meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Startups For the Rest of Us

TinySeed Tales S2E3 | Is This All Worth It?

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9819 Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brian & Scottie Elliott are the husband & wife co-founders of Gather, an interior design project management app. Today, Rob chats with Brian & Scottie about their new hires, setting ambitious revenue goals, and managing stress and anxiety as entrepreneurs. The topics we cover [01:01] Update on hiring, new sales, and more Hired a VA Hired an industry expert to help with marketing/copywriting Scottie & Brian now focused on documenting the processes Had their first "team plan" subscription One thing you'll notice as an entrepreneur is that when you start to expand your team beyond just the founders, new hires, propel you to get more organized, creating standard operating procedures like Brian & Scottie are now doing is a big step towards cementing the continuity and value of the business. [03:18] Attending the TinySeed retreat and setting ambitious revenue goals Brian and Scottie attended their first in-person retreat for their TinySeed batch Setting batch goals are less of a punitive thing and more of a "let's do this together and let's be ambitious together" Once we started talking about specific numbers, it forces you to reevaluate how you are thinking about pricing There are a number of levers that we have at our discretion to pull. That number gave us, like, it allowed me to think about the numbers that mattered the most and the ones that would provide the most leverage. [13:13] Anxiety, stress, and entrepreneurs We had a pretty high churn month Because we are now starting to carve that path to that new type of customer, our features are no longer speaking to the other subset of customers The fear is that this (churn) happens every month Whether you're going upmarket, whether you're changing from one vertical to another, whether you're expanding into other verticals going from vertical to horizontal, there are all these changes you can make that are really scary while you're doing them. It's important to look a few months ahead and imagine what it will look like if it succeeds Links from the show 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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Can I sustain this for years and years on end?

0:03.0

Even though every day is not like this, but the ones that are like this are bad sometimes.

0:18.6

Welcome back to Tiny Seatales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles,

0:22.7

victories, and failures as they build their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling. I'm a serial

0:27.4

entrepreneur and co-founder of TinyC, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers.

0:33.1

We're back with Brian and Scotty, co-founders of Gather. If you're just joining us, you should go back and listen to the previous two episodes.

0:40.3

As we learned last episode, Gather is trying to take their product upmarket,

0:43.7

which means focusing on finding product market fit with a new group of customers

0:46.9

and likely leaving behind the group they've been used to serving.

0:50.4

This week's focus is on a feeling that's pervasive in the entrepreneur community, anxiety.

0:55.7

Brian's quote from the start of this episode communicates that perfectly.

0:58.9

It's been an up and down week for their business.

1:01.1

But first, Scotty updates us on their two new hires and some good news on the sales front.

1:06.0

We hired a VA who is going to help us with, you know, all of the email, the cold email.

1:14.6

So she's responsible for managing that, responding to emails and setting up calendar dates for

1:23.9

those demos.

1:26.4

And then we've also hired a marketing slash industry expert who's going to come on part-time.

1:36.6

And we had our first meeting with her yesterday, and that was really great.

1:41.6

She went through a rewrite of our copy and just kind of spoke out loud

1:47.2

as she read it and kind of wear her head with her interior designer architecture hat on,

1:53.9

gave us some feedback. So we're really, really excited to get started with that, with her, get her going.

2:03.1

So, you know, we're just really, we're setting in place a lot of processes, writing things down more.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Rob Walling, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Rob Walling and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.