Episode 651 | From Side Hustle to Full-time & Profitable (with Mike Taber)

Rob Walling:
It’s Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This week, I talk with Mike Taber, how he has gone from Bluetick being a side hustle for years to finally being a full-time gig for him, a profitable app that supports him full-time. I’m really happy for Mike. We have a fun conversation.
For those that don’t know, for the first 448 episodes of this podcast, Mike and I co-hosted Startups For the Rest of Us, and then Mike stepped back to focus on Bluetick so that he could grow it into a full-time income. And in this episode 651, he comes on the show to help share what that journey has looked like over the past year or two.
But before we dive into that, MicroConf in Denver is just a couple of months from now, April 14th through the 16th. Tickets are selling out. We are going to sell out in the next week or two. So if you’re interested in joining me, Leanna Patch, Deb Basu, Patrick Campbell, and 200 of your closest bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap founder friends, head to microconf.com/americas to grab your ticket before they sell out.
And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Mike Taber on moving from side hustle to full-time and profitable.
Mike Taber, welcome back to Startups For the Rest of Us. How you doing, man?

Mike Taber:
Hey, how’s it going?

Rob Walling:
It’s going pretty good. Yeah, it’s nice to chat with you. It’s been a while.

Mike Taber:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
I think last time you were on the show was over a year ago. It’s like 14, 15 months.

Mike Taber:
Yep. Something like that.

Rob Walling:
And so there’s going to be some folks listening who are deeply familiar with your story through the AuditShark years, the Bluetick years, and then other folks, we should probably provide some background. You and I co-hosted the show till episode 448, which I believe was sometime in 2018. And since then, you’ve come on periodically to update us on your startup. You run a SaaS app called Bluetick @bluetick.io. And your H1 is personal outreach at scale for all your follow-up emails. Imagine there were 1000 of you to follow up one-on-one with your prospects. So you send a lot of email, lot of follow up email. And last time we were on what, November of 2021, I believe, you had a a potential partnership that didn’t come through and Bluetick was not supporting you and you’d been working on it for several years. And at the time you were kind of like 90-day plan. That’s how that episode ended. I have a 90-day plan to double down, triple down on Bluetick. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to start thinking about other options. So talk to us about what’s happened in the ensuing 15 months.

Mike Taber:
Sure. So I guess I’ll give context there for the listeners who are not necessarily familiar with the story. Bluetick is a struggle for a long time trying to find out what market addresses. I generally have conversations with people who, if they’re in a troubled situation where they’ve got lots of outreach to do, but they’re not really sure where to start, one of the things that generally continues to come up with those conversations is that Bluetick can do a lot of things. Where do I start with it? And that’s actually a challenge that kind of rolls over into the marketing side of things too, because Bluetick can be used for so many different situations or use cases. So how do I market it? How do I present it?
As part of that 90-day plan, I decided to double down on Bluetick and just kind of figure out what is it am I actually going to do with it, and what are my own internal mental metrics for whether or not I continue with it or not.
And so I went from, things have been successful, I would say over the past 12, 15 months and have gone really, really well. And most of that has been sort of a pivot towards agencies. And that I think has been the big change where before I was going after individual customers who were maybe paying $50 a month or a hundred dollars a month for one or two mailboxes, and switching over to agencies. And agencies manage lots of mailboxes. So they’re much higher value customers, they’re harder to land, and they have more in depth needs and more technical requirements, but they’re also far more profitable, and it’s a lot easier to do support for them. Because even if they have 200, 300 mailboxes, I still only have a single point of contact. Whereas if I had a hundred customers each with their own individual mailbox, the support costs can easily go through the roof. And as one person, it’s just a lot harder to keep on top of all those things. So the agency route has really been helpful for me and has really kind of changed things quite a bit.

Rob Walling:
That’s cool. And so are these agencies using Bluetick for cold outreach to get new business, or is it for follow up with existing clients?

