Hammerstone.dev / Hello Query

Colleen Schnittler's path to founding Hammerstone is unconventional. In 2014, as a stay-at-home military spouse with three young children, she desperately wanted flexible remote work. "I didn't know anybody who was doing this. It felt like this pipe dream, like this unobtainable pipe dream," she recalls. She taught herself Ruby on Rails through nights and weekends—listening to Code Newbie while doing dishes, working from 8-10 p.m. to educate herself—until she landed her first consulting gig after a year of unpaid work. Her co-founder, Aaron Francis, a Laravel expert, had built an initial query builder component for a tax property company to handle custom reports. When a massive enterprise client (doing hundreds of millions in ARR) needed the same tool for Rails, Aaron hired Colleen as a consultant.

Colleen spent eight months building out the Rails version of the query builder for the enterprise client. The company, which uses the open-source Bullet Train framework and keeps a lean team philosophy, allowed both Aaron and Colleen to retain the intellectual property—an unusually favorable arrangement for contractors. After her contract ended, Colleen took a full-time job. But two months later, the enterprise client asked for full-time support on the product. She quit after three months and became a full partner in Hammerstone. The company's flagship product, Refine, is unique: it exists as two completely separate implementations—one for Laravel with Vue, one for Rails—under the same brand name, allowing them to serve both communities.

Hammerstone's earliest traction came directly from the enterprise client that had sparked the product's creation. By January 2023, they had a 500-person mailing list of interested developers and were generating revenue from both the Laravel and Rails versions. However, early sales were disappointing. When they tested a major repositioning—dropping the Laravel version's price from $1,000 to $250 annually to position it as an add-on to a popular Laravel admin panel—the results were discouraging. They sold one copy at $250 and had to refund the customer who'd purchased at full price the day before. As Colleen reflected, "We just don't get it quite. Why people aren't buying it?" The low conversion from their mailing list taught them a harsh lesson: price wasn't the barrier.

The failed pricing experiment and low conversion rates forced critical reflection. Colleen and Aaron began conducting more customer interviews, particularly with product managers rather than developers. A pattern emerged: product managers wanted custom reporting functionality—the ability for their customers to build and save custom reports, download CSVs, and email reports on a schedule. Hammerstone had already built the hardest part—the visual query builder logic—which represented 85% of the work. Building the scaffolding around custom reports (index views, CSV downloads, background jobs) was relatively simple. This realization sparked what Colleen called a "gentle re-correction" rather than a pivot: they would reposition from a developer tool to a product manager tool, focusing on custom reports as the primary use case. Aaron began implementing this V2 in just ten hours of work. In parallel, they were building a complete rewrite of the Rails version based on early customer feedback to improve the developer experience.

As of January 2023, Hammerstone was in early-stage growth, still very far from clear product-market fit. Colleen joined Tiny Seed's accelerator program, not primarily for the capital (the enterprise client was funding her salary during consulting work) but for access to the community of bootstrapped founders and the mentorship network. She declared 2023 "all about risk-taking," with major plans to launch the custom reports repositioning and the Rails V2 simultaneously. The company was moving from positioning itself to developers to repositioning for product managers and business users, a shift driven directly by customer conversations. Colleen's background as a military spouse, self-taught developer, and persistent founder gave her the resilience to absorb these early setbacks and double down on customer feedback rather than her original assumptions.