Code with Jason
Code with Jason
257 - Colleen Schnettler, Creator of HelloQuery
In this episode, Colleen Schnettler discusses her startup HelloQuery, which allows non-technical people to query databases using natural language. She explains her marketing approach for growing the business, including her LinkedIn outreach system and focus on finding the right niche in the crowded AI space. Colleen also shares insights about her new venture, SaaS Marketing Gym, which helps technical founders develop and implement marketing plans.
Hey, it's Jason, host of the Code with Jason podcast. You're a developer. You like to listen to podcasts. You're listening to one right now. Maybe you like to read blogs and subscribe to email newsletters and stuff like that. Keep in touch.
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Speaker 2:Hey, jason, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. Ran into you at Rails World in Toronto and you told me about this new thing you're working on, which I find really interesting. It's called Hello Query, and why don't you tell us about it? And, while you're at it, any intro you want to give for yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I am. As some people might know, I'm a Rails developer turned startup founder, and the current project I'm working on is Hello Query, and I'm super excited about it. What it is is it's at its core it's a natural language to SQL engine, if you will. But what it really is is it's bigger than that it's a report generator. It allows non-technical people to come in and query their database in natural language.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the way I think about it, based on what little I know about it so far far, is like you can ask a question and get an answer from your database yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, which I think is like such such a compelling idea, um, and so I think that's really interesting, that that you're doing that, and what stage is it at, like you have people using it like what? What stage is it at, like you have people using it like what stage is it at in terms of where the business is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it has launched. I have paying customers and I'm actually I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but I'm working on something that I think is even more compelling, even more interesting, and it's going to be a micro pivot within Hello Query. So I'm working with a few of my higher tier customers to actually put Hello Query in front of their customers.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting Okay.
Speaker 2:So what that? Yeah, so what that means and I know you have a pretty technical audience, so they're going to be super into this what that means is I'm letting the AI write, and obviously with a lot of guardrails, tenant scoped queries. So, for example, if you are running a CRM for I don't know construction companies, the idea is one of your customers can now sign in and he can ask natural language questions to his data. So it's very different from what you see with chatbots that are like trained on documents. It's not that it's his actual data in his CRM.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, yeah, that seems really compelling.
Speaker 2:I mean it's exciting because it feels kind of groundbreaking. There are a lot of people doing ask questions to your database and that in and of itself, it's its own product. Like you could get on right now, you know, and just ask questions to your database. A lot of people who use that feature are CEOs, founders, like c-suite people who need like what's the report of this thing that happened? But this next micro pivot I'm working on I'm really excited about because I think it's like it's the future. Like in five years we will all be talking to our own data. I have no doubt about that. Like I just really think it's the future and it's kind of groundbreaking and it's exciting because not many people are doing it yet.
Speaker 1:Um, so we'll see yeah, I think're totally right. It's so interesting to see all people's, to see people's predictions about where AI is going to go and what impacts it's going to have, and a lot of them, like are not very believable. Like, yeah, it's crazy, like these like prominent, like CEOs of tech companies and stuff like that, saying like in five years there will be no programmers, it's like come on, like clearly, that's not true, that's not going to be the case.
Speaker 1:Um, but certain other things, like even like right now, like not even a prediction about the future, like AI, assisted programming, like cursor and stuff like that, like that already is like, if you aren't coding with the help of AI, like you're just leaving so much on the table. It's just like the way to go now. And I imagine one one like prediction that that I'm willing to make is some companies okay, so it's the case right now that, like, some companies allow their programmers to use AI and some don't, because of like IP or legal reasons or whatever, and I think that's gonna become like a real obstacle to hiring and retaining talent.
Speaker 1:Like in interviews, developers are probably gonna be asking, like can we use AI to do our coding? Here, and if the answer is no, that's going to be a big red flag. That's my prediction.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think all the companies are going to be using it, though I hypothesize and I don't know this for a fact. But developers who are told they can't use AI in their job, I guarantee you they're just copying and pasting and stuff into ChatGPT because it makes you so much faster. And I'm a heavy cursor user. Do you use cursor?
Speaker 1:I use something similar. I use SuperMaven with Vim.
Speaker 2:Okay and like it's still kind of terrible. I mean, it's kind of this weird thing where my favorite thing to do with cursor is to highlight some text and say give me an SVG that looks like this, because it always gets. Totally agree, like you can't outsource your high level thinking to AI.
Speaker 1:You can only outsource like really low level grunt work.
Speaker 2:Right, like build this view. Yeah, that's pretty much right now. No, I think it will get better, but I think to your point, developers are not going anywhere. I think, as more and more people turn out crap too. Excuse my language, but like crappy. Ai apps that don't work. You're going to need more seasoned developers to come in and kind of glue those pieces back together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a multiplier, Like. I feel like we're seeing this already now where, like, however good you are, AI is like a coefficient. And so if you're if you're mediocre, you'll pretty much just stay mediocre. If're really good, ai will make you incredible and if you suck ai is going to make you even worse because you're going to create a big, bigger mess faster, maybe not even realize it and then they're going to have to hire somebody really good who's like 50 times the cost of you, to come up and clean the mess after.
