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In this episode of TinySeed Tales, Rob Walling catches up with Colleen Schnettler, co-founder of Hammerstone, about the progress her team has made since their initial check-in.
Colleen describes the tough decision to focus on one product stack, and their recent pivot toward building a reporting MVP. They also discuss Colleen’s shift into a more managerial role.
Topics we cover:
- (2:10) – Motivations behind building additional functionality
- (7:07) – Repositioning the reporting dashboard
- (10:08) – Focusing in on the successful part of the product
- (14:30) – How shifting focus affects the team dynamic
- (16:19) – ”Hiring is horrible”
- (22:20) – What has management been like?
- (26:11) – Growing as a manager
Links from the Show:
- Invest with TinySeed
- Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X
- Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky
- Refine by Hammerstone
- Hello Query
- Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
Rob Walling:
Welcome back to season four, episode two of TinySeed Tales where we continue hearing Colleen Sch Nestler’s Startup journey. TinySeed is the gold standard for mentorship, funding, and advice for bootstrapped SaaS founders. We’re a world class accelerator and most people come to us not for the money, but for the community, the masterminds, the playbooks, the mentorship, and the advice We are raising fund three. So if you are an accredited investor or the equivalent in your country and you want to put some money to work and effectively index across dozens, if not hundreds of ambitious, handpicked motivated B2B SaaS companies, you should head to TinySeed dot com slash invest and take a look around. If you fill out the form there expressing your interest, that goes straight to my co-founder Volt, whom you’ve heard on the show, and it’ll provide you with our full fundraising deck and answer any questions you have about investing. Progress on our fundraise is going very well so far, and if you’d love to come on board with TinySeed and join me in empowering and accelerating hundreds of B2B SaaS founders, head to TinySeed dot com slash invest. And with that, let’s dive into season four, episode two of TinySeed Tales.
Colleen Schnettler:
Oh man. It’s like having both kind of felt like a safety net, and I know that’s a false feeling, but you’re like, oh, well, if it doesn’t work out in Rails, it’s okay because we have Layer Valve. If it doesn’t work out in Layer Valve, it’s okay. We have Rails. It kind of felt like spreading the net wide, like lots of small bets if you will, gave us this safety. It gave me a feeling of safety, and so to go all in on one stack is I absolutely think the smart thing to do, but it’s also scarier because if it doesn’t work, then you’re like, oh, shoot. Now what?
Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles, victories, and failures as they build their startup. I’m your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for Bootstrappers. Today on episode two, we’re back with Colleen Schettler, a developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Hammer Stone. It’s been about six weeks since Colleen and I last spoke, so I reached out to her via email to find out if anything notable had happened since our last conversation. As many of us know when it comes to building startups, it’s not uncommon to go through periods of time where although you’re grinding, nothing terribly noteworthy has occurred. But when I heard back from Colleen, I was shocked by how many interesting things have been happening with Hammer Stone. One recent development is Colleen and her co-founder Erin, have made the decision to build a reporting dashboard into their product. I was curious to learn more about this additional functionality and what inspired Colleen and Erin to build it.
Colleen Schnettler:
So the product as it stands right now is a drop in filter builder component. So what that means is you as the developer, or let’s say you’re the product manager and you want to buy this, you then have to have your developer drop it in, but he or she also has to do a lot of customization to hook it up. And one of the hardest technical issues we keep running into is if people are going to pay a large amount of money for a product, they want it to match their UI perfectly. Frontend UI customization for a composable query builder is just a bear. It is so hard and we keep changing things and trying to give people more, make it more customizable, but fundamentally, what keeps happening is the most painful part of this product. It’s not the query building, which you think that’d be the hard part, but that’s not really the hard part.
It’s the front end UI customization, and what we were finding is people are putting this on index views or whatever, and they’re building reports. Fundamentally, people are using this to build reports, only query builder. No one knows what that is. So even positioning that and trying to sell that is really hard. People are what? Wait, what does it do? Can you explain it again? And so the positioning on it is really tough, and ultimately 85 to 90% of the use case is just reporting anyway. So we, after talking to several customers who have purchased the product that we have, we realized there’s an opportunity here to build out reporting. We own the UI on that, so we don’t have this. It has to fit in perfectly with your existing index views. We own the whole page, we own the ui, and we can build out this functionality we keep telling you you can do. So when we sell QueryBuilder, we say things like, oh, you can use it to schedule background jobs so your customers can get an email every week of who purchased their product. But then you as the purchaser of our product, have to build that out. Reporting gives us the company Hammer, stone, the ability to build all that out for you and just sell you a real true drop in solution.
Rob Walling:
How did you come to this solution? As you describe it, sounds completely obvious to me. I find that things that look completely obvious in retrospect are not completely obvious when you have 20 different data points. It’s this muddy thing of like, should we do this? Should we build it in a third language? You have PHP, you have Ruby already. Do we expand into a third language? Or you have 20 different options that you could have done and you’re deciding to do this one. How did you get here?
Colleen Schnettler:
So we want to be focused. I think we’re a small team with limited resources and we are trying to throw our net too wide. Isn’t that always the advice you give to Bootstrappers? You need to niche down, niche down. So we’re trying to focus and just hitting the same pain points over and over with customers who purchase it. I have this on the rail side, people are not using it in production, not yet customizable enough, and they’re like, really? We want to give our customers what we keep hearing over and over. These are reports for our customers. Our customers come in and they want to be able to find X, Y, and Z, so I have to build them the report. And so we had to make a decision. We felt that these multiple products and multiple frameworks was not focused enough, so we needed to make a decision and we feel like this is a focused decision. And honestly, it’s so funny you wouldn’t think this, but this positioning matters. We really, as a tech person, you like to believe that’s not true. You’re like, you’ll just see the beauty of the product, but we can’t sell it. We can’t freaking explain it. So reporting feels very explainable to people.
