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In this episode of TinySeed Tales, Rob Walling chats with Colleen Schnettler, co-founder of Hello Query, as she navigates the complexities of her startup journey.
After a challenging period with her co-founder Aaron, Colleen reflects on their decision to part ways and the emotional toll it has taken on her. She shares her feelings of crushing failure, the uncertainty of moving forward alone, and the realization that their initial product vision may not align with market needs.
Topics we cover:
- (0:49) – Colleen and Aaron make a tough decision
- (4:09) – Voice memo, “Crushing Failure”
- (7:59) – What if you hadn’t raised money?
- (11:44) – Colleen weighs her remaining options
Links from the Show:
- Applications for TinySeed are Open Through Feb 23rd
- Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X
- Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky
- Hello Query
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 to season four, episode five of TinySeed Tales where we continue hearing Colleen SCH nestler’s startup journey. Before we get into the episode, applications for my SaaS accelerator. TinySeed are open from now until February 23rd. If you are bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS founder and you’re interested in the perfect amount of funding, mentorship, advice, and community, head to TinySeed dot com slash apply
Colleen Schnettler:
And I know what I want even though I have failed at it over and over and over.
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. We’re back with Colleen Schettler for episode five. Colleen is a developer, entrepreneur and co-founder of Hello Query. Last time we spoke, Colleen and her business partner Erin, were at a turning point in their business relationship and since then, Colleen and Erin made a tough decision about the future of the business. I’ll hand it over to Colleen to explain.
Colleen Schnettler:
So what we had done in the past two weeks is we had actually hired a contract Laravel developer to help Aaron to speed up the development process. We had agreed that we would have an MVP of Hello Query to put in my side project, simplify upload on Monday. I had expected it to be done and he told me it wasn’t, which is okay. Estimating software timeline requirements is very, very hard. But then he told me that when he sat down to code on Hello Query, he just could not summon the energy for it. He said he was burned out and he would just sit down at his desk and he would just feel an overwhelming sense of dread and burnout’s tough. So many people in our community have experienced it, and so I said maybe if you came to some customer calls, because I get a lot of the positive dopamine endorphins, the one doing all the customer calls, and so I asked him if he wanted to join me on these customer calls and he said no because he was concerned that would just increase the pressure.
Now, it’s not only do I have Colleen to answer to, but I have all these customers, so I took a beat too because my question is do I beg him to stay or do I let him go? Right? And so I had to decide because here he is on the phone telling me he’s totally burned out. He has no excitement for the product and he just can’t bring himself to work on it. So what we landed on that day was we landed on why don’t we both take a break, think about what we want and come back and talk again in a couple days.
Rob Walling:
During that time, in the back of your mind, did it feel to you like it was going to end or did you still have that maybe Aaron will reconsider and decide, oh, I really do want to be part of this.
Colleen Schnettler:
I knew he was going to leave. Have you ever heard that vending machine breakup analogy like breakups are shaking a vending machine, knocking over a vending machine. You have to shake it a few times before it falls over, and I was like, oh man, we’ve already had this conversation once. There’s a disconnect in terms of the speed at which we want to work and what we are trying to do. So maybe if I was just more chill, maybe if I wasn’t trying so hard and I was just like, it’s fine. Let’s just hang out and we’ll just do this at whatever speed we do it. Maybe we could have made it work, but
Rob Walling:
Sounds like a recipe for a really successful startup. I’ll just chill out and I’m sure things will take care of themselves.
Colleen Schnettler:
So I think that I knew we were going to part ways, but also, I mean it was ultimately his decision, but I didn’t beg him to stay.
Rob Walling:
So now Colleen is left without a co-founder, a difficult spot to be in during this time. She recorded a voice memo titled it Crushing Failure and sent it to me.
Colleen’s Voice Memo:
I don’t really know what to say. I’m in a position where it feels like I have no options for this business, and it feels awful, especially after taking funding and having people bet on me and for me to be in this position where I can’t execute and it doesn’t even feel like I did anything wrong. It just feels like my partner and I fundamentally wanted different things and we thought we wanted the same thing. We’ve been in TinySeed for almost a year now, I guess 10 months, and we’ve come so far in this space. So to walk away from it right now, gosh, the failure level feels massive. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I should do this alone, but if I’m not going to have my business partner, it’s his tech stack. So it’s almost like, no, it’s definitely I need to have a product and a tech stack. I understand, and I’m a senior developer, so should I spend the next three to four months learning or should I rebuild the whole thing in Ruby on Rails? Should I shut this product down? Because reporting, I actually don’t care that much about reporting or should I recognize that I have put so much time and energy into this space and I have people that are interested. I don’t know what to do, but it feels like crushing failure
Rob Walling:
In that amazing crushing failure. M four A. You mentioned the word failure. Why did you use that word?
