Episode 448 | Let’s Talk About Bluetick

Rob: Mike, which program do Jedi use to open their PDF files?

Mike: I don’t know what.

Rob: Adobe Wan Kenobi.

Mike: Oh God.

Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about Bluetick, where he’s at, and maybe where he’s headed. This is Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 448.

Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve build your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.

Mike: And I’m Mike.

Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. To where this week, sir?

Mike: I strained my back somehow about a week or so ago, so sleeping the past five or six days has been rather rough. It’s on the left side. When I try to sleep, it gets really, really tight throughout the course of the night and it wakes me up. It’s been rough getting any kind of measurably good sleep for pretty much the entire week.

Rob: That’s a bummer. How did you strained up?

Mike: I have no idea. I think I was just alive and that was it.

Rob: Just. I was just old and I moved.

Mike: That’s a good way to put it. The thing is, I just woke up and it was like that. It got progressively worse over the course of two or three days or something like that. It was bad for about four or five and then it slowly gotten better over the last two or three.

Rob: Strained back is no good and no sleep is no good. You’re going back to your pre-CPAP machine days aren’t you?

Mike: Yeah, pretty much.

Rob: We’ll get into some of that more in this episode. We’re going to talk about, as I said in the intro, what’s going on with Bluetick and you and such. Before that, we have some good comments on recent episodes. In Episode 444, you and I went off on Gmail desktop clients. Carl posted a comment saying, “I switched everyone over to Mailbird last month,” everyone at his company. “We switched away from Office 365, Dropbox, and GoDaddy’s email service, and switched to G Suite Solutions. I needed to find an alternative to Outlook and I found Mailbird. It works great, love the Google integrations. My only complaint, one of my coworker’s complaints is that capability of right-clicking to create new folders does not exist. Not a deal breaker, just a complaint.”

What was the one I was using? I don’t remember now. It was Mailplane, like an airplane. When I right click, I often do right-click, paste as text or paste and match style or whatever, because I’ll be copying something that’s all weirdly formatted and I want it to go in the format of the email. In Mailplane, that’s disabled. Not a deal breaker, but I have to flip over into Atom, your […] text editor, I paste it in there then I Shift Command-A Command-C and then go back and paste it in. It’s this extra step that when you’re in a Chrome browser, you can right click, paste the match style, and then it’ll just go in. How about you? Are you still using the desktop Windows client you were using?

Mike: Yeah, I use it on occasion. I flip-flop back and forth between them because it’s an IMAP client and it’s got all that stuff. It’s nice to be able to use one or the other when I need it. The one that I did find with it was that I use the labels feature. I will take things and put them into, I refer to more folders than anything else, but in Gmail it uses labels for that. The one thing I find is that, if I go to use the shortcuts to move it into a folder or apply a label to it, some of my labels, depending on the folder, overlap.

For example I’ll have a customers label but there’s a customers label underneath a couple of different products. When I started typing it out, it doesn’t show me which customers label it is because it basically drops everything before the slash. I have no idea which customers label it actually is because it just doesn’t show me. I still use it on occasion but once I get into those use cases, it becomes a barrier for me. It makes it more difficult. I don’t know why they don’t show the whole thing, but whatever.

Rob: It’s weird. When we bring these things up, it’s like, “That’s kind of a nitpick. Right click, paste and match style, is that really that big of a deal? Is it the labeling?” It can be. It can become that. For me, it’s not that big of a deal, but label stuff, that gets in the way of your workflow and it can get in the way of the perfect solution unless you get used to the new way they do it.

Mike: Like I said, I flip-flop back and forth between them a little bit. I did notice when I was using it that I could shut it down and I would just have Gmail closed, but I’ve noticed that recently I’ve been having Gmail open again. With that, I know that I’m actually just going to close that tab entirely right this second because I forget to do that. Email can be distracting and disruptive. That’s a problem that I’ve uncovered with my workflow, is that when that is open, I tend to get pulled back into my email quite a bit. When that happens, I’m not as productive.

Rob: For sure. Another comment on Episode 447. Paul Mendoza was commenting on the Google verification stuff that you’ve been struggling with for several weeks. He says, “I’ve been dealing with Google verification stuff for months, you can see my day-by-day interactions with Google here. We just got a response from the security vendors, but our app still isn’t approved but I’m sending them emails almost everyday.” He has a URL. You can come to 447 if you want to check that Google verification status. He feels your pain, apparently. It’s not just something that you have manufactured in order to create drama and good radio on the podcast as you’ve been known to do. You haven’t been on […].

Mike: Sure.

Rob: We got another couple of comments, because 447 we started diving in, we typically do our chit chat at the top end of the episode. When we talked about the Google stuff, we wound up spending 18 minutes just talking about that because I was asking questions and going through it. We’ve got some compliments like, “Do more of that. You guys aren’t digging into Bluetick enough,” was the comments, “or your own projects enough.” Part of the impetus for today’s episode was comments we’ve received but also, I think it’s been something that’s been on our minds for a while.

