Tyler Tringas is a founder who writes about bootstrapped micro SaaS, selling his company Storemapper, and alternative funding models for software startups.
Commenters recommend his posts on selling a bootstrapped SaaS and micro SaaS, noting the best time to sell is when you don't have to.
Easiest would be to just link my twitter, but I will give you some suggestions:
@clairejlew - founder of KnowYourTeam, community that teaches management - she shares a lot of management tips worth knowing
@heyitsnoah - founder of Percolate, has interesting blog whyit'sinteresting
@DavidSpinks - focused on building communities, shares a lot of insight on this
@spakhm - Slava Akhmechet founder of RethingDB. A lot of contrarian views worth thinking about. I think he is currently starting a new company
@tylertringas - founder of EarnestCapital alternative to VC (not sure if you only want founders or VC and related is fine) he has cool blogpost here https://tylertringas.com/business-ideas-meat-grinder/
@JohnONolan - ex Wordpress now has Ghost platform for bloging. More in the maker/nomads sphere of interest
@codinghorror - cofounder of stackoverflow and discourse.
@yongfook - digital nomad, one of the originals. Now creating app for remote teams.
@dhof - founder of vine, now creating another app in similar market. Doesn't really talk about startups that much but app will get big I think.
@benln - master of networking
@amasad - founder of Replit. Very down to earth and likeable person. Shares a lot of great stuff from Replit community (mostly kids that program for fun, very inspiring)
@justinkan - founder of Twitch, now Atrium (law for startups) shares a lot of personal wisdom
@patrickc - Founder and CEO of stripe. He likes to dig deep into different…
Is there anything from your freelance development projects that jumps out as potentially worthwhile? Many of the best bootstrapped SAAS businesses I've seen have come from problems people encountered while freelancing or working on other things:
Tyler Tringas created StoreMapper based upon freelance work he was doing: http://tylertringas.com/storemapper-store-locator-bootstrapped-to-50k/
Andrew Culver created ChurnBuster after repeatedly running into credit card renewal problems for clients: https://www.churnbuster.com
I built ExpeditedSSL - https://www.expeditedssl.com - after getting fed up with adding SSL to client sites.
Josh Pigford built BareMetrics - https://baremetrics.com after getting frustrated with trying to understand his metrics from other SAAS projects.
In general freelancing is a great spot to be in to observe what pains businesses have that are sufficiently difficult that they'll shell out actual amounts of money to deal with.
It also pains me to have to sift through all the meta noise. But some examples do stand out. patio11 is one.
I recently found about Tyler Tringas, who has open revenue numbers, is profitable, and specifically focused on making the business as automated as possible to have time. He was going to write and sell a "metabook", but decided against it precisely for reasons of credibility. He's publishing it for free at https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas-ebook/.
Another one is Jason Kester, who wrote about how he did it for free on one simple blog post here: http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop.html
It's good to see there are some actual cases, and it sounds at least more doable than the crazy startup lottery that is, ironically, more socially acceptable. (Passive stuff is for lazy people.)
I'm using Feedly. Checking it once a couple of weeks and happy about my flow.
Here are the blogs that I follow:
- https://jvns.ca/atom.xml
- http://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml
- https://blog.kowalczyk.info/atom.xml
- https://ashfurrow.com/feed.xml
- https://sneak.berlin/feed.xml
- https://sookocheff.com/index.xml
- https://www.hanselman.com/blog/feed/rss
- https://zachholman.com/atom.xml
- https://www.wezm.net/v2/rss.xml
- https://alexdanco.com/feed/
- https://tyler.io/feed/
- https://tylertringas.com/feed/
https://tylertringas.com/selling-my-bootstrapped-saas-business/
Might contain a few useful tidbits.
What most stuck with me from his pieces on microSaas is that the best time to sell is when you don’t have to - which implies that you should not put yourself in a situation where starting the talks leads you to have to sell (because you fall in love with the idea of selling, of you neglect the business, etc)
An interesting post by Tyler Tringas about being sued as a founder. Obviously there's an AI angle to this post, but I also found it an interesting look in to the power dynamics of civil litigation in the US.
In a previous post [0] they talk about the impact of the litigation, which seems to have contributed to the shuttering of his fund
[0] https://tylertringas.com/code-concrete/