Ask Me Anything: Bluetick – Mike Taber – MicroConf Europe 2019

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0:08first question for you is how does it feel to have been on a podcast for nine and a half years and then to only come on once a month it's a little odd yeah it really is I mean you know you fast forward however many months it's been since June maybe five months or so and I still think of it as my podcast and the reality of the situation is that it will never have not been my podcast I mean it will be something that I started even if I were to walk away or get hit by a bus tomorrow it will always be something that I had started same thing with

0:37microcon and I think that's odd when you sit there and look at whatever you do whether it's building a business or launching a family so to speak it's like you were the creator and you will always have been the creator no matter what happens so whether you make some decisions to step way to do other things move on to a different phase of your life you will always have been that creator and that will never change other questions for Mike people are being all kinds of questions I'll keep going I have five or six ready hey Mike what was that what was that what's the main challenge that you'll face with

1:17users when it comes to bluetick right now oh the users honestly it's just getting traffic and that's sounds like a fairly straightforward problem to solve and I don't think that it would be terribly difficult to solve it it's it's there's I would say there's other a lot of other underlying issues which have kind of caused bluetick to not go in the direction that it I would like and Rob kind of alluded to them a little bit in terms of I've always got all these things I'm juggling all these other things that I'm doing and I don't have a lot of dedicated time to focus on BlueTEC for example for like two three

1:52five weeks at a time there's always these other little interruptions that come up because you know you record a podcast and it's a weekly interruption and most people don't realize this but we actually back that off to recording every two weeks so you still get the podcast every week but we'll record an episode and then we will record another episode five minutes later we'll just open up another thing in Zen caster so sometimes you'll hear from one episode to the next so what's going on this week not much since last week in reasons because last week was only about ten minutes ago so you know the some of

2:24those things are very very much obscured but most of what I would say the bigger challenges are just like working on myself my own mental you know well-being and physical well-being and the problem is those things really impact all the other stuff that you do so last year I was not scheduled to speak and I knew that I had a ton of things going on I was hoping to put everything together for this conference in the last minute we had a speaker drop out because of family emergency so I put together talking about a day day and a half and gave that talk but there's those things that kind of pop up

2:56all the time and it was just very difficult to schedule the the time to work on bluetick and when those things pop up there very interruptive and you you think about them for longer periods of time but one of the things I talked about last year was the fact that I've got sleep apnea so I was diagnosed literally weeks before the conference and it wasn't obvious I think to most people but I would forget words I was only getting maybe two hours of sleep a night and that was for an extended period of time and if you read anything about sleep deprivation it is really really bad

3:28there's tons of books out there that you could read on it but I was suffering from sleep deprivation so bad that it was probably going to kill me sooner rather than later so had I been on that path I may not even be here right now well okay so maybe you already touched upon that but my question is your - have you talked about your ambition with blue tick and also you know where you want to be in a one year or two years and especially why especially why um so I've looked back so I keep a notebook of like personal retreats and stuff that I do

4:08and I took one earlier this year it was I think at the end of August 14th august something like that and went on a personal retreat it was gonna be the last weekend that I was gonna be able to because my kids were going to start in school and soccer season everything is gonna get crazy and I look back through that notebook and I started realizing that certain themes were there from year to year and one of the things I look back at was in 2017 I had written this is where I with blue tick and this is where I want to be and I am still not there and I was

4:37thinking to myself in that you know in it and I broke down in ten weeks I want to do this well it's been two years and I'm still not at that ten week goal so you know to answer your question of do I know where I want to be of course they do I wrote it down two years ago but I also wrote I did write down why and a lot of it was has to do with I think a lot of the things that all of us in this room are really after it's like financial independence you don't want to have to worry about where your income is

5:05coming from you want to be able to do the things that you wanted to and quite frankly you just want to be in charge of your own time you want to be master of your own destiny and I think that's why everybody in this room has probably started a business most people just didn't fall into a million dollars but it's it doesn't make it easy and sometimes you have to pick and choose the things that you do you might want to do that are actually detrimental to those goals so part of it is stepping back from things that I would like to go do but I know that it's