We have always liked doing updates, sharing what we’re up to, and what we’re working on, but it can be hard when it’s not good news. It’s hard to show up week after week and try to have an update of what you did in the past week if you didn’t get anything done or if things are going backwards. I think we tend to do update episodes every few months and I feel like this one today is really just a conversation about where you are, where Bluetick is, how you’re thinking about things, and try to find out more about what’s going on and even to give advice.

We talked for a while before this episode started and you’re bringing up things that I was telling you how I would approach them. We haven’t necessarily always been a ‘big advice for each other’ podcast. It’s a lot more answering listener questions. I think that can be helpful today, too, for you to hear how I would think of approaching different problems or how I have approached them in the past because I’ve done some of this stuff as well.

Mike: Do you want to relabel this as Mike’s therapy session?

Rob: Yeah, it’s going to be 50 minutes and I’m going to bill you […].

Mike: That’s actually cheaper.

Rob: Cheaper than you thought it would be.

Mike: Cheaper than a regular therapy session with […].

Rob: Indeed. Bluetick today, you’ve been working on it for two or three years, and it’s still not supporting you full time.

Mike: I went back and I started looking at my funnel metrics and stuff where I started tracking some of that stuff. I’ve got data in here from November of 2017 and that’s when I started tracking the numbers that I have here. I think that was shortly before I flipped the switch and said, “I’m just going to start billing people. If you’re not ready, then you can either cancel or that’s the end of the free trial or whatever that we have for you.” Obviously, my memory is kind of fuzzy as to exactly what state those things were at at the time so I don’t remember whether it was November of that year or what have you.

Rob: Was that November 2017?

Mike: Yes, November 2017. The reality is it’s not nearly where I would think that it should be if things were going well, the product had product market fit, and I was actively growing it. It’s just not. It’s not enough to support me full time. I don’t necessarily need it to, but at the same time if it’s going for an extended period of time and it’s not making enough money to do that, then why continue?

Rob: Yeah. It’s a waste of time and effort, opportunity cost, could you be working on something else that would be dramatically more lucrative whether that something else is a different product, or whether that something else is consulting, or heaven forbid a salary job? Not that you’re going to go do that, but you have skills. You’re a developer. You can write code. That’s a very valuable skill. To be wasting, I don’t mean wasting time on a day-to-day basis, but having 18 months, you’ve been charging for it, and to be only ramen profitable and not full time income is a struggle. It’s not just that you don’t have full time income but it’s not headed in the right direction anymore. You basically peaked at some point last year in terms of MRR.

Mike: Yeah and it’s more floundering than anything else. It’s not on a tailspin and I’m not bleeding out customers every single week or anything like that. It’s not tanking quickly, but it’s certainly not growing quickly, either. It’s really just meandering; go up on some months and then go down on some months. I have some customers who’ve been around since the very beginning and there are customers who will stick around for three to six months and then that’s it. I don’t feel like I’ve delve into the numbers of how long people have stuck around for and what the amount of revenue that I’ve gotten from each customer is enough, I just haven’t. It’s because I’ve spent a lot of my time on other things.

I feel like I have a hard time prioritizing where I should spend some of that time. Objectively, I think it’s like, “You should spend all of that time on marketing activities, analyzing what your current customers are doing, and who you should be targeting as those customers. One thing I struggle with is the fact that Bluetick has a very good use case for cold email and I don’t want those customers. I have a hard time justifying adding a lot more customers on there that are using the tool for that.

Rob: Is it an ethical thing? You just don’t like cold email?

Mike: Yeah, mostly.

Rob: Or a moral thing? Wait, what ethical is this? External and moral is internal. You’re internal code is like, “Meh. Not a fan of it.” Is that the idea?

Mike: The problem is that it depends on the customer. There are some customers that I’ll talk to, I’ll do a demo for somebody and I hear what they’re doing and they’re doing cold email. I’m like, “It’s not just a great tool that you have, but it’s also a great service. You’re doing great things with it and you are trying to make the world a better place,” versus some of the people just doing the cold email. They’re really bad at it and they’re doing things that are shady or scammy. I’m like, “Yeah. I don’t want those as customers,” but at the same time the tool works exactly the same for both of them.

How do I filter one out versus the other without having a conversation with every single one of them and how do you do that in the marketing that you put out such that you are catering specifically to a type of person who has a certain mindset?

Rob: I hear you. There are ways around it. You have options. You could, on your homepage, just be like the best tool for warm email interactions and then you could put in the FAQ, “This is not for cold email.” You could put it in your terms of service, “This is not for cold email.” You can have flags if people go in it, you see patterns of people doing cold email type things that you flag and you say, “Hey, this isn’t for cold email.”

We had to do this with Drip. People can’t use Drip for cold email. We had to build things and communicate that along the way. It was a pain. It was a lot of work and some people got really pissed off. Some people came in, signed up, uploaded their cold list and started emailing. Our system would automatically block them or they’d get enough complaints that are email spam. Dude would block them. That’s what you have to do if you really don’t want to do it.

