What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both at their companies and
in their personal lives? And what makes their businesses tick?
Today, I am talking to Mike Tabor. Mike is one of the co-creators of MicroConf, probably
the biggest and I think definitely the best conference for self-funded founders. Mike
is also the co-host of the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, which is a great show.
You should all check it out. And finally, Mike is the founder of a company called BluTick,
which is what we're going to spend most of our time talking about today. Mike, I'm glad
to finally have you on here, and thanks for joining.
Thanks for having me.
So the company you're working on, BluTick, is what you'd call email follow-up software.
The basic idea is that if you find yourself wasting time sending email after email to
the same people, you sign up for BluTick instead. And it's super smart. It will send out follow-up
emails on your behalf automatically. And it knows exactly when to stop sending them and
you can set it to send different emails every time and sort of a sequence. Is that a good
description of what the company does?
Yeah, that's a generally good description, good high level overview.
Great. I think it's a cool idea. It's something that I probably should have been using for
Andy Hackers because I send a ton of follow-up emails for the podcast to get guests like
yourself scheduled. I send a ton of follow-up emails for the text interviews on the site
to remind people to finish their writing. And I think more importantly, back when I
was selling ads, I took a ton of follow-up emails just to get sponsors to get me their
ad copy and pay me, etc. So probably could have made more money if I had something like
BluTick so I wouldn't forget to send follow-up emails every now and then.
So BluTick is entirely self-funded. Is that right?
Correct, yes.
How long have you been working on it? And who's working with you and how much money
are you making nowadays?
To start with, before I started breaking code on it, I think it was 2015. November or December
was about the time I started going through the validation process for it. And I did not
break code until January or so of 2016. And then it took four or five months or so to
get an actual thing that people could use. Took another six to eight months to get people
to start using it. And then at some point, I drew a line in the sand and said, okay,
you're going to start paying for it because I've taken pre-orders. After that, I basically
just started onboarding new customers. And it's kind of my... I work on it full-time
for the most part, but it's not enough to make a full-time living on. So I have around
1500 or so in recurring revenue. And then I've also got people who've paid for annual
plans. So it's somewhere north of that, but it's probably not quite $2,000 a month if
you were to aggregate it over the course of an entire year.
What's your long-term goal with all of this? Do you want BluTick to make enough money to
support your lifestyle? Or do you want to build some sort of huge business?
Well, yeah, I don't really want to make it some ginormous business. But at the same time,
I wanted to make enough money that I can use that revenue as kind of a platform to do kind
of whatever I want and essentially buy my own time so that I can do anything. So that
way I can just go to sleep at night. And if I want to take off two or three days or a
week, I can just go do so. And I just took a family vacation a couple of weeks ago and
drove down to Virginia from Massachusetts, stopped at DC, stopped in Philly, along the
way, did a bunch of different things. I answered a couple of emails, a couple of support things
while I was gone, and everything just kept running without me doing anything, which is
great to have that recurring revenue where I mean, I'm still getting the emails that
say, Hey, you know, this credit card was discharged. And it's nice to see those things coming in.
And I'll call it a light at the end of the tunnel where at some point in the future,
there's enough customers where I don't have to worry about what other sources of revenue
I have. And I can just basically, I don't want to say let the money roll in. It's misleading
to say that in any business, you're going to be able to get it to a point where it's
passive income. That's just not going to, that's not the way to really phrase it. I
think it's misleading to say every business could be turned into passive income.
That's true. But it's also the dream that a lot of people have to just create this machine
that spits out money while you go do other things in your life. So if you consider that
to be an unrealistic goal, what do you look forward to? What are your goals?
Yeah, my goal is to get it to that point where it's not as hard. And it's getting easier.
But I mean, because with any sort of recurring revenue business, things grow month over month.
So assuming that you're not, you know, tanking the business or pushing out things that are
completely broken. But the goal is to kind of get that engine going so that it's growing
month over month or at least at least maintaining its momentum. And then you don't have to worry
about things as much. You don't have to work as hard.
Yeah, let's talk about working hard because a lot of people want to start a business,
but they feel like they don't have time because they've got a family or a job or other responsibilities
to take care of. And yet here you are running blue tick. And at the same time, you're still
hosting your podcast and you're still running microconf. And you've got a wife and kids.
How do you find the time to do all of this effectively? Or are you effective?
That's a that's a good question is am I effective? I am effective enough to be able to maintain
everything running at the same time. But there's a lot of things where I don't do nearly as
much as it may appear on the surface. So for example, when we were first when Rob and I
first built the Start of the Rest of His Podcast, him and I would like we'd alternate with the
episodes very similar when we were creating content for the Founder Cafe community. We
he'd do an episode and outline then I would do one. And at the same time, we were also
doing all of the editing for it, we would send out the transcripts, because quite frankly,
that was just way too much effort. So we would pay to have those done. But we would do the
audio editing ourselves. And anyone who's done audio editing, you know that it takes
probably about three times as much time as there is raw audio. So if you have 60 minutes
of raw audio, it's going to take you about three hours to edit it, regardless of what
you edit it down to. And we ended up outsourcing that fairly early on, maybe let no later than
like the 10th or 15th episode, I think it was just too time consuming. So at this point,
our process is really one of us puts together the outline, the other person gets on the
call, maybe five minutes before, maybe five or 10 minutes after the scheduled time, and
we record and it gets sent into Dropbox. And that's it, like we're hands off completely
after that, like we don't touch anything. So my time for that is actually extremely
limited. But it looks like I probably put a lot of work into it.
What about the rest of the things that you're working on? How does it all break down? You
just spend one day a week on your podcast and then the rest on blue tick.
I spend half an hour a week on the podcast. I mean, it's maybe 45 minutes tops. I mean,
you were on the podcast once before. And literally what you saw is probably about the extent
of my involvement with it, aside from just writing the outline, which sometimes like
earlier today, we did an episode, and we created the the outline literally on the call because
we didn't have one.
Yeah, that's depressing to hear because it takes me about a full day to get an episode
out for this podcast. What about everything else that you're working on blue tick and
microconf? How do you juggle those things into your schedule?
So with microconf, things are planned far enough in advance that most of the time, there
is not much that goes on on a weekly basis. We also have Xander who helps out with a lot
of logistical stuff directly interacting with the hotels and vendors and things like that.
We have things split. So Rob handles the speakers, for the most part, I handle the sponsors for
the most part. And I have my own process for dealing with the sponsors. He has his own
process for dealing with the speakers, but we don't really mix back and forth between
them. So my involvement microconf tends to be mostly just on that sponsor side of things.
So it's, it's a lot less work than it looks like. And plus, I have blue tick to help me
out with that.
Yeah. So if I had to summarize your strategy, it's three things basically. Number one, work
with a co founder. So you've got Rob helping you on the podcast and with the conference.
So you're not doing it all by yourself. Number two, reduce the scope of everything you're
doing down to the bare minimum. And I think this is what most people struggle with and
why most of us feel like we don't have time. We envision these massive projects, we bite
off way more than we can chew, when in reality, it would be better off if we just did, you
know, sort of that small first 10 or 20%. And I think your podcast is a great example
of this, you just do the 20% of the work that gets you 80% on the results, and you don't
worry about the rest. And the number three is to outsource the rest. And so you've got
Xander doing events for you for microconf. And you've got transcriptionist and an editor
for your podcast. And all of this comes together to let you get more done and less time.
