Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales. This is Season 4, Episode 8, the penultimate episode where we hear Colleen Schnettler with her back to the wall as she's trying to find product market fit. Before we dive into this episode, I want to tell you about SaaS Launchpad. This is the best course I've ever created and it is the best course that I know of for early stage SaaS founders. You can get it at SaaS Launchpad.
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a bunch of names that you know. We really enjoyed building the course and it's getting rave reviews from the hundreds of folks who have purchased it. So saslaunchpad.co if you're interested. Let's dive in to Tiny Seed Tales. The product is totally different, but the job to be done is the same. And, you know, we couldn't make that first product really work the way we want it to. But this feels very doable with the tech that I already have.
Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the roller coaster of building their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers.
We're now in episode eight with developer and entrepreneur Colleen Schnettler. The last time we chatted with Colleen, she decided to make some changes. It no longer made sense to cater to engineering managers. So she decided to shift her focus to helping marketers. caused its own frustration since the market was pretty crowded. I was going all in on marketing data analyst.
I was, I think I mentioned this last episode, but doing the whole cold LinkedIn DM thing, started a newsletter, targeted those people, built a guide and engaged as many of those people as I could in actual conversation. I had honestly kind of an abysmal response rate from my cold LinkedIn outreach. I don't know if that's because marketers are just overwhelmed with choice, but it wasn't great. The few people I did get on the phone.
They aren't using their database as a tool to provide any kind of signal. So they have many, many different data sources. They're almost overwhelmed with data sources. But one of those data sources is not the database. That makes sense. So they have all these tools, these little mix panel and product analytics, or even I imagine tracking incoming conversions from ads and SEO and all that. And yeah, none of that's all third party data. Yep. There was some interest, but it was more of a...
that would be nice to have. There was no, this is absolutely something I need to do my job. And a lot of them are using like data aggregators, like a segment or something like that. And those tools just pretty much pull in your data from all these different sources, try to aggregate it.
Some people use BigQuery, so they are using databases. They're just not using their like main or primary database. Right. And so would an approach there be to do a bunch of integrations and like pull that data in and aggregate it? Yeah, I thought about that. That was one of the things I looked at because I could be an aggregator. I could sit on top of BigQuery. But learning more about that, it's pretty tricky.
I actually have a founder friend and that's what his business literally does. And maintaining those integrations can be really, really painful. So without, again, it comes down to, I would totally build that if I thought it would work. But I don't have any kind of unique take on it that all of these other data aggregators, you know.
Like, I'm not like, oh, I've seen this one hole in the market and I'm going to solve it. Like, there was nothing like that. It was like, this is a space. There's a lot of players in this space. Most people use segment. Can you build something better? And not being a marketer, I think this is where maybe the fact that I'm just learning marketing, that is both...
Helpful and harmful. Like it's helpful because I'm approaching it with beginner eyes. So I'm able to kind of see things people take as, you know, kind of just ground truth. But also it's hurtful because I don't have deep industry knowledge. So I can't say this is the very...
specific problem that is wrong with segment, here is how I can solve it. And it's hard to enter a competitive, crowded space when you don't, when you don't have an obvious position. Yeah, that's my take on it. It's just, I mean, that's... It's just not worth it without having 30 people saying, yes, I need this one very specific thing. So I saw a lot of people's problems, even like getting segment data. One person I spoke with walked me through like getting his segment data into big.
query and all this custom stuff he had to do. But that was, I couldn't see how that wasn't just an isolated problem he had because of his unique data like structure. And that's one of the hard parts about all of this is there's so much noise among the signal. Sometimes all the signal is kind of noise. Talk to 10 people, they tell you 10 different things.
You told me to talk to my customers. What do I build now, right? You can't build what they all said because it's 10 different products. So where did that lead you? Like, where does it stand? Where does Heliquary stand today? The one thing that the marketers did seem to have in common was a general hatred for GA4.
And so I kind of went down the GA4 path for a while to learn more about that space to see if there was something I could build on top of GA4. But again, what I learned there was I don't... Like I wasn't a power user of Universal Analytics. So I can't say there's this one feature in Universal Analytics I really miss that I want to build out in GA4.
So anyway, I didn't think I was the right person to build like a GA4 wrapper, for example, although I spent some time investigating it to see if that was the right choice. Like, I don't have a strong enough opinion about... what i would want in that kind of a product like what data insights are not being surfaced and so i did not think that was the right direction to go
Eventually, though, Colleen did find a new direction, one that led her towards an epiphany. She found a new customer who wanted to pull their own data. This had her reconsidering an idea that she had tabled in the past. The product is totally different, but the job to be done is the same. And, you know, we couldn't make that first product really work the way we wanted to. You know, why that is, it's neither here nor there, but...
This feels very doable with the tech that I already have. So it's ambitious, but... It is full circle and it is like something I can build and I have someone who will pay me for it. So I'm going to do it. That's crazy. How much will he be paying you for? $150 a month. And you already have a customer paying you $60, right? $59?
Yeah. Well, now they're both. So now I have two customers paying me 60 bucks a month. Got it. And then this guy told me he'll upgrade once I have this SSO embedded features. It's going to be at $210 of MRR soon. That's got to. two customers though for me i mean it does i know i know we're laughing because it's just it's true
Because it's just, it is, it's like been a long journey, you know? So this is, here's the interesting thing. When you were going to build or you built the query builder, you know, back in episode one and two, there was something with where like embedding it in an app was going to be complicated because it doesn't. doesn't look and feel like their app, right? And it's like, ooh, it's like really hard to make it. But now it's just a text box, right? I mean, it's a tabular display of stuff, but...