The struggle is, with Drip, it will get you blacklisted. So, it’s a big problem for the business itself. With Bluetick, it’s not because they’re using their own inbox. You’re not going to get Bluetick itself, your IP doesn’t get blasted. You have to decide, “Hey, if ethically or morally or whatever, I only want to service certain type customer,” then you can do that. Just make it clear upfront.

It sounds to me like is it an excuse? If you accepted all the cold email, would Bluetick be where you want it to be? Or if you just focus on the warm email use case and ignore the cold email, would Bluetick be where you want it to be?

Mike: I don’t want to say it’s an unfair question, I think the question is a little bit off because it’s more a matter of holding me back from doing the marketing which would acquire those types of customers. It’s not about accepting them as customers or trying to turn them away or whatever. It’s more about holding me back from doing the marketing. I think it’s a very valid question about is that an excuse? I have a whole load of things I’ve looked at and thought about that comes to mind is, […] every single one of them is like, “Is that just an excuse?”

If you looked back at the stuff I did with AutoShark and then with Bluetick, I’ll […] frankly a lot of excuses along the way with AutoShark. If you think about objectively the stuff I’m going through with Google right now, there’s a huge question mark of this $15,000–$75,000 for a security audit. I’m apparently at the end point with Google where all I need to do is get this security audit and get a letter of—I forget what it is—authentication or something, this audit letter that I have to send into Google that says, “Yes, Bluetick is all up to snuff and we don’t have to worry too much about security vulnerabilities for the product,” but at the same time, is that another excuse?

If the products were much further along or had more customers and was making a substantial amount of revenue, would $15,000–$75,000 matter? The answer is no, it wouldn’t. The problem is I can’t point at Google and say they’re killing my business when the reality is the business isn’t making enough money. Really, that’s just the driver that says, “Here’s a hard line that you can’t cross unless the business is making enough.” If the business was making enough, that wouldn’t matter. The actual amount of whatever that is going to come out to would make no difference or whatsoever. So, is that an excuse?

I was saying in a way it kind of is, but at the same time I could almost point at anything that I’ve come across and say, “Is this an excuse?” Anything that comes up on the business as to why something is not working, you could ask that question and I think it’s a valid question to ask. I don’t have a good answer for some of those things. I just don’t.

Rob: That’s the thing. The cold email versus warm email thing, you don’t want to market it because people are using it for cold email. There are solutions to that. If I were in your shoes, I would decide, am I willing to let people do ethical cold email and warm email? If the answer is yes, then that would be on the website. That would be in my onboarding. I would mention that in every demo. I would probably do demo only for now in your shoes because you don’t have such an influx of trials. I’m guessing that you can’t do some type of demo with everyone at a minimum of screencast, 15 minutes of screencast that seriously talks about, “Look, we only do ethical cold email.” Just make that part of the whole deal. If that’s your hard line, then take the hard line and then move forward. That’s one option.

Second option is to not take the hard line and just say, “Hey, this is legal and it’s not going to hurt my IPs so I’m okay with people doing that.” That’s the second option.

Third option, shut the product down. It’s to realize, “Boy, I really built a product that people are going to misuse,” and the nuclear option would be to shut it down. Now that’s tough. I don’t know if I can come up with an easy fourth option. I feel like the ethical cold and warm is a perfectly viable non-nuclear option, and again, to just communicate that in every onboarding sequence.

Some people will sneak through, unfortunately. The good news is, it won’t get you on a blacklist like it did with Drip where we get on the blacklist and it’s like this, “Oh, […],” moment where a bunch of us were running around trying to figure out how to ban this customer and this and that. You’ll just have to have a conversation with that customer and say, “Look, by our judgment or by my judgment, you’ve gone over the line. I need you to migrate away or I need you to improve your things.” You can get a conversation with them where they say, “How do I improve my cold email?” You say, “Here’s a good example of a super ethical one. You only hit them four times over the course of a month, not 17 like you’re doing,” and blah, blah, blah.

All of this is work. It all takes work and that’s a crappy part. It’s the same thing with the Google approval, I think, that it totally gets in your head it seems like and it becomes this road block where really, it should be a speed bump that you look at your options. I say should. You’re going to encounter these over and over. I feel like if you look at the mess of speed bumps rather than roadblocks, knowing that there’s almost without exception, there’s always a way around it.

There are a few exceptions that are not. You can get sued into oblivion. You can get seriously injured. There are these extreme things where you can’t work or where your business is completely decimated because the whole platform just blocks your IP. There are certain exceptions but I don’t see that. Aside from Google disapproving you here in the next week or two, everything else you’ve mentioned to me is a speed bump, but I feel like it impacts you more than that.

