Episode 729 | 9 Things I've Learned Investing in 170+ SaaS Companies

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 729, join Rob Walling as he shares insights from the 170+ SaaS investments he’s made through his B2B SaaS accelerator, TinySeed. Key patterns include the survivability of SaaS, the lucrative value of these companies, and commonalities across the ones that grow the fastest. To see even more patterns that didn’t make this episode, be sure to check out the MicroConf YouTube channel. Episode Sponsor: Hiring senior developers can really move the needle in your business, but if you bring on the wrong person, you can quickly burn through your runway. If you need help finding a vetted, senior, results-oriented developer, you should reach out to today’s sponsor, Lemon.io. For years, they’ve been helping our audience find high quality, global talent at competitive rates, and they can help you too. Longtime listener Chaz Yoon, hired a senior developer from Lemon.io and said his hire ”definitely knew his stuff, provided appropriate feedback and pushback, and had great communication, including very fluent English. He really exceeded my expectations.” Chaz said he’d definitely use Lemon.io again when he’s looking for a senior level engineer. To learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer at lemon.io/startups. Topics we cover: 2:24 – Survivability of B2B SaaS in TinySeed 4:09 – SaaS is extremely valuable 8:26 – Vertical and orthogonal SaaS face fewer headwinds 12:36 – A supermajority of TinySeed companies want a big exit 15:51 – TinySeed founder count aligns with the broader MicroConf ecosystem 17:04 – Ruined cap tables have prevented deals 19:35 – A quarter of TinySeed companies raise subsequent fundraising 21:17 – Common advisory topics: pricing, plateaus, cofounders, funding, selling Links from the Show: Apply for TinySeed Invest in TinySeed MicroConf YouTube: 6 Lessons From My Most Successful Investments (B2B SaaS) Episode 727 | Gymdesk Sells for More than $32.5 million, Hiring Gets Easier, and More Hot Take Tuesday Topics Episode 728 | Bootstrapping Gymdesk to a More Than $32.5M Exit State of Independent SaaS Report 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! Subscribe & Review: iTunes |

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us.
0:03.2	I'm your host, Rob Walling.
0:04.6	And in this episode, I talk through lessons that I've learned investing in more than 170 companies,
0:12.3	specifically through my startup accelerator Tiny Seed.
0:15.3	And if you're a B2B SaaS founder who's looking for the right amount of money,
0:19.1	mentorship, community, advice for me,
0:22.2	and our amazing mentors. You can head to tinyseed.com slash apply. Applications are open right now
0:27.8	for about the next two weeks, and I'd love to see you apply. Now, between Tiny Seed and Mine
0:34.4	and Sherry's personal investments, we are over 190 companies, but I wanted to limit the percentages, the numbers, the takeaways to only those where Tiny Seed has written a check in the past.
0:46.5	I guess the first check was written about five years ago. And so that gives us a pretty tight time frame and a more cohesive decision-making approach
0:56.6	because we've been much more deliberate about the types of businesses that we fund.
1:00.2	So today's episode is stemmed from a question I got in a private Slack group I'm in
1:03.7	where someone said, you're basically five years, we're six years from the announcement of Tiny Seed almost,
1:09.4	but we are just over five years from the first check being written.
1:13.8	And he asked, are there any patterns or takeaways that you're noticing across these 170-plus companies?
1:21.6	And there are, and that's what I'm going to share today.
1:23.5	Now, I want to make a note.
1:24.7	I have almost two dozen of these takeaways, and that's too long
1:29.4	for a podcast episode. It would run well over an hour. So what it did is I split off six of them,
1:33.7	and I put them in a YouTube video on the Microcom channel. And it has a name similar to this. It
1:39.2	probably just came out a couple days ago, and it's six things that I've learned investing in,
1:43.6	more than 170 companies over five years, something like that. So if you head to microcomf.com slash
	...

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