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Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 619 | TinySeed Tales s3e1: Moving from Bootstrapped to Mostly Bootstrapped

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome to Season 3 of TinySeed Tales, where we follow the founders of one SaaS startup throughout a year as they share their struggles, victories, and failures. On the first episode of Season 3, Rob introduces us to Tony Chan, the cofounder of CloudForecast. CloudForecast is a daily AWS cost monitoring service for busy engineering teams. Tony is one of 33 startup founders from TinySeed’s Spring 2021 accelerator batch. Topics we cover:  2:41- What’s CloudForecast?  4:09- How large is the CloudForecast team?  6:54- Why did Tony apply to TinySeed? 8:30- Why Tony turned down venture capital offers?  13:48- Tony reflects on the added complexity of taking funding  19:47- Tony’s biggest fear  22:34- What is Tony looking forward to? Links from the Show: Tony Chan (@toeknee123) I Twitter CloudForecast  TinySeed  Castos  Gather  TinySeed Tales S2E1 I Introducing Gather  TinySeed Tales S1E1 I A Non-Technical Saas Founder  If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This week, and for the next six weeks, we're going to have episodes of Tiny Seed Tales

0:04.0

Season 3 in your feed on Thursday morning. So you get a special bonus episode for this next

0:09.9

six weeks. If you're not familiar with Tiny Seed Tales, it's a seasonal show where I interview

0:16.8

a founder across about a year's time. I believe these six episodes were recorded over

0:21.7

somewhere between 10 and 14 months. And the idea is to give you some insight into the ups and

0:27.0

the downs, the struggles, the victories, and the failures of a real startup founder growing

0:31.9

a real SaaS company that was bootstrapped until they took money from Tiny Seat. And so in

0:36.8

season one, I interviewed Craig

0:38.6

Hewitt, founder of Castos, who many of you are familiar with. In season two, it was Brian and

0:43.6

Scotty, the husband and wife pair founders of Gather. And in this season, it is Tony Chan from Cloud

0:50.0

Forecast. I never know what to expect when we start one of these seasons because it is just a

0:55.6

conversation framing their business and finding out where are we headed with this. And some of

1:02.1

these episodes are massive wins and some are crushing defeats and a lot are in between. And if you're

1:08.6

not familiar with Tiny Seed, it's the startup accelerator that I run for bootstrapped SaaS companies.

1:14.4

We run applications twice a year,

1:16.1

and in fact, our next application period opens on September 12th,

1:20.0

just a couple weeks from now, and that will run for two weeks.

1:22.7

So with that, let's dive in to Season 3, Episode 1 of Tiny Seed Tales.

1:27.5

From the very beginning, we were very focused on building a bootstrap business,

1:31.6

cash positive, profitable, to a point where we've turned down offers to raise money

1:37.6

or to be part of accelerators because it just did not fit our convictions.

1:42.8

And what we felt was best for the company.

...

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