Hammerstone.dev: a self-taught founder's early SaaS journey

Executive overview

Colleen Schnettler is a self-taught Rails developer and military spouse who became co-founder of Hammerstone.dev, building Refine — a drop-in visual query builder sold in both Laravel and Rails flavours. The company is pre-product-market fit, navigating positioning confusion and running early customer discovery. Joining TinySeed provided capital to go full-time and access to a founder network.

Positioning a technical product that customers can't immediately picture is the core obstacle — and customer conversations, not price changes, reveal the real problem.

How Hammerstone and Refine came together

• Co-founder Erin Francis built a Laravel query builder for an enterprise client, retaining the IP in his contract
• A major Rails company (hundreds of millions ARR) wanted a Rails version; Erin hired Colleen as a contractor
• After eight months building the Rails version, Colleen went full-time and became an equal partner
• Refine is sold as one product but is two separate codebases — Laravel and Ruby on Rails
• The enterprise client's philosophy: keep teams lean and use off-the-shelf components rather than building everything in-house

Colleen's path into tech

• Started learning to code in 2011 as a stay-at-home mother with three young children, seeking flexible remote work
• First product: an iOS app that made $60 against a $100 App Store fee — a net loss
• Shifted to web development; taught herself Rails through tutorials, grinding 8–10 p.m. every night for years
• Worked for free for roughly a year before landing a first paid consulting job
• Military spouse context: frequent moves made traditional careers hard; remote work was a necessity, not a preference
• Resilience framing: surviving solo parenting through deployments and losing close friends recalibrates what "hard" means

Where the company stands at episode one

• Pre-product-market fit: "anything could happen, which is both exciting and terrifying"
• Revenue comes partly from the original enterprise client paying Colleen's salary while she builds
• TinySeed funding goal: free Colleen from consulting work to focus on the business full-time
• Secondary TinySeed goal: access to a mastermind and peer founder network

A failed pricing experiment

• Refine's positioning problem: when Colleen says "visual drop-in query builder," audiences don't know what it means
• Hypothesis: price ($1,000/year) was blocking sales in the Laravel market
• Test: dropped price to $250/year and emailed a 500-person list of people who had expressed prior interest
• Result: one sale — and a refund owed to a customer who had bought at full price the day before
• Lesson: a 75% price cut producing one sale proves price was never the obstacle

A promising repositioning signal

• Customer discovery calls with product managers surfaced a recurring need: custom reports for end users
• Analytics and healthcare companies want customers to generate, save, and schedule their own reports
• Hammerstone has already built ~85% of this capability inside Refine; the remaining scaffold work is lightweight
• The shift is less a pivot than a repositioning — same codebase, different H1 on the homepage
• Rails side is also undergoing a V2 rewrite to make the product easier to work with for new customers
• 2023 framed internally as a year of risk-taking and big moves