Episode 856 | Key Learnings from MicroConf Europe 2026

Rob Walling: Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, I welcome back Derrick Reimer, and we talk through our key learnings that we took away from MicroConf Europe 2026, happened just a few weeks ago in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was an amazing event. And I think you’re going to enjoy this episode because we talk through all kinds of things that happened there, things we took away from the talks. Before we dive into that, Idea to Traction, my next book is available for pre-order today. ideatotractionbook.com is the place to go to get all the links to buy. This book, of course, takes you from coming up with a SaaS idea to early product-market fit. It’s effectively an updated version of Start Small, Stay Small, updated 16 years later. And it’s like a prequel to The SaaS Playbook.

It’s all about the earliest stages from idea to launch, through validation, building that MVP, finding customers, and moving towards product-market fit. ideatotractionbook.com. And if you pre-order it now, instead of buying it when it comes out, you get all kinds of goodies. We have checklists, worksheets, as well as a live Q&A that I’m going to do. And I don’t do public live Q&As anymore. So if you’re going to order it, you should pre-order it now, ideatotractionbook.com. And if you listen to this episode and you’re stoked to head to a MicroConf, we have been selling MicroConfs out for years now. Last seven or eight events have sold out. So if you want a ticket to Austin, Texas in April or Dubrovnik, Croatia next fall, these are 2027 dates, head to microconf.com/events for all the details, the dates, and to get your tickets, use code ROB50, that’s ROB50, to get $50 off.

Today, tickets are as cheap as they will ever be. So microconf.com/events. And with that, let’s dive in to my conversation with Derrick about MicroConf in Iceland 2026. Derrick Reimer back again to talk about MicroConf Europe.

Derrick Reimer: Iceland.

Rob Walling: Did you get back today? No, you got back yesterday.

Derrick Reimer: I got back yesterday.

Rob Walling: Yeah. You stayed an extra four or five days.

Derrick Reimer: Just slightly jet lagged.

Rob Walling: It’s good. It’s only five-hour difference for us, which is, I don’t know, that’s not too bad. You wake up at four or five in the morning, it’s like, I’m going to get a jump on the day versus when last year Istanbul was nine hours. So I’m waking up at two in the morning here, one in the morning. It’s like, that’s not cool. Was it your first time to Iceland?

Derrick Reimer: First time to Iceland, yeah. So I brought my wife with me and we did the conference up front and then spent five days after exploring around. Did the Golden Circle, went over to see a bunch of waterfalls, hiked on a glacier. And it was the traditional mix, I think, of fall Iceland weather. It was very rainy a lot of the time, but also the weather would turn on a dime. So it’d be downpouring and then suddenly it’s clear and it’s blue sky. And so it pulled you in many different directions, but yeah, it’s a gorgeous place.

Rob Walling: Yeah. Otherworldly is the phrase I keep using with people when they’re like, “Hey, you went to Iceland?” I was like, “It’s my third trip in four years or maybe five years, but I dig that. I can’t get enough of it.” And before the event, I try to go early because I want to get acclimated to time because I have to be on stage at nine or 10 in the morning and I don’t want to be zonked out. So I went early, and I rented a car and drove six hours on Saturday and six hours on Sunday, one in the north direction and one in the south direction, just as far as I could go till I got tired. And I’ve been all around the ring road twice. I’ve been around the main part of the country twice and it doesn’t get old for me, not at all.

And I was like, “Oh, I’ve seen that bluff before. Oh, I’ve seen that town before. Oh, I’ve seen these cliffs before.” But it doesn’t matter. It’s like not being on earth anymore. It’s crazy.

Derrick Reimer: I found even driving out, it was pretty moody weather. It was foggy. There were low clouds. And so I remember looking at some of the big mountains and they sort of just disappeared into the clouds. And I was like, “I wonder what’s on top of there.” And then when we were driving back, headed back towards Reykjavik, it was a clear day and I was like, “Oh, that’s what that is.” But seeing it in a completely different light, it was a new experience.

Rob Walling: Yeah. So if you’re listening to this and Iceland’s on your list, I would bump it up. It’s one of probably, I mean, it depends on the vibe of the travel you want, because I’ll get asked. I’ve been to I think 25 countries and I get asked, “So what’s your favorite?” And I’m like, “Well, depends on what you want. If you want history and food and culture, go to Italy.” And I can tell you parts of Italy to go very specifically. If you want outdoor amazingness, adventure snorkeling and whitewater rafting and just beautiful scenery, Iceland’s it for me. And Switzerland used to be it, the Alps, and Iceland took the cake for me. It’s my number one. I mean, again, I certainly haven’t been to a foreign country three times in five years other than Iceland. It might be three times in four years. I’d have to look at the calendar.

