Open X right now and count how many people are building the same AI wrapper.
Meanwhile, a guy in Melbourne built a tool that packages Windows apps for Microsoft Intune. That's it. That's the product.
It makes $83,000 a month.
His name is Thomas Mahony, the product is Pckgr, and Starter Story got him to walk through the whole thing: the idea, the free Reddit launch, the $25 beta price, and the five rules he'd use to find a boring SaaS niche again from scratch.
I pulled the numbers from the episode, checked them against his Indie Hackers interview and Pckgr's live pricing page, and broke down the playbook below.
The boring problem hiding inside his 9 to 5
Tom was an IT admin at a Melbourne consulting firm (later acquired by Capgemini), working deep inside Microsoft Intune, the platform big companies use to push software onto employee devices.
One task ate his days: packaging applications. Taking a piece of software, wrapping it in the format Intune wants, and verifying it actually installs.
His words: "It can sometimes take an hour to successfully package an application."
One app, one hour. And again for every update.
So he did what most of us only think about at our desks. He went looking on forums and found hundreds of IT admins complaining about the exact same thing.
The existing tools? "Either too technical or too expensive."
That gap is the whole business: a cost-affordable, browser-based tool that does one simple job. Deploy applications to Intune in one click.
No fancy design, no AI angle. And he built the first version before Cursor or Claude Code even existed, writing most of it by hand.
Launch free on Reddit, then charge $25
Once the MVP worked (or at least, once Tom thought it worked), he launched it completely free on Reddit.
It got traction fast. Some users loved it. Some gave sharp, useful feedback.
And some were, in his words, "just downright rude."
He kept all three groups. The harsh comments stung, but the feedback stabilized the product faster than any internal QA would have.
Then came the move most founders are too scared to make: he put a $25 per month price on it while still in beta.
"I remember sitting there and getting the first notification on my phone of a customer that signed up and was actually willing to pay for something I built."
That notification is the real validation, not upvotes or waitlist signups. A stranger put in a credit card.
If you want to see how other founders run this exact motion, I broke down a Reddit and SEO playbook from another Starter Story founder who built a $13K a month SaaS the same way.
The growth channel that compounds: Microsoft MVPs
After beta, Tom's most effective strategy wasn't ads.
He partnered with Microsoft MVPs, the certified experts whose blogs and YouTube channels every Intune admin already reads, and had them create product demos.
A perfectly targeted audience, with none of the spray and pray you get from ads.
He calls it planting seeds: "A YouTube video, someone could stumble across it 2 years later and become a customer. Something that you paid for a long time ago. That return on investment is huge."
This is the part I'd tattoo on every bootstrapper's forearm. Rented attention stops the day you stop paying. A demo video in front of the right 5,000 IT admins keeps selling for years.
Tom's 5 rules for finding a boring SaaS idea
Pat Walls asked him the question everyone watching wants answered: if you started over today, how would you find a niche like this?
Tom gave five rules.
1. Build where you already have credibility. Intune looked boring to outsiders. Tom was living and breathing it. Customers can tell when you actually know the problem (and when you love it).
2. Look for pain points, not ideas. If people at your job keep complaining about something, that complaint is a product brief someone will pay for.
3. Avoid competing with the masses. His competitors chased enterprises with millions of devices. Tom targeted the smaller businesses they ignored. There were plenty.
4. Charge early, even if the price is low. $25 a month during beta proved people would pay. "There's no point chasing that idea if in the early stages no one's willing to pay for it."
5. Optimize for freedom, not scale at all costs. Small team, small costs, work from home. "I've been able to build a life that I'm really happy with."
→ The pattern across all five: start from a position you already occupy, and let the niche stay small enough that nobody serious follows you in.
I keep a running list of boring business ideas that make money if you want more raw material for rule number two.
The numbers, checked
Here's where Pckgr actually stands, from the episode plus what I could verify outside it.
In the video (recorded early 2026), Tom shows a dashboard going from $447K to $910K in revenue, roughly doubling year over year, and says they're at about $60K a month.
By July 2026, in an Indie Hackers interview, he reported $83K a month, which puts Pckgr past $1M in annual run rate.
The rest of the picture:
- 1,000+ paying customers, deploying apps in over 60 countries
- 100% bootstrapped, no outside money
- Current pricing (live on their site): $49 a month up to 100 devices, $99 up to 1,000, $149 up to 2,500, custom above that, 30 day free trial
- Started as a side project next to his day job
And the detail Pat Walls flagged that I think matters most: churn.
These customers are IT departments. The tool is wired into how they ship software to every laptop in the company. Nobody rips that out to save $99 a month.
Compare that to the consumer AI apps everyone is building right now, where users try it for a week and vanish. $83K a month of IT department revenue is worth a multiple of the same number in almost any other market.
The tech stack will upset the purists
The front end is Bubble. Yes, the no-code tool.
Package builds and testing run on GitHub Actions. Serverless functions on Microsoft Azure. Project tracking on monday.com.
That's a seven figure run rate B2B SaaS with a no-code front end, sold to the most technical buyers imaginable: IT administrators.
Nobody asked about the stack before paying. They asked whether packaging an app still takes an hour, and with Pckgr it takes a few clicks.
His parting advice in the episode is the same thing I tell Club members who've been "validating" for six months: just start. "Someone else could build your idea while you're still sitting there planning it. Speed is the key."
What I'd copy this week
If you're sitting in a day job right now, Tom's story converts into three moves you can make before Friday.
First, write down every task at work that takes you more than 30 minutes and repeats weekly. That's your idea list. Mine would have had "editing podcast clips" on it three times.
Second, search Reddit and the relevant forums for people complaining about the one that annoys you most. Tom found hundreds of IT admins with his exact problem before he wrote a line of code. If nobody's complaining, pick the next task on the list.
Third, when you ship, put a price on it during beta. $25 a month filtered Tom's curious tire kickers from actual buyers, and the entry price has since doubled to $49 without slowing growth.
The founders I interview keep proving the same point from different angles: the money is sitting in problems you already understand, not in ideas you need to research.
FAQ
What is a boring SaaS?
A boring SaaS is software that solves an unglamorous, repetitive business problem in a niche most founders never look at, like app packaging for Microsoft Intune. These products rarely go viral, but they tend to have clear buyers, little competition, and very low churn because they get embedded in a company's daily operations.
How much money does Pckgr make?
Pckgr was doing about $60K a month at the time of the Starter Story episode in early 2026, with an in-video dashboard showing revenue growing from $447K to $910K. By July 2026, founder Thomas Mahony reported $83K a month on Indie Hackers, past $1M in annual run rate, fully bootstrapped with 1,000+ customers.
How do you find boring SaaS ideas?
Start inside work you already know. Tom's rules: build where you have credibility, hunt for pain points people complain about (forums and subreddits are full of them), pick segments the big players ignore, and charge early to prove the pain is real. The best ideas usually look like "that annoying task that eats an hour every day."
Can you really build a SaaS with no-code tools?
Pckgr's front end runs on Bubble, and it sells to IT administrators at over $1M a year run rate. Buyers pay for the outcome, not the stack. For heavier logic, Tom pairs Bubble with GitHub Actions and Azure serverless functions, which is a pattern almost any technical-ish founder can copy.
Steal more playbooks like this
A boring niche, a $25 beta price, and a marketing channel that compounds for years. Tom didn't invent any of it. He just executed, patiently, in a corner of the Microsoft ecosystem nobody else wanted.
This is exactly the kind of founder I chase down for my podcast: bootstrapped, real revenue between $100K and $10M a year, and willing to open the books and show the dashboard.