5:37not going to help me towards those goals and making sure that you actively say no to certain things when you want to do them but it's probably counterproductive to do those things Mike I think one thing that that I feel a lot with kind of following your story is that I've known you for four five years now and loved you and would love to see you be happy and successful and so I I you know I think a lot of people here want to help and so and the heck comes in the form of unsolicited advice a lot of times and and I would love to

6:10hear from your perspective maybe it's a help everyone here talk about what what you like to get out of interactions with other people here and and what you don't want here and what you don't want to get um because I think we all we all want to help each other and it all just goes around um and I think maybe coming just for you in for everyone else you're like what school what's not cool and what's been helpful sure so I my last retreat that I did you know a couple months ago I wrote down a bunch of thoughts about you know are there other people could who could help me

6:42what are my goals where were my a and one of the things that had not necessarily occurred to me until I wrote it down was that I hate asking people for help so that's a big personal challenge I think there's no reason for me to not do it I mean I'm sure that I've helped lots of people in this room people who listen to the podcast have said all the time like hey thanks between the podcast it's been fantastic thanks for micro cop I'm awful when it comes to praise it's not that I you know say oh I I will joke about it I will downplay it a lot because I like doing

7:16it I don't necessarily like the massive recognition that comes with it's like I want to be famous and have the benefits of that but not actually be famous and it's a it's a very weird mental dynamic where like I want to help people and I want to do things and at least have somebody be aware on some level that I was help I hope to do that and was responsible for but I don't want like you know grant stands or parades or anything like that I just want to be I like the personal thank-yous I really do I don't really know how to answer the question other than that I mean there's

7:47probably you know many ways that people could could help me but I'm bad at asking for that help all right to continue his question or double down on it if you're not good at asking for it is it okay if say hey I've listened to the putt you know a lot of people know your story you're one of the more public folks probably in this room at least in this space and if people say hey I have an idea for you yeah yeah I think that's what Craig was getting at is like do you like that or is it kind of like I do because it gives me a lot of ideas and

8:17it makes me consider things that I hadn't necessarily thought of you know so like joint marketing efforts and direct integrations with other products I mean blue ticks got an API that can do a lot of different things and it'd be great to hook it into other products but I don't necessarily know where to start and I don't I don't know every single product that every single one of you is working on so I don't know whether blue tick would fit into that or whether it would help your customers or mine I mean if you have something more than happy to talk about it and see if we can do

8:42somewhat shorter integration or joint marketing or something like that but since I don't know what I don't know it's hard to just answer that upfront say hey we should go do this hey so first off just wanted to say big kudos to you for having the courage to go up on stage put yourself out there like this when you have somebody else that you are working with like Rob who's had a lot of success how do you deal with envy and do you well let's first ask do you feel it and then number two is if you feel it how do you deal with it I would definitely classify it as envy

9:21rather than jealousy because I think there's a very fine line between those two but at the same time I'm very proud of what Rob is accomplished I don't think that there's anything that I would want to ever say or do or think of that would even detract from that because he's like you know he should be genuinely proud of all the accomplishments I'm very happy for him but at the same time when you're on a trajectory like right now on side of somebody I mean we started out at about the same time and obviously like his director ejector he has gone way up into the right and mine's like meandered

9:47along a little bit I mean I'm okay doing okay but at the same time it can't go on forever because eventually there's that you know cliff at the end where I'm the coyote and the Road Runners I'm not saying Rob's will cut Rob he is tall but seen the cartoons was the analogy I wanted to make if you could take the act six seconds of time I'd be one of them

10:19Mike Mike Mike you've put a huge man into this community and I think you are leading to it earlier on people were saying there what would be helpful you mentioned you didn't actually ask for anything I want to say to you what could we do as a room now here to help you would it be useful to push out to the people that we know on Twitter and talk about BlueTEC and tell people to go and check it out should we do something like that can we do something like that you probably could interesting story back when I took some time off from the podcast I've not been

