One day with 150 vertical SaaS founders at Tidemark’s VSaaS Collective Live event in San Francisco.
Great speakers from billion-dollar vertical software companies who shared deep insights about how they got there.
Founders connecting with each other to compare notes on how to get there.
Practical Founders from my CEO peer groups came in to learn and connect.
Some founder attendees are VC-funded, others bootstrapped. They came from all over the US.
This is still the largest gathering of vertical software founders in the country.
Half of ALL software companies are vertical (industry) focused. But most of them aren’t VC-funded, so we don’t hear about their success stories.
We also don’t hear about the unique examples of scaling vertical SaaS companies to $100M or $1B, until this VSaaS Collective Live gathering.
- Vertical SaaS is still going strong and building in powerful ways.
- AI is very practical and powerful, with deep industry savvy and data.
- Horizontal software companies aren’t solving industry-specific problems sufficiently (e.g., CRM).
- Vertical SaaS has lower CAC, higher LTV, and lower churn than horizontal SaaS.
- Vertical SaaS scales up differently from horizontal SaaS
- Most vertical TAMs are not VC scale, but many are huge.
Thanks to David Yuan at Tidemark for generously hosting so many founders and bringing amazing expert speakers in to share what worked for them.
And thanks to Eva Pullano and the Tidemark team for coordinating a successful event.
Tidemark is one of the most successful and practical investors in massive vertical software companies. But this event wasn’t about funding at all.
They publish their deep insights for vertical SaaS founders every month on their website for all to see and use. I don’t know of any other investors who do that in the vertical SaaS space.
Great to hangout my practical founder friends and meet fans of my podcast!
