What's up, everyone?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives, and what makes their businesses tick? Today, I am talking to Mike Tabor. Mike is one of the co-creators of MicroConf, probably the biggest and I think definitely the best conference for self-funded founders. Mike is also the co-host of the podcast, startups for the rest of us, which is a great show. You should all check it out. And finally, Mike is the founder of a company called Blue Tick, which is what we're going to spend most of our time talking about today. Mike, I'm glad to finally have you on here, and thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. So the company you're working on, Blue Tick, is what you'd call email follow-up software the basic idea is that if you find

yourself wasting time sending email after email to the same people you sign up for blue tick

instead and it's super smart it'll send out follow-up emails on your behalf automatically and it

knows exactly when to stop sending them and you can set it to send different emails every time and

sort of a sequence is that a good description of what the company does? Yeah, that's a generally good description, good high-level overview. Great. I think it's a cool idea. It's something that I probably should have been using for Andy hackers because I send a ton of follow-up emails for the podcast, get guests like yourself scheduled. I send a ton of follow-up emails for the text interviews on the site to remind people to finish their writing. And I think, more importantly, back when I was selling ads, it took a ton of follow-up emails just to get sponsors to get me their ad copy and pay me, et cetera. So probably could have made more money if I had something like Blu-Tick, so I wouldn't forget to send follow-up emails every now and then. So Blue Tick is entirely self-funded. Is that right?

Correct. Yes.

How long have you been working on it? And who's working on it? wouldn't forget to send follow-up emails every now and then. So Blue Tick is entirely self-funded. Is that right?

Correct. Yes.

How long have you been working on it? And who's working with you and how much money are you

making nowadays? To start with, when I, before I started breaking code on it, I think was

2015. So it was like November or December was about the time I started going through the validation

process for it. And I did not break code until January or so of 2016. And then it took four or five

months or so to get an actual thing that people could use, took another six to eight months to

get people to start using it. And then one at some point I drew a line in the sand and said,

okay, you're going to start paying for it because I've taken pre-orders. After that, I basically

just started onboarding new customers. And it's kind of my, I work on it full time for the most

part, but it's not enough to make a full time living on. So I have around 1500 or so in recurring revenue. And then I've also got people who've paid for annual plans. So it's somewhere north of that, but it's probably not quite $2,000 a month if you were to aggregate it over the course of an entire year. What's your long-term goal with all of this? Do you want Blue Tick to make enough money to support your lifestyle, or do you want to build some sort of huge business? Well, yeah, I don't really want to make it some ginormous business, but at the same time, I wanted to make enough money that I can use that revenue as kind of a platform to do kind of whatever I want and essentially buy my own time so that I can do anything. So that wins I can just, you know, go to sleep at night. And if I want to take off two or three days or a week, I can just go do so. And I just took a family vacation a couple of weeks ago and went, drove down to Virginia from Massachusetts, stopped at D.C., stopped in Philly along the way, went, did a bunch of different things. I answered a couple of

emails, a couple of support things while I was gone and everything just kept running without me

...