1: Colleen Schnettler's Journey with Hammer Stone

Background and Introduction

This podcast is the first episode of TinySeed Tales Season 4, a narrative-style show that follows founder Colleen Schnettler over a two-year journey building her SaaS company.

Colleen Schnettler is the co-founder of Hammer Stone (which rebrands to Hello Query later in the season), alongside her technical co-founder Aaron Francis. What makes their partnership unique is that while both are technical co-founders, they each have different coding specialties - Colleen is a Ruby on Rails developer while Aaron is a Laravel expert.

The Product: Refine

Their flagship product, Refine, is a visual query builder that exists as two separate codebases:

A Laravel version (built by Aaron)

A Ruby on Rails version (built by Colleen)

Colleen explains how she joined the company:

"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... a huge company in the rail space...came in and said, we want this for Rails, and he's not a Rails developer, so he hired me as a consultant."

After working for eight months as a contractor, the enterprise client requested full-time support, leading Colleen to quit her job and become a full partner in Hammer Stone.

Colleen's Path to Tech

One of the most inspiring aspects of the episode is Colleen's non-traditional path into tech and entrepreneurship:

"I was a stay-at-home mom. I had 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 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."

As a military spouse who moved frequently, traditional employment was challenging. She taught herself Ruby on Rails through consistent effort:

"I would grind. I would listen to, I'd do the dishes and listen to the Code Newbie podcast... And then I'd work every night trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails from eight to 10:00 PM and I just did that for years."

Her persistence eventually led to success, despite the challenges:

"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. There is a world where you can make six figures working from home. It seemed impossible."

"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...If you Google 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."

But despite the difficulties, she emphasizes the transformation it brought:

"It was a grind, but it changed my life. I would do it again in a heartbeat, a hundred percent worth it."

Current Business Status

At the time of recording (January 2023), Hammer Stone is in the early stages:

"We are very early, so we are 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."

Why Join TinySeed?

Unlike many TinySeed founders who join primarily for the community, Colleen admits:

"We need the money. 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."

She also values the network and community:

"The whole not crazy, not hustle, bro, has been very nice because again, military spouse, I have three kids, I'm still mostly the primary caregiver. So it's not only a network, it's a network of like-minded founders, and that's really important."

Recent Challenges & Insights

A recent low point was a pricing experiment. They tried reducing their product price from $1,000 to $250, thinking price was the barrier to sales. The result was revealing:

"We announced it, we emailed our list the day before we dropped the price, someone bought the Laravel package for a thousand dollars. The next day we drop the price, one person buys it from our list, so now we have to refund the guy who spent a thousand dollars the difference, and we only have the one other sale."

This experience taught them that price wasn't the main obstacle to adoption.

Exciting Developments

The high point came from customer conversations with product managers, revealing a potential repositioning:

"Something that keeps coming up is custom reports for customers... Well, we've built out 85% of that. We've built out the hard work of that with this query builder... we've done the hard part."

Rather than positioning as a "visual query builder," they're exploring reframing their product as a "custom reports" solution - a relatively simple pivot that leverages their existing technology.

Looking Forward

The episode concludes with Colleen's ambitions for 2023:

"I have some big plans, big moves that are risky. 2023 is all about risk taking."

This first episode sets the stage for following Colleen's journey as she navigates the challenging path of building a SaaS business as an "atypical founder."

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