Episode 761 | TinySeed Tales s4e7: Identifying Pain Points
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What is the focus of this TinySeed Tales episode?
Welcome back to Season 4, Episode 7 of Tiny Seed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen Schnettler's startup journey as she ventures on now as a solo founder. Before we get into the episode, if you are a SaaS founder, doing at least $1 million in ARR aren't going to be there soon. You should check out SaaSInstitute.com. That's our premium coaching program for founders doing seven and eight figures. We have our first two coaches in place, Jordan Gall, who many of you know from Bootstrapped Web, founder of CartHook, founder of Rosie, as well as Mark Thomas, who runs growth at Podia and formerly worked at Powered by Search. Both have been TinySeed mentors for many years, and both are exceptional at helping SaaS founders figure out their roadblocks, figure out those bottlenecks, and get things going. So SaaSInstitute.com if you are looking to be in a mastermind group with four other ambitious seven and eight figure founders.
If you're looking for amazing one-on-one coaching, community, a couple in-person events per year, there's a lot going on and we're putting together an incredible group of folks. And with that, let's dive into the episode.
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.
Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the roller coaster of building 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, in episode seven, we're back with Colleen after almost four months since our last conversation. In the world of startups, four months can feel like an eternity. I was eager to hear how things are going. So Colleen, when we last left your story, you were building a tool aimed at directors of engineering. How did all that play out? Where do you stand today?
Why did Colleen decide to pivot her product strategy?
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.
How does Colleen address early product challenges?
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the focus of this TinySeed Tales episode?
0:00–2:31
2
Why did Colleen decide to pivot her product strategy?
2:31–3:25
3
How does Colleen address early product challenges?
3:25–5:48
4
When should a founder decide to move on from an idea?
5:48–9:01
5
What led Colleen to target marketing data analysts?
9:01–11:56
6
How did Colleen land her first paying customer?
11:56–20:23
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Startups For the Rest of Us
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