Yeah, yep. Especially when there's things that you need to do that you know, take a
lot of focus and mental energy, because if you have to spend that time doing things that
are complicated, like, for example, writing code is generally something that you have
to dedicate a lot of mental resources to, it's hard to alternate between that, and then
interrupting it with like, support emails and, you know, oh, I've got to make this phone
call or my kid's sick, and I got to take him to the doctor, like, it's really hard to flip
flop back and forth between them, or just con the context switching will kill you, you
just won't be able to get anything done. So it's really about limiting the thing the things
that I need to do that require a lot of mental focus.
So we've met at microconf a couple times now, but I actually don't know very much about
your past history, Mike, I know you've been doing all this stuff around bootstrapping
and startups for years now. But how did you first get into it? And what made you decide
that you didn't want to stay in the normal track of being an employee?
I don't feel like I ever really wanted to become an employee of a business. So I actually
gave this quite a bit of thought a while ago. And my earliest business was I was probably
10 or 11 years old, and I made a couple hundred dollars renting out my Nintendo video games
to my friends, and I would just charge them a dollar a day and they would take my video
game and most of them would keep them for a couple of weeks because it was cheap enough
that they could do that. And then they'd give them back to me and then I would, you know,
get the money from them. And then I would use that money to go out and buy other video
games that I thought that they were interested in that I also wanted to buy or wanted to
play. And then I would just repeat the process. So I had a nice little game business going
when I was probably 11 years old.
What were some of the first businesses that you started as an adult?
I had a video game company that I wanted to build out. The goal was to not just publish
my own video games, but to also publish those of others. I had a friend who his name is
Andrew Welsh. He ran Ambrosia Software for a long time. Still runs to this day, but he
runs a couple of other side businesses at this point. So I grew up and went to the same
college as he did. And so I kind of looked up to him as like, Oh, this is somebody who
he went to college and he actually went to college for photography, but he had built
up this shareware business while he was still in high school. And I looked at him and said,
Well, he's doing these types of things. I'd love to be able to do that too. So the goal
at the time was to be able to publish other people's games, basically become video game
publisher and build out the business. And I never really quite figured out how to market
them well enough. And a lot of the games were built by other people. So it was very difficult
for me to, I'll say have creative control or help them with stuff like early enough
in the process, just because I didn't have the money to be able to get involved that
early or the connections or anything like that. And I was still extremely young at the
time. So that business never really went too far. I think that the, we did have a game
called Cry of the Ancients that was a web based game way before like the Facebook games
like Farmville and Candy Crush and things like that became popular because this was
five, seven years before that. But we got it to the point where, or I got it to the
point where it had probably 400 or 500 players who logged in pretty much every day to play
the game. And it was a, I'll say it was a moderate success, but there was really no
good revenue stream for it. Advertising only went so far. We were doing a pay per click
things inside their banner ads, stuff like that. But it paid for server costs to some
extent, but probably not the whole thing.
A lot of the founders that I bring on the show have stories just like that one, or maybe
their first or second or third business ended up failing. And they took the lessons that
they learned from that and apply them to their future endeavors. How much time have you spent
reflecting on exactly why your first business failed?
Well, I, I thought about why or reasons that that particular business didn't go as well.
Part of it was just, I didn't have the money to be able to interact with like the people
who are building better games, to be honest. Like I just didn't have the money to be able
to fund those types of things on my own. In terms of the Cry of the Ancients game, I think
that the, that could have definitely been monetized a lot better. But one of the core
things that I wanted to bring to it was have a game like that where you couldn't buy your
way into a better position. So I hated playing games where you could basically pay money
and become better than other players solely because you paid money for it. And I never
wanted it to turn into that. And had I gone in a different direction, had I tried to really
monetize it, I definitely think that the game could have been a much bigger thing than it
was. And I definitely think it could have been a moneymaker, but it was not something
that I really focused on. So those are the types of things that I did think about, but
it just kind of went against what my vision for that particular game was.
So this is the point where a lot of people would decide, you know what, starting companies
is not for me. This is way too hard. I'm going to go do something else. What did you do after
that and what gave you the confidence to continue being an entrepreneur?
Well, I mean, I ran that on the side. So at the time I was still in, I was still finishing
up college. So it was very early on. It was probably 90, 98, 99, something like that.
So I had a server that was co-located that ran that stuff. But in order to help pay for
the bulk of my bills and living expenses, I was working full time for a company called
Clearwire Technologies out of Buffalo, New York at the time.
And then when I left there in 2001, I think, 2000, 2001 timeframe, I went and worked at
Wegmans Food Markets in upstate New York and Rochester, New York. And I worked there for
probably two or three years. And then after the 2003, I moved to the Boston area and worked
for a startup company called Pedestal Software where they made audit and compliance software.
So I worked for them for two years and then they got acquired for around $75 million.
And I was the fourth engineer that was hired there. And I made, I think it was $8,000 for
that acquisition.
You got robbed, Mike.
Yes. And that was what the line in the sand was that I was like, you know what, I'm done.
I'm not working for other people anymore. That's really what it came down to.
You got like 0.01% or something.
Oh, I did it. It's more zeros than one after it. Trust me. Yes. So needless to say, I did
not take it particularly well, but I quit shortly afterwards. And after I was able to
finally cash in my stock options because they locked them in too. So what had happened was
they would have been worth twice as much, but the company that acquired us was called
Altairus and they acquired us. But then there was a lock on our stock options. So we couldn't
sell them for like six months or something like that. And then by that time, their stock
price had dropped in half. So I got way less money than I should have. But oh, well.
Yeah, that hurts. So today you're working on BluTick. How did you get started with the
BluTick? And how did you first come up with the idea for this company?
So I was working for 2005 until, I don't know, five, seven years later, I was doing a lot
of consulting. And when I left Hetisil Software, as I said, they did audit and compliance software.
And they're acquiring company fast forward like five or so years, they were looking at
possibly getting rid of that particular product. And I knew that I had already done a lot of
consulting with those types of customers. And so I said, well, I could build a replacement
for this. And I started doing it. And then I realized there's all these like legal implications
about building a clone of a product that I just did a lot of professional services work
on. And it got really messy, but I built it anyway, and then was kind of terrified to
start really trying to push it because it's, you know, a semantic corporation product.
And yeah, I had all these legal agreements in place. So I tried selling it without going
into any of those, which, you know, in retrospect, maybe I should have just tried it anyway.
And if they sued me, then deal with it at that point. But I was trying to actively avoid
getting sued. So that took several years to kind of churn out, I'll say, and end up being
marked as a failure, and I ended up shutting it down.
But during that process, what I found was I had to microconf was going out at the time.
And because I was in charge of all the sponsorships, I had to reach out to all these people and
ask them if they wanted to sponsor microconf. And I realized at that point, hey, there's
probably a product here to reach out via email for event organizers. And I started looking
into it and trying to figure out what the financials behind that would look like. How
much would I need to charge? How much would be worth my time? And I figured, OK, well,
even if I charge them $500 or $600, that's probably a very tough sell to an event organizer.
So and they're only going to use it like once, you know, for if they're running one event
a year, and that's expensive, it's going to be very hard.
So I ended up kind of abandoning it. And then fast forward several years later, when I shut
down Autoshark, I realized that, hey, that software would have also been very useful
during my enterprise follow ups, or follow ups to these enterprise level customers. And
I could have really used that in a more generic sales scenario. So that's where the idea for
Bluetooth came from is because I had previously experienced that problem. And I discounted
it because it was I was thinking about it for the wrong market.
The classic startup advice is to build something that solves your own problem where you're
your own customer, because then you'll have special insight as to what the customer needs.
And that's exactly what you did. But it kind of backfired because you're applying it to
your one use case, which is organizing conferences, and the business model didn't work out for
that use case, whereas it could have worked for someone else's use cases.
