Omer (00:11.520)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to Mike Taber, the founder of BlueTick IO, a SaaS product that automates the process of sending follow up mails while keeping it personal.
Mike is also the co host of Startups for the Rest of Us podcast and he's the co founder of microconf, both of which he runs with Rob Walling, the founder of Drip.
His last startup was auditshock, a software product that helped regulated businesses such as financial companies to ensure IT security compliance.
He tried for several years to get that business off the ground.
It was a long, painful effort trying to make it work, but in the end the business failed.
Mike believes that it wasn't a product market fit issue, but a product founder fit issue.
In other words, the business wasn't a good fit for him as a founder.
Selling to enterprise customers typically involves outbound sales.
Mike wasn't comfortable doing that and probably wasted a lot of time trying to acquire customers in different ways, such as inbound marketing that didn't work as well.
In this episode we talk about the lessons he learned from the failure of Audit Shock and how he's making sure that he doesn't make the same mistakes again with Bluetick IO.
I enjoyed chatting with Mike and I think you'll enjoy this episode too, especially if you're also in the early stages of building your SaaS business.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Taber (02:05.280)
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
Omer (02:07.360)
Let's start by asking you about if there's a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you or kind of helps you getting down to doing business every day.
Mike Taber (02:17.010)
One I would say that I aspire to, but I don't necessarily listen to all the time, is no fear.
So it's basically the idea of there's things out there that are going to scare you and you should probably do them anyway.
I'm not talking about like base cliff jumping or anything like that, but there's lots of things that you do in your business that you're scared to do, and usually it's because you haven't done it before and you're not familiar with it and you don't know what you're doing.
So most people hesitate.
And I've done this myself in the past where you hesitate and just try to find more information out about it and it Almost never is a good substitute for just doing it.
Omer (02:49.710)
So you said you don't always follow it, but when you do, have you become more kind of self aware of when you feel uncomfortable or don't feel like doing something?
Is that often a sign for you that you have to go and do that?
Mike Taber (03:03.950)
I usually find when I have something on my task list that I've been procrastinating on for a while, it's usually that I'm trying to find other things to do that will actively allow me to avoid that.
Because there's always more things to do.
So you can essence, push off those things indefinitely because there's always other things to do instead of that.
Omer (03:23.930)
Yeah, I heard a story about the guy, I can't remember his name, the founder of the Samuel Adams.
He knew that he needed to go and get sales and start selling his product, but just didn't want to do it and kind of was focusing on other things like buying a computer system so he could set up accounting and payroll or whatever.
And yet he didn't have any customers.
And eventually he kind of went out to a local bar and got them to try his product and they ordered like 25 crates.
And suddenly he said like in 10 minutes that fear just disappeared into ecstasy.
But it's just interesting that even if you hear of all these successes out there and these companies and how easy it can be just to sabotage yourself in terms of just not doing the things that you know you should be doing, but they just push you outside of your comfort zone.
Mike Taber (04:17.720)
There's a long list in every business of things that you know that you should be doing.
And typically they just get deprioritized to some extent.
And you know, there's some that are important enough like reaching out to somebody via email or giving somebody a call when you're just not comfortable on the, on the phone that you should do, and it's gonna sit there on your list for a while.
And I try to make a conscious effort to look at the those types of things and evaluate why it is that they're getting pushed off.
And is it really because I don't have time, or there are other things that are in the way, or am I just not doing it because I don't want to?
Omer (04:50.170)
Before we talk about Bluetick, tell us the audience a little bit about.
For people who aren't kind of familiar with your background, what were you doing before you launched Bluetick?
Mike Taber (04:59.850)
There's a whole laundry list of other things that I have done and am doing, I guess to Start off with I also co host the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast and I do that with Rob Walling, who, who is the co founder of Drip.
And let's see here what else.
We also do microconf and then we also run our online community called Founder Cafe.
And then beyond that, I also have the single founder handbook that I wrote a couple years ago.
And before that, for several years I was trying to get a product off the ground called Audit Shark, which was aimed at the compliance industry for regulated businesses.
Think of like financial companies or oil and gas or energy companies.
It where they need to know that their computers are configured in a certain way.
And my software would walk out into their network and pull back data from those machines remotely so that they didn't have to go each individual machine and they could verify within a couple of hours that yes, every machine in our network is configured in exactly this way.
And it could show them reports on machines that were not configured that way so that they could then turn around and say, okay, we're going to do change control and we're going to fix these machines so that they are now in compliance.
Omer (06:04.320)
And what happened with Audit Shock?
Mike Taber (06:06.400)
So it was a long, painful effort of trying to make it work, and it ultimately never did.
And it wasn't because the product didn't work.
It was because it wasn't a good fit.
For me as a founder, I probably didn't do as much validation upfront as I probably should have to recognize that ultimately the way that the product really needed to be sold was not a way that I wanted to.
And, and I did kind of recognize that, but I didn't, I didn't look at that as a big enough red flag to not do it, because I was very familiar with that particular line of business.
I'd helped grow a startup company back between 2003 and 2005 that ultimately sold for $75 million.
And I could see the dollar signs there.
I mean, it was, it was obvious that there was something there because it's still not a solved problem.
But what I didn't realize was that just because I didn't like the enterprise sales process itself, I was trying to avoid doing those types of sales and I was trying to figure out other ways around it.
And ultimately like, that's how that type of software needs to be sold.
So my options were either shut it down or go out and try to raise funding.
But I'd spent enough time working on it already that honestly, by the time the end of it came, I was Just done with it.
I just wanted to move on.
Omer (07:17.050)
What were you trying to do in terms of sales that was different to how a typical enterprise sales process would look?