Rob Walling:
Colleen is spot on. Reporting is very explainable. This pivot also requires effective positioning. As she mentioned, as builders and makers, we often believe that the product should simply sell itself, but unfortunately products don’t do that. There are a lot of strategies you can use when trying to reposition a product like changing the website or having conversations with customers. I asked Colleen if she’d tried any of these tactics yet and if so, how they’re working out.
Colleen Schnettler:
So we haven’t done anything on our website, we haven’t repositioned that, but what we’re doing is when people come to us about QueryBuilder, we also are showing them our mockup UI of what reporting dashboard is going to look like. And nine times out of 10, they say that’s what they’re trying to build anyway. I mean, it feels like it’s going to be, the signals are good, I guess.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s where sometimes you find an avenue that instantly feels like, oh, this works, this works. If you’re saying nine out of 10, that’s an incredible win because I’ve seen folks try to do a pivot like this or an expansion or whatever, and maybe it’s five out of 10 and it’s still the right call because the other five want five different things, but at least if you can get half the people to want the same thing, then you have a market there that’s really cool. So they’re already trying to build this and it’s really just we’re going to take on more of the functionality. I think of it a little bit, think of all these tools that we’ve seen just expand and expand and expand. They’re at a larger scale, but HubSpot, it was a website builder with Google Analytics built into it. It was very simple, and then they’re like, now we’re going to add SEO tools, now we’re going to add a CRM, now we’re going to add whatever. I mean, HubSpot’s just this big, right? And they’re a public company and all that, but in a way, you found that you built something that was worth something but maybe not enough and it got you to where you are today, which is great. It’s almost like, oh, we got to step one. It’s like this is the next piece of functionality around it. Is there something beyond that? Have you even thought about it? Or I guess you’re still thinking, let’s just get slowed down. Let me get this thing shipped before we even think about that.
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, it’s interesting because our original hypothesis or dream with this company was to build developer components. So yeah, it feels like there is something beyond it. I mean, we’re already starting to think bigger, which is exciting. We’re focusing on Rails and Aaron, my co-founder comes from Laravel where they have this beautiful admin panel and he’s like, what are you using Rails? I was like, nothing. We all use a hodgepodge of open source components that kind of sort of work, and you make ’em work the way you want ’em to, but there feels like there is something beyond this. There’s an opportunity to maybe it’s reporting and we become profitable in that space. Maybe it’s a full admin dashboard, maybe it’s taking some of the things that are missing in our framework and bringing them to the framework as paid add-ons. We feel like there’s a lot of potential here.
Rob Walling:
I’m really looking forward to seeing what Colleen and Erin do in the coming months with all that potential. Another area they appear to have made a lot of progress in is deciding to focus on one element of the product line that is proven to be more successful, but reaching that decision wasn’t as simple as it sounds.
Colleen Schnettler:
So in just the last episode we talked about how we are going after both the Laravel and the Rails markets and we have a product in both of those markets. And the interesting thing about this is the product is functionally the same, but practically it’s two completely different products, different code bases, different customers, different go to market strategies, and I perpetually feel like we’re not moving fast enough, and one of the things we were talking about is how do you succeed? You got to run experiments until you figure out what works. So let’s keep running experiments and in the Laravel space, we have run what I would consider three experiments now. We built Aaron, my co-founder, built this beautiful drop in query builder component and we tried to sell it and five people bought it right? There was not a knocking down of the doors for it.
Then our next experiment was, okay, it’s because it’s not easy enough to integrate. Let’s integrate it in their paid add-on, which is called Laravel Nova, which is the Laravel admin dashboard. So then we built it so it integrates exactly perfectly into Laravel Nova and we’re like, oh, this is it. Now it’s going to be a one click installation. Everyone’s going to buy it. No one it. And then so now we’re on experiment three if you’re counting. Then we said, oh, it’s because the price anchoring in Laravel is so low. It’s way, way, way too expensive. And so we dropped the price and we thought, oh, now we’re going to drop the price. That’s it. This is the gates are going to open, and we sold four. So it feels like to us, we have run three experiments in the Laravel space and we have shown that that market has a low propensity to pay for things, and if you look at the customers we’re getting in rails versus the customers we’re getting in Laravel and Laravel getting a lot of hobbyist in rails.
We’re getting a lot of companies. And so when you look at the propensity to pay, we think the rails market is just a little more mature and the people are coming to us are more likely to pay for things, and so we’re holding these facts in our hands. This literally, we decided this last week and we’re like, okay, what do we do? And we’re, it feels like we’re working on two different things. We’re like, we’ve got to be rowing in the same direction. We need to be working together, common vision, common goal, and so we think we’re relatively confident we are going to focus both of our efforts on the rail space to test experiments in that space.
Rob Walling:
How did it feel once you made that decision last week?
Colleen Schnettler:
I mean, it feels scary because, oh man, it’s having both kind of felt like a safety net, and I know that’s a false feeling, but you’re like, oh, well, if it doesn’t work out in rails, it’s okay. We have layer valve. If it doesn’t work out in rail valve, it’s okay. We have rails. It kind of felt like spreading the net wide, lots of small bets if you will, gave us this safety. It gave me a feeling of safety. And so to go all in on one stack is I absolutely think the smart thing to do, but it’s also scarier because if it doesn’t work, then you’re like, oh, shoot. Now what?
Rob Walling:
Asking yourself now what is something I’m sure we can all relate to? I see this often from indie hacker types. They launch and they get that quick hit of dopamine from a product hunt launch only to then realize that the project gets little or no traction, or if they did get some uptick, they don’t actually want to market and sell it, which bringing us full circle leaves them asking themselves now. So I see folks try to diversify by having a bunch of irons in the fire, but I think the lack of focus means nothing gets enough momentum to get traction. If you recall from episode one, Aaron is a Laravel developer, while Colleen is a Rails developer and seeing as how their focus has shifted more into Rails, I was curious to find out how this impacts Aaron.
