# Between Two Plants We Stole Off of Someones Patio: Andy Martin - MicroConf Remote

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsrqrwHZZEA
Duration: 15 min
Language: English
Words: 3285
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/HsrqrwHZZEA

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[0:00] [Music] mr martin how you doing sir very well happy to be here this is andy martin he has over 10 years of technical and management experience in building designing and constructing control systems and project management most of that was a mouthful most of which were with mission critical facilities like data centers and hospitals he holds a masters of science in software engineering from the university of st thomas in saint paul which of course was why he could join me here today because he's local to the cities and you will know that we are properly socially distancing even though it looks like we're far away um he has had full

[0:37] responsibility for tons of scopes of work uh including p l on many multi-million dollar complex contracts like data centers hospitals and even an nfl stadium and i can guess which one that is i think take a wild guess you'll probably be playing you can't tell anyone but you know we live here at uh where the vikings play so andy is the president and founder of blue rhythm which is sas focused on streamlining mission critical and commercial commissioning efforts and so people who have no idea what that is i'm going to talk a little bit so i was an electrician for just like the blink of an eye before

[1:12] i decided i wanted to go write code for a living and i remember on one of these things so we were installing pipe and running wire and i remember we built a big data center in the and i say we i was like an apprentice right but we built a big data center in the bay area and i had to carry around this clipboard and had to follow an engineer around and it was a big checklist of all this stuff as they would turn on the the uninterruptable power supplies the ups's and then they would turn the generator on and they'd make sure that the failsafe tripped and there was an

[1:37] automatic switch breaker and blah blah and you had to test all this crap because once it's live and you have a thousand servers in there it can't break right and so that's commissioning and that's what blue rhythm does is it takes that clipboard or the five clipboards that we used to carry around and all the paper we then had to fax to people right that's how old i am and it puts it into sass exactly exactly yeah it's just a it's a project management tool for that specific situation so you know if you're the person building the data center you might hire somebody who's one of our customers and

[2:06] our customers will take our software and they'll go through their checklist it'll create the reports for them and just really kind of automate everything right and i love it because it's such a niche right there's there's so much value and not you know you're not competing against whatever mailchimp is an esp or you know these other big players google like you've picked such a small slice that really you know microsoft's not going to come build commissioning software right you know or google or facebook like right you are in a place obviously you have big bigger competitors than you but um it's not something that they're going

[2:35] to come and attack and you i asked you about mrr um you're in your five-figure mrr which for folks who are counting it's that means 10 000 or more in mrr just to give you an idea of you know of where he lands um your yeah your minneapolis based i think we already mentioned that which is why we can hang out and really my first serious question for you is longboard or shortboard sir actually wakeboard wakeboard western kid that's uh that's kind of what i've grown up doing and actually did around this past weekend which i'm still feeling the effects of the store from yeah so a wake board you

[3:05] pull on the back of a boat right and you stand up on it so it's as close as you can kind of get to surfing yeah exactly that's how you serve in the midwest i guess 10 000 lakes you don't have much tide for a long board so obviously this was a pain point you know to build blue rhythm like the origin story since you were involved in this commissioning this was a pain point that you were experiencing but you weren't a developer i know you would toyed around with some stuff but like what made you think that you could build the prototype of blue rhythm

[3:31] not having ever built you know really built production code yeah so i guess i didn't know for sure that i could but i also didn't know that i couldn't so i really just wanted to try so that's what i did i just kind of started tinkering at first and just kind of testing the waters i tested the mark a little bit i did some outreach just put some feelers out and it just kept building and building and i got good response from people and decided to just keep at it yeah and so when you started building blue rhythm was there existing software already doing this and if so why did you think you

[4:07] know what edge did you think you had what did you think you could do better sure so yeah there were some existing solutions out there so that gave me just a little bit of confidence that there was a market you know there was people paying money for a solution like this um but the the existing options were either real old legacy platforms that were kind of on the downslope of their their life cycle or there's a there's a couple newer real modern sas you know web uh web-based platforms that are out there and they just have real clunky pricing models they're not as easy to do business with