Mike Taber:
So originally Bluetick was all intended for that warm email outreach. But because warm email is kind of a subset of cold email outreach, it just has, I’ll say, more requirements and it’s a little bit more difficult because if you have somebody in multiple email sequences, for example, you need to be able to recognize exactly which sequence that they’re replying to and then pull them out of that one but not touch the other ones. And so a lot of my competitors have that issue where if somebody replies to any email, they’re immediately out of every sequence and they’re just essentially marked as done. Whereas I don’t do that inside of Bluetick. You can have somebody inside of 1, 3, 10, 20 different sequences all at the same time on different schedules, and Bluetick will still be able to properly identify which sequence they reply to and not mark them as done in the other ones and continue doing the outreach for whatever it is.
I have customers who use Blue Tick for onboarding new customers. They have a complicated onboarding process. They need lots of information from their customers, and they’ve tried using a spreadsheet or a checklist or something like that, and it’s just too much. Their customers look at it, their eyes glaze over, and then they end up losing those customers because the customer doesn’t want to go through the effort of hunting down 10 or 20 different things and then sending them over. So they broke it up quite a bit and started going through individual things and asking for things on a much smaller scale through those follow-ups. And then when they get them, they turn around and add them into a different sequence and essentially just cycle through them until they’re completely onboarded.
So anyway, that’s a kind of long way of saying that, I’ve also switched over to saying, you know what, I’m not necessarily opposed to cold email either. And that’s where those agencies come in, because they do do a lot of cold email outreach.

Rob Walling:
Got it. And when we talk about startups, anytime I interview someone here, I ask, give us an idea where the business is, and sometimes they give MRR and sometimes they give employee headcount and say, it’s four of us and we’re profitable, or whatever. If you say, I’m 37 people versus I’m solo and it’s not paying my bills, it just gives us an idea of where the business is. So talk to us about that.

Mike Taber:
Yeah, so when we talked last time, I was not even at a point where the business was supporting me. I was still spending several thousand dollars a month out of savings out of my own pocket every month. At this point, the business is fairly profitable. I see avenues for essentially tripling revenue. It is past five figures at the moment, certainly not near six, but I could definitely see some things on the horizon where it could get close to six figures by the end of this coming year. And that’s MRR. So I am paying myself a salary and things are going well. I’m already looking to hire at least one, probably two engineers in the next couple of weeks or so, maybe a month at the latest, because I’ve got all these low-hanging features that I want to have implemented that I just don’t have time to get to because they just don’t bubble up to the top of the priority list. But they still need to get done. So I’m looking at hiring a couple of people to help bang out those low-hanging features, that… Simple things like, oh, I want to be able to see my invoices inside the app. It’s like, all right, well, you get them emailed to you, but you can’t go back and see anything if… And you’re an agency, that’s kind of a big deal.

Rob Walling:
That’s cool, man. It’s really good to hear. I think after these years of toil on both AuditShark and Bluetick, it’s certainly awesome to hear that you’re making that progress. How does that feel?

Mike Taber:
It’s mixed feelings, and of course they’re mixed in other ways, too. I don’t think that I mentioned this to you before, but somebody approached me late last year, and I ended up selling the auditshark.com domain, and I did get five figures for it, so…

Rob Walling:
Whoa.

Mike Taber:
I can’t complain.

Rob Walling:
That’s funny.

Mike Taber:
So yeah, I made decent money off of that, I guess. But no, it’s one of those things where I wish things had turned in this direction a lot sooner, but I’ll say there was personal struggles. There was a lot of health issues for a while, still have some of them I’m going through, but I also went off all but one of my medications this past year, and that was just kind of a hard stop. I was having literal heart problems. So basically got rid of all that stuff and I’m only on one now and things are tolerable or manageable, I guess, however you want to put it.

Rob Walling:
That’s good to hear, man. I’m curious about the agency focus. Did that come about accidentally? Did you start getting agency interest or you had one or two that it really worked for and then you decided to focus on them? Or was it a deliberate thing that you decided I’m going to go out and target these folks?

