Episode 851 | The Messy Middle of a SaaS Pivot

Rob Walling: Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. In this episode, I talked to a founder who is in the middle of a SaaS pivot, and I wanted to bring Nathan Tyler on the show so that you can see what it actually feels like in the midst of a pivot, because I’m probably going to interview him two, three years from now when he’s had wild success. And we can, to the best of our recollection, talk through what’s happening today and how he felt. But for you to really hear it as it’s going on, I think is important for a lot of folks who don’t understand just how muddy, complicated, and frankly, unclear the signals are when you’re in the midst of this. I told a brief anecdote about Nathan and his co-founder and how they’ve built BlinkMetrics over the past couple years and how over the past six to 12 months, they’ve been doing a lot of consulting-ish work.

It’s like software with a service, as Dan and Ian would say on the Tropical MBA. And through that process, they’ve come upon another idea that may just be the future of the company. So it’s a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Before we dive into that, by the time you hear this episode, I’m going to be in Reykjavik, Iceland running MicroConf Europe. And if you’ve never been to a MicroConf, here’s what it actually looks like. It’s a couple hundred founders in one room talking candidly about everything that’s changing right now, what’s working, what’s no longer working, and what we’re all still trying to figure out. So MicroConf Europe is sold out, but I want to tell you about the next one because I’m heading to Austin, Texas for MicroConf US, and the lineup is already pretty incredible. We have sold out our last seven events.

So if you want to buy a ticket, you’re going to want to do it now, microconf.com/us. And the lineup for this event is Nick Francis, founder of Help Scout. You heard him on the show a few months back when I interviewed him. We have Ramli John [VERIFY: “Romlee John” – unsure of spelling] from Product-Led, Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, known as A Smart Bear on the Internet, and Anthony Pieri [VERIFY: unsure of spelling] is taking the stage again. He has given one of the best talks on SaaS positioning I’ve ever seen, and he’s going to follow up on that talk, which he gave in MicroConf New Orleans. We’re going to be at the Hotel Van Zant [VERIFY: unsure of spelling] right in downtown Austin, April 18th through the 20th. I hope you join us. As I said, tickets have been selling well, microconf.com/us to buy yours and use promo code ROB50, that’s ROB50 for the best price. And with that, let’s dive into the middle of this messy SaaS pivot.

Nathan Tyler, welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us.

Nathan Tyler: Thank you for having me. This is surreal. I’ve been listening to your podcast since the early 2010s.

Rob Walling: This is going to be great. I love it when guests come on because they just know the vibe and it’s an easy conversation. You’re less nervous because you’re just like, “I know there’s a bunch of nerds out there like me and Rob that are going to be listening to this in the next few weeks.” So it’s good to have you on, man. And we’re going to be talking today about your SaaS company, BlinkMetrics. I actually told a fun anecdote about you and your co-founder and how you’re trying to find product market fit with it. Before we get to that, I want to let folks know that you are a serial entrepreneur. You actually started Staging Pilot, which was a WordPress plugin. Am I remembering that correctly? And you sold it.

Nathan Tyler: It was a SaaS platform, yeah, for automating WordPress updates. Did visual regression tests and check the site before and after updates.

Rob Walling: Yep. Really well built and so well built that even at early stages, you sold it. It’s a pretty nice exit. I mean, you and I, you shared the details with me and sold it to Pantheon. Is that right?

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. They’re managed hosting and focused on developer experience. It was a great fit for their product.

Rob Walling: That’s cool. And then you worked there for what, a couple years and now you’re back doing BlinkMetrics. I told a story a month or two ago about how you’re trying to find product market fit with BlinkMetrics. And just so folks know, your H1 is take your business reporting out of spreadsheets for good. You know the data is somewhere in your CRM, finance and operations tools. BlinkMetrics pulls it all together into live dashboards that finally answer the questions your individual tools can’t. So do you want to tell us a little, expand on that a little more, like what it does and then recap the story that I told about how you’re doing really, you’ve really been grinding to try to figure out where the market is for this and frankly what the feature set is and how this becomes a real business.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. So in my agency days, I did a lot of data intensive projects and I saw how big companies use data really well and most small companies are just kind of flying by the seat of our pants and not measuring anything. And I’ve seen the power of data used well. And so the whole purpose of BlinkMetrics was to take what I used to do across 12 to 24 months, six figure huge projects that lumbered on for big companies and streamline that down to something we could deliver in 30 days, connects to all the tools that we use and lets smaller companies get the benefit of that. And I think to recap a little bit what you talked about, my original premise was going after companies who do EOS and had scorecards and KPIs. That’s

Rob Walling: Right. I forgot about that. That was the start. Yeah. That

Nathan Tyler: Was the start. The premise was like you would just have your scorecard with all your KPIs across your 15 different tools and as you recapped in more detail, but turns out that a lot of companies weren’t ready and willing to pay for that. So we kind of have pivoted it more into a done for you full service model across 30 days. We do a build out and it’s more of a one time upfront charge to build it. So it’s much more of an agency model and that seems to be working much better.