Mike: That’s absolutely true. As you were talking through that and shifting the marketing to saying much more of it is ethical cold email and warm email, I actually got excited. I was like, “That’s exactly it.” I think that there are other ways to force that as well. I was talking to Josh from Referral Rock. He said that one of the things that they had done early on was that they charged a setup fee and that works really well for them. I was thinking about doing that as well and trying to figure out how can that work in there. That fits in really well with the idea of pitching it more towards the ethical cold email and warm email for people and then forcing people to do a demo.

That’s part of what the setup fee would be and making sure that they’re doing things the right way, that they’re not just spamming a ton of people just because they have the technical capabilities to. Honestly, that would make me feel a whole heck of a lot better about it. I was actually trying to figure out, “How can I justify this setup fee and how can I do that stuff?” I think that it falls directly in line with that. It makes total sense as to how that could happen now whereas before, I struggled a little bit with how do I present it or pitch it or make sure that people are doing the right things and everything is going well for them. I’ll say it’s like software augmented by services to some extent.

Rob: Absolutely. I feel like that’s one issue but it’s not as if we can now, “Alright and that’s the whole session, Mike, you’re all good,” because there are some deeper issues going on. It seems to me like the two biggest issues that I see with Bluetick and what you’ve been up to, number one, I don’t understand how Bluetick is any different than any of the other tools. I don’t think you’re differentiated. You can convince me otherwise but I don’t feel like there’s anything Bluetick can do that three or four other tools can’t do. That’s a problem because you’re picking up crumbs at that point.

The second thing that feeds into that is you have struggled to ship things. Whether it’s health issues, the distraction from the Google approval, I know you’ve had sleep issues for a long time. You talked at the last podcast about how you had a five- or six-hour workday. Two hours of it was with calls, then your kids were going to get home, and you’ve spent an hour on the Google thing. Your workday was just poof. Gone. You’re not shipping new features. You’re not shipping marketing.

When you look at the people who are making progress in these early stages, they’re shipping something every week. You look at Derrick Reimer. Even though he shut Level down, he was shipping features, he was shipping emails, he was shipping blog post. You look at Peter Suhm, who is the founder of Branch, which is a TinySeed company, was just announced today, he’s doing the same thing. He releases a blog post almost every week and he ships new features to Branch almost every week. You’ve struggled with that going way back.

I think that’s where we talked a little bit offline before this. You have reasons but you were saying to yourself like, “Are they reasons or are they excuses?” The health issues, there’s testosterone levels a few years back, there’s CPAP, there’s all that stuff. It impacts your motivation and that means that you haven’t shipped enough stuff fast enough to differentiate Bluetick and everyone else that you’re competing against is moving, I would say faster than you. You never catch up. Again, my impression is they are better tools, they just have more features, and they do more. So, how can you possibly grow an app that isn’t differentiated in any way?

Mike: A lot of them have definitely caught up in terms of the features. Some of them even started out further along than I was at the early stages. My difference in feature was intended to be the fact that Bluetick does not miss emails, whereas I know that people who were using the Gmail API, those types of customers tend to miss emails here and there. I feel like a lot of those problems have tended to go away. I don’t know whether that’s because the Gmail API has just gotten better in terms of what data that they’ve been sending or the frequency, but I don’t hear about those problems nearly as much as I used to.

Maybe the tools have just gotten better and they’ve fixed those problems. I don’t really know the answer to that because I don’t use those tools on a regular basis. But the fact is you’re right. I’m not shipping things nearly as much as I could or should be. There are certain things where I’ve gone through and I’ve reengineered something or changed how something works, and I’ve got all these data that is going through the system. I’m terrified in some cases of breaking stuff.

I’ve been going back-and-forth recently with one of the vendors who supplies the component that I use for synchronizing with IMAP. They won’t give me access to the stuff where I know for a fact it breaks and I can’t test it. I can’t put an automated test in place and they won’t give me a way to do it. I’m just like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” other than switching to some other component which again is non-trivial work. Is that an excuse?

Rob: It’s a problem but you’re going to encounter a problem almost everyday as an entrepreneur. If they become, they should be speed bumps. You could mock up an interface of some kind. Again, we had a bunch of APIs that we interfaced with Drip and we couldn’t hit the production or staging APIs so when our unit has ran, they would hit a mocked up interface. There’s a better word for it, but you know what I’m talking about.

You could feasibly break things but that’s what integration testing is for, and then you just have a checklist of like, “These are the five things that I’m always worried about breaking because I can’t test them well.” Those are in a Google Doc or a Trello board or whatever. Every time you do a big push or everytime you modify that code, you test those things. That’s how I would think about it. Again, it’s not perfect but it makes it into a speed bump. It makes it into a bump in the road rather than an actual road block.

Mike: The specific issue with that piece of it and the problem that I have with that, there are certain things that come up on occasion and I literally can’t do that because they’ve marked the class that I need to use as internal and sealed and there’s no interface for it. I literally cannot do it. The only way that I found to get around it is to create a constructor that uses the internal private constructor for it and basically fake the data, but I’m looking at obfuscated code at that point and I don’t know what the hell half of it does. I think all of this particular example is kind of immaterial, I agree it should be more of a speed bump than a road block. Going down the rest of that specific example is more of going down the rabbit hole more than anything else because it’s not the only thing.