Mike Taber:
It was first, I had a couple of agencies and I made the decision to focus on those. So it was a little, I don’t know how to answer that, it’s a little both really. One kind of led to the other, but it was kind of intentional to start focusing on those agencies more, because I could see that that was where my support costs would be lower because they’re going to have essentially a standardized process internally for managing their own customers and then being able to translate that across 5, 10, 50 different customers or whatever inside of Bluetick, and then just use the exact same process inside of each of their accounts. And I did do some things inside of Bluetick to cater to them specifically. So I’m sure you remember in Drip you could have all these different accounts for different brands or whatever.
I implemented something similar in Bluetick where you can literally just use a dropdown menu and switch between different accounts, because I noticed that some of my customers were managing multiple accounts for their customers, and they had a different user account for each of them. So they had a different email address, different password, and for all I know, maybe they were using the same password, I don’t know. But the underlying problem was that they’d have to log in, view everything, and then they’d log out, and then to log into a different account, and it just kind of made things messy. So I kind of streamlined that a little bit so they can just toggle back and forth between the different accounts very quickly. Obviously it helped them, but it also helps me scale, because then they don’t have to create new user accounts every single time that they want to spin up a new customer. It’s just they go in and click add account, and then they just start adding stuff.

Rob Walling:
Exciting. You’re obviously adding features specifically for agencies. Once you have a customer segment that is profitable and allows you to grow your MRR, it makes total sense to do that.
One thing you mentioned to me offline is that you have some customer concentration in terms of, for folks who haven’t heard that term before, it means, let’s say, I have example. This is not your numbers, but let’s say I have a thousand customers, but five customers make a 60% of my MRR, or 70, or some huge number. There’s risk that if I lose just those handful of customers that the business isn’t in a great shape. And in fact, if you go to raise investment, folks will ask about it. It won’t necessarily be a deal breaker, but in an acquisition, if you go to sell the company, it can and will impact the purchase price because there’s obviously risk there of losing one customer or 10 customers, whatever that number is. So you have this. So how are you thinking about that as you grow this business? Does it bother you? Is it a daily thing of if I lose a few customers, I’m not in a great shape. Or other, are you okay with it and you’re just pushing ahead?

Mike Taber:
It’s a good question. It doesn’t bother me until things start to go wrong. I don’t really think about it and then a service fails and I don’t notice it right away, or something doesn’t restart correctly, or go to do deployment and something gets locked up and the logs start flooding with all these different problems. Because my infrastructure has, I’ll say, grown dramatically over the past 12 months. I’ve gone from sending on a good day, I was sending maybe a thousand emails a day to anywhere from five to 600,000 emails a day. So 500 X growth in 12 months, just keeping things running has been something of a struggle at times. And I would say the past month or two, things have really calmed down, and I’ve been able to focus more on new things that the customers need as opposed to just trying to hold things together with bailing twine and duct tape, because that’s really what I was doing for most of this past year is just trying to keep everything going. Part of that was because of the massive growth. I would say my MRR doubled in the past three months. There’s that hockey stick looking growth curve that I’ve had recently, which that’s something that everyone wants to see, but when you’re in the weeds trying to make sure everything is still going to work, it’s hard to see that that’s a good thing.

Rob Walling:
It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem and it is something, I lost a lot of sleep over when we were scaling Drip. And I was telling you, I still have get triggered when people show me queues that are all backed up because it was just, I thought about it so much, and it can make your life kind of crappy as an entrepreneur. Do you feel like if you were to double again in three months, are you set up better to scale, or would you still run into the same struggles?

Mike Taber:
I’m better set up now than I was four to six months ago when I first started onboarding some of these customers. I had to make a lot of changes and some really fundamental changes in order to be able to grow. I had thought that there were certain places where I had kind of modularized a lot of the code and said, oh, well, I’ll create a microservice over here, or I’ll use queues over in this other place. And at the time, I felt like I was going to be able to scale to as far as I would need to. And the reality is that when you go from the scale that I was at and you multiply by 500 X, it is not the same ballpark of problems that you run into. And so I would say early on in this past year in 2022, I probably lost a lot of sleep.
The tail end of it, not so much. Things have gone, I would say, pretty well. And even being able to send, I forget who I was talking to, they were commenting on, I think it was SendGrid. They’re like, yeah, I can only get one email per second out of SendGrid. And I’m like, I’m sending 30 a second through Bluetick. And it’s insane. I just look at the numbers of how things are going, and I know that they’re going up. Every single week they go up. It’s just insane. It’s just between the profit margin and the numbers of the metrics, I’m kind of blown away, to be honest. But it is a good problem to have. So it’s hard to complain, too.