Colleen Schnettler:
Aaron is a phenomenal developer, a great product designer, and he can churn out code so fast. I am a very, very good developer, but I would say his skills exceed mine in that arena. And so our relationship up until last week has been that he does all the product kind of design development and I do everything that turns that into a business. So I’m the Rails developer, so this is going to be an interesting shift for us to figure out how we both fit. And I think that’s too part of the reason I’m nervous how we both fit into the company with this new vision and we’re still trying to figure that out. He loves Laravel and the community, so hopefully we get to a point where we will be able to work on both products, but right now we’re thinking he’s going to learn Rails, which is kind of fun and I think could be really good marketing content, honestly, because he excels as a developer relations person, so him learning rails and tweeting about it would get a ton of eyeballs on our content. So we feel like that’s probably the path forward. But it’s interesting. It puts us both outside of our comfort zone.
Rob Walling:
Stepping outside of your comfort zone is never easy, but a senior developer, Aaron shouldn’t have too much trouble picking up a new concept or even a new programming language. I’ve always been shocked by how quickly the senior devs I work with were able to pick up new languages and not just pick ’em up but really understand them. I’ll be sure to get an update on that next time I sit down with Colleen. Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about hiring. In a recent email Colleen sent me, she wrote, I hired a new developer. He’s awesome, but the hiring was terrible. I’ve hired in the past and I have a process I’ve used that didn’t work out, so this time I did it properly and it was a huge pain, but totally worth it. Let’s find out what exactly was so horrible about the hiring process, including what she’s tried in the past and what she did this time around.
Colleen Schnettler:
So what I’ve done in the past is, this is embarrassing to admit, but it is what it is. I basically said on my podcast, which was relatively popular, that I was hiring people Twitter DMed me or emailed me and I said, that seems great. And we just started working together or someone, a friend of a friend was like, Hey, I’ve worked with this person. He’s great. I said, okay, cool. I just hired them with no thought, rhyme or reason to if they were a good fit for what I was trying to do. It was a good, I mean, you think about this in terms of learning so much of this startup journey For me even I’ve only been full-time on the business for two months and I just feel like I’m learning at this incredibly accelerated rate, and so I try to look at these experiences as learning experiences instead of, holy cow, why did I do that? That was stupid.
Rob Walling:
Oh yeah. Oh, it’s absolutely a learning experience and that’s one of the reasons we’re on a podcast right now is so that people listening will hopefully not make the same mistakes that you’ve made that I’ve made. What is the old quote? It’s like a wise person learns from the mistakes of others, and I feel like, yeah, learning you’re doing is a greatly accelerated pace once you’re full-time focused on something and you start doing new things that maybe you haven’t done in the past. So what was the new process then? Posting a job description, doing interviews, all that.
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, so I heard about Dan Martel’s book on your podcast actually. So I bought the book, I read it in a weekend. So I was feeling real inspired and then I took a more measured approach to it, and I think the biggest thing that didn’t work out with the early people I hired, they were all wonderful. There was no problem except that I had not set expectations,
And at some point, I don’t know, I expected ’em to read my mind. I don’t know what I thought they were going to do with no expectations, and so I just hadn’t written down what I really needed when the person didn’t deliver what I really needed, and then I’m talking to him two months later. Of course, it didn’t work out. There’s no way this time I started with a proper job description, here is what I really need. And I posted that job description on a couple rails, job boards, got tons of applicants. It was amazing. That’s good and bad though. Then you have to go through them all.
Rob Walling:
I know what that feels like. Yeah,
Colleen Schnettler:
Got tons of applicants. And one of the things I did is I put a really, I don’t want to say easy, but I put a little coding challenge two liner in the form, in the application form just to weed out people who actually were paying attention. And so yeah, I went through all these job applications. I did intro calls with seven people, and then I wrote up a coding challenge and I gave the coding challenge to four people, and then I selected one person based on that. But even things like a coding challenge, you’re like, man, this is kind of a pain. What do I do to come up with what’s relevant to come up with? And just the logistics around that. You got to come up with something, but I didn’t want to just grab something off the shelf. I wanted something that was specific.
What we do is very specific, and one of the things I was really filtering for was communication, because I work with this person really, really closely. So how do you communicate? How far do you go when you have an issue before you reach out to me? So I made a custom coding challenge, and we do a lot of stimulus and hot wires, so I needed to make sure they actually had stimulus and hot wire knowledge and things like that. So it did work out, but it was like I’ve been color coding my days, energy levels, green, yellow, red. That was a lot of red that week.
Rob Walling:
Rob, I can imagine. I want to touch on a couple things that we talked about there. One is I don’t want it to come across, it’s not okay to out of your network because it is, I’ve done it. I’ve had it work. Tracy Osborne, TinySeed program manager, was a microcom speaker in 2016 and kind of was in the orbit. I didn’t know her very well, but we had a full job description. We posted it publicly. We got a bunch of applicant. She was one, and I was like, Ooh, I think this could be a winner. But then she went through a full interview process, you know what I mean? She went with an upfront and a second, and then there was an offer letter. Everything was as official as if we did not know her. And so I want a listener, speaking of learning from mistakes or experience for me when we hire today, like producer Ron who helps produce this podcast in our YouTube channel. He has been a tenure listener of startups For the Rest Of Us, for example. So he is in our community in essence, but full hiring process. So I like hiring out of your network. I just think you want the officialness of it because as you said otherwise you don’t exactly know what you’re getting and maybe you’re doing the candidate a disservice a bit.
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, I totally agree. Well, hopefully I’ll be hiring again someday, and I will go through, I mean, if I’m hiring someone in my network, I’m not going to go through interviewing 35 people or whatever, but I will go through the process of a proper job description, proper expectations of engagement, coding, challenge, the whole thing, because I think you’re right. Even when you hire in your network, it’s good to go through that entire process so everyone knows what’s going on.
