Episode 759 | TinySeed Tales s4e6: Does AI + Pivot = Success?
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It's Tiny Seed Tales, Season 4, Episode 6, where we continue hearing Colleen Schnettler's startup journey, and we ask ourselves, does AI plus a pivot equal success?

Before we get into the episode, applications for our next batch of TinySeed companies are open from now until February 23rd. If you want to be part of a world-class accelerator, receive the perfect amount of funding, mentorship, advice, and community, head to tinyseed.com slash apply. And now let's dive into the episode. 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. 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. Today, in episode six of this season of Tiny Seed Tales, we're diving back into Colleen's journey. It's

It's been a whirlwind since we last checked in with twists, turns, and moments of uncertainty. But that's what makes her story so captivating. It's a tale of resilience, ambition, and the pursuit of something bigger. So buckle up and join me as we explore the latest chapter in Colleen's adventure. In last week's episode, Colleen and her co-founder Aaron had decided to go their separate ways, and Colleen seemed to be quite stressed. ♪

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

It had been a while since I had shipped code. 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.

Four months have passed since our last conversation, and Colleen dove headfirst into a new project called GetPodcastLeads.com, seeking to scratch her own itch and solve a familiar pain point in the world of podcasting. But as the dust settled, she faced the harsh reality of market viability. There was certainly a problem there, but would the market actually pay to solve it? So I asked Colleen how she launched it.

Launch would be a strong word. I think I tweeted about it like once. Hey, that's what we call an indie hacker launch. Yeah, well. Ooh, that was savage. Burn. That was brutal. 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. And-

Trying to figure out how to ask this question delicately, but could you have found that out before writing the code? And do you feel like you were, like, do you have a regret about spending the time writing the code or was getting your shipping muscle working again worth it? First of all, Rob, you crush my soul all the time. It's fine. You're used to it. 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, like 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, I was like on the sidelines watching everyone. And I was like, I'm

I wanna 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. 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. Yeah. Economics don't work out. Do you think it is it is tasteless to say that get podcast leads was your rebound relationship after Hello Query? It was like I knew it wasn't going to work out, but I don't regret it. Got that in the game.

It's totally appropriate. That is absolutely correct. While getpodcastleads.com may not have been the runaway success she envisioned, it reignited her so-called shipping muscle. It was a necessary step, a rebound relationship of sorts that ultimately led her to her next endeavor.

So then I was at the bottom of another, you know, 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, you know, 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?

And it's hard with this because you have to separate sunk cost from unfair advantage, right? Like I, and so that was really my struggle is it was, 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 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 clear. 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 and

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 Cloud.

report builder. So it's still called Hello Query, but it's a different product. And describe how it works. Who would be a user at a company? And what is, I know that I've seen the interface, it's relatively simple. So describe like what it does.

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. Okay.

Internal. And so internal. Internal users. Yes, internal users. And so what that looks like is that looks like, you know, Jim from accounting asks a natural language question.

That's converted to SQL under the hood. It's run against this database. And the product, though, is the reports. Those are the answers that Jim wants. He can then export it to CSV, export it to Google Sheets. He can schedule that report to be sent to him and his team every week, rerun and sent. So the product is really all the reporting around the initial query.

This reminds me of a quote that you said in the last episode where you said, looking back, we should have shipped SQL to CSV because we could have done it quickly. And you and Aaron conflicted on that viewpoint. This feels like an AI-assisted SQL to CSV, or at least the vision that you had. Would you agree with that? Yeah, 100% agree. And the AI also, I wasn't even going to ship that. That was like, I added that

because it was almost going to be like more of a marketing gimmick to be like, oh, AI. And then people were so excited about it. And I was like, oh, right. Okay, people are so excited about this. So this should be part of the offering. But yeah, that's exactly what this is. As this went back to, I was like, you know what? Let's go back. Let's think about, you know, what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do little, take off little bites of this problem, right? Little bites at a time, put it in front of people, let the vision change as needed.

Right. And that's something you and I've been talking periodically about. How do you get just a little more data or a little more information so you're not guessing and you're not just thinking and ruminating, right? Because you and I can sit for two hours and guess what people are going to do. And in fact, I think it was three weeks ago, you and I had a chat and you were asking the question of, I'm concerned. No one's using it. It wasn't launched yet.

