Episode 759 | TinySeed Tales s4e6: Does AI + Pivot = Success?

Rob Walling:
It’s TinySeed Tales season four, episode six, where we continue hearing Colleen SCH Nestler’s startup journey. And we ask ourselves, does AI plus a pivot equal success before we get into the episode? Applications for a next batch of TinySeed? Companies are open from now until February 23rd. If you want to be part of a world-class accelerator, receive the perfect amount of funding, mentorship, advice, and community. Head to tiny c.com/apply. And now let’s dive into the episode.  

Colleen Schnettler:
It’s just good to remember, for most people that don’t quit, it eventually works out. Most people, if you look at these success stories and you really dig into them, most people that don’t quit, it eventually works out.  

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 six of this season of TinySeed Tales, we’re diving back into Colleen’s journey. It’s been a whirlwind since we last checked in with twists, turns and moments of uncertainty, but that’s what makes her story so captivating. It’s a tale of resilience, ambition, and the pursuit of something bigger. So buckle up and join me as we explore the latest chapter in Colleen’s Adventure. And last week’s episode, Colleen and her co-founder Erin, had decided to go their separate ways and Colleen seemed to be quite stressed  

Colleen Schnettler:
Right after we recorded and we recorded so quickly on the heels of the co-founder breakup. I was pretty upset. You’re absolutely right. There was a lot of stress, there was a lot of anxiety in terms of what to do next. And my immediate gut reaction was, I need to walk away from this idea. I need to walk away from this name. I’m just going to do something else. I have other ideas. I’m going to pursue a different idea. And it had been a while since I had shipped code. And so I really was having a little bit of self doubt about what it takes to get an app from zero to paying authentication, the whole deal. And so I wanted to ship something and I wanted to go in a different direction. And so at that time, I had this idea, I used to be a podcaster, and we always had this problem finding and managing sponsors to the point where we literally stopped taking sponsors. The overhead was just too much of a pain. So I started going down that direction.  

Rob Walling:
Four months have passed since our last conversation, and Colleen dove headfirst into a new project called Get podcast leads.com, seeking to scratch her own niche and solve a familiar pain point in the world of podcasting. But as the dust settled, she faced the harsh reality of market viability. There was certainly a problem there, but would the market actually pay to solve it? So I asked Colleen how she launched it.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Launch would be a strong word. I think I tweeted about it once.  

Rob Walling:
Hey, that’s what we call an Indie hacker launch.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, well,  

Rob Walling:
Savage,  

Colleen Schnettler:
It  

Rob Walling:
Was brutal. Sick burn.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, I don’t know. So I launched it, launched on Twitter, so I tweeted about it once and I did start DMing people. I know everyone podcasts. And so I am fortunate too that I actually know a bunch of people that own podcast hosting companies. So it was kind of cool to be able to go right to the source and talk to those guys. And what I found out when I was doing that is podcasting is a tough market. Low margins, podcasters are broke. So the fact that they would shell out additional money seemed unlikely. It could have been, I think it could have been a productized service, but still it’s not like if I’m going to do productized consulting, I should do it in Rails and make real money, not for podcasters who are like, I’ll pay you 20 bucks if you find me a sponsor that’ll pay me 200. The math of the business model just didn’t seem like it was going to work out  

Rob Walling:
And trying to figure out how to ask this question delicately, but could you have found that out before writing the code? And do you feel like you were, do you have a regret about spending the time writing the code or was getting your shipping muscle working again worth it?  

Colleen Schnettler:
First of all, Rob, you crush my soul all the time. It’s fine. You’re used to it like artist history. I’m used to it, so it’s fine. You know what? I think I knew before I built it that this was going to be the outcome, but building it for me was more about getting that muscle of shipping activated again because it had been so long since we had shipped because I hadn’t gone zero to full app in such a long time. I just needed to activate that muscle. And I had really wanted to play with the AI APIs and I hadn’t and was on the sidelines watching everyone, and I was like, I want to get into this. This is the future. And so the podcast thing was cool because there’s this huge podcast, API that I bought data from and then ran it through Deep Graham to transcribe and then ran it through OpenAI to try to extract sponsors. So I got to piece all these different APIs together and I had a lot of fun and it gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to ship something. And so I do not regret it, but I do think I already knew the answer because again, if you’re getting a podcast sponsor for 200 bucks, so what are you going to pay for that? Not much.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, economics don’t work out. Do you think it is tasteless to say that podcast was your rebound relationship after Hello Query? It was like I knew it wasn’t going to work out, but to regret got you back in the game,  

Colleen Schnettler:
It’s totally appropriate. That is absolutely correct.  