Rob Walling:
So with hiring comes managing, you’re managing a team. Have you managed a team of developers before? What’s that like for you?
Colleen Schnettler:
I have not. And it’s been interesting because I’m a very likable person, people like me, and I guess I thought that would magically translate into being a good manager, and spoiler alert, it does not. Yeah, I have really struggled with figuring out how to manage people, what the right cadence is.
Rob Walling:
I find that being nice. I consider myself similar. I’m a very likable person. I’m amicable. I had to get over the fact. I started managing, I’m trying to think. I was probably 29 ish years old, which is for me was young. I took me a while to mature. I was too nice. I didn’t know how to give negative feedback. I feared giving negative feedback. That is something for people who are pretty amicable and get along with everybody to get in a meeting like this and say, I love working with you, but you drop the ball on this, or I need you to do better in this area. Let me help you. It somehow feels like you’re being mean. I think we’re trained not to say bad things about people. I think we’re trained not to tell people they’re not doing a good job, and yet that’s what you have to do as a manager. And that’s one thing that I have as I’ve hired people who haven’t managed, and I mentor them into being managers. This is what I tell them is, you’re going to build great rapport with the folks who work from you. They’re going to, you figure out a way to help them improve, to help them get better, and in order to help them get better, you have to point things out that they’re not doing at the top of their game.
Colleen Schnettler:
That is a hundred percent my problem. I worked back in the pre 15 years ago, I worked at a Fortune 500 company, and it was the kind of company that had meetings just to plan the next meetings. So I came out of that experience being like, we don’t do anything at this company except have meetings. So I am never having meetings. There will be no meetings. Well, here I am wanting to have meetings with my developers. So yeah, it’s a super learning process. I am trying to figure it out.
Rob Walling:
So speaking of meetings and how much, I hate meetings as well, I never liked one-on-one meetings. So when I was a developer, we do these one-on-ones with your boss or your supervisor, and I was always like, this is such a bold, can you leave me alone so I can go write I code to write? I don’t want to talk to you about my feelings. And then I had a team of 10 and I was doing no one-on-ones, and I realized, oh, no one’s going to just come and tell me when there’s a grievance or when they feel bad, they’re not going to initiate a lot, especially introverted developers don’t want to rock the boat, don’t want to, whatever. For whatever reason, they don’t have the opportunity for it. And I realized I have to do one-on-ones. And so if you have senior people, I do monthly one-on-ones.
If you have mid-level, usually it’s every two weeks, whatever the cadence, but that one-on-one then is the time every two weeks or every month for them to talk about their performance, for them to talk about, to make sure that you’re guiding them well, and then for you to talk about their performance and to compliment them like, you did an amazing job here, here, and here. And then to say, Hey, so we shift a bug to production that broke our trial flow. Obviously we need more process to not do that, but talk to me about how that happened. Let’s talk it through. The idea behind them is that it forces you to do it, otherwise you’re never going to do it. You’re not going to think, wake up today and think, man, I should really talk to so-and-so about how they’re dropping the ball. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. How are you thinking about getting better as a manager? Do you have any friends, mentors? Do you have any books that you plan to read?
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, I am challenging myself to be more, I dunno if assertive is the right word, but as you described, to be more honest, I was socialized or whatever. I am bad at giving negative feedback. It’s funny because I’m always kind of tiptoeing around the issue, and my co-founder is actually great at emotional intelligence. And so Aaron, and I’ll be on the call and he’ll say this thing to me where he’s like, what’s the subtext you’re not saying? And that always makes you be like, oh, what is the thing that I’m not saying? I don’t want to hurt your feelings. And so I’m trying. But honestly, I don’t really know. I mean, I’m just trying to be better. We weren’t having regular check-ins. Now that I have this team of three, I’m trying to do regular check-ins with everyone and give them an opportunity to speak, but also be more assertive, like I said, in terms of being like, Hey, you’ve got to hit this deadline.
If you’re not going to hit this deadline, I need to know before the day of the deadline. We’ve got to communicate in such a way that I share my expectations with you and you give me feedback on whether or not those expectations can be met. And I do read a lot of books, so I just read Never Split the Difference, which is technically a negotiating book, but just felt kind of like a communications book. So I’m trying to take some of those tactics into place when speaking to my team. It’s hard too, because if you think of the success of a business, the success of a business, I think you’d know better. But it depends on your team. I was reading a bunch of stuff from the Netflix guy, and he talked about how he goes in and fires all the B players, because if you want to build something excellent, you need a team of excellent people that can work together. But also, it’s hard coming in from a tech side like, ah, managing’s not that important. How hard can it be? Do I really need to learn how to do this? So it’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition between being a technical person trying to run a business and appreciating the importance of a good team. And one of the things I was doing in the early days of a team was I was so worried everyone was going to quit
Because good developers are hard to find and hard to retain. And so instead of unifying people behind a shared vision, I was trying to let everyone do whatever they wanted so they wouldn’t quit. I wasn’t a real fear. No one quit, but it’s just you have all this stuff, these subconscious thoughts about how do I keep these people happy? So they enjoy working here. So they have that intrinsic motivation while also telling them when they’re not performing up to standards.
Rob Walling:
That is it. That’s the difficult balance. The interesting thing is you don’t need to be a good manager in the near term. You can hire people, you’ll do fine for six months, you’ll be fine for a year, but in the long term, if you want to grow this larger, you will start to lose people if things are poorly managed, frankly, especially as the team gets bigger and especially the longer people stick around, they just get tired of it. As we wrap up, what’s the one thing you’re most looking forward to between now and the next time we chat?
Colleen Schnettler:
I am super excited about this whole reporting MVP pivot. Like Aaron has all these cool ideas about what it’s going to look like, and by the time I talk to you next, we should have this. I mean, it won’t be done done, but we will have a solid functional MVP that we can start really picking up and showing to potential customers. So that is definitely what I’m most excited about.