Rob Walling: Yeah. And I talked about how you did 104 coffee chats in Q1, which yielded 24 sales calls and then some were second, third rounds at the same client. And you closed like a handful of these deals and I forget you’re charging sometimes like five grand or 10 grand to do an initial writing a bunch of code and you’re using AI to help you do that fast. So it’s not super. It sounds like agency work, but it’s less agency work than it would have been three years ago. And then some of those are rolling into monthly subscriptions of like a thousand a month, 500 to 1,000 a month.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. So we do the build, we have all the connectors. And so it’s kind of like a traditional agency thing. You build a website and then, hey, we also host the website or you could go host it yourself, but it makes sense to host with us. Same kind of setup for us. They don’t want to pay a thousand bucks a month, but they’ll pay 10,000 upfront and then they’ll pay 100 or 200 a month just to host it and pull the data in. There has to be a cost somewhere, so they might as well do that and that’s working.

Rob Walling: And the reason I told the story on the podcast was I remember saying like, “Well, yeah, it’s not a real SaaS business yet.” And it was kind of like my condolences, you’re not there yet. And then I level set and I’m like, “But you’re doing like 10 to 20,000 a month in revenue that you just made appear from nowhere.” And it was this cool realization of like entrepreneurs who get done are really powerful. Imagine five or 10 years ago, you or I being like, “I want a business that does 20 grand a month,” and suddenly you’re just here doing it. And it was like a big level set. I was impressed with you and your co-founder’s willingness to grind and to figure it out. You spent six months, nine months just doing this. And this is something I want folks who are listening to this.

I often get questions of like, “Well, what are my steps to finding product market fit? How exactly do I do it? What should I do now?” And it’s like try a bunch of stuff. Talk me through your thinking about it.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. I mean, I think you come with one theory of it working, like my scorecard idea, and that doesn’t work. You just have to keep talking to people, figure out what will they pay for, what do they like, what problem are they trying to solve? And I just had to keep trying more stuff.

Rob Walling: And why didn’t you build 12 products in 12 weeks and launch them and see what sticks? And I’m asking that seriously. You started laughing when I said it, but seriously, you’re a successful second or third time founder. I don’t know how many other startups you had aside from Staging Pilot, but I find that the serial entrepreneurs never do that. It’s always first timers that want to do the 15 things in 15 weeks. And I’m curious why that is for you.

Nathan Tyler: I think that’s all just the fun part, but you don’t really get deep enough to find out if it’s really going to work and everybody’s going to kind of say your idea’s cool and it’s a nice little demo, but you don’t really have enough to get really into the trenches with clients to figure out whether they’ll pay. I don’t think you can get that far that quickly. It’ll feel exhilarating the whole time.

Rob Walling: That’s the thing. It’s dopamine, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. And so why am I bringing you on the show to not talk about BlinkMetrics, but to talk about your second product? You’re never supposed to launch a second product. Have you not listened to the show? Ruben and I spent an hour talking about no second products and you ring me up. And so folks know you’re a TinySeed founder. And so I think you got me on a call and you’re like, “We’re launching a second product.” And I was like, “What? Why are you doing this? Are you shutting the old one down?” But just talk me through the story of you now have BlinkMetrics and BlinkPages. It’s at blinkpages.ai. And what’s been your experience or thought process to get you to this place?

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. So I mean, as I’ve been going through these hundreds of calls and talking to lots of folks, BlinkMetrics definitely has a great place, but you have to find the right company of the right size and the right person in that company at the right time for that company where reporting is painful enough that they want it solved, which is hard to scale up marketing and sales efforts around. It’s hard to target. It’s very horizontal across different types of businesses. So a lot of ad types don’t work, but I’ve been looking for some universal problem that’s like a foot in the door, a very small job to be done that is shared across many companies. And what I kept running into was the website, and even myself during this time moved our own marketing sites off of WordPress onto static sites. And so we actually helped a few of these clients.

We were doing the reporting and then there was like, oh, also there’s this website and also we can’t get any tracking data off of it and we need to fix the website. So we kind of actually got pulled in or pushed ourselves in to work on the website as part of those engagements and have found a simple job to be done that is much lower price point. And so we’ve launched BlinkPages, much against the plan that you recommend, but I think you’re on board.

