A firmly held belief in the venture capital world is that founding teams perform better than solo founders. It’s believed that founding teams offer a breadth of experience and industry skills that a solo founder can never possess alone.

While that may be true, founding teams also experience a wide range of challenges. Data shows that 60% of new ventures fail because of team issues. Also, data shows that solo founder teams bring in more revenue than founding team pairs. This article strives to debunk the myths surrounding investment in founding teams.

Some TinySeed companies go on to raise further funding, and we also quite often see investment opportunities that fall outside our core thesis that is quite exciting. The TinySeed Syndicate is for those kinds of investments, and any accredited investor can now apply to join.

We’re proud to announce the Fall 2021 accelerator batch, our first Fall-starting batch and our second accelerator batch this year. We're excited that we're able to work with more founders and startups each year as we expand our program.

TinySeed’s mission is to increase the world’s population of independent SaaS companies, giving capital-efficient startups an option between bootstrapping and raising traditional venture capital. We’re proud to announce a dedicated arm of our accelerator with a dedicated Program Manager to support founders in European timezones.

Mailchimp’s historic exit not only demonstrates the power of bootstrapping but also reinforces TinySeed’s investment thesis. Nearly any other kind of business would need to raise tens of millions to attain a billion-dollar exit like Mailchimp. But, given the capital-efficient nature of B2B SaaS, Mailchimp was able to achieve a venture-level return without significant dilution.

On August 10th, Rob Walling (TinySeed’s co-founder) and Tracy Osborn (TinySeed’s Program Director) hosted a live webinar to answer questions about the upcoming Fall 2021 accelerator batch.

The TinySeed x MicroConf team is growing! We’re now hiring a Remote Community Manager to coordinate and lead our two communities. We’d love it if you have previous familiarity and a love for working with early-stage startups and founders. Bonus points if you are already a member of the MicroConf Community.

We’re fortunate to be continuously amazed by the quality and number of applicants for TinySeed’s annual accelerator program. With each successive batch, the quality of applications has grown, and this round’s batch is also our most international to date, with eleven founders based outside the U.S.

We’re thrilled to share that our portfolio company SeekWell was acquired by ThoughtSpot, representing TinySeed’s first firm to announce an exit. SeekWell was founded by Mike Ritchie and Thabo Fisher, who graduated from TinySeed’s 2020 accelerator program

We’re excited to announce we’ve raised our second fund, totaling more than $25M, allowing us to invest in and support 100+ companies over the next three years across North and South America. Notable investors include Bloomberg Beta, Eric Ries, Patrick McKenzie, Steli Efti, and Rand Fishkin.

Our terms allow our founders to remain in control of when they reinvest profits back into their business vs. when they pull them out as dividends. We determine a fair salary cap with the founders, where profits taken out of the company above that salary are considered dividends. Which leads to a common question: How do we determine the salary cap?

The TinySeed accelerator team (Rob Walling, Einar Vollset, and Tracy Osborn) took questions about our third batch application in a live webinar. We’re getting the recording transcribed and timestamped now (we’ll update this post when it’s done) but in the meanwhile, we’ve listed out some of our most frequently asked questions below:

A year ago we wrote a post featuring podcast episodes by TinySeed founders in the middle of our inaugural batch. Now, a year later and a month before our applications open again, we thought we’d revisit the question with the experiences of our second batch.

Over time successful venture firms raise larger and larger funds, quickly running into the 99 investor limit, and forcing their investment minimum higher. These high minimums concentrate this wealth creation opportunity to super high net worth individuals and institutional investors, excluding accredited investors who cannot afford to write such a large check. We’re looking into how we can change this law.

In the past 18 months, we’ve backed 23 fast-growing SaaS companies out of nearly 1600 applications. And we would have funded dozens more if we’d had the capital at our disposal. That’s why we’re raising our second fund.

In the last 15 months, we’ve backed 23 fast-growing SaaS companies across two continents. We’ve proven out our model — in fact, we would have funded dozens more from our nearly 1600 applications if we’d had the investment capital. Now we’re raising our second fund so we can continue to invest in a broad index of hundreds of hand-picked independent SaaS companies using our simple, founder-friendly terms.

If you read the mainstream tech press, it feels like there is a constant stream of startup acquisitions in the news. The sheer volume of these stories can make you think that you hear about most of the startup acquisitions that happen. Although our gut feel was that the software industry was much larger than most assume, we didn’t really have a good grasp of how much larger. So we decided to find out.

We were blown away by the sheer number and quality of the applications we received for TinySeed’s second batch. Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to narrow down the field of amazing candidates, and today we’re proud to announce that these twelve companies are in our 2020 batch of startups:

We held our second TinySeed retreat this last October for our current batch of startups, coinciding with the MicroConf Europe conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Like our first retreat, we spend about half the day in a room together, workshopping and and discussing what our companies are currently struggling with…

The application for our 2020 batch of startups has been open for almost two weeks now and we’re so excited to see many amazing applications roll in. We’ve gotten quite a few questions so we thought we’d respond here to the most frequently asked: