Product People

You'll recognize Mike from Startups for the Rest of Us and the MicroConf conference. He's launching a new product called Bluetick.

We talked about the pressure we put on ourselves to succeed, setting the ego aside, and growing a SaaS.

Show Notes

You'll recognize Mike from Startups for the Rest of Us and the MicroConf conference. He's launching a new product called Bluetick.

This episode sponsored by...
★ I'm updating my most popular product: the Marketing for Developers book.
Relaunches end of August 2017. Grab a sample chapter here.

Show notes

Want to contact Justin?

Thanks to...

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Creators and Guests

Host
Justin Jackson
⚡ Bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics. Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Guest
Mike Taber
https://t.co/aRhLfVNl1e, https://t.co/JjR5XelbjH, https://t.co/2ytgOjS45g, https://t.co/mNaNKzCGmm, https://t.co/ebgGIS8TY1, Author of https://t.co/aSclMQtG8l & old codger

What is Product People?

A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them

Speaker 1:

Hey, folks. Welcome to the product people podcast. Justin Jackson here. You can follow me on Twitter. The letter m, the letter I, Justin.

Speaker 1:

It's m I Justin. And on the show today, someone you've probably heard of before, it's Mike Taber from the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. He also organizes MicroConf, which is one of the biggest conferences for self funded startups. We're gonna talk about his new product, Bluetick, and what it's like to launch a product under pressure, what it's like to fear, you know, putting something out into the world and having people like it or dislike it, and also some of the tactics he's used up till now for launching that product. Just a personal update.

Speaker 1:

You folks wanna know what I'm working on right now. I'm updating the marketing for developers book. This is probably the most popular thing I've ever ever really created. It's sold nearly 5,000 copies. In the last year and a half, the book hasn't been available.

Speaker 1:

You could only buy the video tutorials. But I'm updating the book and it will be out by the August. So if you're interested in that, go to devmarketing.xyzed or xyz, depending on your preference. Devmarketing.xyz. Alright.

Speaker 1:

Let's get into this chat with Mike Taber. Alright. I am here with Mike Taber who, many of you will recognize from the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast as well as the MicroConf conference. How's it going, Mike?

Speaker 2:

It's going great. How are you?

Speaker 1:

I'm doing good. I was out a little bit late last night, but I've had, a coffee.

Speaker 2:

Just one?

Speaker 1:

Just one so far. I'm I I I was gonna get one right before you and I got on, and I was like, no, Justin. You need to treat yourself after. So I'm you are all that standing between me and a coffee. It's also donut day at my favorite coffee shop.

Speaker 1:

So that will either, inspire me to make this conversation incredible or I'll just be thinking about donuts the whole time.

Speaker 2:

Or you'll make it really short because of that. Well, I gotta go. I got a donut.

Speaker 1:

This has been great. See you guys. Yeah. So I wanted to talk to Mike today because Mike has just gone through a launch for BlueTick. And Mike, maybe let's just start off and you can, describe for everybody what BlueTick is and maybe even how you came up with the idea.

Speaker 2:

Sure. So there's essentially two different scenarios that somebody could fall into where they're using Blutic. So I'm still kind of struggling a little bit with where to position it, like in a general case. But the two places where it really falls into is if you're doing any sort of cold outreach and, you know, you're looking for software that'll send an email to somebody and if they don't respond, it will send another email and keep following up for several times until either runs out of emails to send or the person responds. So that's the the cold email scenario.

Speaker 2:

And then there's also the warm lead follow-up where you need somebody to either do something or to respond to an email because you've got a question for them. Maybe you're trying to set up a call or you're trying to get them to update their credit card information on your product and you need them to do that action. Until they do, you need to keep following up with them. Another situation that just recently came up with was somebody wants to follow-up with people who are signing up for their software and then ask them to, review their software on various websites.

Speaker 1:

Now, what is there a specific person or, situation you had in mind when you created this? Like, was there something that kinda started it all off?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I had this the idea for this probably back in 2012, 2013. Okay. And the problem that I was struggling with was that I was, when Rob and I started MicroConf, I was in charge of sponsorships. He's been in charge of handling speakers.

Speaker 2:

And that trend is, you know, that's continued until today. But even back then, I was struggling with communicating with the sponsors because I would go out and I would send in a sponsor an email. And even if it was a warm contact, I would, you know, send them an email and they may not respond right away. And it doesn't mean that they're not interested. It just means that they're probably busy or it slipped down on their priority list or some server crashed in the middle of the day, they gotta go deal with that.

