Tools: Solved: How Did You Discover Your Last Profitable Startup? 2026
Posted on Jan 28
• Originally published at wp.me
TL;DR: Profitable DevOps and SaaS startup ideas emerge from solving persistent, expensive technical problems like internal toil, fragile scripts, and integration gaps. By identifying and productizing solutions for these widespread engineering pain points, valuable products can be built.
Profitable DevOps and SaaS startup ideas often originate from solving persistent, expensive technical problems that engineering teams face daily. By identifying and productizing solutions for internal toil, fragile glue scripts, and gaps in existing toolchains, engineers can build valuable products that address widespread industry pain points.
In any growing engineering organization, certain patterns emerge that signal an unmet need. These aren’t bugs in a single application; they are systemic frictions that slow down development, increase operational load, and lead to burnout. These symptoms are the fertile ground from which profitable, problem-solving startups are born. If you find yourself or your team repeatedly saying “this should be easier,” you’ve likely found a valuable problem to solve.
Many of the most successful developer tools started as internal projects built to scratch a very specific itch. Think of Slack, which began as an internal communication tool for a game development company. Your company’s collection of internal dashboards, CLIs, and Slack bots is a potential goldmine. The key is to identify the one that has moved from a “pet project” to “mission-critical infrastructure.”
Look for internal tools with these characteristics:
Imagine a common scenario: a developer needs short-lived, permission-scoped credentials to an AWS production database for a debugging session. The manual process involves a Jira ticket, manager approval, and a senior DevOps engineer manually running IAM commands. It’s slow and error-prone.
An engineer builds an internal Slack bot. A developer types a command, a manager approves it with a button click in Slack, and the bot uses AWS STS to generate and DM the temporary credentials. This internal tool saves hundreds of hours per year.
This is a perfect startup candidate. The problem—managing just-in-time, least-privilege access—is universal. Here’s a hypothetical CLI interaction for such a tool:
The path to productization involves generalizing the tool to support different identity providers (Okta, Google Workspace), multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP,
Source: Dev.to