[4:40] so i felt like there was an opportunity to to get in it's not a saturated market um over half of this industry is not using a sas solution right now they're using a combination of homegrown tools access databases maybe some cloud file storage so lots of opportunity for them to streamline and really come on board with a you know modern web platform to manage their projects yeah that makes sense and so how in an industry like this obviously you're not going to be able to run um i shouldn't say not but i would guess i'm guessing facebook ads is not going to work in your space you know and even

[5:12] like google adwords and linkedin are going to be a tough they're going to be tough traffic channels so you know are there a couple kind of lead gen avenues that have really worked for you yeah it's it's been tricky it's still it still is tricky um so whatever we do it just has to be very very targeted so yes facebook ads are difficult um we're trying some different things with um just promoting uh blog posts to a retargeted audience or look-alike audiences so still very very narrow um same thing with with google ads so any paid paid acquisition we're we're keeping it very small very focused

[5:46] and the things that have really i think move the needle are kind of the in-person events so we go to industry conferences it's such a small community that if you're not at those events you're really kind of not part of the industry and in the community so you know last year once we once we started showing up to those events it really just gets our name out there people see that we're serious and we're here to stay and make a long-term push in the market so the in-person events at conferences you know setting up a booth talking to people face to face and cold outreach has been a good channel

[6:18] for us too which is difficult and there's some good bad ways to do that but um had some success there just some people just you know aren't aren't aware or um just aren't currently you know in the mindset where they're looking so they just need that little extra prompt to get them interested yep yeah and that's the thing is you know i'll hear people say that let's say cold email is dead or that um you know trade shows and events aren't worth it but in these small niches where there are only thousands of potential customers you know or maybe tens of thousands but there aren't that

[6:48] many that oftentimes that still works you know if you're trying to cold email um i'm trying to say you know if you're trying to cold email startup founders today or startup executives or whatever that's a it's pretty saturated it's still possible you can but it takes a lot of time but in a space like that that maybe isn't inundated uh you know i think there's a lot of room there yep so you started working on blue within part time about four years ago it was 2016 you toiled part-time for two years and you you know you told me offline before we chatted you had a bunch of beta users

[7:20] coming really early they would come in they'd use it and they would churn out what was going on there what was the issue because i'm sure there are folks listening right now who are in exactly the same position that you were two years ago yeah so for better or worse i took the path of getting something put together getting a usable product i don't know if you call an mvp or not but getting something there where people could come in and use it so i was i was just testing the product testing to see what what people would respond to um and i got a huge amount of feedback

[7:50] so it's not a approach that would work or i would advise in all situations but for me never having started a business before let alone a software company getting that getting all that feedback early on really drove the direction that we ended up taking the company and i think without that feedback we would have toiled a lot longer and and had a lot more difficulty reaching the point where we finally feel like we have product markets that um where we figured out these different marketing channels and stuff so just lots of experimentation and some of those early adopters that are willing to give us a try they're also willing to

[8:26] you know tell you how bad it sucks or give you some some feedback that'll get you going in the right direction so um that's that's really what it was it just was a product that that wasn't quite ready yet and you know so many developers that i know go in their basement for two years and just code and they don't have anybody use the app whereas you went counter to that it sounds like intuitively your natural instinct was to let people use it early again that's even back in the day that was not my instinct because i was scared and it was never good enough and it was

[8:57] never there why do you think you did that why do you think you did the opposite of what most people do um partly for the reasons i said and partly just out of ignorance honestly there were a couple times where i i thought we had got it to a point where it was going to work and it was good enough so to speak but it wasn't and those were the just in terms of rejection and just the emotional response that i had those were some of the the toughest times but um you know i i just stuck with it and i was like you know there's there's a response people

[9:29] want this if i keep at it eventually we'll get this figured out and eventually they'll you know the the feedback will shift to more positive versus more negative right yeah that's what's going to ask you about you spent two years part-time obviously you were probably working a day job right and you had nights and weekends working on blue rhythm two years is a long time you're getting rejection people are churning out why didn't you quit i think there was always enough momentum for me to keep pushing forward and and i just had a strong desire to make it work i'd always wanted to have something that

