This year’s headwinds of slower growth and reduced VC funding for B2B SaaS companies have created an opportunity for serious SaaS founders who didn’t raise institutional funding:

It’s easier to hire best-fit executive leaders to help your company grow to the next level.

It was crazy hard to hire a few years ago in the boom, but it’s actually possible now–without expensive recruiters or big signing bonuses.

There are many, many SaaS leaders who are looking for new gigs with software companies that aren’t saddled and stuck because they raised too much VC funding when it was “cheap and easy.”

Hundreds of thousands of SaaS refugees are doing consulting gigs and looking for jobs after being laid off because their companies didn’t hit their crazy growth targets.

But most bootstrapped and lightly funded SaaS companies over $1M ARR are growing just fine, albeit slower than any VC would bet on. They are also hiring slowly and steadily.

These practical SaaS companies are hard to find, but there are just as many of them as VC-funded SaaS companies in vertical markets and horizontal niches and with alternative approaches. They don’t show up at local tech events.

Several practical SaaS CEOs I work with were astonished at the response they just got when they posted a senior leader job opening and started reaching out. The response was overwhelming, with 500+ executives applying.

The biggest problem with qualifying these candidates is that most leaders were used to booming markets, lavish funding, big teams, vanity metrics, and playing the funding game.

Most of these folks aren’t used to the gritty world of self-funded early-stage companies that requires real results and efficient leverage. You can’t just throw money at big problems and see what happens.

It’s a great time to be a practical SaaS founder with happy, paying customers and no institutional investors. Great talent, AI efficiencies, and hobbled competitors.

It’s still really hard, but it just got a little easier with leadership hiring.