But anyway, so MicroConf, we hosted it in Iceland this year, MicroConf Europe. And that was just a week or two ago as this episode goes live. It was our biggest MicroConf Europe ever. We had 174 attendees from more than 30 countries and 30% had more than $1 million of ARR. And 92 or 93% had a business with revenue. That’s why I said from stage, this is unlike any room you’ll be in. There are no other startup conferences or maybe like Dan and Ian type thing like Tropical MBA, like DCBKK really is the event I’m talking about. But there are a handful like that and they’re never the big events. You go to the event with 1,000 to 5,000 people and it’s not going to feel this way. I felt like there were more folks from the US than usual at MicroConf Europe this year.

And I think probably because it’s proximity, it’s a five… No, I guess it was about a six-hour flight for us from Minneapolis, but from the East Coast, it’s got to be what, a four- or five-hour flight?

Derrick Reimer: Yeah.

Rob Walling: Yeah. I think that just makes it easier. Time change as well.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. The companion passes too. I think a lot of folks brought a spouse along or did I think like John Reynolds from TinySeed, he did a two-week trip.

Rob Walling: Oh, John Reynolds. Yep.

Derrick Reimer: Yep. Did a two-week trip with the camper, did the ring road with his wife and then went to MicroConf. So yeah, I think a lot of folks used it as an opportunity for a little vacation time too.

Rob Walling: Totally. And I did an impromptu survey from stage saying even the weather, I mean the theme was go for this MicroConf, but also for starting a startup is go with the flow and bring ponchos. Because the weather was so, as you said, it was like, oh, it’s raining right now. And then it’s not raining an hour later. And the wind was so brutal that when I went to rent a car, they’re like, “Hold onto the door with two hands when you open the door because it damages rental cars and you have to pay for it if it rips it off the hinge.” And it’s like, “This is a thing?” And they’re like, “This is a thing, sir.” But even in spite of that, I was like, “Look.” And then the weather was beautiful at moments. And I have a picture of myself in front of a waterfall smiling and it’s all sunny and everything.

But I asked from stage, in spite of the weather and the kind of bipolar nature of the weather, because again, it was great at sometimes and not at others. I said, “Would you come back if we did it in Iceland again?” Because I was wondering, for me, I can keep going back, but I imagine there might have been people there who were like, “Well, this is my first time and now that I’ve done it, I’m good and I don’t need to come back here.” But there was an overwhelming… I mean, it was like 90 plus percent, I think raised their hand of come back. Would you go back?

Derrick Reimer: I would definitely go back. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the other things I liked about it, so Reykjavik is a small town. It’s a city, but it’s really more of a town because not that big.

Rob Walling: 250,000 people or something?

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. You can walk around pretty much everywhere. And the venue I thought was really, really cool. It’s the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre and it’s this amazing architectural piece right there on the water. It was fun to do a MicroConf, not in a hotel conference room, in a proper venue where it just sort of had the dramatic effect of you go in this room and it’s the big screen and the mood lighting and just everything, the polish of a proper conference hall venue I thought was very fun to be in.

Rob Walling: I’m glad you reminded me of that because when I first went in there, I was like, “What? MicroConf, it’s all grown up now. This is the best venue specifically that we’ve ever had it at, the feel and the vibe of that place.” And if you haven’t seen the Harpa, go to harpa.is or you can go to Google Images and type in Harpa Iceland. It is just amazing. It looks like a big crystal Rubik’s cube, kind of two Rubik’s cubes stacked next to each other. That makes it sound boring. It’s really interesting. And every picture I took of it is gorgeous because there’s all this natural light. So it was just an incredible venue. Speaking of the venue, let’s talk about the hallway track. Then we’ll dive into a handful of the talks. We won’t have time to cover all of them. And then I’d love to hear your experience with your excursion because excursions are I think a big part of MicroConf now.

So hallway track, you have been to almost all of the MicroConfs in the US and this is your second Europe. And so I’m curious this year if you found it same or different, any takeaways? Did you see old friends? What were the conversations like, et cetera?

Derrick Reimer: Yeah, I think this held up with past MicroConfs I’ve been at where everybody was very willing to dive in and socialize with each other. So it was a very vibrant hallway track, I’d say. It was interesting that we were sort of dispersed at various hotels and things. So these sort of organic meeting spots emerged. I think one of this food hall kind of right in the center of the city became MicroConf territory early on. There were a lot of people who came into town early, maybe they were doing a little traveling around or whatever, just got in a few days early and were just hanging out and walking around and you would just bump into MicroConf people all over the city, which was fun. And I had a number of great conversations with folks, just catching up with old friends, meeting new friends. I feel like AI just kind of dominated a lot of the conversations, which also dominated a lot of the talks.

