaS retention: Findigs signed diverse customer profiles before supporting their workflows, creating manual workarounds that end users resented - proving that decision-maker enthusiasm does not equal user adoption.
• 🔄 Listen to adjacent stakeholders for pivot signals: Brand partners told Carroll renters are most valuable at move-in, not after. That feedback from outside the core user base triggered the pivot from payments to leasing.
• 🤝 Warm outbound beats cold outbound in niche SaaS sales: Findigs' first B2B customers were landlords they already paid rent to, turning cold calls into warm conversations with a built-in touchpoint.
• 🛠️ Avoid rip-and-replace to shorten sales cycles: Findigs integrates alongside existing software instead of replacing it, reducing sales cycles from months to weeks - critical in a market with entrenched incumbents.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Steve's background on Wall Street and restaurant tech
• What Findigs does and the problem it solves
• Business size: $2M ARR, 12 people, 60,000 units
• How the idea came from renting in New York City
• Starting with rent payments as the first product
• Getting started with funding from a Wall Street contact
• Bar surveys: collecting 1,000 results in New York
• How Keith met his girlfriend doing customer research
• Shipping the first product in five months
• Getting 400 payments in the first month with no marketing
• Why the service was free and 75% of users tipped
• Pivoting to B2B niche SaaS after brand partner feedback
• Understanding the leasing pain point for landlords
• Six months of research before building the new product
• Early product mistakes: shipping before workflows were ready
• Getting attention in a crowded market
• Outbound sales: posing as renters to find leads
• Differentiating with ML-powered underwriting
• Usage-based pricing model
• Sales cycle measured in weeks, not months
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/290
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email