Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to season four, episode four of TinySeed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen SCH nestler’s startup journey. Before we dive into the episode, if you want to invest in founders like Colleen, you can do so through my world class accelerator and Venture fund TinySeed. We are currently raising our third fund after having raised and mostly deployed almost $42 million across our prior funds. If you’re an accredited investor or the equivalent in your country and you are interested in indexing across dozens, if not hundreds of B2B SaaS companies that are handpicked by myself, a r, and our team at TinySeed to be the companies that we believe will succeed. You can head to TinySeed dot com slash invest. If you enter your info there, it goes straight to a R. You’ve heard him on startups For the Rest Of Us, and you can have a conversation with him if you have any questions or you can receive our deck and our memo and just the thesis of what we’re investing under because we are a unique venture fund and SaaS accelerator. So if you think you might be interested in putting some capital to work in ambitious, mostly bootstrapped B2B SaaS founders, head to TinySeed dot com slash invest. Let’s dive into the episode.  

Colleen Schnettler:
I’m just naturally energetic and enthusiastic and optimistic, right? I was projecting my, oh my gosh, you love this, and they were like, yeah, I guess so.  

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the wild rollercoaster of building their startup. I’m your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for Bootstrappers. Today in episode four, we’re back with Colleen Schneller, a developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Hello Query, and Colleen’s been busy when we last spoke. She had recently almost broken up with her business partner, completely pivoted her company and changed its name, and through all this unrest, she’s been using customer interviews as a guiding light.  

Colleen Schnettler:
What’s interesting is you hear so much about how important it’s to do customer interviews, but if those are not focused, then it can be hard for those interviews to lead you in the right direction. This is probably our third round, and I’ve probably talked to 20 people since I spoke with you last. As we refine our vision for what this product should be, what we learned was there’s even higher value for our customers customers to get their data. Our customers customers need to build their own reports. These companies are constantly being asked for custom reports from their customers, and so that to us means embedding in your application.  

Rob Walling:
And so this is a change from last time we spoke because we had talked about Hello Query, great name by the way, being a standalone SaaS app that would almost be used by internal teams. But now you’re saying after these interviews, it sounds like you’ve gotten a signal that says, no, we need to embed in other apps. So as an example, if I had an email service provider and I’m a SaaS app and I have a thousand customers and I need them to be able to develop customer reports, you’re saying I would be able to embed Hello Query in my SaaS apps. Is that right?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Exactly. So if you’re an email service provider, maybe your customers want to segment their email list. This is a very common thing, and so you wouldn’t have to build that out. You can drop in a Hello Query, embed, set up some custom base queries for tenancy concerns, and they can then build out and save and segment their own customer lists.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. And when you do interviews like this or you have customer conversations, it’s often very noisy. It’s often not nearly as clear as folks make it out to be. I remember I did a talk seven, eight years ago as we were building Drip, and I was trying to figure out what we actually were building in for who it was early, it was trying to figure out product-market fit, and I had a hundred emails sent into me from people who were canceling, and then I had a bunch of conversations and I remember saying, this was our conclusion, and boy does it seem obvious and brilliant in retrospect, but I had very little confidence. I mean, I was like a 40% out of a hundred of maybe this is the right thing. Question. Do you feel similar to how I’ve just described or do you feel like you have a higher level of certainty than that?  

Colleen Schnettler:
That’s a tough question. I feel like this is 50% confidence, 50% gut, because literally from the beginning, Rob, this is what I have wanted to build, and what was happening when we get on these customer calls is when we asked them about internal reporting and we say, how many times does your C-Suite, for example, request a report maybe once a week? Once a week is not that painful. And then if you move up market, the upmarket companies are using a Power bi. They want all of those additional features that we don’t plan to add. So it feels like a bit of a gut decision, but also it was almost like we’ve always wanted to build this and we now have talked to 20 plus people that confirm that we are probably on the correct path.  

Rob Walling:
In our previous episode, Colleen mentioned a red flag. Her original idea didn’t have any competition. It’s one of the main reasons she made such a big pivot. So I wanted to know this new idea, does it have competitors? Have other companies already tried this idea? And if so, what is Hello Query going to do differently?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yes, there are definitely competitors in the space. Even on these customer calls, I saw at least two people show me a different embedded solution to solve this exact problem. So we know it exists and we found this with the first iteration of our product giving someone else a different company control over that. People do not like that. That is generally not what we are trying to do. So the companies that seem really excited about this are companies that are data heavy companies. Visual interfaces aren’t what they’re looking for. Their users want to get their data out. Their customers have their own data analysts. So data analysts don’t want the SaaS owner to build charts for them. Data analysts want their hands on their data, and so these are the kind of companies we’re going to target.  

Rob Walling:
And so given that reporting is usually, I will say, not that it’s not important, but I remember that being a big pain in my ass. So it’s like reports are almost a necessary evil have been in my experience. And so I think that’s what you’re saying is that’s why it’s not a core feature in essence, it’s a core feature because customers want it, but it’s not something that as a product team I typically want to be building.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Exactly. Those are the kinds of people we’ve been talking to is my customers want their data out, they want it in Excel, they’re going to put it in a Power BI or they like Excel where they live and building out reporting and filtering and custom export CSVs and scheduling is not core to our product. We don’t really care, but we’ve got to give them this feature, and by the way, we can upcharge them for this feature, and I love that because now we’re closer to the money.  

Rob Walling:
Absolutely. Yeah. I believe we talked either offline or maybe on this podcast about some issues you were running into when this was still an embeddable component, but then it’s like, well, I got to tweak the styles. It has to match the app because they have customers using it. How do you get around that with this?  

