TinySeed

“We've raised almost sixty million dollars.”

“And in fact, the profit that I get, the earnings I get from TinySeed are significantly less than I made when I was building Drip.”

“Between MicroGump and TinySeed, there are, I think there are 10 of us And people make full-time salaries. You know, these are mostly W-II folks living in North America, so it's not cheap.”

“Generally, the people who succeed, they do a lot of things, and they're right more often than not. Not all the time, but they're right. They can be right 60% of the time, but they just do a lot of and the founders, and they're not flailing.”

“By the time you get there, like, cut the lifetime, cut the one time deal, but it becomes addictive, right? Because it's a lot of cash, because you're getting your whole lifetime value. Up front.”

“Most businesses these days that get into TinyC do have price points in the single digit hundreds, kind of as their low end. That's not a, always, that's not a hundred percent, but it, maybe it's 70 to 80% of companies.”

“It brings our total number of companies funded to 217, and now myself up to 241 investments in SaaS companies.”

“About 80% of any batch has an issue with the pricing.”

“One quick way to test whether that lower end, that bottom end pricing plan is doing you good or harm, is to just hide it. Just hide a div on your pricing page. And watch your numbers. This is obviously where it's like a lower touch sign up, you know, this is n…”

“TinySeed companies, as well as TinySeed itself, and MicroConf, and this podcast, and Rob Walling, are all getting referrals and traffic from LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.”

“Of all the tiny seed companies we've backed, something like 22% are now doing seven or eight figures of ARR.”

“Once they hit the 20, 30, 40,000 MRR, Life's good. They don't have to worry about the day to day as much, and you don't have that kind of like broke fire burning under them as much. So they kind of just limit themselves naturally for that, or they'll like natu…”

“I think Blinkmetrics is going to make this work. I mean, they really are on that trajectory.”

“How few, even tiny seed startups that are like, bleeding edge, Almost none of them have MCP and CLI, and the ones that do have two users, three users, is not, we are not nearly as far as Twitter would have you believe, right? We're like, oh, everyone's buildin…”

“Tiny team, think of like MicroConf and TinySeed is nine full-time people and two part-time. And we have invested in 210 B to B SaaS companies in the last seven years. We run all the MicroConf events in addition to mastermind matching and connect. We push out t…”

“Einar and I at one point, this is six, seven years ago, talked about should we raise a debt fund, right, and have Tiny Seed Capital. I don't know what we call it, but whatever, you know, you get the idea. Tiny Seed RBF. And when we looked at the amount that we…”

“Of the 210 companies That Tiny Seed has invested in, it's like, I think it's just over four percent have any type of social media marketing or any type of audience. The other 96%, they just market, they do SEO, they do cold outbound, they do advertise, you kno…”

“Every company that I've invested in or otherwise had visibility into that has been no code or has been poorly coded, I will say, I'm just going to assume that AI vibe coding is poorly coded and hard to maintain long term. That may or may not be correct. But wh…”

“We do 10 to 12% for, what is it, 120 to, usually two 20, so the valuation, I think that's one to two million, or one to two and a half million, you get it. And the two and a half 1,000,003 million dollar valuations we've done, someone had a hundred K of MRR wh…”

“Across TinySeeds, 210 companies, there were like four percent of those, maybe five, I think it was just under five percent, that had any type of audience Or have ever built any type of audience, and yet we have dozens of companies doing six, I mean, sorry, doi…”

“And in fact, with our latest fund that we raised, that we just closed, that fund only invests in C-Corps.”

“Now that I have like raised funding with tiny seed and I see companies that raise a few million, you know, we have a bunch of tiny seed companies that have done this. If you do it well, if you think about it like a bootstrapper, and you approach it like Laura …”

“So my first prediction is that bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped horizontal SaaS will experience massive headwinds in twenty-twenty-six.”

“It is an exception that I'm seeing when a horizontal, mostly bootstrapped company is able to continue growth and not plateau in that, the ranges depend on the size of the market and all this, but it's half a million, a 1,000,002 million, and they plateau hard,…”

“We've just recently closed our fund three, which is our fourth fund technically, because fund naming is just, it's a thing. And we've invested in more than 210 B to B SaaS companies. I believe the number is probably two 11 or two 12.”

“And we've raised now across all our funds, Just under sixty million dollars”

“Most of our investors are founders themselves or were founders who have exited.”

“We are in a Pretty unique position of having survived this long and having returned fund one at this point and return more than fund one. We returned actual investment returns to our fund one investors”

“And it's okay to use AI to code as long as a, like an engineer is supervising slash running that process, because we know That you can have AI build you something, and we know that in six, 1218 months it will become very, very hard to maintain. Feature velocit…”

“We accept a lower percentage of applicants than Harvard does, so Harvard accepts about three and a half percent, and we are Below that, which puts us in a pretty privileged position that I take very seriously.”

“More than 75% of our applicants come from referrals from Tiny Seed alumni, from MicroConf, or MicroConf YouTube, from Startups for the Rest of Us, from other word-of-mouth referrals, or from our social media, or email lists, or my books, or my email list, and …”

“It's a little less than 10% of all Tiny C companies have raised follow-on rounds, and we fully support our founders when they want to do that, but that's not what we're optimizing for, unlike most other accelerators.”

