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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob checks in with Mike Taber about his progress with Bluetick. They talk about new growth, where that growth is coming from, theories on why customers are choosing Bluetick over competitors, and more.
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Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host Rob Walling. This week, we catch up with Mike Taber. I get an update on his progress with Bluetick. Mike was my co-host for the first 448 episodes of this podcast. Now he’s a host emeritus. He comes on every couple of months and updates us on his story and his progress with his software product bluetick.io. It’s a good update this week. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but needless to say, things are going up and to the right for Mike.
Before we dive into that, I want to give you two things. Number one is invitations for Microconf Connect, which is our online community. The first invitations have been sent out. If you haven’t checked out microconfconnect.com and you are interested in being in a community of, well, there’s more than 1100 applicants at this point, so depending on how many actually come through and sign up, let’s say it’s going to be many hundreds, if not close to a thousand, of indie-funded and self-funded startup founders from around the world. If you’re interested in that, head to microconfconnect.com.
Number two, if you haven’t shared this podcast with someone that you think could get value out of it, it would mean a ton to me. If you feel like you’ve gotten value out of episodes over the past three months you’ve been listening, three years you’ve been listening, the biggest thing that I look at when I look at the success of the podcast, there’s a couple of things.
One, I look at the feedback from listeners and the comments that we receive and the growth of the subscriber base. Really been focusing on that over the past 6–9 months to try to get the message out to more people. The message that we can be ambitious, and we can build life-changing businesses without sacrificing our life or health or family or our relationships in order to do that.
We’d really appreciate it even if that’s just a tweet that says, “Startups for the Rest of Us is a podcast that I enjoy,” or if you do a one-on-one email or text to someone, I would really appreciate it. With that, let’s dive in to my conversation with Mike Taber.
Mike, it’s been a while. How are you doing?
Mike: I’m doing good. How are you doing?
Rob: I’m doing okay. It’s been six weeks to the day since our last conversation. Actually, we ran a Twitter poll a few weeks back because I got a couple of comments on the last episode. Let’s say I got 10 or 12 comments through Twitter, email. and posted to the website. One of them said, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable when you and Mike talk because I feel like you’re putting a lot of pressure on him.” Then someone said, “You should be easier. You should go easier on Mike.” I thought, “Wow. I don’t feel like I’m being hard on you.” Do you feel that way?
Mike: I don’t think so. The questions that you’re asking are pretty valid questions. I feel like it’s easier to answer them. I’ve commented on this before, it feels easier for me to answer them now because there’s more time in between each episode when we talk. It’s like I have more time to work on stuff and I’m not distracted by other things that are going on. I don’t really think so. I don’t know. Maybe I would have felt differently right after an episode is recorded. You can ask me again right after this episode if they were tough questions.
Rob: Totally. That’s the thing that people should know is like you and I were very deliberate, in advance, offline, before we started this whole series of following your story. That I said, “Look, I’m going to ask you questions that I think are helpful to the audience. I want to ask you questions that I think are helpful to hopefully keep you motivated and accountable. Is that okay?” I got your permission to bust your chops a little bit. I’ve never felt like I’m over-the-top, up in your face, sell, sell, sell, buy, buy, buy. I’m not being outrageous. I’m genuinely just asking. I know I am asking some tough questions, but I don’t know.
Anyway, after that, I ran a Twitter poll and I got 114 responses. The results were 8% thought I should go easier on you, 31% said I could push you harder, which I was surprised by, and 61% said they felt like I’m striking a good balance. Overall, 31% Mike, a third of the people want me to bust your chops more. It’s funny.
Mike: It’s all right. If you want to bust my chops a little bit more to appease that 31%, I’m fine with it.
Rob: I don’t. This is very natural. The thing is these conversations, at least from my perspective, are not forced at all. I’m not doing anything that doesn’t feel very natural in the conversation. I’m genuinely just curious about what’s there. When I ask, “Why didn’t you do that?” I’m genuinely curious why you didn’t do something. Anyway, let’s start talking about stuff because I did go back and listen to the last few episodes. It’s been a while. It’s been six weeks since the last one and three months since the one before that. I almost forget the story sometimes of exactly what was happening.
Our last episode was actually really positive. You were upbeat and things seemed to be working well. You had grown the revenue of 50% in two months. You’re still early-stage so folks know—percentages can be deceiving. That’s where we last left you. I’m curious to hear about your high point over the past six weeks. What was your biggest win or the moment where you felt the best? Then conversely, the biggest setback or where you were feeling the worst.
Mike: I think that in terms of the biggest win is I had a customer, and I know that this is on your outline already, so I’m going to totally blow it out of the water. Your question was about the big customer that I had to sign on a couple of months ago for $500 a month and are they still around. The answer is yes, they are still around, but they also asked to upgrade to an annual plan. That just came through yesterday so that’s all set. I’d say that’s probably the biggest one.
In terms of a low point, I can’t really point to anything specific where it’s like, “Oh, I wish this had gone very, very differently.” I’ve got a bunch of things that are up in the air right now. I’m optimistic that some of them will come through and then there are other things where I have to play things by ear for a little while to see how it goes. I don’t know how they’re going to play out yet.
Rob: Congratulations on that; that’s big to get. For them to request to go annual implies that they’re using the tool, they’re enjoying the tool, and they want to use it for the coming foreseeable future. The challenge that I always see with, especially early-stage products, that are really finding their footing is that you can get a big customer, but they’ll stick around for two weeks or a month or two. Then they realize, “Well, this just doesn’t fit what we need.” That is why I kept circling back on that topic is like, “Hey, you have this customer paying you a chunk of money. Are they still around?” That’s great. That’s really a good sign in my opinion. Congratulations on that.
Mike: Another thing that I would say that is, I wouldn’t say there was a particular point where it was a high point as well, but you have mentioned that I had grown revenue by about 50% over the course of two months. Then over the most recent two months, I’ve grown it by roughly another 50%. Basically, double where I was about four months ago. Maybe it’s 4½ months, maybe close to 5, but it’s still pretty close to that. It depends more on how things shake out through this month, which it’s still very early on in the month, but from the looks of it, I would expect that I will eclipse that point.
Rob: Is a big part of this your warm/cold email campaign? Because the last time we spoke, your report was it was working very well, you were getting upwards of 50% response rates, you had so many learnings that you actually had to back off of it so you could get other work done, you were saying some calls were running 1½-2, you had a bunch of notes, and that some were turning into customers. Is that a big part of this? Because to double in four months even at early stages is still traction. That shows that something has happened that wasn’t happening in the prior 18 months frankly.
Mike: Yeah. I look back at the outreach campaign that I was doing. It’s interesting because only one of those conversations has turned into an actual customer. There are maybe three others that are still prospects. One of them is in a trial but I have to implement some additional things before he’ll actually start paying for it. The trial itself right now is like I’ve extended his trial because literally, certain things don’t work for him. I’m trying to go through. I basically just have to implement a couple of extra features before he can start using it. At that point, I’ll restart his trial more or less.
I don’t see any direct correlation between the conversations that I’m having and the revenue, which is weird. Because I look back at it now and I just went through and counted. I’ve had over 30 calls with people in the past 5-6 weeks. Those are just the ones from my outreach campaign, but only one of those turned into a customer.
Rob: That’s crazy. Where’s the growth coming from?
Mike: I’m still working on it.
Rob: Oh, no. You don’t know.
Mike: It’s from a variety of sources. Some of its recommendations are from other people. I onboarded somebody over the past two weeks. They’re a real estate attorney in New York City, and they heard about it from a Facebook group. Somebody else had recommended to him. I’m like, “Well, who was it and what organization was it?” They said it was from the EO group which I think is Entrepreneurs’ Organization or something like that. You have to have a business that’s doing a million dollars in revenue in order to even be eligible to join, and they have to verify it.
Somebody in there said, “Hey, you should check out Bluetick.” I don’t know who that person was, but I don’t necessarily care either. The person signed on and I helped him get everything set up through Zapier. They asked me already about upgrading to an annual plan. I said, “Well, we could do that now but why don’t you wait a month or two and see how things go and then if everything is working well we’ll upgrade you.” It’s very casual and conversational about that.
I think that that’s a good opportunity to try and potentially get either additional recommendations or more revenue what have you. I’m sure these people know other people. I definitely think there are opportunities there that are coming about just from having these conversations.
Rob: Right. That’s the idea is if they do end up being happy, and they sign up for annual, right after they pay for annual, a great ask is, “I know you heard about me through an EO group, would you mind posting back to that group and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve just signed up. It’s been a really good experience.’” At this stage, it’s doing things that don’t scale. At this stage, all of this just helps get you to where you want to go.
Mike: Exactly.
Rob: I’m curious then. Customers are signing up and you obviously have some growth going on, something that I’ve asked you multiple times is why Bluetick? Why did they sign up with Bluetick and not go to one of your probably dozens of competitors, I’m guessing? Last time you had said you had some theories but you hadn’t really figured that out yet.
We tossed around some things like Bluetick checks the mailbox every 10 minutes whereas a lot of your competitors check it every four hours so your data is more up-to-date. You’re more thorough in terms of seeing I think it was like trash and spam and some other folders. Is that it or has there something else that you’ve figured out why these folks come, sign up, and convert to annual with you and not one of your competitors? That key differentiator.
Mike: I don’t think there’s a specific key differentiator in the products, but the recommendations certainly help. As part of those 30-plus calls that I have gone through, one person said, “Hey, I have this customer over here, these couple of customers, and I think that you should go talk to them. For this one, feel free to use my name and say that I said that you should reach out to them.”
I reached out, talked to them. I don’t think that this came up in our last call because it was since then, but I basically had a conversation with them. They said, “Yeah. Actually, your software sounds like it would be really helpful for us. Send me a proposal,” which you wouldn’t think most of the time you’d need to send a proposal to somebody. It’s over $1000 a month for this particular customer. They said, “Send me the proposal.” I sent them a proposal and then without even me asking or following up on the proposal, they didn’t have any questions at all. “This is great. This looks good. I’m going to introduce you to our technical team. Let’s set up a call with them.”
Did that, went through the technical call. At the end of the call, I said, “Are there any objections or questions you have or any problems you see in switching from what you’re using now into this?” They said, “No.” Now I’m at the point where they said, “Okay. Next week’s bad for us, but touch base with us the following week. We’ll see how things shake out from there.” I’m optimistic that that will come in. That’s over $1000 a month in MRR from just that one customer, but I definitely know there are certain things that they’re going to need. The point I’m going after though is the reason that that person took the call was that they got a recommendation from this other person they knew and trusted.
Rob: That makes sense. Your title tag on your website, bluetick.io, is, “Cold and Warm Email Follow-up Software.” Then the headline is, “Personal outreach at scale for all of your follow-up emails.” There’s cold and there’s warm and you’ve tended to be in the warm area of getting things you need from other people. If an accountant needs a tax return, he can put it in here. I’m just giving an example. I guess you don’t have any accountants.
Mike: I do, actually.
Rob: Oh, you do? Okay. Or a conference organizer needs to bother sponsors until they pay, you put them in Bluetick and they would do that. Which of these new sign-ups over the past four months are they using? Are they doing it more for the cold or more for the warm?
Mike: Most of them are warm, to be honest. As I’m thinking about it, most of them are warm. They’ve done business in some way shape or form but it’s not a tight relationship, it’s very loose. Maybe there was a transaction of some kind. Maybe there was a trial that was downloaded. Maybe there was an introduction or something along those lines. There was at least some touch-point and then they go in to use Bluetick to help move them to the next step and strengthen the relationship.
Rob: It’s less about sales. It’s part of the sales process but it’s not usually the first step in the sales process. There’s at least some relationship then it’s how do we keep moving it down, which is what you wanted to do. Remember, we talked about it a year ago. You said, “I feel like a lot of the cold outreach is spammy. I have a struggle with how some of these folks are doing it.” This feels better to you?
Mike: Yeah. What’s interesting, though, is that those that I’ve had come on so far, those tend to be like they want to do the warm outreach, but then the demo for the customer who the price quote I gave them (I think) was $1200 a month. They’re going to have upwards of 20–30 mailboxes and their growth anticipation is going to get up to between 50 and 60 by the end of the year. What they do is they do lead gen for other companies. They basically work with marketing agencies who are trying to do market analysis and market research, and they get people on the phone to talk to those companies.
I’ve actually started going down the road of looking out there to see what marketing agencies that are out there that are currently doing lead gen and see if I can get conversations going with them to ask how they’re doing that now. My suspicion is most of them are running a bunch of different campaigns in parallel.
They probably have anywhere between 20 and 50 or 100 mailboxes, which I would basically be charging them for each one of those, but let’s say that it’s 50 mailboxes at my current price in which I’d probably cut them a bulk discount at some point. I don’t know what that would look like. Let’s say it’s just raw numbers alone right now, fifty mailboxes at $50 a month is $2500 a month. That’s huge.
One of those customers could substantially start moving the needle for Bluetick, especially if they go and sign up for an annual plan. Not that I think that they would do that on day one, but fast forward a month or two if it’s working better for them than their current solution then it would make sense for them to go to an annual plan to get a little bit more of a discount.
I do think that there are opportunities there are for Bluetick to go in and do some competitive displacements for people who are using things like SalesLoft, Outreach, or Reply because it does have that more in-depth hooks into the mailbox and it can do more in-depth checks to make sure that it’s identically identifying, was this a reply? Was that a reply? Did I get a reply from a different email address or was it forwarded? All those kinds of things. I just have the capability to do a more in-depth analysis that I don’t think that those other products have nor do I think that they care about. Their pricing has started going through the roof like they’re really going upmarket in terms of the pricing.
Rob: Which leaves a nice opportunity for you because even having these several hundred dollars a month/low four-figure per month clients is such a different business than a $40 or $50 a month app. You need so many fewer clients. Bravo to that. High ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is just one of the Holy Grails. That’s awesome.
Mike: I’m working those angles to try and see how that works out. I just don’t know how it’s going to play out yet.
Rob: You never do. It’s pipeline stuff. Listeners should realize you’re not saying, “I’m counting on all of these deals to close.” You’ve done sales enough to realize that only a certain percentage of your pipeline closes. But the fact that you’re even sitting at the table with someone who could feasibly pay you $1000, $2000 a month is so far removed from where you were a year ago or 18 months ago.
That’s the part I’m excited about because you don’t need all of these to pan out. You just need a certain percentage. You’re growing, you’re off to the races, and you’re profitable, supporting yourself. You get to the point where you can hire someone to handle your audits and rewrite that sealed .NET component.
Mike: What’s motivating about it is that I feel like I’m winning a disproportionately large number of them, too.
Rob: Why is that?
Mike: Honestly, I think it’s me. It’s the conversations that I have with people. Even in the demo that I did with the customer that I did a custom proposal for, when I was talking to them they were asking questions about the software and how it worked. They had some very specific requirements as well, which I was shocked by because most people are like, “Oh, I just want to be able to detect replies and be able to send out emails and make sure that those are going out to people who didn’t reply.”
One of the specific requirements they had was they’re like, “This has to be able to send an email out as a reply to a previous email and it has to include the contents of the other one.” I said, “Yes. It can do that. This is exactly how it looks.” and I showed them an example. They’re like, “That’s perfect. That’s exactly what we need.”
It’s just being able to have that discussion and then also explain this is how it was built and this is why it was built this way. Fascinated is not the right word for it, but they really liked hearing that the person on the phone giving them the demo was the person they would also talk to for support if they needed help, or the person who built it. If there’s something wrong and it doesn’t work, they can talk to me and I can get it fixed for them. Whereas with the current vendor they have, it’s got to go through three layers of support, there was a project manager and put out a roadmap. You don’t have to do that with me. You’re going to talk to me. I can get things done.
Rob: That’s the thing when you’re small and you’re competing with venture-backed startups or even just larger companies, founders will often say, “Well, I’m outgunned.” How can I possibly compete with them? You can. You just have to use your advantages.
Mike: Didn’t you call this—I think it was in Microconf Europe—the founder advantage?
Rob: Maybe I did. Thank you for reminding. I’ll have to go back.
Mike: I think that was you.
Rob: I don’t recall but we should find out. Anyway, in Judo, you’re supposed to—even if you have a larger opponent—use their force against them. Let’s say they swing at you or whatever, it’s more about dodging and pulling them in the direction that they swung to flip them over or whatever.
I’ve only done Judo a couple of times, so it’s not something I’m an expert at, but when you are a small company you are super agile. You can get stuff done super-fast. They can talk directly to the founder. These are the advantages that you can just use against larger companies over and over and over. There are others as well. All that to say, that’s cool to be able to do that. Obviously, it doesn’t last forever, but while you have it, this should absolutely be something that you’re taking advantage of.
Mike: I totally am for the time being.
Rob: Cool. Curious, some of these other questions I’m not even sure are worth going into since things are working. You’re doing demos, you’re talking to customers, you’re selling, and they’re writing you checks. It’s like, “Should you even be bothering with these other things?” I come back to the podcast tour where (I guess) you put it into Bluetick. You were doing cold outreach to try to get on podcasts. Scaled it back a bit because you got busy with calls. Then you ramped it up again. Curious for an update on that.
Mike: I had scaled it down and I’d planned on ramping it up again, but I started sending out a couple of emails and I haven’t gone back to start sending out more of them. I was basically doing it individually. It’s like approving them one at a time. I got busy with all the phone calls and everything. I haven’t gone back to that.
I basically have stopped learning things from the conversations that I’ve been having with the people I was reaching out to. I’m going to put some of that stuff on autopilot and try to involve myself a little bit less. Instead of pitching it as, “Hey, I’d like to get on a phone and talk to you because I’d like to learn,” now I’m going to present it as, “These are the things that I’ve learned. Are there ways that you can help me or other people that you could refer to this particular product because I think I have a better story or position around that?”
I’m going to do that instead. Now that my learning process there I think it is a little bit more complete. I’m going to go back and start doing the podcast outreach again. I just haven’t done it yet.
Rob: Yeah. You’re trying to balance four things. Development of features is one thing; sales and learning, which is what a lot of LinkedIn and that warm outreach; and then marketing. You haven’t been doing much marketing because sales and learning are taking so much at the time. It sounds like you’ve learned. I think what you’re saying to summarize is you’ve learned about as much as you need for now and you can really dial that down and then switch some focus to marketing to then generate leads for you to continue with sales, right?
Mike: Yeah. I don’t want to not correct you, but to narrow it down exactly on the learning side of it. The reason I’m backing off on that is because I’m starting to hear the same things over and over. It’s not that I don’t think that I have anything left to learn because I certainly think there’s lots more, but the people that I’m talking to it’s getting repetitive now. I’m hearing the same things over and over. Going through the rest of the list of people that I was reaching out to, I don’t think that that’s going to be fruitful in terms of learning stuff. I do still think that there’s a lot of value in continuing to reach out to those people and seeing if there are people that they could introduce me to or put the product in front of.
Rob: Right. You’re switching from learning to sales. In essence, you’re switching that campaign, which is exactly what I think you should be doing based on what you’re saying. It’s funny for these episodes that we do every month or two, it’s typically been a roller coaster; one where you’re up and one where you’re down. We now have two back-to-back where you’re up. You got it, so it’s going to get boring for people after a while, Mike. If your #winning every episode, people will stop listening. Next episode, bring some low points.
Mike: I’ll say I got a hangnail.
Rob: Exactly.
Mike: They’re terrible.
Rob: I’m joking, obviously.
Mike: I can barely type with my finger. Do you want to see that finger, Rob?
Rob: Not really. Good thing this is an audio podcast. I’m happy for you and I’m happy the way things are going. Again, it’s like we’ve talked about this sealed .NET component for so long. The last episode I finally said, “You know what, if sales are working I wouldn’t replace it right now unless it’s causing you the inability to close sales,” because right now, number one is getting revenue up. It was my thinking at the time. We were both agreeing on it. You were saying, “Yeah. I know I need to replace it at some point.” Given where you’ve been, have you ever given it a thought over the past six weeks?
Mike: I have. It’s more, I would say, over the past 1½–2 weeks where I’ve started to look at that a lot more. The main reason for looking at that is that I mentioned it earlier but I didn’t go into the details of a customer where I basically extended their trial because certain things weren’t working for them. To drill into that is they have an exchange server.
Rob: That’s their first mistake?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Oh, snap. No, I’m just kidding. Send hate mail to mike@mike—
Mike: I didn’t say it. It wasn’t me.
Rob: I know.
Mike: Anyway, the issue is that yes you can enable IMAP on an exchange server, but the default is to not have it enabled. There are tons of sales organizations out there where they have exchange server. Unless you have a device that directly goes into the exchange server to use these exchange web services, basically, it doesn’t work. And Bluetick relies on that IMAP component.
What I’ve been doing is this person tried to sign up. They went in, try to add a mailbox, it didn’t work. I went through all these things trying to figure out how to make it work. The only way to do it is through exchange web services, which I have a component that can do that, the one that I have now can do it, but it’s got to be rewritten. The underlying storage system has got to be changed in order to help support that.
I knew that all that stuff needs to be done anyway in order to basically replace how that sealed .NET component is currently used. It was never a priority before because stuff works, but now it’s at a point where I have to replace this. I have to rewrite some of that code otherwise I can’t get this customer onboarded.
Now it’s a barrier to revenue. I can justify it now especially since, I think he said there’s 70 sales reps in the organization and if I can get it working for him, its land and expand because he’s more than willing to introduce me to these two managers of all the sales reps, but I have to get it working for him first.
Now, I’m in a position where I have to do this now. Technically, I don’t have to. I can say, “Screw it. I’m just going to go find other customers.” But the combination of this particular person needing that and this customer where there’s $1200 of MRR is initially on the table, where I know that their mailboxes are going to be coming from their customers.
My suspicion is at least some of those customers are going to be using an exchange server. It did come up in the call when they asked, “Can you integrate with an exchange server?” and I said, “Yes,” thinking that I can do it through IMAP. Then, I onboarded this other customer and realized that’s not going to work if you have to go through the IT department and the IT department has to justify why they’re going to turn that capability on for a particular mailbox. Now I’m like, “I have to fix that at this point.” That’s why I’m looking at it now.
I’ve spent the last week or so looking at redesigning it, doing a bunch of different prototyping and testing and figuring out how it’s going to work. I’m pretty close to being able to move forward with it. I just haven’t written any production code to screw with it.
Rob: Good for you. That’s cool. That’s actually good news because that’s exactly the time that you should be doing it. It’s when it impacts revenue. You’d mentioned last time you can flip in the database to do it for one mailbox at a time, which also is a nice luxury to maybe not have to deal with all of the data migration that will take a week or more all at once. That’s cool.
Something else that we talked about a few times is that Enneagram test, it’s a personality test. The reason that we started talking about it was we’re talking about you know what motivates you deep down as a human being and also what are your blind spots? We all have these blind spots in our personalities that perhaps behaviors that aren’t helpful to us getting stuff done. I’m a fan of these personality tests because they just help (in most cases), give me insight about who I am, what my blind spots are, what motivates me, all that kind of stuff.
When we were last talking, you had taken the Enneagram but you said you hadn’t really dug into it to suss out actionable bits of things that you should think about on a day-to-day basis. It’s fun to read through the whole doc, but if you’re not going to then somehow implement that in your life then it is all just a waste of time. I’m curious if you had time to go through and highlight and maybe a couple of key takeaways you might be able to take action on or at least be aware of in your day-to-day.
Mike: Yeah, I did. I started going through, and I was going to highlight a bunch of stuff. Then, I said, “I’ll just underline it instead,” which is close enough. It’s one of those things where the different personality types that it has for me printed out it, comes out (I think) 16 or 18 pages; it’s about six pages for each one.
There is a lot of stuff underlined. Some of it is just notes for me, but there’s also stuff in here where I like the fact that they put together things and they say, “These are ways that you can make things work better.” Some of them are things I’m already doing. For example, one of them was like, “Oh, if you’re this particular personality type then it can very much help you to either get in a room with other people and just talk about these types of issues or do journaling and write that stuff down.”
It was interesting that I discovered the journaling aspect on my own because I’ve been doing that for a couple of years. I do find it extremely helpful because I can sit there and basically do a brain dump at the end of the day. I’ve found that by doing that, it helps me clear my thoughts and helps me sleep at night. Then, there are a few other things that I went through. I still have to go back through it again just because there’s so much here. I definitely think there’s a lot more in here that I could probably pull out. A few, I wouldn’t call them productivity hacks but life hacks, so to speak, is like, “Oh, do this, and this other piece of your life will be made easier.” If that makes sense.
Rob: It does.
Mike: Some of it is just managing negative emotions. Some of it is being able to express feelings about certain things or be more assertive about what you want or what you need. Generally, I’m a low-key person, low-maintenance, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t have needs that somehow need to be met. I just don’t really talk about it. I’m much better at advocating for other people than I am for myself.
Rob: Yeah. That’s something good to know about yourself, right?
Mike: Yeah. I intuitively know that but seeing it written down on papers is like, “Hey, this is a part of your personality profile. Here are some ways to deal with that.” Some of it is you read through some of this text that’s in here and some of it is just coaching. It says, “Hey, you may believe this, but has anything ever really gone that badly? The answer is probably not.” It’s just a good reminder.
Rob: Indeed. How about your sleep? How’s it been in general?
Mike: Generally, pretty good. The past week or so has been pretty stressful. It’s funny because in the Enneagram there are specific sections in there that call out and say, “When you are under stress, if this is your personality profile then you switch over to this other thing. These are the types of behaviors you exhibit.” For the most part, they’re pretty dead-on. It’s nice to go through and read those and see that those things can impact my stress levels, which then turn around and impact my sleep. Last week or so has been pretty stressful, but I think there’s definitely some strategy and takeaways in there that I can leverage to help clear that up.
Rob: And that’s something that was game-changing for me (it’s gone up and down but let’s say) about 8 or 10 years ago. I realized that I would just wake up in the morning or I would just be walking around and I would feel this enormous amount of stress. I would just feel it, live it, and let it consume me.
Over time, I learned through stuff like this, this self-awareness and these tests, why do I feel that way? I think there’s a biological component. When I look at my family history on both sides there’s all these anxiety disorders and all this stuff we don’t need to go into here. I’m naturally prone to just have constant mid-level, I won’t say high-grade anxiety because I don’t have panic attacks, but I do have low- to mid-level stress all the time.
What I learned to do was I would say, “Why am I feeling that way? Literally, why am I feeling that way?” I would say, “Well, it’s because someone said this,” or, “It’s because I’m worried about this revenue thing,” whatever. But then, I could actually look at it and say, “Well, how likely is that to happen and how bad would it be if that happened?”
Then, I can just try to left-brain myself out of it. It works for me to really look at it and say, “Look, there’s no new information. You can’t fix this. It actually isn’t going to be that big of a deal if it happens. If it is, there’s contingency A, B, and C that I could use to get around it. So put it to bed for now and if it comes back up then deal with it.” You know what, 90% of the time none of them come back up. It’s just wasted. It’s just wasted worry. It doesn’t help anybody to worry about it.
I’m not saying you or anyone else should do that, but it works for me. The only way that I came across these types of coping mechanisms is, (1) is being married to Sherry, (2) listening to the Zen Founder podcast, and (3) learning this about myself to know, “Wow. This isn’t normal and other people don’t feel this way all the time.”
All right. As we’re wrapping up, I’m curious what, between now and our next chat, what are you most looking forward to?
Mike: I’m going to be diving back into the technical side of things to rewrite that email synchronization mechanism and get it working so that the exchange server can just be connected without having to worry about IMAP or enabling certain things. It should just work at that point. I’m hoping that by the time the next time we get on a call, that stuff will be taken care of and at least started onboarding this customer that I quoted the $1200 to.
Those are the things that I’m looking at the most, and then trying to go through and see if I can have some more conversations with other marketing agencies that do lead gen or do market analysis and outreach; because they’re doing it at scale with small numbers of people, and it’s not as if they’ve got 80 people that need to be trained to use Bluetick. It’s a handful of people that are using it on behalf of a much larger group of people. I do think that that could potentially be an area of growth, but I don’t know yet. I want to explore that quite a bit more.
Rob: Sounds good. As always, thanks for coming on the show again, having a conversation. I always enjoy chatting with you and the listeners benefit from it as well.
Mike: Awesome. Thanks for having me back and I will definitely keep you guys posted.
Rob: Awesome. Talk to you soon.
Mike: All right. Bye.
Outro: I always enjoy my conversations with Mike and it’s good to hear him you know feeling well and feeling motivated. If you’ve been a listener for any length of time, you know that he’s definitely had some entrepreneurial ups and downs. To get to two positive updates in a row, I’m thankful for that.
If you have a question for me, for a guest, or for Mike, you should either email us questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can attach an audio file to that; it will go straight to the top of the Q&A stack. Or you can leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690. Of course, you can just write a text or email to that address.
If you haven’t checked out startupsfortherestofus.com, every episode has a full transcript within a week or two of being published. We have show notes, we have links to everything that is in these episodes. If you’re not subscribed, we have links there, too. You can head to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and all those to get every episode dropped into your inbox.
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Before we dive into that, I want to give you two things. Number one is invitations for Microconf Connect, which is our online community. The first invitations have been sent out. If you haven’t checked out microconfconnect.com and you are interested in being in a community of, well, there’s more than 1100 applicants at this point, so depending on how many actually come through and sign up, let’s say it’s going to be many hundreds, if not close to a thousand, of indie-funded and self-funded startup founders from around the world. If you’re interested in that, head to microconfconnect.com.
Number two, if you haven’t shared this podcast with someone that you think could get value out of it, it would mean a ton to me. If you feel like you’ve gotten value out of episodes over the past three months you’ve been listening, three years you’ve been listening, the biggest thing that I look at when I look at the success of the podcast, there’s a couple of things.
One, I look at the feedback from listeners and the comments that we receive and the growth of the subscriber base. Really been focusing on that over the past 6–9 months to try to get the message out to more people. The message that we can be ambitious, and we can build life-changing businesses without sacrificing our life or health or family or our relationships in order to do that.
We’d really appreciate it even if that’s just a tweet that says, “Startups for the Rest of Us is a podcast that I enjoy,” or if you do a one-on-one email or text to someone, I would really appreciate it. With that, let’s dive in to my conversation with Mike Taber.
Mike, it’s been a while. How are you doing?
Mike: I’m doing good. How are you doing?
Rob: I’m doing okay. It’s been six weeks to the day since our last conversation. Actually, we ran a Twitter poll a few weeks back because I got a couple of comments on the last episode. Let’s say I got 10 or 12 comments through Twitter, email. and posted to the website. One of them said, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable when you and Mike talk because I feel like you’re putting a lot of pressure on him.” Then someone said, “You should be easier. You should go easier on Mike.” I thought, “Wow. I don’t feel like I’m being hard on you.” Do you feel that way?
Mike: I don’t think so. The questions that you’re asking are pretty valid questions. I feel like it’s easier to answer them. I’ve commented on this before, it feels easier for me to answer them now because there’s more time in between each episode when we talk. It’s like I have more time to work on stuff and I’m not distracted by other things that are going on. I don’t really think so. I don’t know. Maybe I would have felt differently right after an episode is recorded. You can ask me again right after this episode if they were tough questions.
Rob: Totally. That’s the thing that people should know is like you and I were very deliberate, in advance, offline, before we started this whole series of following your story. That I said, “Look, I’m going to ask you questions that I think are helpful to the audience. I want to ask you questions that I think are helpful to hopefully keep you motivated and accountable. Is that okay?” I got your permission to bust your chops a little bit. I’ve never felt like I’m over-the-top, up in your face, sell, sell, sell, buy, buy, buy. I’m not being outrageous. I’m genuinely just asking. I know I am asking some tough questions, but I don’t know.
Anyway, after that, I ran a Twitter poll and I got 114 responses. The results were 8% thought I should go easier on you, 31% said I could push you harder, which I was surprised by, and 61% said they felt like I’m striking a good balance. Overall, 31% Mike, a third of the people want me to bust your chops more. It’s funny.
Mike: It’s all right. If you want to bust my chops a little bit more to appease that 31%, I’m fine with it.
Rob: I don’t. This is very natural. The thing is these conversations, at least from my perspective, are not forced at all. I’m not doing anything that doesn’t feel very natural in the conversation. I’m genuinely just curious about what’s there. When I ask, “Why didn’t you do that?” I’m genuinely curious why you didn’t do something. Anyway, let’s start talking about stuff because I did go back and listen to the last few episodes. It’s been a while. It’s been six weeks since the last one and three months since the one before that. I almost forget the story sometimes of exactly what was happening.
Our last episode was actually really positive. You were upbeat and things seemed to be working well. You had grown the revenue of 50% in two months. You’re still early-stage so folks know—percentages can be deceiving. That’s where we last left you. I’m curious to hear about your high point over the past six weeks. What was your biggest win or the moment where you felt the best? Then conversely, the biggest setback or where you were feeling the worst.
Mike: I think that in terms of the biggest win is I had a customer, and I know that this is on your outline already, so I’m going to totally blow it out of the water. Your question was about the big customer that I had to sign on a couple of months ago for $500 a month and are they still around. The answer is yes, they are still around, but they also asked to upgrade to an annual plan. That just came through yesterday so that’s all set. I’d say that’s probably the biggest one.
In terms of a low point, I can’t really point to anything specific where it’s like, “Oh, I wish this had gone very, very differently.” I’ve got a bunch of things that are up in the air right now. I’m optimistic that some of them will come through and then there are other things where I have to play things by ear for a little while to see how it goes. I don’t know how they’re going to play out yet.
Rob: Congratulations on that; that’s big to get. For them to request to go annual implies that they’re using the tool, they’re enjoying the tool, and they want to use it for the coming foreseeable future. The challenge that I always see with, especially early-stage products, that are really finding their footing is that you can get a big customer, but they’ll stick around for two weeks or a month or two. Then they realize, “Well, this just doesn’t fit what we need.” That is why I kept circling back on that topic is like, “Hey, you have this customer paying you a chunk of money. Are they still around?” That’s great. That’s really a good sign in my opinion. Congratulations on that.
Mike: Another thing that I would say that is, I wouldn’t say there was a particular point where it was a high point as well, but you have mentioned that I had grown revenue by about 50% over the course of two months. Then over the most recent two months, I’ve grown it by roughly another 50%. Basically, double where I was about four months ago. Maybe it’s 4½ months, maybe close to 5, but it’s still pretty close to that. It depends more on how things shake out through this month, which it’s still very early on in the month, but from the looks of it, I would expect that I will eclipse that point.
Rob: Is a big part of this your warm/cold email campaign? Because the last time we spoke, your report was it was working very well, you were getting upwards of 50% response rates, you had so many learnings that you actually had to back off of it so you could get other work done, you were saying some calls were running 1½-2, you had a bunch of notes, and that some were turning into customers. Is that a big part of this? Because to double in four months even at early stages is still traction. That shows that something has happened that wasn’t happening in the prior 18 months frankly.
Mike: Yeah. I look back at the outreach campaign that I was doing. It’s interesting because only one of those conversations has turned into an actual customer. There are maybe three others that are still prospects. One of them is in a trial but I have to implement some additional things before he’ll actually start paying for it. The trial itself right now is like I’ve extended his trial because literally, certain things don’t work for him. I’m trying to go through. I basically just have to implement a couple of extra features before he can start using it. At that point, I’ll restart his trial more or less.
I don’t see any direct correlation between the conversations that I’m having and the revenue, which is weird. Because I look back at it now and I just went through and counted. I’ve had over 30 calls with people in the past 5-6 weeks. Those are just the ones from my outreach campaign, but only one of those turned into a customer.
Rob: That’s crazy. Where’s the growth coming from?
Mike: I’m still working on it.
Rob: Oh, no. You don’t know.
Mike: It’s from a variety of sources. Some of its recommendations are from other people. I onboarded somebody over the past two weeks. They’re a real estate attorney in New York City, and they heard about it from a Facebook group. Somebody else had recommended to him. I’m like, “Well, who was it and what organization was it?” They said it was from the EO group which I think is Entrepreneurs’ Organization or something like that. You have to have a business that’s doing a million dollars in revenue in order to even be eligible to join, and they have to verify it.
Somebody in there said, “Hey, you should check out Bluetick.” I don’t know who that person was, but I don’t necessarily care either. The person signed on and I helped him get everything set up through Zapier. They asked me already about upgrading to an annual plan. I said, “Well, we could do that now but why don’t you wait a month or two and see how things go and then if everything is working well we’ll upgrade you.” It’s very casual and conversational about that.
I think that that’s a good opportunity to try and potentially get either additional recommendations or more revenue what have you. I’m sure these people know other people. I definitely think there are opportunities there that are coming about just from having these conversations.
Rob: Right. That’s the idea is if they do end up being happy, and they sign up for annual, right after they pay for annual, a great ask is, “I know you heard about me through an EO group, would you mind posting back to that group and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve just signed up. It’s been a really good experience.’” At this stage, it’s doing things that don’t scale. At this stage, all of this just helps get you to where you want to go.
Mike: Exactly.
Rob: I’m curious then. Customers are signing up and you obviously have some growth going on, something that I’ve asked you multiple times is why Bluetick? Why did they sign up with Bluetick and not go to one of your probably dozens of competitors, I’m guessing? Last time you had said you had some theories but you hadn’t really figured that out yet.
We tossed around some things like Bluetick checks the mailbox every 10 minutes whereas a lot of your competitors check it every four hours so your data is more up-to-date. You’re more thorough in terms of seeing I think it was like trash and spam and some other folders. Is that it or has there something else that you’ve figured out why these folks come, sign up, and convert to annual with you and not one of your competitors? That key differentiator.
Mike: I don’t think there’s a specific key differentiator in the products, but the recommendations certainly help. As part of those 30-plus calls that I have gone through, one person said, “Hey, I have this customer over here, these couple of customers, and I think that you should go talk to them. For this one, feel free to use my name and say that I said that you should reach out to them.”
I reached out, talked to them. I don’t think that this came up in our last call because it was since then, but I basically had a conversation with them. They said, “Yeah. Actually, your software sounds like it would be really helpful for us. Send me a proposal,” which you wouldn’t think most of the time you’d need to send a proposal to somebody. It’s over $1000 a month for this particular customer. They said, “Send me the proposal.” I sent them a proposal and then without even me asking or following up on the proposal, they didn’t have any questions at all. “This is great. This looks good. I’m going to introduce you to our technical team. Let’s set up a call with them.”
Did that, went through the technical call. At the end of the call, I said, “Are there any objections or questions you have or any problems you see in switching from what you’re using now into this?” They said, “No.” Now I’m at the point where they said, “Okay. Next week’s bad for us, but touch base with us the following week. We’ll see how things shake out from there.” I’m optimistic that that will come in. That’s over $1000 a month in MRR from just that one customer, but I definitely know there are certain things that they’re going to need. The point I’m going after though is the reason that that person took the call was that they got a recommendation from this other person they knew and trusted.
Rob: That makes sense. Your title tag on your website, bluetick.io, is, “Cold and Warm Email Follow-up Software.” Then the headline is, “Personal outreach at scale for all of your follow-up emails.” There’s cold and there’s warm and you’ve tended to be in the warm area of getting things you need from other people. If an accountant needs a tax return, he can put it in here. I’m just giving an example. I guess you don’t have any accountants.
Mike: I do, actually.
Rob: Oh, you do? Okay. Or a conference organizer needs to bother sponsors until they pay, you put them in Bluetick and they would do that. Which of these new sign-ups over the past four months are they using? Are they doing it more for the cold or more for the warm?
Mike: Most of them are warm, to be honest. As I’m thinking about it, most of them are warm. They’ve done business in some way shape or form but it’s not a tight relationship, it’s very loose. Maybe there was a transaction of some kind. Maybe there was a trial that was downloaded. Maybe there was an introduction or something along those lines. There was at least some touch-point and then they go in to use Bluetick to help move them to the next step and strengthen the relationship.
Rob: It’s less about sales. It’s part of the sales process but it’s not usually the first step in the sales process. There’s at least some relationship then it’s how do we keep moving it down, which is what you wanted to do. Remember, we talked about it a year ago. You said, “I feel like a lot of the cold outreach is spammy. I have a struggle with how some of these folks are doing it.” This feels better to you?
Mike: Yeah. What’s interesting, though, is that those that I’ve had come on so far, those tend to be like they want to do the warm outreach, but then the demo for the customer who the price quote I gave them (I think) was $1200 a month. They’re going to have upwards of 20–30 mailboxes and their growth anticipation is going to get up to between 50 and 60 by the end of the year. What they do is they do lead gen for other companies. They basically work with marketing agencies who are trying to do market analysis and market research, and they get people on the phone to talk to those companies.
I’ve actually started going down the road of looking out there to see what marketing agencies that are out there that are currently doing lead gen and see if I can get conversations going with them to ask how they’re doing that now. My suspicion is most of them are running a bunch of different campaigns in parallel.
They probably have anywhere between 20 and 50 or 100 mailboxes, which I would basically be charging them for each one of those, but let’s say that it’s 50 mailboxes at my current price in which I’d probably cut them a bulk discount at some point. I don’t know what that would look like. Let’s say it’s just raw numbers alone right now, fifty mailboxes at $50 a month is $2500 a month. That’s huge.
One of those customers could substantially start moving the needle for Bluetick, especially if they go and sign up for an annual plan. Not that I think that they would do that on day one, but fast forward a month or two if it’s working better for them than their current solution then it would make sense for them to go to an annual plan to get a little bit more of a discount.
I do think that there are opportunities there are for Bluetick to go in and do some competitive displacements for people who are using things like SalesLoft, Outreach, or Reply because it does have that more in-depth hooks into the mailbox and it can do more in-depth checks to make sure that it’s identically identifying, was this a reply? Was that a reply? Did I get a reply from a different email address or was it forwarded? All those kinds of things. I just have the capability to do a more in-depth analysis that I don’t think that those other products have nor do I think that they care about. Their pricing has started going through the roof like they’re really going upmarket in terms of the pricing.
Rob: Which leaves a nice opportunity for you because even having these several hundred dollars a month/low four-figure per month clients is such a different business than a $40 or $50 a month app. You need so many fewer clients. Bravo to that. High ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is just one of the Holy Grails. That’s awesome.
Mike: I’m working those angles to try and see how that works out. I just don’t know how it’s going to play out yet.
Rob: You never do. It’s pipeline stuff. Listeners should realize you’re not saying, “I’m counting on all of these deals to close.” You’ve done sales enough to realize that only a certain percentage of your pipeline closes. But the fact that you’re even sitting at the table with someone who could feasibly pay you $1000, $2000 a month is so far removed from where you were a year ago or 18 months ago.
That’s the part I’m excited about because you don’t need all of these to pan out. You just need a certain percentage. You’re growing, you’re off to the races, and you’re profitable, supporting yourself. You get to the point where you can hire someone to handle your audits and rewrite that sealed .NET component.
Mike: What’s motivating about it is that I feel like I’m winning a disproportionately large number of them, too.
Rob: Why is that?
Mike: Honestly, I think it’s me. It’s the conversations that I have with people. Even in the demo that I did with the customer that I did a custom proposal for, when I was talking to them they were asking questions about the software and how it worked. They had some very specific requirements as well, which I was shocked by because most people are like, “Oh, I just want to be able to detect replies and be able to send out emails and make sure that those are going out to people who didn’t reply.”
One of the specific requirements they had was they’re like, “This has to be able to send an email out as a reply to a previous email and it has to include the contents of the other one.” I said, “Yes. It can do that. This is exactly how it looks.” and I showed them an example. They’re like, “That’s perfect. That’s exactly what we need.”
It’s just being able to have that discussion and then also explain this is how it was built and this is why it was built this way. Fascinated is not the right word for it, but they really liked hearing that the person on the phone giving them the demo was the person they would also talk to for support if they needed help, or the person who built it. If there’s something wrong and it doesn’t work, they can talk to me and I can get it fixed for them. Whereas with the current vendor they have, it’s got to go through three layers of support, there was a project manager and put out a roadmap. You don’t have to do that with me. You’re going to talk to me. I can get things done.
Rob: That’s the thing when you’re small and you’re competing with venture-backed startups or even just larger companies, founders will often say, “Well, I’m outgunned.” How can I possibly compete with them? You can. You just have to use your advantages.
Mike: Didn’t you call this—I think it was in Microconf Europe—the founder advantage?
Rob: Maybe I did. Thank you for reminding. I’ll have to go back.
Mike: I think that was you.
Rob: I don’t recall but we should find out. Anyway, in Judo, you’re supposed to—even if you have a larger opponent—use their force against them. Let’s say they swing at you or whatever, it’s more about dodging and pulling them in the direction that they swung to flip them over or whatever.
I’ve only done Judo a couple of times, so it’s not something I’m an expert at, but when you are a small company you are super agile. You can get stuff done super-fast. They can talk directly to the founder. These are the advantages that you can just use against larger companies over and over and over. There are others as well. All that to say, that’s cool to be able to do that. Obviously, it doesn’t last forever, but while you have it, this should absolutely be something that you’re taking advantage of.
Mike: I totally am for the time being.
Rob: Cool. Curious, some of these other questions I’m not even sure are worth going into since things are working. You’re doing demos, you’re talking to customers, you’re selling, and they’re writing you checks. It’s like, “Should you even be bothering with these other things?” I come back to the podcast tour where (I guess) you put it into Bluetick. You were doing cold outreach to try to get on podcasts. Scaled it back a bit because you got busy with calls. Then you ramped it up again. Curious for an update on that.
Mike: I had scaled it down and I’d planned on ramping it up again, but I started sending out a couple of emails and I haven’t gone back to start sending out more of them. I was basically doing it individually. It’s like approving them one at a time. I got busy with all the phone calls and everything. I haven’t gone back to that.
I basically have stopped learning things from the conversations that I’ve been having with the people I was reaching out to. I’m going to put some of that stuff on autopilot and try to involve myself a little bit less. Instead of pitching it as, “Hey, I’d like to get on a phone and talk to you because I’d like to learn,” now I’m going to present it as, “These are the things that I’ve learned. Are there ways that you can help me or other people that you could refer to this particular product because I think I have a better story or position around that?”
I’m going to do that instead. Now that my learning process there I think it is a little bit more complete. I’m going to go back and start doing the podcast outreach again. I just haven’t done it yet.
Rob: Yeah. You’re trying to balance four things. Development of features is one thing; sales and learning, which is what a lot of LinkedIn and that warm outreach; and then marketing. You haven’t been doing much marketing because sales and learning are taking so much at the time. It sounds like you’ve learned. I think what you’re saying to summarize is you’ve learned about as much as you need for now and you can really dial that down and then switch some focus to marketing to then generate leads for you to continue with sales, right?
Mike: Yeah. I don’t want to not correct you, but to narrow it down exactly on the learning side of it. The reason I’m backing off on that is because I’m starting to hear the same things over and over. It’s not that I don’t think that I have anything left to learn because I certainly think there’s lots more, but the people that I’m talking to it’s getting repetitive now. I’m hearing the same things over and over. Going through the rest of the list of people that I was reaching out to, I don’t think that that’s going to be fruitful in terms of learning stuff. I do still think that there’s a lot of value in continuing to reach out to those people and seeing if there are people that they could introduce me to or put the product in front of.
Rob: Right. You’re switching from learning to sales. In essence, you’re switching that campaign, which is exactly what I think you should be doing based on what you’re saying. It’s funny for these episodes that we do every month or two, it’s typically been a roller coaster; one where you’re up and one where you’re down. We now have two back-to-back where you’re up. You got it, so it’s going to get boring for people after a while, Mike. If your #winning every episode, people will stop listening. Next episode, bring some low points.
Mike: I’ll say I got a hangnail.
Rob: Exactly.
Mike: They’re terrible.
Rob: I’m joking, obviously.
Mike: I can barely type with my finger. Do you want to see that finger, Rob?
Rob: Not really. Good thing this is an audio podcast. I’m happy for you and I’m happy the way things are going. Again, it’s like we’ve talked about this sealed .NET component for so long. The last episode I finally said, “You know what, if sales are working I wouldn’t replace it right now unless it’s causing you the inability to close sales,” because right now, number one is getting revenue up. It was my thinking at the time. We were both agreeing on it. You were saying, “Yeah. I know I need to replace it at some point.” Given where you’ve been, have you ever given it a thought over the past six weeks?
Mike: I have. It’s more, I would say, over the past 1½–2 weeks where I’ve started to look at that a lot more. The main reason for looking at that is that I mentioned it earlier but I didn’t go into the details of a customer where I basically extended their trial because certain things weren’t working for them. To drill into that is they have an exchange server.
Rob: That’s their first mistake?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Oh, snap. No, I’m just kidding. Send hate mail to mike@mike—
Mike: I didn’t say it. It wasn’t me.
Rob: I know.
Mike: Anyway, the issue is that yes you can enable IMAP on an exchange server, but the default is to not have it enabled. There are tons of sales organizations out there where they have exchange server. Unless you have a device that directly goes into the exchange server to use these exchange web services, basically, it doesn’t work. And Bluetick relies on that IMAP component.
What I’ve been doing is this person tried to sign up. They went in, try to add a mailbox, it didn’t work. I went through all these things trying to figure out how to make it work. The only way to do it is through exchange web services, which I have a component that can do that, the one that I have now can do it, but it’s got to be rewritten. The underlying storage system has got to be changed in order to help support that.
I knew that all that stuff needs to be done anyway in order to basically replace how that sealed .NET component is currently used. It was never a priority before because stuff works, but now it’s at a point where I have to replace this. I have to rewrite some of that code otherwise I can’t get this customer onboarded.
Now it’s a barrier to revenue. I can justify it now especially since, I think he said there’s 70 sales reps in the organization and if I can get it working for him, its land and expand because he’s more than willing to introduce me to these two managers of all the sales reps, but I have to get it working for him first.
Now, I’m in a position where I have to do this now. Technically, I don’t have to. I can say, “Screw it. I’m just going to go find other customers.” But the combination of this particular person needing that and this customer where there’s $1200 of MRR is initially on the table, where I know that their mailboxes are going to be coming from their customers.
My suspicion is at least some of those customers are going to be using an exchange server. It did come up in the call when they asked, “Can you integrate with an exchange server?” and I said, “Yes,” thinking that I can do it through IMAP. Then, I onboarded this other customer and realized that’s not going to work if you have to go through the IT department and the IT department has to justify why they’re going to turn that capability on for a particular mailbox. Now I’m like, “I have to fix that at this point.” That’s why I’m looking at it now.
I’ve spent the last week or so looking at redesigning it, doing a bunch of different prototyping and testing and figuring out how it’s going to work. I’m pretty close to being able to move forward with it. I just haven’t written any production code to screw with it.
Rob: Good for you. That’s cool. That’s actually good news because that’s exactly the time that you should be doing it. It’s when it impacts revenue. You’d mentioned last time you can flip in the database to do it for one mailbox at a time, which also is a nice luxury to maybe not have to deal with all of the data migration that will take a week or more all at once. That’s cool.
Something else that we talked about a few times is that Enneagram test, it’s a personality test. The reason that we started talking about it was we’re talking about you know what motivates you deep down as a human being and also what are your blind spots? We all have these blind spots in our personalities that perhaps behaviors that aren’t helpful to us getting stuff done. I’m a fan of these personality tests because they just help (in most cases), give me insight about who I am, what my blind spots are, what motivates me, all that kind of stuff.
When we were last talking, you had taken the Enneagram but you said you hadn’t really dug into it to suss out actionable bits of things that you should think about on a day-to-day basis. It’s fun to read through the whole doc, but if you’re not going to then somehow implement that in your life then it is all just a waste of time. I’m curious if you had time to go through and highlight and maybe a couple of key takeaways you might be able to take action on or at least be aware of in your day-to-day.
Mike: Yeah, I did. I started going through, and I was going to highlight a bunch of stuff. Then, I said, “I’ll just underline it instead,” which is close enough. It’s one of those things where the different personality types that it has for me printed out it, comes out (I think) 16 or 18 pages; it’s about six pages for each one.
There is a lot of stuff underlined. Some of it is just notes for me, but there’s also stuff in here where I like the fact that they put together things and they say, “These are ways that you can make things work better.” Some of them are things I’m already doing. For example, one of them was like, “Oh, if you’re this particular personality type then it can very much help you to either get in a room with other people and just talk about these types of issues or do journaling and write that stuff down.”
It was interesting that I discovered the journaling aspect on my own because I’ve been doing that for a couple of years. I do find it extremely helpful because I can sit there and basically do a brain dump at the end of the day. I’ve found that by doing that, it helps me clear my thoughts and helps me sleep at night. Then, there are a few other things that I went through. I still have to go back through it again just because there’s so much here. I definitely think there’s a lot more in here that I could probably pull out. A few, I wouldn’t call them productivity hacks but life hacks, so to speak, is like, “Oh, do this, and this other piece of your life will be made easier.” If that makes sense.
Rob: It does.
Mike: Some of it is just managing negative emotions. Some of it is being able to express feelings about certain things or be more assertive about what you want or what you need. Generally, I’m a low-key person, low-maintenance, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t have needs that somehow need to be met. I just don’t really talk about it. I’m much better at advocating for other people than I am for myself.
Rob: Yeah. That’s something good to know about yourself, right?
Mike: Yeah. I intuitively know that but seeing it written down on papers is like, “Hey, this is a part of your personality profile. Here are some ways to deal with that.” Some of it is you read through some of this text that’s in here and some of it is just coaching. It says, “Hey, you may believe this, but has anything ever really gone that badly? The answer is probably not.” It’s just a good reminder.
Rob: Indeed. How about your sleep? How’s it been in general?
Mike: Generally, pretty good. The past week or so has been pretty stressful. It’s funny because in the Enneagram there are specific sections in there that call out and say, “When you are under stress, if this is your personality profile then you switch over to this other thing. These are the types of behaviors you exhibit.” For the most part, they’re pretty dead-on. It’s nice to go through and read those and see that those things can impact my stress levels, which then turn around and impact my sleep. Last week or so has been pretty stressful, but I think there’s definitely some strategy and takeaways in there that I can leverage to help clear that up.
Rob: And that’s something that was game-changing for me (it’s gone up and down but let’s say) about 8 or 10 years ago. I realized that I would just wake up in the morning or I would just be walking around and I would feel this enormous amount of stress. I would just feel it, live it, and let it consume me.
Over time, I learned through stuff like this, this self-awareness and these tests, why do I feel that way? I think there’s a biological component. When I look at my family history on both sides there’s all these anxiety disorders and all this stuff we don’t need to go into here. I’m naturally prone to just have constant mid-level, I won’t say high-grade anxiety because I don’t have panic attacks, but I do have low- to mid-level stress all the time.
What I learned to do was I would say, “Why am I feeling that way? Literally, why am I feeling that way?” I would say, “Well, it’s because someone said this,” or, “It’s because I’m worried about this revenue thing,” whatever. But then, I could actually look at it and say, “Well, how likely is that to happen and how bad would it be if that happened?”
Then, I can just try to left-brain myself out of it. It works for me to really look at it and say, “Look, there’s no new information. You can’t fix this. It actually isn’t going to be that big of a deal if it happens. If it is, there’s contingency A, B, and C that I could use to get around it. So put it to bed for now and if it comes back up then deal with it.” You know what, 90% of the time none of them come back up. It’s just wasted. It’s just wasted worry. It doesn’t help anybody to worry about it.
I’m not saying you or anyone else should do that, but it works for me. The only way that I came across these types of coping mechanisms is, (1) is being married to Sherry, (2) listening to the Zen Founder podcast, and (3) learning this about myself to know, “Wow. This isn’t normal and other people don’t feel this way all the time.”
All right. As we’re wrapping up, I’m curious what, between now and our next chat, what are you most looking forward to?
Mike: I’m going to be diving back into the technical side of things to rewrite that email synchronization mechanism and get it working so that the exchange server can just be connected without having to worry about IMAP or enabling certain things. It should just work at that point. I’m hoping that by the time the next time we get on a call, that stuff will be taken care of and at least started onboarding this customer that I quoted the $1200 to.
Those are the things that I’m looking at the most, and then trying to go through and see if I can have some more conversations with other marketing agencies that do lead gen or do market analysis and outreach; because they’re doing it at scale with small numbers of people, and it’s not as if they’ve got 80 people that need to be trained to use Bluetick. It’s a handful of people that are using it on behalf of a much larger group of people. I do think that that could potentially be an area of growth, but I don’t know yet. I want to explore that quite a bit more.
Rob: Sounds good. As always, thanks for coming on the show again, having a conversation. I always enjoy chatting with you and the listeners benefit from it as well.
Mike: Awesome. Thanks for having me back and I will definitely keep you guys posted.
Rob: Awesome. Talk to you soon.
Mike: All right. Bye.
Outro: I always enjoy my conversations with Mike and it’s good to hear him you know feeling well and feeling motivated. If you’ve been a listener for any length of time, you know that he’s definitely had some entrepreneurial ups and downs. To get to two positive updates in a row, I’m thankful for that.
If you have a question for me, for a guest, or for Mike, you should either email us questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can attach an audio file to that; it will go straight to the top of the Q&A stack. Or you can leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690. Of course, you can just write a text or email to that address.
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Episode 481 | A Bluetick Update from Mike #Taber
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In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob checks in with Mike Taber’s progress with Bluetick. They talk about his big new customer, traction on the podcast tour, Mike’s outreach to his LinkedIn connections, and more.
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Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This is episode 481 where I catch up with Mike Taber. He gives us an update on his recent progress with Bluetick.
It’s been about six weeks since we last spoke. Frankly, the last update was a little disappointing. Mike was not moving forward with the marketing things that I had encouraged him to do in October, November. He was kind of stuck and his motivation was not at an all time high. He’s definitely having a down month.
I appreciated the conversation this week. I think you’ll enjoy it. Things are definitely starting to tick up from Mike as I talk about in our conversation. The roller coaster metaphor (as completely cliche as it is) really matches up with our conversations. It’s 1–2 months, it tends to be about six weeks. You’ll just hear some episodes he’s crushing it and moving forward, in other episodes he’s not and his motivation’s low.
This week, he’s no different, but I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation. This is one that left me feeling a little better about things. My hope is that our conversations after this carries through. I think that’s something that Mike really needs and has really struggled with over the years—his momentum. He’ll have these good months—one, two, three months. But then, he hits this roadblock and can’t get past it. It really trips him up and stops momentum.
When you’re building a startup, as a founder, momentum is just so important. It’s important for your team. It’s important for your morale. It’s important just to stay sane while you’re trying to push this boulder up the hill once you get that momentum. It’s a lot easier to keep it going.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about. Mike Taber was essentially a former weekly co-host of Startups for the Rest of Us for about the first 450 episodes. He took a step back to focus on his startup, Bluetick, which is warm and cold email engagement. I enjoy these conversations because I think they’re valuable for you as a listener, to hear someone going through struggles, to hear them have to persevere as a founder, not have as much success as they’re trying to get. It is becoming more and more of me helping him think through things.
I think and hope I could give him some clarity so that he knows what he’s doing over the next four to six weeks. I try to cheer him on but also give him some tough love and accountability of, “You should have done that.” It’s not directly every episode an accountability session, but it definitely is a longitudinal look at a founder. I think we started these eight or nine months ago now, so it’s interesting. I’ve listened back to two or three episodes at a time to try to make sure I ask the right questions on the next one. It’s going to make a fascinating case study (I think) if we stitched this out over an extended period of time.
Mike has not committed to doing that over an extended period of time. I think it depends on a lot of factors, but it’s definitely becoming an interesting story (I think) that each of us can dip into every once in a while. He’s quite being open and honest. I’ll vouch for him that offline before and after, he and I had just a few minutes of conversation. It really isn’t other stuff going on that he’s not talking about both good and bad. There’s always some stuff in the works that’s a little early that we don’t touch on.
Really, this is what’s happening with him. I don’t have this big prepped conversation where we picked out the good or bad or whatever. He’s being an open book and I really appreciate that about Mike. I think it helps him think things through and keep moving forward. I also think that it helps all of us to follow someone’s story, to hear the struggles, and to hear how he’s pushing himself to make it through those. With that, let’s hear an update from Mike Taber on what he’s been up to on Bluetick.
Mikey T, how’s it going, man?
Mike: It’s going well. How are you?
Rob: Doing all right. Just wrapped up the State of Independent SaaS report and did my first livestream ever yesterday. I will just say it was really nerve-wracking. It was a 30 minute essentially with producers. Sander was there, of course, doing stuff, then there was a video guy that had the lower third. It felt like a cable access, new show or something. It was very intense. There were cameras, lights, and all that stuff. Fun, exhilarating, but completely adrenaline-filled and exhausting, just sitting and talking for 30 minutes. It was fun.
How about you? What have you been up to for the last six weeks since we talked?
Mike: Lots of stuff going on. I’m sure we’ll cover the vast majority over the next 30–40 minutes or so.
Rob: I’m excited to get into it. After the last episode, I did receive some feedback. There’s some comments on the website startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-475-a-bluetick-update-from-mike-taber. You can read those in there. There were mixed comments. Some people were really down on the fact that you hadn’t started the cold email outreach, the podcast tour, email outreach, or I guess it just started but there were no results. Other people were like, “Hang in there, Mike. Don’t let these things drag on forever. We’re rooting for you.”
My hope today is to dig into some of that stuff. I did listen back to some of our older conversations over the past. It’s been six or eight months now since we’ve been doing this kind of format. We retouch base every four to six weeks. The Google Audit stuff started a long time ago. That sealed .NET component has hung around in a very long time.
I think that’s the thing I want to look at today. I mentioned this a little bit last episode. I want to figure out how we can have things hang around for shorter amounts of time. We talked about them for months on hand. It feels like you’re not making progress on those fronts even though you might be on to some.
Before we were recording, my memory was, your big wins over the past six months have really been getting the Google Audit done and wrapped. Am I correct that that’s completely done? You haven’t had to spend any time on that?
Mike: Yes it is.
Rob: Cool, that’s good. Then, the other thing is something that we talked about last conversation where you said a new larger customer has signed up. I think it’s your biggest customer, actually. You were building some features, trying to keep them onboard. How has that gone since then over the past six weeks?
Mike: That customer is using the product. So far, it seems to be working well. I’d like to obviously see more of their users a little bit more actively engaged, but it’s kind of an ongoing process. So far, things are working out as far as I can tell. In terms of generally held, Bluetick is going well. Revenue is up in November, December, and it looks like it’ll be up in January as well. That’s a good sign, I guess. We’ll see how things go. I don’t know. It’s hard to put it in words as to not where things are at, but expectations do not always align with reality.
Rob: Sure. Even if you look back over the past three months, you’re saying revenues ticked up each month, which has not been the case a couple years prior to that. It’s been stagnant. It had been stagnant or slow the client from time to time. Can you give us any idea of scale? Probably without mentioning exact dollar amounts. When you say revenues up, is it up a few percentage points? Is it up pretty dramatically over that time period?
Mike: Over the past couple of months, I have to say it’s up maybe 30% or 40%, something like that. Maybe 50%.
Rob: Okay. How are you feeling about that?
Mike: I’m feeling good but it’s still short of where I would like. Revenue’s always going to be short of where you would like it to be. I feel really good about where things are headed. I spent a lot of time over a holiday break thinking about different things. You’ve mentioned how there were a couple of large things that were hanging over my head or Bluetick’s head in terms of where the product is at. It’s just not getting certain things done like Google Audit, for example. I made it a concerted effort to fully finish some of the things that I started now.
If I worked on the Google Audit, for example, my goal was to finish it, put a line in the sand, and say, “Look, even though there’s other things going on that are important, it needed to be paid attention to, I can’t just do 80% of this or 60% of it, then let it drop, and then move on to something else.” I need to take it all the way to the finish line as opposed to letting other things that maybe just as important to distract me. I’ve been making more of an effort to take things all the way to the finish line.
Rob: Yeah. I think that’s good to know about yourself. I have seen that in you for sure, the tendency to bounce from one thing to the next, to have that stuff that you do talk about for six months on podcast interview, and they feel like they hang around. There’s certainly a mental weight on your psyche if not in completely most things.
Mike: Yeah. That’s what I recognized, just the mental weight of those things. If there’s a couple of them, they start to stack up even though I’m bouncing back and forth between some of those things. I may be making progress on them, it doesn’t mean that they’re gone and out of the way. They still weigh on my mind. I think about them and there are times where I really shouldn’t be. It’s very distracting.
I got to a point where I made a list of distractions and said, “Look, I’m going to make an active decision to not pursue these things.” These are known distractions I basically written down. It’s like those shiny object syndrome for entrepreneurial ADD like, “Look. Recognize that these things are there, but I’ve made the decision to not go on this direction, and just walk away.”
Rob: Yeah. A really hard part about entrepreneurship is knowing what to work on next and try to prioritize. When you don’t have a boss, a lot of us came up through grammar school, high school, and college. Then you get through a job. Everyone’s telling you what to do. “Do this project.” “Do these worksheets.” “Write this code.” “Build this thing.”
Then, you’re a founder. It’s like, “I have 100 things I could work on. What do I do next?” It’s very, very hard to get used to. I think what you’re doing—locking it down and saying, “Whatever I decide to work on, I’m going to be deliberate about it. I’m going to see that through until it’s done.”—is a very strong way to do it.
A second topic are the distractions that then try to pull you away from those things. I’m curious to hear, you said you made a list of them. Is it stuff that we would expect like Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, audio books? Or was it other stuff?
Mike: It’s a combination of things. It’s stuff like that. It’s also things within the product where it’s like, “Look, this feels important but it actually doesn’t matter.” For example, there are certain new features that are on the list of things to do where I don’t feel that the features would be nice to have, but they’re not going to be things that drive revenue in any way, shape, or form. They would make the product better, but it’s not going to do anything for me, so don’t spend time on those things because that time could be better spent doing marketing, sales, demos and things like that.
Rob: Yeah. You’ve gone even a layer deeper. It’s not the superficial distractions of the world. You’re literally thinking, “Within my business, I have distractions that are so tantalizing,” like the siren song of, “We’re builders. We’re developers.” The siren song of building that next feature is always calling. We can always justify that our product isn’t as far along as it needs to be. That’s cool then.
You have two marketing efforts we talked about last time that you hadn’t started in mid-December. I’ll say I was disappointed or busting your chops. I really wished you had started these because I want you to get moving faster. The first one is this kind of warm/cold email where you’re sending it out, you have LinkedIn connections, Bluetick cancellations, other sales leads and all that stuff. I believed I have a quote in the dock. “It will definitely get kicked off by then,” because I said, “Do you think they will get kicked off by our next call?” You want to update us on that and what the status is?
Mike: Yes. I have started on that. Like I said, I was fortunate. I don’t know who I told this to and haven’t. I don’t remember if I messed this on the podcast last time, but I was fortunate enough to export my LinkedIn contacts before LinkedIn basically eliminated the ability to take the email addresses with them. I have all these email addresses. What I did is I went through, prioritize them, and said, “Who do I want to reach out to first? Who do I think is going to be either a contact who might be interested in purchasing Bluetick, or who would be interested in a position to either refer me to somebody else, or just give me direct feedback on a product and tell me whether or not it would be applicable in their business?”
Part of this was the discovery effort. Obviously, people that I’m connected to on LinkedIn are going to be more likely to respond to my emails. Even if I’m just saying, “Hey, can you take a look at this? Let me know whether it would be useful in your business or not? If so, I’d love to give you demo and try to get you onboarded as a customer. If not, I still want to have that conversation because I want to know why. Why would this product not be a good fit for your business?”
And use those essentially as votes. An affirmation of things I already believe or potentially new information about where Bluetick does fit in different businesses and where it doesn’t. Even if I hear something that I intuitively know or have already thought of before, I don’t care. It’s still a vote in that direction that is external. I can sit in my office all day long and think about these things. But getting those external votes to say X, Y, or Z, that’s important because it means that it’s more objective than me sitting there than looking at it and thinking about it.
I have kicked those off. My response rate is upwards of 50%. So far, I have been having tons of meetings going through every single one of them just writing down notes. I’ve got at least a page of notes if not two for every single person I’ve talked to and have a demo with. I’ve had a couple of calls that have gone like in an hour and a half, two hours before. I’m getting a lot of responses from them. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to keep up with them to be frank about it. I still have to keep going through those. I actually backed off and turned it off just so I could catch up a little bit but I’ve turned it back on and started sending those emails back out.
Rob: Yeah. The high response rate was because they’re warm, right?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: They have some connection to you. You said that it was like a personal email list, LinkedIn connections, and sales leads that never converted. That’s cool. That’s a nice resource to have. Are any of these converting to sales or trials? Or are they conversations? Are they all rejections that you’re then essentially doing customer development with?
Mike: Surprisingly—maybe not surprisingly—some of them have actually turned into customers. That’s probably part of the uptick and revenue for this month. I think the tactic I’ve taken with some of these were like the person is in a sales role. I say, “Look, I’m going to show you the product. I’m not going to tell you what it’s used for. I’m just going to show you what the features and functionality are. I want you to tell me what you would use it for.” In that way, I’m not leading the witness.
I’ve found that the people who are in the sales positions, I don’t want to say that it resonates with them as a sales tactic, but it really helps me because then they’re not being lead by me in terms of the things that I’m telling them they could be used for. They’re coming to me within their own words with what they would use it for. Yeah, some of those have definitely turned into sales.
I have one person who said, “Yeah. I would use it for this. I would use it for this. I’d use it for this. These couple of other things.” We talked about getting on and have them starting on a trial. Even offered me to introduce the product and do a demo for a couple of sales managers at their company where they’ve got I think 60 or 70 sales reps, something like that.
The thought was, “Hey. I can put you in front of these people because we’ve known each other. I trust that this is a decent product and does what you say it does.” I held back on that a little bit just because adding that many all at once is a little disconcerting, I’ll say, but I also want to be able to put him in a position where he’s using the product himself personally for his sales outreach efforts. Then, when they have an internal meeting, it’s not just, “Oh hey, my friend developed this and I think that you guys should use it,” but he can say, “I’m using it for these situations and these are the results. It’s working for that.”
Rob: Yeah, got it. It sounds like this has been going well. Is this a win? Is this the high of the last month, you think?
Mike: Oh, totally. I have one customer who’s onboard right now. Their billing just went through a couple of days ago. They’re in an organization where there’s either 10 sales reps and the manager of that person is looking at Bluetick directly and saying, “I want to see what the results are from this. I’m interested because the rest of the team might be able to use it, too.”
My previous thought have been, if I can get more into these situations where the multiuser counts are providing value, then obviously the revenue will follow from that. It looks like that is probably the right direction to go. I’m still having a lot of these conversations. I just want to see any of these direct outreach efforts. Any little bit helps, to be honest.
Rob: I would agree. I’m stoked to hear that you’re getting response rates up to 50% because that’s really nice. It sounds like you’re learning a ton, which is really nice, and you’re getting some prospects and potential customers, which I think is good. This is forward progress. It is more forward progress than you’ve had in the past several months. Bravo to that and glad that it’s working out. For me, it’s motivating to hear.
Does this motivate you? I know you’ve said there’s been a lot of conversations, but does this gear you up like, “Oh man, this is working,” like, “This is exciting”?
Mike: It does, yeah. I implemented a pause feature several months ago where customers, instead of cancelling, they can pause their accounts for a nominal fee on a monthly basis. I don’t know if I mentioned this about this part of the Google Audit. They’re really cagey about if you cancel a customer’s account and you keep their data around because Google says that it’s their data, not yours and the customers.
What I did was I said, “Well, in order to bypass that, I’ll implement this feature where you can pause your account,” at which point you’re technically still a customer of mine. I don’t need to delete your data. Four to five people who would cancel over the recent time period, switched over, and said, “Yeah. I’d like to pause my account.”
This week I have one of them came back. I had a call with them later this afternoon. Then another customer from a couple of years ago have come back as well. Yeah, that’s growth. You’re right. To answer your question directly, it is motivating to see this kind of stuff come through. Part of it is a mindset shift for some of the conclusions I came through over the holiday break. Some of it is just seeing quantifiable results from the things that I”m doing.
Rob: Yeah. You’re doing things in public again. You’re not just dealing with Google Audit and building some features. You’re out there and you’re taking risks by sending warm/cold email. You’re having conversations with customers, which can be a lot of work. It can be scary, you can get negative feedback, but you’re doing it and it’s working to at least some degree. I don’t know, I’m pretty excited about that.
Does coming on this show and recording this every month or two make you feel accountable to something? Do you ever think, “Man, I need to make some progress so that Rob does not bust my chops”?
Mike: You know that’s a really interesting question. I feel like before when I was on every week, not as much. If that makes sense. I feel like coming on less frequently, I feel like I should hold myself more accountable because I come on less frequently. If that makes sense.
Rob: Yeah. It’s easy when we’re here every seven days, it’s like how much can I get done, and talk about during that time? You’re always thinking, “Well, I got to talk about something,” but you can let yourself off the hook. So, good. That makes sense.
That was an aside, but I was thinking about that and listening to the last episode. I had said, “Hey, I’m going to ask you about this next time.” It truly was an accountability and has been. I’ve been trying to do that, so it’s good to hear it. So, cool. We’ll call that a win. I’ll obviously going to ask it again next time. It sounds like it’s working. Keep doing it, man. I’m totally rooting for you on that.
Then there’s the emails for podcast tour or to just go on podcast and those had started sending already. I believe you said you might’ve had one response or whatever. How’s all that going?
Mike: I scale that back a little bit because of the LinkedIn prospect that I was doing. I am starting to ramp that back up again. I’ve got a call next week with somebody. We’ll see what the schedule shakes out with. There’s a couple of others that I’m trying to figure out where on the schedule we can get together just because we’ve exchange calendars, go back and forth and stuff. That seems to be moving forward as well, but my list for that is much shorter as well. I don’t have 900 of them.
Rob: Yeah. If I were to choose between going on podcast and talking to customer prospects, guess which one I would do? It’s what you’re doing if one of those has to be scaled back. A podcast tour is a nice thing to do. I do feel like you could probably get it going at some point. As I said earlier, that’s not going to drive a bunch of customers. What’ll drive a bunch of customers is cold outreach, warm outreach, marketing funnels, and all the things we know about. I don’t have much of an issue with that.
I’m curious. I’m meant to ask when you were saying that some of the folks you’re talking to are interested. They’re either coming back on or they’re signing up. Why Bluetick? In their words. We’ve talked a lot about differentiation. I kept saying you either need a unique marketing channel. You need to rank number one in Google or you need to rank number one in some type of channel where you are capturing the customers.
Or you need to have this pretty unique selling proposition or a unique feature or some unique positioning when someone looks at your other nine or 109 competitors filling the space you’re in, that they say, “Wow, Bluetick is best at this and this is my need.” How do you differentiate? I’m curious what has come out of these conversations, if anything, that makes you think, “This is exactly why they’re signing up for Bluetick and not the other tools.”
Mike: I haven’t teased out some of the specifics of that. I’ve got some ideas. When people switch from other tools to Bluetick, most of the time it’s because they run into a problem that those tools aren’t very good at. Whether they can only have contact in one sequence at a time, or they’re missing emails because it relies on the Gmail API and it’s not checking the spam folder, or the notifications and stuff don’t get triggered.
I have direct access to the mailbox, so every email that comes in, I can process it versus years in Gmail API. You’re very dependent upon their scheduling on all of those things. Whereas Bluetick, it checks the mailbox every 10 minutes. And longer term, I have other plans to make that even faster, and reduce the process in time on my site.
That’s one of those things where I actively decided it’s good enough for now. It doesn’t need to be that good. Every 10 minutes is fine. There’s other ones out there, they take upwards an hour, or 6, or 12 hours. They get by, so what difference does it make? I’m already faster than that. It doesn’t make a difference.
I think one of the other things is that the workflow itself inside Bluetick, it’s weird because some people say it makes complete sense. Some people say, “I don’t understand this at all. I’d rather go use these other tools that work on the same way.”
Rob: Okay. I wonder long-term—I don’t think we’ve dived into this now—you’re saying you check more often. Is that right? Your data is more up-to-date or fresh? That’s a feature, not a benefit. I’m thinking, what’s the next thing on top of that? Is it like your data is always synced? Unlike other tools, you’re near real time acts. There’s a way to position it where Bluetick is the real neartime version that’s always accurate and everything you just listed. I don’t even remember. You were saying spam, trash, and folders. How does all that get combined into one or two bullets that are true benefits?
Mike: The benefit of it is if Bluetick sees the email, like a reply, it will pull the person out of the sequence. If there’s a delay, let’s say that there’s a four hour delay for some other tool, a reply can come in within that four hours. If the tool doesn’t see it, it can send out a follow-up. What happens is you receive an email that says, “Hey, you sent somebody an email replying to something.” Then they come back with an email and it says, “Hey. I haven’t heard back from you.” I’m just like, “I literally just sent you an email an hour or two ago. Why are you saying that you didn’t see it and that you haven’t heard back from me?” That’s the situation that you go in every 10 minutes […]
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s something we can look at and talk through in future episodes as you get more data. Something I wanted to touch on is the last episode, I asked about your motivation. I said, “How’s your motivation over the past six weeks?” You said, “It’s okay.” You said, “Sleep was fine but not great.” Then you started talking about front-end code. That’s what you launched into something like, “I get discouraged when I do that. Should I hire someone part time? I threw that out.” Has that come up again?
I get the feeling that if you get demotivated by thinking about front-end code, it takes a bunch of time. That’s something you naturally shy away from like a hot stove, even if it’s only your lizard brain and you’re not actively thinking or realizing that you’re shying away from that. Has that been an issue or are you so much in sales and marketing mode that it doesn’t matter because you’re really not building features right now?
Mike: I think it matters more when I run into problems with the front-end code. I’m struggling to get some of the CSS right or some of the pages to show up in a way that I want. I’ve kind of coached myself to be less anxious or particular about some of that stuff. It’s like, “This doesn’t look perfect but you know what? It works.” The interesting thing I also realized was that Bluetick works really well for the people who use it in the way that it’s supposed to be, which means that you’re not logging in into it very much, which is a really bizarre way to position your SaaS app.
Most of the time I think you want people to log into your app and use it as much as possible because you’re getting the most value out of it. Bluetick is actually the opposite where the less you login, the more value it could provide you because you got things automated and setup to run into the background. If something doesn’t look quite right or if there’s a dropdown that’s slightly on the wrong spot, it actually probably doesn’t matter nearly as much as I use to feel like it does.
As long as the data that you need shows up in the UI, that’s one of those that I kind of backed off and said that this doesn’t really matter as much. I agree there’s probably some of that that is influenced by the fact that I’m doing much more of the sales and marketing. Just showing the products to people and saying, “This is what it can do,” and less front-end development.
Rob: Right, cool. Other than that, how was your overall motivation? I think sleep ties into that. How was your sleep and your motivation? You sound up. You sound up to me. Last time, you didn’t. You sounded down. This is the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. That’s the beauty of doing this every month and two for months. Presumably, if you do these for years, you just see the ups and downs, and the ups and downs. Has that been reflected over the past six weeks? Or is it just the last week or few days that you felt that?
Mike: I felt really good for the past couple of weeks. Part of it could be just the result of getting past some of that front-end code. I had to redesign the UI. I put all the navigation at the top of the page. That was probably part of where my frustrations last time where coming from. I had to move everything and at the same time, not break all the code that was currently in place for it. It wasn’t quite as simple as I would’ve liked to move the navigation. Now that it’s done, I even enjoy going into the app more myself just because the navigation has been moved to the top. It’s easier to get around and less clicks to do different things. I definitely feel like that factors into it. Obviously, increasing MRR also helps. There’s that.
Rob: That’s a huge motivator and when things are going up in another right, you can put up with a lot of other stuff. That’s the mental battle.
Next, I’m curious about the sealed untestable .NET component. I’m curious on a couple of fronts because when I listen to backdoor conversations, we’ve gotten back and forth. I’ve been like, you should either do this and get it done. Don’t let it hang around. Either decide not to do it or decide to do it and do it soon. It sounds like it keeps you from building features that you need.
Then when I hear this update today where it’s like, “No, you’re selling. You’ve grown MRR substantially.” It makes me think, why are we even talking about this .NET component? Leave it and just keep going. Push it down the line. What’s your current thinking on it?
Mike: I feel the same way. I’ve gone back and forth on it a bunch of times. It’s like, “Do I really need to do that? Do I need to do it now?” The answer is, probably not. Do I want to because it’s technical debt that has been hanging over my head over for a while? It is distracting. I rather have it out of the way but at the same time it is a chunk of work to get done. It’s not stopping the product from doing what it does. I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer for you.
I think if I buckled down, just did it, knocked it out, and got it out of the way, I wouldn’t have to ever worry about it again. Or at least until other stuff happens. I do feel like I would probably have to address it in a semi near future if I’m starting to add in substantially larger accounts just because the back-end I don’t know.
I don’t know how far I can scale it up without adding more servers in which would mean that I need to reengineer how some of that stuff works. At that point, it would be a hornet’s nest to get into that code and start working with it, to try and separate it among multiple servers. I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer for you. I just don’t.
Rob: I don’t either, in this case. Given how limited you are, my bet is to leave it where it is, and sell. Revenue solves everything. In this case, profit really solves everything. In your case, just growing MRR, if you can keep doing that and focus 100% of your time on conversations, 100% of your time on selling, and grow another 50% over the next two months, technically that sucks. I hate it. It’s something you can circle back to.
I think the thing that I’m going to bust your chops about is when you get the point and you’re like, “I need to build these features in order to get these bigger customers on. I can’t because the sealed .NET component is keeping me from doing it. But I still don’t want to do it.” There’s going to come a time where you have to do this, I think. The technical debt is going to sink you, at least based on how you described it.
I think that’s in the bank of my mind of don’t worry about it until you need to. Once you do, buckle down and do it. In two or three weeks, it’s done. You know what I mean? Stop everything. That’s how performance used to go.
Like with Drip, you just don’t do much work on it because you’re cranking on features, you’re selling it, you’re marketing it, you’re doing this stuff, and you’re grow, grow, grow. Then you hit the point where it’s like, “Oh, no. The database is about to fall over.” Unfortunately, it was a fire drill and it was all hands on deck. We pulled people off features, we go and upgrade the database. We do a lot of stuff. It bought us about 4–6 months more. That’s not sustainable. You don’t want to grow a business long-term over that. About the time you’re at $1 million or 20 employees, it’s too much. It’s too jarring and you needed a better process.
But when you’re as early, as scrappy, and as agile as you are, and you’re just trying to get to default alive or you have enough money to basically buy out your own time, I think you just have to. That’s how you have to operate.
Mike: Yeah. I would love to have that off out of the back of my head. For now, I’m kicking it down the road even more.
Rob: Yup. I think when you get there, it would be amazing if you could hire someone to do it. If you could bring in high-end senior engineer, you just bite the bullet, and eat some money. You show him what it is, you say it needed to go from there to there, you write up the spec to tell him exactly how you’re going to do it, and again, it’ll cost you. It’s not a $10 an hour developer.
Mike: Yeah. I hate to interrupt you at that one. I don’t know if I could outsource that. The reason is because there’s a lot of domain knowledge that I acquired based on just having written different prototypes and doing different things that I think would be difficult for somebody else to have or acquire. I’m not saying they couldn’t come up with a plan that I could interject and say, “Hey, if you do it this way, these things are going to break.” I don’t know.
Rob: Yeah, I hear you. Said every developer ever, Mike. This is really hard to do. I know you have domain knowledge. I know it’s not easy. I just think it’s possible and something you should consider.
This is the same thing that I think we both thought about MicroConf, that we brought Zander on. I thought that about marketing before I met people who are way better in marketing than I was. I was like, “I’m the only one that knows how to market this product. All the copies are my own.” Then I’d meet someone and I’m like, “Well, they’re better at this.”
It’s not cut and dry. I don’t really think we should go down this road right now, but it’s something I just know that it’s going to derail you for probably a month if I were to guess. Maybe longer. If you’re going full speed with marketing and sales, and you really are landing customers and growing, it would be a shame for you to have just put the brakes on that and switch over.
Mike: The fortunate thing is I think the way things are, I think you’re right. I think there’s definitely ways for me to make that work. One of which is if I hand it over to somebody, the interesting thing in Bluetick is I have a flag in the database that says, “What version of the backend storage extension are you using? If it’s version one, use this code. If it’s version two, use this code.” I could switch on an individual mailbox level. I could just use my mailboxes like a test, switch it over, and then upgrade it.
If things are working great, I could roll it out slowly to other customers as opposed to doing everything all at once. That’s what the real kicker. It’s a critical core […]. I can do it individually. It took a while to get to that point.
Rob: I think that’s the way you do it. That’s the speed bump way of doing it versus the […] way. Cool. That’s good.
Someone wrote in and made a comment. They asked if you ever took the Enneagram? I sent you, just for the record, I went, and paid $12. I said, “Merry Christmas,” and sent you an email with the link. I’m curious if you took it.
Mike: Yeah. I saw that email and I’m like, “You bastard.” I have no way out of it.
Rob: Because you gave me crap the last time. I was like, “Look. I’ll pay for it Mike. Just take and bust chops, right?” and you’re like, “Oh. No, you won’t.” I was like, “Can I pay for this in advance?” This is the best.
