Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
Thu, 16 Jan 2025
Welcome to Season 4 of TinySeed Tales, where we follow the founders of one SaaS startup throughout a few years as they share their struggles, victories, and failures. In the first episode of Season 4, Rob introduces us to Colleen Schnettler, the cofounder of Hammerstone. Colleen is a self-taught Rails developer, and this season will follow how Hammerstone eventually becomes Hello Query – an AI-powered chatbot that runs custom reporting on your data. Colleen is one of 27 startup founders from TinySeed’s Fall 2022 accelerator batch. Topics we cover: (2:16) – TinySeed Tales Season 4 with Colleen Schnettler (3:57) – Custom reporting in Laravel and Rails (7:05) – Becoming an “atypical founder” (14:11) – Entrepreneurship as a military spouse (16:17) – Motivations for joining TinySeed (19:15) – A recent low point, and high point in the business (25:00) – Big plans and risky moves ahead Links from the Show: TinySeed Applications open on February 10th Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky Refine by Hammerstone Hello Query Software Social Podcast TinySeed Tales | Season 1 | Castos TinySeed Tales | Season 2 | Gather TinySeed Tales | Season 3 | Cloudforecast 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
What's that, you say? Startups for the rest of us? On a Thursday? Well, starting this week and for the next eight weeks, we're going to have episodes of Tiny Seed Tales, season four, in your feed, every Thursday morning.
If you're not familiar with Tiny Seed Tales, it's a narrative-style, season-based show where I interview a founder as they try to find and optimize their product, finding product market fit, scaling, finding escape velocity, etc. These nine episodes have been recorded over the past two years. So I want you to think about that, entering into this adventure.
You're going to see a startup founder's journey over two years, but you get to hear it in about nine weeks. The idea is to give you some insights into the ups and the downs, the struggles, the victories, and the failures of a real startup founder growing a real SaaS company that was bootstrapped until they took some money from TinySeed. So they're still mostly bootstrapped in my parlance.
In season one of Tiny Seed Tales, I interviewed Craig Hewitt, the founder of Castos, who you're probably familiar with at this point. He's been a recurring guest on this show. In season two, it was Brian and Scotty, the husband and wife pair, founders of Gather. And season three was Tony Chan from Cloud Forecast.
In this season, we're following Colleen Schnettler, founder of Hammerstone.dev, which in the middle of the season rebrands to HelloQuery. It really is a wild ride. It's a testament to the fight that it takes to make it down the hard road of starting a SaaS.
If you're not familiar with TinySeed, it's the startup accelerator that I run for ambitious, bootstrapped SaaS companies, the first accelerator of its kind.
We run applications twice a year for folks who are bootstrapped and want the perfect amount of funding, a community of like-minded, ambitious, bootstrapped founders, advice, mentorship, and everything else you'd imagine would come from a world-class accelerator. Our next application period opens on February 10th and closes on February 23rd. Head over to tinyseed.com slash apply for more info.
So with that, let's dive into season four, episode one of Tiny Seed Tales.
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.
Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles, victories, and failures as they build their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers.
Today, we're kicking off the first episode of season four of Tiny Seed Tales with developer and entrepreneur, Colleen Schnettler.
My name is Colleen Schnettler, and I am the co-founder of Hammerstone.dev.
To give you context, Hammerstone is the name of the company started by Colleen, a skilled Ruby on Rails developer, and her co-founder, Aaron Francis, an expert in Laravel development. The idea behind Hammerstone was to build a company that specializes in creating developer tools with small, easy to use components that simplify the process of building software.
What sets this company apart is that while both Colleen and Aaron are technical co-founders, they each have different coding stacks, something that becomes particularly relevant when discussing their flagship product, Refine. Refine is sold as a single product that exists as a drop-in visual query builder.
But Refine is actually two completely separate products due to the fact that they offer a version for Laravel and a version for Ruby on Rails. This relatively unique approach allows Hammerstone to cater to a wider audience of developers. How did we get here where you have two separate products under the same name?
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.
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.
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.
That's super interesting. Not only the way that you were brought on as a consultant and are now a co-founder, but in the way that you've been able to keep the IP. Oh, yeah. How did that come about? Was it just, we want to keep the IP? Okay, here's a contract? Or was there negotiation around that?
Because I would imagine if I ran a company and I was hiring you to build something for me, I would tend to want to own that code if I was paying for it.
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.
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?
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.
I'm fascinated by the fact that Colleen's enterprise client is disciplined enough to focus their attention on what they do best. It's not often you see a company with that kind of mindset. Usually large companies try to make everything themselves, believing that it'll be faster or more cost effective than buying an existing solution. In reality, that's not usually the case.
It takes months or in some cases years to develop software in-house and the results are often pretty mediocre. Which is why this enterprise client's approach is probably the right way to do it. It sounds like they're focusing on their strengths. There's another inspiring example in Colleen's story about how she became what she likes to call an atypical founder. You're a Rails developer.
Yes.
Did you go to school to learn how to code?
I did not. I am a self-taught Rails developer.
How'd you get into it?
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.
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.
So you lost. Net loss on your first product.
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.
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,
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.
