The 7 SaaS Ideas I'd Build in 2026 If I Could Start Over

0:00 What SaaS company would I build in 2026 today if I had to start all over from scratch now? I've built SaaS companies before, I've scaled SaaS companies before, I'Ve sold and exited SaaS companies before. Now, most people that start to build a SaaS company today that are developing ideas today are just trying to build an AI tool, a wrapper or a copilot or some sort of a plugin. That's not the right way to do that, not today.

0:26 I also see founders trying to build old school SaaS companies in today's environment, and that won't work either. The difference between a great idea and a terrible idea for SaaS and AI today is the difference between creating a tool versus creating and delivering an actual outcome. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through seven key SaaS AI ideas. Now, you might be wondering, if these ideas are so great, why am I sharing it? Well, I'm super busy with my own companies and truthfully, I didn't come up with these ideas.

0:58 I gave AI my core framework on how I develop ideas, on how I advise founders to develop ideas, on how I've developed my own ideas, the ideas that I'm actually pursuing. And it generated these very specific ideas. And honestly, when I first looked at it, I was a little skeptical, but then I was really impressed. I think that it truly understood my framework and really created the right set of ideas that are going to be meaningful.

1:22 So I'm going to walk you through each of these seven ideas. I'm going to explain the framework that I use to develop them, and I'm going to explain exactly what these ideas are and why I think they could be real winners. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand the difference between a dead SaaS idea and a winning SaaS and AI idea that's going to work in 2026 today. Intro. Okay, so before I dive into each of the seven ideas, here's the framework that I fed into AI to really develop each of these ideas.

1:58 Now, this is the core framework. Number one, it has to be a recurring workflow, meaning the problem that we're solving with this idea has to attack a workflow, something that's being done in a business on a daily or weekly basis. If it's not at least daily or weekly, then it's not going to be worth it. It's not going to be an important and urgent enough problem. Which brings me to number two, it has to be an important and urgent problem, meaning as soon as I go to a specific person that I'm targeting, and I mentioned, this is the problem we solve.

2:28 Here's how we solve it. It's got to be in the top three in their priority list to actually solve. That makes it urgent and important. Number three, it has to be for a clear buyer. It can't be for too wide of an audience, because then I'll never actually get traction. And in this noisy market, it has to be built for a very specific buyer. Number four, I can execute at least part of the work. That is the rule for all of these ideas that I gave it.

2:56 It has to be where I can actually execute part or the entire workflow and serve the human versus building a tool that the human uses. And then lastly, it has to be explained, meaning whatever they're doing, the problem that exists, it has to be an expensive problem, meaning if they don't solve it, they're gonna be losing a lot of money, they're gonna be falling behind in the goals of their business. So it has to be an expensive, urgent, and important problem for this specific buyer.

3:25 So that's the framework that I use for every single idea that I pursue. Every single time I'm talking to another founder and they're pitching me their idea, and I get pitched a lot of ideas. That's the framework that I pass it. So I fitted the framework, and it's also trained on a lot of videos that I've done in the past on generating ideas and the frameworks and the way I think about it. And it generated these seven ideas.

3:44 And at first I was like, let me just give me some ideas. But honestly, they were all really, really good. And I research each of them. So I'm going to now walk you through it. By the way, if you're new to this channel, I drop episodes like this on actionable strategies and tactics on how to grow your AI and SaaS business faster based on everything that's working in my companies. So if you're new, be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon that we'll get notified every single time I drop an episode.

4:06 And if you're already part of this community, go and smash that, like, button, and let's dig right into it. All right? Number one is an AI Implementation manager. And the specific group of people that we would sell this into is the VP of Customer Success. Let me explain the problem. I've seen this with nearly every single SaaS company that I've had, every single SaaS company that I've advised, and it exists Today in a huge way where sales closes a deal and then they kind of chuck it over the wall to customer success and says good luck, make sure you implement it and make sure you hold onto that revenue and, and make sure they don't churn and make sure they're set up for success.

4:39 And basically two teams get absolutely demolished because of this experience. Number one, the customer success team, cause they're trying to actually fulfill all the promises sales made to win that deal. And number two, the support team, because when things break or when things don't get implemented, the support team gets barraged with all the problems that the customer is facing. And right now, even today, it is an incredibly manual process that's actually followed by followed in terms of the workflow that exists.

5:06 It's a very messy workflow. And you'll notice with each of these ideas, a messy workflow is where the opportunity is for agents today and for SaaS ideas today. So what you're going to do is you're going to build an AI agent that hooks into the checklist, the emails, the calendar deal, the contract, the support system, everything end to end, and get a full understanding of what we promised the customer and, and what we actually need to deliver and what are the key steps that need to happen in order to make that successful.

