Building a startup from the ground up is a challenging feat. In fact, it’s a well-known fact that 90% of new startups fail.
However, this hasn’t discouraged thousands of ambitious entrepreneurs to try to bring their ideas to life year after year. 2018 has brought us some awesome startups that are here to stay – Lyft, Coinbase, Noodle.ai and Robinhood being just some of them.
But if there’s one niche that is particularly booming recently, it’s definitely SaaS (Software As A Service). As we’re nearing the end of the year, everyone has already started speculating about the SaaS startups that will have their big break in 2019. And the future sure looks bright considering all the great startup ideas that are possible contenders for making a huge impact next year.
So, let’s check out the 10 promising SaaS startups for 2019.
Infinity is an ultra-flexible, completely customizable project management tool that lets you organize your workspace exactly how you want.
Project management software is a fiercely competitive field, with tons of different tools already on the market. But Infinity is a startup with a lot of potential because it aims to offer something that no other existing tool does – complete flexibility and infinite storing capacity.
After running several successful businesses, Infinity founders came up with the idea for the tool. Having realized that other PM tools have certain limitations, especially when it comes to capacity and customization, they wanted to create a solution that would adapt to everyone’s needs.
Infinity team is planning to compete with the biggest names in the game and it seems they’re willing to put in the work necessary to get there. Infinity is currently in its beta phase but it has already been featured on major websites such as BetaList and Viral Loops. It looks like big things are in store for this startup in 2019.
Buy Me A Coffee is a platform that enables creators of all kinds to get financial support for their work.
In the sea of profit-oriented startups, Buy Me A Coffee is a real refreshment. The idea is to help aspiring creators – writers, artists, designers, photographers, and all other creative souls out there – to receive donations from their fans in a subtle and friendly way. The platform also makes it possible for art lovers to explore their list of creators and choose who they want to help out.
Asking for funds is always tricky but Buy Me A Coffee makes it super simple. Creators can set up their page in a couple of minutes or just include a Buy Me A Coffee button on their blog, website, Tumblr, etc. And, they can share their creative journey with supporters by setting goals and milestones.
The startup is based in London and currently has a small team but it looks like it’s only going to grow in the next year.
Deep learning is becoming an increasingly popular concept and it’s already being applied to machine translation, speech recognition, language processing, computer vision and many other fields. Lobe is an innovative, user-friendly tool that makes deep learning accessible to everyone.
With Lobe, you can basically teach your app to recognize emotions, hear music, feel movement and understand nature – and all that without any technical knowledge. With visual examples, you can build custom deep learning models that you can test, refine and export.
Even though it was founded in 2015, Lobe is still in its closed beta stage as they are determined to “give everyone a great experience,” so they’re slowly developing the product.
Their innovative idea has ensured Lobe a bright future in the tech world. In fact, the company was bought by Microsoft in September this year so it’s certain that 2019 will be extremely successful for this small startup from San Francisco.
Overflow is the “world’s first user flow diagramming tool” created to help designers present their designs in a way that describes the entire user journey from beginning to end.
Having already built a successful business Proto.io – specialized in creating interactive app prototypes – Overflow founders came up with the idea for a similar product focused on design.
By introducing simple and attractive user flow diagrams, this tool helps designers visualize the user journey and tell a story with their designs. These user flows can easily be created, presented, shared and adapted to any type of design.
Overflow was launched on ProductHunt in March 2018 when it quickly swept up the competition with over 3,000 upvotes, becoming the product of the month. Although it’s still in beta stage, the app already has 35,000 subscribers. Thanks to the original idea and flawless design, Overflow is bound to grow even more in 2019; especially after its full product launch.
AcademyOcean is an academy builder for SaaS companies that aims to boost marketing efforts and customer success through education.
The platform helps businesses go one step further when it comes to educating their customers. Instead of simple knowledge bases, eBooks and help articles, AcademyOcean allows businesses to create interactive custom courses for capturing, nurturing and converting leads, as well as educating existing customers. According to AcademyOcean’s team, their educational content ultimately results in more leads, better conversion rate and higher LTV (customer lifetime value).
Aside from lessons and courses, AcademyOcean includes quizzes, certifications, unlockable lessons, progress bars, and social media sharing options, all of which are designed to motivate the learners even more.