Mike Taber (07:24.420)
With a typical enterprise sales process you are looking at probably having sales reps and doing demos and calling people and doing marketing campaigns to get in front of like the IT directors or you're also.
Another big option that most companies pursue is having resellers.
And I really did not want to do like to build a reseller network.
I had people who were asking me to do it because they wanted to sign on as resellers.
But having been a reseller myself in the past for software, I, I really didn't want to do that because I just knew in general how they were treated and it was because of the economics of the situation and I didn't really want to get involved in that kind of a business.
So I pushed off from that kind of stuff.
As a one person shop, it's kind of hard to fly around the country and do sales in person at different companies.
So mostly what I relied on was inbound leads that came in and I had some pretty high profile leads that came in from like, you know, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Raytheon and they wanted to use the software in extremely large environments.
One of them said, hey, we've got 50,000 machines and we'd like to potentially use your software in here.
And I really just couldn't get the traction inside of that environment because I didn't have a sales rep that I could kind of drop on site and say, okay, let's go through a proof of concept or a demo.
Omer (08:39.910)
Okay, so you launched Bluetick, was it last year?
Mike Taber (08:45.760)
Technically the year before, but I'll say I soft launched it the year before and it was, I spent most of last year kind of getting it to the point where it was stable enough to actually have customers on it.
And at this point, like I'm not really worried about adding customers to it.
Omer (09:01.760)
Can you just kind of explain what Bluetick is?
Like, what problem are you trying to solve and for who?
Mike Taber (09:09.360)
The basic problem that Bluetick solves is that when you have situations or areas of your sales funnel where you're going to send an email to somebody and you know that the chances are good that they're probably not going to respond to that first email.
So you're going to have to send them a follow up email.
And what it does is it automates the process of sending that follow up because you know that that situation comes up enough time that you can create a template and plug it in and have that template sent out on your behalf when the person doesn't respond.
So Bluetick hooks into your mailbox, doesn't matter whether you're using Office 365 or G Suite or your own custom mail server, it hooks into that and then analyzes the incoming emails.
And if somebody is responding to an email that you sent them through Bluetick, then it will say, okay, I don't need to send this person follow ups anymore.
And what happens as a result of that is those emails get sent out from Blue Tick and it's trying to initiate the conversation.
And then once the person has responded, the email is in your mailbox and Bluetick sees that and then backs off and it's hands off at that point.
So it might send out 2, 3, 4, 10 different emails until the person responds or does whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do.
And when they do that, Bluetick backs off.
So it's really about automating those things that you would have to do manually anyway and making it look like you're manually sending those emails even though you're not.
Omer (10:28.589)
You don't think of Bluetick as a kind of a prospecting tool for like sending out cold emails, right?
Mike Taber (10:35.390)
I don't think of it that way.
I do have customers who use it for that.
But I'm much more focused on the warm email follow ups as opposed to cold email.
And there's plenty of tools out there that can help with cold email.
And in fact, cold email is basically a subset of warm email anyway.
But warm email follow ups are, I'll say, a lot more valuable and that you get better response rates from them.
And it's easier to see the value of doing those than it is to try to acquire a list of a thousand or ten thousand email addresses, which, you know, maybe a half or a quarter percent of those are actually going to convert into some sort of a conversation.
Omer (11:11.530)
And so typically these kind of emails may be inbound from somebody coming in, signing up for a trial, or providing their information to request a demo.
Is that kind of like the main source of emails that would make sense to use with Bluetick?
Mike Taber (11:31.050)
Yeah, I mean, those are some examples.
Other ones that I've seen people use them for is for following up with existing customers and asking them for testimonials or for case studies, things like that.
I have a customer who's using Bluetick to talk to anyone who signed up for their product.
And after two or three weeks, after they've signed up, they send them into a Bluetick sequence and say, hey, can you go out to Capterra and write us a review?
And there's a couple of other websites that are fairly well known for B2B software apps and their whole goal is to just get their new customers that are coming on to go over to those websites and basically rate them because the more ratings they get, the higher they rank in the search results on those websites.
And you know, some of them are getting a lot of traction based on following up with those people and getting them to write the testimonials for them.
Omer (12:19.330)
And if someone is working those warm leads currently using kind of an email marketing system like a Drip or an activecampaign, what would you say to them is kind of different or better about using Blue Tip Tick?
Mike Taber (12:36.610)
Instead of the specific things that differentiate Bluetick from some of the tools that you named like Drip and aweber or mailchimp, the problem with those is those have unsubscribe links in them which, you know, you can debate back and forth whether sending somebody a cold email or sending them emails without a way to get off of the list is good or bad.
That's a personal moral question or ethical question, which is partly why I also position it for warm follow ups.
But the main difference is that these emails come directly from your mailbox.
So there's no real telltale signs that it was an automated email.
And you also can schedule them at very specific times of the day.
So instead of saying, oh this is going to go out at 9am you can say I want this to go out at 9:07am which when you start receiving emails from somebody, especially if you're getting follow ups, let's say you get two emails in a row or three emails in a row and all of them are sent at exactly 10am it looks suspicious.
You may not necessarily recognize it, but your brain does.
And it sees that this email looks like it's probably automated in some way, shape or form.
So you're going to put less weight on it and you're not going to reply as quickly.
Same thing goes with any sort of email that's got an unsubscribe link in it.
You know it's automated, you know it was probably sent out to thousands of people.
And you're just in the back of your mind, you're going to put it as a lower priority to reply to that versus something that comes from somebody.
And it looks like a real person is behind that.
It looks like they're wrote it specifically for you.
You're going to give that a higher priority.