Rob Walling:
Love it. That’s awesome. That’s the next milestone. I’m excited for you too. Thanks. I am excited to see where Colleen, Aaron and Hammer Stone are. The next time we talk, we’ll learn more about their progress on the reporting MVP pivot. Find out how Aaron’s Rails skills are developing and dive even deeper into Colleen and Aaron’s ongoing journey with Hammer.
Welcome back to season four, episode two of TinySeed Tales where we continue hearing Colleen Sch Nestler’s Startup journey. TinySeed is the gold standard for mentorship, funding, and advice for bootstrapped SaaS founders. We’re a world class accelerator and most people come to us not for the money, but for the community, the masterminds, the playbooks, the mentorship, and the advice We are raising fund three. So if you are an accredited investor or the equivalent in your country and you want to put some money to work and effectively index across dozens, if not hundreds of ambitious, handpicked motivated B2B SaaS companies, you should head to TinySeed dot com slash invest and take a look around. If you fill out the form there expressing your interest, that goes straight to my co-founder Volt, whom you’ve heard on the show, and it’ll provide you with our full fundraising deck and answer any questions you have about investing. Progress on our fundraise is going very well so far, and if you’d love to come on board with TinySeed and join me in empowering and accelerating hundreds of B2B SaaS founders, head to TinySeed dot com slash invest. And with that, let’s dive into season four, episode two of TinySeed Tales.
Colleen Schnettler:
Oh man. It’s like having both kind of felt like a safety net, and I know that’s a false feeling, but you’re like, oh, well, if it doesn’t work out in Rails, it’s okay because we have Layer Valve. If it doesn’t work out in Layer Valve, it’s okay. We have Rails. It kind of felt like spreading the net wide, like lots of small bets if you will, gave us this safety. It gave me a feeling of safety, and so to go all in on one stack is I absolutely think the smart thing to do, but it’s also scarier because if it doesn’t work, then you’re like, oh, shoot. Now what?
Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles, victories, and failures as they build their startup. I’m your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for Bootstrappers. Today on episode two, we’re back with Colleen Schettler, a developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Hammer Stone. It’s been about six weeks since Colleen and I last spoke, so I reached out to her via email to find out if anything notable had happened since our last conversation. As many of us know when it comes to building startups, it’s not uncommon to go through periods of time where although you’re grinding, nothing terribly noteworthy has occurred. But when I heard back from Colleen, I was shocked by how many interesting things have been happening with Hammer Stone. One recent development is Colleen and her co-founder Erin, have made the decision to build a reporting dashboard into their product. I was curious to learn more about this additional functionality and what inspired Colleen and Erin to build it.
Colleen Schnettler:
So the product as it stands right now is a drop in filter builder component. So what that means is you as the developer, or let’s say you’re the product manager and you want to buy this, you then have to have your developer drop it in, but he or she also has to do a lot of customization to hook it up. And one of the hardest technical issues we keep running into is if people are going to pay a large amount of money for a product, they want it to match their UI perfectly. Frontend UI customization for a composable query builder is just a bear. It is so hard and we keep changing things and trying to give people more, make it more customizable, but fundamentally, what keeps happening is the most painful part of this product. It’s not the query building, which you think that’d be the hard part, but that’s not really the hard part.
It’s the front end UI customization, and what we were finding is people are putting this on index views or whatever, and they’re building reports. Fundamentally, people are using this to build reports, only query builder. No one knows what that is. So even positioning that and trying to sell that is really hard. People are what? Wait, what does it do? Can you explain it again? And so the positioning on it is really tough, and ultimately 85 to 90% of the use case is just reporting anyway. So we, after talking to several customers who have purchased the product that we have, we realized there’s an opportunity here to build out reporting. We own the UI on that, so we don’t have this. It has to fit in perfectly with your existing index views. We own the whole page, we own the ui, and we can build out this functionality we keep telling you you can do. So when we sell QueryBuilder, we say things like, oh, you can use it to schedule background jobs so your customers can get an email every week of who purchased their product. But then you as the purchaser of our product, have to build that out. Reporting gives us the company Hammer, stone, the ability to build all that out for you and just sell you a real true drop in solution.
Rob Walling:
How did you come to this solution? As you describe it, sounds completely obvious to me. I find that things that look completely obvious in retrospect are not completely obvious when you have 20 different data points. It’s this muddy thing of like, should we do this? Should we build it in a third language? You have PHP, you have Ruby already. Do we expand into a third language? Or you have 20 different options that you could have done and you’re deciding to do this one. How did you get here?
Colleen Schnettler:
So we want to be focused. I think we’re a small team with limited resources and we are trying to throw our net too wide. Isn’t that always the advice you give to Bootstrappers? You need to niche down, niche down. So we’re trying to focus and just hitting the same pain points over and over with customers who purchase it. I have this on the rail side, people are not using it in production, not yet customizable enough, and they’re like, really? We want to give our customers what we keep hearing over and over. These are reports for our customers. Our customers come in and they want to be able to find X, Y, and Z, so I have to build them the report. And so we had to make a decision. We felt that these multiple products and multiple frameworks was not focused enough, so we needed to make a decision and we feel like this is a focused decision. And honestly, it’s so funny you wouldn’t think this, but this positioning matters. We really, as a tech person, you like to believe that’s not true. You’re like, you’ll just see the beauty of the product, but we can’t sell it. We can’t freaking explain it. So reporting feels very explainable to people.
Rob Walling:
Colleen is spot on. Reporting is very explainable. This pivot also requires effective positioning. As she mentioned, as builders and makers, we often believe that the product should simply sell itself, but unfortunately products don’t do that. There are a lot of strategies you can use when trying to reposition a product like changing the website or having conversations with customers. I asked Colleen if she’d tried any of these tactics yet and if so, how they’re working out.