Mike: Yeah, I saw that. I did spent the time. I went through and took it. It was interesting. It was definitely better than the previous time I took it where everything came out even. This time, it gave me a spread of the different types. One that came to the top with a score of 22 was Type 6, the loyalist. Then the next one, both of them was the score of 20, it was Type 9, the peacemaker and Type 1, the reformer.
I read through it. I actually thought it was interesting enough that I printed it out, and I’m going back through it and highlight different things. I felt like after reading through the results and the description of the things, I felt like it was pretty dead on.
Rob: That’s cool. What is a key motivation? You’re like a 6 with 9 or 6 with, what was the third one you said?
Mike: 6 with 9 and 1.
Rob: Yeah. I’m looking through this description. If you’re on a computer, you can just Google Enneagram Type 6 with Type 9 and it will give you a combined thing, like loyalist and peacemaker. Some 6s and 9s find it difficult to say what is actually on their minds. There is a great tendency in this relationship to clam up, to be silently stubborn, defensive, and to make the other person guess what’s going on.
The thing I like about the Enneagram is there’s some positive but they definitely talk about blindspots a lot. Potential trip spots or issues. It can callout things that I think it’s that know yourself and try to figure out how to be better for it. If you think it’s pretty accurate, are there things that you’re going to do or have started doing that you think can help overcome some of these?
Mike: That’s what I was looking at. That’s why I printed it out and I was going back through it. The printout of the results for me was about 20 pages. It’s because there’s the top level one, then there’s two that are tied for second.
Rob: Yeah. That makes it complicated.
Mike: It does make it a little bit more complicated. Then things dropped off after these top three. I have to go through it a little bit more. I plan on highlighting different things that stick out to me, that they resonate really well with me. I just haven’t done that yet.
Rob: Yeah, that’s cool. Do that because I’m curious. The whole point of this was when I took it, some people on a leadership team that I’m on took it, it really dead point out that some of them, they were a couple threes. That’s the achiever, the success-oriented, pragmatic type, driven, images-conscious, their motivation is to achieve. They’re probably never going to stop wanting to achieve. Whether it’s nature or nurture or it’s something their parents said or did to them when they were kids or whether it’s just genetics, that’s what they want.
It was interesting to work with them because I kind of don’t care about that. I don’t need to make a dent in the universe. My thing was creating, building, and doing interesting things. I can’t remember. I was trying to look through, find what my number is. I don’t have the report. My memory’s mind was like a creator. It was a creative type. You’re motivated by creating things, putting them into the world, and having people using them.
Of course, there’s a bunch of negatives to that, too. You can bee too introverted. I don’t know. There’s stuff. All that to say, that was once again a confirmation, it helped me know myself a little more like, “Yeah, that’s right. I do need to be creating things.” I am most excited when I am creating new things rather than taking a company from $5–$50 million. In my opinion, not creating very much. That tends to be the place I really get bored with it, so it’s good for me to know that.
Running things for the long term, building processes, and have them on a scale, I’m going to do the same thing for 5 or 10 years. I can exist in an org like that but I need to be a person that’s creating things. That was the whole point of, “Hey, have you thought about taking it? So you can learn a little bit more about what motivates you.” Really, the motivation you talked about was flexibility. You’re like, “I want the flexibility that entrepreneurship offers.” I’m concerned that that’s just not enough motivation to keep you going when times get really tough and when sleep gets hard.
Mike: Yeah. I think what I like the most about the Enneagram was that it talked about different levels of the personality types. Within the levels, it’s essentially how healthy you are as a person within that level. They say, “If you’re unhealthy, you could turn into this other personality type at this level.” Or, “If you’re healthy, you can turn into this other personality type at a certain level.” I thought that that was the most interesting piece to me.
Like I said, when I was reading through some of these things, it was shocking to me how dead on it was. I’ll read a very little excerpt here from the personality Type 6 where it says, “Sixes do their best to be solid and responsible, but they are often troubled by an undercurrent of doubt and anxiety. In fact, sixes often seem a bit jittery and uneasy in general. They live in a state of worry then find something to worry about.” I’m like, “Yeah, I kind of do that sometimes.”
Like I said, some things just jumped out of me. It’s like that totally describes me. Then there were other ones like, “Yeah. That’s not really me.”
Rob: Yeah, cool. I’m glad you did that. I hope you’ll look through it. Maybe come back through their findings in terms of things that you think might motivate you.
That kind of wraps us up for today. I think the one question that I would like to find out is your high and your low over the past six weeks. Your high sound like the fact that it’s growth. The cold outreach is working. What’s been the lowest point for you, where you felt most discouraged, the biggest loss or whatever?
Mike: I think that implementing the client site. Some of the client-side features that I was working on before which I finished probably shortly after our call was just the trouble I was having with reorganizing the navigation to help better support some of the multi-user functions that I’m adding. That was just a real nightmare. It sucks.
Rob: Discouraging and that was what you touched on last month as you were doing it.
Mike: Yeah, there was that. I think there was one feature that I wanted to get to this other feature to implement. It ended up taking longer to finish the client-side navigation changes. I implemented this feature that allows customers to skip sending emails on public holidays. Christmas, for example. There’s a toggle in there that just says, “Don’t send these emails during the holidays,” and that happens to be one of them. It’s shocking how simple that code was to write on the back-end, but it just took way longer than I wanted it to to get into the product. It didn’t get in until after Christmas, which I really wanted to get in there beforehand, but it is what it is.
Rob: Cool, man. Thanks again for coming back. We’ll circle up with you here in the next month or two.
Mike: Sounds good.
Rob: All right, take it easy.
Mike: All right, bye.
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It’s been about six weeks since we last spoke. Frankly, the last update was a little disappointing. Mike was not moving forward with the marketing things that I had encouraged him to do in October, November. He was kind of stuck and his motivation was not at an all time high. He’s definitely having a down month.
I appreciated the conversation this week. I think you’ll enjoy it. Things are definitely starting to tick up from Mike as I talk about in our conversation. The roller coaster metaphor (as completely cliche as it is) really matches up with our conversations. It’s 1–2 months, it tends to be about six weeks. You’ll just hear some episodes he’s crushing it and moving forward, in other episodes he’s not and his motivation’s low.
This week, he’s no different, but I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation. This is one that left me feeling a little better about things. My hope is that our conversations after this carries through. I think that’s something that Mike really needs and has really struggled with over the years—his momentum. He’ll have these good months—one, two, three months. But then, he hits this roadblock and can’t get past it. It really trips him up and stops momentum.
When you’re building a startup, as a founder, momentum is just so important. It’s important for your team. It’s important for your morale. It’s important just to stay sane while you’re trying to push this boulder up the hill once you get that momentum. It’s a lot easier to keep it going.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about. Mike Taber was essentially a former weekly co-host of Startups for the Rest of Us for about the first 450 episodes. He took a step back to focus on his startup, Bluetick, which is warm and cold email engagement. I enjoy these conversations because I think they’re valuable for you as a listener, to hear someone going through struggles, to hear them have to persevere as a founder, not have as much success as they’re trying to get. It is becoming more and more of me helping him think through things.
I think and hope I could give him some clarity so that he knows what he’s doing over the next four to six weeks. I try to cheer him on but also give him some tough love and accountability of, “You should have done that.” It’s not directly every episode an accountability session, but it definitely is a longitudinal look at a founder. I think we started these eight or nine months ago now, so it’s interesting. I’ve listened back to two or three episodes at a time to try to make sure I ask the right questions on the next one. It’s going to make a fascinating case study (I think) if we stitched this out over an extended period of time.
Mike has not committed to doing that over an extended period of time. I think it depends on a lot of factors, but it’s definitely becoming an interesting story (I think) that each of us can dip into every once in a while. He’s quite being open and honest. I’ll vouch for him that offline before and after, he and I had just a few minutes of conversation. It really isn’t other stuff going on that he’s not talking about both good and bad. There’s always some stuff in the works that’s a little early that we don’t touch on.
Really, this is what’s happening with him. I don’t have this big prepped conversation where we picked out the good or bad or whatever. He’s being an open book and I really appreciate that about Mike. I think it helps him think things through and keep moving forward. I also think that it helps all of us to follow someone’s story, to hear the struggles, and to hear how he’s pushing himself to make it through those. With that, let’s hear an update from Mike Taber on what he’s been up to on Bluetick.
Mikey T, how’s it going, man?
Mike: It’s going well. How are you?
Rob: Doing all right. Just wrapped up the State of Independent SaaS report and did my first livestream ever yesterday. I will just say it was really nerve-wracking. It was a 30 minute essentially with producers. Sander was there, of course, doing stuff, then there was a video guy that had the lower third. It felt like a cable access, new show or something. It was very intense. There were cameras, lights, and all that stuff. Fun, exhilarating, but completely adrenaline-filled and exhausting, just sitting and talking for 30 minutes. It was fun.
How about you? What have you been up to for the last six weeks since we talked?
Mike: Lots of stuff going on. I’m sure we’ll cover the vast majority over the next 30–40 minutes or so.
Rob: I’m excited to get into it. After the last episode, I did receive some feedback. There’s some comments on the website startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-475-a-bluetick-update-from-mike-taber. You can read those in there. There were mixed comments. Some people were really down on the fact that you hadn’t started the cold email outreach, the podcast tour, email outreach, or I guess it just started but there were no results. Other people were like, “Hang in there, Mike. Don’t let these things drag on forever. We’re rooting for you.”
My hope today is to dig into some of that stuff. I did listen back to some of our older conversations over the past. It’s been six or eight months now since we’ve been doing this kind of format. We retouch base every four to six weeks. The Google Audit stuff started a long time ago. That sealed .NET component has hung around in a very long time.
I think that’s the thing I want to look at today. I mentioned this a little bit last episode. I want to figure out how we can have things hang around for shorter amounts of time. We talked about them for months on hand. It feels like you’re not making progress on those fronts even though you might be on to some.
Before we were recording, my memory was, your big wins over the past six months have really been getting the Google Audit done and wrapped. Am I correct that that’s completely done? You haven’t had to spend any time on that?
Mike: Yes it is.
Rob: Cool, that’s good. Then, the other thing is something that we talked about last conversation where you said a new larger customer has signed up. I think it’s your biggest customer, actually. You were building some features, trying to keep them onboard. How has that gone since then over the past six weeks?
Mike: That customer is using the product. So far, it seems to be working well. I’d like to obviously see more of their users a little bit more actively engaged, but it’s kind of an ongoing process. So far, things are working out as far as I can tell. In terms of generally held, Bluetick is going well. Revenue is up in November, December, and it looks like it’ll be up in January as well. That’s a good sign, I guess. We’ll see how things go. I don’t know. It’s hard to put it in words as to not where things are at, but expectations do not always align with reality.
Rob: Sure. Even if you look back over the past three months, you’re saying revenues ticked up each month, which has not been the case a couple years prior to that. It’s been stagnant. It had been stagnant or slow the client from time to time. Can you give us any idea of scale? Probably without mentioning exact dollar amounts. When you say revenues up, is it up a few percentage points? Is it up pretty dramatically over that time period?
Mike: Over the past couple of months, I have to say it’s up maybe 30% or 40%, something like that. Maybe 50%.
Rob: Okay. How are you feeling about that?
Mike: I’m feeling good but it’s still short of where I would like. Revenue’s always going to be short of where you would like it to be. I feel really good about where things are headed. I spent a lot of time over a holiday break thinking about different things. You’ve mentioned how there were a couple of large things that were hanging over my head or Bluetick’s head in terms of where the product is at. It’s just not getting certain things done like Google Audit, for example. I made it a concerted effort to fully finish some of the things that I started now.
If I worked on the Google Audit, for example, my goal was to finish it, put a line in the sand, and say, “Look, even though there’s other things going on that are important, it needed to be paid attention to, I can’t just do 80% of this or 60% of it, then let it drop, and then move on to something else.” I need to take it all the way to the finish line as opposed to letting other things that maybe just as important to distract me. I’ve been making more of an effort to take things all the way to the finish line.
Rob: Yeah. I think that’s good to know about yourself. I have seen that in you for sure, the tendency to bounce from one thing to the next, to have that stuff that you do talk about for six months on podcast interview, and they feel like they hang around. There’s certainly a mental weight on your psyche if not in completely most things.
Mike: Yeah. That’s what I recognized, just the mental weight of those things. If there’s a couple of them, they start to stack up even though I’m bouncing back and forth between some of those things. I may be making progress on them, it doesn’t mean that they’re gone and out of the way. They still weigh on my mind. I think about them and there are times where I really shouldn’t be. It’s very distracting.
I got to a point where I made a list of distractions and said, “Look, I’m going to make an active decision to not pursue these things.” These are known distractions I basically written down. It’s like those shiny object syndrome for entrepreneurial ADD like, “Look. Recognize that these things are there, but I’ve made the decision to not go on this direction, and just walk away.”
Rob: Yeah. A really hard part about entrepreneurship is knowing what to work on next and try to prioritize. When you don’t have a boss, a lot of us came up through grammar school, high school, and college. Then you get through a job. Everyone’s telling you what to do. “Do this project.” “Do these worksheets.” “Write this code.” “Build this thing.”
Then, you’re a founder. It’s like, “I have 100 things I could work on. What do I do next?” It’s very, very hard to get used to. I think what you’re doing—locking it down and saying, “Whatever I decide to work on, I’m going to be deliberate about it. I’m going to see that through until it’s done.”—is a very strong way to do it.
A second topic are the distractions that then try to pull you away from those things. I’m curious to hear, you said you made a list of them. Is it stuff that we would expect like Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, audio books? Or was it other stuff?
Mike: It’s a combination of things. It’s stuff like that. It’s also things within the product where it’s like, “Look, this feels important but it actually doesn’t matter.” For example, there are certain new features that are on the list of things to do where I don’t feel that the features would be nice to have, but they’re not going to be things that drive revenue in any way, shape, or form. They would make the product better, but it’s not going to do anything for me, so don’t spend time on those things because that time could be better spent doing marketing, sales, demos and things like that.
Rob: Yeah. You’ve gone even a layer deeper. It’s not the superficial distractions of the world. You’re literally thinking, “Within my business, I have distractions that are so tantalizing,” like the siren song of, “We’re builders. We’re developers.” The siren song of building that next feature is always calling. We can always justify that our product isn’t as far along as it needs to be. That’s cool then.
You have two marketing efforts we talked about last time that you hadn’t started in mid-December. I’ll say I was disappointed or busting your chops. I really wished you had started these because I want you to get moving faster. The first one is this kind of warm/cold email where you’re sending it out, you have LinkedIn connections, Bluetick cancellations, other sales leads and all that stuff. I believed I have a quote in the dock. “It will definitely get kicked off by then,” because I said, “Do you think they will get kicked off by our next call?” You want to update us on that and what the status is?
Mike: Yes. I have started on that. Like I said, I was fortunate. I don’t know who I told this to and haven’t. I don’t remember if I messed this on the podcast last time, but I was fortunate enough to export my LinkedIn contacts before LinkedIn basically eliminated the ability to take the email addresses with them. I have all these email addresses. What I did is I went through, prioritize them, and said, “Who do I want to reach out to first? Who do I think is going to be either a contact who might be interested in purchasing Bluetick, or who would be interested in a position to either refer me to somebody else, or just give me direct feedback on a product and tell me whether or not it would be applicable in their business?”
Part of this was the discovery effort. Obviously, people that I’m connected to on LinkedIn are going to be more likely to respond to my emails. Even if I’m just saying, “Hey, can you take a look at this? Let me know whether it would be useful in your business or not? If so, I’d love to give you demo and try to get you onboarded as a customer. If not, I still want to have that conversation because I want to know why. Why would this product not be a good fit for your business?”
And use those essentially as votes. An affirmation of things I already believe or potentially new information about where Bluetick does fit in different businesses and where it doesn’t. Even if I hear something that I intuitively know or have already thought of before, I don’t care. It’s still a vote in that direction that is external. I can sit in my office all day long and think about these things. But getting those external votes to say X, Y, or Z, that’s important because it means that it’s more objective than me sitting there than looking at it and thinking about it.
I have kicked those off. My response rate is upwards of 50%. So far, I have been having tons of meetings going through every single one of them just writing down notes. I’ve got at least a page of notes if not two for every single person I’ve talked to and have a demo with. I’ve had a couple of calls that have gone like in an hour and a half, two hours before. I’m getting a lot of responses from them. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to keep up with them to be frank about it. I still have to keep going through those. I actually backed off and turned it off just so I could catch up a little bit but I’ve turned it back on and started sending those emails back out.
Rob: Yeah. The high response rate was because they’re warm, right?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: They have some connection to you. You said that it was like a personal email list, LinkedIn connections, and sales leads that never converted. That’s cool. That’s a nice resource to have. Are any of these converting to sales or trials? Or are they conversations? Are they all rejections that you’re then essentially doing customer development with?
Mike: Surprisingly—maybe not surprisingly—some of them have actually turned into customers. That’s probably part of the uptick and revenue for this month. I think the tactic I’ve taken with some of these were like the person is in a sales role. I say, “Look, I’m going to show you the product. I’m not going to tell you what it’s used for. I’m just going to show you what the features and functionality are. I want you to tell me what you would use it for.” In that way, I’m not leading the witness.
I’ve found that the people who are in the sales positions, I don’t want to say that it resonates with them as a sales tactic, but it really helps me because then they’re not being lead by me in terms of the things that I’m telling them they could be used for. They’re coming to me within their own words with what they would use it for. Yeah, some of those have definitely turned into sales.
I have one person who said, “Yeah. I would use it for this. I would use it for this. I’d use it for this. These couple of other things.” We talked about getting on and have them starting on a trial. Even offered me to introduce the product and do a demo for a couple of sales managers at their company where they’ve got I think 60 or 70 sales reps, something like that.
The thought was, “Hey. I can put you in front of these people because we’ve known each other. I trust that this is a decent product and does what you say it does.” I held back on that a little bit just because adding that many all at once is a little disconcerting, I’ll say, but I also want to be able to put him in a position where he’s using the product himself personally for his sales outreach efforts. Then, when they have an internal meeting, it’s not just, “Oh hey, my friend developed this and I think that you guys should use it,” but he can say, “I’m using it for these situations and these are the results. It’s working for that.”
Rob: Yeah, got it. It sounds like this has been going well. Is this a win? Is this the high of the last month, you think?
Mike: Oh, totally. I have one customer who’s onboard right now. Their billing just went through a couple of days ago. They’re in an organization where there’s either 10 sales reps and the manager of that person is looking at Bluetick directly and saying, “I want to see what the results are from this. I’m interested because the rest of the team might be able to use it, too.”
My previous thought have been, if I can get more into these situations where the multiuser counts are providing value, then obviously the revenue will follow from that. It looks like that is probably the right direction to go. I’m still having a lot of these conversations. I just want to see any of these direct outreach efforts. Any little bit helps, to be honest.
Rob: I would agree. I’m stoked to hear that you’re getting response rates up to 50% because that’s really nice. It sounds like you’re learning a ton, which is really nice, and you’re getting some prospects and potential customers, which I think is good. This is forward progress. It is more forward progress than you’ve had in the past several months. Bravo to that and glad that it’s working out. For me, it’s motivating to hear.
Does this motivate you? I know you’ve said there’s been a lot of conversations, but does this gear you up like, “Oh man, this is working,” like, “This is exciting”?
Mike: It does, yeah. I implemented a pause feature several months ago where customers, instead of cancelling, they can pause their accounts for a nominal fee on a monthly basis. I don’t know if I mentioned this about this part of the Google Audit. They’re really cagey about if you cancel a customer’s account and you keep their data around because Google says that it’s their data, not yours and the customers.
What I did was I said, “Well, in order to bypass that, I’ll implement this feature where you can pause your account,” at which point you’re technically still a customer of mine. I don’t need to delete your data. Four to five people who would cancel over the recent time period, switched over, and said, “Yeah. I’d like to pause my account.”
This week I have one of them came back. I had a call with them later this afternoon. Then another customer from a couple of years ago have come back as well. Yeah, that’s growth. You’re right. To answer your question directly, it is motivating to see this kind of stuff come through. Part of it is a mindset shift for some of the conclusions I came through over the holiday break. Some of it is just seeing quantifiable results from the things that I”m doing.
Rob: Yeah. You’re doing things in public again. You’re not just dealing with Google Audit and building some features. You’re out there and you’re taking risks by sending warm/cold email. You’re having conversations with customers, which can be a lot of work. It can be scary, you can get negative feedback, but you’re doing it and it’s working to at least some degree. I don’t know, I’m pretty excited about that.
Does coming on this show and recording this every month or two make you feel accountable to something? Do you ever think, “Man, I need to make some progress so that Rob does not bust my chops”?
Mike: You know that’s a really interesting question. I feel like before when I was on every week, not as much. If that makes sense. I feel like coming on less frequently, I feel like I should hold myself more accountable because I come on less frequently. If that makes sense.
Rob: Yeah. It’s easy when we’re here every seven days, it’s like how much can I get done, and talk about during that time? You’re always thinking, “Well, I got to talk about something,” but you can let yourself off the hook. So, good. That makes sense.
That was an aside, but I was thinking about that and listening to the last episode. I had said, “Hey, I’m going to ask you about this next time.” It truly was an accountability and has been. I’ve been trying to do that, so it’s good to hear it. So, cool. We’ll call that a win. I’ll obviously going to ask it again next time. It sounds like it’s working. Keep doing it, man. I’m totally rooting for you on that.
Then there’s the emails for podcast tour or to just go on podcast and those had started sending already. I believe you said you might’ve had one response or whatever. How’s all that going?
Mike: I scale that back a little bit because of the LinkedIn prospect that I was doing. I am starting to ramp that back up again. I’ve got a call next week with somebody. We’ll see what the schedule shakes out with. There’s a couple of others that I’m trying to figure out where on the schedule we can get together just because we’ve exchange calendars, go back and forth and stuff. That seems to be moving forward as well, but my list for that is much shorter as well. I don’t have 900 of them.
Rob: Yeah. If I were to choose between going on podcast and talking to customer prospects, guess which one I would do? It’s what you’re doing if one of those has to be scaled back. A podcast tour is a nice thing to do. I do feel like you could probably get it going at some point. As I said earlier, that’s not going to drive a bunch of customers. What’ll drive a bunch of customers is cold outreach, warm outreach, marketing funnels, and all the things we know about. I don’t have much of an issue with that.
I’m curious. I’m meant to ask when you were saying that some of the folks you’re talking to are interested. They’re either coming back on or they’re signing up. Why Bluetick? In their words. We’ve talked a lot about differentiation. I kept saying you either need a unique marketing channel. You need to rank number one in Google or you need to rank number one in some type of channel where you are capturing the customers.
Or you need to have this pretty unique selling proposition or a unique feature or some unique positioning when someone looks at your other nine or 109 competitors filling the space you’re in, that they say, “Wow, Bluetick is best at this and this is my need.” How do you differentiate? I’m curious what has come out of these conversations, if anything, that makes you think, “This is exactly why they’re signing up for Bluetick and not the other tools.”
Mike: I haven’t teased out some of the specifics of that. I’ve got some ideas. When people switch from other tools to Bluetick, most of the time it’s because they run into a problem that those tools aren’t very good at. Whether they can only have contact in one sequence at a time, or they’re missing emails because it relies on the Gmail API and it’s not checking the spam folder, or the notifications and stuff don’t get triggered.
I have direct access to the mailbox, so every email that comes in, I can process it versus years in Gmail API. You’re very dependent upon their scheduling on all of those things. Whereas Bluetick, it checks the mailbox every 10 minutes. And longer term, I have other plans to make that even faster, and reduce the process in time on my site.
That’s one of those things where I actively decided it’s good enough for now. It doesn’t need to be that good. Every 10 minutes is fine. There’s other ones out there, they take upwards an hour, or 6, or 12 hours. They get by, so what difference does it make? I’m already faster than that. It doesn’t make a difference.
I think one of the other things is that the workflow itself inside Bluetick, it’s weird because some people say it makes complete sense. Some people say, “I don’t understand this at all. I’d rather go use these other tools that work on the same way.”
Rob: Okay. I wonder long-term—I don’t think we’ve dived into this now—you’re saying you check more often. Is that right? Your data is more up-to-date or fresh? That’s a feature, not a benefit. I’m thinking, what’s the next thing on top of that? Is it like your data is always synced? Unlike other tools, you’re near real time acts. There’s a way to position it where Bluetick is the real neartime version that’s always accurate and everything you just listed. I don’t even remember. You were saying spam, trash, and folders. How does all that get combined into one or two bullets that are true benefits?
Mike: The benefit of it is if Bluetick sees the email, like a reply, it will pull the person out of the sequence. If there’s a delay, let’s say that there’s a four hour delay for some other tool, a reply can come in within that four hours. If the tool doesn’t see it, it can send out a follow-up. What happens is you receive an email that says, “Hey, you sent somebody an email replying to something.” Then they come back with an email and it says, “Hey. I haven’t heard back from you.” I’m just like, “I literally just sent you an email an hour or two ago. Why are you saying that you didn’t see it and that you haven’t heard back from me?” That’s the situation that you go in every 10 minutes […]
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s something we can look at and talk through in future episodes as you get more data. Something I wanted to touch on is the last episode, I asked about your motivation. I said, “How’s your motivation over the past six weeks?” You said, “It’s okay.” You said, “Sleep was fine but not great.” Then you started talking about front-end code. That’s what you launched into something like, “I get discouraged when I do that. Should I hire someone part time? I threw that out.” Has that come up again?
I get the feeling that if you get demotivated by thinking about front-end code, it takes a bunch of time. That’s something you naturally shy away from like a hot stove, even if it’s only your lizard brain and you’re not actively thinking or realizing that you’re shying away from that. Has that been an issue or are you so much in sales and marketing mode that it doesn’t matter because you’re really not building features right now?
Mike: I think it matters more when I run into problems with the front-end code. I’m struggling to get some of the CSS right or some of the pages to show up in a way that I want. I’ve kind of coached myself to be less anxious or particular about some of that stuff. It’s like, “This doesn’t look perfect but you know what? It works.” The interesting thing I also realized was that Bluetick works really well for the people who use it in the way that it’s supposed to be, which means that you’re not logging in into it very much, which is a really bizarre way to position your SaaS app.
Most of the time I think you want people to log into your app and use it as much as possible because you’re getting the most value out of it. Bluetick is actually the opposite where the less you login, the more value it could provide you because you got things automated and setup to run into the background. If something doesn’t look quite right or if there’s a dropdown that’s slightly on the wrong spot, it actually probably doesn’t matter nearly as much as I use to feel like it does.
As long as the data that you need shows up in the UI, that’s one of those that I kind of backed off and said that this doesn’t really matter as much. I agree there’s probably some of that that is influenced by the fact that I’m doing much more of the sales and marketing. Just showing the products to people and saying, “This is what it can do,” and less front-end development.
Rob: Right, cool. Other than that, how was your overall motivation? I think sleep ties into that. How was your sleep and your motivation? You sound up. You sound up to me. Last time, you didn’t. You sounded down. This is the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. That’s the beauty of doing this every month and two for months. Presumably, if you do these for years, you just see the ups and downs, and the ups and downs. Has that been reflected over the past six weeks? Or is it just the last week or few days that you felt that?
Mike: I felt really good for the past couple of weeks. Part of it could be just the result of getting past some of that front-end code. I had to redesign the UI. I put all the navigation at the top of the page. That was probably part of where my frustrations last time where coming from. I had to move everything and at the same time, not break all the code that was currently in place for it. It wasn’t quite as simple as I would’ve liked to move the navigation. Now that it’s done, I even enjoy going into the app more myself just because the navigation has been moved to the top. It’s easier to get around and less clicks to do different things. I definitely feel like that factors into it. Obviously, increasing MRR also helps. There’s that.
Rob: That’s a huge motivator and when things are going up in another right, you can put up with a lot of other stuff. That’s the mental battle.
Next, I’m curious about the sealed untestable .NET component. I’m curious on a couple of fronts because when I listen to backdoor conversations, we’ve gotten back and forth. I’ve been like, you should either do this and get it done. Don’t let it hang around. Either decide not to do it or decide to do it and do it soon. It sounds like it keeps you from building features that you need.
Then when I hear this update today where it’s like, “No, you’re selling. You’ve grown MRR substantially.” It makes me think, why are we even talking about this .NET component? Leave it and just keep going. Push it down the line. What’s your current thinking on it?
Mike: I feel the same way. I’ve gone back and forth on it a bunch of times. It’s like, “Do I really need to do that? Do I need to do it now?” The answer is, probably not. Do I want to because it’s technical debt that has been hanging over my head over for a while? It is distracting. I rather have it out of the way but at the same time it is a chunk of work to get done. It’s not stopping the product from doing what it does. I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer for you.
I think if I buckled down, just did it, knocked it out, and got it out of the way, I wouldn’t have to ever worry about it again. Or at least until other stuff happens. I do feel like I would probably have to address it in a semi near future if I’m starting to add in substantially larger accounts just because the back-end I don’t know.
I don’t know how far I can scale it up without adding more servers in which would mean that I need to reengineer how some of that stuff works. At that point, it would be a hornet’s nest to get into that code and start working with it, to try and separate it among multiple servers. I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer for you. I just don’t.
Rob: I don’t either, in this case. Given how limited you are, my bet is to leave it where it is, and sell. Revenue solves everything. In this case, profit really solves everything. In your case, just growing MRR, if you can keep doing that and focus 100% of your time on conversations, 100% of your time on selling, and grow another 50% over the next two months, technically that sucks. I hate it. It’s something you can circle back to.
I think the thing that I’m going to bust your chops about is when you get the point and you’re like, “I need to build these features in order to get these bigger customers on. I can’t because the sealed .NET component is keeping me from doing it. But I still don’t want to do it.” There’s going to come a time where you have to do this, I think. The technical debt is going to sink you, at least based on how you described it.
I think that’s in the bank of my mind of don’t worry about it until you need to. Once you do, buckle down and do it. In two or three weeks, it’s done. You know what I mean? Stop everything. That’s how performance used to go.
Like with Drip, you just don’t do much work on it because you’re cranking on features, you’re selling it, you’re marketing it, you’re doing this stuff, and you’re grow, grow, grow. Then you hit the point where it’s like, “Oh, no. The database is about to fall over.” Unfortunately, it was a fire drill and it was all hands on deck. We pulled people off features, we go and upgrade the database. We do a lot of stuff. It bought us about 4–6 months more. That’s not sustainable. You don’t want to grow a business long-term over that. About the time you’re at $1 million or 20 employees, it’s too much. It’s too jarring and you needed a better process.
But when you’re as early, as scrappy, and as agile as you are, and you’re just trying to get to default alive or you have enough money to basically buy out your own time, I think you just have to. That’s how you have to operate.
Mike: Yeah. I would love to have that off out of the back of my head. For now, I’m kicking it down the road even more.
Rob: Yup. I think when you get there, it would be amazing if you could hire someone to do it. If you could bring in high-end senior engineer, you just bite the bullet, and eat some money. You show him what it is, you say it needed to go from there to there, you write up the spec to tell him exactly how you’re going to do it, and again, it’ll cost you. It’s not a $10 an hour developer.
Mike: Yeah. I hate to interrupt you at that one. I don’t know if I could outsource that. The reason is because there’s a lot of domain knowledge that I acquired based on just having written different prototypes and doing different things that I think would be difficult for somebody else to have or acquire. I’m not saying they couldn’t come up with a plan that I could interject and say, “Hey, if you do it this way, these things are going to break.” I don’t know.
Rob: Yeah, I hear you. Said every developer ever, Mike. This is really hard to do. I know you have domain knowledge. I know it’s not easy. I just think it’s possible and something you should consider.
This is the same thing that I think we both thought about MicroConf, that we brought Zander on. I thought that about marketing before I met people who are way better in marketing than I was. I was like, “I’m the only one that knows how to market this product. All the copies are my own.” Then I’d meet someone and I’m like, “Well, they’re better at this.”
It’s not cut and dry. I don’t really think we should go down this road right now, but it’s something I just know that it’s going to derail you for probably a month if I were to guess. Maybe longer. If you’re going full speed with marketing and sales, and you really are landing customers and growing, it would be a shame for you to have just put the brakes on that and switch over.
Mike: The fortunate thing is I think the way things are, I think you’re right. I think there’s definitely ways for me to make that work. One of which is if I hand it over to somebody, the interesting thing in Bluetick is I have a flag in the database that says, “What version of the backend storage extension are you using? If it’s version one, use this code. If it’s version two, use this code.” I could switch on an individual mailbox level. I could just use my mailboxes like a test, switch it over, and then upgrade it.
If things are working great, I could roll it out slowly to other customers as opposed to doing everything all at once. That’s what the real kicker. It’s a critical core […]. I can do it individually. It took a while to get to that point.
Rob: I think that’s the way you do it. That’s the speed bump way of doing it versus the […] way. Cool. That’s good.
Someone wrote in and made a comment. They asked if you ever took the Enneagram? I sent you, just for the record, I went, and paid $12. I said, “Merry Christmas,” and sent you an email with the link. I’m curious if you took it.
Mike: Yeah. I saw that email and I’m like, “You bastard.” I have no way out of it.
Rob: Because you gave me crap the last time. I was like, “Look. I’ll pay for it Mike. Just take and bust chops, right?” and you’re like, “Oh. No, you won’t.” I was like, “Can I pay for this in advance?” This is the best.
Mike: Yeah, I saw that. I did spent the time. I went through and took it. It was interesting. It was definitely better than the previous time I took it where everything came out even. This time, it gave me a spread of the different types. One that came to the top with a score of 22 was Type 6, the loyalist. Then the next one, both of them was the score of 20, it was Type 9, the peacemaker and Type 1, the reformer.
I read through it. I actually thought it was interesting enough that I printed it out, and I’m going back through it and highlight different things. I felt like after reading through the results and the description of the things, I felt like it was pretty dead on.
Rob: That’s cool. What is a key motivation? You’re like a 6 with 9 or 6 with, what was the third one you said?
Mike: 6 with 9 and 1.
Rob: Yeah. I’m looking through this description. If you’re on a computer, you can just Google Enneagram Type 6 with Type 9 and it will give you a combined thing, like loyalist and peacemaker. Some 6s and 9s find it difficult to say what is actually on their minds. There is a great tendency in this relationship to clam up, to be silently stubborn, defensive, and to make the other person guess what’s going on.
The thing I like about the Enneagram is there’s some positive but they definitely talk about blindspots a lot. Potential trip spots or issues. It can callout things that I think it’s that know yourself and try to figure out how to be better for it. If you think it’s pretty accurate, are there things that you’re going to do or have started doing that you think can help overcome some of these?
Mike: That’s what I was looking at. That’s why I printed it out and I was going back through it. The printout of the results for me was about 20 pages. It’s because there’s the top level one, then there’s two that are tied for second.
Rob: Yeah. That makes it complicated.
Mike: It does make it a little bit more complicated. Then things dropped off after these top three. I have to go through it a little bit more. I plan on highlighting different things that stick out to me, that they resonate really well with me. I just haven’t done that yet.
Rob: Yeah, that’s cool. Do that because I’m curious. The whole point of this was when I took it, some people on a leadership team that I’m on took it, it really dead point out that some of them, they were a couple threes. That’s the achiever, the success-oriented, pragmatic type, driven, images-conscious, their motivation is to achieve. They’re probably never going to stop wanting to achieve. Whether it’s nature or nurture or it’s something their parents said or did to them when they were kids or whether it’s just genetics, that’s what they want.
It was interesting to work with them because I kind of don’t care about that. I don’t need to make a dent in the universe. My thing was creating, building, and doing interesting things. I can’t remember. I was trying to look through, find what my number is. I don’t have the report. My memory’s mind was like a creator. It was a creative type. You’re motivated by creating things, putting them into the world, and having people using them.
Of course, there’s a bunch of negatives to that, too. You can bee too introverted. I don’t know. There’s stuff. All that to say, that was once again a confirmation, it helped me know myself a little more like, “Yeah, that’s right. I do need to be creating things.” I am most excited when I am creating new things rather than taking a company from $5–$50 million. In my opinion, not creating very much. That tends to be the place I really get bored with it, so it’s good for me to know that.
Running things for the long term, building processes, and have them on a scale, I’m going to do the same thing for 5 or 10 years. I can exist in an org like that but I need to be a person that’s creating things. That was the whole point of, “Hey, have you thought about taking it? So you can learn a little bit more about what motivates you.” Really, the motivation you talked about was flexibility. You’re like, “I want the flexibility that entrepreneurship offers.” I’m concerned that that’s just not enough motivation to keep you going when times get really tough and when sleep gets hard.
Mike: Yeah. I think what I like the most about the Enneagram was that it talked about different levels of the personality types. Within the levels, it’s essentially how healthy you are as a person within that level. They say, “If you’re unhealthy, you could turn into this other personality type at this level.” Or, “If you’re healthy, you can turn into this other personality type at a certain level.” I thought that that was the most interesting piece to me.
Like I said, when I was reading through some of these things, it was shocking to me how dead on it was. I’ll read a very little excerpt here from the personality Type 6 where it says, “Sixes do their best to be solid and responsible, but they are often troubled by an undercurrent of doubt and anxiety. In fact, sixes often seem a bit jittery and uneasy in general. They live in a state of worry then find something to worry about.” I’m like, “Yeah, I kind of do that sometimes.”
Like I said, some things just jumped out of me. It’s like that totally describes me. Then there were other ones like, “Yeah. That’s not really me.”
Rob: Yeah, cool. I’m glad you did that. I hope you’ll look through it. Maybe come back through their findings in terms of things that you think might motivate you.
That kind of wraps us up for today. I think the one question that I would like to find out is your high and your low over the past six weeks. Your high sound like the fact that it’s growth. The cold outreach is working. What’s been the lowest point for you, where you felt most discouraged, the biggest loss or whatever?
Mike: I think that implementing the client site. Some of the client-side features that I was working on before which I finished probably shortly after our call was just the trouble I was having with reorganizing the navigation to help better support some of the multi-user functions that I’m adding. That was just a real nightmare. It sucks.
Rob: Discouraging and that was what you touched on last month as you were doing it.
Mike: Yeah, there was that. I think there was one feature that I wanted to get to this other feature to implement. It ended up taking longer to finish the client-side navigation changes. I implemented this feature that allows customers to skip sending emails on public holidays. Christmas, for example. There’s a toggle in there that just says, “Don’t send these emails during the holidays,” and that happens to be one of them. It’s shocking how simple that code was to write on the back-end, but it just took way longer than I wanted it to to get into the product. It didn’t get in until after Christmas, which I really wanted to get in there beforehand, but it is what it is.
Rob: Cool, man. Thanks again for coming back. We’ll circle up with you here in the next month or two.
Mike: Sounds good.
Rob: All right, take it easy.
Mike: All right, bye.
Rob: Thanks again to Mike for coming on the show. I always appreciate our conversations. If you have a question from Mike or for me or for prior guests or just in general, for the show, about startups, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690, or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
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Episode 470 | A Bluetick Update from Mike Taber
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob checks in with Mike Taber on his progress with Bluetick. They talk about the finale of the Google audit, a new integration. and trying to find differentiation in the market.
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Rob: In this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, I catch up with Mike Taber and get an update on his progress with Bluetick. This is Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 470.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth start up or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob and today with Mike Taber, we’re going to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to the show. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on the show, I cover topics related to building, growing startups in order to build yourself a better life and improve the world in some small way. We strive to be ambitious, but we’re not willing to sacrifice our life or health to grow our companies. We have many different show formats. We have some tactics and teaching. We have interviews, listener questions. Sometimes, we do founder hot seats and breaking news episodes. All kinds of things that just mix it up and the feedback I’ve gotten since the mix up 20, 25 episodes ago is that the people really like that and they almost like the unpredictability of it. I’ve been overwhelmingly told to keep going and keep doing what we’re doing.
Each month or so, about every four to six weeks, I catch up with Mike Taber. He’s still a regular guest on the show, but he only comes on every month or two to update us on what he’s been doing with his product, Bluetick, that he’s been struggling to get to the point of supporting him full-time. If you haven’t already heard episodes 448 and 458, I’d encourage you to go listen to those episodes because they do give you a background on really what we’re talking about, how I’m trying to help push Mike forward, and challenge some of his assumptions. Also, to get updates, just to hear what’s going on because I like to know what’s up with Mike and I’ve heard overwhelmingly that people want to as well. They want to know what’s going on with him.
Today’s episode is a fun one. I do push back on a few things that Mike has said and call him on why he hasn’t made more progress. Overall, it’s a positive episode and it’s fun to hear Mike rant about the Google audit and I think our editor even has to bleep him once or twice, which is unusual for Mike.
Before we dive in, I want to let you know that tiny TinySeed applications for batch two are now open. You can go to tinyseed.com, click the apply button. If you’re a bootstrap, SaaS app, or subscription software and you’re looking for mentorship and community in a small batch of motivated founders as well as $120,000 investment or more frankly, if you have a couple of founders, you should head over to TinySeed and see what we’re up to. We’re super bootstrapper-friendly and the idea is to raise the tide and to raise all the boats in this segment that is really an underserved group.
The venture capitalist has an agenda and it’s to go bigger or go home, it’s to be a unicorn or bust, and that’s not what we’re doing. Our thesis is that we can get a lot of folks who are wanting to build this $1–$20 million ARR, these life-changing SaaS apps, ambitious but not 90-hour weeks. We’re about halfway through our first batch of ten. This application process runs for the next couple of weeks and we’ll be doing another batch early next year. We’re getting that together. Good things have been happening there. tinyseed.com, if you’re interested. With that, let’s talk to Mike.
Mike, thanks for coming back on the show.
Mike: Hey, how is it going?
Rob: It’s pretty good, man. I was just counting the days. I think it’s been about five weeks, about right around 34–35 days since we last spoke. I know during that time you were out of town for five days with MicroConf Europe, but I’ve been getting feedback both at MicroConf Europe and then at a little founder retreat I went to earlier this week that folks do like following the story of what you’ve been up to, so I’m curious.
As usual, I have my list of stuff from last time that some stuff was up in the air and the threads that we’re following, so I look forward to hearing about it. I think the thread of the hour and the one that you’re basically spending 15 hours a week last time we spoke is this Google audit. You were a month into it and you thought it would be six more weeks’ worth of stuff. We’re essentially five weeks into that period so I’m fascinated to hear what that’s looked like over the past five weeks, where it’s at, are you wrapping up, that kind of stuff.
Mike: I guess for context of dates and timeline here, three weeks ago was MicroConf Europe. There was a Wednesday that I was basically either on a plane or over in Dubrovnik for MicroConf Europe. That spans a couple of weeks where, I don’t know about you, but a day or two before you travel, you really don’t get a whole lot done and then the day or two after is kind of the same thing so that basically makes it almost two full weeks right there.
My audit started last Monday and it was supposed to go from Monday to Monday, I believe. That process is finished. I’ve got a draft of the report and I’m going to go over it with them next week. I’ve got the letter of attestation or whatever it is, more like a letter of assessment. That’s already in my hands and I’ve sent that off to Google. Now, it’s a waiting game to see if Google just looks at it and says, “Yup, this is good. You’re all set for the next 12 months.” That’s the good news. The bad news is I’m super pissed about the whole thing.
Rob: Well, you have been the whole time. Are you more pissed now than you were the last two episodes? Has something more happened?
Mike: I’m way more pissed about it because basically they came back and said, “Yeah, everything looks fine. It’s pretty much it.” There was one thing they complained about and they’re like, “Yeah, you’re cryptography keys, the keys that you’re using to encrypt information, shouldn’t be on the same machine as all source code,” or not even a source code, but the actual application because before, I was compiling it directly into the application knowing that nobody else has access to that machine. You can’t get to it unless you break the machine open and hack into it, and then you’ve got access to the source code and everything else.
At that point, encrypting things really doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot and yeah, the data is on a different machine, but I’m well aware of all the security implications there. In the grand scheme of things, that’s a very, very small thing. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s an absolute no, no. You can’t do that.” I was like, “All right. Fine.” I spend a couple of days using Azure’s Key Vault, I think it’s called. Basically, now I’m storing the keys someplace else, but the client’s secret and stuff are still on that machine, so it’s like, “Okay, now I have to go to this other machine, pull back that information, and then encrypt it.” I have to do that every single time that I have to encrypt or decrypt information. I’m like, “This is just stupid.” It’s just like, “All right, whatever. I’ll do it,” because I have to. I have no other choice.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing. You can get hung up on it and be pissed about it, but then you got to move past it especially if Google approves this certificate of attestation, I think is what you said. I mean assuming that that goes through, you have 12 months and it’s time to get on your horse and get things moving.
I’m curious. Over the past five weeks, how much of your time was that was it? You expected it to maybe ramp up to like 20 hours a week, like half your time, and I’m curious if that amounted to that or what it looked like.
Mike: It wasn’t that much. I had to give them a whole ton of documentation. It wasn’t quite a dozen different documents of policies and procedures and stuff like that, but some of it was just I’ll say personally frustrating because they’re like, “Document what your secure coding procedures look like and how you educate other people who come onboard.” I’m like, “Well, there really isn’t anybody else that I have to educate about it because it’s just me.”
I distinctly remember looking at one of the questions and it was something along the lines of, “Please describe how you do pair programming for code reviews.” I wanted to laugh at it and I had to hold myself back from saying, “I wait 12 hours, sober up, and then look at the codes sober to figure out what it was that I was doing.” It’s just so frustrating to have to go through that stuff and answer completely stupid questions and provide documentation for things that I’m not going to look at and nobody else will.
Rob: I wish you would have put that drunk answer on there and just to see what they said.
Mike: Well, it ended up in the report, too. Not that, but some of the other things that I wrote, they asked me a couple of clarifying questions and literally word-for-word, the stuff that I put in there, it was word-for-word what I said was in the executive report.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I was joking, by the way, about the drunk comment. I’m glad you didn’t do that because that wouldn’t have gotten well. This feels like a win to me. I’m going to flip it on its head because I can tell you’re pissed and you have been for three months or more because the whole thing threatened your business itself.
When you got initial quotes or estimates, they were really high. Then you got lower quotes, then you negotiated, and then you got something that was reasonable enough for you to pay. Now, it sounds like your done and while it has killed some time, it didn’t kill as much time as you were projecting over the next six weeks. Right now, are you done? Do you have to make any more code changes to satisfy their recommendations?
Mike: As far as I know, no. I have the letter. I have to hand it off to Google. I believe, at that point, Google just takes it and says, “Okay. Yes, you’re approved.” And they toggle some switches on their side and they stop bugging me about all this stuff. My belief is that I’m done, but what pisses me off is how little they found and how big a deal Google made it out to be. They’re like, “We’re going to kill your business if you don’t do these things or you don’t go through this process and pay this large sum of money to this third party company to do a security audit.”
There’s no recourse there whatsoever. So, I go through the process and then when I get through it, I come back and I look at their end result of it and they’re like, “Oh yeah, you have to change this one minor thing here that’ll take you like a day or two.” Then, all the other documentation that I put together, which is a total waste of time because nobody else is ever going to look at any of it, it’s totally useless. It was a huge time sink for absolutely nothing. It didn’t benefit my customers. It doesn’t make the product any better. It doesn’t get more people using it. It literally does nothing other than allow me to stay in business. That’s the piece that’s so frustrating. That’s the part that really pisses me off and makes me angry at Google, for putting me through this when at the end of the day, you look at the report and they’re like, “Oh yeah, these one or two things.” It was almost completely unnecessary.
Rob: If you’re at home playing the Startups For the Rest of Us drinking game, you can know take your shot for Mike saying it was unnecessary and he’s angry at Google. Mike, I know. I totally get it. I think I want to say it again. I consider this a win because you’ve passed this. Six months ago, maybe more, you started talking about this and it was a big, big deal and you’re done. You made it through and it didn’t wreck the business. To me, it’s like the Bill Wolf quote, “Control what you can control and let the score take care of itself.” That’s where you are. You can be pissed. I get pissed all the time at stuff. You know me pretty well. I get mad pretty easily, but I try to let stuff go quickly and move on. You know what I mean?
I mean this could’ve been a complete and utter roadblock that decimated your business whether because you failed the audit, whether it’s because you couldn’t afford the audit, whether it’s because you refused to do the audit on principle. Any one of those would’ve wrecked the business and you turned it into a speed bump. You said, “What are my options here? I can pay for this thing. I can negotiate this thing. With my teeth clenched, I can just force my way through,” and that’s what you did. I think I know it’s a pain in the ass. I totally get it and I’m really surprised that we have not had to use the beep noise over any of your words so far this episode, but cheers to you, man. I am happy. I look ahead at Bluetick and now, it’s all about execution. It’s differentiation. It’s writing some code. It’s marketing. It’s getting more people in. That’s how I feel about it. I have the outside perspective. You’ve been mired in this for months. Does that resonate with you? Do you feel that way or do you feel like I’m being too optimistic silver lining?
Mike: You’re absolutely right. Everything that you just said is 100% correct, but Google still pisses me off right now. I’m not the type of person who gets upset easily. I’m not the person who you can just poke with a stick and suddenly, I just rear my claws and just go after you. I just don’t do that, but this has been dragging on for so long and I really feel like I’ve been put through the ringer for this for no good reason. I just can’t point anything justifiable. The problem is I know I have to go through it again next year.
Next year, it will be better because I’ve got all the documentation in place and yeah, the product will change, certain things are going to have to be updated here and there and that’s fine, but the fact that they went through this whole thing and they made it such a big deal, and they get to the end of it and there’s this report that shows, “Oh, we found three things.” One of which is not even on my servers. I’m like, “Okay, this is total […]. Complete and utter […]. You’re complaining about an SSL certificate that I put on a server that’s not even my server. Come on. That’d ridiculous.” I even told them that. I’m like, “I have no control over this.”
Rob: Yeah. I hear you about having to do it again in 12 months. My hope is that the fact that you already have an existing relationship with an auditor and that you have the same docs or depending on where you are in 12 months, maybe you’ll have hired a developer or a senior developer that could do parts of this for you so you don’t have to mire through it.
I realized that’s a tall order. You’d have to make a lot of progress between now and then, but I think in the back of my mind, in your shoes, you’ve seen how frustrating this is and how much it emotionally derails you. With me, with Drip, it was blacklists, there were support requests, it was cues being slow. There were these things that I had to find people to do because they slowly tore away at me and they made me hate my job.
As entrepreneurs, we can’t hate our job because we control them. If we’re not enjoying it, it’s to a certain extent, our fault. Now, in this case, it’s not. It’s not your fault that Google made you do that but you did then have the chance to say, “Well, I’m just going to shut the business down,” or, “I’m going to pivot away from Google,” or whatever, but you gritted it and made it through, which is in my opinion, what you should have done. But looking ahead 12 months, I’d be thinking how can I not let this be six weeks, eight weeks of me being mad next time? What types of things can I put in place to help with that?
Mike: The fact of the matter is, I think that in a year when this comes up again, it will be a lot less stressful because I will have had full visibility of all the things that are going on, and all the things that they’re looking out, and I will have already had one report to look at that says, “These are all the things that we looked at and be able to at least keep them in mind moving forward.” Up until I got a final report, even during the week of the audit, it was just super stressful because I wasn’t getting anything back from them and I was expecting a daily report or something along those lines that says, “Hey, we looked at this and this is a problem. You need to fix it. Here’s a high priority. Here’s a critical thing that you have to do.” Because that all those critical and high items had to be taken care of before they could issue this letter of assessment and I was getting nothing.
I asked them. I was like, “What’s going on here? I’m expecting something here and I haven’t heard anything.” They’re like, “Oh, we haven’t found anything so far.” But of course, there’s a lag time between the time that I sent them an email and then they get back to me. I think some of their penetration testing staff are in completely different time zones like halfway around the world, so it just makes that back-and-forth a lot harder to do because, (1) they don’t report directly to me, and (2) they’re in a completely different time zones. It just makes it a lot harder and a lot more stressful, but I don’t think that it’ll be nearly as bad next time.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree. Looking ahead, let’s talk about some other things that you had in the works, some of which were on hold or I think one of which was on hold due to a code freeze and then there were some other stuff that step through. Just to keep going on the thread.
You have an untestable sealed .NET component. Startups For the Rest of Us drinking game just gets so good when we go over this topic again. I want to go back and I think it had to have been six or eight months ago when you first mentioned of this thing. You said, “I’m going to replace this thing,” and you put it on hold due to the Google audit. Have you replaced it yet? Is this top priority? Where do we stand with this?
Mike: I just got the letter of assessment this morning. I was expecting it on Monday because they said that they were working on it, and then Tuesday came and nothing, Wednesday came and still nothing, and finally, I got it this morning. It was like one o’clock in the morning. Until then, it’s basically been on code freeze. So no, I haven’t touched that yet. Is it on deck? Yes, at some point. When exactly? I don’t really know.
I have to go through and look at where that really falls in the priority list because I feel like it’s a lower priority than a lot of the sales and marketing stuff that I have to do. I hate to say that this is or isn’t holding me back because I’m not really sure. I want to get it out of there. I don’t know how hard it is to be able to pull it out because it is pretty integrated into the core of my code and I’m going to have to change the storage mechanism.
I think I’m just going to have to make a judgment call at some point about do I just suck it up and leave it there even though I know that it’s the wrong decision? There are certain part of I think everybody’s application where it’s got words on it and you’re like, “This really needs to be rewritten or it needs to be refactored.” And you don’t do it because you know that you’re just kicking a hornet’s nest and it’s going to be terrible.
Rob: How long do you think it’s going to take you to get the new component in? I know you have to redo data and you have to remap stuff and namespaces. I get it. How long though? That’s the thing.
Mike: Just for me to migrate the data would probably take a week. That’s just the computers churning.
Rob: Yeah, so it’s a sizable thing, but you have decided that this is the right choice, right?
Mike: Yeah. That’s the thing. Assuming nothing goes wrong, it would take a week.
Rob: Sure. All right. It happened this morning and you’re not done with it yet, Mike? What have you been doing? No, I’m just kidding. Do you plan to start it? What is it? Thursday today so do you plan to start that tomorrow or Monday? Is that the next priority or you’re just saying I’m going to do this in a few months?
It’s tough. This one’s not so clear up to me. To me, in my head, it’s a bite the bullet type of thing where it’s overhead and I know it creates legacy, or cruft, or just hard code to work around. To me, I would bite the bullet and I would cover up two weeks and I would hammer this through. But I can also see an argument on the other side of this provides no value to your customers. On the flip side, it’s like, “I should be marketing, selling, and getting more people in before that.” I could see an argument either way. Again, I would probably make the product such that I feel more comfortable marketing and selling it, because I hate having crappy code. What’s your plan there?
Mike: The best thing that I can come up with is to plan to do it in about a month because that would put it in mid- to late-December, which I know there’s not going to be many people using Bluetick at the time and I’m probably not going to be fielding very many support requests. I’m probably not going to be launching very many new marketing or sales campaigns at the time. It’s a slow time where it would be a good time to sit down and bite the bullet and do that as opposed to now where people are still ramping up for the holiday season, doing email follow-ups, and trying to get deals and stuff. By the end of the year, it seems like my time is probably better spent doing that now and then plan for that slow period of biting the bullet.
Rob: Cool. That sounds good. We will connect with you again on that next time you come back. For our next topic, let’s talk about marketing. You obviously had the majority of your work weeks to be doing other things. You didn’t want to write code and the Google audit was taking some time. We talked about a marketing hire you were making. It was a contractor to do podcaster research and we had talked that through a little bit last time. Where does that stand?
Mike: Most of the stuff is already done and been sorted and prioritized. I got the information I need for all those things, so we’re basically waiting until the end of this audit to start queuing those up. Between today and tomorrow, the plan is to start queuing those up, start sending those emails out, and see if I can get onto a handful of other podcasts. I’ve already done one podcast interview. I actually did that last week. I’ve got another one that I was told by the podcast host that she’d love to have me on so it’s just a matter of reaching out to them and getting that set up as well. There’s no more roadblocks in the way of doing that so that’s get started ASAP at the moment.
Rob: It’s been five weeks. Why did it take that long? Why hasn’t that started two weeks ago?
Mike: Well, two weeks ago, I was in Europe. That’s why. Of the last five weeks, a good solid week-and-a-half to two weeks was spent in the middle of the audit and then there was another solid week or two that was basically over in Europe. I basically had maybe two weeks or so before MicroConf Europe get started on that. That was mostly the data aggregation and the actual work that was done behind the scenes.
Rob: Got it. Are you sending those emails through Bluetick?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: That’s cool.
Mike: Well, that’s the plan. I haven’t actually sent them out yet.
Rob: How did you get on the podcast then?
Mike: Oh, there’s a personal invitation. Somebody raised that to me.
Rob: Got it. Cool. That would be an ASAP thing then. You could get that going tomorrow literally or Monday. You just got to write some copy and get her in.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Cool.
Mike: That’s the plan for that.
Rob: Good. Looking forward to that. We already talked about that. I won’t go into it. Again, it drives a little bit of traffic. It’s more of a slow burn. It’s a one-time thing type of thing, but I think that it’s easy enough to do as long as it doesn’t take a bunch of time. I would probably be doing the same thing right now.
The other thing you were looking at was code emailing. It was really warm emailing. You said 900 email addresses from your LinkedIn connections. You had prior Bluetick cancellations, sales leads that never converted, that were in pipe drive, other stuff. You were going to bucket them and start warm emailing cold batches in the next week or two last time we talked. Talk to me the status on that.
Mike: I’ve got those all bucketed out and that’s another situation where I was holding off on actually doing it and pulling the trigger after this audit was done. That again is something else that got the green light at this point that I can start today or tomorrow.
Rob: That’s interesting. Why were you holding off on that? Because you knew you were going to pass the audit. That wasn’t a big question. I knew you were.
Mike: It was never a question of whether I would it pass it or not, it was a question of timing. There are two pieces of the audit itself. There was the technical piece where they say, “Hey, we’re going to beat on you servers for six days.” And then aside from that, there is all this policy documentation that I had to create. Anything that they saw that raised a red flag, I had to either change the policy itself, it’s not just text that I have to change, but it’s also I have to change how I do things.
For example, one of the things that they said was, “Oh, you have to enable multi factor authentication on everything including source control.” So I have to basically generate SSH keys and lock down all of my source controls, which means that I also have to generate API keys, then go into my build environment, and I have to change all that stuff, too. It’s not just a simple thing like changing some texts on a piece of paper that I hand to them. I actually have to go do those things as well. All of that stuff needed to be changed.
There was a bunch of other things that came up during the policy side of things where they said, “Hey, you need to change how you’re going about these things just in order to comply with the requirements.” Between that, I knew that I only had a week or two before I had to leave for Europe, and then immediately after that, I had to dive right into the technical side of the policy stuff.
What I didn’t want to do is start going out and start and try to schedule meetings, calls, and stuff with people. They were not going to be for a month-and-a-half because I didn’t necessarily know that earlier this week things were going to be done. For all I knew, they could come back and say, “Well, you’ve got these 25 vulnerabilities, and 17 of them are high or critical. You need to make code changes to do those.” I didn’t know that I was going to be done this week. For all I knew, it could’ve been another three to four weeks.
Rob: Yeah, but I think we talked last time and I had said cold email doesn’t just start converting overnight typically. Typically, you start it at trickle, you test some things, you tweak, you tweak, you tweak. It takes weeks to really start ramping it up. I had suggested, “Hey, you have this month or whatever,” I guess it was six weeks during the audit that was projected to be six weeks, “I would propose that you just start emailing 5 a day or 10 a week.” Just a very small trickle to start seeing something such that the volume of things wouldn’t have been like, “Oh my gosh, I have 50 calls.”
It wouldn’t have been so much, but just to start ironing those out because I bet if you start this on Monday, it’ll be a couple of weeks until it really starts getting going and now, you’re at a standing stop five weeks later. You know what I mean? Five weeks after our last call, you are at standing stop trying to get it going rather than having a little bit of momentum. That’s what I was more getting at. Why did you wait during the audit to get it going?
Mike: I think I agreed at the time and then realized that I just was not going to have time. Even if that started to turn into something, I wasn’t sure what the future would hold in terms of my timeline leading up to the week after MicroConf or two weeks afterwards. Like I said, for all I knew, it could’ve been another three or four of hard, heavy lifting in terms of code or code changes. I just didn’t know. That big blind spot is really what held me back there.
Rob: Okay. Next time, you should be good. You should be rolling on these things. Right now, cold email and the podcast tour, do you have any other marketing stuff that you’re going to be rolling out or are you going to be focusing on those two? I’m just talking over the next month. Let’s say we talk again in four or five weeks.
Mike: I do have one other thing that has finished up, which we haven’t really talked about. I just finished up an integration that I got approval for I think on Monday of this week. Now, if you go over to zapier.com and you search for bluetick.io, you’ll find it underneath the early access section. bluetick.io now officially has a Zapier integration that is no longer just buy and bite only.
Rob: Nice. Congrats man. That’s cool. Now, what’s funny is I have a note because I was going to cover that. The note says, “Mike is working on an integration that should be live at the end of this week.” I read that five weeks ago. Why did it take that extra month?
Mike: Because I had to email them and then there was a little bit of back and forth. They basically had to run it through their own testing and stuff like that. There was a bunch of things that needed to be changed both on my side and inside the Zap itself in order to get it live. It took a little bit longer to get finished than I thought it would or I hoped it would. And then I emailed them and said, “Hey, can you guys take another look at this.” When I got back from MicroConf, I emailed them again because I haven’t heard back. Maybe the email got lost or buried under all the other stuff that I’ve got going on, but I ended up having to ask them again to take a look at it. It only took them two or three days after that to take a look at it to say, “Yup, this thing looks good. Go for it.”
Rob: Cool. So people can go and search for that right now. Do you get any promotion out of that? Are they going to list you anywhere?
Mike: No. They don’t do any code promotion until you get to a certain number of users, which I think I was told it was like 50 users before that happens so I have to look and see if there’s any way for me to actually see how many active users I have. But I don’t know what it currently stands at so I don’t know how far I have to go between now and doing any sort of code promotion with them.
Rob: Got it. In order to get to 50 users, obviously, you need to get more customers yourself and then have something in a sequence somewhere that is asking people to hook it up, right?
Mike: Exactly.
Rob: Cool.
Mike: But I will say having the audit and the Zapier integration behind me, I would call both of those huge wins for me.
Rob: Yeah, that’s good. Would you say over the past, since our last call, those are probably the two high points?
Mike: I would say so, yeah.
Rob: And then the low point was the audit? Just in the midst, that’s what it sounds like.
Mike: Well, the midst of it and then the end results been everything’s fine. It’s like if I wanted to pay somebody five plus figures to go not find something, I’m sure my kids would volunteer. Again, it’s just irksome. I mean you don’t know until after you’ve done it because you do have to poke at everything and I get that part of it, but it’s still frustrating especially being early on.
Rob: Wait, are you saying you were frustrated with Google and the audit? Oh Mike, every time, I’m going to keep bringing it up.
Mike: My anger is interesting.
Rob: Oh, next call, I’m going to bring it up again just to see, just to troll you. Cool. A couple of other things before we wrap. One thing I had asked you about was differentiation. I’ve mentioned, Bluetick is very similar and undifferentiated from most of your competitors and you had said, “I need to talk to some of my customers more and ask them why did they decide to use Bluetick.” Think about it as a job to be done thing. You had talked to a few customers. You got a couple of ideas. One was to have customers in multiple sequences at the same time. In other words, to be able to re-add customers to the same sequence.
It’s a two part question. One is have you gotten more confirmation that those two feature ideas or differentiators are enough? Are you going to build those? And I guess the third part is, maybe we’ll start with this, have you had more conversations with customers since we last spoke? Talk about those other things.
Mike: I’ve had a few here and there, yeah. I still don’t necessarily know if what I have in mind is the deciding factor of like, “Hey, this is going to make Bluetick leaps and bounds better than the other things that are out there.” I believe that it is, but I don’t necessarily know that for a fact. I don’t have any real basis for that. It’s a gut feeling more than anything else.
Rob: How can you turn it from a gut feeling into something? I would say a gut feeling is like, “Yeah, I’m like 30%, 40%, 50%.” How can you get this to 70% or 80%? Whether it’s with one of these things or whether it is something entirely different that you start hearing from other customers.
Mike: I think the first step one, obviously talk to some more of my customers, but two is to start running the idea past. I almost want to say go back to basics when I was first flushing out the idea of Bluetick with a bunch of different people and ask them questions about, “Would you be […] this?” or a product that solves this particular problem. I think it’s a matter of going to some of my list and finding out, “Is this the type of problem that you would be interested in solving inside of your own business?” I feel like it’s more of a reframing of what Bluetick does versus selling what Bluetick is, if that makes sense.
Rob: It does. Now, is it reframing what it does just like, “Hey, it does this one extra feature or two extra features,” or is it in a whole position? Like it’s a more broad branding/positioning shift?
Mike: A little of both, I think. In order to do it, I would have to write some more code. Obviously, I don’t want to go in that direction unless I hear more from people about, “Hey, yeah, this would actually be very compelling for us to use that.” But the other thing is when you hear about an email follow-up tool, your inclination is cold email. There has to be some sort of a brand positioning of, “Hey, this isn’t just for cold email. This is how it is positioned differently in order to make it work for people who aren’t just doing cold email.”
Right now, Bluetick serves a very, very specific piece of functionality for people in their business and if they don’t have that particular problem, then they won’t use it, but that also makes it hard to identify the types of customers because two businesses who are largely identical, one of them may be doing that activity and the other one may not be. It’s hard for me to say, “Oh, go after SaaS companies that fits this profile or in this particular business,” because unless they’re doing that particular thing, it doesn’t solve their problem.
Rob: Got it. So between now and the next time we chat, is this high on your priority list, to speak with this additional customers to try to suss this out?
Mike: It is. I wouldn’t call it my number one priority, but I really need to find what that one differentiating feature or factor is that would make it easy for people to understand what I originally had in mind with Bluetick as a vision as opposed to what it currently is and does today and what people see it as.
Rob: Yeah. I wouldn’t disagree with that. It’s kind of what I’ve been saying the whole time back to episode 448 when we first really dug into all of this. My point was Bluetick is not differentiated and you’re not moving fast enough. That was the thing, whatever that was five months ago. Now, you’re through the Google audit and you’re through a lot of this speed bumps and does feel like, (a) step one, figure out how to differentiate it, and then (b) differentiate it and move fast enough such that folks you’re trying differentiate away from aren’t keeping up with you or aren’t going in the same direction or whatever. That’s what I’d be doing, too, in your shoes, would be a lot of conversations.
I think that cold emails probably can play into that. Again, they’re not cold emails, but it’s your LinkedIn connects and the Bluetick cancellations and such. In addition, I’d probably talk to every customer you have right and just try to figure out why they’re using it, how else you can make it to be sticky. You have those two ideas of those features I mentioned earlier. Those seem like nice to have as interesting tweaks but I’m not convinced. My gut is that they aren’t enough. They aren’t enough to be really, really differentiated and make people switch. Just like what can you have that will make people switch from other tools or choose your tool when they’re comparing yours to the three or four other tools that are top of mind for me.
Mike: I mean I have an idea of exactly what it is that I would want to talk to people about because it’s something that we can talk about it here if you want. The basic idea using Bluetick as a mechanism for identifying things that you need from other people and this is something that you can do with Bluetick right now, but let’s say that I need a W-9 from you or something like that, the question is, how do I get that from you and how do I make sure that I follow-up with you until I get it?
That was one of the things that Bluetick was born out of, was when basically before Xander started helping out with this stuff, I was doing all of the data gathering for all the sponsors for MicroConf. I would say, “Hey, I need logo. I need title text. I need an image. I need all these different things,” and asking them for it and then going back and forth like, “Hey, I’ve got these two things but not this other one or this third one over here or fourth one over here,” and using Bluetick instead as a mechanism for gathering that stuff.
That’s basically a way to build a process into Bluetick such that solve a very tightly-defined problem to gather digital materials from other people and they may fit a specific format, or they may be documents, or Excel spreadsheets or something, and then Bluetick can manage that back and forth process to say, “Hey, I’ve got these three things but not this other thing over here.” Does that make sense? There are like 30 different use cases for it but just very simplistically, that’s the idea.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s a clear path or a clear job to be done. The job to be done, you’re saying, is not cold email, it’s not increasing sales, it really is to get something in a workflow from other folks and to do that with email. My first thought when I hear that is right now, the tool I use for that is Gmail and Boomerang. If I email someone for an image, and a this, and an invoice, I Boomerang it in a week if there’s no reply or two weeks if there’s no reply and then I just respond to it again. I know that’s different. Probably in Bluetick, you could put a whole sequence together and if they don’t reply, it automatically does it. I don’t have to type the next one.
I think that Boomerang does a really good job on a small scale and if I only had five sponsors to deal with, that’s what I would do. Bluetick is going to be limited only to those that needed that scale. Cold outbound email or sales emails, you’re a 1000 a month or 2000 a month. There’s no way you would do that via a Boomerang, so everyone in that boat needs or should be using a tool like Bluetick or one of your competitors’.
Whereas, the niche you’re talking about, I think, not only is that a lot smaller and it’s further away from the dollars that the people are trying to generate for their business, because more of a back office thing, but it has to be people doing that at scale. Again, if you’re onboarding five clients a month, you’re probably just going to do via email. If you’re onboarding 100 clients a month, 100 sponsors a month, now it makes a lot more sense to use a tool like you’re talking about.
Mike: A lot of what you’re saying makes sense but I had a conversation with somebody who does onboarding at a small scale and they already know let’s say 30 or 50 different things that they need from the customer. Rather than saying, “Here’s the list of all the stuff that I need,” they only ask for two or three. The reason they only ask for 2 or 3 is because if they ask for 50, it’s going to be overwhelming to the customers. Instead, they only ask them for a couple of things and then they modify that list over time.
So the idea would be you’ll have this, I’ll say a workflow, where you’re asking for something from somebody and you need Bluetick to follow-up or you need a follow-up mechanism in place to basically manage the process of gathering that stuff and you don’t want to overwhelm them with everything all at once. That’s just one instance.
But also, I’ll tell you from experience of managing the sponsors. Once you get up to more than about five conversations in parallel like that where you have different things that you need from people, it gets really hard to manage. It’s not 1000, it’s not even 25, it’s like 5 or 6, and it’s just a nightmare to manage, even 5 or 6.
Rob: It’s interesting. I think, in the interest of time because we’re wrapping up, I want to make a note of this and circle back once you’ve had more conversations, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea. It’s an interesting position. I think there’s a hole we could dive way into how I would think about this because if you’re going to build a generic tool to do that and there are three different use cases, you have a problem. If you can pick one, what’s the biggest one of those used cases, the biggest pain point? Back to conversations we’ve had in the past, is it conference organizers trying to get sponsors and speakers to give them stuff? Is it, whatever, we could pick any vertical and is that where you start? Or is it lawyers trying to get stuff?
Mike: Is it CPAs trying to get tax information from their customers?
Rob: Exactly. Right. All that stuff.
Mike: I’ve had those conversations, too, and it’s a nightmare. I hate to go down the road of going after real estate brokers where you’re trying to get a loan and you need all these different things to apply for. I don’t want to deal in that particular business, but that’s another particular use case where there’s a lot of back and forth and a lot of information that’s needed.
Rob: That’s the thing, is all those verticals we just named or several of them are a pain in the ass to sell into. They are inundated with cold outreach. They don’t adopt new technology quickly. I tweeted this out a few months ago where I said you’re either dealing with competitor pain or customer pain these days if you’re building a SaaS. It’s a general comment but 10 years ago, you could go into a greenfield market with somewhat sophisticated customers, and you could build a SaaS app, and they would come and adopt it, and that was it. It was cool. But things changed over time and today, there’s not much greenfield left and a lot of the greenfield is like, “Well, there’s not a really good this and that for lawyers, or this and that for CPAs, or this and that for dentists.” And so, there’s not some specific thing for them. It’s like, “Cool. I’m going to build for that because I don’t want competitor pain. I don’t want a bunch of completion that chomping at my heels all the time.”
On the flip side, you’re now going to have customer pain. What I mean by that are high maintenance customers, they could be long sales cycles, they could be high price sensitivity, they are high support because they’re not technical, that’s kind of stuff. I’m not trying to make an unequivocal 100% of the time this is the thing, but these are the patterns that I’m seeing. When I look at the TinySeed batch, or when I look at people who apply to become in TinySeed, or when I look at my experience, you got to pick one of those. Trying to get away from both of those is very, very hard, I would say dang near impossible these days unless you get pretty lucky and be early to a certain market for early adopters where the market is just emerging.
I can name a few. Baremetrics is one. Early on, he didn’t have either. Now, he has competitor pain because he has a bunch of competitors, but he got in so early with the Stripe Metrics. I think another one is Tuple, Ben Orenstein’s. They filled a big gap that was left by a startup that have been acquired and shut down and right now, they don’t have competitor pain and they don’t really have customer pain either because it’s a lot of developers.
In the long run, Tuple will have competitor pain because people are watching that and there are going to be competitors that are developed there. They have a bit of a technical mode but in the long term they should just expect to experience that eventually, but since they have a head start, that’s good.
That was my long diatribe about that’s where as you decide if you want to do one vertical or five verticals to start with or wherever you want to position this. I certainly think making it a generic horizontal tool where the headline says get anything from anyone in an automated way, I think that’s a really tough way to go because in a lot of examples, people are trying to fit it into like, “What it is actually then? Is this like Mailchimp?” “No.” “Is it a cold email outreach tool?” “No. It’s not that.” So they’re trying to fit it into a bucket. That’s what people do when we go to these sites. If it’s something that’s just completely new, it’s always you’re just explaining the same thing over and over.
This is interesting. I’m making a note here because I think this is the key to unlocking something with a small group of people. This is how you find early signs of product market fit with a small group, and they love it, and they rave about it, and they say, “No other tool does it this way.” And they have different feature request for you than they would if you’re a cold email tool. If you can make it work and it’s a big if, that the direction you head. That’s how you find that you start growing.
Mike: Yeah. It’s just interesting how many conversations I’ve had have led me in that particular direction. There are a lot of things that remind me of, back when I first started working on Bluetick. It was some of the problems I ran into in trying to onboard sponsors for MicroConf or to sales for AutoShark. A lot of them are overlapping in a very similar way. Some of those features, they just never really got built.
Rob: So wrapping us up today, each time we’ve tended to talk about motivation, sleep, exercise, and stuff—I don’t want to run so far over what we dive into all of that today—I’m curious, over the last five weeks, what has your motivation been like?
Mike: I would say it’s fluctuated. It’s gone up and down. There are definitely days where I don’t have a whole lot of motivation and I feel like the world is pressing down around me. It’s not that I don’t have any options, it’s just that it’s hard to figure out what to do. And then there are days where I don’t even think twice about it and I just sit down and start working and banging things out, but it fluctuates from day-to-day. I can’t say that there’s a great pattern to it or not a great pattern but like an identifiable cause for anything that’s going on. It’s not really sleep-related. It’s not really exercise-related because I’m sleeping fairly well and exercising pretty well. So I don’t know. It’s hard to say.
Rob: I was going to wrap up the interview anyways, but the recording software crashed right at that moment and then Mike and I were basically just text chatting. But I feel like we’ve got a pretty good feeling of where Mike’s at and I’ll probably dig more into motivation, sleep, and exercise in the next episodes. It’s kind of got short shrift here. But I, for one, am feeling good for Mike about his Google audit effect that it’s done and I feel like he can get past it and move on. I’m super interested to hear what progress he can make on trying to get on this podcast as well as really the cold email as the one that I’m banking on as well as the differentiation. Those are the things that I’m going to be continuing to press him on.
These are the points of accountability that I think helped us all to move forward, is to have someone bring up what we said last time and say, “Where are you with that? If you’re not as far as you should be, why not? Okay. Let’s talk about that again in a few weeks.” Is starts to get in your head that this is a real thing that you need to move on and make progress on. Otherwise, the business doesn’t move forward.
I always enjoy talking to Mike. I feel like these are enjoyable conversations for me when I listen back to them. I feel like there are a lot of value for folks to follow his story, to hear what he’s going through as well as to take away how to keep pushing a business forward and have accountability. In a way, it’s a one way mastermind. It’s a little bit how I think about it. It’s kind of he’s reporting on things and I’m helping move it forward. I appreciate that Mike takes the time to keep us posted and we’ll keep doing this as long as it’s interesting.
If you have a question for the show, because we do a lot of Q&A episodes, email us questions@startupsfortherestofus.com and you can even attach a voicemail or link to a Dropbox, Google Drive, MP3, or whatever, or you can leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690. Per usual, voicemails go to the top of the stack and we will have another Q&A episode coming up here pretty soon.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. In any podcaster, search for “startups.” We’re typically in the top five. You can visit startupsfortherestofus.com to get a full transcript of each episode. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth start up or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob and today with Mike Taber, we’re going to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to the show. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on the show, I cover topics related to building, growing startups in order to build yourself a better life and improve the world in some small way. We strive to be ambitious, but we’re not willing to sacrifice our life or health to grow our companies. We have many different show formats. We have some tactics and teaching. We have interviews, listener questions. Sometimes, we do founder hot seats and breaking news episodes. All kinds of things that just mix it up and the feedback I’ve gotten since the mix up 20, 25 episodes ago is that the people really like that and they almost like the unpredictability of it. I’ve been overwhelmingly told to keep going and keep doing what we’re doing.
Each month or so, about every four to six weeks, I catch up with Mike Taber. He’s still a regular guest on the show, but he only comes on every month or two to update us on what he’s been doing with his product, Bluetick, that he’s been struggling to get to the point of supporting him full-time. If you haven’t already heard episodes 448 and 458, I’d encourage you to go listen to those episodes because they do give you a background on really what we’re talking about, how I’m trying to help push Mike forward, and challenge some of his assumptions. Also, to get updates, just to hear what’s going on because I like to know what’s up with Mike and I’ve heard overwhelmingly that people want to as well. They want to know what’s going on with him.
Today’s episode is a fun one. I do push back on a few things that Mike has said and call him on why he hasn’t made more progress. Overall, it’s a positive episode and it’s fun to hear Mike rant about the Google audit and I think our editor even has to bleep him once or twice, which is unusual for Mike.
Before we dive in, I want to let you know that tiny TinySeed applications for batch two are now open. You can go to tinyseed.com, click the apply button. If you’re a bootstrap, SaaS app, or subscription software and you’re looking for mentorship and community in a small batch of motivated founders as well as $120,000 investment or more frankly, if you have a couple of founders, you should head over to TinySeed and see what we’re up to. We’re super bootstrapper-friendly and the idea is to raise the tide and to raise all the boats in this segment that is really an underserved group.
The venture capitalist has an agenda and it’s to go bigger or go home, it’s to be a unicorn or bust, and that’s not what we’re doing. Our thesis is that we can get a lot of folks who are wanting to build this $1–$20 million ARR, these life-changing SaaS apps, ambitious but not 90-hour weeks. We’re about halfway through our first batch of ten. This application process runs for the next couple of weeks and we’ll be doing another batch early next year. We’re getting that together. Good things have been happening there. tinyseed.com, if you’re interested. With that, let’s talk to Mike.
Mike, thanks for coming back on the show.
Mike: Hey, how is it going?
Rob: It’s pretty good, man. I was just counting the days. I think it’s been about five weeks, about right around 34–35 days since we last spoke. I know during that time you were out of town for five days with MicroConf Europe, but I’ve been getting feedback both at MicroConf Europe and then at a little founder retreat I went to earlier this week that folks do like following the story of what you’ve been up to, so I’m curious.
As usual, I have my list of stuff from last time that some stuff was up in the air and the threads that we’re following, so I look forward to hearing about it. I think the thread of the hour and the one that you’re basically spending 15 hours a week last time we spoke is this Google audit. You were a month into it and you thought it would be six more weeks’ worth of stuff. We’re essentially five weeks into that period so I’m fascinated to hear what that’s looked like over the past five weeks, where it’s at, are you wrapping up, that kind of stuff.
Mike: I guess for context of dates and timeline here, three weeks ago was MicroConf Europe. There was a Wednesday that I was basically either on a plane or over in Dubrovnik for MicroConf Europe. That spans a couple of weeks where, I don’t know about you, but a day or two before you travel, you really don’t get a whole lot done and then the day or two after is kind of the same thing so that basically makes it almost two full weeks right there.
My audit started last Monday and it was supposed to go from Monday to Monday, I believe. That process is finished. I’ve got a draft of the report and I’m going to go over it with them next week. I’ve got the letter of attestation or whatever it is, more like a letter of assessment. That’s already in my hands and I’ve sent that off to Google. Now, it’s a waiting game to see if Google just looks at it and says, “Yup, this is good. You’re all set for the next 12 months.” That’s the good news. The bad news is I’m super pissed about the whole thing.
Rob: Well, you have been the whole time. Are you more pissed now than you were the last two episodes? Has something more happened?
Mike: I’m way more pissed about it because basically they came back and said, “Yeah, everything looks fine. It’s pretty much it.” There was one thing they complained about and they’re like, “Yeah, you’re cryptography keys, the keys that you’re using to encrypt information, shouldn’t be on the same machine as all source code,” or not even a source code, but the actual application because before, I was compiling it directly into the application knowing that nobody else has access to that machine. You can’t get to it unless you break the machine open and hack into it, and then you’ve got access to the source code and everything else.
At that point, encrypting things really doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot and yeah, the data is on a different machine, but I’m well aware of all the security implications there. In the grand scheme of things, that’s a very, very small thing. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s an absolute no, no. You can’t do that.” I was like, “All right. Fine.” I spend a couple of days using Azure’s Key Vault, I think it’s called. Basically, now I’m storing the keys someplace else, but the client’s secret and stuff are still on that machine, so it’s like, “Okay, now I have to go to this other machine, pull back that information, and then encrypt it.” I have to do that every single time that I have to encrypt or decrypt information. I’m like, “This is just stupid.” It’s just like, “All right, whatever. I’ll do it,” because I have to. I have no other choice.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing. You can get hung up on it and be pissed about it, but then you got to move past it especially if Google approves this certificate of attestation, I think is what you said. I mean assuming that that goes through, you have 12 months and it’s time to get on your horse and get things moving.
I’m curious. Over the past five weeks, how much of your time was that was it? You expected it to maybe ramp up to like 20 hours a week, like half your time, and I’m curious if that amounted to that or what it looked like.
Mike: It wasn’t that much. I had to give them a whole ton of documentation. It wasn’t quite a dozen different documents of policies and procedures and stuff like that, but some of it was just I’ll say personally frustrating because they’re like, “Document what your secure coding procedures look like and how you educate other people who come onboard.” I’m like, “Well, there really isn’t anybody else that I have to educate about it because it’s just me.”
I distinctly remember looking at one of the questions and it was something along the lines of, “Please describe how you do pair programming for code reviews.” I wanted to laugh at it and I had to hold myself back from saying, “I wait 12 hours, sober up, and then look at the codes sober to figure out what it was that I was doing.” It’s just so frustrating to have to go through that stuff and answer completely stupid questions and provide documentation for things that I’m not going to look at and nobody else will.
Rob: I wish you would have put that drunk answer on there and just to see what they said.
Mike: Well, it ended up in the report, too. Not that, but some of the other things that I wrote, they asked me a couple of clarifying questions and literally word-for-word, the stuff that I put in there, it was word-for-word what I said was in the executive report.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I was joking, by the way, about the drunk comment. I’m glad you didn’t do that because that wouldn’t have gotten well. This feels like a win to me. I’m going to flip it on its head because I can tell you’re pissed and you have been for three months or more because the whole thing threatened your business itself.
When you got initial quotes or estimates, they were really high. Then you got lower quotes, then you negotiated, and then you got something that was reasonable enough for you to pay. Now, it sounds like your done and while it has killed some time, it didn’t kill as much time as you were projecting over the next six weeks. Right now, are you done? Do you have to make any more code changes to satisfy their recommendations?
Mike: As far as I know, no. I have the letter. I have to hand it off to Google. I believe, at that point, Google just takes it and says, “Okay. Yes, you’re approved.” And they toggle some switches on their side and they stop bugging me about all this stuff. My belief is that I’m done, but what pisses me off is how little they found and how big a deal Google made it out to be. They’re like, “We’re going to kill your business if you don’t do these things or you don’t go through this process and pay this large sum of money to this third party company to do a security audit.”
There’s no recourse there whatsoever. So, I go through the process and then when I get through it, I come back and I look at their end result of it and they’re like, “Oh yeah, you have to change this one minor thing here that’ll take you like a day or two.” Then, all the other documentation that I put together, which is a total waste of time because nobody else is ever going to look at any of it, it’s totally useless. It was a huge time sink for absolutely nothing. It didn’t benefit my customers. It doesn’t make the product any better. It doesn’t get more people using it. It literally does nothing other than allow me to stay in business. That’s the piece that’s so frustrating. That’s the part that really pisses me off and makes me angry at Google, for putting me through this when at the end of the day, you look at the report and they’re like, “Oh yeah, these one or two things.” It was almost completely unnecessary.