The startup has already received recognition from websites such as Product Hunt, Capterra and G2 Crowd and it seems like we’re going to see much more from this team in the future.
What if payday was every day? With WorkChain.io, it is. This startup is using blockchain technology to create a faster, safer and more efficient way to pay and get paid.
WorkChain.io modernizes the payroll system, ensuring real-time payments. This means you get paid as soon as you clock out each day, instead of waiting for several weeks.
But real-time payment is not the only benefit of WorkChain.io. Since the app is built on the blockchain, it’s completely decentralized, eliminates the needs for banks and other third-parties and supports stable coins like TrueUSD that protect users from the volatility of cryptocurrency.
WorkChain.io was picked as blockchain ‘top pick’ at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this year. Ryan Paul Fyfe, WorkChain.io founder is already using the app for payments in his other company Humanity and is planning integrations with WorkPuls, which will introduce the app to over a million users next year.
Javelin is a platform that helps innovators and aspiring startup founders find the answers to their burning questions and validate their business ideas through expert methods.
Co-founders of Javelin, Trevor Owens and Grace Ng, have been helping innovators since 2010. Before creating Javelin, they had held hundreds of workshops helping entrepreneurs find the right market and discover the right customers.
Putting their experience together, they came up with Javelin, a complete framework for testing startup ideas. The platform connects you to your target audience to identify their needs, lets you build landing pages to validate your ideas and measures your success during the beta stage.
The platform was named Product Hunt’s Product of the Month in June 2018, with over 3,000 upvotes since their beta launch. It’s going to be interesting to see what 2019 brings to this ambitious startup.
A simple idea brought to another level – There is an app that lets you keep track of the timezones of your friends, family, teammates, and clients no matter where they are.
Before developing There, Mo Rajabifard, was a remote engineer working with clients all around the world. That’s how he came up with the idea for the app that would always keep him updated about his clients’ timezones.
Unlike some other timezone apps, There tracks and updates everyone’s location automatically as they travel so you don’t have to enter the new timezone manually.
The app was included in Product Hunt’s list of best startups for 2018, but this startup is announcing many more updates. Some of the features planned for the near future are team settings, focus hours, scheduler board, admin panel, and others.
Cruip is a gallery of beautifully-designed free HTML landing pages for startups. And yes, it’s as simple as it sounds.
The Italian duo Pasquale Vitiello and Davide Pacilio had had years of experience in product design, UI design, and web development when they decided to collaborate on Cruip. The idea was to help out startups without the budget or skills to set up well-designed landing pages. So they created a collection of templates tailored to startups in different stages of development. That’s why Cruip offers four different categories of templates: Validation, Pre-Launch, Beta and Startup (for established startups).
Cruip landing pages are not only eye-catching but also fully responsive on all devices. For now, they offer eleven templates, but they are regularly adding new ones.
Launched this October, Cruip was hunted on Product Hunt the following day and has collected almost 1,700 upvotes in two months. This startup is definitely one to watch in 2019.
Snovio is a cold outreach automation platform that aims to cover your whole lead generation process with a comprehensive email marketing toolset.
The platform helps you discover potential leads, build an email list, send out email drip campaigns, track your results and much more. Although Snovio is a one-stop solution to your email marketing needs, its main selling point is the brilliant email finder that helps you quickly discover and verify email addresses and connect to your leads.
Snovio team started working on their idea in 2017 with the aim to help businesses grow sales by scaling their lead generation efforts. As soon as the platform was launched, it attracted more than 1,000 users in the first few weeks, eventually growing to over 100,000 users.
The platform is already popular among some major companies like Uber, Ubisoft, Lenovo, and Oracle. By the look of it, 2019 is only going to bring more success to this great startup.
Conclusion
From complete innovators to powerful alternatives to existing tools, 2018 has brought us numerous amazing SaaS startups. But we’ll have to wait and see which ones have what it takes to succeed in the highly competitive SaaS market.
Hitting $10 million in annual revenue always seems like a long road but some startups made exceptions and did it in one year. Will some of the listed achieve this too? Let’s follow their path during 2019 and find out.
Aleksandar Dimitrijevic