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, is that not exactly what this is? I mean, what have we been doing for a year, Rob? We’re getting to the end of our TinySeed year. Everyone’s like, what did you do all year? And I’m like, I don’t. No. What did we do all year? Sorry.
Rob Walling:
No, no, this. That’s how it feels. Yeah,
Colleen Schnettler:
I have been working. It feels like we’ve, both Aaron and I, because he’s been putting in a ton of time working so hard and we have nothing. I even walked away from 20 KA month when we were consulting. I shut that down.
Rob Walling:
I was going to ask about that. If you regretted that at this point,
Colleen Schnettler:
I mean, if I hadn’t shut that down, that wasn’t just 20 KA month, that was infinite KA month, I could just keep scaling that up indefinitely. I could have a whole freaking consultancy right now. When we raised the TinySeed money, I made the decision to walk away from the product ties consulting and that, like I said, that was a significant amount of money. I cut my legs out from under me, but you know what? I do not regret it. I do not regret it. I would rather fail this way than still be doing that stuck in limbo forever.
Rob Walling:
That’s really good to know about your own decision.
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah,
Rob Walling:
It would be terrible to feel like huge waves of regret of like, oh, can I go get that back?
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
It doesn’t sound like you want it.
Colleen Schnettler:
I think that this is the most important thing and we get wiser as we get older and all that stuff, but to get what you want, you have to know what you want and I know what I want even though I have failed at it over and over and over.
Rob Walling:
Now, hypothetically, let’s say you had not raised money. Given where you are now, what do you think you would do? Would you keep going with this or would you shut it down and look to get a job or do something else?
Colleen Schnettler:
The problem with this idea, hello Query is this is really Aaron’s idea. It’s his baby. He’s the one who experienced the problem and he’s the one who has a vision on how to solve it. And so to take his vision and run with it, I don’t know if that is something I want to do. I don’t know if it is the right product for me. So if we didn’t raise money and he decided not to be involved, I can almost say I would not do this without him. For sure.
Rob Walling:
I feel like, tell me if I’m wrong on this. I feel like you have a particular gifting and or desire to solve problems for developers and or product people. Would you say that’s accurate?
Colleen Schnettler:
I think that is an audience I know, so that is probably why I have gravitated to that particular audience.
Rob Walling:
But it’s not necessarily something that you would pigeonhole yourself into?
Colleen Schnettler:
I wouldn’t because we spent a first year before we hooked up with TinySeed, we spent a year trying to sell this as a Ruby gem to developers, but they’re a hard market to sell to
Rob Walling:
Because you mentioned several things. You mentioned it was Aaron’s idea you were going to work on it with him and also you’ve done it. So have you been there, done that kind of bored, not interested in it? What are the factors?
Colleen Schnettler:
The problem is deep and complex, and there’s a lot of data, not only data privacy, but data authentication issues in this space. And one of the things I realized rewatching the customer interviews is people don’t want reporting off of a single table. They want their users to be able to go in, see what data they can access and work through these tables to get that other data. And that’s a hard problem to solve. I have no idea how to solve it. And then you’re in this kind of scary, not even regulatory but scary space where if you screw it up, you can really screw it up. And so I think my concern isn’t that I can’t do it, it’s that the product Erin and I had envisioned, it’s not the right solution. I can already tell you from the customer interviews what we have 50% done, that is not the right solution right now.
It’s this iframe that loads in your site that your customers can build queries in. But I know the first thing people are going to say is, this is customer facing. I don’t like the way it looks. What? It loads an iframe. So now, I mean, it’s not actually that easy. There’s technical problems that I think, I mean, I’m sure I can solve them, right? All technical problems are solvable. I just think the layers of this problem and our solution do not match. And so unless you really, really care about it, I think it’s a hard sell to figure out what the right product is in this space. I don’t think we have it.
Rob Walling:
That’s interesting. So not only have you lost your co-founder, but what you’ve built to date you don’t have confidence in and you feel like you need to start over without a
Colleen Schnettler:
Co-founder. That’s why.
Rob Walling:
Yeah,
Colleen Schnettler:
And I feel like if we had still been together, we would’ve figured it out. It’s a hard problem to solve. I don’t know how to solve. It feels like the reasons not to do it are stacking up
Rob Walling:
A lot of headwinds. Yeah. The way I see it, she has three options. Colleen could go it alone or find a new business partner, rethink the approach and bring Hello Query to life, or she could pivot within TinySeed. We’ve certainly seen our share of entrepreneurs who pivot their business. It’s not the most common thing, but it’s also not unheard of. So I pose these options to Colleen. Where are you with that decision? What are you thinking?
