Colleen Schnettler
Appearances
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
You know, it's funny joining TinySeed because you go to the retreat and meet the other TinySeed founders and they all say, we don't need the money. And we joined TinySeed because we need the money. Okay, so I guess technically we didn't need the money because this enterprise client is paying my salary as I develop for them. But the money is going to make a huge difference for us.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
It is going to enable me to free myself up as a consultant and work on the business full time. And the other reason is, you know, it's funny, Rob, listening to this podcast years ago, and you would talk about like your mastermind, like your secret mastermind. And this is before I knew anyone in this space. And I was like, how do I get in a secret mastermind? Like, I want to be in the club.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
And so TinySeed has really is giving that to us. We're in a mastermind. I have access to you. I mean, it's really expanding our network. We have people who have reached out, offered to help, people offered to share contacts. And The more I get into this, the more I really think your network makes a tremendous difference, especially when you're first trying to get off the ground.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Yes. And the thing about TinySeed too is the whole not crazy, not like hustle bro has been very nice because again, military spouse, I have three kids. I'm still mostly the primary caregiver, you know? So it's not only a network, it's a network of like-minded founders. And that's really important.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Yes. So our product, as I said, it's a visual drop-in query builder. When I say that, people don't know what I'm talking about. So we have really struggled with positioning this product. And one of the ideas we had, because we already have it made in Laravel, is Laravel has a admin panel that you can purchase that I guess everyone in the Laravel space uses.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
So we thought we'll drop our price from $1,000 a year to $250 a year and sell it kind of as an add-on.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Exactly. So we announced it. We emailed our list. The day before we dropped the price, someone bought the Laravel package for $1,000. The next day we dropped the price. One person buys it from our list. So now we...
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
have to refund the guy who spent a thousand dollars seven you know the the difference and we only have the one other sale so we're net negative on that so so that was not awesome fun yeah oh that sucks at least to look on the bright side of that it's it it
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
We are confused, I think, as to... Right. So basically, let's just say it was one sale because the other guy bought it at full price. And we just don't get it quite why people aren't buying it. I mean, we don't have a huge mailing list, but we have 500 people on our mailing list. All of those people at one point expressed an interest. So to have one sale feels just like...
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Are we just totally wrong?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Oh, it's painful. But yeah, we thought price was the issue and you're right. Clearly price is not the issue.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
A high point. Okay. I like this. So we have been talking to product managers because we are repositioning, we think, away from selling directly to developers and talking to product managers. And something that keeps coming up is custom reports for customers. So they want... So we've talked to analytics companies. We've talked to healthcare companies. They want their customers...
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
to be able to come in and get custom reports that they can save, that they can email, to choose to email to themselves. Well, we've built out 85% of that. We've built out the hard work of that with this query builder. So to build the scaffolding around custom reports, which is literally just like an index view, you download the CSV and you set up a background job to send you an email once a week.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Like we've done the hard part. So Aaron and I have been talking about kind of fleshing out the rest of that and providing custom reports for customers. And because we've done the hard part, he's just kind of been hacking away on that this week. And he's almost done, like 10 hours. And we're so close.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
I was ready to go back to work and I wanted remote work. I didn't know anybody who was doing this. It felt like this pipe dream, like this unobtainable pipe dream. Like there is a world where you can make six figures working from home. It seemed impossible.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
So we think from these product manager conversations, we're going to lean into, instead of visual query builder, whatever that means, to custom reports. That's amazing. Yeah, we're super excited. Not an admin dashboard, but it's for your customers.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Yeah, it feels clear. Now, you know, I talked to some founders who talk to like 15 customers a week and we do not have that volume of customer interviews anymore. So our sample size is smaller, but we do keep hearing it. And every like customer we have that we've talked to, I mean, we just keep hearing it. So it feels like a really enticing kind of pivot, although it's not really like a pivot.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
It's kind of just like a gentle recorrection.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Yes, I would say that is what I'm most excited about. On the Rails side, we are also responding to a lot of early customer feedback and building out essentially a V2 of our product. And so I'm also, so a lot, I mean, we're going to do a lot this month. So I'm hoping next time we talk, both of these things are done. And I am really excited to get over that hump because the current product is,
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
It's an MVP running in an enterprise client's application. So it's a lot of work, I guess is the best way to say it. Like we're making changes quickly. And so I think this kind of rewrite that we're working on behind the scenes is going to make working with the product so much easier for the Rails customers.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Yeah, we're super excited.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
