Today, I’m talking with Rob Walling, Co-Founder and General Partner at TinySeed, a year-long, remote accelerator designed for early-stage SaaS founders. Rob is also the Co-Host of Startups For the Rest of Us, Co-Founder of MicroConf, and Co-Founder of Drip, which he successfully exited, along with a long list of other businesses and projects over the years.
Rob has been on the show a few times before and this time around I wanted to dig into a new project he’s working on to give non-venture track founders more data to help them make better decisions as they grow their company.
The project is called The State of Independent SaaS Report and to put it together, hundreds of revenue generating SaaS companies were surveyed and the result will be an epic report filled with benchmarks, growth rates, demographics, validation approaches, and more.
When Rob was last on the show back in episode 6, he had just opened the doors for TinySeed’s first batch of founders and I also wanted to follow-up and see how things went.
After receiving hundreds of high quality applications, the TinySeed team narrowed it down to 10 lucky founders and today we’ll hear what Rob and his team have learned and what is in store for the second batch, which will be accepting applications on November 1st.
Most of my listeners are very familiar with Rob and have probably already skipped over this intro to get right to the good stuff, but if you’re still listening, stop and dive in. This is an interview you don’t want to miss.
Topics covered:
- The State of Independent SaaS
- What is this new project?
- Why is it so important to you?
- How will the report help founders?
- TinySeed Update
- How has their progress been?
- What is the goal you want them to achieve by the end of it?
- What are the most effective growth levers they’ve found?
- What are you confident you got right in the first batch?
- What are you confident you got wrong?
- When does the next round of applications open?
- Behind-the-scenes
- How are you thinking about the costs of operating the fund? (e.g. the retreat)
- What does success look like to you?
- Who do you look up to?
- Where can listeners go to learn more?
Resources mentioned:
- Indie.vc
- CartHook
- RightMessage
- Recap and Lessons Learned from the First TinySeed Retreat
- TinySeed Mentors
- SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs
- Matt Wensing of SimSaas – Effective Founder Interview
Where to learn more:
To apply for the next TinySeed batch, head to TinySeed.com
To check out The State of Independent SaaS Report when it’s ready, head to microconf.com/saas-this-year
To hear more from Rob, you can follow him on Twitter or tune into Startups For the Rest of Us