Rob Walling: But this is the thing, these rules of thumb of like, look, everybody wants to launch a second product when the first one gets hard, but sometimes it’s the right choice. And if things work out, I don’t know how you’re thinking necessarily about BlinkMetrics, but I could see BlinkPages taking off so quickly that you’re just like, well, BlinkMetrics is a background thing. I wouldn’t say shut it down. I know you have existing customers, but I have had that happen. I mean, I was running HitTail and doing about 25, 30 grand a month, but it was bootstrapped and it was pretty flat, high churn, 10% churn month over month, but it was a lifestyle business. It was great. Launched Drip and then was like, “Oh boy, I can’t even pay attention to this other.” I’m like, “Hi, we’re at 10 people. I had no time to look at and do this other thing.” And it took over and it was the right call for me.

It was the right decision. It changed my life. And so we don’t know if BlinkPages is going to be amazing, but you’ve at least, you’re giving it a shot. And one thing, because you and I talked about, you were saying that you felt like BlinkMetrics, it was just a grind to find new customers and you were doing the grind, you were doing the work, but with BlinkPages, it’s like the people who get it, it’s like, “Shut up and take my money.” Does it feel that way? Market pull is just completely different.

Nathan Tyler: Completely. Yeah. I think BlinkMetrics, I still believe in and has a great place. The projects go well, the clients are happy, they’re profitable, but I have not found a scalable marketing and sales channel for it, whereas BlinkPages is the opposite. It’s lower price point. The problem is very clear. It’s in everyone’s mind right now, is like, get me the heck off this Squarespace or WordPress site. I’m already using Claude all day every day to do all of my thinking and planning and drafting. And then I have this weird step where I have to cram my design into Elementor. Let’s get rid of that step and just have it. So it’s on everybody’s mind and there’s definitely a pull. I will start talking about something and someone will just cut me off and complete my sentence, which has never happened with BlinkMetrics, right?

Rob Walling: Well, that’s what happened with you and me, right? You’re like, “I got this new product.” And I was like, “All right, here we go.” And I wasn’t. I was obvious because I trust your entrepreneur, your founder gut is quite good. But you said, “I’m going to demo it to you.” And you started demoing it. And I was like, “I need this.” I literally tried to migrate startsmall.com, which is just a single landing page for Start Small, Stay Small, my first book. And it was on Squarespace and I’ve been paying for it for, I don’t know how long, years and not since 2010. It used to be an HTML site on DreamHost, but maybe for the last eight years since I had it redesigned. And it’s a single page website on Squarespace. It’s slow because Squarespace is slow. And I think I was paying $288 a year or something like that, which is insane to me.

And it’s not even the cost. It’s like a pain in the ass to update. One of the first things you pointed out is at the bottom, there were some links to buy or to listen and they didn’t look like links. They didn’t look like buttons. And it’s like, I’m not going to hire a designer to fix that. And yeah, I know HTML and CSS, but I’m not a designer. And so you were like, I knew exactly what you were doing when you started demoing BlinkPages. And then I was like, “Yeah, the big problem though is I wanted to migrate it to Astro on Cloudflare.” And so I was like, “I’ve heard. Look, I used to be a developer. Everyone’s doing this.” Got Claude Code up 45 minutes later, it still wasn’t migrated because of images and these edge case things and it just couldn’t do it.

And it was like, well, you have to go manually in and export, right click. And I’m like, “This is for the birds. Why am I even doing this? I’m just going to pay 288 a year for the rest of my life until I die. My heirs will shut this site down.” I seriously was like, “I’m not wasting the time.” And then when you demoed it for me and you’re like, “I can do a one click migration and then host it, and then you can just tell AI,” it was basically Claude, right? “Create four versions of this page and create buttons at the bottom instead of those links and you just click the one you want to replace it with,” and it’s super fast static. I was like, “What is happening right now? Yes, I want this.” So that’s the example. And I did. I interrupted you multiple times on that call.

And other people have done that?

Nathan Tyler: Yes. Yeah. I mean, multiple times they’re like, “Oh, we were just thinking about this. Oh, we have all these updates we need to do and we can’t do them or we have to do all this. We ran an SEO audit with Claude. It has all this stuff to fix. And now it’s been on my to-do list for three weeks to go in and click all the stupid check boxes and change all the headlines.” And they’re like, “I just want Claude to just do it. After it makes the plan, just do it.” What you can do with a static site, infinitely great at navigating an open source Astro website, and it could just do everything that it recommends, which is amazing.