Rob Walling:
Well get podcast leads.com may not have been the runaway success she envisioned. It reignited her so-called shipping muscle. It was a necessary step, a rebound relationship of sorts that ultimately led her to her next endeavor.  

Colleen Schnettler:
So then I was at the bottom of another trough of Sorrow. I was like, oh wow, this was a terrible idea, which I think I knew, but I really just wanted to ship something. So now you’re at the bottom of the curve again and you’re again like, crap, what am I going to do? And so I went back full circle to what is my unfair advantage here? And it’s hard with this. You have to separate sunk cost from Unfair Advantage. And so that was really my struggle is it was another time of a lot of kind of confusion, anxiety, whatever, whereas well as my unfair advantage that I have been immersed in reporting for two years or is that a sunk cost? And I just walk away and I realized that I still think that’s an unfair advantage that I have been immersed in this world of internal reporting. 

And it is a problem. People want to solve it. It is so clear. It is so hard as someone trying to start a business just to come up with a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. And I was like, okay, if I take all of the complicated emotions around what I have already done going down the Hello Query route, if I separate that from the practical, logical, what is the business opportunity here, I still think there’s a business opportunity there. And I had been playing around with all these APIs, and so I was like, I wonder if there’s a way I can combine what I learned with GET podcast leads and the new tech out there and the original vision. And so what I have now, what I just launched, it’s AI assisted SQL Report builder. So it’s still called Hello Query, but it’s a different product  

Rob Walling:
And describe how it works, who would be a user at a company? And I know that I’ve seen the interface, it’s relatively simple, so describe what it does.  

Colleen Schnettler:
So I just launched it last week, so it’s still very early in terms of ideal customer. So what I am finding is when I first built it, I had thought it would be more for the developers to kind of remind you how to write SQL because we’re not all checking all the time, but everyone I have talked to wants to put it in front of their non-technical teammates.  

Rob Walling:
Internal  

Colleen Schnettler:
And internal  

Rob Walling:
Users.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yes, internal users. And so what that looks like is that looks like Jim from Accounting asks a natural language question that’s converted to SQL under the hood, it’s run against his database. And the product though is the reports, Jim, if those are the answers that Jim wants, he can then export it to CSV, export it to Google Sheets. He can schedule that report to be sent to him and his team every week rerun and sent. So the product is really all the reporting around the initial query.  

Rob Walling:
This reminds me of a quote that you said in the last episode where you said, looking back, we should have shipped SQL to CSV because we could have done it quickly and you and Aaron conflicted on that viewpoint. This feels like an AI assisted SQL to CSV or at least the vision that you had. You agree with that?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, a hundred percent agree. And the AI also, I wasn’t even going to ship that. I added that. It was almost going to be more of a marketing gimmick to be like, oh, ai. And then people were so excited about it and I was like, oh, right, okay, people are so excited about this, so this should be part of the offering. But yeah, that’s exactly what this is, is this went back to, I was like, you know what? Let’s go back. Let’s think about what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do little take off little bites of this problem, little bites at a time, put it in front of people, let the vision change as needed.  

Rob Walling:
And that’s something you and I have been talking periodically about how do you get just a little more data or a little more information so you’re not guessing and you’re not just thinking and ruminating because you and I can sit for two hours and guess what people are going to do. And in fact, I think it was three weeks ago, you and I had a chat and you were asking the question of, I’m concerned no one’s using it, it wasn’t launched yet and I’m concerned, are people going to be willing to hook up production databases? And on that call I said, well go ask them. Right? Should you just launch? It was a question, should you just launch? Go tweet it, I’ll retweet it, see if people do it. And what was that experience like for you?  