My name is Colleen Schnettler, and I am the co-founder of Hammerstone.dev.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
So this is kind of a good story. My co-founder, Aaron, he was working for a tax property company and they kept getting asked for custom reports. And so he built out this custom component, this Laravel and Vue query builder. And kept the IP in his contract and decided he was going to start selling it in the Laravel space.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
And then a huge company in the Rails space, so we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year, ARR, came in and said, we want this for Rails. And... He's not a Rails developer. So he hired me as a consultant. So I joined, I didn't join him. I worked as a contractor for him for this big enterprise client. I did that for about eight months. I built out the product.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Then I thought our contract was over. So I went and got a full-time job. And then two months after that, the original enterprise client said, no, we need full-time support on this product. And so I quit my full-time job after three months and became a full partner in Hammerstone.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
So this company was doing a complete rebuild. So the timing was excellent for us. They were doing a complete rebuild of their product, and they're also using a Ruby on Rails framework called Bullet Train. That's an open source framework. So their philosophy is keep their team lean and small.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
I mean, they have 50 engineers, so I don't know that it's that small, but keep their team lean and basically use off-the-shelf components for everything they can. And honestly, Rob, I kind of think that they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in business. They don't care. Like if we do 5 million a year, they don't care, right?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
It's just so, it's not, you know, it's critical to their app, but it's also kind of like a boilerplate thing that is not a distinguishing feature.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
I did not. I am a self-taught Rails developer.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Well, I was a stay-at-home mom. I had, you know, three kids under five or something, so I'm dripping with children. And I wanted flexible remote work. And this is back in 2014, before COVID, before, you know, that was easy to find. And honestly, at the time, I didn't know anyone that had flexible remote work except this idea of software developers. And so that's what I decided I wanted to do.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
So back in, gosh, 2011, I think I published an app to the iOS App Store. That was my very first foray into software development. And I made $60. But you have to pay $100 to be in the App Store.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Net loss on my first product. And I, you know, again, this was crazy time. Like my husband's in the service, so he's gone a lot. He deploys a lot. Little kids were home, you know, I was home with little kids. And so I thought not everyone needs an iOS app, but everyone needs a website. So I am going to learn how to make websites. Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
And Rails was the hotness, even though Rails maybe isn't the hotness anymore. I still think it's the right place to start. It's a very, you know, it's a very, it's a very descriptive framework with like, and it's not, I don't want to say it's easy to learn. It's not, but it's,
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
You can learn, you know, there's enough in there that you can learn following a lot of tutorials and publish stuff to the web. And so I just started doing that. And then I worked for free. I mean, I did all the things they say you aren't supposed to do. Like I worked for free for like a year until eventually I got my first consulting job.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Well, desperation breeds discipline. I think that, I mean, I wasn't desperate. It's not like we couldn't put food on the table, but I was ready to go back to work. And I wanted remote work. And that is what is so interesting to me, too, is I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anybody who was doing this. So it seemed like I can still remember what it felt like.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
It felt like this pipe dream, like this unobtainable pipe dream. Like there is a world where you can make six figures working from home. It It seemed impossible. And so for me, I just, it was a grind. I mean, I just would grind. I would listen to, I'd do the dishes and listen to the Code Newbie podcast, which was very popular at the time, excellent podcast.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
And then I'd work every night trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails. from like 8 to 10 p.m. And I just did that for years. The thing that I would like to tell people is it's not easy. I hate when you go on the internet, and I think we could probably make a lot of these same analogies with business building.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
You go on the internet and you read, like if you Google, like learn to code, you'll see all these articles where people are like, oh, I spent four months and now I'm making $120,000 working from home. And that just doesn't feel like reality for most of us. And so I kind of had to learn that, but I am like the most persistent person on the face of the planet. So it was just, but it was a grind.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
But one more thing I want to say about it. It was a grind, but it changed my life. Like I would do it again in a heartbeat, 100% worth it.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
I do too. And this was always the end goal. But when you're looking again, when you're so far from it, it was like, okay, first I've got to learn to code this. I feel the same way. It's kind of neat to have had that experience because before you have reached a goal, sometimes they can feel like somewhat unobtainable. Right. And so having already lived that once, I think you're right.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Like, I think this for me, a hundred percent, this is the next thing that's going to change my life.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Yes, both of those things are true. I think the thing I said a little earlier about desperation, we move a lot. Before I had kids, I had had a job that I had to go into every day. It was an hour commute each way, eight hours, come back. And military spouses are traditionally underemployed for this reason. When you're moving a lot, it is hard to build a career. So the remote was so important to me.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