11:01on social media either so I've not been on Twitter or Facebook or pretty much anything since that time I basically stuck my head in the sand and very intentionally specific things that you could do yeah I mean tweeting might help I don't think that a lot of leads would come in very much through Twitter to be perfectly honest should blue tickets wasn't really that type of thing but talking about it when it comes up in situations where people are talking about warm and cold email follow-ups you know say hey have you checked out blue tech that would be very helpful direct referrals and things like that

11:33introductions is a really good thing blue tech has a lot of good word of mouth so when people start using it they have attended my customers have a tendency to tell their friends about it and that tends to be the direct channel or the best channel that I get because word of mouth I mean quite honestly the fact of the matter is I'm an engineer I'm not a designer and bluetick is direct reflection of that when you log in it's very obvious that it was built by an engineer but it works well and it does exactly what you needed to do there isn't really a great billing page you

12:01can't see all things like that so there's certain things that it could you know be cleaned up of course but the product works really well and that's what I struggle with in terms of the cold email market cuz I see a lot of people out there who are doing cold email and they're doing a really really bad job of it and I don't want my tool to be used for people who are using like you know selling I don't know supplements that don't actually work and don't improve other people's lives or businesses or world I'm very much of a mindset of I want to improve the world

12:30around me and bluetick is a reflection of that and it's reflected in some of the marketing that I do and the type of marketing that I don't do is to appeal to those people who are doing things that do not contribute to the greater good so here you'll who are your sort of ideal customers here are those who are those people and who in this room can relate to this this group do you think yeah so I small business owners for one technical people if you're integrating in through zapier if you need any sort of goal reach so I built blue tick partially as a result of doing

13:03sponsorships for microcon where I would email penalty and say hey penalty would you like to sponsor my kerkhof and I know he's going to say yes it's just a matter of when he's going to say yes or how long it's going to be so I may need to email him once twice three times and finally when you know the server is no longer on fire and he's no longer deleting projects from everybody's smallest he'll get back to me and he'll say is he'll send me an email and say yeah sure I'm interested but until those are done deleting like he's just not going to respond to me but I have blue tick in

13:33the background that's continuing that outreach effort because I know eventually he's gonna respond to it and he's going to say something so situations like that and there's obvious obviously other use cases for like Dunning emails like you need somebody to update their credit card like yeah it can do that it can do that outreach or if you want to schedule it's a call with somebody or get testimonials all sorts of things like that it's great for those types of outreach efforts where you need a response or you need them to schedule a call with you you can integrate with calendly or you can book me or various

14:02other calendar schools through zapier is happier integration and it's not about some some tools that like blue tech you use them and you can click on a link inside of it and it tracks that link and fires off an event and actually if you're trying to schedule a meeting with somebody you don't care about that click you don't care how many times they clicked on it to view your calendar what you actually care about is did they book the meeting because when they book the meeting and that's when you want to pull them out of email sequence and then contends and then move on to something

14:26else so those are the types of situations but like I said I don't know all the businesses that everybody's in here is in and how that would help some of your customers so it's hard for me to say you like exactly these types of people but those are kind of generalities around what it does and how it does it so who in this room sounds a who's here sounds like that's an interesting thing for you personally stick your hand up five six come see me afterwards go and see this guy afterwards and see what we can do see if you can Constantine I would appreciate the help I really would I suppose I can

15:06say I'm desperate for the help but no that was Mark little would everyone if you know business a software he runs at thanks for coming this year mark other questions hello oh yeah I think is it right the biggest asset you have is like this this huge audience you've built and have you may be considered pivoting to a product that more people in this room would be able to use I have and I've had customer I've had discussions with several customers over the past few weeks that explore some of those and some of them some of those ideas and some of the things that would come out of that are it's almost not

15:52quite a pivot it's almost a completely new product so it's a fine line between let me add a few features or let me do a few things that are gonna change how the products is working or what it does for people versus something that's almost fundamentally a rewrite and I really don't want to do go down the path of a complete rewrite and maybe maybe at the end of the day that happens to be the thing I think the most people in this room they don't build or engineer very many SAS applications and I don't exclude myself from that group and as you get it through it you get into the

