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Startups For the Rest of Us

TinySeed Tales S2E6 | Best Growth Month Ever

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9819 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2020

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brian & Scottie Elliott are the husband & wife co-founders of Gather, an interior design project management app. On this episode, Brian and Scottie share with us an update on their unexpected MRR growth, the psychology of raising prices, and the difficulty of making decisions amidst a mountain of unknowns. The topics we cover 01:07] Update on MRR growth since we last spoke Had a goal to grow a thousand dollars of MRR in a single month. Trailing 30 days is like $1,006. MRR is currently $8,200. Get caught up in the day to day to actually celebrate. Is good for us to stop and recognize that we have made a lot of progress. We're still burning more cash than we're making. [03:53] Closing a large 20-person enterprise deal They did do a trial. Then they bumped up to an enterprise plan. You can have your sights set on a goal and before long you might achieve it. But that's not the end of your journey. You're onto the next hurdle. This is one of the things I've found so difficult about starting this kind of company, your to do list is never clear and things don't end until you put someone in charge of the company or you sell it. [05:47] Raising prices, again. We've even raised twice. Don't get a lot of price objections. We have had to reject our previous customer avatar. Lower prices send a bad signal to them. The psychology of pricing, both at the founder level and also at the buyer level. This is a tried and true SaaS playbook. You start at the bottom of the market because you don't have a brand and no one's heard of you and your product is really early, and you don't have the features that you need. You price yourself pretty low. You get a little bit of ttraction, use that to make a better product. You'll find your positioning. You learn more about the market, and then you just go up, up, up from there. Lower price points, higher churn. A lot of people don't realize product market fit is not just building a product that people want and are willing to pay for. It's also having a good idea about your positioning and pricing and some idea of channels where you can reach future customers. You're making a lot of decisions quickly with incomplete information and you only know which ones work in retrospect. [12:21] Biggest wins so far and looking to the future In the beginning it felt a little bit scary and unknown when we were leaving, seeing the small teams. Biggest win: validating with these larger teams. Biggest win: we are selling into the kinds of firms that we hypothesized we could sell into. Doing these sales over the last couple of months has just taught me how to sell. [15:33] Biggest fear right now That we're going to run out of money. It's scary to see the bank account dwindle. Just figuring out how we can keep going and keep growing and even accelerate growth. How are we going to cross this bridge? Because we can see the green pastures on the other side. Navigating a world that I don't quite understand yet should be the title and subtitle and every subheading of being an entrepreneur. I'm most excited to see how we deal with this cash crunch that we're heading into. 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 wh...

Transcript

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0:00.0

it takes a lot of psychological, internal change to start looking at yourself as something

0:06.2

that you never really set out to be.

0:10.0

But now that I think that we've opened our minds to that, then the upside potential or

0:15.4

how far up we can go up market, so to speak, just seems, I don't want to say limitless,

0:20.6

but the limits are a lot less.

0:28.3

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

0:36.8

victories and failures as they build their startup.

0:39.3

I'm your host, Rob Walling. I'm a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator for SaaS bootstrappers.

0:48.2

We're back with Brian and Scotty, co-founders of Gatherer. It's been a few months since I last spoke with them,

0:53.8

and there's a lot of

0:54.4

good news to report. Brian and Scotty are surpassing their goals for MRR growth, and they're

0:58.9

making great progress on their quest to move up market. But they're not satisfied yet, and at this

1:03.6

point, they're turning their attention to what's next. So Brian and Scotty, it's been about four and a

1:09.8

half months since we last spoke. A lot has

1:13.1

happened, but I feel like the lead, so to speak, on this story is that your MRR is up quite a bit

1:22.1

since we last spoke. And in fact, you had your best month of growth ever last month. You'd mentioned at some point that,

1:30.7

you know, you had a goal to grow $1,000 of MRR in a single month. So, like, you've achieved

1:37.5

your goal at least one time. How does that feel? Yeah, that feels amazing. That actually just

1:41.6

happened hours ago. Our price plans, you know, are

1:44.7

considerably higher than when we first started Tiny Seed. And so when one comes in, it tips the scale

1:50.0

more than it used to. But yeah, I just looked at it today and trailing 30 days is like $1,06 or

1:55.8

something like that. So that kind of felt like this interesting milestone. Yeah, it's not really

...

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