TinySeed Tales S2E2 | Moving Upmarket

Brian & Scottie Elliott are the husband & wife co-founders of Gather, an interior design project management app.

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.