Episode 761 | TinySeed Tales s4e7: Identifying Pain Points

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to season four, episode seven of TinySeed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen Sch Nestler’s startup journey as she ventures on now as a solo founder. Before we get into the episode, if you are a SaaS founder, doing at least 1 million in a RR are going to be there soon. You should check out SaaS institute.com. That’s our premium coaching program for founders doing seven and eight figures. We have our first two coaches in place, Jordan Gaul, who many of you know from bootstrapped web, founder of Cart Hook, founder of Rosie, as well as Mark Thomas, who runs growth at Podia and formally worked at Powered by Search. Both have been TinySeed mentors for many years, and both are exceptional at helping SaaS founders figure out their roadblocks, figure out those bottlenecks and get things going. So SaaS institute.com, if you are looking to be in a mastermind group with four other ambitious seven and eight figure founders, if you’re looking for amazing one-on-one coaching community, a couple in-person events per year, there’s a lot going on and we’re putting together an incredible group of folks. And with that, let’s dive into the episode.  

Colleen Schnettler:
There were like hundreds of competitors and I was like, who are these people? And so it’s a little bit of a rant and it’s good for capitalism, but it’s bad for me in that these products are really good. And no matter what you think is unique, it’s probably not. Someone’s probably doing it with more money and better ui. So you really just have to put the work in to make the product better. The product development has to be a continuous cycle.  

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the 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 seven, we’re back with Colleen after almost four months since our last conversation in the world of startups, four months can feel like an eternity. I was eager to hear how things are going. So Colleen, when we last left your story, you were building a tool aimed at directors of engineering. How did all that play out? Where do you stand today?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Well, yes, it’s been a few months and it has been quite a wild ride. I’m going to be honest. So my first vision last time we talked was going to be this product, and I was targeting engineering managers in the hopes that it would help their developers save time by allowing other teammates, like non-technical teammates to build their own reports. And so the first I got some kind of initial, which when you’re trying to go zero one is really fun, and it kind of felt like there was a lot of energy and momentum around the initial product, but truthfully, that fizzled out pretty quickly. So at that time, it kind of felt like I had more of a, oh gee whiz, this is cool and not a wow, this is actually a useful product. I’m going to integrate into my workflow. So at the time, there were maybe three or four people who were actually interested in using the product to build reports. 

So I worked really closely with them to say, how do we decrease the kind of cognitive overload for the person using the product? So you’d come into the product and it’s AI on top of your database to build reports, and you say, but what do I want to know from my database? I don’t even know what I can ask. So I built in suggested questions based on your schema, and then I shortened the time from, someone has this book, I forget her name, but it’s called First Time to Wow. And it’s this idea of you get something in front of your customers, how do you wow them quickly? So now I have it set up in a way where you come in, it shows you a sample question customized to your database, you click it and you immediately get a chart so you can immediately see a visual that represents the data, you can add it to dashboards, all of that to say there was a lot of early development working tightly with potential customers. 

But as I continued to go down that path, I just wasn’t getting the engagement I thought I would get from developers and engineering managers. When push came to shove, it just felt like they were casually interested, but this product was not really solving a pain point. And I think part of that was because you can’t put it in front of completely non-technical people yet the AI is just not good enough. So a lot of development work, talking to a lot of developers, talking to a lot of engineering managers, but ultimately I don’t think they’re my target market.  

Rob Walling:
Early stage founders are often faced with this dilemma. When is the right time to move on from an idea and how do you know when that’s the right direction?  

Colleen Schnettler:
That is such a hard question because I feel like for every successful bootstrap business out there, you’ll hear both sides of the story. You’ll be like, this person was successful. They pivoted so quickly, this person was successful, they stuck with it for three years. So I was really just going on what I felt was the right decision. And for me, the reporting that I was looking at targeting engineering managers and developers that was going towards embedding reporting for customers and looking deeply at that space, I just didn’t think I had any unique angle. I mean, there’s a lot of products out there that’s embedded reporting for customers, and they’re really pretty good. And I didn’t have any kind of unique takes. So at one point I even almost took a consulting job building embedded reports for a potential customer in order to learn more about that space and the limitation of that space. But I decided not to do that because talking to a couple different people, it seemed like the requirements were so disparate. And I didn’t want to get myself back in that situation where I was a consultant who thought I was building a product, but I was really just consulting.  

Rob Walling:
And so you find yourself at a decision point. You decide, well, this isn’t the right idea for me, or this is not how I’m going to proceed. What next? Are there fallback ideas that you’ve fall back to or is it searching for the next thing?  

Colleen Schnettler:
So actually, to be completely honest, I went and spent a week in the woods, and that gave me some time to really think about, do I want to pursue this embedded reporting idea? Do I want to stick with this idea and try another take on it? Do I want to shut the business down? Obviously a huge opportunity cost to continue to pursue this idea. And what I landed on is I’m not done with this idea yet. I want to take another swing at it, come approach it from a different direction.  

