Real Internet Money

Colleen Schnettler 00:00

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Michele Hansen 00:28

Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 00:29

Hey, Michele.

Michele Hansen 00:31

How you doing?

Colleen Schnettler 00:32

I'm doing pretty well. I had a pretty uplifting week over here in the Simple File Upload world.

Michele Hansen 00:38

You know what? That's good to hear. Because I feel like last week you were, we talked about how you were kind of feeling like you were in the void.

Colleen Schnettler 00:44

I totally was. And, you know, I still feel that but I'm trying to, two things happen that changed my perspective. One, I got another check from Heroku. So that always helps. That doesn't hurt. And I'm kind of just trying to focus on my mindset as I approach this business. I have to say the check from Heroku because unlike Stripe, where you just get paid randomly when people, you know, when people pay, you only get paid once a month. So I've been telling you I have $800 MRR for like three weeks, and I haven't seen that money. So I just saw that money yesterday. So that was pretty exciting.

Michele Hansen 01:21

Nice

Colleen Schnettler 01:22

Yeah, I think I remember telling you my very first check. I got like I had enough leftover to buy a bagel.

Michele Hansen 01:28

Yes. The bagel, the $20 bagel.

Colleen Schnettler 01:30

The $20 bagel. Well, this time it was it was quite a bit more so I could could have bought quite a few bagels. So that was pretty exciting.

Michele Hansen 01:37

And I saw you tweeted out earlier this week that the Stripe payouts, I was just like payout, payout, payout.

Colleen Schnettler 01:45

I think what must happen is like people must have signed up, there were, like, four or five people who signed up like one day apart. And so the all of their invoices hit like right after each other. So I like signed on to my email every day, and it was like payout payout payout. It was awesome. It's very exciting. It was a lot of excitedness in terms of actually seeing the fruits of my labor on this product this week. So that was fun.

Michele Hansen 02:10

Yay. Internet money.

Colleen Schnettler 02:12

Yay, internet money.

Michele Hansen 02:13

So where is your MRR at now? So I just checked and I'm at $975. I know. What? Oh my god, you're almost at the $1,000 MRR mark, and it's been, like, three months. Yeah, I guess it's, yeah, three, oh my god. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 02:35

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 02:36

That's, that's not common. Like, just for everybody else kind of like, listening like that is, that is very uncommon. Like, you're you're not like ending up on $1,000 after three months like Coleen like that's, that's normal. Like, I think it took us like six months, and even then that was kind of fast for a little project. Dude, 975. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 02:57

That's real money. It's real. That's why my last check. Because if you look at my checks from Heroku, and once again, I only get those once a month. It's not like Stripe. It was like the first one was like 150. The second one was like 250. This last one was like $570. I was like, that's like, real money. Like I could do something with that money. That's cool. Yeah, so, so from a monetary perspective, it's going great. I think I, I was struggling a lot. And I still am kind of struggling because I don't have a good feedback loop. I have been kind of unsure what to do next, and how to push the product forward. And it's funny because I like I think mid last week, I was just in a funk. And I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna build it the way I want to build it. I'm gonna develop all these features. I don't care what anyone tells me. Like, I'm just gonna do what I want to do. And you know, of course, everyone I talked to is like, that's a terrible idea. And the best way someone phrased it to me, they were like, what if you do go and you spend a couple months and you build all these features you feel like you need, you're still not going to know who your customer is. Like, I was complaining because I don't know who my customer is. And she was like, even if you spend this time to build that out, you'll be three months down the road, and you still won't know who your customer is. So have you made any progress? And I was like, oh, that's a good way to put it. So, I did a few interviews this week, which was really great. I'm really gonna take a pause on any kind of development work, and just talk to people. I mean, talk talk, talk.

Michele Hansen 03:01

Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 03:02

I know, I know.

Michele Hansen 03:04

You're done putzing around in the code garden and like, you're out there in the town square.

Colleen Schnettler 03:29

I'm convinced. Like, between the, I mean, I probably five different people had to tell me this. But like you guys have convinced me that I just need to talk to more people. I just need, I don't know. Like, if you ask me who my ideal customer was, like, is, or who this provides value to, I can't identify that person, and casting a net of all developers is way too broad and too vague. So, that's really what I am focused on. In the next couple months, I think another thing is I need to calm down a little bit and slow down and be a little bit more patient.

Michele Hansen 05:21

You said that you could go off and build something for three months, and it sounds like this person you were talking to, kind of helped you realize basically, like, you wouldn't know who you were building for and why you were building it and how they needed any of that to work.

Colleen Schnettler 05:39

Yeah. And I think that's exactly the thing. So, so this week has been great. I spoke to three consultants, I have another one today, and I'm trying to get to five consultants, which I'm sure I can find one more person. Here's the thing, Michele, they all want different things.

Michele Hansen