You're going to be more likely to respond, especially if you receive two or three or five emails from that same person over the course of a couple of weeks or a couple of months, because clearly they're interested in talking to you.
And there's a guilt trip factor that plays into that as well.
Like they're going to want to respond to you eventually.
It may not be the right time right now.
Something may have caught on fire and they need to deal with that first.
But eventually, you know, you'll, you'll take that conversation forward.
Omer (14:29.040)
You know what drives me nuts is sometimes getting those quote, personalized emails where they've done a terrible job kind of hacking a copy and paste and you can tell that the font size is different in places or whatever.
It just drives me crazy.
Mike Taber (14:43.680)
Yeah, I totally agree.
And that's why I did a lot of validation early on with Blue Tick.
But one of the things that I really concentrated on was making sure that the product does whatever it possibly can to not destroy the illusion that you are personally sending that email.
So there's things in there, like, for example, the follow up emails, you can have them sent as a task, like you can approve them before they get sent out.
Just to make sure that if your call to action in your emails is like, hey, give me a phone call, the system can't figure out that there's, that you got a phone call, it's just not going to know.
And no system out there would be able to do that.
But if you have yourself interjecting it as a task and say, hey, basically pause this until I click the button to send that next email.
And it also allows you to modify each individual email before it goes out.
So then you can say things are extremely customized to that person.
So if it's somebody in Las Vegas right now, for example, you could talk about the Knights and, and how they're doing in the playoffs, but that comes across as very highly personalized.
But if you start doing things like the fonts that are off, or you say, hey, I've emailed you three or four times and they look through their email and they don't find any of those emails, then the person looks at that and says, well, now you're not just not trustworthy, but I'm also seeing telltale signs that like you're trying to hack the system or somebody puts an re in the subject line to make it seem like they've emailed you before.
Those things are all like lies.
They basically make it look like you are trying to present yourself in a way that it's not true and it turns people off immediately.
Omer (16:19.330)
Okay, let's talk a little bit about how you started here.
So you've kind of talked a little bit about the validation piece, but before we get into that, where did the idea come from?
How did you decide that this was the business and the product that you
Mike Taber (16:35.370)
were going to work on?
As I said before, I'm the co founder of microconf and I handle the sponsor side of the house and Rob handles working with speakers.
And as part of that I have basically have to email people and ask them like, hey, would you be interested in signing up as a sponsor for microconf this year?
And I had this problem back in 2012, 2013 and it was kind of early stages of audit Shark where I was trying to decide whether I was going to keep going with it or not.
And I looked at that problem and I did a little bit of validation on it.
And my initial focus was on other conference organizers and saying, well, what could I put together as a business plan for this?
Because the problem I was having at the time was I'd email people and they wouldn't respond right away and then I'd have to go back into my mailbox or into a spreadsheet, see who I'd email, send them a response or a follow up and keep on them to make sure that nobody was slipping through the cracks.
And it was painful and tedious, but I had to do it.
So in the process of doing that though, I recognized that there was a product there and I initially looked at it to try and solve that problem for conference organizers to get them sponsors and I didn't see a viable financial model for it.
So I basically tabled it and I kept working on Audit Sharp.
But then I revisited it at the tail end of that and I realized that it's a general purpose sales tool, not just for conference organizers.
So it applies to any situation where you have to do a follow up of some kind, whether it's, you know, you send somebody a price quote or you're trying to get them to do a testimonial or they signed up on page one of your SaaS product and then they didn't sign up for, they didn't put their credit card information in on step two and you know, you want to reach out to them personally and say, hey, what is it that I can.
Are there any questions I can answer for you to help move you to the next step in terms of like
Omer (18:17.170)
validation, how did you go out there and figure out whether this was an idea that people were willing to pay for?
Mike Taber (18:25.570)
I spent about a month doing interviews with people that were in my network and I basically just emailed them and said, hey, I'm, I'm thinking about this new idea.
This is what it involves basically email follow ups.
And I asked if they'd be willing to talk to me because I thought that it might be a good fit for their particular business and how, and explains a little bit about how they could use it or situations that they could use it.
And from that I ended up with about a dozen probably, probably close to actually 20 people who were willing to talk to me and actually basically take it to the next level.
I talked to a total of about 40 or 50 people and of those, about 25 said, yeah, I'd definitely be willing to talk to you more about this.
So from there I built out about 70 or 80 different mockups of what the application was going to look like using Balsamiq mockups.
You could click around in the interface, had fake data in it, and then I took that back to them about a month later and said, look, this is what I've got here.
Does this match what we talked about?
Yes.
You said that you'd be willing to pay for it.
Yes.
Great, okay, will you pay for it?
And that was when the rubber hit the road and I found about a third of the people who had said, yes, I would pay for that basically turned out right there as like, I would pay for that, but it's not a problem I have.
So there's a. I'll say there's little subtleties in there that you really have to be careful about when you are trying to do validation because it's very easy to make mistakes that are obvious in hindsight, but not necessarily obvious when you're going through them.
Omer (19:49.650)
How much did you charge them?
Well, how did you figure out how to charge them?
Mike Taber (19:53.490)
Oh, so this is an interesting thing I did.
I did not give them a dollar amount.
I was always very careful to not tell them what I wanted to charge them.
I had in my head that I wanted to charge them about $50 per person, but I didn't want to say that.
And in fact I made it a point to intentionally avoid any language or any comments that would give them an idea of what I had in my head.
So what I did is I had a website where they could give them a pre order page and it said, I'd like to prepay for X number of months, and it defaulted to three.
And you could choose between one and six months.
And then it had a text box where they could type in a dollar amount.
And that was what I was going to charge them times however many months they selected.
Of the 12 initial pre orders I took, I had nine people who said between 47 and $50 a month.
