ACCELERATOR CASE STUDY
At $300,000 ARR, Why Join the TinySeed SaaS Accelerator?
How Kieran Delaney, founder of FlatPlan (TS Fall 2022), scaled with structure, support, and community.
In his own words: Kieran at our TinyUK event in summer 2025.
The case of the accidental SaaS founder
Kieran Delaney never set out to be a software founder. As the owner of a digital agency (where he played every role from developer to project manager), he built FlatPlan.io as a solution for one of his publishing clients.
The tool, which distributes content for media businesses into Apple News, was just another agency project: part software, part service, with plenty of blurry lines in between.
Eventually, Kieran brought on a co-founder, and they spun off FlatPlan as its own company. “For a while I was running two businesses, which was horrendous,” he remembers.
By the time Kieran stumbled across a tweet about TinySeed in 2022, FlatPlan was doing $300K ARR. Both he and his co-founder were paying themselves, and there was enough to pay a full-time support person.
They were successful. But Kieran was starting to realize that even though he was an accomplished business owner, he needed more specialized SaaS knowledge.
At the same time his co-founder decided to leave FlatPlan, Kieran applied to TinySeed. 🌱
Why? Not because he was worried about the future of the business.
"I didn’t need a feeling of security,” Kieran explains. Instead, he was looking to systematize and scale with SaaS-specific guidance.
“I wanted to learn to do what we were doing in a structured way,” he says.
While he was already tracking acquisition costs and churn (and had no problems with pricing high enough), he aimed to become “fluent” in more sophisticated metrics, like CAC payback periods and LTV/CAC ratios.
"These guys know what they're talking about," Kieran says of the TinySeed team. "They've experienced this with hundreds of startups.”
Escaping the bootstrapped marketing trap
Kieran had tried the cheap and quick marketing tactics — including spending $60/month on Google AdWords for ultra-specific Apple News delivery keyword searches. They didn't work. But at least they didn't hurt.
Unfortunately, real marketing experiments that might yield big results were impossibly expensive. "When you're bootstrapped, that's money down the drain," Kieran says.
He also felt a ton of pressure to never make a wrong move. Every dollar spent on failed experiments felt like money stolen from his family's security.
So when he joined TinySeed’s Fall 2022 batch, Kieran didn’t see the investment money as desperately needed runway. Since FlatPlan was already doing well, he saw it as freedom to take bigger swings — especially in marketing and sales.
"The money that came in from TinySeed allowed me to experiment,” Kieran says. “Being bootstrapped, I was never able to experiment before."
Finding community without competition
Kieran's best friend had gone through a well-known startup accelerator. His stories weren't encouraging.
"When he would meet with other founders, everyone would talk about how everything was going so brilliantly. 'Oh, it's great, we know exactly where we're going, we’re on track to do incredibly.' And that is not helpful in any sense," Kieran says.
TinySeed offered something unique: successful founders who shared what they knew, and admitted what they didn’t.
Kieran’s first TinySeed batch meeting in Malta set the tone. "I remember walking into the restaurant and there was a chap standing there," he recalls.
"We just started talking, and I was like, ‘Okay, I like this guy, he seems like a nice person.’ Everyone was just really, truly down to earth."
The TinySeed Slack community, filled with helpful founders and mentors, quickly became a daily resource for Kieran’s tactical questions.
“I was really active on Slack early on. I’ve found it so, so helpful. I just learned so much from Slack,” he says. “And the first year, with the regular calls, I think I asked a question on all of them.”
Getting the SaaS education he wanted
FlatPlan’s numbers tell the story of its success:
Annual revenue has more than 5xed
The team has gone from 2 to 18 people
And FlatPlan currently serves more than 300 media businesses.
Even TinySeed’s monthly investor update requirement — which Kieran initially chafed at — has become a useful guidepost. The updates force him to pull data from ProfitWell, analyze wins and obstacles, and think more systematically about the business.
"It's absolutely brilliant to have that structure," he admits. "There's this invisible loss that occurs if you're not thinking very seriously about elements like sales and targets."
And when a huge enterprise opportunity came up during his first few months, TinySeed co-founder Einar Vollset pushed him to price the deal much higher than he would have dared. It worked.
Why was TinySeed a good fit for Kieran and FlatPlan?
Kieran was looking for three things from a startup accelerator:
Permission to spend money on experiments, whether they worked or not.
Proven frameworks and advice from people who'd seen hundreds of SaaS companies.
A community where openness is an asset, not a liability.
He also appreciated that TinySeed acknowledges a different kind of pressure, which most accelerators ignore: founders have families. "It's not just you that's setting that business up. It's your partner, it's your family, it's everyone that surrounds you closely,” Kieran remembers.
Thinking back on TinyFest, where he sat by the pool to chat with other founders who shared his "unfortunate obsession with software," Kieran was confident in his choice to join TinySeed.
"You'll be relieved at what an amazing group of people you're spending time with and you're going to learn from," he says.
What does the future hold for FlatPlan?
Though he doesn't lean on the community as frequently as he used to, Kieran still regularly turns to TinySeed with questions about employee management, hiring, customer guarantees, and the many other challenges that come with scaling.
“The vision is to grow a stable and safe business without continually needing to take on more funding,” Kieran says. “It’s building a company that has the right culture, is growing sustainably and doing good — and where the people are happy.”
Are you a B2B SaaS founder who’s looking to grow?
Apply to the TinySeed Accelerator, or get on the list to be in the know when applications open again.