It’s just the new era we’re in. So it was really interesting to compare notes with people, just people all over the gamut on where they’re at on how they’re thinking about AI and the threats of it and how to capitalize on it. And are we still looking at code anymore? There’s a number of folks who are already in the camp of like, nope, I don’t even read code anymore. So it was just really interesting to kind of swap notes and get some inspiration and try to refine my own thinking from having these real world conversations, which I feel like are happening all the time on Twitter. But Twitter is such a weird place and you don’t know how many people are just there to rage bait. So actually having these conversations in person with founders who are actually running real businesses was fun.

Rob Walling: Yeah. I felt the same way. I probably didn’t have as many conversations as you did because I was working and I was managing my own energy and also trying to get to and from different events, but I definitely talked with a lot of the attendees and it did. It felt like the world-class MicroConf hallway track we’ve always had. And I agree with you about AI being such a force. It’s just the thing everyone’s like, “Well, how are you thinking about this? What’s your opinion? What are you doing in terms of…” For me, it was a lot about marketing and sales and automating stuff. I’m sure if I was writing code, it would’ve been like, “Are you looking at…” I heard some people don’t even look at their code anymore. And then there’s people who are adamantly hand coding stuff still and have strong opinions on it.

And so I definitely enjoyed that. I felt a lot of positivity in the audience, if I’m honest. And that’s the usual for MicroConf, but there was something about it. Maybe it was just the being at that place and the venue itself, but I just felt elevated and I felt when I looked around like, “Man, everyone’s having a good time and everyone’s being really supportive.” That was something someone came up to me and they’re like, “You said at the start, everyone here wants to help you and everyone’s open to talking and that’s kind of the gestalt of MicroConf. You weren’t lying. Now I believe you. Now I understand what you meant.” And I’m like, “Good,” because that’s the environment that we’ve created. It’s not going and being sold to at a big, I don’t know, like SaaStr, for example, not to throw a specific event under the bus, but SaaStr is thousands of people.

You don’t know anyone. And people will go there and just not attend any of the events or the talks and they just book sales meetings the whole time, which is fine. You’re trying to close deals. That’s not MicroConf. It’s just a very different event and a different environment. So cool. With that, and speaking of AI, let’s dive into some of the talks. The first day we had two talks in the morning and I think we had an attendee talk as well. And then in the afternoon were our excursions and we’ll get to those later. But two of the talks were about AI SEO or GEO, generative engine optimization. One was how to rank number one in ChatGPT by George Chasiotis. And we had the state of search SEO and AI for B2B SaaS founders from Aleyda Solis. What were your takeaways, if any, from those two talks?

Because they covered similar and related ground, but it was like a Venn diagram where they meet in the center.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. I kind of just jotted some bullet points from my main takeaways from both of those together. And I feel like it was really good that this was subject matter being talked about because I know for me, I have run content strategies before in the past, the typical SEO playbook. And I feel like a lot of that has just changed because now when you go to Google, the top dominating part is the AI overview and people are increasingly using ChatGPT or Claude or whatever for their search engine. So how do we think about this? What does ranking look like? What does content strategy look like? So I feel like I got some insights from these. One of the core ideas here was that these days you need to be thinking about building content for the LLMs to consume and you’re trying to basically control the narrative that the LLMs are parroting back about your stuff.

Rob Walling: Crazy. Marketers ruin everything.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. And that was kind of an unlock because for a long time I’ve been in this place of the world is saturated with relatively low effort, low quality content marketing. So the idea of just contributing to that stream of slop has not been particularly inspiring to me. And I’ve been skeptical that is this actually going to be effective? Are people really reading this type of content? And I think one of the key unlocks is partly doesn’t really matter if humans are reading it. It’s like the agents are reading it to form their opinions to reflect back to humans that are asking the LLM for advice on something. So they talked about creating prompt libraries, using real world buying decisions that come up in customer conversations or just that you can mine from actual customers, questions that they ask when they’re looking for products like yours, and then creating content specifically to basically pattern match on that so that an LLM can easily access that when it’s providing an answer.

I think another principle here is that good GEO, AEO, whatever, is also good SEO. So those same core ideas of being useful, substantive, novel, all the things that Google rewards are also good for optimizing for visibility in LLMs. So that kind of core idea of producing high quality stuff hasn’t changed. And yeah, I also heard perspectives about doing some programmatic SEO stuff like the high volume AI assisted content. And it was interesting to hear the perspective that that stuff is not necessarily penalized as long as it’s still high value. I heard this also from Corey Haines. I think they all were in agreement about this perspective that no, you can use AI to help in part or wholly generate content. It just needs to be good.

