I'm a solo SaaS founder and would absolutely love to have a partner but the few people I've discussed it with have not been able to tolerate the financial risk / lost opportunity cost.
Finding 2+ people with the risk tolerance alone limiting, much less having a complementary skill set, interests, goals, etc.
Unfortunately, most potential co-founders write me off when they discover I’m ethically challenged.
Yes. However, in practice, it is very rare to be able to raise money before the founding team has already been working on the business for a few months. Hence, by the time VCs put money into the company, most likely, the founders have already incurred their most significant financial risk.
It'd be quite interesting to have survey data on what the sales process is like. But probably only relevant for SaaS businesses that sell to government / large business customers.
But my understanding of slide 55 is that requiring a credit card up front doesn't pose much of a problem to growth.
I converted the conversion rates from unique-trial-paid for each scenario. It looks like 0.846% for credit card required upfront and 0.264% for no credit card required. So *net conversion is ~3.2x higher when a credit card __is__ required upfront.*
Showing my work:
I eyeballed each bar chart and turned it into a data table. I'm getting median unique-to-trial conversion rates of 3.1% (credit card required) and 6.1% (credit card not required). I'm then adjusting these to account for the % of "don't know" responses. So, adjusted medians of 1.8% (cc required) and 3.3% (cc not required).
Following the same process for trial-to-paid yields medians of 47% (cc required) and 8% (cc not required).
Multiplying each pair yields 0.846% (cc required) and 0.264% (cc not required) unique-to-trial-to-paid.
If you build it well, it'll probably be alive for a long time. (low daily expenses needed)
- What is a MRR Growth in dollars ? Thats not how we compute growth
- Is that data statistically significant ? there 2% of companies which had 4+ more founders and still you try to make a correlation between growth and founders count.
- There is 66% of companies who have employees but only 66% of founders who work more than 30 hours a week ? That doesn't seem right...
I like the initiative, but we need more clarity to really be able to trust the data from this report
Survey was sent to 25k founders in the MicroConf database, 673 respondents (534 completed the survey)
It's a company's growth in MRR... I'm not sure what you're asking? Also who is the "we" here?
0: https://microconfpodcast.com/episodes/let39s-answer-some-sal...
Over half of the product ideas (~57%) came from experiencing a problem/issue firsthand.
The percentage tips to ~90% if you also include experiencing a problem/issue secondhand (through friends, clients, customers, etc.).
A measly 8% came from research alone.
Personally, I procrastinate starting a product/service because I feel that I have to have an amazing idea before I get started. (There's nothing new under the sun.)
As this slide reinforces, though, a given person already knows many problems/issues that could be used as a starting point in a product/service endeavor.
Naively it'd be great to have data of the form "given our idea for a business was bad specifically because there would be insufficient market demand, when we validated the idea by method A (e.g. getting verbal commitment from n potential customers), validation result indicated there was enough market demand to proceed, we decided to proceed, but the business failed later specifically for a reason that the validation approach was intended to measure (customers willing to buy the service) and not for some other reason". I.e. known ground-truth, measurement, measurement result, decision to proceed or abort based on measurement result, actual outcome.
Probably would be a very tricky thing to isolate the effectiveness of the validation approach and tease it apart from other confounding factors.
I meekly suggest a different framing or mindset.
It is less "this idea is good or bad / market demanded it or not" - which suggests a passive, fixed worldview - I propose a more proactive approach: "am I able to make people adopt our solution or not."
If you launch something innovative (i.e. not 1-1 comparable with existing alternatives) your effective market is 0. This applies even more if you create a new category. So you can be faced with the situation where market demand cannot be satisfied unless you know how to reshape its adoption dynamics.
In this case, validation has multiple pieces that have to come together: is there compensatory behaviour to prove that existing solutions are underdelivering; can we identify an early adopter psychographic looking for a specific feature set we're able to create; do we have a way to get to them;