Yep, that's right. And it's interesting to see the number of different use cases that
it's possible to fit BlueTik in as a solution. I mean, you mentioned earlier, the, you know,
the thought that you had about, oh, I could use it to follow up with people to get them
to fill out something on my website, or I could get them to schedule a an interview
for the Indie Hackers podcast. Like each of those is definitely a viable place where BlueTik
could be plugged in, because it's a repeated scenario that comes up for you on a consistent
basis. And you need to manually basically deal with it, which kind of sucks. But at
the same time, it's still got to get done. So it detracts from your ability to do other
things. I'm all about automating things that you don't have to do them again. My mother
would probably claim that I'm the the king of not doing things that, you know, like not
wanting to do things more than once and the king procrastinator, but it's really like,
I just don't want to have to do those things over and over again.
Earlier, we were talking about just how much can you really automate your business? How
realistic is it to build something that's truly passive income? And even though it might
not be, you know, super realistic, it's much easier nowadays to get close to that goal
than it ever was, because there exists businesses like yours that automate these tasks that
otherwise would be repetitive and take up a ton of your time. I'm curious if you ever
considered working on a different idea, instead of blue tick, because I know a lot of people
listening have a large list of ideas or at least two or three they want to work on. And
they're not sure which one to pick what made blue ticks stand out as the one to go with.
So actually, that's a that's a really good story that I probably don't talk about very
much. But there was one idea that I'd had was that I had been hired for to do some consulting
work for a company and they wanted to have this data aggregated from different spreadsheets
together and they didn't really have like a unique key between them, or it wasn't the
same one. And so I had to figure out some system to gather all that data extracted from
the spreadsheets, match it up individually, and then also do that over time and load it
into a database so that they could pull queries from it. I went through that and I said, Oh,
I think that there's actually a really good product behind this because they're paying
me at a consulting rate. So it's like thousands of dollars a month to like have me work on
this for them. And I worked on it for probably was a three, four or five months, something
like that was a long term project. So they're spending $40, $50,000 on this. So it's like,
Well, it seems to me like there's a tool that you could build for this. So I started validating
this idea that I had for a product that would do this type of thing called ETL studio. And
I built a web page and tried to drive traffic to it and tried to get people on the phone
to talk to them. And I got it was a handful of people, it was really hard to get people
on the phone to talk about this particular problem. And I'm like, these people are paying
me lots of money to solve this problem for them. And there's got to be a market for it.
And there are products out there that do that. But I couldn't find enough that we're in a
price range that I think would have made it a viable product for me to build. I don't
think that I could have reached them. So I ended up moving on from that. And then I validated
blue tick and the response was like 10 to 100 times higher for blue tick than it was
for ETL studio. So that's why I ended up choosing blue tick instead. Because I just I did not
get nearly enough to give me the confidence to actually start building and writing code.
I think your story so far is illustrative of why if you really want to start a business,
it helps to sort of jump in and get your hands dirty without waiting for the perfect idea
and ideally start multiple businesses over time. And I say this for two reasons. The
first reason is, it makes it way easier for you to recognize what traction looks like.
If you only started one business, it's very easy to get stuck and say, hey, is this really
worth spending my time on? Is this taking off? Or is it not? You don't really know because
you don't have any reference points. Whereas you had started multiple businesses, you had
your game in the past, you had ETL studios, you have blue tick. And it's easier for you
to say, look at the reception that blue tick is getting. This is something special. I should
keep working on that. You really need multiple companies to get that perspective.
Well, I think the cheat that I did was they're like, I think the cheat that I had there was
that I didn't actually start a business or write any code, I was just trying to get people
to talk to. So I didn't actually start a business for that. I just tried to find people to talk
to and I couldn't find them.
Yeah, that's a great point. You don't really even have to go the full distance with the
business, you can just do those sort of first validation steps. And that's enough to get
you the perspective that you need. The second reason I think people should start multiple
businesses is because it helps you come up with ideas. So if you're, you know, one of
these people who's paralyzed, you don't have the perfect idea, you don't know what to work
on, just work on a less than perfect idea. And in the course of working on that, you'll
probably come up with a better idea if you keep your eyes open. And so I think your story,
Mike, you came up with the idea for ETL studios while you were running your consulting business,
you came up with the idea for blue tick while you were running microconf. So a lot of your
best ideas came out as a result of you working on some other business.
I find it hard for me to resonate or understand the people who say I don't have any ideas
because I think that like I have way too many ideas. I actually keep like a spreadsheet
or a Word document or something like that, that just list out things like here's my idea
for this. So this is a problem I run into. And there's different things out there. It's
difficult for me to find a solution to it. Because this one is good at this, but not
at this other piece over here. And I just I don't have that problem personally. I see
lots of opportunities and stuff. It's more a matter of for me, what opportunities am
I not pursuing? Or what am I going to be giving up by pursuing that particular opportunity?
Because I just I have too many things that I think would be interesting to go after.
But I have to kind of pick and choose which ones I do and don't.
What do you think is the primary difference between you and people who say they don't
have any ideas? I mean, how do you what special insight do you have to let you see these opportunities
for starting a business and generating revenue?
I think that there's a reluctance to do things that have been done before. And I think I
used to fall into this camp as well. Oh, I don't want to build, you know, a help desk
product because there's this other company over here that's doing that. And I say that
distinctly remembering there was a help desk product that I did not build back in the 2001
to 2004 timeframe because I found this other one that was online that was using the same
types of technologies. And at the time, it was ASP, even pre ASP.net, just classic ASP.
And I just I said, Well, they've got a product here that does this, why would I build a help
desk product? So I never did it. But that was an example of one of the ideas where it
came from me trying to run that free online game where I was like, Hey, it would be nice
to be able to have some sort of help desk ticketing system to help me deal with inquiries
and questions from people. And I didn't do it because specifically, I was afraid of building
something that somebody else had already done.
Yeah, that's a great point. It's really hard to identify a valuable problem that nobody
else is solving and then solve it yourself. But it's a little bit easier to look at a
valuable problem that people are already paying to have solved. And then bring your own solution
to the table that's, you know, significantly better than the competitions in some way,
for some group of people. So let's get back to your story with blue tick. You've returned
to this idea after putting it on the back burner for a little while. What's the first
thing you do to get this project off the ground?
So what I did was I set up a landing page. And then I went into my own personal network
and started asking people about it. And I said, Hey, I have this idea for a product
that would do something along these lines. Is that something you're interested in? Or
you have a problem with as well? And if so, let's get on a call. Or do you know somebody
who might have this problem? Is there somebody else you could, you know, introduce me to?
So I did that. And I ended up with about 30 to 40 different conversations with people.
Spent a long time. I spent almost a month like going through and having those conversations
because each of them was about a half hour call. And I took, you know, copious notes
on every conversation. I tracked it all in a spreadsheet. And then this is one of those
like inception like products where having blue tick at the time would have helped me
follow up with the people that I wanted to get to a call. Right. So, but I found that
like, going through the process of that, like, I knew what the process was, I just needed
the software to actually do it for me. So I had those conversations, and I spent about
a month with them and asked them a lot, tons of questions, said, What is it that you want?
How would you see this working? And what do you think would be a good price point for
this? Like, What would you pay for this? Or would you pay for it? That was the question
I had asked. Is this something you would pay for? And I got yeses for most of them. I spent
about a month, close to three weeks getting balsamic mockups built for the entire application.