Rob Walling: That’s a big deal. Yeah. And look, there’s probably a bunch of developers, or there are a bunch of developers, listening to this episode and just be like, “Well, I would never use BlinkPages because I just use Claude Code to do everything.” Great. You totally should. The moment that you have a non-technical person on your team that needs to update this, they’re not going to use Claude Code. Yeah. They’re not going to do it. And so that is one. I mean, we should talk through, because somebody might be listening to this not even knowing really what we’re talking about, what is the benefit of Astro and Cloudflare and Claude Code? I tell you, the benefits for me were I have like six or seven Squarespace sites and I’m paying like $288 each and I never changed them. I never do anything. A, I would make some updates if I could, but it’s a pain in the butt.

I feel like I’m paying quite a bit of money for things that aren’t. I’m not using any of the Squarespace functionality to edit and it’s slow. The page load speed is awful with Squarespace. It sucks. I didn’t know that before I moved there, but I want a site that’s faster. So those are the things, the reasons that I’ve been thinking about it. But piggyback, let’s talk about why people are doing this, why we think. I mean, I think you were saying 20% of the internet, or 20% of WordPress and Squarespace and Wix and all that sites, are going to wind up. I think that could be low.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, forget BlinkPages, just moving to static sites in general is going to be a huge movement. It doesn’t make sense if you have a five to 50 page website that’s mostly information, maybe a couple forms. The best options have been WordPress or Squarespace, but we can’t pretend that those were actually easy or great. No page builder is great. You have to have a PhD in Elementor to figure out how to work it. It’s this weird kind of easy to use thing, but kind of highly technical. And all of this comes from 20 years ago. In the ’90s, we had HTML text files and somebody said, “Well, I can’t really manage a website that has 1,500 text files, so let’s make some templates and then, okay, we’ll make a database and now I need an interface to go in and update the database.” That all made sense and it was a logical progression, but that fundamental premise has changed.

Claude has no problem managing 1,500 text files. I think there’s going to be huge movement back to this because the power of being able to have Claude do the work and not just make the recommendation, everybody wants that. Everybody wants to just say, “Do it this way. Describe it in normal language.” That’s such a powerful unlock when it happens. I think it’s inevitable that sites move away from these systems.

Rob Walling (18:26): I do too, because even if WordPress or Squarespace or Wix adds, let’s just say a Claude chat that you can use to update your site, there’s still so much legacy there. It’s going to break things. It’s going to be still slow. Squarespace is not going to ever be faster, I don’t think, in terms of page load speed. There’s still a lot of legacy.

Nathan Tyler: And they’re all trying. They’re all trying to reverse their way into AI and give an AI interface, but fundamentally their stack, their decades of stuff that they’ve built up, are really not necessary anymore. And AI is kind of like a bandaid they’re putting over it. And really what we’ve all seen, AI gets really dumb when you give it too much stuff, right? Everybody’s had this experience, and that’s really at the root of this, why they don’t have a path to making AI work well. If you have an Elementor or a Squarespace site, there is so much HTML and stuff in there that comes from the page builder, that all gets cut away when you move it to an Astro site. It’s 10% as big, which of course makes it load fast and we like that in the browser. But when you give the AI an instruction to say, change those buttons, it is dealing with 10% of the text that it was before, and even smaller because it has all of these nice components in Astro, so the AI gets really smart instead of really dumb.

So there’s no way around that based on the stack of things that they have.

Rob Walling: So startsmall.com is now on BlinkPages. You said, “Just for kicks, we got off the call and I was like, be curious about it.” And you’re like, “Hey, by the way, I migrated the site and obviously didn’t point DNS, but you sent me a link to it.” I was like, “Dude.” Oh, and you fixed the buttons at the bottom. You added buttons. And I was like, “How’d you do that?” And you showed me in a Loom that you were just recording. I was like, “Gosh, dang it. I need to point my DNS there.” So I did that the other day. The thing that I’m already thinking about now is I have robwalling.com on Squarespace. I have Exit Strategy Book. I have The SaaS Playbook. Those are more. I was going to say static sites. They’re sites that I don’t change often. They’re all on Squarespace. But robwalling.com, I need new landing pages on that site all the time.

And producer Ron and I sit there and grind and we copy and then we edit and we this and that, and what’s the thing for Drip? I really would like to ask Claude to just create a new landing page and here’s the premise and write me some copy that I’m going to edit, of course, but an optimizer for this and pull an image from this, whatever. That to me is a huge part of the appeal, that it’s not manually. Manually clicking buttons and menus just feels like now it feels ancient.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah, it does. And it’s just so tedious and Claude can just do it.