Speaker 2:

And then, of course, your email kinda drops down on their priority list until they either forget about it or they say, well, you know, I'll get back to this later. And good intentions aside, it doesn't matter. The fact is they're not getting back to you. So I needed a way to follow-up with these people in a way that was very systematic and it was difficult to find something that worked for me. Most of the things I found, they were Gmail only or they did honestly, just didn't work very well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It was it was hard to find something that kinda fit the bill.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And If you've ever been, like, coordinated an event, you know that pain of feeling like, I need these people to confirm with me, like, you even if it's, like, speakers, sponsors, caterers, whatever, and you're trying to get them to, you know, complete give you the information they need or complete it or whatever.

Speaker 2:

Close the loop is really all it is. Like, you need that loop closed. Like, or no, whatever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Totally. So I I can understand that pain. So that was the the kind of genesis of the idea. Mhmm.

Speaker 1:

You know, a lot of people have situations like that in their lives all the time. What made you feel like you should turn it into a product? Was there, a way that you were, you know, able to validate initial interest in the idea? Like, how did that work?

Speaker 2:

So, I guess, a step back a little bit from that. Like, I I had been running the exact same process that I eventually implemented in BlueTick for several years. So I mean, from 2011, basically through 2014, 2015, like I was doing all of that manually. Yeah. And then by the time I got to the point where I said, okay, well, let me see if there's actually anything here.

Speaker 2:

I started going down that road and talking to people, but when I initially looked at it, it didn't look to me like there was anything there because of the fact that I was gonna try and target event coordinators and event planners. And what I realized was that the price point would have had to been fairly high for me to make it worth it for me. And like, I don't run microconf more than at the time, I was only we were only running it once a year. Mhmm. So it, you know, like charging somebody $50 a month doesn't really do anything for my bottom line because the person's only gonna sign up for maybe one, two, three months at the most and it's gonna be hard to make a business off of that.

Speaker 1:

That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I didn't really think that there was anything there. I actually kind of walked away from it for a little while. And I had I had done some initial validation. It just didn't go anywhere. And then I revisited later on because I was, you know, working on Autoshark and I had all these sales scenarios where I needed to follow-up with somebody and get an answer, get to a meeting.

Speaker 2:

I distinctly recall a time where I was communicating with, I think it was Raytheon and, know, of course, like it would have been a 50,000 endpoint installation. And I just needed an answer from him. I kept emailing him and emailing him and nothing. And then finally, I got an email to him and said, you know, and said, hey, we just put up this new release, etcetera. And they said, hey, yeah, we'd love to get on a call.

Speaker 2:

Like, okay, well, really all it was was me just continuing to follow-up with them. So it kinda made me realize that there was this broader or more generalized problem that I could be solving for other types of businesses, not just, like, event planners or event coordinators.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. That sales scenario seems, like, particularly interesting to me because, really, if you're doing sales, it's like you have to usually ping someone multiple times to get to that first demo or to get to that first meeting. And, that's like one of the that's like Steli's famous quote. Right?

Speaker 1:

It's like follow-up. Follow-up. Follow-up. And most people don't follow-up. They'll send the initial email and then they'll they just won't ever contact that person again.

Speaker 1:

And, there's obviously there's obviously a threshold there, like, can follow-up too many times and or be too generic or too robotic or whatever. But I have to say, like, if you're gonna get me to do something, if it whether if it's go on your podcast, if it's you know, there's all these things. You're gonna have to, like, ping me probably multiple times before I'm going you're gonna get an answer out of me because the first time I see it, I'll be like, I'll think about that later. The second time, I'm like, okay. You're making me think about it.

Speaker 1:

And then the third time, it's like, okay. Well, I'll I'll take this seriously now. And, so I can see the application. There's there's there's some pain there. It it and it almost reminds me of this thing I've I've been thinking about with this tweet I sent yesterday.

Speaker 1:

Everyone hates x and wants it to be easier. I think there's often, know, and this was from a conversation with my friend Adam Wavin, but, you know, there's situations where you're doing something over and over and over again, maybe it's in your business and every time you do it, you're like, I just hate doing this. So for Mike McDermott at FreshBooks, it was, you know, creating invoices every month in Microsoft Word and he's like, I just hate doing this. Every month, have to do this and it's it sucks. And then he looked around and he saw that there's a bunch of other freelancers that were also, like, saying the same thing.

Speaker 1:

The sentiment was shared. Everybody hates doing invoices and wants it to be easier, and so he created FreshBooks. And I think there's a similar strain in, in, like, following up, isn't there?

