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
So this is kind of a good story. 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.
And then a huge company in the Rails space, so we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year, ARR, came in and said, we want this for Rails. And... He's not a Rails developer. So he hired me as a consultant. So I joined, I didn't join him. I worked as a contractor for him for this big enterprise client. I did that for about eight months. I built out the product.
Then I thought our contract was over. So I went and got a full-time job. And then two months after that, the original enterprise client said, no, we need full-time support on this product. And so I quit my full-time job after three months and became a full partner in Hammerstone.
So this company was doing a complete rebuild. So the timing was excellent for us. They were doing a complete rebuild of their product, and they're also using a Ruby on Rails framework called Bullet Train. That's an open source framework. So their philosophy is keep their team lean and small.
I mean, they have 50 engineers, so I don't know that it's that small, but keep their team lean and basically use off-the-shelf components for everything they can. And honestly, Rob, I kind of think that they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in business. They don't care. Like if we do 5 million a year, they don't care, right?
It's just so, it's not, you know, it's critical to their app, but it's also kind of like a boilerplate thing that is not a distinguishing feature.
Yes.
I did not. I am a self-taught Rails developer.
Well, I was a stay-at-home mom. I had, you know, 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, you know, 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. And so that's what I decided I wanted to do.
So back in, gosh, 2011, I think I published an app to the iOS App Store. That was my very first foray into software development. And I made $60. But you have to pay $100 to be in the App Store.
Net loss on my first product. And I, you know, again, this was crazy time. Like my husband's in the service, so he's gone a lot. He deploys a lot. Little kids were home, you know, I was home with little kids. And so I thought not everyone needs an iOS app, but everyone needs a website. So I am going to learn how to make websites. Yeah.
And Rails was the hotness, even though Rails maybe isn't the hotness anymore. I still think it's the right place to start. It's a very, you know, it's a very, it's a very descriptive framework with like, and it's not, I don't want to say it's easy to learn. It's not, but it's,
You can learn, you know, there's enough in there that you can learn following a lot of tutorials and publish stuff to the web. And so I just started doing that. And then I worked for free. I mean, I did all the things they say you aren't supposed to do. Like I worked for free for like a year until eventually I got my first consulting job.
Well, desperation breeds discipline. I think that, I mean, I wasn't desperate. It's not like we couldn't put food on the table, but I was ready to go back to work. And I wanted remote work. And that is what is so interesting to me, too, is I didn't know anybody. 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. Like there is a world where you can make six figures working from home. It It seemed impossible. And so for me, I just, it was a grind. I mean, I just would grind. I would listen to, I'd do the dishes and listen to the Code Newbie podcast, which was very popular at the time, excellent podcast.
And then I'd work every night trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails. from like 8 to 10 p.m. And I just did that for years. 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.
You go on the internet and you read, like if you Google, like 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. And so I kind of had to learn that, but I am like the most persistent person on the face of the planet. So it was just, but it was a grind.
But one more thing I want to say about it. It was a grind, but it changed my life. Like I would do it again in a heartbeat, 100% worth it.
I do too. And this was always the end goal. But when you're looking again, when you're so far from it, it was like, okay, first I've got to learn to code this. I feel the same way. It's kind of neat to have had that experience because before you have reached a goal, sometimes they can feel like somewhat unobtainable. Right. And so having already lived that once, I think you're right.
Like, I think this for me, a hundred percent, this is the next thing that's going to change my life.
Showing 121–140 of 167 · page 7 of 9
← Previous
Next →