Rob Walling: And so I’m bringing you on here as it’s like a different type of conversation, because it’s not like, “Hey, look, you’ve been successful, you’re doing millions a year or you’ve exited, and let’s tell people how you’ve done it.” I wanted to specifically bring you on because of the amount of uncertainty and grind that you have experienced over the past, I think it’s 18 months, two years, of BlinkMetrics. The first was the EOS stuff, and then you were just like, at a certain point you’re like, “This isn’t working.” And that’s a question I get often, “How do you know when something’s not working?” And I guess I’ll start there. How did you know the EOS stuff wasn’t working? How did you know it was time to make a shift to what BlinkMetrics is today? And then how did you get to the point where you’re like, “And now I need BlinkPages as the next effort,” and it’s in process.

I want people to know that. You’re in the midst of it.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. I think with the EOS stuff, it was clear that just a lot of companies are just not at a stage of maturity that they’re taking data seriously, that they have the processes to have good data. There’s so much education and so much process change and so little appetite for it, that wasn’t enough. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I was taking 15 numbers from 15 places and putting it in one spot, which wasn’t a painful enough problem. So BlinkMetrics evolved into deeper reporting about one or two sources, being able to show them things that they couldn’t see, because reporting in every tool sucks. The built-in reports are just kind of slapped in there and everybody needs something different. And so if you want any real analysis, or if you’re trying to blend it with another data source, that’s incredibly hard, but it’s incredibly valuable if your company runs on this system or two.

So as I made that shift, it was obviously a better fit and BlinkMetrics has worked, but I think what isn’t working was I was doing the hundreds of calls and that’s just not efficient. It did work and we have some great clients and they’re super happy and they’re paying us a good chunk of money this year and going to pay us more, but do I have a path to 10x-ing this business? I can’t do 8,000 calls to do that in a year. BlinkPages has a much more straightforward path. It is literally in the path of change that’s already going to happen and it’s a much simpler offer. I actually believe, I mean, you mentioned BlinkMetrics earlier, of course we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s possible that it kind of goes into back burner mode, but I actually believe that there’s a good foot in the door with BlinkPages.

I actually have better belief that we could get a thousand BlinkPages customers and 50 of them turn into high-end BlinkMetrics custom reporting customers. I think that’s going to be an easier way to get 50 BlinkMetrics customers than doing the number of phone calls and grinding and just searching randomly to find the right company of the right size of the right person at the right stage of time.

Rob Walling: That’s interesting. And you and I have specifically talked about how BlinkPages is something you feel market pull, and I do think it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people are going to be moving to these static sites. I mean, if I was trying to do it, I’m not an early adopter. I don’t like stuff that is risky or is going to be gone in a year or whatever. I used to build my own computers and I stopped because I didn’t like maintaining it. Now I buy off the rack and all that stuff. I don’t bounce from one tech to the next, but when I got the Squarespace, I think they raised their prices or something and I got an email and it had all our Squarespace sites between Sherry and I, because she has sherrywalling.com [VERIFY: exact domain spelling] and Zen Founder and Touching Two Worlds, and then we have our books.

I mean, we have a lot of them. I was like, “What are we doing?” I was like, “This is bananas that we’re paying.” And to be honest, the money in the scheme of things in my life, it actually is a rounding error. It doesn’t matter, but there is a bit of principle to it, that paying this much and they don’t load very fast and I’m not super. Squarespace is fine. It was the best option. And I do like the designers we used and all that, but I think you’re making a bet on something that is happening, because if I’m doing it, again, I’m not a laggard per se, but I’m not one of the first to be doing this. So it seems like a calculated gamble, and I’m wondering how you’re thinking about it, because someone on the outside could look and say, “Well, you’re chasing a shiny object,” or they could say, “Well, how do you know it’s going to work?

You’re putting a lot of time, effort, and energy into it. How do you know?” What are your thoughts on those two?

Nathan Tyler: Well, you don’t know, but I think when you can feel the pull in calls, when people are interested and they lean forward and they cut you off and it’s clear that they want this problem solved, and if you could just wave a magic wand, especially the migration part is really annoying and there’s a lot of really weird parts to it. To get a clean migration, you can just say, “I’ll have this for you next week.” You go where the market’s pulling you. I’ve weighed a lot internally about the shiny object. Am I giving myself an excuse? I think one, the market pull is so strong, and two, I actually don’t think it’s a step away from BlinkMetrics entirely, because one of our fundamental problems with BlinkMetrics is to do good reporting, we need good data. So we need to find clients who have good data in a good state.

