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Startups For the Rest of Us

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

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8792 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 651, Rob Walling catches up with fan favorite Mike Taber, who co-hosted the first 448 episodes of Startups For the Rest of Us. The last time he was on the podcast, Bluetick was still a side hustle. Now, 15 months later, he shares that the app is now profitable, supporting him full-time, and gives an update on some key parts of his entrepreneurial journey. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover:  1:34 - An update on Bluetick 6:26 - Is Bluetick a profitable business? 8:59 - Why Mike decided to pivot his company to supporting agencies 13:34 - Setting up Bluetick to scale from 1x to 500x volume 15:33 - Is Mike doing much marketing these days? 19:12 - Mike’s celebration moment in the past 15 months 20:40 - When Mike realized he had product-market fit 23:54 - How Mike thinks about implementing new features 24:55 - Mike’s low point in the past 15 months 26:27 - What changed that allowed Mike’s business to grow so dramatically over the past year? 32:50 - Is Mike planning to update his marketing to position the product to agencies? Links from the Show: Mike Taber (@SingleFounder) I Twitter Bluetick.io MicroConf US If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you. Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0

It's startups for the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, this week. I talk with Mike Tabor,

0:05.0

how he has gone from Blue Tick being a side hustle for years to finally being a full-time

0:11.2

a profitable app that supports him full-time. I'm really happy for Mike. We have a fun conversation.

0:17.1

For those that don't know, for the first 448 episodes of this podcast, Mike and I co-hosted

0:22.4

startups for the rest of us. And then Mike stepped back to focus on Blue Tech so that he could

0:27.8

grow it into a full-time income. And in this episode, 651, he comes on the show to help share

0:34.4

what that journey has looked like over the past year or two.

0:43.0

But before we dive into that, MicroConfUS is in Denver, April 16th through 18th, and we have sold out.

0:45.2

I kept telling you that we were going to sell out.

0:46.9

If you haven't grabbed your ticket yet, we do have a wait list.

0:50.0

Some tickets may become available in the coming weeks.

0:53.1

It's going to be an amazing event.

0:54.7

I'm co-hosting it with Leanna Patch.

0:56.4

Patrick Campbell's doing a talk, Dev Basu, and a couple others.

1:00.1

As I've mentioned on this show in the past,

1:02.2

we have really doubled and tripled down on the founder relationships.

1:05.8

So there are only five talks, I believe,

1:08.0

as opposed to the nine that we used to do pre-COVID. And as a result,

1:12.5

it's a lot of time connecting with other founders. We have activities where we get out of the

1:17.1

building, brewery tours, and we really double down on connecting founders to one another.

1:23.4

So if this sounds interesting, you can join the waitlist by heading to microconf.com slash Americas.

1:29.5

And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Mike Tabor on moving from side hustle to full-time and profitable.

...

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