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

Startups For the Rest of Us

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.

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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
• (11:44) – SEO as the engine behind thousands of trials
• (17:00) – 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!

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