Speaker 1:So I think like if you imagine the like the salaries of all developers as some kind of exponential curve or something like that, the bottom is going to go down a little bit and the top is going to go way up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think everything is changing. I definitely think it's going to be very different in five years and 10 years and I think you might be right about the direction we're heading. Where seasoned system level thinkers are, I mean almost, I mean you can almost have system level thinkers that kind of know how to code too right, Because there's that know enough and then you have people doing slash AI, doing the actual grunt work of building the views and building the controllers and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think. So Back to Hello Query and like that whole kind of idea, it's different from a lot of other AI-enabled product features, because I think a lot of AI features were just kind of like companies racing to somehow sprinkle some AI on their product, whether or not it really even adds that much value. But with Hello. Query. It's not like sprinkling AI onto an existing feature. It's like more. It's just it integrates with the picture in a way that is a lot more valuable.
Speaker 2:Right. So the original iteration of this idea, the original product, actually didn't have any AI, and so the product is really building reports on top of your database. Non-technical, non-sql writers need to get data out of their database. Usually it's a finance team, it's a marketing team or it's someone in the C-suite. And so what was happening is people were getting into, companies were getting into the situation where you have your overtasked developer already and you have to ask that person for a report, like I need to see X, y, z things. And so, as we're moving forward, what we found out is natural language to SQL is something AI is very good at because it's very structured right. Ai without rag, just straight out of the box, is very good at structured things, and so it's just such a natural use case, whereas, instead of just building a report using a preset like defined filters, you can just ask a question and it turns it into SQL behind the scenes and it builds the report for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I have a Hello Query account and I've just I created this Hello Query account about three minutes before we started recording today and I could like can I just like plug in my database? So, okay, I don't know if you know about this, Colleen, I'm building a product of my own, a continuous integration platform.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I've had similar ideas about like integrating AI in a meaningful way. I'll try to keep this comment brief, but there's all sorts of stuff that I really can't stand about CircleCI and other CI platforms. I've used GitHub Actions.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the whole premise of this product is that it's user-friendly, and one of the things that I often find myself wanting is, like when I perform an investigation of flaky tests, like I want a way to track my work, like I want to be able to, to mark a test as like a flake suspect and then like, pull up a report of like, okay, where is like every time this particular test ran, so that I can see the history of this test, and so that I can see the history of this test and observe the patterns of it failing and passing, so I can draw conclusions and stuff like that. And that made me think of like a whole reporting area where I could have almost a query language for bringing up different runs and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And now I'm thinking like well, yeah, I can build that stuff and that's all fine and good, but maybe also I can plug my database into Hello Query and maybe I don't even need to have those custom features in the product in order to get those kind of answers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's exactly a use case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how does one plug in their database to the product?
Speaker 2:Who hosts your database? Where's it hosted?
Speaker 1:DigitalOcean.
Speaker 2:DigitalOcean? Yeah, so to do that you would go into DigitalOcean, you create a read-only user and in Hello Query you can connect your own database. So you just need the normal things you'd need, which is database name, username, password, port, and it read-only connects to your DigitalOcean database.
Speaker 1:Got it. That makes total sense. I used this product in the past. You might have heard of it the name's escaping me but it would work that same way. You like, create a read-only user and then point the product at your database connection and you could just do ad hoc SQL queries and save them, which was great because, as you mentioned a minute ago, people are often in need of these ad hoc reports and so they need to ask their busy developers to get interrupted and stop what they're doing and create these ad hoc reports. And I think I can probably speak for a lot more than just myself when I say I hate that. I hate getting interrupted.
Speaker 2:And creating an ad hoc report.
Speaker 1:That's like you know, I think part of what programmers like about programming is you like build this machine and then the machine does the work. But with an ad hoc report you're not really building a machine, You're not automating something, You're just like doing this one-off task and it's really not what I'm here for.
Speaker 2:Right, it's not your job really. I mean, you want to build product, most likely if you're a developer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and so doing reports is just toil. So oh, I remember the name. Now I set up this product called Retool, which could connect to the database, and that was really nice. It wasn't so abstracted that my boss could just like use it himself. Maybe he actually like could go in there, I don't know, he didn't. He would just email me and I would like download a CSV. But that was still a thousand times better than me manually writing the report and then like SCPing a CSV file down to my computer then, emailing it to them and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And so this obviously seems like a very natural progression from that where you don't even have to first of all the nobody technical has to be involved maybe you have to be. I don't know how technical you have to be in order to use it. Probably not really at all, huh you don't?
Speaker 2:um, there are. There's a non technical view, which is not what you see when you first log in, but basically there's a non-technical view where you don't even see the sequel and it auto runs the sequel. Um, what you do need to do to get better reports is, in the beginning, I'd like to onboard people and sit down with the developer for like 20, 30 minutes and give some schema metadata. If they don't have schema metadata, because a lot of people don't To. Kind of, if you're going to run a lot of complicated joins because that's a common question, for example in your org, like, add that stuff to the schema in a metadata section.
Speaker 1:Okay, tell me about that. Like, if you're going to run a bunch of complicated joins, add that in a metadata section.
