Founder Playbook

Bootstrapping
one person teams are like what is it 60 or 70% of the Eco of our kind of ecosystem... and then one and two person teams combined I think is like 90... I actually have a matrix of this of like the most common first second and third hires of depending on your founding team's makeup

Bootstrapped SaaS lives in 1-2 person teams — use a hiring matrix for first hires

~90% of Tiny Seed's bootstrapped portfolio runs as 1-2 person teams. 4-person bootstrapped founding teams are an anti-pattern. The first-hire decision changes based on what the founders already are: a solo dev in low-touch sales hires support first; a solo non-technical founder hires a second developer; a two-person dev+marketing team hires a sales/success role. Don't hire "a generalist" — hire the specific gap your founding team can't cover.


R
Rob Walling
MicroConf / Tiny SeedFounder of MicroConf and Tiny Seed (~150 funded SaaS companies, ~$150M collective MRR across 30-40 countries), sold Drip and several other SaaS businesses. Author of "The SaaS Playbook"; "Startups for the Rest of Us" podcast (700+ episodes).
The Bootstrapped Founder
Rob Walling — Stair-Stepping into SaaS Success· 45:40
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