And I'm concerned, are people going to be willing to hook up production databases? And on that call, I said, well, go ask them, right? Should you just launch? It was a question. Should you just launch? Like, go tweet it. I'll retweet it. See if people do it. And what was that experience like for you? First of all, amazing. And amazing because...

For whatever reason, and I think it's just the way that the speed at which we were working in terms of shipping product last year, there was a lot of thinking, right? It was like, we only have, we have to ship the right thing the first time. So we have to have figured all of this out, which is terrible, right? But I do think it's important to remember, we got into that mindset because, have you heard that thing like all advice is true? Yeah.

There's like a, I don't know, it's some famous article. It's kind of like all advice is true because it worked for the person giving you the advice. So you're always going to have people in the business building community who have both sides of this. You have the people who ship frequently and iterate. Then you have the people who are like, oh, we spent two years building this thing by talking to our customers. And this thing is amazing and successful.

And so I say all of that to kind of explain why we were in such like this, we're going to think the perfect product the first time. And so going back to this whole, one of the biggest reasons I think this particular product could fail will be because people won't connect their production databases. And you're like, well, you can just, you can just find out. I was like, yes, yes.

I can literally just find out. Like it doesn't have to be, maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe this group will, maybe this group won't. I can just ship the thing that I've built and then see if people hook up their production databases. Yeah. And this is a luxury. You know, there's this often this debate of like, should I build an audience? And you'll see Laura Roeder and Jason Cohen and I on Twitter the other day saying, not for SaaS. If you're going to sell info products, build an audience. Not for SaaS, not worth it. There's other things you should do. But

But there are exceptions to it. And I'm not saying exceptions that you should build an audience, but where it is nice to have a group of people who know who you are and whether that's a thousand followers on Twitter or 2000 or whatever, you tweeted it out. Here's this thing. Here's a GIF of the screen. Click here to try it out. And that is a really nice luxury. If you had no social media following and you had no network, no community, you

you can still do it. Hell, we've all done, we've all been there. I did it 15, 20 years ago and you know, you've done it yourself, but this made, this sped up the process is what it did. That's what I was thinking as you were saying that, like this just makes the feedback cycle faster because I can access people who are my target audience faster. Yeah. And I feel like it's, it's a virtuous cycle because it ties back into the shipping muscle comment you made earlier of you shipped,

And then you get really quick feedback. And that feedback is the dopamine rush of like good or bad, I'm doing something. And that's where, you know, the build in public hashtag happens.

I could take it or leave it. I think the biggest benefit of building public is not, ooh, like, look at me and I'm going to get customers from this. I think it's the feedback loop of really quickly, especially, well, if you're building in public and you're targeting the people who are actually listening, because the problem is if you make anything that's not for indie hackers or developers and you put it on Twitter, you get indie hacker and developer feedback. And usually, which is the opposite of what you actually want. But in this case, you know, you are...

Developers could feasibly bring it inside a company, you know, maybe they're not that the target user, but, um, they at least know how it works. Yeah. There. And again, like I think at the, in the end, not that there's ever an end, but, um,

I don't know if I'll be targeting developers or like finance teams or C-suites. But yes, the developers will have to touch it at some point and they can be the people because they're often the people being asked to pull these reports. Like so many people were like, oh, yeah, I get asked to do this all the time. Like it's such a pain because it's not my job. So they they are an in for me for them to pull it into their company.

And so where do you stand today then? You launched this thing three weeks ago. You got feedback. People hooked it up to their production database. Do you have more learnings and you know what features are going to build next? Is there more research thinking, data gathering to be done? Yeah.

It's tough. I mean, this whole thing is tough, right? If we all knew what to do, we'd just do it. I am in a... I think I learned enough with a very small group of initial people who are interested to know what needs to happen next in terms of feature sets. So I am... I'm trying to...

