Episode 757 | TinySeed Tales s4e5: Founder Breakups, Crushing Failures, and the Future
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Welcome to Season 4, Episode 5 of TinySeed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen Schnettler's startup journey. Before we get into the episode, applications for my SaaS accelerator, TinySeed, are open from now until February 23rd. If you are a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS founder, and you're interested in the perfect amount of funding, mentorship, advice, and community, head to tinyseed.com slash apply.

And I know what I want, even though I have failed at it over and over and over. Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the wild 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.

We're back with Colleen Schnettler for episode five. Colleen is a developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Hello Query. Last time we spoke, Colleen and her business partner Aaron were at a turning point in their business relationship. And since then, Colleen and Aaron made a tough decision about the future of the business. I'll hand it over to Colleen to explain.

So what we had done in the past two weeks is we had actually hired a contract Laravel developer to help Aaron to speed up the development process. We had agreed that we would have an MVP of Hello Query to put in my side project, Simple File Upload on Monday. I had

And he told me it wasn't, which is okay, right? Estimating software timeline requirements is very, very hard. But then he told me that when he sat down to code on Hello Query, like he just could not summon the energy for it. He said he was burned out.

And he would just sit down at his desk and he would just feel an overwhelming sense of dread. And burnout's tough. I know so many people in our community have experienced it. And so I said, maybe if you came to some customer calls, because I get a lot of the positive dopamine endorphins because I'm the one doing all the customer calls. And so I asked him if he wanted to join me on these customer calls.

And he said no, because he was concerned that would just increase the pressure. Like now it's not only do I have Colleen to answer to, but I have all these customers. So I took a break. I took a beat too. Like, cause my question is, do I beg him to stay or do I let him go? Right. And so I had to decide cause here he is on the phone telling me he's totally burned out. He has no excitement for the product.

And he just can't bring himself to work on it. So what we landed on that day was we landed on, why don't we both take a break, think about what we want and come back and talk again in a couple of days. During that time in the back of your mind, did it feel to you like it was going to end? Or did you still have hope that maybe Aaron will reconsider and decide, oh, I really do want to be part of this?

I knew he was going to leave. You know, have you ever heard that vending machine breakup analogy? Like breakups are like shaking a vending machine, like knocking over a vending machine. You have to shake it a few times before it falls over. And I was like, oh man, we've already had this conversation once. There's a disconnect in terms of the speed at which we want to work and what we are trying to do. So maybe if I was just more chill, I

Like maybe if I wasn't trying so hard and I was just like, it's fine. Let's just hang out and we'll just do this at whatever speed we do it. Maybe we could have made it work. But sounds like a recipe for a really successful startup. You know, I'll just chill out. I'm sure things will take care of themselves. So I think that I knew we were going to part ways. But also, I mean, it was ultimately his decision. But I didn't I didn't beg him to stay.

So now Colleen is left without a co-founder. It's a difficult spot to be in. During this time, she recorded a voice memo titled it Crushing Failure and sent it to me. I don't really know what to say. I'm in a position where it feels like I have no options for this business and it feels awful, especially after taking funding and having people bet on me.

And for me to be in this position where I can't execute and it doesn't even feel like I did anything wrong. It just feels like my partner and I fundamentally wanted different things. And we thought we wanted the same thing. We've been in Tiny Seed for almost a year now, I guess 10 months. And we've come so far in this space. So to walk away from it right now, gosh, the failure level feels...

massive. I don't know what to do. I don't know if I should do this alone. But if I'm not going to have my business partner, it's his tech stack. So it's almost like, no, it's definitely like I need to have a product and a tech stack I understand. And I'm a senior developer. So should I spend the next three to four months learning Laravel? Or should I rebuild the whole thing in Ruby on Rails?

Should I shut this product down because reporting, I actually don't care that much about reporting or should I recognize that I have put so much time and energy into this space and I have people that are interested. I don't know what to do, but it feels like crushing failure. In that amazing crushing failure.m4a, you mentioned the word failure. Why did you use that word?

Well, is that not exactly what this is? I mean, what have we been doing for a year? Rob, we're getting to the end of our tiny seed year. Everyone's like, what did you do all year? And I'm like, no. Like, what did we do all year? Sorry.

No, no. That's how it feels. Yeah. I have been working. It feels like we've both, Aaron and I, because he's been putting in a ton of time, working so hard and we have nothing. I even walked away from 20K a month, you know, for when we were consulting. I shut that down. I was going to ask about that if you regretted that at this point. I mean, if I hadn't shut that down...

That wasn't just 20K a month. That was like infinite K a month. Like I could just keep scaling that up indefinitely. I could have a whole freaking consultancy right now. When we raised the tiny scene money, I made the decision to walk away from the productized consulting. And that was, like I said, that was a significant amount of money. And so, you know, I cut my legs out from under me, but you know what?

I do not regret it. I do not regret it because I would rather fail this way than still be doing that stuck in limbo forever. That's really good to know about your own decision. Yeah. It would be terrible to feel like huge waves of regret of like, oh, can I go get that back? Yeah. Doesn't sound like you want it. I think that this is the most important thing, right? And we get wisers, we get older and all that stuff, but...

To get what you want, you have to know what you want. And I know what I want, even though I have failed at it over and over and over.

