Episode 813 | SaaS Predictions for 2026 (+ Reflections on 2025)

Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. And in this episode, I'm gonna look back and revisit my predictions that I made a year ago for 2025. I'm gonna look ahead at some predictions I have for 2026, and I'm also gonna reflect on a few new concepts introduced on this podcast over the past year as well as some of the accomplishments of me and my teams at MicroConf and TinySeed. Before I dive into that, this podcast is looking for sponsors. Do you feel like your product serves the folks that listen to this podcast? Imagine getting in the earbuds of tens of thousands of founders and aspiring founders who are part of this incredible community. If you're interested in potentially sponsoring this podcast, send us an email, sponsors@startupsfortherestofus.com. We are close to filling 2026, and we're already starting to plan q two. So reach out if you're interested. Sponsors @startupsfortherestofus.com. Before I get into to predictions, revisiting the fail whale, that is the list of predictions I made for this past year. I was going through episodes from the past fifty two weeks, and there were a few concepts that I felt like I kept touching on. They kept coming up through listener questions or through just the kinda gestalt of the start up community that we live in. One was a lot of talk about plateaus, folks trying to make it through plateaus, wondering why they've plateaued, and wondering what the tactic or solution is to getting through plateaus. I talked about that on a few episodes of the show, and I also did a talk at MicroConf. Well, it was about a year ago. I did one in Europe, and then I did one in New Orleans just six, seven months ago. And I believe you can find that on the MicroConf YouTube channel, microconf.com/youtube if you wanna check it out. But I went through and I identified what I believe is every cause of a SaaS plateau. And there were I'm trying to think now. Top of my head, this is the reason I have notes. But I was seven or eight different causes, and that's it. And I looked across hundreds of b to b SaaS companies and talk a little bit about how to get through them. But, frankly, how to get through them is usually obvious. It's really just identifying the cause or the reason for the plateau that's the key insight that you're looking for. So you can check that out on YouTube or go back to the podcast backlog if you haven't in a while. The next thing that came up is the question of, do I need a cofounder? And it comes up about every other month, and usually it's, I'm technical. Do I need a marketing sales cofounder? Or a marketing sales, do I need a technical cofounder? As well as I had questions about the SaaS skill set …