Episode 765 | TinySeed Tales s4e9: Making the hardest decision

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is it time to shut down for good? In this season finale of TinySeed Tales, Rob Walling sits down with Colleen Schnettler, founder of Hello Query, to reflect on her journey over the past few years. Colleen candidly shares the challenges she faced while trying to grow her SaaS business, including the difficult decision to shut it down after struggling to find traction. Moving past a painful part in her founder journey, Colleen is excited about her new venture where she’s already seeing early success. Join us for this honest look into the final days of Hello Query and to hear Colleen's resilience in the startup world. Topics we cover: (1:07) – Difficulty in finding and onboarding customers (5:32) – Why didn’t it work? (9:29) – How did the co-founder split affect the business? (13:11) – Founder regrets (18:49) – Reflecting on the decision (22:38) – Anything that you would have done differently? (25:21) – Moving forward to founder coaching and marketing Links from the Show: Join the TinySeed Mailing List Apply for TinySeed SaaS Marketing Gym Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger) | X Colleen Schnettler (@leenyburger.bsky.social) | Bluesky Hello Query The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh 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 the season finale of season four of Tiny Seed Tales. This is episode nine, where we hear
0:08.2	how it all turns out for Colleen and Hello Quarry. Before we get into this episode, if you're a
0:14.4	founder who's interested in the right amount of funding without the unicorn or bust pressure to
0:19.9	scale your SaaS to a billion,
0:21.7	you're probably a good fit for Tiny Seed.
0:24.1	Applications just closed for our spring 2025 batch, but you can get more details about our
0:29.7	world-class SaaS accelerator at TinySead.com slash program and get onto our mailing list to be
0:35.9	notified when our applications open in the fall.
0:38.8	And with that, let's dive into the episode.
0:41.2	I don't want to have a five-year side project.
0:46.4	Like, this is so important to me.
0:48.4	I have so many friends and good for them that works with their life.
0:51.8	I have a – actually, you know what?
0:53.2	I have a five-year side project that
0:54.8	makes $2,000 a month, right? And it hasn't grown and it just sits there. I don't want another
0:59.7	one of those. Like, I want to outpaced success. Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow
1:09.7	a founder through the rollercoaster of building their startup. I'm your host, Robed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through the roller coaster
1:11.0	of building their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder
1:15.7	of Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. For the past two years,
1:21.5	we've been following Colleen's journey building Hello Quarry. When we started these conversations,
1:26.5	we hoped to document the path to success.
1:29.2	Instead, we captured something equally valuable, the real, raw experience of trying to get a business
	...

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