Colleen Schnettler:
I don’t know. Robert is so hard to decide because I watched the customer interviews and I’m like, clearly there is a problem here. So there’s something we’ve hit a nerve somehow. Can I solve that without Aaron? But then another part of me is like, man, it’d be nice to walk away from filters and sequel. I have been doing that for years and years and years, and I cannot make it work.
Rob Walling:
I’m kind of sick of it.
Colleen Schnettler:
I’m kind of sick of it. Maybe I should do something else. Why not? These past eight months, I mean, my skillset has just exploded, so I just need an idea and a little bit of luck and maybe I can do something else. It’s an interesting position to be in because when you see other people in this position, you want to play your tiny violin for them. You’re like, oh, you have funding and no idea how hard for you, and now I’m in this position and I’m super stressed.
Rob Walling:
As you think back over the past six months, 12 months, is there something that you wish you’d done differently?
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, I think originally when we had talked about this idea once we got rid of our consulting arm, we had talked about starting, which is SQL to CSV and Iteratively building. And for reasons that I’m still kind of unclear, I couldn’t get Aaron to do that, and I think part of it was he felt, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he felt like that wasn’t well aligned with his vision, and so I feel like we should have shipped something faster. It should have been SQL to CSV instead of going with this huge vision where we’re going to solve all your problems. Well, gosh, it’s so cliche to say this out loud now, but we should have shipped SQL to CSV and because Aaron and I, we maybe didn’t, I don’t want to say we’re conflict, but when you have a personal relationship with your co-founder, you don’t.
I was always really worried about pushing him too hard and we broke up anyway, so I should have pushed him harder eight months ago. We should have broke up eight months ago. I learned a lot about communicating from him, which was great. Lessons I will take, if I ever take a co-founder again, lessons I will take forward with me. Business relationships are hard, and it’s not awesome the way this turned out, but also people have real lives and we like to pretend that’s not true, but we’re not 22 living in a van by the ocean, right? We’ve got kids and lives and sometimes people’s priorities change and I’d like to believe that he and I handled this maturely and we separated with class and we are still friends, so I do not regret it.
Rob Walling:
There’s a reason entrepreneurship is often equated with a rollercoaster ride, and while it may seem like Colleen is at a standstill dips, this are all part of the journey. Next week we’ll follow up with Colleen and see where she’s taking Hello Query.
Welcome to season four, episode five of TinySeed Tales where we continue hearing Colleen SCH nestler’s startup journey. Before we get into the episode, applications for my SaaS accelerator. TinySeed are open from now until February 23rd. If you are bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS founder and you’re interested in the perfect amount of funding, mentorship, advice, and community, head to TinySeed dot com slash apply
Colleen Schnettler:
And I know what I want even though I have failed at it over and over and over.
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. We’re back with Colleen Schettler for episode five. Colleen is a developer, entrepreneur and co-founder of Hello Query. Last time we spoke, Colleen and her business partner Erin, were at a turning point in their business relationship and since then, Colleen and Erin made a tough decision about the future of the business. I’ll hand it over to Colleen to explain.
Colleen Schnettler:
So what we had done in the past two weeks is we had actually hired a contract Laravel developer to help Aaron to speed up the development process. We had agreed that we would have an MVP of Hello Query to put in my side project, simplify upload on Monday. I had expected it to be done and he told me it wasn’t, which is okay. Estimating software timeline requirements is very, very hard. But then he told me that when he sat down to code on Hello Query, he just could not summon the energy for it. He said he was burned out and he would just sit down at his desk and he would just feel an overwhelming sense of dread and burnout’s tough. So many people in our community have experienced it, and so I said maybe if you came to some customer calls, because I get a lot of the positive dopamine endorphins, the one doing all the customer calls, and so I asked him if he wanted to join me on these customer calls and he said no because he was concerned that would just increase the pressure.
Now, it’s not only do I have Colleen to answer to, but I have all these customers, so I took a beat too because my question is do I beg him to stay or do I let him go? Right? And so I had to decide because here he is on the phone telling me he’s totally burned out. He has no excitement for the product and he just can’t bring himself to work on it. So what we landed on that day was we landed on why don’t we both take a break, think about what we want and come back and talk again in a couple days.
