There’s one thing that Christina Gilbert and her co-founder were clear about before launching their company: CVS import is painful. So that’s exactly what they tried to solve with OneSchema, an embedded CSV import component that helps product and engineering teams launch spreadsheet import experiences quickly.
What is your company doing and what was the pivotal moment that led to the creation of your business?
OneSchema is an embedded CSV import component. Product and engineering teams use OneSchema to launch incredible spreadsheet import experiences without wasting months of developer time.
My co-founder’s previous company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering expenses building and rebuilding their CSV importer. Their CTO reflected on the experience of building CSV import as one of the top 3 most painful engineering projects of his entire tenure with the company. After he told us there used to be an internal slack channel called “#we-hate-data-imorter,” we had a strong hunch this was a real pain point we could build a company around.
How do you identify and prioritize new growth channels?
We’re proactive about finding out how prospects found us. We make sure sales asks customers on every demo call, have a required field on our demo form, and interview customers to get a deeper understanding of their journey to finding us. “I found you on Google search” is only so helpful; it’s much more helpful to know that their designer was aware of our category and created an Asana task to research CSV import solutions, which led to a PM discovering one of our blog post.
Which tech tools, software, apps, etc. do you use religiously in your business?
Some of the top tools in our GTM stack: SFDC, Gong, Metabase, PostHog, GSuite, Apollo, Scratchpad
What are some of the challenges you’ve come face to face with on your entrepreneurial journey? How did you overcome them?
I severely underestimated the grit that it takes to be a founder. You have to learn how to motivate yourself in different ways than having a series of small wins. If you’re experimenting fast enough, most things you try in a startup are going to end up being wrong. The learning curve is also so steep that as soon as you get kind-of good at one founder skill, you unlock a new level of your business and there are 10 more skills have to learn very quickly. Learning to manage the stress of constant failure is one of the most important founder skills to learn. You have to have a very different mindset to be successful as a founder than in most other jobs.
In the moment, it never feels like you’re doing well enough. But, if you stop to look back at what you’ve accomplished, you realize that you’ve grown more than you ever thought possible in a short 2 years.
Rapid fire questions
Favorite morning ritual ☕
Morning walk to get some sunlight
Favorite book/s 📕
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
Your leadership style in one word 💼
Practical
Cats or dogs?
Cats
Mountains or beach?
Mountains
Morning person or night owl?
Morning
