Episode 763 | TinySeed Tales s4e8: One Last Pivot

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales. This is season four, episode eight, the penultimate episode where we hear Colleen Schneller with her back to the wall as she’s trying to find product-market fit. Before we dive into this episode, I want to tell you about SaaS Launchpad. This is the best course I’ve ever created, and it is the best course that I know of early stage SaaS founders. You can get it at SaaS launchpad.co, and if you head there, you can download for free one of the videos. I think there’s 26 or 27 different videos, almost 10 hours of content, and you can download one of ’em for free to get a taste of the content. But this is the meatiest most prescriptive course for early stage SaaS founders that I know of my team and I spent, I’ll tell you what, I thought it was going to be about three months, and I think we wound up spending 10 or 11 months outlining recording, editing, producing. It is very dense with material. We have amazing guests like Derek Reimer Lee, Anna Patch, Ruben Gomez, Ross Hudgens, bunch of names that we really enjoyed building the course, and it’s getting rave reviews from the hundreds of folks who have purchased it. So SaaS launchpad.co. If you’re interested, let’s dive in to TinySeed Tails.  

Colleen Schnettler:
The product is totally different, but the job to be done is the same, and we couldn’t make that first product really work the way we want it to, but this feels very doable with the tech that I already have.  

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. We’re now in episode eight with developer and entrepreneur, Colleen Schneller. The last time we chatted with Colleen, she decided to make some changes. It no longer made sense to cater to engineering managers, so she decided to shift her focus to helping marketers, which caused its own frustration since the market was pretty crowded,  

Colleen Schnettler:
I was going all in on marketing data analyst. I think I mentioned this last episode, but doing the whole cold LinkedIn DM thing, started a newsletter, targeted those people, built a guide and engaged as many of those people as I could in actual conversation. I had honestly, kind of an abysmal response rate from my cold LinkedIn outreach. I don’t know if that’s because marketers are just overwhelmed with choice, but it wasn’t great. The few people I did get on the phone, they aren’t using their database as a tool to provide any kind of signal, so they have many, many different data sources. They’re almost overwhelmed with data sources, but one of those data sources is not the database  

Rob Walling:
That makes sense. So they have all these tools, these Mixpanel or product analytics or even I imagine tracking incoming conversions from ads and SEO and all that. And yeah, none of that’s all third party data.  

Colleen Schnettler:
There was some interest, but it was more of a, that would be nice to have. There was no, this is absolutely something I need to do my job. And a lot of them are using data aggregators like a segment or something like that, and those tools just pretty much pull in your data from all these different sources, try to aggregate it. Some people use big queries, so they are using databases, they’re just not using their main or primary database,  

Rob Walling:
And so would an approach there be to do a bunch of integrations and pull that data in and aggregate it?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, I thought about that. That was one of the things I looked at because I could be an aggregator, I could sit on top of BigQuery, but learning more about that, it’s pretty tricky. I actually have a founder friend, and that’s what his business literally does, and maintaining those integrations can be really, really painful. So without, again, it comes down to I would totally build that if I thought it would work, but I don’t have any kind of unique take on it that all of these other data aggregators, I’m not like, oh, I’ve seen this one hole in the market and I’m going to solve it. There was nothing like that. It was like, this is a space. There’s a lot of players in this space. Most people use Segment. Can you build something better? And not being a marketer, I think this is where maybe the fact that I’m just learning marketing that is both helpful and harmful, it’s helpful because I’m approaching it with beginner eyes, so I’m able to kind of see things people take as kind of just ground truth, but also it’s hurtful because I don’t have deep industry knowledge, so I can’t say this is the very specific problem that is wrong with Segment. 

Here is how I can solve it,  

Rob Walling:
And it’s hard to enter a competitive crowded space when you don’t have an obvious position. That’s  

Colleen Schnettler:
On my it’s, I mean, it’s just not worth it without having 30 people saying, yes, I need this one very specific thing. So I saw a lot of people’s problems even getting segment data. One person I spoke with walked me through getting his segment data into Big Query and all this custom stuff he had to do, but that was, I couldn’t see how that wasn’t just an isolated problem he had because of his unique data structure.  

