Schnettler: Modern software niches require higher polish due to pervasive competition
Colleen Schnettler · Episode 761 | TinySeed Tales s4e7: Identifying Pain Points · Feb 27, 2025 · at 14:57
Colleen Schnettler, founder of Hello Query, discusses why the era of launching unpolished, low-design minimum viable products (MVPs) has ended due to elevated competition across SaaS categories.
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“Honestly, I think it just seems that the products are so good and it seems like every niche that you've, you can think of, that's what it feels like to me. Has five or six products. Like there's no world of like, oh, there's one competitor and they have a crappy product. The, like people are just building better stuff than they were 10 years ago, right? Like 10 years ago, you're like, oh, this thing, it looks crappy, but it does exactly what I say it's gonna do. And that kind of worked for some people, but I just feel like the level of polish you need in a product is so much higher now.”
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More from Colleen Schnettler
Schnettler: Community popularity does not matter when building SaaS
“Like if you're popular in your community, you do courses, you do coaching, right? Like that's how you capitalize on, on popularity. And we were trying to build a SaaS and popularity doesn't matter when you build a SaaS.”
Schnettler: AI is not yet good enough for non-technical database reporting
“And I think part of that was because you can't put it in front of completely non-technical people yet because the AI is just not good enough.”
Schnettler: Positioning AI database chat tools as virtual data analysts is ineffective
“Chat with your database is not in any way unique. Everyone's doing that. And a lot of the companies doing it are trying to position it as the data analyst for your company. I don't think that's right. Cause I think that is still too vague. People are still lik…”
Schnettler: Developers do not pay for proprietary software gems
“Developers, generally speaking, they aren't in the mindset that they go and they license, like they pay for a Ruby gem and license that. That's not their workflow. Their workflow is they want an open source package, and then maybe you can upcharge them for sup…”
Schnettler: Open-source-to-paid model does not work for small teams
“I am not a big believer in the open source to paid model for a small team. I mean, I think if we had raised a lot of money, it might be a great path, but What we're trying to build, like that, that just isn't a model that was really working.”
Schnettler: Rails developers have a higher willingness to pay than Laravel developers
“In Laravel, we're getting a lot of hobbyists. In Rails, we're getting a lot of companies. And so when you look at the propensity to pay, we think the Rails market is just a little more mature, and the people are coming to us are more likely to pay for things.”