Rob Walling:
Especially now that you’re past it.

Mike Taber:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
It’s being able to scale it up and not lose your key customers and also, I guess, not have it take forever. To scale it over the course of weeks or a month or two is one thing, if you have to rewrite an entire code base and or plug into a different data store, suddenly, that could be a six-month project, and that’s when it’s not good. With this focus on agencies. We’ve talked a lot about engineering and scaling and product. Have you been doing much marketing?

Mike Taber:
No. Most of what I’ve been doing is just trying to keep everything running. The vast majority of the growth has come from the customers themselves growing.

Rob Walling:
Expansion revenue.

Mike Taber:
And going back to your, and I’ll touch on a couple of different things here. One, your question about the growth and the being able to keep everything up and running. There’s times where I’ll log in on a Monday or Tuesday or something like that… Or actually I get a daily report every single day that just gives me all this statistics from the app, how many accounts there are, how many emails have been sent on a daily basis, how many mailboxes each customer has. And there’s some of them that I kind of monitor more than others just because of their size. And there’ll be times where it’s like, oh, this customer added a hundred mailboxes between yesterday and today, and it’s just like the rest of the infrastructure just didn’t even notice. And that’s a great position to be in. So that’s where those questions about being able to sleep or having problems with stress start to go away, because those things on day one, 365 days ago, that would’ve been a major, major problem.
And today it’s not. Because my infrastructure’s gotten large enough and the system is scalable, and it kind of rearranges things a little bit to some extent to kind of take care of itself. So that stuff is helpful. And then the other side of it is that you asked about is it stressful having majority of my revenue kind of locked up in a few of these key customers. And I would say that when things go wrong, yes it is. But at the same time, I also have implemented a number of features that have helped them either move away from other services that they’re using. One thing I implemented was some basic automations that allowed people to stop using some other tools that were out in the market that allowed them to glue different tools together. And I cut their bill by five or $6,000 a month.
So it’s incentive for them to stick with me. Because even if they move off, if they decide that they’re not happy with Bluetick, and I’m not responsive, which I am. I try to be really responsive to those types of customers, but if something goes wrong, they know that I’m there and I’m going to fix it for them. But the fact that they’re also saving five, six, $7,000 a month from not having to pay for these other tools because now that functionality that they needed is native in Bluetick, it’s another reason for them to not leave.

Rob Walling:
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And so talk me through, in the last 15 months, I like to ask this high low question of have you had a high point where you were celebrating, we’re going to break out the champagne, wife and I are going to get some ice cream or bourbon or whatever it is. I don’t know. I guess I haven’t celebrated in a while, because it’s like I don’t know what to do. But has there been a moment where you’re just like, hell yes, this is amazing and I’m super happy that I’m doing this?

Mike Taber:
I would say there’s a couple of them. The first one was when I crossed 10K MRR, and then after that I would say that kind of looking at my bank account and seeing that the money is going up as opposed to down, and then getting to the end of the year. This is January now, but last month I made sure to do the vast majority of my bookkeeping and taxes before the end of the year. And then I looked at my bank account and I’m like, crap, I’m going to have to spend money in order to reduce my tax burden. And so I ended up spending like $20,000 in December solely for that reason alone. It was like, I don’t want to have to pay extra taxes, but I’m still going to have to pay money on the rest of the profit, but it’s going to be somewhat reduced. But even then, I still could have spent a heck of a lot more, and I just chose not to. Those, I would say, are high points.

Rob Walling:
Your high points around money. All right. When you’re a founder that number one metric is MRR. The number two metric is MRR growth, right? These are the ways I think about it. I have another, I want to do the low point, but first I have to ask you, Mike, when did you know, you had product market fit?