Colleen Schnettler:
So we haven’t done anything on our website, we haven’t repositioned that, but what we’re doing is when people come to us about QueryBuilder, we also are showing them our mockup UI of what reporting dashboard is going to look like. And nine times out of 10, they say that’s what they’re trying to build anyway. I mean, it feels like it’s going to be, the signals are good, I guess.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s where sometimes you find an avenue that instantly feels like, oh, this works, this works. If you’re saying nine out of 10, that’s an incredible win because I’ve seen folks try to do a pivot like this or an expansion or whatever, and maybe it’s five out of 10 and it’s still the right call because the other five want five different things, but at least if you can get half the people to want the same thing, then you have a market there that’s really cool. So they’re already trying to build this and it’s really just we’re going to take on more of the functionality. I think of it a little bit, think of all these tools that we’ve seen just expand and expand and expand. They’re at a larger scale, but HubSpot, it was a website builder with Google Analytics built into it. It was very simple, and then they’re like, now we’re going to add SEO tools, now we’re going to add a CRM, now we’re going to add whatever. I mean, HubSpot’s just this big, right? And they’re a public company and all that, but in a way, you found that you built something that was worth something but maybe not enough and it got you to where you are today, which is great. It’s almost like, oh, we got to step one. It’s like this is the next piece of functionality around it. Is there something beyond that? Have you even thought about it? Or I guess you’re still thinking, let’s just get slowed down. Let me get this thing shipped before we even think about that.
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, it’s interesting because our original hypothesis or dream with this company was to build developer components. So yeah, it feels like there is something beyond it. I mean, we’re already starting to think bigger, which is exciting. We’re focusing on Rails and Aaron, my co-founder comes from Laravel where they have this beautiful admin panel and he’s like, what are you using Rails? I was like, nothing. We all use a hodgepodge of open source components that kind of sort of work, and you make ’em work the way you want ’em to, but there feels like there is something beyond this. There’s an opportunity to maybe it’s reporting and we become profitable in that space. Maybe it’s a full admin dashboard, maybe it’s taking some of the things that are missing in our framework and bringing them to the framework as paid add-ons. We feel like there’s a lot of potential here.
Rob Walling:
I’m really looking forward to seeing what Colleen and Erin do in the coming months with all that potential. Another area they appear to have made a lot of progress in is deciding to focus on one element of the product line that is proven to be more successful, but reaching that decision wasn’t as simple as it sounds.
Colleen Schnettler:
So in just the last episode we talked about how we are going after both the Laravel and the Rails markets and we have a product in both of those markets. And the interesting thing about this is the product is functionally the same, but practically it’s two completely different products, different code bases, different customers, different go to market strategies, and I perpetually feel like we’re not moving fast enough, and one of the things we were talking about is how do you succeed? You got to run experiments until you figure out what works. So let’s keep running experiments and in the Laravel space, we have run what I would consider three experiments now. We built Aaron, my co-founder, built this beautiful drop in query builder component and we tried to sell it and five people bought it right? There was not a knocking down of the doors for it.
Then our next experiment was, okay, it’s because it’s not easy enough to integrate. Let’s integrate it in their paid add-on, which is called Laravel Nova, which is the Laravel admin dashboard. So then we built it so it integrates exactly perfectly into Laravel Nova and we’re like, oh, this is it. Now it’s going to be a one click installation. Everyone’s going to buy it. No one it. And then so now we’re on experiment three if you’re counting. Then we said, oh, it’s because the price anchoring in Laravel is so low. It’s way, way, way too expensive. And so we dropped the price and we thought, oh, now we’re going to drop the price. That’s it. This is the gates are going to open, and we sold four. So it feels like to us, we have run three experiments in the Laravel space and we have shown that that market has a low propensity to pay for things, and if you look at the customers we’re getting in rails versus the customers we’re getting in Laravel and Laravel getting a lot of hobbyist in rails.
We’re getting a lot of companies. And so when you look at the propensity to pay, we think the rails market is just a little more mature and the people are coming to us are more likely to pay for things, and so we’re holding these facts in our hands. This literally, we decided this last week and we’re like, okay, what do we do? And we’re, it feels like we’re working on two different things. We’re like, we’ve got to be rowing in the same direction. We need to be working together, common vision, common goal, and so we think we’re relatively confident we are going to focus both of our efforts on the rail space to test experiments in that space.
Rob Walling:
How did it feel once you made that decision last week?
Colleen Schnettler:
I mean, it feels scary because, oh man, it’s having both kind of felt like a safety net, and I know that’s a false feeling, but you’re like, oh, well, if it doesn’t work out in rails, it’s okay. We have layer valve. If it doesn’t work out in rail valve, it’s okay. We have rails. It kind of felt like spreading the net wide, lots of small bets if you will, gave us this safety. It gave me a feeling of safety. And so to go all in on one stack is I absolutely think the smart thing to do, but it’s also scarier because if it doesn’t work, then you’re like, oh, shoot. Now what?
Rob Walling:
Asking yourself now what is something I’m sure we can all relate to? I see this often from indie hacker types. They launch and they get that quick hit of dopamine from a product hunt launch only to then realize that the project gets little or no traction, or if they did get some uptick, they don’t actually want to market and sell it, which bringing us full circle leaves them asking themselves now. So I see folks try to diversify by having a bunch of irons in the fire, but I think the lack of focus means nothing gets enough momentum to get traction. If you recall from episode one, Aaron is a Laravel developer, while Colleen is a Rails developer and seeing as how their focus has shifted more into Rails, I was curious to find out how this impacts Aaron.
