Startups For the Rest of Us

TinySeed Tales S2E2 | Moving Upmarket

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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.
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              Startups For the Rest of UsBy Rob Walling
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