MicroConf Tactics: What SaaS Buyers Actually Want in 2026

Rob Walling (0:07)

Welcome back to the MicroConf Podcast. This is a tactics episode where we pull audio from one of our most popular YouTube videos, this one called What SaaS Buyers Actually Want in 2026

In this video, I sit down with Einar Vollset to talk about some of the motes that private equity is thinking about as they are acquiring SaaS this year. Before we dive in, I'm hosting a premium small group event called TinySummit for founders doing one million ARR or more in Cancun two and a half days from December 5th through the 7th. This is not a conference, it's much more of a working retreat where you get to put dedicated time into solving your hardest problems while you're surrounded by other founders at your level and folks like me. To apply to attend, head to tinyseed.com/tinysummit.

Prices are going up soon, so if you've been thinking about applying, now is the time and we will sell this event out as well. So tinyseed.com/tinysummit if you're interested. And now let's dive into what SaaS buyers actually want in 2026

Last year, a SaaS company went up for sale with metrics most founders would kill for. Great growth, great retention, the works. 22 private equity firms took a meeting. Not one of them made an offer. Nothing was wrong with the business. What changed is what buyers are now looking for. The private equity firms that usually set the price have quietly raised the bar, and a lot of companies aren't even getting offers anymore. So I sat down with Einar Vollset to get the real picture. And what he laid out is a set of five motes that now have a huge impact on what your company is worth. I want to walk you through all five with the best of what he told me. And we'll come back to that company at the end, because how it played out is clear proof of the shift we're seeing. The headlines say AI is killing SaaS, but Einar has a different perspective. In addition to being my co-founder at TinySeed, he runs Discretion Capital, which helps SaaS founders doing 2 to 20 million in ARR sell their companies. So I asked him, why is everyone so sure SaaS is doomed? His answer was simple.

Einar Vollset (2:20)

I think AI is amazing. I think AI is super impactful. But one of the funny things for me is this is still software. I think people lose track of that sometimes because they talk to it, and so they anthropomorphize this thing and they think of it as somehow different to software. But I'm like, look, it's software. And if you're very bearish on SaaS companies, then you're sort of saying that the companies that are the best in the world at deploying software are gonna be bad at deploying this particular kind of software.

Rob Walling (2:45)

And it's not just theory. He's seeing it inside the TinySeed portfolio in real time.

Einar Vollset (2:50)

I actually think it's a great time to be an early stage software and entrepreneur just because there is so much uncertainty. The cost of developing software has gone way down. That's definitely true. And honestly, I think we see that inside the TinySeed portfolio. We've invested in 200 plus companies. I've never seen the sentiment be so different between what we're seeing internally at the Slack channels among founders who are like, things are going super well, growth is accelerating. We're adding features in three weeks. Normally, it took us six months and everyone's going home and up to the right. And same actually thing with most of the public SaaS companies are reporting. They're coming like, we're not seeing any disruption whatsoever from AI, no additional churn. But in the public markets, the sky is falling. It's strange to me.

Rob Walling (3:33)

So if SaaS isn't going anywhere, here's why this matters to you specifically. Even the bootstrappers watching who are thinking, I'm never going to sell. Why do I care what buyers want? Well, for two reasons. First, everyone sells eventually or you shut down. I've watched almost 100 percent of the founders who swore they'd never sell hit a moment where that makes sense. They get tired or someone offers them 10, 15, 20 million dollars, their life changes. They go through a divorce, they have a kid and they sell.

Second, even if you never sell, you're sitting on an asset worth a lot of money. Knowing what makes it valuable is like knowing the value of your house. You don't need to check it every day, but you should pay enough attention to spot an opportunity or a storm coming. And what makes it valuable comes down to motes. In the SaaS Playbook, I laid out four that have always mattered. Integrations, especially custom integrations that make you part of a company's core workflow. A strong brand, the reason people just buy Salesforce or Zapier. High switching costs and own traffic channels, like really strong SEO. I also called out a moat, unique features. As developers, we love to think the clever thing we built is a moat. It never really was, and it definitely isn't today. Now, AI didn't erase those four motes, it just changed what they look like, and it added five more. So let's go through Einar's five, starting with the one I underrated the most, and that's hardware. Two years ago, if a founder came to us at TinySeed with a hardware component baked into their SaaS, it was a strike against them. Too hard to scale, too slow to ship. But today, that's flipped. When your software delivers value tightly coupled with a hardware layer, switching you out isn't just an API swap. There are real world downstream consequences. Einar puts it like this.