Speaker 2:I that in a metadata section. I have no idea what that could mean. Yeah, so when you log on to Hello Query, on the left there's something that says training data and if you click on training data it's going to show you your whole, all of your tables, your whole schema. And there's an option in the Hello Query software so you don't have to muck about with your actual database schema to add under each table to add a brief description, and so that brief description helps train the AI on your schema, because everyone's schema is a special snowflake and we all would love to have our database model set up properly the first time, but I've never seen that in real life.
Speaker 2:So you're able to go in there and explain this table does this. And then there's a general section where you explain things like when I ask for user accounts, I really mean teams, Like I use that word interchangeably, so it's basically instructions for the AI to help it learn about your specific database, and you'll find that that greatly improves the accuracy of the SQL. So you do that and then you ship it, you ship it out, you share it with your boss or whomever you know marketing lead, and they don't see any SQL. It auto runs the SQL. They just see the answers.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting. Yeah, I didn't know if you meant something like that or if you meant something like actually inside of the database management system, like something that's like more like, like more like an out of the box PostgresQL feature that I didn't know about or something like that, but it sounds like it's a HelloQuery feature. That's where the annotations get added.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, Got it. That's really interesting and my mind's going all sorts of places where and I'm sure you've thought of the exact same things like presumably you could hook up the client's entire code base and that would give an additional layer of understanding to the structure, and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of ways we have been. I'm working with a machine learning consultant because I'm learning a lot of this machine learning stuff as I go. But yeah, there's a lot of ways to continue to improve it. But of course, you know product development. You're building a product, so you can appreciate this. I'm a big believer in build a little, learn, iterate, build, learn, iterate. So I am trying to learn with my current customers what the next most important thing is. I think we could continuously tweak the sql and, like, one of the things we're going to add is we're going to add your logs so you'll be able to see if you know if people want to opt into that, and so I can see what's your postgres logs, if you're on postgres, so I can see what queries you run a lot and I can see what queries work and like I can start to learn even more about how your database talks to itself or connect you know, interconnects yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sure the bottleneck for developing this product is not, uh, the number of good ideas you have. For what?
Speaker 2:could certainly not. Yeah, probably something more like time. I have all the ideas. So so many ideas, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, and you've touched on it a little bit, and I think we talked about this when we talked in person. But, like, can you give me a feel for what kind of people are using this? And I'm also curious how you found them, or they found you, or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the people who are using this right now are typically CEOs, founders, and this is kind of an odd one, but this is where I'm going with this. Future pivot is people who run CRMs, and I think I have always. You know, I have another product that's a completely different product called Simple File Upload, which is a nice little product, but this product I really wanted to make something I could charge more for, to be honest, and I really think the crm play, like the users chatting with their own data is a huge opportunity. So how I find these people? Um, I do a lot of cold outreach and I think it's kind of interesting and you'll have to see if you find the same People in our developer circles.
Speaker 2:Like I go to a lot of conferences, I do a lot of podcasts, I know a lot of people in our developer circles and those people really want to support me, which I super appreciate. Thank you so much. But sometimes I can give you false signals in terms of if your product is working or not. So getting lots and lots of people telling me that they want to use it or they think it's cool is not the same as getting lots and lots of people to pay me money, and so I have found the best way to validate an idea is people who don't know you, who are not in any way and invested in your success.
Speaker 1:So I I do a lot of cold outreach, a lot of cold calls yeah, what you say there makes so much sense like, uh, judging based on the level of support and interest and stuff like that you get from people who know you and are interested in seeing you succeed, that can give you a distorted picture, and so I think that's really smart to go after people who don't care. You know they don't have any interest one way or the other and so if they use it, the one and only reason they use it is because they actually want to use it. Okay, and you do a lot of cold outreach. That's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Um, and part of you know, when I'm hearing your answers, I'm thinking to myself, like how might I apply this in what I'm doing? Because with my product, um, it's called sat CI, it's a continuous integration platform. Really it's just a test runner, but people know what a CI system is and it's kind of an Apple's. Pretty much everybody who uses CircleCI is just using it to run tests. Anyway, most people aren't integrating all these other CI features to it.
Speaker 1:Same with the web actions and stuff, grading all these other like ci features to it same with actions and stuff. Anyway, um, I'm at the stage where I'm trying to get my first few customers, or even first few people, to use it for free not yeah, for the purpose of validation, um, but to kind of um, stress test the technical aspect of the system.
Speaker 1:I have to make sure that, like, if I try to onboard aspect of the system, I have to make sure that, like if I try to onboard somebody into the system, I can actually get them all the way onboarded. And not surprisingly, when I got my first user onboarded, the answer was no, they can't be onboarded, they, you know. Oh yeah, I don't have a way to put in environment variables or whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I got my first user kind of onboarded but it's an old don't offense Ryan but it's an old kind of cobwebby project and he knows that. So it's maybe not the best example. You know, I want to start with like. I want to start with like a five-pound weight. I don't want to start with a hundred-pound weight. I want to start easy and then work my way to the more difficult ones. So I've been trying to identify people who have like new baggage-free Rails applications.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I thought it would be easy. I don't know why I thought it would be easy, but it's been a little bit less easy than I thought to find people with such projects who are willing to give this product a go. Not that I've tried super hard, but yeah, that's the stage I'm at now with that.