Colleen Schnettler:
Aaron is a phenomenal developer, a great product designer, and he can churn out code so fast. I am a very, very good developer, but I would say his skills exceed mine in that arena. And so our relationship up until last week has been that he does all the product kind of design development and I do everything that turns that into a business. So I’m the Rails developer, so this is going to be an interesting shift for us to figure out how we both fit. And I think that’s too part of the reason I’m nervous how we both fit into the company with this new vision and we’re still trying to figure that out. He loves Laravel and the community, so hopefully we get to a point where we will be able to work on both products, but right now we’re thinking he’s going to learn Rails, which is kind of fun and I think could be really good marketing content, honestly, because he excels as a developer relations person, so him learning rails and tweeting about it would get a ton of eyeballs on our content. So we feel like that’s probably the path forward. But it’s interesting. It puts us both outside of our comfort zone.
Rob Walling:
Stepping outside of your comfort zone is never easy, but a senior developer, Aaron shouldn’t have too much trouble picking up a new concept or even a new programming language. I’ve always been shocked by how quickly the senior devs I work with were able to pick up new languages and not just pick ’em up but really understand them. I’ll be sure to get an update on that next time I sit down with Colleen. Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about hiring. In a recent email Colleen sent me, she wrote, I hired a new developer. He’s awesome, but the hiring was terrible. I’ve hired in the past and I have a process I’ve used that didn’t work out, so this time I did it properly and it was a huge pain, but totally worth it. Let’s find out what exactly was so horrible about the hiring process, including what she’s tried in the past and what she did this time around.
Colleen Schnettler:
So what I’ve done in the past is, this is embarrassing to admit, but it is what it is. I basically said on my podcast, which was relatively popular, that I was hiring people Twitter DMed me or emailed me and I said, that seems great. And we just started working together or someone, a friend of a friend was like, Hey, I’ve worked with this person. He’s great. I said, okay, cool. I just hired them with no thought, rhyme or reason to if they were a good fit for what I was trying to do. It was a good, I mean, you think about this in terms of learning so much of this startup journey For me even I’ve only been full-time on the business for two months and I just feel like I’m learning at this incredibly accelerated rate, and so I try to look at these experiences as learning experiences instead of, holy cow, why did I do that? That was stupid.
Rob Walling:
Oh yeah. Oh, it’s absolutely a learning experience and that’s one of the reasons we’re on a podcast right now is so that people listening will hopefully not make the same mistakes that you’ve made that I’ve made. What is the old quote? It’s like a wise person learns from the mistakes of others, and I feel like, yeah, learning you’re doing is a greatly accelerated pace once you’re full-time focused on something and you start doing new things that maybe you haven’t done in the past. So what was the new process then? Posting a job description, doing interviews, all that.
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, so I heard about Dan Martel’s book on your podcast actually. So I bought the book, I read it in a weekend. So I was feeling real inspired and then I took a more measured approach to it, and I think the biggest thing that didn’t work out with the early people I hired, they were all wonderful. There was no problem except that I had not set expectations,
And at some point, I don’t know, I expected ’em to read my mind. I don’t know what I thought they were going to do with no expectations, and so I just hadn’t written down what I really needed when the person didn’t deliver what I really needed, and then I’m talking to him two months later. Of course, it didn’t work out. There’s no way this time I started with a proper job description, here is what I really need. And I posted that job description on a couple rails, job boards, got tons of applicants. It was amazing. That’s good and bad though. Then you have to go through them all.
Rob Walling:
I know what that feels like. Yeah,
Colleen Schnettler:
Got tons of applicants. And one of the things I did is I put a really, I don’t want to say easy, but I put a little coding challenge two liner in the form, in the application form just to weed out people who actually were paying attention. And so yeah, I went through all these job applications. I did intro calls with seven people, and then I wrote up a coding challenge and I gave the coding challenge to four people, and then I selected one person based on that. But even things like a coding challenge, you’re like, man, this is kind of a pain. What do I do to come up with what’s relevant to come up with? And just the logistics around that. You got to come up with something, but I didn’t want to just grab something off the shelf. I wanted something that was specific.
What we do is very specific, and one of the things I was really filtering for was communication, because I work with this person really, really closely. So how do you communicate? How far do you go when you have an issue before you reach out to me? So I made a custom coding challenge, and we do a lot of stimulus and hot wires, so I needed to make sure they actually had stimulus and hot wire knowledge and things like that. So it did work out, but it was like I’ve been color coding my days, energy levels, green, yellow, red. That was a lot of red that week.
Rob Walling:
Rob, I can imagine. I want to touch on a couple things that we talked about there. One is I don’t want it to come across, it’s not okay to out of your network because it is, I’ve done it. I’ve had it work. Tracy Osborne, TinySeed program manager, was a microcom speaker in 2016 and kind of was in the orbit. I didn’t know her very well, but we had a full job description. We posted it publicly. We got a bunch of applicant. She was one, and I was like, Ooh, I think this could be a winner. But then she went through a full interview process, you know what I mean? She went with an upfront and a second, and then there was an offer letter. Everything was as official as if we did not know her. And so I want a listener, speaking of learning from mistakes or experience for me when we hire today, like producer Ron who helps produce this podcast in our YouTube channel. He has been a tenure listener of startups For the Rest Of Us, for example. So he is in our community in essence, but full hiring process. So I like hiring out of your network. I just think you want the officialness of it because as you said otherwise you don’t exactly know what you’re getting and maybe you’re doing the candidate a disservice a bit.
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, I totally agree. Well, hopefully I’ll be hiring again someday, and I will go through, I mean, if I’m hiring someone in my network, I’m not going to go through interviewing 35 people or whatever, but I will go through the process of a proper job description, proper expectations of engagement, coding, challenge, the whole thing, because I think you’re right. Even when you hire in your network, it’s good to go through that entire process so everyone knows what’s going on.
Rob Walling:
So with hiring comes managing, you’re managing a team. Have you managed a team of developers before? What’s that like for you?
Colleen Schnettler:
I have not. And it’s been interesting because I’m a very likable person, people like me, and I guess I thought that would magically translate into being a good manager, and spoiler alert, it does not. Yeah, I have really struggled with figuring out how to manage people, what the right cadence is.