Rob: If you’re at home playing the Startups For the Rest of Us drinking game, you can know take your shot for Mike saying it was unnecessary and he’s angry at Google. Mike, I know. I totally get it. I think I want to say it again. I consider this a win because you’ve passed this. Six months ago, maybe more, you started talking about this and it was a big, big deal and you’re done. You made it through and it didn’t wreck the business. To me, it’s like the Bill Wolf quote, “Control what you can control and let the score take care of itself.” That’s where you are. You can be pissed. I get pissed all the time at stuff. You know me pretty well. I get mad pretty easily, but I try to let stuff go quickly and move on. You know what I mean?
I mean this could’ve been a complete and utter roadblock that decimated your business whether because you failed the audit, whether it’s because you couldn’t afford the audit, whether it’s because you refused to do the audit on principle. Any one of those would’ve wrecked the business and you turned it into a speed bump. You said, “What are my options here? I can pay for this thing. I can negotiate this thing. With my teeth clenched, I can just force my way through,” and that’s what you did. I think I know it’s a pain in the ass. I totally get it and I’m really surprised that we have not had to use the beep noise over any of your words so far this episode, but cheers to you, man. I am happy. I look ahead at Bluetick and now, it’s all about execution. It’s differentiation. It’s writing some code. It’s marketing. It’s getting more people in. That’s how I feel about it. I have the outside perspective. You’ve been mired in this for months. Does that resonate with you? Do you feel that way or do you feel like I’m being too optimistic silver lining?
Mike: You’re absolutely right. Everything that you just said is 100% correct, but Google still pisses me off right now. I’m not the type of person who gets upset easily. I’m not the person who you can just poke with a stick and suddenly, I just rear my claws and just go after you. I just don’t do that, but this has been dragging on for so long and I really feel like I’ve been put through the ringer for this for no good reason. I just can’t point anything justifiable. The problem is I know I have to go through it again next year.
Next year, it will be better because I’ve got all the documentation in place and yeah, the product will change, certain things are going to have to be updated here and there and that’s fine, but the fact that they went through this whole thing and they made it such a big deal, and they get to the end of it and there’s this report that shows, “Oh, we found three things.” One of which is not even on my servers. I’m like, “Okay, this is total […]. Complete and utter […]. You’re complaining about an SSL certificate that I put on a server that’s not even my server. Come on. That’d ridiculous.” I even told them that. I’m like, “I have no control over this.”
Rob: Yeah. I hear you about having to do it again in 12 months. My hope is that the fact that you already have an existing relationship with an auditor and that you have the same docs or depending on where you are in 12 months, maybe you’ll have hired a developer or a senior developer that could do parts of this for you so you don’t have to mire through it.
I realized that’s a tall order. You’d have to make a lot of progress between now and then, but I think in the back of my mind, in your shoes, you’ve seen how frustrating this is and how much it emotionally derails you. With me, with Drip, it was blacklists, there were support requests, it was cues being slow. There were these things that I had to find people to do because they slowly tore away at me and they made me hate my job.
As entrepreneurs, we can’t hate our job because we control them. If we’re not enjoying it, it’s to a certain extent, our fault. Now, in this case, it’s not. It’s not your fault that Google made you do that but you did then have the chance to say, “Well, I’m just going to shut the business down,” or, “I’m going to pivot away from Google,” or whatever, but you gritted it and made it through, which is in my opinion, what you should have done. But looking ahead 12 months, I’d be thinking how can I not let this be six weeks, eight weeks of me being mad next time? What types of things can I put in place to help with that?
Mike: The fact of the matter is, I think that in a year when this comes up again, it will be a lot less stressful because I will have had full visibility of all the things that are going on, and all the things that they’re looking out, and I will have already had one report to look at that says, “These are all the things that we looked at and be able to at least keep them in mind moving forward.” Up until I got a final report, even during the week of the audit, it was just super stressful because I wasn’t getting anything back from them and I was expecting a daily report or something along those lines that says, “Hey, we looked at this and this is a problem. You need to fix it. Here’s a high priority. Here’s a critical thing that you have to do.” Because that all those critical and high items had to be taken care of before they could issue this letter of assessment and I was getting nothing.
I asked them. I was like, “What’s going on here? I’m expecting something here and I haven’t heard anything.” They’re like, “Oh, we haven’t found anything so far.” But of course, there’s a lag time between the time that I sent them an email and then they get back to me. I think some of their penetration testing staff are in completely different time zones like halfway around the world, so it just makes that back-and-forth a lot harder to do because, (1) they don’t report directly to me, and (2) they’re in a completely different time zones. It just makes it a lot harder and a lot more stressful, but I don’t think that it’ll be nearly as bad next time.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree. Looking ahead, let’s talk about some other things that you had in the works, some of which were on hold or I think one of which was on hold due to a code freeze and then there were some other stuff that step through. Just to keep going on the thread.
You have an untestable sealed .NET component. Startups For the Rest of Us drinking game just gets so good when we go over this topic again. I want to go back and I think it had to have been six or eight months ago when you first mentioned of this thing. You said, “I’m going to replace this thing,” and you put it on hold due to the Google audit. Have you replaced it yet? Is this top priority? Where do we stand with this?
Mike: I just got the letter of assessment this morning. I was expecting it on Monday because they said that they were working on it, and then Tuesday came and nothing, Wednesday came and still nothing, and finally, I got it this morning. It was like one o’clock in the morning. Until then, it’s basically been on code freeze. So no, I haven’t touched that yet. Is it on deck? Yes, at some point. When exactly? I don’t really know.
I have to go through and look at where that really falls in the priority list because I feel like it’s a lower priority than a lot of the sales and marketing stuff that I have to do. I hate to say that this is or isn’t holding me back because I’m not really sure. I want to get it out of there. I don’t know how hard it is to be able to pull it out because it is pretty integrated into the core of my code and I’m going to have to change the storage mechanism.
I think I’m just going to have to make a judgment call at some point about do I just suck it up and leave it there even though I know that it’s the wrong decision? There are certain part of I think everybody’s application where it’s got words on it and you’re like, “This really needs to be rewritten or it needs to be refactored.” And you don’t do it because you know that you’re just kicking a hornet’s nest and it’s going to be terrible.
Rob: How long do you think it’s going to take you to get the new component in? I know you have to redo data and you have to remap stuff and namespaces. I get it. How long though? That’s the thing.
Mike: Just for me to migrate the data would probably take a week. That’s just the computers churning.
Rob: Yeah, so it’s a sizable thing, but you have decided that this is the right choice, right?
Mike: Yeah. That’s the thing. Assuming nothing goes wrong, it would take a week.
Rob: Sure. All right. It happened this morning and you’re not done with it yet, Mike? What have you been doing? No, I’m just kidding. Do you plan to start it? What is it? Thursday today so do you plan to start that tomorrow or Monday? Is that the next priority or you’re just saying I’m going to do this in a few months?
It’s tough. This one’s not so clear up to me. To me, in my head, it’s a bite the bullet type of thing where it’s overhead and I know it creates legacy, or cruft, or just hard code to work around. To me, I would bite the bullet and I would cover up two weeks and I would hammer this through. But I can also see an argument on the other side of this provides no value to your customers. On the flip side, it’s like, “I should be marketing, selling, and getting more people in before that.” I could see an argument either way. Again, I would probably make the product such that I feel more comfortable marketing and selling it, because I hate having crappy code. What’s your plan there?
Mike: The best thing that I can come up with is to plan to do it in about a month because that would put it in mid- to late-December, which I know there’s not going to be many people using Bluetick at the time and I’m probably not going to be fielding very many support requests. I’m probably not going to be launching very many new marketing or sales campaigns at the time. It’s a slow time where it would be a good time to sit down and bite the bullet and do that as opposed to now where people are still ramping up for the holiday season, doing email follow-ups, and trying to get deals and stuff. By the end of the year, it seems like my time is probably better spent doing that now and then plan for that slow period of biting the bullet.
Rob: Cool. That sounds good. We will connect with you again on that next time you come back. For our next topic, let’s talk about marketing. You obviously had the majority of your work weeks to be doing other things. You didn’t want to write code and the Google audit was taking some time. We talked about a marketing hire you were making. It was a contractor to do podcaster research and we had talked that through a little bit last time. Where does that stand?
Mike: Most of the stuff is already done and been sorted and prioritized. I got the information I need for all those things, so we’re basically waiting until the end of this audit to start queuing those up. Between today and tomorrow, the plan is to start queuing those up, start sending those emails out, and see if I can get onto a handful of other podcasts. I’ve already done one podcast interview. I actually did that last week. I’ve got another one that I was told by the podcast host that she’d love to have me on so it’s just a matter of reaching out to them and getting that set up as well. There’s no more roadblocks in the way of doing that so that’s get started ASAP at the moment.
Rob: It’s been five weeks. Why did it take that long? Why hasn’t that started two weeks ago?
Mike: Well, two weeks ago, I was in Europe. That’s why. Of the last five weeks, a good solid week-and-a-half to two weeks was spent in the middle of the audit and then there was another solid week or two that was basically over in Europe. I basically had maybe two weeks or so before MicroConf Europe get started on that. That was mostly the data aggregation and the actual work that was done behind the scenes.
Rob: Got it. Are you sending those emails through Bluetick?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: That’s cool.
Mike: Well, that’s the plan. I haven’t actually sent them out yet.
Rob: How did you get on the podcast then?
Mike: Oh, there’s a personal invitation. Somebody raised that to me.
Rob: Got it. Cool. That would be an ASAP thing then. You could get that going tomorrow literally or Monday. You just got to write some copy and get her in.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Cool.
Mike: That’s the plan for that.
Rob: Good. Looking forward to that. We already talked about that. I won’t go into it. Again, it drives a little bit of traffic. It’s more of a slow burn. It’s a one-time thing type of thing, but I think that it’s easy enough to do as long as it doesn’t take a bunch of time. I would probably be doing the same thing right now.
The other thing you were looking at was code emailing. It was really warm emailing. You said 900 email addresses from your LinkedIn connections. You had prior Bluetick cancellations, sales leads that never converted, that were in pipe drive, other stuff. You were going to bucket them and start warm emailing cold batches in the next week or two last time we talked. Talk to me the status on that.
Mike: I’ve got those all bucketed out and that’s another situation where I was holding off on actually doing it and pulling the trigger after this audit was done. That again is something else that got the green light at this point that I can start today or tomorrow.
Rob: That’s interesting. Why were you holding off on that? Because you knew you were going to pass the audit. That wasn’t a big question. I knew you were.
Mike: It was never a question of whether I would it pass it or not, it was a question of timing. There are two pieces of the audit itself. There was the technical piece where they say, “Hey, we’re going to beat on you servers for six days.” And then aside from that, there is all this policy documentation that I had to create. Anything that they saw that raised a red flag, I had to either change the policy itself, it’s not just text that I have to change, but it’s also I have to change how I do things.
For example, one of the things that they said was, “Oh, you have to enable multi factor authentication on everything including source control.” So I have to basically generate SSH keys and lock down all of my source controls, which means that I also have to generate API keys, then go into my build environment, and I have to change all that stuff, too. It’s not just a simple thing like changing some texts on a piece of paper that I hand to them. I actually have to go do those things as well. All of that stuff needed to be changed.
There was a bunch of other things that came up during the policy side of things where they said, “Hey, you need to change how you’re going about these things just in order to comply with the requirements.” Between that, I knew that I only had a week or two before I had to leave for Europe, and then immediately after that, I had to dive right into the technical side of the policy stuff.
What I didn’t want to do is start going out and start and try to schedule meetings, calls, and stuff with people. They were not going to be for a month-and-a-half because I didn’t necessarily know that earlier this week things were going to be done. For all I knew, they could come back and say, “Well, you’ve got these 25 vulnerabilities, and 17 of them are high or critical. You need to make code changes to do those.” I didn’t know that I was going to be done this week. For all I knew, it could’ve been another three to four weeks.
Rob: Yeah, but I think we talked last time and I had said cold email doesn’t just start converting overnight typically. Typically, you start it at trickle, you test some things, you tweak, you tweak, you tweak. It takes weeks to really start ramping it up. I had suggested, “Hey, you have this month or whatever,” I guess it was six weeks during the audit that was projected to be six weeks, “I would propose that you just start emailing 5 a day or 10 a week.” Just a very small trickle to start seeing something such that the volume of things wouldn’t have been like, “Oh my gosh, I have 50 calls.”
It wouldn’t have been so much, but just to start ironing those out because I bet if you start this on Monday, it’ll be a couple of weeks until it really starts getting going and now, you’re at a standing stop five weeks later. You know what I mean? Five weeks after our last call, you are at standing stop trying to get it going rather than having a little bit of momentum. That’s what I was more getting at. Why did you wait during the audit to get it going?
Mike: I think I agreed at the time and then realized that I just was not going to have time. Even if that started to turn into something, I wasn’t sure what the future would hold in terms of my timeline leading up to the week after MicroConf or two weeks afterwards. Like I said, for all I knew, it could’ve been another three or four of hard, heavy lifting in terms of code or code changes. I just didn’t know. That big blind spot is really what held me back there.
Rob: Okay. Next time, you should be good. You should be rolling on these things. Right now, cold email and the podcast tour, do you have any other marketing stuff that you’re going to be rolling out or are you going to be focusing on those two? I’m just talking over the next month. Let’s say we talk again in four or five weeks.
Mike: I do have one other thing that has finished up, which we haven’t really talked about. I just finished up an integration that I got approval for I think on Monday of this week. Now, if you go over to zapier.com and you search for bluetick.io, you’ll find it underneath the early access section. bluetick.io now officially has a Zapier integration that is no longer just buy and bite only.
Rob: Nice. Congrats man. That’s cool. Now, what’s funny is I have a note because I was going to cover that. The note says, “Mike is working on an integration that should be live at the end of this week.” I read that five weeks ago. Why did it take that extra month?
Mike: Because I had to email them and then there was a little bit of back and forth. They basically had to run it through their own testing and stuff like that. There was a bunch of things that needed to be changed both on my side and inside the Zap itself in order to get it live. It took a little bit longer to get finished than I thought it would or I hoped it would. And then I emailed them and said, “Hey, can you guys take another look at this.” When I got back from MicroConf, I emailed them again because I haven’t heard back. Maybe the email got lost or buried under all the other stuff that I’ve got going on, but I ended up having to ask them again to take a look at it. It only took them two or three days after that to take a look at it to say, “Yup, this thing looks good. Go for it.”
Rob: Cool. So people can go and search for that right now. Do you get any promotion out of that? Are they going to list you anywhere?
Mike: No. They don’t do any code promotion until you get to a certain number of users, which I think I was told it was like 50 users before that happens so I have to look and see if there’s any way for me to actually see how many active users I have. But I don’t know what it currently stands at so I don’t know how far I have to go between now and doing any sort of code promotion with them.
Rob: Got it. In order to get to 50 users, obviously, you need to get more customers yourself and then have something in a sequence somewhere that is asking people to hook it up, right?
Mike: Exactly.
Rob: Cool.
Mike: But I will say having the audit and the Zapier integration behind me, I would call both of those huge wins for me.
Rob: Yeah, that’s good. Would you say over the past, since our last call, those are probably the two high points?
Mike: I would say so, yeah.
Rob: And then the low point was the audit? Just in the midst, that’s what it sounds like.
Mike: Well, the midst of it and then the end results been everything’s fine. It’s like if I wanted to pay somebody five plus figures to go not find something, I’m sure my kids would volunteer. Again, it’s just irksome. I mean you don’t know until after you’ve done it because you do have to poke at everything and I get that part of it, but it’s still frustrating especially being early on.
Rob: Wait, are you saying you were frustrated with Google and the audit? Oh Mike, every time, I’m going to keep bringing it up.
Mike: My anger is interesting.
Rob: Oh, next call, I’m going to bring it up again just to see, just to troll you. Cool. A couple of other things before we wrap. One thing I had asked you about was differentiation. I’ve mentioned, Bluetick is very similar and undifferentiated from most of your competitors and you had said, “I need to talk to some of my customers more and ask them why did they decide to use Bluetick.” Think about it as a job to be done thing. You had talked to a few customers. You got a couple of ideas. One was to have customers in multiple sequences at the same time. In other words, to be able to re-add customers to the same sequence.
It’s a two part question. One is have you gotten more confirmation that those two feature ideas or differentiators are enough? Are you going to build those? And I guess the third part is, maybe we’ll start with this, have you had more conversations with customers since we last spoke? Talk about those other things.
Mike: I’ve had a few here and there, yeah. I still don’t necessarily know if what I have in mind is the deciding factor of like, “Hey, this is going to make Bluetick leaps and bounds better than the other things that are out there.” I believe that it is, but I don’t necessarily know that for a fact. I don’t have any real basis for that. It’s a gut feeling more than anything else.
Rob: How can you turn it from a gut feeling into something? I would say a gut feeling is like, “Yeah, I’m like 30%, 40%, 50%.” How can you get this to 70% or 80%? Whether it’s with one of these things or whether it is something entirely different that you start hearing from other customers.
Mike: I think the first step one, obviously talk to some more of my customers, but two is to start running the idea past. I almost want to say go back to basics when I was first flushing out the idea of Bluetick with a bunch of different people and ask them questions about, “Would you be […] this?” or a product that solves this particular problem. I think it’s a matter of going to some of my list and finding out, “Is this the type of problem that you would be interested in solving inside of your own business?” I feel like it’s more of a reframing of what Bluetick does versus selling what Bluetick is, if that makes sense.
Rob: It does. Now, is it reframing what it does just like, “Hey, it does this one extra feature or two extra features,” or is it in a whole position? Like it’s a more broad branding/positioning shift?
Mike: A little of both, I think. In order to do it, I would have to write some more code. Obviously, I don’t want to go in that direction unless I hear more from people about, “Hey, yeah, this would actually be very compelling for us to use that.” But the other thing is when you hear about an email follow-up tool, your inclination is cold email. There has to be some sort of a brand positioning of, “Hey, this isn’t just for cold email. This is how it is positioned differently in order to make it work for people who aren’t just doing cold email.”
Right now, Bluetick serves a very, very specific piece of functionality for people in their business and if they don’t have that particular problem, then they won’t use it, but that also makes it hard to identify the types of customers because two businesses who are largely identical, one of them may be doing that activity and the other one may not be. It’s hard for me to say, “Oh, go after SaaS companies that fits this profile or in this particular business,” because unless they’re doing that particular thing, it doesn’t solve their problem.
Rob: Got it. So between now and the next time we chat, is this high on your priority list, to speak with this additional customers to try to suss this out?
Mike: It is. I wouldn’t call it my number one priority, but I really need to find what that one differentiating feature or factor is that would make it easy for people to understand what I originally had in mind with Bluetick as a vision as opposed to what it currently is and does today and what people see it as.
Rob: Yeah. I wouldn’t disagree with that. It’s kind of what I’ve been saying the whole time back to episode 448 when we first really dug into all of this. My point was Bluetick is not differentiated and you’re not moving fast enough. That was the thing, whatever that was five months ago. Now, you’re through the Google audit and you’re through a lot of this speed bumps and does feel like, (a) step one, figure out how to differentiate it, and then (b) differentiate it and move fast enough such that folks you’re trying differentiate away from aren’t keeping up with you or aren’t going in the same direction or whatever. That’s what I’d be doing, too, in your shoes, would be a lot of conversations.
I think that cold emails probably can play into that. Again, they’re not cold emails, but it’s your LinkedIn connects and the Bluetick cancellations and such. In addition, I’d probably talk to every customer you have right and just try to figure out why they’re using it, how else you can make it to be sticky. You have those two ideas of those features I mentioned earlier. Those seem like nice to have as interesting tweaks but I’m not convinced. My gut is that they aren’t enough. They aren’t enough to be really, really differentiated and make people switch. Just like what can you have that will make people switch from other tools or choose your tool when they’re comparing yours to the three or four other tools that are top of mind for me.
Mike: I mean I have an idea of exactly what it is that I would want to talk to people about because it’s something that we can talk about it here if you want. The basic idea using Bluetick as a mechanism for identifying things that you need from other people and this is something that you can do with Bluetick right now, but let’s say that I need a W-9 from you or something like that, the question is, how do I get that from you and how do I make sure that I follow-up with you until I get it?
That was one of the things that Bluetick was born out of, was when basically before Xander started helping out with this stuff, I was doing all of the data gathering for all the sponsors for MicroConf. I would say, “Hey, I need logo. I need title text. I need an image. I need all these different things,” and asking them for it and then going back and forth like, “Hey, I’ve got these two things but not this other one or this third one over here or fourth one over here,” and using Bluetick instead as a mechanism for gathering that stuff.
That’s basically a way to build a process into Bluetick such that solve a very tightly-defined problem to gather digital materials from other people and they may fit a specific format, or they may be documents, or Excel spreadsheets or something, and then Bluetick can manage that back and forth process to say, “Hey, I’ve got these three things but not this other thing over here.” Does that make sense? There are like 30 different use cases for it but just very simplistically, that’s the idea.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s a clear path or a clear job to be done. The job to be done, you’re saying, is not cold email, it’s not increasing sales, it really is to get something in a workflow from other folks and to do that with email. My first thought when I hear that is right now, the tool I use for that is Gmail and Boomerang. If I email someone for an image, and a this, and an invoice, I Boomerang it in a week if there’s no reply or two weeks if there’s no reply and then I just respond to it again. I know that’s different. Probably in Bluetick, you could put a whole sequence together and if they don’t reply, it automatically does it. I don’t have to type the next one.
I think that Boomerang does a really good job on a small scale and if I only had five sponsors to deal with, that’s what I would do. Bluetick is going to be limited only to those that needed that scale. Cold outbound email or sales emails, you’re a 1000 a month or 2000 a month. There’s no way you would do that via a Boomerang, so everyone in that boat needs or should be using a tool like Bluetick or one of your competitors’.
Whereas, the niche you’re talking about, I think, not only is that a lot smaller and it’s further away from the dollars that the people are trying to generate for their business, because more of a back office thing, but it has to be people doing that at scale. Again, if you’re onboarding five clients a month, you’re probably just going to do via email. If you’re onboarding 100 clients a month, 100 sponsors a month, now it makes a lot more sense to use a tool like you’re talking about.
Mike: A lot of what you’re saying makes sense but I had a conversation with somebody who does onboarding at a small scale and they already know let’s say 30 or 50 different things that they need from the customer. Rather than saying, “Here’s the list of all the stuff that I need,” they only ask for two or three. The reason they only ask for 2 or 3 is because if they ask for 50, it’s going to be overwhelming to the customers. Instead, they only ask them for a couple of things and then they modify that list over time.
So the idea would be you’ll have this, I’ll say a workflow, where you’re asking for something from somebody and you need Bluetick to follow-up or you need a follow-up mechanism in place to basically manage the process of gathering that stuff and you don’t want to overwhelm them with everything all at once. That’s just one instance.
But also, I’ll tell you from experience of managing the sponsors. Once you get up to more than about five conversations in parallel like that where you have different things that you need from people, it gets really hard to manage. It’s not 1000, it’s not even 25, it’s like 5 or 6, and it’s just a nightmare to manage, even 5 or 6.
Rob: It’s interesting. I think, in the interest of time because we’re wrapping up, I want to make a note of this and circle back once you’ve had more conversations, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea. It’s an interesting position. I think there’s a hole we could dive way into how I would think about this because if you’re going to build a generic tool to do that and there are three different use cases, you have a problem. If you can pick one, what’s the biggest one of those used cases, the biggest pain point? Back to conversations we’ve had in the past, is it conference organizers trying to get sponsors and speakers to give them stuff? Is it, whatever, we could pick any vertical and is that where you start? Or is it lawyers trying to get stuff?
Mike: Is it CPAs trying to get tax information from their customers?
Rob: Exactly. Right. All that stuff.
Mike: I’ve had those conversations, too, and it’s a nightmare. I hate to go down the road of going after real estate brokers where you’re trying to get a loan and you need all these different things to apply for. I don’t want to deal in that particular business, but that’s another particular use case where there’s a lot of back and forth and a lot of information that’s needed.
Rob: That’s the thing, is all those verticals we just named or several of them are a pain in the ass to sell into. They are inundated with cold outreach. They don’t adopt new technology quickly. I tweeted this out a few months ago where I said you’re either dealing with competitor pain or customer pain these days if you’re building a SaaS. It’s a general comment but 10 years ago, you could go into a greenfield market with somewhat sophisticated customers, and you could build a SaaS app, and they would come and adopt it, and that was it. It was cool. But things changed over time and today, there’s not much greenfield left and a lot of the greenfield is like, “Well, there’s not a really good this and that for lawyers, or this and that for CPAs, or this and that for dentists.” And so, there’s not some specific thing for them. It’s like, “Cool. I’m going to build for that because I don’t want competitor pain. I don’t want a bunch of completion that chomping at my heels all the time.”
On the flip side, you’re now going to have customer pain. What I mean by that are high maintenance customers, they could be long sales cycles, they could be high price sensitivity, they are high support because they’re not technical, that’s kind of stuff. I’m not trying to make an unequivocal 100% of the time this is the thing, but these are the patterns that I’m seeing. When I look at the TinySeed batch, or when I look at people who apply to become in TinySeed, or when I look at my experience, you got to pick one of those. Trying to get away from both of those is very, very hard, I would say dang near impossible these days unless you get pretty lucky and be early to a certain market for early adopters where the market is just emerging.
I can name a few. Baremetrics is one. Early on, he didn’t have either. Now, he has competitor pain because he has a bunch of competitors, but he got in so early with the Stripe Metrics. I think another one is Tuple, Ben Orenstein’s. They filled a big gap that was left by a startup that have been acquired and shut down and right now, they don’t have competitor pain and they don’t really have customer pain either because it’s a lot of developers.
In the long run, Tuple will have competitor pain because people are watching that and there are going to be competitors that are developed there. They have a bit of a technical mode but in the long term they should just expect to experience that eventually, but since they have a head start, that’s good.
That was my long diatribe about that’s where as you decide if you want to do one vertical or five verticals to start with or wherever you want to position this. I certainly think making it a generic horizontal tool where the headline says get anything from anyone in an automated way, I think that’s a really tough way to go because in a lot of examples, people are trying to fit it into like, “What it is actually then? Is this like Mailchimp?” “No.” “Is it a cold email outreach tool?” “No. It’s not that.” So they’re trying to fit it into a bucket. That’s what people do when we go to these sites. If it’s something that’s just completely new, it’s always you’re just explaining the same thing over and over.
This is interesting. I’m making a note here because I think this is the key to unlocking something with a small group of people. This is how you find early signs of product market fit with a small group, and they love it, and they rave about it, and they say, “No other tool does it this way.” And they have different feature request for you than they would if you’re a cold email tool. If you can make it work and it’s a big if, that the direction you head. That’s how you find that you start growing.
Mike: Yeah. It’s just interesting how many conversations I’ve had have led me in that particular direction. There are a lot of things that remind me of, back when I first started working on Bluetick. It was some of the problems I ran into in trying to onboard sponsors for MicroConf or to sales for AutoShark. A lot of them are overlapping in a very similar way. Some of those features, they just never really got built.
Rob: So wrapping us up today, each time we’ve tended to talk about motivation, sleep, exercise, and stuff—I don’t want to run so far over what we dive into all of that today—I’m curious, over the last five weeks, what has your motivation been like?
Mike: I would say it’s fluctuated. It’s gone up and down. There are definitely days where I don’t have a whole lot of motivation and I feel like the world is pressing down around me. It’s not that I don’t have any options, it’s just that it’s hard to figure out what to do. And then there are days where I don’t even think twice about it and I just sit down and start working and banging things out, but it fluctuates from day-to-day. I can’t say that there’s a great pattern to it or not a great pattern but like an identifiable cause for anything that’s going on. It’s not really sleep-related. It’s not really exercise-related because I’m sleeping fairly well and exercising pretty well. So I don’t know. It’s hard to say.
Rob: I was going to wrap up the interview anyways, but the recording software crashed right at that moment and then Mike and I were basically just text chatting. But I feel like we’ve got a pretty good feeling of where Mike’s at and I’ll probably dig more into motivation, sleep, and exercise in the next episodes. It’s kind of got short shrift here. But I, for one, am feeling good for Mike about his Google audit effect that it’s done and I feel like he can get past it and move on. I’m super interested to hear what progress he can make on trying to get on this podcast as well as really the cold email as the one that I’m banking on as well as the differentiation. Those are the things that I’m going to be continuing to press him on.
These are the points of accountability that I think helped us all to move forward, is to have someone bring up what we said last time and say, “Where are you with that? If you’re not as far as you should be, why not? Okay. Let’s talk about that again in a few weeks.” Is starts to get in your head that this is a real thing that you need to move on and make progress on. Otherwise, the business doesn’t move forward.
I always enjoy talking to Mike. I feel like these are enjoyable conversations for me when I listen back to them. I feel like there are a lot of value for folks to follow his story, to hear what he’s going through as well as to take away how to keep pushing a business forward and have accountability. In a way, it’s a one way mastermind. It’s a little bit how I think about it. It’s kind of he’s reporting on things and I’m helping move it forward. I appreciate that Mike takes the time to keep us posted and we’ll keep doing this as long as it’s interesting.
If you have a question for the show, because we do a lot of Q&A episodes, email us questions@startupsfortherestofus.com and you can even attach a voicemail or link to a Dropbox, Google Drive, MP3, or whatever, or you can leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690. Per usual, voicemails go to the top of the stack and we will have another Q&A episode coming up here pretty soon.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. In any podcaster, search for “startups.” We’re typically in the top five. You can visit startupsfortherestofus.com to get a full transcript of each episode. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 465 | A Bluetick Update from Mike Taber
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob checks in with Mike Taber on his progress with Bluetick. They talk about Mike’s motivation, specifically over the long term , the continuing Google security audit, differentiating from competitors and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host Rob Walling. Each week on the show, we cover topics that help software entrepreneurs, developers, designers, people who want to launch a product into the software space and ultimately gain the freedom from their full-time job and even be ambitious beyond that. It’s not just about lifestyle, having a sustainable lifestyle and maintaining relationships. That’s all important, but a lot of the founders that listen to the show and that come to MicroConf are folks that are ambitious, but not willing to sacrifice their life or their health to grow their company.
We have many different show formats. Sometimes we do interviews, we answer a lot of listener questions, we have founder hot seats, but over the past 465 episodes, we have followed a lot of stories. We followed stories of folks in the MicroConf community. We have followed the stories of myself and Mike Taber. If you’re a new listener. Mike has been on the show since the beginning, but now he comes on about once a month and updates us on his progress as he’s doubling down and focusing on his software product called Bluetick. In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, we get a Bluetick update from Mike Taber. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 465.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups. Whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob, and today with Mike, we are going to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made. Thanks again for coming back. We’re going to be talking with Mike here in just a minute. Before we dive in, I had a couple things I wanted to mention. First is, if you haven’t already left a review on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple podcast, Google podcast, I would really appreciate you logging and clicking that five stars.
We had a recent review from Josh Krist and he says, “The real experience of bootstrapping. This show absolutely rocks. If your bootstrapping a company, thinking about starting a company in the future or just curious to understand what it really feels and looks like to start a company without outside funding, this is a must listen. Thank you Rob and Mike.” Thank you so much for that review Josh and we’d love to hear a review from you as a listener, if you feel you’ve gotten value out of the show or you don’t even need to do a full review, you can click the five stars and that helps new people discover us.
We have, I believe it’s 354 five star reviews that actually contain text and we have another 200 or 300 that are just people rating us, but I can’t seem to find the numbers anywhere. It’s hard to get worldwide numbers and there was an app I was using that that stop working, so I think we’re in the 600–700 range of reviews and I would love to just add a few more this week. I haven’t mentioned them in a while and if you can be obliged to click that five star, we’d really appreciate it.
Next item on the agenda is MicroConf Minneapolis is April 19th to 23rd and tickets will be going on sale very soon in the next, I’ll say, week, maybe two, tops. If you are interested in potentially becoming a growth or starter, Minneapolis late April, head microconf.com and get on the email list. The other thing I wanted to mention is the state of independent SaaS report, which I record a little mini episode, a half episode that I put in the feed last week, that survey is alive right now. It’s only live for another couple of days after this recording.
If you’re able to head over to stateofindiesaas.com. I didn’t do independent because it’s so long and I got tired of typing it, stateofindiesaas.com, that takes you right to the survey and that will help yourself and your fellow independent SaaS companies because we’re going to try to get a bunch of metrics together and put out this MicroConf state of independent SaaS report. Listen to shore episode I recorded. If you want the full details on that, but that’s only open for another couple days now we’re going to start the data crunching and start working on that report.
With that, let’s dive into today’s conversation with Mike. Mike, welcome back to the show.
Mike: Thanks, how you doing?
Rob: I’m pretty good. It’s good to hear your voice, man. It’s been a while.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: It’s been a month.
Mike: Has it been? Okay, yeah, I think so.
Rob: I think so. The episodes about four weeks apart and we record, I don’t know, a couple days before, so yeah. I think it’s been somewhere in the three or four week range.
Mike: I lose track of time when I’m not talking to people. Obviously, I haven’t talked to you, really, other than email, but there are certain things that used to be on my schedule that are no longer my schedule and I used to use those as benchmarks as time passes. I don’t really have as much of that anymore, so I lose track of even just what day of the week it is sometimes.
Rob: Yeah, I totally get it. I think not being on social media, I’m guessing you’re not reading a bunch of news all the time. You’re trying to keep distraction-free, so you don’t get it. That’s part of being an entrepreneur, too. If you didn’t have kids, you would really forget what day of the week it is.
Mike: Yeah, totally. Just because they have to go to school five days a week, so other than that, I would just completely lose track of time, I think.
Rob: Right. I remember, it was before our kids were in school and I was just working on my stuff solo, maybe with contractors and a holiday would come up, whatever, Labor Day, Memorial Day and I just be like, “Oh, are people taking that off today?” just out of the blue, I was not paying attention to any of that stuff. There was no vacation schedule.
Mike: Yeah. Sometimes, the kids will have a vacation for something, I’m like, “Why did they have Monday off? What’s going on here?” and then like, “Oh, it’s a federal holiday,” or something like that, “Oh okay, whatever.” I just don’t even notice most of the time. I think that’s a direct result of working for yourself and not having to go into an office, because otherwise, if you work for somebody else, then your schedule is theirs and they tell you when you do you don’t have to come in, so you’re looking forward to those days versus when you’re on the other side of the fence when you’re trying to get things done, days off doesn’t, I’ll say, really mean a whole lot to you. You’re distracted sometimes, a little bit more disruptive than it would be otherwise.
Rob: Yes, especially if you’re in a flow, like a day-to-day or week-to-week flow. I think that’s a big thing, to touch on it like flexibility is what you’re talking about. It’s like the flexibility to take a day off when you need to, the flexibility to work on a holiday, and have it really move the needle circles back to what I believe is a big motivator for you in being an entrepreneur.
Mike: Yeah. I feel having kids, though, does tend to screw that up a little bit because if they have a day off then their expectation is that you do as well so I think that that throws a wrench in it to some extent.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree with that. We have some stuff to resume from our last conversation, whenever it was, three or four weeks ago. I have some notes here I work from to remind us where we’re headed, but I am super curious how your sleep has been because over the course of the last several years, that has tended to be a big source of ups and downs, that when you’re sleeping well, it’s easier to have a positive outlook, easier to find motivation and when you’re not, that can that can negatively impact it.
Mike: I would say up until about a week ago, my sleep was pretty good, but then I screwed up my shoulder, I almost always sleep on my left side and I screwed up my left shoulder at the gym, so it’s sore. It’s not overly painful, not enough that I would feel the need to go to the doctor and have them take a look at it because there’s going to say, “Don’t lift as much weight,” or whatever, because I’ve done that before and I messed up that shoulder and it’s just a recurring thing that comes up once in awhile, but because I sleep on that side, it has a tendency to wake me up. My sleep’s gotten better over the past day or two, but for probably three or four days, it was pretty messed up.
Rob: Did that impact you during the day? Did it impact your productivity?
Mike: Yeah, totally. I would wake up in the middle and then I couldn’t get back to sleep and then of course the cascade of thoughts throughout the course of the night, it’s like, “Alright, here we go again,” but it’s gotten better the past day or two.
Rob: Good. Glad to hear that. I guess that that leads to motivation, which is something I’ll probably be asking you about every time we talk. I’ll put it this way, over the past several years, you’ve seen times of extremely high motivation and extremely low and a lot in between. What has the last month felt like, look like for you?
Mike: I wouldn’t say it’s been really high, but I wouldn’t say it’s been super low, either. It’s one of those middle of the road, things are just plotting forward and I wish things were going faster, but at the same time it’s just takes longer to get certain things done that I would like. For example, I’ve got the Google security audit that’s coming up, where it’s just sucking up a ton of my time for something that I know is just not going to make a meaningful impact in my business, other than the fact that it’s going to allow me to continue to be in business. I would say it’s detrimental to have to be doing those things, which sucks, but you have to take the good with the bad and you have to do those things too.
Rob: Right, I feel the Google security audit as this slog, that’s exactly how I would describe it. It’s like the stuff you don’t want to be doing but that you’re really, in your case, you have to, to stay in business. How much of your time is that taking?
Mike: There’s two different sides of it. There’s documentation and then there’s the technical audit itself. For the technical side of it, that’s not scheduled until, I think, the 28th. It’s basically the week after MicroConf Europe, because they asked me, “Hey, when would this fit in your schedule.” They wanted to know if I had any vacations or breaks or anything like that where I wouldn’t be in contact with them. I said, “Look, this really has to start after this date,” and they said, “Okay, we’ll schedule it for that.” In the meantime, there’s all this documentation that we’ve got to get gathered. It’s all processes and procedures and things like that which are, I’ll say, a waste of time, because really, all these things are stuff that I would be doing anyway. It’s just that they want to document it.
It’s like, “Okay. Well, what do you do if this happens? What do you do if that happens? How is this handled and how was that handled?” They just want to review everything to make sure that, I don’t know, I guess you’re doing a good job, so to speak. In my mind, it’s all a bunch of paperwork for the sake of having paperwork. It feels like dealing with the government to be honest.
Rob: Yeah, it feels to me like PCI or GDPR or it’s just reams of docs that sit in a filing cabinet, figuratively or literally, and I agree with you there, that it totally sounds like that.
Mike: Yeah, in terms of describing that it’s a slog, yeah, absolutely. It sucks because there’s a lot of documentation and they said flat out that this is going to be the bulk of the effort and the most time-consuming part. Because it’s a different team, it doesn’t count towards this technical side of things. Hopefully, I can get most of that, all of it taken care of before they start the technical stuff and then when they do that, then they’ll do penetration testing, black box testing, and all these different things to try and make sure that the application itself is secure.
If anything comes up, then I have to address those issues. Assuming that everything’s okay at the end of the technical audit, then they’ll give me the stamp of approval and I can immediately send it to Google, but I think that some of that’s contingent upon them receiving the final check and everything else as well, but it’s a slog, it sucks.
Mike: Yeah, it sounds like it. What’s the timeline on that? Is this a two week thing you’ll have this cert or is a month? When will this be over?
Mike: My hope is mid-November.
Rob: Wow. Okay, so that’s another six weeks when we’re recording.
Mike: Yeah. It’s wild.
Rob: That’s brutal. I should say as much as we’re bagging on this, I’m guessing that much like PCI and GDPR, I feel there’s a reason these things exist, but I think 90% of it is unnecessary at our scale and it’s probably 10%. If they do penetration testing and they find something, it will be like, “Cool, you fixed something.” I’m guessing there’s going to be a couple things that improve your security, a couple out of it. Maybe it’s 5% or 10%, but most of it I think is, as you’ve said, huge waste of time.
Mike: Yeah, it is. I’m not the type of person to go out and totally bash on other companies for the way that they’re doing things but Google in this particular situation, I really feel them taking back their “don’t be evil thing” several years ago, which probably is a decade at this point, but all the things that they’re doing, I just feel the company itself is really abusing their position to force people to do things in a certain way, in cases like for my app and things that are below a certain scale, really don’t make a difference. It doesn’t make a meaningful impact and it doesn’t help the world in any way, shape, or form but they’re forcing do it for no other reason because they can.
Rob: It’s CYA. They’re trying to cover their ass for if suddenly, there’s a breach, they’re going to be in the headlines, not you. If there’s a breach, they’re going to get called in front of Congress, not you.
Mike: I guess, but at the same time, the scale of the breach. For example, if I have 20 customers and Google has 10 billion—let’s call it 50 million for them and call it 50 for me. The scale between the breach between those two things is very, very different and forcing me to go through the exact same processes and procedures as Google or somebody of a comparable size just does not make sense. It’s just the way it is. Like I said, I don’t like to bash other people for the way that they’re doing things, but I feel this is just extortion 101 to be perfectly honest. There’s no other real way to put it .
Rob: How much of your time? Has it been 20 hours a week you’re spending on this?
Mike: It’s probably not quite that much, but things are ramping up as time goes on, because I have to fab this basically finished and all the back and forth done, probably before MicroConf, which I leave for that in a couple weeks. The next couple weeks, that’s probably going to be 30 to 40 hours a week of my time.
Rob: Yeah, that’s tough. Looking back over the previous month, you have had some time. If it was 15 hours a week then you got another, I don’t know, 20 hours a week or whatever to do stuff. This kind of stuff, this slog, doing things that I don’t want to do, tends to de-motivate me. I almost have a tough time then transitioning because it sucks the joy out of the day. It sucks the good glucose or the joy or whatever it is and when I turned it like, “Well, now I got to write code or I got to the market, I have a tough time separating those.” Are you similar to that?
Mike: No.
Rob: Okay. This is negatively impacted your motivation then.
Mike: Yeah. It’s not just motivation but overall productivity. I’ve been trying to figure out ways to segment out my days, so that I’m not working on those types of things that are de-motivational, first thing, because what I’ve found is that, if I work on some of those things to start the day and then I take a break for whatever reason, the rest of my day is shot. Even if I’m trying to work on other things that would be motivational. I just don’t get anything done because my mind is wandering back to the stuff that I was working on before.
Rob: Interesting, because if I were to do it, I would think that since it’s the thing that I want to do the least, I would try to get into work, drink coffee, listen to loud music and hammer through it in an hour or two, such that I can breathe and reward myself with a break and then I can spend the rest of the day working on other stuff. That’s how I would mentally approach it, but you’re saying that’s not. It’s bleeding over, it sounds like.
Mike: Yeah, it definitely is. I don’t say this doesn’t factor into it at all but I’ve been talking to my wife about my exercise routines and stuff like that, modifying my diet and all these other things. It’s just like, “I hate exercising. I hate going to the gym. I hate dieting. I hate working on this stuff for the Google security audit.” I’m going through some third party integrations and stuff and going through all the fine print all the other things for that stuff. I can’t stand doing that as well. I’m stuck in this position where I’m forced to do all of these things that I absolutely hate doing. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s not really fun parts of the day, either.
Rob: Yeah, that makes it tough. I’m sorry to hear that, honestly. I know exactly what that feels like, where everything on your to do list is […] and you don’t want to do any of it. I know what that feels like. “No, I’m not in that mode today,” but I have done that and had to deal with it throughout my career. Those are the times where it’s like, “This has to end soon or I’m going to burn out.” That’s what eventually what will happen. Hopefully, you’re done in a month, six weeks. It’s going to be a slog for a month or six weeks, but when that part goes away, it sounds like that could dramatically improve your day to day working conditions.
Mike: Yeah. That’s what I’m hoping as well. I say six weeks, mid-November. That’s what I’m hoping it’ll be done, but it could theoretically be as late as the end of November, because after the technical piece of the audit is done, if I don’t have everything fixed by the time they’ve done that, then I have to go fix a bunch of stuff. They can come back with a report on day one and say, “Hey, these 25 things are wrong or whatever and need to be addressed,” and then I could presumably fix them all that night and then the next day say, “Hey, you can retest the stuff now,” and during the course of the actual technical piece, they’ll continue to redo those things, but then once the end hits, I basically have 30 days to go back to them and say, “Okay, all of these other issues are fixed, you can retest it.” Then assuming that all of them fixed, great. If not or if it exceeds that 30 days, I can request that they retest it, but it is really expensive to have them retest it after that.
Rob: Got it. So, time is of the essence here for sure. We’ll move on from motivation in a minute, but I had this concern. It was at the last month or the month before where I said, “I’m concerned about your motivation over the long-term. Will you be able to stay motivated if flexibility is our only motivation?” You’d said, “Hey, am I running away from something, which is a crappy Dilbert job or running towards something and will that maintain over long-term?”
The times when that’s tested is when you’re in the middle of the slog. It’s when you’re not making progress because you said, “I’m motivated by progress,” and that motivates you, but it doesn’t sound like you’re making a ton of progress, right now. When you look out over the next month, do you feel is it time to just gather all the muster and just push it forward or are you concerned about what the next month or two months frankly might look like?
Mike: I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily concerned about the next couple of months. What I’m more concerned about, six months or eight months down the road. The reason for that is because there’s all the stuff that needs to be done right now, an example, one of the things that I spent a decent chunk of time in advance to this security audit was that there were multiple projects that I have that get deployed to different URLs and they are largely copies of one another and I had to merge them together. I wanted to merge them so that there wasn’t so much code for them to go through, so that it made sure that everything was consistent between every single API endpoint that I have out there.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t necessarily know. I think that they are, but you just wouldn’t have any real way of knowing for sure. I merge those together and made it so that it basically got one core API project and then three others import it and then use it as opposed to before I basically had two different separate copies of it. By spending time on that, I made sure that that was, I’ll say kind of fun, but at the same time, those things need to be taken care of.
There’s a lot of things that I’m not necessarily holding back from but I know that I probably can’t really get into until after this security audit is over. That includes making major changes to the product because I don’t want to be in the middle of making a major change and being unable to deploy it and have a discrepancy between the code that they’re looking at versus the code that’s deployed and not being able to push it out because it’s in a half completed state. There’s some stuff I’d just have to hold back on until the security audit is over. Those things are just on hold and I don’t really have much choice there.
Rob: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. On a perhaps related note, is one of those things, that untestable sealed .NET component that you’ve been wrestling with for months and for six months more, and you want to work on replacing it but you don’t want to. Is that the idea or you can’t?
Mike: Yeah. I can’t because it would involve a pretty major change. Here’s the part of the issue. The backend data storage system that I have in place to store the emails uses that component as part of a naming convention for everything. In order to rip it out, I’d basically have to rewrite it, then have everything imported again from people’s mailboxes, then stored in a different file format with a different naming convention. Just to process that is probably going to take a week and that’s not even testing that.
I have to wait until the security audit is over, which again leads me back to the idea that this whole thing is stupid because I’m basically just trying to get to the finish line here so you guys can do this stuff. Then I can make a bunch of changes to make the app work better. What’s the whole point?
Rob: Something that strikes me is that early on, you were most concerned about the cost of the audit. It turns out the monetary price is not what’s taken the most hole on you and on the product, on Bluetick. It sounds like the motivation and the time it’s requiring.
Mike: Yeah. Absolutely it is, which sucks but at the same time, it’s nice that it doesn’t cost me as much in terms of actual revenue but at the same time, I’m still going to need to make that up next year.
Rob: There are other things. Something you had mentioned at the end of the last time that we spoke is that you’re going to hire someone to help with marketing. Did that happen and how has that been?
Mike: It did. I hired somebody to help out with a couple of very specific projects. The first one that we’re just going to be kicking off on the next week or so is a podcast tour. Basically put together a list of podcasts, go take a look at, and pars out. Obviously, being a host of this podcast, you and I get pitched all the time for different things. Sometimes they come across well and sometimes they don’t. It’s obvious the ones that don’t. What I’m trying to do is say, “Okay, well. How can I position myself for a pitch in a way that is going to actually resonate with the people who are on the receiving end of it?”
I’ve basically gone through the process of having the marketing person help out with filtering a lot of those out and deciding what the best pitch or the best way to present it would be for each of those podcasts, take a look at the history of each of those. If they don’t have guests at all, then probably not a great fit. If they do, then how many guests do they have? Is it a regular thing? Do they have guests on specific topics? Basically, we’re doing a decent amount of indepth research there. Then start emailing them, see if I can do sort of a podcast tour to get onto those different shows and drive some traffic to Bluetick.
Rob: Something that I’ve raised a number of times is that Bluetick, the differentiation, right? I’m bringing that up because if you’re not differentiated yet, do you feel driving more traffic is worthwhile? Are you trying to drive the traffic so that you can get more people using the app to do customer development to differentiate more? Is that the idea or are you really trying to scale the funnel in order to actually get more customers using the product as it is today?
Mike: We’re going to discuss those chicken and egg problem here.
Rob: I know. I guess it ends at some point which you have product market fit but the pre-product market fit, never ending circle.
Mike: Right. The product itself, I feel has enough value for the people who would use the current features. I would agree with you that I don’t think that is differentiated enough from some of the other competitors out there but I also think that that’s okay. If people are out there who have thought of doing email follow-ups in various situations or they don’t even necessarily realize that, “Hey, I could use email follow-ups in that situation. I just had never really thought about it.” I feel if I can get in front of those people to reach them, then that is going to be enough to at least push the revenue in the right direction.
Does it need to solve everything? I don’t think so. Is it suboptimal by having a product where I’m going and doing a podcast tour like this where I don’t have product market fit, I don’t have a lot of differentiation? Yes, it’s absolutely suboptimal. Does that matter? The answer is no. I don’t necessarily care about that. If I were to wait until it was the optimal time to go do it, the thing would be worth millions of dollars and why would I care about doing a podcast tour at that point because I’ve probably outgrown that channel to some extent. So, I have to.
Rob: One of the problems you mentioned last time we spoke was you don’t have enough traffic. I was going to ask about progress, have you made progress towards that end. It sounds like you haven’t made direct progress in terms of driving more traffic but that things are in the works to hopefully drive some from these podcasts.
Mike: Yes.
Rob: If I were in your shoes, I like that you have a podcast tour because: (a) you’re good on the mic, (b) it’s not very much of your time especially if you have this other person doing it and you can just show up, do it, and see what the results are. I’m skeptical that it’s going to drive enough to move your needle but given the amount of time that it’s going to take which is not that much, I think it’s worth trying.
I also think, in your shoes I would consider some short-term stuff. By short-term I mean something that gets customers in very quickly which is cold email. You have a warm/cold email tool. You’ve seen shady cold email and you’ve seen ethical cold email. We’ve talked about this in the past. You could do it in a way that isn’t garbage and that I think you could feel good about. You have your own tools. You don’t need to pay for another one. It’s really just finding the data or the list but that’s something that can start working. If you can get it, it can create leads now, right, to get a lot more conversations started. Have you considered that?
Mike: Yes I have and I’ve already started working in that direction as well. Obviously, you aren’t aware of this because we didn’t talk about it in advance to the show but what I did was I went through and I started bucketing a lot of my prospects list. I was fortunate enough that I went into LinkedIn before LinkedIn decided that they were going to yank all the email addresses out of the export so I have over 1000 people that I’m connected to on LinkedIn where I have their email addresses. It’s closer than 900 or so because I went through and sorted them out because there’s some that appear in that list that I don’t have all the contact information for them or they’re duplicated on another list that I have.
By separating those out, I’ve basically got multiple buckets of people. There’s people who are on that LinkedIn list. There are also people who have signed up for an account in Bluetick but either never finished the process or they signed up and then they cancelled at some point. Then I also have people who I had listed in my Pipedrive account at one point where I was walking them through the process and then they either dropped off for one reason or another. Part of why I built Bluetick was because I didn’t feel Pipedrive helped me as well as it could have. I’ve got those people that are tracked there.
I’ve also got a separate list for people on my personal mailing list. I’ve got people on the Bluetick mailing list as well. All of those, I can reach out to individually through Bluetick. I’ve spent quite a bit of time bucketing those people into different lists and it’s a matter of going through those and sending out those cold emails as you call it. I don’t feel it’s quite as cold but just because we’ve had some contact in some way, shape, or form.
Rob: Yeah. You’re right. It’s not totally cold. It’s lukewarm to warm depending on who you put in there. That’s interesting. What’s your timeline for getting that started because I think that could move a needle here?
Mike: I don’t know and this is something I struggle with a little bit because I’ve got this upcoming Google security audit then I’ve got some of those changes I want to make in order to rip out all that .NET component. Let’s say that I add 50–100 customers, something like that or even just 50–100 trials, each one of those are going to have mailbox data associated with it and then assuming that they’re still active when I start doing conversions. It’s going to take longer for the data migration to happen.
Does that matter as much? Probably not, but it introduces places where things could fail. Having to look at a lot of the stuff that comes out of mailboxes, the more data that’s in there, the more likely you are to run to an edge case where there’s an expectation that there’s a datapoint there and there isn’t. The code crashes and you have to fix it, then redeploy it and potentially have to basically restart the process, which sucks. I’m between this rock and a hard place where I have to do it. I don’t really want to, but I may just have to bite the bullet and kick it off at some point and hope for the best.
Rob: Yeah. On this one, in particular, I think you got to do it. When I think of, “Is it an excuse or is it a valid reason?” I think you and I could come up with probably five reasons why you shouldn’t start sending these lukewarm emails. I think that your business is more important than that. Getting Bluetick to where it’s supporting you full-time because that’s your goal, I think that’s more important because if you wait until all these other stuff you’ve mentioned—there’s always going to be stuff you want to get done before you do whatever—I think you’re months out.
You could feasibly be two months out for the audit, you don’t really want to do this sealed .NET component before that’s done, which I get. As long as the audit keeps sucking up your time, I get it. It seems like that .NET component is really holding things up. I just would hate for it to be mid-December and have you start doing the cold email. You’re 2½ months from now and nobody’s buying at that point. Then you’re into January and it’s that’s a lot to push off.
Mike: Yeah and I’m feeling the best case scenario, if things go well with the security audit, as soon as that’s done, that’s when I should start sending out those emails. I’m okay with doing it through November but when December hits, it’s time to basically back off on that and say, “Okay, let’s pause this and let’s restart it in January,” because nothing’s really going to move in December. I just don’t think that it is unless I were to say, “Hey, you sign up this month and you get an extra two weeks to your trial, four weeks,” or something like that. “You get a six week trial instead of two weeks.” That I can see potentially doing, but aside from that, I agree. I’m not going to let the replacement of that .NET component be something that holds up pushing on that side of things, for the lukewarm outreach I guess.
Rob: Right but I would say, even this cold outreach, why wouldn’t you just start it this week? What’s holding you back from doing that?
Mike: Mostly I just have to sit down and write the email templates to send them. Then the big thing that I think holds me back from doing that is that when new customers come on, they typically need a lot of handholding in the early stages and that’s a huge time sync. As I said, I leave for MicroConf in two weeks, so if I have that coupled with all the documentation paperwork I’m trying to get together for the Google security audit which I know is going to take a huge chunk of time over the next couple of weeks, I feel what’s going to end up happening is I’m just not going to be as responsive to these customers and they’re like, “Well, why did I even give you a chance?” Because they’re lukewarm relationships, I don’t necessarily want to burn personal bridges.
Rob: Could you start with a small number though? Could you get these emails drafted, start cold emailing a ridiculously small amount like 10 a day? Normally, if you’re doing cold email campaigns, you’re sending thousands a month to be honest, but if you start sending 5 a day or 10 a day, so that you had 1–3 prospects in the pipeline? I know the MicroConf stuff is a problem and you’ll have to communicate that. It’s not a problem. It’s a speedbump, right? You’ll have to notify the people that you’re working with and be like, “I’m doing this conference, I’ll be out a few days.”
That’s a bummer but I just want to see you move forward with it, I think is how I feel about it with something. Again, we can think or reasons why you shouldn’t do this until after MicroConf, until after the audit, until after the .NET component, or until after Christmas. Pretty soon you’re in January and you’re 3½ months from now. I don’t think that’s good for your motivation or for the business growth, to be honest.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think you’re right. Starting with a smaller group would probably do it and that would at least get the ball started. Then I would have the whole system in place, so to speak, for ramping it up throughout November. That’s probably a better way to go than just holding off completely.
Rob: That’s how I feel about it because this stuff takes time.
Mike: I think that the other thing that comes to mind as a workaround for people who start to sign on a couple of days before MicroConf starts, I can email them, say, “Hey, look. I’m going to be out for the next week. I know you’re probably going to need help during this time but let me do this, let me extend your trial by another week or two weeks,” whatever, “to help get by that or overcome that just because I know I’m going to be less available during this time.”
Rob: That is such a roadblock to speedbump email that you just brought up. I love it. Seriously. You just figured out a way of like, “Here’s an objection. Here’s something that I can do that would probably work perfect.” It really has a low-risk of failure. That’s it man. When you’re building these types of funnels or these systems or whatever, this stuff takes a lot longer, not just hours in a day but a lot more duration in terms of weeks or months to get going.
If you’re starting from a cold stop in a month, then you’re not making any of that progress. If you start very slowly now, you’re going to see the bugs, the kinks, how you’re going to improve and you can tinker with it and lower risk and then you can basically ramp it up when you feel a little more comfortable about it. Awesome.
Mike: Other ways of it is to differentiate. In that weekly mastermind that I talk to you about, they’re still going with that, we still talk every week usually for at least 1 hour, sometimes 1½–2 hours. One of the things that we’ve specifically talked about is exactly how I can differentiate Bluetick.
Several things have come up which I won’t go into in detail here just because they bleed in for direction and they tend to be an extended conversation, but for the most part, if there are several things that I’ve looked at and say, “This would be a fantastic way to go but it’s almost a completely different product at that point,” it sounds nice in theory but I have to say no to it at that point because I’m not building another product at this point.
Rob: Yeah. It’s not even a pivot. It’s just a start from scratch.
Mike: It would probably be easier to start from scratch at that point. Yes. I don’t know.
Rob: On the plus side, you might not need the Google audit.
Mike: Right because I’ve already committed to that. I don’t know.
Rob: Totally.
Mike: Then you’re like, “Is this a…”
Rob: Sunk cost?
Mike: Sunk cost, I don’t know.
Rob: No, no, no. At this point, you recommitted. We went through this two or three months ago, right? It was like, “Should you keep working on Bluetick? Should you keep being an entrepreneur?” You went on a retreat and you decided, “No, I’m going to do this.” That’s not just so you can’t pivot Bluetick to something but if you literally have to start from a new code base, if it’s that far off from where you are, it’s not the time. Maybe you’ll wind up doing that in a year or two, hopefully not but I don’t think that’s the time because you have all these other stuff moving forward now.
Mike: I think that if we’re incrementally going a direction like that and it’s through customer discovery, then great but this isn’t really that, I don’t think. At least a couple of different directions I thought of, I don’t really feel that’s it.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve come back to this question a lot. Do you know how to differentiate? You had mentioned the integrations could potentially be a differentiator and you mentioned a few minutes ago that you are working on some integrations? Is that part moving forward?
Mike: Yeah. That part is moving forward. I’ve got an integration I’ve been working on the past couple of weeks, on and off. I’m hoping to have it done and submitted by the end of this week but we’ll see how that goes. Actually, I have to. I committed in my mastermind group to absolutely having that done and submitted by the end of this week. I’ve got another day-and-a-half to finish it, but it’s close.
Rob: I missed it. Did you say who’s the integration’s with?
Mike: I did not.
Rob: Okay. Cool. This is the fun stuff is when you’re doing things that are covert and that you don’t want to say in public because you’re worried about a competitor or whatever. Obviously, you’ll announce it in public when it’s done. So you have been making progress then. You’ve been writing code and getting that in place.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Cool. Good to hear it. When I asked about differentiation last time you said, “I need to talk to some of my customers more, ask them why did they decide to use Bluetick.” What was that decision process to find out if you already have some type of differentiation that we just don’t know about or what that is? It’s like a job to be something, the switch interview. “Why did you decide to do this?” Did you have a chance to do any of that?
Mike: Yes. I talked to a couple of different people and I still have to get through, go in, and take a look at some of the other customers I have. What I’m trying to do is go through and actually talk to all of them. Unfortunately, some of them are run by agencies, the people running the account are not necessarily the people paying for it. They’re running 3–5 accounts or something like that. I’d be talking to the same person for five different “customers.”
I still have to sort out some of those because I don’t necessarily know exactly who all those people are. But from the conversations that I have had, one of the things that keep coming up, for example in Bluetick, you can have somebody in multiple sequences at the same time. I’m working on making it so that you can add somebody back into the same sequence multiple times. Something else people have been asking for a little bit is being able to add the same person to the same sequence multiple times.
I’m still trying to sort out exactly the use cases for those. I’ve got a couple of calls scheduled in the future to discuss those in a little bit more detail. But for my understanding, those types of things that are not things that any of my competitors can do because they are explicitly geared toward cold outreach. Once you have reached contact with somebody, once they have responded to an email, they’re so hands off that you literally cannot send them another email. I feel that’s a differentiator for some of my competitors but probably not all of them.
Rob: That’d be interesting. We actually got that request with Drip. We weren’t cold email obviously, it’s warm marketing list but originally, you could go through a sequence which we call a campaign, you can go through campaign once and you couldn’t restart it. We did it for a bunch of reasons. It doesn’t often makes sense to do that and there are some really, they weren’t spammers per se but there were people that were just doing really shady internet marketing stuff and they have a 52-week sequence. If you were still there at the end, they wanted to start over. We’re like, “Oh my gosh. I don’t want you to do that.”
Then there were some legit reasons for this like, “Hey, I throw an event twice a year and I have an email sequence that goes out to all the attendees around the event time and it’s the same sequence. In essence, I’m just going to update the dates in the emails, so I want to start them over with a bulk operation and just be able to boom drop people there. If they can’t go through it again, that doesn’t make sense.” There are totally valid use cases for these kinds of stuff.
Mike: That’s what I’ve found as well. Simple things that you wouldn’t necessarily think of dumping emails which coincidentally, my credit card expires at the end of next month and in the past two days I’ve gotten over a dozen emails saying, “Hey, your credit card expires at the end of the month.” I’m like, “Oh God, now I got to go update it,” like it does in different places but that is one of those cases where adding somebody into an email sequence in Bluetick would be a prime use case for that would be very simple to do that.
The problem is that you can’t really restart them so you could do it once. Then you have to delete them from the sequence then add them back. There is a workaround in place right now but people want the ability to basically restart them in the sequence and then also have the same person in the same sequence multiple times. Again, I’m still trying to dig in to exactly the reasons behind that. I’ve heard from 2–3 different people that they wanted to do that.
Rob: Got it but you want to talk to more customers, you were saying, just to get more ideas.
Mike: Yeah, well I want to talk to them more about the individual use cases for that because if I understand why it is they want to do that, it may dictate how those changes are made inside the code itself because I could just slap something in there that says, “Oh, just restart this person.” But then it has an impact on the data and statistics as well, for example. Bluetick goes, when it does a response to an email, it does a threaded response and it includes the text of the previous email that was sent. If I restart it, it basically has to be email one, for example and it can’t include the previous email that was sent in that thread because it shouldn’t.
Rob: Let’s talk offline about this because we came up with a solution that it’s just too deep in the weeds to go into here, but I remember how we designed it and we’ll see if it works for you.
Mike: Okay.
Rob: But that’s exciting actually. I’m pleased to hear that there are these things that other tools can’t do. The interesting thing is that you can build these as features, but how do those bubble up to positioning? Not just as a feature, but how does that change your headline? What are you now? Are you the most robust one or all these use cases around specific things that then you become the niche player, you pick a couple of verticals that really need repeating, and then you just go after those? There’s a thread here that I think you should keep pulling.
Mike: Yeah. One of the things that has come up in conversations with one of my customers was like most people, they use Gmail as their email client but it’s immaterial which one you actually use. One of the thoughts that I have is about how do they use Bluetick without logging into it?
Let’s say that’s a one off situation. Typically, somebody will send an email from their mailbox and then that’s it. They’re hoping that somebody will come back whereas Bluetick, the expectation is the email sequence is launched from inside of Bluetick. That use case falls apart if they reply from their mailbox. There is a way to create a task, assign to Bluetick, and then you’ve got the email template. It’ll pop up a task and you can go in. You can change that first email and then the rest of it is templated.
Let’s say that there was a way to do that from inside your email client whether it’s Outlook, Office365, or Gmail. Let’s say that there was a folder there called _Bluetick so that it appears right at the top of the list. You send an email and you drag it over into that and then Bluetick picks that up and says, “Hey, I see that there’s this email here. I’m going to essentially add this to a particular email sequence and follow up with it using this first email that that person had as their original one.” Then it’s going to reply to that email several times until they get a response.
The question is, how does that mechanically really work? I don’t know the answer to that yet, but it seems like it’s a really good use case. I think that it would differentiate from the other things that are out there.
Rob: Yeah, I hope this pans out in a way that you can find more people who also have that need because that’s a question mark of course. Is this so niche that there aren’t going to be hundreds or thousands of people that need it? I think that’s TBD and I think that’s more conversations then figuring out how to present that to people when you’re positioning and in your marketing.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Sounds good, man. I guess I would summarize the past month, it sounds like it’s been okay but not great. The Google audit is really throwing a wrench it things and really impacted your productivity.
Mike: But it could be worse.
Rob: It could be worse and it has been worse. I’m pretty happy to hear where these threads are going. Let’s circle up again in about a month. I’m imagining you will either be still in the slog, I’m guessing you’ll be hopefully wrapping up the slog of the Google audit. Now, you’ll still have another two to potentially four weeks after that, actually.
Mike: It’s just going to be 45-minute recording of a solid continuous profanity beep. That’s all it’s going to be.
Rob: That’s a good idea. “Well, hey Mike. Welcome back to the show,” and then it just kicks off. Then I do an outro. “Thanks again. Thanks, Mike, for coming.” I hope things go well over the next month and we will catch up with you soo.
Mike: Sounds good. Talk to you soon.
Rob: All right, bye.
I was enjoying my conversations with Mike and of course, wish him well over the next month of slogging through the Google audit. We know that Mike has some challenges ahead of him with Bluetick, not just this audit but in continuing to prove out the market and differentiating Bluetick. A lot of work to be done, but it is nice to hear that he has continued to be productive since our last conversation. We’ll catch up with Mike again in about a month.
If you have a question for the show, whether it’s for me or a guest, leave us a voicemail at 1-888-801-9690 or email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can attach an MP3, send a dropbox link, or just send a text. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. If you’re not already subscribed to us, you should search for ‘startups’ in any podcatcher of your choice and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript to each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
We have many different show formats. Sometimes we do interviews, we answer a lot of listener questions, we have founder hot seats, but over the past 465 episodes, we have followed a lot of stories. We followed stories of folks in the MicroConf community. We have followed the stories of myself and Mike Taber. If you’re a new listener. Mike has been on the show since the beginning, but now he comes on about once a month and updates us on his progress as he’s doubling down and focusing on his software product called Bluetick. In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, we get a Bluetick update from Mike Taber. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 465.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups. Whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob, and today with Mike, we are going to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made. Thanks again for coming back. We’re going to be talking with Mike here in just a minute. Before we dive in, I had a couple things I wanted to mention. First is, if you haven’t already left a review on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple podcast, Google podcast, I would really appreciate you logging and clicking that five stars.
We had a recent review from Josh Krist and he says, “The real experience of bootstrapping. This show absolutely rocks. If your bootstrapping a company, thinking about starting a company in the future or just curious to understand what it really feels and looks like to start a company without outside funding, this is a must listen. Thank you Rob and Mike.” Thank you so much for that review Josh and we’d love to hear a review from you as a listener, if you feel you’ve gotten value out of the show or you don’t even need to do a full review, you can click the five stars and that helps new people discover us.
We have, I believe it’s 354 five star reviews that actually contain text and we have another 200 or 300 that are just people rating us, but I can’t seem to find the numbers anywhere. It’s hard to get worldwide numbers and there was an app I was using that that stop working, so I think we’re in the 600–700 range of reviews and I would love to just add a few more this week. I haven’t mentioned them in a while and if you can be obliged to click that five star, we’d really appreciate it.
Next item on the agenda is MicroConf Minneapolis is April 19th to 23rd and tickets will be going on sale very soon in the next, I’ll say, week, maybe two, tops. If you are interested in potentially becoming a growth or starter, Minneapolis late April, head microconf.com and get on the email list. The other thing I wanted to mention is the state of independent SaaS report, which I record a little mini episode, a half episode that I put in the feed last week, that survey is alive right now. It’s only live for another couple of days after this recording.
If you’re able to head over to stateofindiesaas.com. I didn’t do independent because it’s so long and I got tired of typing it, stateofindiesaas.com, that takes you right to the survey and that will help yourself and your fellow independent SaaS companies because we’re going to try to get a bunch of metrics together and put out this MicroConf state of independent SaaS report. Listen to shore episode I recorded. If you want the full details on that, but that’s only open for another couple days now we’re going to start the data crunching and start working on that report.
With that, let’s dive into today’s conversation with Mike. Mike, welcome back to the show.
Mike: Thanks, how you doing?
Rob: I’m pretty good. It’s good to hear your voice, man. It’s been a while.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: It’s been a month.
Mike: Has it been? Okay, yeah, I think so.
Rob: I think so. The episodes about four weeks apart and we record, I don’t know, a couple days before, so yeah. I think it’s been somewhere in the three or four week range.
Mike: I lose track of time when I’m not talking to people. Obviously, I haven’t talked to you, really, other than email, but there are certain things that used to be on my schedule that are no longer my schedule and I used to use those as benchmarks as time passes. I don’t really have as much of that anymore, so I lose track of even just what day of the week it is sometimes.
Rob: Yeah, I totally get it. I think not being on social media, I’m guessing you’re not reading a bunch of news all the time. You’re trying to keep distraction-free, so you don’t get it. That’s part of being an entrepreneur, too. If you didn’t have kids, you would really forget what day of the week it is.
Mike: Yeah, totally. Just because they have to go to school five days a week, so other than that, I would just completely lose track of time, I think.
Rob: Right. I remember, it was before our kids were in school and I was just working on my stuff solo, maybe with contractors and a holiday would come up, whatever, Labor Day, Memorial Day and I just be like, “Oh, are people taking that off today?” just out of the blue, I was not paying attention to any of that stuff. There was no vacation schedule.
Mike: Yeah. Sometimes, the kids will have a vacation for something, I’m like, “Why did they have Monday off? What’s going on here?” and then like, “Oh, it’s a federal holiday,” or something like that, “Oh okay, whatever.” I just don’t even notice most of the time. I think that’s a direct result of working for yourself and not having to go into an office, because otherwise, if you work for somebody else, then your schedule is theirs and they tell you when you do you don’t have to come in, so you’re looking forward to those days versus when you’re on the other side of the fence when you’re trying to get things done, days off doesn’t, I’ll say, really mean a whole lot to you. You’re distracted sometimes, a little bit more disruptive than it would be otherwise.
Rob: Yes, especially if you’re in a flow, like a day-to-day or week-to-week flow. I think that’s a big thing, to touch on it like flexibility is what you’re talking about. It’s like the flexibility to take a day off when you need to, the flexibility to work on a holiday, and have it really move the needle circles back to what I believe is a big motivator for you in being an entrepreneur.
Mike: Yeah. I feel having kids, though, does tend to screw that up a little bit because if they have a day off then their expectation is that you do as well so I think that that throws a wrench in it to some extent.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree with that. We have some stuff to resume from our last conversation, whenever it was, three or four weeks ago. I have some notes here I work from to remind us where we’re headed, but I am super curious how your sleep has been because over the course of the last several years, that has tended to be a big source of ups and downs, that when you’re sleeping well, it’s easier to have a positive outlook, easier to find motivation and when you’re not, that can that can negatively impact it.
Mike: I would say up until about a week ago, my sleep was pretty good, but then I screwed up my shoulder, I almost always sleep on my left side and I screwed up my left shoulder at the gym, so it’s sore. It’s not overly painful, not enough that I would feel the need to go to the doctor and have them take a look at it because there’s going to say, “Don’t lift as much weight,” or whatever, because I’ve done that before and I messed up that shoulder and it’s just a recurring thing that comes up once in awhile, but because I sleep on that side, it has a tendency to wake me up. My sleep’s gotten better over the past day or two, but for probably three or four days, it was pretty messed up.
Rob: Did that impact you during the day? Did it impact your productivity?
Mike: Yeah, totally. I would wake up in the middle and then I couldn’t get back to sleep and then of course the cascade of thoughts throughout the course of the night, it’s like, “Alright, here we go again,” but it’s gotten better the past day or two.
Rob: Good. Glad to hear that. I guess that that leads to motivation, which is something I’ll probably be asking you about every time we talk. I’ll put it this way, over the past several years, you’ve seen times of extremely high motivation and extremely low and a lot in between. What has the last month felt like, look like for you?
Mike: I wouldn’t say it’s been really high, but I wouldn’t say it’s been super low, either. It’s one of those middle of the road, things are just plotting forward and I wish things were going faster, but at the same time it’s just takes longer to get certain things done that I would like. For example, I’ve got the Google security audit that’s coming up, where it’s just sucking up a ton of my time for something that I know is just not going to make a meaningful impact in my business, other than the fact that it’s going to allow me to continue to be in business. I would say it’s detrimental to have to be doing those things, which sucks, but you have to take the good with the bad and you have to do those things too.
Rob: Right, I feel the Google security audit as this slog, that’s exactly how I would describe it. It’s like the stuff you don’t want to be doing but that you’re really, in your case, you have to, to stay in business. How much of your time is that taking?
Mike: There’s two different sides of it. There’s documentation and then there’s the technical audit itself. For the technical side of it, that’s not scheduled until, I think, the 28th. It’s basically the week after MicroConf Europe, because they asked me, “Hey, when would this fit in your schedule.” They wanted to know if I had any vacations or breaks or anything like that where I wouldn’t be in contact with them. I said, “Look, this really has to start after this date,” and they said, “Okay, we’ll schedule it for that.” In the meantime, there’s all this documentation that we’ve got to get gathered. It’s all processes and procedures and things like that which are, I’ll say, a waste of time, because really, all these things are stuff that I would be doing anyway. It’s just that they want to document it.
It’s like, “Okay. Well, what do you do if this happens? What do you do if that happens? How is this handled and how was that handled?” They just want to review everything to make sure that, I don’t know, I guess you’re doing a good job, so to speak. In my mind, it’s all a bunch of paperwork for the sake of having paperwork. It feels like dealing with the government to be honest.
Rob: Yeah, it feels to me like PCI or GDPR or it’s just reams of docs that sit in a filing cabinet, figuratively or literally, and I agree with you there, that it totally sounds like that.
Mike: Yeah, in terms of describing that it’s a slog, yeah, absolutely. It sucks because there’s a lot of documentation and they said flat out that this is going to be the bulk of the effort and the most time-consuming part. Because it’s a different team, it doesn’t count towards this technical side of things. Hopefully, I can get most of that, all of it taken care of before they start the technical stuff and then when they do that, then they’ll do penetration testing, black box testing, and all these different things to try and make sure that the application itself is secure.
If anything comes up, then I have to address those issues. Assuming that everything’s okay at the end of the technical audit, then they’ll give me the stamp of approval and I can immediately send it to Google, but I think that some of that’s contingent upon them receiving the final check and everything else as well, but it’s a slog, it sucks.
Mike: Yeah, it sounds like it. What’s the timeline on that? Is this a two week thing you’ll have this cert or is a month? When will this be over?
Mike: My hope is mid-November.
Rob: Wow. Okay, so that’s another six weeks when we’re recording.
Mike: Yeah. It’s wild.
Rob: That’s brutal. I should say as much as we’re bagging on this, I’m guessing that much like PCI and GDPR, I feel there’s a reason these things exist, but I think 90% of it is unnecessary at our scale and it’s probably 10%. If they do penetration testing and they find something, it will be like, “Cool, you fixed something.” I’m guessing there’s going to be a couple things that improve your security, a couple out of it. Maybe it’s 5% or 10%, but most of it I think is, as you’ve said, huge waste of time.
Mike: Yeah, it is. I’m not the type of person to go out and totally bash on other companies for the way that they’re doing things but Google in this particular situation, I really feel them taking back their “don’t be evil thing” several years ago, which probably is a decade at this point, but all the things that they’re doing, I just feel the company itself is really abusing their position to force people to do things in a certain way, in cases like for my app and things that are below a certain scale, really don’t make a difference. It doesn’t make a meaningful impact and it doesn’t help the world in any way, shape, or form but they’re forcing do it for no other reason because they can.
Rob: It’s CYA. They’re trying to cover their ass for if suddenly, there’s a breach, they’re going to be in the headlines, not you. If there’s a breach, they’re going to get called in front of Congress, not you.
Mike: I guess, but at the same time, the scale of the breach. For example, if I have 20 customers and Google has 10 billion—let’s call it 50 million for them and call it 50 for me. The scale between the breach between those two things is very, very different and forcing me to go through the exact same processes and procedures as Google or somebody of a comparable size just does not make sense. It’s just the way it is. Like I said, I don’t like to bash other people for the way that they’re doing things, but I feel this is just extortion 101 to be perfectly honest. There’s no other real way to put it .
Rob: How much of your time? Has it been 20 hours a week you’re spending on this?
Mike: It’s probably not quite that much, but things are ramping up as time goes on, because I have to fab this basically finished and all the back and forth done, probably before MicroConf, which I leave for that in a couple weeks. The next couple weeks, that’s probably going to be 30 to 40 hours a week of my time.
Rob: Yeah, that’s tough. Looking back over the previous month, you have had some time. If it was 15 hours a week then you got another, I don’t know, 20 hours a week or whatever to do stuff. This kind of stuff, this slog, doing things that I don’t want to do, tends to de-motivate me. I almost have a tough time then transitioning because it sucks the joy out of the day. It sucks the good glucose or the joy or whatever it is and when I turned it like, “Well, now I got to write code or I got to the market, I have a tough time separating those.” Are you similar to that?
Mike: No.
Rob: Okay. This is negatively impacted your motivation then.
Mike: Yeah. It’s not just motivation but overall productivity. I’ve been trying to figure out ways to segment out my days, so that I’m not working on those types of things that are de-motivational, first thing, because what I’ve found is that, if I work on some of those things to start the day and then I take a break for whatever reason, the rest of my day is shot. Even if I’m trying to work on other things that would be motivational. I just don’t get anything done because my mind is wandering back to the stuff that I was working on before.
Rob: Interesting, because if I were to do it, I would think that since it’s the thing that I want to do the least, I would try to get into work, drink coffee, listen to loud music and hammer through it in an hour or two, such that I can breathe and reward myself with a break and then I can spend the rest of the day working on other stuff. That’s how I would mentally approach it, but you’re saying that’s not. It’s bleeding over, it sounds like.
Mike: Yeah, it definitely is. I don’t say this doesn’t factor into it at all but I’ve been talking to my wife about my exercise routines and stuff like that, modifying my diet and all these other things. It’s just like, “I hate exercising. I hate going to the gym. I hate dieting. I hate working on this stuff for the Google security audit.” I’m going through some third party integrations and stuff and going through all the fine print all the other things for that stuff. I can’t stand doing that as well. I’m stuck in this position where I’m forced to do all of these things that I absolutely hate doing. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s not really fun parts of the day, either.
Rob: Yeah, that makes it tough. I’m sorry to hear that, honestly. I know exactly what that feels like, where everything on your to do list is […] and you don’t want to do any of it. I know what that feels like. “No, I’m not in that mode today,” but I have done that and had to deal with it throughout my career. Those are the times where it’s like, “This has to end soon or I’m going to burn out.” That’s what eventually what will happen. Hopefully, you’re done in a month, six weeks. It’s going to be a slog for a month or six weeks, but when that part goes away, it sounds like that could dramatically improve your day to day working conditions.
Mike: Yeah. That’s what I’m hoping as well. I say six weeks, mid-November. That’s what I’m hoping it’ll be done, but it could theoretically be as late as the end of November, because after the technical piece of the audit is done, if I don’t have everything fixed by the time they’ve done that, then I have to go fix a bunch of stuff. They can come back with a report on day one and say, “Hey, these 25 things are wrong or whatever and need to be addressed,” and then I could presumably fix them all that night and then the next day say, “Hey, you can retest the stuff now,” and during the course of the actual technical piece, they’ll continue to redo those things, but then once the end hits, I basically have 30 days to go back to them and say, “Okay, all of these other issues are fixed, you can retest it.” Then assuming that all of them fixed, great. If not or if it exceeds that 30 days, I can request that they retest it, but it is really expensive to have them retest it after that.
Rob: Got it. So, time is of the essence here for sure. We’ll move on from motivation in a minute, but I had this concern. It was at the last month or the month before where I said, “I’m concerned about your motivation over the long-term. Will you be able to stay motivated if flexibility is our only motivation?” You’d said, “Hey, am I running away from something, which is a crappy Dilbert job or running towards something and will that maintain over long-term?”
The times when that’s tested is when you’re in the middle of the slog. It’s when you’re not making progress because you said, “I’m motivated by progress,” and that motivates you, but it doesn’t sound like you’re making a ton of progress, right now. When you look out over the next month, do you feel is it time to just gather all the muster and just push it forward or are you concerned about what the next month or two months frankly might look like?
Mike: I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily concerned about the next couple of months. What I’m more concerned about, six months or eight months down the road. The reason for that is because there’s all the stuff that needs to be done right now, an example, one of the things that I spent a decent chunk of time in advance to this security audit was that there were multiple projects that I have that get deployed to different URLs and they are largely copies of one another and I had to merge them together. I wanted to merge them so that there wasn’t so much code for them to go through, so that it made sure that everything was consistent between every single API endpoint that I have out there.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t necessarily know. I think that they are, but you just wouldn’t have any real way of knowing for sure. I merge those together and made it so that it basically got one core API project and then three others import it and then use it as opposed to before I basically had two different separate copies of it. By spending time on that, I made sure that that was, I’ll say kind of fun, but at the same time, those things need to be taken care of.
There’s a lot of things that I’m not necessarily holding back from but I know that I probably can’t really get into until after this security audit is over. That includes making major changes to the product because I don’t want to be in the middle of making a major change and being unable to deploy it and have a discrepancy between the code that they’re looking at versus the code that’s deployed and not being able to push it out because it’s in a half completed state. There’s some stuff I’d just have to hold back on until the security audit is over. Those things are just on hold and I don’t really have much choice there.
Rob: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. On a perhaps related note, is one of those things, that untestable sealed .NET component that you’ve been wrestling with for months and for six months more, and you want to work on replacing it but you don’t want to. Is that the idea or you can’t?
Mike: Yeah. I can’t because it would involve a pretty major change. Here’s the part of the issue. The backend data storage system that I have in place to store the emails uses that component as part of a naming convention for everything. In order to rip it out, I’d basically have to rewrite it, then have everything imported again from people’s mailboxes, then stored in a different file format with a different naming convention. Just to process that is probably going to take a week and that’s not even testing that.
I have to wait until the security audit is over, which again leads me back to the idea that this whole thing is stupid because I’m basically just trying to get to the finish line here so you guys can do this stuff. Then I can make a bunch of changes to make the app work better. What’s the whole point?
Rob: Something that strikes me is that early on, you were most concerned about the cost of the audit. It turns out the monetary price is not what’s taken the most hole on you and on the product, on Bluetick. It sounds like the motivation and the time it’s requiring.
Mike: Yeah. Absolutely it is, which sucks but at the same time, it’s nice that it doesn’t cost me as much in terms of actual revenue but at the same time, I’m still going to need to make that up next year.
Rob: There are other things. Something you had mentioned at the end of the last time that we spoke is that you’re going to hire someone to help with marketing. Did that happen and how has that been?
Mike: It did. I hired somebody to help out with a couple of very specific projects. The first one that we’re just going to be kicking off on the next week or so is a podcast tour. Basically put together a list of podcasts, go take a look at, and pars out. Obviously, being a host of this podcast, you and I get pitched all the time for different things. Sometimes they come across well and sometimes they don’t. It’s obvious the ones that don’t. What I’m trying to do is say, “Okay, well. How can I position myself for a pitch in a way that is going to actually resonate with the people who are on the receiving end of it?”
I’ve basically gone through the process of having the marketing person help out with filtering a lot of those out and deciding what the best pitch or the best way to present it would be for each of those podcasts, take a look at the history of each of those. If they don’t have guests at all, then probably not a great fit. If they do, then how many guests do they have? Is it a regular thing? Do they have guests on specific topics? Basically, we’re doing a decent amount of indepth research there. Then start emailing them, see if I can do sort of a podcast tour to get onto those different shows and drive some traffic to Bluetick.
Rob: Something that I’ve raised a number of times is that Bluetick, the differentiation, right? I’m bringing that up because if you’re not differentiated yet, do you feel driving more traffic is worthwhile? Are you trying to drive the traffic so that you can get more people using the app to do customer development to differentiate more? Is that the idea or are you really trying to scale the funnel in order to actually get more customers using the product as it is today?
Mike: We’re going to discuss those chicken and egg problem here.