Now, hypothetically, let's say you had not raised money. Given where you are now, what do you think you would do? Would you keep going with this or would you shut it down and look to get a job or do something else? The problem with this idea, Hello Query, is this is really Aaron's idea. It's his baby. He's the one who experienced the problem and he's the one who has a vision on how to solve it.

And so to take his vision and run with it, I don't know if that is something I want to do. I don't know if it is the right product for me. So if we didn't raise money and he decided not to be involved, I can almost say I would not do this without him for sure. I feel like, tell me if I'm wrong on this, I feel like you have a particular gifting and or desire thing.

to solve problems for developers and or product people. Would you say that's accurate? I think that is an audience I know.

So that is probably why I have gravitated to that particular audience. But it's not necessarily something that you would pigeonhole yourself into. I wouldn't because we spent a first year before we were, we hooked up with TinySeed. We spent a year trying to sell this as a Ruby gem to developers, but they're a hard market to sell to. Because you've mentioned several things. You mentioned it was Aaron's idea. You were going to work on it with him. And also you've done it.

So have you been there, done that? Kind of bored, not interested in it? Like, what are the factors? The problem is deep and complex. And there's a lot of like data, not only data privacy, but like data authentication issues in this space. And one of the things I realized rewatching the customer interviews is that

People don't want reporting off of a single table, right? They want these really complex, they want their users to be able to go in, see what data they can access and work through these tables to get that other data. And that's a hard problem to solve. I have no idea how to solve it. And then you're in this kind of scary, not even regulatory, but like,

scary space where if you screw it up, you can like really screw it up. And so, so I think my concern isn't that I can't do it. It's that the product Aaron and I had envisioned is not the right solution. Like I can already tell you from the customer interviews, what he, what we have 50% done, that is not the right solution. Right now it's this iframe that loads in your site that your customers can build queries in. But I know the first thing people are going to say is this is customer facing. I don't like the way it looks.

Well, it loads the knife frame. So now, I mean, it's not actually that easy. There's technical problems that I think, I mean, I'm sure I can solve them, right? All technical problems are solvable. I just think the layers of this problem and our solution do not match. And so unless you really, really care about it, I think it's a hard sell, um,

to figure out what the right product is in this space. I don't think we have it. That's interesting. So not only have you lost your co-founder, but what you've built to date, you don't have confidence in and you feel like you need to start over without a co-founder. That's why, yeah. And I feel like if we had still been together, like we would have figured it out. It's a hard problem to solve. I don't know how to solve it. Like feels like the reasons not to do it are stacking up. A lot of headwinds, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The way I see it, she has three options. Colleen could go it alone or find a new business partner, rethink the approach and bring Hello Query to life. Or she could pivot. Within TinySeed, we've certainly seen our share of entrepreneurs who pivot their business. It's not the most common thing, but it's also not unheard of. So I pose these options to Colleen.

Where are you with that decision? What are you thinking? I don't know, Rob. It is so hard to decide because I watched the customer interviews and I'm like, clearly there is a problem here. So there's something, we've hit a nerve somehow. Can I solve that without Aaron? But then another part of me is like,

man, it'd be nice to walk away from filters and SQL. Cause I have been doing that for years and years and years and I cannot make it work. I'm kind of sick of it. I'm kind of sick of it. Maybe I should do something else. Like, like why not? These past eight months, I mean, my skillset has just exploded, right? So I just need an idea and a little bit of luck and you know, maybe I can do something else. It's, it's an interesting position to be in because you

When you see other people in this position, you like want to play your tiny violin for them. You're like, oh, you have funding and no idea how hard for you. Right. And now I'm in this position and I'm super stressed. As you think back over the past six months, 12 months, is there something that you wish you'd done differently? Yeah, I think originally when we had talked about this idea, once we got rid of our consulting arm,

We had talked about starting with just SQL to CSV and iteratively building. And for reasons that I'm still kind of unclear, I couldn't get Aaron to do that. And I think part of it was he felt, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he felt like that wasn't well aligned with his vision. And so I feel like we should have shipped something faster. Yeah.

It should have been SQL to CSV. Instead of going with this huge vision where we're going to solve all your problems. Gosh, it's so cliche to say this out loud now, but we should have shipped SQL to CSV. And I, because Aaron and I, we maybe didn't, I don't want to say we're conflict avoiders, but you know, when you have a personal relationship with your co-founder, you don't, I was always really worried about pushing him too hard.

And we broke up anyway. So I should have pushed him harder eight months ago. We should have broke up eight months ago. I learned a lot about communicating from him, which was great. Lessons I will take if I ever take a co-founder again. Lessons I will take forward with me. Business relationships are hard. And...

you know, it's not awesome the way this turned out, but also people have real lives and we like to pretend that's not true, but you know, we're not 22 living in a van by the ocean, right? Like we've got kids and lives and, and sometimes people's priorities change. And, and I'd like to believe that he and I handled this maturely and, um, we separated with class and we are still friends. So,

I do not regret it. There's a reason entrepreneurship is often equated with a roller coaster ride. And while it may seem like Colleen is at a standstill, dips like this are all part of the journey. Next week, we'll follow up with Colleen and see where she's taking Hello Query.