State of Independent SaaS [pdf]

Could this be survivor-ship bias. If you failed your SaaS venture in less than a year, you are less likely to be part of this survey.

1. Why is VC funding so down the rank compared to self funding, friends and family, angels and even debt? Is it probably because VC funding expects a >100x exit and most SaaS probably can't deliver that? Or are SaaS founders turning away from VC for ideological reasons (like want to enjoy the process instead of rushing to justify a valuation?)

2. 50%+ people pursued ideas which were not their own itch to scratch.

3. 30%+ didn't validate before building. 20%+ just asked their audience. Effectively, 50%+ just jumped into it without doing any significant and rigorous testing. Probably because the cost of entry and failure is too low?

4. 74% don't require a CC to start a trial. (Either infra costs are very low or competition is intense?)

5. 80% don't offer a forever free plan.

6. Most founders don't know their website visitor to trial conversion rates.

7. "Asking for a credit card before a free trial has almost no correlation with revenue growth."

Mental health and emotional attachment I guess, working at a scale you're comfortable working at. The tools, frameworks etc. you prefer, and the community around those can all contribute to developer happiness.

So if you optimize mainly for growth you might throw many things out of the window. I think the more developer you are as an entrepreneur the more you may want to stay within a scale that's comfortable for you.

The VC way seems to be more suited for more marketing oriented entrepreneurs who may not even code and develop an emotional attachment towards their tools, their joy may come more from growth aspect, so basically the opposite of what a dev might want.

1. Of your friends/network, pick 5-10 people who could be potential customers. Ask them.

2. Think of a way to scrape emails addr of people who could be potential customers. Ask them.

3. Same on Linkedin.

4. Build a landing page, buy traffic from G and FB, look at time spent on your landing and CTRs to a signup page which then collects emails of interested parties ("We'll let you know once the Alpha is out").

5. Find a blog with potential customers, pay money to run some article on it that relates to your idea, with links to your landing page. Look at open rates of the article itself, and CTR to the landing, CTR on the landing, etc.

6. Create a public group on FB for people that could be potential customers. (Try to) create content for it, try to get people to join (maybe with ads).

All of these are highly noisy, but it's something. Also you could learn something unexpected, like: "oh, I get your idea, but we use already use X for that", and you didn't know about X, or you didn't know it could be used for that. This happened to me several times. Don't be overconfident in your Google-fu, it's a long tail world, and you may not be able to guess all the relevant keywords/marketing/angle that a competitor could be under.

This is not a representative sample of all SaaS businesses out there. It was run by the founders of Microconf, and their audience is mostly self-funded startups and solopreneurs. Naturally you will see little VC funding there. As ghaff mentioned in another comment, this is not a sample of typical SV startups.