Rob: I know. I guess it ends at some point which you have product market fit but the pre-product market fit, never ending circle.
Mike: Right. The product itself, I feel has enough value for the people who would use the current features. I would agree with you that I don’t think that is differentiated enough from some of the other competitors out there but I also think that that’s okay. If people are out there who have thought of doing email follow-ups in various situations or they don’t even necessarily realize that, “Hey, I could use email follow-ups in that situation. I just had never really thought about it.” I feel if I can get in front of those people to reach them, then that is going to be enough to at least push the revenue in the right direction.
Does it need to solve everything? I don’t think so. Is it suboptimal by having a product where I’m going and doing a podcast tour like this where I don’t have product market fit, I don’t have a lot of differentiation? Yes, it’s absolutely suboptimal. Does that matter? The answer is no. I don’t necessarily care about that. If I were to wait until it was the optimal time to go do it, the thing would be worth millions of dollars and why would I care about doing a podcast tour at that point because I’ve probably outgrown that channel to some extent. So, I have to.
Rob: One of the problems you mentioned last time we spoke was you don’t have enough traffic. I was going to ask about progress, have you made progress towards that end. It sounds like you haven’t made direct progress in terms of driving more traffic but that things are in the works to hopefully drive some from these podcasts.
Mike: Yes.
Rob: If I were in your shoes, I like that you have a podcast tour because: (a) you’re good on the mic, (b) it’s not very much of your time especially if you have this other person doing it and you can just show up, do it, and see what the results are. I’m skeptical that it’s going to drive enough to move your needle but given the amount of time that it’s going to take which is not that much, I think it’s worth trying.
I also think, in your shoes I would consider some short-term stuff. By short-term I mean something that gets customers in very quickly which is cold email. You have a warm/cold email tool. You’ve seen shady cold email and you’ve seen ethical cold email. We’ve talked about this in the past. You could do it in a way that isn’t garbage and that I think you could feel good about. You have your own tools. You don’t need to pay for another one. It’s really just finding the data or the list but that’s something that can start working. If you can get it, it can create leads now, right, to get a lot more conversations started. Have you considered that?
Mike: Yes I have and I’ve already started working in that direction as well. Obviously, you aren’t aware of this because we didn’t talk about it in advance to the show but what I did was I went through and I started bucketing a lot of my prospects list. I was fortunate enough that I went into LinkedIn before LinkedIn decided that they were going to yank all the email addresses out of the export so I have over 1000 people that I’m connected to on LinkedIn where I have their email addresses. It’s closer than 900 or so because I went through and sorted them out because there’s some that appear in that list that I don’t have all the contact information for them or they’re duplicated on another list that I have.
By separating those out, I’ve basically got multiple buckets of people. There’s people who are on that LinkedIn list. There are also people who have signed up for an account in Bluetick but either never finished the process or they signed up and then they cancelled at some point. Then I also have people who I had listed in my Pipedrive account at one point where I was walking them through the process and then they either dropped off for one reason or another. Part of why I built Bluetick was because I didn’t feel Pipedrive helped me as well as it could have. I’ve got those people that are tracked there.
I’ve also got a separate list for people on my personal mailing list. I’ve got people on the Bluetick mailing list as well. All of those, I can reach out to individually through Bluetick. I’ve spent quite a bit of time bucketing those people into different lists and it’s a matter of going through those and sending out those cold emails as you call it. I don’t feel it’s quite as cold but just because we’ve had some contact in some way, shape, or form.
Rob: Yeah. You’re right. It’s not totally cold. It’s lukewarm to warm depending on who you put in there. That’s interesting. What’s your timeline for getting that started because I think that could move a needle here?
Mike: I don’t know and this is something I struggle with a little bit because I’ve got this upcoming Google security audit then I’ve got some of those changes I want to make in order to rip out all that .NET component. Let’s say that I add 50–100 customers, something like that or even just 50–100 trials, each one of those are going to have mailbox data associated with it and then assuming that they’re still active when I start doing conversions. It’s going to take longer for the data migration to happen.
Does that matter as much? Probably not, but it introduces places where things could fail. Having to look at a lot of the stuff that comes out of mailboxes, the more data that’s in there, the more likely you are to run to an edge case where there’s an expectation that there’s a datapoint there and there isn’t. The code crashes and you have to fix it, then redeploy it and potentially have to basically restart the process, which sucks. I’m between this rock and a hard place where I have to do it. I don’t really want to, but I may just have to bite the bullet and kick it off at some point and hope for the best.
Rob: Yeah. On this one, in particular, I think you got to do it. When I think of, “Is it an excuse or is it a valid reason?” I think you and I could come up with probably five reasons why you shouldn’t start sending these lukewarm emails. I think that your business is more important than that. Getting Bluetick to where it’s supporting you full-time because that’s your goal, I think that’s more important because if you wait until all these other stuff you’ve mentioned—there’s always going to be stuff you want to get done before you do whatever—I think you’re months out.
You could feasibly be two months out for the audit, you don’t really want to do this sealed .NET component before that’s done, which I get. As long as the audit keeps sucking up your time, I get it. It seems like that .NET component is really holding things up. I just would hate for it to be mid-December and have you start doing the cold email. You’re 2½ months from now and nobody’s buying at that point. Then you’re into January and it’s that’s a lot to push off.
Mike: Yeah and I’m feeling the best case scenario, if things go well with the security audit, as soon as that’s done, that’s when I should start sending out those emails. I’m okay with doing it through November but when December hits, it’s time to basically back off on that and say, “Okay, let’s pause this and let’s restart it in January,” because nothing’s really going to move in December. I just don’t think that it is unless I were to say, “Hey, you sign up this month and you get an extra two weeks to your trial, four weeks,” or something like that. “You get a six week trial instead of two weeks.” That I can see potentially doing, but aside from that, I agree. I’m not going to let the replacement of that .NET component be something that holds up pushing on that side of things, for the lukewarm outreach I guess.
Rob: Right but I would say, even this cold outreach, why wouldn’t you just start it this week? What’s holding you back from doing that?
Mike: Mostly I just have to sit down and write the email templates to send them. Then the big thing that I think holds me back from doing that is that when new customers come on, they typically need a lot of handholding in the early stages and that’s a huge time sync. As I said, I leave for MicroConf in two weeks, so if I have that coupled with all the documentation paperwork I’m trying to get together for the Google security audit which I know is going to take a huge chunk of time over the next couple of weeks, I feel what’s going to end up happening is I’m just not going to be as responsive to these customers and they’re like, “Well, why did I even give you a chance?” Because they’re lukewarm relationships, I don’t necessarily want to burn personal bridges.
Rob: Could you start with a small number though? Could you get these emails drafted, start cold emailing a ridiculously small amount like 10 a day? Normally, if you’re doing cold email campaigns, you’re sending thousands a month to be honest, but if you start sending 5 a day or 10 a day, so that you had 1–3 prospects in the pipeline? I know the MicroConf stuff is a problem and you’ll have to communicate that. It’s not a problem. It’s a speedbump, right? You’ll have to notify the people that you’re working with and be like, “I’m doing this conference, I’ll be out a few days.”
That’s a bummer but I just want to see you move forward with it, I think is how I feel about it with something. Again, we can think or reasons why you shouldn’t do this until after MicroConf, until after the audit, until after the .NET component, or until after Christmas. Pretty soon you’re in January and you’re 3½ months from now. I don’t think that’s good for your motivation or for the business growth, to be honest.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think you’re right. Starting with a smaller group would probably do it and that would at least get the ball started. Then I would have the whole system in place, so to speak, for ramping it up throughout November. That’s probably a better way to go than just holding off completely.
Rob: That’s how I feel about it because this stuff takes time.
Mike: I think that the other thing that comes to mind as a workaround for people who start to sign on a couple of days before MicroConf starts, I can email them, say, “Hey, look. I’m going to be out for the next week. I know you’re probably going to need help during this time but let me do this, let me extend your trial by another week or two weeks,” whatever, “to help get by that or overcome that just because I know I’m going to be less available during this time.”
Rob: That is such a roadblock to speedbump email that you just brought up. I love it. Seriously. You just figured out a way of like, “Here’s an objection. Here’s something that I can do that would probably work perfect.” It really has a low-risk of failure. That’s it man. When you’re building these types of funnels or these systems or whatever, this stuff takes a lot longer, not just hours in a day but a lot more duration in terms of weeks or months to get going.
If you’re starting from a cold stop in a month, then you’re not making any of that progress. If you start very slowly now, you’re going to see the bugs, the kinks, how you’re going to improve and you can tinker with it and lower risk and then you can basically ramp it up when you feel a little more comfortable about it. Awesome.
Mike: Other ways of it is to differentiate. In that weekly mastermind that I talk to you about, they’re still going with that, we still talk every week usually for at least 1 hour, sometimes 1½–2 hours. One of the things that we’ve specifically talked about is exactly how I can differentiate Bluetick.
Several things have come up which I won’t go into in detail here just because they bleed in for direction and they tend to be an extended conversation, but for the most part, if there are several things that I’ve looked at and say, “This would be a fantastic way to go but it’s almost a completely different product at that point,” it sounds nice in theory but I have to say no to it at that point because I’m not building another product at this point.
Rob: Yeah. It’s not even a pivot. It’s just a start from scratch.
Mike: It would probably be easier to start from scratch at that point. Yes. I don’t know.
Rob: On the plus side, you might not need the Google audit.
Mike: Right because I’ve already committed to that. I don’t know.
Rob: Totally.
Mike: Then you’re like, “Is this a…”
Rob: Sunk cost?
Mike: Sunk cost, I don’t know.
Rob: No, no, no. At this point, you recommitted. We went through this two or three months ago, right? It was like, “Should you keep working on Bluetick? Should you keep being an entrepreneur?” You went on a retreat and you decided, “No, I’m going to do this.” That’s not just so you can’t pivot Bluetick to something but if you literally have to start from a new code base, if it’s that far off from where you are, it’s not the time. Maybe you’ll wind up doing that in a year or two, hopefully not but I don’t think that’s the time because you have all these other stuff moving forward now.
Mike: I think that if we’re incrementally going a direction like that and it’s through customer discovery, then great but this isn’t really that, I don’t think. At least a couple of different directions I thought of, I don’t really feel that’s it.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve come back to this question a lot. Do you know how to differentiate? You had mentioned the integrations could potentially be a differentiator and you mentioned a few minutes ago that you are working on some integrations? Is that part moving forward?
Mike: Yeah. That part is moving forward. I’ve got an integration I’ve been working on the past couple of weeks, on and off. I’m hoping to have it done and submitted by the end of this week but we’ll see how that goes. Actually, I have to. I committed in my mastermind group to absolutely having that done and submitted by the end of this week. I’ve got another day-and-a-half to finish it, but it’s close.
Rob: I missed it. Did you say who’s the integration’s with?
Mike: I did not.
Rob: Okay. Cool. This is the fun stuff is when you’re doing things that are covert and that you don’t want to say in public because you’re worried about a competitor or whatever. Obviously, you’ll announce it in public when it’s done. So you have been making progress then. You’ve been writing code and getting that in place.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Cool. Good to hear it. When I asked about differentiation last time you said, “I need to talk to some of my customers more, ask them why did they decide to use Bluetick.” What was that decision process to find out if you already have some type of differentiation that we just don’t know about or what that is? It’s like a job to be something, the switch interview. “Why did you decide to do this?” Did you have a chance to do any of that?
Mike: Yes. I talked to a couple of different people and I still have to get through, go in, and take a look at some of the other customers I have. What I’m trying to do is go through and actually talk to all of them. Unfortunately, some of them are run by agencies, the people running the account are not necessarily the people paying for it. They’re running 3–5 accounts or something like that. I’d be talking to the same person for five different “customers.”
I still have to sort out some of those because I don’t necessarily know exactly who all those people are. But from the conversations that I have had, one of the things that keep coming up, for example in Bluetick, you can have somebody in multiple sequences at the same time. I’m working on making it so that you can add somebody back into the same sequence multiple times. Something else people have been asking for a little bit is being able to add the same person to the same sequence multiple times.
I’m still trying to sort out exactly the use cases for those. I’ve got a couple of calls scheduled in the future to discuss those in a little bit more detail. But for my understanding, those types of things that are not things that any of my competitors can do because they are explicitly geared toward cold outreach. Once you have reached contact with somebody, once they have responded to an email, they’re so hands off that you literally cannot send them another email. I feel that’s a differentiator for some of my competitors but probably not all of them.
Rob: That’d be interesting. We actually got that request with Drip. We weren’t cold email obviously, it’s warm marketing list but originally, you could go through a sequence which we call a campaign, you can go through campaign once and you couldn’t restart it. We did it for a bunch of reasons. It doesn’t often makes sense to do that and there are some really, they weren’t spammers per se but there were people that were just doing really shady internet marketing stuff and they have a 52-week sequence. If you were still there at the end, they wanted to start over. We’re like, “Oh my gosh. I don’t want you to do that.”
Then there were some legit reasons for this like, “Hey, I throw an event twice a year and I have an email sequence that goes out to all the attendees around the event time and it’s the same sequence. In essence, I’m just going to update the dates in the emails, so I want to start them over with a bulk operation and just be able to boom drop people there. If they can’t go through it again, that doesn’t make sense.” There are totally valid use cases for these kinds of stuff.
Mike: That’s what I’ve found as well. Simple things that you wouldn’t necessarily think of dumping emails which coincidentally, my credit card expires at the end of next month and in the past two days I’ve gotten over a dozen emails saying, “Hey, your credit card expires at the end of the month.” I’m like, “Oh God, now I got to go update it,” like it does in different places but that is one of those cases where adding somebody into an email sequence in Bluetick would be a prime use case for that would be very simple to do that.
The problem is that you can’t really restart them so you could do it once. Then you have to delete them from the sequence then add them back. There is a workaround in place right now but people want the ability to basically restart them in the sequence and then also have the same person in the same sequence multiple times. Again, I’m still trying to dig in to exactly the reasons behind that. I’ve heard from 2–3 different people that they wanted to do that.
Rob: Got it but you want to talk to more customers, you were saying, just to get more ideas.
Mike: Yeah, well I want to talk to them more about the individual use cases for that because if I understand why it is they want to do that, it may dictate how those changes are made inside the code itself because I could just slap something in there that says, “Oh, just restart this person.” But then it has an impact on the data and statistics as well, for example. Bluetick goes, when it does a response to an email, it does a threaded response and it includes the text of the previous email that was sent. If I restart it, it basically has to be email one, for example and it can’t include the previous email that was sent in that thread because it shouldn’t.
Rob: Let’s talk offline about this because we came up with a solution that it’s just too deep in the weeds to go into here, but I remember how we designed it and we’ll see if it works for you.
Mike: Okay.
Rob: But that’s exciting actually. I’m pleased to hear that there are these things that other tools can’t do. The interesting thing is that you can build these as features, but how do those bubble up to positioning? Not just as a feature, but how does that change your headline? What are you now? Are you the most robust one or all these use cases around specific things that then you become the niche player, you pick a couple of verticals that really need repeating, and then you just go after those? There’s a thread here that I think you should keep pulling.
Mike: Yeah. One of the things that has come up in conversations with one of my customers was like most people, they use Gmail as their email client but it’s immaterial which one you actually use. One of the thoughts that I have is about how do they use Bluetick without logging into it?
Let’s say that’s a one off situation. Typically, somebody will send an email from their mailbox and then that’s it. They’re hoping that somebody will come back whereas Bluetick, the expectation is the email sequence is launched from inside of Bluetick. That use case falls apart if they reply from their mailbox. There is a way to create a task, assign to Bluetick, and then you’ve got the email template. It’ll pop up a task and you can go in. You can change that first email and then the rest of it is templated.
Let’s say that there was a way to do that from inside your email client whether it’s Outlook, Office365, or Gmail. Let’s say that there was a folder there called _Bluetick so that it appears right at the top of the list. You send an email and you drag it over into that and then Bluetick picks that up and says, “Hey, I see that there’s this email here. I’m going to essentially add this to a particular email sequence and follow up with it using this first email that that person had as their original one.” Then it’s going to reply to that email several times until they get a response.
The question is, how does that mechanically really work? I don’t know the answer to that yet, but it seems like it’s a really good use case. I think that it would differentiate from the other things that are out there.
Rob: Yeah, I hope this pans out in a way that you can find more people who also have that need because that’s a question mark of course. Is this so niche that there aren’t going to be hundreds or thousands of people that need it? I think that’s TBD and I think that’s more conversations then figuring out how to present that to people when you’re positioning and in your marketing.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Sounds good, man. I guess I would summarize the past month, it sounds like it’s been okay but not great. The Google audit is really throwing a wrench it things and really impacted your productivity.
Mike: But it could be worse.
Rob: It could be worse and it has been worse. I’m pretty happy to hear where these threads are going. Let’s circle up again in about a month. I’m imagining you will either be still in the slog, I’m guessing you’ll be hopefully wrapping up the slog of the Google audit. Now, you’ll still have another two to potentially four weeks after that, actually.
Mike: It’s just going to be 45-minute recording of a solid continuous profanity beep. That’s all it’s going to be.
Rob: That’s a good idea. “Well, hey Mike. Welcome back to the show,” and then it just kicks off. Then I do an outro. “Thanks again. Thanks, Mike, for coming.” I hope things go well over the next month and we will catch up with you soo.
Mike: Sounds good. Talk to you soon.
Rob: All right, bye.
I was enjoying my conversations with Mike and of course, wish him well over the next month of slogging through the Google audit. We know that Mike has some challenges ahead of him with Bluetick, not just this audit but in continuing to prove out the market and differentiating Bluetick. A lot of work to be done, but it is nice to hear that he has continued to be productive since our last conversation. We’ll catch up with Mike again in about a month.
If you have a question for the show, whether it’s for me or a guest, leave us a voicemail at 1-888-801-9690 or email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can attach an MP3, send a dropbox link, or just send a text. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. If you’re not already subscribed to us, you should search for ‘startups’ in any podcatcher of your choice and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript to each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 461 | Doubling Down on Bluetick
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob checks in with Mike Taber’s progress on Bluetick. They revisit some topics that were brought up from their last episode together including motivation, personal retreat, accountability, the Google audit and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on the show, we cover topics related to building and growing startups in a way that’s designed for the rest of us, for the folks who can’t move to the big city, can’t move to the Silicon Valley, don’t want to sacrifice their life or their family to grow a company. We value relentless execution and we have a long-term mindset so we think in terms of years, not months, maybe even decades. As such, we don’t burn ourselves out by working crazy hours, sacrificing our health, sacrificing our relationships. This week, I circle back and catch up with Mike Taber, again, on his progress and learn about how he’s doubling down on Bluetick. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 461.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob, and today with Mike Taber. We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to the show, thanks for joining me. Today’s a bit of a longer episode because I find when Mike and I catch up, he just has a lot going on. The feedback I’ve heard is not to cut it short. Typically, our Startups for the Rest of Us episodes have been 25 to 35 minutes over the years, some of the interviews run a little long and the conversations with Mike, often, they’re just pretty fun. Frankly, I feel the conversation is valuable. We touch on a lot of interesting things today that I know a lot of people are struggling with based on the emails, tweets, and reaches out that he and I have been receiving. I did allow this one to go a little long and I’ll see what I can do in the future to keep them a little shorter.
I plan to do this about every month to touch-base with Mike, to keep up on his progress. It gives him enough time to execute on things, for things to change, and I really love following the thread of any founder and that’s what the show has been for 460 episodes. We’ve always had the teaching aspect, we’ve had interviews, we’ve had hot seats, but I think the most compelling thing that keeps people coming back over these years is our stories. It’s following the journeys that we’ve traveled as entrepreneurs and it’s interesting.
While I’m going to continue doing Q&A episodes, hot seats, some interviews sprinkled here and there, I do want to touch base with Mike every three or four episodes depending on what’s going on to hear what he’s up to and try to dig-in to both the good and the bad that he’s experiencing. With that in mind, I’m working on a super secret podcast project that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet but I’ve been working on for several months now and just stay tuned to Startups for the Rest of Us because I’ll be talking about it on the show once that’s ready to go live.
In addition, I want to circle back on a topic that we brought up, probably 10 or 15 episodes ago. It was a desktop Gmail client and switching to that. I had switched to Mailplane and then switched back to Gmail. But due to some recent changes with how G Suite—forwarding, groups, interacts, and those aren’t changes actually, Google’s been doing it for years—I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t getting things that were forwarded. They were sent to Google groups which is how they do email list.
I won’t go into details. It’s all frankly boring, but it’s irritating. I’ve always just funneled everything into a single Gmail account and then did send as in order to appear as if I had a bunch of email inboxes, but that no longer works. It’s broken based on how Google has implemented some stuff in G Suite. I needed a way to have a unified inbox where I can be in a single inbox and I can funnel everything in there even though it’s multiple inboxes that I’m checking. I went through several providers that do that and I’ve landed on the Airmail which is a desktop client and I believe it was $20, maybe $30 through the Mac App Store. I did try out Kiwi per Adrian Rosebrock’s recommendation but it did not have a unified inbox on, it was just a hard requirement for me given this current situation.
Just to close that loop, I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and it’s good. I’m probably going to keep using it. I do like that it has dark mode and it has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. It’s actually got me a little spoiled already with command delete going through the inbox. It’s almost like a touch interface where I can just swipe, swipe, swipe, and get rid of emails. So far so good on Airmail.
Lastly, I wanted to announce, you heard it here first, that applications for the next TinySeed batch are going to open up on November 1st. It’s just a couple of months out, we’ll be following up with more information. If you’re on the TinySeed email list, you’ll hear about that. Go to tinyseed.com and look for the place to subscribe to our email list. We’ll be updating folks once we have more info on how that is going to go down. If you’re interested in potentially becoming part of batch two of TinySeed, be sure your email is on that list.
I enjoyed the conversation that I had today with Mike and we cover all kinds of stuff. He went on a personal retreat and really sorted some things out, it sounds like, and it feels like his trajectory has really adjusted from the conversation we had back in episode 448. If you haven’t listened to episode 448 and 458, there’s a lead up that’s the start of the story that we’re really following today. I recommend you go back and check it out. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Mike Taber.
Mike: thanks for coming back on the show.
Mike: Thanks for having me back.
Rob: It’s been a few weeks since we caught up and I know, you and I, we’re just talking offline trying to put that line […] episode. It sounds like a lot’s been going on, a lot of progress, a lot of interesting things.
Mike: Definitely.
Rob: I think the first question is, I’m curious, are you still on your social media, Twitter, podcast hiatus?
Mike: I am. I still haven’t logged in to either Twitter or Facebook. I’m sure that I will in the near future if only to get Facebook Ads up and running and probably experiment a little bit with Twitter ads some more, because I’ve done that in the past and it can work out well, it’s just you have to actually dedicate the time to it and you have to log in. I haven’t bit the bullet and gone back in them.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing. I know that people build their entire funnel around being on social media and being a personality and typically, if you’re selling info products that works well and if you’re selling SaaS, it doesn’t as much. I’m sure there’s a counter example, but really, if you get to SaaS app to mid six or seven figures, you’re not going to do that on Twitter in essence. It can be a part of it, but it is such a trip to try to wade the value, the ROI of time and distraction, and frankly, sometimes, the stress that it can cause on you.
Mike: Yeah. I have all of the notifications turned off, whether it’s push notifications or email notifications. Literally, everything is turned off for both of them. I turned off my iPad the other day and I realized that apparently, I didn’t turn it off there so it’s telling me, “Oh, you’ve got a couple of hundred notifications here,” and I’m just like, “Nope, not looking at it.”
Rob: Uninstall, that’s cool. Good. I’m curious to see how that feels if and when you decide to re-enter that world. I know some folks that just go off permanently. I think like Marc Andreessen’s just done. He was known for having the big tweetstorms. There’s a rumor that he invented it or something, I don’t know if he did or didn’t, but he would write entire essays on it and then he just started doing likes only and that’s how people were tracking him, and now he said, “Nope, I’m just completely off,” it’s a trip to see that.
Mike: On my Facebook feed for people who I’m friends with, I have the Taber Household Conversations which is usually various conversations. They happen around the house with the kids and wife and they’re fairly entertaining. I’ve been told by a number of people that’s their most favorite thing to see on Facebook and they love watching that but I’ve been keeping track of them separately in a notepad document on my phone so that if I ever go back, I have probably 40 or 50 of them that I could post, I just haven’t logged in.
Rob: That’s cool. Talk to me about your personal retreat. When we last left you, there were some open questions that I had posed in episode 458, things like thinking about what challenges you wanted to tackle, whether you’re going to keep going with Bluetick. There’s a lot of stuff and we’ll cover that today. Part of that, I threw out an off-hand suggestion of, “Hey, maybe you should do a personal retreat to think through some of these things,” and it sounds like you wound up doing that.
Mike: Yeah, I did. It was more of a last-minute thing just because my wife had had time on her calendar when she wasn’t going to be teaching over the weekend, so she’s like, “Hey, you should go ahead and take one,” so I did. It was last minute like I said and it was really good because I sat down and started looking through my notes and stuff. I brought my notebooks that I had written in from previous retreats that I had gone on dating back to 2014.
Before I did anything else, I really just started looking through what I had previously written down as things to think about, goals, observations, and things like that. I realized that dating back all the way to 2014, one of the biggest things that came out every single one of them was I’m not sleeping well. I need to be able to figure out what’s going on and it was a continuing theme every single time. I have been taking retreat since before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. It was eye-opening to go back and read those things and say, “Huh, that thing is basically taken care of at this point,” but it was eye-opening to see that, that was just a huge recurring theme over and over again and I couldn’t get over to figure out what was going on.
Rob: Yeah, that is such a trip, man. I think it is one of the benefits of doing the founder retreats, as we like to call them, is that if you do them year after year and you keep the notes and refer back, you can see patterns. A lot of us get so caught up in the day-to-day or looking ahead to the future—I speak for myself—I don’t frequently look back and try to see patterns, why am I feeling this way? What’s causing that? It sounds like knowing how much that’s impacted your motivation and your ability to execute over the past five or more years is a really good thing to know.
Mike: Yeah. I think what was eye-opening to me was just the fact that I recognize even then how detrimental it was to me, but because I couldn’t figure out a way to deal with it or figure out what was going on, it just kept continuing to be a problem. What I realized was that most of the time, it just snowballs. I’m not getting enough sleep, so I’m not as productive and I’m not thinking straight that I ended up on various medications for different things that are treating the symptoms, but nothing is really addressing the underlying problems, which just doesn’t go away. So then, somehow it just masks the problem. It just makes it so hard to move things forward.
It did make me realize that I’ve been beating myself up over the past 6–8 months or so just because I felt things weren’t moving forward and I was projecting past Mike to present-day Mike because I couldn’t get past those sleep issues. It’s like, “Wait a second, these things are actually mostly resolved at this point, so I shouldn’t be beating myself up over the problems that I used to have and project them on myself and continue to have motivation problems or anything like that. Each day is a new start, so just use it as that. Since I went on that retreat, actually things have really, really turned around for me.
Rob: That’s really good to hear, man. It really is. I think that’s another big benefit of founder retreats is the clarity it can bring you about big decisions or even it sounds like it was like a cleanse in a new start in a way. I’m curious how Sherry wrote The Zen Founder Guide, the Founder Retreats. Did you use something like that to help you or do you have your own system now that you’ve been doing it for so many years?
Mike: Usually, I have enough time in advance of going to be able to write things down and go through some old notes and stuff I have including stuff that Sherry had put together, but this time I didn’t. What I did was when I got there on Friday night, I started going through my old notes and I was going to put some stuff together. Then on Saturday and Sunday, I was basically going to go through it. I feel like I started going through my previous notes first and then realized that probably wasn’t necessary and it was vicious because things just popped out of me, it’s glaringly obvious in retrospect but not while I’m sitting at my desk every day.
Rob: Yeah, I think that makes sense. It sounds like you had a lot of long-term things to think about and didn’t necessarily need the search for topics to consider. You had an ample number of topics to consider just going into the retreat.
Mike: Right. I didn’t really find that it was an issue. The personal retreat was a pretty […] story, it prefers few hours to be perfectly honest. It didn’t take long for me to start to see what things have been holding me back and why and what my path forward was going to look like. Most of the time I spent was probably personal reflection on different things but not necessarily trying to answer those questions. It was just more thinking about the things that had already come up and that I’d already given thought and consideration to, that I thought I was going to need to spend a lot more time on during the personal retreat. It turned out that I just really didn’t need to. I spent most of the time just doing personal reflection more than anything else.
Rob: I have a few questions for you but I am curious to hear if there are other things that you made decisions on or thought through that I don’t ask you. These are questions that we had posed or I had posed the last couple of times we spoke and said if you want to retreat, you should probably consider this. One of them is, do you want to continue working on Bluetick?
Mike: Yeah, and the answer to that was yes, absolutely.
Rob: Was that a hard decision to make? Did you think through a lot of factors or was it like, “No, this is my gut feel and now I’m going to move on”?
Mike: I did think about it. It wasn’t just a gut feel. This is the answer that I want to have because I’m thinking that other people have expectations on me for that. What I really looked at was where is Bluetick today versus where it needs to be, and if I were to just toss the whole thing and go on to something else, would it take as long as it Bluetick has taken or would there be other risks? The reality is I know that there’d be a lot more risk if I went with something else and it would probably take me just as long because I still have to do all the customer development stuff.
The reality is, it’s a solid product that’s got a lot of things going for it. I just haven’t really put the time and effort needed in focus into the marketing side of things, and I haven’t talked to several customers. They like the product, it’s just that I need to get more of those customers.
I think that if I were to move on and try to do something else, could I sell the products ‘as is’ to somebody? Absolutely, I’ve had those conversations with people and I’m sure that I could sell Bluetick ‘as is’ to somebody if I wanted to, but do I want to start over? The answer is no.
The one thing that came to mind was is this a sunk cost thing that I’m thinking about? Is that why I’m leaning in the structure? I don’t think it is because I thought about that as well. It was actually something that […] probably thought about that more than I thought of do I want to continue on this.
Rob: I could see that because that would be the risk and that was going to be what I brought up was do you feel like you have sunk cost that was going on here and are chasing after something just because you’ve spent so many years building it.
Mike: Yeah, and that’s why I spent so much time thinking about that particular question and I don’t think that’s it. I think that there’s probably a little bit of contribution there for that particular thought but it’s certainly not the only thing. I definitely think there’s a lot more that could be done with Bluetick and there’s a lot more value there than I’ve uncovered, I just haven’t gotten in there yet.
Rob: There was another thing I had noted down and it was around, you raised this challenge, this struggle of motivation and the question I think you posted is like, “I’m not super motivated by money right now. It’s hard for me to be motivated to work on this tool and get up every day and do it. What should motivate me?” That was the question. I threw out, “Oh, you should go take the Enneagram.” That kind of was a joke but it was also helpful for me personally when I took it to have a little bit more insight into who I am and what drives you, and that’s part of what it does. It’s nice that it’s free and it takes 15 minutes to take.
I’m curious if you: (a) took the Enneagram, (b) whether that helped or not, and (c) did you also think about this question of what challenge do you want to tackle and what is going to keep you motivated this week, next week, and next month?
Mike: There’s a bunch of things packed into there. Keep me on track if I forget any of those things. I did take it, I didn’t realize that there was a free version of it. I paid $10 from the website and I took it. In my opinion, it was kind of BS, to be perfectly honest.
Rob: That’s totally fair. I’m not trying to force the Enneagram on anyone and I feel like it is. I liked it but I’m curious to hear why you didn’t like it or why you think it’s BS.
Mike: I think it could be helpful for certain people. The problem is that when I went through it, there are three different steps. The first one is to read these nine paragraphs and then you select how much do you think the whole thing describes you or not. The second step is to go through the ones that described you the most and select the ones that you affiliate the most with. I think there were three of them that you had to pick there.
In the first step, I think there were nine different paragraphs and eight of them were ranked exactly the same. In the second step, I basically completely self-classified myself. I’m like, “That’s not real helpful. I could have just read online paragraphs and then said which one do I want.” It was like throwing a dart at the dartboard, you have an equal chance of it in any of them.
Rob: The Enneagram should have been 40 or 51-sentence questions, is that what you saw? There were no paragraphs when I took it. One sentence, it would describe like, “When I’m in a situation like this, this is what I do,” but it’s just one sentence and I don’t even remember if you’ve ranked it on a one to five or if it’s just this is me or this isn’t, maybe that’s what it is. I think that’s all it was but yours is different, I wonder if you took a different test.
Mike: I think mine was different. Maybe it was the wrong one. I don’t know, let me go back and take a look at that.
Rob: Yeah. Let me see if I can find that link to the one I took because that would make more sense, I think.
Mike: Anyway, out of the three steps, there was only one of them, those nine was eliminated after the first step. Then on the second one, I had to pick out of the eight which one…
Rob: That’s not helpful at all. Dude, okay, I need to go and look. I bet I still have the link. Forget the Enneagram, it’s a tangent and we’ll try to revisit it at some point, but the other two things where have you thought about the challenge you want to tackle, really it’s what’s going to keep you motivated.
Mike: I think that it’s looking outside of what the thing is that I’m working on because I have a tendency to get so engrossed in what I’m working on that I will not look at other things in terms of what my social life, or health, or anything like that. I realized that when I get down the rabbit hole on certain projects, AuditShark being one of them, Bluetick being another, there’s a point at which I probably cross a threshold where I continue to become all consumed by that. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily a bad thing in certain situations, but I think that I let it get the best of me and go too far.
What I really need to do is step back and say, “This is a means to an end, not the end for me. This shouldn’t be my all-consuming life purpose because essentially, it’s work. It is something I’m working on and I do enjoy it, but I can’t let it be the only thing that defines me.” I think that, that’s something else that I’ve struggled with to some extent where I look at the product itself and if the product is struggling, then I personally struggle because I see it as a reflection of myself, and that really shouldn’t be the case. It’s more of being able to step back and separate myself and my own self-value, or self-worth, or whatever form the product itself and how well it’s doing versus how well I am doing.
Rob: Yeah, I think that’s super important, it’s very hard to do. I personally drifted in and out of that over the years of having my entire, like you said, it’s like self-worth, self-confidence, happiness tied to my MRR at times. That can be tough. You said that’s outside of that. I think that’s a great realization. Easier said than done, but a great realization. What is it outside of the app that is going to motivate you?
Mike: Honestly, socializing with the people that I know that are in the area. I mentioned this several times in the past where I have a weekly meet up with a couple of guys that I played D&D with. It’s a great way for me to get out of the house, away from my desk, and away from my computer, away from technology. I find that it’s a very helpful and therapeutic for me to be looking forward to that as opposed to looking forward to getting up at five o’clock in the morning and going to work because I really want to work on something and then distracts my sleep because I’m so excited about it the night before. Being able to back off a little bit from that stuff and look at it and say, “Look, this is just a means to an end and it’s means to make a living, not an expression of me.”
Rob: Yeah. I think that’s good. I think the thing I’m missing though, because I also play D&D and I read stuff now, for the first time in a long time within the past year or two, I’ve started to read fiction again. A lot of it is graphic novels, but I’m doing hobby stuff again. I’m giving myself permission to do that, but that’s how I distract myself so that I don’t think about work all the time. Me personally, that’s my personality.
I’m missing how going and hanging out with friends, or playing games, or having a hobby is going to motivate you to stick with Bluetick everyday when it gets hard? Or does it? Or am I misunderstanding that? Because that’s what I’m trying to get at is you’ve talked about getting up and like, “I’m not motivated to do this. I don’t know why I’m doing this,” or you do know why, but it’s like, “I’m just not that motivated to sit here and work six or eight-hour days and crank away on this stuff.”
Mike: I think it’s a very subtle thing and that, as I said, Bluetick is essentially, if I view it as a means to an end, and that end being I get to go socialize with my friends and do these other things, I can’t neglect that and I can’t just let things go because if I do, then I won’t be able to do those other things. It becomes a way for me to create a balancing act that, can I let things slide sometimes? Sure. I absolutely can. Can I let them slide forever? Absolutely not because then, it puts me in a bad financial position, that I’m then stressed out and anxious, and I can’t focus on what needs to get done. But if I make myself balance those things a little bit more so that I’m not so single-handedly focused just on Bluetick or single-handedly focused on socializing with friends, if I force that balance, then it helps me to concentrate. Does that make sense?
Rob: I think so. Is it taking a break gives your mind a break and that when you come back, you’re re-energized rather than basically burning your mind out?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: That’s what it is?
Mike: Mm-hmm.
Rob: Fascinating. I get that. I definitely understand the link there, but I wonder if this answers the question that I posed earlier of everyday you’re going to have to get up and there are going to be things you don’t want to do dealing with the Google audit and whatever, firing a contract or hiring a contract, or maybe it’s writing code, maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s whatever. You’re going to have to do some things you don’t want to do, some things you are excited about, but how are you going to push yourself to not sit there, stare at your screen, and churn away the time? Or whether it’s being unproductive because you are churning or whether it’s being unproductive because you are unmotivated to work on it?
Mike: I feel like that’s just more a matter of putting certain systems in place. One of the things I recognized is that systems are what really helped me stay focused, stay on track. and get things done, but at the same time, my personality is such that I hate being a cog in a wheel. In some ways, it’s demotivational to me to have a system but it’s motivational when it works. Like I said, it’s that balancing act.
One of the issues I had with me taking in the Enneagram is that by definition, I think that I’m very well-balanced in very many ways. I forget what it was called, it was a test that was given that business software like 8 or 10 years ago or something like that and afterwards, I showed it to the person who has given it, I think it was Paul Kenny, he looked at it and he’s like, “Wow, that’s extremely balanced in every direction.”
He said he hadn’t really ever seen that before which is, I don’t know whether that just speaks to how weird I am or not, but it was interesting to see. I have a lot of empathy and ability to see things in multiple ways and multiple directions and I think that’s a strength, but at the same time, it could be a downfall because I can easily find myself in a situation where I’m paralyzed because I’m like, “If I do it this way, then this will happen. If I do it this other way, then this other thing will happen.” It’s difficult to deal with that but at the same time, I also have to recognize, “Hey, you just need to move things forward. You need to make a decision and move on because you can’t stay here looking at this forever.” By timeboxing and things like that, that helps me to move things forward when I need to, but at the same time, it forces that structure which, again, I hate the structure but I do like the results of it.
Rob: Yeah, there you go. The hating structure and liking results means that you hopefully can plow through it. It sounds like the motivation will be the results that you see and I think the other side of that sword or the sharp edge of that is that if you are not seeing results, will you become demotivated? Again, last time I talked about some people are motivated by money. It’s like, “I want to make enough money so that I can support my family or that I never have to work again.” That, whether you’re seeing results or not, you’re still motivated by that.
If some people are motivated by this achievement, it’s the Jeff Bezos, “I want to start a billion-dollar company,” and that you’re just motivated to achieve. Whether you’re seeing results or not, you do still have that goal that you’re hungry for. Last time, we talked about how you’re not hungry for anything right now. I think probably my main concern is that if you’re not hungry for it, if you are not seeing results, are you going to get demotivated?
Mike: You bring up something that sparked my memory of something that came up during my personal retreat is like, “Am I running towards something or away from something?”
Rob: Yeah, because that is away from having to work full time. The last time you talked about that you had the Dilbert comic and you said, “I don’t want to go back because bosses are […].” It’s a pain in the ass to work for other people. There’s a commute, and this and that. We talked through some things about you should get a job with no commute, you should get a job where the boss is not dumb. I can remove all of those.
Mike: I’m screwed working for myself.
Rob: Yeah, but we can remove that. Are you just running away from working for other people? That’s what you’re referring to? Are you actually running towards, “I wanted to keep this,” or just running away from, “I don’t want a full-time job”?
Mike: Yeah. The sad part is I think it’s a mix of both and that’s part of what makes it a hard question for me to answer. I don’t have a specific answer for that. That’s one thing that I did come out of my retreat. One […] about is like, “What is it that I really want to achieve?” and I still don’t have a specific answer for that, but I do know that I want to have a successful SaaS application that is going to support me and my family, at least do reasonably well. If that means that I can take some time off in the middle of the week if I want to, then great.
Kids started school last week on Thursday and on Thursday, we were actually out looking for a new car for her because her Toyota Corolla from 2004 is about to die. It was nice to be able to just take the time and go do that and get it taken care of that day because I have that flexibility in my schedule. If I were working for somebody else, I wouldn’t have that. If I didn’t have an app that was doing at least reasonably well, I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Things do come up. There are bugs and stuff that will come up on occasion that I have to get those fixed and I have those come up as well last week. It’s nice to be able to rearrange my schedule, have the flexibility to move things around and work on it. That’s really what I want out of my future is to be able to have that flexibility.
Rob: Sounds like that’s the thing. That is the one thing that you have referred back to the most is flexibility, is like owning your own time. I wonder if that’s your number one motivator.
Mike: It’s funny because I think that it is, but at the same time, I also know that, as I said, those systems that I have to put in place sometimes to get things done and move things forward, those are restrictive. This weird dichotomy between them that sometimes I have to go in one direction and sometimes I have to go in the other.
Rob: Cool, that’s actually helpful for me and I want to revisit that at some point in the future, but I just want to hear how that how well that’s panning out. We can circle back in a future conversation such that I want to see what the motivation is and if you’re not seeing results, if it’s still working and if just the drive for flexibility is enough. I also updated the Enneagram link, it’s tests.enneagraminstitute.com is the official one, it’s $12 to take the test. I will Venmo you $12, Mike, Go take the test because you didn’t pay for the other one, did you?
Mike: I did. It was enneagramworldwide.com.
Rob: Oh, interesting. When I typed in like take Enneagram online, there’s a bunch of places doing it, and you paid for it and that’s what it gave you? I think go to enneagraminstitute.com, I believe those are the folks that developed it. That’s at least my rudimentary understanding right now.
Mike: Oh, well.
Rob: Anyway, it’s $12. Give it a shot. It should be a bunch of either-or questions. It will make a statement like, “I would prefer to be viewed as successful or happy,” or “I prefer to be successful or happy,” and then you can say, “Yes, this is me,” “No, this is me,” and some of them have partials, I don’t know. That’s what you should see. You should not have to read paragraphs to do this.
Cool. There’s a couple of other points we’re talking about last time that I want to revisit. One is the Google audit thing, the chaos that has been the ongoing Google going to block you if you don’t get this audit and go through their security process, update us on that status.
Mike: I’ve talked to two companies that do that. I had two discussions with each of them, worked with both of them. I’ve selected one that I will be going to. Basically, I was able to work with them on the price a little bit, so it falls at the lower end of the range of $15,000–$75,000 it was originally given. Fortunately, it’s not closer to $75,000 but it is still 5 figures. It’s a difficult pill to swallow but at the same time, it’s also, I would say, a motivational factor for me. One thing I have recognized about myself is that I’m a completionist to some extent. If I were to pay for that, it would be hard for me to not follow through afterwards because that’s a huge chunk of money that needs to be paid every year.
But the other side of it is that it also gives me a defensible moat around Bluetick as well. I probably don’t have a whole lot to worry about from competitors coming in underneath me, which is a weird situation to be in. I still have those bigger fish that are above me but I probably don’t need to worry nearly as much about anybody coming in on our niche and stealing customers or what have you. Not that I really think that would happen for a while. Even if it did, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference, but it does create a barrier to entry for anybody else who’s trying to do similar things.
Rob: I would totally agree with that. Anyone who’s thinking about just dabbling in and they’re starting a little side project to do it or wanting to start just a small lifestyle business and doesn’t really want to go after, it’s going to be deterred. I would be deterred from doing that, it would discourage me from one drop, however much it is, $20,000–$30,000 to get in and just to get started. That’s a trip.
Was it a hard decision then to decide whether to do it or not? Because, again, if they quoted you $75,000, it would have been a reason to shut the company down. We know it’s a lesson in that boat. As you’ve gotten towards it, was it a hard decision or was it like, “No, this is once I’ve decided to do it, I’m also going to suck it up and do this”?
Mike: I think when the initial pricing came in, it was like, “Gee, I don’t know if that’s actually going to fly. I’m not sure if I really want to go through and do that because it would have been really hard to swing it.” Then after going back and renegotiate with them, it was much more doable. Yeah, it’s probably going to be something that needs to be […] each year, but at the same time, it’s a SaaS application. There’s only going to be so many changes that are between them. They didn’t specifically say that was a differential they would do from one year to the next, but that certainly does factor into it if you’d go with the same company for one year to the next.
Google could easily change their policies moving forward. I’ve had this discussion with other people in my mastermind group, where I think that they are just laying down the law, drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Okay, this is what it is, and screw anyone that has to deal with this in the next 18–24 months. We’ll figure it out before then. There’s going to be small players that gets screwed in that meantime, but oh, well, we need to protect our company and our users’ data. In two years out, things will be fine.” I think that’s the decision they’ve made and things will change in a couple of years but probably not dramatically.
Rob: Yeah, and I like the way you couched it as a motivating factor. There were two times that I really recall having my back to the wall and talk about sunk cost, you are talking quite a chunk of money. I bought DotNetInvoice for $11,000 and I bought HitTail for $30,000. Those were 4–5 years apart, but those were very difficult pills for me to swallow. It was a lot of money. It was all the money that I had saved up from doing all this consulting on the side.
I had an incredibly productive two or three months stretches right after that because my back was to the wall. I worked for longer hours. That was one of the seasons where I work long hours and a big part of it was I can’t have written that check-in vain. I have to make this work. I keep saying my back was to the wall, but that’s how I feel about it. I wonder if you can use this at least in the short term as motivation of, “I have to be a good steward of that money and make this worth it.”
Mike: Yeah. I’m definitely that type of person as well. Some people crack under pressure and I do extremely well under pressure, which is a double-edged sword because sometimes, I’m a procrastinator to some extent. In some ways, that helps me because I procrastinate and then I get to this part where it’s do or die and I’m willing to put in the time and effort to make sure that things happen and that things work.
I probably haven’t experienced that in a while but there are certainly things that I can point back to in my history where I […] my masters degree, for example. I was coming up to the wire in terms of being able to finish my masters thesis and they’re like, “Okay, you need to have this done by the end of August.” So, I buckled down and I wrote the entire thing in a month-and-a-half, or two months, or something like that and I went back to them and basically got it all done, but it needed to get done and it needed to get done fast. There was really no other option, otherwise, I was blowing $20,000–$25,000 down the train and I would walk away without anything to show for. Still, having taken those classes, I don’t have the degree, not that it means a whole lot if I’m self-employed but it was one of those personal accomplishments or achievements that I wanted to have.
Rob: Yeah. It comes back to that extrinsic motivation. It’s really an optimist scenario for you. Cool. A couple more things before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about that untestable seal.net component. You had made the decision to replace it with a different component, but you were saying while you get slotted in among things and I was like, “Look, you made the decision. Just go ahead and do it because it’s keeping your back. It’s technical debt, right now, it’s a liability that keeps you from making changes to things.” Where does that sit?
Mike: I still have not touched that. Most of my time has been spent going back and forth with the vendors on the security audit because just even scheduling a meeting with them takes a week. It’s a week before it happens but it’s several days of back and forth and trying to get an answer because they’re just busy and they have to slot in conversations when they get a chance. It’s a pain in the neck.
I’ve been stalling on other things to see how that works out because obviously, it did hold it back to some extent because of the final numbers for the quotes came back in $75,000, I was just going to walk away, but since it didn’t, it made things a lot easier to get working on other stuff. At this point, I do recognize that needs to get done. It’s a matter of looking at schedule and seeing, “Where can I slot that in between marketing activities?” because I feel like that’s probably more important, but I go back and forth on that.
Rob: When do you feel you’re going to pull out that component?
Mike: I think if I get a more detailed information from the security company about what I can and can’t store, that’s probably going to dictate that to some extent because I don’t want to get in the position where I spend all this time and effort replacing that component so that I can download all the data in the way that I want to only to find out that they come back and say, “You really shouldn’t be storing that,” or those other things that go into. It’s just I’m holding off and maybe that’s a bad decision.
Rob: I don’t think it is. That’s what I would do as well. It sounds like there’s a bunch of unanswered questions and you are right with the security audit. They can come back and say anything. I would personally also wait on that but I wouldn’t wait on other development on marketing because you can do that stuff before then.
Your mastermind group is meeting weekly and you have a pseudo business coach. Both those things still going on and do you feel like they’re working for you?
Mike: I do. I actually have an email in my inbox right now from the coach that I have to reply to today and then the meetings have been going on every week and we talk about all kinds of different things from conversion rates to where marketing should be focused or conversations to customers, but I find that the weekly accountability has been pretty helpful because it forces me to make progress on everything and part of it is schedule-related because I have to make sure that I slot time for those things but it’s also what am I looking at next and then making sure that’s getting done because I’m basically committing to each of those things.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. Glad to hear that’s still working out. I do want to touch base periodically and hear more about that. I’m curious. We had a conversation, it was episode 448 where we really dug into this stuff for the first time. You raised a concern that you didn’t really want do the spammy-cold email and I threw out an idea of a warm and ethical code email or you can just focus on warm email, is that still your thinking that you want to focus on something that you feel better about personally and have you made any strides to make that part of reality?
Mike: I have thought about it quite a bit more and I had a conversation with a customer that I onboarded a couple of weeks ago where he’s like, “I definitely want to use Bluetick, and this is what we are doing right now and it looked automated and we’re using it for cold email.” After going through and talking to them about how he was doing it, I realized like, “Hey, you’re actually doing warm email, not cold email,” because they’re sending physical mailers and things like that. It reminded me of one of the original thoughts that I’d had behind Bluetick was using it as something of a multi-channel marketing campaign because if you send somebody something in the physical mail and then send them emails or you send them tweets and things like that, this is a functionality that really hasn’t made it into Bluetick yet, but the conversation did remind me to like, “Hey, that was the original idea here.”
It turns cold contacts into warm contacts because they’ve at least seen your name before and they’ve heard of you because you’ve reached them through other channels. Some of them can be automated. I think Postable probably has an API where you can send direct mailers to people “handwritten notes.” They’re not actually handwritten, but they look like they are. Things like that are ones that would probably do well in that type of multichannel campaign. There is not a lot of people who are doing that right now, most of the people that I’ve seen who were doing that, they do it by hand and it sucks.
Rob: Yeah, no doubt. Cool. It sounds like you’ve made a decision because I have talked about life-changing your website copy, changing your onboarding, and even considered potentially doing a setup, doing a setup fee and then verifying upfront that they are doing stuff that’s in line with what you want Bluetick to do. It sounds like you haven’t moved forward on that but are those still things that you want to put in place?
Mike: Those are still on my radar. I think the larger challenge or problem that I have is just that I don’t have enough traffic. That’s the biggest thing. I don’t think that adding in a setup fee or something like that, that’s not really going to move the needle for me, at least not right now, but if I were to triple traffic, for example, that type of thing is I’m won’t say easily attainable, it’s probably something that would move the needle for me a lot more than adding in a setup fee.
Rob: Right. I think as we wrap up, there are still this open question of how to differentiate Bluetick, how are you going to make it different from the other tools that I could go out and essentially do the same thing with? Have you given that more thought?
Mike: I’ve given it some thought. I wouldn’t say that I have any concrete conclusions on that. One of the things I have seen is that people who are most successful with Bluetick are the ones that integrated it into their marketing and sales pipelines. I think that integrating Bluetick into other products directly would allow it to have a tighter integration into other people’s marketing and sales funnels. Integrating into other tools directly is probably the most straightforward way to do that. Most of these tools that are like Bluetick have an API of some kind where you can upload stuff but it’s really those integrations that are going to basically keep people around and keep churn low. If I can keep churn really low, then I don’t have to worry about growing the product as quickly to counter that churn.
Rob: That’s true. I agree with all that actually.
Mike: But it doesn’t directly answer the question.
Rob: Yeah, which was differentiation. Do those integrations differentiate you or do your competitors have some or all of those?
Mike: I think most of them have a Zapier integration of some kind. I haven’t looked in-depth enough at them. I do have somebody that I hired to help me out with marketing. They’ll probably start later this week or next week, but that’s something I’ll probably look at a little bit more to do more in-depth competitive analysis and say, “What markets do these people serve, and why?” and, “Is there a place where Bluetick can fit into those and really shine as opposed to where it currently is?”
You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t really have any major differentiating feature other than I can offer direct support and you’re going to talk to the developer if you’ve got a problem. There’s some value to that but I don’t think that it’s enough to overcome the challenges that it has by not being able to be differentiated easily.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think I’ve used the phrase picking up crumbs a few times where if you really are similar to most of the other tools in the space, you will get some customers, you are just picking up crumbs as you get lucky, you’re not going to have that key differentiator that people are like, “Oh, my gosh, Bluetick is the only want to do this or Bluetick does this the best.” What are you really known for? It’s positioning.
In your shoes, I would try to get an idea of the entire landscape for all the competitors, the big ones, the small ones, the funded, the unfunded, whether you have a mental model of it, a mind map, or notes on a whiteboard, whatever it is, try to sketch out how are they positioned and how can you try to find feature differentiation.
Mike: Yeah. I definitely have some thoughts on those. The issue that I think I struggle with there is that most of the things that I think would be great to be able to include are packaged into Bluetick that would beat those differentiators, are things that are going to require technical heavy lifting in order to implement. It’s hard to justify spending the time and effort there without solid data to back it up and that data is hard to come by without doing it and then seeing if it works, so to speak.
Rob: I would agree with that.
Mike: It’s exploration, I guess. I definitely think I have to talk to some of my customers a little bit more, though.
Rob: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like. More research to be continued. I’d love to talk about your marketing hire because that sounds cool, but I have another call I have to jump on. I got it, I have to end it here to the groans of both me and the listeners. But there’s one other thing I actually want to ask about. What was your low point over the past month? It sounds like everything is going up into the right in general. Things have been good, you’re in good spirits, you have good answers, you’re thinking about this stuff, but what was the hardest moment or the lowest point in the past since we spoke last, which I think was about three or four weeks ago?
Mike: I would say just making the decision to make certain changes. I think that it’s the inertia of not moving just yet. When you have an idea of, “Oh, this is how I want to solve this problem or these are the things that I need to do,” where do you even start? In terms of inertia, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting up at five o’clock in the morning on average and going to the gym. That’s usually the first thing I’ve done. I’ve exercised three times today. If that gives you any indication, I was at the gym before five o’clock, then I went for a one-mile walk, and after that later on, I went for a two-mile walk.
I’m making some pretty dramatic changes and I feel like they’re going well, they’re giving me energy, and I’m able to get those things done which I’ve never really put a lot of emphasis on my own personal health from the past, but those first four or five days of doing that was just brutally hard. It was really, really hard to just get started. Now that I’ve been doing it for a little while, it’s not a habit yet, by no means are no stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s on its way there. I’d really like to keep seeing that continue.
Rob: Awesome, man. Thanks again for taking the time to come and update us and I’ll talk to you again in a few weeks.
Mike: All right, sounds great.
Rob: Thanks again to Mike for coming back on the show. It’s fun to have him pop in almost like a guest now and again. I wanted to remind you if you’ve been considering potentially becoming a part of TinySeed’s second batch which will start in early 2021, head over to tinyseed.com and enter your email address or if you just want to keep up with what we’re doing, it’s a nice way to do it. We don’t email very often and we will be emailing about news like this when the batch opens, November 1st of this year.
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Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob, and today with Mike Taber. We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to the show, thanks for joining me. Today’s a bit of a longer episode because I find when Mike and I catch up, he just has a lot going on. The feedback I’ve heard is not to cut it short. Typically, our Startups for the Rest of Us episodes have been 25 to 35 minutes over the years, some of the interviews run a little long and the conversations with Mike, often, they’re just pretty fun. Frankly, I feel the conversation is valuable. We touch on a lot of interesting things today that I know a lot of people are struggling with based on the emails, tweets, and reaches out that he and I have been receiving. I did allow this one to go a little long and I’ll see what I can do in the future to keep them a little shorter.
I plan to do this about every month to touch-base with Mike, to keep up on his progress. It gives him enough time to execute on things, for things to change, and I really love following the thread of any founder and that’s what the show has been for 460 episodes. We’ve always had the teaching aspect, we’ve had interviews, we’ve had hot seats, but I think the most compelling thing that keeps people coming back over these years is our stories. It’s following the journeys that we’ve traveled as entrepreneurs and it’s interesting.
While I’m going to continue doing Q&A episodes, hot seats, some interviews sprinkled here and there, I do want to touch base with Mike every three or four episodes depending on what’s going on to hear what he’s up to and try to dig-in to both the good and the bad that he’s experiencing. With that in mind, I’m working on a super secret podcast project that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet but I’ve been working on for several months now and just stay tuned to Startups for the Rest of Us because I’ll be talking about it on the show once that’s ready to go live.
In addition, I want to circle back on a topic that we brought up, probably 10 or 15 episodes ago. It was a desktop Gmail client and switching to that. I had switched to Mailplane and then switched back to Gmail. But due to some recent changes with how G Suite—forwarding, groups, interacts, and those aren’t changes actually, Google’s been doing it for years—I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t getting things that were forwarded. They were sent to Google groups which is how they do email list.
I won’t go into details. It’s all frankly boring, but it’s irritating. I’ve always just funneled everything into a single Gmail account and then did send as in order to appear as if I had a bunch of email inboxes, but that no longer works. It’s broken based on how Google has implemented some stuff in G Suite. I needed a way to have a unified inbox where I can be in a single inbox and I can funnel everything in there even though it’s multiple inboxes that I’m checking. I went through several providers that do that and I’ve landed on the Airmail which is a desktop client and I believe it was $20, maybe $30 through the Mac App Store. I did try out Kiwi per Adrian Rosebrock’s recommendation but it did not have a unified inbox on, it was just a hard requirement for me given this current situation.
Just to close that loop, I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and it’s good. I’m probably going to keep using it. I do like that it has dark mode and it has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. It’s actually got me a little spoiled already with command delete going through the inbox. It’s almost like a touch interface where I can just swipe, swipe, swipe, and get rid of emails. So far so good on Airmail.
Lastly, I wanted to announce, you heard it here first, that applications for the next TinySeed batch are going to open up on November 1st. It’s just a couple of months out, we’ll be following up with more information. If you’re on the TinySeed email list, you’ll hear about that. Go to tinyseed.com and look for the place to subscribe to our email list. We’ll be updating folks once we have more info on how that is going to go down. If you’re interested in potentially becoming part of batch two of TinySeed, be sure your email is on that list.
I enjoyed the conversation that I had today with Mike and we cover all kinds of stuff. He went on a personal retreat and really sorted some things out, it sounds like, and it feels like his trajectory has really adjusted from the conversation we had back in episode 448. If you haven’t listened to episode 448 and 458, there’s a lead up that’s the start of the story that we’re really following today. I recommend you go back and check it out. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Mike Taber.
Mike: thanks for coming back on the show.
Mike: Thanks for having me back.
Rob: It’s been a few weeks since we caught up and I know, you and I, we’re just talking offline trying to put that line […] episode. It sounds like a lot’s been going on, a lot of progress, a lot of interesting things.
Mike: Definitely.
Rob: I think the first question is, I’m curious, are you still on your social media, Twitter, podcast hiatus?
Mike: I am. I still haven’t logged in to either Twitter or Facebook. I’m sure that I will in the near future if only to get Facebook Ads up and running and probably experiment a little bit with Twitter ads some more, because I’ve done that in the past and it can work out well, it’s just you have to actually dedicate the time to it and you have to log in. I haven’t bit the bullet and gone back in them.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing. I know that people build their entire funnel around being on social media and being a personality and typically, if you’re selling info products that works well and if you’re selling SaaS, it doesn’t as much. I’m sure there’s a counter example, but really, if you get to SaaS app to mid six or seven figures, you’re not going to do that on Twitter in essence. It can be a part of it, but it is such a trip to try to wade the value, the ROI of time and distraction, and frankly, sometimes, the stress that it can cause on you.
Mike: Yeah. I have all of the notifications turned off, whether it’s push notifications or email notifications. Literally, everything is turned off for both of them. I turned off my iPad the other day and I realized that apparently, I didn’t turn it off there so it’s telling me, “Oh, you’ve got a couple of hundred notifications here,” and I’m just like, “Nope, not looking at it.”
Rob: Uninstall, that’s cool. Good. I’m curious to see how that feels if and when you decide to re-enter that world. I know some folks that just go off permanently. I think like Marc Andreessen’s just done. He was known for having the big tweetstorms. There’s a rumor that he invented it or something, I don’t know if he did or didn’t, but he would write entire essays on it and then he just started doing likes only and that’s how people were tracking him, and now he said, “Nope, I’m just completely off,” it’s a trip to see that.
Mike: On my Facebook feed for people who I’m friends with, I have the Taber Household Conversations which is usually various conversations. They happen around the house with the kids and wife and they’re fairly entertaining. I’ve been told by a number of people that’s their most favorite thing to see on Facebook and they love watching that but I’ve been keeping track of them separately in a notepad document on my phone so that if I ever go back, I have probably 40 or 50 of them that I could post, I just haven’t logged in.
Rob: That’s cool. Talk to me about your personal retreat. When we last left you, there were some open questions that I had posed in episode 458, things like thinking about what challenges you wanted to tackle, whether you’re going to keep going with Bluetick. There’s a lot of stuff and we’ll cover that today. Part of that, I threw out an off-hand suggestion of, “Hey, maybe you should do a personal retreat to think through some of these things,” and it sounds like you wound up doing that.
Mike: Yeah, I did. It was more of a last-minute thing just because my wife had had time on her calendar when she wasn’t going to be teaching over the weekend, so she’s like, “Hey, you should go ahead and take one,” so I did. It was last minute like I said and it was really good because I sat down and started looking through my notes and stuff. I brought my notebooks that I had written in from previous retreats that I had gone on dating back to 2014.
Before I did anything else, I really just started looking through what I had previously written down as things to think about, goals, observations, and things like that. I realized that dating back all the way to 2014, one of the biggest things that came out every single one of them was I’m not sleeping well. I need to be able to figure out what’s going on and it was a continuing theme every single time. I have been taking retreat since before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. It was eye-opening to go back and read those things and say, “Huh, that thing is basically taken care of at this point,” but it was eye-opening to see that, that was just a huge recurring theme over and over again and I couldn’t get over to figure out what was going on.
Rob: Yeah, that is such a trip, man. I think it is one of the benefits of doing the founder retreats, as we like to call them, is that if you do them year after year and you keep the notes and refer back, you can see patterns. A lot of us get so caught up in the day-to-day or looking ahead to the future—I speak for myself—I don’t frequently look back and try to see patterns, why am I feeling this way? What’s causing that? It sounds like knowing how much that’s impacted your motivation and your ability to execute over the past five or more years is a really good thing to know.
Mike: Yeah. I think what was eye-opening to me was just the fact that I recognize even then how detrimental it was to me, but because I couldn’t figure out a way to deal with it or figure out what was going on, it just kept continuing to be a problem. What I realized was that most of the time, it just snowballs. I’m not getting enough sleep, so I’m not as productive and I’m not thinking straight that I ended up on various medications for different things that are treating the symptoms, but nothing is really addressing the underlying problems, which just doesn’t go away. So then, somehow it just masks the problem. It just makes it so hard to move things forward.
It did make me realize that I’ve been beating myself up over the past 6–8 months or so just because I felt things weren’t moving forward and I was projecting past Mike to present-day Mike because I couldn’t get past those sleep issues. It’s like, “Wait a second, these things are actually mostly resolved at this point, so I shouldn’t be beating myself up over the problems that I used to have and project them on myself and continue to have motivation problems or anything like that. Each day is a new start, so just use it as that. Since I went on that retreat, actually things have really, really turned around for me.
Rob: That’s really good to hear, man. It really is. I think that’s another big benefit of founder retreats is the clarity it can bring you about big decisions or even it sounds like it was like a cleanse in a new start in a way. I’m curious how Sherry wrote The Zen Founder Guide, the Founder Retreats. Did you use something like that to help you or do you have your own system now that you’ve been doing it for so many years?
Mike: Usually, I have enough time in advance of going to be able to write things down and go through some old notes and stuff I have including stuff that Sherry had put together, but this time I didn’t. What I did was when I got there on Friday night, I started going through my old notes and I was going to put some stuff together. Then on Saturday and Sunday, I was basically going to go through it. I feel like I started going through my previous notes first and then realized that probably wasn’t necessary and it was vicious because things just popped out of me, it’s glaringly obvious in retrospect but not while I’m sitting at my desk every day.
Rob: Yeah, I think that makes sense. It sounds like you had a lot of long-term things to think about and didn’t necessarily need the search for topics to consider. You had an ample number of topics to consider just going into the retreat.
Mike: Right. I didn’t really find that it was an issue. The personal retreat was a pretty […] story, it prefers few hours to be perfectly honest. It didn’t take long for me to start to see what things have been holding me back and why and what my path forward was going to look like. Most of the time I spent was probably personal reflection on different things but not necessarily trying to answer those questions. It was just more thinking about the things that had already come up and that I’d already given thought and consideration to, that I thought I was going to need to spend a lot more time on during the personal retreat. It turned out that I just really didn’t need to. I spent most of the time just doing personal reflection more than anything else.
Rob: I have a few questions for you but I am curious to hear if there are other things that you made decisions on or thought through that I don’t ask you. These are questions that we had posed or I had posed the last couple of times we spoke and said if you want to retreat, you should probably consider this. One of them is, do you want to continue working on Bluetick?
Mike: Yeah, and the answer to that was yes, absolutely.
Rob: Was that a hard decision to make? Did you think through a lot of factors or was it like, “No, this is my gut feel and now I’m going to move on”?
Mike: I did think about it. It wasn’t just a gut feel. This is the answer that I want to have because I’m thinking that other people have expectations on me for that. What I really looked at was where is Bluetick today versus where it needs to be, and if I were to just toss the whole thing and go on to something else, would it take as long as it Bluetick has taken or would there be other risks? The reality is I know that there’d be a lot more risk if I went with something else and it would probably take me just as long because I still have to do all the customer development stuff.
The reality is, it’s a solid product that’s got a lot of things going for it. I just haven’t really put the time and effort needed in focus into the marketing side of things, and I haven’t talked to several customers. They like the product, it’s just that I need to get more of those customers.
I think that if I were to move on and try to do something else, could I sell the products ‘as is’ to somebody? Absolutely, I’ve had those conversations with people and I’m sure that I could sell Bluetick ‘as is’ to somebody if I wanted to, but do I want to start over? The answer is no.
The one thing that came to mind was is this a sunk cost thing that I’m thinking about? Is that why I’m leaning in the structure? I don’t think it is because I thought about that as well. It was actually something that […] probably thought about that more than I thought of do I want to continue on this.
Rob: I could see that because that would be the risk and that was going to be what I brought up was do you feel like you have sunk cost that was going on here and are chasing after something just because you’ve spent so many years building it.
Mike: Yeah, and that’s why I spent so much time thinking about that particular question and I don’t think that’s it. I think that there’s probably a little bit of contribution there for that particular thought but it’s certainly not the only thing. I definitely think there’s a lot more that could be done with Bluetick and there’s a lot more value there than I’ve uncovered, I just haven’t gotten in there yet.
Rob: There was another thing I had noted down and it was around, you raised this challenge, this struggle of motivation and the question I think you posted is like, “I’m not super motivated by money right now. It’s hard for me to be motivated to work on this tool and get up every day and do it. What should motivate me?” That was the question. I threw out, “Oh, you should go take the Enneagram.” That kind of was a joke but it was also helpful for me personally when I took it to have a little bit more insight into who I am and what drives you, and that’s part of what it does. It’s nice that it’s free and it takes 15 minutes to take.
I’m curious if you: (a) took the Enneagram, (b) whether that helped or not, and (c) did you also think about this question of what challenge do you want to tackle and what is going to keep you motivated this week, next week, and next month?
Mike: There’s a bunch of things packed into there. Keep me on track if I forget any of those things. I did take it, I didn’t realize that there was a free version of it. I paid $10 from the website and I took it. In my opinion, it was kind of BS, to be perfectly honest.
Rob: That’s totally fair. I’m not trying to force the Enneagram on anyone and I feel like it is. I liked it but I’m curious to hear why you didn’t like it or why you think it’s BS.
Mike: I think it could be helpful for certain people. The problem is that when I went through it, there are three different steps. The first one is to read these nine paragraphs and then you select how much do you think the whole thing describes you or not. The second step is to go through the ones that described you the most and select the ones that you affiliate the most with. I think there were three of them that you had to pick there.
In the first step, I think there were nine different paragraphs and eight of them were ranked exactly the same. In the second step, I basically completely self-classified myself. I’m like, “That’s not real helpful. I could have just read online paragraphs and then said which one do I want.” It was like throwing a dart at the dartboard, you have an equal chance of it in any of them.
Rob: The Enneagram should have been 40 or 51-sentence questions, is that what you saw? There were no paragraphs when I took it. One sentence, it would describe like, “When I’m in a situation like this, this is what I do,” but it’s just one sentence and I don’t even remember if you’ve ranked it on a one to five or if it’s just this is me or this isn’t, maybe that’s what it is. I think that’s all it was but yours is different, I wonder if you took a different test.
Mike: I think mine was different. Maybe it was the wrong one. I don’t know, let me go back and take a look at that.
Rob: Yeah. Let me see if I can find that link to the one I took because that would make more sense, I think.
Mike: Anyway, out of the three steps, there was only one of them, those nine was eliminated after the first step. Then on the second one, I had to pick out of the eight which one…
Rob: That’s not helpful at all. Dude, okay, I need to go and look. I bet I still have the link. Forget the Enneagram, it’s a tangent and we’ll try to revisit it at some point, but the other two things where have you thought about the challenge you want to tackle, really it’s what’s going to keep you motivated.
Mike: I think that it’s looking outside of what the thing is that I’m working on because I have a tendency to get so engrossed in what I’m working on that I will not look at other things in terms of what my social life, or health, or anything like that. I realized that when I get down the rabbit hole on certain projects, AuditShark being one of them, Bluetick being another, there’s a point at which I probably cross a threshold where I continue to become all consumed by that. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily a bad thing in certain situations, but I think that I let it get the best of me and go too far.
What I really need to do is step back and say, “This is a means to an end, not the end for me. This shouldn’t be my all-consuming life purpose because essentially, it’s work. It is something I’m working on and I do enjoy it, but I can’t let it be the only thing that defines me.” I think that, that’s something else that I’ve struggled with to some extent where I look at the product itself and if the product is struggling, then I personally struggle because I see it as a reflection of myself, and that really shouldn’t be the case. It’s more of being able to step back and separate myself and my own self-value, or self-worth, or whatever form the product itself and how well it’s doing versus how well I am doing.
Rob: Yeah, I think that’s super important, it’s very hard to do. I personally drifted in and out of that over the years of having my entire, like you said, it’s like self-worth, self-confidence, happiness tied to my MRR at times. That can be tough. You said that’s outside of that. I think that’s a great realization. Easier said than done, but a great realization. What is it outside of the app that is going to motivate you?
Mike: Honestly, socializing with the people that I know that are in the area. I mentioned this several times in the past where I have a weekly meet up with a couple of guys that I played D&D with. It’s a great way for me to get out of the house, away from my desk, and away from my computer, away from technology. I find that it’s a very helpful and therapeutic for me to be looking forward to that as opposed to looking forward to getting up at five o’clock in the morning and going to work because I really want to work on something and then distracts my sleep because I’m so excited about it the night before. Being able to back off a little bit from that stuff and look at it and say, “Look, this is just a means to an end and it’s means to make a living, not an expression of me.”
Rob: Yeah. I think that’s good. I think the thing I’m missing though, because I also play D&D and I read stuff now, for the first time in a long time within the past year or two, I’ve started to read fiction again. A lot of it is graphic novels, but I’m doing hobby stuff again. I’m giving myself permission to do that, but that’s how I distract myself so that I don’t think about work all the time. Me personally, that’s my personality.
I’m missing how going and hanging out with friends, or playing games, or having a hobby is going to motivate you to stick with Bluetick everyday when it gets hard? Or does it? Or am I misunderstanding that? Because that’s what I’m trying to get at is you’ve talked about getting up and like, “I’m not motivated to do this. I don’t know why I’m doing this,” or you do know why, but it’s like, “I’m just not that motivated to sit here and work six or eight-hour days and crank away on this stuff.”
Mike: I think it’s a very subtle thing and that, as I said, Bluetick is essentially, if I view it as a means to an end, and that end being I get to go socialize with my friends and do these other things, I can’t neglect that and I can’t just let things go because if I do, then I won’t be able to do those other things. It becomes a way for me to create a balancing act that, can I let things slide sometimes? Sure. I absolutely can. Can I let them slide forever? Absolutely not because then, it puts me in a bad financial position, that I’m then stressed out and anxious, and I can’t focus on what needs to get done. But if I make myself balance those things a little bit more so that I’m not so single-handedly focused just on Bluetick or single-handedly focused on socializing with friends, if I force that balance, then it helps me to concentrate. Does that make sense?
Rob: I think so. Is it taking a break gives your mind a break and that when you come back, you’re re-energized rather than basically burning your mind out?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: That’s what it is?
Mike: Mm-hmm.
Rob: Fascinating. I get that. I definitely understand the link there, but I wonder if this answers the question that I posed earlier of everyday you’re going to have to get up and there are going to be things you don’t want to do dealing with the Google audit and whatever, firing a contract or hiring a contract, or maybe it’s writing code, maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s whatever. You’re going to have to do some things you don’t want to do, some things you are excited about, but how are you going to push yourself to not sit there, stare at your screen, and churn away the time? Or whether it’s being unproductive because you are churning or whether it’s being unproductive because you are unmotivated to work on it?
Mike: I feel like that’s just more a matter of putting certain systems in place. One of the things I recognized is that systems are what really helped me stay focused, stay on track. and get things done, but at the same time, my personality is such that I hate being a cog in a wheel. In some ways, it’s demotivational to me to have a system but it’s motivational when it works. Like I said, it’s that balancing act.
One of the issues I had with me taking in the Enneagram is that by definition, I think that I’m very well-balanced in very many ways. I forget what it was called, it was a test that was given that business software like 8 or 10 years ago or something like that and afterwards, I showed it to the person who has given it, I think it was Paul Kenny, he looked at it and he’s like, “Wow, that’s extremely balanced in every direction.”
He said he hadn’t really ever seen that before which is, I don’t know whether that just speaks to how weird I am or not, but it was interesting to see. I have a lot of empathy and ability to see things in multiple ways and multiple directions and I think that’s a strength, but at the same time, it could be a downfall because I can easily find myself in a situation where I’m paralyzed because I’m like, “If I do it this way, then this will happen. If I do it this other way, then this other thing will happen.” It’s difficult to deal with that but at the same time, I also have to recognize, “Hey, you just need to move things forward. You need to make a decision and move on because you can’t stay here looking at this forever.” By timeboxing and things like that, that helps me to move things forward when I need to, but at the same time, it forces that structure which, again, I hate the structure but I do like the results of it.
Rob: Yeah, there you go. The hating structure and liking results means that you hopefully can plow through it. It sounds like the motivation will be the results that you see and I think the other side of that sword or the sharp edge of that is that if you are not seeing results, will you become demotivated? Again, last time I talked about some people are motivated by money. It’s like, “I want to make enough money so that I can support my family or that I never have to work again.” That, whether you’re seeing results or not, you’re still motivated by that.
If some people are motivated by this achievement, it’s the Jeff Bezos, “I want to start a billion-dollar company,” and that you’re just motivated to achieve. Whether you’re seeing results or not, you do still have that goal that you’re hungry for. Last time, we talked about how you’re not hungry for anything right now. I think probably my main concern is that if you’re not hungry for it, if you are not seeing results, are you going to get demotivated?
Mike: You bring up something that sparked my memory of something that came up during my personal retreat is like, “Am I running towards something or away from something?”
Rob: Yeah, because that is away from having to work full time. The last time you talked about that you had the Dilbert comic and you said, “I don’t want to go back because bosses are […].” It’s a pain in the ass to work for other people. There’s a commute, and this and that. We talked through some things about you should get a job with no commute, you should get a job where the boss is not dumb. I can remove all of those.
Mike: I’m screwed working for myself.
Rob: Yeah, but we can remove that. Are you just running away from working for other people? That’s what you’re referring to? Are you actually running towards, “I wanted to keep this,” or just running away from, “I don’t want a full-time job”?
Mike: Yeah. The sad part is I think it’s a mix of both and that’s part of what makes it a hard question for me to answer. I don’t have a specific answer for that. That’s one thing that I did come out of my retreat. One […] about is like, “What is it that I really want to achieve?” and I still don’t have a specific answer for that, but I do know that I want to have a successful SaaS application that is going to support me and my family, at least do reasonably well. If that means that I can take some time off in the middle of the week if I want to, then great.
Kids started school last week on Thursday and on Thursday, we were actually out looking for a new car for her because her Toyota Corolla from 2004 is about to die. It was nice to be able to just take the time and go do that and get it taken care of that day because I have that flexibility in my schedule. If I were working for somebody else, I wouldn’t have that. If I didn’t have an app that was doing at least reasonably well, I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Things do come up. There are bugs and stuff that will come up on occasion that I have to get those fixed and I have those come up as well last week. It’s nice to be able to rearrange my schedule, have the flexibility to move things around and work on it. That’s really what I want out of my future is to be able to have that flexibility.
Rob: Sounds like that’s the thing. That is the one thing that you have referred back to the most is flexibility, is like owning your own time. I wonder if that’s your number one motivator.
Mike: It’s funny because I think that it is, but at the same time, I also know that, as I said, those systems that I have to put in place sometimes to get things done and move things forward, those are restrictive. This weird dichotomy between them that sometimes I have to go in one direction and sometimes I have to go in the other.
Rob: Cool, that’s actually helpful for me and I want to revisit that at some point in the future, but I just want to hear how that how well that’s panning out. We can circle back in a future conversation such that I want to see what the motivation is and if you’re not seeing results, if it’s still working and if just the drive for flexibility is enough. I also updated the Enneagram link, it’s tests.enneagraminstitute.com is the official one, it’s $12 to take the test. I will Venmo you $12, Mike, Go take the test because you didn’t pay for the other one, did you?
Mike: I did. It was enneagramworldwide.com.
Rob: Oh, interesting. When I typed in like take Enneagram online, there’s a bunch of places doing it, and you paid for it and that’s what it gave you? I think go to enneagraminstitute.com, I believe those are the folks that developed it. That’s at least my rudimentary understanding right now.
Mike: Oh, well.
Rob: Anyway, it’s $12. Give it a shot. It should be a bunch of either-or questions. It will make a statement like, “I would prefer to be viewed as successful or happy,” or “I prefer to be successful or happy,” and then you can say, “Yes, this is me,” “No, this is me,” and some of them have partials, I don’t know. That’s what you should see. You should not have to read paragraphs to do this.
Cool. There’s a couple of other points we’re talking about last time that I want to revisit. One is the Google audit thing, the chaos that has been the ongoing Google going to block you if you don’t get this audit and go through their security process, update us on that status.
Mike: I’ve talked to two companies that do that. I had two discussions with each of them, worked with both of them. I’ve selected one that I will be going to. Basically, I was able to work with them on the price a little bit, so it falls at the lower end of the range of $15,000–$75,000 it was originally given. Fortunately, it’s not closer to $75,000 but it is still 5 figures. It’s a difficult pill to swallow but at the same time, it’s also, I would say, a motivational factor for me. One thing I have recognized about myself is that I’m a completionist to some extent. If I were to pay for that, it would be hard for me to not follow through afterwards because that’s a huge chunk of money that needs to be paid every year.
But the other side of it is that it also gives me a defensible moat around Bluetick as well. I probably don’t have a whole lot to worry about from competitors coming in underneath me, which is a weird situation to be in. I still have those bigger fish that are above me but I probably don’t need to worry nearly as much about anybody coming in on our niche and stealing customers or what have you. Not that I really think that would happen for a while. Even if it did, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference, but it does create a barrier to entry for anybody else who’s trying to do similar things.
Rob: I would totally agree with that. Anyone who’s thinking about just dabbling in and they’re starting a little side project to do it or wanting to start just a small lifestyle business and doesn’t really want to go after, it’s going to be deterred. I would be deterred from doing that, it would discourage me from one drop, however much it is, $20,000–$30,000 to get in and just to get started. That’s a trip.
Was it a hard decision then to decide whether to do it or not? Because, again, if they quoted you $75,000, it would have been a reason to shut the company down. We know it’s a lesson in that boat. As you’ve gotten towards it, was it a hard decision or was it like, “No, this is once I’ve decided to do it, I’m also going to suck it up and do this”?
Mike: I think when the initial pricing came in, it was like, “Gee, I don’t know if that’s actually going to fly. I’m not sure if I really want to go through and do that because it would have been really hard to swing it.” Then after going back and renegotiate with them, it was much more doable. Yeah, it’s probably going to be something that needs to be […] each year, but at the same time, it’s a SaaS application. There’s only going to be so many changes that are between them. They didn’t specifically say that was a differential they would do from one year to the next, but that certainly does factor into it if you’d go with the same company for one year to the next.
Google could easily change their policies moving forward. I’ve had this discussion with other people in my mastermind group, where I think that they are just laying down the law, drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Okay, this is what it is, and screw anyone that has to deal with this in the next 18–24 months. We’ll figure it out before then. There’s going to be small players that gets screwed in that meantime, but oh, well, we need to protect our company and our users’ data. In two years out, things will be fine.” I think that’s the decision they’ve made and things will change in a couple of years but probably not dramatically.
Rob: Yeah, and I like the way you couched it as a motivating factor. There were two times that I really recall having my back to the wall and talk about sunk cost, you are talking quite a chunk of money. I bought DotNetInvoice for $11,000 and I bought HitTail for $30,000. Those were 4–5 years apart, but those were very difficult pills for me to swallow. It was a lot of money. It was all the money that I had saved up from doing all this consulting on the side.
I had an incredibly productive two or three months stretches right after that because my back was to the wall. I worked for longer hours. That was one of the seasons where I work long hours and a big part of it was I can’t have written that check-in vain. I have to make this work. I keep saying my back was to the wall, but that’s how I feel about it. I wonder if you can use this at least in the short term as motivation of, “I have to be a good steward of that money and make this worth it.”
Mike: Yeah. I’m definitely that type of person as well. Some people crack under pressure and I do extremely well under pressure, which is a double-edged sword because sometimes, I’m a procrastinator to some extent. In some ways, that helps me because I procrastinate and then I get to this part where it’s do or die and I’m willing to put in the time and effort to make sure that things happen and that things work.
I probably haven’t experienced that in a while but there are certainly things that I can point back to in my history where I […] my masters degree, for example. I was coming up to the wire in terms of being able to finish my masters thesis and they’re like, “Okay, you need to have this done by the end of August.” So, I buckled down and I wrote the entire thing in a month-and-a-half, or two months, or something like that and I went back to them and basically got it all done, but it needed to get done and it needed to get done fast. There was really no other option, otherwise, I was blowing $20,000–$25,000 down the train and I would walk away without anything to show for. Still, having taken those classes, I don’t have the degree, not that it means a whole lot if I’m self-employed but it was one of those personal accomplishments or achievements that I wanted to have.
Rob: Yeah. It comes back to that extrinsic motivation. It’s really an optimist scenario for you. Cool. A couple more things before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about that untestable seal.net component. You had made the decision to replace it with a different component, but you were saying while you get slotted in among things and I was like, “Look, you made the decision. Just go ahead and do it because it’s keeping your back. It’s technical debt, right now, it’s a liability that keeps you from making changes to things.” Where does that sit?
Mike: I still have not touched that. Most of my time has been spent going back and forth with the vendors on the security audit because just even scheduling a meeting with them takes a week. It’s a week before it happens but it’s several days of back and forth and trying to get an answer because they’re just busy and they have to slot in conversations when they get a chance. It’s a pain in the neck.
I’ve been stalling on other things to see how that works out because obviously, it did hold it back to some extent because of the final numbers for the quotes came back in $75,000, I was just going to walk away, but since it didn’t, it made things a lot easier to get working on other stuff. At this point, I do recognize that needs to get done. It’s a matter of looking at schedule and seeing, “Where can I slot that in between marketing activities?” because I feel like that’s probably more important, but I go back and forth on that.
Rob: When do you feel you’re going to pull out that component?
Mike: I think if I get a more detailed information from the security company about what I can and can’t store, that’s probably going to dictate that to some extent because I don’t want to get in the position where I spend all this time and effort replacing that component so that I can download all the data in the way that I want to only to find out that they come back and say, “You really shouldn’t be storing that,” or those other things that go into. It’s just I’m holding off and maybe that’s a bad decision.
Rob: I don’t think it is. That’s what I would do as well. It sounds like there’s a bunch of unanswered questions and you are right with the security audit. They can come back and say anything. I would personally also wait on that but I wouldn’t wait on other development on marketing because you can do that stuff before then.
Your mastermind group is meeting weekly and you have a pseudo business coach. Both those things still going on and do you feel like they’re working for you?