5:37 This agent is also going to be responsible for following up on action items and actually pulling together all the key stakeholders on the things that need to be done. This agent is also going to be responsible for identifying blockers and coordinating with engineering to figure out where the blockers exist and what needs to be done and what needs to be prioritized. And the way you're going to charge for this is you're going to charge per customer.

6:03 So you're going to go to VP of Customer Success as Hey Mr. Or Ms. VP of Customer Success. I'm going to charge you per customer and I'm going to run an entire agentic workflow to ensure that these customers are set up for success. I'm going to make sure that nothing gets missed. I'm going to make sure I chase down every blocker across organization and I'm going to feed it all back to your customer success people so that they understand everything that's going on and nothing falls through the cracks.

6:30 This is probably would not have been possible when models the way they were maybe two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. But as models have gotten better and better, as we're starting to create harnesses that make these models work as it's become easier to integrate into different systems. This is more possible than ever before. And one of the core themes you'll see is you're not selling a tool, you're selling an outcome. You're selling customer success as an outcome and you're charging for it.

7:00 And this begs the question, I didn't put a dollar amount here, but how much would a VP of customer success pay for ensuring that their customers are successful? That's kind of interesting, right? And this is one of the biggest reasons why everything is changing in SaaS and AI today. Back in the day we used to charge per seat, which sounds incredible, but how many customer success people are you going to have and how much can you charge per seat?

7:24 Whereas if you're charging per outcome, that's going after the labor budget and there's no cap, literally no cap on. There's no cap on how much you can charge for. That just depends on the value your agent is delivering. This is the big shift and this is what you're going to see in all the other ideas that I'm going to be highlighting as well. So that's idea number one. Idea number two are AI compliance ops for regulated SMBs.

7:48 That's a mouthful. Let's get specific. You take regulated small or medium sized businesses. This could be insurance companies, this could be mortgage companies, this could be financial services companies. These are all regulated industries. And the thing about these regulated industries is they have customers and they have clients and there's a whole amount of work that goes into making sure it's all compliant, which means there's a messy workflow. Remember, whenever there's a messy workflow, there's an opportunity.

8:16 In SaaS today, there's an opportunity. In AI today, there's an opportunity in building an agent that can streamline that messy workflow. Who you would be selling to. These are SMB's you'd be selling to the COO or the owner and you're going to go in and say, hey, look, right now you have emails, PDFs, contracts, shared document folders and you have people looking through all of this. And God forbid a compliance audit happens because you are in a regulated industry, there's likely going to be human error, there's likely going to be issues.

8:46 So we're going to sell you an AI compliance agent and we're going to charge you anywhere from 500 to $5,000 depending on the volume that you have of clients. And we're going to run automated audit 24,7. Every single move that happens with every customer with every client, every new customer, every new client, every event that happens, we're going to make sure that we scan everything across the workflow and, and identify compliance issues for you in real time.

9:12 And this is something that a human cannot do. They just literally can't keep up with that kind of pace. And two, this is significantly reducing the risk these regulated companies actually come across. So that means you can charge anywhere from $500 to $5,000 a month. Again, these numbers might seem crazy to you if you're used to the old SaaS world of just selling a $9 a month C seat or a $29 a month seat or $100 a month seat.

9:39 To think that, oh, it's $5,000 a month, well, guess what? That's how much a human costs. Except you can now build agents that works the same way a human does, but they can do it 24, 7. And these messy workflows are now more approachable than ever before. So that's idea number two. AI compliance ops for regulated SMBs. Number three, AI rev ops for board reporting. And I promise these two happen to be ops. And I probably should have separated them a little bit.

10:08 The rest are not ops. This one's interesting. This is for CEOs and CFOs. It's AI Rev Ops for board reporting. If you don't know what goes into being a CEO and board reporting. My last company, ToutApp, we raised on the likes of Jackson Square Ventures, founder Collective, Andreessen Horowitz, Incredible firms. And we had a board. The board meeting was an event the entire company teams. At the early days it was just me. And then we had a whole biz ops person and a team under him would come together to pull all the data to actually create the board deck and the board meeting notes and the narrative that we were going to do so that everyone would be prepped for the board meeting.

10:45 There was a lot of data that needed to come together. We scaled ToutApp, we sold it to a company called Marketo. And Marketo was owned by Vista Private Equity. And I was in the executive team and I would go to these board meetings. For those board meetings, you had to go in wearing a suit and a tie. And an even more enormous amount of work got done to create these board decks. Here's the thing, those reports had to come together in the event of the board meeting in time for that.