Rob Walling:
And that’s one of the hard parts about all of this is there’s so much noise among the signal. Sometimes all the signal is kind of noise. Talk to 10 people, they tell you 10 different things. It’s like, you told me to talk to my customers. What do I build now? You can’t build what they all said because 10 different products. So where did that lead you? Where does it stand? Where does hell query stand today?  

Colleen Schnettler:
The one thing that the marketers did seem to have in common was a general hatred for GA four, and so I kind of went down the GA four path for a while to learn more about that space to see if there was something I could build on top of GA four. But again, what I learned there was I wasn’t a power user of Universal Analytics, so I can’t say there’s this one feature in universal analytics I really miss that I want to build out in GA four. So anyway, I didn’t think I was the right person to build a GA four wrapper, for example, although I spent some time investigating it to see if that was the right choice. I don’t have a strong enough opinion about what I would want in that kind of a product, like what Data insights are not being surfaced. And so I did not think that was the right direction to go.  

Rob Walling:
Eventually though Colleen did find a new direction, one that led her towards an epiphany. She found a new customer who wanted to pull their own data. This had a reconsidering an idea that she had tabled in the past.  

Colleen Schnettler:
The product is totally different, but the job to be done is the same, and we couldn’t make that first product really work the way we want it to. Why that is, it’s neither here nor there, but this feels very doable with the tech that I already have. So it’s ambitious, but it is full circle and it is something I can build, and I have someone who will pay me for it, so I’m going to do it.  

Rob Walling:
That’s crazy. How much will he be paying you for it?  

Colleen Schnettler:
One 50 a month.  

Rob Walling:
A hundred. And you already have a customer paying you 60, right? 59?  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah. Well, they’re both. So now I have two customers paying me 60 bucks a month.  

Rob Walling:
Got it.  

Colleen Schnettler:
And this guy told me he’ll upgrade once I have this SSO embedded features,  

Rob Walling:
It’s going to be at $210 of  

Colleen Schnettler:
MRR  

Rob Walling:
Soon. That’s got to feel good. Two customers though, for, I mean, it does Rob. It does feel good. I know. I know. We’re laughing because it’s true, because it is been a long journey. So here’s the interesting thing. When you were going to build, or you built the query builder back in episode one and two, there was something with where embedding it in an app was going to be complicated because it doesn’t look and feel like their app and it’s like, Ooh, it’s really hard to make it, but now it’s just a text box, right? I mean, it is a tabular display of stuff, but  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, so the biggest difference is, I mean, it’s a completely different product, but yeah, the UI will be less just because it’s less obtrusive in terms of what the UI is versus what we were looking at building first.  

Rob Walling:
A while back, Colleen mentioned she had six months of runway until she ran out of funding, which would’ve taken her through December, just three months from when we were having this conversation. I wanted to check in and see how she was feeling about that timeline.  

Colleen Schnettler:
I have mixed feelings about it. This whole season of this podcast shows a really real journey, and unfortunately it just hasn’t gone the way I thought it would, and man, but I don’t want to do anything else. And that’s the weirdest thing, because before I got into TinySeed and before we got that initial big contract, it just seemed inevitable that this was going to work. There’s nothing I will outwork anyone. I will do anything. I am coachable. I have all of the skills, literally all the skills to make this work. So the trajectory that it’s taken, which is really not working, is a super bummer. But also, I don’t want to do anything else. So I do think I’m going to stick. So for this business, and it might be this is the wrong business, everyone, and you can speak to this, everyone who has found product-market fit says you will know when you are building something people want, you will know. 

So I can tell you right now for sure, that is not happening to me. I am not building something people want. I am cold calling and trying to get people onboarded, and it’s like just pushing this boulder up the hill. You want this thing, you want this thing. And I’m not. So this last pivot to customer facing, this is my last pivot on this business. So one thing I don’t want, and I know a lot of people who do this, and that’s fine for them, but I don’t want a side project that goes on for five years making no money or little bit of money. Oh, it’s making $200 a month. I should keep it up. No, I’m here to go big or go home. I’m kind of an intense person. I am all in. So yeah, so that’s why I’m giving myself till the end of the year, I have a specific goal of where I want to be by the end of December. And if I’m not there, then I’m just going to walk away.  