There was about 60 or 70 pages. I used their presentation mode to be able to click through
to different pieces of the application to show exactly how it was going to look. And
then I went back to those people who said, Yes, I would pay you for this. And I showed
them, I said, This is what I built, or this is what I'm going to build. This is what it
looks like. Is this still something that you're interested in? And for the most part, most
of them said yes. And then at that point, I said, Will you pay me for this? And I said,
here's a web page where you can put in your credit card. And it will take a prepayment
for, from you for, but defaults to three months, you can put up to either one month or up to
six months. And the text field for how much they were going to pay was blank. And they
could tell me how much they were going to pay for it. And I got about a dozen people
to give me anywhere from $40 a month up to $100 a month, with most of them clustered
between $47 and $50. There were nine people in that range. There were two people who said
either $39 or $40. And then one person said $100 a month.
So this is a huge, multiple step process you've got going here, you set up a landing page,
and you started showing it to people to see if they're interested in the idea. And you
put in more effort into actually coming up with detailed mockups, how this product is
going to work. And you got people to say that, yeah, they're still interested. And then you
hit them with the question, all right, put in your credit card, how much are you going
to pay? I want to dive into the details behind all of these steps and find out how exactly
you did them. But before that, I want to talk about how a lot of people skip all three of
these steps, if not one or two of them. How did you know this is the right way to go?
Where did you learn this stuff? And how does anybody sort of acquire the right knowledge
and learning that they can go into their business with confidence, they're not going to repeat
some of the more often repeated and easy to avoid mistakes.
So there's one was just from having attended microconf for so many years, I kind of knew
what other people had done and how the some of them had validated their own products.
But I took things to, I'll say what amounts to almost an extreme level. I don't know of
anyone else who's gone to the point where they took prepayments before they even started
writing code on something. You know, like, I'm sure that there's an example of somebody
out there who's done it, but I haven't met them and I don't know who they are. The, what
I was trying to actively avoid was building something that people did not want, or that
I wasn't going to be able to get in front of the right people, I was trying to make
absolutely 100% sure that I was not making a mistake and was going to spend the next
couple of years building something that ultimately I couldn't sell because that's exactly what
had happened with AutoShark. I built it because I knew I could build it. And I knew that I
could implement the things that need to be implemented. And it worked like the product
was good. The problem was I couldn't get in front of the people and I wasn't able to sell
it in the way that it needed to be sold. It really needed like a Salesforce and resellers
and things like that, all things that I actively want to avoid. So I used all those things
that I did not want to do to find and settle on a product and that could be sold in a way
that I did want to sell it. So all those things really come from years of mistakes and learning
more about myself and how I needed to run things moving forward.
Yeah, you touch a hot stove once. And then from then on, you remember exactly not to
touch that stove again. It's tricky because, you know, having been through that yourself,
it's extremely visceral to you how important it is to validate an idea and how easy it
can be to be overconfident in your idea and start building and it turns out nobody wants
it. But I think when you're maybe a first time founder, you're listening to an episode
like this, you're reading about entrepreneurs online, it's hard to internalize the lessons
that have been learned by other people that you haven't experienced yourself. It's much
easier to get caught up in the moment to get caught up in like the excitement and the emotions
that you're feeling in the present and to sort of make all the mistakes that you've
read about other people making.
I think it's very easy to be overly optimistic, especially as a developer, because if you're
a reasonably good developer, you can build just about anything. The question is, how
much time do you have to do it? And the other thing is, how much runway do you have? Well,
if you have a full-time job and you're working on it on the side, you've got unlimited runway.
And that's not necessarily a good thing, which I found with AutoSharkers, because I didn't
have these lines in the sand that I absolutely needed to be able to make rent payments, for
example. So that was, there was no constraints on how much time I could spend on it other
than public perception, which was overly negative in certain cases and justifiably so.
Okay, so let's go through step one of this process. You put up a website, a landing page,
that describes your idea so that hopefully people can read it and you can get feedback
from them. What was your process like for actually finding people to visit this website?
So I'd had a mailing list for my personal blog that I leveraged that and sent out a couple
thousand people. And obviously, that doesn't necessarily drive a ton of traffic, because
if they're not interested in that type of product, they're just not going to visit it.
And then there's also, like, it filters down even further to, like, how many of those people
who do visit the page are even going to reach out to you. The biggest thing that I found
that was helpful was talking to the people that I knew and asking them, hey, like, going
through, like, the people I knew and saying, like, do I think that they're a good fit for
it? And if so, like, I'll reach out to them. So most of what I got from those first 20
to 30, 40 conversations was people that I reached out to and said, Hey, I'm building
this. I think that this might help you. Can we talk? And from there, what I always did
on every single call, I would, I would ask them, Are there 3 people that you can think
of that would have that would fit a similar profile to you that would also have this problem?
And if so, can you introduce me to that?
That's smart.
At least, I would say probably almost 60% of the people that I talked to were actually
introductions from the people that I talked to. It wasn't me reaching out directly to
my network. It was people in my network introducing me to other people that they thought would
also be a good fit.
Yeah, that's super smart. I never really hear about people going about it that way. Were
you doing any posting online? Were you posting your landing page on online communities or
different websites or forums? Were you taking out ads on Facebook or Google or was it 100%
cold calls?
It was all calls, introductions and referrals. That was what I relied on. I didn't, I think
I might have run some Twitter ads at one point, but not very many. It was, it was minimal,
if anything, like I wouldn't have spent more than a 50 or 100 bucks. I'm sure of that.
The other thing that you mentioned was that you'd already built up an audience through
years of blogging and growing your mailing list and running microconf. But it's interesting
because the audience that you built through those activities isn't necessarily a line
of the types of customers that you wanted for blue tick. How did you think about this
at the time and how helpful was it that you had built this audience beforehand?
So remember the percentage of what I got from Pedestal's sale is like 0.0001%. It's probably
about that. That's what my personal blog contributed to the number of people that I talked to.
It was almost nothing. And I think that that's, in general, building an audience is a good
thing to do. The problem is that if you're trying to build a software product and it's
the first product that you have, what are you actually going to attract them based on?
Like you, you have to attract them based on content or something like that or advice or
videos or tutorials or educational stuff. At which point you're building an educational
product probably anyway. So I feel like in some ways, like that's overly generic advice
that sounds good on the surface, but the reality is most of the time it doesn't help. And then
there's the other aspect of it where, where this was my personal blog. So the people there
were there to read stuff I wrote about, not necessarily read about like, Hey, some new
product that Mike is developing. Like they didn't necessarily care as much. So it's,
you're not probably going to get customers from it. I think even Jason Cohen had said
when he was building WP engine, he blasted out an email to several, like, I don't know,
probably 10 or 20,000 people. And he got like three customers from it or five or something
like that, which does not move the needle in any way, shape or form.
Yeah, it really is kind of a crapshoot. It allows the audience that you've happened to
be building over the years is perfectly aligned with the product that you decide to launch.
And I think that's something that you have to consciously make happen. It's unlikely
to just happen on its own. Right. So you ended up getting a bunch of preorders for blue tick
before you launched. Do you remember how much money those preorders are worth? And the point
at which you decided this is something I'm going to work on. And you actually started
building the product. So I had people pay me roughly $2,000 in preorders. So I think
I had 11 or 12 people pay me and each of them paid anywhere from, you know, the $40 to $100.
And many of them paid for multiple months. I think one person paid me for one month,
one or two paid me for two months, and everyone else paid me for three months. So collectively,
it was all about $2,000 in preorders. And that was what gave me the confidence to say,
well, if people are willing to shell this out, without having actually seen me write
a single line of code, and based on some balsamic mockups that I created, it seems to me like
there's definitely something here. And I've got this group of 12 people who I think who
have already paid me to deliver on something. So in a way, it's kind of like consulting,
but not really because they're prepaying for something that you're going to build.
