Colleen Schnettler
speaker
167 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Colleen Schnettler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
And. So learning about the space and talking about the space is something that comes very naturally to me. And like I said, it's something I've wanted to do anyway. So it felt like a good alignment of things I wanted to do and potential customers.
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.
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