11:11 And board meetings are usually quarterly. But why can't the CEO and the rest of the exec team have that data and have that Board deck every Friday. Think about that for a second. Why? Well, the first reason is it's an enormous amount of work for rev ops to pull all this data together. But for an agent that can plug into this messy workflow, you can go to the CEO and the CFO and say, hey, every Friday you're gonna get a real time board deck.

11:35 You're gonna get all the metrics in your business, from new business to expansion, win, loss rates, retention, churn, marketing, spend, you name it. You're gonna get a full board deck. We're gonna hook into all your systems and we're gonna give you a board deck and that you can charge depending on the size of the company and anywhere from $1,000 a month to $10,000 a month. Because you're now getting four board reports in a month. How much is that worth to you for say, a 500 millionaire or company?

12:00 So that's idea number three again. Messy workflow, expensive problem. There's a recurring workflow happening. All of these things are true based on the framework that I. I'll go through this again in a little bit so that you keep it fresh. Okay, that's idea number three. Idea number four. We're cranking now as a pipeline recovery platform. I like this one. This one you can sell to a VP of Sales. Here's what happens. VP of Sales, VP of Marketing spends a ton of money.

12:25 Anywhere from $100 a lead to maybe $1,000 a lead. That lead comes in, becomes an opportunity, and you win anywhere from 20% of 50% of those opportunities, which means that anywhere from 80% to 50%, 50 to 80%, you don't win. And that sits in Salesforce and that sits in the marketing automation platform. And quite honestly, for most companies, they never think about it again. One of the things I've learned back in my TOUTAPP days, marketo, now I run a portfolio of companies.

12:53 It's a true ethos across all the companies that I run. They always come back. If someone didn't buy from you last week, they're going to buy from you, especially if you have a great product. And that's been true in every company I've ever owned and operated. We always had really great products, really great success stories, and people always came back. And that wasn't by mistake. They came back because we kept marketing to them. And this most companies don't do.

13:14 And that's what this idea was. AI pipeline recovery platform where you sell to the VP of sales and say, hey, we'll take all the Leads that you didn't win, that didn't book a call with you. We'll just take all of them. We're gonna hook into that messy workflow, we're gonna pull all the data, we're gonna figure out who they are, and we're gonna figure out how to re engage with them through marketing and through direct email.

13:33 For every person we bring back to book a meeting, you pay us money. So you can charge per meeting booked, or you can take a percentage of revenues. You can make a pure upside. And this agent will hook into the CRM system, the marketing automation system. It will get a Persona and an email account and it'll just 24, 7, look at all those leads that met but didn't do anything. Look at the call recordings, understand the win loss, figure out what went wrong.

13:58 Maybe it was a new rep and just screwed up the deal. Figure all those things out. Maybe they went with a competitor and they expire in eight months. You figure all that out and you run an entire campaign automatically to bring those people back to the VP of sales. And for every meeting book, you get money. And you could even go further and say, I want $100 per meeting booked and I want 1% of revenue booked, and that's it.

14:20 You don't have to pay anything if the agent doesn't do anything else. And that becomes a really, really powerful platform. One of the cool things about this is all of these have a really interesting wedge. You know, you don't have to rebuild any sort of big platform. You don't have to. You can hook into the existing workflows, but they can become categories. You could be the number one AI pipeline recovery platform. The number one AI pipeline recovery agent.

14:42 There's network effects with this data. If you're, if you're serving across 10 companies, you can start to see the same buyer. There's some interesting things that can happen there too. All of these ideas start small and can compound into incredibly big ideas, like huge ideas, because these are solving some such urgent and important problems. All right, now before I go to 5, 6, 7, let me pause here for a second. Let's go back to the framework.

15:06 Remember, this is how I developed these ideas with AI. Number one recurring workflow, urgent and important problem, a clear buyer, expensive problem. And also AI can execute the work. This is the big shift, you know, this is where you stop creating a little AI wrapper, little chatbot, little code copilot. You replace labor, you go in and you attack an entire workflow and say, we're going to take this workflow. I know it's a messy workflow. We got to hook in a bunch of data and we're going to make sure we deliver.

15:34 And you can actually charge per outcome instead of per se. That's the big change. If you're getting excited about this, if you're getting excited the framework, getting excited about these ideas. If you're starting to come up with ideas of your own using this framework, can I just get a yes in the comments below and also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm? Hit. Just loves it when you do that. Also this episode this episode is brought to you by one of my portfolio companies, Unstoppable.