Rob Walling: Yeah. And that Google specifically has come out and said, we’re not anti-AI content and we’re not going to penalize just because we recognize it’s AI. We’re going to penalize or not rank it or whatever you want to say, have a negative signal if it’s thin, if it’s untrue, if it’s slop, if it’s this and that, which is fascinating to me because some of these models, especially if you train them on your own thoughts, like even narrating something and having… We could take part of this podcast, and I have been doing this, taking part of old podcasts and feeding the transcript in where it’s like, no, this is my thought. This is 10 minutes of audio of me. And I’ve trained a Claude instance to, it’s called Writes Like Rob. And I say, write an essay like me. And then I correct it and I say, nope, this is how I’d say that. This is how I do that.

And it’s very, very good. In fact, I bet if I gave you the first draft from it that you wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t me. I can tell it’s not me because there are some little subtle things, but it’s really close. So when I hear that, oh, that Google isn’t going to penalize it, it’s like, well, being able to train up a model, not even a model, just a prompt, basically an agent, if you will, to the point of writing comparable to a human. Now, is it going to write the amazing… Is it going to write Joanna Wiebe level sales copy? No, I don’t think so. Not without a ton of training, but can it write as good of an essay as I could? I think it’s right in there, right in that ballpark.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve played with Opus 5.5. I mean, it’s a very of the moment thing, but Anthropic’s like, we fixed the writing and this writing is considerably better than the typical Claude speak or whatever. So it’s crazy how good they’re getting at that.

Rob Walling: So that was the first day was a lot about AI SEO and I appreciated it. It got me thinking, because I haven’t done any of that for any of my books or robwalling.com. We’re obviously talking internally about TinySeed and MicroConf, but TinySeed and MicroConf, when we’ve done SEO in the past and we get cold traffic, that traffic is worth a 10th or a 50th of anyone seeing a YouTube video. You know what I mean? It’s just like this cold search on entrepreneur masterminds or startup this and that. It just doesn’t convert very well for us, so we haven’t put a ton of effort. We tend to put it more in the actual content creation of audio video and such. But with that said, there’s been multiple people now that I meet at a MicroConf for the first time. They say it’s their first one and I say, “How’d you hear about it?” And they said, “I asked ChatGPT where I should go to talk to startup founders and it said MicroConf’s one of the best events.” So it’s happening already.

So I feel like we should have a little bit of say in that and that’s what AI SEO will… As you said, that’s how we could control the narrative.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. Oh, and one other thing they mentioned too, I think in Google Search Console, they added a thing where now you can start to… You have to dig a few layers deep, but you can start to see some analytics about how much it’s surfacing you in generated responses. So there’s kind of a new metric in there. I think they’ll probably flesh out more of it over time, but kind of interesting you can get some from Google insights now on that.

Rob Walling: And then we had an attendee talk from Jacob Wright, who’s the founder of Dabble. It was called Don’t Make Me Think, Make Me Feel. And I remember when he submitted this, he has a B2C SaaS app. It’s for novel writers, for story and novel writers. I remember being like, “Okay, B2C, not my thing.” Dude’s doing $2 million a year as a single founder. And he said his churn was something. It was super low for B2C. It was like 4%, I think. I can say all this. It was in his talk and it’ll be on YouTube at some point, so it’s public info at this point. I really, really enjoyed his talk. What did you take away from it?

Derrick Reimer: Yeah, I mean, I’m envious of him because he is in a kind of unique position where his product is the UX. He wouldn’t be displaced by AI because he’s specifically making a thing for humans to hit keystrokes in. The experience of using it is his whole value proposition, which I think a lot of us wish that we could use that as a defensible moat, but as we’ll get to in a second, cannot. Yeah, it was fun to hear from someone who’s like, “Yep, this has been my process for identifying true UX issues in some of the incumbents and then systematically crafting a nicer experience that delights users.” So it felt very quaint, felt very something that a lot of us would be talking about in prior years, and now there’s fewer of us that get to spend cycles on thinking about crafting UX. But yeah, I enjoyed it.

Rob Walling: And then we had excursions. We had our evening events of everybody hanging out. And the second day we had a few talks. One was called Riding the AI Wave in Bootstrapped SaaS: How Ajelix Got 350,000 Users Without Spending a Dime on Ads. It was from Agnese, and I’m going to mess up her last name, but Agnese Jaunosane. She’s the co-founder of Ajelix. Did you have any thoughts or takeaways on her talk?

