Why do micro SaaS products fail?

Most micro SaaS products fail for one of 2 reasons: nobody who has the problem ever hears about them, or the people who do hear about them don't want them enough to pay. 23 of my 25 dead products died one of those 2 ways. Not one died because I chose the wrong framework.

The piles

When I laid all 25 autopsies side by side, they fell into 5 piles:

Nobody knew it existed. The biggest pile: products that worked and that almost nobody ever heard about.
Nobody wanted it enough to pay. People found these, and some loved them. Not one paid enough to keep them alive.
Nobody I could name. Built "for freelancers" or "for small teams": a category, never a person I could have phoned.
It needed a crowd. Good designs that were empty until they were full, built by somebody with no crowd to bring.
The ones I killed. 2 that were working when I switched them off, because I'd stopped caring.

The same 5 or 6 mistakes

Reading them in one sitting, the thing I didn't enjoy was how few mistakes there were. The same 5 or 6, in slightly different clothes, over 9 years. Launching to people who follow me instead of people who have the problem. Treating a store listing as a launch. Giving it away and calling that validation. Building for a word. Keeping a dead product alive because closing it meant admitting it.

I'd been treating each death as its own bad luck. Laid side by side they were a pattern, and the pattern was mine.

What the technology had to do with it

Almost nothing. My most technically careful product, with tests, a diagram in the README and a deploy pipeline I was proud of, was the one nobody ever saw. The stack is the part you can be certain about, which is why it gets the attention. It's rarely the part that kills the product.

How to stop repeating them

Write an autopsy the week a product dies, while it still stings: what it was, who it was for, how long it lived, what actually killed it, and the rule it leaves you. The autopsy card is the form I use. Read your old ones before you start the next thing.

Nobody Bought It has all 25. The graveyard has the cards.

Questions

What is the most common reason a small SaaS fails?

In my experience, that the people with the problem never hear about it. Distribution kills more small products than code ever does.

Do most micro SaaS products fail?

Most of mine did: 25 of roughly 30. The useful question is what each failure leaves behind for the next attempt.

How do you avoid the same mistakes on the next product?

Write each autopsy the week the product dies, and read them all before you start the next one.