In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, I talk about the survey we launched this week

for independent SaaS founders. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 463.5.

Mike and I came up with these half episodes, sometime back in 2011, to announce the first microcomf.

And we like to use them as like out-of-band announcements for things that don't fit into a typical episode format.

If you haven't already heard, the microcomf team and I have been working for a few months to put together a survey for SaaS founders, for non-venture track SaaS founders.

And it's called the state of independent SaaS. This survey is the first of its kind in our space.

There certainly have been surveys like this tons of them in the venture space, but it's the first of

its kind and the report will be the first of its kind as well, looking at SaaS benchmarks for

non-venture-funded companies. This really fits into the mission that, you know, that this

podcast has taken, that Micracomph has taken, that I took with my book and the blog. And our

mission really has been to help startup founders launch and grow without venture capital. Obviously,

there's a time and a place for venture capital, but in our community, we're looking to do this without the strings that venture capital comes with.

And the idea behind the survey is to bring some data into our space because there really hasn't

been any. You know, if you think back to 2010 when this podcast started, there was really no one

talking about this about starting software

companies without venture funding. And microconf was kind of the first event and it's a longest

running event that gets people together to talk about that. But there still is a lack of data

compared to the venture space. And this is our first little wedge into that of how can we

provide more benchmarks, more information to founders out there who are,

you know, running a SaaS app day to day and they don't know, how should I validate an idea,

what does that look like, what marketing approaches are people using, what should my churn

benchmarks be at different points, my MRR, you know, it's all the SaaS benchmarks and

...