Derrick Reimer: I felt tired after watching her talk, and I got a chance to speak with her at lunch afterward and I was like, “Are you guys burned out at all?” She was like, “Yeah, pretty much.” Because I mean, the talk was kind of rapid fire over the last, what was it, three years maybe that they’ve been working on this and they’ve pivoted every year to basically stay relevant. They started out as AI empowered Excel or whatever, and now they’ve had to continue to figure out how to stay relevant as AI has been sort of jammed into all of these places. And now they basically found a corner in the EU privacy space, so they’re training their own open weights models and they have some support from the EU to help with the funding of that process, and they’re kind of carving out this niche over there.

So it was a really fun story just to hear how they’ve continually reinvented themselves. And I think, yeah, if you’re riding the AI wave as an AI provider, that is what’s necessary right now, so it’s not for the faint of heart.

Rob Walling: She kept saying, “And then we pivoted into this thing.” I’m like, “That’s really far from the other thing. That does not…” I mean, it’s slightly related, but yeah, same thing. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds exhausting.” It was a really good talk. Well, obviously you have that. I think these are all going on YouTube in the next couple of months. I will have to producer [VERIFY: “Ron”] and Tracy may have my head for making that public statement, but usually you have about this. Usually we get them on within a month or two, but I think we’re going to hold some of them back. My talk is about moats that still work in the age of AI, and it’s called Your Features Won’t Save You: The Eight Moats That Work in the Age of AI. And this was really a collaborative effort. It’s the first talk I’ve co-written with someone because basically Einar and I have spent the last couple months thinking very hard and looking very hard at the TinySeed portfolio and saying, given that the M&A market right now for SaaS has really taken a dive since the SaaSpocalypse, and it’s because private equity and strategics are like, “Well, I don’t know if this company’s going to be worth anything in six months or in three years.” So the question we were asking ourselves was, “Are there moats?

Are there things that make you AI resistant or protect you from AI usurping your state?” And so I said on stage, Einar, probably about 75, 80% of the content was from him, and he got Claude and ChatGPT basically dueling back and forth, like arguing. He’d paste it in and be like, “What’s wrong here?” And then he’d go back and say, “This is what they said is wrong.” And he spent weeks doing this and wrote a big, it’s like a white paper, basically, like a 15 or 20 page white paper on the topic that’s very dense and very academic, but it’s meaty. And so I took what he did, what he had, and tried to translate it more into something that was founder friendly. Because when I read through it, I was like, “This is great information, but I want to be able to communicate it in the way that we communicate on this podcast, ways that you can just see it.” And so he had six moats and I found two more that I think are valid.

And then we talk about how all the threats of most people are like, “Hey, AI is making me ship faster and my customers aren’t going to vibe code my app, so I’m in the clear.” I opened the talk by saying, “That’s one vector of attack. There are nine more, nine more, and you probably haven’t thought of five of them.” And then I rolled through them, then talked about old moats that aren’t there anymore like, “Hey, great UX and complex code. I’ll just point my agent at it and it’ll just copy that.” And then I went through the eight moats. But this stuff we’re going to be diving deep, deep into with SaaS Institute and the TinySeed Accelerator and creating more… I mean, dare I say a curriculum and evaluation criteria, ways to evaluate your own company. We’re going to do a two-plus-hour call with folks with a big group call to get everybody on the same page with it because AI is not going to kill SaaS, but it is having an impact and it will continue to.

And so that’s what we were trying to do is this was a little bit of a wake-up call, but also, A, be scared, and B, there’s some hope. And at this current time, dude, maybe we find nine moats, maybe we find 10 eventually. There’s not 50. There’s eight, nine, or 10. Or maybe one or two of them turns out to not be a moat. So maybe realistically, there’s only six of them, whatever. We’re in the right direction. We have more information today than we did last week based on this talk. So that’s kind of the high level view of my talk. I’m curious if you saw it and what your thoughts were.

Derrick Reimer: I saw it. I did feel the wake-up call aspect of it. I mean, this is stuff that I think most of the people in the room, me included, have been sort of ruminating on since the AI wave really came into full force. But I think a lot of people have been focused primarily on the productivity benefits that we can experience from it. And there’s sort of this lagging thing that’s coming up behind all of us that’s like, “Oh, cool. If we can do all this stuff with AI, so can everyone else. So where’s the value to actually be captured?” Of course, there’s some arbitrage in there. It’s going to take time for the entire world to reorient itself and shift over towards the frontier. And many of us are sitting right on the bleeding edge of the frontier. So there’s some early mover advantage there to exploit and capitalize on.

