Startups For the Rest of Us

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

23 Sep 2025

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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 But that’s nonsense unless your strategy is blindly following tired, recycled, outdated strategies.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 (11:52) – SEO as the engine behind thousands of trials (17:24) – 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

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

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 762 | Doing Great Work, Hierarchy of SaaS Skills, and Public Deadlines (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Episode 761 | TinySeed Tales s4e7: Identifying Pain Points

Episode 760 | White-Labeling, Founder Mindset, and More Listener Questions (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Episode 759 | TinySeed Tales s4e6: Does AI + Pivot = Success?

Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting

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