And then I had two people who said 39 or $40 a month.
And then I had one person who said they were willing to pay $100 a month.
So at the end of the day, I basically just said, okay, well, most of them are in this 47 to $50 a month range.
And that's what I chose as my pricing, at least the initial pricing.
And so it's.
It's $50 a month per mailbox, and that's what it's been ever since I launched.
Omer (21:01.310)
So that's smart.
So you basically use that as an opportunity to get some early feedback on what the market was willing to pay for a product like this.
Mike Taber (21:11.090)
Yeah, and the interesting thing is anytime I get an answer is like, what is it that they were willing to pay?
I also asked them why they chose that, and I got some interesting feedback from people who basically came in at a much lower dollar amount.
And I kind of turned them away and said, look, that's really just not going to work for this.
So it wasn't like they could type in any dollar amount and I would take it.
So if somebody typed in a dollar, be like, yeah, look, this is just really is not going to work for that.
But then, you know, there were people who would tell me, oh, I based this off of how much I pay for, you know, this particular product over here or that one over there that I saw, that's a competitor.
Some things that were completely unrelated.
Somebody said, you know, oh, I pay.
I forget what it was.
It was like $9 a month for some other product.
And it wasn't really the same thing, but in their mind, that's where they anchored the price.
So that's why they came up with that.
And it was, it was interesting, but it was also a data point for me to be aware of that.
Like, hey, don't refer to that product or don't position it near it so that people don't anchor the price into that.
Omer (22:08.310)
Got it.
And so the pricing right now is it starts at $50 a month, and there's $150 a month and $500 a month.
And it looks like it's just based on the number of mailboxes that people are using right here.
Mike Taber (22:24.230)
Yeah, that's right.
Omer (22:25.510)
Okay, so pretty clean and simple there.
Mike Taber (22:28.070)
Yep.
Yeah.
I mean, there's other stuff that's going in later that is going to help me price tier it a little bit differently because I don't think that the price current pricing model is going to work long term just because it's very linear.
Like, why would you ever sign up for the $500 a month plan if you can just sign up for the $50 a month plan and then just add a mailbox whenever you need to?
I mean, the whole point of price tearing is to get people to go to that next level up where you're not only providing them more value, but you're also charging them substantially more for that value on a, on a per user basis.
So I don't really have the feature set in place to be able to effectively do that now, but that has kind of a direction I'm moving.
Omer (23:02.990)
So I'm curious, like, had you done that before?
Did you do something similar with, with Audit Shark in terms of getting feedback on from people in terms of pricing, or was this the first time you tried something like this?
Mike Taber (23:16.030)
I did not do that with Audit Shark.
Most of what I was doing with Audit Shark was basically working with people to figure out what other things that they were willing to pay for.
It was more like small individual price quotes to different people.
I didn't have a public price listed.
And what I would do is I would talk to them and basically ask them what other things that they were evaluating, try to find out what they were going to end up paying for that, and then position Audit Shark as a lower priced alternative to whatever it was that they were looking at.
I didn't have a good sense of what the market would price would be for that because I didn't have a. I didn't just didn't have a network or a sales channel that was already working.
I was still trying to figure things out.
Omer (23:54.790)
How long did it take you to put together the prototype or the screenshots in Balsamiq?
Mike Taber (24:01.270)
I spent probably about 20 to 30 hours on it over the course of a couple of weeks.
Like I said, that was for 80 some pages or so that you could click through and links back and forth between different parts of the application.
And it really helped me figure out what the application needed to look like.
And in a way it helped design the backend database and how stuff was going to be stored and presented and things like that.
But I mean, I spent good deal of time on it, and I probably didn't need to spend as much time on it because I didn't actually show a lot of those pages to most of the people that I talked to.
But at the same time, it helped me figure out what it was going to take to build it.
So I could probably could have gotten away with a lot less time spent there.
But ultimately I would have needed to do it anyway in order to just build the design for the app itself.
So as part of validation, I didn't need to do as much time, but as part of the whole process of building it after I decided to greenlight it, then I would have needed to spend that time anyway.
Omer (24:55.970)
Oh, and one last thing.
When you asked people in terms of how much they were willing to pay for three months or whatever period of time, were you taking their credit card information at that time?
Mike Taber (25:04.530)
Yes.
So they were actually paying me at that point.
So I took about $2,000 worth of prepayments from people and I told every, all of them, look, if this isn't going to work out for you, or if there's a problem that you run into where we just simply can't fix it and we're not going to be able to, then I'm more than willing to stamp a guarantee on this and give you a full refund if that's what it takes.
Because, you know, obviously, like, my reputation's on the line, but I also didn't want them.
I wanted to remove as many hurdles as I possibly could and still get them to commit to it.
Omer (25:37.550)
And then in terms of building the product, did you look for any sort of funding or was it kind of you completely bootstrapped with this business, Right?
Mike Taber (25:46.190)
Yep, that's true.
So I basically took the money that I had been bringing in from consulting work that I've been doing and from my book and from the conference and from Founder Cafe, and basically put it down so that I could extend a Runway for myself to build the product.
And, you know, the $2,000 upfront helped out with that a little bit as well.
Obviously, you know, there's debate that you could probably have about, well, should you spend that money or not, or should you just put in a bank account someplace in case you need to refund it?
But it all added up is really what it comes down to.
Omer (26:18.600)
Then you brought on a couple of developers to help you build the product.
Mike Taber (26:22.680)
Yep.
So I hired three developers to help build kind of the core of the application and spent about three and a half to four months doing that.
And it was a basic prototype.
I'd say it was functional, but not very functional.
