Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 761 | TinySeed Tales s4e7: Identifying Pain Points
Thu, 27 Feb 2025
In this episode of TinySeed Tales, Rob Walling checks in with Colleen Schnettler, co-founder of Hello Query, as she discusses finding customer pain points. Colleen, now solo, navigates the challenge of refining her product vision. After a period of introspection, Colleen shares her decision to pivot from targeting engineering managers to focusing on marketing data analysts. She discusses the insights gained from hiring a marketing coach and the excitement of landing her first paying customer, despite some critical feedback on her product's UI. Topics we cover: (1:50) – Early product excitement fizzles out (5:14) – When is it time to move on from an idea? (8:57) – Helping marketers build better reports (13:03) – Setting early pricing (14:02) – Determining how much to polish an MVP (17:36) – Predicting what’s ahead Links from the Show: SaaS Institute TinySeed 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
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this TinySeed Tales episode?
Welcome back to Season 4, Episode 7 of Tiny Seed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen Schnettler's startup journey as she ventures on now as a solo founder. Before we get into the episode, if you are a SaaS founder, doing at least $1 million in ARR aren't going to be there soon. You should check out SaaSInstitute.com.
That's our premium coaching program for founders doing seven and eight figures. We have our first two coaches in place, Jordan Gall, who many of you know from Bootstrapped Web, founder of CartHook, founder of Rosie, as well as Mark Thomas, who runs growth at Podia and formerly worked at Powered by Search.
Both have been TinySeed mentors for many years, and both are exceptional at helping SaaS founders figure out their roadblocks, figure out those bottlenecks, and get things going. So SaaSInstitute.com if you are looking to be in a mastermind group with four other ambitious seven and eight figure founders.
If you're looking for amazing one-on-one coaching, community, a couple in-person events per year, there's a lot going on and we're putting together an incredible group of folks. And with that, let's dive into the episode.
There were like hundreds of competitors and I was like, who are these people? And so... It's a little bit of a rant and it's good for capitalism, but it's bad for me in that these products are really good. And no matter what you think is unique, like it's probably not. Someone's probably doing it with more money and better UI. So you really just have to put the work in to make the product better.
Like the product development has to be a continuous cycle. Right.
Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the roller coaster of building 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, in episode seven, we're back with Colleen after almost four months since our last conversation.
In the world of startups, four months can feel like an eternity. I was eager to hear how things are going. So Colleen, when we last left your story, you were building a tool aimed at directors of engineering. How did all that play out? Where do you stand today?
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Chapter 2: Why did Colleen decide to pivot her product strategy?
Well, yes, it's been a few months and it has been quite a wild ride. I'm going to be honest. So my first vision last time we talked was going to be this product. And it was I was targeting engineering managers in the hopes that it would help their developers save time by allowing other teammates like non-technical teammates to build their own reports.
When you're trying to go zero one is really fun. And there was a lot of, it kind of felt like there was a lot of energy and momentum around the initial product. But truthfully, that fizzled out pretty quickly. So at that time, it kind of felt like I had more of a, oh, gee whiz, this is cool. And not a, wow, this is actually a useful product I'm going to integrate into my workflow.
Chapter 3: How does Colleen address early product challenges?
So I, at the time there were maybe three or four people who were actually interested in using the product to build reports. So I worked really closely with them to say, how do we decrease the kind of cognitive overload for the person using the product? So you'd come into the product and it's AI on top of your database to build reports.
And you say, but what, what do I want to know from my database? Like, I don't even know what I can ask. So, you know, I built in suggested questions based on your schema. And then I shortened the time from, someone has this book, I forget her name, but it's called like First Time to Wow. And it's this idea of you get something in front of your customers, how do you wow them quickly?
So now I have it set up in a way where you come in, it shows you a sample question and customized to your database. You click it and you immediately get a chart. So you can immediately see a visual that represents the data. You can add it to dashboards. All of that to say there was a lot of early development working tightly with potential customers.
But as I continued to go down that path, I just wasn't getting the engagement I thought I would get from developers and engineering managers. When push came to shove, it just felt like they were casually interested, but this product was not really solving a pain point.
And I think part of that was because you can't put it in front of completely non-technical people yet because the AI is just not good enough. So a lot of development work, talking to a lot of developers, talking to a lot of engineering managers, but ultimately I don't think they're my target market.
Early stage founders are often faced with this dilemma. When is the right time to move on from an idea? And how do you know when that's the right direction?
That is such a hard question because I feel like for every successful bootstrap business out there, you'll hear both sides of the story, right? You'll be like, this person was successful because they pivoted so quickly. This person was successful because they stuck with it for three years. So, you know, I was really just going on what I felt was the right decision.
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Chapter 4: When should a founder decide to move on from an idea?
