He found a $1M/year business hiding inside Microsoft's own ecosystem

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Some of the best niches are not found through market research. They are found by doing a tedious job long enough to resent it properly.

Thomas Mahony started on the help desk of a five-person managed service provider in 2017, slowly building his IT knowledge from hardware up through networking. From there he moved to a Melbourne consulting firm working mainly with Microsoft Intune - the platform IT admins use to deploy software across company devices. When Capgemini acquired the firm, he found himself working on very large client projects, deep inside the exact workflow that would later become his business.

The workflow in question: packaging applications so Intune can deploy them. Thomas could not believe how much effort it required. When he searched online for answers, he found forums full of IT administrators equally stuck - and existing market solutions priced far beyond what smaller businesses could justify.

So he built Pckgr, a web-based SaaS that turns Intune application packaging into a point-and-click task. Want Google Chrome deployed across your fleet? Sign up, connect to Intune, select Chrome, deploy. That is the whole workflow.

Pckgr is now past $1M ARR with a small team, serving customers from under 100 devices to over 100,000. Here is how a fully bootstrapped side project got there.

What Thomas spotted was not just a problem - it was a problem shaped correctly for a solo builder. The pain was real and widely shared. The incumbent solutions were too expensive for smaller businesses, leaving an underserved segment. And the scope could be kept deliberately minimal: a modern, browser-based deployment tool focused on doing one thing well.

His years inside the Intune ecosystem were the unfair advantage. He already understood the packaging process, the common failure points, and what IT administrators would expect from a finished product. That domain knowledge is not something a competitor can replicate with a bigger budget - it comes from having lived the workflow.

The hardest technical challenge proved the point: building hundreds of application packages for deployment meant learning an enormous number of fringe cases in how Windows applications behave. That accumulated edge-case knowledge is now baked into the product, and it is precisely the kind of unglamorous depth that keeps a niche defensible.

Thomas built most of the original product himself while Pckgr was still a side project - and notably, this was before Claude Code, Cursor, and similar AI tools existed. The development and troubleshooting were manual, done across most of his nights.

Fully bootstrapped meant managing costs carefully. His observation here is encouraging for anyone starting now: SaaS startups can begin extremely cheaply, because so many services offer generous free tiers. The platform scaled while staying bootstrapped largely because he built lean from the start. The stack:

A no-code front end paired with serious cloud infrastructure underneath is an unusual combination, and it reflects the priority: ship the product a solo founder can actually maintain, and put the engineering effort where it matters - the packaging automation itself.

Pckgr launched completely free. Thomas is explicit that he thinks this is the best way to do it: attract early users, learn how the product performs in real environments, and fix the most important bugs before asking anyone to pay.

Once the platform had improved based on user feedback, he introduced a subscription at $25 per month - and that is the moment he went full-time on the product. The first paying customer validated everything: proof the problem was significant enough that someone would pay to solve it.

The recurring model fits the problem's shape. Application management is not a one-off task - software must continually be deployed, updated, replaced, and maintained. The subscription mirrors the ongoing nature of the work itself.

As the product matured, Pckgr expanded to four tiers - Starter, Pro, Business, and Custom - and adjusted pricing to reflect what the platform had become. Thomas names price increases directly as a significant driver of growth. Customers now range from small IT teams managing their own environments to managed service providers supporting multiple client organizations.

The go-to-market sequence had two distinct phases, and the second is the more interesting one.

Phase one: with a working MVP, Thomas launched Pckgr for free in the subreddits and Facebook groups where Intune administrators were already discussing packaging and deployment. Immediate access to a highly relevant audience, and immediate validation of whether the problem mattered enough for people to try something new.

Phase two: he used the marketing budget to reach Microsoft MVPs - independent technology experts recognized within the Microsoft ecosystem - and asked them to demo Pckgr on YouTube. This became one of the most effective growth channels the business has had, for a structural reason worth understanding.

These specialists already had trusted audiences in the exact community Pckgr serves. And a useful YouTube demo keeps working: the content continues attracting sign-ups years after it was published, giving it a far longer return than any short-lived advertising campaign. Trusted voice, targeted audience, compounding content. That combination is hard to beat with paid ads at any budget.

Thomas hit constant roadblocks and was frequently sure there was no way forward. The worst arrived at the worst possible moment: as he was getting close to launch, Microsoft announced it would release its own similar platform.

For a solo founder building a tool inside Microsoft's ecosystem, that announcement is close to a worst-case scenario. He lost enormous motivation and nearly abandoned the release entirely.

What got him through was not a strategy. It was a habit.

The business is now past $1M ARR, which is its own commentary on how often the announced threat turns out to be smaller than it looked from the launch trench.

Thomas prefaces his advice with a candor most founders skip: it is hard to give, because the landscape is much different now than when he started - and honestly, a bit scarier. With Claude Code and other AI tools, the barrier to entry feels incredibly low, which means competition is increasing everywhere.

But he points at the flipside of the same fact. The low barrier cuts both ways: it has never been easier for you to build an MVP and test an idea. So do exactly that.

His filter for what to build carries the weight of his own story: make sure it is something unique, and something you are genuinely passionate about. In a world where anyone can build anything quickly, the defensibility comes from the niche you know deeply and the persistence to keep going when the roadblocks arrive - because they will.

The next venture is already in motion: Pckgr RMM, a platform for fully managing Windows devices - an expansion from packaging applications into managing the entire device lifecycle. His stated aim is to grow it into his first deca-millionaire business.

And after that? In his words, once he achieves it, he will be done with software for a while. It is a refreshingly honest end state for a founder to name out loud.

You can follow Thomas's journey on LinkedIn, and see the product at Pckgr.

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