16:24architecture and you start learning things like oh shoot I should throw away this entire code base and rewrite it and that's not you typically the right answer but at the same time the process of going through it and learning how different events get triggered or different things that you track or how the signup process works you learn through those things that you should have done in the first place but you didn't know that you needed to do so prime examples earlier probably put something up and they showed like oh we have this internal dashboard there here's a button you can restart somebody's trial but I'd be great to

16:52have him bluetick and I gave him you know hard time during last and I said you know you really should have showed me that slide two years ago because that that button was awesome but I think it's just learning those things and I don't have a concrete answer of whether I should completely pivot you know Rob is no longer with drips so I thought about rewriting drip but bad idea hey Mike you know I think you have a very sort of it's important to you to do good in the world and be the ethical good guy obviously you're in the space that's you know cold email and you must have gotten

17:28a fair few potential customers who will be doing what you'll be considered unethical or just sleazy do you have an idea or the percentage of or the amount of revenue you left on the table by not wanting to serve that market I don't it is probably not nearly as high as you might think it is most of the people that I end up having as customers they're either a really good fit for what bluetick does or they're not and the fundamental technical decisions that I made as when building it kind of filtered out the types of people that would do like you know tens you know tens of thousands of emails per

18:10day for example it's like you literally can't do it inside a blue text so if it if the product can't do that there's those people are not gonna be attracted to it so if I were to go in that direction and you say build a tool for nefarious purposes I had a conversation with somebody who literally wanted to send you know 30 40 thousand emails per day and I was just like no that's just not what I want to do but he didn't want to pay more than $1,000 a month so Mike yes first of all we all love you obviously you can tell everyone wants to

18:45help you but I just wanted to know like as your obviously every one of us are here because we've been struggling to some extent or we've reached friction and so my curiosity is what like what are you learning right now or what realizations are you having as you're meeting friction and what do you kind of feel like you're in the middle of discovering or realizing that maybe you didn't think of two years ago or three years ago when you were as naive as we all were when we thought I'm gonna build a business and it's gonna be awesome and it's gonna be easy and we're gonna live

19:17the dream on the beach working on a laptop occasionally I would say a lot of it is about myself personally and realize in the so I've been no secret that like I've had back problems for kind of as long as I can remember in the past year or two I've struggled with weight loss as well so when I before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea I was on adderall for focus because I couldn't I couldn't focus on my work and then I couldn't sleep at night so I was on medication for that so I was bad going back and forth between them it's like take meds so I can sleep and then I take

19:48other meds so that I can focus during the day it's like back and forth back and forth and obviously like that that bouncing back and forth is not I'm actually off of all of that right now as a result of the CPAP machine and as I get older it's also harder to do things like lose two simple things like lose weight when I went off the adderall I immediately put on like 15 pounds and like I've lost probably 18 pounds in the past I don't know 12 14 weeks something like that which sounds better than it is because I actually lost my laptop at one point that was eight eight pounds of it

20:22so I'm really just down ten but that ten pounds has been in the last month and a half or two but it was level for the longest time and it just nothing was moving for me so there was my weight loss bluetick wasn't moving I wasn't adding more customers wasn't adding more traffic and pretty much everything was locked up complete log jam and now that my weight has changed a little bit I've is I would apparently was not eating enough I was apparently not eating the right proportions of different foods and as soon as I change those that fixed and it was very very noticeable very quickly so now I've got

20:56that done my zapier integration is almost complete and it's going through their program they're a beta program right now you know next I have a cool little security audit that start that kicks off on Monday right after Micra conference ended and just recognizing that I'm not as young as I used to be like like I said my my back has been a problem you know like my arms and legs look great but I've also got the belly in the middle too so it's like I've got hardware and software problems it sucks but just getting older like I just physically can't keep up the way I used

21:28to so there's a recognition that like I really need that work-life balance a little bit more than I used to because I used to be able to just power through and I I was a night owl I could just you know burn they had burned the candle at both ends and I can't do that anymore I have to go to bed at like 10 10 o'clock 11 o'clock and there are times where I can stay up a little bit later