Speaker 2:

There there is. And I've I've dug into that specifically with people and kind of try to come up with a phrase for it, and it's the, the emotional pain of following up is really what it comes down to. You don't want to feel like you're bothering people. And that's why, like, the software is built around these templates that either can automatically be sent out or they pop up as a task for you and and literally all you have to do is look at it and you can approve it at any time, which allows you to interject yourself into the process, but it also allows you to customize it before it goes out. So if you know that somebody had, like, a a vacation or whatever, you can customize that template for just that one person and send that email out.

Speaker 2:

And you don't have to deal with, like, all these other issues that you're like, oh, you've gotta copy the entire No. There there's no need to do that. Like, just save the data that was sent for that one person and then, you know, use that in line with the next email that's sent to that person. It doesn't it's not that big deal.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. That's like if I mean, if email automation in kinda bulk email has become kind of a a standard now, a lot of people are doing that. They'll set up a sequence.

Speaker 1:

But there's definitely times where I've been like, man, I wish I could just set up a sequence for this one relationship. You know, like, we're planning a partnership, and it's like there's you know, I I need to reach out x number of times to get to the partnership thing. But, yeah, if there's a template there that I could just go in and put my stuff in and, customize it or whatever and just know it's gonna run, there is something about that that's interesting.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Yeah. And, I mean, it's got a lot of those, the automation pieces that you would kind of expect from, a marketing automation tool because it's built using the the liquid template engine, which there's a lot of tools out there that use it. And, you know, it's it's very similar. You're just basically injecting variables that are custom to, like, each individual contacts.

Speaker 2:

You throw their first name in or based on different tags, say different things. There's a lot of automation things that you can do with it to make it look very organic. And because those emails come directly from your mailbox as opposed to, like, something from Mailchimp or Aweber or Drift, like, they look like you literally handcrafted that email and the fact is that you didn't. And I've got a I have a five email, sequence setup that I was actually using to invite people to demos. And the really funny part was that I could I would put them into it.

Speaker 2:

I would customize that first email and the next four, I would just let it go. And I would have people after the so there's obviously, like, about 30% of the people would come in and after the first email, they'd say, yeah, let's let's get on a demo. But the other 70% came after that first email.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

So that was the most interesting part. There's just a lot of people need that the those extra emails or reminders or, invites Yeah. And then they'll do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. And we're gonna we should get to there's some questions in the chat here about, you know, what, you know, how much email is too much email and and things like that. But I wanna get to a a different I just wanna change gears for a second here. And, this is something that you've written about.

Speaker 1:

I think you've written about and talked about this. I can't remember where I saw this. But one of the challenges you have is that you are very much in the, the spotlight, especially in the bootstrapping and software community. So you run this really, this really popular conference that sells out every year. It has you you expanded it to two conferences in The United States and one in Europe.

Speaker 1:

And so people know you from there, and then they also know you from this podcast that you've been running for a long time. Right? Startups for the Rest of Us is

Speaker 2:

02/2010.

Speaker 1:

02/2010.

Speaker 2:

Is, like, seven years now. Wow.

Speaker 1:

So almost seven years. And, you know, a lot of building products is about getting outside yourself and just really thinking about the the needs of the customer. Where does the customer where is the customer struggling? Where do they wanna go? But I found even for myself, like, that's hard when you also have this pressure of, you know, public expectation.

Speaker 2:

Uh-huh.

Speaker 1:

So and I'm not I'm not going crazy. You did write about this. Right?

Speaker 2:

I did. No. I did. I I I put a blog post about it. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Do you wanna

Speaker 2:

I'm pretty sure I did.

Speaker 1:

Do do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Like, what that was like and and maybe, you know, how you've dealt with some of that pressure?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I mean, I'll be honest. Like, it it was difficult, especially early on. I I definitely felt a lot more pressure with, my last product, which was AutoShark, which I would say was a fantastic failure, in every sense of the word. Like, it did not, I spent probably $50,000 extra on it above and beyond what it, you know, what it made.

Speaker 2:

So and it was hard. I mean, it was probably four or five years of going going on it and it just it never worked out. And there's a lot of different reasons for it, some of which are just like the product was not something that I felt comfortable selling in the way that it needed to be sold. So I wrote this blog article about it called Working in Public is Hard which I think you just kinda looked at. Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

But it's very, you know, it's tough to be in the spotlight or, you know, and I guess the spotlight is a very generic term. It's not like I'm, you know, on national TV or anything, but, you know, in the circles where I'm known, I do feel a lot of pressure to say like to be successful is really what it comes down to. It's like, why how is it that you're this person and you're known in all these places and how is it that you could possibly fail at something like this? Or how could you not have seen x y or z? And there's a lot of reasons for it, but I mean, there's obviously, like, the self delusion about, oh, is this gonna work?