I don't know if I'm going to go week, you know, the whole week, marketing week, coding week thing. I don't know if I'll do that. But I am trying to make sure I stay in a cadence where I'm talking to people and I'm building. And what I have learned, okay, so I feel like there's this whole concept with building a business, especially as a solo founder, right?

of emotional runway. I don't know if we've talked about this, but it's like this concept of, okay, so it's this concept of emotional runway where this is like a ultra marathon, right? Like this isn't going to be done despite what people on the internet tell you. You're not going to ship something in a weekend that's going to make you a million dollars. Like,

highly unlikely. And so what I have found for me is I really, really enjoy being in the code. Like I like talking to people, but it's very draining. So I'm trying to balance like the talking to people and especially when you talk to people and you think your idea is so brilliant and they're like, I can't use it because of this or I can't use it. I mean, that's demoralizing. Like that's hard to come back from and come back from and come back from. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to

spend a week, maybe 10 days shipping a new feature that I know I need, and then following up with these people who are trying it to see how it's working for them. So kind of getting that cadence as I go forward. I like it. Sounds like a good plan. Shipping often, shipping early, shipping often, small pieces. To piggyback on your emotional runway, I have this thing that I tweeted once and then now I say it now and again, and it's funded companies,

fail when they run out of money. Bootstrapped companies fail when the founder runs out of motivation. And I would count, you're a mostly bootstrapped company, you know? And what I see, what we see with Tiny Seed and outside of it is some people will have some traction after a year or two, three, four years, they're at 4K, MR, 5K, but you just get so tired of doing it. And you feel, you know, you watch other, the success stories come out and you feel like

Can I just, so that's where bias towards action, mostly working on the right things and getting enough of them correct that you have momentum. Because once you lose momentum, it's demoralizing and you can only beat, you know, demoralized for so long. And so that's where your shipping, your shipping muscle that you're rebuilding right now, as well as the fast feed, as well as the fast feedback cycle, I think is going to help with that motivation. It helps refill that,

your helps shorten your runway. No, the opposite helps lengthen your runway or helps, you know, kind of refill your motivation, your, your, your bucket so that you can keep going. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think, you know, and whenever I start to like,

panic a little like, oh my gosh, this isn't working. Okay. I only shipped it two weeks ago. So it's a little early for that. But I've, I try to think about that. I'm right. I'm like, okay, this goes on as long as I want this to go on. Right. And in a positive way in that, like, yes, this needs to work on a, you know, relatively quick timeline because got to pay the bills. But also I can spend a year, I can spend five years. Like this can be my, I want this to be my future.

Like, I don't want to go get a job. And I want that so badly. I think it's just good to remember, like, for most people that don't quit, it eventually works out. Like most people, if you if you look at these success stories, and you really dig into them, like most people that don't quit, it eventually works out. One decision that I think you're facing that still feels very muddy is

And I want to bring it up because it is muddy. I want to show people listening to this that, you know, in hindsight, after this season airs and they're like, well, Colleen was wildly successful with Hello Query. She always knew she would be. She knew exactly what to build. Everything's great. And up and to the right.

But looking back in the midst of it, you usually really are uncertain as to what kind of what you're building, who you're building it for. Like it's very muddy, right? And one good example of that is right now you're building this AI assisted SQL to CSV reporting engine for internal BI users, for people to query stuff. And that's kind of where you have interest. And that's kind of what the product is today. And you're adding features on. But there

there's been this other request of a few of them around, well, could this just tie into all of our marketing tools and allow us to query what Google Analytics plus Mixpanel plus Heap plus, you know, just whatever marketing stack to kind of, I would love to just ask my marketing stack questions. How many trials do we have last month? How are they converting? Are they up? Just whatever. People can imagine that maybe it's a dashboard, maybe it's not.

But that is a different direction. Those two are not the same thing, kind of the marketing query engine or the marketing dashboard versus an internal BI tool. What are your thoughts on that decision? And like, is it weighing on you? Are you uncertain about it? Like, how is that going for you? You're right. They're not the same thing. They're two totally different directions. And I find both of them to be really appealing.

In the world of startups, decisions are seldom clear-cut. Colleen finds herself at a crossroads, torn between two compelling directions for her product, catering to internal BI teams or tapping into the excitement surrounding marketing analytics. It's a classic case of the curse of the audience, a dilemma that highlights the challenges of navigating the murky waters of finding product market fit. On one hand, I think if I went the marketing route...