Rob Walling:
I find that being nice. I consider myself similar. I’m a very likable person. I’m amicable. I had to get over the fact. I started managing, I’m trying to think. I was probably 29 ish years old, which is for me was young. I took me a while to mature. I was too nice. I didn’t know how to give negative feedback. I feared giving negative feedback. That is something for people who are pretty amicable and get along with everybody to get in a meeting like this and say, I love working with you, but you drop the ball on this, or I need you to do better in this area. Let me help you. It somehow feels like you’re being mean. I think we’re trained not to say bad things about people. I think we’re trained not to tell people they’re not doing a good job, and yet that’s what you have to do as a manager. And that’s one thing that I have as I’ve hired people who haven’t managed, and I mentor them into being managers. This is what I tell them is, you’re going to build great rapport with the folks who work from you. They’re going to, you figure out a way to help them improve, to help them get better, and in order to help them get better, you have to point things out that they’re not doing at the top of their game.
Colleen Schnettler:
That is a hundred percent my problem. I worked back in the pre 15 years ago, I worked at a Fortune 500 company, and it was the kind of company that had meetings just to plan the next meetings. So I came out of that experience being like, we don’t do anything at this company except have meetings. So I am never having meetings. There will be no meetings. Well, here I am wanting to have meetings with my developers. So yeah, it’s a super learning process. I am trying to figure it out.
Rob Walling:
So speaking of meetings and how much, I hate meetings as well, I never liked one-on-one meetings. So when I was a developer, we do these one-on-ones with your boss or your supervisor, and I was always like, this is such a bold, can you leave me alone so I can go write I code to write? I don’t want to talk to you about my feelings. And then I had a team of 10 and I was doing no one-on-ones, and I realized, oh, no one’s going to just come and tell me when there’s a grievance or when they feel bad, they’re not going to initiate a lot, especially introverted developers don’t want to rock the boat, don’t want to, whatever. For whatever reason, they don’t have the opportunity for it. And I realized I have to do one-on-ones. And so if you have senior people, I do monthly one-on-ones.
If you have mid-level, usually it’s every two weeks, whatever the cadence, but that one-on-one then is the time every two weeks or every month for them to talk about their performance, for them to talk about, to make sure that you’re guiding them well, and then for you to talk about their performance and to compliment them like, you did an amazing job here, here, and here. And then to say, Hey, so we shift a bug to production that broke our trial flow. Obviously we need more process to not do that, but talk to me about how that happened. Let’s talk it through. The idea behind them is that it forces you to do it, otherwise you’re never going to do it. You’re not going to think, wake up today and think, man, I should really talk to so-and-so about how they’re dropping the ball. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. How are you thinking about getting better as a manager? Do you have any friends, mentors? Do you have any books that you plan to read?
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, I am challenging myself to be more, I dunno if assertive is the right word, but as you described, to be more honest, I was socialized or whatever. I am bad at giving negative feedback. It’s funny because I’m always kind of tiptoeing around the issue, and my co-founder is actually great at emotional intelligence. And so Aaron, and I’ll be on the call and he’ll say this thing to me where he’s like, what’s the subtext you’re not saying? And that always makes you be like, oh, what is the thing that I’m not saying? I don’t want to hurt your feelings. And so I’m trying. But honestly, I don’t really know. I mean, I’m just trying to be better. We weren’t having regular check-ins. Now that I have this team of three, I’m trying to do regular check-ins with everyone and give them an opportunity to speak, but also be more assertive, like I said, in terms of being like, Hey, you’ve got to hit this deadline.
If you’re not going to hit this deadline, I need to know before the day of the deadline. We’ve got to communicate in such a way that I share my expectations with you and you give me feedback on whether or not those expectations can be met. And I do read a lot of books, so I just read Never Split the Difference, which is technically a negotiating book, but just felt kind of like a communications book. So I’m trying to take some of those tactics into place when speaking to my team. It’s hard too, because if you think of the success of a business, the success of a business, I think you’d know better. But it depends on your team. I was reading a bunch of stuff from the Netflix guy, and he talked about how he goes in and fires all the B players, because if you want to build something excellent, you need a team of excellent people that can work together. But also, it’s hard coming in from a tech side like, ah, managing’s not that important. How hard can it be? Do I really need to learn how to do this? So it’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition between being a technical person trying to run a business and appreciating the importance of a good team. And one of the things I was doing in the early days of a team was I was so worried everyone was going to quit
Because good developers are hard to find and hard to retain. And so instead of unifying people behind a shared vision, I was trying to let everyone do whatever they wanted so they wouldn’t quit. I wasn’t a real fear. No one quit, but it’s just you have all this stuff, these subconscious thoughts about how do I keep these people happy? So they enjoy working here. So they have that intrinsic motivation while also telling them when they’re not performing up to standards.
Rob Walling:
That is it. That’s the difficult balance. The interesting thing is you don’t need to be a good manager in the near term. You can hire people, you’ll do fine for six months, you’ll be fine for a year, but in the long term, if you want to grow this larger, you will start to lose people if things are poorly managed, frankly, especially as the team gets bigger and especially the longer people stick around, they just get tired of it. As we wrap up, what’s the one thing you’re most looking forward to between now and the next time we chat?
Colleen Schnettler:
I am super excited about this whole reporting MVP pivot. Like Aaron has all these cool ideas about what it’s going to look like, and by the time I talk to you next, we should have this. I mean, it won’t be done done, but we will have a solid functional MVP that we can start really picking up and showing to potential customers. So that is definitely what I’m most excited about.
Rob Walling:
Love it. That’s awesome. That’s the next milestone. I’m excited for you too. Thanks. I am excited to see where Colleen, Aaron and Hammer Stone are. The next time we talk, we’ll learn more about their progress on the reporting MVP pivot. Find out how Aaron’s Rails skills are developing and dive even deeper into Colleen and Aaron’s ongoing journey with Hammer.
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