Yeah, and you're making sure upfront that it's not susceptible to what consulting is
susceptible to where only one person wants it, you're not going to actually start building
this thing unless you've proven that it's not just a one off thing. Right. I think another
thing that's kind of smart about this is that once people have like actually put in their
credit cards, you suddenly have a fire under your ass or you need to deliver what you're
building. You can't, it's like you're saying earlier, you don't have any constraints if
you're building something on the side of let's say a full time job, you can keep going forever.
Well, if people have paid you, they probably want a product by some sort of deadline that's
actually functional. And so you're going to be a lot more motivated to get it out the
door. Yep. What were some of the first things that you did to make sure you could actually
deliver this product to them? And did you have any sort of deadline to get a belt?
Obviously, I gave I showed to everybody the balsamic mockups that I had and walk them
through exactly what the product was going to look like. That actually helped in two
different ways. One is I was able to show it to people and say, this is what it's going
to look like. And this is how you interact with it. And two, I was able to take that.
And then I went on to Upwork and I hired three developers to help me build it. So I essentially
went through and vetted them and it took a couple of weeks to do that. But from there,
I basically set a deadline and said, okay, in three weeks, we're going to ship, not three
weeks, three or four months, we're going to ship this and I want it shipped by I think
it was like April or May or something like that. And we wanted to have it usable and
have at least one person on the system and actively using it by that time.
That's fascinating to me because you are a programmer yourself. Yes, you can just build
this yourself. Why hire other developers off of Upwork to build it for you?
Because I knew that I could hire multiple development. So I was doing consultant work
at the time, and I had a lot more money than time. So I knew that if I hired developers
to come in and handle certain aspects of it, I could handle the high level architecture
stuff and management of the people and make sure that different things were getting done
and they were getting done in the way that they needed to be in multiple areas of the
application because many of those things were separate from one another. So like the email
sequences page, for example, can be completely different from the profile page. And you don't
need the same person working on both of those things as long as they both work. And I knew
that there's lots of these different things that could be done in parallel.
So hiring somebody, hiring three different people to help work on those things made a
lot of sense because I could get more of it done in parallel. And then I could be essentially
responsible for quality control and making sure that things were going in the right direction.
What are your tips for making this work? Because I know a lot of people who've outsourced development
of their product and it is definitely varying degrees of success. If you could go back and
do it all over again, what would you change? And what did you get right the first time?
If I had to go back and do it over again, I'm not sure that I would hire a development
team to do it, to be honest.
So it didn't work out?
I don't believe so. It did in some respects. So there were some choices that were made
in terms of the technology stack and how certain things were implemented that, for example,
the front end was all done in Angular. And I have no background in using Angular in any
way, shape, or form when the project started. That said, I've had to go back through and
fix a bunch of things and make them work. But at the time, it seemed like a reasonably
good decision to make. But I think what I would probably have changed is I would hire
somebody to show me how to do some of those things in different ways of doing them. So
I would hire probably a developer to say, hey, I want you to teach me how you would
do this and then hire a different programmer to teach me the exact same thing about how
they would do it.
So that way I get two or three different perspectives because what I found was each of the developers
I hired had different ways of doing things. And there were overlaps to some extent, but
some of them knew better about how to handle certain situations than others. So what you
get is like the best and worst of both worlds when you're hiring one person. And if you've
got two or three different people who have never worked together before, you end up with
a hodgepodge of code that in some places works really well, and then in other places does
not because a different person implemented it in parallel. So going back to the thing
where I thought I was hiring three different people to be able to build an app in parallel
much faster, what I ended up with was some places the app works really well, and some
places it works really poorly, even though it's the same team, it's just because different
people were doing different aspects of it. So I think that just nailing down exactly
how things would be handled would have been a better way to go.
What were you spending your time doing while these developers were building your product?
So I was still had like a full time consultant job. And then at this on the side, I was also
like trying to manage these people. And then there was another component, the back end
component that would synchronize with a mail service that I was basically responsible for.
So they were doing their code, I was doing mine for the back end system stuff. And then
I also had the consultant gig. So it's my time was spent mostly doing those things,
but then also trying to make sure that what they were delivering and checking in was functional
and was doing what the specs says it was supposed to do. And I think the big issue I had was
mostly just communicating with them exactly how these different pieces fit together. And
I don't know whether it was, you know, I assume that it's mostly my fault, to be honest, like,
I don't think that I'm a particularly fantastic manager. And I think that there's definitely
a lot of growth that I have to becoming a better one, but and you don't get that unless
you practice it. So in that respect, it's helpful. But I don't think that it was a good
idea for me to outsource as much as I tried to just because of the scope of the product.
I think it's just it was too complicated to start off with.
Yeah, I wonder what the consequences of that ended up being. I mean, when you launched,
or when you, you know, first started showing this to the people who had agreed to pay,
were they upset with the product or disappointed? Or did you have to go back and rewrite it?
Or was it full steam ahead? This is what we got. We're going with it.
Yep. So what the the I think the consequences of it were that it was six to eight months
of reengineering lots of things to make sure that they actually work the way that they're
supposed to, and then standardizing the code in different places, because it was like some
places were just radically different than others, you know, like, for example, doing
an API call and paging results back versus, oh, this works fine for, you know, receiving
10 rows or 20 rows. But hey, we've got to pull back 100,000 here. And this is just not
going to work. So you're gonna have to page it. So the whole thing's got to be rewritten.
And we spent or I spent a ton of time rewriting things because of the issues like that.
Let's talk about your launch and how you got blue tick out the door. And I know it took,
you know, a lot longer because of these development issues, maybe other things to get the product
out the door than you would have hoped for initially. But how do things change once you
launched blue tick? And was there even some sort of singular launch? Or was it more of
a slow gradual process of opening it up to people?
I don't think there's ever a singular moment. There was a there was a time where I just
decided to make it publicly available. And that was last August. So I decided to just
start pushing things live and making it available. And I think last, yeah, it was last August
when I went through, I went to my own personal mailing list and said, Hey, I'm going to blog
about this. And I'm going to do 21 days of videos before I make this thing public. And
there's a 21 day series, like you can watch a five to 10 minute video of me basically
just talking to the camera for for a little while at the end of each day, about like what
I did, what I'm going to be doing, and then, you know, leading up to the actual public
launch of it. And I use my blue tick mailing list mainly for for the actual launch itself.
So I had a couple of different emails that were going to go out and told people what
the product did and how it would work and gave them a couple of videos of tutorials
for how it would, how they could use it. And that's, that's kind of how I handled the launch.
But I don't think there was some single moment in time where it's like, Oh, this is ready
for prime time. I mean, there's still things that I'm going through and reworking. I mean,
no product is ever finished, I'll say.
So how did things go? Do people respond well to the video series you created and the emails
that you wrote?
Well, so the video series was just in my personal blog, it wasn't to the, it wasn't to the blue
tick mailing list. And to the blue tick mailing list, I had like three or four emails, there
was just a sequence to get people interested and then have them come and sign up. And I
roughly doubled the customer base when I did that. So I went from like, I think I had 10
to 15 people on it to about 25 or so, 25 to 30. And that, I mean, that helped at the time.
So it was, it was helpful in sorting out places in the app that were just, were more broken
than I thought they were, I'll say. Because when you start adding more people into an
app that is still very early stage, you start finding, like you, you just have more people
exercising it. So there's more use cases that you didn't necessarily account for, and more
people touching something where they're, you know, putting in weird things or you're using
weird languages. So I had a, I had a customer who, they had a Japanese mailbox connected
and it's, it worked fine, you know, and then I also had another customer who had their
own private email server connected. And that worked fine as well. But then I had places
where like, there, there's not every mail server that follows the RFCs for sending and
receiving emails. So I found, I definitely found places where like, as I added customers,
I identified more and more or these emails that like, they would just break certain parts
of the app because they included weird characters or something along those lines that just,
you know, some RFC was violated. And I depended on that being correct to store the data and
it didn't. So I had to fix stuff.
