Episode 757 | TinySeed Tales s4e5: Founder Breakups, Crushing Failures, and the Future

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of TinySeed Tales, Rob Walling chats with Colleen Schnettler, co-founder of Hello Query, as she navigates the complexities of her startup journey. After a challenging period with her co-founder Aaron, Colleen reflects on their decision to part ways and the emotional toll it has taken on her. She shares her feelings of crushing failure, the uncertainty of moving forward alone, and the realization that their initial product vision may not align with market needs. Topics we cover: (0:49) – Colleen and Aaron make a tough decision (4:09) – Voice memo, “Crushing Failure” (7:59) – What if you hadn’t raised money? (11:44) – Colleen weighs her remaining options Links from the Show: Applications for TinySeed are Open Through Feb 23rd Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky Hello Query 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	Welcome to Season 4, Episode 5 of Tiny Seed Tales, where we continue hearing Colleen Schnetler's
0:06.5	startup journey.
0:07.8	Before we get into the episode, applications for my SaaS Accelerator Tiny Seed are open
0:13.9	from now until February 23rd.
0:17.0	If you are bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS founder, and you're interested in the perfect amount of funding, mentorship, advice, and community,
0:26.4	head to tiniseed.com slash apply.
0:29.8	And I know what I want, even though I have failed at it over and over and over.
0:35.9	Welcome back to Tiny Seat Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the wild
0:39.9	roller coaster of building their startup.
0:42.0	I'm your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed, the first
0:46.3	startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers.
0:48.9	We're back with Colleen Schnetler for episode five.
0:52.1	Colleen is a developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Hello Quarry.
0:55.8	Last time we spoke, Colleen and her business partner, Aaron, were at a turning point in their
0:59.7	business relationship. And since then, Colleen and Aaron made a tough decision about the future
1:04.3	of the business. I'll hand it over to Colleen to explain.
1:10.8	So what we had done in the past two weeks is we had actually hired a contract
1:14.8	Laravel developer to help Aaron to speed up the development process. We had agreed that we would
1:20.3	have an MVP of Hello query to put in my side project simple file upload on Monday. I had
1:25.9	expected it to be done and he told me it wasn't,
1:29.3	which is okay, right? Estimating software timeline requirements is very, very hard. But then he told
1:35.3	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
	...

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