Speaker 2:

I was on a podcast a while ago, earlier this year, and I talked to somebody that's like, well, you know, how did you know that this was gonna work? I'm like, oh, I didn't. And that's the that's the key part of like any developer who's ever put a product out there, whether that you're successful or not, you don't know that it's gonna work. You you believe that it will because otherwise you wouldn't have started building it to begin with. Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

And that I mean that goes for FreshBooks as well. Like he believed that it was gonna work. Yeah. But had he believed that it was gonna work and then it tanked, where would he be? He'd probably be moving on to his next product and nobody would have heard about it.

Speaker 2:

And he wouldn't be sitting there talking about the fantastic success that FreshBooks has become. Yeah. But nobody's gonna start building something if they believe that out of the gate, there it's gonna fail. Mhmm. So we're all under this self delusion that we're going to succeed at whatever it is that we do, and it's it's very difficult when you have lots of people watching you.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm. I think I found, like, myself, there's nothing that'll hurt my creativity and the quality of my work and my focus on the needs of the customer more than comparing myself to other people. And I I wrote this I think I I wrote a post called what is it called? Focus on your own shit. And the idea was like it's easy to get distracted about other people's expectations of you and what other people are doing and other people's success.

Speaker 1:

But really, the only thing you should be focused on is the people you're trying to serve and how you can best serve them. Right? And everything else is a a little bit of a distraction. But that doesn't make it any less hard because you still feel the pressure of, you know, there's that fear of, man, I really hope I don't look like an idiot, you know. Whereas I maybe the bigger fear we should have is like, maybe like, to to be so focused on the customer that our our ultimate fear is just if if I don't get this right, then they're gonna continue to struggle.

Speaker 1:

Like, I really want them to succeed. But there's always the humanness. Like, I don't think we can get away from that. Like, no one wants to fail. No one wants to fail in public and that that pressure is difficult.

Speaker 1:

What what if what were some of the ways you were able to deal with that? Did you find some tricks for, you know, ignoring that kind of pressure or or diminishing it?

Speaker 2:

So here's the kind of the insight that I ended up having is that the pressure to succeed is really in some ways, it's self inflicted, of course. But the other thing is that it's about not meeting other people's expectations. So by positioning it as, oh, I'm gonna launch this product and I wanna be able to get to $50,000 by the end of the month or something like that, you're not only setting these goals, which may or may not be realistic and, you know, if you're just coming out of the gate, that's probably not realistic for most people. But by setting the expectation about what it is that you're doing and why you're doing it, and just talking about it, it creates a different situation for yourself. So in my, I guess in my story line, like what I did was I created this twenty one day video series that I basically talked through what the process was I was going through for BlueTix launch.

Speaker 2:

Every day for twenty one days leading up to my launch day, I recorded a video in the evening and drank whiskey and kind of introduced everybody to that. And that was just kind of a little fun thing that I threw in there mainly because I have a large whiskey collection as well. So, but I just kind of threw that out there and there were people that that story resonated with just because they wanted to, they just wanted to see the different whiskeys, but then there were other people who just wanted to follow along with the story. And by doing that, I did a couple of different things. The first one was I set the expectation that I was going to launch.

Speaker 2:

I did not set the expectation that I'm going to launch and it's gonna get, you know, 500 sign ups on the first week. Like, that was not my expectation. My expectation is on this Tuesday, I'm going to launch this.

Speaker 1:

I think that's helpful. I there's been a lot of writing about the ego. You know, Ryan Holiday has a book called Ego is the Enemy. And I I really think, like, no matter where you're at in building products or having a following online or whatever that is, there's something healthy about putting your ego aside and saying, listen, I'm just a human being that's trying to make stuff and put it out into the world, and this might not work. Like, there this is something I'm trying.

Speaker 1:

I'm there there's nothing magical about, you know, there's nothing magical about me just because, I've I've run this conference or I'm on this podcast. I'm just a human being like you trying to launch some stuff, and I hope it succeeds, for the customers, but I also hope it succeeds for me. But you never know until you try. So I I liked that video series because it did feel like, it it it for me, anyway, it just reminded me that, oh, yeah. Mike's just a human being just trying to just trying to build some stuff on the Internet.

Speaker 1:

Right? And every time you start a new project, we all basically start back at that that in that place where we have to put our ego aside. Doesn't matter what we've done in the past. Now this is all about serving a new group of customers with a new thing and it might not work. But Mhmm.

