Episode 798 | Lessons From 10 Years of SaaS Growth Without a Hockey Stick

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you bootstrap a SaaS to $1 million+ ARR? In this episode, Rob Walling chats with Colin Bartlett about how he and his co-founder Andy transformed a side project monitoring tool into a seven-figure ARR business that now serves as an early warning system for outages across 6,000+ services. From nearly abandoning the product during three stagnant years to discovering their killer differentiation, Colin's journey is a masterclass in patient iteration, finding product-market fit the hard way, and why sometimes the most boring infrastructure businesses make the best SaaS companies. Episode Sponsor: You’ve probably heard that ChatGPT can do all of your marketing. But that’s nonsense unless your strategy is blindly following tired, recycled, outdated strategies. If you care about systematically creating a marketing engine that converts, not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, you need real humans who actually understand positioning, persuasion, and modern customer acquisition playbooks. That’s Conversion Factory. They’re a SaaS marketing and design agency that have worked with over 50 startups, including several TinySeed companies. Book a call at conversionfactory.co and mention this podcast for $1,000 off your first month. And if you’re at MicroConf Europe next week, make sure to connect with Corey Haines in the hallway track. Topics we cover: (3:08) – How StatusGator detects outages (and why users are part of the signal) (6:23) – From side project to SaaS: the early days of building StatusGator (8:46) – Shifting the ICP: Why developers weren’t the buyers (11:44) – SEO as the engine behind thousands of trials (17:00) – Hitting early MRR milestones and hiring the first marketer (25:12) – How TinySeed funding unlocked a full product redesign (32:05) – Building a dual funnel to boost ACV and win enterprise deals (38:00) – Advice for other SaaS founders playing the long game Links from the Show: Invest in TinySeed Fund Three MicroConf Mastermind Matching - Applications open until September 24th StatusGator Colin Bartlett | LinkedIn 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 | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	If your goal was to listen to an episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, you're in the right place.
0:05.1	I'm your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, I talk with Colin Bartlett about his long journey.
0:11.0	It's actually just over 10 years building, growing, and scaling status gator.
0:17.4	From just an idea back in 2014 to seven figures of ARR today.
0:23.2	You'll hear some really interesting learnings that Colin and his co-founder have taken away
0:28.2	over the years, and we cover some of those during the episode, and then a nice recap at the
0:33.1	end of just some things he learned and would recommend other founders do as well.
0:38.2	Before we get into that conversation, Tiny Seed Fund One has now returned more than 100% of our invested capital, including all fees, to our limited partners.
0:48.9	And we're not stopping there.
0:50.3	We've raised most of Fund 3, but there's still a bit of room for investors who are interested in backing ambitious B2B SaaS founders, much like Statistigator, who you'll hear from in this episode.
1:02.5	If you'd like to diversify your portfolio out of public markets and index across dozens, if not more than 100, early stage B-to-B SaaS companies,
1:12.9	reach out to my partner, Anar Volsat at EINAR at tiny seed.com.
1:17.5	To check out our thesis and learn more about our results to date, head to tiniC.com slash invest.
1:23.8	And if you'll be at MicroConf Europe next week, you can chat with them there.
1:27.2	In addition, I wanted to remind you that MicroConf Mastermind matching applications are open.
1:32.2	I've talked a lot on this podcast about how important masterminds have been to my
1:35.5	entrepreneurial success, but finding the right founders to join up with can be really hard.
1:40.5	So over the past several years, my team has successfully hand-matched over a thousand founders into mastermind groups
1:46.3	by looking at their revenue, team size, strengths, goals, and a few other data points to make sure your peer group is the right fit.
1:53.8	And once you're matched, you'll have access to our mentorship series, an eight-week program where you can connect with some great minds in sales, biz dev, marketing,
2:04.4	and more. If you're looking for accountability, honest feedback about your business, and the opportunity to make new friends that care about your business, you should apply at microconf.com.com
2:09.1	slash masterminds. Applications are only open until September 24th, so make sure you sign it
	...

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