The standard advice is: pick one product, find your niche, grind on it for five years, and pray you don't get out-executed by a better-funded team. I've read the blog posts. I've listened to the podcasts. I know the playbook.

We're not running that playbook.

What we're running instead is a factory. One Flask template — dangercorn-saas-template, or dcst — that ships 220+ small vertical SaaS apps, each aimed at a tiny audience that nobody large enough to matter is going to build for. Cheesemakers. Backyard beekeepers. Parents who don't want their kid's first steps stored on a social network. Book clubs that actually read. Each one is a real product. Each one runs on the same shell. Each one has a self-host tier at $0 and a hosted tier in the $19-49 range.

This sounds absurd written down. It is, in a normal economic model, absurd. It's also the only strategy I can find that fits the 2026 reality I'm actually standing in.

The Pie Was Never Going to Be One Slice

Jess and I had this conversation early: if we build one big product and it takes off, great — but we're betting the whole family's time on a single throw of the dice. If we build 220 small products, any ten of them doing $2K-5K MRR is a real business. The math works differently.

Call it the pie-slice thesis. A traditional SaaS founder bakes one huge pie, spends three years convincing the market they're hungry for it, and prays. We're baking a pie made of 220 thin slices. Most will be dry. Some will be pretty good. A few will be excellent. We don't have to know in advance which ones — we just have to get them to the table.

AI Changed the Economics

Here's the thing that makes this possible now and didn't five years ago: the marginal cost of shipping a new vertical has collapsed.

Our template handles the boring 80% — auth, billing, database, deploy pipeline, landing page design, Stripe wiring, Anthropic integration, deterministic port assignment so we can run 40 of them on one dev box without collisions. Building a new vertical means writing the business-logic layer on top: the cheesemaking batch tracker, the beekeeping inspection form, the shift-swap board. That's usually a weekend, sometimes an evening. We shipped 31 verticals in a single Saturday. That would've been a year of work in 2020.

The AI piece isn't the headline feature. It's the force multiplier underneath. Claude writes first drafts of the landing copy, the feature descriptions, the FAQ. Our shared Claude wrapper means every app that wants AI features gets retry logic, model fallback, and cost tracking for free. The things that used to take a team now take one person with a template and a good coffee.

Small Markets Are the Real Market

The other thing: nobody is building for the markets we're targeting. Not because they're not real — they're extremely real — but because they're too small for anyone chasing venture scale to touch. There are maybe 40,000 backyard beekeepers in North America who'd pay $29/mo for a hive logger. That's a $14M annual ceiling if you captured every single one of them. No VC is funding that. No growth team is pointed at that.

Which means there's no competition. The "market" is a few dusty Excel spreadsheets, a couple of abandoned Android apps from 2017, and a Facebook group where people keep re-asking the same question because there's no searchable record. We can show up with a real product and be the only real product. I've written more about the TaskRabbit-ignored towns elsewhere — same dynamic.

One of these apps being a $500/mo business is a win. Twenty of them being $500/mo businesses is a company. We don't need a unicorn. We need a herd of goats.

The Risk I'm Taking

I'll be honest about what this strategy gets wrong.

If you need venture funding, this doesn't work. You can't pitch "220 apps and we'll see what sticks" to a VC. They want focus, a wedge, a TAM slide, a clear path to $100M ARR. This is the opposite of that. I've written about why we're fine with that.

If you need a big initial revenue hit, this doesn't work either. Each app is going to take time to find its audience. The cost-to-acquire is low (each product sells itself to a tiny community that's been waiting for it), but the absolute numbers are small. This is a compounding play, not a big-bang play.

And if you hate marketing to 40 different audiences with 40 different mental models, you'd hate this. Every vertical needs its own tone, its own landing page, its own understanding of the customer's pain. The template makes the code easy. It doesn't make the empathy easy.

What Success Looks Like

I don't know which apps will hit. I have guesses. The per-vertical spotlights in this series — cheesemaking, honeybees, bookcircle — are the ones I personally find most interesting. But "Tim finds it interesting" isn't a market signal. The market signal is someone emailing me asking for a feature or paying $29/mo unprompted.

My working model is: 220 apps, 15 of them reach $500+/mo in year one, 5 of them reach $5K+/mo in year two, 1 of them surprises us and becomes the actual business. Total revenue from the portfolio: call it $40-80K/mo by end of 2027. That's a real family business. That's the goal.

None of those 220 apps is going to be worth a $10M exit. Collectively, they're worth more than most of them individually. And the template that makes them possible — that is worth something in a different way. It's the factory, not the products, that's the actual asset.

That's the bet. We'll see.