“Horizontal B to B SaaS is very hard. And at a certain point, a lot of competitors are in your space, and It becomes hard to grow. And so vertical and orthogonal SaaS, we've seen stronger exits, we've seen folks able to get further and have lower churn and all …”

“Across these 10 we have approximately zero horizontal companies. They all are vertical or orthogonal, I believe actually all 10 of these are vertical, ranging from retail stores to first responders to jewelers to IT service teams to cannabis growers and distri…”

“The earliest I've seen any of them really bring someone in to collaborate on strategy, and I'll say they didn't hand it off completely, but it's probably about, certainly above a million ARR. I would lean towards 1.5 to maybe two million ARR, and this depends …”

“I think you're probably, it's definitely one to two million is the earliest. I would consider bringing someone else in to start making product decisions, what you build, in what order, getting customer feedback, understanding your space, deciding how things ar…”

“I do not think you can get to a million in ARR in any repeatable fashion. There's probably one example that someone could bring up, but as a rule, I think this experience is going to be a very common one.”

“TinySeed has funded a couple no-code codebases, and I don't honestly know the exact number. It might be two, and it may be a size four. I don't think we've funded a Vibe Coded code base. We, we're now asking that in interviews because I want to know if you're …”

“Don't model yourself after Apple. Because they also have infinity resources to do things. Model after people who are constrained and who have solely, you know, like a Derek Reimer, any tiny C company, maybe some of the indie hackers that have taste, I don't kn…”

“And you were season one of Tiny Seed Tales, and you're now doing low seven figures of ARR.”

“Across my entire portfolio, TinySeed Plus private investments, I'm about to be at like, two 34, two 35. Companies. And probably, if I were to guess, it's maybe 10%, 15% of those have a, like a SOC II or an ISO.”

“And this is why approximately zero founders in the MicroConf TinySeed Startups and Restless Ecosystem have patents. There are some exceptions. That's why I say approximately zero. So yes, you can, I can point out two right now, but there are More than what is …”

“And when I go down this list, none of them hired for or outsourced any of these core for, Before they were doing about one and a half to two million ARR.”

“There are tiny seed founders that have sold their companies for more money than I've ever sold a company for. There are tiny seed founders that have more money in the bank. Than I have in the bank.”

“We had a tiny seed company, there was a competitor, that competitor raised like ten million in venture, and they did just drop their prices to a third Of the tiny sea company, and they did a lot of damage there.”

“If you find a co-founder have vesting. Have four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, such that they, you know, if things don't work out after a few months, they don't walk away with a big chunk of your company. We have seen tiny seed applicants that we were un…”

“I mean, within TinySeed, if I were to guess, it's two percent of companies, or five percent, like, it's a minuscule, minuscule number.”

“That's the entire thesis of Tiny Seed, of course, is to get people to focus and not, you know, we don't allow folks in who are going to bring in multiple products, unless the products are an ecosystem, right, are highly related to each other, but just scattere…”

“My timeline was right, so I joined Tiny Seed, spring 24 batch, We went to San Diego in May, which was awesome. At that time when I left, I thought to myself, I want to be profitable, like, a year from now, which was June, 25. I thought the number Was 30, it wa…”

“So if I go back to our first month of revenue, which was October, twenty-twenty-three, well, I mean, we have been between 10 and 20% growth on average throughout that whole time. There's like a couple exceptions. The third month was a down month, and then like…”

“We recently returned more than 100% of our first Tiny Seed fund.”

“20 K, let's go. I don't know. I'm still sinking in, but really, really feeling a little overwhelmed, and also like, what's the next thing about hitting 20 K MRR? So yeah, hit it ahead of schedule. Had been hoping to hit this in May, that had been, you know, ki…”

“The moment that you rise up one layer of abstraction, you lose granularity, and two hours on churn makes no sense if there's a biotech company next to you, and a hardware company on the other side, and a two-sided marketplace on the other side, and a B to C co…”

“That's why we require any founder we invest in to fully commit to their idea.”

“And it's the same thing we see with tiny seed companies across, 204 companies we funded, and I think 300 something founders, and 85 to 90% of the companies have at least one technical founder.”

“And the ones that don't, the 10, 15% that don't, Code maintainability, code velocity, security, just all this stuff is there, is always their number one issue, inevitably.”

“We've funded a handful, and I don't know the exact numbers, but it's five or less Of no code, code bases. No code apps, I guess I would call them, you know, that are built in air table, bubble, that kind of stuff. And all of them have been rewritten or will ne…”

“We have funded gobs of single founder companies, and I don't remember the exact number, but it's probably 50%, if I'm guessing, are single founder, and another 35% are two founder, if I were to just ballpark it, so that puts us to 85, maybe even more, maybe it…”

“If I run a five person team, almost without exception, I will not hire someone from a 500 person team. Just won't do it, because retraining that culture, that thinking, that there is no process, you have to do your stuff, is so very hard. And so, again, I say …”

“I think it was 200 K that we raised from you guys. And so at that time now, nowadays I'm like, that's like, what do I do with that? Right. But at that time, when you have 10,000 in the bank, it's everything, right?”