$10K/mo from a simple tool site

And a few PERFECT online tool niche ideas...

Author

Ian H
January 25, 2025

Imagine building a simple website that does one thing well, charging $5 to use it, and making $10,000/mo passively.

That’s what this viral tweet from yesterday is about:

Grant doesn’t reveal the site, but don’t worry, I’ll show you how to find niches where something similar would work.

This is actually a perfect segue into today’s sponsor, Niche Tools…

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The comments on that tweet are fascinating:

A bunch of commenters are speculating on the niche, or sharing niches that are similar in nature:

There are more, but I’ll stop there.

How to find good niches for online tools

If you have Ahrefs or a similar keyword research tool, the simplest method is to search a broad keyword like “compress” or “pdf”, and filter the results to only show low-competition keywords.

Let me run through an example real quick.

Using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, I searched for “compress”.

I then filtered the results by KD (keyword difficulty) of 5 or less.

Right away, I see that “compress video for discord” and “compress mov file” are perfect keywords to build a simple online tool around.

I’ll check the first one in Google:

The second result is a single-serving website, just as described in the tweet. It also looks like they charge $5 for a subscription. Idk, maybe I just accidentally stumbled on the site Grant was talking about?? Probably not though, since the site he was talking about charges $5 per usage.

Whatever the case, this site is exactly the type of simple online tool site that can make you $10,000/mo passively (once you rank high enough in Google, which is the hard part).

In case you thought 8mbvideo was too “niche”, think again:

It’s estimated to get over half a million monthly visitors according to SimilarWeb!

Ahrefs estimates it gets 23,000 monthly visitors which is quite a bit less, but still nothing to sneeze at:

Going back to Ahrefs, I scrolled down a bit further and saw “how to compress a powerpoint”.

So, I searched Google for “compress powerpoint”, and found this site ranking second:

Choladeck gets lots of traffic, all for PowerPoint-related tools.

What’s interesting is how little competition this niche has. Choladeck has a domain rating of just 3.1. Most of the other results are not exactly what the user is searching for, which is PowerPoint manipulation tools, not HOW to manipulate a PowerPoint.

High-traffic and low DR are good indicators of a low competition niche

I’ll share one more example. Another keyword I saw on Ahrefs was “compress epub”. I googled it, and check this this out:

Dead-simple site. And guess what, they’re charging for the service! Here’s the pricing page:

And yes, even this super niche compression site gets decent traffic:

Another good way to find niche ideas for simple online tool sites is to use Site Stats Database.

Filter the niche field by “compressor”, “converter, “calculator”, “generator”, etc.

Set filters on the Traffic and DA fields as well to find high traffic, low-DA (domain authority) sites. You can even set a “date registered” filter to show recently-built websites. Young sites with lots of traffic is a great indicator of a low competition niche.

I found dozens of fantastic niches in less than a minute with this method.

A few examples:

This site was started in 2023!

This site was also started in 2023!

This one was started in 2021.

One more great way to find niche ideas is to search the NicheTools database (today’s sponsor). Access it here.

There are endless problems out there in need of a simple solution. Not every niche is saturated, as some people think.

I hope this email opened your eyes to the potential in one-page online tool sites.

Thanks for reading!

Ian

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