Speaker 2:So that's interesting because I would think you have so much crossover between your audience and your customers. Because it's developers, right? You're selling to developers or you're trying to get developers to try it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but I guess it's kind of a right at this moment. Moment it's a very specific. You have to be in a pretty specific situation where you have a relatively new rails project. Um, I guess that's the only thing a relatively new rails project I think honestly the the obstacle is, I just haven't tried that hard yet I was trying to say.
Speaker 2:I haven't seen you trying. So I feel like I follow you on Twitter and stuff, but I haven't seen anything about that. Yeah, and so I have a question for you, not to get too far off topic, but you said you're not really worried about validation. Tell me more about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's because this is not an experimental idea, it's not novel.
Speaker 2:It's a CI platform Like.
Speaker 1:People need CI and so the question is not is's a ci platform like people need ci? And so the question is not is this a viable idea? The question is can I do it? You know like, can I market the product and get customers and, uh, overcome the technical challenges and stuff like that. That's the question for this product, not. Do people want it?
Speaker 2:right, right, it's already a validated idea. You're just a new take on an existing market. That's smart.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great idea, yeah yeah, and people have asked me like so what's different about it? Like, why would I use this instead of something else?
Speaker 1:and my answer is that it's just a better ux, which is like super vague and not very convincing because, like anybody could say that, but, as far as I can think, like that really is like the real answer, and I don't think, I don't think it's something that's like could be made concrete, because it honestly, it's a purely like emotional appeal. Um, like why would somebody buy an iphone instead of an android? It's purely an emotional decision, like it's just aesthetically better.
Speaker 1:It's like why is it better, like I guess you could get into like the artistic aesthetic reasons why it's better, but it's not like oh, it's 2.3 times faster or something like that. It's just like either you're the kind of person who values that or you're not yeah, yep, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's really what linear did, like they didn't invent a new category, but they came out and took over that market because people just enjoy using the product so much more.
Speaker 1:Okay Interesting. Sometimes I don't know how these, these issue tracker fashions are kind of interesting to me because it really is like a fashion thing. Like people, people hop on a new issue tracker and then a few years later it's something else, Like remember what was that one? Like ex Facebook people, they made an issue tracker that was like hot for a while.
Speaker 2:I don't remember.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it was like a flavor of the month kind of thing, and now nobody uses that anymore, anyway. Okay, so you've been doing cold outreach. How have you been identifying people to reach out to?
Speaker 2:So I have a whole system. I think one of the benefits so I raised I don't know if we've talked about this before, but a little bit of accelerator funding, and so that gave me a little more freedom and flexibility to learn new things, and so I have spent quite a lot of time just like deep in the marketing world. I'm definitely a developer who has learned marketing, so I'm like a developer marketer now and I have a whole system for it, um so much so that I actually coach in it right now. But, um, yeah, so what I do is is you know you identify your icp, your um, your ideal customer profile and for me, I'm looking for insane clown posse that's funny, because have you taken leona patch's copywriting course?
Speaker 2:no oh, because she also made that joke just the other day, um, so I, so my system is, is this I, um, I identify who I'm targeting. That's really important and we hear about that. And with my first product, I just kind of like threw spaghetti on the wall and it mostly stuck and I got lucky. This one I've been trying, I'm trying to be more deliberate. So, identify who I'm targeting and I use, you know, linkedin sales nav and I build a list of people Wait wait, what's that?
Speaker 1:LinkedIn sales nav?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so LinkedIn sales navigator is a paid part of LinkedIn and what it enables you to do is it enables you to build lists of people, basically targeting them based on company duration, of company location, if they're active on LinkedIn, if you're connected to them. It gives you like 15 to 20 different ways to target people. So you go in there and you build these lists. So, for example, I have a list of CRM owners. I have a list of companies smaller than 10 people and targeting the C-suite, so you have to identify like what size company do you want to target? Who's most likely to buy your product For me, for founders and C-suite to get information out of their database, like we were just talking about, I need to target companies that are small enough that they don't have a full-time data analyst, because one of my pitches is this is your AI data analyst, you don't have to hire a professional. So I'm targeting smaller companies, I'm targeting specific roles in those companies and you build these lists and then you do this targeted outreach and I use another tool for that, just like targeted cold outreach and the strategy which some people don't know. The strategy is to send a connection request and, in that connection request, send something educational, something useful to that person.
Speaker 2:So, depending on who you're targeting, it could be an article, it could be hey, I wrote this. A thing that I used is I wrote when I was targeting marketers, I wrote a guide about how SQL can help you in your marketing. So I said, hey, I'm a marketer, would love to connect. Here's a guide I wrote on how SQL can help you in marketing, like why, as a marketer, you should learn some basic SQL. And that got phenomenal response rates. And then a day later you sent another follow-up message, basically being like by the way, I'm building this tool, xyz, keep it short, keep it useful. I'd love to talk to you about it because xyz interesting yeah a whole.
Speaker 2:It's a whole thing.
Speaker 2:It's a whole vibe yeah, okay, but it really worked, like the number of people that don't know me that got on a call with me was a lot Wow. And like we talked about, at the top of the pod, is I really if people use my product and they don't know me, it's because the product is good and they want to use my product Right and that's really to grow this product. I need to figure that out. I'm in a crowded space. Natural language processors, like natural language to SQL database chatters that's a pretty. There's every. I mean there's like five YC companies doing this. It's ridiculous. So it's a very crowded space. So I really need to talk to as many people as possible to figure out what I need to build to differentiate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting.