Rob Walling:
During that time, in the back of your mind, did it feel to you like it was going to end or did you still have that maybe Aaron will reconsider and decide, oh, I really do want to be part of this.
Colleen Schnettler:
I knew he was going to leave. Have you ever heard that vending machine breakup analogy like breakups are shaking a vending machine, knocking over a vending machine. You have to shake it a few times before it falls over, and I was like, oh man, we’ve already had this conversation once. There’s a disconnect in terms of the speed at which we want to work and what we are trying to do. So maybe if I was just more chill, maybe if I wasn’t trying so hard and I was just like, it’s fine. Let’s just hang out and we’ll just do this at whatever speed we do it. Maybe we could have made it work, but
Rob Walling:
Sounds like a recipe for a really successful startup. I’ll just chill out and I’m sure things will take care of themselves.
Colleen Schnettler:
So I think that I knew we were going to part ways, but also, I mean it was ultimately his decision, but I didn’t beg him to stay.
Rob Walling:
So now Colleen is left without a co-founder, a difficult spot to be in during this time. She recorded a voice memo titled it Crushing Failure and sent it to me.
Colleen’s Voice Memo:
I don’t really know what to say. I’m in a position where it feels like I have no options for this business, and it feels awful, especially after taking funding and having people bet on me and for me to be in this position where I can’t execute and it doesn’t even feel like I did anything wrong. It just feels like my partner and I fundamentally wanted different things and we thought we wanted the same thing. We’ve been in TinySeed for almost a year now, I guess 10 months, and we’ve come so far in this space. So to walk away from it right now, gosh, the failure level feels massive. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I should do this alone, but if I’m not going to have my business partner, it’s his tech stack. So it’s almost like, no, it’s definitely I need to have a product and a tech stack. I understand, and I’m a senior developer, so should I spend the next three to four months learning or should I rebuild the whole thing in Ruby on Rails? Should I shut this product down? Because reporting, I actually don’t care that much about reporting or should I recognize that I have put so much time and energy into this space and I have people that are interested. I don’t know what to do, but it feels like crushing failure
Rob Walling:
In that amazing crushing failure. M four A. You mentioned the word failure. Why did you use that word?
Colleen Schnettler:
Well, is that not exactly what this is? I mean, what have we been doing for a year, Rob? We’re getting to the end of our TinySeed year. Everyone’s like, what did you do all year? And I’m like, I don’t. No. What did we do all year? Sorry.
Rob Walling:
No, no, this. That’s how it feels. Yeah,
Colleen Schnettler:
I have been working. It feels like we’ve, both Aaron and I, because he’s been putting in a ton of time working so hard and we have nothing. I even walked away from 20 KA month when we were consulting. I shut that down.
Rob Walling:
I was going to ask about that. If you regretted that at this point,
Colleen Schnettler:
I mean, if I hadn’t shut that down, that wasn’t just 20 KA month, that was infinite KA month, I could just keep scaling that up indefinitely. I could have a whole freaking consultancy right now. When we raised the TinySeed money, I made the decision to walk away from the product ties consulting and that, like I said, that was a significant amount of money. I cut my legs out from under me, but you know what? I do not regret it. I do not regret it. I would rather fail this way than still be doing that stuck in limbo forever.
Rob Walling:
That’s really good to know about your own decision.
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah,
Rob Walling:
It would be terrible to feel like huge waves of regret of like, oh, can I go get that back?
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
It doesn’t sound like you want it.
Colleen Schnettler:
I think that this is the most important thing and we get wiser as we get older and all that stuff, but to get what you want, you have to know what you want and I know what I want even though I have failed at it over and over and over.
Rob Walling:
Now, hypothetically, let’s say you had not raised money. Given where you are now, what do you think you would do? Would you keep going with this or would you shut it down and look to get a job or do something else?
Colleen Schnettler:
The problem with this idea, hello Query is this is really Aaron’s idea. It’s his baby. He’s the one who experienced the problem and he’s the one who has a vision on how to solve it. And so to take his vision and run with it, I don’t know if that is something I want to do. I don’t know if it is the right product for me. So if we didn’t raise money and he decided not to be involved, I can almost say I would not do this without him. For sure.
Rob Walling:
I feel like, tell me if I’m wrong on this. I feel like you have a particular gifting and or desire to solve problems for developers and or product people. Would you say that’s accurate?
Colleen Schnettler:
I think that is an audience I know, so that is probably why I have gravitated to that particular audience.
Rob Walling:
But it’s not necessarily something that you would pigeonhole yourself into?