Rob: The thing is, when these things come up, it’s not going to be perfect. I know that sounds silly to say, but you’re an engineer, you’re left brained, and you want every I to be dotted, every T to be crossed, every edge and corner case to be handled. Mike, your software is going to break sometimes. There is […] software that is doing seven, eight, nine figures a month and the stuff breaks. You can build a company with software that isn’t 100%. My guess is your software is going to be pretty dang good because you’re a developer and because you’ve been doing this most of your life, but at a certain point, you can’t let perfect get in the way of good and in the way of shipping.

Mike: And I do. I absolutely let that get in the way. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to just let it go. There are some things where I can just say, “Oh, we’ll just do this. Yes, […], go ahead.” Then there are other things where I’m like, “No, it has to be right.” For whatever reason, I fixate on those things.

Rob: That’s the problem. If you can’t identify when you’re fixating, then tell yourself stop and approach this from a different mindset. What would XYZ person do? How should I think about this differently is probably a better question that when you find yourself fixating to stop yourself and have the introspection to say, “What is the hack to get the solution? What is the 95% solution to this? What are the three or four options I have?” We’ve talked about a few topics here and then each one, you see, I’m just breaking them down into what are your choices here?

You’re choices with this API or whatever or it’s the component that you don’t have internal access to and it’s sealed and whatever, Mike, here are your options. You can completely shut your entire company down. Honestly, let’s look at them. You could shut the company down because of that. You could build a solution that is 80/20 or 95/5, however you want to phrase it. That’s like the one I said earlier which has been attacked together. It’s not going to catch everything and you have a checklist, and that’s probably good enough for now. Or you can spend a lot of time fixating on it. You can fight with the guy over email, you can try to reverse engineer it.

Mike: I can replace the component.

Rob: That’s great, you could feasibly do that. You could rewrite the whole thing yourself.

Mike: No, I wouldn’t do that. I would find a different vendor where I can rip that out and replace it with something else, that’s what I would do. I would absolutely not going down that road.

Rob: But that is an option. What’s funny is you could replace it with a different one. You’re going to spend time reworking your code or you could just rewrite the whole component yourself. It’s ridiculous but it is an option. Those are your five or six options. When you look at them, some of them seem like the dumbest thing ever like shutting your business down or writing the component yourself; don’t do those. It’s obvious, those are dumb. But the other three, if we look at them, black and white mindset and try to think about them. Which of those gets you to full-time income? Which of those gets you to $10,000? Yeah, there’s a little bit of risk with the one I’m suggesting, but that turns it into a speed bump rather than a road block.

Mike: One of the challenges I run into with this is that I don’t really have a mastermind group anymore where I can bounce ideas off of people and they call me out on a weekly basis that says, “Hey, you’re not working on this,” or, “You said that you’re going to have this done. You’ve been working on this for three weeks. This should’ve been done a long time ago.” I don’t have that external forcing function anymore. I think that’s been a big challenge for me.

Rob: Yeah. You’ve talked about in the past. You’ve told me that you feel like you’re more extrinsically motivated, that having someone who’s keeping you accountable is the way you work best versus being intrinsically motivated. And that’s fine. There are successful entrepreneurs on both sides of that. This is not something that precludes you from being one. You lost your mastermind or it broke up how long ago?

Mike: A little over a year and then I started a new one but we’ve only met I think three times total.

Rob: In a year?

Mike: It was over the course of three months or so and then we haven’t had a call on five or six months, I think.

Rob: For all intents you’re not really part of a mastermind at this point. You ended a year ago. Now, didn’t your revenue peak around that time?

Mike: Yeah, it did.

Rob: So…

Mike: I know.

Rob: A correlation?

Mike: Correlation, causation. That’s a valid point too. That’s an excuse.

Rob: Don’t say it. You’re going to say, “It’s hard to find a mastermind and it’s hard to be part of one.” I would say, “All right, Mike, you have choices. Shut your company down, number one. Number two, don’t be an entrepreneur anymore. It is a choice. Number three, email Ken of MastermindJam—mastermindjam.com—and try to hook with a mastermind. Four, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t do a mastermind and expect your future results to be the same as they have been,” is probably what I would say.

Mike: Some of these things like the other thing that it could potentially be solved by us having a cofounder. I have talked to you about this before. I’m not opposed to having a cofounder or having somebody else who works in the business with me, but at the same time it’s a question of finding the right person and all that other stuff. But again, is that an excuse? Is that what I really want? The answer is I don’t know. Is that an excuse? Probably. Is it what I really want? I don’t know. I’ve gone out in that road before and I think things worked out fantastically with you, with Microconf, the podcast, and everything else, but my past experiences have not been all sunshine and rainbows.

