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.

Show Notes

• 1:30 Meet the Co-Founders of Gather, Brian Elliott, and Scottie Elliott
  • Brian and Scottie have been working on Gather since late 2014
  • Scottie has 20+ years in the interior design industry
  • Brian was looking for software to build and continued to hear Scottie's frustrations with current software in the interior design industry
• 6:02 Gather's current Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and why Brian & Scottie decided to join TinySeed
  • MRR is $5,600 with 8% growth
  • They were compelled by the three components of TinySeed (funding, mentorship, community)
  • As opposed to mastermind groups, everyone in TinySeed is serious about their business
  • They hadn't considered angel funding -- never felt like the right move. They wanted to continue to have control over their lifestyle.
  • Meeting with venture capitalists tends to make you want to raise venture capital
  • Bootstrapping doesn't have to be binary: either lifestyle or a moonshot startup.
  • There is a third option between bootstrapping and moonshots, but the third option doesn't preclude taking funding.
• 13:36 Do Brian & Scottie still feel like they are bootstrappers after taking funding?
  • All decisions are prioritized and based on being cost-effective
  • They're still protecting the downside risk
  • Going to continue to geo-arbitrage, and hire developers from developing countries
• 15:44 Biggest win of the week
  • Last week nearly doubled prices and had 2-3 new signups at that level. Good validation.
  • Raising prices is always a scary thing because you don't know what it's going to break
  • When they raised their prices, they grandfathered existing customers.
  • They want to reward their first customers for being early adopters
  • Churn can often, over time, take care of grandfathered customers
  • They over-index on relationships with users
• 19:54 Setback from the week
  • A majority of the trial signups would disappear without much activity on the product
  • Considering picking up the phone to call users to see why they didn't do anything on the product, but they also want to be respectful of the user's time.
  • Improve the quality of leads at top of the funnel to possibly help with trial signup engagement with the product
  • Often times, under the water for most startups, founders are kicking like a duck.
  • Brian is the optimist & Scottie balances things out.
  • So far, they've learned so much from building Gather that they will be happy with the outcome.