Colleen Schnettler:
I wouldn’t because we spent a first year before we hooked up with TinySeed, we spent a year trying to sell this as a Ruby gem to developers, but they’re a hard market to sell to
Rob Walling:
Because you mentioned several things. You mentioned it was Aaron’s idea you were going to work on it with him and also you’ve done it. So have you been there, done that kind of bored, not interested in it? What are the factors?
Colleen Schnettler:
The problem is deep and complex, and there’s a lot of data, not only data privacy, but data authentication issues in this space. And one of the things I realized rewatching the customer interviews is people don’t want reporting off of a single table. They want their users to be able to go in, see what data they can access and work through these tables to get that other data. And that’s a hard problem to solve. I have no idea how to solve it. And then you’re in this kind of scary, not even regulatory but scary space where if you screw it up, you can really screw it up. And so I think my concern isn’t that I can’t do it, it’s that the product Erin and I had envisioned, it’s not the right solution. I can already tell you from the customer interviews what we have 50% done, that is not the right solution right now.
It’s this iframe that loads in your site that your customers can build queries in. But I know the first thing people are going to say is, this is customer facing. I don’t like the way it looks. What? It loads an iframe. So now, I mean, it’s not actually that easy. There’s technical problems that I think, I mean, I’m sure I can solve them, right? All technical problems are solvable. I just think the layers of this problem and our solution do not match. And so unless you really, really care about it, I think it’s a hard sell to figure out what the right product is in this space. I don’t think we have it.
Rob Walling:
That’s interesting. So not only have you lost your co-founder, but what you’ve built to date you don’t have confidence in and you feel like you need to start over without a
Colleen Schnettler:
Co-founder. That’s why.
Rob Walling:
Yeah,
Colleen Schnettler:
And I feel like if we had still been together, we would’ve figured it out. It’s a hard problem to solve. I don’t know how to solve. It feels like the reasons not to do it are stacking up
Rob Walling:
A lot of headwinds. Yeah. The way I see it, she has three options. Colleen could go it alone or find a new business partner, rethink the approach and bring Hello Query to life, or she could pivot within TinySeed. We’ve certainly seen our share of entrepreneurs who pivot their business. It’s not the most common thing, but it’s also not unheard of. So I pose these options to Colleen. Where are you with that decision? What are you thinking?
Colleen Schnettler:
I don’t know. Robert is so hard to decide because I watched the customer interviews and I’m like, clearly there is a problem here. So there’s something we’ve hit a nerve somehow. Can I solve that without Aaron? But then another part of me is like, man, it’d be nice to walk away from filters and sequel. I have been doing that for years and years and years, and I cannot make it work.
Rob Walling:
I’m kind of sick of it.
Colleen Schnettler:
I’m kind of sick of it. Maybe I should do something else. Why not? These past eight months, I mean, my skillset has just exploded, so I just need an idea and a little bit of luck and maybe I can do something else. It’s an interesting position to be in because when you see other people in this position, you want to play your tiny violin for them. You’re like, oh, you have funding and no idea how hard for you, and now I’m in this position and I’m super stressed.
Rob Walling:
As you think back over the past six months, 12 months, is there something that you wish you’d done differently?
Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, I think originally when we had talked about this idea once we got rid of our consulting arm, we had talked about starting, which is SQL to CSV and Iteratively building. And for reasons that I’m still kind of unclear, I couldn’t get Aaron to do that, and I think part of it was he felt, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he felt like that wasn’t well aligned with his vision, and so I feel like we should have shipped something faster. It should have been SQL to CSV instead of going with this huge vision where we’re going to solve all your problems. Well, gosh, it’s so cliche to say this out loud now, but we should have shipped SQL to CSV and because Aaron and I, we maybe didn’t, I don’t want to say we’re conflict, but when you have a personal relationship with your co-founder, you don’t.
I was always really worried about pushing him too hard and we broke up anyway, so I should have pushed him harder eight months ago. We should have broke up eight months ago. I learned a lot about communicating from him, which was great. Lessons I will take, if I ever take a co-founder again, lessons I will take forward with me. Business relationships are hard, and it’s not awesome the way this turned out, but also people have real lives and we like to pretend that’s not true, but we’re not 22 living in a van by the ocean, right? We’ve got kids and lives and sometimes people’s priorities change and I’d like to believe that he and I handled this maturely and we separated with class and we are still friends, so I do not regret it.
Rob Walling:
There’s a reason entrepreneurship is often equated with a rollercoaster ride, and while it may seem like Colleen is at a standstill dips, this are all part of the journey. Next week we’ll follow up with Colleen and see where she’s taking Hello Query.
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