Heliquary

Colleen Schnittler spent two years building Heliquary, a data analytics product, but struggled to find product-market fit. Her journey was marked by multiple pivots—first targeting engineering managers, then marketing data analysts—each time hitting walls. Cold LinkedIn outreach to marketers yielded an "abysmal response rate," and the few conversations she had revealed that marketers were overwhelmed with existing tools like Segment, Mixpanel, and product analytics platforms. They simply didn't see a database as a critical tool in their workflow.

After struggling with the crowded marketing analytics space, Colleen explored becoming a GA4 wrapper or data aggregator, but neither felt like her differentiated idea. She lacked the deep domain expertise to claim a unique position in a crowded market. As she reflected: "It's hard to enter a competitive crowded space when you don't have an obvious position." The noise from customer conversations—each person wanting something slightly different—made it nearly impossible to build a cohesive product. She describes the challenge: "Talk to 10 people, they tell you 10 different things. You can't build what they all said because it's 10 different products."

Then a turning point came. A customer expressed interest in pulling their own data directly. This led Colleen to reconsider an idea she'd previously shelved. As she explained in the episode: "The product is totally different, but the job to be done is the same... this feels very doable with the tech that I already have." This new direction excited her because it played to her technical strengths and didn't require building complex integrations with third-party tools.

Colleen now has two paying customers. Her first customer pays $60/month, and her new customer is paying $150/month, bringing her to $120 MRR (soon to be $210 when the new customer upgrades after SSO features are built). However, she's acutely aware that this is not yet product-market fit. She's setting a hard deadline: by the end of December (about three months from the episode recording), she needs to hit specific growth goals or she'll walk away. She set "kill criteria"—a date and a milestone—to avoid the trap of running a low-revenue side project indefinitely. As she says: "I'm here to go big or go home. I'm kind of an intense person. I am all in." With six months of runway at the time of recording and clarity on her walk-away date, Colleen is making what she's calling her final pivot, focused on nailing her value proposition and proving customer demand.