This entire process of going from idea to launch is full of hardships. You have situations
where your development isn't going as smoothly as you'd hoped. And it's expensive and it's
taking a long time. The product isn't what you envisioned. And you have situations where
your marketing efforts aren't going as well as you'd hoped. And your audience that you
built didn't really come through the way that you wanted. I think a lot of people facing
this kind of resistance would just quit. They'd say, okay, I'm done. It's not working out.
It's a lot of time. I'm just going to keep my job. What kept you going? Why didn't you
decide to quit?
I think mostly because I knew that I just wanted to get away from consulting. So very
early on when I first started doing consulting, I loved it. It was fantastic. So I would get
dropped into a customer and it was a different environment every time. And I was solving
interesting things and I was getting paid a lot of money for it. But the problem was
I was on the road between 40 and 50 weeks a year. So there were at least one year that
I can think of, I was on the road for 45 weeks. And so I would fly in on a Sunday, fly out
on a Friday, and I was there the whole week. And it was a different customer every week.
So you have a family and that wears on you after a while because you never see your family.
And I got to a point where I was just like, I can't do consulting anymore. I just do not
want to do it. You can't pay me enough to continue doing it. So that's really what drove
me to say, look, I've got to get this out there. And I've got to push it to the point
where I can actually make a living from this and not have to go back to consulting.
Was it stressful knowing that BluTik was your lifeline and that if this business doesn't
work out, you're gonna have to keep consulting and doing something that you don't like doing?
It's stressful. It was stressful. But at the same time, I also recognize that if I really
needed to go back to consulting, it's not like I cut all ties and would never be able
to go back to it. I knew that I'd be able to go to that and make ends meet, even if
it was only for a little while. So I knew that it wasn't like, I wasn't burning the
ship completely, so to speak. I could go back if I needed to. And maybe I just needed a
break from it. I definitely don't want to go back to consulting on a long term basis,
especially if it involves any sort of travel. But otherwise, you know, it's not the end
of the world if I had to.
Let's talk about growing BluTik after your launch. So in the very beginning, when you
first had the idea, you've got your pre-orders by reaching out to people in your network
and making cold calls and getting introductions to other people that way. And then in the
weeks leading up to your launch, you reached out to your personal mailing list and you
started a new mailing list for BluTik. How did things change after you launched BluTik?
And how did you go about finding customers and making sales after that point?
So most of what I've spent my time on is making the product as good as I possibly can, and
then asking people for referrals and other people that they know that might have a similar
problem. And I found that that's actually worked pretty well. I know that there's definitely
room for me to grow in terms of doing a lot more online marketing or content, and you
know, driving more people to the mailing list.
I've automated some of those things to some extent, but one of the things that I have
is in BluTik, there's actually an email sequence that I have set up where I can ask people
and say, hey, I see that you've been successful with BluTik for a little while. Is there anyone
that you know that you think could also benefit from using this? And it's interesting, like
you're almost asking for a testimonial, but really what you're asking for is for like
a customer referral. And the only way that you can get, not the only way, but one of
the better ways that you can get people to basically give you an introduction to somebody
else is to give them the best services that you can possibly give them.
So I've, I've spent a lot of time making sure that if somebody emails me with support,
I'm fairly responsive, almost always within 24 hours. And the answers that I give them
are fairly comprehensive. If they need help, like I'm more than willing to do things on
their behalf. So I've gone, I've logged into people's accounts, fixed up their entire email
sequence for them so that they don't have to go in and mess around with any HTML. Just
giving them the best possible experience they can have with your software has been, I won't
say monumental, but it's, it's really, really helpful when it comes to turning around and
saying, Hey, can you do me a favor?
Walk me through how you're thinking about this, because you have a ton of options as
a founder for what you can do once your product is out the door to bring more customers and
the door. What you're doing here is, is very, I think, salesy, you know, you're reaching
out to be one on one asking for referrals, and then I imagine reaching out to those people.
But you can also change your pricing, maybe raise your pricing or lower your pricing to
reach more customers, you can do a lot of marketing activities, you can do advertising,
what was your overall game plan if you had one?
So I have a Google Doc that I have that just lists like tons and tons of ideas that I have
for how to grow the product. And I have a hard time going through and deciding like,
Hey, I'm going to focus on these different things, or I'm going to do these things in
this particular order, because reality is, it's mostly just a checklist. The problem
is like, some of them take a long time to get to the end of, like SEO, for example,
or building a content marketing strategy, like those things take a lot of time and effort
and money. And quite frankly, I don't have a lot of any of those. So I would have to
outsource it and pay somebody else to do it. But I don't have the funds and revenue to
be able to do that either. So mostly what I focus on is the types of things that I can
do without spending a lot of money. So that kind of excludes certain activities, like
paid advertising, I don't have the money to be able to do that. So mostly, I'll focus
on things where I'm asking people for help in various ways, or providing the best service
I possibly can that makes them feel somewhat indebted to me for that kind of thing. And
then also promoting things like annual plans, that's actually really helpful as well. But
you have to be able to get people to trust you enough to be able to say, okay, yeah,
I'll pay you for an annual plan.
It's funny, because it's super basic and straightforward when you hear it. But a lot of people don't
have that list. A lot of people don't have a list of all the different things that they
can think of to try to grow their business or improve or overcome some obstacle. What
they're doing instead is, you know, they hear about one thing, they become fixated on it,
maybe that's search engine optimization, maybe that's advertising, maybe that's making cold
calls. And they say, okay, that's what I've got to do, you know, so and so did that to
grow their business, I've got to do that to grow my business. And if you get fixated on
one option, and you don't have a list, then you can't compare, you can't compare and contrast
these options, you can't say which is going to take more time, which one do I have more
certainty about which one is most likely to succeed. So I think just having that list
is crucial. Were there any things that you tried that are maybe on your list that didn't
work as well as you'd hoped?
I think the easiest thing to do as a developer is actually to just dive in and write more
features and think that features are going to you're going to feature your way out of
this customer acquisition problem. Yeah, that doesn't happen at all. Adding new features
and almost never adds new customers unless somebody came to you and said, I need this
feature. And I'm not willing to sign up until you implement it. I actually take that and
turn it around. This is a good hack for some people have them sign up and then offer to
extend their trial until that feature is implemented. Because if you if you say that you will implement
the feature, and then they'll sign up, what you've done is you've committed yourself to
doing work for somebody who hasn't paid you yet and isn't going to pay you. So if you
turn that around, you get them to sign up, then they're not off looking for a replacement
or some other product because they've kind of made a commitment to you already. And that
works especially well if you can get them to give you the first payment, and then you'll
give them a credit for one month down the road or something like that. So at least that
way, there's that that tie in because I did find that when the pre orders, for example,
I had a lot of people who prepaid me and then even after going back to them, most of them
did not stick around and become customers for a long time because they had in the meantime
went and found other things because they had that problem, they needed it solved and they
needed it solved sooner than I was going to be able to deliver.
You mentioned earlier that one of the things that helps you come up with business ideas
is that you don't get frustrated by the existence of competition. You don't care that someone
else has done something similar to what you're doing. And I think that's the case with Bluetooth
as well. Bluetooth is not the only business that exists that helps people automate their
email process and send follow up emails. How do you think about the competition? And what
do you do to stand out and make sure that people choose you over your competitors?
