Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev
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What's that, you say? Startups for the rest of us? On a Thursday? Well, starting this week and for the next eight weeks, we're going to have episodes of Tiny Seed Tales, season four, in your feed, every Thursday morning. If you're not familiar with Tiny Seed Tales, it's a narrative-style, season-based show where I interview a founder as they try to find and optimize their product, finding product market fit, scaling, finding escape velocity, etc. These nine episodes have been recorded over the past two years. So I want you to think about that, entering into this adventure. You're going to see a startup founder's journey over two years, but you get to hear it in about nine weeks. The idea is to give you some insights into the ups and the downs, the struggles, the victories, and the failures of a real startup founder growing a real SaaS company that was bootstrapped until they took some money from TinySeed. So they're still mostly bootstrapped in my parlance.
In season one of Tiny Seed Tales, I interviewed Craig Hewitt, the founder of Castos, who you're probably familiar with at this point. He's been a recurring guest on this show. In season two, it was Brian and Scotty, the husband and wife pair, founders of Gather. And season three was Tony Chan from Cloud Forecast. In this season, we're following Colleen Schnettler, founder of Hammerstone.dev, which in the middle of the season rebrands to HelloQuery. It really is a wild ride. It's a testament to the fight that it takes to make it down the hard road of starting a SaaS. If you're not familiar with TinySeed, it's the startup accelerator that I run for ambitious, bootstrapped SaaS companies, the first accelerator of its kind.
We run applications twice a year for folks who are bootstrapped and want the perfect amount of funding, a community of like-minded, ambitious, bootstrapped founders, advice, mentorship, and everything else you'd imagine would come from a world-class accelerator. Our next application period opens on February 10th and closes on February 23rd. Head over to tinyseed.com slash apply for more info. So with that, let's dive into season four, episode one of Tiny Seed Tales.
I was ready to go back to work and I wanted remote work. I didn't know anybody who was doing this. 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 seemed impossible.
Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles, victories, and failures as they build 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, we're kicking off the first episode of season four of Tiny Seed Tales with developer and entrepreneur, Colleen Schnettler.
My name is Colleen Schnettler, and I am the co-founder of Hammerstone.dev.
To give you context, Hammerstone is the name of the company started by Colleen, a skilled Ruby on Rails developer, and her co-founder, Aaron Francis, an expert in Laravel development. The idea behind Hammerstone was to build a company that specializes in creating developer tools with small, easy to use components that simplify the process of building software. What sets this company apart is that while both Colleen and Aaron are technical co-founders, they each have different coding stacks, something that becomes particularly relevant when discussing their flagship product, Refine. Refine is sold as a single product that exists as a drop-in visual query builder. But Refine is actually two completely separate products due to the fact that they offer a version for Laravel and a version for Ruby on Rails. This relatively unique approach allows Hammerstone to cater to a wider audience of developers. How did we get here where you have two separate products under the same name?
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.
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