KEY TAKEAWAYS
- ✓Micro-SaaS businesses in boring niches can be incredibly profitable. Store locators aren't sexy, but thousands of e-commerce stores need them.
- ✓Build the first version as fast as possible. Tyler built Storemapper's MVP on a single long-haul flight.
- ✓Know when to sell. Tyler recognized that Storemapper had reached a natural ceiling and exited to pursue his next chapter.
Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?
Tyler Tringas coined the term "micro-SaaS" and then lived it. In 2013, he was working as a freelance developer and spending a lot of time in e-commerce. He noticed that online stores frequently needed store locator functionality, a simple map showing customers where they could buy the product in physical retail stores. The existing solutions were either enterprise-grade and overpriced or so basic they barely worked. The gap was obvious.
On a 30-hour flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Tyler built the first version of Storemapper. It was deliberately simple: give it a list of store addresses, and it would generate an embeddable map widget that e-commerce stores could drop into their website. The initial pricing was $5 per location per month, making it accessible even for small brands with a handful of retail partners.
The early growth came from the Shopify App Store, where Storemapper became one of the most popular store locator apps. The Shopify ecosystem was a perfect distribution channel because store owners were already looking for exactly this functionality and were comfortable paying monthly subscription fees for tools that integrated with their stores. Tyler didn't need to do cold outreach or run ads; the App Store brought customers to him.
Over the next two years, Tyler grew Storemapper from $200 per month to $2,000, and then from $2,000 to $7,000 by the end of 2014. Revenue more than tripled year over year. He was still running the business solo, handling customer support, development, and marketing himself while traveling through South America. The lifestyle was exactly what he wanted: location-independent income that grew steadily without requiring a team or an office.
By 2016, Tyler was pulling over $250,000 per year from Storemapper as owner salary, with revenues exceeding $18,000 per month. He had hired a small team to handle support and development, but the business was still lean. The product had expanded beyond Shopify to support BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and custom websites, broadening the addressable market.
The product reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue by 2017 with a team of five. At that point, Tyler started thinking about what came next. Storemapper was profitable and growing, but the market had a natural ceiling. There are only so many e-commerce stores that need store locators, and the average revenue per customer was relatively low. Tyler could see a path to continued slow growth but not to a dramatically larger business.
Tyler attended MicroConf, the conference for bootstrapped SaaS founders, and met Kevin McArdle from SureSwift Capital, a company that acquires and operates small SaaS businesses. After several months of discussions, Tyler agreed to sell Storemapper to SureSwift. The exact terms weren't publicly disclosed, but Tyler has said he was satisfied with the outcome and that the sale gave him the financial freedom to pursue his next venture.
That next venture was Earnest Capital, a fund designed to provide early-stage funding to bootstrapped founders. Tyler had seen firsthand how traditional VC funding was misaligned with the goals of most small software companies. VC investors want exponential growth and billion-dollar exits. Most bootstrapped founders want sustainable profitability and personal freedom. Earnest Capital offered a different model: small investments of $50K to $200K with terms that aligned with the founder's desire to build a profitable, sustainable business rather than chase hypergrowth.
Tyler's biggest mistake with Storemapper was not raising prices sooner. For years, the entry-level plan was priced too low, attracting price-sensitive customers who generated disproportionate support volume. When he finally experimented with higher prices, conversion rates barely changed but revenue per customer increased significantly. The lesson was clear: in B2B SaaS, most customers care more about whether the product solves their problem than about the price tag, within reason.
The Storemapper story became one of the defining examples of the micro-SaaS movement. Tyler wrote extensively about his journey on his blog, covering everything from the initial flight where he built the MVP to the decision to sell. His transparency helped inspire a generation of developers to consider building small, profitable SaaS products instead of chasing VC-funded moonshots. The idea that you could build a software business on a flight, grow it while traveling the world, sell it for a life-changing sum, and then use the proceeds to help other founders do the same resonated deeply with the bootstrapped community.
Tyler continues to run Earnest Capital, investing in early-stage bootstrapped and "calm" companies. His portfolio includes dozens of small SaaS businesses, many of which were inspired by the micro-SaaS playbook he pioneered. The throughline of his career, from building Storemapper on a plane to funding the next generation of bootstrappers, is a belief that technology businesses don't need to be venture-scale to be meaningful, profitable, and life-changing for the people who build them.