Mike Taber:
Oh, good question. I wouldn’t say this was product market fit in my mind yet, but I knew that I was on the path to it. And I would say it was when I had a customer who came on. They said, we’d like to trial for eight weeks, and we’re going to put a hundred mailboxes on your system and see how things go. And it was just going to be a trial, and it was limited. I gave them a proposal. The trial started three weeks late, which was obviously a little concerning. And then I think it was three or four weeks into it, they said, you know what? Everything looks great. We’re going to start dumping more on. And instead of adding another 300, 350 mailboxes, like they said that they were going to, they ended up adding 450, something like that. So I would say that was about the time where I recognized it as an obvious turning point. I just didn’t know all the implications of what that was going to entail.
And then of course, that was very stressful because lots of things broke at the time because my infrastructure was just really not set up to handle that kind of influx. Since then, if I had a customer who added four or 500 mailboxes tomorrow, it really wouldn’t be an issue. It might take an extra hour or two of work to spin up a couple more servers. But I self-manage everything. It’s not like I’m using AWS or Azure’s serverless cloud computing stuff to do things. I manage the servers myself, which helps me to reduce costs. And then I pass those savings onto the customers so they get a great deal. And I get customers who don’t want to leave, because I’m giving them such a good deal and the software just works and does what it’s supposed to do.

Rob Walling:
Giving them a great deal. Do you feel like you are leaving money on the table? Do you feel like you should be charging them more?

Mike Taber:
Yes and no. I go back and forth on that a little bit. I feel like with any SaaS, when you’re first starting off, you’re willing to cut deals with people just to make sure that you get things off the ground, figure out what problems they’re actually having. And for the customers that I have now, they are getting, I would say, reasonably good deals. In the future that will probably turn out to be less of great deals, still good deal, but not nearly as good as the early ones. And I feel like that’s appropriate too, because you’ve got those people who are the early adopters, they’re taking chances on you. And I think that giving them a reward in the form of lower prices is appropriate because you’re also learning from them too, and that’s helpful for you. And on their side, they’re taking a chance on you. They’re risking parts of their business.
And I do have customers who 95% of their business success relies directly on Bluetick functioning properly, because if it doesn’t, that’s their entire business. Yeah, am I leaving money on the table? Yeah, absolutely. But there are also features that I’m cutting discounts for certain features that I don’t have that they have to pay other vendors for. And I’m looking specifically at those features as ways to essentially triple revenue in the next six to eight months because of implementing those features and then rolling them out to my customers that I have now, and then they don’t have to pay these other vendors. They can pay me instead. And I’ve already had those conversations so that money should come through. I just need to implement the features.

Rob Walling:
Are you implementing features that other companies will use? Because almost when you say it like that, it’s almost like, oh, are you more doing consulting ware? Are you kind of building custom software that you of course own the rights and IP to, but does that apply to other agencies or companies who would sign up?

Mike Taber:
It does, yeah.

Rob Walling:
Okay.

Mike Taber:
At a certain scale, you’re going to want those features. And so those features are directly applicable to agencies. And that’s where, if it was one customer, and I’m thinking of a feature right now, that it would probably take four months of hard work in order to implement that one feature, but it’s worth an extra 60% to my bottom line. And I could also kind of spin that off and not just integrate it directly into Bluetick, but I could also spin it as a completely separate product if I wanted to. Will I? I don’t know. That seems like a lot of extra work and a lot of extra marketing stuff that I’d need to do, which I probably will not. But at the same time, there might be a way to modularize it so that in the future if I wanted to do that, I probably could.

Rob Walling:
And I want to finish up the high point low point thing I asked you about high point, talked about money. Are your low points with money, too? No. What is one or two really hard times that you’ve had with the business over the past 15 months?

Mike Taber:
I would say most of them boil down to times where scalability was an issue. There were a couple of times where not to trigger you or anything, but there were times where queues would-

Rob Walling:
You can talk about it.

Mike Taber:
One of my queues, we had over a million messages in it. I knew that it was going to take hours and hours for it to clear. Most of my code runs through these services that are running in the background on the servers, and I have the ability to toggle some of those services on and off, and I turned all of them off except for the ones that process the queues for about four hours and just let it catch up. But at the same time, it kind of leads me to that thought of, well, what if I anger some of these customers? Or what if they notice? Or what if it becomes a problem for them and it’s really affecting their business? And it didn’t, but those thoughts still go through your mind.

