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
Full Episode
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.
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