There were a lot of bugs in it, a lot of inconsistencies, just because different people were responsible for different pages of the app.
And so simple things that should have all been handled exactly the same were handled differently.
So, like the API, in some cases return an error in one format, and in another place it would return it in a completely different format.
And that meant that in the application itself, which was a single page application, like, all the error handling was different.
And then the backend database, like somebody was responsible for that, but then other people kind of got their fingers in there, and there was no one person kind of governing that.
So there was a lot of things I would say that went wrong during that process.
But it did help me get something out the door relatively quickly with certain technologies that, quite frankly, I just wasn't terribly familiar with.
Omer (27:22.850)
And how much did it end up costing you to build the product?
Mike Taber (27:26.290)
That's a complicated question.
It probably depends a lot on whether you include my time or not.
So if you exclude my time and just include the developers that I hired and like, the tools and stuff that I had to pay for, I'd say the initial prototype was maybe $10,000 or so, something like that.
And then of course, like, after that, there's also various costs for different pieces of software, and it's hosted in Azure, so I had to pay for hosting costs and things like that.
Omer (27:56.610)
And how were you splitting your time during that sort of period in terms of focusing on the product?
And how much time was kind of focused on marketing and sales?
Mike Taber (28:08.130)
So during that time, virtually all of my time was spent working on the product alongside of the developers and trying to make sure that we were going to be able to meet the, the deadline that I had.
So I had wanted to have it done in about three and a half months.
And it was just an unrealistic timeline, to be perfectly honest.
It's just the people that I had and the resources that I had to bring to that problem.
It just was not, not realistic to have it done and functional enough in that time frame.
I mean, it really needed like, probably eight to 10 months, if not 12, to get it to that point.
And I, I would say that I definitely underestimated how much of an effort it would take for certain parts of the product because of my unfamiliarity with, like, Angular.
Like, I had no idea how to do anything in Angular until we started building it.
And of course I've learned over time, but it was A complete black hole for me.
So there's lots of things that could have gone better, but it was the decisions that I made at the time.
Omer (29:04.910)
What is the tech stack like?
What are you using behind the scenes in addition to Angular?
Mike Taber (29:10.190)
So the front end is angular and then I have two different websites that run on the back end.
One of them is just for the API and then the other one serves up the Angular code.
And on the back end there's a couple of Windows virtual machines that one of them runs SQL Server and the other one is basically just a worker machine that runs these back end jobs that have to run to synchronize with the mailboxes, and then it's because it's hosted in Azure.
I also have a lot of things that are going on with the Azure tables, which is NoSQL and then there's also Blob storage and Queue storage and lots of different services there.
Omer (29:46.810)
I'm curious, why did you choose Azure over Heroku or something like that?
Mike Taber (29:51.690)
I was more familiar, I would say, with Azure than I was with Heroku.
And Heroku, to me, feels like it's made for people who are doing Rails development, which is great, but if you're doing Windows development, the back end of the app is all written in C. It needs a Windows server to run it, or at least it did at the time.
They've done a lot more with NET Core these days, but it just needed a Windows server on the back end.
I also have a lot of extensive Windows system administration experience, so virtual machines work better for me.
I also had issues with performance.
Right now, Bluetick is synchronizing.
Basically one of the things that came out of the validation process was people complaining about other apps that were synchronizing emails and saying, oh well, it takes way too long for the mailbox to synchronize.
So if I get an email, the product doesn't recognize it for like an hour or two.
Bluetick does it every 10 minutes, but it does it against every single email in your entire mailbox every 10 minutes.
So it's synchronizing 7 to 8 million emails every 10 to 12 minutes.
It's roughly 10,000 per second.
And you can't get that level of performance out of a lot of other things unless you do some really heavy lifting or you do a lot of parallel stuff.
But it's already parallelized quite a bit.
But it works really well, especially on a virtual machine.
Omer (31:13.560)
So that's going to become an interesting scale problem as you start to get thousands and thousands of mailboxes?
Mike Taber (31:18.760)
Yes.
I mean, you know, when somebody signs on, like, it has to do an initial synchronization of the mailbox.
And the other challenge I have is that, especially early on, there's a lot of edge cases when you're trying to connect to a mailbox and, like, parse the emails and make sure that you've got local copies of the header information and all that kind of stuff.
It's a really interesting engineering problem, but one I would not necessarily wish on anyone, because there's lots of companies out there or, you know, vendors that do not follow the RFCs when it comes to sending emails.
And you've run into all these edge cases, and a lot of them are taken care of now.
But I hadn't even realized how many of those edge cases that would come up in the process of the development.
So that's why a lot of things have gone a lot slower than I would have liked just because.
And I still run into problems, too.
Like, somebody.
Somebody will email me and say, hey, this.
This email wasn't caught, for example, or this bounce wasn't detected.
It's like, okay, well, why is that?
It's almost inevitably because somebody's not following the RFCs, but I have to account for that in my rules engine.
Omer (32:19.400)
Okay, so you eventually built the product, you shipped it.
How do those people who had prepaid kind of react?
Was.
Was everybody kind of on board?
Did it kind of meet their expectations compared to the demo that you had shown them initially?
Mike Taber (32:36.840)
So I actually had a really hard time getting them to use the product.
And I think that it was more an issue of.
Because of the way that I'd set expect, where I had said, look, you know, I won't charge you a monthly fee until after you're onboarded and until you're seeing value from the product.
And I think that that was a mistake because it doesn't put any pressure or impetus on the person to make it a priority.
So even though they had prepaid for it, the money was already out of their pocket and they weren't getting actively charged for it.
So there was nothing that pushed them in the direction of saying, hey, I have to make a decision on this.
So what would happen is it would just drop lower on their priority list.