Rob Walling:
Concentration risk is platform risk, but different. But it is. It’s relying on a one or a handful of customers and it makes you nervous. It’s something to keep. It literally keeps you up at night. It’s also sometimes how you have to build your business. And the goal moving forward should obviously be to add more customers to the point where no one customer is more than X percent of your revenue, but hey, it’s better than not having them. It is, right? It’s better to have that revenue.
I’m curious, something changed pretty dramatically. You had been working on Bluetick for, I don’t know, three, four years, not much progress. And then in the last year or so, obviously revenue has gone up dramatically, five or 10 X. I don’t even remember the number. You said doubled in the past three months, but even before that, what changed? Did you start marketing? Did you change the positioning? No, you said you started getting agencies before you changed positioning. Was it a little bit of luck? What do you attribute it to? Why are you having this success at this point?

Mike Taber:
I would definitely say part of it was luck. One of the agencies that I brought on, they were using a competitor, and I suspect I don’t have the whole story. I’ve never really asked. It might be. I don’t know how well it would go over if I were to ask, but I don’t think that they were happy with this competitor. And so they were looking around. This is essentially kind of the what kicked things off for me with kind of the new focus for Bluetick. And I’ll say a lot of the growth, this one customer that I have now, they were with a competitor, weren’t happy, wanted to do a trial with me, and it went so well that they’re like, yeah, we’re done with them. And so they brought over a lot of stuff, a lot of mailboxes. And then I saw that the competitor had raised their prices, and maybe it was across the board, maybe that had something to do with it, but they’ve grown quite a bit with me.
So I think that that has a lot to do with it. The other thing is, I don’t know if you remember, it was at MicroConf in Croatia where it was the last day of the conference. We were sitting there and I don’t remember who was on stage talking, but you and I were sitting at the same table and I’m like, I’ve got to go. I don’t feel good. And my heart was just racing. And so I went and I laid down for an hour or two, and that helped. But getting off of all those medications that I had accumulated over five or six years really helped out a lot, because then I was able to actually sleep at night. I was able to focus during the day. I can’t even begin to go into the details on how awful that experience was. But getting off of those things helped.
And then I would say that there is a certain amount of a snowball effect when you have some success and things start going well. And it gives you this motivation that if you’re struggling, and struggling, and struggling, beating your head against the wall, it’s hard to be motivated to do anything else because you look at it, and you’re like, this hasn’t worked, that hasn’t worked. This other thing hasn’t worked. Why am I continuing to beat my head against the wall when nothing I do seems to make any difference at all? And then when you start to get some sort of traction and some level of success, that builds and it becomes a snowball in the other direction. I don’t know if there’s a great way to combat that other than buckle down and do it. Maybe there’s something to be said for that sometimes. But with all these different factors that are in play for any given person, it’s hard to generalize and say, this is what you should do.

Rob Walling:
Well, yeah and that’s one reason, it’s small wins along the way. It creates a virtuous cycle. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m so pro on the stair step approach is that if you get these small wins and you build a product doing a thousand or 5,000, you then have the confidence, the revenue, some skills that you’ve built to then do it again and to do it bigger even. So to summarize, it sounds like I asked what made the difference, but it sounds like you got a little lucky, but you executed really well. You worked hard and you delivered, and you were at the right place at the right time. There’s the luck surface area from Jason Roberts where your luck surface area is big because you were doing things in public. Doing things in public creates opportunity. You had this app out there, and if you didn’t have that, none of this would’ve happened. So a little bit of luck, but execution as well. You’ve scaled it up in a way that maybe a lesser engineer wouldn’t have been able to do. You’ve done things for your customers. You’ve made decisions that have allowed you to grow the business.

Mike Taber:
And I mean, to speak to the luck point a little bit, I’ll definitely acknowledge that there was a little bit of luck involved. And the first customer that came into me in that 90-day window that we had kind of talked about in the last episode we recorded, it was in December, I think, when I talked to them. And so they had reached out to a dozen different vendors, tried to get on the phone with them and talked to them because they had what they felt was a fairly large infrastructure that they needed to be able to have supported with an email service provider. And I made the shortlist. They talked to about 12 of them, and they reached out to 12, cut it down to half very quickly. I gave them a proposal, and then I was the only one that they had a second call with.
And they told me that. They’re like, you’re the only one we’re talking to for a second time. I feel like in part, that’s because I was the founder of the company and they were talking directly to me. And I told them, I was like, look, if there’s something specific you need, I can get it done. I may not be on the exact timeline that you’re looking for, but I can guarantee that whatever it is that you need, if it’s important, I can get it done for you. And knowing that I’m also the person who’s writing the code, answering the support tickets, all that stuff, it factored into it and they’re like, yeah, this guy can help us. And they acknowledged, we’re taking a risk with you, but we’re going to try this out as a pilot program first. And that was where things really started to kick off and really turn around for the product. And it just kind of gives that confidence, yeah I’m on the right track. These are the right things to do, and things just kind of snowballed in the right direction from there.