Mike: I do. I actually have an email in my inbox right now from the coach that I have to reply to today and then the meetings have been going on every week and we talk about all kinds of different things from conversion rates to where marketing should be focused or conversations to customers, but I find that the weekly accountability has been pretty helpful because it forces me to make progress on everything and part of it is schedule-related because I have to make sure that I slot time for those things but it’s also what am I looking at next and then making sure that’s getting done because I’m basically committing to each of those things.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. Glad to hear that’s still working out. I do want to touch base periodically and hear more about that. I’m curious. We had a conversation, it was episode 448 where we really dug into this stuff for the first time. You raised a concern that you didn’t really want do the spammy-cold email and I threw out an idea of a warm and ethical code email or you can just focus on warm email, is that still your thinking that you want to focus on something that you feel better about personally and have you made any strides to make that part of reality?
Mike: I have thought about it quite a bit more and I had a conversation with a customer that I onboarded a couple of weeks ago where he’s like, “I definitely want to use Bluetick, and this is what we are doing right now and it looked automated and we’re using it for cold email.” After going through and talking to them about how he was doing it, I realized like, “Hey, you’re actually doing warm email, not cold email,” because they’re sending physical mailers and things like that. It reminded me of one of the original thoughts that I’d had behind Bluetick was using it as something of a multi-channel marketing campaign because if you send somebody something in the physical mail and then send them emails or you send them tweets and things like that, this is a functionality that really hasn’t made it into Bluetick yet, but the conversation did remind me to like, “Hey, that was the original idea here.”
It turns cold contacts into warm contacts because they’ve at least seen your name before and they’ve heard of you because you’ve reached them through other channels. Some of them can be automated. I think Postable probably has an API where you can send direct mailers to people “handwritten notes.” They’re not actually handwritten, but they look like they are. Things like that are ones that would probably do well in that type of multichannel campaign. There is not a lot of people who are doing that right now, most of the people that I’ve seen who were doing that, they do it by hand and it sucks.
Rob: Yeah, no doubt. Cool. It sounds like you’ve made a decision because I have talked about life-changing your website copy, changing your onboarding, and even considered potentially doing a setup, doing a setup fee and then verifying upfront that they are doing stuff that’s in line with what you want Bluetick to do. It sounds like you haven’t moved forward on that but are those still things that you want to put in place?
Mike: Those are still on my radar. I think the larger challenge or problem that I have is just that I don’t have enough traffic. That’s the biggest thing. I don’t think that adding in a setup fee or something like that, that’s not really going to move the needle for me, at least not right now, but if I were to triple traffic, for example, that type of thing is I’m won’t say easily attainable, it’s probably something that would move the needle for me a lot more than adding in a setup fee.
Rob: Right. I think as we wrap up, there are still this open question of how to differentiate Bluetick, how are you going to make it different from the other tools that I could go out and essentially do the same thing with? Have you given that more thought?
Mike: I’ve given it some thought. I wouldn’t say that I have any concrete conclusions on that. One of the things I have seen is that people who are most successful with Bluetick are the ones that integrated it into their marketing and sales pipelines. I think that integrating Bluetick into other products directly would allow it to have a tighter integration into other people’s marketing and sales funnels. Integrating into other tools directly is probably the most straightforward way to do that. Most of these tools that are like Bluetick have an API of some kind where you can upload stuff but it’s really those integrations that are going to basically keep people around and keep churn low. If I can keep churn really low, then I don’t have to worry about growing the product as quickly to counter that churn.
Rob: That’s true. I agree with all that actually.
Mike: But it doesn’t directly answer the question.
Rob: Yeah, which was differentiation. Do those integrations differentiate you or do your competitors have some or all of those?
Mike: I think most of them have a Zapier integration of some kind. I haven’t looked in-depth enough at them. I do have somebody that I hired to help me out with marketing. They’ll probably start later this week or next week, but that’s something I’ll probably look at a little bit more to do more in-depth competitive analysis and say, “What markets do these people serve, and why?” and, “Is there a place where Bluetick can fit into those and really shine as opposed to where it currently is?”
You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t really have any major differentiating feature other than I can offer direct support and you’re going to talk to the developer if you’ve got a problem. There’s some value to that but I don’t think that it’s enough to overcome the challenges that it has by not being able to be differentiated easily.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think I’ve used the phrase picking up crumbs a few times where if you really are similar to most of the other tools in the space, you will get some customers, you are just picking up crumbs as you get lucky, you’re not going to have that key differentiator that people are like, “Oh, my gosh, Bluetick is the only want to do this or Bluetick does this the best.” What are you really known for? It’s positioning.
In your shoes, I would try to get an idea of the entire landscape for all the competitors, the big ones, the small ones, the funded, the unfunded, whether you have a mental model of it, a mind map, or notes on a whiteboard, whatever it is, try to sketch out how are they positioned and how can you try to find feature differentiation.
Mike: Yeah. I definitely have some thoughts on those. The issue that I think I struggle with there is that most of the things that I think would be great to be able to include are packaged into Bluetick that would beat those differentiators, are things that are going to require technical heavy lifting in order to implement. It’s hard to justify spending the time and effort there without solid data to back it up and that data is hard to come by without doing it and then seeing if it works, so to speak.
Rob: I would agree with that.
Mike: It’s exploration, I guess. I definitely think I have to talk to some of my customers a little bit more, though.
Rob: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like. More research to be continued. I’d love to talk about your marketing hire because that sounds cool, but I have another call I have to jump on. I got it, I have to end it here to the groans of both me and the listeners. But there’s one other thing I actually want to ask about. What was your low point over the past month? It sounds like everything is going up into the right in general. Things have been good, you’re in good spirits, you have good answers, you’re thinking about this stuff, but what was the hardest moment or the lowest point in the past since we spoke last, which I think was about three or four weeks ago?
Mike: I would say just making the decision to make certain changes. I think that it’s the inertia of not moving just yet. When you have an idea of, “Oh, this is how I want to solve this problem or these are the things that I need to do,” where do you even start? In terms of inertia, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting up at five o’clock in the morning on average and going to the gym. That’s usually the first thing I’ve done. I’ve exercised three times today. If that gives you any indication, I was at the gym before five o’clock, then I went for a one-mile walk, and after that later on, I went for a two-mile walk.
I’m making some pretty dramatic changes and I feel like they’re going well, they’re giving me energy, and I’m able to get those things done which I’ve never really put a lot of emphasis on my own personal health from the past, but those first four or five days of doing that was just brutally hard. It was really, really hard to just get started. Now that I’ve been doing it for a little while, it’s not a habit yet, by no means are no stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s on its way there. I’d really like to keep seeing that continue.
Rob: Awesome, man. Thanks again for taking the time to come and update us and I’ll talk to you again in a few weeks.
Mike: All right, sounds great.
Rob: Thanks again to Mike for coming back on the show. It’s fun to have him pop in almost like a guest now and again. I wanted to remind you if you’ve been considering potentially becoming a part of TinySeed’s second batch which will start in early 2021, head over to tinyseed.com and enter your email address or if you just want to keep up with what we’re doing, it’s a nice way to do it. We don’t email very often and we will be emailing about news like this when the batch opens, November 1st of this year.
Again, if you have a question for this show that you’d like to hear answered on air, you can leave us a voicemail at (888) 801-9690 or you can email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can enter that as text or attach an MP3.
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Episode 458 | The Return of Mike Taber
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike returns to the podcast to give updates on the fate of Bluetick as well as progress updates on his motivation and health.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: In this Taberrific episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike returns to the show. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 458.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re working on your first. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made on our journeys. Mike, it’s been a long time.
Mike: Hi. Yeah, it has. What? 10 episodes?
Rob: Ten episodes. I don’t think either of us realized that it would be that long. Just so listeners know, you and I had literally not spoken verbally. We’ve texted since that episode, but we have not spoken since episode 448.
Mike: That’s true.
Rob: We’re not talking that much. We tend to text and email a lot.
Mike: I hear that from people when I talk to them at MicroConf. They have the expectation or the inclination to believe that you and I talk either everyday or at least a couple of times a week. That’s totally not true. We’ll email back and forth. We will sometimes go for a couple of weeks without talking at all.
Rob: Yeah, if we don’t record the podcast. Ten episodes. What have you been doing with the enormous amount of free time you had not had? Showing up every week to record this and all that.
Mike: I’ve come to the realization that I was probably recovering from a pretty massive dose of burnout. I feel like I’m at the tail end of getting over that. How do I put this? There were times where I would just take an entire day off just because I felt like I needed it. Then, there are other times where I would just sit at my desk. I really wouldn’t feel like I was getting any work done. I would say that was the early stage when I started to take the time off.
I got to the point where I realize just sitting at my desk wasn’t actually doing anything. If I wasn’t actually being productive in any ways to perform, I’ll just get up and go do something else. What’s the point of sitting there if it’s not doing me any good? Because then, I’m just going to feel bad about it later and that’s not good for me either. It was rough to get through, but it was probably necessary, too.
Rob: It’s nice to have the luxury to be able to take that time and did not have to show up everyday for a season. It’s like over the course of years, you need to show up everyday in general, but when you’re burned out, you have to take time off. There’s really no other way to get around that. You have to get away from it. It’s hard to show up even once a week and be like, “All right. I’ve got to sit there and talk on the mic about stuff that I don’t really feel great about.” I’ve gone through months of time when I felt that way. When I listen back to the show, I can hear that in either one of us at a given time when they’re burned out.
It’s great you have that time to step away. You just got to give yourself permission to do that. That’s the thing. I often feel guilty when I do it, but you come back the next day or the next week assuming it’s not a long term depression or a chemical imbalance, which is totally very valid and real thing. But assuming it’s not that and you are just burned out because of the work or whatever it is, it’s super valuable. Each of us should give ourselves permission to do that.
Mike: Yeah. That was a good realization for me is just giving myself permission to walk away then come back later either when I felt like it or maybe the next day if I didn’t feel like it. Sometimes, there were definitely a couple of periods where I would take two or three days just because I didn’t feel like doing anything and I wasn’t being productive. You can’t beat yourself up all the time because that’s really what was happening to me. I don’t know how long it was going on, either.
When you’re sitting there trying to get work done, it’s like you’re concentrating more on beating yourself up about why you’re not getting things done, not focused, and not moving at all forward. Then, you are about taking a larger view of things saying, “How long does this been going on?” I try to forgive myself, I guess, for those periods of not being able to get stuff done. Like I said, things just has gotten a lot better over the past month or so.
Rob: We’ll dive into that. That’s the whole point of this episode. I have a couple of questions for you before we get into what you’ve been thinking about, how things have been with your health, your progress, and what’s going on. Have you been listening to the podcast?
Mike: I’ve not. I’ve gone into hermit mode.
Rob: Yes. You haven’t been on Twitter at all, right?
Mike: Aside from logging in very briefly on Twitter and Facebook just for authentication purposes for a couple of different things, I haven’t gone on either one of them. Nothing. No social media. I don’t even really watch the news or anything like that. There’s stuff going on. I’m just like, “I have no idea what’s happening in the world.” It’s just hermit mode.
Rob: Mike, do you miss it desperately and feel like there’s a huge Twitter-shaped hole in your heart?
Mike: No, not really.
Rob: Not at all?
Mike: I do miss some of the playful interactions and stuff like that. At the same time, I know they’re also distracting for me. I miss reconnecting with people just to shoot them a message here and there, and just make a comment on different things that are going on. At the same time, a lot of those doesn’t necessarily add any real value for me. I guess there’s a social contact, but I’ve tried to find personal social contacts outside of the internet.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. I find it fascinating you have been listening to the podcast at all. The listeners who’ve been listening, they know the format. I’ve changed the format. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, really trying to dig in and not just do the same old. We never wanted an interview show. There were enough interview shows. I’ve been trying to dig into people’s stories and the struggles. Done several Q&A episodes. I did a Q&A episode where Tracy Osborn came on and co-hosted with me. Jordan Gal came on for one.
That’s been actually the cool part for me. It was almost an excuse/motivation/force to me to figure out how I run the show on my own. It forced me to innovate. It’s the mother of invention to sit here, stare at the mic, and be like, I don’t just want to do what a lot of solo hosts do which is interviews. I don’t just want to monologue on the mic. Heaven knows I can sit and talk for 30 minutes. How do I try to up the game?
I’ve been spending a lot more time on the podcast than I used to. Over the course of the last several years, we show up and we talked about on the mic, but I’ve been trying to be really deliberate about trying to craft stories, just experimenting with new ideas, and new formats. It’s been cool. You can go back and listen to them now, I think your hermit mode is great, and it’s probably what you needed at this point. Someday, go back and listen, and let me know what you think.
The response I have asked in some of the episodes for folks to write in, or write me personally, or tweet, or somehow give their thoughts on the new format are overwhelmingly positive. I probably got 20-25 responses saying, “Yup, this is great.” “Keep being creative.” “Keep changing it up.” Some folks have mentioned that they missed the Q&A episodes probably the most. We used to do it every other episode, this Q&A.
That’s easy enough. I did one that went live today when we’re recording this. It was just me doing Q&A. I listen through it and it’s good. I think that works. I also like bringing experienced folks like Jordan Gal or Tracy to co-host with me on the Q&A. I think I’m finding my groove here in a way to keep it going.
Mike: Yeah. It’s interesting that you bring up the forced innovation. There’s a couple of things that come to mind in terms of just the podcast in general. I call it a general success and general longevity. The fact that we show up all the time, I guess until 10 episodes, we show up every week. Then, the past 10 has just been you showing up every week. The fact that it’s there and people can rely on it is not just a testament to the show, but it’s one of the reasons why it has been successful.
The other thing that you look at is you can continue to do the same thing over and over again, but eventually, maybe it gets boring. Maybe you decided that there’s other things that you want to do or there’s other ways to innovate on this show or whatever it is you’re working on. Those things don’t get done sometimes unless you force it because you’re either afraid to make changes or you decide, “I’m comfortable now. I don’t want to go through the…” I don’t want to call it pain but the uncomfortable mess of trying to change something that is already working. That applies in not just the podcast but in a lot of other places, too.
Rob: I would agree. I actually have a snippet from one email that we received from […]. He had a couple of comments, but one thing he said, it was indicative of what a lot of folks said. He said, “You asked for feedback about the new format. I’m really enjoying the in-depth nitty-gritty interviews with entrepreneurs who are in the trenches and openly talk about their successes, failures, and what they’re currently working on. It’s so valuable to hear what people think through the challenges, problems, and decisions. You’re a great interviewer because it doesn’t feel like you’re an interviewer, if that makes sense.”
I really appreciate that piece because I’m trying to deliberately do that. I’m not trying to be an investigative journalist. I’m trying to be a founder who’s just having a conversation with another founder much likely we would have whatever, at a bar, or at a conference in hallway track or something.
Back to his email, he says, “I also appreciate how you introduce the guest’s background yourself so you can go right into the good stuff with your guest.” That’s been very deliberate. The first 2-3 minutes, I hammer through their history so that we don’t have to sit there for 20 minutes talking through, “So, when did you become an entrepreneur?” Nobody really cares about that, in general. We really want to know what’s this pivotal piece of your story and let’s dig into that; that element of it.
His emails continues. He says, “I’ve learned so much from the topic-focused/listener-questions episodes as well.” That’s some more of the older format. “There’s so many concepts I’ve incorporated into my own thinking that have made me vastly more productive and effective.” It’s cool he rattles up a bunch. He said off the top of my head, relentless execution, road blocks versus speed bumps, almost all decisions are reversible, good glucose, moving a business forward, I could go on. He says, “I like the new format. I like the new voices, I like the stories, but the previous format is also great and it has taught me a lot.”
I appreciate that email. That was in general, indicative of the feedback that I saw. There was one person who wrote in and said, “I like the old format better.” That’s not super helpful without more description, but yeah, in general, it’s been a fun adventure.
Mike: That was cool.
Rob: How about the website? Have you been to the website? I’m about to announce it today, but about a week-and-a-half ago, brand new, Startups for the Rest of Us website went live.
Mike: I did see that.
Rob: It’s a new WordPress design. I’m sorry that I had to deprecate our 9½ year old WooTheme that we customized. Oh Mike, the humanity.
Mike: That was so hard to work with.
Rob: It’s not because it’s a WooTheme, it’s because it’s 9 years old. It was so crafty. Everything was breaking. We have plugins that were deprecated six years ago. Thanks again to Rich Staats at the Secret Stache who jumped in. The podcast feed would have died three months ago. We weren’t able to get new episodes in. He jumped in a day’s notice and hacked something in a plugin to get that going. That was cool. It keeps us going.
I don’t know if you know, but we’re now on Seriously Simple Podcast hosting which is Craig Hewitt’s WordPress plugin. We were in ProdPress and it hadn’t been touched in six years. Craig did us a favor, jumped in, and spent several hours migrating us over. We were just bailing the water out of the boat, in essence, to keep the podcast going. That’s cool. Now, we have a new theme. My hope is that we’re in a much better situation now.
Mike: Yup. In 2027, we can update it again.
Rob: It’s the thing I was thinking. It was like, “Oh my. We need to do this a little more often.”
Mike: It might be a good idea, but I think we both just got busy doing other things. It’s still work and it’s functional, it’s a little along the priority list.
Rob: Yup, that’s right.
Mike: That happens.
Rob: I was motivated by the fact that the momentum carried through were I was like, “Okay, here I am doing this show on my own, setting up interviews.” I kept going to the site and being just like, “I’m so bothered by this website.” The copy’s out of date. The greatest hits ends at 220, it’s like half of our podcast feed had been analyzed for greatest hit, and just the design and everything. It’s never fun to redesign a site, but it’s fun to have redesigned it. Now that it’s done, I’m glad that it’s all taken care of.
Mike: Now that it’s over and it looks nice, then it’s much better off.
Rob: Yeah. Episode 448 really struck a nerve. We received north of three dozen comments on that episode, tweets, emails to myself, emails to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. It is the episode that received the most feedback, perhaps, of any episode in our 450 episode run.
Mike: Yeah. You can probably at least add 50%-75% to that. I’ve got a ton of things that came directly to me through email as well. I don’t know if anybody has tweeted at me. If they did, I apologize because I have not logged into Twitter since 2½ months ago. On top of that, I’ve got a ton of personal direct emails to me, as well.
Rob: That’s cool. Thank you to everyone who reached out, honestly. I’ve responded to a lot of them, but I read every single one of them. I know you did as well, the stuff that came to you, Mike. In general, it was just super encouraging. There was a voicemail last episode that I felt like it had a couple of questions. He had a piece that I felt summed it up nicely. He said, “I wanted to take Mike for his immense courage in being so open and vulnerable in sharing his Bluetick blues with the podcast community. As a fellow, still struggling in Boston area, B2B SaaS founder, I empathize with him in the challenge he’s facing and I deeply appreciate his willingness to share them in public. I wish him the best in deciding what’s next.”
I felt that was, in general, like, “Thanks for coming in the mic and doing this, both of you.” “Thanks for diving into this difficult topic in front of 20,000 listeners,” and, “This is helpful.” That’s what I keep hearing is, “This is helpful for me to hear as a founder to know that I’ve gone through this, I am going through this.” It really humanizes it and a lot resonated with a lot of people that we were able to dig into that for 40 minutes, 10 episodes ago.
Mike: Yeah. When that episode went live, I got inundated with a ton of emails upfront. Then, they just kept trickling in. They tapered off after three or four weeks. It was hard for me because I wanted to respond to every single one of them, but I just really wasn’t in a place where I could. I apologize to anyone who I didn’t respond to. I started replying to them and I got to a point where I just couldn’t. It was like I was seeing the same things over and over again to people which is continuing to beat me down, I guess. Apologies to anyone, but I do want to say, definitely, I want to thank anyone who did email me. I did appreciate it.
Rob: Mike, when we last left our hero, we were talking about […] of things. I have seven or eight bullet points here to cover and revisit. You don’t need an answer to all of them. Some of the answers maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet. To take 2½ months off and expect that everything is thought through, everything is fixed, I don’t think is realistic. I am curious and I’m sure the listeners are, too. Did you give this particular bullet a thought? What’s your conclusion? Where do you stand now? Where do you see it heading over the next months and years?
To start high level, a question I brought up a couple of times in that episode was, “Do you still want to be an entrepreneur?” and you said, “The answer is absolutely yes.” That’s cool. The other question towards the end, “Should you be an entrepreneur? Do you feel like this is what you should be doing? Or do you feel like you should—not want to, but should—take a step back? Do some consulting? Build up the bankroll? Take a salary job?” because healthcare is so expensive. I know salary jobs make both of us sad. They make me depressed, but they are so stable, they’re so much less stressful, and there’s less need for that intrinsic motivation. Did you have a chance to think through that stuff?
Mike: I did think about it. Coincidentally, it was maybe four or five days ago, I got an email from a recruiter who was asking me. He’s like, “Hey, I saw your job experiences and stuff on LinkedIn. There’s a position over here at Amazon that you’d be really good for.” I looked at it and I thought for eight or ten seconds, “Oh my God, No. I just can’t do that.” Not just the fact that it would be all the way up for in Summerville. It’s taken me an hour to get there, so no. Absolutely not. That’s part of why I went out on my own anyway.
The thought of going back to a full time employment, there is an attraction from just the healthcare standpoint, but at the same time the lack of flexibility. The past couple of months, we’ve been able to make things work because I’m working at home. My wife’s got her business. She’s in and out. We just tag team on all the stuff with the kids during the summer. It’ll be so much harder if I had a fulltime job. Yeah, I could probably make it work if I were working remotely, but it’s still just the hassle of working for somebody else.
I saw this Dilbert comic. My wife and I actually talked about this, me going back and working for somebody else. I remember coming across this Dilbert comic very recently that really summed it up. The boss comes in and he says to Dilbert, “Hey, good news. We just won this nationwide contracts to roll out a wireless network.” Dilbert says, “Newsflash: We don’t know how to roll out a wireless network nationwide.” The boss says, “How hard could it be to not roll out wires?” That completely sums up exactly why.
Don’t get me wrong. Not every company is like that. But there are some things that I see that companies done where you’re just like, “This is the dumbest thing ever.” Yet, it’s hard to say something in those situations. Then you come off as an adversarial employee, you’re not working with the team, it’s just like, “Come on. This is a dumb idea. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
Rob: Did you just quote a Dilbert comic as a reason not to get a full-time job?
Mike: I think so.
Rob: I hear what you’re saying. Honestly, if you were to get a job, it should be for a startup. It should be for 10, 20, 30, person company. Probably, with funding so they have good benefits and it should be remote.
I get it. I’m not saying you should do this, but I think that not wanting to go back to the cubicle form or the hour commute, I get that. Neither of us should do that. But I don’t think you need to in this day and age.
Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I could probably find something that’s remote. I thought a lot about it. Even if I had all the money in the world, I would still build stuff. The problem with that is that money isn’t necessarily a main driver for me. That’s the problem that I’ve run into. I have enough money in the bank and I have enough income coming in where I don’t have to work my ass off in order to have the things in life that make me happy. The problem is I’m not really making a ton of forward progress on a lot of things.
It really comes down to an existential question of, “What is it that actually drives me if it’s not money?” It used to be money because I was the only one in my household who was working and now I’m not. My wife is able to help out with the income side of things. It’s great because now I don’t have to push myself nearly as hard. But as a direct result of that, the question is, if I don’t have to work nearly as hard, why am I doing this? What’s the point?
It’s something I definitely struggled with, to be perfectly honest. I don’t have a great answer for it yet. I’m still working on that, but the reality is, that is what stopped me or prevented me for going full speed on a lot of stuff because I haven’t needed the money, so what’s the point?
Rob: That makes sense, although you’re not independently wealthy. You do have to work. If you stopped working altogether, it’s not like you can take five years off. When I was in your shoes, that was my motivation. It was to get to a point where I could take years off or the rest of my life to achieve financial freedom. It’s an overused term and it’s almost devoid of meaning at this point, but I wanted the ability to never have to work again. That was a big motivation for me. Does that not motivate you?
Mike: I feel like the runway’s long enough. It’s not like a hardcore motivator for me, if that makes sense. I’m not under the gun. I don’t have two months or whatever to make ends meet or I’m done and I have to go find a full time job because that’s not the position I’m in. I’m fine for probably several years. That’s not a big deal. The problem is that there are going to be points along the way.
Let’s say Bluetick completely went away, for example, I lose that income. Yeah, I would probably be in a little bit of trouble, but I would still have plenty of runway left to figure out what I was doing at that point. The question is how do I address that? What do I really want? What am I really looking for?
I don’t necessarily have specific answers for that. I’m still working on those. I agree that the financial freedom aspect of it is a good and worthy goal. The question is, what is it that I’m really looking for above and beyond that? If I have that, what am I going to do? What’s going to drive me and motivate me? Even if I achieved that, then what’s next? What’s going to prevent me from just saying, “Okay, now what?”
Rob: That’s so interesting. I hear you, but I would get to that point then say, now what? I have gotten to that point a number of times. For me, quitting a salary job was this huge goal of mine. I quit it and went full time contracting, remote, consulting, in, let’s say, 2002 or 2003. I remembered being like, “Oh my gosh! This is it. I’ve dreamed of this for 20 years since I was in high school. I wanted to have this remote job.” And I did. Six months later, I said, “Now what?”
You know what “now what?” for me was? It was, “Huh, I’m bored of working dollars for hours. I want a product. I want a product to support me.” Then, in 2008, I’ve got a full time income from products. I remember loving it for about a year. Then, I said, “Now what? I’m bored. I needed to do something bigger.” That was podcast, conference book, Micropreneur Academy. Then, it was HitTail. It was like, “I need to level up.” Then, after that it was Drip. After Drip, it was, “Now what?” Now, I spend more time in the podcast than I do in TinySeed.
Your and my motivations do not have to be the same thing. That’s not what I’m saying. I do think that the best entrepreneurs I know have a driving motivating factor. It is either to create—to build stuff that people use—or to achieve. There are a bunch of folks who just want to build a big company. They want to build the Amazon, or Google, or the Uber. That’s not my motivation. My motivation has always been to create interesting things that other people can use. I’m sure there are other motivations.
The thing that I’ve seen, if you ever heard of the Enneagram, it’s a personality test. It’s like the Myers-Briggs or whatever. It’ll tell you, “This is what motivates you and this is what doesn’t.” I’d be fascinated for you to take that. Whether you talk about it on the show or you just take it for yourself to get some insight into your likes, dislikes, your pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and your motivations.
I think that until you know that, it’s going to be a challenge for you to really be motivated to launch products because this […] is hard. That’s what we’ve experienced. It is hard to do this. Without a real drive of, “Man, I need financial freedom,” or, “I need to create stuff that a bunch of people can use,” or, “I just need to escape this inner voice in my head that probably my dad or my mom put in me.”
These are the motivations that I’ve seen drive entrepreneurs to do really interesting things. I don’t even mean great things, you don’t have to build a multimillion dollar business. That’s not what Startups for the Rest of Us is about. It can just be about shipping cool things into the world that people use and showing up everyday to do it.
Mike: Yeah. Part of my question that I’m kicking around in my head is, what is it that I want? All of the things you talked about are like, different people have different goals. Some may want to build the next Amazon and for you personally, that doesn’t resonate. It’s not what you want. But when you’re talking about your journey from going to self employment to building a product then to HitTail, Drip, and TinySeed, that whole journey is a series of challenges that you’re undertaking.
In my mind, what I’m really struggling with is what is the challenge that I actually want to tackle? What is it that I personally want to do. That’s not something that comes over night. Especially, if you have the time to figure out what it is you want to do rather to be in having some forcing function that makes you decide within a week. Within a week, that’s a time constraint. You have to deal with the constraints right there and then versus I’m in a position where I can take some time to figure out what it is I actually want, reflect on exactly why that is, and why it’s going to make me happy. If it’s not going to make me happy, I don’t want to do it.
Rob: You’re right. Until you’ve been there, it’s hard to understand how saying, “I can move and live anywhere,” actually makes it a lot harder. It’s tough to say, “I can build or do anything. I have a few years of runway,” makes the choice a lot harder because there is no forcing function for you to make a decision. There’s not a ton of things pressing on you to do it. I hear what you’re saying.
It sounds like, “Here’s what I’d like to do with this because this is really an interesting topic.” I noted, “What is the challenge that Mike wants to tackle? Why is he doing this?” I want to revisit this. I think that you should give a thought, do a retreat, do whatever it is that you’re going to do to figure that out. Take the Enneagram. I’ll just put the link. It’s not a silver bullet. Take it. Take some personality test and do some thinking and stuff. Think about what it is you want to do. This is a time to be deliberate about these things.
The mistakes that I’ve seen some founders make, it’s a founder I have in mind in particular, he sold a company and sold it for several hundred thousand dollars and didn’t have enough to retire, but he could take time off. He didn’t take time off. He made a quick decision that said, “I got to get right back on.” He launched this next thing within a few weeks. It was a mistake because it was almost like a rebound, like a rebound startup or like a rebound idea.
You’re not in a position to where you’re shutting Bluetick down and looking for another thing. You are in a place where you have the luxury of taking a month or two, set a timeline so you don’t take a year or two, but figure it out. That’d be my advice. What do you think? Do you think I’m full of BS?
Mike: Well yeah, but no. That’s a great way to phrase that question. I like that. An excellent point about the fact that when you got a blank slate, you can live anywhere, and you can do anything, what is it that you’re going to do? When you’re facing the problem, there’s all those constraints. It helps guide you in the right direction. But when you have no constraints or very, very few that makes it a lot harder. That’s the position I’m in. I have much fewer constraints on me now than I probably did five or six years ago.
Rob: The paradox of choice.
Mike: Yeah. I’m just trying to make sure that I make the right choice for myself, go in a direction that is going to make me happy, and that’s actually what I want to do. I remember a time when I was a kid. I was like, “I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this.”
Fast forward 30 years and you don’t have time in your life to do all of those things. The question I’m trying to answer for myself is, in 10 years, or 15, or 20 years, when I look back on my life, what is it that I want to have achieved? What would make me happy? Or what do I believe would make me happy? That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now.
Rob: And you’ve taken a couple of months off of the podcast. I know you took some time off of work to think about it and this is not something that could come overnight. Let’s revisit that in future episodes. I feel like you should come back in three or four episodes and cover all this stuff again—anything that is an open question.
Whether you have an answer then or not, I’d love to hear updates on your progress and I think the listeners would as well. It’s been an ongoing story for nine years and continuing that thread is going to be good for all of us to hear the decision you make.
If we come back in seven days and I ask you the same question, you don’t have progress because it’s like, “I can’t figure these things out in a week.” But if we give it time to breathe, I feel like we can potentially follow the story in a way that’s helpful and doesn’t put pressure on you to force you to have answers to things that you probably don’t have.
Mike: That’s a double edged sword because there are times where having a forcing function like that makes you make decisions. It is not to say that it makes the decisions for better or worse. It’s just that it forces you into making a decision.
It could go either way. I’m not saying it should. I’m just saying that it could go either way where it’s like if it’s seven days versus three or four weeks or whatever. Sometimes, having to make the decisions earlier is better. Sometimes it’s not. I don’t know if that’s a good answer either way. That’s why the classic answer from my consultant is, “Well, it depends.”
Rob: Yup. When we last left you, there were some speed bumps that we were talking about, like roadblocks. Then there were some health stuff, there were sleep stuff, there were coaching and failures, a bunch of stuff I have bullets about that I want to run through.
The first thing is there was Google drama. Google needing an inspection certification that could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Potentially, no one was getting back to you. That was two months ago. That was a weekly thing that was going on. Is Bluetick going to get shut down because of Google? What’s going to happen? Update us on that. What does it look like today?
Mike: I’m past 95%, it’s probably 80% because of the 80/20 rule. Then, I’ve got another 80% to go. Everything is done with Google except for the security review. Actually, I reached out to the companies that are doing the security reviews before and I dropped it. I didn’t get back to them because I was just not in a place where it was worth my mental energy to continue pursuing it.
I’ve gone back to them recently. One of them had a survey that I needed to fill out and give them a bunch of technical stuff. I gave that to them and scheduled a follow-up call with them. The other one I’m trying to get us a meeting schedule with them. I’m basically trying to get the price quotes hammering out and seeing how much is this going to cost me. In some way, that probably impacts what I’m going to do with Bluetick moving forward, but maybe not.
Maybe I just made a decision that’s like, this is going to be the path forward for me. Regardless of how much that cost, I’m just going to do it. Whereas before it was much more on the mindset of, “How much is this going to cost?” “What’s my growth trajectory?” “Is it even worth me going in that direction?” Part of the factor of that was how much is it going to cost to have that review done. Right now I’m just in the process of figuring out what the cost is.
It’s hard to say that I’m not less focused on the growth trajectory because I still think that that’s very important, but is it something I want to do? Probably the bigger question that I need to answer is do I want to continue working on Bluetick and moving it forward? I definitely think that some of the recent conversations I’ve had with existing customers has really added to my motivation to do that. I got away from talking to my customers nearly as much as I probably should’ve been. That has dramatically helped that motivation.
Rob: Fascinating. To summarize then, Google stuff is moving forward. You don’t have exact data yet, but you’re waiting to hear back. Bluetick shutdown is not imminent based on Google doing anything. You’re in the process of answering this question of, “Is this something I want to continue working on?” probably based on customer interactions.
Mike: Yes.
Rob: Related to that, there was a technical issue that you brought up which was this sealed .NET component you’re using, untestatable because it’s hard to get into all of this stuff. Have you done anything with that? Have you made progress? Or are you just saying, “Forget it. I’m just going to deal with it the way it is”?
Mike: Do we have a 20 minute profanity filter or a beep that we can put in here?
Rob: We do.
Mike: I went back and forth with the support people on that. I’ve made the decision that I’m going to need to rip that out and replace it. I’ve already got something I could replace it with. I’ve already started going through the process of replacing it. Their support basically came back and said, “Yeah. This isn’t a priority for us. We’re not going to make any changes with that.” “Too bad,” is really what the bottom line was. That’s a nice way of phrasing what they said, but yeah, I’m really, terribly, unhappy with the response I got from them.
Rob: But it’s no longer a roadblock because you’re going to fix it and you can move on. It was something you brought up multiple shows in a row as well. It seemed to be really hanging you up. This was one of the options we threw out, remember? I was like, “You can shut down the whole company. You can write the component yourself.” You brought up, you could switch components or I said, “You could just deal with it and not have great test or whatever.” This is one of the options. At least it’s one of them and you’re moving forward with it.
Mike: Yup, and I’ve already started that process. The problem with ripping it out completely and switching over is that it’s a process is going to take probably several days for my servers to turn on. It’s a little terrifying to have to pull the trigger and actually make that complete switch. There’s the architectural changes that needed to be made as well. I’m trying to push it off or make it so that I can do one mailbox at a time or something like that. I haven’t dedicated a huge amount of time to that beyond the initial prototype and stuff.
Rob: Don’t let it hang around. If I have one piece of advice, it’s get past this. It’s easy to put this off and be like, “Oh, I don’t really want to. It is a headache,” or, “It’s hard to pull the bandaid off.” If you’re going to do it, do it, and get past it.
Mike: The question in my mind that I’m struggling a little with is, does this add anything for the customers?
Rob: No, of course not.
Mike: You’re right. It doesn’t, but at the same time, there are places where it’s a detriment to me to be working in that code because I have to be super careful about things breaking because of that code. My time is better spent on doing marketing stuff anyway. Should I be focusing my time on that even though this thing is hanging out around up there?
What I struggle with is the fact that it’s mental overhead. I know it’s there, I know that it’s a problem, I know it needs to be dealt with, but if it weren’t there, I wouldn’t think about it at all. I have a hard time just pushing it out of my mind because I know that it’s there, but at the same time, I need to be working on other things. I don’t have a great answer for that.
Rob: It sounds to me, you know that there are four or five options. We ran through those. Shut the business down, replace it, rewrite it, whatever. It sounds to me like you made a choice to replace it. If you’ve made that choice, just do it and get past it. What is it? A week’s worth of work? Two weeks’ worth of work? You have the luxury. If you haven’t made the decision, then that’s fine. If you made the decision but then are half doing the work on a decision because you feel like you need to do other stuff, then it sounds like you really haven’t made the decision.
Mike: No. I have made the decision. It’s just a question of trying to slot it in when I’ve got other things that are also relatively high priority to get done. I’ve got a challenge around prioritization as well because I’ve got so many things that need to get done. We can come back to that. There’s other stuff of it.
Rob: Exactly. We don’t want to run two hours. I have an open questions for future episode where we revisit all these. This is one of them.
Another thing was during the last episode, listeners know you’ve had issues with low testosterone and your doctor taking you off this patch. You felt like you’re unmotivated, that you are having trouble sleeping which is related, but not the same thing. You were not doing great in that last episode, to be honest. I could tell and we talked a little bit after we closed that episode. What has happened since then?
Mike: To be blunt about it, I was a total mess when we recorded that last episode. The very next day I went back on my medication which is just a dramatic difference between them. I basically told my doctor I was never going to do that again which he wasn’t happy about. I’m like, “I’m sorry you’re going to have to deal with this.” Things have been a lot better in that regard.
I’m actually off two other medications. That was really tough. That took probably six or eight weeks to get through and get over. There’s withdrawal effects and things like that. I had to deal with them. It was just low energy, low motivation, hard time sleeping. Things have gotten dramatically better in the past three or four weeks, I’d say. But it was hard getting through that period, to get off those medications.
It has done a lot of good for me. I’m no longer suffering from a lot of those side effects. That’s part of the reason why I was on some of those medications because I wasn’t sleeping very well. It created this vicious cycle. To be more specific, I was on Adderall because I couldn’t focus during the day. Then, I was on sleep meds at night to try and get me to sleep. It’s just like they’re basically fighting against each other. The reality is I couldn’t sleep at night because of the sleep apnea. I ended up on these other meds that have addictive qualities and things that go really sideways in your body when you’re trying to come off of them.
Those things are a lot better. I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that things have gotten dramatically better in terms of my energy, my ability to focus, and my ability to be productive. Productivity is, I don’t want to say it’s a choice, but you have to focus on being productive. If you don’t focus on that, then you’re just going to sit there and not get anything done. At least I found that way for me. I don’t want to overgeneralize that.
Rob: Yeah. That sounds like a rough couple of months. I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling better.
Mike: I’m only at one medication now. Well, actually two. It’s like for testosterone and I’m on blood pressure meds. My doctor’s done all kinds of test. I actually have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. As far as I know, I also don’t have cancer. I guess that got back down going for me.
Rob: Yay, that’s good news. Great! That sounds like a tough couple of months. Taking time off was probably the right choice to deal with that because that’s not something you necessarily wanted to be working through. I’m glad to hear it and I really hope that that continues. You don’t know what you’ll feel like in three months, or six months, or nine months. Things come and go.
You sound more awake and alive than you have been for a long time. I don’t know if it’s just because you’re fresh, because you’re like, “Oh boy!” I don’t know if you ever lifted weights all the time, but if you lift seven days a week, your body gets tired. If you take two or three days off, you come back, you can just lift crazy amounts of weight. You just feel amazing because your body has had time to recover. I feel like there’s been a bit of that. You just sound better.
Mike: For sure. I’ve been doing a lot of little things. I’ve been tracking when I sleep well, when I don’t. What was I doing the day before. I’ve been tracking what I eat a lot. I’m trying to lose weight, but that’s only going marginally well. Coming off of the Adderall was really hard because I added 10 or 15 pounds really quick. I’m back down to only about five pounds over what I was, but still, I wanted to lose weight on that point anyway. There’s that.
Then, I found that there’s certain types of music that I can listen to. If I listen to it first thing in the morning versus I sit down and I start working without listening to music, then, I’m way less productive and I’m way less energetic. I’ve also realized that I need to have a routine as much as I hate it. I can’t stand going through the same routine all the time. It’s boring to me. My brain just doesn’t deal with it well. At the same time, I need that structure.
Those are the kinds of things that I’ve found to be very helpful over the past month or two. It’s been a learning process because I’ve been on my own. I’ve been able to do whatever I want and still make it through, still be productive, but things have changed. I don’t know if it’s just because of burnout or because I’ve gotten older and things like that. Drawing lines between work and playtime, the exercise has obviously made a little bit of a difference. I’ve gotten back to that.
Then other little stuff like getting rid of small annoyances. We were talking before the podcast started. You’re like, “Wow, your keyboard’s really loud.” I was like, “Yeah, I bought a new one.” It’s a total of really little thing, but it’s got a volume control built into it with little roll bar. I can put the volume up or down on my music while I’m sitting there as opposed to banging on a button or having to go use the mouse and change the song that are on. It’s all the little stuff, but I made a conscious effort to identify those little things that were annoyances that are now smoothed out. They’re no longer impact my day and they no longer cause me to either get out of a rhythm or get angry about stuff that’s going sideways.
Rob: Yeah, that’s good to do. that’s good to recognize. To summarize all that, it’s like you took a step back. You took a step back and you look at your life, your worklife, your day to day progress, and you got over some off medications which is always hard to do. You took a step back and you said, “Hey, what can I improve in my life?” At least one listener is thinking to himself, “Mike, welcome to 2015 with the volume control on you.” But I’m definitely not thinking that.
How was your sleep? We have a couple more bullets to cover. We’re just going to have run long today. How was your sleep? That has been such a big issue, frankly, for years.
Mike: It’s a lot better. I definitely noticed that there’s days of the week where that I don’t get as much sleep as I would like, but then, there’s other ones where I would just wake up feeling completely refreshed and ready to get to work. That’s what I was just talking about where I’m trying to be more deliberate about tracking what happened the day before, how the day went before, and what specific things may have caused that. I don’t have a lot of information on that yet, but I’m definitely keeping a close eye on that, being very deliberate about looking at that, and examining it because that’s going to be important for me.
Rob: I’m making a note here to check back on this as well just because it’s something that’s important and it’s important to be honest about it. Everytime doesn’t have to be, “Oh, everything’s great. My health and my sleep are great.” You got to be able to talk about when it’s impacting you, like in episode 448, talk about when it’s negatively impacting your progress. Something you mentioned on that episode and prior was like, “I think I need to be in a mastermind.” “I need more accountability.” “I’m thinking about hiring a coach.” There was stuff bubbling around that. What’s the update on that status?
Mike: I have a new mastermind group. We’ve been meeting at least once or twice a week, more on a Monday or a Friday, just because of the scheduling and stuff like that. That’s been going really, really well. I’m really glad that I picked that up and thanks to the listener. I won’t call out the specific name of who it is, but know that the person who introduced this probably listens to the podcast, so I just want to say thanks for that.
In terms of a coach, I’ll say a pseudo business coach, more or less who’s holding me accountable on a weekly basis saying, “What did you do these past weeks? What do you plan on doing this week?” Then, we’ve had a couple of calls here and there not just for accountability. We have a call just yesterday or within the past three days about going through my marketing plan, picking it apart, and saying, “Are these things really important? Are they not? How are these things ranked and weighted against each other? And what should you be focusing on next?” Those are the things that are going to end up on the shortlist of stuff that I implement moving forward. He’s just going to hold me accountable to it and get me a sanity check.
Rob: So far so good?
Mike: So far so good. Yeah.
Rob: I have a bullet here to ask about you. Your motivation, your effectiveness. Have you developed a system because we covered that as well. You already talked about that. It sounds like for the past three or four weeks, things have been feeling a lot better?
Mike: Yeah. I would say things started to turn a corner about three or four weeks ago. The past week-and-a-half to two weeks, things have really started amped up a little bit. It’s a combination of no longer really suffering from the withdrawal symptoms of the medication and then also getting to the tail end of burnout, which maybe I’m still working through that. I’m not really sure. It’s really important for me to figure out not just what it is that motivates me, but what it is that I want to achieve.
Rob: As we start to wrap up, something that we talked a lot about that I brought up multiple times in the prior episode is about making progress on Bluetick or making progress to your day to day work, figuring out how to differentiate Bluetick, how to make it different from the other offerings such that it’s a product that you can sell, and you’re not just picking up crumbs. Do you have clarity about how to do that? That’s the first part of the question, and have you started making progress towards that end?
Mike: I wouldn’t say that I have absolute clarity on it, but I would say that I have some ideas about what the direction of it it should be. It’s more or less, I believe, doubling down on the warm email follow ups because I’ve been talking to a couple of customers here and there about what it is that they used Bluetick for, why they use it, and asking questions to help me figure out what the direction for it is, what it should be, what are they unhappy about, what are they using it to begin with, and consolidate that information.
One of the customers that I talked to, interestingly enough, he said that he started out using it for cold email. Then, when he switched over and started using it for warm email for other things, he’s like, “Oh, I’ve got this tool. I might as well use it.” Then a lightbulb went on for him. I was just like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why?” Then, he started talking about the fact that it’s really built well for those types of scenarios. He was talking about why he was using it and how if there were some minor changes to it, it would be more helpful to him and just easier to use.
It gave me some ideas about how to go in that direction a little bit more. The problem I see is that when I ask him if he were talking about it to somebody that he knew or another entrepreneur or something like that, how would he pitch it to them? He’s like, “I really don’t know.” That’s something I struggle with is how to present it to people that in a context outside of use cases, maybe I just have to go on to that direction, and talk about it in terms of specific use cases.
Rob: How would you summarize that?
Mike: How would I summarize what? How it’s used?
Rob: No. Just the whole thing. If I were to say, do you know how it should be differentiated? I think I do. It’s the warm email context. Then, making progress towards that, not yet? Still in the thinking phase? When I say progress, have you shipped code or marketing material or different copy? Updated the website? Anything to that, and yet.
Mike: Yeah, I haven’t done any of that stuff yet. I’ve just been consolidating the information, kind of thinking about it. I’m not sure what the best ways for me to present that to other people are. I’m not sure if that’s the absolute direction I should go. Should I niche it down a little bit so that it is much more like a pipe drive plugin or should I integrate with a bunch of different products that are similar to that?
I have some open questions about that stuff and I don’t have the answers yet, but they are things I’m trying to actually figure out. Like how should this be pitched to people? Who are the exact people that I should be solving this specific problem for? When I first started on Bluetick, it was much more open-ended. It still is open-ended and it can do a lot of things, but if I were to niche down and only solve a very small sub-segment of the bigger problems that it can solve, I feel like it could probably get a lot more traction, and the question is, what exactly are those?
One example might be to reschedule meetings that have been cancelled. Those people are probably high profile prospects or high value prospects. If somebody cancel the meeting they scheduled, that’s probably a good situation where Bluetick could help you get those people back to a meeting. But is that the place where I want to niche down into? I don’t know the answer to that yet.
Rob: How are you going to answer those questions? You said you had several open questions. Do you have a plan to figure out how to answer them?
Mike: I’m going to be going through in talking to the rest of the customers that I have and seeing if that is something that they generally use it for. If so, then, I can at least generally answer that. At least try it out as a direction. I don’t know. Let’s say I decided to do that today. It may take another month or two to figure out, is this a reasonable direction? Am I going to get any attraction with it? I don’t know that.
Even if I made the decision, I’m still going to have to test it out. I’m still going to have to try it, see if I can get enough customers, and get some sort of traction. If I’m not getting that, then I have to probably go back to the drawing board and try and figure it out.
There’s going to be a decision point activity and then wait to see what the results of the tests are. If I don’t go through all three of those things, I can decide what the direction that is all I want. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful and there’s no way to verify it.
Rob: Makes sense. To be continued in a future episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. Stay tuned to hear the stunning conclusion of Mike’s journey with Bluetick in a few episodes. Mike, I have the next three episodes mapped out or recorded already. What we’ll do is…
Mike: I’m totally screwing up your […] system.
Rob: Yeah, you are. No, this one slides perfectly in place. I have all that dialed in, but what I’d like to do in the interest of both keeping the story going is also giving you time to get stuff together and make progress on these things is record with you again in a few weeks. I don’t know if it’ll be 461 or 462, somewhere in that range, and to hear what else is going on, hear updates on your thinking.
There’s a lot of open questions. I have six or seven bullets here that I have taken about differentiation, accountability, health and sleep, to what challenge do you want to tackle, and what it is you really want to do. I’m glad that you’ve made the progress that you have. It sounds like you’re out of the fog. It seems to me like what you have been doing for the past two months is working. Keep doing that.
I feel good just talking to you about it. It makes me feel good to hear you, the old Mike. It’s the Mike that I remember. You and I have gone in and out of these things. There’s an old Rob and a new Rob where I was super depressed for six months doing stuff. It’s not just about you. It’s cool to hear that. Do you feel that in yourself as well?
Mike: I do. It’s hard for me to look back on it. It’s one of those painful things to look back on. It’s like, “Oh man, I wish I hadn’t felt that way,” but it is what it is. I’d rather take the time and do the right things for myself, what I want, what I’m trying to do, and make the right healthy choices, I’ll say, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that going through those periods is easy either. I definitely agree that I feel alot better today than I did two months ago, or three months ago, or even six or eight months ago. The word you used earlier, coming out of a fog, that was woefully accurate. It’s the way I’d put it.
Rob: Well, thanks for coming back on and digging into these stuff. If folks want to keep up with you—no, I’m just kidding. You know I always do at the end of the interview. “If folks want to keep up with you, Mike, where would they go?”
Mike: I would say Twitter, but I don’t use Twitter.
Rob: Very good. I feel that wraps us up for today.
Listener, if you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at (888) 801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt of We’re Outta Control by MoOt, it’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit stratupsfortherestofus.com for a sexy new website and the full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re working on your first. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made on our journeys. Mike, it’s been a long time.
Mike: Hi. Yeah, it has. What? 10 episodes?
Rob: Ten episodes. I don’t think either of us realized that it would be that long. Just so listeners know, you and I had literally not spoken verbally. We’ve texted since that episode, but we have not spoken since episode 448.
Mike: That’s true.
Rob: We’re not talking that much. We tend to text and email a lot.
Mike: I hear that from people when I talk to them at MicroConf. They have the expectation or the inclination to believe that you and I talk either everyday or at least a couple of times a week. That’s totally not true. We’ll email back and forth. We will sometimes go for a couple of weeks without talking at all.
Rob: Yeah, if we don’t record the podcast. Ten episodes. What have you been doing with the enormous amount of free time you had not had? Showing up every week to record this and all that.
Mike: I’ve come to the realization that I was probably recovering from a pretty massive dose of burnout. I feel like I’m at the tail end of getting over that. How do I put this? There were times where I would just take an entire day off just because I felt like I needed it. Then, there are other times where I would just sit at my desk. I really wouldn’t feel like I was getting any work done. I would say that was the early stage when I started to take the time off.
I got to the point where I realize just sitting at my desk wasn’t actually doing anything. If I wasn’t actually being productive in any ways to perform, I’ll just get up and go do something else. What’s the point of sitting there if it’s not doing me any good? Because then, I’m just going to feel bad about it later and that’s not good for me either. It was rough to get through, but it was probably necessary, too.
Rob: It’s nice to have the luxury to be able to take that time and did not have to show up everyday for a season. It’s like over the course of years, you need to show up everyday in general, but when you’re burned out, you have to take time off. There’s really no other way to get around that. You have to get away from it. It’s hard to show up even once a week and be like, “All right. I’ve got to sit there and talk on the mic about stuff that I don’t really feel great about.” I’ve gone through months of time when I felt that way. When I listen back to the show, I can hear that in either one of us at a given time when they’re burned out.
It’s great you have that time to step away. You just got to give yourself permission to do that. That’s the thing. I often feel guilty when I do it, but you come back the next day or the next week assuming it’s not a long term depression or a chemical imbalance, which is totally very valid and real thing. But assuming it’s not that and you are just burned out because of the work or whatever it is, it’s super valuable. Each of us should give ourselves permission to do that.
Mike: Yeah. That was a good realization for me is just giving myself permission to walk away then come back later either when I felt like it or maybe the next day if I didn’t feel like it. Sometimes, there were definitely a couple of periods where I would take two or three days just because I didn’t feel like doing anything and I wasn’t being productive. You can’t beat yourself up all the time because that’s really what was happening to me. I don’t know how long it was going on, either.
When you’re sitting there trying to get work done, it’s like you’re concentrating more on beating yourself up about why you’re not getting things done, not focused, and not moving at all forward. Then, you are about taking a larger view of things saying, “How long does this been going on?” I try to forgive myself, I guess, for those periods of not being able to get stuff done. Like I said, things just has gotten a lot better over the past month or so.
Rob: We’ll dive into that. That’s the whole point of this episode. I have a couple of questions for you before we get into what you’ve been thinking about, how things have been with your health, your progress, and what’s going on. Have you been listening to the podcast?
Mike: I’ve not. I’ve gone into hermit mode.
Rob: Yes. You haven’t been on Twitter at all, right?
Mike: Aside from logging in very briefly on Twitter and Facebook just for authentication purposes for a couple of different things, I haven’t gone on either one of them. Nothing. No social media. I don’t even really watch the news or anything like that. There’s stuff going on. I’m just like, “I have no idea what’s happening in the world.” It’s just hermit mode.
Rob: Mike, do you miss it desperately and feel like there’s a huge Twitter-shaped hole in your heart?
Mike: No, not really.
Rob: Not at all?
Mike: I do miss some of the playful interactions and stuff like that. At the same time, I know they’re also distracting for me. I miss reconnecting with people just to shoot them a message here and there, and just make a comment on different things that are going on. At the same time, a lot of those doesn’t necessarily add any real value for me. I guess there’s a social contact, but I’ve tried to find personal social contacts outside of the internet.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. I find it fascinating you have been listening to the podcast at all. The listeners who’ve been listening, they know the format. I’ve changed the format. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, really trying to dig in and not just do the same old. We never wanted an interview show. There were enough interview shows. I’ve been trying to dig into people’s stories and the struggles. Done several Q&A episodes. I did a Q&A episode where Tracy Osborn came on and co-hosted with me. Jordan Gal came on for one.
That’s been actually the cool part for me. It was almost an excuse/motivation/force to me to figure out how I run the show on my own. It forced me to innovate. It’s the mother of invention to sit here, stare at the mic, and be like, I don’t just want to do what a lot of solo hosts do which is interviews. I don’t just want to monologue on the mic. Heaven knows I can sit and talk for 30 minutes. How do I try to up the game?
I’ve been spending a lot more time on the podcast than I used to. Over the course of the last several years, we show up and we talked about on the mic, but I’ve been trying to be really deliberate about trying to craft stories, just experimenting with new ideas, and new formats. It’s been cool. You can go back and listen to them now, I think your hermit mode is great, and it’s probably what you needed at this point. Someday, go back and listen, and let me know what you think.
The response I have asked in some of the episodes for folks to write in, or write me personally, or tweet, or somehow give their thoughts on the new format are overwhelmingly positive. I probably got 20-25 responses saying, “Yup, this is great.” “Keep being creative.” “Keep changing it up.” Some folks have mentioned that they missed the Q&A episodes probably the most. We used to do it every other episode, this Q&A.
That’s easy enough. I did one that went live today when we’re recording this. It was just me doing Q&A. I listen through it and it’s good. I think that works. I also like bringing experienced folks like Jordan Gal or Tracy to co-host with me on the Q&A. I think I’m finding my groove here in a way to keep it going.
Mike: Yeah. It’s interesting that you bring up the forced innovation. There’s a couple of things that come to mind in terms of just the podcast in general. I call it a general success and general longevity. The fact that we show up all the time, I guess until 10 episodes, we show up every week. Then, the past 10 has just been you showing up every week. The fact that it’s there and people can rely on it is not just a testament to the show, but it’s one of the reasons why it has been successful.
The other thing that you look at is you can continue to do the same thing over and over again, but eventually, maybe it gets boring. Maybe you decided that there’s other things that you want to do or there’s other ways to innovate on this show or whatever it is you’re working on. Those things don’t get done sometimes unless you force it because you’re either afraid to make changes or you decide, “I’m comfortable now. I don’t want to go through the…” I don’t want to call it pain but the uncomfortable mess of trying to change something that is already working. That applies in not just the podcast but in a lot of other places, too.
Rob: I would agree. I actually have a snippet from one email that we received from […]. He had a couple of comments, but one thing he said, it was indicative of what a lot of folks said. He said, “You asked for feedback about the new format. I’m really enjoying the in-depth nitty-gritty interviews with entrepreneurs who are in the trenches and openly talk about their successes, failures, and what they’re currently working on. It’s so valuable to hear what people think through the challenges, problems, and decisions. You’re a great interviewer because it doesn’t feel like you’re an interviewer, if that makes sense.”
I really appreciate that piece because I’m trying to deliberately do that. I’m not trying to be an investigative journalist. I’m trying to be a founder who’s just having a conversation with another founder much likely we would have whatever, at a bar, or at a conference in hallway track or something.
Back to his email, he says, “I also appreciate how you introduce the guest’s background yourself so you can go right into the good stuff with your guest.” That’s been very deliberate. The first 2-3 minutes, I hammer through their history so that we don’t have to sit there for 20 minutes talking through, “So, when did you become an entrepreneur?” Nobody really cares about that, in general. We really want to know what’s this pivotal piece of your story and let’s dig into that; that element of it.
His emails continues. He says, “I’ve learned so much from the topic-focused/listener-questions episodes as well.” That’s some more of the older format. “There’s so many concepts I’ve incorporated into my own thinking that have made me vastly more productive and effective.” It’s cool he rattles up a bunch. He said off the top of my head, relentless execution, road blocks versus speed bumps, almost all decisions are reversible, good glucose, moving a business forward, I could go on. He says, “I like the new format. I like the new voices, I like the stories, but the previous format is also great and it has taught me a lot.”
I appreciate that email. That was in general, indicative of the feedback that I saw. There was one person who wrote in and said, “I like the old format better.” That’s not super helpful without more description, but yeah, in general, it’s been a fun adventure.
Mike: That was cool.
Rob: How about the website? Have you been to the website? I’m about to announce it today, but about a week-and-a-half ago, brand new, Startups for the Rest of Us website went live.
Mike: I did see that.
Rob: It’s a new WordPress design. I’m sorry that I had to deprecate our 9½ year old WooTheme that we customized. Oh Mike, the humanity.
Mike: That was so hard to work with.
Rob: It’s not because it’s a WooTheme, it’s because it’s 9 years old. It was so crafty. Everything was breaking. We have plugins that were deprecated six years ago. Thanks again to Rich Staats at the Secret Stache who jumped in. The podcast feed would have died three months ago. We weren’t able to get new episodes in. He jumped in a day’s notice and hacked something in a plugin to get that going. That was cool. It keeps us going.
I don’t know if you know, but we’re now on Seriously Simple Podcast hosting which is Craig Hewitt’s WordPress plugin. We were in ProdPress and it hadn’t been touched in six years. Craig did us a favor, jumped in, and spent several hours migrating us over. We were just bailing the water out of the boat, in essence, to keep the podcast going. That’s cool. Now, we have a new theme. My hope is that we’re in a much better situation now.
Mike: Yup. In 2027, we can update it again.
Rob: It’s the thing I was thinking. It was like, “Oh my. We need to do this a little more often.”
Mike: It might be a good idea, but I think we both just got busy doing other things. It’s still work and it’s functional, it’s a little along the priority list.
Rob: Yup, that’s right.
Mike: That happens.
Rob: I was motivated by the fact that the momentum carried through were I was like, “Okay, here I am doing this show on my own, setting up interviews.” I kept going to the site and being just like, “I’m so bothered by this website.” The copy’s out of date. The greatest hits ends at 220, it’s like half of our podcast feed had been analyzed for greatest hit, and just the design and everything. It’s never fun to redesign a site, but it’s fun to have redesigned it. Now that it’s done, I’m glad that it’s all taken care of.
Mike: Now that it’s over and it looks nice, then it’s much better off.
Rob: Yeah. Episode 448 really struck a nerve. We received north of three dozen comments on that episode, tweets, emails to myself, emails to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. It is the episode that received the most feedback, perhaps, of any episode in our 450 episode run.
Mike: Yeah. You can probably at least add 50%-75% to that. I’ve got a ton of things that came directly to me through email as well. I don’t know if anybody has tweeted at me. If they did, I apologize because I have not logged into Twitter since 2½ months ago. On top of that, I’ve got a ton of personal direct emails to me, as well.
Rob: That’s cool. Thank you to everyone who reached out, honestly. I’ve responded to a lot of them, but I read every single one of them. I know you did as well, the stuff that came to you, Mike. In general, it was just super encouraging. There was a voicemail last episode that I felt like it had a couple of questions. He had a piece that I felt summed it up nicely. He said, “I wanted to take Mike for his immense courage in being so open and vulnerable in sharing his Bluetick blues with the podcast community. As a fellow, still struggling in Boston area, B2B SaaS founder, I empathize with him in the challenge he’s facing and I deeply appreciate his willingness to share them in public. I wish him the best in deciding what’s next.”
I felt that was, in general, like, “Thanks for coming in the mic and doing this, both of you.” “Thanks for diving into this difficult topic in front of 20,000 listeners,” and, “This is helpful.” That’s what I keep hearing is, “This is helpful for me to hear as a founder to know that I’ve gone through this, I am going through this.” It really humanizes it and a lot resonated with a lot of people that we were able to dig into that for 40 minutes, 10 episodes ago.
Mike: Yeah. When that episode went live, I got inundated with a ton of emails upfront. Then, they just kept trickling in. They tapered off after three or four weeks. It was hard for me because I wanted to respond to every single one of them, but I just really wasn’t in a place where I could. I apologize to anyone who I didn’t respond to. I started replying to them and I got to a point where I just couldn’t. It was like I was seeing the same things over and over again to people which is continuing to beat me down, I guess. Apologies to anyone, but I do want to say, definitely, I want to thank anyone who did email me. I did appreciate it.
Rob: Mike, when we last left our hero, we were talking about […] of things. I have seven or eight bullet points here to cover and revisit. You don’t need an answer to all of them. Some of the answers maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet. To take 2½ months off and expect that everything is thought through, everything is fixed, I don’t think is realistic. I am curious and I’m sure the listeners are, too. Did you give this particular bullet a thought? What’s your conclusion? Where do you stand now? Where do you see it heading over the next months and years?
To start high level, a question I brought up a couple of times in that episode was, “Do you still want to be an entrepreneur?” and you said, “The answer is absolutely yes.” That’s cool. The other question towards the end, “Should you be an entrepreneur? Do you feel like this is what you should be doing? Or do you feel like you should—not want to, but should—take a step back? Do some consulting? Build up the bankroll? Take a salary job?” because healthcare is so expensive. I know salary jobs make both of us sad. They make me depressed, but they are so stable, they’re so much less stressful, and there’s less need for that intrinsic motivation. Did you have a chance to think through that stuff?
Mike: I did think about it. Coincidentally, it was maybe four or five days ago, I got an email from a recruiter who was asking me. He’s like, “Hey, I saw your job experiences and stuff on LinkedIn. There’s a position over here at Amazon that you’d be really good for.” I looked at it and I thought for eight or ten seconds, “Oh my God, No. I just can’t do that.” Not just the fact that it would be all the way up for in Summerville. It’s taken me an hour to get there, so no. Absolutely not. That’s part of why I went out on my own anyway.
The thought of going back to a full time employment, there is an attraction from just the healthcare standpoint, but at the same time the lack of flexibility. The past couple of months, we’ve been able to make things work because I’m working at home. My wife’s got her business. She’s in and out. We just tag team on all the stuff with the kids during the summer. It’ll be so much harder if I had a fulltime job. Yeah, I could probably make it work if I were working remotely, but it’s still just the hassle of working for somebody else.
I saw this Dilbert comic. My wife and I actually talked about this, me going back and working for somebody else. I remember coming across this Dilbert comic very recently that really summed it up. The boss comes in and he says to Dilbert, “Hey, good news. We just won this nationwide contracts to roll out a wireless network.” Dilbert says, “Newsflash: We don’t know how to roll out a wireless network nationwide.” The boss says, “How hard could it be to not roll out wires?” That completely sums up exactly why.
Don’t get me wrong. Not every company is like that. But there are some things that I see that companies done where you’re just like, “This is the dumbest thing ever.” Yet, it’s hard to say something in those situations. Then you come off as an adversarial employee, you’re not working with the team, it’s just like, “Come on. This is a dumb idea. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
Rob: Did you just quote a Dilbert comic as a reason not to get a full-time job?
Mike: I think so.
Rob: I hear what you’re saying. Honestly, if you were to get a job, it should be for a startup. It should be for 10, 20, 30, person company. Probably, with funding so they have good benefits and it should be remote.
I get it. I’m not saying you should do this, but I think that not wanting to go back to the cubicle form or the hour commute, I get that. Neither of us should do that. But I don’t think you need to in this day and age.
Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I could probably find something that’s remote. I thought a lot about it. Even if I had all the money in the world, I would still build stuff. The problem with that is that money isn’t necessarily a main driver for me. That’s the problem that I’ve run into. I have enough money in the bank and I have enough income coming in where I don’t have to work my ass off in order to have the things in life that make me happy. The problem is I’m not really making a ton of forward progress on a lot of things.
It really comes down to an existential question of, “What is it that actually drives me if it’s not money?” It used to be money because I was the only one in my household who was working and now I’m not. My wife is able to help out with the income side of things. It’s great because now I don’t have to push myself nearly as hard. But as a direct result of that, the question is, if I don’t have to work nearly as hard, why am I doing this? What’s the point?
It’s something I definitely struggled with, to be perfectly honest. I don’t have a great answer for it yet. I’m still working on that, but the reality is, that is what stopped me or prevented me for going full speed on a lot of stuff because I haven’t needed the money, so what’s the point?
Rob: That makes sense, although you’re not independently wealthy. You do have to work. If you stopped working altogether, it’s not like you can take five years off. When I was in your shoes, that was my motivation. It was to get to a point where I could take years off or the rest of my life to achieve financial freedom. It’s an overused term and it’s almost devoid of meaning at this point, but I wanted the ability to never have to work again. That was a big motivation for me. Does that not motivate you?
Mike: I feel like the runway’s long enough. It’s not like a hardcore motivator for me, if that makes sense. I’m not under the gun. I don’t have two months or whatever to make ends meet or I’m done and I have to go find a full time job because that’s not the position I’m in. I’m fine for probably several years. That’s not a big deal. The problem is that there are going to be points along the way.
Let’s say Bluetick completely went away, for example, I lose that income. Yeah, I would probably be in a little bit of trouble, but I would still have plenty of runway left to figure out what I was doing at that point. The question is how do I address that? What do I really want? What am I really looking for?
I don’t necessarily have specific answers for that. I’m still working on those. I agree that the financial freedom aspect of it is a good and worthy goal. The question is, what is it that I’m really looking for above and beyond that? If I have that, what am I going to do? What’s going to drive me and motivate me? Even if I achieved that, then what’s next? What’s going to prevent me from just saying, “Okay, now what?”
Rob: That’s so interesting. I hear you, but I would get to that point then say, now what? I have gotten to that point a number of times. For me, quitting a salary job was this huge goal of mine. I quit it and went full time contracting, remote, consulting, in, let’s say, 2002 or 2003. I remembered being like, “Oh my gosh! This is it. I’ve dreamed of this for 20 years since I was in high school. I wanted to have this remote job.” And I did. Six months later, I said, “Now what?”
You know what “now what?” for me was? It was, “Huh, I’m bored of working dollars for hours. I want a product. I want a product to support me.” Then, in 2008, I’ve got a full time income from products. I remember loving it for about a year. Then, I said, “Now what? I’m bored. I needed to do something bigger.” That was podcast, conference book, Micropreneur Academy. Then, it was HitTail. It was like, “I need to level up.” Then, after that it was Drip. After Drip, it was, “Now what?” Now, I spend more time in the podcast than I do in TinySeed.
Your and my motivations do not have to be the same thing. That’s not what I’m saying. I do think that the best entrepreneurs I know have a driving motivating factor. It is either to create—to build stuff that people use—or to achieve. There are a bunch of folks who just want to build a big company. They want to build the Amazon, or Google, or the Uber. That’s not my motivation. My motivation has always been to create interesting things that other people can use. I’m sure there are other motivations.
The thing that I’ve seen, if you ever heard of the Enneagram, it’s a personality test. It’s like the Myers-Briggs or whatever. It’ll tell you, “This is what motivates you and this is what doesn’t.” I’d be fascinated for you to take that. Whether you talk about it on the show or you just take it for yourself to get some insight into your likes, dislikes, your pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and your motivations.
I think that until you know that, it’s going to be a challenge for you to really be motivated to launch products because this […] is hard. That’s what we’ve experienced. It is hard to do this. Without a real drive of, “Man, I need financial freedom,” or, “I need to create stuff that a bunch of people can use,” or, “I just need to escape this inner voice in my head that probably my dad or my mom put in me.”
These are the motivations that I’ve seen drive entrepreneurs to do really interesting things. I don’t even mean great things, you don’t have to build a multimillion dollar business. That’s not what Startups for the Rest of Us is about. It can just be about shipping cool things into the world that people use and showing up everyday to do it.
Mike: Yeah. Part of my question that I’m kicking around in my head is, what is it that I want? All of the things you talked about are like, different people have different goals. Some may want to build the next Amazon and for you personally, that doesn’t resonate. It’s not what you want. But when you’re talking about your journey from going to self employment to building a product then to HitTail, Drip, and TinySeed, that whole journey is a series of challenges that you’re undertaking.
In my mind, what I’m really struggling with is what is the challenge that I actually want to tackle? What is it that I personally want to do. That’s not something that comes over night. Especially, if you have the time to figure out what it is you want to do rather to be in having some forcing function that makes you decide within a week. Within a week, that’s a time constraint. You have to deal with the constraints right there and then versus I’m in a position where I can take some time to figure out what it is I actually want, reflect on exactly why that is, and why it’s going to make me happy. If it’s not going to make me happy, I don’t want to do it.
Rob: You’re right. Until you’ve been there, it’s hard to understand how saying, “I can move and live anywhere,” actually makes it a lot harder. It’s tough to say, “I can build or do anything. I have a few years of runway,” makes the choice a lot harder because there is no forcing function for you to make a decision. There’s not a ton of things pressing on you to do it. I hear what you’re saying.
It sounds like, “Here’s what I’d like to do with this because this is really an interesting topic.” I noted, “What is the challenge that Mike wants to tackle? Why is he doing this?” I want to revisit this. I think that you should give a thought, do a retreat, do whatever it is that you’re going to do to figure that out. Take the Enneagram. I’ll just put the link. It’s not a silver bullet. Take it. Take some personality test and do some thinking and stuff. Think about what it is you want to do. This is a time to be deliberate about these things.
The mistakes that I’ve seen some founders make, it’s a founder I have in mind in particular, he sold a company and sold it for several hundred thousand dollars and didn’t have enough to retire, but he could take time off. He didn’t take time off. He made a quick decision that said, “I got to get right back on.” He launched this next thing within a few weeks. It was a mistake because it was almost like a rebound, like a rebound startup or like a rebound idea.
You’re not in a position to where you’re shutting Bluetick down and looking for another thing. You are in a place where you have the luxury of taking a month or two, set a timeline so you don’t take a year or two, but figure it out. That’d be my advice. What do you think? Do you think I’m full of BS?
Mike: Well yeah, but no. That’s a great way to phrase that question. I like that. An excellent point about the fact that when you got a blank slate, you can live anywhere, and you can do anything, what is it that you’re going to do? When you’re facing the problem, there’s all those constraints. It helps guide you in the right direction. But when you have no constraints or very, very few that makes it a lot harder. That’s the position I’m in. I have much fewer constraints on me now than I probably did five or six years ago.
Rob: The paradox of choice.
Mike: Yeah. I’m just trying to make sure that I make the right choice for myself, go in a direction that is going to make me happy, and that’s actually what I want to do. I remember a time when I was a kid. I was like, “I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this.”
Fast forward 30 years and you don’t have time in your life to do all of those things. The question I’m trying to answer for myself is, in 10 years, or 15, or 20 years, when I look back on my life, what is it that I want to have achieved? What would make me happy? Or what do I believe would make me happy? That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now.
Rob: And you’ve taken a couple of months off of the podcast. I know you took some time off of work to think about it and this is not something that could come overnight. Let’s revisit that in future episodes. I feel like you should come back in three or four episodes and cover all this stuff again—anything that is an open question.
Whether you have an answer then or not, I’d love to hear updates on your progress and I think the listeners would as well. It’s been an ongoing story for nine years and continuing that thread is going to be good for all of us to hear the decision you make.
If we come back in seven days and I ask you the same question, you don’t have progress because it’s like, “I can’t figure these things out in a week.” But if we give it time to breathe, I feel like we can potentially follow the story in a way that’s helpful and doesn’t put pressure on you to force you to have answers to things that you probably don’t have.
Mike: That’s a double edged sword because there are times where having a forcing function like that makes you make decisions. It is not to say that it makes the decisions for better or worse. It’s just that it forces you into making a decision.
It could go either way. I’m not saying it should. I’m just saying that it could go either way where it’s like if it’s seven days versus three or four weeks or whatever. Sometimes, having to make the decisions earlier is better. Sometimes it’s not. I don’t know if that’s a good answer either way. That’s why the classic answer from my consultant is, “Well, it depends.”
Rob: Yup. When we last left you, there were some speed bumps that we were talking about, like roadblocks. Then there were some health stuff, there were sleep stuff, there were coaching and failures, a bunch of stuff I have bullets about that I want to run through.
The first thing is there was Google drama. Google needing an inspection certification that could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Potentially, no one was getting back to you. That was two months ago. That was a weekly thing that was going on. Is Bluetick going to get shut down because of Google? What’s going to happen? Update us on that. What does it look like today?
Mike: I’m past 95%, it’s probably 80% because of the 80/20 rule. Then, I’ve got another 80% to go. Everything is done with Google except for the security review. Actually, I reached out to the companies that are doing the security reviews before and I dropped it. I didn’t get back to them because I was just not in a place where it was worth my mental energy to continue pursuing it.
I’ve gone back to them recently. One of them had a survey that I needed to fill out and give them a bunch of technical stuff. I gave that to them and scheduled a follow-up call with them. The other one I’m trying to get us a meeting schedule with them. I’m basically trying to get the price quotes hammering out and seeing how much is this going to cost me. In some way, that probably impacts what I’m going to do with Bluetick moving forward, but maybe not.
Maybe I just made a decision that’s like, this is going to be the path forward for me. Regardless of how much that cost, I’m just going to do it. Whereas before it was much more on the mindset of, “How much is this going to cost?” “What’s my growth trajectory?” “Is it even worth me going in that direction?” Part of the factor of that was how much is it going to cost to have that review done. Right now I’m just in the process of figuring out what the cost is.
It’s hard to say that I’m not less focused on the growth trajectory because I still think that that’s very important, but is it something I want to do? Probably the bigger question that I need to answer is do I want to continue working on Bluetick and moving it forward? I definitely think that some of the recent conversations I’ve had with existing customers has really added to my motivation to do that. I got away from talking to my customers nearly as much as I probably should’ve been. That has dramatically helped that motivation.
Rob: Fascinating. To summarize then, Google stuff is moving forward. You don’t have exact data yet, but you’re waiting to hear back. Bluetick shutdown is not imminent based on Google doing anything. You’re in the process of answering this question of, “Is this something I want to continue working on?” probably based on customer interactions.
Mike: Yes.
Rob: Related to that, there was a technical issue that you brought up which was this sealed .NET component you’re using, untestatable because it’s hard to get into all of this stuff. Have you done anything with that? Have you made progress? Or are you just saying, “Forget it. I’m just going to deal with it the way it is”?
Mike: Do we have a 20 minute profanity filter or a beep that we can put in here?
Rob: We do.
Mike: I went back and forth with the support people on that. I’ve made the decision that I’m going to need to rip that out and replace it. I’ve already got something I could replace it with. I’ve already started going through the process of replacing it. Their support basically came back and said, “Yeah. This isn’t a priority for us. We’re not going to make any changes with that.” “Too bad,” is really what the bottom line was. That’s a nice way of phrasing what they said, but yeah, I’m really, terribly, unhappy with the response I got from them.
Rob: But it’s no longer a roadblock because you’re going to fix it and you can move on. It was something you brought up multiple shows in a row as well. It seemed to be really hanging you up. This was one of the options we threw out, remember? I was like, “You can shut down the whole company. You can write the component yourself.” You brought up, you could switch components or I said, “You could just deal with it and not have great test or whatever.” This is one of the options. At least it’s one of them and you’re moving forward with it.
Mike: Yup, and I’ve already started that process. The problem with ripping it out completely and switching over is that it’s a process is going to take probably several days for my servers to turn on. It’s a little terrifying to have to pull the trigger and actually make that complete switch. There’s the architectural changes that needed to be made as well. I’m trying to push it off or make it so that I can do one mailbox at a time or something like that. I haven’t dedicated a huge amount of time to that beyond the initial prototype and stuff.
Rob: Don’t let it hang around. If I have one piece of advice, it’s get past this. It’s easy to put this off and be like, “Oh, I don’t really want to. It is a headache,” or, “It’s hard to pull the bandaid off.” If you’re going to do it, do it, and get past it.
Mike: The question in my mind that I’m struggling a little with is, does this add anything for the customers?
Rob: No, of course not.
Mike: You’re right. It doesn’t, but at the same time, there are places where it’s a detriment to me to be working in that code because I have to be super careful about things breaking because of that code. My time is better spent on doing marketing stuff anyway. Should I be focusing my time on that even though this thing is hanging out around up there?
What I struggle with is the fact that it’s mental overhead. I know it’s there, I know that it’s a problem, I know it needs to be dealt with, but if it weren’t there, I wouldn’t think about it at all. I have a hard time just pushing it out of my mind because I know that it’s there, but at the same time, I need to be working on other things. I don’t have a great answer for that.
Rob: It sounds to me, you know that there are four or five options. We ran through those. Shut the business down, replace it, rewrite it, whatever. It sounds to me like you made a choice to replace it. If you’ve made that choice, just do it and get past it. What is it? A week’s worth of work? Two weeks’ worth of work? You have the luxury. If you haven’t made the decision, then that’s fine. If you made the decision but then are half doing the work on a decision because you feel like you need to do other stuff, then it sounds like you really haven’t made the decision.
Mike: No. I have made the decision. It’s just a question of trying to slot it in when I’ve got other things that are also relatively high priority to get done. I’ve got a challenge around prioritization as well because I’ve got so many things that need to get done. We can come back to that. There’s other stuff of it.
Rob: Exactly. We don’t want to run two hours. I have an open questions for future episode where we revisit all these. This is one of them.
Another thing was during the last episode, listeners know you’ve had issues with low testosterone and your doctor taking you off this patch. You felt like you’re unmotivated, that you are having trouble sleeping which is related, but not the same thing. You were not doing great in that last episode, to be honest. I could tell and we talked a little bit after we closed that episode. What has happened since then?
Mike: To be blunt about it, I was a total mess when we recorded that last episode. The very next day I went back on my medication which is just a dramatic difference between them. I basically told my doctor I was never going to do that again which he wasn’t happy about. I’m like, “I’m sorry you’re going to have to deal with this.” Things have been a lot better in that regard.
I’m actually off two other medications. That was really tough. That took probably six or eight weeks to get through and get over. There’s withdrawal effects and things like that. I had to deal with them. It was just low energy, low motivation, hard time sleeping. Things have gotten dramatically better in the past three or four weeks, I’d say. But it was hard getting through that period, to get off those medications.
It has done a lot of good for me. I’m no longer suffering from a lot of those side effects. That’s part of the reason why I was on some of those medications because I wasn’t sleeping very well. It created this vicious cycle. To be more specific, I was on Adderall because I couldn’t focus during the day. Then, I was on sleep meds at night to try and get me to sleep. It’s just like they’re basically fighting against each other. The reality is I couldn’t sleep at night because of the sleep apnea. I ended up on these other meds that have addictive qualities and things that go really sideways in your body when you’re trying to come off of them.
Those things are a lot better. I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that things have gotten dramatically better in terms of my energy, my ability to focus, and my ability to be productive. Productivity is, I don’t want to say it’s a choice, but you have to focus on being productive. If you don’t focus on that, then you’re just going to sit there and not get anything done. At least I found that way for me. I don’t want to overgeneralize that.
Rob: Yeah. That sounds like a rough couple of months. I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling better.
Mike: I’m only at one medication now. Well, actually two. It’s like for testosterone and I’m on blood pressure meds. My doctor’s done all kinds of test. I actually have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. As far as I know, I also don’t have cancer. I guess that got back down going for me.
Rob: Yay, that’s good news. Great! That sounds like a tough couple of months. Taking time off was probably the right choice to deal with that because that’s not something you necessarily wanted to be working through. I’m glad to hear it and I really hope that that continues. You don’t know what you’ll feel like in three months, or six months, or nine months. Things come and go.
You sound more awake and alive than you have been for a long time. I don’t know if it’s just because you’re fresh, because you’re like, “Oh boy!” I don’t know if you ever lifted weights all the time, but if you lift seven days a week, your body gets tired. If you take two or three days off, you come back, you can just lift crazy amounts of weight. You just feel amazing because your body has had time to recover. I feel like there’s been a bit of that. You just sound better.
Mike: For sure. I’ve been doing a lot of little things. I’ve been tracking when I sleep well, when I don’t. What was I doing the day before. I’ve been tracking what I eat a lot. I’m trying to lose weight, but that’s only going marginally well. Coming off of the Adderall was really hard because I added 10 or 15 pounds really quick. I’m back down to only about five pounds over what I was, but still, I wanted to lose weight on that point anyway. There’s that.
Then, I found that there’s certain types of music that I can listen to. If I listen to it first thing in the morning versus I sit down and I start working without listening to music, then, I’m way less productive and I’m way less energetic. I’ve also realized that I need to have a routine as much as I hate it. I can’t stand going through the same routine all the time. It’s boring to me. My brain just doesn’t deal with it well. At the same time, I need that structure.
Those are the kinds of things that I’ve found to be very helpful over the past month or two. It’s been a learning process because I’ve been on my own. I’ve been able to do whatever I want and still make it through, still be productive, but things have changed. I don’t know if it’s just because of burnout or because I’ve gotten older and things like that. Drawing lines between work and playtime, the exercise has obviously made a little bit of a difference. I’ve gotten back to that.
Then other little stuff like getting rid of small annoyances. We were talking before the podcast started. You’re like, “Wow, your keyboard’s really loud.” I was like, “Yeah, I bought a new one.” It’s a total of really little thing, but it’s got a volume control built into it with little roll bar. I can put the volume up or down on my music while I’m sitting there as opposed to banging on a button or having to go use the mouse and change the song that are on. It’s all the little stuff, but I made a conscious effort to identify those little things that were annoyances that are now smoothed out. They’re no longer impact my day and they no longer cause me to either get out of a rhythm or get angry about stuff that’s going sideways.
Rob: Yeah, that’s good to do. that’s good to recognize. To summarize all that, it’s like you took a step back. You took a step back and you look at your life, your worklife, your day to day progress, and you got over some off medications which is always hard to do. You took a step back and you said, “Hey, what can I improve in my life?” At least one listener is thinking to himself, “Mike, welcome to 2015 with the volume control on you.” But I’m definitely not thinking that.
How was your sleep? We have a couple more bullets to cover. We’re just going to have run long today. How was your sleep? That has been such a big issue, frankly, for years.
Mike: It’s a lot better. I definitely noticed that there’s days of the week where that I don’t get as much sleep as I would like, but then, there’s other ones where I would just wake up feeling completely refreshed and ready to get to work. That’s what I was just talking about where I’m trying to be more deliberate about tracking what happened the day before, how the day went before, and what specific things may have caused that. I don’t have a lot of information on that yet, but I’m definitely keeping a close eye on that, being very deliberate about looking at that, and examining it because that’s going to be important for me.
Rob: I’m making a note here to check back on this as well just because it’s something that’s important and it’s important to be honest about it. Everytime doesn’t have to be, “Oh, everything’s great. My health and my sleep are great.” You got to be able to talk about when it’s impacting you, like in episode 448, talk about when it’s negatively impacting your progress. Something you mentioned on that episode and prior was like, “I think I need to be in a mastermind.” “I need more accountability.” “I’m thinking about hiring a coach.” There was stuff bubbling around that. What’s the update on that status?
Mike: I have a new mastermind group. We’ve been meeting at least once or twice a week, more on a Monday or a Friday, just because of the scheduling and stuff like that. That’s been going really, really well. I’m really glad that I picked that up and thanks to the listener. I won’t call out the specific name of who it is, but know that the person who introduced this probably listens to the podcast, so I just want to say thanks for that.
In terms of a coach, I’ll say a pseudo business coach, more or less who’s holding me accountable on a weekly basis saying, “What did you do these past weeks? What do you plan on doing this week?” Then, we’ve had a couple of calls here and there not just for accountability. We have a call just yesterday or within the past three days about going through my marketing plan, picking it apart, and saying, “Are these things really important? Are they not? How are these things ranked and weighted against each other? And what should you be focusing on next?” Those are the things that are going to end up on the shortlist of stuff that I implement moving forward. He’s just going to hold me accountable to it and get me a sanity check.
Rob: So far so good?