Speaker 2:And it seems like time is of the essence because as time goes on, that market will just get more and more crowded oh, I mean, I saw a tweet I didn't fact check it, but it was someone was tweeting about how YC just had their first demo day and, like 95% of the companies had AI in the name. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so a race, right? I feel like this AI thing is just a race and I can't beat. I can't win on speed because I do not want to raise any more money, like, I'm not going big, I'm not going to raise VC, it's just me and a couple contractors. So I have to win based on, like, really niche product, and that's what I'm trying to do interesting.
Speaker 1:yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, yeah, sometimes I think like I mostly have applied this to consulting. But, like I asked my question, like what do I have a shot at being the best in the world at? Yeah, um, like I'm not going to be the number one ruby on rails guy in the world, um, but maybe I can be like the number one rails testing guy in the world that's narrow enough, can be like the number one Rails testing guy in the world that's narrow enough that there's not a lot of competition for that, and I could surely at least be in the top 10. Even with like Ruby podcasts, like there's how many Ruby podcasts? Like fewer than 10, I think so, just by having one congratulations, you're in the top 10.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, having one congratulations, you're in the top 10. Yeah, yeah, um, okay and I apologize because I can be kind of slow sometimes um, you said that you're you're trying to go narrow and, like you know, you're not going to compete on like breadth and richness of features and stuff like that probably, um, what is that?
Speaker 2:like narrow, like you know what I mean yeah, so for me, um, and so the the paying customers I have now are using it just as an ai data analyst, and that's great. But for me, the narrowness is going to be the crm owners. Your customers can chat with their data. Like, if you are a crm owner or you're in hubspot, I'm I'm gonna do it in hubspot as well. If you're in hubspot, if, like, you're a hubspot app developer, like my product is a product you're going to want to use to let your customers chat with their own data yeah, to let your customers chat with their own data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, hmm, um, and back to the cold outreach, because I find this fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, honestly, to me it's a small miracle that the response rate is more than 0%, because not anything to do with you or your product, obviously, but like just getting messages from strangers on LinkedIn. Messages from strangers on LinkedIn, it's like that happens to me once in a while. I'm sure it happens to you sometimes and like rarely is it anything remotely interesting. But I guess, these people must see your messages and they're like hey, this is actually like relevant and it's worth talking to this person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a couple important things. Don't ever send in mails. In mails are trash. Like in mails are the way. Like LinkedIn lets you send messages to people you are not connected to. You don't want to do that ever. You want to send a connection request first and then again, the first step is always offer right. This is like the you know because you're a consultant and you have a blog right Offer value before you ask for anything. So we forget that. A lot like offer value. Like I wrote this thing, you might like this. The other thing I think is important to remember is like you're a developer I'm a developer. You have a mostly developer audience. We as developers hate this stuff but, like other people are used to it and they don't like they're more receptive. Sales marketing product has been my experience. They're way more receptive to it. I don't know why that is, but that seems to be the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I feel like developers often have like almost a pathological antipathy toward anything that seems like marketing at all, which is not always completely rational, but I get it. Yeah, so it makes sense that outside these circles people are going to be a bit different. Potentially Interesting, yeah, and I'm thinking about these things you're saying also, not just how they can apply to Saturn CI, but also my consulting, not just how they can apply to Saturn CI, but also my consulting. Um, one of my bigger challenges is that I don't know how to describe what I do, and I'm actually realizing, um, that maybe like describing what I do concisely is not so realistic and like picking just one like really narrow thing is maybe not like a great idea, which is like goes against the grain of a lot of advice out there to like niche down and pick something very specific and narrow.
Speaker 1:But most of my early consulting clients came from my email list and they were like CTOs of very small businesses maybe, where the CTO is the only programmer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that was fine and good, um, but there's small businesses that have very limited revenue and so they can hire me for a little bit of of of consulting and we can maybe meet like once a week and talk or something like that, but it's going to take a lot of those kind of clients to make my living right. So I I ended up going more after um, bigger organizations, and by bigger I just mean a team of people. Like one of my clients has a team of five developers, another one had like 10, one has like 60. So I don't mean like GitHub size or something like that, I just mean like more than one or two developers.
Speaker 1:And that's been super interesting because originally okay, if you had to guess, colleen, what kind of consulting, knowing what you know about me, what kind of consulting would you guess that I do?
Speaker 2:I would guess that you come in and you fix people's flaky test suites.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So that definitely overlaps and that's the kind of thing that I expected that I might be doing early on, and that's something kind of thing that I expected that I might be doing early on, and that's something that I have done for people in the past, but what?
Speaker 1:I found is that people will often ask for my help based on testing or software design or something like that. But then I get in there and I interact with their team and I find out that, yes, those problems exist, but in order to begin addressing those problems, there are deeper problems upstream of that stuff that need to be addressed first, like for example, their developers might not know how to take an assignment and turn it into a project and like do some planning, like have a plan for working on it and getting it into production and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:And so people just kind of do stuff and it like takes forever for anything to get in production and there's a lot of waste and stuff like that and like testing can't even come into the picture because, like the whole development workflow and people's habits and stuff like that, there's such a mess that like we can't just like plug testing into that. That doesn't work yeah and so it's a whole. It's a whole different thing that I never expected, and I don't know what to what to call this thing that I do. Yeah, that's soup.