Rob: That’s a tougher one because finding a cofounder is hard. You can’t rush that. That’s not an easy thing to do. I do think it could be a fit for you given that you would work better with someone pushing you on and you’re feeling accountable to that.

Mike: I totally agree with that. But most of the people that I know of, that I know well enough to say, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going into business with them at all,” most of them have their own things going on. It’s hard to find somebody who is in that same position because I’ve got Bluetick that is substantially far along at this point. One thing that I’ve run into when you have employees or contractors or whatever, is I feel like they’re not just motivated, but they’re way less critical of the boss’ performance or decisions and things like that because they’re like, “Oh, well. That person is the person in charge. I don’t want to challenge them as hard as I probably could or would if I truly believed in this other direction versus the one that they’ve chosen or decided to go in.”

Rob: Yeah, but that’s just a minor speed bump. I’ve worked with contractors and employees and I’ve had cofounders. It’s just something you get over. I think the deeper issue comes back to the two things that I said, number one, Bluetick is not differentiated. Number two, it’s because you’re not shipping enough. It sounds like you struggle with indecision quite a bit where you’ve ruminated on a question for a long time, for days or weeks, and sometimes just can’t break out of that to make the decision to move forward. So, you get stalled.

And then the motivation thing. You told me offline that you were bored, you weren’t motivated. At times you know what you should do, “I should go build this feature,” but you’re not motivated to do it. Is that right? Talk about that. Is it a health thing? I guess you don’t know. If you knew you would fix it, right? You don’t know if it’s lack of sleep. You don’t know if it’s low testosterone. You don’t know if you just don’t want to do the idea. Do you have any thoughts or even more background for people?

Mike: My doctor took me off of my testosterone and it wasn’t because it was too high, it was because one of my other blood tests came back, it’s too high. He was like, “This is way outside of the normal range so I’m going to take you off with testosterone for four weeks to see how that plays out.” I was about a week-and-a-half into it and I was like, “I have to take some of it right now.” The downsides or drawbacks of having it, having low testosterone is you get depressed, you have a hard time focusing, you can’t get things done, you can’t really think straight. That was happening to such a severe degree, I was like, “I have to take it today just to put myself at least a little bit back on track.”

I’m going to call him and try and see if we can cut this whole thing short because it is extremely detrimental to me right now but I don’t have any answers, I wish I did. There’s a lot of things where I’m just like, “This is boring to me.” Some of it has to do with the work that needs to get done. Again, is that an excuse? Is that just a reason that I’m using to justify not feeling bad about getting the work done? I get that, as an entrepreneur, not everything is always going to be fine. You’re not always going to enjoy everything.

There are some things that you like to do versus there are things that you need to do. If you can outsource those things that need to be done that you don’t like doing, great. I don’t feel like I’ve been in a position where I can outsource everything that I hate doing because there’s financial research and things like that.

Rob: You’ll never be able to do that. Even when HitTail and Drip were growing like crazy, I still came in and did a bunch of crap that I didn’t want to do. With TinySeed, I have more resources than I’ve ever had and there’s still crap that I’m dealing with that I don’t want to do. But (a) I tried to minimize it, and (b) I tried not to let it clog the top of my to do list. When it’s sitting in that Trello board I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I do not want to look at health care plans and setting up a 401(k) for us.” But it’s like, “I’m going to power through it, suck it up, and get it done. Then I’m going to come out the other side and reward myself by doing something super fun, make it some swag or something.” I don’t know. You can’t avoid that. You can’t avoid it entirely. You can minimize it.

We’re building businesses that we want to be a part of, that we want to run. We’re building it for our lifestyles. That’s great, but that doesn’t mean that 100% of the time, it’s like a trip to Disneyland. I know you know that. I’m being a little facetious, but that’s the thing I think you’ve struggled with a lot. There’s this indecision piece. You’ve expressed to me like, “I’m not motivated to do this thing.” Whatever it is, I know that’s what has to get done. I think you’ve got to figure that out because without that, you can’t move forward. You have to be motivated some days even through the struggles.

We have a mutual friend who runs a SaaS app, who has pretty major health issues. He struggles, he works four hours a day, and it’s tough for him to travel. There’s a lot of stuff that it’s just hard. It’s hard for him, but he runs a successful SaaS app, lives off, and has a few employees. He shows up everyday. In those four hours, I bet he’s pretty damn effective by the fact that his SaaS app still grows.

Mike: I haven’t found a system, I guess, that works for me in terms of preventing me from wasting time on the stuff that I don’t want to do or procrastinating to get those things done. I don’t want to stay here and say, “Oh, well. I just need to find the right system,” because I don’t think that’s the right way to go, either, or the answer to it. I do feel maybe I just need to experiment more and say, “Okay, try this for a week or try that for a week,” and be very deliberate about trying to get things done and shipping things, as you said, versus just showing up to work every day and a lot of motion without forward progress. I feel like I’m thrashing a lot. I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe the problem is that I’ve thought about what the answer to that is without actually doing anything to try and figure it out.