Mike: So far so good. Yeah.
Rob: I have a bullet here to ask about you. Your motivation, your effectiveness. Have you developed a system because we covered that as well. You already talked about that. It sounds like for the past three or four weeks, things have been feeling a lot better?
Mike: Yeah. I would say things started to turn a corner about three or four weeks ago. The past week-and-a-half to two weeks, things have really started amped up a little bit. It’s a combination of no longer really suffering from the withdrawal symptoms of the medication and then also getting to the tail end of burnout, which maybe I’m still working through that. I’m not really sure. It’s really important for me to figure out not just what it is that motivates me, but what it is that I want to achieve.
Rob: As we start to wrap up, something that we talked a lot about that I brought up multiple times in the prior episode is about making progress on Bluetick or making progress to your day to day work, figuring out how to differentiate Bluetick, how to make it different from the other offerings such that it’s a product that you can sell, and you’re not just picking up crumbs. Do you have clarity about how to do that? That’s the first part of the question, and have you started making progress towards that end?
Mike: I wouldn’t say that I have absolute clarity on it, but I would say that I have some ideas about what the direction of it it should be. It’s more or less, I believe, doubling down on the warm email follow ups because I’ve been talking to a couple of customers here and there about what it is that they used Bluetick for, why they use it, and asking questions to help me figure out what the direction for it is, what it should be, what are they unhappy about, what are they using it to begin with, and consolidate that information.
One of the customers that I talked to, interestingly enough, he said that he started out using it for cold email. Then, when he switched over and started using it for warm email for other things, he’s like, “Oh, I’ve got this tool. I might as well use it.” Then a lightbulb went on for him. I was just like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why?” Then, he started talking about the fact that it’s really built well for those types of scenarios. He was talking about why he was using it and how if there were some minor changes to it, it would be more helpful to him and just easier to use.
It gave me some ideas about how to go in that direction a little bit more. The problem I see is that when I ask him if he were talking about it to somebody that he knew or another entrepreneur or something like that, how would he pitch it to them? He’s like, “I really don’t know.” That’s something I struggle with is how to present it to people that in a context outside of use cases, maybe I just have to go on to that direction, and talk about it in terms of specific use cases.
Rob: How would you summarize that?
Mike: How would I summarize what? How it’s used?
Rob: No. Just the whole thing. If I were to say, do you know how it should be differentiated? I think I do. It’s the warm email context. Then, making progress towards that, not yet? Still in the thinking phase? When I say progress, have you shipped code or marketing material or different copy? Updated the website? Anything to that, and yet.
Mike: Yeah, I haven’t done any of that stuff yet. I’ve just been consolidating the information, kind of thinking about it. I’m not sure what the best ways for me to present that to other people are. I’m not sure if that’s the absolute direction I should go. Should I niche it down a little bit so that it is much more like a pipe drive plugin or should I integrate with a bunch of different products that are similar to that?
I have some open questions about that stuff and I don’t have the answers yet, but they are things I’m trying to actually figure out. Like how should this be pitched to people? Who are the exact people that I should be solving this specific problem for? When I first started on Bluetick, it was much more open-ended. It still is open-ended and it can do a lot of things, but if I were to niche down and only solve a very small sub-segment of the bigger problems that it can solve, I feel like it could probably get a lot more traction, and the question is, what exactly are those?
One example might be to reschedule meetings that have been cancelled. Those people are probably high profile prospects or high value prospects. If somebody cancel the meeting they scheduled, that’s probably a good situation where Bluetick could help you get those people back to a meeting. But is that the place where I want to niche down into? I don’t know the answer to that yet.
Rob: How are you going to answer those questions? You said you had several open questions. Do you have a plan to figure out how to answer them?
Mike: I’m going to be going through in talking to the rest of the customers that I have and seeing if that is something that they generally use it for. If so, then, I can at least generally answer that. At least try it out as a direction. I don’t know. Let’s say I decided to do that today. It may take another month or two to figure out, is this a reasonable direction? Am I going to get any attraction with it? I don’t know that.
Even if I made the decision, I’m still going to have to test it out. I’m still going to have to try it, see if I can get enough customers, and get some sort of traction. If I’m not getting that, then I have to probably go back to the drawing board and try and figure it out.
There’s going to be a decision point activity and then wait to see what the results of the tests are. If I don’t go through all three of those things, I can decide what the direction that is all I want. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful and there’s no way to verify it.
Rob: Makes sense. To be continued in a future episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. Stay tuned to hear the stunning conclusion of Mike’s journey with Bluetick in a few episodes. Mike, I have the next three episodes mapped out or recorded already. What we’ll do is…
Mike: I’m totally screwing up your […] system.
Rob: Yeah, you are. No, this one slides perfectly in place. I have all that dialed in, but what I’d like to do in the interest of both keeping the story going is also giving you time to get stuff together and make progress on these things is record with you again in a few weeks. I don’t know if it’ll be 461 or 462, somewhere in that range, and to hear what else is going on, hear updates on your thinking.
There’s a lot of open questions. I have six or seven bullets here that I have taken about differentiation, accountability, health and sleep, to what challenge do you want to tackle, and what it is you really want to do. I’m glad that you’ve made the progress that you have. It sounds like you’re out of the fog. It seems to me like what you have been doing for the past two months is working. Keep doing that.
I feel good just talking to you about it. It makes me feel good to hear you, the old Mike. It’s the Mike that I remember. You and I have gone in and out of these things. There’s an old Rob and a new Rob where I was super depressed for six months doing stuff. It’s not just about you. It’s cool to hear that. Do you feel that in yourself as well?
Mike: I do. It’s hard for me to look back on it. It’s one of those painful things to look back on. It’s like, “Oh man, I wish I hadn’t felt that way,” but it is what it is. I’d rather take the time and do the right things for myself, what I want, what I’m trying to do, and make the right healthy choices, I’ll say, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that going through those periods is easy either. I definitely agree that I feel alot better today than I did two months ago, or three months ago, or even six or eight months ago. The word you used earlier, coming out of a fog, that was woefully accurate. It’s the way I’d put it.
Rob: Well, thanks for coming back on and digging into these stuff. If folks want to keep up with you—no, I’m just kidding. You know I always do at the end of the interview. “If folks want to keep up with you, Mike, where would they go?”
Mike: I would say Twitter, but I don’t use Twitter.
Rob: Very good. I feel that wraps us up for today.
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Episode 448 | Let’s Talk About Bluetick
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about the current status of Bluetick. They discuss the Google approval process, external/internal motivations, current roadblocks, and Mike’s future with Bluetick.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: Mike, which program do Jedi use to open their PDF files?
Mike: I don’t know what.
Rob: Adobe Wan Kenobi.
Mike: Oh God.
Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about Bluetick, where he’s at, and maybe where he’s headed. This is Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 448.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve build your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. To where this week, sir?
Mike: I strained my back somehow about a week or so ago, so sleeping the past five or six days has been rather rough. It’s on the left side. When I try to sleep, it gets really, really tight throughout the course of the night and it wakes me up. It’s been rough getting any kind of measurably good sleep for pretty much the entire week.
Rob: That’s a bummer. How did you strained up?
Mike: I have no idea. I think I was just alive and that was it.
Rob: Just. I was just old and I moved.
Mike: That’s a good way to put it. The thing is, I just woke up and it was like that. It got progressively worse over the course of two or three days or something like that. It was bad for about four or five and then it slowly gotten better over the last two or three.
Rob: Strained back is no good and no sleep is no good. You’re going back to your pre-CPAP machine days aren’t you?
Mike: Yeah, pretty much.
Rob: We’ll get into some of that more in this episode. We’re going to talk about, as I said in the intro, what’s going on with Bluetick and you and such. Before that, we have some good comments on recent episodes. In Episode 444, you and I went off on Gmail desktop clients. Carl posted a comment saying, “I switched everyone over to Mailbird last month,” everyone at his company. “We switched away from Office 365, Dropbox, and GoDaddy’s email service, and switched to G Suite Solutions. I needed to find an alternative to Outlook and I found Mailbird. It works great, love the Google integrations. My only complaint, one of my coworker’s complaints is that capability of right-clicking to create new folders does not exist. Not a deal breaker, just a complaint.”
What was the one I was using? I don’t remember now. It was Mailplane, like an airplane. When I right click, I often do right-click, paste as text or paste and match style or whatever, because I’ll be copying something that’s all weirdly formatted and I want it to go in the format of the email. In Mailplane, that’s disabled. Not a deal breaker, but I have to flip over into Atom, your […] text editor, I paste it in there then I Shift Command-A Command-C and then go back and paste it in. It’s this extra step that when you’re in a Chrome browser, you can right click, paste the match style, and then it’ll just go in. How about you? Are you still using the desktop Windows client you were using?
Mike: Yeah, I use it on occasion. I flip-flop back and forth between them because it’s an IMAP client and it’s got all that stuff. It’s nice to be able to use one or the other when I need it. The one that I did find with it was that I use the labels feature. I will take things and put them into, I refer to more folders than anything else, but in Gmail it uses labels for that. The one thing I find is that, if I go to use the shortcuts to move it into a folder or apply a label to it, some of my labels, depending on the folder, overlap.
For example I’ll have a customers label but there’s a customers label underneath a couple of different products. When I started typing it out, it doesn’t show me which customers label it is because it basically drops everything before the slash. I have no idea which customers label it actually is because it just doesn’t show me. I still use it on occasion but once I get into those use cases, it becomes a barrier for me. It makes it more difficult. I don’t know why they don’t show the whole thing, but whatever.
Rob: It’s weird. When we bring these things up, it’s like, “That’s kind of a nitpick. Right click, paste and match style, is that really that big of a deal? Is it the labeling?” It can be. It can become that. For me, it’s not that big of a deal, but label stuff, that gets in the way of your workflow and it can get in the way of the perfect solution unless you get used to the new way they do it.
Mike: Like I said, I flip-flop back and forth between them a little bit. I did notice when I was using it that I could shut it down and I would just have Gmail closed, but I’ve noticed that recently I’ve been having Gmail open again. With that, I know that I’m actually just going to close that tab entirely right this second because I forget to do that. Email can be distracting and disruptive. That’s a problem that I’ve uncovered with my workflow, is that when that is open, I tend to get pulled back into my email quite a bit. When that happens, I’m not as productive.
Rob: For sure. Another comment on Episode 447. Paul Mendoza was commenting on the Google verification stuff that you’ve been struggling with for several weeks. He says, “I’ve been dealing with Google verification stuff for months, you can see my day-by-day interactions with Google here. We just got a response from the security vendors, but our app still isn’t approved but I’m sending them emails almost everyday.” He has a URL. You can come to 447 if you want to check that Google verification status. He feels your pain, apparently. It’s not just something that you have manufactured in order to create drama and good radio on the podcast as you’ve been known to do. You haven’t been on […].
Mike: Sure.
Rob: We got another couple of comments, because 447 we started diving in, we typically do our chit chat at the top end of the episode. When we talked about the Google stuff, we wound up spending 18 minutes just talking about that because I was asking questions and going through it. We’ve got some compliments like, “Do more of that. You guys aren’t digging into Bluetick enough,” was the comments, “or your own projects enough.” Part of the impetus for today’s episode was comments we’ve received but also, I think it’s been something that’s been on our minds for a while.
We have always liked doing updates, sharing what we’re up to, and what we’re working on, but it can be hard when it’s not good news. It’s hard to show up week after week and try to have an update of what you did in the past week if you didn’t get anything done or if things are going backwards. I think we tend to do update episodes every few months and I feel like this one today is really just a conversation about where you are, where Bluetick is, how you’re thinking about things, and try to find out more about what’s going on and even to give advice.
We talked for a while before this episode started and you’re bringing up things that I was telling you how I would approach them. We haven’t necessarily always been a ‘big advice for each other’ podcast. It’s a lot more answering listener questions. I think that can be helpful today, too, for you to hear how I would think of approaching different problems or how I have approached them in the past because I’ve done some of this stuff as well.
Mike: Do you want to relabel this as Mike’s therapy session?
Rob: Yeah, it’s going to be 50 minutes and I’m going to bill you […].
Mike: That’s actually cheaper.
Rob: Cheaper than you thought it would be.
Mike: Cheaper than a regular therapy session with […].
Rob: Indeed. Bluetick today, you’ve been working on it for two or three years, and it’s still not supporting you full time.
Mike: I went back and I started looking at my funnel metrics and stuff where I started tracking some of that stuff. I’ve got data in here from November of 2017 and that’s when I started tracking the numbers that I have here. I think that was shortly before I flipped the switch and said, “I’m just going to start billing people. If you’re not ready, then you can either cancel or that’s the end of the free trial or whatever that we have for you.” Obviously, my memory is kind of fuzzy as to exactly what state those things were at at the time so I don’t remember whether it was November of that year or what have you.
Rob: Was that November 2017?
Mike: Yes, November 2017. The reality is it’s not nearly where I would think that it should be if things were going well, the product had product market fit, and I was actively growing it. It’s just not. It’s not enough to support me full time. I don’t necessarily need it to, but at the same time if it’s going for an extended period of time and it’s not making enough money to do that, then why continue?
Rob: Yeah. It’s a waste of time and effort, opportunity cost, could you be working on something else that would be dramatically more lucrative whether that something else is a different product, or whether that something else is consulting, or heaven forbid a salary job? Not that you’re going to go do that, but you have skills. You’re a developer. You can write code. That’s a very valuable skill. To be wasting, I don’t mean wasting time on a day-to-day basis, but having 18 months, you’ve been charging for it, and to be only ramen profitable and not full time income is a struggle. It’s not just that you don’t have full time income but it’s not headed in the right direction anymore. You basically peaked at some point last year in terms of MRR.
Mike: Yeah and it’s more floundering than anything else. It’s not on a tailspin and I’m not bleeding out customers every single week or anything like that. It’s not tanking quickly, but it’s certainly not growing quickly, either. It’s really just meandering; go up on some months and then go down on some months. I have some customers who’ve been around since the very beginning and there are customers who will stick around for three to six months and then that’s it. I don’t feel like I’ve delve into the numbers of how long people have stuck around for and what the amount of revenue that I’ve gotten from each customer is enough, I just haven’t. It’s because I’ve spent a lot of my time on other things.
I feel like I have a hard time prioritizing where I should spend some of that time. Objectively, I think it’s like, “You should spend all of that time on marketing activities, analyzing what your current customers are doing, and who you should be targeting as those customers. One thing I struggle with is the fact that Bluetick has a very good use case for cold email and I don’t want those customers. I have a hard time justifying adding a lot more customers on there that are using the tool for that.
Rob: Is it an ethical thing? You just don’t like cold email?
Mike: Yeah, mostly.
Rob: Or a moral thing? Wait, what ethical is this? External and moral is internal. You’re internal code is like, “Meh. Not a fan of it.” Is that the idea?
Mike: The problem is that it depends on the customer. There are some customers that I’ll talk to, I’ll do a demo for somebody and I hear what they’re doing and they’re doing cold email. I’m like, “It’s not just a great tool that you have, but it’s also a great service. You’re doing great things with it and you are trying to make the world a better place,” versus some of the people just doing the cold email. They’re really bad at it and they’re doing things that are shady or scammy. I’m like, “Yeah. I don’t want those as customers,” but at the same time the tool works exactly the same for both of them.
How do I filter one out versus the other without having a conversation with every single one of them and how do you do that in the marketing that you put out such that you are catering specifically to a type of person who has a certain mindset?
Rob: I hear you. There are ways around it. You have options. You could, on your homepage, just be like the best tool for warm email interactions and then you could put in the FAQ, “This is not for cold email.” You could put it in your terms of service, “This is not for cold email.” You can have flags if people go in it, you see patterns of people doing cold email type things that you flag and you say, “Hey, this isn’t for cold email.”
We had to do this with Drip. People can’t use Drip for cold email. We had to build things and communicate that along the way. It was a pain. It was a lot of work and some people got really pissed off. Some people came in, signed up, uploaded their cold list and started emailing. Our system would automatically block them or they’d get enough complaints that are email spam. Dude would block them. That’s what you have to do if you really don’t want to do it.
The struggle is, with Drip, it will get you blacklisted. So, it’s a big problem for the business itself. With Bluetick, it’s not because they’re using their own inbox. You’re not going to get Bluetick itself, your IP doesn’t get blasted. You have to decide, “Hey, if ethically or morally or whatever, I only want to service certain type customer,” then you can do that. Just make it clear upfront.
It sounds to me like is it an excuse? If you accepted all the cold email, would Bluetick be where you want it to be? Or if you just focus on the warm email use case and ignore the cold email, would Bluetick be where you want it to be?
Mike: I don’t want to say it’s an unfair question, I think the question is a little bit off because it’s more a matter of holding me back from doing the marketing which would acquire those types of customers. It’s not about accepting them as customers or trying to turn them away or whatever. It’s more about holding me back from doing the marketing. I think it’s a very valid question about is that an excuse? I have a whole load of things I’ve looked at and thought about that comes to mind is, […] every single one of them is like, “Is that just an excuse?”
If you looked back at the stuff I did with AutoShark and then with Bluetick, I’ll […] frankly a lot of excuses along the way with AutoShark. If you think about objectively the stuff I’m going through with Google right now, there’s a huge question mark of this $15,000–$75,000 for a security audit. I’m apparently at the end point with Google where all I need to do is get this security audit and get a letter of—I forget what it is—authentication or something, this audit letter that I have to send into Google that says, “Yes, Bluetick is all up to snuff and we don’t have to worry too much about security vulnerabilities for the product,” but at the same time, is that another excuse?
If the products were much further along or had more customers and was making a substantial amount of revenue, would $15,000–$75,000 matter? The answer is no, it wouldn’t. The problem is I can’t point at Google and say they’re killing my business when the reality is the business isn’t making enough money. Really, that’s just the driver that says, “Here’s a hard line that you can’t cross unless the business is making enough.” If the business was making enough, that wouldn’t matter. The actual amount of whatever that is going to come out to would make no difference or whatsoever. So, is that an excuse?
I was saying in a way it kind of is, but at the same time I could almost point at anything that I’ve come across and say, “Is this an excuse?” Anything that comes up on the business as to why something is not working, you could ask that question and I think it’s a valid question to ask. I don’t have a good answer for some of those things. I just don’t.
Rob: That’s the thing. The cold email versus warm email thing, you don’t want to market it because people are using it for cold email. There are solutions to that. If I were in your shoes, I would decide, am I willing to let people do ethical cold email and warm email? If the answer is yes, then that would be on the website. That would be in my onboarding. I would mention that in every demo. I would probably do demo only for now in your shoes because you don’t have such an influx of trials. I’m guessing that you can’t do some type of demo with everyone at a minimum of screencast, 15 minutes of screencast that seriously talks about, “Look, we only do ethical cold email.” Just make that part of the whole deal. If that’s your hard line, then take the hard line and then move forward. That’s one option.
Second option is to not take the hard line and just say, “Hey, this is legal and it’s not going to hurt my IPs so I’m okay with people doing that.” That’s the second option.
Third option, shut the product down. It’s to realize, “Boy, I really built a product that people are going to misuse,” and the nuclear option would be to shut it down. Now that’s tough. I don’t know if I can come up with an easy fourth option. I feel like the ethical cold and warm is a perfectly viable non-nuclear option, and again, to just communicate that in every onboarding sequence.
Some people will sneak through, unfortunately. The good news is, it won’t get you on a blacklist like it did with Drip where we get on the blacklist and it’s like this, “Oh, […],” moment where a bunch of us were running around trying to figure out how to ban this customer and this and that. You’ll just have to have a conversation with that customer and say, “Look, by our judgment or by my judgment, you’ve gone over the line. I need you to migrate away or I need you to improve your things.” You can get a conversation with them where they say, “How do I improve my cold email?” You say, “Here’s a good example of a super ethical one. You only hit them four times over the course of a month, not 17 like you’re doing,” and blah, blah, blah.
All of this is work. It all takes work and that’s a crappy part. It’s the same thing with the Google approval, I think, that it totally gets in your head it seems like and it becomes this road block where really, it should be a speed bump that you look at your options. I say should. You’re going to encounter these over and over. I feel like if you look at the mess of speed bumps rather than roadblocks, knowing that there’s almost without exception, there’s always a way around it.
There are a few exceptions that are not. You can get sued into oblivion. You can get seriously injured. There are these extreme things where you can’t work or where your business is completely decimated because the whole platform just blocks your IP. There are certain exceptions but I don’t see that. Aside from Google disapproving you here in the next week or two, everything else you’ve mentioned to me is a speed bump, but I feel like it impacts you more than that.
Mike: That’s absolutely true. As you were talking through that and shifting the marketing to saying much more of it is ethical cold email and warm email, I actually got excited. I was like, “That’s exactly it.” I think that there are other ways to force that as well. I was talking to Josh from Referral Rock. He said that one of the things that they had done early on was that they charged a setup fee and that works really well for them. I was thinking about doing that as well and trying to figure out how can that work in there. That fits in really well with the idea of pitching it more towards the ethical cold email and warm email for people and then forcing people to do a demo.
That’s part of what the setup fee would be and making sure that they’re doing things the right way, that they’re not just spamming a ton of people just because they have the technical capabilities to. Honestly, that would make me feel a whole heck of a lot better about it. I was actually trying to figure out, “How can I justify this setup fee and how can I do that stuff?” I think that it falls directly in line with that. It makes total sense as to how that could happen now whereas before, I struggled a little bit with how do I present it or pitch it or make sure that people are doing the right things and everything is going well for them. I’ll say it’s like software augmented by services to some extent.
Rob: Absolutely. I feel like that’s one issue but it’s not as if we can now, “Alright and that’s the whole session, Mike, you’re all good,” because there are some deeper issues going on. It seems to me like the two biggest issues that I see with Bluetick and what you’ve been up to, number one, I don’t understand how Bluetick is any different than any of the other tools. I don’t think you’re differentiated. You can convince me otherwise but I don’t feel like there’s anything Bluetick can do that three or four other tools can’t do. That’s a problem because you’re picking up crumbs at that point.
The second thing that feeds into that is you have struggled to ship things. Whether it’s health issues, the distraction from the Google approval, I know you’ve had sleep issues for a long time. You talked at the last podcast about how you had a five- or six-hour workday. Two hours of it was with calls, then your kids were going to get home, and you’ve spent an hour on the Google thing. Your workday was just poof. Gone. You’re not shipping new features. You’re not shipping marketing.
When you look at the people who are making progress in these early stages, they’re shipping something every week. You look at Derrick Reimer. Even though he shut Level down, he was shipping features, he was shipping emails, he was shipping blog post. You look at Peter Suhm, who is the founder of Branch, which is a TinySeed company, was just announced today, he’s doing the same thing. He releases a blog post almost every week and he ships new features to Branch almost every week. You’ve struggled with that going way back.
I think that’s where we talked a little bit offline before this. You have reasons but you were saying to yourself like, “Are they reasons or are they excuses?” The health issues, there’s testosterone levels a few years back, there’s CPAP, there’s all that stuff. It impacts your motivation and that means that you haven’t shipped enough stuff fast enough to differentiate Bluetick and everyone else that you’re competing against is moving, I would say faster than you. You never catch up. Again, my impression is they are better tools, they just have more features, and they do more. So, how can you possibly grow an app that isn’t differentiated in any way?
Mike: A lot of them have definitely caught up in terms of the features. Some of them even started out further along than I was at the early stages. My difference in feature was intended to be the fact that Bluetick does not miss emails, whereas I know that people who were using the Gmail API, those types of customers tend to miss emails here and there. I feel like a lot of those problems have tended to go away. I don’t know whether that’s because the Gmail API has just gotten better in terms of what data that they’ve been sending or the frequency, but I don’t hear about those problems nearly as much as I used to.
Maybe the tools have just gotten better and they’ve fixed those problems. I don’t really know the answer to that because I don’t use those tools on a regular basis. But the fact is you’re right. I’m not shipping things nearly as much as I could or should be. There are certain things where I’ve gone through and I’ve reengineered something or changed how something works, and I’ve got all these data that is going through the system. I’m terrified in some cases of breaking stuff.
I’ve been going back-and-forth recently with one of the vendors who supplies the component that I use for synchronizing with IMAP. They won’t give me access to the stuff where I know for a fact it breaks and I can’t test it. I can’t put an automated test in place and they won’t give me a way to do it. I’m just like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” other than switching to some other component which again is non-trivial work. Is that an excuse?
Rob: It’s a problem but you’re going to encounter a problem almost everyday as an entrepreneur. If they become, they should be speed bumps. You could mock up an interface of some kind. Again, we had a bunch of APIs that we interfaced with Drip and we couldn’t hit the production or staging APIs so when our unit has ran, they would hit a mocked up interface. There’s a better word for it, but you know what I’m talking about.
You could feasibly break things but that’s what integration testing is for, and then you just have a checklist of like, “These are the five things that I’m always worried about breaking because I can’t test them well.” Those are in a Google Doc or a Trello board or whatever. Every time you do a big push or everytime you modify that code, you test those things. That’s how I would think about it. Again, it’s not perfect but it makes it into a speed bump. It makes it into a bump in the road rather than an actual road block.
Mike: The specific issue with that piece of it and the problem that I have with that, there are certain things that come up on occasion and I literally can’t do that because they’ve marked the class that I need to use as internal and sealed and there’s no interface for it. I literally cannot do it. The only way that I found to get around it is to create a constructor that uses the internal private constructor for it and basically fake the data, but I’m looking at obfuscated code at that point and I don’t know what the hell half of it does. I think all of this particular example is kind of immaterial, I agree it should be more of a speed bump than a road block. Going down the rest of that specific example is more of going down the rabbit hole more than anything else because it’s not the only thing.
Rob: The thing is, when these things come up, it’s not going to be perfect. I know that sounds silly to say, but you’re an engineer, you’re left brained, and you want every I to be dotted, every T to be crossed, every edge and corner case to be handled. Mike, your software is going to break sometimes. There is […] software that is doing seven, eight, nine figures a month and the stuff breaks. You can build a company with software that isn’t 100%. My guess is your software is going to be pretty dang good because you’re a developer and because you’ve been doing this most of your life, but at a certain point, you can’t let perfect get in the way of good and in the way of shipping.
Mike: And I do. I absolutely let that get in the way. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to just let it go. There are some things where I can just say, “Oh, we’ll just do this. Yes, […], go ahead.” Then there are other things where I’m like, “No, it has to be right.” For whatever reason, I fixate on those things.
Rob: That’s the problem. If you can’t identify when you’re fixating, then tell yourself stop and approach this from a different mindset. What would XYZ person do? How should I think about this differently is probably a better question that when you find yourself fixating to stop yourself and have the introspection to say, “What is the hack to get the solution? What is the 95% solution to this? What are the three or four options I have?” We’ve talked about a few topics here and then each one, you see, I’m just breaking them down into what are your choices here?
You’re choices with this API or whatever or it’s the component that you don’t have internal access to and it’s sealed and whatever, Mike, here are your options. You can completely shut your entire company down. Honestly, let’s look at them. You could shut the company down because of that. You could build a solution that is 80/20 or 95/5, however you want to phrase it. That’s like the one I said earlier which has been attacked together. It’s not going to catch everything and you have a checklist, and that’s probably good enough for now. Or you can spend a lot of time fixating on it. You can fight with the guy over email, you can try to reverse engineer it.
Mike: I can replace the component.
Rob: That’s great, you could feasibly do that. You could rewrite the whole thing yourself.
Mike: No, I wouldn’t do that. I would find a different vendor where I can rip that out and replace it with something else, that’s what I would do. I would absolutely not going down that road.
Rob: But that is an option. What’s funny is you could replace it with a different one. You’re going to spend time reworking your code or you could just rewrite the whole component yourself. It’s ridiculous but it is an option. Those are your five or six options. When you look at them, some of them seem like the dumbest thing ever like shutting your business down or writing the component yourself; don’t do those. It’s obvious, those are dumb. But the other three, if we look at them, black and white mindset and try to think about them. Which of those gets you to full-time income? Which of those gets you to $10,000? Yeah, there’s a little bit of risk with the one I’m suggesting, but that turns it into a speed bump rather than a road block.
Mike: One of the challenges I run into with this is that I don’t really have a mastermind group anymore where I can bounce ideas off of people and they call me out on a weekly basis that says, “Hey, you’re not working on this,” or, “You said that you’re going to have this done. You’ve been working on this for three weeks. This should’ve been done a long time ago.” I don’t have that external forcing function anymore. I think that’s been a big challenge for me.
Rob: Yeah. You’ve talked about in the past. You’ve told me that you feel like you’re more extrinsically motivated, that having someone who’s keeping you accountable is the way you work best versus being intrinsically motivated. And that’s fine. There are successful entrepreneurs on both sides of that. This is not something that precludes you from being one. You lost your mastermind or it broke up how long ago?
Mike: A little over a year and then I started a new one but we’ve only met I think three times total.
Rob: In a year?
Mike: It was over the course of three months or so and then we haven’t had a call on five or six months, I think.
Rob: For all intents you’re not really part of a mastermind at this point. You ended a year ago. Now, didn’t your revenue peak around that time?
Mike: Yeah, it did.
Rob: So…
Mike: I know.
Rob: A correlation?
Mike: Correlation, causation. That’s a valid point too. That’s an excuse.
Rob: Don’t say it. You’re going to say, “It’s hard to find a mastermind and it’s hard to be part of one.” I would say, “All right, Mike, you have choices. Shut your company down, number one. Number two, don’t be an entrepreneur anymore. It is a choice. Number three, email Ken of MastermindJam—mastermindjam.com—and try to hook with a mastermind. Four, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t do a mastermind and expect your future results to be the same as they have been,” is probably what I would say.
Mike: Some of these things like the other thing that it could potentially be solved by us having a cofounder. I have talked to you about this before. I’m not opposed to having a cofounder or having somebody else who works in the business with me, but at the same time it’s a question of finding the right person and all that other stuff. But again, is that an excuse? Is that what I really want? The answer is I don’t know. Is that an excuse? Probably. Is it what I really want? I don’t know. I’ve gone out in that road before and I think things worked out fantastically with you, with Microconf, the podcast, and everything else, but my past experiences have not been all sunshine and rainbows.
Rob: That’s a tougher one because finding a cofounder is hard. You can’t rush that. That’s not an easy thing to do. I do think it could be a fit for you given that you would work better with someone pushing you on and you’re feeling accountable to that.
Mike: I totally agree with that. But most of the people that I know of, that I know well enough to say, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going into business with them at all,” most of them have their own things going on. It’s hard to find somebody who is in that same position because I’ve got Bluetick that is substantially far along at this point. One thing that I’ve run into when you have employees or contractors or whatever, is I feel like they’re not just motivated, but they’re way less critical of the boss’ performance or decisions and things like that because they’re like, “Oh, well. That person is the person in charge. I don’t want to challenge them as hard as I probably could or would if I truly believed in this other direction versus the one that they’ve chosen or decided to go in.”
Rob: Yeah, but that’s just a minor speed bump. I’ve worked with contractors and employees and I’ve had cofounders. It’s just something you get over. I think the deeper issue comes back to the two things that I said, number one, Bluetick is not differentiated. Number two, it’s because you’re not shipping enough. It sounds like you struggle with indecision quite a bit where you’ve ruminated on a question for a long time, for days or weeks, and sometimes just can’t break out of that to make the decision to move forward. So, you get stalled.
And then the motivation thing. You told me offline that you were bored, you weren’t motivated. At times you know what you should do, “I should go build this feature,” but you’re not motivated to do it. Is that right? Talk about that. Is it a health thing? I guess you don’t know. If you knew you would fix it, right? You don’t know if it’s lack of sleep. You don’t know if it’s low testosterone. You don’t know if you just don’t want to do the idea. Do you have any thoughts or even more background for people?
Mike: My doctor took me off of my testosterone and it wasn’t because it was too high, it was because one of my other blood tests came back, it’s too high. He was like, “This is way outside of the normal range so I’m going to take you off with testosterone for four weeks to see how that plays out.” I was about a week-and-a-half into it and I was like, “I have to take some of it right now.” The downsides or drawbacks of having it, having low testosterone is you get depressed, you have a hard time focusing, you can’t get things done, you can’t really think straight. That was happening to such a severe degree, I was like, “I have to take it today just to put myself at least a little bit back on track.”
I’m going to call him and try and see if we can cut this whole thing short because it is extremely detrimental to me right now but I don’t have any answers, I wish I did. There’s a lot of things where I’m just like, “This is boring to me.” Some of it has to do with the work that needs to get done. Again, is that an excuse? Is that just a reason that I’m using to justify not feeling bad about getting the work done? I get that, as an entrepreneur, not everything is always going to be fine. You’re not always going to enjoy everything.
There are some things that you like to do versus there are things that you need to do. If you can outsource those things that need to be done that you don’t like doing, great. I don’t feel like I’ve been in a position where I can outsource everything that I hate doing because there’s financial research and things like that.
Rob: You’ll never be able to do that. Even when HitTail and Drip were growing like crazy, I still came in and did a bunch of crap that I didn’t want to do. With TinySeed, I have more resources than I’ve ever had and there’s still crap that I’m dealing with that I don’t want to do. But (a) I tried to minimize it, and (b) I tried not to let it clog the top of my to do list. When it’s sitting in that Trello board I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I do not want to look at health care plans and setting up a 401(k) for us.” But it’s like, “I’m going to power through it, suck it up, and get it done. Then I’m going to come out the other side and reward myself by doing something super fun, make it some swag or something.” I don’t know. You can’t avoid that. You can’t avoid it entirely. You can minimize it.
We’re building businesses that we want to be a part of, that we want to run. We’re building it for our lifestyles. That’s great, but that doesn’t mean that 100% of the time, it’s like a trip to Disneyland. I know you know that. I’m being a little facetious, but that’s the thing I think you’ve struggled with a lot. There’s this indecision piece. You’ve expressed to me like, “I’m not motivated to do this thing.” Whatever it is, I know that’s what has to get done. I think you’ve got to figure that out because without that, you can’t move forward. You have to be motivated some days even through the struggles.
We have a mutual friend who runs a SaaS app, who has pretty major health issues. He struggles, he works four hours a day, and it’s tough for him to travel. There’s a lot of stuff that it’s just hard. It’s hard for him, but he runs a successful SaaS app, lives off, and has a few employees. He shows up everyday. In those four hours, I bet he’s pretty damn effective by the fact that his SaaS app still grows.
Mike: I haven’t found a system, I guess, that works for me in terms of preventing me from wasting time on the stuff that I don’t want to do or procrastinating to get those things done. I don’t want to stay here and say, “Oh, well. I just need to find the right system,” because I don’t think that’s the right way to go, either, or the answer to it. I do feel maybe I just need to experiment more and say, “Okay, try this for a week or try that for a week,” and be very deliberate about trying to get things done and shipping things, as you said, versus just showing up to work every day and a lot of motion without forward progress. I feel like I’m thrashing a lot. I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe the problem is that I’ve thought about what the answer to that is without actually doing anything to try and figure it out.
Rob: Yeah, not taking action. I think effectiveness is what you’re summarizing. Thrashing is the opposite of being effective. If this founder we’re talking about works four hours a day but gets a full day’s work done, he’s highly effective. Some people can work 10 hours. If they’re not effective, their business doesn’t move forward. We’ve talked about this in the past. The 80-hour-a-week startup people, I think, are probably not effective. That’s the reason they work 80 hours.
There’s a few exceptions but there’s a lot of younger folks. I used to work longer hours when I was younger too. It’s just not picking the right stuff to work on and then not focusing on that stuff, not wandering off to answer email, jump on Twitter, go to Reddit, really focusing. I think you can get a full day’s work done in 4–6 hours. Your full day’s work would have been 10 years ago, I believe, with the personal growth, experience, and stuff that a person can be more effective with less time.
There’s a couple things that I’ll throw out. One is that I feel like you should consider whether you want to keep doing this, to continue doing Bluetick, whether you want to continue being an entrepreneur. Here’s the thing. If you’re working in a contract job or if you were working a salary job, a lot of these issues go away because daily you would do a daily standup, or weekly, or whatever. You would have accountability. That external motivation would be there for you to ship stuff. That would make a lot of these go away. That’s a pretty nuclear option. In the interest of time, we probably shouldn’t go down that today. I do think it’s something for you to take a step back and just think about longer term.
Mike: Counterargument to that would be if I worked, did the right thing, and got Bluetick to a point where I was able to hire people to put on a team, that exact same result would come out of it.
Rob: Yeah, okay. That’s fine. That’s fine but you’ve got to get there. At the rate you’re going, you’re not going to get there.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: I don’t disagree with you, Mike. This is Startups for the Rest of Us. The whole point is that we want to help people start businesses that give them personal freedom. The whole point of this podcast and everything we do is to feel free, to do what you want to do, and work on which you want to do. That would be my answer as well. It’s just, you have to figure out how to get there because you’re not making progress there now.
The second thing I would think about which is a less nuclear option, if we’re talking about options, it’s to go one step further than our mastermind and to find someone who would do a daily standup with you. Every morning, five minute phone call or five minute Slack. They keep you accountable. You subscribe to that. When you say, “These are the things I did yesterday. This is what I’m going to do today.” The next day, you come and you do the walk of shame if you didn’t get that done. You celebrate if you did and that extrinsic motivation is something that you think will help to do that.
What do you think about that is that, does it not matter? Because you’re so tired you can’t get anything done? Is the extrinsic motivation enough if someone was breathing down your neck? Would that be enough? Or do you think no? “I’m still too damn tired. I just have health issues and I shouldn’t do this.”
Mike: I would certainly try it. I would say, it’s pretty immature for me to say that it would or wouldn’t work. I suspect that it would. I seriously contemplated trying to find a way to get a one-on-one business coach or something like that, somebody who’s going to hold me accountable. You’re right. A five minute thing like that on a daily basis could be plenty. I don’t know. Without trying it, I can’t say for sure one way or the other. My inclination is to say, “Yes, that would work,” but it would also need to be somebody who is, I don’t want to say willing to yell at me because I don’t want to be inundated with thousands of emails saying, “Hey, I’ll yell at you.”
Rob: Sure because you don’t need yelling. You do need positive and negative encouragement and feedback.
Mike: I think that’s certainly worth exploring. I would say, it goes further than my thoughts about having a business coach who holds me accountable on a weekly basis because I think a daily basis would probably be better. That’s mainly because I feel like I could waste a lot of time during a whole week whereas from a day-to-day, I can’t. I don’t want to say the stakes are higher but the deadlines are sure. I’ve always found myself to be somebody who works extremely well with tight deadlines and time pressure.
Rob: Yeah, external motivation.
Mike: Yes. When I was doing consulting, the […] gets subcontracting through, they’ve held me in with a bunch of stuff. I stopped consulting from them probably a year-and-a-half or two years ago, but every single time I get an email from them it’s because something’s on fire. They want me to deal with it. I actually got to a point where from one customer to the next, every single one, everything was on fire and burning to the ground. They needed somebody to go in and fix it. I was their person because I was really good at it. I just got burned out with the travel. That was what the problem was. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy doing those things but I got burned out with the travel. The customers tended to be the same from one to the next. And the problem was repetitive. It got to a point where the problem was the same thing over and over. Then, I just got bored.
Rob: Yeah. Consulting is like a hamster wheel. You want to own something. You want an equity in something that has a longer lasting thing than just […] per hour.
Mike: Sure.
Rob: Yeah, that desire.
Mike: Right. That was a big reason for me leaving and decided to do Bluetick instead because I wanted something that was going to need much more of that Rob’s flywheel as opposed to the hamster wheel.
Rob: Yeah. Obviously, we can’t solve stuff like these in a day. You and I talked about you taking some time to think about this, three weeks, four weeks where you think about both of what we’ve talked about today, some stuff we talked about offline, but really, do soul searching and figure out. I think there’s big questions here. It’s like, Mike, do you want to do this and do you want to do it bad enough that you’re willing to change? What you’re doing now isn’t working so you have to change it. Are you going to be willing and able to start looking at every problem as a speedbump rather than a roadblock?
Is this the right fit for you? Whether it’s this being entrepreneurship, Bluetick, it’s just those two. Does Bluetick have the potential? If you feel like you’re gaining your momentum and motivation to take a hard look and say, “How long will it take to get Bluetick to a point where it is differentiated?” My assessment is that, until you’re differentiated enough that you’re like, “Nope, we do this and no one else does,” or “We do this better than all these other tools.” Until you get to that point, you just don’t win many sales.
Mike: I totally agree with all that. I don’t even have to think too long about that one aspect of those. Do I still want to be an entrepreneur? For me, the answer is absolutely yes. The question for Bluetick is what does that look like moving forward? The reality is, the situation is I’ve got basically a seven month deadline at this point. I think you said there were some questions about how that shakes out with Google. I kind of know the answers to some extent. I still don’t have all the information, but I’ve gone past the last stage of Google’s verification with the exception of the security audit. That’s all that needs to be done. That’s the piece where I don’t know how much that’s going to cost. I don’t know what they have to go through or what other things I’m going to have to change. I’m still waiting to find out what that’s going to cost.
Then, I have to make a judgment called the end of it to say if it’s $15,000 and I’m going to make that $15,000 back in a reasonable time frame, not a big deal. Even if it was $75,000 or $100,000. If I were going to be able to make that back within three or four months, it’s not a big deal. If I’m in a revenue standpoint where it’s not going to happen in six months, eight months, ten months, then, no. I can’t justify even continuing with the product to that point. I don’t know what the price tag on it is right now. It’s a question of how far can I get in the next six to seven months to the point where I know how much revenue I’m going to be making three or four months down the road to be able to justify putting the cash out for that security audit.
Rob: You understand that while the security audit is one thing like we’ve talked about today, there are bigger issues. It’s shipping. Let’s say you pass the security audit and you pay for it. Bluetick is still not growing. Bluetick is still not differentiated right now. The reason again, going back, is you haven’t been motivated, or you’ve been bored with it, or there’s been health issues. There’s been all these things along the way. If that doesn’t change, it doesn’t matter what happens with the Google audit.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: We talked about you taking some time to think about it and actually stepping back from the podcast here for about three or four weeks. Give you some clarity.
Mike: Hopefully.
Rob: Some time alone. I know, give you a chance to maybe find clarity. These are hard decisions. This is retreat level kind of stuff where it’s a lot of thinking.
Mike: Yeah. The weird thing is these aren’t nothing we’ve really talked about. So far, things I haven’t thought about or considered over the past couple of years, it’ s just like I haven’t really taken the time to step back, objectively look at things, and take a hard look. I mean, if I do look at stuff and how things have gone, one constant that has been throughout the whole thing is me. Is it me? That’s a hard thing to say and the hard thing to admit to as well.
The question, can things change? Or will they change? Or do I want them to? I think that I want to. It’s just a question of how is that going to happen? How do I make sure that I don’t go through this process and come out of it and say, “Yeah, I’m motivated. I’m amped up. Let’s do this,” then put in time and effort for six months, then fall back into the same patterns again, I’ll say? That could happen. I don’t know but I need to step back.
Rob: That’s for sure. You know, Mike, I’ve always respected your technical chops, your intelligence, your writing, and you just have a lot of positive qualities. You’ve accomplished stuff in your life but you’ve definitely gotten in your own way. You’ve gotten in your own way more than I think you want to or should have. I think if you can start thinking about it, in terms of, how do I not do in the next six months what has happened in the past six months? We’ll see.
I’m going to be holding down the fort here for a few weeks. It’ll be good to hear from you. I’m sure people will be waiting with bated breath. We’ll have an episode, I don’t know, will it be 452 or 453? It’s the return of Mike. We get to hear from you, what you’ve been thinking about, and stuff.
Mike: Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I got to talk to my doctor and go back on a testosterone because it’s just, my God.
Rob: It’s kind of […].
Mike: It really is. You wouldn’t think that that does it. It was like, “Oh, that can’t possibly be that bad.”
Rob: I would totally think, any chemical in our body, when it gets that out a whack, it has these negative impacts that can be pretty brutal.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Well, thanks for delving into this today. I know this is not easy stuff to talk about. I appreciate your openness, honesty, and willing to delve into it. I’m sure the listeners do, too. This has over and over been voiced. This is like one of the favorite aspects of our show is when we do these things. We talk pretty open and raw about what’s going on.
Mike: Yup. I guess with that, why don’t you take us out then?
Rob: Yeah. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.
Mike: I don’t know what.
Rob: Adobe Wan Kenobi.
Mike: Oh God.
Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about Bluetick, where he’s at, and maybe where he’s headed. This is Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 448.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve build your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. To where this week, sir?
Mike: I strained my back somehow about a week or so ago, so sleeping the past five or six days has been rather rough. It’s on the left side. When I try to sleep, it gets really, really tight throughout the course of the night and it wakes me up. It’s been rough getting any kind of measurably good sleep for pretty much the entire week.
Rob: That’s a bummer. How did you strained up?
Mike: I have no idea. I think I was just alive and that was it.
Rob: Just. I was just old and I moved.
Mike: That’s a good way to put it. The thing is, I just woke up and it was like that. It got progressively worse over the course of two or three days or something like that. It was bad for about four or five and then it slowly gotten better over the last two or three.
Rob: Strained back is no good and no sleep is no good. You’re going back to your pre-CPAP machine days aren’t you?
Mike: Yeah, pretty much.
Rob: We’ll get into some of that more in this episode. We’re going to talk about, as I said in the intro, what’s going on with Bluetick and you and such. Before that, we have some good comments on recent episodes. In Episode 444, you and I went off on Gmail desktop clients. Carl posted a comment saying, “I switched everyone over to Mailbird last month,” everyone at his company. “We switched away from Office 365, Dropbox, and GoDaddy’s email service, and switched to G Suite Solutions. I needed to find an alternative to Outlook and I found Mailbird. It works great, love the Google integrations. My only complaint, one of my coworker’s complaints is that capability of right-clicking to create new folders does not exist. Not a deal breaker, just a complaint.”
What was the one I was using? I don’t remember now. It was Mailplane, like an airplane. When I right click, I often do right-click, paste as text or paste and match style or whatever, because I’ll be copying something that’s all weirdly formatted and I want it to go in the format of the email. In Mailplane, that’s disabled. Not a deal breaker, but I have to flip over into Atom, your […] text editor, I paste it in there then I Shift Command-A Command-C and then go back and paste it in. It’s this extra step that when you’re in a Chrome browser, you can right click, paste the match style, and then it’ll just go in. How about you? Are you still using the desktop Windows client you were using?
Mike: Yeah, I use it on occasion. I flip-flop back and forth between them because it’s an IMAP client and it’s got all that stuff. It’s nice to be able to use one or the other when I need it. The one that I did find with it was that I use the labels feature. I will take things and put them into, I refer to more folders than anything else, but in Gmail it uses labels for that. The one thing I find is that, if I go to use the shortcuts to move it into a folder or apply a label to it, some of my labels, depending on the folder, overlap.
For example I’ll have a customers label but there’s a customers label underneath a couple of different products. When I started typing it out, it doesn’t show me which customers label it is because it basically drops everything before the slash. I have no idea which customers label it actually is because it just doesn’t show me. I still use it on occasion but once I get into those use cases, it becomes a barrier for me. It makes it more difficult. I don’t know why they don’t show the whole thing, but whatever.
Rob: It’s weird. When we bring these things up, it’s like, “That’s kind of a nitpick. Right click, paste and match style, is that really that big of a deal? Is it the labeling?” It can be. It can become that. For me, it’s not that big of a deal, but label stuff, that gets in the way of your workflow and it can get in the way of the perfect solution unless you get used to the new way they do it.
Mike: Like I said, I flip-flop back and forth between them a little bit. I did notice when I was using it that I could shut it down and I would just have Gmail closed, but I’ve noticed that recently I’ve been having Gmail open again. With that, I know that I’m actually just going to close that tab entirely right this second because I forget to do that. Email can be distracting and disruptive. That’s a problem that I’ve uncovered with my workflow, is that when that is open, I tend to get pulled back into my email quite a bit. When that happens, I’m not as productive.
Rob: For sure. Another comment on Episode 447. Paul Mendoza was commenting on the Google verification stuff that you’ve been struggling with for several weeks. He says, “I’ve been dealing with Google verification stuff for months, you can see my day-by-day interactions with Google here. We just got a response from the security vendors, but our app still isn’t approved but I’m sending them emails almost everyday.” He has a URL. You can come to 447 if you want to check that Google verification status. He feels your pain, apparently. It’s not just something that you have manufactured in order to create drama and good radio on the podcast as you’ve been known to do. You haven’t been on […].
Mike: Sure.
Rob: We got another couple of comments, because 447 we started diving in, we typically do our chit chat at the top end of the episode. When we talked about the Google stuff, we wound up spending 18 minutes just talking about that because I was asking questions and going through it. We’ve got some compliments like, “Do more of that. You guys aren’t digging into Bluetick enough,” was the comments, “or your own projects enough.” Part of the impetus for today’s episode was comments we’ve received but also, I think it’s been something that’s been on our minds for a while.
We have always liked doing updates, sharing what we’re up to, and what we’re working on, but it can be hard when it’s not good news. It’s hard to show up week after week and try to have an update of what you did in the past week if you didn’t get anything done or if things are going backwards. I think we tend to do update episodes every few months and I feel like this one today is really just a conversation about where you are, where Bluetick is, how you’re thinking about things, and try to find out more about what’s going on and even to give advice.
We talked for a while before this episode started and you’re bringing up things that I was telling you how I would approach them. We haven’t necessarily always been a ‘big advice for each other’ podcast. It’s a lot more answering listener questions. I think that can be helpful today, too, for you to hear how I would think of approaching different problems or how I have approached them in the past because I’ve done some of this stuff as well.
Mike: Do you want to relabel this as Mike’s therapy session?
Rob: Yeah, it’s going to be 50 minutes and I’m going to bill you […].
Mike: That’s actually cheaper.
Rob: Cheaper than you thought it would be.
Mike: Cheaper than a regular therapy session with […].
Rob: Indeed. Bluetick today, you’ve been working on it for two or three years, and it’s still not supporting you full time.
Mike: I went back and I started looking at my funnel metrics and stuff where I started tracking some of that stuff. I’ve got data in here from November of 2017 and that’s when I started tracking the numbers that I have here. I think that was shortly before I flipped the switch and said, “I’m just going to start billing people. If you’re not ready, then you can either cancel or that’s the end of the free trial or whatever that we have for you.” Obviously, my memory is kind of fuzzy as to exactly what state those things were at at the time so I don’t remember whether it was November of that year or what have you.
Rob: Was that November 2017?
Mike: Yes, November 2017. The reality is it’s not nearly where I would think that it should be if things were going well, the product had product market fit, and I was actively growing it. It’s just not. It’s not enough to support me full time. I don’t necessarily need it to, but at the same time if it’s going for an extended period of time and it’s not making enough money to do that, then why continue?
Rob: Yeah. It’s a waste of time and effort, opportunity cost, could you be working on something else that would be dramatically more lucrative whether that something else is a different product, or whether that something else is consulting, or heaven forbid a salary job? Not that you’re going to go do that, but you have skills. You’re a developer. You can write code. That’s a very valuable skill. To be wasting, I don’t mean wasting time on a day-to-day basis, but having 18 months, you’ve been charging for it, and to be only ramen profitable and not full time income is a struggle. It’s not just that you don’t have full time income but it’s not headed in the right direction anymore. You basically peaked at some point last year in terms of MRR.
Mike: Yeah and it’s more floundering than anything else. It’s not on a tailspin and I’m not bleeding out customers every single week or anything like that. It’s not tanking quickly, but it’s certainly not growing quickly, either. It’s really just meandering; go up on some months and then go down on some months. I have some customers who’ve been around since the very beginning and there are customers who will stick around for three to six months and then that’s it. I don’t feel like I’ve delve into the numbers of how long people have stuck around for and what the amount of revenue that I’ve gotten from each customer is enough, I just haven’t. It’s because I’ve spent a lot of my time on other things.
I feel like I have a hard time prioritizing where I should spend some of that time. Objectively, I think it’s like, “You should spend all of that time on marketing activities, analyzing what your current customers are doing, and who you should be targeting as those customers. One thing I struggle with is the fact that Bluetick has a very good use case for cold email and I don’t want those customers. I have a hard time justifying adding a lot more customers on there that are using the tool for that.
Rob: Is it an ethical thing? You just don’t like cold email?
Mike: Yeah, mostly.
Rob: Or a moral thing? Wait, what ethical is this? External and moral is internal. You’re internal code is like, “Meh. Not a fan of it.” Is that the idea?
Mike: The problem is that it depends on the customer. There are some customers that I’ll talk to, I’ll do a demo for somebody and I hear what they’re doing and they’re doing cold email. I’m like, “It’s not just a great tool that you have, but it’s also a great service. You’re doing great things with it and you are trying to make the world a better place,” versus some of the people just doing the cold email. They’re really bad at it and they’re doing things that are shady or scammy. I’m like, “Yeah. I don’t want those as customers,” but at the same time the tool works exactly the same for both of them.
How do I filter one out versus the other without having a conversation with every single one of them and how do you do that in the marketing that you put out such that you are catering specifically to a type of person who has a certain mindset?
Rob: I hear you. There are ways around it. You have options. You could, on your homepage, just be like the best tool for warm email interactions and then you could put in the FAQ, “This is not for cold email.” You could put it in your terms of service, “This is not for cold email.” You can have flags if people go in it, you see patterns of people doing cold email type things that you flag and you say, “Hey, this isn’t for cold email.”
We had to do this with Drip. People can’t use Drip for cold email. We had to build things and communicate that along the way. It was a pain. It was a lot of work and some people got really pissed off. Some people came in, signed up, uploaded their cold list and started emailing. Our system would automatically block them or they’d get enough complaints that are email spam. Dude would block them. That’s what you have to do if you really don’t want to do it.
The struggle is, with Drip, it will get you blacklisted. So, it’s a big problem for the business itself. With Bluetick, it’s not because they’re using their own inbox. You’re not going to get Bluetick itself, your IP doesn’t get blasted. You have to decide, “Hey, if ethically or morally or whatever, I only want to service certain type customer,” then you can do that. Just make it clear upfront.
It sounds to me like is it an excuse? If you accepted all the cold email, would Bluetick be where you want it to be? Or if you just focus on the warm email use case and ignore the cold email, would Bluetick be where you want it to be?
Mike: I don’t want to say it’s an unfair question, I think the question is a little bit off because it’s more a matter of holding me back from doing the marketing which would acquire those types of customers. It’s not about accepting them as customers or trying to turn them away or whatever. It’s more about holding me back from doing the marketing. I think it’s a very valid question about is that an excuse? I have a whole load of things I’ve looked at and thought about that comes to mind is, […] every single one of them is like, “Is that just an excuse?”
If you looked back at the stuff I did with AutoShark and then with Bluetick, I’ll […] frankly a lot of excuses along the way with AutoShark. If you think about objectively the stuff I’m going through with Google right now, there’s a huge question mark of this $15,000–$75,000 for a security audit. I’m apparently at the end point with Google where all I need to do is get this security audit and get a letter of—I forget what it is—authentication or something, this audit letter that I have to send into Google that says, “Yes, Bluetick is all up to snuff and we don’t have to worry too much about security vulnerabilities for the product,” but at the same time, is that another excuse?
If the products were much further along or had more customers and was making a substantial amount of revenue, would $15,000–$75,000 matter? The answer is no, it wouldn’t. The problem is I can’t point at Google and say they’re killing my business when the reality is the business isn’t making enough money. Really, that’s just the driver that says, “Here’s a hard line that you can’t cross unless the business is making enough.” If the business was making enough, that wouldn’t matter. The actual amount of whatever that is going to come out to would make no difference or whatsoever. So, is that an excuse?
I was saying in a way it kind of is, but at the same time I could almost point at anything that I’ve come across and say, “Is this an excuse?” Anything that comes up on the business as to why something is not working, you could ask that question and I think it’s a valid question to ask. I don’t have a good answer for some of those things. I just don’t.
Rob: That’s the thing. The cold email versus warm email thing, you don’t want to market it because people are using it for cold email. There are solutions to that. If I were in your shoes, I would decide, am I willing to let people do ethical cold email and warm email? If the answer is yes, then that would be on the website. That would be in my onboarding. I would mention that in every demo. I would probably do demo only for now in your shoes because you don’t have such an influx of trials. I’m guessing that you can’t do some type of demo with everyone at a minimum of screencast, 15 minutes of screencast that seriously talks about, “Look, we only do ethical cold email.” Just make that part of the whole deal. If that’s your hard line, then take the hard line and then move forward. That’s one option.
Second option is to not take the hard line and just say, “Hey, this is legal and it’s not going to hurt my IPs so I’m okay with people doing that.” That’s the second option.
Third option, shut the product down. It’s to realize, “Boy, I really built a product that people are going to misuse,” and the nuclear option would be to shut it down. Now that’s tough. I don’t know if I can come up with an easy fourth option. I feel like the ethical cold and warm is a perfectly viable non-nuclear option, and again, to just communicate that in every onboarding sequence.
Some people will sneak through, unfortunately. The good news is, it won’t get you on a blacklist like it did with Drip where we get on the blacklist and it’s like this, “Oh, […],” moment where a bunch of us were running around trying to figure out how to ban this customer and this and that. You’ll just have to have a conversation with that customer and say, “Look, by our judgment or by my judgment, you’ve gone over the line. I need you to migrate away or I need you to improve your things.” You can get a conversation with them where they say, “How do I improve my cold email?” You say, “Here’s a good example of a super ethical one. You only hit them four times over the course of a month, not 17 like you’re doing,” and blah, blah, blah.
All of this is work. It all takes work and that’s a crappy part. It’s the same thing with the Google approval, I think, that it totally gets in your head it seems like and it becomes this road block where really, it should be a speed bump that you look at your options. I say should. You’re going to encounter these over and over. I feel like if you look at the mess of speed bumps rather than roadblocks, knowing that there’s almost without exception, there’s always a way around it.
There are a few exceptions that are not. You can get sued into oblivion. You can get seriously injured. There are these extreme things where you can’t work or where your business is completely decimated because the whole platform just blocks your IP. There are certain exceptions but I don’t see that. Aside from Google disapproving you here in the next week or two, everything else you’ve mentioned to me is a speed bump, but I feel like it impacts you more than that.
Mike: That’s absolutely true. As you were talking through that and shifting the marketing to saying much more of it is ethical cold email and warm email, I actually got excited. I was like, “That’s exactly it.” I think that there are other ways to force that as well. I was talking to Josh from Referral Rock. He said that one of the things that they had done early on was that they charged a setup fee and that works really well for them. I was thinking about doing that as well and trying to figure out how can that work in there. That fits in really well with the idea of pitching it more towards the ethical cold email and warm email for people and then forcing people to do a demo.
That’s part of what the setup fee would be and making sure that they’re doing things the right way, that they’re not just spamming a ton of people just because they have the technical capabilities to. Honestly, that would make me feel a whole heck of a lot better about it. I was actually trying to figure out, “How can I justify this setup fee and how can I do that stuff?” I think that it falls directly in line with that. It makes total sense as to how that could happen now whereas before, I struggled a little bit with how do I present it or pitch it or make sure that people are doing the right things and everything is going well for them. I’ll say it’s like software augmented by services to some extent.
Rob: Absolutely. I feel like that’s one issue but it’s not as if we can now, “Alright and that’s the whole session, Mike, you’re all good,” because there are some deeper issues going on. It seems to me like the two biggest issues that I see with Bluetick and what you’ve been up to, number one, I don’t understand how Bluetick is any different than any of the other tools. I don’t think you’re differentiated. You can convince me otherwise but I don’t feel like there’s anything Bluetick can do that three or four other tools can’t do. That’s a problem because you’re picking up crumbs at that point.
The second thing that feeds into that is you have struggled to ship things. Whether it’s health issues, the distraction from the Google approval, I know you’ve had sleep issues for a long time. You talked at the last podcast about how you had a five- or six-hour workday. Two hours of it was with calls, then your kids were going to get home, and you’ve spent an hour on the Google thing. Your workday was just poof. Gone. You’re not shipping new features. You’re not shipping marketing.
When you look at the people who are making progress in these early stages, they’re shipping something every week. You look at Derrick Reimer. Even though he shut Level down, he was shipping features, he was shipping emails, he was shipping blog post. You look at Peter Suhm, who is the founder of Branch, which is a TinySeed company, was just announced today, he’s doing the same thing. He releases a blog post almost every week and he ships new features to Branch almost every week. You’ve struggled with that going way back.
I think that’s where we talked a little bit offline before this. You have reasons but you were saying to yourself like, “Are they reasons or are they excuses?” The health issues, there’s testosterone levels a few years back, there’s CPAP, there’s all that stuff. It impacts your motivation and that means that you haven’t shipped enough stuff fast enough to differentiate Bluetick and everyone else that you’re competing against is moving, I would say faster than you. You never catch up. Again, my impression is they are better tools, they just have more features, and they do more. So, how can you possibly grow an app that isn’t differentiated in any way?
Mike: A lot of them have definitely caught up in terms of the features. Some of them even started out further along than I was at the early stages. My difference in feature was intended to be the fact that Bluetick does not miss emails, whereas I know that people who were using the Gmail API, those types of customers tend to miss emails here and there. I feel like a lot of those problems have tended to go away. I don’t know whether that’s because the Gmail API has just gotten better in terms of what data that they’ve been sending or the frequency, but I don’t hear about those problems nearly as much as I used to.
Maybe the tools have just gotten better and they’ve fixed those problems. I don’t really know the answer to that because I don’t use those tools on a regular basis. But the fact is you’re right. I’m not shipping things nearly as much as I could or should be. There are certain things where I’ve gone through and I’ve reengineered something or changed how something works, and I’ve got all these data that is going through the system. I’m terrified in some cases of breaking stuff.
I’ve been going back-and-forth recently with one of the vendors who supplies the component that I use for synchronizing with IMAP. They won’t give me access to the stuff where I know for a fact it breaks and I can’t test it. I can’t put an automated test in place and they won’t give me a way to do it. I’m just like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” other than switching to some other component which again is non-trivial work. Is that an excuse?
Rob: It’s a problem but you’re going to encounter a problem almost everyday as an entrepreneur. If they become, they should be speed bumps. You could mock up an interface of some kind. Again, we had a bunch of APIs that we interfaced with Drip and we couldn’t hit the production or staging APIs so when our unit has ran, they would hit a mocked up interface. There’s a better word for it, but you know what I’m talking about.
You could feasibly break things but that’s what integration testing is for, and then you just have a checklist of like, “These are the five things that I’m always worried about breaking because I can’t test them well.” Those are in a Google Doc or a Trello board or whatever. Every time you do a big push or everytime you modify that code, you test those things. That’s how I would think about it. Again, it’s not perfect but it makes it into a speed bump. It makes it into a bump in the road rather than an actual road block.
Mike: The specific issue with that piece of it and the problem that I have with that, there are certain things that come up on occasion and I literally can’t do that because they’ve marked the class that I need to use as internal and sealed and there’s no interface for it. I literally cannot do it. The only way that I found to get around it is to create a constructor that uses the internal private constructor for it and basically fake the data, but I’m looking at obfuscated code at that point and I don’t know what the hell half of it does. I think all of this particular example is kind of immaterial, I agree it should be more of a speed bump than a road block. Going down the rest of that specific example is more of going down the rabbit hole more than anything else because it’s not the only thing.
Rob: The thing is, when these things come up, it’s not going to be perfect. I know that sounds silly to say, but you’re an engineer, you’re left brained, and you want every I to be dotted, every T to be crossed, every edge and corner case to be handled. Mike, your software is going to break sometimes. There is […] software that is doing seven, eight, nine figures a month and the stuff breaks. You can build a company with software that isn’t 100%. My guess is your software is going to be pretty dang good because you’re a developer and because you’ve been doing this most of your life, but at a certain point, you can’t let perfect get in the way of good and in the way of shipping.
Mike: And I do. I absolutely let that get in the way. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to just let it go. There are some things where I can just say, “Oh, we’ll just do this. Yes, […], go ahead.” Then there are other things where I’m like, “No, it has to be right.” For whatever reason, I fixate on those things.
Rob: That’s the problem. If you can’t identify when you’re fixating, then tell yourself stop and approach this from a different mindset. What would XYZ person do? How should I think about this differently is probably a better question that when you find yourself fixating to stop yourself and have the introspection to say, “What is the hack to get the solution? What is the 95% solution to this? What are the three or four options I have?” We’ve talked about a few topics here and then each one, you see, I’m just breaking them down into what are your choices here?
You’re choices with this API or whatever or it’s the component that you don’t have internal access to and it’s sealed and whatever, Mike, here are your options. You can completely shut your entire company down. Honestly, let’s look at them. You could shut the company down because of that. You could build a solution that is 80/20 or 95/5, however you want to phrase it. That’s like the one I said earlier which has been attacked together. It’s not going to catch everything and you have a checklist, and that’s probably good enough for now. Or you can spend a lot of time fixating on it. You can fight with the guy over email, you can try to reverse engineer it.
Mike: I can replace the component.
Rob: That’s great, you could feasibly do that. You could rewrite the whole thing yourself.
Mike: No, I wouldn’t do that. I would find a different vendor where I can rip that out and replace it with something else, that’s what I would do. I would absolutely not going down that road.
Rob: But that is an option. What’s funny is you could replace it with a different one. You’re going to spend time reworking your code or you could just rewrite the whole component yourself. It’s ridiculous but it is an option. Those are your five or six options. When you look at them, some of them seem like the dumbest thing ever like shutting your business down or writing the component yourself; don’t do those. It’s obvious, those are dumb. But the other three, if we look at them, black and white mindset and try to think about them. Which of those gets you to full-time income? Which of those gets you to $10,000? Yeah, there’s a little bit of risk with the one I’m suggesting, but that turns it into a speed bump rather than a road block.
Mike: One of the challenges I run into with this is that I don’t really have a mastermind group anymore where I can bounce ideas off of people and they call me out on a weekly basis that says, “Hey, you’re not working on this,” or, “You said that you’re going to have this done. You’ve been working on this for three weeks. This should’ve been done a long time ago.” I don’t have that external forcing function anymore. I think that’s been a big challenge for me.
Rob: Yeah. You’ve talked about in the past. You’ve told me that you feel like you’re more extrinsically motivated, that having someone who’s keeping you accountable is the way you work best versus being intrinsically motivated. And that’s fine. There are successful entrepreneurs on both sides of that. This is not something that precludes you from being one. You lost your mastermind or it broke up how long ago?
Mike: A little over a year and then I started a new one but we’ve only met I think three times total.
Rob: In a year?
Mike: It was over the course of three months or so and then we haven’t had a call on five or six months, I think.
Rob: For all intents you’re not really part of a mastermind at this point. You ended a year ago. Now, didn’t your revenue peak around that time?
Mike: Yeah, it did.
Rob: So…
Mike: I know.
Rob: A correlation?
Mike: Correlation, causation. That’s a valid point too. That’s an excuse.
Rob: Don’t say it. You’re going to say, “It’s hard to find a mastermind and it’s hard to be part of one.” I would say, “All right, Mike, you have choices. Shut your company down, number one. Number two, don’t be an entrepreneur anymore. It is a choice. Number three, email Ken of MastermindJam—mastermindjam.com—and try to hook with a mastermind. Four, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t do a mastermind and expect your future results to be the same as they have been,” is probably what I would say.
Mike: Some of these things like the other thing that it could potentially be solved by us having a cofounder. I have talked to you about this before. I’m not opposed to having a cofounder or having somebody else who works in the business with me, but at the same time it’s a question of finding the right person and all that other stuff. But again, is that an excuse? Is that what I really want? The answer is I don’t know. Is that an excuse? Probably. Is it what I really want? I don’t know. I’ve gone out in that road before and I think things worked out fantastically with you, with Microconf, the podcast, and everything else, but my past experiences have not been all sunshine and rainbows.
Rob: That’s a tougher one because finding a cofounder is hard. You can’t rush that. That’s not an easy thing to do. I do think it could be a fit for you given that you would work better with someone pushing you on and you’re feeling accountable to that.
Mike: I totally agree with that. But most of the people that I know of, that I know well enough to say, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going into business with them at all,” most of them have their own things going on. It’s hard to find somebody who is in that same position because I’ve got Bluetick that is substantially far along at this point. One thing that I’ve run into when you have employees or contractors or whatever, is I feel like they’re not just motivated, but they’re way less critical of the boss’ performance or decisions and things like that because they’re like, “Oh, well. That person is the person in charge. I don’t want to challenge them as hard as I probably could or would if I truly believed in this other direction versus the one that they’ve chosen or decided to go in.”
Rob: Yeah, but that’s just a minor speed bump. I’ve worked with contractors and employees and I’ve had cofounders. It’s just something you get over. I think the deeper issue comes back to the two things that I said, number one, Bluetick is not differentiated. Number two, it’s because you’re not shipping enough. It sounds like you struggle with indecision quite a bit where you’ve ruminated on a question for a long time, for days or weeks, and sometimes just can’t break out of that to make the decision to move forward. So, you get stalled.
And then the motivation thing. You told me offline that you were bored, you weren’t motivated. At times you know what you should do, “I should go build this feature,” but you’re not motivated to do it. Is that right? Talk about that. Is it a health thing? I guess you don’t know. If you knew you would fix it, right? You don’t know if it’s lack of sleep. You don’t know if it’s low testosterone. You don’t know if you just don’t want to do the idea. Do you have any thoughts or even more background for people?
Mike: My doctor took me off of my testosterone and it wasn’t because it was too high, it was because one of my other blood tests came back, it’s too high. He was like, “This is way outside of the normal range so I’m going to take you off with testosterone for four weeks to see how that plays out.” I was about a week-and-a-half into it and I was like, “I have to take some of it right now.” The downsides or drawbacks of having it, having low testosterone is you get depressed, you have a hard time focusing, you can’t get things done, you can’t really think straight. That was happening to such a severe degree, I was like, “I have to take it today just to put myself at least a little bit back on track.”
I’m going to call him and try and see if we can cut this whole thing short because it is extremely detrimental to me right now but I don’t have any answers, I wish I did. There’s a lot of things where I’m just like, “This is boring to me.” Some of it has to do with the work that needs to get done. Again, is that an excuse? Is that just a reason that I’m using to justify not feeling bad about getting the work done? I get that, as an entrepreneur, not everything is always going to be fine. You’re not always going to enjoy everything.
There are some things that you like to do versus there are things that you need to do. If you can outsource those things that need to be done that you don’t like doing, great. I don’t feel like I’ve been in a position where I can outsource everything that I hate doing because there’s financial research and things like that.
Rob: You’ll never be able to do that. Even when HitTail and Drip were growing like crazy, I still came in and did a bunch of crap that I didn’t want to do. With TinySeed, I have more resources than I’ve ever had and there’s still crap that I’m dealing with that I don’t want to do. But (a) I tried to minimize it, and (b) I tried not to let it clog the top of my to do list. When it’s sitting in that Trello board I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I do not want to look at health care plans and setting up a 401(k) for us.” But it’s like, “I’m going to power through it, suck it up, and get it done. Then I’m going to come out the other side and reward myself by doing something super fun, make it some swag or something.” I don’t know. You can’t avoid that. You can’t avoid it entirely. You can minimize it.
We’re building businesses that we want to be a part of, that we want to run. We’re building it for our lifestyles. That’s great, but that doesn’t mean that 100% of the time, it’s like a trip to Disneyland. I know you know that. I’m being a little facetious, but that’s the thing I think you’ve struggled with a lot. There’s this indecision piece. You’ve expressed to me like, “I’m not motivated to do this thing.” Whatever it is, I know that’s what has to get done. I think you’ve got to figure that out because without that, you can’t move forward. You have to be motivated some days even through the struggles.
We have a mutual friend who runs a SaaS app, who has pretty major health issues. He struggles, he works four hours a day, and it’s tough for him to travel. There’s a lot of stuff that it’s just hard. It’s hard for him, but he runs a successful SaaS app, lives off, and has a few employees. He shows up everyday. In those four hours, I bet he’s pretty damn effective by the fact that his SaaS app still grows.
Mike: I haven’t found a system, I guess, that works for me in terms of preventing me from wasting time on the stuff that I don’t want to do or procrastinating to get those things done. I don’t want to stay here and say, “Oh, well. I just need to find the right system,” because I don’t think that’s the right way to go, either, or the answer to it. I do feel maybe I just need to experiment more and say, “Okay, try this for a week or try that for a week,” and be very deliberate about trying to get things done and shipping things, as you said, versus just showing up to work every day and a lot of motion without forward progress. I feel like I’m thrashing a lot. I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe the problem is that I’ve thought about what the answer to that is without actually doing anything to try and figure it out.
Rob: Yeah, not taking action. I think effectiveness is what you’re summarizing. Thrashing is the opposite of being effective. If this founder we’re talking about works four hours a day but gets a full day’s work done, he’s highly effective. Some people can work 10 hours. If they’re not effective, their business doesn’t move forward. We’ve talked about this in the past. The 80-hour-a-week startup people, I think, are probably not effective. That’s the reason they work 80 hours.
There’s a few exceptions but there’s a lot of younger folks. I used to work longer hours when I was younger too. It’s just not picking the right stuff to work on and then not focusing on that stuff, not wandering off to answer email, jump on Twitter, go to Reddit, really focusing. I think you can get a full day’s work done in 4–6 hours. Your full day’s work would have been 10 years ago, I believe, with the personal growth, experience, and stuff that a person can be more effective with less time.
There’s a couple things that I’ll throw out. One is that I feel like you should consider whether you want to keep doing this, to continue doing Bluetick, whether you want to continue being an entrepreneur. Here’s the thing. If you’re working in a contract job or if you were working a salary job, a lot of these issues go away because daily you would do a daily standup, or weekly, or whatever. You would have accountability. That external motivation would be there for you to ship stuff. That would make a lot of these go away. That’s a pretty nuclear option. In the interest of time, we probably shouldn’t go down that today. I do think it’s something for you to take a step back and just think about longer term.
Mike: Counterargument to that would be if I worked, did the right thing, and got Bluetick to a point where I was able to hire people to put on a team, that exact same result would come out of it.
Rob: Yeah, okay. That’s fine. That’s fine but you’ve got to get there. At the rate you’re going, you’re not going to get there.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: I don’t disagree with you, Mike. This is Startups for the Rest of Us. The whole point is that we want to help people start businesses that give them personal freedom. The whole point of this podcast and everything we do is to feel free, to do what you want to do, and work on which you want to do. That would be my answer as well. It’s just, you have to figure out how to get there because you’re not making progress there now.
The second thing I would think about which is a less nuclear option, if we’re talking about options, it’s to go one step further than our mastermind and to find someone who would do a daily standup with you. Every morning, five minute phone call or five minute Slack. They keep you accountable. You subscribe to that. When you say, “These are the things I did yesterday. This is what I’m going to do today.” The next day, you come and you do the walk of shame if you didn’t get that done. You celebrate if you did and that extrinsic motivation is something that you think will help to do that.
What do you think about that is that, does it not matter? Because you’re so tired you can’t get anything done? Is the extrinsic motivation enough if someone was breathing down your neck? Would that be enough? Or do you think no? “I’m still too damn tired. I just have health issues and I shouldn’t do this.”
Mike: I would certainly try it. I would say, it’s pretty immature for me to say that it would or wouldn’t work. I suspect that it would. I seriously contemplated trying to find a way to get a one-on-one business coach or something like that, somebody who’s going to hold me accountable. You’re right. A five minute thing like that on a daily basis could be plenty. I don’t know. Without trying it, I can’t say for sure one way or the other. My inclination is to say, “Yes, that would work,” but it would also need to be somebody who is, I don’t want to say willing to yell at me because I don’t want to be inundated with thousands of emails saying, “Hey, I’ll yell at you.”
Rob: Sure because you don’t need yelling. You do need positive and negative encouragement and feedback.
Mike: I think that’s certainly worth exploring. I would say, it goes further than my thoughts about having a business coach who holds me accountable on a weekly basis because I think a daily basis would probably be better. That’s mainly because I feel like I could waste a lot of time during a whole week whereas from a day-to-day, I can’t. I don’t want to say the stakes are higher but the deadlines are sure. I’ve always found myself to be somebody who works extremely well with tight deadlines and time pressure.
Rob: Yeah, external motivation.
Mike: Yes. When I was doing consulting, the […] gets subcontracting through, they’ve held me in with a bunch of stuff. I stopped consulting from them probably a year-and-a-half or two years ago, but every single time I get an email from them it’s because something’s on fire. They want me to deal with it. I actually got to a point where from one customer to the next, every single one, everything was on fire and burning to the ground. They needed somebody to go in and fix it. I was their person because I was really good at it. I just got burned out with the travel. That was what the problem was. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy doing those things but I got burned out with the travel. The customers tended to be the same from one to the next. And the problem was repetitive. It got to a point where the problem was the same thing over and over. Then, I just got bored.
Rob: Yeah. Consulting is like a hamster wheel. You want to own something. You want an equity in something that has a longer lasting thing than just […] per hour.
Mike: Sure.
Rob: Yeah, that desire.
Mike: Right. That was a big reason for me leaving and decided to do Bluetick instead because I wanted something that was going to need much more of that Rob’s flywheel as opposed to the hamster wheel.
Rob: Yeah. Obviously, we can’t solve stuff like these in a day. You and I talked about you taking some time to think about this, three weeks, four weeks where you think about both of what we’ve talked about today, some stuff we talked about offline, but really, do soul searching and figure out. I think there’s big questions here. It’s like, Mike, do you want to do this and do you want to do it bad enough that you’re willing to change? What you’re doing now isn’t working so you have to change it. Are you going to be willing and able to start looking at every problem as a speedbump rather than a roadblock?
Is this the right fit for you? Whether it’s this being entrepreneurship, Bluetick, it’s just those two. Does Bluetick have the potential? If you feel like you’re gaining your momentum and motivation to take a hard look and say, “How long will it take to get Bluetick to a point where it is differentiated?” My assessment is that, until you’re differentiated enough that you’re like, “Nope, we do this and no one else does,” or “We do this better than all these other tools.” Until you get to that point, you just don’t win many sales.
Mike: I totally agree with all that. I don’t even have to think too long about that one aspect of those. Do I still want to be an entrepreneur? For me, the answer is absolutely yes. The question for Bluetick is what does that look like moving forward? The reality is, the situation is I’ve got basically a seven month deadline at this point. I think you said there were some questions about how that shakes out with Google. I kind of know the answers to some extent. I still don’t have all the information, but I’ve gone past the last stage of Google’s verification with the exception of the security audit. That’s all that needs to be done. That’s the piece where I don’t know how much that’s going to cost. I don’t know what they have to go through or what other things I’m going to have to change. I’m still waiting to find out what that’s going to cost.
Then, I have to make a judgment called the end of it to say if it’s $15,000 and I’m going to make that $15,000 back in a reasonable time frame, not a big deal. Even if it was $75,000 or $100,000. If I were going to be able to make that back within three or four months, it’s not a big deal. If I’m in a revenue standpoint where it’s not going to happen in six months, eight months, ten months, then, no. I can’t justify even continuing with the product to that point. I don’t know what the price tag on it is right now. It’s a question of how far can I get in the next six to seven months to the point where I know how much revenue I’m going to be making three or four months down the road to be able to justify putting the cash out for that security audit.
Rob: You understand that while the security audit is one thing like we’ve talked about today, there are bigger issues. It’s shipping. Let’s say you pass the security audit and you pay for it. Bluetick is still not growing. Bluetick is still not differentiated right now. The reason again, going back, is you haven’t been motivated, or you’ve been bored with it, or there’s been health issues. There’s been all these things along the way. If that doesn’t change, it doesn’t matter what happens with the Google audit.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: We talked about you taking some time to think about it and actually stepping back from the podcast here for about three or four weeks. Give you some clarity.
Mike: Hopefully.
Rob: Some time alone. I know, give you a chance to maybe find clarity. These are hard decisions. This is retreat level kind of stuff where it’s a lot of thinking.
Mike: Yeah. The weird thing is these aren’t nothing we’ve really talked about. So far, things I haven’t thought about or considered over the past couple of years, it’ s just like I haven’t really taken the time to step back, objectively look at things, and take a hard look. I mean, if I do look at stuff and how things have gone, one constant that has been throughout the whole thing is me. Is it me? That’s a hard thing to say and the hard thing to admit to as well.
The question, can things change? Or will they change? Or do I want them to? I think that I want to. It’s just a question of how is that going to happen? How do I make sure that I don’t go through this process and come out of it and say, “Yeah, I’m motivated. I’m amped up. Let’s do this,” then put in time and effort for six months, then fall back into the same patterns again, I’ll say? That could happen. I don’t know but I need to step back.
Rob: That’s for sure. You know, Mike, I’ve always respected your technical chops, your intelligence, your writing, and you just have a lot of positive qualities. You’ve accomplished stuff in your life but you’ve definitely gotten in your own way. You’ve gotten in your own way more than I think you want to or should have. I think if you can start thinking about it, in terms of, how do I not do in the next six months what has happened in the past six months? We’ll see.
I’m going to be holding down the fort here for a few weeks. It’ll be good to hear from you. I’m sure people will be waiting with bated breath. We’ll have an episode, I don’t know, will it be 452 or 453? It’s the return of Mike. We get to hear from you, what you’ve been thinking about, and stuff.
Mike: Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I got to talk to my doctor and go back on a testosterone because it’s just, my God.
Rob: It’s kind of […].
Mike: It really is. You wouldn’t think that that does it. It was like, “Oh, that can’t possibly be that bad.”
Rob: I would totally think, any chemical in our body, when it gets that out a whack, it has these negative impacts that can be pretty brutal.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Well, thanks for delving into this today. I know this is not easy stuff to talk about. I appreciate your openness, honesty, and willing to delve into it. I’m sure the listeners do, too. This has over and over been voiced. This is like one of the favorite aspects of our show is when we do these things. We talk pretty open and raw about what’s going on.
Mike: Yup. I guess with that, why don’t you take us out then?
Rob: Yeah. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.
Episode 438 | Casual Conversations with Rob & Mike
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike have a casual conversation about what’s going on with each other recently. Some of the topics they touch on include Dungeons & Dragons, personal computer setups, new ideas for MicroConf, and Bluetick/TinySeed updates.
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Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be having a casual conversation about what’s going on. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 438.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?
Rob: I just felt like we haven’t done kind of a casual episode in a while where you and I talk about things that are going on. We often get stuck in this odd place where we might have a lot going on, but it’s not necessarily stuff you can talk about or feel comfortable broadcasting to tens of thousands of people. I feel like we’re in a good place, we’re obviously pre-recording this episode because it’s going to go live after MicroConf—I think the week after—and we’re recording it the week before just because so much is going on that whole week. Since we do Growth and Starter now, I mean the week is just torched for me. When do you fly out and when do you fly back?
Mike: I fly out on Friday. I get in at like 8:00 PM or so on Friday night and then I don’t leave until the following Friday. I think my flight is at 12:00 PM or 1:00 PM or something like that.
Rob: Yeah. It’s a full on week for you. I go Saturday to Friday. It’s only six days but still, A, six days, seven days in Vegas is too long. B, pretty much the whole time—I don’t know about you—but all I’m thinking about is, what am I forgetting? What am I missing this year? Oh yeah, we need that opening slideshow for the first 10 minutes of each conference. I need to update that. There’s all these little things and then stuff just really ramps up Sunday. Honest question, do you sleep very well at MicroConf typically?
Mike: I haven’t slept well in 4-5 years so it’s not a really fair question.
Rob: Yeah, you’re the wrong person to ask. I tend to sleep well. I don’t have many sleep problems in general aside from grinding my teeth which is irritating as heck for Sherry. At MicroConf I always struggle and I think it’s just how much I have going on in my mind. I wake up at 5:00 AM and I got to make sure to do that one thing or to tell that to that one person who needs to be at that one place at that time. There’s just a lot of details.
Xander has changed the game for us absolutely. But even then, I’m still thinking about stuff. Frequently what happens is I think of it, “Oh yeah, we need to do that one thing.” Then I wake up in the morning and I text you and Xander and Xander’s like, “Yeah, I already took care of that a week ago.” That’s actually the most often thing, but it still wakes me up in the middle of the night.
Mike: I think when I am in Vegas for MicroConf, I tend to actually sleep better I think when I’m there than when I’m at home, but that’s also I think partially a result of me remembering to bring a sleep mask because otherwise, the blinds of the hotel rooms are absolutely horrendous. You flip and shut but any hotel I’ve ever been in, they’re never very good so you have to have something else.
It feels like it gets so light so early and it just screws me because I tend to be up late and then the light comes and wakes me up in the morning. That’s the biggest problem I think I have. I agree with you in like having all those little things that are hanging out, they come up and you have to remember that, “We have to do this. I have to go back and tweak that from last year’s slides,” or whatever. That obviously comes up just constantly.
I carry around a pen and a notebook at all times just so I can make sure to write things down as they’re happening, or keep track of what has to go on with different sponsors, or different times of each conference. There’s just lots of little things to keep track of and trying to keep them in your brain is just not going to happen.