Oh, I'll talk to you next week or the week after.
And things just kept getting pushed and kept getting pushed, and finally I just, you know, drew a line in the sand.
It took like six months before I made the decision to say, look, you know what?
I. I Just can't do this anymore.
I'm going to start charging you whether you're onboarded or not at this point, and if you don't want it, then that's fine.
And what ended up happening was I'd say probably half of the people ended up churning out at that point.
So some of them onboarded, and a lot of them just did not.
Even though they had prepaid me.
And they said, yeah, like, I don't care about the prepayment.
You can keep it, but I'm just not going to be dedicating the time to this.
So it was an interesting, I'll say lesson that just because somebody prepays you doesn't mean that they actually need it.
I did find that some of them really just wanted to support what I was doing and, you know, help me be successful.
But the reality is that it gives you false data points.
So if you know the people, there's, I'll say, some definite caution you have to have about taking money from those people in the form of prepayments, because it can give you this false sense of.
Of security that you're onto the right track and you may not be, and it's just that they're giving you the money because they.
They believe in you and they want you to succeed, but it misleads you.
Omer (34:20.220)
Yeah, that.
That's a really interesting insight.
You know, typically when you ship a product like this and, you know, for a founder, you know all the flaws of the product and the things that you haven't done yet that, you know, you should kind of go and do in terms of improving the product, what was your experience there in terms of, like, once you had shipped, how frequently were you updating the product?
How are you figuring out what you were going to fix or what new features were you going to add?
Mike Taber (34:54.310)
So I think initially I made the mistake of looking at the things that I knew about the product and trying to address those issues versus talking to the people who were onboarded and were using it and trying to find out what the pain points that they were experiencing were.
And it took probably three to six months for me to kind of shift my perspective a little bit and focus much more on the things that they found important versus the ones that I could see.
Because if there's a bug and they don't see it, then is it really a bug?
Like, it doesn't matter at that point?
It doesn't matter that it's going to take you three weeks to fix if they're never going to touch that piece of code.
So I realized after that time that there were things that I was prioritizing that I really shouldn't have been.
So I found that just talking to the customers and digging directly into the reasons, for example, why they weren't using the product as much as I wanted them to, or why it wasn't integrated into their process, like, digging into those things was actually a lot more beneficial than trying to ship more code and more features and fix things that I knew were fundamentally broken until, you know, after people started complaining about them.
So now I'm tracking how many times people complain about certain things, and then once it meets kind of a critical threshold within a certain timeframe, that's when I'll set aside time to fix it.
But otherwise, I generally don't bother unless it's something that comes up a lot or I see it in the logs a lot, and it has to be dealt with.
Omer (36:17.460)
That's a really difficult thing, I think, for many founders, because you want to keep improving the product, you want to make it better.
But there's a difference between what you think needs to get done and needs to get fixed versus what your customers are actually telling you.
I've kind of been in that situation where I kind of feel, like, pressure to kind of go and resolve stuff, yet people are using the product and no one seems to be complaining.
It's kind of a weird situation, right?
Mike Taber (36:44.910)
Yeah.
I mean, it's definitely that instance that you just said where, like, you feel like it's important and, like, because you see everything, like, you're seeing the logs, you're seeing how people are using it, and you have this vision or idea in your head of what the roadmap is going to look like for the product and what needs to change in order to get there.
But there's so many things, things that the customers just really don't care about, and they're the ones who are giving you money.
And if they are leaving because they are not getting a feature that you haven't built yet, then that's the time to pay attention.
But otherwise, like, you're making them happy.
What you really should be focused on is, like, adding more customers into the product to help it scale up and get you more revenue so that you can do more things and hire people or, you know, bring on people to help you in different aspects of the business, because that's.
That's why you're building it is in order to generate money so that you can do other things.
Omer (37:33.560)
Now, one thing many of us would do in terms of building a new product or business is to get a marketing website up and running in terms of, okay, this is the product and here's the landing page or here's whatever that site is going to have.
So you had an interesting experience with that because people were telling you that you needed to have a better website.
What was the deal there?
Mike Taber (37:57.720)
And I think this goes back to most people when they start a new business, they like, oh, I need to get a website and you have a logo and I need to get business cards and things like that.
But the reality in my situation was does any of that stuff actually make a difference right now?
And the answer is no, because I'm not going to be able to compete with any of my competitors on SEO.
For example, because I had very little content on my website.
I could spend a lot of time and effort and money building that stuff and then publish it and then try to do SEO for six months or a year.
But that's extremely long timeline that I simply just don't have and I can't, can't do that forever.
So I knew that getting people to my website and having a really good looking website was not priority because it wasn't going to be my main source of customers or traffic.
So I basically just ignored it for easily a year and a half.
I just had the website redone about three to six months ago and it looks fantastic at this point, but I went for a really long time without having a website that was more than a couple of pages and it looks terrible.
It looked like an engineer built it because that's really how it came about.
And it looks terrible, it was awful.
But it got me to like 25 or 30 customers.
So I didn't have actually care.
I mean, I had these people who are paying me each $50 a month or in some cases 100 or $200 a month.
And it just quite frankly made no difference at all.
Like the website is fantastic and yes, my stats and SEO and stuff like that are going up now.
But at the time I was much more focused on trying to get people in and using the product and making sure that the experience with it was good and adding more people into that funnel was not the priority.
So I think it's more about just knowing what the priorities are for you and the product and the marketing and whether you should spend your time or not.
And being able to say no to those things is really hard.
Especially when it's as visible as like the website.
Omer (39:46.270)
Yeah, yeah.
But I think it just re emphasizes the point that, you know, sales are a lot more important than some of the things we end up trying to do.