Speaker 2:So you come in, so someone to hire you and be like, hey, our test suite takes 30 minutes and half of them fail. It's slowing down our developers and whatever. And you come in and you're like, oh well, that's because you have these upstream problems of. I mean, it's almost management, it's almost like product management. Yeah, like you're more like a McKinsey consultant, right Like top down instead of bottom up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And I actually bought a whole bunch of management books. This you might find this interesting. I bought, like I don't know, five management books from like engineering manager type people and they all sucked no offense those books, but they, they all sucked it was like I remember this one. I set it down because I got to a page and it was like do you have an intern coming to get on boarded? Find out what time they're coming? It's like, oh, thanks for the advice. I'm a fucking idiot and I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I didn't think about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I set all those books aside and I bought some management books that were outside of technology.
Speaker 2:The first one.
Speaker 1:I bought was one called the Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, and it was great and it said I'm trying to remember some of the principles from it. One of the things that I really remember from it is focus on strengths and not weaknesses, and so I was kind of coming at it from what's maybe the intuitive angle, which is, if there's a team that has weaknesses, let's focus on, like, shoring up those weaknesses and getting them to good yeah but I found that doesn't work very well um yeah especially when the people didn't necessarily ask for my help.
Speaker 1:Maybe their boss asked for my help, but they didn't ask for my help. It's hard enough to help people when they asked for it when they want it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah but to like foist your help upon them. That's like really hard. And so I've discovered that there are there's going to be a mix. Uh, there's some people who are interested and engaged and there's some people who aren't, and I've decided just to take those people who aren't that interested and just leave them be. Maybe they're never going to be helped. That's okay. It's not going to be a 100% success rate. Focus 100% on the people who do want to be helped. I've also learned to expect really modest results, like if I can achieve like a 2% improvement, then that's great.
Speaker 1:Like, if I can achieve anything at all, then that's like a 2% improvement, then that's great. Like, if I can achieve anything at all, then that's like a small miracle, because this is all about changing people's behavior.
Speaker 2:People. I was about to say this is about people now right. We've just changed the script here. Yeah, changing people's behavior, that's tough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so it went from like I help with Rails testing to like I help try to change developer behavior, and so I ended up in this way, different place than I expected do your client, so the people who hired you, do they feel like it's valuable, like after you've done an engagement, or are they just kind of like everyone's still kind of the same and you put some process in place but no one follows them?
Speaker 1:I don't think I have a big enough sample size yet to really make a conclusion of that sort, but there's a couple clients I've been working with for more than a year coming up on two years for one client.
Speaker 1:He's just an individual CTO and we've been doing mostly technical stuff and I think I remember asking him like hey, like is this actually helpful? Because from my perspective it didn't seem like it was very helpful, but from his perspective it was very helpful, okay, yeah. And so it's kind of hard to tell and, like I think the results you know. Talking again about like quantifiable things versus emotional things, I think what people are seeking is sometimes a totally intangible emotional something or other, able to talk through your issues out loud and first of all, just have a sympathetic, understanding ear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, and not, you know your spouse only wants to hear so much about your work day, right? Um, so to be able to, to talk to somebody who's who's not inside your company, um, about that stuff.
Speaker 1:That's helpful, even if nothing happens because of it um, yeah and then what was the other thing I was gonna say, oh yeah, um, like, if you can, just I've talked to some people on one of the teams that I'm helping and I'm like, hey, I'll be honest, I don't feel like this has been going very well. I don't think like I've been successful in helping you guys, and they've said actually, no, like we have changed how we've been thinking quite a bit since you've started and it has changed our work. And I was like, oh, ok, that's a little bit surprising, but like that's not, it's not like, oh, we're developing 10 faster now, or something like that it's just a fuzzy emotional thing yeah, it's not really quantifiable, you can't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I see it's so funny because, as you're describing that, it sounds like coaching, like it sounds like technical coaching, like you're like a technical mentor, coach, thought leader. It's interesting that it's turned into that.
Speaker 1:Exactly yeah, and I have mixed feelings about the term coach, because yeah, yeah, all the connotations. Yeah, and that's maybe a good segue back to back to focus on your stuff. You told me pre-show that, you're that. Tell me about this, this marketing thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So because of all the developer turned marketing, I've been doing um with a friend of mine who's a professional marketer. We launched something called sas marketing gym, so sas software as a service, s-a-a-s marketing gym and it's kind of coaching, it's kind of a community um. Basically what it is is we are taking technical I think we have 80% technical founders. We have two non-technical founders in the cohort and we're taking these people actually much like yourself with what you described with your new product, and we're building a marketing plan for them.
Speaker 2:Because developers get really hung up on marketing and I always tell people like it's just marketing, you really can't screw it up. Right, it's not like building product. Like, if you build product and you screw it up, you can screw it up. You screw up billing, you can screw that up. Marketing, you just have to do things. And what I'm seeing in this cohort is a lot of technical founders just are perfectionists, right, like they want, they want their product to be perfect, they want their marketing to be perfect and, um, it's been really fun working with these people, getting them I mean these people cold outreach. They're like Ooh, no way, right. So, like, pushing them to be like this is what you do, man, like you got to do cold outreach, you've got to find distribution for your product. Um, it's been really fun and I think I told you offline I use the term coach.