21:47like Saturday I stayed up til 5:00 a.m. that idea I paid for it but you know hopefully that debt has already been paid but yeah I mean it's just the recognition that there are limits to what I'm able to do partly physically but partly mentally and emotionally so there I don't berate myself for not meeting in my own expert Haitians anymore so if it's 11 o'clock in the morning I'm sitting there at work and I haven't accomplished anything for the day over the past couple of months I've gotten to the point where I just call it a day at eleven o'clock in the morning it was like I know that I'm not

22:22gonna get anything else done today or it's not gonna be meaningful progress so why bother to continue doing it why bother sitting in that chair and then berating myself later on for not being able to make progress during the day and just walk away start again tomorrow tomorrow's a new day you're basically hitting the reset I'm hitting the reset button at those times so by basically re-enable in my iron enabling myself to make those decisions it helps me because then I get kind of a mental reset I'm no longer at a point where the battery is burning down and by sitting there until 6:00 o'clock at

22:53morning or 6 o'clock at night it continues to go down rather than walking away and let every charge time for one more

23:09okay thank you so much for sharing that and I can recognize a lot of what you're saying there especially with getting older and not being able to do the same things and all this stuff and calling it a day which is that's a struggle for me my question is which just popped into my head just now how do you keep believing in getting success with you know when if you feel like you know you're getting older everything is tiny how do you how do you stick to a belief and getting up in the morning I'm kind of an idiot I don't know delusional doesn't throw on this lense I

23:51don't know I've always been always been confident in my own abilities but not necessarily to the point of wanting to like you know shout it from the rooftops I always used to thrive as somebody who I was doing consulting I was the person who always got dropped into the firestorm I was the one who was sent to customers they tell me the day before we need you there tomorrow morning and I'd go there and I solve their problems very quickly and then you know that was kind of it but it was repeated thing when I was a consultant I always got dropped into the worst customers and

24:24it did wear on me after a while I just I got to a point where I couldn't do it and part of that was just you know you deal with those types of customers every single day week in week out and it wears on you in terms of being able to get up and just continue to have the motivation to keep going when you're not really seeing progress it's been hard it's been really hard and in the last I'd say your so the last year and a half at least bluetick hasn't made a lot of progress and a lot of that has been a direct result of the lack of sleep and not

24:59being able to focus and I recognize that but I think at the time when I was in the middle of it I did not so at this point I feel like I'm a little bit recharged I mean if you ask me where things were at six months ago I'm like oh yeah I'm kind of you know getting near the tail end of burnout and that was absolutely not true and I could say that three months ago I could say that now and I feel better today than I did three months ago and three months ago felt better than the previous three months so things are getting better but

25:24maybe they're not where they need to be and I don't know the answer to that but I am hopeful and optimistic I mean a lot of people in this room have great businesses that are moving forward and it can I want to say it can't possibly be this hard but I think we all know that running a business is hard but I think there's a lot of inspiration that I take from the people in this room who have their own businesses that are growing that are making revenue that are bringing in new customers and growing and as a result a direct result of microcon and I feel like if you beat

25:54your head against that wall enough times eventually something's got to give and I feel like why can't that happen for me what is what's the what's wrong not real what's wrong but maybe the continuous thread there is I'm the problem you know I've thought about that I've given that a lot of thought and I don't think that that's the case i think it's more all the ancillary stuff that has held me back the fear of you know going out and actively marketing the product and saying oh well you need to use this product look at what I've built where I said before I'm not real good at asking

26:26for help I'm also not real good at like shoving my product in people's faces and saying hey you should take a look at this this is really good because the fact is it is good I just don't I have a bit of a problem with that and I think that for me personally is really just I need to learn to get over that and then put my products out there because it is a good product but I think a lot of people in this room it's just it's inspiring to see what you guys are accomplishing and I know that if I keep at it enough then I could certainly

26:52achieve what everybody else thank you Mike [Music]