Personally, I use the trust factor and service. So like if I can get somebody onto a phone
call, I will because I've not only run into this problem and experienced it, but as the
founder of the business, people feel much more trusting of the founder of a business
when they're talking to them versus talking to a sales rep. I have like a list of probably
30 different competitors that I basically track. And the problem is that with so many
different vendors to choose from, it's difficult to know who to trust and who not to. But if
you find one and you get to talk directly to the founder, that says a lot. People have
a tendency to trust, especially developers. I've been in various sales calls before and
I apparently have a persona that projects confidence to people when I'm talking about
technical stuff, because it's obvious that I know all the different edge cases. And I
know the different ways that something can be exploited, or misused, or just like somebody
does something wrong. And I could talk to those things. And it's clear to them that
I have a certain level of expertise. You don't really get that when you talk into a sales
rep and say, Well, how does your API interact with this? And they're like, Well, let me
get somebody on my team to get back to you. And it becomes this convoluted process that
they don't want to deal with. So between that and running the podcast and microconf, like
there's a lot of trust that I try to establish as quickly as possible. And that translates
into like I said, like lots of other things and the ability for them to give you the benefit
of the doubt in virtually every scenario.
So you're a pretty well known guy, I think people probably look up to you as an expert
because of your podcast and because of microconf, and look at you as someone who should know
all the right things to do with your business, which I think can be a lot of pressure. How
do you how do you deal with that? And do you ever feel afraid or embarrassed about sharing
what you're up to and talking about the decisions you make with Bluetooth and public?
So I try to ignore as much public commentary and feedback as I possibly can. More because
it's detrimental than anything else. And I think that I found that I became acutely aware
of that when I was running the audit shark because I felt compelled to continue working
on it and building it and trying to sell it because I had a podcast and I talked about
it. And things really just did not go very well. And like things are completely opposite
with Bluetooth. And that's great. But at the same time, like I'm not where I want to be.
I don't think any founder has ever said, No, I'm going to rain in growth this month because
I just don't I don't want to grow anymore and doing way too well, we need to hit the
Yeah, we're going too fast. Let's put the brakes on like that does not happen. And don't
get me wrong, there's certain cases where you may say, let's not run ads this week,
because I'm going to be on vacation for the next two weeks. And I know I'm going to blow
a lot of money. Like that's a very different scenario than I'm good. Like I don't want
any more money. You know, that's not something people typically tend to do. So I mean, I
think that there is a certain amount of expectations, I'll say about like, Oh, well, Mike should
be doing much better. And, you know, quite frankly, like there's times where I look at
my revenue numbers. And I'm like, well, I wouldn't say that I'm embarrassed about it.
But I'm certainly not happy with where things are where I feel like I should be. I think
that it's probably where a lot of founders feel the exact same way. It's like you always
wish things were better than they were. And you always plan for them to be better. And
it almost never works out that way. So there's always this lingering nuts, not general disappointment,
but like, self disappointment, like, I should be doing better than this.
Yeah, it's crazy because it existed pretty much every level. Like if you're someone who's
been thinking about starting a startup for a very long time, you might be disappointed
in yourself because you just never started. Whereas if you are someone running, I don't
know, $10 billion company, you might be thinking of all the things you want your company to
be doing and how you're not there yet. And you're looking at the Amazons and the Googles
of the world and thinking, you know, why don't I get to that point? So it's hard to internalize,
but it's really true that there's never a point along that continuum where you just
feel like you're doing everything you could be doing. Because no matter where you get,
you end up looking sort of above you in it. And you want to impress the people who are
doing a little bit better than you and you want to reach a level that's further than
you've gotten.
But I think you also have to recognize that there everyone has a different situation.
So like I make it a point to not compare myself in any way, shape or form to any business
that's funded, because I'm bootstrapped. So I know that like, if I had a million dollars,
heck even if I had $150, $250,000 in my bank account, that would enable me to do a heck
of a lot more things. But that goes down to the question of like, Well, should I look
for funding? And that's a very, very different conversation that we could have another 2
or 3-hour conversation on. But, you know, for me right now, it's like, you know, that's,
that's not on the table. So, you know, the question is like, Who should I be comparing
myself to? And the reality is like, you should be comparing yourself to yourself 3 months
ago or 6 months ago. Like, are you in a better position now than you were? And if not, like,
how can you how can you fix that? How can you improve things? Or should you move on
to something else? Because if you start comparing yourself to other people, it's like keeping
up with the Joneses, you're always going to be comparing yourself with other people. And
it's never a good scene mentally, like, you can never catch up, like there will always
be people in front of you, there will always be people who are smarter than you.
Despite your best efforts, is there anybody that you do look up to and you find yourself
chasing after or comparing yourself to? Are there any businesses that you look up to as
role models? Or maybe a better question is, do you have any mentors who you look to for
guidance and advice and running blue tick who are perhaps further ahead than you are?
Yeah, I think I think it's a very subtle distinction between looking up to somebody and respecting
them and how they run their business and what they do versus comparing yourself to them
and saying, Oh, I wish I were there or I wish I were doing things like you. So like, for
example, Pele from balsamic, like, I very much respect him. And like, I look up to him
and what he's achieved with balsamic, but I don't look at myself and say, Oh, he did,
you know, he was able to get to $800,000 a year in revenue in eight months. And like,
I want to be able to do that. And why am I not? I'm disappointed with myself. Like, it's
a completely different business. Like, everything is different. So I don't compare myself to
him, but I definitely look up to him and respect him. And if I were to ask him a question,
like I would absolutely listen to what he has to say. But I don't, I don't beat myself
up over the fact that I'm not there.
Let's talk about Bluetooth today, and how you grow into the future. What's top of mind
for you, sort of every day that you're working on your product? And how do you grow from
$2,000 a month in revenue to $10,000 a month in revenue and beyond?
I've spent a ton of time basically making sure that the app is stable and can scale.
And like on the back end, it does a ton of processing because it, it operates at a fundamentally
different level than most other applications that are out there that do the similar things.
And I, that's typically, that's explicitly because during the validation process for
BlueTick, I looked at what they were doing and how they were doing it and said, Well,
how can I do this better? So there were products out there, they said, Well, I like this product
and I use it now. But the reason I don't like it is because I only get updates like once
an hour. I said, Well, why is it as the like, I look around and find out that they're using
some third party service. And that's what they're using to synchronize the mailboxes,
they're not doing it themselves. So that's part of why it's taken so long for me to get
to where I am with BlueTick. But that said, I also did it myself, I own that entire tech
stack, I'm not reliant on an external party. So although I have to move slower, I have
much more flexibility and the technical capabilities at a lower level that those competitors don't.
And what that has allowed me to do is put things in such a position where it can scale.
And I've done, I've done premature scaling, premature optimization for sure. But at the
same time, I also recognize that as I'm adding customers in, and some customer I added had
a mailbox that had 750,000 emails in it. And my servers just basically handled it, it didn't,
it didn't even bat an eye really. So but they do that every 10 to 15 minutes, it's got to
synchronize the entire mailbox. And it does that for every single customer. But by owning
that technology stack, I don't have to worry about that stuff. And by focusing on making
sure that the app is, I don't want to say stable, because it's stable, it's, it's able
to handle those types of situations without breaking or slowing down or bogging down.
By focusing on those things, I put myself in a position where I can leverage things
like a Zapier integration, or I can go out to product hunt and post it there. Or I can
do things that leverage other people's audiences to add a bunch of more customers in very
short time span, and not have to worry about the app breaking. Because that's more stressful
than anything else. Like if the back end services stop working, that's a big deal.