Speaker 2:It's not quite coaching. Like I said, we, we do an hour with you, we build you a marketing plan and then we have daily kind of like office hours. It's almost more like an office hour co-working situation, but it's been a lot of fun and a lot of the things like you're describing, like how do you define what you do? Right? We have so many high value consultants and successful people that I mean myself, when I was a consultant, I never really defined it because I just had word of mouth, probably similar to what you're seeing, where it's like word of mouth from person to person, and it just kind of worked out magically. But to get to that next level, like to unlock the next level, you do need to be, you do need to figure that out right. You do need to figure out what you're great at, like what you do, how you're going to define it, how to get like higher quality, higher paying customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. And how did this? I have so many questions. I'll just ask them all at once and take your pick.
Speaker 2:Okay, how you want to answer All at once. Go for it.
Speaker 1:I'm curious why you wanted to do this. You know you're a busy person. Why take on another responsibility? How did you find the people who are in it? And is it a paid thing? How does that all work?
Speaker 2:Take your pick of any of that. You want to answer yeah, so I okay. So this is interesting. We may have talked about this, but generally, as a rule, I hate communities. I think they're all terrible, like I hate them. If you were like I'm going to start a community, maybe you have one, but I'm definitely not in it because I don't like them. Um, and the reason I think they're all terrible is there's too many people and there's not enough connection, there's not enough trust. So that's problem one. And so if you hold that in a bucket, but at the same time, I desperately want a community, because I am a solo founder and I am lonely, right, like I want people to talk to, to bounce ideas off of people going through what I'm going through right now. And I have tried communities. I've tried paid communities, I've tried free communities. I have not had any success.
Speaker 2:And what I also have learned is, especially in this AI age, there's a lot of talk about people churning out apps really quickly, like the cost of intelligence going to zero. You're going to win on distribution and marketing, like, whatever idea you have, someone has already shipped it. So you need I mean, obviously you need a good product you have, someone has already shipped it, so you need I mean, obviously you need a good product, but with people churning out products so much faster, you don't have the same moat you used to have, like it used to be. I've built this product over two to three years, like you can't catch up with me. I don't think that's true anymore, because I think people are able to work so much faster, which is generally good, but because of that, you need to be even better at distribution and marketing and so, taking all of that together and I was doing so much marketing anyway and so what happened was some of my friends who have small businesses started asking me about this linkedin thing. Because I was like telling my friends, like I just had five cold calls with people I don't even know. Like I talked to this human on zoom and they're like how did you do that? And I had built this whole system and I had just never written it down. I had never, like, told anyone about it. So I started telling people about it and people were like I want to do that and so, um, this is. This is kind of funny and I'm going to tell this story because it's a good origin story.
Speaker 2:I was literally at a conference with my friend liana, and we're drinking at the bar and she's a conversion copywriter, so she's really good at words not my forte and she was like I'm kind of bored and I was like, well, I've been thinking of starting this thing, let's do it together. And so there at the bar, like in whatever town we were in, we decided to try it and that's how it got started. And we don't even have a website, like we have a Notion page. It is expensive, it's $1,500 a month.
Speaker 2:So it is only for serious and not to like I don't mean to make this seem what's the word gatekeepy? But like it's for serious people. Everyone is either. I mean, we have a couple of people that are pre-product, but they are really serious about getting the right product, getting it in front of people, like getting that engine going, and it just started, like we just started this last month, but it's, it's fun, it's exciting, it's every single day. So it really forces you to focus. Like there's some people who are actually pretty good at marketing. We have two, three professional marketers who are in there. Have two, three professional marketers who are in there, but it really forces them to show up and do the marketing work, um, because we all know what to do, but like actually doing it like is a whole nother ball game is what I found with with founders.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. Um, so like kudos to you for charging so much, because that's almost like astonishingly high um but okay.
Speaker 1:So it was a breath of fresh air to hear you say that, like you find most communities to be terrible, because me too I've joined so many communities, even paid communities, over the years. I remember this one in particular. You would know the one if I told you, um, but it was a lot of money to get in and I thought, okay, great, now, after I get into this community, I'm going to meet so many people who can help me because they're like so much further ahead of me.
Speaker 1:Um and I got in there and it was all just like chit chat about you know. Oh, I went to the mechanic and it was annoying and it's like what you're like. This sucks yeah um, and I really do think you have to filter out people with money, um, and yeah, I don't think. Well, okay, maybe it is gatekeepy, but some gates exist for a reason and they should be gatekept um because you can't.
