Don't start SaaS right now — with Mike Hill

Don't start SaaS right now — with Mike Hill

Sounds Good Podcast #1 — Mike Hill on whether bootstrapped SaaS is still worth starting in 2026. His advice to anyone asking him right now: don't. Not because SaaS is dying. He doesn't buy that — neither do I. But the gap between building a product (easier than ever) and getting your first SaaS customer (harder than ever) got pretty broken. Mike Hill is a serial bootstrapper. His newest thing is Smile — a Slack app for sending dorky cards to your team (which I love using!). What we got into: - Why the SaaSpocalypse started five years ago and has nothing to do with AI - The Google-to-ChatGPT shift is wiping out bootstrappers - AI makes senior people better and junior people worse - Lifetime deals stop making sense when token costs are ongoing and buyers already have your competitor's LTD - The day Claude went down and Mike just went home, and what that says about all of us - Why he still recommends every founder who emails him to get a technical co-founder Timestamps: 00:00 - Is SaaS Still Worth Starting? 00:57 - SaaSpocalypse Explained 03:14 - AI Makes Seniors Faster 04:30 - Content Led Growth Edge 06:00 - Why Not Start SaaS 07:47 - AI Search Hurts Discovery 11:11 - Building SaaS for Fun 15:46 - Ship Fast New Process 17:59 - Agent Overload Limits 25:24 - Get a Technical Cofounder 28:21 - AI Skepticism and Hype 29:36 - Reliance and Outage Fear 31:09 - API Risk and Cost Creep 33:09 - Lifetime Deals vs Token Costs 37:35 - SaaS Is Not Dead 45:05 - Competition and Go To Market 48:27 - AI Sidekicks Not Replacements 50:46 - Why AI Design Still Fails 52:02 - Wrap Up If you've been wondering whether you missed the SaaS window, this one's for you. New episodes of Sounds Good every week. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Mike Hill — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mymatemike/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mymatemike/] Smile — https://smiile.co/ [https://smiile.co/] Curator — https://curator.io/ [https://curator.io/] Juuno — https://juuno.co/ [https://juuno.co/] #SaaS #Bootstrapping #IndieHackers sounds good. — a podcast with Anna Nadeina soundsgoodpod.com [http://soundsgoodpod.com] anna@soundsgoodpod.com [anna@soundsgoodpod.com]

sounds good. launching June 1

Have you ever heard a podcast, read an article, or just seen a LinkedIn post that sounded really, really good? Where someone was sharing the ultimate playbook that definitely works, the sales process that makes your team indestructible, and that great game changer for SaaS growth? Yeah. We've all been there. I've clicked on those links. And hey, fair enough, some of those did work. And some sent me on a trip to Cringeville and my wine cabinet because I had to recover from thinking people get paid for this stuff. So that's what this is. I'm Anna, and this is sounds good. — where I talk to SaaS folks who walked that yellow brick road. People who ran with it and can look me in the eye and tell me if it worked, or spectacularly didn't. Because I'm not sure if playbooks are real. Or if there's a version of SaaS success you can follow like a recipe — or if every company that made it just had a great team, obsessive founders, and quite a bit of luck. And then someone wrote a LinkedIn post about it afterwards. That's what I want to find out. Tune in to "sounds good." podcast episode 1 on June 1st.