Speaker 1:

That's that's life. Right? That's the that's the that's the, the creative process.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It is. But I mean, it's it doesn't necessarily always make it any easier, but I think the recognition of that as a process and the fact that, you know, everyone out there who's ever built something is also a human and they make mistakes and, you know, you may have this ideal of how something should be done. And then once you get into it, you start realizing, oh, well, that's why those people don't do that or why they're not fixing this particular bug. And it's because you've got so many other things to deal with that it's just not a priority.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. And it does make you, I found that like, and this is one of the reasons that why people don't like to do things in public is because they're afraid of being trolled. Mhmm. And I feel like, you know, in in all the conversations I've had with people, the people who will criticize you the least are the ones who've ever who've done it. Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

Like they like anyone who's ever been successful or even failed at something. Yeah. They will not criticize you. Yeah. In any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2:

They're like, yes, that's hard. I've done that before and they'll relate stories. But as soon as you start talking to the people who have never done it before, it's really easy to be that, you know, Monday morning quarterback where they second guess every decision you made along the way because they've never tried it themselves.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Well, maybe this is a good time to talk about the launch. So you just launched officially launched Bluetick.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm. How did it go? And and what's kind of your next step?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So, I started out before I had the, before I did the launch, was, I've been onboarding people for about six months or so. Got it up to a little bit over a thousand dollars of MRR, had about 20 to 25 customers. It's kinda hard to kind of guess in there just because different like if you sign up as a customer, you pay based on the number of mailboxes that you have connected. So some of them have more than one mailbox.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha. So it's not a direct correlation of like, oh, he has you know, 10 customers so it's $500 a month. It's like, well, some of them have more than one mailbox. Mhmm. So it's between twenty and twenty five or so.

Speaker 2:

And then, I added about roughly another 10 to 12 customers during the launch. So between last week and this week. So it's basically an increase of about 50% if you wanna look at it that way which sounds fantastic but at the same time it's like, well, you know, you're still not even at $2,000 a month. So, you know, there's, like I said, there's multiple ways to kind of slice and dice those numbers. But at this point, the fact of the matter is that like it's launched, it's public, you can go there and sign up.

Speaker 2:

And right now I'm in the process of going through and tweaking things and saying, taking measurements from different places. Hey, who signed up and got through the first step, but they didn't get to the second? How can I get them from the first to the second? Where are the places where this whole system falls down? Because I could have spent the next twelve months trying to figure that stuff out and deal with all the edge cases.

Speaker 2:

And it really wouldn't have made a difference because I'm sure that I still would have run into places where either I did a lot of work that it didn't make a difference at all and it would not have impacted the ability for the product to make money or, you know, there would have been things I missed. So Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I mean, I think the one thing people forget is, everybody starts at zero MRR, and then eventually, you you build it up, you know, slowly over time. And, like, if you go to BearMetrix open page, which a lot of people, you know, a lot of people go and they'll, like, immediately go to maybe BearMetrix. They're at 90,000 or Hubstaff. They're at 200,000.

Speaker 1:

But there's some at £364 a month, $3,000 per month, $5.99 per month, 2,500, euros per month. Is that euro or a pound? Maybe that's anyway, the you know

Speaker 2:

That's euros.

Speaker 1:

Everyone everyone starts somewhere. Right?

Speaker 2:

Everyone starts at zero.

Speaker 1:

Everyone starts at zero. And so, for you to you you said you've added another 10 customers. That's great. Now, what's your what's your thinking now for like, are you go are you immediately thinking I'm gonna try to add another 10 customers? Or do you feel like you're still, like, trying to nail, product market fit?

Speaker 2:

I feel like I I should probably be working more on product market fit than I should be on trying to add customers. And not to say that I don't wanna add customers because anyone who, feels like it's gonna be a good fit for them and it's and it's gonna solve a problem for them, by by all means, go ahead and sign up and check it out. But what I'm really working on is trying to figure out what the marketing message is that really resonates with people, in a way that doesn't require me to deliver it. So that I can sit here and I can explain to you, hey, this is what this product does and give you some situations. But if you're a new new prospect, you've never been to my website before and you hit it, what's the first thing that you're gonna think?

