Episode 749 | TinySeed Tales s4e1: Introducing Hammerstone.dev

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to Season 4 of TinySeed Tales, where we follow the founders of one SaaS startup throughout a few years as they share their struggles, victories, and failures. In the first episode of Season 4, Rob introduces us to Colleen Schnettler, the cofounder of Hammerstone. Colleen is a self-taught Rails developer, and this season will follow how Hammerstone eventually becomes Hello Query – an AI-powered chatbot that runs custom reporting on your data. Colleen is one of 27 startup founders from TinySeed’s Fall 2022 accelerator batch. Topics we cover: (2:16) – TinySeed Tales Season 4 with Colleen Schnettler (3:57) – Custom reporting in Laravel and Rails (7:05) – Becoming an “atypical founder” (14:11) – Entrepreneurship as a military spouse (16:17) – Motivations for joining TinySeed (19:15) – A recent low point, and high point in the business (25:00) – Big plans and risky moves ahead Links from the Show: TinySeed Applications open on February 10th Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky Refine by Hammerstone Hello Query Software Social Podcast TinySeed Tales | Season 1 | Castos TinySeed Tales | Season 2 | Gather TinySeed Tales | Season 3 | Cloudforecast If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's that, you say? Startups for the rest of us on a Thursday?
0:04.4	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.
0:15.3	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.
0:30.3	These nine episodes have been recorded over the past two years.
0:34.9	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. So I want you to think about that, entering into this adventure. You're going to
0:38.5	see a startup founder's journey over two years, but you get to hear it in about nine weeks.
0:45.2	The idea is to give you some insights into the ups and the downs, the struggles, the victories,
0:50.4	and the failures of a real startup founder growing a real SaaS company that was bootstrapped
0:54.7	until they took some money from Tiny Seed.
0:57.5	So they're still mostly bootstrapped in my parlance.
1:00.2	In season one of Tiny Seed Tales, I interviewed Craig Hewitt, the founder of Castos,
1:04.4	who you're probably familiar with at this point.
1:06.9	He's been a recurring guest on this show.
1:09.1	In season two, it was Brian and Scotty, the husband and wife pair, founders of Gather.
1:14.9	And season three was Tony Chan from Cloud Forecast. In this season, we're following Colleen
1:20.9	Schnetler, founder of Hammerstone.dev, which in the middle of the season rebrands to Hello Query. It really is a wild ride.
1:30.1	It's a testament to the fight that it takes to make it down the hard road of starting a SaaS.
1:35.9	If you're not familiar with Tiny Seed, it's the startup accelerator that I run for ambitious
1:40.9	bootstrapped SaaS companies, the first accelerator of its kind. We run
1:44.8	applications twice a year for folks who are bootstrapped and want the perfect amount of funding,
1:51.1	a community of like-minded, ambitious bootstrapped founders, advice, mentorship, and everything
1:57.1	else you'd imagine would come from a world-class accelerator. Our next application period opens on February 10th and closes on February 23rd.
	...

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