Rob: Yeah, not taking action. I think effectiveness is what you’re summarizing. Thrashing is the opposite of being effective. If this founder we’re talking about works four hours a day but gets a full day’s work done, he’s highly effective. Some people can work 10 hours. If they’re not effective, their business doesn’t move forward. We’ve talked about this in the past. The 80-hour-a-week startup people, I think, are probably not effective. That’s the reason they work 80 hours.

There’s a few exceptions but there’s a lot of younger folks. I used to work longer hours when I was younger too. It’s just not picking the right stuff to work on and then not focusing on that stuff, not wandering off to answer email, jump on Twitter, go to Reddit, really focusing. I think you can get a full day’s work done in 4–6 hours. Your full day’s work would have been 10 years ago, I believe, with the personal growth, experience, and stuff that a person can be more effective with less time.

There’s a couple things that I’ll throw out. One is that I feel like you should consider whether you want to keep doing this, to continue doing Bluetick, whether you want to continue being an entrepreneur. Here’s the thing. If you’re working in a contract job or if you were working a salary job, a lot of these issues go away because daily you would do a daily standup, or weekly, or whatever. You would have accountability. That external motivation would be there for you to ship stuff. That would make a lot of these go away. That’s a pretty nuclear option. In the interest of time, we probably shouldn’t go down that today. I do think it’s something for you to take a step back and just think about longer term.

Mike: Counterargument to that would be if I worked, did the right thing, and got Bluetick to a point where I was able to hire people to put on a team, that exact same result would come out of it.

Rob: Yeah, okay. That’s fine. That’s fine but you’ve got to get there. At the rate you’re going, you’re not going to get there.

Mike: Yeah.

Rob: I don’t disagree with you, Mike. This is Startups for the Rest of Us. The whole point is that we want to help people start businesses that give them personal freedom. The whole point of this podcast and everything we do is to feel free, to do what you want to do, and work on which you want to do. That would be my answer as well. It’s just, you have to figure out how to get there because you’re not making progress there now.

The second thing I would think about which is a less nuclear option, if we’re talking about options, it’s to go one step further than our mastermind and to find someone who would do a daily standup with you. Every morning, five minute phone call or five minute Slack. They keep you accountable. You subscribe to that. When you say, “These are the things I did yesterday. This is what I’m going to do today.” The next day, you come and you do the walk of shame if you didn’t get that done. You celebrate if you did and that extrinsic motivation is something that you think will help to do that.

What do you think about that is that, does it not matter? Because you’re so tired you can’t get anything done? Is the extrinsic motivation enough if someone was breathing down your neck? Would that be enough? Or do you think no? “I’m still too damn tired. I just have health issues and I shouldn’t do this.”

Mike: I would certainly try it. I would say, it’s pretty immature for me to say that it would or wouldn’t work. I suspect that it would. I seriously contemplated trying to find a way to get a one-on-one business coach or something like that, somebody who’s going to hold me accountable. You’re right. A five minute thing like that on a daily basis could be plenty. I don’t know. Without trying it, I can’t say for sure one way or the other. My inclination is to say, “Yes, that would work,” but it would also need to be somebody who is, I don’t want to say willing to yell at me because I don’t want to be inundated with thousands of emails saying, “Hey, I’ll yell at you.”

Rob: Sure because you don’t need yelling. You do need positive and negative encouragement and feedback.

Mike: I think that’s certainly worth exploring. I would say, it goes further than my thoughts about having a business coach who holds me accountable on a weekly basis because I think a daily basis would probably be better. That’s mainly because I feel like I could waste a lot of time during a whole week whereas from a day-to-day, I can’t. I don’t want to say the stakes are higher but the deadlines are sure. I’ve always found myself to be somebody who works extremely well with tight deadlines and time pressure.

Rob: Yeah, external motivation.

Mike: Yes. When I was doing consulting, the […] gets subcontracting through, they’ve held me in with a bunch of stuff. I stopped consulting from them probably a year-and-a-half or two years ago, but every single time I get an email from them it’s because something’s on fire. They want me to deal with it. I actually got to a point where from one customer to the next, every single one, everything was on fire and burning to the ground. They needed somebody to go in and fix it. I was their person because I was really good at it. I just got burned out with the travel. That was what the problem was. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy doing those things but I got burned out with the travel. The customers tended to be the same from one to the next. And the problem was repetitive. It got to a point where the problem was the same thing over and over. Then, I just got bored.

Rob: Yeah. Consulting is like a hamster wheel. You want to own something. You want an equity in something that has a longer lasting thing than just […] per hour.

Mike: Sure.

Rob: Yeah, that desire.

Mike: Right. That was a big reason for me leaving and decided to do Bluetick instead because I wanted something that was going to need much more of that Rob’s flywheel as opposed to the hamster wheel.