Speaker 2:

I'm not there to explain it and you're gonna look at that page and you could easily just click the back button and walk away and I'll never hear from you again. And that's the biggest problem is that, like, I don't have a firm understanding of what it is going to take in order to pull people in, like, immediately as soon as they hit the page. What is the what are the use case scenarios that are going to immediately resonate? So right now I'm focusing more on marketing tactics like, you know, obviously like talking about it, doing this podcast, doing webinars and things like that will probably be higher on the list. But it's really about giving myself the time to explain what the product does so that as I add more customers, I get more bits and pieces and can flesh out the website and figure out that problem over time as opposed to trying to fix it all in one shot because I don't think that I can do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Has there been a a certain group of people that Bluetick has really resonated with? Like, a certain use case where they're like, man, this has just changed my life. Is there kind of a defined market yet, do you feel?

Speaker 2:

No. And that's the problem is, like, it's all over the place. I've got some people who are using it because, they wanna book guests on their podcast or they wanna do a podcast tour and they wanna go out and talk about what it is that they're doing to other, on other people's podcasts. I've got people who are using it for, finding sponsors for their podcasts. I've got people using it for events and finding sponsorships for those and finding sponsorships for podcasts.

Speaker 2:

I've got people who are using it as part of their sales process to help bring people back after they've either signed up to download something or their lead score has gotten to a certain point and, you know, drip or whatever their marketing automation tool is. And they wanna be be able to reach out to them individually because clearly the person has expressed enough interest. I've also got people who are using it on inbound lead forms where somebody fills out a form, ask for information, or maybe they're asking for a price quote, and then they use it to follow-up with them to get them to a demo or get them to a call. Like, there's all these different scenarios and situations that it's applicable to. And because it's got Zapier integration, it opens up the world for like, hey, you can integrate with this with Asana.

Speaker 2:

I've got people integrating it there. I've got people integrating it into a streak, for example, where streak is built into Gmail and they say, this person hasn't responded to me. Let me tag them. And then all the automation through Zapier triggers just starts following up with them and until they, reply. And when they reply, blue tick detects that and then changes the the stage that they're at inside of Streak.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I don't have like a single one and that's like, hey, that's gonna be the one that works. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1:

That's what's so hard in the beginning is you're kind of fishing around for and this is what I I've been using this example a lot because I think a lot of people have forgotten this. But, you know, with ConvertKit, Nathan started, saying this is email marketing for digital product creators. And it it just kinda like didn't really grow. And then he changed to this is, email marketing for authors. And he got a bunch of sign ups, but they ended up being really bad customers.

Speaker 1:

They were they churned right away. They didn't have money. They were really hard to support. And then he changed it again. And it's funny, like, what ends up being, what kinda triggers each of these changes.

Speaker 1:

If you listen to a story, like, some of it is just serendipitous. Like, you know, someone said, hey. Why don't you try, email marketing for professional bloggers? And he's like, okay. I'll try that.

Speaker 1:

That seems crazy. And he tried it. And if you told me, like, I had to bet on any of those, I would never have bet on email marketing for professional bloggers. It just seems silly. But that's the one that worked.

Speaker 1:

That was as he's fishing around for position for the right positioning, he finally nailed it with email marketing for professional bloggers. And at the beginning, like, you've just launched. That's kind of the challenge, isn't it? You gotta find that group or that use case that you can at least hang your hat on and go, you know, when people go, well, what is this? You can say, well, if you're a freelancer, you know, you can use it to close more deals.

Speaker 1:

Right?

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Have you I I think it's I think it's very easy in retrospect to look back at Nathan's story, for example, and say, oh, well, professional bloggers, it totally makes sense. They've already they already know how to add people to a list or get them to to a list. And they if they're professional, then they already have money. So, yeah, why wouldn't that be a natural fit?

Speaker 2:

But as you just said, I wouldn't I certainly agree with you. Like, I would not have put my hat on that particular bet either. Like, that would have been the last one that I probably made.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

But in retrospect, it's very easy to say, oh, no. Of course, that's gonna be successful because you can explain the reasons afterwards and make them fit, after you see the results.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And I think this is why we you can't be scared to share your ideas or to launch or to put your things out in the public because it's really when you're kind of open to people either, you know, maybe knocking against your idea or suggesting something different or, you know, even being open to like opening the doors and seeing who shows up and then what success they have. Unless you do those things, it's really hard to guess. You know, like you could be in in your cave building it but you you really don't know until you put it out into the world and, you know, people start knocking into it and that's the part that's scary like at for our ego. We don't want people to say that the thing we made is not good or doesn't fit, you know, their thing or whatever.

Speaker 1:

But those are the, like, sharing those things, putting them out into public, it seems like time after time is it ends up being the things that kind of, create those inflection points for success. Mike Taber not Mike Taber. Mike, McDermott had the other one which was his he he initially launched FreshBooks as second site, like the number two and then n d and then site. And people kept saying, that's the worst name ever. Like, we gotta change that.