Now, obviously if your business is built around some kind of inbound marketing and, and you're investing in content marketing and driving traffic to your site, then yeah, obviously you need to have something.
But probably in the early days, like you've been doing, the customers is probably going to be a lot of through networking, relationships, whatever kind of outbound sales that you're doing.
And yeah, really?
Is the website that important?
Well, I don't know.
Mike Taber (40:20.080)
I think in the early days you can definitely get away without it or without a decent website, especially if you're relying on those relationships.
Because the purpose of a website is to establish trust with whoever's looking at the website that you know what it is that you're doing and you're going to be able to solve their problem.
And because I was having direct demos with people and it was mostly referrals from other customers or from people in my network, there was already that trust factor there that Mike Tabor knows what he's doing.
So what difference did the website really make?
Especially if I'm on a phone call with somebody and I'm showing them, hey, this is what the product looks like, this is what it can do for you, and this is how it works.
That's the trust that they need.
It's not looking at my website, they didn't care about it.
And in fact, I mean, when I took those $2,000 in pre orders, I literally had like one page on my website for the homepage and then I had another page where you could give me a credit card number and that was it.
Like that's all that was there.
So it's about knowing where, where people are going to kind of drop off in that sales process.
And for me, it was just not the website.
Omer (41:21.800)
Cool.
Is there anything else that the experience that you've gone through, if somebody's in a similar situation to you, was there any other lesson that you learned that you think is worth sharing?
Mike Taber (41:33.880)
I think that if you are looking for a single thing that's going to move the needle for your business, then you're probably going to be looking for a really long time.
And I think that's a common thing on the Internet that I see is people are always looking for a silver bullet that's going to magically solve every problem they have or create this hockey stick curve for them in terms of growth.
And the reality is that like, it doesn't really work that way.
It's Always slower growth over time, especially when it comes to SaaS businesses.
Because with a SaaS business, like you're making somebody commit to a monthly payment, which even if it's less than what they would pay for like a course, for example, let's say they paid 200 or $300 for a course.
If you're asking them to pay $50 a month, they're much more hesitant than they are for like a one time purchase, even if it seems like it would be a no brainer.
So with sas, you've definitely got that long, slow SAS ramp of death as Gail Goodman from Constant Contact called it.
Omer (42:28.670)
Right?
All right, so it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Mike Taber (42:39.470)
Sure.
I'm not good with lightning stuff.
Omer (42:42.670)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Mike Taber (42:46.530)
I would probably have to say go fast and break things, which I'm inherently uncomfortable with, but it seems to work a lot better than you would think.
Even if you see like the log files blowing up, a lot of people don't notice.
It's shocking how little people notice is going wrong in an app as complicated as Bluetick, for example.
Not saying that it's a bad app or anything, it's just that like sometimes things will go off the rails a little bit and like, or if I, I put a bug into the system, things can happen.
I mean, you've got 10,000 emails per second being synced and one little thing goes wrong or a network glitch someplace and it comes to a halt for a little while.
Omer (43:24.140)
Yeah, totally.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Mike Taber (43:28.780)
I would say there's a book called Traction from Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.
It's a really good mechanism for giving you ideas about different marketing channels that you can pursue and how to go about them.
So what it really, I think puts in perspective is the fact that different businesses grow in different ways.
And just because you are comfortable in one particular form of building your business doesn't mean that there aren't other ones.
Other marketing channels that you could pursue that would be much better fit for you.
Not just because there's less competition there, but also because as your business matures and as it grows over time and changes, there's different things that are going to work better in different situations.
And they may just be stuff that you would not think of, but it gives you a framework for trying to figure out what that looks like.
Omer (44:15.310)
Yeah, Gabriel Weinberg, who's also the founder of DuckDuckGo, was on the show episode 33.
So if folks want to check that out and kind of hit the DuckDuckGo story and a little bit about traction, they can do that there.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Mike Taber (44:33.230)
I would say blind ignorance of how hard something's actually going to be.
I think you have to have a little bit of self delusion to kind of go down the path and think that you can do something when everyone around you probably says, hey, that's going to be a terrible idea.
And I think that's mostly because most of us don't have a ton of entrepreneurs that we hang out with on a regular basis.
A lot of people I talk to, they live in remote areas or even if they live in a city, they don't necessarily have a lot of friends who are also starting businesses.
Unless you're in very specific, specific social circles.
And it's hard to get, I'll say, a more objective but also business oriented view of what it is that you're trying to do.
So the people around most of the listeners of the show probably just don't understand.
Like none of the friends that I have for social lives with on a regular basis have ever started their own business.
So they don't really know what it's like to go through it.
And their instant response is, oh, you're crazy for trying that.
And I think you kind of have to be a little bit.
Omer (45:29.500)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Mike Taber (45:33.100)
I use journaling quite a bit.
So I have a app that I pay for called Penzu.
It's a P E N Z U. I think it's like 20 bucks a year or something like that.
Or 60, I don't remember exactly.
But I basically use it to send myself daily reminders at different points throughout the day and it allows me to just dump my thoughts in there.
So like I have a sleep journal and then I have like a product journal which at the end of each day I'll try and write down the things that I accomplished and, and things that I was working on.
And it really helps me do like a brain dump and get thoughts out of my head and gives me an opportunity to really think about things because it's very easy to get in a situation where you're just working heads down and you never kind of lift your head up to think strategically about the stuff that you're doing and the things that you've accomplished and to back up a little bit to say, should I actually be doing this and should I be spending my time here?
Or is this a heck of a lot of effort for something that like five people are going to see?
And if you don't take that time to look up every now and then, you could easily spend weeks or months doing something that is never going to even be used.