And there's another thing that I think has influenced me. People look at me and they seem to be really worried that I'm going to burn out because I work a lot and I love what I do. But I have this context of being a military spouse. And let me tell you, Rob, nothing in the world is harder than single parenting three little kids. Like if I survived that, you know, I've kind of lived through.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
I just feel like my life experience and also this is a little bit darker, but also true. Like we have friends that die. It happens. You know, we went through a really hard period. In like 2013 to 2015, where there were a lot of bad things happening in the world and we lost a couple really close friends. So I feel like I have been through some really hard things.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
And so when people complain about having to work too much or they're worried that like I'm going to burn out, like I don't know how to take care of myself. I'm like, that's not accurate because I've had these really challenging life experiences. And I was in my 20s and I got married young.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
So I've had these really challenging life experiences that I think have kind of changed who I am and how I approach the world and how I approach life. And I think now at this point in my career, that's going to help me get over the challenges of trying to start a business.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Well, we're very early. So we haven't, we're kind of in that position right now where it's kind of sort of working, but we don't feel like we have landed on real product market fit. So it feels like anything could happen, which is both exciting and terrifying.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
What's interesting is you hear so much about how important it is 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Exactly. So if you're an email service provider, maybe your customers want to segment their email list. This is a very common thing, right? 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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. What was happening when we get on these customer calls is when we ask 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
And then if you move upmarket, the upmarket companies are using a Power BI because 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, you know, 20 plus people that confirm that we are probably on the correct path.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Yes, they're 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 like a different company control over that. People do not like that. That is generally not what we are trying to do.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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 you, you the SaaS owner, to build charts for them. Data analysts want their hands on their data.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
And so these are the kind of companies we're going to target.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Exactly. Those are the kind of people we've been talking to is my customers want their data out. They want it in Excel because they're going to put it in Power BI or they like Excel because that's 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Oh, and by the way, we can upcharge them for this feature. And I love that because now we're closer to the money.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
So here's what we've decided, right or wrong. We've decided that this is what it looks like, full stop. 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
And again, I think for us, like 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Yeah, no one has had an issue with that yet.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Like when I first started doing them, I heard everyone say yes, because I'm just naturally energetic and enthusiastic and optimistic, right? I was projected by, oh my gosh, don't you love this? And they were like, yeah, I guess so.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
And after doing so many of these, I think I have hit a really nice balance of really being who I am, like 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, right? Like I've done so many of these.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
The plan is to give them the V1, see if it solves their problem, work with them, iterate until we can kind of like narrow the funnel on who really is our target customer. Because 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Yeah, the customer thing is really hard.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
And so it feels like we've made a ton of progress on product.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Yes. So we had a large part of the code already exists because we are using our old product in the new product.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Yeah, no kidding. That's nice.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Because I'm just naturally energetic and enthusiastic and optimistic, right? I was projected by, oh my gosh, don't you love this? And they were like, yeah, I guess so.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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 like big data analysts, Tableau, Power BI forums, hanging out, seeing what those people are doing. And everyone needs data. Like our world is controlled by data. So people are going to want to access their data. I think...
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
It really is interesting too, like some people just want to throw their Excel files into ChatGPT and we can enable that. It's literally like at its very, very core, all of this packaging and positioning, we're still solving the same problem.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
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, you know, start from zero.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
I am most looking forward to getting this into customers' 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.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
So we have to be really, really careful when we look at the quality versus minimal features to value, you know, 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.