We don’t control their HubSpot, and I’m not a HubSpot consultant. I’m not going to go clean up their CRM for them and make them use tags and custom fields and train their team. They have to be in a good data state, and that’s one of the requirements that’s hard to find. But with BlinkPages, we actually can control a bunch of data, right? If we control the website, we could do SEO reporting, we can do custom Google Analytics tracking. We’ve implemented human behavior tracking. So because it’s on Cloudflare in our system, we can use Turnstile, which is their captcha human detection. So we can deliver analytics of how many human visitors have visited the site, verified by Cloudflare. There’s a bunch of first party data things that we can do that all of a sudden we can control entirely and we’re not reliant on the customer to do.

I think that there’s a path back to that reporting world that we can do better than anybody, but we don’t have to be reliant on the client to make 17 changes in their business to get there.

Rob Walling: I have this quote I say, “Doing things in public creates opportunity.” I was really thinking about, back in the day, I would publish blog posts or I’d launch a little, this 2004 or five, right? I’d launch a little tool utility on the internet before most people were doing that. And I remember people then approaching me to. They’re like, “Oh, I like Feedshot [VERIFY: unsure of spelling], this one stupid blog submission thing I had where you submit your RSSs.” They were all dumb ideas, but I got a bunch of consulting work on that, like freelance dev work, and I had a day job as a dev, and then I suddenly started making, I don’t know, at the time it was like 50 bucks an hour, but eventually got my rate up. I had so much incoming inbound from just doing stuff like blogging, that I was charging 100, 125 an hour.

And this is like ’05 to ’08. We’re young, married couple, that was a crap load of side income for me. And this feels similar. It feels like maybe you would have stumbled upon the idea for BlinkPages on your own with no other product, but BlinkMetrics and all the calls you did just naturally led you to that. Am I reading that right?

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. I think during that time I moved my own sites. I felt the pull as a crazy founder who was like, “I got to do this thing. I got to move it off.” If I’m going to move my website off of WordPress, 19 years in the WordPress space, WordPress plugins as part of my business history, I think there’s a really strong pull. I felt it in a half a dozen of these calls. It was a central point of the call that they brought up. Then I started asking about it and there was a lot of immediate interest in 10 other calls. So maybe 10% of those calls, it was a central point that they were very interested in, and that layered in with my own experience, I think is what kind of led me to it. And one thing I will add that was pretty funny was where I realized I think there actually really is a product here is because there’s lots of fiddly founders like us who are going to install Astro and make our marketing site and get all excited.

I told my marketing and ops person who is. I mean, she is so reliable. She is so wonderful. She deals with so much for us. She’s always positive and I could just see the life drain out of her face and she’s staring at me and her warm expression turned these cold, steely eyes and she’s like, “You did what? How are we supposed to update a page? You’re telling me there is no WordPress admin?” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just you’re going to open up VS Code.” She’s like, “No, no, I’m not going to open up VS Code.”

Rob Walling: That’s not going to happen. I’m going to email you and Slack you and you’re going to do it.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. And the other person on our team will never, ever launch VS Code. You might be able to convince me.” And then I was like, “Okay, all right. All right. Let me build you a little interface.” And she’s like, “I’m afraid that I’m going to break it.” So then we built preview links. There were all these little problems that are around this. All the value we’ve talked about is undeniable of Claude doing stuff for you, but there’s a lot of change adoption. And for people, a lot of people who are managing the website are not the developers in a lot of cases. And so then if we could solve all those problems well surrounding it, I was like, well, there’s got to be a product here because she flipped from cold, steely eyes to updating multiple websites multiple times a day constantly once she was armed with it, and she loves it.

Rob Walling: That makes a lot of sense. And that’s the behind the scenes that I think, especially early stage entrepreneurs or first time founders, don’t realize how unclear and muddy and far off. And from the time you had the idea till the time you had even a half baked product, even with AI, was a lot of steps. It sounds like already a lot of iteration and thinking it through.

Talk to me about pricing, because you have AI features, so you have real costs to this. And there’s people like me switching from Squarespace. There are people who probably pay a designer a monthly retainer of three, four, 500 bucks. We’ve been in that position to kind of maintain the website. Some months I send them zero changes and other times you send them more to actually do things. So there’s this, I don’t know, there just seems like a lot of factors. And what is your pricing? Explain it to folks, both your migration and ongoing. How’d you come up with it? And the most important part, how do you feel about it? Because that’s again what I want the lesson for folks to hear: you came up with it. Are you 100% confident it is 100% correct?

And how do you know? That’s the question. So just talk me through it.

Nathan Tyler (32:10): No. So it’s definitely been a work in progress and still is. And AI pricing specifically, it’s super weird, which we can get into. But we broke it down into: there’s two phases. One is the migration. If you’re going to do this yourself, as you experienced, there’s a lot of weird issues with getting Claude to get it pixel perfect. It can kind of approximate it and you’re going to get some weird site that looks like a Claude AI site. And that’s not what people want. They’re happy with their site. They’ve invested in their brand. They just want to be able to manage it better. So migration is the first step and we have a sliding scale based on the number of pages. You have less than 10 pages, less than 100, less than a thousand. And it’s $499 to $1,999 [VERIFY: exact pricing tiers unclear in audio] one time, we move it in seven days.