I find that just the process of writing those things down is very helpful.
Omer (46:39.940)
Yeah, journaling is something that I've heard a number of people talk about and it's something that I would love to try and get into doing myself.
What you mentioned in terms of that clarity of thought is really useful because I've been in situations where I've had something on my list that I need to get done and maybe it's been there for a few weeks and I'm chipping away at it.
And then I get to a point where I look at it, I go, why am I even working on this anymore?
It doesn't make any sense.
And I think the process that maybe I've gone through in those periods is that over a matter of weeks or whatever, you learn new things, you get insights and something that you thought needed to be done maybe doesn't make sense anymore.
And if you don't take the time to sort of sit back and reflect and think about what you're doing and have that kind of strategic view, it's very easy just to keep heads down and working on things that really aren't that important anymore.
So that's my personal experience anyway.
Okay, what's a crazy new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Mike Taber (47:43.280)
I'd say there's a couple of them.
One would be like a board game or role playing game company.
So I used to build board games and things like that and design them when I was a kid.
And I probably built and designed like 20, 30, 40 different types of games.
Some of them I actually still have a couple of them laying around that I haven't played in probably 20 some years, but I still have them.
And it's just interesting kind of looking back at those and saying like, like, because back then there was really no channel for taking those things and creating them and putting them out to market.
But now you've got things like Kickstarter where it would actually probably be fairly straightforward for me to take one of those things or several of them and put them out there and try and have them published or do self publishing.
The other interesting idea that I Had, and this one's out.
There is something like an iPhone app or an Android app that, or maybe both, where you can basically rate other drivers.
So think of ways where people use it for basically avoiding police hotspots, for example, or finding out where there's accidents and getting around when they're driving.
Well, imagine something like that, only it's a rating system for other drivers and being able to basically tag them and identify bad drivers that are on the road.
And obviously, like, certain people would accumulate a huge number of points because they just drive like jerks and you could just rank them them.
And I think it'd be interesting to see how that plays out.
I don't have any idea for, like a business model or financial model beyond it.
I just think it'd be interesting to see how the social implications of that played out.
Omer (49:15.720)
I think I read somewhere this morning that more than 70% of people think that they're good drivers.
There'll be a lot of people with hurt feelings, I think, with an app like that.
Mike Taber (49:27.880)
And 90% of the population thinks that they're above average intelligence, too.
So
Omer (49:34.290)
what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Mike Taber (49:38.210)
I was born in Japan.
That's probably the most out there thing.
Yeah.
So my dad was in the Air Force, and so I stationed over there, and my mom was with him at the time.
And so I was born overseas, but because it was on an Air force base, I'm not considered a naturalized citizen.
I'm a US Citizen that I don't have to have any of those papers or anything.
So when I'm filling out government forms and they're like, where were you born?
Have to say Japan.
And they say, oh, well, where's your naturalization papers?
Well, I don't have any.
Well, why not?
Like, how are you in this country?
It's like, all right.
Because they just have no idea.
It's an edge case that they just don't account for in any of their software systems or paper forms or anything like that.
So, yeah, it's interesting.
Omer (50:20.750)
Wow.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Mike Taber (50:25.870)
I like computers.
Like computers and electronics.
I just find them fascinating.
And like, I like to mentally deconstruct how things are built.
Like, for example, Alexa and things like the Waze programmed on.
On iPhone and various electronic devices that I see come out.
It's.
It's really interesting to just look at them and try and figure out how they worked or how they were built.
It's also fun from like a troubleshooting standpoint.
When my kids come and say, hey, like, you know, this isn't working, you know, can you fix it?
And, and understanding why it is that those things might not be working and being able to mentally deconstruct them is just.
I'll say it's fun.
I wouldn't say that there's any real hobby or strategy behind it though.
Omer (51:07.340)
So did you buy this stuff and just take it apart?
Mike Taber (51:10.060)
No.
So like what I mean by I mentally deconstruct is in like, if I were to build this, how would it be built?
Omer (51:15.460)
Got it.
Mike Taber (51:16.020)
Okay.
Yeah, that's more it than anything else.
I don't take things apart anymore.
I will say as a kid I was notorious for taking things apart and then being bored with it and not putting them back together, much to my parents parents displeasure.
Omer (51:30.560)
Yeah, I used to do that too.
And I remember like taking apart my parents vcr.
I guess people these days might not even know what a VCR is, but.
And then putting it back together again and kind of realizing I had three or four pieces still left over and just kind of hiding them and then everybody was surprised why the thing didn't work anymore.
Mike Taber (51:49.280)
Yeah, I definitely had my fair share of those.
But yeah, I used to take things apart all the time as a kid.
I'm.
I'm glad that my children have not done that yet, but we'll see.
Omer (51:58.680)
Awesome.
Cool, Mike, thank you.
You know, it's been a pleasure chatting and kind of learning more about what you've been doing with Bluetick and kind of some lessons you've learned and how you're doing things differently.
If people want to find out more about Bluetick, they can go to Bluetick IO and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Mike Taber (52:19.960)
So they can email me mikeltick IO or then head over to the website and you know, know I believe there's a contact to this form over there.
But I also have a blog over@singlefounder.com that people can go to and then I have a newsletter there.
But I'm also kind of all over the Internet and on Twitter so you can find me on Twitter at Single Founder as well.
Omer (52:39.800)
Cool.
I'll include links to those in the show notes so people can grab those.
Mike Taber (52:45.560)
Awesome.
Omer (52:46.440)
Awesome.
Well Mike, it's been a pleasure and thank you and I wish you all the best with BlueTech.
Mike Taber (52:52.520)
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Omer (52:54.120)
Cheers.