But yeah, for sure it felt like a wake-up call that a lot of the sort of implicit things that we’ve been ascribing to our companies as an edge or something that would make us valuable to an acquirer maybe in X number of years, if you start playing out the scenarios of what could happen over X number of years, you start to realize, “Uh-oh, this may not play out the way that I thought it would when I set my strategy, when I started my company X number of years ago. The world is changing.” Yeah, I feel like a lot of these moats, most of them, I sort of flagged this and you might have said something similar, most of them have to do with trust. That’s the one through line that I’m kind of pulling out of them. So it’s things like if you allow it to act inside of your organization and that’s like, well, you trust it to be autonomous.

Or if it’s like a black box like Gusto where you trust it to do work for you, again, there’s this –

Rob Walling: Don’t double check it.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. Yeah. So most of these things kind of all tie into having that trust factor. And so in part, I don’t know, I left the talk feeling a little bit anxious about the future. Is there a closing window here? Is there a narrow window of time where we can try to build some of these moats before AI just neutralizes all of them? And maybe that’s the case. I think these are the competing views of the world that I heard being debated at tables all around MicroConf. It’s like some people are of the mind that the frontier models are going to just subsume all of SaaS because as they get more and more intelligent, they’re all incentivized to try to provide as much business value as possible. I’m sure Anthropic would love for every worker to just sit down at their desk, open the Claude desktop app and be able to do their entire job.

And they’re about to IPO at $2 trillion valuation. So there’s a lot of money behind this frontier that it feels like we as bootstrappers have to try to outrun. So I mean, that’s the slight doomer angle to it, but I think the optimistic angle is what Einar expressed in his going-on-offense side of things, which was disruption and risk breed opportunity for startups. I need to put that on a post-it note on my monitor, I think, as just a continual reminder that this is something we should ultimately be excited to see because when there’s disruption like this, that’s the chance for entrepreneurs to find new opportunities. It’s just not at all clear to me and to a lot of people what exactly those opportunities are, but that fact remains.

Rob Walling: Yeah. And you referenced Einar’s talk. It was kind of like a part one and a part two. I did a 45-minute talk. He did a 20-minute talk. And so we divided up some aspects of this. But yeah, that’s the tough part today is people on social media want to be really certain that it’s everything’s going to zero or nothing’s changing. Most people are everything’s going to zero, frankly. But there are a lot of indie hacker types and some bootstrappers who are like, “I don’t see why anything’s going to change. No one’s going to vibe my product.” We’re seeing that too. And man, people are so sure of their opinion. And it’s like, no, no, none of us, even us, with these 241 investments in SaaS companies, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. This is just our best guess right now. And so that’s the thing.

I think I keep saying SaaS is going to be impacted or is already being impacted. And I think 10 to 20% of SaaS companies in the world will either go to zero or significantly plateau or start declining, which is effectively going to zero over time. I mean, if you’re not growing with SaaS, your multiples are a lot lower, it’s hard to be profitable, blah, blah, blah. And that’s a lot, but it’s not everybody. And I think a lot of us, a lot of MicroConf and TinySeed companies are going to survive and are going to thrive in this age. The big question is how? How will that happen? And right now we’re all just kind of taking our best guess and it feels like things change every few months with new models and as new information comes out and as we see the M&A market shifting.

So the M&A market went super cold in February, March of this 2026 because of public markets for SaaS multiples plummeted because people started saying SaaSpocalypse, SaaSpocalypse. And then I’ll say it’s bottomed out is what it feels like to me. Am I saying it’s turning upward? I don’t know. There’s a little, what do they call it? The green sprouts. There’s these little early signs that maybe it could be getting better. Certainly when money’s more abundant, people are spending more on everything. And I’m seeing that crypto’s up quite a bit right now. Collectibles, cards are way up. Comics are starting to go up again. None of this has happened since 2020 really in 2021. And then we had the big drop off in 22. So as money becomes more abundant, will acquisitions go through and will the valuations go back up or will just more deals go through?

These are questions we’re all thinking about and no one knows for sure. We are just trying to do our best with the information we have right now.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah, because I think the tricky thing is that phrase of perception is reality. I mean, that’s true with investors. The way things get priced is what they think the future will hold for the things they’re going to acquire. And part of me feels like to see independent SaaS as a good investment, you have to almost bet against the frontier. And I feel like that’s the core tension where there’s the people who are the most AI pilled, maybe under a little bit of AI psychosis, they always accuse you of thinking too small if you claim that there’s going to be some edge that you can have over an AI system. And you see investment moving in that direction too with just announced the founder of the web host that I use is moving on from the company to start a new startup that’s like a new phone where there’s no pre-built apps, but you just generate all the apps on the fly with AI.

