Seven predictions for SaaS bootstrappers in 2024

Executive overview

Rob Walling runs through seven predictions for capital-efficient SaaS founders heading into 2024. The episode closes with a look back at predictions from 2013 to 2021 — most were directionally right, just early.

Vertical SaaS, AI as augmentation, and subscription resilience in B2B are the structural bets worth making in 2024.

Vertical SaaS is the dominant model

• Vertical SaaS — software for a specific industry — makes up an estimated 75–80% of TinySeed's portfolio.
• Less competitive than horizontal SaaS; you only need to out-market others in your niche.
• Examples: fitness centre analytics, tiny-house CAD, construction project management for Latin America.
• Trend is accelerating, not plateauing.

SaaS growth in emerging markets

• Latin American B2B SaaS is a growing opportunity; lower price points are offset by lower hiring and marketing costs.
• Local founders have structural advantages: geography, language, cultural familiarity.
• TinySeed has seen a meaningful uptick in applicants from these regions.

Twitter faces a major ownership reckoning

• Twitter's valuation has collapsed; it is undermonetised and declining outside tech circles.
• Prediction: financiers who lent Elon Musk the money to buy it will force a sale or foreclosure in 2024.
• In most non-tech verticals, Twitter is already a ghost town.

Subscription fatigue won't dent B2B SaaS

• Consumer complaints about subscriptions will be loud but won't translate to B2B churn.
• Businesses pay for SaaS when it removes real pain — that value exchange remains intact.
• 37signals' one-time-purchase model (Once.com) will stay a niche product for self-hosting developers.

No-code and low-code will professionalise

• No-code/low-code currently lacks the tooling that code development took decades to build: version control, unit testing, code review.
• These tools can skip the trial-and-error phase by learning from established software engineering practices.
• Expect meaningful progress toward professional-grade no-code tooling in 2024.

AI moves past the obvious applications

• Low-hanging-fruit AI builds are mostly done; 2024 will surface novel, surprising integrations.
• AI will accelerate software development — augmenting developers, not replacing them.
• Automated customer service will improve but remain patchy.
• Expectation: AI follows the mobile-app arc — initial hype normalises into a daily productivity layer.

Stripe will finally go public

• Prediction: Stripe IPOs in 2024.
• Risk: public markets impose a quarterly earnings treadmill, historically pushing companies toward rate increases and user-hostile moves.
• Key question: how long can Stripe hold off the cash-grab mode that Wall Street eventually forces?

Looking back: a decade of predictions

• Often right, just early — Twitter acquisition (predicted 2019, happened 2022), fundstrapping (predicted 2016, normalised after 2018).
• Reliably wrong on timing — VR mainstream adoption predicted three separate years; startup bubble burst predicted 2013, arrived 2022.
• Good structural calls — WordPress dominance, integration marketing, Bitcoin crash in 2018 with long-term bull case, drone deliveries.
• Bear predictions tend to be years too early; structural technology trends are directionally correct even when timing slips.