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.

Welcome to Season 2 of TinySeed Tales, where we follow the founders of one SaaS startup week by week through their struggles, victories, and failures. On the first episode of this series, Rob introduces us to Brian & Scottie Elliott from Gather, an interior design project management app.

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.

On this final episode following Craig Hewitt of Castos, Rob checks in to get the results of the “no credit trial” decision, and to see whether or not the move increased conversions.

This week Craig Hewitt of Castos, feels the pains of a growing team and talks about how his role as a founder must evolve as the team continues to grow.

In this week’s episode Craig Hewitt “turns the business on it’s head” by implementing a no credit card trial.

Rob is back with Craig Hewitt of Castos. They talk about learning to delegate more of his responsibilities as a new growth marketer joins the team.

Rob does another follow up with Crag Hewitt of Castos, they talk about his new hire (growth marketer) and news of a major break-through.

Rob follows up with Craig Hewitt of Castos, as he shares some big news on the podcast

Rob continues his conversation with Craig Hewitt of Castos in this week’s episode of TinySeed Tales.

Rob starts his new podcast series "TinySeed Tales," with an interview with Craig Hewitt of Castos.