Rob Walling:
And that’s the power of, I’d say bootstrapping, but it’s the power of being a small agile team, in this case a one person team, is that you can make decisions like that if you had raised funding or if you were a 10, 20 person team. It just doesn’t make sense to do these things. And you had this agility and this superpower of being small and being able to move really quickly.

Mike Taber:
I was going to say, it’s being in the right place at the right time was helpful in December, but I also think that there was something about having been around for several years before that, where I had done a lot of the work and cleaned out a lot of the rough edges of the products. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still rough edges all over the place, but it was good enough and functional for what they needed, and it’s gotten better since then. But it was enough to kind of get over those initial hurdles. And now they like the product. They use it all the time, and it’s gone well for them. And then it’s helped me land other customers as well, which has been the turning points, because that first customer is really where things started to turn around. And since then, things have gotten better and better.

Rob Walling:
Are you going to update your marketing to position it to agencies? I’m just curious, because it sounds like agencies are really working, but when I read your H1, it doesn’t mention that. Does it make sense to do that?

Mike Taber:
It does. And that’s something that, you and I talked about startups for a long time, and it’s one of those things where if you’re growing quickly enough, the marketing almost doesn’t matter, especially if you’ve got that expansion revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have more customers and more new customers any given day of the week. But when updating those things on your website is such a low priority as opposed to, let me implement this feature over here that I know that I can charge a bunch of my customers more money for. And I can justify it because on the invoices, and then somebody, I forget who it was, they gave me this advice about, oh, any discounts that I give my customers, I put it on the invoice and say, this is how much this discount is for, and this is how much of a discount you’re getting.
And when you go back to essentially negotiate a different price for them, whether it’s new features or this or that, it gives you, they said, ammunition. And I wish I could remember who it was that told me that, but they advise me to do that. And so it shows up on the invoices every month. This is the discount that you’re getting, this is how much it is, and this is per mailbox, et cetera, and it’s pretty substantial. So when I implement some of these new features, I’m going to be able to go to them very easily and say like, hey, you’re not going to get this discount anymore, but you won’t have to use this other product over here that I haven’t been able to provide for you, even though we discussed it before. And so it’ll just add to my profit margin at that point. Chances are good I’ll have to pay in advance to hire some people to help out with some of those things. I don’t think I have a choice, but at the same time, the business is profitable enough that I don’t care. And the ROI on those is probably going to be a couple of months at most, which is great.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I’m really happy for you, man. Congratulations on getting to this point.

Mike Taber:
Thanks.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s great to hear it. You’re in good spirits. Just your tone and the way you’re talking is just the most positive that I’ve heard you in a very long time. So awesome to have you back on the show. Folks want to see what you’re up to. Bluetick.io and of course, singlefounder on Twitter. You’re never on Twitter, are you?

Mike Taber:
I’m rarely on Twitter.

Rob Walling:
Even before the Elon Musk stuff, you were like never on Twitter.

Mike Taber:
Yeah, we won’t discuss that. If you want to do another episode where we could just rag on Twitter, then sure. But…

Rob Walling:
Riff on it. Yeah. Frankly, I was telling you offline, I deleted Twitter off my phone when I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago, Twitter and Slack. And I really don’t miss it. And I don’t know that I will stay off it, but it’s does not feel like a big hole in my life. I’ll put it that way. So anyways.

Mike Taber:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Thanks again, man. Thanks for coming on the show.

Mike Taber:
All right. Thanks for having me.

Rob Walling:
Thanks to Mike for coming on the show. I always enjoy our conversations. He and I have known each other for 16 years, I believe. It’s always good to chat with him. Thank you for sticking around this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 651.