16:00 Unstoppable helps founders take their ideas and scale their companies with a differentiated go to market strategy. In today's world with AI, it has become easier and easier to build software and it has become harder and harder to get distribution to actually do sales and marketing so you can actually get your customers to notice you. And that's what Unstoppable helps you do. And Unstoppable has been doing it for nearly seven years. So if you want to learn more how you can get help depending on the stage that you're in, just go to getunstoppable.com you can go see this page where you'll get all of the details.

16:38 On that page you'll see the exact methodology that Unstoppable follows to help founders build a differentiated go to market strategy. You'll see the different programs we have during that idea stage. We have the launch program that helps you go from idea to successful customers. If you already have some revenues, then we have the go to market program that helps you scale. And also on that page, you'll get all of our success stories. Because we've been operating for seven plus years, we've worked with hundreds of founders and you'll see all the success stories we've captured.

17:09 At this point, there's over 50 of them, which is incredible. So just go to getunstoppable.com they're the ones that have sponsored this episode. That's what makes this possible. It allows me to go do this on YouTube. So go to getunstoppable.com also if you're getting value, smash that like button. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit the subscribe button too. Number five, AI vendor consolidation. Sell to the CFO and charge per fee plus percent of savings.

17:35 This is something that everybody is thinking about. They have too many SaaS, tools, they're overpaying for tokens. They're not always using the right model for the right job. There is overspend going on all the time, all over the place. And so you're going to go in to the CFO and you're going to say, hey, we have a vendor agent. We're going to hook into your systems and every month you're going to get a report on how you can consolidate and save.

18:01 It's a small nominal fee for the agent to work. It's completely unbiased, it does not care, it is ruthless and it's going to take a percent of the savings. We also work with a thousand of these companies so we know exactly what everyone is paying. So we'll tell you if you're overpaying. We'll help you negotiate as well. That you can do at scale. That's the idea and I love it because I think this is where it's going.

18:23 A human has biases, can't track everything, can be swayed, but an AI agent does not care. It can hook into all the systems, find all the spend and figure out how to save money. And it can do that across a thousand companies, a hundred thousand companies, and come back and say you're overpaying for this and help you save even more money. And they'll just charge a small fee and a percentage of the savings. Super powerful number six AI field marketing agent.

18:50 This one is near and dear to my heart. I love this one because now I've kind of elevated myself to TK Capital. That's my holding company of these AI SaaS, companies and advisory companies. But for, for a good number of the last few years after I sold Toutapp to Marketo and then we helped sell Marketo to Adobe, then I started Unstoppable. I worked was, I was in Unstoppable. I hosted a lot of dinners. Like I went all over the world hosting a lot of dinners.

19:15 And in those dinners, it was essentially community, it was field marketing. It was getting our clients together. It was incredible. But oh my God, it was a ton of work. It was a ton of work trying to pick the right group of people in each city, do the reservations, do the booking, make sure the flow is right, reaching out to each other people to make sure they're coming so you're not sitting there like a dinner and half the people couldn't make it because something came up because everyone's busy.

19:39 It's a lot of work. So this sells to the VP of Marketing of the CRO and it's an AI field marketing agent charges anywhere from 2K to 15K. And what it does is it hooks into that messy workflow. It hooks into the messy workflow and says, hey, if you want to hold an event in this city, here are the people to invite. Hit a button. Yep, go invite them, make sure they're coming. Go book the place, make sure that's done.

19:59 Streamline the whole thing. Come up with questions I should ask and come up with a seating chart. Done. This is possible. This is, I know it sounds like kind of crazy, but I think AI is getting there because the data is there where this is possible. And you can charge anywhere from 2k to 15k a month, depending on the size or the number of events that you're doing. And you might say, tk, that's a lot. Like eight humans are going to show up to a restaurant in a private room and they're going to have dinner.

20:25 And the AI decided where the dinner is, who to invite, where to seat each other. Yeah, that's where this is headed. That's what makes this a huge category. Imagine this single agent booking events for a thousand companies or 10,000 companies or a hundred thousand companies. And through those events, building the relationships with every single banquet manager or restaurant manager. They have different titles in a city and being able to say, hey, I'm going to keep doing more dinners at your place across my a hundred thousand companies if you give me a discount.

20:56 Just think about the scale of what that means. So this is totally possible. What may not happen right away is you maybe not be able to build and have it do everything, meaning some of it the agent will do and some of it your internal team will do. And that's okay. A lot of agent companies have expert in the middle. The agents are kind of running point, but they have experts in the the middle to round out the gaps.

21:19 What the LLMs can't do. And over time, you can go fully agented, and that's totally fine too. So don't let the current state of LLMs stop you from the vision on ideas like this, because you can put experts in the middle and get enough done. And over time, the LLMs can do it on their own, but you can still deliver the result, the outcome to the customer and charge a really hefty, really great hefty fee. So totally, totally possible.