Speaker 1:If you just let anybody in, it's really going to dilute the quality and then the like high level people who could really benefit are not going to want to stay there. Um, I've found and I'm curious if this has been your experience as well that it's actually easier to help people who are already further along and better than it is to help people who are like more beginner.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I agree. I think it's the easiest people to help are the people who actually care. I mean, you have a lot of I think there's a lot of people who think they care or pretend to care but don't really, and and so I think the easiest people to help are, like, open and receptive, because they really care.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Hmm, yeah, I've been. So where I got that impression was in my consulting work. It seems counterintuitively, it seems easier to help people who are already doing well, do even better than you know. If there's a like super dysfunctional organization that wants my help, like it's kind of hopeless. Oh yeah, like super dysfunctional organization that wants my help, like it's kind of hopeless because, oh yeah, they're probably dysfunctional because the people are dysfunctional people and we're not gonna.
Speaker 1:The only way to change it is to get different people different people yeah but with, with your group and the the marketing stuff, I imagine it's like a different dynamic.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we have a. I mean, this is the first cohort, so we capped it at eight and we filled it, so there's clearly a need for this. But and again I use the word community I never wanted this to be a community. We just started a Slack because people wanted to talk outside of the calls. But we just have such high quality people, right, and the thing I don't want to do is, like a lot of people like to sell courses, and we all know people buy courses and never take them. Like, I don't even, not even at that price point. I don't want to sell it to someone who's not going to show up, you know. So I think it's really.
Speaker 2:But I think we're automatically filtering for high quality people, right, we're talking about people who are founders, right, we're talking about people who are founders who have got a product off the ground. That's really hard, even if your product's not making money. Just launching a product is really hard. So I've like, just based on our, the people we are targeting, we've already filtered just not have great people. Those people might just not care. I think there's so much about this is like, does the person care that they're not doing well?
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh man, the. It's been so interesting, I've been like reminded or I've realized whatever. Like there are programming teams and individuals who are like underperforming, and not only, not only like is the code base a mess and everything is like really miserable to work with. But people often are completely unaware, like everything's terrible, and they don't even know it they don't even realize that it's like whoa, like I. I thought like pain is pain, and if you're experiencing this pain every day, then like you'll feel that pain. But no, not everybody does.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we've. So we and I'm including by we I mean you and me like we've self-selected to a higher caliber of performers, because people who are able to go out on their own build a business make consulting revenue. Now, I'm not saying always and like I'm not trying to disparage anyone. There's nothing wrong with not doing that but those kind of people tend to be people that are higher level performers because you can't coast there's no coasting in consulting right Like if you don't deliver, you're out. So, and these are all the people I hang out with.
Speaker 2:So I just think that, like, my network of developers and founders is just people who are already really, really good, and so when you go into an organization that has 50 or 100 people and some of them are not high performers, they don't even know it and they don't even care. Like we just don't interact with those people, yeah, routinely. That sounds terrible. I don't mean it to sound terrible, I'm just saying like not everyone is awesome and um, that's just how it is, and some people, to your point, they don't even realize they're like dealing with this muck and like it's not great. Um, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny because, like we probably sound like such assholes talking about this stuff but like, it's just the, the cold hard realities of the world.
Speaker 1:It's, it's the way it is. Um, yeah, and I'm figuring out like, what do I, what do I do with this information? Um, because, like, if you have a team of like pliable, impressionable, super smart people, then, like, that is basically the best hand you can get dealt. But if you have a team of people who are like average and you know most teams are, are going to be like average by definition- yeah, Um what do you do in that situation?
Speaker 1:And I'm not sure yet. Again, the best thing. I figured out is like focus on the people who are most receptive, or whatever. Don't worry about the rest of them. Jerry Weinberg said in his consulting book despite people's best efforts, most of the time not much changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's kind of comfort in that. It's kind of freeing. It's like, okay, the default is that nothing happens. If we even accomplish any small thing, then that's still a win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's tricky too, because you know, I, when I had built a team for this, but not Hello Query, but the last business I had and I learned a lot about that too, because that kind of confused me, like how do you, how do you? It's really like, how do you motivate people? How do you get people to? I think there's something with a lot of developers where they feel pride in their work and that's probably a lever. I don't know, do you see that? Or do you see people being like?
Speaker 1:I'm just I'm here for eight hours and I'm out Like this is what I do. I see both of that and I see, like, the idea of pride in the work, but maybe different ideas of what it means to do good work.
Speaker 2:Ah, yes, okay, that's an interesting point, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, maybe doing good work means that you get it done fast, or you get it done what you think is fast because, like, as you know, like if you try to do everything just as quickly as possible, then before very long at all it gets really slow. But but if you personally are rushing and doing it as fast as you can even though as fast as you can is slow you feel like you you can is slow. You feel like you're making an effort and you're like committing these heroics and you feel like that that's what it means to do a good job, rather than to like steward this system so that it remains easy to change and work with over the long term. So people have very different ideas of what it means to do a good job.
Speaker 2:So people have very different ideas of what it means to do a good job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, well, we've touched on like four different topics, each of which I would love to talk with you about for like several more hours each, but we have limited time, so, before we go, where should people go to learn more about hello, query and anything else you want to share?
Speaker 2:yeah, so hello queries, hello querycom, and you can reach out to me at colleen c-o-l-l-e-e-n at hello querycom. I use that email address for anything, so you can reach out for anything. And if you are a founder running a sass and you want some marketing help, the new thing we just launched is called SaaSMarketingGymcom. We are full. We will open up new spots probably mid-January, and that's a very small group cohort, daily marketing, task-oriented thing.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, Colleen, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.