Rob: Yeah and that’s a good point too, because in my day-to-day workflow, I use email a ton. I use Trello. I just have a system that all goes out the window when I’m at MicroConf because I’m not checking email very much at all and I’m not looking at my Trello board. I have email to Trello basically. If you and I are talking in day-to-day or I’m at a dinner party and someone mentions a book I should read, or a something I should check out, a website, a person I should contact, whatever, I pop open Gmail, I email my own Trello board and it goes to the top of it. The next time I sit on my computer, I put it into the right queue. It’s an Amazon wish list, or an Audible wish list, or I fire off an email or whatever.
I don’t do that at MicroConf because I’ve just not checked my Trello board at all. That pen and paper approach you’re talking about, it’s either that or Simple Note because I have Simple Note on my phone. I just open up like a MicroConf-only to-do that I have to keep referring back to because I just find that my systems don’t work when we’re just running 110% for five days straight.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. That’s why I kind of switched over to the pen and paper. One of the things that tends to drop down on my list is the email and text notifications, though text notifications are different than Slack notifications. I totally don’t pay attention to it. You’re right though, being in a different environment like that where you’re not at your desktop, you don’t have all the tools available to you because you’ve just got so many other things going on, and you’re not really able to get into any sort of deep work because you don’t have your desktop, or laptop, or whatever. It’s just a very different operating environment.
Rob: Do you still use a desktop, Mike?
Mike: I do.
Rob: Are you going to bring that with you to MicroConf?
Mike: No, I’m not. I think the 30-inch monitor would probably be hard to get through.
Rob: For the love of god man, why do you use a desktop at home and not a laptop?
Mike: I have yet to find an actual laptop that I like and like enough to take with me, that’s part of it I think. I built my desktop from hand, because I’ve always kind of built my own computers even back when I was in college. I like the hardware that went with it but at the same time, because I built this 5-6 years ago, actually no, it’s more than that because I just recently reformatted everything, but I didn’t replace any of the hardware. I’m trying to remember, I think I found a software that was installed like 2010-2011. Most of the hardware is that old. I think it’s a hex core machine. It was a top of the line Core i7 at the time. I’ve got 64 gigs of RAM in it and SSD drives. The thing is it’s still a beastly machine all things considered.
Rob: Given that it’s 10 years old or 9 years old I guess, that’s a trip. I guess my question is and it’s going to die eventually. It’ll either fail or it’ll just be too slow to run stuff. When that happens, are you going to buy or build another desktop or you just kind of pony up for top of the line, because you’re in Windows right? It’s top of the line Dell, or HP, or whoever’s making Lenovo these days.
Mike: Yeah. For a while, I’ve been using a MacBook Pro and just ran VMware on top of it.
Rob: Dual booting or VMware. Are you going to just buy a high-end MacBook?
Mike: I don’t think so. I have not heard anybody have great things to say about the newer Macs. Everybody I see talking about them kind of hates them. They’re like, “I wish I could go back to the 2013 model.” Funny enough, I actually have a 2013 MacBook Pro. I use that when I travel, but I go back and forth on this. I think the biggest thing for me is, in order to be productive, I feel like I have to have more screen real estate available to me. I run three monitors at all times. One of them is a 30-inch and a pair of 20-inch monitors. That really works well for me. Going to a laptop kind of sucks. I looked at like the Surface Books…
Rob: You can do that because I run two monitors, two 24-inch or whatever off of my laptop. My laptop is one monitor and it’s retina so it’s amazing, and then I have the two 24s, so I essentially have three. How is that different than what you’re doing?
Mike: It’s not, except that on the one laptop that I was looking at was the Microsoft Surface Book and it doesn’t have the ability to do three monitors at 60 hertz because of the bandwidth limitations or something like that for 4K monitors. They’re so close, they really are.
Rob: That’s the limitation. I wonder if there isn’t a laptop out there—you don’t need to drive three monitors, you just need to drive two because the laptop itself if it’s high-res, you can use that in the center. I have an elevated thing. My laptop is up at eye level, and then I have a remote Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I sit on my lap, basically on a panel, that’s the center monitor and then I have two on the other side. I just need to drive two. A, will that situation work for you and B, can you find a windows laptop that can drive two 4K monitors?
Mike: I haven’t tried doing that yet. Would it work for me or could I make it work for me? I probably could, but your comment about, “Oh, eventually my machine is not going to be able to do it.” My machine’s lasted long enough. Since that time, processors haven’t gone to six or seven gigahertz. I don’t think it’s an issue of that so much as just being able to have the laptop itself. I don’t have a justifiable reason to just go drop $3000-$4000 on a new laptop.
Rob: I agree and I don’t think you should do that now. I was just wondering when your desktop fails because it will. Something’s going to happen or it’s going to get too slow in the next five years. It’s not going to last 15 years. I was just wondering what you were going to do at that point, but maybe you’ll evaluate it when you get there.
I guess the thing of just working on a laptop all the time is then when you’re traveling, you’re not in this weird environment where you don’t have your stuff and it’s not the way it is. I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro and it is the new one with the touch bar. I don’t love the touch bar but I’ve gotten used to it. When I’m at home, I have extra screen real estate it’s amazing. When I’m on the road, I don’t but you can flip back and forth between the windows and I have the exact same shortcuts, icons everywhere, the same files, everything. It’s the same hard drive.
To me, traveling isn’t this big issue. I hate switching computers I guess is what I’m saying. I figure that’s why most people have moved to laptop so they can be mobile and go to a coffee shop or do something and it’s not this step down, aside from screen real estate, it’s not a step down in productivity. That’s all I was wondering for you.
Mike: That’s something I look at. My preference I think would be able to have a laptop that can do everything that I want and needed to do and that I just have a docking station. Just plug it in and everything’s the same. I can go on the road, or go to a coffee shop, or something like that, but I don’t work well or at least I haven’t historically worked very well in coffee shops or remote locations. It’s partly because I have back problems.
For me to sit at a coffee shop or in some weird chair that doesn’t do a good job of distributing my weight, I have kind of a hard time just sitting there and trying to be productive because I’m just sitting there in pain more than anything else. Maybe that’s part of why it doesn’t matter nearly as much to me as it probably would to somebody else. But I do want to at some point be able to switch and just say I just grab the thing and go, and that’s my entire environment, and nothing’s changed, I don’t have to worry about any of the stuff that you talked about where syncing things back and forth.
Most of the time for the current setup I have like, I have a MacBook Pro but then I have a windows VM that’s running on it. I reinstall all the software there. It’s a very similar environment. It’s not exactly the same, but anything that needs to be there, I just keep it in Dropbox, or Google docs, or something like that. It’s not that big a deal and Chrome keeps all my bookmarks in the same places. It’s not nearly as painful as it probably was 10-15 years ago.
Rob: That’s what I was going to say. With Dropbox and being able to sign in to Chrome and have your browser. You’re in your browser a lot of the time anywhere unless you’re writing code so it is nice. We were talking about MicroConf and we veered into that. I’m pretty stoked man. You’re running a little mini campaign fifth edition D&D on Saturday.
Mike: I am. I’m looking forward to that. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s already kind of laid out. I have just a couple of things I got to send you guys. I have to do that in the next day or so. It should be good. I almost wish I could talk a little bit more about it because I think it’s going to be interesting. I’ve actually run it twice so far. It’s not like everything is completely new. There are certain places where I know that there’s a few issues to iron out, but I think I’ve got them all straightened out. I took all of your characters and I gave them to other people and said, I want you to play these characters and I wanted to see how things kind of shook out. I’m hoping it’s well prepared.
Rob: That’s cool. If you’ve done it multiple times, to me it’s like a conference talk. The second, third, and fourth time I do a talk, it just gets better and better until to the point where I get bored of it, and it starts getting worse. I think you’re still on the upswing with this campaign.
Mike: Yeah. We’ll see. I mean it’s just a simple one shot. I expect it to take maybe three—like both times I ran it before, it’s taken four hours. I got to come and tighten that in somehow.
Rob: A little bit, yeah.
Mike: I have an idea of how to do that, I’m not sure you guys will like it though.
Rob: To kill it, do a TPK.
Mike: No. Well, I could do that. The very first room you walk into, “Hey, nobody dies. Let’s go get a beer.” I was thinking something along the lines of like a timer or something like that would be like, “Hey, this is kind of timed here, you’ve got to go a little bit quicker than you normally would.” I don’t know.
Rob: There’s a nuclear bomb waiting to go off and goes off of you if you don’t get this done. Is this campaign something you came up with or is it like a module?
Mike: It’s a module. Somebody ported it from fourth edition to fifth, and then I ported it from that platform because it was made for Fantasy Grounds which allows you to play D&D online. You get tokens and stuff to drag around and stuff, but the module itself because it was ported from fourth edition to fifth edition, it’s got errors in it. That’s why I wanted to play it a couple times in advance because the very first time I run it I was like, “This is a problem. That’s a problem. This is wrong like flat out.” They’re referring to things that just simply don’t exist and the authors never went back and fixed any of it. It’s like, “Well, what’s my interpretation of what it should be or how it’s supposed to be?”
Rob: It’s going to exciting and for folks who don’t know, it’s fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons that we’re talking about which is the current edition of that. You and I have never gamed together before, so this would be kind of cool. Frankly, I got out of D&D until 4-5 years ago when my oldest son got old enough to start playing, then I had the impetus to get into it again. Did you also take a bunch of time off from it and recently get back into it?
Mike: When I graduated from high school and went to college, I think I played once once or twice. I played once in college that I remember and I might have played over the summer the year after I went to college or something like that with some friends back home. But like you, I took a bunch of time off and I started again. When they first published fifth edition, I bought the books as they came out. When those were published I think back in 2014, this was about five years ago, that’s when I got back into it and started rereading stuff.
I basically skipped from the second edition all the way to the fifth and know very little about the third and fourth editions other than what I’ve read about what the differences are between those and the fifth edition. Just because some people I play with have played the version three and I didn’t know much about it. I was trying to educate them about what the differences were, but most of the people I play with now, they’ve either played second edition or they’re kind of new.
Rob: I did the same thing. I played basic back in the early 80s and then played [inaudible 00:15:39]. When the first edition AD&D came out, we played that. I don’t think I ever played second edition, never played third or fourth. When I got back into it, let’s say 4-5 years ago, I Googled, “Coming back into D&D. I’m going to teach my kid. Should we play first edition because that’s what I’m most familiar with or is fifth edition good?” There were some really cool threads talking about the pros and cons of it.
In the end, people are like, “Fifth edition is a better,” not better, that was not the word they used, but it’s a faster rule set. The game moves quicker. It’s easier to understand for someone who’s never played it and there’s tons of new stuff being put out for. You can do either one, but consider checking out fifth edition. It’s nice that the rules are available for free. There’s a PDF that Wizards of the Coast lets you down. I downloaded it and I was blown away by the simplicity and how they’ve gotten rid of all of descending armor class, and all these tables to hit, and saving throws and stuff and it’s just come down to difficulty checks with advantage and disadvantages. It’s just really elegant to me—elegant simplifications of things.
I know folks who are used to the old stuff, adapting something new is like changing programming languages from SEED to Ruby or something, seed.net where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is such a different paradigm.” Even if it might be more elegant or whatever, it doesn’t feel that way because it’s different. When I was 10, 12, or 14, I just had hours and hours to pour into it, invented our own stuff, and read every book, but I just don’t have that time now. It’s like, “Look, I have two hours a week maybe three hours to hammer something out. What’s fast and what’s fun to play?”
Mike: Now you can go online and there’s like random dungeon generators, and random character generators, and all the stuff, they’re fantastic tools that streamline things. I remember I used to spend an hour or two creating a character and now you can just go and use one of these tools, and you can have a character done in 10-15 minutes tops. That’s just fantastic.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: I agree. I love the fifth edition rule set overall the other ones over the basic edition, the AD&D first edition, and second edition just because I think the biggest thing that I think it has going for it is that your character will get more powerful as they level up, as opposed to depending so much on items and things like that in order to make you more powerful. That’s the thing I think I disliked the most about some of the previous editions, because you could just make somebody completely overpowered at a super low level just by giving them a bunch of magic items. Whereas with this one, you’re competitive every step of the way with no magic item which is kind of awesome.
Rob: Right, it makes sense. I know we can talk about D&D. This could be a casual D&D conversation with just Rob and Mike, or tabletop gaming. Folks who don’t play D&D might have already tuned out. Those two listeners are gone. I have a question for you. Have you ever been to a conference where the opening 10 minutes, where the host gets on stage and talks about things, sets the stage so to speak, for what’s going to happen during the conference. What’s the best one of those you’ve ever seen? Have you seen any that have blown you away, I think. Obviously, the reason I’m asking you is, we have adapted ours over the years especially last year changed, the whole slide deck changed, the format changed, and stuff. I’m just trying to think about the best way to keep improving that.
Mike: I don’t know about best. I would say the most interesting one I ever saw—and I wasn’t there personally for this—I’m think this is a little bit of secondhand information. I was there the year after and I think that as a result of that previous year, things have changed in terms of policies of the company. It was at a Altiris conference back in, I want to say 2007-2009 timeframe, or something like that maybe it was even slightly before that, but the founder of the company came in through the back, and went through the aisles, and up on the stage riding a motorcycle.
Rob: Okay. Let’s talk to Xander, and on Monday, I want you to do that.
Mike: Sure. I do have my motorcycle. I could do that theoretically.
Rob: Fantastic.
Mike: I think we may need to update the insurance, and waivers, and various other things.
Rob: And all the things, yeah, and rent a motorcycle, and get the drop to let us drive it through the hall. Alright, so that’s not helpful. That was completely unhelpful.
Mike: That’s my job here I think, to be completely unhelpful.
Rob: Exactly. Doing it 438 episodes since 2010—being unhelpful.
Mike: Yeah. I don’t know what the most interesting thing is. I mean I’ve been to conferences where the founder of whatever the business is, will come out and then give a really good opening talk or presentation, and it talks about the future, but it’s not like a 5 or 10 minute intro. It’s usually the keynote speech or something like that.
Rob: It’s a keynote, right. It’s an actual talk. Obviously, at MicroConf, for folks who haven’t been, you and I get up and we have between 10-15 minutes right at the start of the conference where we welcome everybody, we talk about what MicroConf is, we go through a breakdown of attendees, and stages they’re at, and that kind of stuff. It sets the stage for where we’re headed. Because it would be weird if everyone shows up at 10:00 AM on Monday and you and I get up and we’re just like, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jason Cohen, Chris Savage,” or whoever our speaker is and they get up on stage, because it’s not a program, it’s just a disjointed speaker after speaker. There’s no context for all of it. That’s why we’ve always done the welcome of like, “Welcome.” I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of something that’s not a keynote per se. We could do whatever we want. We can’t do it this year because the schedule is already set but next year, you and I could…
Mike: Are you looking for something different like to change it up in terms of saying how can we do this differently, or just looking for ideas of what other things, or are you just looking for validation of, “Is this the best thing for us to do or not?”
Rob: I think we should do it. I don’t think that’s part of the conversation of us not getting up there. It could be super weird if we weren’t there to welcome the people. Someone has to be there. I think we should do something. I think what we did last year was better than what we have done in prior years. I just am looking, is there anything else we can add to that to make it even better. That’s what I’m thinking about.
I think the best one I’ve seen was at SaaStr. Jason Lemkin got up and talked for maybe 15 minutes. It wasn’t a keynote, it was kind of like the state of SaaStr. He talked about the conference, and he talked about their community, and he talked about their fund, and it really was just an overview. It’s like when you think about writing a 10-page paper. You start high level, and then you dig in deep, and then at the end you come back to high level to conclude, and that’s how I think we structure MicroConf.
We have that introduction that really is this high level context setting, and then at the end, we should wrap it up with context and stuff, and we even have to structure the talks that way. We don’t tend to put a super tactical talk as the first talk on Monday because the vibe is off if you do that. That’s it. I think I might try to think back to what SaaStr’s opening was like and see if there’s any elements of that that could apply to us. We are similar to that opening and that we do set context, but I think there’s just ways to do it better.
Mike: What we do is we set context for the attendees at the conference. An idea that comes to mind—and obviously, there’s zero time to do that for this year—this is actually something that I have had an idea of the within the past couple of years like, “Hey, it would be cool if somebody kind of headed this up.” Not that I really had the time to do it, but it’s something that either we could potentially put together because of the audience and community.
But as you said, kind of give the state of self-funded entrepreneurs, or the state of SaaS applications, or the state of software in general for extremely small software companies like ours. Give a 10-15 minute overview of, “Hey, this is some of the major changes that have kind of come out over the past year. This is how things are progressing. These are things that are going on in the industry that people should kind of either be on the lookout for or be careful of. These are some opportunities that you guys might want to think about.” As opposed to what we do right now which is welcome them to the conference which I do think we still need to do that. But I also think that it would be nice if there was this extra piece there that was kind of an opening that did set the stage for other stuff. I think what that would actually probably take is doing interviews with founders, or calls, or surveys, and things along those lines to help gather information from the community to be able to compile that and show it to them.
I did a talk in MicroConf Europe in 2016 that I basically did that. I asked people for information and say, “Hey, could you submit this?” I’m basically writing a talk about it. I included a bunch of that information, but it’s not something I could potentially do like every single year so I just didn’t keep it up. I think something along those lines could be helpful and useful for the audience.
Rob: Do you know what the name of my talk is on Monday afternoon? You have not looked have you?
Mike: You know, I don’t even know the names of all the speakers.
Rob: I know. Well, we do keep a firewall between speakers and sponsors. Literally, we were talking last week I guess and I said, “Yeah, I don’t know.” I know some of the sponsors because there’s a lot of them returning, but I tend to wait until a day or two before to look through all the sponsors. Because this is our editorial firewall. Advertising versus editorial, we don’t link those two up. I don’t want that to influence decisions.
Mike: Right.
Rob: But the name of my talk is, The State of Bootstrapping in 2019. It’s not exactly what you are talking about, but I am trying to give that overview and talk about trends, and what’s happened over the past 10 years. I mean, you saw my Europe talk from eight months ago, or six months ago. It’s an expansion of that.
Mike: That would be cool. I mean obviously, you don’t want to do a one hour talk at the very beginning like that.
Rob: Exactly.
Mike: I don’t know how you would condense your talk into 10-15 minutes. That’s the other thing I think I would struggle with is how to gather enough data that is meaningful and useful to the audience, and present it in a short enough timeframe that isn’t distracting, or it doesn’t create a whole host of other questions.
Rob: Right. We have all these questions and then it’s like, “Alright and now our first speaker.” And people are like, “No wait, I want to hear more. That was in the middle of it. I’m so confused.” What’s up with Bluetick?
Mike: Oh, let’s see here.
Rob: Oh, that? What’s Bluetick?
Mike: What’s that? Could you spell that? I need to Google it real quick while we’re on a call.
Rob: What’s the news on that? I’m sure people want to hear it. Have you been working on it? Are you too bogged down with MicroConf stuff?
Mike: I’ve been so bogged down with MicroConf stuff and all sorts of other things going on. I think we talked about it a little bit in the last episode or the one before that. Just the timing of MicroConf and lots of other things that are going on has been so incredibly bad that I have not had time to look at it. Last week I had to sit down for a day or two and look at renewing my health insurance, because I think most people renew their health insurance at the beginning of the year and mine’s up for renewal on April 1st. I and had to call them and I’m just like, “Look, this is really bad timing.” They’re like, “We need to have this paperwork in by the 1st. Otherwise, it’s going to renew at the current rates.” I’m like, “Dear god.” It’s the worst timing.
Rob: I don’t renew my health insurance. What does that even mean? You have to reapply and fill out paperwork? I’ve never done that.
Mike: They change the plans every year. I don’t know whether this happens for everybody. They change the insurance plans that are available and the rates for all of them change as well. Sometime they will move things around. It’ll change the prescription coverage, or they’ll change what is covered under a particular plan, or they’ll change copays or which hospitals they cover. It’s just like, “Dear god, this sucks.” I have to renew by April 1st or basically, I just don’t have coverage.
It will automatically renew but because of the timeframe, I have to look at it now and figure out whether what I’m going to be doing now is the right thing or not. I was like, “Well, what about an HSA account or something like that?” They said, “Well, in order for you to do an HSA account, we have to give you entirely new plans because these are not HSA certified.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” Then there’s like a health savings account which is not…
Rob: Wait, that’s not HSA. You’re FSA, flexible spending account.
Mike: I think that’s it. Yeah.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. All these terms that are very close to one another that I’m not familiar with because I’m not in that industry. I’m just like, “I’m so confused. Why do I have to learn this right now and have 10 minutes to do it?” Like I said, it’s just bad timing and lots of major things all in a very compressed timeframe and it sucks.
Rob: You’ve been doing health insurance, taxes, prepping for MicroConf, right?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: And so Bluetick is just kind of ‘blue ticking’ along?
Mike: Yeah, basically. I mean aside from the things that I talked about the last couple weeks. The webcast I’m going to be doing. That’s scheduled in late April. I’ve been doing little things here and there trying to move things along. I’ve also been doing research on the backend framework that runs Bluetick. Maybe this is a good time to talk about that, or maybe we should talk about it in the future episodes. I talked to Andrew Culver briefly about it because he is the founder Bullet Train which is essentially a framework that you can use as a starting point for your app whatever it happens to be. He takes care of all of the fundamental things like sign in, password reset, Stripe integration, and all these things. Basically, you start plugging the logic of your application.
When I was first building Bluetick and started out, I couldn’t really find anything like that, but I did find an open source project where they said, “Hey, here’s the MIT license for this,” or whatever, “and you can use this stuff.” It looked like it was pretty decent it’s just it didn’t do everything that I needed to do, and then you’re seeing some of the same library. I based a lot of stuff in on it, imported some of the code, but then there’s obviously a divergence there. They did their own thing and I did mine.
I went back and looked at it and it’s much farther along than it was at the time, and more advanced in certain cases which would actually make it easier for me to use that and plug in more functionality, but the database tables don’t line up. I’d have to port things over and deal with that stuff. I’m just like, “Is it worth it?” I’ve done a little bit of exploration there, but by porting it over would give me all the core functions or the features of just like a SaaS application would be taken cared of for me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about them. I just don’t know if I have a good sense of how long it would take to do that or whether it’s worth it. It maybe something I just do it over time and not necessarily worry too much about it.
Rob: I think the question I asked is like, to me, your number one goal right now is more paying customers. It’s ensure problem-solution fit, ensure product-market fit, and more paying customers, and this doesn’t do that. I know that it makes longer term, it’s a good call. If you run this app for 10 years, 20 years, then yeah, it’s good to be on a framework assuming that they maintain it. But I think that’s pushing off the number one priority which is get more people in your funnel, close more deals, get more revenue because that’s really the point you’re at. Just my take.
Mike: I totally agree with that. That’s why I haven’t tried to bite the bullet and actually do it. There are certain issues that the app has in terms of team accounts and things like that. I’m just like, I don’t want to go down the path of some of those things right now until I have more customers and more revenue because it’s just not—I don’t want to say it’s not important—it’s not the top priority.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: At some point, I’ll do it, but I have a hard time doing it now.
Rob: I would agree. There’s always a lot of distractions like that. I think we talked about last time where customers give you more things or even you have more great ideas and you can never implement. You, as part of being a founder and making the right choice, is picking the ones that are going to have the most impact for you. It’s like, “What are you trying to impact now?” To me, it’s your top line, or bottom line, or however you want to phrase that.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Cool. I guess in the interest of time, we’ll wrap up here in the next couple of minutes. There’s some new stuff at TinySeed but it’s in that weird phase where we have all these applicants and I’m interviewing a lot of them. I’m having fun doing it. It’s super busy and then like you, trying to get taxes done, prepping for MicroConf. My talk is not done and I fly out basically in 48 hours. I know. The dirty little secret of you do enough talks, and you find that you’re closer and closer to your deadline.
I remember Dharmesh Shah at BOS years ago; it was probably a decade ago now. We were talking and we’re both doing a talk that year I believe. I might’ve been doing like a lightning talking and he was doing a full one. Anyways, he said, “Yeah, I’ll start my talk at 11:00 tonight,” and he did it the next day. I was like, “What? I’ve been prepping for weeks.” I was obviously much earlier in my conference speaking than he was. He said, “Yeah.” He typically sits until three in the morning and just writes his talk all at once the night before and that that’s kind of his best way to work.
That’s not mine because I don’t like staying up that late, but I do find that the pressure of having to get it done often forces me to really focus and ship good material. I can burn dozens of hours over the course of weeks if I have all this time to write the talk. Now the practice of it I think is another thing. I think having more time to practice does improve the talks. Off to figure out some good times to do that.
Mike: That’s something I kind of struggle with too is, getting the talk done early enough to be able to also do a lot of practice. I don’t know about you, I have little hacks and stuff that I put in a bunch of my slides where if I’m going through it—and I have a couple bullet points—if there is a bullet point that has a period at the end of it, then I know that hitting the button again goes to the next slide and things like that. Most people wouldn’t catch those types of things, but there’s little things that I use as visual indicators for myself to know what’s coming next, or to pay attention to a certain thing, or make a certain point.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the last thing for me is with TinySeed. As with any startup in the early days—here’s the difference actually is, nowadays, if I were to start a new company that’s going to build a software product, I would go to Stripe Atlas and I would form an LLC or a C-Corp through their one click thing and it creates a bank account that does all these stuff. It’s a solved problem now. I know that you’re then going to need some other paperwork as you hire employees and stuff. There’s gusto and there’s benefits. There are ways that have simplified it.
It’s not there yet with starting an accelerator and essentially an investment fund. The nature starting those is not as refined. You go straight to law firm, and you’re forming multiple LLCs that reference one another, and there’s just a lot of complexity there. Luckily, Einar, my cofounder with TinySeed, has taken care of most of that. But there have just been a few points where I’ve been involved in conversations as we’re trying to get term sheets nailed down and stuff. I had one simple question about changing one word to make things clearer and it wound up being this 10 email back and forth that got more and more complicated.
I don’t know if I wasn’t explaining myself well, but it was one of those moments where I finally said, “I give up. It’s just going to have to be complicated on the dock because to change it from pre-money to post-money would require a huge paragraph, and all these exceptions, and this huge bulleted list in what is otherwise a 10-word sentence right now.” If we do pre-money, then it’s 10-word sentence. If we do post-money, I think based on what he was telling me, I couldn’t actually understand, it just [inaudible 00:36:04] out of control. That’s the kind of stuff that is so frustrating to me as someone who is trying to get things done.
I was trying to send things to people three days ago and then it winds up being this back and forth back. We were going to jump on the phone, I know it would have helped, it would’ve been the same conversation that happened via email. I think the perpetual frustration of being a founder is, you always have these things that are just outside of your control or maybe your expertise. They get complicated and they become time sucks beyond what they should I think. I’m learning when to just throw my head up and say, “I’m going to give up on this one. I’m not going to fight this anymore. I’m not going to waste anymore time.” I think as a younger entrepreneur, I wasted a lot of time fighting against things like this rather than eventually just saying, “Look, it doesn’t really matter. Just do it the way it is.”
Mike: You raged against a machine when you were younger?
Rob: Indeed I did, over and over.
Mike: I think that that type of problem happens in general when you start a business. There’s going to be certain things that are out of your control and it sucks because you want to move fast and you want to get them done. At the same time, I think that one of the issues that you’re running into is that, when it comes to legal terminology, there’s hundreds of years of history of legal things that have happened, and there is precedence that has been set. When you say one word versus another word, it can drastically change how that is interpreted in the eyes of the courts. It sucks to have to deal with that stuff.
I don’t want to say it’s exactly like programming because with writing code, you have to be very explicit about what you wanted to do, and then what the exceptions are. But with legal terminology, there’s always—I don’t want to say ambiguity—but there’s different ways to interpret the exact same words. It kind of sucks sometimes.
Rob: Yeah. It is what it is. I know that people out there are probably not in their head. It’s like taxes, legal stuff, there are others. I don’t know, plumbing code in your SaaS app. It’s things that don’t move your business forward.
Mike: You said plumbing code and I thought the actual plumbing pipes.
Rob: That too.
Mike: [inaudible 00:38:09].
Rob: It’s stuff that doesn’t move your business forward.
Mike: Right.
Rob: That’s all I have to say. We should probably wrap it up for the day huh?
Mike: Yeah, I think so.
Rob: Most of our episodes are not this casual. We answer a lot of listener questions as well as dive into detailed and interesting startup topics. If you have a question for us call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?
Rob: I just felt like we haven’t done kind of a casual episode in a while where you and I talk about things that are going on. We often get stuck in this odd place where we might have a lot going on, but it’s not necessarily stuff you can talk about or feel comfortable broadcasting to tens of thousands of people. I feel like we’re in a good place, we’re obviously pre-recording this episode because it’s going to go live after MicroConf—I think the week after—and we’re recording it the week before just because so much is going on that whole week. Since we do Growth and Starter now, I mean the week is just torched for me. When do you fly out and when do you fly back?
Mike: I fly out on Friday. I get in at like 8:00 PM or so on Friday night and then I don’t leave until the following Friday. I think my flight is at 12:00 PM or 1:00 PM or something like that.
Rob: Yeah. It’s a full on week for you. I go Saturday to Friday. It’s only six days but still, A, six days, seven days in Vegas is too long. B, pretty much the whole time—I don’t know about you—but all I’m thinking about is, what am I forgetting? What am I missing this year? Oh yeah, we need that opening slideshow for the first 10 minutes of each conference. I need to update that. There’s all these little things and then stuff just really ramps up Sunday. Honest question, do you sleep very well at MicroConf typically?
Mike: I haven’t slept well in 4-5 years so it’s not a really fair question.
Rob: Yeah, you’re the wrong person to ask. I tend to sleep well. I don’t have many sleep problems in general aside from grinding my teeth which is irritating as heck for Sherry. At MicroConf I always struggle and I think it’s just how much I have going on in my mind. I wake up at 5:00 AM and I got to make sure to do that one thing or to tell that to that one person who needs to be at that one place at that time. There’s just a lot of details.
Xander has changed the game for us absolutely. But even then, I’m still thinking about stuff. Frequently what happens is I think of it, “Oh yeah, we need to do that one thing.” Then I wake up in the morning and I text you and Xander and Xander’s like, “Yeah, I already took care of that a week ago.” That’s actually the most often thing, but it still wakes me up in the middle of the night.
Mike: I think when I am in Vegas for MicroConf, I tend to actually sleep better I think when I’m there than when I’m at home, but that’s also I think partially a result of me remembering to bring a sleep mask because otherwise, the blinds of the hotel rooms are absolutely horrendous. You flip and shut but any hotel I’ve ever been in, they’re never very good so you have to have something else.
It feels like it gets so light so early and it just screws me because I tend to be up late and then the light comes and wakes me up in the morning. That’s the biggest problem I think I have. I agree with you in like having all those little things that are hanging out, they come up and you have to remember that, “We have to do this. I have to go back and tweak that from last year’s slides,” or whatever. That obviously comes up just constantly.
I carry around a pen and a notebook at all times just so I can make sure to write things down as they’re happening, or keep track of what has to go on with different sponsors, or different times of each conference. There’s just lots of little things to keep track of and trying to keep them in your brain is just not going to happen.
Rob: Yeah and that’s a good point too, because in my day-to-day workflow, I use email a ton. I use Trello. I just have a system that all goes out the window when I’m at MicroConf because I’m not checking email very much at all and I’m not looking at my Trello board. I have email to Trello basically. If you and I are talking in day-to-day or I’m at a dinner party and someone mentions a book I should read, or a something I should check out, a website, a person I should contact, whatever, I pop open Gmail, I email my own Trello board and it goes to the top of it. The next time I sit on my computer, I put it into the right queue. It’s an Amazon wish list, or an Audible wish list, or I fire off an email or whatever.
I don’t do that at MicroConf because I’ve just not checked my Trello board at all. That pen and paper approach you’re talking about, it’s either that or Simple Note because I have Simple Note on my phone. I just open up like a MicroConf-only to-do that I have to keep referring back to because I just find that my systems don’t work when we’re just running 110% for five days straight.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. That’s why I kind of switched over to the pen and paper. One of the things that tends to drop down on my list is the email and text notifications, though text notifications are different than Slack notifications. I totally don’t pay attention to it. You’re right though, being in a different environment like that where you’re not at your desktop, you don’t have all the tools available to you because you’ve just got so many other things going on, and you’re not really able to get into any sort of deep work because you don’t have your desktop, or laptop, or whatever. It’s just a very different operating environment.
Rob: Do you still use a desktop, Mike?
Mike: I do.
Rob: Are you going to bring that with you to MicroConf?
Mike: No, I’m not. I think the 30-inch monitor would probably be hard to get through.
Rob: For the love of god man, why do you use a desktop at home and not a laptop?
Mike: I have yet to find an actual laptop that I like and like enough to take with me, that’s part of it I think. I built my desktop from hand, because I’ve always kind of built my own computers even back when I was in college. I like the hardware that went with it but at the same time, because I built this 5-6 years ago, actually no, it’s more than that because I just recently reformatted everything, but I didn’t replace any of the hardware. I’m trying to remember, I think I found a software that was installed like 2010-2011. Most of the hardware is that old. I think it’s a hex core machine. It was a top of the line Core i7 at the time. I’ve got 64 gigs of RAM in it and SSD drives. The thing is it’s still a beastly machine all things considered.
Rob: Given that it’s 10 years old or 9 years old I guess, that’s a trip. I guess my question is and it’s going to die eventually. It’ll either fail or it’ll just be too slow to run stuff. When that happens, are you going to buy or build another desktop or you just kind of pony up for top of the line, because you’re in Windows right? It’s top of the line Dell, or HP, or whoever’s making Lenovo these days.
Mike: Yeah. For a while, I’ve been using a MacBook Pro and just ran VMware on top of it.
Rob: Dual booting or VMware. Are you going to just buy a high-end MacBook?
Mike: I don’t think so. I have not heard anybody have great things to say about the newer Macs. Everybody I see talking about them kind of hates them. They’re like, “I wish I could go back to the 2013 model.” Funny enough, I actually have a 2013 MacBook Pro. I use that when I travel, but I go back and forth on this. I think the biggest thing for me is, in order to be productive, I feel like I have to have more screen real estate available to me. I run three monitors at all times. One of them is a 30-inch and a pair of 20-inch monitors. That really works well for me. Going to a laptop kind of sucks. I looked at like the Surface Books…
Rob: You can do that because I run two monitors, two 24-inch or whatever off of my laptop. My laptop is one monitor and it’s retina so it’s amazing, and then I have the two 24s, so I essentially have three. How is that different than what you’re doing?
Mike: It’s not, except that on the one laptop that I was looking at was the Microsoft Surface Book and it doesn’t have the ability to do three monitors at 60 hertz because of the bandwidth limitations or something like that for 4K monitors. They’re so close, they really are.
Rob: That’s the limitation. I wonder if there isn’t a laptop out there—you don’t need to drive three monitors, you just need to drive two because the laptop itself if it’s high-res, you can use that in the center. I have an elevated thing. My laptop is up at eye level, and then I have a remote Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I sit on my lap, basically on a panel, that’s the center monitor and then I have two on the other side. I just need to drive two. A, will that situation work for you and B, can you find a windows laptop that can drive two 4K monitors?
Mike: I haven’t tried doing that yet. Would it work for me or could I make it work for me? I probably could, but your comment about, “Oh, eventually my machine is not going to be able to do it.” My machine’s lasted long enough. Since that time, processors haven’t gone to six or seven gigahertz. I don’t think it’s an issue of that so much as just being able to have the laptop itself. I don’t have a justifiable reason to just go drop $3000-$4000 on a new laptop.
Rob: I agree and I don’t think you should do that now. I was just wondering when your desktop fails because it will. Something’s going to happen or it’s going to get too slow in the next five years. It’s not going to last 15 years. I was just wondering what you were going to do at that point, but maybe you’ll evaluate it when you get there.
I guess the thing of just working on a laptop all the time is then when you’re traveling, you’re not in this weird environment where you don’t have your stuff and it’s not the way it is. I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro and it is the new one with the touch bar. I don’t love the touch bar but I’ve gotten used to it. When I’m at home, I have extra screen real estate it’s amazing. When I’m on the road, I don’t but you can flip back and forth between the windows and I have the exact same shortcuts, icons everywhere, the same files, everything. It’s the same hard drive.
To me, traveling isn’t this big issue. I hate switching computers I guess is what I’m saying. I figure that’s why most people have moved to laptop so they can be mobile and go to a coffee shop or do something and it’s not this step down, aside from screen real estate, it’s not a step down in productivity. That’s all I was wondering for you.
Mike: That’s something I look at. My preference I think would be able to have a laptop that can do everything that I want and needed to do and that I just have a docking station. Just plug it in and everything’s the same. I can go on the road, or go to a coffee shop, or something like that, but I don’t work well or at least I haven’t historically worked very well in coffee shops or remote locations. It’s partly because I have back problems.
For me to sit at a coffee shop or in some weird chair that doesn’t do a good job of distributing my weight, I have kind of a hard time just sitting there and trying to be productive because I’m just sitting there in pain more than anything else. Maybe that’s part of why it doesn’t matter nearly as much to me as it probably would to somebody else. But I do want to at some point be able to switch and just say I just grab the thing and go, and that’s my entire environment, and nothing’s changed, I don’t have to worry about any of the stuff that you talked about where syncing things back and forth.
Most of the time for the current setup I have like, I have a MacBook Pro but then I have a windows VM that’s running on it. I reinstall all the software there. It’s a very similar environment. It’s not exactly the same, but anything that needs to be there, I just keep it in Dropbox, or Google docs, or something like that. It’s not that big a deal and Chrome keeps all my bookmarks in the same places. It’s not nearly as painful as it probably was 10-15 years ago.
Rob: That’s what I was going to say. With Dropbox and being able to sign in to Chrome and have your browser. You’re in your browser a lot of the time anywhere unless you’re writing code so it is nice. We were talking about MicroConf and we veered into that. I’m pretty stoked man. You’re running a little mini campaign fifth edition D&D on Saturday.
Mike: I am. I’m looking forward to that. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s already kind of laid out. I have just a couple of things I got to send you guys. I have to do that in the next day or so. It should be good. I almost wish I could talk a little bit more about it because I think it’s going to be interesting. I’ve actually run it twice so far. It’s not like everything is completely new. There are certain places where I know that there’s a few issues to iron out, but I think I’ve got them all straightened out. I took all of your characters and I gave them to other people and said, I want you to play these characters and I wanted to see how things kind of shook out. I’m hoping it’s well prepared.
Rob: That’s cool. If you’ve done it multiple times, to me it’s like a conference talk. The second, third, and fourth time I do a talk, it just gets better and better until to the point where I get bored of it, and it starts getting worse. I think you’re still on the upswing with this campaign.
Mike: Yeah. We’ll see. I mean it’s just a simple one shot. I expect it to take maybe three—like both times I ran it before, it’s taken four hours. I got to come and tighten that in somehow.
Rob: A little bit, yeah.
Mike: I have an idea of how to do that, I’m not sure you guys will like it though.
Rob: To kill it, do a TPK.
Mike: No. Well, I could do that. The very first room you walk into, “Hey, nobody dies. Let’s go get a beer.” I was thinking something along the lines of like a timer or something like that would be like, “Hey, this is kind of timed here, you’ve got to go a little bit quicker than you normally would.” I don’t know.
Rob: There’s a nuclear bomb waiting to go off and goes off of you if you don’t get this done. Is this campaign something you came up with or is it like a module?
Mike: It’s a module. Somebody ported it from fourth edition to fifth, and then I ported it from that platform because it was made for Fantasy Grounds which allows you to play D&D online. You get tokens and stuff to drag around and stuff, but the module itself because it was ported from fourth edition to fifth edition, it’s got errors in it. That’s why I wanted to play it a couple times in advance because the very first time I run it I was like, “This is a problem. That’s a problem. This is wrong like flat out.” They’re referring to things that just simply don’t exist and the authors never went back and fixed any of it. It’s like, “Well, what’s my interpretation of what it should be or how it’s supposed to be?”
Rob: It’s going to exciting and for folks who don’t know, it’s fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons that we’re talking about which is the current edition of that. You and I have never gamed together before, so this would be kind of cool. Frankly, I got out of D&D until 4-5 years ago when my oldest son got old enough to start playing, then I had the impetus to get into it again. Did you also take a bunch of time off from it and recently get back into it?
Mike: When I graduated from high school and went to college, I think I played once once or twice. I played once in college that I remember and I might have played over the summer the year after I went to college or something like that with some friends back home. But like you, I took a bunch of time off and I started again. When they first published fifth edition, I bought the books as they came out. When those were published I think back in 2014, this was about five years ago, that’s when I got back into it and started rereading stuff.
I basically skipped from the second edition all the way to the fifth and know very little about the third and fourth editions other than what I’ve read about what the differences are between those and the fifth edition. Just because some people I play with have played the version three and I didn’t know much about it. I was trying to educate them about what the differences were, but most of the people I play with now, they’ve either played second edition or they’re kind of new.
Rob: I did the same thing. I played basic back in the early 80s and then played [inaudible 00:15:39]. When the first edition AD&D came out, we played that. I don’t think I ever played second edition, never played third or fourth. When I got back into it, let’s say 4-5 years ago, I Googled, “Coming back into D&D. I’m going to teach my kid. Should we play first edition because that’s what I’m most familiar with or is fifth edition good?” There were some really cool threads talking about the pros and cons of it.
In the end, people are like, “Fifth edition is a better,” not better, that was not the word they used, but it’s a faster rule set. The game moves quicker. It’s easier to understand for someone who’s never played it and there’s tons of new stuff being put out for. You can do either one, but consider checking out fifth edition. It’s nice that the rules are available for free. There’s a PDF that Wizards of the Coast lets you down. I downloaded it and I was blown away by the simplicity and how they’ve gotten rid of all of descending armor class, and all these tables to hit, and saving throws and stuff and it’s just come down to difficulty checks with advantage and disadvantages. It’s just really elegant to me—elegant simplifications of things.
I know folks who are used to the old stuff, adapting something new is like changing programming languages from SEED to Ruby or something, seed.net where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is such a different paradigm.” Even if it might be more elegant or whatever, it doesn’t feel that way because it’s different. When I was 10, 12, or 14, I just had hours and hours to pour into it, invented our own stuff, and read every book, but I just don’t have that time now. It’s like, “Look, I have two hours a week maybe three hours to hammer something out. What’s fast and what’s fun to play?”
Mike: Now you can go online and there’s like random dungeon generators, and random character generators, and all the stuff, they’re fantastic tools that streamline things. I remember I used to spend an hour or two creating a character and now you can just go and use one of these tools, and you can have a character done in 10-15 minutes tops. That’s just fantastic.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: I agree. I love the fifth edition rule set overall the other ones over the basic edition, the AD&D first edition, and second edition just because I think the biggest thing that I think it has going for it is that your character will get more powerful as they level up, as opposed to depending so much on items and things like that in order to make you more powerful. That’s the thing I think I disliked the most about some of the previous editions, because you could just make somebody completely overpowered at a super low level just by giving them a bunch of magic items. Whereas with this one, you’re competitive every step of the way with no magic item which is kind of awesome.
Rob: Right, it makes sense. I know we can talk about D&D. This could be a casual D&D conversation with just Rob and Mike, or tabletop gaming. Folks who don’t play D&D might have already tuned out. Those two listeners are gone. I have a question for you. Have you ever been to a conference where the opening 10 minutes, where the host gets on stage and talks about things, sets the stage so to speak, for what’s going to happen during the conference. What’s the best one of those you’ve ever seen? Have you seen any that have blown you away, I think. Obviously, the reason I’m asking you is, we have adapted ours over the years especially last year changed, the whole slide deck changed, the format changed, and stuff. I’m just trying to think about the best way to keep improving that.
Mike: I don’t know about best. I would say the most interesting one I ever saw—and I wasn’t there personally for this—I’m think this is a little bit of secondhand information. I was there the year after and I think that as a result of that previous year, things have changed in terms of policies of the company. It was at a Altiris conference back in, I want to say 2007-2009 timeframe, or something like that maybe it was even slightly before that, but the founder of the company came in through the back, and went through the aisles, and up on the stage riding a motorcycle.
Rob: Okay. Let’s talk to Xander, and on Monday, I want you to do that.
Mike: Sure. I do have my motorcycle. I could do that theoretically.
Rob: Fantastic.
Mike: I think we may need to update the insurance, and waivers, and various other things.
Rob: And all the things, yeah, and rent a motorcycle, and get the drop to let us drive it through the hall. Alright, so that’s not helpful. That was completely unhelpful.
Mike: That’s my job here I think, to be completely unhelpful.
Rob: Exactly. Doing it 438 episodes since 2010—being unhelpful.
Mike: Yeah. I don’t know what the most interesting thing is. I mean I’ve been to conferences where the founder of whatever the business is, will come out and then give a really good opening talk or presentation, and it talks about the future, but it’s not like a 5 or 10 minute intro. It’s usually the keynote speech or something like that.
Rob: It’s a keynote, right. It’s an actual talk. Obviously, at MicroConf, for folks who haven’t been, you and I get up and we have between 10-15 minutes right at the start of the conference where we welcome everybody, we talk about what MicroConf is, we go through a breakdown of attendees, and stages they’re at, and that kind of stuff. It sets the stage for where we’re headed. Because it would be weird if everyone shows up at 10:00 AM on Monday and you and I get up and we’re just like, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jason Cohen, Chris Savage,” or whoever our speaker is and they get up on stage, because it’s not a program, it’s just a disjointed speaker after speaker. There’s no context for all of it. That’s why we’ve always done the welcome of like, “Welcome.” I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of something that’s not a keynote per se. We could do whatever we want. We can’t do it this year because the schedule is already set but next year, you and I could…
Mike: Are you looking for something different like to change it up in terms of saying how can we do this differently, or just looking for ideas of what other things, or are you just looking for validation of, “Is this the best thing for us to do or not?”
Rob: I think we should do it. I don’t think that’s part of the conversation of us not getting up there. It could be super weird if we weren’t there to welcome the people. Someone has to be there. I think we should do something. I think what we did last year was better than what we have done in prior years. I just am looking, is there anything else we can add to that to make it even better. That’s what I’m thinking about.
I think the best one I’ve seen was at SaaStr. Jason Lemkin got up and talked for maybe 15 minutes. It wasn’t a keynote, it was kind of like the state of SaaStr. He talked about the conference, and he talked about their community, and he talked about their fund, and it really was just an overview. It’s like when you think about writing a 10-page paper. You start high level, and then you dig in deep, and then at the end you come back to high level to conclude, and that’s how I think we structure MicroConf.
We have that introduction that really is this high level context setting, and then at the end, we should wrap it up with context and stuff, and we even have to structure the talks that way. We don’t tend to put a super tactical talk as the first talk on Monday because the vibe is off if you do that. That’s it. I think I might try to think back to what SaaStr’s opening was like and see if there’s any elements of that that could apply to us. We are similar to that opening and that we do set context, but I think there’s just ways to do it better.
Mike: What we do is we set context for the attendees at the conference. An idea that comes to mind—and obviously, there’s zero time to do that for this year—this is actually something that I have had an idea of the within the past couple of years like, “Hey, it would be cool if somebody kind of headed this up.” Not that I really had the time to do it, but it’s something that either we could potentially put together because of the audience and community.
But as you said, kind of give the state of self-funded entrepreneurs, or the state of SaaS applications, or the state of software in general for extremely small software companies like ours. Give a 10-15 minute overview of, “Hey, this is some of the major changes that have kind of come out over the past year. This is how things are progressing. These are things that are going on in the industry that people should kind of either be on the lookout for or be careful of. These are some opportunities that you guys might want to think about.” As opposed to what we do right now which is welcome them to the conference which I do think we still need to do that. But I also think that it would be nice if there was this extra piece there that was kind of an opening that did set the stage for other stuff. I think what that would actually probably take is doing interviews with founders, or calls, or surveys, and things along those lines to help gather information from the community to be able to compile that and show it to them.
I did a talk in MicroConf Europe in 2016 that I basically did that. I asked people for information and say, “Hey, could you submit this?” I’m basically writing a talk about it. I included a bunch of that information, but it’s not something I could potentially do like every single year so I just didn’t keep it up. I think something along those lines could be helpful and useful for the audience.
Rob: Do you know what the name of my talk is on Monday afternoon? You have not looked have you?
Mike: You know, I don’t even know the names of all the speakers.
Rob: I know. Well, we do keep a firewall between speakers and sponsors. Literally, we were talking last week I guess and I said, “Yeah, I don’t know.” I know some of the sponsors because there’s a lot of them returning, but I tend to wait until a day or two before to look through all the sponsors. Because this is our editorial firewall. Advertising versus editorial, we don’t link those two up. I don’t want that to influence decisions.
Mike: Right.
Rob: But the name of my talk is, The State of Bootstrapping in 2019. It’s not exactly what you are talking about, but I am trying to give that overview and talk about trends, and what’s happened over the past 10 years. I mean, you saw my Europe talk from eight months ago, or six months ago. It’s an expansion of that.
Mike: That would be cool. I mean obviously, you don’t want to do a one hour talk at the very beginning like that.
Rob: Exactly.
Mike: I don’t know how you would condense your talk into 10-15 minutes. That’s the other thing I think I would struggle with is how to gather enough data that is meaningful and useful to the audience, and present it in a short enough timeframe that isn’t distracting, or it doesn’t create a whole host of other questions.
Rob: Right. We have all these questions and then it’s like, “Alright and now our first speaker.” And people are like, “No wait, I want to hear more. That was in the middle of it. I’m so confused.” What’s up with Bluetick?
Mike: Oh, let’s see here.
Rob: Oh, that? What’s Bluetick?
Mike: What’s that? Could you spell that? I need to Google it real quick while we’re on a call.
Rob: What’s the news on that? I’m sure people want to hear it. Have you been working on it? Are you too bogged down with MicroConf stuff?
Mike: I’ve been so bogged down with MicroConf stuff and all sorts of other things going on. I think we talked about it a little bit in the last episode or the one before that. Just the timing of MicroConf and lots of other things that are going on has been so incredibly bad that I have not had time to look at it. Last week I had to sit down for a day or two and look at renewing my health insurance, because I think most people renew their health insurance at the beginning of the year and mine’s up for renewal on April 1st. I and had to call them and I’m just like, “Look, this is really bad timing.” They’re like, “We need to have this paperwork in by the 1st. Otherwise, it’s going to renew at the current rates.” I’m like, “Dear god.” It’s the worst timing.
Rob: I don’t renew my health insurance. What does that even mean? You have to reapply and fill out paperwork? I’ve never done that.
Mike: They change the plans every year. I don’t know whether this happens for everybody. They change the insurance plans that are available and the rates for all of them change as well. Sometime they will move things around. It’ll change the prescription coverage, or they’ll change what is covered under a particular plan, or they’ll change copays or which hospitals they cover. It’s just like, “Dear god, this sucks.” I have to renew by April 1st or basically, I just don’t have coverage.
It will automatically renew but because of the timeframe, I have to look at it now and figure out whether what I’m going to be doing now is the right thing or not. I was like, “Well, what about an HSA account or something like that?” They said, “Well, in order for you to do an HSA account, we have to give you entirely new plans because these are not HSA certified.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” Then there’s like a health savings account which is not…
Rob: Wait, that’s not HSA. You’re FSA, flexible spending account.
Mike: I think that’s it. Yeah.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. All these terms that are very close to one another that I’m not familiar with because I’m not in that industry. I’m just like, “I’m so confused. Why do I have to learn this right now and have 10 minutes to do it?” Like I said, it’s just bad timing and lots of major things all in a very compressed timeframe and it sucks.
Rob: You’ve been doing health insurance, taxes, prepping for MicroConf, right?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: And so Bluetick is just kind of ‘blue ticking’ along?
Mike: Yeah, basically. I mean aside from the things that I talked about the last couple weeks. The webcast I’m going to be doing. That’s scheduled in late April. I’ve been doing little things here and there trying to move things along. I’ve also been doing research on the backend framework that runs Bluetick. Maybe this is a good time to talk about that, or maybe we should talk about it in the future episodes. I talked to Andrew Culver briefly about it because he is the founder Bullet Train which is essentially a framework that you can use as a starting point for your app whatever it happens to be. He takes care of all of the fundamental things like sign in, password reset, Stripe integration, and all these things. Basically, you start plugging the logic of your application.
When I was first building Bluetick and started out, I couldn’t really find anything like that, but I did find an open source project where they said, “Hey, here’s the MIT license for this,” or whatever, “and you can use this stuff.” It looked like it was pretty decent it’s just it didn’t do everything that I needed to do, and then you’re seeing some of the same library. I based a lot of stuff in on it, imported some of the code, but then there’s obviously a divergence there. They did their own thing and I did mine.
I went back and looked at it and it’s much farther along than it was at the time, and more advanced in certain cases which would actually make it easier for me to use that and plug in more functionality, but the database tables don’t line up. I’d have to port things over and deal with that stuff. I’m just like, “Is it worth it?” I’ve done a little bit of exploration there, but by porting it over would give me all the core functions or the features of just like a SaaS application would be taken cared of for me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about them. I just don’t know if I have a good sense of how long it would take to do that or whether it’s worth it. It maybe something I just do it over time and not necessarily worry too much about it.
Rob: I think the question I asked is like, to me, your number one goal right now is more paying customers. It’s ensure problem-solution fit, ensure product-market fit, and more paying customers, and this doesn’t do that. I know that it makes longer term, it’s a good call. If you run this app for 10 years, 20 years, then yeah, it’s good to be on a framework assuming that they maintain it. But I think that’s pushing off the number one priority which is get more people in your funnel, close more deals, get more revenue because that’s really the point you’re at. Just my take.
Mike: I totally agree with that. That’s why I haven’t tried to bite the bullet and actually do it. There are certain issues that the app has in terms of team accounts and things like that. I’m just like, I don’t want to go down the path of some of those things right now until I have more customers and more revenue because it’s just not—I don’t want to say it’s not important—it’s not the top priority.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: At some point, I’ll do it, but I have a hard time doing it now.
Rob: I would agree. There’s always a lot of distractions like that. I think we talked about last time where customers give you more things or even you have more great ideas and you can never implement. You, as part of being a founder and making the right choice, is picking the ones that are going to have the most impact for you. It’s like, “What are you trying to impact now?” To me, it’s your top line, or bottom line, or however you want to phrase that.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Cool. I guess in the interest of time, we’ll wrap up here in the next couple of minutes. There’s some new stuff at TinySeed but it’s in that weird phase where we have all these applicants and I’m interviewing a lot of them. I’m having fun doing it. It’s super busy and then like you, trying to get taxes done, prepping for MicroConf. My talk is not done and I fly out basically in 48 hours. I know. The dirty little secret of you do enough talks, and you find that you’re closer and closer to your deadline.
I remember Dharmesh Shah at BOS years ago; it was probably a decade ago now. We were talking and we’re both doing a talk that year I believe. I might’ve been doing like a lightning talking and he was doing a full one. Anyways, he said, “Yeah, I’ll start my talk at 11:00 tonight,” and he did it the next day. I was like, “What? I’ve been prepping for weeks.” I was obviously much earlier in my conference speaking than he was. He said, “Yeah.” He typically sits until three in the morning and just writes his talk all at once the night before and that that’s kind of his best way to work.
That’s not mine because I don’t like staying up that late, but I do find that the pressure of having to get it done often forces me to really focus and ship good material. I can burn dozens of hours over the course of weeks if I have all this time to write the talk. Now the practice of it I think is another thing. I think having more time to practice does improve the talks. Off to figure out some good times to do that.
Mike: That’s something I kind of struggle with too is, getting the talk done early enough to be able to also do a lot of practice. I don’t know about you, I have little hacks and stuff that I put in a bunch of my slides where if I’m going through it—and I have a couple bullet points—if there is a bullet point that has a period at the end of it, then I know that hitting the button again goes to the next slide and things like that. Most people wouldn’t catch those types of things, but there’s little things that I use as visual indicators for myself to know what’s coming next, or to pay attention to a certain thing, or make a certain point.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the last thing for me is with TinySeed. As with any startup in the early days—here’s the difference actually is, nowadays, if I were to start a new company that’s going to build a software product, I would go to Stripe Atlas and I would form an LLC or a C-Corp through their one click thing and it creates a bank account that does all these stuff. It’s a solved problem now. I know that you’re then going to need some other paperwork as you hire employees and stuff. There’s gusto and there’s benefits. There are ways that have simplified it.
It’s not there yet with starting an accelerator and essentially an investment fund. The nature starting those is not as refined. You go straight to law firm, and you’re forming multiple LLCs that reference one another, and there’s just a lot of complexity there. Luckily, Einar, my cofounder with TinySeed, has taken care of most of that. But there have just been a few points where I’ve been involved in conversations as we’re trying to get term sheets nailed down and stuff. I had one simple question about changing one word to make things clearer and it wound up being this 10 email back and forth that got more and more complicated.
I don’t know if I wasn’t explaining myself well, but it was one of those moments where I finally said, “I give up. It’s just going to have to be complicated on the dock because to change it from pre-money to post-money would require a huge paragraph, and all these exceptions, and this huge bulleted list in what is otherwise a 10-word sentence right now.” If we do pre-money, then it’s 10-word sentence. If we do post-money, I think based on what he was telling me, I couldn’t actually understand, it just [inaudible 00:36:04] out of control. That’s the kind of stuff that is so frustrating to me as someone who is trying to get things done.
I was trying to send things to people three days ago and then it winds up being this back and forth back. We were going to jump on the phone, I know it would have helped, it would’ve been the same conversation that happened via email. I think the perpetual frustration of being a founder is, you always have these things that are just outside of your control or maybe your expertise. They get complicated and they become time sucks beyond what they should I think. I’m learning when to just throw my head up and say, “I’m going to give up on this one. I’m not going to fight this anymore. I’m not going to waste anymore time.” I think as a younger entrepreneur, I wasted a lot of time fighting against things like this rather than eventually just saying, “Look, it doesn’t really matter. Just do it the way it is.”
Mike: You raged against a machine when you were younger?
Rob: Indeed I did, over and over.
Mike: I think that that type of problem happens in general when you start a business. There’s going to be certain things that are out of your control and it sucks because you want to move fast and you want to get them done. At the same time, I think that one of the issues that you’re running into is that, when it comes to legal terminology, there’s hundreds of years of history of legal things that have happened, and there is precedence that has been set. When you say one word versus another word, it can drastically change how that is interpreted in the eyes of the courts. It sucks to have to deal with that stuff.
I don’t want to say it’s exactly like programming because with writing code, you have to be very explicit about what you wanted to do, and then what the exceptions are. But with legal terminology, there’s always—I don’t want to say ambiguity—but there’s different ways to interpret the exact same words. It kind of sucks sometimes.
Rob: Yeah. It is what it is. I know that people out there are probably not in their head. It’s like taxes, legal stuff, there are others. I don’t know, plumbing code in your SaaS app. It’s things that don’t move your business forward.
Mike: You said plumbing code and I thought the actual plumbing pipes.
Rob: That too.
Mike: [inaudible 00:38:09].
Rob: It’s stuff that doesn’t move your business forward.
Mike: Right.
Rob: That’s all I have to say. We should probably wrap it up for the day huh?
Mike: Yeah, I think so.
Rob: Most of our episodes are not this casual. We answer a lot of listener questions as well as dive into detailed and interesting startup topics. If you have a question for us call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups.
Episode 384 | Bluetick Marketing Plan Teardown
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about the Bluetick marketing plan. Mike breaks down his plan in three categories, one-time, ongoing, and long-term. The two go back and forth on the most effective strategies for each category.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Bluetick
- FemtoConf
- Price Intelligently
- Product Hunt
- CSS Gallery List
- LeadFuze
- Whitetail Software
- Zapier
Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are gonna be doing a teardown of the Bluetick Marketing plan. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 384.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: I’m Rob.
Mike: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How are you doing this week, Rob?
Rob: I’m doing alright. I was just looking through our 584 worldwide iTunes reviews. We’re approaching 600 people, 16 more and we’ll be crossing that 600 mark, which is quite a milestone. Some recent reviews, there’s one here form just last week, from […] and he says, “Great podcast, been listening for years.” One from Mr. Man Man from the UK, he says, “Full of great practical advice. Discovered the show recently and now a regular listener. Extremely valuable advice for anyone who wants to build tech products.” Limons from the US says, “Every episode is invaluable. Somehow Mike and Rob ensure that every episode has at least one and usually a ton of valuable info. I love the presentation style and how much they pack in. I don’t think anyone just started tech business without listening to this podcast.” Thank you very much for those.
You can log into iTunes, or Stitcher, or Downcast, or Overcast, and leave a five-star review without even typing in all those crazy technical words and phrases and sentences. Just hit the five star button and it will go a long way towards helping us stay motivated to record the podcast. Also, helps us grow our audience which convinces us to keep doing every week, to ship every Tuesday, as they say.
How about you? What have you been up to aside from-so you lost power. People know I did a solo episode last week. How was that with no power and no water?
Mike: Oh, that sucks. It was about a day or so that we lost power. We lost it, I think, at around 10:00 o’clock or 11:00 o’clock at night and then we didn’t get power back until probably 6:00 or 7:00 the next day.
Rob: It’s tough.
Mike: Yeah, it sucks. The real hard part is that with no running water either because we have a well and the water comes up through the well with the electricity that powers the pump. We actually have some giant jugs of water that we keep downstairs just in case we do lose power or something happens with our water because we’ve had issues with our pump as well. You lose your pump and you can’t have any running water which is surprising, you use it a lot but you never ever think about of what would happen if I didn’t have water today or what would happen if I don’t have electricity today. It’s just inconvenient to say the least.
Rob: Right. I’m glad you’re back. You went to Germany recently.
Mike: Yup. Went to FemtoConf which was pretty awesome. I had a great time. There were probably about 40-50 people there. There were some issues with a few people getting into FemtoConf just because they were flying in from the Eastern US. Of course the snow storm came through and hit the New England area so some people were delayed, some people just didn’t get there at all. Travel for a few people was kind of a mess. Fortunately, I flew out on Thursday and got there and kind of recovered, no real major issues with jet lag. But I really like the feel of it.
It was a lot like MicroConf when it was much, much smaller. Just much smaller groups, intimate conversations very much like MicroConf. The feel of it and the vibe was very reminiscent of that, I’d say in the very, very early days of MicroConf 2011-2012 when you didn’t necessarily know everybody or you’re just kind of getting introduced to what other people’s businesses were. There were a couple of talks on the first day. Then the next day Sherry gave a small workshop. Then we split off into a couple other ones where Alex Yumashev from JitBit did one on kind of like engineering growth hacking that you could do. Then Mojca Mars gave one on Facebook Ads which I went to that one. She went through and basically set everybody up with their Facebook Ads account, walked them through exactly how to get things started, and kind of helped them figure out what it was that they needed to do moving forward.
Rob: That sounds super cool. There was just one or two talks a day?
Mike: On Saturday there was four talks and then on Sunday there was Sherry’s workshop in the morning, and then there were two other workshops after that. Thomas Smale from FE International was supposed to be there, so there was supposed to be two workshops, and followed by another two workshops. It kind of run simultaneously in different rooms but because Thomas couldn’t make it, Sherry ended up doing one for everybody, and then the other two were split. First speaker on Saturday was Claire Suellentrop who’s also going to be speaking at MicroConf in a couple of months.
Actually, what’s that? Six weeks away right now? Claire spoke first and then it was followed by Aleth, she spoke about GDPR, and then I spoke about email follow-ups, and then Patrick Campbell, he was one of the people who was delayed, he spoke about modifying your pricing and how to figure out what an ideal pricing model should be for your business, and then using it as one of the biggest growth leverage in your business. I think I got a lot out of that talk because I’m kind of right in the middle of evaluating pricing and figuring out what to do with it, and how to pitch it to people.
But he also pointed out the fact that SaaS has gotten substantially more competitive over the past several years. He had graphs and charts to show the number of competitors, the people that started five years ago had versus people who started two years ago versus people who started last year. It was just fascinating the amount of data that he had on that based on all the stuff that they do for Price Intelligently.
Rob: Yep. His talks are always super valuable and have a lot of data. It sounds like a lot of fun, man. Sherry was there, obviously. Told me about it and said she enjoyed it as well and said there was a ton of overlap with the MicroConf crowd. I think she said most people go to one of the MicroConfs which is fun. It’s fun to get together in almost a more mastermind-y arrangement. I know it’s not that small but I bet you kind of know everybody and know what they’re up to and you can literally talk to everyone at the conference.
Mke: Yeah. If you don’t know them before you get there then it’s easy to at least have those conversations and get to know them by the end of it.
Rob: For sure. Cool. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Well, I had asked a few people what they wanted to hear on the podcast. One of the biggest things that came out of it was what is going to be the initial marketing plan for Bluetick now that the new website is up and running. I wanted to talk about that and kind of just go back and forth, and giving I guess a high level indication of what I’m going to be doing. And then you and I can talk about either specifics of it or vet some ideas around or even just tear some of these ideas apart, and say, “Look, don’t do this,” because more than happy to hear some of the advice that you have to share.
Rob: For sure. I know I had shared with you at one point the Drip marketing game plan and the HitTail one actually. The HitTail is a little bit out of date but did you look through that, at all, to populate this list you have?
Mike: Some of those things are pulled from there. I haven’t gone back to either those in a while. I probably should do that at this point. Most of what I’ve been doing lately has been really focused on either MicroConf or getting the new website up and running and now that that’s in place and things are settling down a little bit with MicroConf, I can go back and take a look at those. But some of these things are pulled from that.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. One thing I would consider before we dive in, you have it broken down into two categories, kind of, “I’m gonna do these things now,” and then my longer term things. Maybe you do them over as you get time or as you get budget. Something I would think about is to even have one before now or to split the now into two buckets is to have one-time things and on-going things. One of your bullets here is product listing sites, like product on beta list, and I would even go so far as to say all the CSS Galleries.
There’s 50 different things; there’s getapp.com, there’s Capterra, there’s AppStorm, there’s this whole list that you can put together. Those are truly gonna be one-time things. I think it might help your mental model of like, “Okay, gonna do those once. Gonna get the heat of traffic.” Even podcast store is kind of a one-time thing. You’re not gonna do that for a year whereas webinars, joint webinars, and that kind of stuff I think is more on-going. Does it help for you to think about it like that?
Mike: Yes. In Teamwork I have a project that’s specifically called Bluetick Marketing that just has lists and lists of things there. I’m looking at it now there’s probably 20 different lists in here and there’s about 162 different to-do items in there. One of them is specifically one-time marketing tasks. Things like going into the Chrome Web Store and looking to see if there’s anything that can be leveraged there, submit into the Google Apps Marketplace. The products listing sites, inside of that various accounts are different places, and documented certain processes, etc. Mostly just one-time things that I need to do it once or is it’s a task that needs to be done but the output of that could then be leveraged over and over again.
Rob: Okay, that makes sense. What I’ve done is update the list a little bit and I just kind of threw some things that’s called one-time and then we have on-going, and then a later list. Will that work for you?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Let’s see. Let’s dive in.
Mike: You wanna go straight into the now sort of things?
Rob: Yeah. Let’s talk about the one-time things because I think that these are things that I have all of my marketing plans. But specifically, I’m gonna keep talking about HitTail and Drip because that’s when I formalized this and put it into a doc. I really thought through where are the places that I can get a bump now that I’ve launched. It’s like the website’s live, every time I try to get written up on Venturebeat, and Techcrunch, and ReadWrite web, and GigaOM when it existed, all these things. It never worked but at least I tried it. I was trying to get some type of buzz.
Then there are the ones that are easier or guaranteed. It’s like startupli.st and BetaList, and makeuseof.com, all the things we just talked about, like Producton and that kind of stuff. You’re almost guaranteed to get a listing even though it might take a while to do. I think if you ever venture back, maybe those little-oh, and CSS Galleries is the other one. If your site is good enough and is a custom-design, I realize yours is probably more templatized, but always got a lot of traffic with HitTail and Drip from the CSS Galleries.
Did it convert amazingly well? No. But did it to convert to some trials for almost zero effort because in essence I would have a VA or I think I may have even hired a service at one point because there are like a hundred different CSS Galleries. I think there was someone who productized it and I paid $99 and submitted some info and they submitted it to all of them. To me, that’s a great zero time $99 investment because if you get one or two trials, depending on your price point, that pays it off.
That’s how I always entered it. I think if you ever venture back then need to make a bazillion dollars then maybe these kind of little initial approaches could be a waste of focus or a waste of time but I think given that every trial counts for you, I think those things are important to do. Chrome Web Store is the other one you said in the Google Apps Marketplace. I had zero look with the Chrome Web Store. What’s the difference between the Chrome Web Store and the Google Apps Marketplace?
Mike: I’ll be honest, I don’t know. I’d have to go and take a look at that. I think the Chrome Web Store was specifically for Chrome plugins. At one point, I had on my list of things to put into Bluetick like a small Chrome extension. Obviously, it never materialized. It’s not that it’s not a road map, it’s just I didn’t get there. I don’t know if that’s even viable or something that I could do because they may just say, “No, you have to have an actual Chrome extension to be able to put that in here.”
Rob: Yeah, that’s what it is. While you were talking, I went to the Google Apps Marketplace. It’s now called the G Suite Marketplace. If you integrate essentially into the G Suite, it also looks like you can just integrate with Gmail as well. Since you do that and neither Drip nor HitTail did, I never submitted to the Google Apps Marketplace. That would an interesting distributing channel.
On the Chrome Web Store I did get a minimum Drip and HitTail in and it had zero traction. But I’m not saying it’s not worth the time but it didn’t do anything. It’s pretty crowded in there now. It’s kind of like the iOS app store I think about, in the early days it was a lot easier to get found. I know that PipeDrive said that a lot of their early growth came from the Chrome Web Store but that was a different time. It was five years ago or whatever. It’s one of those things where you have to create some images and you have to create some XML and you have to submit it and it will take you probably half a day to do. You gotta wait if you wanna do that or not. It depends on what else you have going on.
I would probably lean towards doing it just because it is one more distribution channel and you could get lucky but I think it’s not as high priority as pitching podcasts as an example, because that’s gonna have a really high success rate for you.
Mike: Right. The other thing that comes to mind is going through the process of putting out on all those products listing sites. It contributes to long tail SEO as well.
Rob: Yeah, that’s right.
Mike: It contributes to your page authority and Google will see all those lengths coming in and just building those backlinks is kind of important.
Rob: Yup, I would agree with that.
Mike: You said CSS Galleries, fill me in on this because this is something that hadn’t even crossed my mind.
Rob: The only reason that they even came on my radar is when I acquired HitTail–no, it wasn’t HitTail. It was a different site. It was a productized service I had. It was called CMS Themer, CMS Themer at the time.
Mike: I remember that.
Rob: Yeah. It had a really nice design and it would get quite a bit traffic from CSS Galleries. The interesting thing is CMS Themer was really targeting designers and so that traffic converted very well. I’ve just always made it part of the marketing plan. Obviously, it doesn’t convert nearly as well when it’s an app like HitTail or Drip, but again, this posted a link into our docket. It’s cssgallerylist.com. For $60, they submit to hundreds of galleries. For $60 and almost no time it’s worth it for the backlinks, it’s worth it even if the traffic doesn’t convert, it’s just another channel to get out there. Again, the last time I did this was five years ago, there maybe a better resource than this cssgallerylist.com but I do know that I used these guys and it saved me a lot of time.
Mike: Yeah, for sure.
Rob: This is not something that’s gonna grow your business overnight or be some huge game-changing thing but it’s just all these little parts of the snowball that you’re kind of turn the pack on and then seeing which ones get you any kind of traction.
Mike: Right. I think the important thing to keep in mind when going through this stuff is that every little bit helps and you don’t always know that any one link is going to contribute anything but if it gets one person over and the ROI on that is gonna be almost no way to calculate that but you may get three people over and one person converts. It’s not a 33% conversion rate for that obviously but that can help.
Rob: That’s right. Have you considered how you could do an ‘ask me anything’ on Reddit or you could do a Show HN where you say, “Hey, here’s this business. It doing…” whatever the revenue is, or I don’t know if you can be vague about that or not, but I don’t know how you wanna handle it. Then basically say, “I’ve grown it to this. Give me your feedback,” or whatever. Have you thought about that? I don’t know if that’s worthwhile or if that’s just a big waste of time.
Mike: I have. I’m in a couple of Facebook groups. That was suggested to me a couple of months ago via somebody that said, “Hey, you should do an ‘ask me anything’ on Reddit.” I put it on my list but it wasn’t something that kind of rose, I’ll say, close to the top of things that I thought were, not necessarily game changers, but in terms of weighted priority, I didn’t feel it was something that would help out a lot.
Rob: It’s tough. If you’re marketing directly towards developers, then it would make more sense.
Mike: Right. If it was something like ‘ask me anything’ on growthhackers.com for example, that’d be a totally different story. That’s something that I probably should add to the list to be honest.
Rob: Oh, I think you should, yep.
Mike: Anything else in terms of one-time activities that come to mind that’s not on this list?
Rob: I was just trying to think about that. On startups.com, answers that are on Startups used to be kind of a place but I don’t even think that exist anymore. The bummer about Quora is that it’s really not a one-time thing. What I would do with a one-time thing is set-up, subscribe to some topics, there’s probably a cold email, or even just email. You want email sales, you want the email sales channels not the email marketing channel because email marketing tends to be bulk email and that’s not what you’re doing.
I would subscribe to categories or topics that fit your thing so that you’re notified when questions are asked because you wanna be an early answer. You don’t wanna go on a bunch of old Quora threads and add your answer because those threads already have a bunch of up votes and you’re not likely to be the answer that shows for everybody because that’s really what you want. I did that in the early days of Drip. It’s a bit time-consuming but what I found was the questions that come through tend to be so far into your wheelhouse, that they’re really easy to answer.
Even if I type a couple of paragraphs, it just flowed out. I didn’t have to research because it was things like, “What are approximate open right rights? What’s a good open right for a list?” It’s like, “Well, I actually know what the range is. Here, I’ll talk it through.” It’s gonna be stuff that these questions for me would be tough to answer because I’m not knee-deep in this warm email engagement the way you are. Anyways, I would consider as the one-time part of that just subscribing and seeing how it shapes out.
Mike: Yeah,that’s interesting being able to rattle off some of those numbers right off the top of your head. Because it’s part of my talk that I did for FemtoConf. I looked specifically into that and looked across 70,000 emails that had been sent out through Bluetick and looked to see what the open rates were and what the response rates were across those, and then I cross-sectioned them and got the average, the best case, worst case, across everybody’s accounts. It was interesting what the numbers came out to be and then asking the audience I said, “Hey, here is a number, what do you think is this in terms of the open rate?” It was about, I’d say a third of the audience got it right which means that two-thirds did not which indicates that these numbers are, I’ll say, a little bit obscure or opaque and not everybody knows that they are.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense.
Mike: I think a couple of other things that come onto this list is, I don’t know if they’re one-time or you would classify them as one-time, but like a podcast tour, for example. I feel like it’s something that you can do it once when you start and then if you’re going to try and do it again you have to have something compelling to follow-up with, I’ll say.
Rob: I do think of a podcast tour as a one-time thing but it’s not as one-time as say CSS Gallery submission, but it’s gonna move the needle more than them. CSS Gallery and the BetaList and all that stuff. I just posted a link to whitetailsoftware.com and Robert Graham had that pre launch email list building directories. We can include that in the show notes but I think you have 50 or 100 that he had his VA submit to, so that’ll help as well. But all that to say, podcast tour is gonna take several months because you’re gonna email and get scheduled, and by the time it comes out, it’ll be months down the line.
I think the big thing, the advice that I would give when doing a podcast tour is it would be easy for you to just go on a bunch of entrepreneur podcasts and say, “Look, I launched a product. I’m building this SaaS product.” You’ll convert some of those, it’ll be a low conversion rate. The audience who’s gonna convert the best for you is gonna be folks doing sales. It’s gonna be folks both doing cold outreach and then doing the warm nurturing that Bluetick allows you to do, this stuff that comes right out of your inbox and looks very personable. It’s not bulk email like MailChimp or Drip but it’s the one-on-one connecting whether it’s cold or warm. Who’s doing that, right? This is BDRs and salespeople. I know some of those are also founders but I don’t think that’s gonna be your market.
I think initially, you can get SaaS founders, and you can get our audience, and the MicroConf audience, and not crew. It’s good to talk about it here. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go on Mixergy and talk about it but compared to the size of that audience, the conversion rate is gonna be pretty small. The podcast that I would target that I think are gonna be your low-hanging fruit, is to go on podcast that are talking about sales, and talking about tech sales, selling SaaS apps is probably the B2B sales approach.
You can come on not to tell the story of your product but you can pitch it as, “Look, I’m an expert in this because I’m in it day-to-day and I’m seeing dozens or hundreds of customers who use our product and I’m seeing the patterns. I’m seeing the successes and how they’re doing it well. I see the failures and the mistakes people are making.” Does that make sense? I would definitely go after that space rather than focus on the founder and entrepreneur space.
Mike: Yeah, it totally makes sense. That was actually my hesitation, I’ll say, of doing that because I didn’t think that approaching those, the startups community would be something that will really resonate. Like you said, I’ll get some sales out of it but it’s not gonna be a high-converting channel for me.
Rob: Yeah, in all honesty, I will probably do both but I would start with the sales folks, the sales podcast. We both know at least a dozen people who have podcasts that I’m sure you could come on and talk about some aspect of your business. Try to vary it because we have this small community and so if you go on all the podcast of our friends and talk about the same thing on every podcast, everybody hears it, there’s only so many people in it. I will try to suggest different topics, different aspects. If you could talk about the launch on one, you could talk about the stress on another, you could talk about marketing approaches on another.
I do think that is still worthwhile because it’s easy for you to do because you’re used to doing podcasts and it’s 30-45 minutes of your time once it’s booked. It’s not actually that much of a time investment to be in the earbuds of likely several thousands or tens of thousands of people, but as I said, I do think I would start with trying to assess out what are kind of some B2B sales podcast that I can get on?
Mike: The interesting thing about that is there’s two different ways that I could approach that particular problem of going out to the people who are running those podcast. One of them is send directly into Bluetick and let Bluetick follow up with those people. The other one is that there’s a company I’ve stumbled across that will take kind of what your requirements are for appearing on podcast and will go out through the different network of podcasts that they have contact with, and essentially pitch you to them. I’ve mixed feelings on doing that, to be perfectly honest, but at the same time, there’s a time component that it’s gonna suck up some of my time to do it myself but in many ways, it comes across better if I do it myself.
Rob: Yeah. That’s hard. There is a balance because we get a lot of pitches on this show and on Zen Founder. If it’s not the person pitching themselves, I tend to delete them, that’s just a thing. I do glance through them but I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone on the show who wasn’t pitching themselves. When I had an executive assistant who is doing stuff back in the Drip days, when I was still running the business, she could email people as me, look straight out of my inbox, and so you could develop the pitch and have someone else send it as you. But it just depends on what you wanna do. I don’t know but I don’t have a good answer for that.
Mike: But again, at that point, I could just put it through directly into Bluetick and have Bluetick send out the email.
Rob: That’s true. Ta-da. That’s cool.
Mike: It’s interesting because occasionally, when I’ll email people whether they contacted me to ask me something about Bluetick, occasionally they’ll have heard the podcast and they’ll ask in their email as to whether or not it was sent from me personally or whether Bluetick sent it. I’m just, “If you can’t tell, doesn’t that speak to what the product does?”
Rob: Right. Does it matter? Yeah, that’s funny.
Mike: Does it matter?
Rob: We’ve talked at length here about the one-time upfront things. You have nice list of the things that you plan to do on an on-going basis, why don’t we look at a few of those?
Mike: Sure. The things that pop-up high on my priority list-actually, you know what, now that I’m looking through this, one of the other things that is on the on-going list should probably be moved over into one-time is the public Zapier integration.
Rob: Oh, yeah.
Mike: I’ve got a private integration right now but I’ve not taken it public and that’s something that I’ve been asked about a couple of times by Zapier. I just haven’t done it yet to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of edge cases that either are not handled well or I know that there’s other changes that need to be made and I’d rather make those changes before I open it up than have to fix a bunch of other stuff. Because there’s some things that I do some manual data manipulation just to make sure that things are working right for certain customers. I need to put a more permanent solution in place for those.
That’s something that after going through the process, I believe they put it out through their mailing list. I forget what their mailing list is but it’s something like 1 million people or something like that, something ridiculously large. The conversion rate is not gonna be high but it’s more about driving awareness than it is about converting people at that point.
Rob: Yeah, you’re just trying to get the word out so people have heard of you at this point. One other one-time thing that I would do, it’s not a marketing approach, but I would set up Google alerts for relevant terms that you wanna monitor like company names of competitors, try to hear about like articles I think are relevant or conversations that are relevant, you have to use your judgment there but I do think getting something setup so that your kind of participating or at least aware of what’s going on in your space is helpful.
Mike: Yeah. I have a couple of them set up right now but it’s mainly for Bluetick. What I find is I’m getting a lot of emails about dog conversations that are happening.
Rob: Yeah, I could see that.
Mike: I guess if we’re gonna jump right into the ongoing stuff or the short term things that I was looking at, the first on my list is webinars.
Rob: Yep. Are you planning, because right below that you have JV webinars.
Mike: Right. I wouldn’t say I lumped them together but I think the general process is going to be similar for them whereas with the webinars, there’s joint webinars and there’s just the regular webinars. The regular ones are ones that I was probably gonna promote to my own email list and then maybe do one on a regular basis or promote it on a Tuesday every other week or something like that. And then with the joint webinars those would be much more scheduled where I’m leveraging other people’s audiences and contacting influencers and see if they’re interested in having me come and talk specifically to their audience about how Bluetick can solve a particular problem for them. I see it almost like the podcast tour but with a little bit more, I’ll say, pinpoint accuracy or a little bit more focused specifically on those people because I don’t wanna go pitch somebody and say, “Hey, can I just do a joint webinar with you?” But not actually have something that’s gonna be valuable to offer to their audience.
Rob: Right. I would the joint webinars before I try to do internal webinars because it is such a nice way to reach out beyond your own audience. Just through doing webinars to your own list, you’re gonna one and then you’re not gonna fill anymore, you know what I mean, until you get more people either using your product or on your email list. We tried early on with Drip to just run Facebook ads, get people to opt into a webinar, and we’re gonna try to run one every week, and we just couldn’t get people to show up at a price that was worth it for us.
Again, not saying it’s not possible but it’s an entire funnel that you have to develop. It’s gonna take you quite a bit of time and money to do whereas the JV webinars is a low-hanging fruit for you, because JV webinars is about who you know. You do have a good network of people who I think you could contact and have access to their audience right away, basically for free, without running all the ads and developing a funnel. It’s just conversations. I’d definitely prioritize the joint webinars above do your own.
Mike: How would you structure any sort of special offers for those people going to a joint webinar? There’s a lot of discussion and I’ve thought about this myself. I was like, do I wanna offer a discount or I wanna give additional services or special templates like, “Hey, you can only get this here because you’re coming to this particular person’s webinar.” My concern is really putting a lot of extra effort into something that-at the end of the webinar, it may turn out to be nothing. I may not get very many sign-ups out of it or I may get a lot but I don’t know. It’s hard to predict how much time and effort to make things custom for that person’s audience. You know what I mean?
Rob: Yeah, I do. I would lean heavily towards some type of bonus and it’s time-limited. You say, “Hey, free to sign up in the next two or three days, then you get this extra thing.” whether it’s a discount or the thing that you billed. Discounts are the lazy way to do it. It’s like the zero time way but it chews through your money. If you have no time, absolutely no time, then yeah, give people a discount, but discounts are not exciting. They’re not as exciting as like, “Get this complete email series,” even if it’s only three or four emails, my guess is, you can crank that out just using copy+paste from what you’re using already or from what you’re recommending to people and just edit it for their specific niche.
If you talk to a bunch of freelancers then it’s like, “Here’s the way they follow-up and do it for freelancers.” A lot of it is gonna be the same as any other sequence you have but you’re just gonna tweak a few things. I’m guessing, in about half an hour you could probably crank something like that out. You don’t even need to do that in advance of the webinar because if you don’t get sign-ups then you just don’t build it. But if you get sign-ups using that coupon code then you just manually reach out to people because it’s not like you’re gonna get 500 sign-ups. You’re gonna get 10, or 20, or 30. It’s gonna be a small amount. You can just hit people up and distribute that to them. I’m thinking of something like that. It’s high value for someone signing-up but it’s pretty low effort for you to create.
Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. I think right now when you go and sign up, I was probably gonna pull this off as things progress, but when you go and sign up right now, there’s kind of an offer there that basically says I’ll create an email sequence for you based on whatever scenario you describe and that will be your first sequence. It’s kind of concierge onboarding but I’ll say it’s probably not very well described in the website right now but it is something that I just offer to people as they come to sign up.