Speaker 1:

And and he we're often delusional about our own ideas, you know. We think he was like, no. That's a great name. And people were like, no. That's terrible.

Speaker 1:

Like, you've gotta change that. So he changed it to FreshBooks and then, you know, that ended up being one of those inflection points that kinda sent him off on on the, on his path to success. Same thing what happened with, Samuel Hulik. He was, you know, trying out a bunch a bunch of different things and then someone inside a product people club said, you know, I really like, these little teardown things you're doing. You should just do a site that's just all onboarding teardowns.

Speaker 1:

And he had never thought about that before. But having his work out in public and being open to people saying, you know, this thing that you're working on, he was working on something else. And they're like, that's not that interesting. But the thing that's really interesting is this over here. And he's like, okay.

Speaker 1:

So you you almost have to follow where the interest goes. You know?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And you don't know what that interest looks like until you start opening it up and and showing it to other people because and I and I think that's partly a factor of the like, what our experience has been and what our world currently looks like because we're not exposed to other things. So like if you ask a little kid what adulthood is like, they they have no idea. They have no concept of what it's really like. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And you're gonna get some really off the walls answers. But the same thing is, like, if I were to go in and say, okay. Well, what's it like being a corporate employee? I don't know. I can kinda guess, and I may think that I know, but the reality is that I don't.

Speaker 2:

Like, I'm not. I haven't been an employee for, you know, like twelve plus years at this point. So, like, I don't really know what it's like to be in that situation. I mean, during in the middle of my launch, and I think this is a kind of an interesting, side note for people to kinda pick up is that during my during my launch, one of the things that I had offered was I said, okay, well, instead of a thirty day money back guarantee, I'll give a sixty day money back guarantee. And, somebody emailed me and said, hey, do you have a free trial?

Speaker 2:

And I said, well, I don't, but I'm more than happy to give you a thirty day free trial if that's what you're looking for. But can you explain to me what the difference between like a free trial versus a money back guarantee is? And what she said struck me, and it was insightful, like, because I'm not involved in that world. And of course, it's gonna be obvious afterwards, after I explain this. But the fact is that, like, if I didn't if I said that there's a money back guarantee, she would have to go get the company credit card from her boss and then come in and justify it to the boss and say, hey, I think we should sign up for this and this is these are the things that I think it can do for us.

Speaker 2:

If it fails, she looks bad. Yeah. If it succeeds, she looks great but that's a risk that she's gonna have to take. She's gonna have to expend her, you know, social capital at work with her boss in order to to like even make the attempt. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Versus with a free trial, all that stuff goes away. Like, she could just sign up, try it out, and if it doesn't work out, she can just silently shut it down, walk away, and her boss doesn't know anything went wrong. Like, she spent some time working with Solar Software, but didn't work out, no big deal. She doesn't have to go justify it, you know, either sight unseen or not really being aware of all the the subtleties or finer points of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And those are no idea.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. You never think about those until you put your thing in front of a real human being, and then you can see their struggle. Like, like, she's thinking in her head, like, if I try this and I have to go ask my boss for his credit card and it doesn't work, yeah, that that's gonna look terrible on me. I'm I'm I'm taking this huge risk just to try out the software. But if I'm able to try it out for free and it I can tell that it's going to be amazing and that it's going to solve our problems, then it helps me make progress at work because now I look good in front of my boss.

Speaker 1:

When I go to him and ask for his credit card, I can do it with confidence. But, yeah, yeah, you would have never known that unless you put your thing out.

Speaker 2:

And with results. Like, she can actually go and say, look, look, this is what I was able to do now using the software. We should we should pay for this.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Totally. The the, we're gonna we're gonna kinda come to our end here, but, there's two questions. Before we get to these last two, the last two are kind of fun. Dan mentions again, he says the the main differentiator for me personally is that I listen to Mike every week on Star Bust for the Rest of Us and I trust him.

Speaker 1:

That's a big thing. So on one hand, the, having some sort of public profile can be a disadvantage because of the pressure. But on the other hand, it also builds up a rapport. It builds up a relationship. It builds up trust.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 1:

So it's it's a double double edged sword. It's a double sided

Speaker 2:

Double edge it's got to be called a double edged sword. There's more there's more, downsides as well though. Like, I I I definitely feel like there is, some attention to, like, my mailing list that I look at it and they're not actually interested in the product, but they're on the list because they wanna see kind of what's going on. They're just curious. They're just curious or, you know, and it's not that they have a business problem that it's gonna solve.

