Episode 517 | Married Co-founders Who Turned a Free Tool Into a Fast-Growing SaaS Product

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're joined in this episode by the founding team of Scatterspoke, John Samuelson and Colleen Johnson. What started as a lark to learn new technology has now turned into a successful business with more than $12k MRR. In this episode, we learn how they turned a side project into a successful fulltime business. The topics we cover [02:09] The launch story behind Scatterspoke [10:02] Shifting to enterprise customers [16:17] The toll of working fulltime while trying to bootstrap Scatterspoke [18:01] Hiring out for development [26:00] Free plan and raising prices Links from the show Scatterspoke | Twitter Scatterspoke | Website Colleen Johnson | Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this week's episode of startups for the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling.
0:04.0	This week, I sit down with the founding team of Scatterspoke, John and Colleen. I like their story
0:10.8	of how it kind of started almost as a lark, something to learn some new technology, and, you know,
0:16.3	it's kind of a hobby that turned into a business and now a pretty successful business. By the time this goes
0:21.5	live, they should be at or above 12K a month in MRR. It gives you some type of scope of where
0:28.8	they're at, and they're growing pretty quickly in the 10% per month range. So from my observation,
0:34.2	they've hit product market fit and they are getting towards that point
0:37.7	of escape velocity working diligently towards it.
0:40.8	So I hope you enjoy my conversation today with John Samuelson and Colleen Johnson, the co-founders
0:46.6	of Scatterspoke.
0:49.1	John and Colleen, thank you so much for joining me on the show.
0:51.9	Thanks for having us, Rob.
0:52.9	Yeah.
0:53.9	It's great to chat with you again.
0:55.0	I know we did a microconf on air a few weeks back, but for folks who didn't see that, they
0:59.9	certainly heard about scatter spoke in the intro of this episode, or they may have also heard
1:05.5	that you are in Tiny Seed Batch 2. And Scatterspoke, your H1 on your website is it's time to have a smarter retrospective.
1:13.9	We are improving the way teams improve.
1:16.5	And you're focused on helping people have better retroes.
1:19.7	This is an agile methodology, the agile software development methodology.
1:24.5	And you guys have been working on this for several years now, right?
1:27.2	It's, it's,
	...

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