And it’s like that wouldn’t work today. The models aren’t good enough today to do that, I don’t think. But some people are betting that we will get to that place. And if we’re in that world, oh boy, I don’t know what that means for all of us who are creating fixed software or whatever.

Rob Walling: Right. That’s the thing that AI makes you rethink a lot of things. I’m going to go off on a tangent real quick because I just want to throw this down. I’ve been waiting. I haven’t heard anyone talk about it, but it’s occurred to me that AI code agents, coding agents, they’re using Ruby and Rails and Elixir because that’s what you and all the other developers use. AI doesn’t need that. When is an AI language, like AI-native first, you know what I mean, that is designed for agents? Does it already exist? Because somebody’s going to design this.

Derrick Reimer: Well, yeah. So there’s some movement on this front. One, this is again, just from a couple days ago, DHH has been posting a lot about AI stuff and he gave this big talk at Rails World basically saying pencil’s down everyone. We’re not writing code anymore. And then he was just tweeting about the fact that he took one of their ONCE projects, Campfire, I think, and he had an LLM rewrite it in Rust and it performs a thousand times faster than the Ruby equivalent. So that’s happened. People are experimenting with taking whole codebases and just completely rewriting them in a more performant low level language.

Rob Walling: That you’d never want to hand code. Rust is rough. Yeah.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. And then I was having an interesting chat with Anthony Eden from DNSimple. We were talking about what does it look like to hire in this era where we’re kind of still in this middle phase where most of the developers on the market have written code by hand. But if you advance a couple years from now, most people who are trying to apply for developer jobs will perhaps maybe have never written code by hand and have only driven an LLM. And I was kind of posing the question like, how do we feel about that? I would struggle today to want to hire somebody who doesn’t know how to read the code and understand what it’s doing, but the world seems to be moving in the direction of don’t even look at the code. And he brought up this interesting thought experiment that was like, well, what makes you think that in three years time the LLMs are going to be generating human readable code?

We have Elixir, which compiles down to BEAM bytecode, and the BEAM is a very nice VM, but very low level and you don’t read the bytecode. And there’s a very real case to be made that agents would just start generating bytecode and that’d be more efficient.

Rob Walling: Assembler, right? Assembly language. I mean this is the kind of thing I was thinking of. The reason these are human readable is because we’ve been writing in them and we want to be able to review them, but when does that, that need has to go away. It will. And it’ll start, there’ll be a bunch of resistance to it because it’s scary to frankly be a developer and have to give that up and to not know where it’s going to break or why or how. But yeah, I think that’s another direction. And if you’re listening to this and that’s the first time that’s occurred to you or whatever, that type of thinking is happening in marketing and in sales and in SaaS. And it’s all these things we haven’t even thought of as the models get better and as the price, this is the other thing, the price has to come down because it’s very, very expensive.

They need to IPO at $2 trillion to afford to subsidize all of our usage. And it’s supposed to get cheaper and everything in the internet and technology has for 60 years or 70 years or whatever, but will that continue and will it get cheaper before the AI implosion? Because look, AI is a bubble, but also there is an AI bubble. There’s too much money in it. There’s going to be a bunch of companies that just aren’t going to survive. But also like the internet, which was a bubble, the internet survived and the internet changed the world. AI is the same thing. It will survive. It can be a bubble and it can collapse and it can also change the world. And so will the price come down fast enough that by the time people start running out of money, and I don’t mean anthropic and OpenAI, they’re going to be able to…

And Google, obviously Gemini and such, they’re going to be able to raise whatever money they need or whatever. But the thousands of other kind of AI first or AI companies, how many of those will go down? Let’s just say there was whatever, a catastrophic Black Swan event tomorrow and the markets dropped and there was funding dried up, it’s like who would survive that and for how long? All right, let’s wrap up. I like when we go on tangents, but let’s wrap up the event. So the last talk of the second day was Corey Haines and his talk was titled Marketing Like an Engineer Using AI. He referenced his GitHub repo with 51,000 stars on it and it’s called Marketing Skills for Claude and AI. And it’s like 50 or more skills. I really enjoyed this talk because I had yet to use a skill. I knew what they were on the top level and I’ve trained a bunch of prompts for myself, like my Writes Like Rob and other things, but I’m seeing the benefit.

I can obviously see the benefit of skills and the ability to share them. I just enjoyed his walkthrough and his kind of high level thinking as someone who, he’s the founder of Conversion Factory. He’s been a SaaS marketer for, I don’t know, 10 years maybe. And I know you and he worked together in the early days of SavvyCal. So curious if you had any takeaways from his talk.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah, I thought it was super solid and a great introduction to just how to think about crafting skills for repeatable rote things. It inspired me to think hard about for my development side of things, what should I potentially turn into a skill? I find a lot of times development is a little less repetitive. A lot of stuff is just sort of like novel ideation rather than systematizing things. But that said, I think as we get closer to this don’t read the code as closely, rely more on agentic processes, leveraging skills to make all that stuff a little more repeatable and a little more predictable was really interesting. And his method for thinking about how to turn something into a skill and then how to make it so that it can be loopable, so that it can be put on a cadence and then you can have it run on its own.