And that seems to be pretty well received. People are fine with that, especially if they’ve tried it themselves and realized that you can’t do it well or easily. And then I think from there, they could just take it in if they’re a technical person, maybe they want to hook up their own GitHub and Cloudflare keys and set up their own preview links and all that. You can do it if you’re a highly technical person. It’s really annoying having gone through it myself. And if you have a dozen sites, it’s really, really annoying to try to do that a dozen times. So then we’re going to do the natural thing and say, “Hey, we can also host it.” And our pricing there, I think I actually kind of went backwards and be like, “I don’t want to have a business that’s a $9 a month business.” So I’m kind of solving it from the other way of like, “Okay, we’re going to have tiers that are $49.99 to $199 a month [VERIFY: exact pricing tiers unclear in audio].

And what do we have to build to provide enough value to justify that?” And that is a real question. For a lot of people, that’s a pretty straightforward change, especially we’ve talked to some nonprofits and they’re like, “Yeah, we pay WordPress hosting company this, and then we pay the agency that three or $400 a month retainer to do security and updates and maybe they update something for us.” So if you’re going from 500 bucks a month down to 100, it’s a straight win and the site is faster and they can update it themselves and all of that. But there’s other people on the other end, like you, maybe they’re only paying $299 a year. So it’s an increase in price. So we’re experimenting with bundling multiple sites, especially if you have a couple small sites that get very little traffic, we’re bundling those in to some of the plans, but it’s a work in progress.

Rob Walling: It’s a work in progress. Do you feel like you just. I guess, how do you make the decision of when to change it? How will you know?

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. I think that those price points are right and I think it’s just what goes in them that we’re kind of playing around with. There’ll always be agency. We talked to a few agencies who are doing a bulk of sites and they’re kind of a different use case than an end customer. So that’s one that we’re figuring out. But if we want to jump to the AI pricing, that’s the weirdest thing, which I think every company is struggling with, is that you want to have these AI features, but there’s very real cost to them. And then the weird thing that all these companies have done is that the price that they would charge me to run through an API is like 10 times higher than what they’re going to charge you who has a subscription. So there’s this very weird inversion where if you’re going to use your own $20 a month Claude subscription, you’re essentially getting $200 of credit.

So in other words, I would have to charge a client $200 a month to break even, but they’re price anchored at $20 a month because they’re like, “I have my Claude subscription and I can do all this. I could ask it to update a website and it’s cheap. Why are you charging me $200? You’re ripping me off,” but it would actually be me breaking even. So I think that’s the weirdest thing in AI pricing right now.

Rob Walling: Yeah, it really is. And so how do you get around that, or do you?

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. So what we’ve been doing right now is actually leaning into the subscriptions, so that people can use their subscriptions, which I think gets around the pricing thing. But actually as I was talking to clients, it’s actually what they want. They don’t want to only use my interface to run it. They want to also run their skills, or they have it connected to their SEO MCP tool already in their Claude, and they want to basically just connect to their website and their SEO tool and all of their skills about their brand and their tone of writing. So they actually want to run it in their subscription, which helps me kind of sidestep some of the pricing issues, which is like, okay, you don’t need to. I don’t have to run it through my AI billing. I just have to provide an interface for them to use their subscription.

And it actually has a better product experience in a lot of cases for what they’re trying to do.

Rob Walling: Then their Claude would have more context around who they are, right?

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. It has all their context and skills and custom stuff that they’ve built, and then their website’s just one more thing it can connect to, to go do the job.

Rob Walling: All right. Well, I could keep talking to you about this because I’m interested in this both as a customer, also as obviously an investor and an advisor, but maybe more than all of those, I’m just really fascinated by your journey to this point. I’m excited for what’s ahead for you because I know, you and I both know, it’s not a straight shot from here. You want to build a multimillion dollar SaaS company and what you built today with the pricing and everything you have, there’s a 1% chance that that gets you there. It’s still going to be such a windy road and that’s the part that I’m excited about. And the cool part of watching you operate is that every time you send me an update or every time we talk, you’re like, “I tried these six things, five of them didn’t work and this one kind of did, so I’m doubling down.

What do you think?” That’s how it feels to talk to you. I want folks hearing this who maybe haven’t observed an entrepreneur who gets done and is right enough of the time that it works. That’s the part of the journey that I’m along with you and it’s pretty fun.

