Nice article, but the most interesting question remains unanswered: how/where to find SaaS business ideas?
- Don't position yourself how you normally would if you were going for a new job and trying to maximise your income. No "senior developer with experience in python, node, etc"
- Do position yourself as just a general "software developer". I said contractor before but I wouldn't (didn't) even make it look like that. More like a small agency. If they're completely outside of the tech industry (what you want) then they're going to be wanting someone to just give money to in exchange for solving their problem, not someone they're going to have to manage. Instead of hiring Dave by the hour, they're hiring "[town name] Premier Development" on a fixed project basis.
- Be selective with who you take on. Again, you should be positioning yourself pretty cheap to the point where if this wasn't basically an exploratory exercise for you then their project wouldn't be worth your time, so you don't want to get stuck doing work that isn't a potential SAAS for you down the line.
- You want them coming to you trying to get something done for $15k that would normally cost $100k+ to build. Then you say "hey, if you're willing to be my test dummy/case study/first customer, I'll build it and give you a licence for $10k"
Also, why work as a contractor if you already know what SaaS the company wants? And if you don't know what SaaS they want, how do you know you want to work for them to find out?
Even if that's not the case. If it's genuinely out of their price range to get built custom just for them, which it almost always will be, then they should be willing to collaborate just to get it at all.
Sorry, I guess you don't ever need to do any actual contracting at all if it's just exploratory. I was writing from experience as half of a "software development agency" so we did do custom work, I just noticed that a lot of what we were building could easily be turned in to a product.
I will say though that actually doing some work for them, basically getting carte blanche to poke around their workstations and getting rundowns from their staff on how to achieve their tasks, reveals a lot of opportunities. You come across things like them moving over to a different pc. "Oh we need to use this because it has our X on it, which we use to do Important Task. It's not made any more so we can't get a new version".