TinySeed Tales S2E2 | Moving Upmarket

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brian & Scottie Elliott are the husband & wife co-founders of Gather, an interior design project management app. On this episode, Rob chats with Brian & Scottie about taking their product upmarket, focusing on customer success, hiring consultants and contractors, and more! The topics we cover [01:43] Check in on how this week has been going Setting things in motion with some new hires MRR now growing off the chain but feeling good about accomplishments Shifting focus from growing while also building out process MRR growth is not everything [04:50] Scottie talks about hiring Looking at three potential hires right now: lead gen, VA, and an industry expert Consultant vs contractor. A contract shows up and performs a task, a consultant is an expert in the industry Moving from task-based hires to project-based hires With Tinyseed funding now have the opportunity to do more hiring [08:59] New business processes Scottie was initially doing customer support Now realizing needing to focus on customer success to help make sure the customer is successful [10:21] Challenging sales cycles and losing an enterprise deal Had a potential enterprise deal (40-50 seats) but the contract was pulled last minute based on the price The contract eventually went to 0 and the client ghosted Scottie & Brian Losing contracts is disappointing, but they'll continue to reach out until they get a "no". Going to dig into the "why" to understand if it was pricing, or something else. Founders need to decide between learning or hiring for specific skill sets Important to have a sales process in place before handing off to an outsider Lots of institutional knowledge within a business and sales process that needs to be documented [17:57] Technical setbacks from the week They had a complicated new feature about to ship when one of their developers raised an issue that ended up setting them back nearly a week. Links from the show TinySeed Tales Season 2 Episode 1 Gather | Website Brian Elliott | Twitter Thanks for listening to another episode of TinySeed Tales. If you haven't already, be sure to check out Season 1 of TinySeed Tales where we follow the SaaS journey with Craig Hewitt of Castos.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We say we're going up market, but what we're doing really is we're kind of dipping our toe in the water to see what that entails and how well we fit in there.
0:08.2	Like, we definitely see a lot of opportunity and we're excited about it.
0:11.9	But it's certainly not a done deal.
0:14.6	It's like we can't just one day serve a certain set or cohort of customers and then the next day serve a new one.
0:30.1	Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles,
0:34.4	victories, and failures as they build their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling.
0:38.6	I'm a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator
0:42.7	designed for bootstrappers.
0:45.3	We're back with Brian and Scotty, the married couple who are co-founders of Gather, a SaaS
0:50.2	product made for interior designers.
0:52.7	If you're just joining us, you should go back and listen
0:54.9	to the previous episode, which explains more about their product and who they are. In this
0:59.8	episode, you'll see what happens when co-founders are able to step back from working in their
1:03.9	business and start working on their business due to their inclusion in the Tiny Seed Accelerator.
1:09.2	After looking at their market and competitors and talking
1:11.8	with mentors and other founders in the batch, they've decided to take the product upmarket.
1:16.5	There are a lot of venture-backed startups in the lower end of their market, and it became obvious
1:20.5	that there is more opportunity upmarket for a number of reasons. Number one, it will increase their
1:25.5	average revenue per customer. Number two, it should decrease
1:29.1	churn. And three, the products at the higher end of the market tend to be older,
1:33.5	crafty pieces of software that aren't used to innovating or really having competition. So they're
1:38.5	talking about making several changes, including three new hires. I'd love to start this week by asking Scotty, how are you feeling
	...

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