People would just be, I think people in my network, this goes back to, is it worth having a social media following? My people would be so excited if I put AI on top of your Google Analytics. They would be so excited. That is one direction. And people have asked me for that. And then you have this other thing, internal BI tool. And honestly, like, I don't really know. I am just taking my best guess. And my best guess is that

One company in particular that has approached me about the internal BI tools, like a pretty big company. And I realized like there is a demand for this inside big, bigger, like established businesses on the BI side. And that's a customer that would probably pay a premium price for it. Whereas marketing data, marketers have a lot of money, but I also think they have so many tools. So

so many tools at their disposal already. And they probably already kind of sort of understand Google Analytics. So I don't know if that AI on top of Google Analytics is as valuable. So that's why I'm going BI tools. But I think, I think this is like a false, like there could be a false demand signal if I launched the Google Analytics thing, because my people would be so excited. So that's why I'm really torn on the decision, to be honest with you. Like, I think I could go either way.

I call that false demand the curse of the audience. And there's two curses to it. One, you tweet it out or you email your list and everyone's like, oh, I kind of want to check out what they're doing and everybody's really interested. And then they're not actually that interested to solve a problem, but they just want to interact with you. And then the other curse of the audience is when you burn through your entire audience like I did in the early days of Drip where it was like,

I have whatever, 10, 15,000 people on an email list and Twitter following and everything. And we launched this product that was kind of half-baked. It was like a MVP. And people looked at it and said, it just doesn't do enough. And so a lot of churn. And then we rebuilt. We had Drip 2.0. It was actually really good. Automation, all this stuff. And when I went back to my audience, they were like, yeah, we already took a look at that. And like, people didn't want to try it again. Yeah, it was crazy. Multiple people said, oh, I didn't realize that's what it did. Because they had all given me the benefit of the doubt the first time.

So that's why one of the reasons I wanted to call this out is A, it is a very fuzzy and cloudy decision. And neither you nor I know what the right answer is. But the right answer is to keep pushing forward and to try to get more data on both fronts and to make the best decision you can. Being a founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information. And you're the perfect example of that right now with just incomplete information on all the fronts. And actually, I posit that it doesn't get any worse

than when you are pre-product market fit. That is when you have the least amount of information and the most cloudiness. And that's why it's harder to say write blog posts or build frameworks or write books around the pre-product market fit phase that you're in because it is just so...

kind of it depends you have to get more data you have to make a decision there is no if you were like hey i'm at 10k mrr i have 10 customers each pay me a thousand dollars a month they are all either healthcare startups or um it departments of law i'd be like great let's i can rocket fuel that like we can get that going there's an engine there right but but until you get there

it can feel like a bit like wandering in the desert. And it's just, you got to keep going, got to keep shipping, and you got to keep gathering data, which is exactly what you're doing. At this point, we move towards wrapping up the episode, but I left the recording going. Colleen and I have been recording this podcast over the course of almost eight months. And I asked her how she was really doing. Fine. It's more just like, I'm still in the phase where I don't know if this is going to f***.

work or not and it's like so it's hard it can be a little bit hard to like get on here and be like yeah this is

to work. I know, like, I'm making all these decisions. All of that is true. Yeah. But, you know, you don't have to say it's going to work, though. Don't feel like you have to say and don't even feel like you have to be a beat. Yeah, you didn't. You don't have to say that. You don't have to fake it. You don't have to. You don't have to even be a beat. You could come on and I could interview you. You could be like, I feel terrible about this. And I'm super doubtful. And I'm thinking about shutting it down. If you wanted to say that, say that. Be authentic to yourself. Like,

You're not there. I don't, I don't feel like I'm not there. No, but it is like, like talking about it. I'm like, all of the things I said are true and I do feel good about it. But also, man, I guess it's just, we've been recording this podcast for so long and it's like, what do I have to show for it? Right? Like I've been doing this for so long. It feels like, and it's like, man, here I am again, not making any money. It's just a little, it's fine. But, um, you know, it's just a little.

Like, oh, you'd think after doing this for a year, I'd be a little further along.

At this point, I stopped the recording. I think most founders have experienced this feeling, wanting to be further along, wishing they had a clear direction to work toward. One thing is certain, Colleen's journey is far from over. With each twist and turn, she learns, adapts, and keeps shipping, even when it's really freaking hard. Colleen stands at a crossroads, torn between a couple of promising options. What decision will she make? And will she find traction? That's next time on Tiny Seat Tales.