21:42 And that's an important point to understand. Number seven, AI back office for creators, this was near and dear to my heart. You sell to founders anywhere from $299 to $2,000. Near and dear to my heart, I've been a creator for. I don't even know. I'm afraid to count. I think it's coming up on 10 years soon and I love doing it. And one of the things that when I approached this was like, this has to be scalable.

22:05 So I built out a team and we built out a lot of processes. And it's true, like it's basically pulled together with a whole bunch of slack threads, Google Docs and zapiers. I think that for this creator business to run, we probably have like 200 zaps for Unstoppable to run, which I also automated because I was in it. Now I just focus on the coaching. The company kind of is fully agentic now, which is crazy. For that one, we probably have 500 zaps.

22:33 Most of these creator businesses have very complicated backend with a lot of messy workflows. So you can create an AI back office agent that maybe for starters hooks into all the different systems, all the pieces of data, and starts giving reports, but over time can streamline the operations and you can charge anywhere from 299 to $2,000 a month. Because these creators are usually small teams, very lean teams, and what they need is a super agent that knows everything that that's going on across all the messy workflows and can give synthesis which the individuals can't do.

23:06 So that can be really, really powerful as well. All right, so here's what we're going to do now. I'm going to quickly go back to the framework so you can dial it in. We're going to quickly recap the ideas so you can really connect it and then we're going to talk next steps on, like, what do you do next? So the framework, the framework that I use for this was number one recurring workflow. Needs to be happening over and over and over.

23:27 Otherwise it's hard to sell. Has to have an urgent and important problem and an expensive problem. There has to be a clear buyer and I can execute on work. The big thing that's happening here is I'm taking urgent, important, expensive problems for a clear buyer and I'm delivering outcomes, not a tool. That's the shift. And the ideas that I walked you through. Let me just. I don't know how we came up with seven. Seven was a lot.

23:49 I was like, oh my God, that's a lot of ideas. But we got through it. Right? But if you got, if you're getting value from this man, smash that like, button for the YouTube algorithm. Put stuff in the comments. I Love hearing from you guys. Any questions that you have on the framework. Number one, an AI implementation manager selling to VPs of customer success. Number two, AI compliance and ops for regulated SMBs. Number three, AI rev ops for board reporting.

24:15 Number four, AI pipeline recovery platform. Number five, AI vendor consolidation. Number six, AI marketing agent. Number seven, AI back office for creators. My favorite, if I were truly starting another one today, which I don't have capacity for because right now my portfolio companies keep me very busy, is a pipeline recovery platform because you know I come from go to market. Go to market is all I know. And this one was good. I really like this one.

24:42 So that's my favorite one. So now you know the framework that I use to develop Ideas why the SaaS ideas from 201616 are no longer going to work. You got to switch from tools to outcomes. Those are the kind of ideas that work well in SaaS in 2026. Today you have the seven ideas that we developed from my framework and AI combined and you now can hopefully get inspired on whether it's one of these ideas and you run with it awesome.

25:06 Or you're starting to use this framework to really start to think about an idea of your own. Also, if you're in that stage where you're trying to go from like the pre founder, you, the aspiring founder to like, okay, I'm going to run with this idea and you don't want to waste months building the wrong product. This is where a sponsor, Unstoppable comes in. Unstoppable helps founders like you go from idea to market to revenues with a differentiated go to market strategy.

25:32 So if you want help with this process, then check out their launch program. Go to get unstoppable.com, get unstoppable.com and and on that site you'll get all of the details. You'll get exactly what the program's about. You'll get all the success stories. There's a lot of them. You'll get pricing and you get the exact steps to follow so they can join the program. And you know, that way you don't have to go at it alone. But more importantly, you're not wasting months building the wrong product, which would suck.

25:59 So just go to getunstoppable.com for all the details. I drop an episode every single Sunday with app actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your AI and SaaS business faster based on the principles that I'm applying in my own companies. Unstoppable is one of them. So if you got value from this, please hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. That way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. If you're already subscribed, make sure you smash that like button as well.

26:24 The YouTube algorithm loves it when you smash that like button. For me, my love language are comments. So if you got value from this, post it in the comments. If questions about my ideas framework, post it in the comments. If you have feedback, post in the comments. If you're running with one of these ideas, post it in the comments. If you had an aha moment, post in the comments. And also if you're in that stage where you're going from idea to like, hey, I'm going to run with it.

26:46 Check out this video next. In this video I give you the go to market plan for launching a new AI SaaS product. And lastly, remember everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with with us yours, it's going to be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see you in the next episode. Take care everybody.