Colleen Schnettler:
First of all, amazing and amazing because for whatever reason, and I think it’s just the way that the speed at which we were working in terms of shipping product last year, there was a lot of thinking. It was like we have to ship the right thing the first time. So we have to have figured all of this out, which is terrible. But I do think it’s important to remember we got into that mindset because have you heard that thing? All advice is true. I dunno, it’s some famous article. It’s kind of like all advice is true because it worked for the person giving you the advice. So you’re always going to have people in the business building community who have both sides of this. You have the people who ship frequently and iterate. Then you have the people who are like, oh, we spent two years building this thing by talking to our customers and this thing is amazing and successful. 

And so I say all of that to kind of explain why we were in such this. We’re going to think the perfect product the first time. And so going back to this whole, one of the biggest reasons I think this particular product could fail will be because people won’t connect their production databases. And you’re like, well, you can just find out. I was like, yes. I can literally just find out. It doesn’t have to be. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Maybe this group will, maybe this group, I can just ship the thing that I’ve built and then see if people hook up their production databases.  

Rob Walling:
And this is a luxury, there’s this often this debate of should I build an audience? And you’ll see Laura Rotor and Jason Cohen and I on Twitter the other day saying, not for SaaS. If you’re going to sell info products, build an audience. Not for SaaS, not worth it. There’s other things you should do, but there are exceptions to it. And I’m not saying exceptions that you should build an audience, but where it is nice to have a group of people who know who you are and whether that’s a thousand followers on Twitter or 2000 or whatever, you tweeted it out, here’s this thing, here’s a GIF of the screen, click here to try it out. And that is a really nice luxury. If you had no social media following and you had no network, no community, you could still do it. Hell, we’ve all been there. I did it 15, 20 years ago and you’ve done it yourself, but this sped up the process is what it did.  

Colleen Schnettler:
That’s what I was thinking as you were saying that this just makes the feedback cycle faster because I can access people who are my target audience faster,  

Rob Walling:
And I feel like it’s a virtuous cycle because it ties back into the shipping muscle comment you made earlier of you shipped and then you get really quick feedback and that feedback is the dopamine rush of good or bad, I’m doing something. And that’s where the build in public hashtag, I could take it or leave it. I think the biggest benefit of building public is not, Ooh, look at me and I’m going to get customers from this. I think it’s the feedback loop of really quickly, especially, well, if you’re building in public and you’re targeting the people who are actually listening, because the problem is if you make anything that’s not for indie hackers or developers and you put it on Twitter, you get indie hacker developer feedback and not, and usually, which is the opposite of what you actually want, but in this case, developers could feasibly bring it inside a company. Maybe they’re not the target user, but they at least know how it works.  

Colleen Schnettler:
And again, I think in the end, not that there’s ever an end, but I don’t know if I’ll be targeting developers or finance teams or C-Suites. But yes, the developers will have to touch it at some point and they can be the people, often the people being asked to pull these reports, so many people were like, oh yeah, I get asked to do this all the time. It’s such a pain, not my job. So they are for me, for them to pull it into their company.  

Rob Walling:
And so where do you stand today? Then you launched this thing three weeks ago, you got feedback, people hooked it up to their production database. Do you have more learnings and you know what features they’re going to build next? Is there more research thinking, data gathering to be done?  

Colleen Schnettler:
It’s tough. I mean, this whole thing is tough. If we all knew what to do, we’d just do it. I think I learned enough with a very small group of initial people who are interested to know what needs to happen next in terms of feature sets. So I am trying to, I don’t dunno if I’m going to go the whole week, marketing week, coding week thing, I don’t know if I’ll do that, but I am trying to make sure I stay in a cadence where I’m talking to people and I’m building and what I have learned. So I feel like there’s this whole concept with building a business, especially as a solo founder of Emotional Runway. I don’t know if we’ve talked about this, but it’s like this concept of, okay, so it’s this concept of emotional runway where this is a ultra marathon. This isn’t going to be done despite what people on the internet tell you, you’re not going to shift something in a weekend that’s going to make you a million dollars. 

