State of Independent SaaS 2021

Really valuable insights; really shows how different independent SaaS is. For instance, 56% of founders are solo in indie SaaS, whereas a lot of traditional VC accelerators prefer (or require) at least two founders on a team.

Regarding &quot;which best describes how you validated your original business idea?&quot;, is anyone aware of more research around the effectiveness or practicality of different validation approaches? That is, rough false-positive (validation indicated that business idea had sufficient market demand when it didn&#x27;t) and false-negative rates (validation indicated that business idea had insufficient market demand when it did) for different validation approaches.<p>Naively it&#x27;d be great to have data of the form &quot;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&quot;. I.e. known ground-truth, measurement, measurement result, decision to proceed or abort based on measurement result, actual outcome.<p>Probably would be a very tricky thing to isolate the effectiveness of the validation approach and tease it apart from other confounding factors.

Rob Walling and that crowd are great. I read Start Small, Stay Small years ago and found it to be full of good advice that I was able to employ to make a &quot;productized service&quot;. It never really took off, but paid for some new computers and a few vacations, and I learned a ton from it. Wish he or someone would update it, as I think it was a fantastic resource. It had a lot of specifics and details that more handwavy business books just sort of gloss over.

A love the idea origin breakdown on slide 17.<p>Over half of the product ideas (~57%) came from experiencing a problem&#x2F;issue firsthand.<p>The percentage tips to ~90% if you also include experiencing a problem&#x2F;issue secondhand (through friends, clients, customers, etc.).<p>A measly 8% came from research alone.

75% of those with free trials do not require a credit card up front. This was always my preference as a purchaser because I didn&#x27;t have to bother my boss and get approval to try out a product.

- How the founders were selected ? And where ? initially they say &quot;hundreds of non-venture track&quot; but then 14% raised money<p>- What is a MRR Growth in dollars ? Thats not how we compute growth<p>- 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.<p>- There is 66% of companies who have employees but only 66% of founders who work more than 30 hours a week ? That doesn&#x27;t seem right...<p>I like the initiative, but we need more clarity to really be able to trust the data from this report

I assume SAAS is one of the best model for independent developer. If you build a helpful product, users will stay for a long time.<p>If you build it well, it&#x27;ll probably be alive for a long time. (low daily expenses needed)

I love the &quot;Expected&#x2F;Unexpected&quot; break down on the key insight slide intros to each section. Most of the unexpected ones I did not expect!