Nathan Tyler: Thank you. Yeah. I get lost in my own head plenty and I think the solution I’ve come up with for that is just not to keep thinking about it and just try things and then talk to people. It takes you in an entirely different direction that I would have never gotten to on my own, and I would have tired myself out just running in circles in my head.

Rob Walling: Yeah, that’s the thing. Actually, I have one more question for you before we wrap. You did the 104 coffee chats. I know you’ve done hundreds of calls around these products that have gotten you here. I get the question so often, like, “I can’t get anyone on the phone. I can’t get anyone to do a call with me. What do I ask when I get on the call?” It’s the whole thing. It’s just like a bunch of reasons, even though there’s plenty of stuff out there published on this, like buy The Mom Test, buy Deploy Empathy, that’s what to ask. I have it in Idea Attraction. I have it in The SaaS Playbook. I have a 2,000 word version of that in a chapter. You can read that, but it’s like people are almost looking for excuses not to do that work. And so I want to find out from you, you’re a developer.

I don’t take it that you’re some extrovert who loves going out and just being in a big room full of people, and yet you’ve done all these calls. So how have you done those calls and maintained your sanity?

Nathan Tyler: I think I don’t come to it naturally. I am very introverted, but I worked retail in high school and college and did a lot of retail sales and that pushed me through a lot of my hangups, I guess. I just try to maintain. I’m a very curious person and I just approach it that way. I’m just trying to figure out what are people doing? What are they working on? Usually they’re in some weird specialty that nobody asks about. Their friends, their spouse doesn’t ask them about it. So if you’re just interested and curious, people will talk, and I just make a few rules for myself. I won’t demo anything. I won’t share my screen unless they insist and are really curious. But in a first call, that’s kind of classic Mom Test thing. They’re just going to say, “Nice job, that looks great.” But I just make sure that I don’t do that and don’t put that much pressure on it.

Just be curious, see if you can be helpful, even if that’s just making an introduction for them, even if it’s not actually a route to your product. There’s people that I talked to a year ago that just were not a fit for BlinkMetrics, had a great call, and I just sent another call to them to show them BlinkPages, and somebody just signed up on the spot in that first call. So you never really know when things are going to come back around. I don’t know if that really answers your question, but I just kind of do it, right?

Rob Walling: Yeah. And that’s why I wanted you to answer it, is because when I say just do it, people want a different answer, and I wanted them to hear from multiple successful entrepreneurs the same thing. You just figure it out. You do the grind sometimes even when you don’t want to do it. I don’t know how else to say that often.

Nathan Tyler: And I think often enough, they’ll say something that is so surprising that I would’ve never thought of. We can think that we know everything and that we understand all this stuff. I’m really smart, but we don’t have the same life and experiences and expertise that these other people have. And they’ll just ask a very dumb question, or something that had never occurred to me, and then completely shifts it in a different direction. If I was just an introverted developer, I would probably like, “Okay, how can I run the AI in the cloud and control my costs and use an open source model and bring my costs down and do all of it?” I could have gone off really off the deep end, and then somebody was like, “Well, I want to use my skill that I already have in my MCP and my Claude account.

I don’t even want to use your interface.” And I was like, “Okay, well great. That’s actually easier for me, cheaper for me.” So there’s things like that that will just surprise you. If that happens often enough, then there’s a real incentive to do it, because I could just save myself so much time rather than going off in some random direction that I think is academically the right way.

Rob Walling: Nathan Tyler, you are on LinkedIn if folks want to reach out to you. That’s probably the best place to reach you. Nathan Tyler, just like it sounds, and they can maybe type in BlinkMetrics, I suppose, if they’re actually trying to narrow you down.

Nathan Tyler: Yeah. Yeah, blinkmetrics.com, blinkpages.com, LinkedIn DMs, slide right in there.

Rob Walling: Oh my gosh. Don’t slide into my DMs. I do not read any of them. About once a year I go and I’m like, “Oh man, there’s a lot of people DMing me.” But you in fact do respond. If they’re curious, if they want some advice, if they want whatever, they can reach out to you. And also, look, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I really want to hear Nathan answer some questions,” you should email those questions to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Send in a whole list, like a whole bulleted list, and I’ll get him back on the show. If you want to hear about his entrepreneurial experience, of him having the exit, what he’s working on now, just anything that I didn’t ask him today, it’d be fun to get you back on the show. Thanks so much for joining me.

Nathan Tyler: All right. Thank you.

Rob Walling: Thanks so much to Nathan for joining me this week, and thanks to you for joining me this week and every week on the show. If you keep listening, I’ll keep recording. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 851.