It’s like highly unlikely. And so what I have found for me is I really, really enjoy being in the code. I like talking to people, but it’s very draining. So I’m trying to balance the talking to people and especially when you talk to people and you think your idea is so brilliant and they’re like, I can’t use it because of this or I can’t use it. I mean that’s demoralizing. That’s hard to come back from and come back from and come back from. And so what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to spend a week, maybe 10 days shipping a new feature that I know I need and then following up with these people who are trying it to see how it’s working for them. So kind of getting that cadence as I go forward.  

Rob Walling:
It sounds like a good plan. Shipping, often, shipping early shipping, often small pieces to piggyback on your emotional runway, I have this thing that I tweeted once and now I say it now and again and it’s funded. Companies fail when they run out of money. Bootstrapped companies fail when the founder runs out of motivation, and I would count, you’re a mostly bootstrap company, and what I see, what we see with TinySeed and outside of it is some people will have some traction after a year or 2, 3, 4 years. They’re at 4K, MR, 5K, but you just get so tired of doing it and you watch other of the success stories come out and you feel like, can I just, so that’s where bias towards action mostly working on the right things and getting enough of them correct that you have momentum because once you lose momentum, it’s demoralizing and you can only beat demoralized for so long. And so that’s where you’re shipping your shipping muscle that you’re rebuilding right now as well as the fast feedback cycle, I think is going to help with that motivation. It helps refill, it helps shorten your runway. No, the opposite. It helps lengthen your runway or helps kind of refill your motivation, your bucket so that you can keep going.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, absolutely. And whenever I start to panic a little like, oh my gosh, this isn’t working. Okay, I only shipped it two weeks ago, so it’s a little early for that, but I try to think about that, right? I’m like, okay, this goes on as long as I want this to go on, right? In a positive way in that yes, this needs to work on a relatively quick timeline because got to pay the bills, but also I can spend a year, I can spend five years, this can be my, I want this to be my future. I don’t want to go get a job and I want that so badly. I think it’s just good to remember for most people that don’t quit, it eventually works out. Most people, if you look at these success stories and you really dig into them, most people that don’t quit, it eventually works out  

Rob Walling:
One decision that I think you’re facing that still feels very muddy, and I want to bring it up because it is muddy. I want to show people listening to this that in hindsight, after this season airs and they’re like, well, Colleen was wildly successful with Hello Query. She always knew she would be. She knew exactly what to build. Everything’s great and up into the right, but looking back in the midst of it, you usually really are uncertain as to what you’re building, who you’re building it for. It’s very muddy, right? And one good example of that is right now you’re building this AI assisted SQL to CSV reporting engine for internal BI users, for people to query stuff. And that’s kind of where you have interest and that’s kind of what the product is today and you’re adding features on. But there’s been this other request, a few of them around, well, could this just tie into all of our marketing tools and allow us to query what Google Analytics plus Mixpanel plus Heap plus just whatever marketing stack to, I would love to just ask my marketing stack questions. How many trials do we have last month? How are they converting? Are they up? Just whatever people can imagine that. Maybe it’s a dashboard, maybe it’s not, but that is a different direction. Those two are not the same thing. The marketing query engine or the marketing versus an internal BI tool. What are your thoughts on that decision, and is it weighing on you? Are you uncertain about it? How is that going for you?  

Colleen Schnettler:
You’re right, they’re not the same thing. They’re two totally different directions, and I find both of them to be really appealing.  

Rob Walling:
In the world of startups, decisions are seldom clear cut. Colleen finds herself at a crossroads torn between two compelling directions for her product catering to internal BI teams or tapping into the excitement surrounding marketing analytics. It’s a classic case of the curse of the audience, a dilemma that highlights the challenges of navigating the murky waters of finding product-market fit.  

Colleen Schnettler:
On one hand, I think if I went the marketing route, people would just be, I think people in my network, this goes back to is it worth having a social media following? My people would be so excited if I put AI on top of your Google Analytics. They would be so excited. That is one direction and people have asked me for that. And then you have this other thing, internal BI tool, and honestly, I don’t really know. I am just taking my best guess. And my best guess is that one company in particular that has approached me about the internal BI tools, like a pretty big company. And I realize there is a demand for this inside big, bigger established businesses on the BI side, and that’s a customer that would probably pay a premium price for it. Whereas marketing data marketers have a lot of money, but I also think they have so many tools, so many tools that their disposal already, and they probably already kind of understand Google Analytics. So I don’t know if that AI on top of Google Analytics is as valuable. So that’s why I’m going BI tools, but I think this is a false, there could be a false demand signal. If I launched the Google Analytics thing, my people would be so excited. So that’s why I’m really torn on the decision, to be honest with you. I think I could go either way.  