[10:04] i that i owned that i created i just liked the the process of creating and getting the feedback even though it's not always good and and taking that adding it into the product and then getting the feedback that says hey that's great thanks for thanks for doing that um so just the just the desire to see it to see it through and to to see it work and just knowing that the market was there you know it wasn't like i was trying to convince people to to do something that they had never thought of or seen before right yeah and then it was just about a year ago it was

[10:36] mid-2019 that you you kind of call your soft launch right where you actually feel like you kind of went all in um you said this is when things started growing for you and i'm curious that when you went full-time it is yeah may last year may of last year and did you have enough revenue to cover your you know expenses or did you have savings or did you just jump off the diving um yeah i didn't wasn't quite at a point where the the business alone would have um kept me going so i had a fallback plan which was some savings which i did use some of

[11:08] um but yeah i i just had confidence that we were close enough to product market fit that it was going to work um just because of our who our customers are and how our pricing model works it makes sense most of the time for people to pay annually so even though our mrr you know is maybe in four figures the actual amount of money coming in the door was you know in five figures potentially or higher four figures so um i just i just had confidence that it was going to work out one way or another and you know worst case i like i told you i end up living in my

[11:41] parents basement for a little bit but that happens it's sacrifices we make right yeah yeah so pull the trigger i figured if if i'm gonna make it work i gotta i gotta be all in and that's the that's when i jumped off yep and i was so that he he just said a pretty cool hack that i've heard many people mention i've actually done it myself jason cohen talked about it um in in one of the best talks about bootstrapping uh ever called backing what is it yeah building the ideal bootstrap business i believe but it's the annual prepay and if you're in a space where as a bootstrapper you can get your

[12:13] customers to annually prepay typically given two months off is how you know i would often work it so you give them about a 16 and 23 discount um then your cash flow is way more than your mrr but that can allow you to either hire someone or allows you to quit your day job or whatever it is i'm curious so you have this two years of just two or three years of kind of toiling part-time and um struggling people are churning out then you you had enough traction that you're like i think we're almost at product market fit and and then you did you have achieved it at this point um

[12:45] what changed between that early height those early high churn days and the past 12 months of kind of as your growth has accelerated like what's what's different yeah i can't point to one specific thing but it's definitely just a you know a combination of getting the getting the the messaging and the marketing the positioning figured out uh you know so we're we're talking to the right people we're having the right people coming to to talk to us about signing up um so they know what they're getting into we know who we're talking to and and what the you know our deal customer is looking for and then just having that much time to

[13:21] to work on the product and and get it ready and and get you know as closer i can't say that we're 100 there but getting much much closer to product market fit yep yep yeah that makes sense such an evolving process and it's not binary right it's a continuum it's like you notch it up from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 60 70 and then oftentimes you'll find a new audience and i don't know in your tight niche if it'll do that but then you find a new audience that finds out about you and then your aggregate product market fit actually goes down again and then

[13:50] you have to work because the new audience you don't quite have it right you don't have all the features yep um as as we kind of wrap up i you know you're you're in tiny seed batch too and um i'm curious why like what made you decide to well i'm first i'm curious how you heard about tiny seed and second what made you decide to apply because the application you know you went um middle of of 2019 you went full time and you would have applied probably four or five months later it would have been november of 2019 and then you would have been accepted i

[14:19] think you know about six seven months ago so first you know where did you hear about it in a second what made you decide to apply so i had been a listener of startups for the rest of us for a long time um so i that's probably where i heard about it or just something related to that that channel and the idea was to it wasn't so much a safety net so to speak but it was originally planned to be kind of an accelerant so there were some other parts of the the platform that we really needed to to reach to really get our platform built out and

[14:51] get to parity and exceed parity with the other options out there and the plan was to take that and really just kind of throw the fuel on the fire i feel like i felt like we had a really good idea of what we needed to do at that point and i just wanted to do it faster really and has it accelerated for you yeah definitely awesome yep well sir we're at time thank you so much for joining us today yeah absolutely happy to be here great having [Music]

[15:24] you you

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