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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I agree. I think, you know, one of the things with what I have now, if you look at it as chat with your database, build reports. That's not really solving a problem. Like, what is that? Like, that's cool. But what is it? Like, what is the problem you are solving? Like, what can you do with that? I think general, like some people, so chat with your database is not in any way unique.
Everyone's doing that. And a lot of the companies doing it are trying to position it as the data analyst for your company. I don't think that's right because I think that is still too vague. People are still like the whole point of hiring a real data analyst is they tell you what you don't know that you don't know. So I think you're right. I think this is all about exploration.
This is about finding out what tools they're using that maybe aren't good enough. It might be an aggregation of tools. Like I can see a world where it's dump everything in BigQuery. Like I do it for you. Dump everything in BigQuery and I sit on top of BigQuery because Looker gets really expensive really quickly. So... Yeah, I mean, but this is, again, this is like the beginning still.
It's just good to remember like for most people that don't quit, it eventually works out. Like most people, if you look at these success stories and you really dig into them, like most people that don't quit, it eventually works out.
So right after we recorded and we recorded so quickly on the heels of the co-founder breakup, I was, I was pretty upset. Like you're absolutely right. There was a lot of stress. There was a lot of anxiety in terms of what to do next. And my immediate gut reaction was, I need to walk away from this idea. I need to walk away from this name. I'm just going to do something else.
Like I have other ideas. I'm going to pursue a different idea. Yeah. And it had been a while since I had shipped code. And so I really, I was having a little bit of self doubt about what it takes to get an app from zero to paying authentication, the whole deal. And so I wanted to ship something and I wanted to go in a different direction. And so at that time, I had this idea.
I used to be a podcaster and we always had this problem finding and managing sponsors to the point where we literally stopped taking sponsors because the overhead was just too much of a pain. So I started going down that direction.
Sick burn. I kind of, yeah, I don't know. So I launched it, launched on Twitter. So I tweeted about it once and I did start DMing people because I know everyone podcasts, right? And so I am fortunate too that I actually know a bunch of people that own podcast hosting companies. So it was kind of cool to be able to go right to the source and talk to those guys.
And what I found out when I was doing that is podcasting is a tough market. Low margins. Podcasters are broke. So the fact that they would shell out additional money seemed unlikely. It could have been... I think it could have been like a productized service. But still...
It's not like if I'm going to do productized consulting, like I should do it in rails and make real money, not for podcasters who are like, I'll pay you 20 bucks if you find me a sponsor that'll pay me 200. Like the math of the business model just didn't seem like it was going to work out.
First of all, Rob, you crush my soul all the time.
It's like our history. I'm used to it. So it's fine. You know what? I think I knew before I built it that this was going to be the outcome. But building it for me was more about... getting that muscle of shipping activated again. Because it had been so long since we had shipped, because I hadn't gone zero to full app in such a long time, I just needed to activate that muscle.
And I had really wanted to play with the AI APIs. And I hadn't. And I was like on the sidelines watching everyone. And I was like, I want to get into this. Like this is the future. And so the podcast thing was cool because there's this huge podcast API that I bought data from and then ran it through Deepgram to transcribe and then ran it through OpenAI to try to extract sponsors.
So I got to kind of like piece all these different APIs together. And I had a lot of fun. And it gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to ship something. And so I do not regret it. Um, but I do think I already knew the answer because again, if you're getting a podcast sponsor for 200 bucks, like that's, that's so like, what are you going to pay for that? Not much.
So then I was at the bottom of another trough of sorrow because I was like, oh, wow, this was a terrible idea, which I think I knew, but I really just wanted to ship something. So now you're at the bottom of the curve again, and you're again like, crap, what am I going to do? And so I went back like full circle to what is my unfair advantage here? Like,
And it's hard with this because you have to separate sunk cost from unfair advantage, right? And so that was really my struggle is it was another time of a lot of kind of confusion, anxiety, whatever, where it's, well, is my unfair advantage that I have been immersed in reporting for two years or is that a sunk cost and I should just walk away?
And I realized that I still think that's an unfair advantage that I have been immersed in this world of internal reporting. And it is a problem. People want to solve it. Like it is so hard as someone trying to start a business just to come up with a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve.
And I was like, okay, if I take all of the complicated emotions around what I have already done going down the hello query route, if I separate that from like the practical, logical, what is the business opportunity here? I still think there's a business opportunity there. And I'd been playing around with all these APIs.
And so I was like, I wonder if there's a way I can combine what I learned with get podcast leads and like the new tech out there and the original vision. And so what I have now, what I just launched, it's AI assisted SQL report builder. So it's still called Hello Query, but it's a different product.
So, you know, I just launched it last week. So it's still very early in terms of ideal customer. So what I am finding is when I first built it, I had thought it would be more for the developers to kind of like remind you how to write SQL because we're not all checking all the time. But everyone I have talked to wants to put it in front of their non-technical teammates.
Showing 41–60 of 167 · page 3 of 9
← Previous
Next →