Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 755 | TinySeed Tales s4e4: Customer Interviews + Pivoting
Thu, 06 Feb 2025
In this episode of TinySeed Tales, Rob Walling checks in with Colleen Schnettler, co-founder of Hello Query, as she shares the latest developments in her startup journey. Colleen shares the insights gained from recent customer interviews that led to a significant pivot in their product strategy. Hello Query is now focused on embedding custom reporting features within other SaaS applications and Colleen reflects on balancing product quality with minimal v1 features. Her excitement is building to get their solution into users' hands. Topics we cover: (1:32) – Digging into customer interviews (3:54) – Filtering out the noise to achieve confidence (5:31) – Other competitors in the space (8:53) – How Colleen prepares for and sources customer conversations (12:11) – Is the technical implementation coming along? Links from the Show: Invest in TinySeed Episode 748 | The Ins and Outs of Startup Investing Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky Hello Query 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
Welcome back to Season 4, Episode 4 of Tiny Seed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen Schnettler's startup journey. Before we dive into the episode, if you want to invest in founders like Colleen, you can do so through my world-class accelerator and venture fund, Tiny Seed.
We are currently raising our third fund after having raised and mostly deployed almost $42 million across our prior funds.
If you're an accredited investor or the equivalent in your country and you are interested in indexing across dozens, if not hundreds, of B2B SaaS companies that are handpicked by myself, Einar, and our team at TinySeed to be the companies that we believe will succeed in the future, You can head to tinyc.com slash invest. If you enter your info there, it goes straight to Einar.
You've heard him on Startups for the Rest of Us, and you can have a conversation with him if you have any questions, or you can receive our deck and our memo and just the thesis of what we're investing under because we are a unique venture fund and SaaS accelerator. So if you think you might be interested in putting some capital to work,
in ambitious, mostly bootstrapped B2B SaaS founders, head to tinyseed.com slash invest. Let's dive into the episode.
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.
Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the wild roller coaster 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 four, we're back with Colleen Schnettler, a developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of HelloQuery.
And Colleen's been busy. When we last spoke, she had recently almost broken up with her business partner, completely pivoted her company, and changed its name. And through all this unrest, she's been using customer interviews as a guiding light.
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.
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.
And so this is a change from last time we spoke because we had talked about Hello Query, great name by the way, being a standalone SaaS app that would almost be used by internal teams. But now you're saying after these interviews, it sounds like you've gotten a signal that says now we need to embed in other apps. So as an example...
If I had an email service provider and I'm a SaaS app and I have a thousand customers and I need them to be able to develop custom reports, you're saying I would be able to embed Hello Query in my SaaS app. Is that right?
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.
Got it. And when you do interviews like this or you have customer conversations, it's often very noisy. It's often not nearly as clear as folks make it out to be. I remember I did a talk seven, eight years ago as we were building Drip and I was trying to figure out what we actually were building in for who, right? It was early. It was trying to figure out product market fit.
And I had a hundred emails sent into me from people who were canceling. And then I had a bunch of conversations and I remember saying, this was our conclusion. And boy, does it seem obvious and brilliant in retrospect. But I had very little confidence. I mean, I was like a 40% out of 100 of like, maybe this is the right thing, question mark.
Do you feel similar to how I've just described or do you feel like you have a higher level of certainty than that?
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.
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.
In our previous episode, Colleen mentioned a red flag. Her original idea didn't have any competition. It's one of the main reasons she made such a big pivot. So I wanted to know, this new idea, does it have competitors? Have other companies already tried this idea? And if so, what is Hello Query going to do differently?
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.
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.
And so these are the kind of companies we're going to target.
And so given that reporting is usually... I will say, not that it's not important, but I remember that being a big pain in my ass. So it's like reports are almost a necessary evil have been in my experience. And so I think that's what you're saying is that's why it's not a core feature in essence.
It's a core feature because customers want it, but it's not something that as a product team, I typically want to be building.
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.
Oh, and by the way, we can upcharge them for this feature. And I love that because now we're closer to the money.
Absolutely. Yeah. I believe we talked either offline or maybe on this, this podcast about some issues you were running into when this was still an embeddable component, but then it's like, well, I got to tweak the styles because it has to match the app because they have customers using it. How do you get around that with this?
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.
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.
That's a nice attitude to have for a V1. I hope so. To know what you can say yes and no to because that is often the hardest thing to know is what do we build into this first version because it needs to be not very buggy and it needs to look pretty good.
And so folks who need it desperately haven't had an issue then with the fact that the fonts and the spacing and the whatever else may not exactly match our UX paradigm.
Yeah, no one has had an issue with that yet.
These customer interviews are key for Hello Query's future. I asked Colleen for some insight into how she's preparing for these conversations and if her approach is changing over time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think a question a lot of folks listening will have is how did you find these 20 people?
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.
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.
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.
I like what you've said. It's something that I think a lot of folks miss. It's not just what are we building? It's who are we building this for? Yeah. You have to answer those two questions.
And oftentimes you can have an amazing product idea like you do now, but if you don't know who it is you're focused on and who you're selling to, it becomes a real problem once you get through your first three or four customers who actually come in. So I just want to call that out for listeners who maybe discount that.
Yeah, the customer thing is really hard.
While these customer calls have been crucial for Colleen, it's not the only thing she's been busy with. So I'm curious, you have this validation of where you want to head in the next, what, month or two? How much progress have you made technically in terms of implementing features?
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.
And so it feels like we've made a ton of progress on product.
I'm surprised that it's gone that quickly. Is it because you already had a core from the Hammerstone days or refined days that you were able to repurpose?
Yes. So we had a large part of the code already exists because we are using our old product in the new product.
Nice little shortcut. Well, it's handy to be able to not just throw away all that.
Yeah, no kidding. That's nice.
This is where this is where it is a pivot. You know, sometimes people will say, I was going to build project management for hair salons. And now I'm going to pivot into building in a mobile app on Facebook. And it's like, that's not a pivot. That's just a completely different thing.
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...
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.
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.
I'm curious, what are you most looking forward to and what is the thing that will keep you up at night?
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.
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.
If I was in Colleen's shoes, I'd feel that exact same mix of excitement and nerves. But with the insights from her customer interviews, I have a good feeling she's on the right path. We'll check back in with her in a month or two. By then, she'll have had some time to get her product into customers' hands, and she can share some insights into this key moment.