Rob Walling:
And it’s really good to have that clarity because otherwise, how do you answer that question of when to quit? When do I quit? I get this question all the time, right on the podcast, people ask you, and it’s like, it sounds like you’re pretty clear on knowing when to quit that it’s not today. It’s either end of December or it’s not depending on this kill criteria. So I dunno if you’ve read the book, quit by Annie Duke. There were a couple things in it that I took away from, and one is kill criteria. Knowing when to quit and kill criteria involves a date and some type of number usually or some type of milestone that if you haven’t hit this by that date, then it’s done and you can adjust along the way, of course as you get new information. But that’s exactly what you’ve defined. Here is a date and a number,  

Colleen Schnettler:
And I decided I need to do that because I do want to. I want this to work so badly. So that’s why I kind of gave myself those guardrails to be like, if you’ve been doing this for two years and it’s still not working, and to be fair, a lot happened in there and we sold the other thing, but that’s probably a sign. It’s not the right thing. You’re not working on the right thing.  

Rob Walling:
And I say this the time that this is the hardest part, or at least I guess it’s the hardest part mentally, I think because you just don’t know and no one can tell you, I can’t sit here and say, oh, you should definitely take this approach or this direction because none of us know you’re trying to do something novel. And this is one of the hard parts of entrepreneurship is that fuzzy time before product-market fit. But as you start building something, people want your product matures, 5K, 10 KMRR, things become clearer. And then by the time you hit 50 KMR, it’s really clear what you’re building, who you’re building it for. It should be, unless you’re really getting lucky, which can happen. But this part’s fuzzy. This part is hard to even prescribe. The frameworks for it are really loose. I mean, to talk about customer development or lean startup or I have this course in this book called SaaS Launchpad. 

I get as tight as I can with it, but I can’t be as prescriptive as I can. If you were to come and be like, Hey, I’m a 20 KMRR and I have 20 customers or 30 whatever, and I can be like, oh, great, I can playbook the out of this. I know the next steps. I can almost blueprint this out if exactly what I would do in which order of blah, blah, blah. But where you’re at is just like you’re just searching. You’re trying to find it. You’re using Founder Gut and you’re making a lot of hard decisions with incomplete information. A ton of noise.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Lots of noise. I mean, I haven’t talked to you in a couple months. So one of the things I tried in that gap was going after product people. And I mentioned that the marketing people didn’t really want to talk to me. The product people all wanted to talk to me. I got on so many calls and Rob, there were several people that I was sure a hundred percent sure they were going to sign up and try it out. And I just got ghosted so hard by these people so hard. So yeah, I don’t know. It’s a messy, weird middle ground. To your point, signal to noise getting on these calls, these people were like, yes, I need this to make product decisions a hundred percent. And just disappeared. Won’t respond to emails, won’t respond to LinkedIn. Messages just gone poof.  

Rob Walling:
Those are the road. Those are the speed bumps that you encounter. You can let ’em be roadblocks or you can just let ’em be Speed bumps, keep driving, pivot.  

Colleen Schnettler:
Yeah, I mean, there’s just filtering that out at this stage. It’s just trying to filter that stuff out. It’s trying to figure out what people really want, what’s actually useful, and really defining that value prop for people, which even now with what I have, isn’t crazy clear. Even to me. I have a big sales demo on Monday for a big company, and I’m sitting here thinking, what is the one thing that I can show them? And I’m like, this is the thing you need. This is why you reached out to me. This is the thing. So even defining all of that, it’s messy and it’s hard, and you’re kind of building and showing people and building and showing people, and you kind of hope, or at least that’s how I work. I hope to iterate my way to the correct.  

Rob Walling:
As the end of Colleen’s runway approaches, she’ll have a lot to consider. Can she hone her value prop and find a bit of traction with a handful of paying customers in order to extend her runway? That’s next time on TinySeed Tails.