Yeah, so the biggest difference is there's I mean, it's a completely different product. But yeah, the UI will be less just because it's less obtrusive in terms of what the UI is versus what we were looking at building first. A while back, Colleen mentioned she had six months of runway until she ran out of funding, which would have taken her through December, just three months from when we were having this conversation. I wanted to check in and see how she was feeling about that timeline.
I have mixed feelings about it. This whole season of this podcast shows a really real journey. And unfortunately, it just hasn't gone the way I thought it would. man, but I don't want to do anything else. And that's the weirdest thing because before I got into Tiny Seed and before, you know, we got that initial big contract, like it just seemed inevitable that this was going to work.
It was just like, there's nothing like I will outwork anyone. Like I will like I will do anything. I am coachable. I have all of the skills, literally all the skills to make this work. So. And the trajectory that it's taken, which is really not working, is a super bummer. But also, I don't want to do anything else. So I do think I'm going to stick. So for this business.
And it might be this is the wrong business. You know, everyone, and you can speak to this, everyone who has found product market fit says you will know. Like when you are building something people want, you will know. And so I can tell you right now for sure that is not happening to me. Like, I am not building something people want. I am cold calling and...
you know, trying to get people onboarded. And it's like just pushing this boulder up the hill. Like you want this thing? You want this thing? And I'm not. So this last pivot to customer facing. This is my last pivot on this business. So I, one thing I don't want, and I know a lot of people who do this.
And that's fine for them. But I don't want a side project that goes on for five years, making no money or a little bit of money. Oh, it's making $200 a month. I should keep it up. No, I'm here to like, go big or go home. Like I'm kind of an intense person. Like I am.
all in. So yeah, so that's why I'm giving myself till the end of the year. I have a specific goal of where I want to be by the end of December. And if I'm not there, then I'm just gonna walk away. And it's really good to have that clarity. Because otherwise, how do you answer that question of when to quit? When do I quit? I get this question all the time, right? On the podcast, people ask you and it's like, it sounds like you're pretty clear on knowing when to quit, that it's not today.
It's either end of December or it's not, depending on this kill criteria. So I don't know if you've read the book Quit by Annie Duke, but there were a couple of things in it that I took away from. And one is kill criteria, knowing when. to quit and kill criteria involves a date and some type of number usually, or some type of milestone that if you haven't hit this by that date, then it's done.
And you can adjust along the way, of course, you know, as you get new information, but that's exactly what you've defined here is a date and a number. And I decided I need to do that because I do want to, I mean, I want this to work so badly. So that's why I kind of gave myself those guardrails to be like, this is if you've been doing this for.
two years and it's still not working. And to be fair, like a lot happened in there and, you know, we sold the other thing, but you know, that's probably a sign. It's not the right thing. Like you're not working on the right thing. Yeah. And this is. I say this all the time that this is the hardest part, or at least...
I guess it's the hardest part mentally, I think, because you just don't know and no one can tell you. I can't sit here and say, oh, you should definitely take this approach or this direction because none of us know. You're like trying to do something novel. And this is one of the hard parts of entrepreneurship is that fuzzy time. before product market fit. But as you start building something people want, your product matures, 5K, 10K, MRR, things become...
clearer. And then by the time you hit 50k MR, it's really clear what you're building, who you're building it for, you know, or it should be unless you're really getting lucky, which can happen. But this part's fuzzy. This part is... hard to even prescribe the frameworks for it are really loose i mean you need to talk about customer development or lean startup or i have you know this course in this book called sas launchpad
I get as tight as I can with it, but I can't be as prescriptive as I can if you were to come and be like, hey, I'm a 20K MRR and I have 20 customers or 30, whatever. And I can be like, oh, great. Let's I can playbook. out of this you know i know the next steps i can almost blueprint this out if exactly what i would do in which order blah blah blah but where you're at is just like you're just searching you're trying to find it you're using founder gut and you're making
or a lot of hard decisions with incomplete information, a ton of noise. Lots of noise. I mean, when... I didn't like, you know, I haven't talked to you in a couple of months. So one of the things I tried in that gap was going after product people. And I mentioned that the marketing people didn't really want to talk to me. The product people all wanted to talk to me. Like I got on so many calls.
And Rob, there were several, there were several people that I was sure, like 100% sure they were going to sign up and try it out. And like, I just got ghosted so hard by these people. Like so hard. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a you know, it's a messy, weird middle ground to your point. Signal till noise like.
Getting on these calls, these people were like, yes, I need this to make product decisions. A hundred percent. And just disappeared. Won't respond to emails. Won't respond to LinkedIn messages. Just gone. Poof. So, you know. Those are the road. Those are the speed bumps that you encounter. You can let them be roadblocks or you can just let them be speed bumps, keep driving, pivot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's just like filtering that out at this stage. It's just.
Yeah. It's just trying to filter that stuff out. It's trying to figure out what people really want, what's actually useful and like really defining that value prop for people, which even now with what I have isn't. crazy clear even to me. Like I have a big sales demo on Monday for a big company and I'm sitting here thinking like, what, what is the one thing that I can show them? And I'm like, this is the thing you need.
This is why you reached out to me. Like, this is the thing. So even like defining all of that, it's messy and it's hard. And you're kind of like. building and showing people and building and showing people. And you kind of hope, or at least that's how I work. I hope to iterate my way to the correct solution. As the end of Colleen's runway approaches, she'll have a lot to consider.
Can she hone her value prop and find a bit of traction with a handful of paying customers in order to extend her runway? That's next time on Tiny Seed Tales.