Rob Walling:
I call that false demand, the curse of the audience. And if there’s two curses to it, one, you tweet it out or you email your list and everyone’s like, oh, I want to check out what they’re doing. And everybody’s really interested and then they’re not actually that interested to solve a problem, but they just want to interact with you. And then the other curse of the audience is when you burn through your entire audience, I did in the early days of Drip where it was like I have whatever, 10, 15,000 people on an email list and Twitter following and everything, and we launched this product that was kind of half baked. It was like MVP, and people looked at it and said, it just doesn’t do enough. And so a lot of churn and then we rebuilt. We had Drip 2.0, it was actually really good automation, all this stuff, and when I went back to my audience, they were like, yeah, we already took a look at that, and people didn’t want to try it again. 

Yeah, it was crazy. Multiple people said, oh, I didn’t, that’s what it did. Because they had all given me the benefit of the doubt the first time. So that’s why one of the reasons I wanted to call this out is A, it is a very fuzzy and cloudy decision, and neither you nor I know what the right answer is, but the right answer is to keep pushing forward and to try to get more data on both fronts and to make the best decision you can. Being a founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information, and you’re the perfect example of that right now with just incomplete information on all the fronts, and actually I posit that it doesn’t get any worse than when you are pre-product market fit. That is when you have the least amount of information and the most cloudiness, and that’s why it’s harder to save, write blog posts or build frameworks or write books around the pre product-market fit phase that you’re in, because it is just so kind of, it depends. 

You have to get more data, you have to make a decision. There is no, if you were like, Hey, I’m at 10 KMRR, I have 10 customers each paying me a thousand dollars a month, they are all either healthcare startups or IT departments of law. I’d be like, great, I can rock and fuel that. We can get that going. There’s an engine there, but until you get there, it can feel a bit like wandering in the desert and it’s just you got to keep going, got to keep shipping, and you got to keep gathering data, which is exactly what you’re doing at this point. We move towards wrapping up the episode, but I left the recording going, Colleen and I have been recording this podcast over the course of almost eight months, and I asked her how she was really doing  

Colleen Schnettler:
Fine. It’s more just like I’m still in the phase where I don’t know if this is going to work or not, and it’s like, so it can be a little bit hard to get on here and be like, yeah, this is totally going to work. I know I’m making all these decisions. All of that is true. But you don’t  

Rob Walling:
Have to say it’s going to work though. Don’t feel like you have to say, don’t even feel like you have to be upbeat. Say that. Yeah, you didn’t have to say that. You don’t have to fake it. You don’t have to even be upbeat. You could come on and I could intervene and you could be like, I feel terrible about this, and I’m super doubtful and I’m thinking about shutting it down. If you wanted to say that, say that. Be authentic to yourself. You’re not there. I don’t feel  

Colleen Schnettler:
Like you’re there. I’m not there. No, but it is talking about it. I’m like, all of the things I said are true, and I do feel good about it, but also, man, I guess it’s just we’ve been recording this podcast for so long and it’s like, what do I have to show for it? Right? I’ve been doing this for so long, it feels like, and it’s like, man, here I am again, not making any money.  

Rob Walling:
It  

Colleen Schnettler:
Just a little, it’s fine, but it’s just a little like, oh, you think after doing this for a year, I’d be a little further along  

Rob Walling:
At this point. I stopped the recording. I think most founders have experienced this feeling, wanting to be further along, wishing they had a clear direction to work toward. One thing is certain Colleen’s journey is far from over with each twist and turn. She learns, adapts, and keeps shipping even when it’s really freaking hard. Colleen stands at a crossroads torn between a couple of promising options. What decision will she make and will she find traction? That’s next time on TinySeed Tails.