what was an idea that ANR and I started talking about in 2018 and frankly might not have worked.

This is the thing that everyone forgets, including me, is that when we propose investing in bootstrappers,

there was a lot of doubt in my mind whether bootstrappers would want to raise money.

There was a lot of doubt in my mind whether investors would want to invest in bootstrappers.

And there was doubt of my mind

whether we knew enough people

with money accredited investors

who could put money into a fund.

...

...

... Welcome back to another episode of startup to the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling,

and in this episode, I talked through the state of Tiny Seed as of the end of 2025.

The state of Tiny Seed is not just inside baseball, right?

It's not just one of the companies that I'm working on alongside MicroConf.

But I feel like the trends we're seeing in terms of Tiny Se seed applications and who we're funding and the types

of businesses that we're funding can be viewed as a type of fractal of the broader

bootstrapped SaaS ecosystem because there is a lot of intermixing of this ecosystem from

podcast listeners to folks who buy my book, who then become

part of the microcom community in one way or another, either by attending events or doing

mastermind matching, who then apply for Tiny Seed or sometimes if they've already exited, they

become an investor or a mentor for Tiny Seed.

And now that we have Tiny Seed's SAS Institute, which is our premium coaching for seven and eight-figure founders,

...