TrainerMetrics Receives Pre-Seed Funding Through TinySeed
We’re in.
We are excited to share that as of today, November 1st, 2023, TrainerMetrics was accepted into the TinySeed accelerator and received pre-seed funding. For anyone who has been following this company — or who has been building their own bootstrapped SaaS and understands what this means — we wanted to share the full story.
This one is personal
We first encountered Rob Walling in 2011 when he launched the Micropreneur Academy. At the time, we were personal trainers working 6 days a week and training 120-140 sessions a month, trying to figure out what building a software business actually looked like without venture capital, solely bootstrapped, and without a strategic roadmap.
Rob had one. He shared it openly.
Over the years, that evolved into Startups for the Rest of Us, MicroConf, and eventually TinySeed — a pre-seed fund and accelerator built specifically for bootstrapped and mostly-bootstrapped SaaS founders. The thesis was simple: there are a lot of good businesses being built by people who don’t fit the traditional VC mold, and they deserve real support.
We applied to TinySeed more than once. Each time was a checkpoint — a forcing function to get honest about where the business stood, what was working, and what wasn’t.
Getting accepted this time wasn’t just a nice outcome. It was a milestone we had been working toward for a long time.
What’s TinySeed?
If you’re not familiar: TinySeed is not a traditional accelerator. It’s not a 90-day sprint toward a demo day pitch. It’s a year-long program designed for founders who are already generating revenue and want to grow deliberately — with mentorship, capital, and a peer network of founders at a similar stage.
The Fall 2023 cohort includes 19 startups spanning 10 countries. TrainerMetrics is among them.
The mentors and advisors in the TinySeed network are practitioners — people who have built and scaled SaaS businesses and are willing to be direct about what that actually requires. That’s the resource we’re most looking forward to accessing.
What it means for TrainerMetrics
We built TrainerMetrics to solve a real operational problem: personal training departments at single-location and multi-location fitness organizations have no purpose-built infrastructure. Assessment data lives in paper folders. Program delivery is inconsistent across locations. Revenue reporting is manual and unreliable.
We’ve been solving that problem, quietly, for years. The customers who use TrainerMetrics have seen what’s possible when that infrastructure exists. The acceptance into TinySeed is validation that the problem is real, the market is real, and the timing is right to accelerate.
We’re not going to overpromise what the next year looks like. What we can say is that we have a clearer runway now, a stronger support network, and more capacity to build what this market needs.
Thank you
To the TrainerMetrics team: you helped us get to the starting line. That’s not a small thing.
To our customers: you trusted us early, gave us honest feedback, and built your businesses on a platform that was still finding its footing. That trust is not taken for granted.
To Rob Walling and the TinySeed team: thank you for building a program designed for founders like us.
More to come.
— Devin & Hank, Co-Founders, TrainerMetrics