Colleen Schnettler:
So here’s what we’ve decided. Right or wrong, we’ve decided that this is what it looks like full. So this last round of interviews have been, they’re not quite sales yet because I’m still trying to fully wrap my hands around people’s problems, but I also show them what we have and it looks very nice. I mean, it looks great, and again, I think for us, we can’t just target everyone in the world. We’re a small team of two. We are going to niche down really, really tight.  

Rob Walling:
That’s a nice attitude to have for a V one,  

Colleen Schnettler:
I hope so,  

Rob Walling:
To know what, to know what you can say yes and no to, because that is often the hardest thing to know is what do we build into this first version? It needs to be not very buggy and it needs to look pretty good. And so folks who need it desperately haven’t had an issue then with the fact that it may not, the fonts and the spacing and the whatever else may not exactly match our UX paradigm.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, no one has had an issue with that yet.  

Rob Walling:
These customer interviews are key for Hello Query’s future. I asked Colleen for some insight into how she’s preparing for these conversations and if her approach is changing over time.  

Colleen Schnettler:
I am naturally a pretty social person, so I just thought I would be magically good at customer interviews and no, I’m really not magically good at them. You have to go in with understanding your own personality and understanding how to get people to be honest with you and kind of walk that line. When I first started doing them, I heard everyone say yes because I’m just naturally energetic and enthusiastic and optimistic. I was projecting my, oh my gosh, you love this, and they were like, yeah, I guess so. And after doing so many of these, I think I have hit a really nice balance of really being who I am, still being myself, but also not pushing them in a specific direction. When I get on a call with someone and I say, how are you solving this problem now if they haven’t even tried to solve it, it’s not a big problem. I’ve done so many of these. I know what questions to ask, and I can tell pretty quickly by the size of your business, how frequently you have this problem, what you are already paying to solve this problem. So I think that’s just something you learn the more you do it.  

Rob Walling:
I think a question a lot of folks listening will have is, how did you find these 20 people?  

Colleen Schnettler:
So right now, our social networks are still our number one source of traffic. So some of these people came in through cold LinkedIn outreach, but I did a whole LinkedIn outreach cold outreach campaign, and it was great because I learned a lot and I actually got a decent number of responses, which was very exciting. I had a much better success rate with people coming in from Twitter because it’s kind of like a warm intro based on all of these calls and people have reached out. I’ve got a group of what I’m calling founding customers, three to four people depending, and the plan is to give them the V one, see if it solves their problem, work with them, iterate until we can narrow the funnel on who really is our target customer. I think long-term cold outreach is going to be one of our traction channels, but again, I can’t outreach to people if I don’t know who those people are.  

Rob Walling:
I like what you’ve said. It’s something that I think a lot of folks missed. It’s not just what are we building? Who are we building this for? You have to answer those two questions. And oftentimes you can have an amazing product idea like you do now, but if you don’t know who it is you’re focused on and who you’re selling to, it becomes a real problem once you get through your first three or four customers who actually come in. So I just want to call that out for who maybe discount that.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, the customer thing is really hard.  

Rob Walling:
While these customer calls have been crucial for Colleen, it’s not the only thing she’s been busy with. So I’m curious, you have this validation of where you want to head in the next, what month or two, how much progress have you made technically in terms of implementing features.  

Colleen Schnettler:
We have a working secure embeddable link that shows what your users will see if I were to embed this in my application and they were able to use it. And so it’s been really fun because I have been able to play around with it and see how useful it is and what kind of things do I want to do that I can’t do and what’s important to me. And so it feels like we’ve made a ton of progress on product.  

Rob Walling:
I’m surprised that it’s gone that quickly. Is it because you already had a core from the hammer stone days or refine days that you were able to repurpose?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yes. So we had a large part of the code already exists because we are using our old product in the new product.  

Rob Walling:
Nice little shortcut. Well, it’s handy to be able to not just throw away all that,  

Colleen Schnettler:
Isn’t  

Rob Walling:
It? Yeah, no kidding. That’s nice. This is where it is a pivot. Sometimes people will say, I was going to build project management for hair salons and now I’m going to pivot into building in a mobile app on Facebook. And it’s like, that’s not a pivot. That’s just a completely different thing.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Absolutely. And I think that data is just such a good place to be. So I have been spending a lot of time in the big data analysts, Tableau, power BI forums, hanging out, seeing what those people are doing, and everyone needs data. Our world is controlled by data, so people are going to want to access their data. I think it really is interesting too. Some people just want to throw their Excel files into chat GPT, and we can enable that. It’s literally at its very, very core, all of this packaging and positioning, we’re still solving the same problem. And the fundamental problem we’re solving is you want your data out of your database so you can actually understand it, play with it, build visualizations, whatever you’re into. And so yeah, it does feel like a true pivot as opposed to it. Let’s scrap all of this. We’ve been working on it for two years and just start from zero.  

Rob Walling:
I’m curious, what are you most looking forward to and what is the thing that will keep you up at night?  

Colleen Schnettler:
I am most looking forward to getting this into customer’s hands because these interviews, Rob, I mean, we are in this position now where it feels like momentum. It feels like it’s going to work. And you know what else is really tricky about this is finding the right balance. To your point, this isn’t an MVP. These people are going to put this in their production software, so we have to be really, really careful when we look at the quality versus minimal features to value figuring that out. And so that’s why on one hand, I’m super excited to get in front of people, but I’m also very nervous that if we do it too early, we will erode trust and lose those potential customers.  

Rob Walling:
If I was in Colleen shoes, I’d feel that exact same mix of excitement and nerves, but with the insights from her customer interviews, I have a good feeling she’s on the ride path. We’ll check back in with her in a month or two. By then, she’ll have had some time to get her product into customer’s hands and she can share some insights into this key moment.