Let's say the technical aspects and the robustness of your product get to exactly where you want
them to be tomorrow. How do you think about finding customers and getting more people
in the door using bluetick?
I think it's mostly it's awareness. But there are places where bluetick is not going to
be the right solution for everyone at all, at all cases. So bluetick includes like a
lightweight CRM in the middle of it. But I think that integrating with other CRM so that
you can bring your own and integrate with it is helpful. I mean, the way you phrase
the question, like if it was if it did everything I wanted it to, all those integrations would
be in place, I wouldn't have to build them. So it's, it's kind of a catch 22 there. So,
but I mean, at some point down the road, like integrating into other products, so that bluetick
is a, I'll say a point solution and a specific piece of your sales funnel. That's where it
needs to go. That's the piece where I would focus and making sure that people are aware
of it because at the end of the day, marketing in general is making people aware of your
product and getting them to trust it enough to give it a shot to solve whatever problem
they have. And if you haven't done all of those things, you're never going to be able
to sell the solution to them. But you also have to remember, you need to make sure that
they're getting their problem solved. And once they are automated everything, I found
that the most successful customers have integrated blueticks so that it's, it's automate stuff
for them.
Yeah. And I think what I'm getting at here is something that we touched on briefly earlier,
which is especially if you're a developer, there's always this temptation to build more
features to write this, to write more code, you know, things can always be more stable,
they could always be more robust, they could always be more featureful. And you're sort
of in the middle of this situation right now where you have to decide, okay, how much time
do I spend on improving my product? And how much time do I spend on trying to get more
people to use it? How do you navigate that, especially, you know, when you're a resource
constrained solo founder, and when you're marketing, nobody's writing code. And when
you're writing code, nobody's growing your product.
So I'm, I'm, I'm kind of crossing that line at the moment. So like, you could probably
argue that like, I could have done that back in December or, you know, January, February,
this year, I mean, you could probably make a case that, Oh, you last August is when you
should have done it when you first opened up the doors to the public. But the reality
is that if I open up the doors, and a lot of people come in all at once, or even if
just all it takes is one customer who crosses a certain threshold, and then the entire app
falls down on itself, like a lot of apps probably fit that mold where if one thing goes wrong
in a certain piece of it, the whole thing just grinds to a halt. So I've spent a lot
of time making sure that that I recognize those situations and either coded around them
or have avoided them. And it's, I'm at the point now where I feel much more comfortable
moving forward and pushing on those on the gas more to add more people in, because those
those situations have been largely resolved. And that's, because I've slowly added customers
in, they find problems, I fix them, I iterate, push out new features or new things that will
cover different edge cases. And then they say, Yes, this is great. But could you do
this over here? And I just keep iterating on that process. And at this point, I'm much
more comfortable with it. Versus if you asked me to do that last August, when I first opened
the doors, I'd have been really hesitant because one thing goes wrong. And I've had situations,
I think it was in December, November, December timeframe, where I integrated OAuth authentication,
and things ground to a halt because I used some example code that I shouldn't have used
because I basically just copy pasted from the wrong example. And what was happening
is in the background, like the token would expire, and it would pop up a browser as the
local system account. And because there's nobody there, nobody sees it, and you can't
click on anything. So all of the synchronization stopped working. And had I, I only had like
20 customers at the time, let's say I had 1000, like I've got 1000 people who I just
introduced this new feature, and it stops working for 1000 people, like, trust me, I
do not want that problem. Right. But by slowly doing things by slowly moving forward, I think
you're in a much better position to handle those exceptional or edge cases where something
goes massively wrong, and only a handful of people see it. And I think that's that's actually
an advantage to moving slow. Obviously, there's disadvantages to revenue and profit margins
and stuff like that. But when you've got something as complicated as this on the back end, it's
actually kind of a benefit to go slow. It's interesting, because it's so dependent
on the product that you're building, you know, for what you're doing, it's so mission critical
that these emails get sent that they get sent correctly, that they can handle your customers
workloads. Or another example would be Stripe. With a business like Stripe, you're dealing
with customers financial data and payments and really the core of their business. And
so it's extremely important to be reliable and stable. But of course, there are tons
of other businesses that don't rely on that reliability and stability, and they have other
concerns. And so really just comes down to understanding what your central selling points
are to your customers, what are your customers want? What do they fear? And you can't necessarily
just copy what you see other people doing, you have to understand your customers.
Yeah, and I think that the the fact is that I mean, I'm really trying to focus on the
you know, I promote this kind of the trust factor earlier on today. But at the same time,
I just want to make sure that the customers are getting exactly what they need, and that
they trust that the app is not going to break on them are not going to do things. I mean,
that's one thing that I found from the validation process and asking people like, What do you
like about other products and what you do not like? What have you tried? And I got a
whole laundry list of complaints about other people's products. And I engineered it around
all of those things. And if I can't solve those, then people aren't going to trust me.
And if they're not going to trust me, they're not going to tell their friends or their colleagues
about it. So if I can make sure that they never run into any of those problems, it's
very difficult to bad mouth a product that has nobody bad math and bad mouth in it. I
mean, somebody at microconf earlier this year, and I'm sure this will trigger something,
but they said I came to microconf solely because they're not solely but in large part because
I looked around for bad reviews, and I could not find one. He's like, I'm not bad at Google,
I just couldn't find one. And I'm like, that's great. But now of course, we're gonna get
a flood of people.
Yes, challenge accepted. So but I want to put blue tick in that position as well. I
want it to be able to be something that people can get in can use, and really just does its
job and does its job extremely well. And I have to go slow because of that, which, you
know, it sucks in some cases, but I have to.
What's your advice for people who want to follow in your footsteps and build something
that can generate 1000s of dollars a month in revenue, but who haven't yet gotten started?
If you're just starting out, you don't have anything that you've built or sold. My, my
first piece of advice is to find something that you can create that you can charge people
money for. And I think people underestimate how long it's going to take to do that. There's,
there's a lot of opportunity to just build like a pamphlet or a cheat sheet or a guide
about something, whether it's a software development framework, or, you know, a publicly available
library or something like that. And you can put it out on, you know, various platforms,
either, you know, Gumroad or something along those lines where you just sell like a very
short ebook. And you'll learn a lot about running a business and the types of problem
that you're going to run into just by selling that one simple thing. Amazon is a good channel,
obviously, for that type of stuff as well. But you're going to learn a lot in going through
the process of trying to put something on Amazon, like just by virtue of getting started
with a business, doesn't matter what it is, and selling something online, like that's
the very first thing that you should do because that will give you the experience and at least
a little bit of revenue and confidence that you can do bigger things.
I think that's great advice. And having constraints is so powerful, because if you can eliminate
some substantial portion of the types of things that you typically have to worry about when
running a business, then you can focus your efforts to other areas and learn a lot more
about those. So if you build on an existing platform, you don't have to worry as much
about marketing, or if you build something really simple, you don't have to worry that
much about, you know, development and spending months dealing with development issues. So
totally agree there. Anyway, Mike, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show and
walking through everything that you're doing with BlueTick. Can you tell the audience where
they can go to find out more about what you're up to personally and what's going on with
your business?
Sure. So if you want to learn more about BlueTick, you can head over to bluetick.io. There's
also a mailing list that you can sign up for. There's a email course there as well. It talks
a little bit about follow ups and how to go about them in different ways that you can
do them even without using BlueTick. And then if you're looking to find out more about me,
you can go, I would say Twitter is probably the best place, but you can also go to singlefounder.com,
which is my blog. But on Twitter, you can find me at singlefounder.
Awesome, Michael. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
All right. Thank you.
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