Self-taught Rails developer and a military spouse with three kids at home. That's almost the definition of an atypical founder, which is a term that you've discussed at length with your co-host on your podcast. Colleen's path to building a startup is perhaps a bit non-traditional. Let's dig deeper into her story and find out what led her into tech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel the same way about software development. I'm also self-taught. I was a kid. I had the luxury of my parents were able to afford an Apple IIe in the 1980s. And I wrote code because we couldn't afford to buy any games for it. And so it came with a book, I Speak Basic to My Apple. And I learned basic programming and then we started, I know it's sad, but it's the history.
I was eight years old and it was the first code I ever wrote, you know? And then, and it absolutely changed my life, right? The entire trajectory of what, and what I've built today is based on that got me into tech. That is what got me into tech. After I graduated from college, I worked construction, but I had this coding knowledge from like 15 years prior. Yeah.
And all those nights and weekends of doing it then and then I had to reteach everything because basic didn't do anything, right? In the late 90s. So I went to the library and HTML and Perl and basically had to teach myself how to do it again. I would say the same thing about entrepreneurship.
I like and want to underscore what you said, which is the internet or social media somehow glorifies the easy path or that it's easy. And maybe it's someone trying to sell a course. Maybe it's someone trying to sell their point of view. It's weird. It's easy and it's hard, I think. I remember it being a lot of hard work and just a lot of hours, that 10,000 hours to get good at something. Yeah.
But I also remember thinking this is easier than my day job where I would literally sit next to a backhoe with it. I was with a shovel and in the mud and it would rain and we were like digging ditches to lay pipe, you know, to lay electrical cable next to a building that you couldn't get things into. And I thought that sucks. That was actual hard work. This is a lot of hours.
But it was stimulating. It stimulates your mind. And you see that there's a light at the end of a tunnel of like, this could feasibly change the trajectory of my life. And it sounds like it did that for you, just learning to develop. And I think that being an entrepreneur is that next stage for you. You know what I mean? It's the next thing that's going to change your life in the same way.
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.
Like, I think this for me, a hundred percent, this is the next thing that's going to change my life.
I often use the phrase think in terms of years, not months. As a founder, especially as someone who is bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapping a company, you've already done that. You've already been thinking in years, right? Because you started 2011, is that right? Yes. Learning the code? Yep. Which, you know, we're recording this in 2023, so like what a journey.
How do you think being a military spouse impacted this journey? I imagine you, I'm making guesses. I've never, not in the military, never had a family in the military. I'm imagining you moved a lot. Yes. And you probably, as you were learning the code, did not have many peers around you, as you said. So how does that shape your story?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you give us an idea of where Hammerstone slash Refine stands today in terms of the progress that you're making as a company?
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.
Absolutely. Essentially, you're not at that point where this is a certainty and you're still changing a lot about the business. Which brings me to my next question. Why join TinySeed?
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.
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.
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.
It absolutely does. That was a hard pill for me to swallow as I came up as an entrepreneur, and it sounds like for you as well. I'm working construction and I look around and I say, oh, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And that pissed me off because I felt like an outsider. And I was, and you just have to figure it out, right?
And sometimes it's a decade of grinding to figure that out or to build a network from scratch on your own. And other times you can come alongside and join a network, which it sounds like what you've done with TinySeed is joining the network there that already exists.
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.
At TinySeed, we've worked hard to build a supportive culture for all types of founders. So this comment really made me smile. I'm curious over the past month or two, what has been a low point or something where you think back, this kind of sucks. This makes me think, do I really want to do this?
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.
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.
Like a step one business. It's a marketplace.
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...
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
does sting, but it's a $500 issue. It's a $500, whether it's a mistake or just a $500 road bump, right? There are times when there are $50,000 road bumps, right? But it's probably less of the $500 and more about your aspiration for this to work. I mean, you wanted it to work, right? You wanted to sell five copies, 10 copies, whatever the number was.
You had a number in your head probably, and it wasn't one sale. Yeah.
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...
Are we just totally wrong?
Well, if I can pause it, I think price wasn't the issue. Yeah, clearly. Price wasn't the issue because dropping it by 75% sold one copy. It's obvious people were not buying because it was expensive, you know?
Yeah.
Such a good lesson to learn.
Oh, it's painful. But yeah, we thought price was the issue and you're right. Clearly price is not the issue.
How about a high point over the past month or two?
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...
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.
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.
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.
I love it when that comes together because it rarely does, right? There's always, almost always, a bunch of different signals and it's muddy and it's like, incomplete information, hard decisions. It sounds like this one's pretty clear so far. It's exciting.
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.
It's kind of just like a gentle recorrection.
Well, it's an expansion of the software's capabilities. You're adding features, but then it all sounds like a repositioning in that you're going to call it something different, right? Hey, those are the best. When you can change an H1 on your homepage and not have to like, because a real pivot, it's like, well, throw half the code base out, you know, and we're doing a whole different thing.
I mean, it depends on if there's zoom ins and zoom outs and all that.
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,
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.
given that we're recording this in January of 2023, I find it so fitting that you are quoted by my producer in this document saying on Software Social, I have some big plans, big moves that are risky. 2023 is all about risk-taking. And I feel like that's the perfect way to end the first episode of this series is because this will almost follow a calendar year. And...
I know that I'm super interested to see how the year is going to pan out for you.
Yeah, we're super excited.
I'm really excited to see where Colleen and Hammerstone are the next time we talk. It sounds like she and her co-founder have done a lot of reflecting and developed a healthy amount of self-awareness along their journey. Be sure to tune in next week to see how customer reports and the overall repositioning of the product turn out.
Thank you.