That was something that one of the round tables I sat in on was kind of AI focused. And I feel like a lot of folks, me included, were expressing this desire to experiment with agents in a more kind of agentic way, a little more autonomous where processes are running kind of more automatically rather than being initiated by hand. And skills are a big part of that. So yeah, it was a good talk.

Rob Walling: Yeah, I thought so too. It got me fired up. I don’t do that many kind of rote tasks. It’s not like I’m running a SaaS these days and could really use the skills he built, but it got me thinking about what am I leaving on the table and not doing for my books and this podcast and YouTube and robwalling.com and all this stuff. There has to be something that I haven’t been paying attention to that I don’t want to do by hand that it could help with. So I appreciated the talk. Let’s wrap up with excursions. There were, I think three options you could go to like the Sky Lagoon, which is a, what is it? It’s a spa.

Derrick Reimer: Geothermal hot spring thing. Yeah.

Rob Walling: Hot spring. Thank you. Which is amazing. I’ve been there, I think I’ve been there twice, but hot spring and there’s all types of skin treatment and clay and stuff you can put on and then you’re just chilling in a hot spring for hours. And then there was a hike and there was some type of tasting of Icelandic spirits. And excursions are something we started in, well, we’re going to start them in 2020, that was the first year. And so we started them in 2021. We typically do them in the afternoon the first day now. And we get that first morning in with a few talks. It’s like family reunion, you’re seeing people again. And then you get to get out of the building, you get to have an adventure, it’s usually fun and you’re hanging out with other founders and you’re learning extension of the hallway track and conversation.

So that’s the logic and we’ve got nothing but positive responses about that switch up of the MicroConf program. And so that’s why we’ve done it now since 21. So with that, I’m curious what excursion you went on and what your experience was like.

Derrick Reimer: My excursion was the hike, the hike to the natural hot spring. And this one was, it was fascinating. We piled on this bus, it was pouring buckets outside and we’re headed out to a location. It was like 50 minutes outside of the city. And so we’re just on this bus and we get into this area where suddenly we just see steam rising from these little vents out of this mountain. There’s a tour guide on the bus that’s sort of explaining what’s going on here, these geothermal vents where there’s basically groundwater very close to magma under the ground. So it’s heating the water up naturally and it’s just venting out all over the place. Just incredible to see with your eyes. And then pull up to the spot and we basically hike up this trail up a mountain. And at the end of the mountain, there’s this river that is naturally heated by the earth.

It’s about 100 degrees and it wasn’t super deep. So you basically got in a swimsuit and then you just laid on these rocks with this warm water flowing around you. And so it was just a bunch of beached MicroConfers having chats about life and business in minimal clothing, laying on rocks at the top of an Icelandic mountain. It was amazing.

Rob Walling: That’s surreal. Yeah, that’s awesome. I saw some of the pictures of the hike and it looked pretty incredible.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah, there were some wind gusts on the side of this mountain. I’m not going to lie, some sideways wind in the face, but –

Rob Walling: Hanging on for dear life.

Derrick Reimer: Yep. Yep. But they made it clear that it was possibly going to get canceled or we’re going to pivot to some other kind of experience if the weather wasn’t permitting, but turns out it cleared up enough. But the tour guys made it clear, this is a class of type two fun where you will enjoy the experience after the fact. You may not enjoy it while you’re in it the whole time, but honestly, it was really fun the whole time. It felt like you were doing hard things with other founders, which hey, that’s what we’re doing all the time, right? And we’re going with the flow.

Rob Walling: That’s cool. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming to MicroConf Europe and thanks for taking an hour to talk through it with me on the show so that people who missed out can experience massive amounts of FOMO because it was a great event. It was a great event. Yeah. Appreciate you coming out, man.

Derrick Reimer: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Rob Walling: If folks want to keep up with you on the internet, you are @derrickreimer on X/Twitter. We’ll link it up in the show notes as well as the best scheduling link on the internet now supporting appointments in addition to meetings, savvycal.com. Thanks again to Derrick for coming on the show. As a reminder, Idea to Traction is available for pre-order, ideatotractionbook.com and MicroConf tickets are on sale for both Austin and Dubrovnik next year. microconf.com/events. Thanks for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off for episode 856.