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.