Rob Walling:
I’ve talked for years about the value of founder retreats, taking a break and spending some time away from the computer can give you the space to find some clarity. Colleen’s time in the woods seemed to reinvigorate her interest in a previous idea, a report builder for marketers. So I was wondering what led her back to this idea.  

Colleen Schnettler:
I actually hired a marketing coach to help me figure out an ICP, and I sat down with him and there was this immediate thing that happened where before he was a marketing coach. He was a marketing analyst, and he was like, oh, I literally would’ve bought this tool. This was a problem I ran into all the time where I needed data from my database. I think you can really reach these people by teaching marketers sql. So teach marketer sequel and see if it resonates. And so I said, all right, let’s try it. And marketing I think is really good for me because I’m a developer and I’m really, really interested in the marketing space. It’s something I really want to learn. And one of the things I do well is kind of learn in public. And so learning about the space and talking about the space is something that comes very naturally to me. And like I said, it’s something I’ve wanted to do anyway. It felt like a good alignment of things I wanted to do and potential customers.  

Rob Walling:
And so where do you stand today? Do we have a product in the market? Do we have folks using it?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, so I am all in on this new idea. And the new idea is I help marketers build better reports. I’m targeting marketing data analysts, people who are marketers. So there’s actually, I’ve been in this space for a while now. There’s a big difference between data analysts who are pure data people. They’re with Python and R and whatever. And then the marketing data analysts and marketing, those people are marketing first. So they’re trying to take their existing data and figure out how to use that data to do better marketing, to sell more product. And so I’m all in on those people. I started a newsletter. I am on LinkedIn. I’m sending thousands of cold dms on LinkedIn. I have a whole strategy behind helping them get data out of their database using sql. So that’s kind of what my newsletter’s about. I have a couple users and I have my first paying customer, which is pretty exciting.  

Rob Walling:
Wow, that’s amazing. How long ago did that happen?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Two weeks.  

Rob Walling:
Okay.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Just happened.  

Rob Walling:
So they’re paying, are they using it as well?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah. What’s interesting about this person is I got on a call with them and they hate my ui. I don’t know how else to say it, but they’re like, this product isn’t even very good. And I was like, oh, okay. But I do think it’s interesting that this person was like, this product isn’t very good. So I didn’t think they were going to convert. And then it was kind of fun. I was in the woods having my soul searching, and I didn’t have Stripe notifications set up. So it was two days later I realized they had converted and I sent them a message and they were like, yeah, well, I needed to run more queries. I was like, awesome. But I mean, this is still the wild west. This is still my plan is focus in on these marketing data analyst people with everything I have. I think what I’m going to find is their data is in many different data sources, but try to find, I’m just really, really trying to find that one pain point, one little niche where I can just grab a foothold while simultaneously, I’m a one woman shop now because budget is tight. So simultaneously making the product something that these people want to use. And so it’s crazy.  

Rob Walling:
This is early stage where everything’s cloudy and you wish you had 10 times more hours to get there faster. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So what is the product today? Is it I can type out an English sentence and AI turns that into a SQL query and then pulls data out? Or is there more than that?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, so the product today is, it’s a chat with your database, but you ask, it’s fine tuned to you ask a question, it returns to SQL Query. You can edit the sql, which was funny, that was a heavily feature, but no one actually does it. It’s like people just want to know that they can, they want to see it. 

They want to see it. You can edit the sequel, you run the sequel. It gives you charts. It gives you tables that you can export or add to a dashboard. So the dashboard seems to be kind of an interesting thing. Right now, the marketers so far, and again, it’s a very small sample size I’m working with right now, they seem to really be leaning into what can I do? What reports can I build with this? And you also have a live shareable link. And so one of the things I’ve thought about is you can do triggers, you could do triggers off your database, which is actually something I’m really excited about. My one paying customer really wants me to do that and I need to talk to more people. But I don’t know, I think there’s something there. I think there’s possibility there. The goal is to have something, they come in, they set up, and they don’t have to log into Hello Query. So if you look at product analytics tools or some other tools, even like a Google, they send you emails once a week, here’s what you need to know. And you’re like, sweet, I’m happy with that. So that’s kind of where I want to go with this.  

Rob Walling:
I’m just curious how much your first customer is paying you.  

Colleen Schnettler:
$59 a month,  

Rob Walling:
You decide on that amount.  

Colleen Schnettler:
I literally made it up.  

Rob Walling:
Usually how it goes. Yeah, we have TinySeed companies come in and they’ll be like, our pricing is 499 and 1,002 thousand or whatever, high end tools. And we will look at their data and I’ll say, why are these people paying you $29? And they’re like, well, so when we launched, we launched at 20. You know what I mean? And it’s like it just shows you that’s what happens. 59 will become 99, we’ll become, when you build something people really, really want, that number goes up fast. There’s one interesting comment you made to me via email. I want to surface because so many people listening to this episode will have felt this or might be feeling this now, but to quote you said, the bar for product is so high in today’s market, or at least my solution is not compelling enough to have a low bar. 