Speaker 2:

It's just they wanna see what's going on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So it gives this false sense of, like, oh, my email list is this much bigger and it's and it's really not. It's, like, not qualified, I'll say.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And you can also end up with people who will sign up and just, you know, like, start handing you money to be to be blunt about it because they kinda wanna support what you're doing but they don't necessarily want to actually use it or they're just like, hey, I wanna support what you're working on. Yeah. And that's actually a big problem early on because I had a bunch of people who I think signed up and gave me money because they're like, oh, I trust Mike And I'm well, I'm I'd love to help support what he's working on. Yeah. But the reality is it's not it's kinda like a false indicator, I'll say.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. No. I've noticed that too. Whenever I do a launch, I have a a group of fans that I love that will buy almost everything, because, you know, they just like my work and they wanna support it.

Speaker 1:

But it it is a false indicator in that they're not organic leads. They're not people, you know, who are searching for a solution on the Internet and, found my site and signed up. They're they're people that already liked my work and already liked me, and they're a great that's a great base to have, I think. But definitely to grow, you need to get way past that. Like, your your personal following, no matter how big it is, is never going to be enough to sustain a business.

Speaker 1:

Eventually, you're gonna need to have organic leads that are coming from somewhere else.

Speaker 2:

People who don't know you is really what it comes down to. Like, can you convince somebody who doesn't know who you are to trust you enough to give you money and use your product? And that's kind of the position I'm in is right now, like, most of the like, I mean, that's kind of that goes back to what I'd said about the the web page. Like, need somebody to be able to come to my web page and without knowing who I am or the business behind it, like, is this going to solve my problem and have enough confidence based on what it says to put in their credit card and sign up and wanna start using it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Totally. Alright. Let's get to these two questions here. First one, how did you come up with the name Bluetick?

Speaker 2:

Oh, good question. So, my grandfather was farmer. I grew up in a very rural area of Upstate New York about halfway between Rochester and Syracuse. So, he had, cornfields and, you know, dairy farm and everything. And he used to have problems with raccoons coming in and, like, ravaging his cornfields.

Speaker 2:

So he had a blue tick coonhound dog that he would take out into the woods in the middle of the night and basically let it chase the, the raccoons. And he would just turn the dog loose, and they would chase him down. And then once it got to the once it got close to him, of course, they're not gonna stick around because there's a dog there and they'll run up a tree. And then the dog will sit there in the middle of the woods, the middle of the night and just bark its head off and say, hey, the raccoon is over here. So kind of the analogy is that like if you put blue tick onto one of your sales prospects prospects, it's just gonna hunt it down until the person, you know, responds, at which point the the software can back off and let you do your job.

Speaker 1:

I love it. That's awesome. I I didn't know the story behind that either. Mhmm. So last question, and then we're gonna say goodbye for today, comes from Matt Bertino, and he wants to know what your favorite scotch from the series was.

Speaker 2:

Oh, favorite scotch. That's a good question. I would have to say it was probably the Westland.

Speaker 1:

Westland? Yep.

Speaker 2:

It's the, Westland peated scotch. Probably my favorite.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So the Westland peated American single malt whiskey. Is that right?

Speaker 2:

Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1:

That's the one. I'm gonna put the link in the show notes for Matt and anyone else that wants to check it out. Hey, Mike. Thanks so much for being here on the show. All the best with your launch.

Speaker 1:

You've just started. That's the that's the biggest thing. Most people never get to launch. So the fact that you've launched and you've got some paying customers is awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And I'd love for you to come back and and talk about what you did next. Where do you want people to go on the Internet to kind of see, more about you and more about Bluetick?

Speaker 2:

I I have, like, 30 domains at this point. So I the the the I would say the prob if you're you're listening to this, probably bluetick.i0 is the first place to go. Beyond that, you can go to my blog, singlefounder.com. And then as always, if you happen to be at MicroConf, make sure make sure to say hi.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So blue bluetick.io, and then definitely go to singlefounder.com. And the blog post we were talking about is working in public is hard.

Speaker 1:

Cool. Thanks again, Mike. And, yeah, we'll talk again soon.

Speaker 2:

Excellent. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

Alright. Big thanks to Mike for being on the show. As I said, you can follow him at single founder on Twitter. I am the letter m, the letter I, Justin. That's m I Justin.

Speaker 1:

And definitely go to devmarketing.xyzed and sign up for the free sample chapter, and then you'll get notified when it launches. Devmarketing.xyzed.