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. Episode Sponsor: You’ve probably heard that ChatGPT can do all of your marketing. But that’s nonsense unless your strategy is blindly following tired, recycled, outdated strategies.  If you care about systematically creating a marketing engine that converts, not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, you need real humans who actually understand positioning, persuasion, and modern customer acquisi