There’s this prevailing wisdom that if someone wants something bad enough, they’ll put up with a mediocre ui. But it seems every category is crowded. And I hear this, I hear this from folks getting started of the days of a crappy MVP may be gone, and I can either confirm nor deny because I do know that there are some folks, there are some areas where you can still build crappy MVPs and they work, but there are also places where it’s not. And the more technical your audience, the more design focused, whatever, they pick up on products that are really and not poorly built, but that don’t look amazing, don’t have amazing UX and don’t feel finished. We can tell you and I can tell as builders when a product is finished. So what does that mean for you then as someone who is building a product and has what we might call an MVP now with one customer? What is that sentiment that you sent me imply for your journey?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Honestly, I think it just seems that the products are so good and it seems like every niche that you can think of, that’s what it feels like to me has five or six products. There’s no world of like, oh, there’s one competitor and they have a crappy product. People are just building better stuff than they were 10 years ago, right? 10 years ago. You’re like, oh, this thing, it looks crappy, but it does exactly what I say it’s going to do. And that kind of worked for some people, but I just feel like the level of polish you need in a product is so much higher now. And it’s funny because I think of it because the very first version of my product, I thought it looked pretty good, and then I put it in front of people, like five people, and I was like, oh. And they were like, Ooh, where do I change the name? And I expect to be able to do that in line, and this font looks weird and it’s too big. And I was like, but it does what I said it was going to do. Okay.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. When you’re talking to engineering managers or even marketers who have this high bar for the tools they use now, right? Because things are polished. Makes  

Colleen Schnettler:
Sense. Yeah, things are polished and I don’t know, it feels like this whole revolution of everyone, shipping product is great, but everyone is shipping a product. So there is a ton of competition even in, so when I was thinking if I wanted to do other ideas, I was talking to friends that work in other industries. I talk to someone in insurance. I talked to someone who’s in this really niche, really niche industry you’ve probably never heard of. And I was like, definitely they don’t have tools because no one even knows what they do, but they do. She was like, yeah, we have five competitors. I looked at the schools I looked at, I was looked across anything where I knew someone, environmental survey companies. I was like, all of these sectors have products. I think I even told you I filled out, they call ’em request for proposal for this really niche thing. 

I was like, no one’s going to apply for this or submit a proposal to this because no one has ever heard of this. I didn’t get it. But that was another example of there were hundreds of competitors and I was like, who are these people? And so it’s a little bit of a rant and it’s good for capitalism, but it’s bad for me in that these products are really good. And no matter what you think is unique, it’s probably not. Someone’s probably doing it with more money and better ui. So you really just have to put the work in to make the product better. The product development has to be a continuous cycle. If  

Rob Walling:
I ever prediction for where you’re headed, and this is just none of us can predict where you’re headed with the product, but I feel like it won’t be inventing a new category or it won’t be building something that has no competition. It will be figuring out, as you get into this, now you have your ICP. What tools do they use today that they’re already paying for that are not good, that are either way overpriced? And I don’t mean 20% overpriced. I mean five x what you could charge half or a quarter and still mint money or that are really, they’re polished and you can do a lot of things, but they still don’t work. And there’s either a major deficit in a big competitor or there’s a corner of the market that isn’t being handled. And I think it’s kind of being in the game, increasing your luck surface area by just being there, having the conversations, building something. And I think the difference between success or failure will be if you can find that spot where you fit in the market.  

Colleen Schnettler:
I agree. I think one of the things with what I have now, if you look at it as chat with your database, build reports, that’s not really solving a problem. What is that? That’s cool, but what is it? What is the problem you are solving? What can you do with that? I think general, some people, so chat with your database is not and any way unique. Everyone’s doing that and a lot of the companies doing it are trying to position it as the data analyst for your company. I don’t think that’s right. I think that is still too vague. People are still, the whole point of hiring a real data analyst is they tell you what you don’t know that you don’t know. So I think you’re right. I think this is all about exploration. This is about finding out what tools they’re using that maybe aren’t good enough. It might be an aggregation of tools. I can see a world where it’s dump everything in Big query. I do it for you, dump everything in Big Query. And I sit on top of Big Query because Looker gets really expensive really quickly. Yeah. But again, this is the beginning still. I’m still in the beginning.  

Rob Walling:
In the last episode, Colleen was frustrated at her lack of progress. And now that she’s 22 months in, it feels like she’s just getting started again. And you know what? Sometimes that’s just how it goes. Sometimes you have to pivot your idea. Sometimes you lose a co-founder. Sometimes it takes a while to find a problem worth solving. That’s being a founder. In talking with Colleen after this interview, she has about six months of runway to find some traction. Six months to find a signal in all the noise that indicates she’s working in the right direction. That’s next time on TinySeed Tails.