Rob: Yeah. If you get 30 sign-ups at a time that’s gonna get tough. I think you’re gonna have to stop doing that because it’s too time-intensive. You have to back off as you start getting more sign-ups.
Mike: Right.
Rob: What else? You have direct follow-ups with the following; invite to demos, you have current mailing list, prior prospects which I think is good, and personal LinkedIn contacts.
Mike: Yep. I have a couple of different spreadsheets based on when I was doing early validation. Some people said, “Hey, now is not a good time. Maybe later on when you’re further along.” And then there’s people who have come in and I’ve done a demo with them and things just didn’t work out for whatever reason, or they sign-up but they never followed through or they used it for a little bit, and then they said, “Yeah, this isn’t working out for me.” I’ve got this pool of people that I can go to that fit into that criteria, that I can put them into a Bluetick sequence, for example, and invite them to come back and check it out or go to a demo or something like.
But in addition to that, I also have the mailing list that is in the Drip account which I have been putting on the website where there’s an email course that you can go through. It’s like a 5-day course which I’m in the process of copy+pasting all the content all of that to make it a slightly longer course. But those people that I can go to directly, I can take them out of Drip and then plug them into Bluetick, and individually follow up with each of them. I could do that based on lead score for example and just sort them by lead score and then add them in in that order and say, “These are the people that I’m gonna approach first versus these are all the people who are probably, I’ll say, less interested, but still on the list.”
Rob: Yeah. I think that’s a good idea to kind of approach. I was definitely gonna say anybody who’s cancelled in the past, if the product’s a lot better than when they’ve tried it, you definitely wanna contact them. Prospect who haven’t converted, people who’ve been paywalled because they don’t wanna give their credit card, now is the time when you’re doing this to just circle back and clean all that out.
The personal LinkedIn contacts, you gotta use your judgement there, you don’t wanna come off as… I’ve never done that but if you know someone who really should value out of it and you do a very soft pitch like, “Hey, just to let you know I just launched this. I thought it might be helpful.” Not anything that’s forceful like, “Jump on a call. Jump on a call.” Then, I think, it’s halfway reasonable.
Mike: Yeah. I wasn’t planning on doing that. What I was gonna do was go through my LinkedIn contacts and just look. Obviously, I’m gonna hand pick which ones i’m gonna contact and which ones I’m not. I’ve got people who I know are software developers or they’re engineering managers, or something like. They’re really not a good fit for it but that doesn’t mean that I can’t go to them and say, “Hey, I just wanted to check in with you and see how are things going, and let you know I just recently launched this. If you know of anyone who could use this, I’d love an introduction just to kind of help me out.” I’m leveraging my personal relationships at that point.
Rob: I could see doing that. I just added a couple things to the list. Actually, you have retargeting on there, mostly Facebook. I think it says Facebook primarily, I think that’s a really good idea to get set up whether you use perfect audience, you have the display networks like Google and stuff already, you just tick Facebook and it gets probably a material but I think you should get that set up pretty quick. That’d be probably towards the top of my list. Do you already have the pixel installed?
Mike: Yep.
Rob: Okay, good.
Mike: yeah, I’ve had that in pixel installed for a while. But then, the reality there is, I’ve put it under ongoing because there’s a one-time piece of setting it up and there is the follow on activities where you go in and you analyze how much traffic you’ve brought in, do you have a critical mass yet, what kind of advertisements you’re doing. It’s kind of two different components to that but I do find that even with my two-step process for the sign-up, you put in your email address and password, and it takes you over to a credit card page, and there’s people who don’t fill that out.
Obviously, those people, I wanna follow up with anyway but I also wanna make sure that people who come to the iste and then go over there but never even fill out that first page, I still wanna be able to retarget those people to bring them back. Because obviously, they were interested enough to go look at the signup page but they didn’t actually sign up.
Rob: I think in the interest of time here because we’re running pretty long today. I think you should consider-paid acquisition I have written here, it’s a tough one. It all depends on if you have budget and if you have time to sit there and test a bunch of stuff, so something to consider, maybe it goes on your later list but it’s definitely if you can get it to work, it’s really, really good. Cold email outreach, you have the tool to do it, nice to use your own tool. You can go to something like LeadFuze and get a list of people, and start doing the outreach yourself, or you can hire someone to the outreach for you.
We had mixed results when we did Drip but it definitely drove enough trials that have made it worth spending. We were spending money on it at that time and it definitely had positive ROI for us. Integration Marketing which is you just think of all the top 10 integrations that you would wanna have and think about trying to get either in their director. If it’s Stripe or Basecamp, they’re probably not gonna co-promote with you because they’re so big but they have these integration directories. Or if they’re a little bit smaller, if they’re a startup, they’ll probably have a list and are willing to email out and promote you. That requires dev time, of course, so it has to be worth your while.
But that was something we did 30 something integrations with Drip and it makes a lot of sense with a tool like Drip because it it a hub of data and so we integrated with a bunch of shopping carts and all types of marketing tools. That both helped our customers but it also really helped to start to get traction and kind of be everywhere in their early days. I think those are the other three I would throw out that you may wanna do sooner rather than later.
Mike: Yeah. I’ve already been asked by people about integrating directly into Bluetick using the API and I’ve kind of pushed off mainly because I know that there are parts of the API that are still changing, so I haven’t really structured it in a way that says, “Hey, this is available for you to use and it’s pretty solid versus these other pieces where you shouldn’t touch it.” I had a conversation with somebody at FemtoConf where they said they actually have three different versions of their API published. One of them was for them internally, and then there’s another one that’s a public API, and then they have special endpoint specifically for Zapier. It’s interesting they split theirs out and I think it makes a lot of sense as well. It’s just a matter of rearranging some things a little bit to allow people to do that and say, “Hey, this area is solid. This area is off-limits or don’t touch them.”
Rob: Yep, that makes sense. Anything else that you wanna pull out of here? Either in ongoing? It looks like you have a couple more and then you have some stuff for later?
Mike: Yup. The one idea that have come to mind that somebody had mentioned to me at FemtoConf was the idea of having Bluetick offered as sort of a managed service for x thousand dollars a month. Then they’ll send all of their contacts over into Bluetick and then, it’s my responsibility to make sure that things are running smoothly for them so that they don’t have to go in and manage anything which, if you set up a lot of the automation and stuff, you don’t have to worry about that, but there’s also ongoing tweaking, A/B testing, or making sure that, “Are these numbers any reasonable ballpark of what they should be?” If you’re getting a low open rate, for example, how would you necessarily know unless you’re looking at all the other data. I have access to that but other people don’t. Those are the things that I can provide a lot of additional value for customers but they don’t necessarily have access to it on their own if they just signed up.
Rob: Yeah. That makes sense. There’s a risk with managed services because they can just suck up a bunch of your time and also the revenue is not worth nearly what a SaaS revenue is in terms of a multiple-whether you’re gonna raise funding or whether you’re gonna sell or whatever. If you have a bunch of consulting revenue, it’s worth like 1X, 1X the revenue versus actual recurring revenue, it’s a different story. I shouldn’t say recurring. It’s higher margin revenue where if it’s software it has 70% or 80% margin. If it’s consulting it has what, 10%, 20%, 30% margin. It’s something that I would consider in the early days but it just matters what cash position you’re in. I think you would do it for the cash and not really for the long term prospect of the company because I don’t think you wanna grow a big kind of productized service long term.
Mike: No, I agree. The way I was gonna structure it was like, “Hey, here’s a managed service that if you wanna subscribe to you can,” and it’s either a three-month or a six-month contract, and then that’s it. If I decide to continue offering it then they can continue paying me for it but if I decide that we’re not gonna do this anymore, then things are kind of pushed back. It wouldn’t be something that you can just go to the website and buy off the shelf but it’d be limited three to six months contract or something like that. You’re right, it would absolutely be for improving cash flow for example, but it would also put a solid number on, “Hey, what is this particular customer going to be worth to me in the next three months or in the next six months.” Does that make sense?
Rob: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. Certainly trying it with one customer is not gonna hurt much. That’s the thing, is to see how much-if it’s valuable to them, if it’s workable for you, and obviously if you do it for 10 or 20 people, you’re getting yourself in pretty deep but you don’t have to do that. You can just dip your toe and then figure it out.
Mike: Yeah. I was gonna do it for probably one to five. The other nice thing that I thought that would deliver to me is the ability to work hand-in-hand with those customers and see what exactly what it was that they’re trying to do as opposed to, “Hey, here sign up to Bluetick,” and then after that, I don’t really have a ton of visibility into their business or exactly what challenges they’re trying to solve. I know generally what they’re trying to do but I don’t get that insight or I don’t have calls with them to really see on a weekly basis like, “Hey, what are you really trying to get out with this?” I think that those insights would actually help me build a better product longer term.
Rob: One of the thing I see on your later list that I like, that I don’t think we’ve covered, is you have this library of email templates, lead gen, and you use this as a lead gen to acquire email addresses? I think that’s intriguing both for the SEO and you can always run ads to it, you could retarget to it and you’re basically giving something away. I think that’s gonna take a ton of time for you to set-up. It’s a little more complicated than it sound but I’m glad you have it on your later list so at least, in a few months, once you get some of these other ones done, you can move into that, and start thinking about how to shape that up.
Mike: Right. The other nice, I’ll say, by-product of doing that is that, I could create those inside of Bluetick as a library where you can when you create your account, you can just select from a bunch of them, kind of a similar to the way that Drip has those pre-made blueprints for different situations, this would be exactly that. Like, “What situations have I run into with different customers that they’re trying to get a response or get the customer to take an action? What sorts of things work? What sorts of things don’t? What sorts of approaches do you wanna try?” You can almost categorize them. It’s like, “This is extremely aggressive versus to do the exact same thing to get somebody to a call. This one is much more laid back and hands off, and it depends on the situation whether it’s cold email versus a warm email with somebody who’ve had three or four conversations with us.” Which one you would use?
Rob: Cool. Well this was a good run. Thanks for bringing this on the show. I had fun talking about it. I’m guessing we’ve provided quite a bit of value for the folks who are thinking about this kind of stuff.
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Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: I’m Rob.
Mike: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How are you doing this week, Rob?
Rob: I’m doing alright. I was just looking through our 584 worldwide iTunes reviews. We’re approaching 600 people, 16 more and we’ll be crossing that 600 mark, which is quite a milestone. Some recent reviews, there’s one here form just last week, from […] and he says, “Great podcast, been listening for years.” One from Mr. Man Man from the UK, he says, “Full of great practical advice. Discovered the show recently and now a regular listener. Extremely valuable advice for anyone who wants to build tech products.” Limons from the US says, “Every episode is invaluable. Somehow Mike and Rob ensure that every episode has at least one and usually a ton of valuable info. I love the presentation style and how much they pack in. I don’t think anyone just started tech business without listening to this podcast.” Thank you very much for those.
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How about you? What have you been up to aside from-so you lost power. People know I did a solo episode last week. How was that with no power and no water?
Mike: Oh, that sucks. It was about a day or so that we lost power. We lost it, I think, at around 10:00 o’clock or 11:00 o’clock at night and then we didn’t get power back until probably 6:00 or 7:00 the next day.
Rob: It’s tough.
Mike: Yeah, it sucks. The real hard part is that with no running water either because we have a well and the water comes up through the well with the electricity that powers the pump. We actually have some giant jugs of water that we keep downstairs just in case we do lose power or something happens with our water because we’ve had issues with our pump as well. You lose your pump and you can’t have any running water which is surprising, you use it a lot but you never ever think about of what would happen if I didn’t have water today or what would happen if I don’t have electricity today. It’s just inconvenient to say the least.
Rob: Right. I’m glad you’re back. You went to Germany recently.
Mike: Yup. Went to FemtoConf which was pretty awesome. I had a great time. There were probably about 40-50 people there. There were some issues with a few people getting into FemtoConf just because they were flying in from the Eastern US. Of course the snow storm came through and hit the New England area so some people were delayed, some people just didn’t get there at all. Travel for a few people was kind of a mess. Fortunately, I flew out on Thursday and got there and kind of recovered, no real major issues with jet lag. But I really like the feel of it.
It was a lot like MicroConf when it was much, much smaller. Just much smaller groups, intimate conversations very much like MicroConf. The feel of it and the vibe was very reminiscent of that, I’d say in the very, very early days of MicroConf 2011-2012 when you didn’t necessarily know everybody or you’re just kind of getting introduced to what other people’s businesses were. There were a couple of talks on the first day. Then the next day Sherry gave a small workshop. Then we split off into a couple other ones where Alex Yumashev from JitBit did one on kind of like engineering growth hacking that you could do. Then Mojca Mars gave one on Facebook Ads which I went to that one. She went through and basically set everybody up with their Facebook Ads account, walked them through exactly how to get things started, and kind of helped them figure out what it was that they needed to do moving forward.
Rob: That sounds super cool. There was just one or two talks a day?
Mike: On Saturday there was four talks and then on Sunday there was Sherry’s workshop in the morning, and then there were two other workshops after that. Thomas Smale from FE International was supposed to be there, so there was supposed to be two workshops, and followed by another two workshops. It kind of run simultaneously in different rooms but because Thomas couldn’t make it, Sherry ended up doing one for everybody, and then the other two were split. First speaker on Saturday was Claire Suellentrop who’s also going to be speaking at MicroConf in a couple of months.
Actually, what’s that? Six weeks away right now? Claire spoke first and then it was followed by Aleth, she spoke about GDPR, and then I spoke about email follow-ups, and then Patrick Campbell, he was one of the people who was delayed, he spoke about modifying your pricing and how to figure out what an ideal pricing model should be for your business, and then using it as one of the biggest growth leverage in your business. I think I got a lot out of that talk because I’m kind of right in the middle of evaluating pricing and figuring out what to do with it, and how to pitch it to people.
But he also pointed out the fact that SaaS has gotten substantially more competitive over the past several years. He had graphs and charts to show the number of competitors, the people that started five years ago had versus people who started two years ago versus people who started last year. It was just fascinating the amount of data that he had on that based on all the stuff that they do for Price Intelligently.
Rob: Yep. His talks are always super valuable and have a lot of data. It sounds like a lot of fun, man. Sherry was there, obviously. Told me about it and said she enjoyed it as well and said there was a ton of overlap with the MicroConf crowd. I think she said most people go to one of the MicroConfs which is fun. It’s fun to get together in almost a more mastermind-y arrangement. I know it’s not that small but I bet you kind of know everybody and know what they’re up to and you can literally talk to everyone at the conference.
Mke: Yeah. If you don’t know them before you get there then it’s easy to at least have those conversations and get to know them by the end of it.
Rob: For sure. Cool. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Well, I had asked a few people what they wanted to hear on the podcast. One of the biggest things that came out of it was what is going to be the initial marketing plan for Bluetick now that the new website is up and running. I wanted to talk about that and kind of just go back and forth, and giving I guess a high level indication of what I’m going to be doing. And then you and I can talk about either specifics of it or vet some ideas around or even just tear some of these ideas apart, and say, “Look, don’t do this,” because more than happy to hear some of the advice that you have to share.
Rob: For sure. I know I had shared with you at one point the Drip marketing game plan and the HitTail one actually. The HitTail is a little bit out of date but did you look through that, at all, to populate this list you have?
Mike: Some of those things are pulled from there. I haven’t gone back to either those in a while. I probably should do that at this point. Most of what I’ve been doing lately has been really focused on either MicroConf or getting the new website up and running and now that that’s in place and things are settling down a little bit with MicroConf, I can go back and take a look at those. But some of these things are pulled from that.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. One thing I would consider before we dive in, you have it broken down into two categories, kind of, “I’m gonna do these things now,” and then my longer term things. Maybe you do them over as you get time or as you get budget. Something I would think about is to even have one before now or to split the now into two buckets is to have one-time things and on-going things. One of your bullets here is product listing sites, like product on beta list, and I would even go so far as to say all the CSS Galleries.
There’s 50 different things; there’s getapp.com, there’s Capterra, there’s AppStorm, there’s this whole list that you can put together. Those are truly gonna be one-time things. I think it might help your mental model of like, “Okay, gonna do those once. Gonna get the heat of traffic.” Even podcast store is kind of a one-time thing. You’re not gonna do that for a year whereas webinars, joint webinars, and that kind of stuff I think is more on-going. Does it help for you to think about it like that?
Mike: Yes. In Teamwork I have a project that’s specifically called Bluetick Marketing that just has lists and lists of things there. I’m looking at it now there’s probably 20 different lists in here and there’s about 162 different to-do items in there. One of them is specifically one-time marketing tasks. Things like going into the Chrome Web Store and looking to see if there’s anything that can be leveraged there, submit into the Google Apps Marketplace. The products listing sites, inside of that various accounts are different places, and documented certain processes, etc. Mostly just one-time things that I need to do it once or is it’s a task that needs to be done but the output of that could then be leveraged over and over again.
Rob: Okay, that makes sense. What I’ve done is update the list a little bit and I just kind of threw some things that’s called one-time and then we have on-going, and then a later list. Will that work for you?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Let’s see. Let’s dive in.
Mike: You wanna go straight into the now sort of things?
Rob: Yeah. Let’s talk about the one-time things because I think that these are things that I have all of my marketing plans. But specifically, I’m gonna keep talking about HitTail and Drip because that’s when I formalized this and put it into a doc. I really thought through where are the places that I can get a bump now that I’ve launched. It’s like the website’s live, every time I try to get written up on Venturebeat, and Techcrunch, and ReadWrite web, and GigaOM when it existed, all these things. It never worked but at least I tried it. I was trying to get some type of buzz.
Then there are the ones that are easier or guaranteed. It’s like startupli.st and BetaList, and makeuseof.com, all the things we just talked about, like Producton and that kind of stuff. You’re almost guaranteed to get a listing even though it might take a while to do. I think if you ever venture back, maybe those little-oh, and CSS Galleries is the other one. If your site is good enough and is a custom-design, I realize yours is probably more templatized, but always got a lot of traffic with HitTail and Drip from the CSS Galleries.
Did it convert amazingly well? No. But did it to convert to some trials for almost zero effort because in essence I would have a VA or I think I may have even hired a service at one point because there are like a hundred different CSS Galleries. I think there was someone who productized it and I paid $99 and submitted some info and they submitted it to all of them. To me, that’s a great zero time $99 investment because if you get one or two trials, depending on your price point, that pays it off.
That’s how I always entered it. I think if you ever venture back then need to make a bazillion dollars then maybe these kind of little initial approaches could be a waste of focus or a waste of time but I think given that every trial counts for you, I think those things are important to do. Chrome Web Store is the other one you said in the Google Apps Marketplace. I had zero look with the Chrome Web Store. What’s the difference between the Chrome Web Store and the Google Apps Marketplace?
Mike: I’ll be honest, I don’t know. I’d have to go and take a look at that. I think the Chrome Web Store was specifically for Chrome plugins. At one point, I had on my list of things to put into Bluetick like a small Chrome extension. Obviously, it never materialized. It’s not that it’s not a road map, it’s just I didn’t get there. I don’t know if that’s even viable or something that I could do because they may just say, “No, you have to have an actual Chrome extension to be able to put that in here.”
Rob: Yeah, that’s what it is. While you were talking, I went to the Google Apps Marketplace. It’s now called the G Suite Marketplace. If you integrate essentially into the G Suite, it also looks like you can just integrate with Gmail as well. Since you do that and neither Drip nor HitTail did, I never submitted to the Google Apps Marketplace. That would an interesting distributing channel.
On the Chrome Web Store I did get a minimum Drip and HitTail in and it had zero traction. But I’m not saying it’s not worth the time but it didn’t do anything. It’s pretty crowded in there now. It’s kind of like the iOS app store I think about, in the early days it was a lot easier to get found. I know that PipeDrive said that a lot of their early growth came from the Chrome Web Store but that was a different time. It was five years ago or whatever. It’s one of those things where you have to create some images and you have to create some XML and you have to submit it and it will take you probably half a day to do. You gotta wait if you wanna do that or not. It depends on what else you have going on.
I would probably lean towards doing it just because it is one more distribution channel and you could get lucky but I think it’s not as high priority as pitching podcasts as an example, because that’s gonna have a really high success rate for you.
Mike: Right. The other thing that comes to mind is going through the process of putting out on all those products listing sites. It contributes to long tail SEO as well.
Rob: Yeah, that’s right.
Mike: It contributes to your page authority and Google will see all those lengths coming in and just building those backlinks is kind of important.
Rob: Yup, I would agree with that.
Mike: You said CSS Galleries, fill me in on this because this is something that hadn’t even crossed my mind.
Rob: The only reason that they even came on my radar is when I acquired HitTail–no, it wasn’t HitTail. It was a different site. It was a productized service I had. It was called CMS Themer, CMS Themer at the time.
Mike: I remember that.
Rob: Yeah. It had a really nice design and it would get quite a bit traffic from CSS Galleries. The interesting thing is CMS Themer was really targeting designers and so that traffic converted very well. I’ve just always made it part of the marketing plan. Obviously, it doesn’t convert nearly as well when it’s an app like HitTail or Drip, but again, this posted a link into our docket. It’s cssgallerylist.com. For $60, they submit to hundreds of galleries. For $60 and almost no time it’s worth it for the backlinks, it’s worth it even if the traffic doesn’t convert, it’s just another channel to get out there. Again, the last time I did this was five years ago, there maybe a better resource than this cssgallerylist.com but I do know that I used these guys and it saved me a lot of time.
Mike: Yeah, for sure.
Rob: This is not something that’s gonna grow your business overnight or be some huge game-changing thing but it’s just all these little parts of the snowball that you’re kind of turn the pack on and then seeing which ones get you any kind of traction.
Mike: Right. I think the important thing to keep in mind when going through this stuff is that every little bit helps and you don’t always know that any one link is going to contribute anything but if it gets one person over and the ROI on that is gonna be almost no way to calculate that but you may get three people over and one person converts. It’s not a 33% conversion rate for that obviously but that can help.
Rob: That’s right. Have you considered how you could do an ‘ask me anything’ on Reddit or you could do a Show HN where you say, “Hey, here’s this business. It doing…” whatever the revenue is, or I don’t know if you can be vague about that or not, but I don’t know how you wanna handle it. Then basically say, “I’ve grown it to this. Give me your feedback,” or whatever. Have you thought about that? I don’t know if that’s worthwhile or if that’s just a big waste of time.
Mike: I have. I’m in a couple of Facebook groups. That was suggested to me a couple of months ago via somebody that said, “Hey, you should do an ‘ask me anything’ on Reddit.” I put it on my list but it wasn’t something that kind of rose, I’ll say, close to the top of things that I thought were, not necessarily game changers, but in terms of weighted priority, I didn’t feel it was something that would help out a lot.
Rob: It’s tough. If you’re marketing directly towards developers, then it would make more sense.
Mike: Right. If it was something like ‘ask me anything’ on growthhackers.com for example, that’d be a totally different story. That’s something that I probably should add to the list to be honest.
Rob: Oh, I think you should, yep.
Mike: Anything else in terms of one-time activities that come to mind that’s not on this list?
Rob: I was just trying to think about that. On startups.com, answers that are on Startups used to be kind of a place but I don’t even think that exist anymore. The bummer about Quora is that it’s really not a one-time thing. What I would do with a one-time thing is set-up, subscribe to some topics, there’s probably a cold email, or even just email. You want email sales, you want the email sales channels not the email marketing channel because email marketing tends to be bulk email and that’s not what you’re doing.
I would subscribe to categories or topics that fit your thing so that you’re notified when questions are asked because you wanna be an early answer. You don’t wanna go on a bunch of old Quora threads and add your answer because those threads already have a bunch of up votes and you’re not likely to be the answer that shows for everybody because that’s really what you want. I did that in the early days of Drip. It’s a bit time-consuming but what I found was the questions that come through tend to be so far into your wheelhouse, that they’re really easy to answer.
Even if I type a couple of paragraphs, it just flowed out. I didn’t have to research because it was things like, “What are approximate open right rights? What’s a good open right for a list?” It’s like, “Well, I actually know what the range is. Here, I’ll talk it through.” It’s gonna be stuff that these questions for me would be tough to answer because I’m not knee-deep in this warm email engagement the way you are. Anyways, I would consider as the one-time part of that just subscribing and seeing how it shapes out.
Mike: Yeah,that’s interesting being able to rattle off some of those numbers right off the top of your head. Because it’s part of my talk that I did for FemtoConf. I looked specifically into that and looked across 70,000 emails that had been sent out through Bluetick and looked to see what the open rates were and what the response rates were across those, and then I cross-sectioned them and got the average, the best case, worst case, across everybody’s accounts. It was interesting what the numbers came out to be and then asking the audience I said, “Hey, here is a number, what do you think is this in terms of the open rate?” It was about, I’d say a third of the audience got it right which means that two-thirds did not which indicates that these numbers are, I’ll say, a little bit obscure or opaque and not everybody knows that they are.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense.
Mike: I think a couple of other things that come onto this list is, I don’t know if they’re one-time or you would classify them as one-time, but like a podcast tour, for example. I feel like it’s something that you can do it once when you start and then if you’re going to try and do it again you have to have something compelling to follow-up with, I’ll say.
Rob: I do think of a podcast tour as a one-time thing but it’s not as one-time as say CSS Gallery submission, but it’s gonna move the needle more than them. CSS Gallery and the BetaList and all that stuff. I just posted a link to whitetailsoftware.com and Robert Graham had that pre launch email list building directories. We can include that in the show notes but I think you have 50 or 100 that he had his VA submit to, so that’ll help as well. But all that to say, podcast tour is gonna take several months because you’re gonna email and get scheduled, and by the time it comes out, it’ll be months down the line.
I think the big thing, the advice that I would give when doing a podcast tour is it would be easy for you to just go on a bunch of entrepreneur podcasts and say, “Look, I launched a product. I’m building this SaaS product.” You’ll convert some of those, it’ll be a low conversion rate. The audience who’s gonna convert the best for you is gonna be folks doing sales. It’s gonna be folks both doing cold outreach and then doing the warm nurturing that Bluetick allows you to do, this stuff that comes right out of your inbox and looks very personable. It’s not bulk email like MailChimp or Drip but it’s the one-on-one connecting whether it’s cold or warm. Who’s doing that, right? This is BDRs and salespeople. I know some of those are also founders but I don’t think that’s gonna be your market.
I think initially, you can get SaaS founders, and you can get our audience, and the MicroConf audience, and not crew. It’s good to talk about it here. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go on Mixergy and talk about it but compared to the size of that audience, the conversion rate is gonna be pretty small. The podcast that I would target that I think are gonna be your low-hanging fruit, is to go on podcast that are talking about sales, and talking about tech sales, selling SaaS apps is probably the B2B sales approach.
You can come on not to tell the story of your product but you can pitch it as, “Look, I’m an expert in this because I’m in it day-to-day and I’m seeing dozens or hundreds of customers who use our product and I’m seeing the patterns. I’m seeing the successes and how they’re doing it well. I see the failures and the mistakes people are making.” Does that make sense? I would definitely go after that space rather than focus on the founder and entrepreneur space.
Mike: Yeah, it totally makes sense. That was actually my hesitation, I’ll say, of doing that because I didn’t think that approaching those, the startups community would be something that will really resonate. Like you said, I’ll get some sales out of it but it’s not gonna be a high-converting channel for me.
Rob: Yeah, in all honesty, I will probably do both but I would start with the sales folks, the sales podcast. We both know at least a dozen people who have podcasts that I’m sure you could come on and talk about some aspect of your business. Try to vary it because we have this small community and so if you go on all the podcast of our friends and talk about the same thing on every podcast, everybody hears it, there’s only so many people in it. I will try to suggest different topics, different aspects. If you could talk about the launch on one, you could talk about the stress on another, you could talk about marketing approaches on another.
I do think that is still worthwhile because it’s easy for you to do because you’re used to doing podcasts and it’s 30-45 minutes of your time once it’s booked. It’s not actually that much of a time investment to be in the earbuds of likely several thousands or tens of thousands of people, but as I said, I do think I would start with trying to assess out what are kind of some B2B sales podcast that I can get on?
Mike: The interesting thing about that is there’s two different ways that I could approach that particular problem of going out to the people who are running those podcast. One of them is send directly into Bluetick and let Bluetick follow up with those people. The other one is that there’s a company I’ve stumbled across that will take kind of what your requirements are for appearing on podcast and will go out through the different network of podcasts that they have contact with, and essentially pitch you to them. I’ve mixed feelings on doing that, to be perfectly honest, but at the same time, there’s a time component that it’s gonna suck up some of my time to do it myself but in many ways, it comes across better if I do it myself.
Rob: Yeah. That’s hard. There is a balance because we get a lot of pitches on this show and on Zen Founder. If it’s not the person pitching themselves, I tend to delete them, that’s just a thing. I do glance through them but I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone on the show who wasn’t pitching themselves. When I had an executive assistant who is doing stuff back in the Drip days, when I was still running the business, she could email people as me, look straight out of my inbox, and so you could develop the pitch and have someone else send it as you. But it just depends on what you wanna do. I don’t know but I don’t have a good answer for that.
Mike: But again, at that point, I could just put it through directly into Bluetick and have Bluetick send out the email.
Rob: That’s true. Ta-da. That’s cool.
Mike: It’s interesting because occasionally, when I’ll email people whether they contacted me to ask me something about Bluetick, occasionally they’ll have heard the podcast and they’ll ask in their email as to whether or not it was sent from me personally or whether Bluetick sent it. I’m just, “If you can’t tell, doesn’t that speak to what the product does?”
Rob: Right. Does it matter? Yeah, that’s funny.
Mike: Does it matter?
Rob: We’ve talked at length here about the one-time upfront things. You have nice list of the things that you plan to do on an on-going basis, why don’t we look at a few of those?
Mike: Sure. The things that pop-up high on my priority list-actually, you know what, now that I’m looking through this, one of the other things that is on the on-going list should probably be moved over into one-time is the public Zapier integration.
Rob: Oh, yeah.
Mike: I’ve got a private integration right now but I’ve not taken it public and that’s something that I’ve been asked about a couple of times by Zapier. I just haven’t done it yet to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of edge cases that either are not handled well or I know that there’s other changes that need to be made and I’d rather make those changes before I open it up than have to fix a bunch of other stuff. Because there’s some things that I do some manual data manipulation just to make sure that things are working right for certain customers. I need to put a more permanent solution in place for those.
That’s something that after going through the process, I believe they put it out through their mailing list. I forget what their mailing list is but it’s something like 1 million people or something like that, something ridiculously large. The conversion rate is not gonna be high but it’s more about driving awareness than it is about converting people at that point.
Rob: Yeah, you’re just trying to get the word out so people have heard of you at this point. One other one-time thing that I would do, it’s not a marketing approach, but I would set up Google alerts for relevant terms that you wanna monitor like company names of competitors, try to hear about like articles I think are relevant or conversations that are relevant, you have to use your judgment there but I do think getting something setup so that your kind of participating or at least aware of what’s going on in your space is helpful.
Mike: Yeah. I have a couple of them set up right now but it’s mainly for Bluetick. What I find is I’m getting a lot of emails about dog conversations that are happening.
Rob: Yeah, I could see that.
Mike: I guess if we’re gonna jump right into the ongoing stuff or the short term things that I was looking at, the first on my list is webinars.
Rob: Yep. Are you planning, because right below that you have JV webinars.
Mike: Right. I wouldn’t say I lumped them together but I think the general process is going to be similar for them whereas with the webinars, there’s joint webinars and there’s just the regular webinars. The regular ones are ones that I was probably gonna promote to my own email list and then maybe do one on a regular basis or promote it on a Tuesday every other week or something like that. And then with the joint webinars those would be much more scheduled where I’m leveraging other people’s audiences and contacting influencers and see if they’re interested in having me come and talk specifically to their audience about how Bluetick can solve a particular problem for them. I see it almost like the podcast tour but with a little bit more, I’ll say, pinpoint accuracy or a little bit more focused specifically on those people because I don’t wanna go pitch somebody and say, “Hey, can I just do a joint webinar with you?” But not actually have something that’s gonna be valuable to offer to their audience.
Rob: Right. I would the joint webinars before I try to do internal webinars because it is such a nice way to reach out beyond your own audience. Just through doing webinars to your own list, you’re gonna one and then you’re not gonna fill anymore, you know what I mean, until you get more people either using your product or on your email list. We tried early on with Drip to just run Facebook ads, get people to opt into a webinar, and we’re gonna try to run one every week, and we just couldn’t get people to show up at a price that was worth it for us.
Again, not saying it’s not possible but it’s an entire funnel that you have to develop. It’s gonna take you quite a bit of time and money to do whereas the JV webinars is a low-hanging fruit for you, because JV webinars is about who you know. You do have a good network of people who I think you could contact and have access to their audience right away, basically for free, without running all the ads and developing a funnel. It’s just conversations. I’d definitely prioritize the joint webinars above do your own.
Mike: How would you structure any sort of special offers for those people going to a joint webinar? There’s a lot of discussion and I’ve thought about this myself. I was like, do I wanna offer a discount or I wanna give additional services or special templates like, “Hey, you can only get this here because you’re coming to this particular person’s webinar.” My concern is really putting a lot of extra effort into something that-at the end of the webinar, it may turn out to be nothing. I may not get very many sign-ups out of it or I may get a lot but I don’t know. It’s hard to predict how much time and effort to make things custom for that person’s audience. You know what I mean?
Rob: Yeah, I do. I would lean heavily towards some type of bonus and it’s time-limited. You say, “Hey, free to sign up in the next two or three days, then you get this extra thing.” whether it’s a discount or the thing that you billed. Discounts are the lazy way to do it. It’s like the zero time way but it chews through your money. If you have no time, absolutely no time, then yeah, give people a discount, but discounts are not exciting. They’re not as exciting as like, “Get this complete email series,” even if it’s only three or four emails, my guess is, you can crank that out just using copy+paste from what you’re using already or from what you’re recommending to people and just edit it for their specific niche.
If you talk to a bunch of freelancers then it’s like, “Here’s the way they follow-up and do it for freelancers.” A lot of it is gonna be the same as any other sequence you have but you’re just gonna tweak a few things. I’m guessing, in about half an hour you could probably crank something like that out. You don’t even need to do that in advance of the webinar because if you don’t get sign-ups then you just don’t build it. But if you get sign-ups using that coupon code then you just manually reach out to people because it’s not like you’re gonna get 500 sign-ups. You’re gonna get 10, or 20, or 30. It’s gonna be a small amount. You can just hit people up and distribute that to them. I’m thinking of something like that. It’s high value for someone signing-up but it’s pretty low effort for you to create.
Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. I think right now when you go and sign up, I was probably gonna pull this off as things progress, but when you go and sign up right now, there’s kind of an offer there that basically says I’ll create an email sequence for you based on whatever scenario you describe and that will be your first sequence. It’s kind of concierge onboarding but I’ll say it’s probably not very well described in the website right now but it is something that I just offer to people as they come to sign up.
Rob: Yeah. If you get 30 sign-ups at a time that’s gonna get tough. I think you’re gonna have to stop doing that because it’s too time-intensive. You have to back off as you start getting more sign-ups.
Mike: Right.
Rob: What else? You have direct follow-ups with the following; invite to demos, you have current mailing list, prior prospects which I think is good, and personal LinkedIn contacts.
Mike: Yep. I have a couple of different spreadsheets based on when I was doing early validation. Some people said, “Hey, now is not a good time. Maybe later on when you’re further along.” And then there’s people who have come in and I’ve done a demo with them and things just didn’t work out for whatever reason, or they sign-up but they never followed through or they used it for a little bit, and then they said, “Yeah, this isn’t working out for me.” I’ve got this pool of people that I can go to that fit into that criteria, that I can put them into a Bluetick sequence, for example, and invite them to come back and check it out or go to a demo or something like.
But in addition to that, I also have the mailing list that is in the Drip account which I have been putting on the website where there’s an email course that you can go through. It’s like a 5-day course which I’m in the process of copy+pasting all the content all of that to make it a slightly longer course. But those people that I can go to directly, I can take them out of Drip and then plug them into Bluetick, and individually follow up with each of them. I could do that based on lead score for example and just sort them by lead score and then add them in in that order and say, “These are the people that I’m gonna approach first versus these are all the people who are probably, I’ll say, less interested, but still on the list.”
Rob: Yeah. I think that’s a good idea to kind of approach. I was definitely gonna say anybody who’s cancelled in the past, if the product’s a lot better than when they’ve tried it, you definitely wanna contact them. Prospect who haven’t converted, people who’ve been paywalled because they don’t wanna give their credit card, now is the time when you’re doing this to just circle back and clean all that out.
The personal LinkedIn contacts, you gotta use your judgement there, you don’t wanna come off as… I’ve never done that but if you know someone who really should value out of it and you do a very soft pitch like, “Hey, just to let you know I just launched this. I thought it might be helpful.” Not anything that’s forceful like, “Jump on a call. Jump on a call.” Then, I think, it’s halfway reasonable.
Mike: Yeah. I wasn’t planning on doing that. What I was gonna do was go through my LinkedIn contacts and just look. Obviously, I’m gonna hand pick which ones i’m gonna contact and which ones I’m not. I’ve got people who I know are software developers or they’re engineering managers, or something like. They’re really not a good fit for it but that doesn’t mean that I can’t go to them and say, “Hey, I just wanted to check in with you and see how are things going, and let you know I just recently launched this. If you know of anyone who could use this, I’d love an introduction just to kind of help me out.” I’m leveraging my personal relationships at that point.
Rob: I could see doing that. I just added a couple things to the list. Actually, you have retargeting on there, mostly Facebook. I think it says Facebook primarily, I think that’s a really good idea to get set up whether you use perfect audience, you have the display networks like Google and stuff already, you just tick Facebook and it gets probably a material but I think you should get that set up pretty quick. That’d be probably towards the top of my list. Do you already have the pixel installed?
Mike: Yep.
Rob: Okay, good.
Mike: yeah, I’ve had that in pixel installed for a while. But then, the reality there is, I’ve put it under ongoing because there’s a one-time piece of setting it up and there is the follow on activities where you go in and you analyze how much traffic you’ve brought in, do you have a critical mass yet, what kind of advertisements you’re doing. It’s kind of two different components to that but I do find that even with my two-step process for the sign-up, you put in your email address and password, and it takes you over to a credit card page, and there’s people who don’t fill that out.
Obviously, those people, I wanna follow up with anyway but I also wanna make sure that people who come to the iste and then go over there but never even fill out that first page, I still wanna be able to retarget those people to bring them back. Because obviously, they were interested enough to go look at the signup page but they didn’t actually sign up.
Rob: I think in the interest of time here because we’re running pretty long today. I think you should consider-paid acquisition I have written here, it’s a tough one. It all depends on if you have budget and if you have time to sit there and test a bunch of stuff, so something to consider, maybe it goes on your later list but it’s definitely if you can get it to work, it’s really, really good. Cold email outreach, you have the tool to do it, nice to use your own tool. You can go to something like LeadFuze and get a list of people, and start doing the outreach yourself, or you can hire someone to the outreach for you.
We had mixed results when we did Drip but it definitely drove enough trials that have made it worth spending. We were spending money on it at that time and it definitely had positive ROI for us. Integration Marketing which is you just think of all the top 10 integrations that you would wanna have and think about trying to get either in their director. If it’s Stripe or Basecamp, they’re probably not gonna co-promote with you because they’re so big but they have these integration directories. Or if they’re a little bit smaller, if they’re a startup, they’ll probably have a list and are willing to email out and promote you. That requires dev time, of course, so it has to be worth your while.
But that was something we did 30 something integrations with Drip and it makes a lot of sense with a tool like Drip because it it a hub of data and so we integrated with a bunch of shopping carts and all types of marketing tools. That both helped our customers but it also really helped to start to get traction and kind of be everywhere in their early days. I think those are the other three I would throw out that you may wanna do sooner rather than later.
Mike: Yeah. I’ve already been asked by people about integrating directly into Bluetick using the API and I’ve kind of pushed off mainly because I know that there are parts of the API that are still changing, so I haven’t really structured it in a way that says, “Hey, this is available for you to use and it’s pretty solid versus these other pieces where you shouldn’t touch it.” I had a conversation with somebody at FemtoConf where they said they actually have three different versions of their API published. One of them was for them internally, and then there’s another one that’s a public API, and then they have special endpoint specifically for Zapier. It’s interesting they split theirs out and I think it makes a lot of sense as well. It’s just a matter of rearranging some things a little bit to allow people to do that and say, “Hey, this area is solid. This area is off-limits or don’t touch them.”
Rob: Yep, that makes sense. Anything else that you wanna pull out of here? Either in ongoing? It looks like you have a couple more and then you have some stuff for later?
Mike: Yup. The one idea that have come to mind that somebody had mentioned to me at FemtoConf was the idea of having Bluetick offered as sort of a managed service for x thousand dollars a month. Then they’ll send all of their contacts over into Bluetick and then, it’s my responsibility to make sure that things are running smoothly for them so that they don’t have to go in and manage anything which, if you set up a lot of the automation and stuff, you don’t have to worry about that, but there’s also ongoing tweaking, A/B testing, or making sure that, “Are these numbers any reasonable ballpark of what they should be?” If you’re getting a low open rate, for example, how would you necessarily know unless you’re looking at all the other data. I have access to that but other people don’t. Those are the things that I can provide a lot of additional value for customers but they don’t necessarily have access to it on their own if they just signed up.
Rob: Yeah. That makes sense. There’s a risk with managed services because they can just suck up a bunch of your time and also the revenue is not worth nearly what a SaaS revenue is in terms of a multiple-whether you’re gonna raise funding or whether you’re gonna sell or whatever. If you have a bunch of consulting revenue, it’s worth like 1X, 1X the revenue versus actual recurring revenue, it’s a different story. I shouldn’t say recurring. It’s higher margin revenue where if it’s software it has 70% or 80% margin. If it’s consulting it has what, 10%, 20%, 30% margin. It’s something that I would consider in the early days but it just matters what cash position you’re in. I think you would do it for the cash and not really for the long term prospect of the company because I don’t think you wanna grow a big kind of productized service long term.
Mike: No, I agree. The way I was gonna structure it was like, “Hey, here’s a managed service that if you wanna subscribe to you can,” and it’s either a three-month or a six-month contract, and then that’s it. If I decide to continue offering it then they can continue paying me for it but if I decide that we’re not gonna do this anymore, then things are kind of pushed back. It wouldn’t be something that you can just go to the website and buy off the shelf but it’d be limited three to six months contract or something like that. You’re right, it would absolutely be for improving cash flow for example, but it would also put a solid number on, “Hey, what is this particular customer going to be worth to me in the next three months or in the next six months.” Does that make sense?
Rob: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. Certainly trying it with one customer is not gonna hurt much. That’s the thing, is to see how much-if it’s valuable to them, if it’s workable for you, and obviously if you do it for 10 or 20 people, you’re getting yourself in pretty deep but you don’t have to do that. You can just dip your toe and then figure it out.
Mike: Yeah. I was gonna do it for probably one to five. The other nice thing that I thought that would deliver to me is the ability to work hand-in-hand with those customers and see what exactly what it was that they’re trying to do as opposed to, “Hey, here sign up to Bluetick,” and then after that, I don’t really have a ton of visibility into their business or exactly what challenges they’re trying to solve. I know generally what they’re trying to do but I don’t get that insight or I don’t have calls with them to really see on a weekly basis like, “Hey, what are you really trying to get out with this?” I think that those insights would actually help me build a better product longer term.
Rob: One of the thing I see on your later list that I like, that I don’t think we’ve covered, is you have this library of email templates, lead gen, and you use this as a lead gen to acquire email addresses? I think that’s intriguing both for the SEO and you can always run ads to it, you could retarget to it and you’re basically giving something away. I think that’s gonna take a ton of time for you to set-up. It’s a little more complicated than it sound but I’m glad you have it on your later list so at least, in a few months, once you get some of these other ones done, you can move into that, and start thinking about how to shape that up.
Mike: Right. The other nice, I’ll say, by-product of doing that is that, I could create those inside of Bluetick as a library where you can when you create your account, you can just select from a bunch of them, kind of a similar to the way that Drip has those pre-made blueprints for different situations, this would be exactly that. Like, “What situations have I run into with different customers that they’re trying to get a response or get the customer to take an action? What sorts of things work? What sorts of things don’t? What sorts of approaches do you wanna try?” You can almost categorize them. It’s like, “This is extremely aggressive versus to do the exact same thing to get somebody to a call. This one is much more laid back and hands off, and it depends on the situation whether it’s cold email versus a warm email with somebody who’ve had three or four conversations with us.” Which one you would use?
Rob: Cool. Well this was a good run. Thanks for bringing this on the show. I had fun talking about it. I’m guessing we’ve provided quite a bit of value for the folks who are thinking about this kind of stuff.
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Episode 353 | Noah Kagan’s Post-Launch Advice for Bluetick
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and Noah Kagan of AppSumo, talk about the evolution of Bluetick. Mike discusses how the idea came about, development, and issues faced along the way. Noah provides some post launch marketing advice and tactics.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, I’m going to be talking to Noah Kagan about Bluetick marketing tactics. This is Startups For the Rest of Us, episode 353. Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike, you got to say, “And I’m Noah.”
Noah: What’s up, man? I’m Noah.
Mike: We’re here to share experiences to help people who made the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Noah?
Noah: This week, I’m doing marketing. That’s kind of what I’ve been thinking about with our sumo.com business, just who’s the customer, where are they, what kind of plan can we put in place to help reach out to them.
Mike: Awesome.
For the listener who may not be familiar with Noah Kagan, he’s the founder of AppSumo and sumo.com. They offer a variety of free tools for small businesses. You put a little JavaScript snippet on your website and essentially you end up with a suite of tools that helps you build your email list, promote it, get people into your sales funnel, and really just manage a lot of the online marketing that you do. Is that an accurate ballpark assessment of that?
Noah: Yeah. Our whole company’s purpose is we help the small dudes or the little guys become sumos. We have two businesses, one’s AppSumo which is a GroupOn for geeks, and sumo.com which is the tools for people to be able to promote themselves, mostly around growing their mailing list and growing their customer base.
Mike: Awesome. Today, we were going to dive into Bluetick. I just launched it a couple of days ago, I think this episode will go out actually a week or two later. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about it just because you’ve got a knack for all things marketing, to be perfectly honest. You’ve done a lot of different work with some very high profile companies like Mint and Facebook, especially in the early days of those companies.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about if you were running Bluetick based on where it is today, what would you do and how would you approach things moving forward? Take that not only for my own selfish purposes to use that moving forward, but also to illustrate to the listener what sorts of things are possible and what sorts of things they should be looking at when they’re trying to get their product out the door right after they launch.
Noah: Totally. I don’t know how much you shared with your audience on the podcast, maybe you want to give a little bit of a background for possibly new listeners or to anyone who haven’t heard about Bluetick yet?
Mike: Sure. Bluetick is a warm and cold email follow up tool. The basic idea is that if there are certain points in your sales funnel that you know where you typically have to reach out to somebody more than once to get them to do something, whether that’s to reply or to fill out a form, or to submit information, something along those lines, then you put them into this email sequence. It will email them. If they don’t perform that action, it will email them again. It will keep emailing them again until it either runs out of emails to send or the person does that. You can have them pulled out of the email sequence, put into a different one.
It integrates with Zapier. People use it for integrating into a variety of tools like Asana and various CRMs to help them move people through so that they don’t have to do it manually. Otherwise, you have to copy from spreadsheets and things like that. It’s a pain in the neck to track of how many emails you’ve sent to each person and how far down in the email sequence they are.
Noah: How did it come to where it is today? Were you on the toilet and you’re like, “Hey, I really am tired of doing follow-ups. I need to go build software because I’m a smart developer.” How long did it take? I’m curious more of where the problem and the creation came from.
Mike: You were actually one of the first speakers at MicroConf back in 2011.
Noah: I thought you were going to say I was one of the first speakers to never be invited back, which that is true. I’m still waiting for my invite.
Mike: The hot sauce incident, I think that’s what did it. There was hot sauce 12 ft up in the wall.
Noah: [00:03:49] incident, it will not be talked about.
Mike: There was a no hot sauce rule after that. Disregarding that, when Rob and I were running MicroConf, he typically handles a lot of the speaker side of things and I handle the sponsor side of things. What I found was that when I was emailing sponsors to see if they were interested in sponsoring MicroConf, what would happen is I would send somebody an email and they wouldn’t respond. I would have to send them another one and possibly two or three more.
At some point along the way, they would reply. Usually, these were sometimes warm contacts, sometimes they were cold contacts. In most cases, because my email fell much lower on their priority list, they didn’t necessarily see it as necessary to respond right away. Of course, there’s good intentions there. “Oh, yeah, I’ll get to this. I don’t have time right now because everything else gets in the way.”
I would find myself emailing them two, three times, four times, over the course of a week or two, or three weeks, something like that. I found myself saying the exact same things to them over and over. I had the idea that there could be a piece of software out there that would do this for me.
I know exactly what the second, third, and fourth emails are going to be. The first ones are usually customized, Bluetick allows you to do exactly that. But those followup emails are all heavily driven from a template. They’re pretty much automatic. It’s really just to kind of get a response from somebody and help move the conversation forward.
Noah: So you had the idea, you’ve had these problems with these guys. I’m just curious, these are the things I’m thinking about. How did you go from that to saying, “Alright, I’m gonna build a software around that.”
Mike: I started doing a little bit of validation around it. My thought was oh, I could sell this to other conference planners and event planners. What I did was I looked into it, tried to figure out what a pricing model would look like, and realize that unless you ran a lot of conferences on a very regular basis, then you probably wouldn’t use the software.
Just because the pricing model didn’t really work out in terms of finances for me. If I charged a couple hundred dollars, it’s a little bit of a tougher sell than if I were to charge $50 a month for it. But if I’m only charging $50 a month, how many times are they actually going to pay me? It maybe two or three because they’re doing sponsorships for a couple of months leading up to the conference, and then they don’t need it for the rest of the year.
I tried doing the validation for a while and then I said this just isn’t going to go anywhere. And then fast forward a few years, I kind of came back to it and said well, there’s actually a lot of other situations that this applies to. Following up a consulting services company where they’ve got a proposal out to somebody, or they’re just trying to get the conversation started, or they’re just trying to find the right person to talk to. Those are all situations where this type of tool applies. But initially, I was looking at the wrong type of buyer for it. The right solution, wrong target person.
Noah: Who were you hitting up originally?
Mike: When I was first trying to figure out who to go after, I was looking at event planners and conference coordinators because I knew what that looked like. Right now, what I’m looking more at is services companies, anyone who has a price point that’s probably above $2,000 but less than $10,000. It’s well worth your time and effort to follow up with those people, but a lot of people don’t just because they either feel bad or they don’t want to go through that emotional hassle of sending that second, third, or fourth email.
I’ve got lots of data that shows me if you send that first email, yes you may get a 30%, 40% response rate, but if you send four or five, your response rate can increase dramatically to 70% or 80%.
Noah: That is really interesting. I found the same thing. I’ve used a similar tool. What was shocking for me is 50% of my replies to people came on the second email. It was like oh wow. It’s one of these things where most people I’m sure, Mike, you get a bunch of emails and a lot of people get a bunch of emails. You delete them. If it’s really important, people will follow up. If it’s something that’s important, the data actually really shows that.
Did you go and just build this right away or did you sell a bunch of them and get customers before you made it? How did that go?
Mike: What I did was I created this little explainer video. It was about a minute and a half long. I sent it to a handful of people in my network who I thought would have this particular problem and ask them, “Hey, is this a problem that you have? If so, are you willing to talk to me about it? I think I have a solution that would solve it.”
I got probably about a dozen conversations out of that fairly quickly, out of about 20 to 30 people that I send it to. I had those conversations. That was the initial discussion. I would ask them, “Is this something that you would pay for?” Most of them said yes. Once I got to the point where I had 12 people who said yes I would pay for this, then I sat down and I created balsamic mockups of what the application was going to look like, how it was going to work.
And then I went back to those people a month later and said, “This is what it will be, what do you think?” Then walked them through everything, gave them a “demo” of the product using those mockups. And then I asked them for a credit card, for a pre-payment. People gave me anywhere between a one month to three months pre-payment, I let them choose how much they were going to pay which helps me figure out what the price point was going to be. If that would make sense for me—if it was going to be $5 a month, I didn’t want to deal with it. But if it was $50 or $100, that’s reasonable.
After going through that, I ended up with about 15 or so people that gave me pre-payments, anywhere between one and three months, and anywhere between $40 and $100. I ended up with close to $2,000 worth of pre-payments.
Noah: Dude, go you. That is awesome. I think most people do it backwards. Build, build, build, hopefully someone comes. You’re like let’s see if people buy. I think one thing that’s a good thing for your audience to think about and it’s a good reminder for myself is that you had people already that you could reach out to. Either you had a mailing list or you had some audience or you had some type of network. I think most people do that way too late.
One of my favorite silly examples is people want to eat vegetables so they go like they have a garden. They dig a hole, plant a seed, and then they try to eat the seed the next day. I’m like obviously you have to water it, wait, and nurture it. I think you did a really interesting job where you’ve been doing this over a year so it made it easier for you to go validate this type of business idea. For people out there, go start a mailing list, go start a website, go start joining Facebook groups, go to conferences like MicroConf or whatever that is. It’s just a really good thing.
One thing I’m curious is who are the people that pre-pay? I think that’s amazing. What were they really excited about?
Mike: Most of them were services companies who wanted to get somebody into their sales pipeline or wanted to get somebody to a meeting so that they can have a call and talk to them. The issue that they had was that they would send somebody an email and say, “Hey, can we hop on a call?” The person wouldn’t respond, or they’d send them the link to their Calendly, youcanbook.me, or whatever that they were using. They’d suggest a couple of times and the person wouldn’t do it. Then, they would have to go back and follow up with them.
I built Bluetick in such a way that you can send them that link and it will send and inject data into the query string for that. So that when they click on it, they schedule a time, it closes the loop so that you don’t have to go back and pull the person out of the email sequence, it’s all done automatically for you. It tracks that on the backend so you can check what is your conversion rates and things like that on those emails that you sent, which one was the most effective, and it really just helps automate that whole process so that you don’t have to do anything beyond that first email. You just set it and by the time that person gets to that end of the sequence, the email has done its job.
Noah: You sold $2,000 worth to people, most of them wanted it for sales. What did you do next?
Mike: After that, I sat down and hired a couple of developers to help me build it. Spent about four months or so doing that. Then, probably two or three months after that trying to work through very early issues with customers, trying to figure out is this going to work for you, how does it work in your business, and just trying to get them to use it.
I ended up taking my entire development team that I hired, fired them all because everything behind it was really just not very good. I spent about six months re-architecting a bunch of things. At that point, probably around November this past year, that’s when I added my first customer who started paying on a monthly basis. Since then, I’ve been adding customers over the course of the past six, seven months or so. Right now, it’s sitting at around 20 to 25 active customers, and around $1,100 to $1,200 MRR.
Noah: Hold on, dude. That was crazy. What happened? You’re working with these guys or girls, and then you fired them after?
Mike: Basically. It was a team of three people, and they didn’t know each other. It’s just three independent contractors. I tried to position to them like hey, one of you needs to take the lead and step up and do this particular role and manage stuff. None of them really wanted to do it because it was all off of Upwork, they’ve never worked together before. In terms of management, I was trying to hand that off to them so that I could focus on customer stuff. It fell apart.
I blame myself for it because I didn’t necessarily give them as much guidance in terms of the design and engineering upfront as I probably needed to. My expectations were probably too high for them.
Noah: How would you do that differently? It’s funny, in the past six months as I’ve been doing more personal stuff, I was building some recruiting software. I used actually the Pakistani in the outsourced team that helped me build AppSumo seven years ago. Man, it was a freaking struggle. “Alright, cool, we’ll do those features.” Then they come back with the features and I’m like this is not even close to what I exactly told you guys to do and I showed you what to do.
I’m curious, how would you better communicate, hire a better team, how would you do that next time you build something?
Mike: I think that the design itself really needs to have more details or more screencasts or walk throughs with me explaining things. One of the things that I did was I would give them a document that says, “Hey, this is what it’s supposed to do.” It’s really dry and boring to look at those things. Even if you have things on the screen, it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to everybody on the team doing things in the same way.
If you have three different people who are tasked with building three different areas of the application, you still need somebody to coordinate between them to help understand, “This is the style we’re going to use, this is how we’re going to do paging and sorting,” things like that. There’s a lot of backend stuff that was just an absolute mess. It was implemented completely differently from one page to the next.
From the end user standpoint, the app barely works. It was because of all those issues. There wasn’t enough focus, I’d say, on letting them know about areas where they really need to be concerned about, which were things like you can’t just assume that you’re going to get ten records here, you might get hundreds or thousands of records, or even hundreds of thousands.
The replaces in the app where it just wasn’t scalable in any way, shape, or form and it would fall apart once you started using it. That’s what a lot of the reengineering effort was focused on.
Noah: That’s actually interesting. How much did that cost you to begin with, and then how long did it take once you took it back over to just finish it?
Mike: I’d have to go back and look but I don’t think it was more than probably $15,000 or so to have them work on it, between the three and six months that they worked on it. Most of them were working on it part-time. I don’t think it was more than $15,000.
Noah: Then how much was the new version?
Mike: The reengineered version, I did all that work myself. It took like six months to do it.
Noah: If you could go back, it sounds like ten months plus some of the validation. A year, give or take. What do you think would’ve been an alternative to get it out sooner? If you had to start this all over tomorrow, what would you do?
Mike: I’d probably stub out certain parts of the code base myself so that it’s clear how to do certain things or clear how to manage certain types of problems. There’s typical things you would do in an app like security controls, team accounts, and things like that. You really need to have those types of designs engineered upfront. If you don’t, then you’d have to figure out what to do with them later.
But there’s also that trade-off that you have to think about. Are you going to over engineer upfront to make sure that you get it right, or are you just going to slap something together and put it out there and see if it works and if it resonates with people and then re-do it afterwards so that you don’t figure out later on if you’re making a mistake? I think it depends a lot on how much money you have to spend on it and how much time, versus how quickly do you want to get to market and make the mistakes.
Are you okay with prototyping certain parts of your app, for example? Are you okay with prototyping the whole thing and throwing it away once you’ve validated that the idea’s going to fly? It depends on where in that spectrum you fall.
Noah: Where do you think most people make mistakes around that?
Mike: I’d say that people spend probably too much time building the app as opposed to putting it in front of people.
I had something that was barely functional in front of people in about four months. I realized early on where the problems were, why they weren’t using it, and what sorts of issues they were running into that made them not want to use it. That was helpful in that I got there quick, but at the same time those types of problems took a long time to solve partially because I wasn’t familiar with some of the technologies. Using a stack that I was probably more familiar with would’ve been a little bit better, but I can’t really do anything about it at this point.
Noah: One thing that I’m considering, and then we can get into the marketing plan about how to scale this out, cause I actually use a competitor tool, we could talk about that as well. If you couldn’t have built any software, you’re an engineer so you’re obviously very smart. Engineers are smarter than everyone else. If you couldn’t build a software, how would you have done the software and how would you have just done the service without the software?
I think what people miss a lot of the time, they’re like oh, software as a service, it’s just a SaaS recurring revenue. They don’t know that SaaS means you’re doing a software that’s replacing a service. I think that’s really critical that people just jump to the software. I’m like do the service a few times. In most businesses, you can actually implement ghetto versions of it to see if it’s something valuable for people before you go out and build software.
Mike: Yeah, I think for this, to figure out whether or not that was an idea that would fly, like in terms of the validation piece of it, to see if the process itself works. If you didn’t know that the process worked, then you could probably just create your own email account or ask somebody, “Hey, can you create a mailbox on your domain? I will send the emails for you.” When people get replies, then I will shoot it over to you unless you take over the conversation. You could do that, that would probably be the easiest way.
Noah: Dude, that’s a great idea.
Mike: If you don’t know how to code, if you don’t know how to do anything like that, you basically have to say how can I insert myself in here to do what a computer would do?
Noah: Dude, I love it. I’m just going to repeat it cause it’s so good. You’re like, “Hey, just give me access to your inbox or give me a separate account. I’ll even write the emails,” and you do it for them and then they’re like oh shit, this is working. Then, you could actually go build software.
Mike: Yup. I think that would work if you didn’t know anything about it or if you weren’t technical. I think in my case, I had done some of that early validation because I was doing this exact same process for MicroConf sponsors and I basically just took that process and implemented it as a piece of software. I think it depends on the type of problem you’re going to solve, whether or not that specific solution will work. But I don’t see any reason why if you’re going to build software that solves problem X, you can’t just do it manually until you can program a computer to do it.
Noah: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You finally got it built six months later because you took over, you did it yourself. I’m curious for the people who aren’t technical, a lot of MicroConfs and your listeners are, but for the non-technical, how would they find someone to build it? Let’s say they validated it. Where would you go?
Mike: I started out with Upwork. I think that they combined with freelancer.com or something like that, I forget what the other one was. There’s also weworkremotely.com. The issue you find though is that the better developers, you have to pay more money. If you’re operating as a bootstrapped business or running it on the side, then you have this constant challenge or balance that you’re trying to strike between paying somebody to develop something versus either doing stuff yourself or paying somebody who is a lower cost so that you’re not burning through your runway as quickly. Cool?
Noah: Any of those different types of services, does Fiverr have any development?
Mike: Ah, I don’t know. I’ve never looked on there. Maybe they do, but my guess is that it’s probably very certain problems.
Noah: That’s fair. You finally build it and you give it to these people. What do they say? They’ve been waiting for it.
Mike: Depends on where you are in the timeline. After the four to five month mark, I count from January or 2016, because that’s when I broke ground on code. And then in April or May is around when MicroConf was, and right after that I came back and I started putting it in front of people. It really just wasn’t ready.
I had a hard time getting people to use it, I created accounts for them and they just really wouldn’t use it. I spent several months trying to figure out why it was that people weren’t using it, what was it not doing for them. There were just a ton of issues here and there, basically throughout the entire app. A lot of it just needs to be re-architected. It took me six months to get it to the point where I was getting people to start using it and realized now this is at a point where I could actually sell it to people.
I actually took somebody from outside of that core group of people and said, “If you want access to this software, you’re going to get charged on day one.” I was still trying to on-board those people, but I had given carte blanche access to use the software or not until they were getting value out of it, that’s when I would start charging them. There wasn’t any real impetus for them to start using it because it was obviously putting something on their task list, because then they have to start using it.
But then if they start getting value out of it, then I’m going to start charging them. I didn’t really draw the line in the sand for them until probably four or five months ago.
Noah: Interesting. Now you finally got it out, you finally got most of the bugs fixed, let’s jump to the marketing thing. Let’s get to the meaty stuff where a lot of people say, “Hey, how do I get more people to find my product and buy my product and grow my business?” I think the missing part sometimes is do you have something people actually want? Do you ever wonder about that, or think about if this is something people actually wanted?
Mike: For this product, no. I think that’s actually an interesting question, the way you phrase it because I don’t think that most people, when they’re building something, even question whether or not people want it. I don’t think that they do. I don’t think I’ve ever questioned anything that I’ve ever built and said do people actually want this? You don’t know that or even really consider it until after you put it out there, and then people don’t buy it. You’re like, “Oh, do people really want this?” You’re not going to build something that you don’t think people want.
Noah: Yeah, we think that. I don’t think anyone tries to be like, “I can’t wait to build stuff that no one’s ever going to use.” You know what I mean? I generally don’t think that’s the case.
Mike: Exactly. That could just be self-delusion too. It’s not to say that that’s not a possibility, it just means that no, I never really seriously thought that, and I still don’t. But it doesn’t mean it’s not a fair question, objectively, do people care?
Noah: What was your plan to get it out there? This is where we can start going through the marketing plan stuff that we went over in your document.
Mike: There’s different stages that I would say the app needs to get to. There’s the early adopters or beta users, whatever you want to call them. That group of people needed to get on-boarded and start being successful with it. Then there’s this level where I feel like it needed to start getting a critical mass of 20 or 30 people before I can go public with it and start pushing it out to larger numbers of people. That’s where it is today.
Most of the people who are on there now have either been using it for several months or were part of the very early access group, or just heard about it through word of mouth. I’ve actually gotten a lot of referrals from people who have been using the software and then recommended it to somebody else and said, “Oh, you’re having problems with X? I was too. I switched over to Bluetick and those particular problems went away. I found a lot of success in asking specific people for referrals and getting into other people’s networks and leveraging those networks to add more people into Bluetick.
Noah: Referrals, and then did you pick a goal, did you pick a customer? How did you organize that at a high level?
Mike: With the referrals, a lot of them were people that I didn’t know. It wasn’t as if I necessarily had a particular goal in mind, it was just who do you know that has this particular type of problem, and then is Bluetick a good fit for solving that problem for them? Most of it boil down to doing a demo for them, talking to them about their problems, if there were ways to reengineer the software a little bit to fit that particular use case.
I found a couple of use cases that people have hit on, one is podcasters who want to get sponsors for their podcast. It’s funny that that has come up because several years ago, when I was first doing the early validation, I was looking at event coordinators and conferences. They just didn’t happen often enough, but podcasters record every week or every other week. There’s a much higher frequency, and they could actually use the software to do exactly what it was originally going to be for for event coordinators.
Noah: A few other things. It seems like one challenge you’re figuring out is who is the ideal target customer?
Mike: Yup, that’s absolutely true.
Noah: For me, I use Outreach, there’s Mixmax, there’s Boomerang, there’s FollowUp.cc, there’s a good amount of different people doing this. Even with sumo.com and AppSumo, there’s always competitors. I’ve never seen a business where there is not competitors, even people like Tesla. There’s a bunch of other car companies, and guess what, there’s public transportation, there’s biking and Uber. Sometimes, their biggest competitors don’t even realize.
I guess the thing for you and people out there is just not to get discouraged. That’s also advice for myself. There’s always some competitor.
I think that what I’m curious for you is who do you think your customer will end up being? Is it for SMBs that are small sales teams, is it the podcast marketing tool? I do think with the outreach and some of these guys, I think we’re paying $500 a month per person or something pretty crazy and you can’t just sign up for it, you have to have a demo and all this other stuff.
Mike: I have talked to people who have been using Outreach or switched away from Outreach. One of their biggest complaint was the fact that it costs so much per license. I talked to somebody a few weeks ago and they said that there were quoted $150 or $160 a month per person. Bluetick is only $50 a month per person and it does largely the same type of things. I’ve heard from people who have used various competitors that they had problems with them.
What I did early on when I was doing the validation was I focused in on those problems and said how can I avoid Bluetick having any of those problems? I worked really hard on the engineering side of things to make sure that those things don’t happen. For example, being able to add somebody into more than one email sequence at a time and recognize when they’re in one versus the other and pull them out of the correct one for example.
Another one is being able to make sure that the emails are not being missed. If a reply comes in, how do you guarantee that the software does not miss a reply? I do that by synchronizing the entire mailbox, which I don’t know of anyone else who does that. It’s basically brute forcing to make absolutely sure that does not happen. And there’s a few other little things here and there, but those are kind of the main pieces that I focused on because the people I talk to were generally unhappy with other options.
In many ways, I won’t say the target market is this but I feel like a good chunk of my early customers are probably going to come from people who are fed up with other products and are looking for a solution because of specific things that they run into.
Noah: We can go about how I like to think about marketing plans and some of the things I’d recommend for you to do.
How do you know which customer you’re going to finally be like let me hone in on this customer and this pricing?
Mike: That’s a good question. I don’t know what that looks like right now, that’s something I’m still trying to work out. I’ve shied away from honing in specifically on one particular use case or one particular type of customer so far because I don’t feel like I have enough customers who fit a given profile yet to be able to say I’m going to go in this direction.
My concern is really that the tool gets pegged for getting sponsors for podcasters, for example. I don’t want the tool to be pigeon-holed into something like that too early. I don’t know what the best customer looks like. Maybe that’s not even a valid concern, maybe I shouldn’t be worried about that.
Noah: I think you should, and I think that’s where you’re going to win. Winning means just making the business a lot easier. What I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks is called PPD. Who’s my person, what’s the price for them, and what’s my differentiator? Your PPD, I guess PDP or whatever way you want to organize it, for yourself is this is something that when I was doing marketing at Mint was probably one of the reasons that we did well. It obviously was not just me, there’s a bunch of people that made Mint.
What we did is we targeted people who read personal finance books. It was free. Your price is zero which is good, and then differentiator was it was free, and the people was very exact. It was like if you’re reading a personal finance blog, I want you. If you’re not reading personal finance blogs, I don’t care. The more that you can do that, and even commit to it for three months.
I think what I’ve noticed with marketing is that people don’t want to be very narrow because they’re going to lose out on customers. An example of that was yesterday I was talking to my friend who helps me with design work. He said, “Hey, the most lucrative customers are my web app and mobile app designs, but I get all these other businesses and I want money but I’m not making a bunch, so what do I do? It’s hard to say no to that.” I said great, more you’re saying no, the more it means you’re focused and you have the right customer. But find someone else that you can pass them off to and say hey, this is a great person for all these things you want, I’m this. In reality, he can get better at that skill and he could start charging more.
If you had two today, Mike, I’m curious, if you could only serve one person and you said for the next month, let’s just keep it really short, I’m only going to focus on this person. Who do you think that would be?
Mike: I would probably say the owner of a services company that has less than ten people in it. By ten people, I would say ten people total but probably two or three that are charged with doing the outreach efforts and marketing and sales for that business to help them build the business and build the relationships they need with their customers.
Noah: Let’s go with that, now we’ve got something. We’re doing service people who need more customers. Web design agencies, what’s an example of that?
Mike: Software development, web design. You could go so far as print design. Anyone where there’s a service based component where you typically have to talk to the customer in some way, shape, or form before you can really start working on them. Because of that, you end up with the type of business where you have multiple people involved in the creative process because you’ve got a sales rep or marketing person on the front end and they’re really doing business development, and then they hand off the business or the work to be done to somebody else, and then that person does it but they’re the ones getting compensated or the money is being generated for that consultant company based on their work. It’s not really that sales person upfront.
The price points for them tend to be higher. It may be a couple thousand dollars, maybe $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a week, but it’s worth it for them to follow up with their customers. That’s really the key point that I found, the price point that they’re selling at has to be high enough for them to justify doing those outreach efforts. We talked about this earlier, the second, third, fourth emails, those are the ones that you also see a fairly high response rate.
If you can get to the point where you have a business if a lead is worth $4,000, $5,000, you only send them one or two emails, it’s probably not enough. You need to get to a point where you get an answer, you don’t want to send an email into a blackhole and just assume that they’re not interested. You have to follow up until you get an answer one way or the other, even if it’s no, you don’t care, you just want to know if that lead is dead.
Noah: You have that, and then what’s next? What’s next for you with that? I think sometimes when people ask for advice, this is why I tend to never give advice, is because we all have our own plans. You already have some kind of plan that you already want to do. I think when people are giving advice, just try to understand what people’s plans already are and see if you can assist that, that’s why I asked that before I tell you to go do all this stuff.
Mike: Yeah, I think the biggest question in my mind is how do I get in front of those people? It doesn’t even necessarily need to be at scale either. It’s how do I get in front of those people so that I can capture enough of their attention and enough of their interest to get the conversation going when they don’t know who I am, when they don’t know what Bluetick is or what it can do for them. Maybe they’re familiar with cold or warm emailing software and CRMs and sales funnels and things like that, but they aren’t necessarily looking specifically for these types of tools.
Noah: I am curious. How come you’re not targeting… MicroConf has how many people on their mailing list and you have so many on your mailing list. How many people are on that mailing list?
Mike: I’d say between them probably 8,000, 10,000, something like that.
Noah: Just out of curiosity, how come you didn’t focus on serving those people? Or tailoring this more to them?
Mike: I won’t say that I haven’t. Bluetick is my business, and then there’s also the Micropreneur Academy which under that umbrella you have the podcast and MicroConf and Founder Cafe. We don’t really mix email lists. I would say I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable going out and trying to do a sales blast or anything like that to them, just because that’s not what they were there for, it’s not what they signed up for.
It’s different if I talk to somebody at MicroConf where they come up to me and ask me questions about Bluetick because they’ve heard about it and they’re interested in it. I have no problems doing that, especially when they’re coming to me. “Oh yes, I know this person, I feel like I can trust them. They’re going to do the right thing for me.” That’s not an issue, it’s that going outbound to that audience, to those particular mailing lists is too head-putted.
Noah: That’s just one feedback, and then we can go through marketing plans. We’ll do a marketing plan in 15 minutes or less, it’s like dominoes. I think most people with marketing, and this is something that I think why sometimes my marketing is done well is that I do go to the people I already know first. I try to serve them first.
What I mean by that is I don’t know, and maybe you do and I’m totally off-base. I don’t know how many people you have that are already running software development firms, and maybe it’s a lot. The easier thing you already have for sure is you have a bunch of people who already like you, who probably have businesses or know someone who has a business that I would try to tap my close network first before I even try to think of my secondary or fourth networks I have no clue of.
Mike: No, that’s a good point. I just have to think of creative ways to do that.
Noah: I don’t even think you have to be creative, dude. Not to be mean about it, but those people already like you. I don’t know if they hate me or like me but for sure they like you. You don’t even have to sell them. Be like, “Hey guys, there’s something I’m launching, you guys are launching things, I’d love to get anybody’s feedback on it or if you guys want to use it, feel free.” You can hook them up if you want, that’s totally on your discretion.
It’s just like when I started AppSumo, I started a business for startups because I love startup software. I like promoting stuff. I had a network of that. I went out to my network on LinkedIn, I went out to all my friends and said, “Hey, can you tweet this?” It just made it really easy cause I tried to help and serve the people I already had access to versus ones I had no clue of.
Mike: That’s a good point.
Noah: Just something to consider. It’s been really interesting talking about this, here’s just a few thoughts about it.
What’s your goal for the year with Bluetick?
Mike: My goal with it, by the end of the year, I kind of classify the end of November as the end of the year because December I don’t think a whole lot is going to get sold. By the end of November, I’d like to hit $10,000 in MRR.
Noah: Okay, that is key. I just want to highlight it for people out there. If you don’t have a goal with a timeline, I just don’t think you can be successful. Someone said this quote, it’s like a boat without a router. You’re just going randomly. Maybe you’ll end up in America, maybe you’ll end up in South America, who knows?
I love that you have a goal. And then to that goal with that timeline, what’s your plan now to hit the $10,000?
Mike: I have a bunch of notes and stuff that I still feel like I need to organize a little bit better, kind of like you said just going without a router. I have a lot of tactics and specific things that I could do kind of written out, probably have a couple of hundred things. I haven’t really organized them to what your PPD, the person price differentiator. I haven’t narrowed down to say these are the people that I’m actually going to go for and these are the tactics that I’m gonna slot in to actually do that.
I have some ideas that have kind of worked in the past few months. One of them is doing influencer outreach and going on podcasts and things like that. I’ve also taught about doing joint webinars, I’ve talked to a few different people who have fairly large audiences themselves and said that they’d be willing to talk about Bluetick and have me on the podcast to talk about cold and warm email strategies, things like that.
Those are the things that I would probably lean more towards right now just because I’m more comfortable with them. I think that there’s also plenty of other things that I either haven’t done before or I’m not comfortable with, or just don’t even know about or haven’t thought about that I could do to increase traffic and add sales and customers.
Noah: Do you mind if I give some suggestions of what I do?
Mike: Absolutely, that’s what you’re here for.
Noah: Do whatever you want, but here’s how I would organize your marketing a little bit tighter. Number one, I think you should just pick a specific customer and then make your website very tailored to them. When I go to bluetick.io, it’s not very clear who it’s for. It’s like, “Hey, everyone should send cold and warm email followup software.” There’s feature driven, demographic driven, and then psychographic driven types of headlines. It’s not speaking to anyone.
For me, if I come to Bluetick, it should be we help service companies make two times more money. Oh, how the hell do you do that? And then that hooks me into what you do.
This is getting there. We send follow up emails so you don’t have to, but what does a followup email actually mean? If you’re talking to your specific audience, let’s say you target podcasters just to get guests, it’s like we help two times you book your guests, or don’t waste so much time booking guests. “Oh yeah, I’m a podcaster, I waste a bunch of time. That’s really painful.”
I think your marketing, the way that I would do it, is think about who your customers are. This is what I do. Either use live chat or just talk to them and ask them how they describe your business. Use a recorder, record it interviewing for the podcast, interview a customer, and take their language. I don’t know how they talk to their friends, but the way they talk to their friends is the way you need to talk to them, or their colleagues. That would be number one.
Number two, with your overall marketing plan, the way I like to do it is I love your goal, $10,000. You need to break that down monthly. What does that mean for August, for September, October, November, December? From each month, you should have how much MRR do I need to be to get my $10,000 by the end of the year? Then within each month, I break out if I need to go from $1,000 to $3,000, I need $2,000 MRR. What are ways I can get that? What I like to do is list out ten different ways, then I make estimations about how much MRR I can get from each activity.
For example with sumo.com, we were trying to double the amount of customers we have in the next six months. I have a list of six different things, it’s content marketing, affiliate marketing, paid marketing, free tools, SEO kind of stuff. I estimate based on some historicals and just guesses, how much I think each one is going to happen. I sort it, and then I pick just three. I don’t think we can do that many things great. I execute on just those three for the month. At the end of the month, I’d say, what did it actually produce versus what I expected?
The beauty of that then is I can cut the one that doesn’t work, keep one or maybe two that do work, and then add in another experiment, the 80-20 rule. What that does is it forces some discipline on accountability. “Wow, this is what it should do if I actually executed correctly,” and help you hit your goal. Does that make sense?
Mike: That makes perfect sense. That’s dead-on accurate. That’s fantastic, to be honest.
Noah: It’s a basic spreadsheet, I don’t use crazy software, it’s totally free, Google Spreadsheets, or illegally download Excel or maybe open source it. Even for you, you could even do one on one. A lot of times I do that in the beginning, just referral.
With sumo.com, when we started it, I just literally went out to people that I knew. If you don’t know a bunch of people, go join MicroConf, go get involved in things if you don’t know people before you need them and before you want to work with them. If you do have people, how can you go one by one and do that? We literally went through every single person on my LinkedIn account.
You know I’ve been doing internet stuff for 15 years, it took me a long time. But at the end of it, it was like oh wow, we have a good amount of people using this now and paying us. It’s one of your tactics, I wouldn’t want to discount even direct selling one by one and say I think I could probably generate $500 from that and then you do it at the end of the month. You’d be like, “I did $300, it was pretty damn good versus other things. I’ll do more of that next month and then less of something else.”
Mike: That point, I could export all my contacts on LinkedIn and just look through them, see who I think would be a good fit, or should just be filtered out entirely and then throw them into Bluetick and just do that personal outreach. I can do that. There’s nothing preventing me, I don’t think.
Noah: I think that’s even more genius. Use your own product, use your own dog food. I think that’s epic, man.
Mike: I actually use that during the course of demos. Previously, up until this week, I had just a little field on the website where you could ask for an invitation code and then they go to the next page, fill out a survey. Anyone who filled out a survey, I’d look at what they said and then plug them into Bluetick and then use Bluetick to get them to a demo. During the demo, I would show them, “Hey, this is how Bluetick got you to this demo.” It works really, really well. We got an 80% response for it.
Noah: Dude, that’s genius, I love that. This is a new method that I’ve been using with my marketing and I’m starting to apply it in other parts of the business, and it’s called Proactive Dashboards. The idea there, Mike, and for people listening is that you create a dashboard for yourself and your team of things you can do on a weekly basis that is fully controllable by you.
What do I mean by that? Mike, can you control if someone responds to your email or not?
Mike: Not directly, no.
Noah: You can’t force somebody to respond to your email. You can be like, “No, do it, I’ll kill you.” I’m going to be like meh, whatever.
Mike: There’s 300 of them.
Noah: Yeah, and then we’ll just filter emails or whatever. Point being is you can’t control them but can you control how many emails you send?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely.
Noah: Completely. I create Proactive Dashboards for my podcast, The Noah Kagan Present one that we were talking about earlier, and then for sumo.com we have a proactive dashboard. For each of these teams, it’s things that we can control that help us hit our goal.
Let’s say your goal is this MRR goal, you have a person doing sales for you or for yourself. It’s like can I send ten emails a week? That’s controllable by you. Each week, we do a green or red, whether we hit our goal. Then, you can have other things. How much ad spend? Did you spend $50 in ads? One of the guys in our team, it’s like hey, did you run two marketing experiments this week? I don’t really care which things they actually do, I just care that they do it or not do it. I want them to take initiative and all that other good stuff.
The point of the proactive dashboard is that it’s kind of this living controllable dashboard that will help you hit your goals. You can adjust it as needed, meaning you’ll probably be doing stuff like we were doing a bunch of Pinterest for a while. It was just doing nothing. After a month, it was said kill Pinterest, what’s working better? Quora. Okay, let’s increase our Quora. We did and we saw Quora go up. This week, we’re experimenting with LinkedIn. I’m seeing a lot more LinkedIn traffic and engagements so we’re experimenting with one post on LinkedIn a week.
Basically, I encourage everyone to think about what are controllable things I can be accountable for or make my team accountable for on a weekly basis that will help me hit my goals?
Mike: That’s awesome. I guess in terms of psychology, what does that do for you? Obviously, you do have control over these things. Is that why this works? Is it a psychological hack that doesn’t put you in a position where you just freeze because you’re not sure what to do?
Noah: Dude, I’ve gone to a bunch of therapy. I know everything.
I think why I like this and why the teams like it is a few different reasons. One, you want to play games you can win. If you’re doing things and your end vanity metrics aren’t working, it’s very demoralizing. But this is something where I can control it completely. I learned this from my friend [davidgrasshopper.com 00:44:07].
One, it’s controllable so you feel like you can actually win. Two, a lot of us like to see that we have streaks. The green and red every week and you start seeing you have green, you’re like okay cool, I’m doing well, I’m getting my stickers.
Three, I do think the fact that you make—I don’t know if this is as much with the psychology of it but the fact that you adjust it. For example, these marketing tests. If we were doing marketing tests and it would never help our goal, we would just cancel it. I think it just makes you a little bit more short term, like alright, am I doing the activities that I can control that are helping me move to where I want to be? So far, it’s been really great. I’m starting to implement it and I’m looking forward to it.
With the Sumo team, the webinar guy, it’s like hey you have to make one YouTube video a week. He’ll start doing it and then it’s like holy crap, that’s actually really driving traffic and customers, now you got two. And then maybe it’s like you have to do a collaboration every other week. Did you do that or not? That’s less control but did you email five people to collaborate with? That’s controllable. I think more ultimately, I have power to choose in this. I think with certain other times, you feel you’re at their mercy of hoping things work out. I don’t really believe in hope, I believe in making sure things work.
Mike: I think I have a blog post or a conference talk some place called hope is not a strategy. I completely ripped that off from Scott Adams.
Noah: I think with marketing, that’s why I always tell people to spreadsheet it. I call it quant-based marketing and I’ve written a bunch about it on OkDork. The ideas, if you need to hit $10,000, map out all the ways you think you would get to $10,000, execute on it, see which ones are right and which ones are wrong, and then keep iterating on it versus I want to be $10,000, I’ll just do a bunch of random shit and hopefully it gets there.
I don’t think if you’re trying to travel somewhere you would just say alright let’s just get on a plane and hope it lands where I want to go.
Mike: Yeah, I can’t imagine that works out for most people.
Noah: It doesn’t. A lot of the time, you’re going to try things, some of it is gonna work, some of it is not going to work. The point is that for sure in business, things aren’t going to work, that’s a guarantee. Knowing that things aren’t going to work, it’s great, but you have to say now that I know that, what things are working so that I can do more of them?
Mike: I think your point earlier about playing games that you know that you can win, I think that’s probably the killer insight that really needs to be a high level takeaway from all this.
Noah: I think that’s great, man. It sounds like overall for your marketing, one, you already got customers and revenue which is further ahead than most other people which is amazing. I would just put a little bit more organization around the PPD. Who’s the person, what’s the price, what’s your differentiator. There are options out there, so who’s your exact person?
And then in your marketing plan, I think it’s just hey, here’s my plan laid out for the year, here’s my things for this month, let me go execute on them. Let me have my weekly dashboard. And then, start iterating from that. You’ll be like holy crap, I hit $10,000 sooner than I thought.
Mike: Awesome, that’s fantastic advice. I know that you’ve got a gig going here soon. Where could people find you if they want to follow up with you?
Noah: If you’re interested in my personal stuff, Noah Kagan Presents podcast or okdork.com, I talk about business stuff that I’m learning from our business which is sumo.com, which is tools to grow your email list. We also have the AppSumo.com which is GroupOn for geeks. Any of that you can find me, I’m pretty darn accessible. If you can’t find me online, I don’t know, something is wrong.
Mike: You’re not looking hard enough I would say.
Noah: I didn’t get enough attention in high school so I’m desperate for it now. I hope to get invited back to MicroConf one day if I can earn that right. There will be no Sriracha, or I might just bring one bottle.
Mike: You take it easy. Thanks for coming on the show, I really appreciate it. If you as a listener have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