And for me, the reporting that I was looking at, targeting engineering managers and developers, that was going towards embedding reporting for customers. And looking deeply at that space, I just didn't think I had any unique angle. I mean, there's a lot of products out there that's embedded reporting for customers, and they're really pretty good. And I didn't have any kind of unique take.
So at one point... I even almost took a consulting job building embedded reports for a potential customer in order to learn more about that space and the limitation of that space. But I decided not to do that because talking to a couple different people, it seemed like the requirements were so disparate.
And I didn't want to get myself back in that situation where I was a consultant who thought I was building a product, but I was really just consulting.
And so you find yourself at a decision point. You decide, well, this isn't the right idea for me or this is not how I'm going to proceed. What next? Are there fallback ideas that you fall back to or is it like searching for the next thing?
So I actually, to be completely honest, I went and spent a week in the woods. And that gave me some time to really think about, do I want to pursue this embedded reporting idea? Do I want to stick with this idea and try another take on it? Do I want to shut the business down? Because there's obviously a huge opportunity cost to continue to pursue this idea.
And what I landed on is I'm not done with this idea yet. I want to take another swing at it, come approach it from a different direction.
I've talked for years about the value of founder retreats. Taking a break and spending some time away from the computer can give you the space to find some clarity. Colleen's time in the woods seemed to reinvigorate her interest in a previous idea, a report builder for marketers. So I was wondering what led her back to this idea.
I actually hired a marketing coach to help me figure out an ICP. And I sat down with him and there was this immediate thing that happened where before he was a marketing coach, he was a marketing analyst. And he was like, oh, I literally would have bought this tool. This was a problem I ran into all the time where I needed data from my database.
I have, I think you can really reach these people by teaching marketer SQL. So teach marketer SQL and see if it resonates. And so I said, all right, let's try it. And, you know, marketing, I think is really good for me because I am a developer and I'm really, really interested in the marketing space. It's something I really want to learn. And one of the things I do well is kind of learn in public.
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Chapter 5: What led Colleen to target marketing data analysts?
Yeah, so I am all in on this new idea. And the new idea is I help marketers build better reports. I'm targeting marketing data analysts, people who are marketers. So there's actually, you know, I've been in this space for a while now. There's a big difference between data analysts, who are pure data people. They're with Python and R and whatever.
And then the marketing data analysts and marketing, those people are marketing first. So they're trying to take their existing data and figure out how to use that data to do better marketing, right? To sell more product. And so I'm all in on those people. I started a newsletter. I, you know, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm sending thousands of cold DMs on LinkedIn.
I have a whole strategy behind helping them get data out of their database using SQL. So that's kind of what my newsletter is about. I have a couple of users and I have my first paying customer, which is pretty exciting.
Wow. That's amazing. How long ago did that happen?
Two weeks. Okay. It just happened.
So they're paying. Are they using it as well?
Yeah. What's interesting about this person is I got on a call with them and they... hate my UI. I don't know how else to say it, but they're like, this product isn't even very good. And I was like, oh, okay. But I do think it's interesting that this person was like, this product isn't very good. So I didn't think they were gonna convert. And then it was kind of fun. I was in the woods.
having my soul searching and I didn't have Stripe notifications set up. So it was two days later, I realized they had converted and I sent them a message and they were like, yeah, well, I needed to run more queries. I was like, awesome. But I mean, this is still the wild west, right? Like this is still, my plan is focus in on these marketing data analyst people with everything I have.
I think what I'm gonna find is Their data is in many different data sources. But try to find, you know, I'm just really, really trying to find that one pain point, like one little niche where I can just grab a foothold while simultaneously, I'm a one woman shop now, right? Because like budget is tight. So simultaneously making the product something that these people want to use. And so it's crazy.
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Chapter 6: How did Colleen land her first paying customer?
They want to see it.
They want to see it. You can edit the SQL. You run the SQL. It gives you charts. It gives you tables that you can export or add to a dashboard. So the dashboard seems to be kind of an interesting thing right now. Like the marketers so far, and again, it's a very small sample size I'm working with right now. They seem to really be leaning into like, what can I do?
Like, what reports can I build with this? Right. And you also have a live shareable link. And so one of the things I've thought about is you can do triggers. You could do triggers off your database, which is actually something I'm really excited about. Like my one paying customer really wants me to do that. And, you know, I need to talk to more people, but...
I don't know, I think there's something there. I think there's possibility there. The goal is to have something, they come in, they set up and they don't have to log into Hello Query. So if you look at like product analytics tools or some other tools, even like a Google, like they send you emails once a week, like here's what you need to know. And you're like, sweet, I'm happy with that.
So that's kind of where I want to go with this.
I'm just curious how much your first customer is paying you.
$59 a month.
How'd you decide on that amount?
I literally made it up.
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