Rob: Yeah. Obviously, we can’t solve stuff like these in a day. You and I talked about you taking some time to think about this, three weeks, four weeks where you think about both of what we’ve talked about today, some stuff we talked about offline, but really, do soul searching and figure out. I think there’s big questions here. It’s like, Mike, do you want to do this and do you want to do it bad enough that you’re willing to change? What you’re doing now isn’t working so you have to change it. Are you going to be willing and able to start looking at every problem as a speedbump rather than a roadblock?

Is this the right fit for you? Whether it’s this being entrepreneurship, Bluetick, it’s just those two. Does Bluetick have the potential? If you feel like you’re gaining your momentum and motivation to take a hard look and say, “How long will it take to get Bluetick to a point where it is differentiated?” My assessment is that, until you’re differentiated enough that you’re like, “Nope, we do this and no one else does,” or “We do this better than all these other tools.” Until you get to that point, you just don’t win many sales.

Mike: I totally agree with all that. I don’t even have to think too long about that one aspect of those. Do I still want to be an entrepreneur? For me, the answer is absolutely yes. The question for Bluetick is what does that look like moving forward? The reality is, the situation is I’ve got basically a seven month deadline at this point. I think you said there were some questions about how that shakes out with Google. I kind of know the answers to some extent. I still don’t have all the information, but I’ve gone past the last stage of Google’s verification with the exception of the security audit. That’s all that needs to be done. That’s the piece where I don’t know how much that’s going to cost. I don’t know what they have to go through or what other things I’m going to have to change. I’m still waiting to find out what that’s going to cost.

Then, I have to make a judgment called the end of it to say if it’s $15,000 and I’m going to make that $15,000 back in a reasonable time frame, not a big deal. Even if it was $75,000 or $100,000. If I were going to be able to make that back within three or four months, it’s not a big deal. If I’m in a revenue standpoint where it’s not going to happen in six months, eight months, ten months, then, no. I can’t justify even continuing with the product to that point. I don’t know what the price tag on it is right now. It’s a question of how far can I get in the next six to seven months to the point where I know how much revenue I’m going to be making three or four months down the road to be able to justify putting the cash out for that security audit.

Rob: You understand that while the security audit is one thing like we’ve talked about today, there are bigger issues. It’s shipping. Let’s say you pass the security audit and you pay for it. Bluetick is still not growing. Bluetick is still not differentiated right now. The reason again, going back, is you haven’t been motivated, or you’ve been bored with it, or there’s been health issues. There’s been all these things along the way. If that doesn’t change, it doesn’t matter what happens with the Google audit.

Mike: Yup.

Rob: We talked about you taking some time to think about it and actually stepping back from the podcast here for about three or four weeks. Give you some clarity.

Mike: Hopefully.

Rob: Some time alone. I know, give you a chance to maybe find clarity. These are hard decisions. This is retreat level kind of stuff where it’s a lot of thinking.

Mike: Yeah. The weird thing is these aren’t nothing we’ve really talked about. So far, things I haven’t thought about or considered over the past couple of years, it’ s just like I haven’t really taken the time to step back, objectively look at things, and take a hard look. I mean, if I do look at stuff and how things have gone, one constant that has been throughout the whole thing is me. Is it me? That’s a hard thing to say and the hard thing to admit to as well.

The question, can things change? Or will they change? Or do I want them to? I think that I want to. It’s just a question of how is that going to happen? How do I make sure that I don’t go through this process and come out of it and say, “Yeah, I’m motivated. I’m amped up. Let’s do this,” then put in time and effort for six months, then fall back into the same patterns again, I’ll say? That could happen. I don’t know but I need to step back.

Rob: That’s for sure. You know, Mike, I’ve always respected your technical chops, your intelligence, your writing, and you just have a lot of positive qualities. You’ve accomplished stuff in your life but you’ve definitely gotten in your own way. You’ve gotten in your own way more than I think you want to or should have. I think if you can start thinking about it, in terms of, how do I not do in the next six months what has happened in the past six months? We’ll see.

I’m going to be holding down the fort here for a few weeks. It’ll be good to hear from you. I’m sure people will be waiting with bated breath. We’ll have an episode, I don’t know, will it be 452 or 453? It’s the return of Mike. We get to hear from you, what you’ve been thinking about, and stuff.

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I got to talk to my doctor and go back on a testosterone because it’s just, my God.

Rob: It’s kind of […].

Mike: It really is. You wouldn’t think that that does it. It was like, “Oh, that can’t possibly be that bad.”

Rob: I would totally think, any chemical in our body, when it gets that out a whack, it has these negative impacts that can be pretty brutal.

Mike: Yeah.

Rob: Well, thanks for delving into this today. I know this is not easy stuff to talk about. I appreciate your openness, honesty, and willing to delve into it. I’m sure the listeners do, too. This has over and over been voiced. This is like one of the favorite aspects of our show is when we do these things. We talk pretty open and raw about what’s going on.

Mike: Yup. I guess with that, why don’t you take us out then?

Rob: Yeah. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.