Episode 833 | Success Patterns of Nobel Laureates, Developing Expertise, and From Zero to $10k (A Rob Solo Adventure)

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
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Welcome back to another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I'm your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, I'm going to talk through some solo topics. First one's about how a TinySeed founder who found they didn't have product market fit just started generating $10,000, $15,000 a month in quasi-consulting revenue, but it's really customer development mixed with project based work, and how impressed I was with how quickly he pulled this off. I'm going to talk about what separates Nobel Prize winners from forgotten researchers, and one or two other topics as time allows.
Before I dive in to those topics, tickets for MicroConf Europe are going fast. We will sell this event out. We've sold out all our events for the past several years. MicroConf Europe is in Reykjavik, Iceland from September 21st through the 23rd of this year. We have incredible speakers coming to this event, our world class hallway track, and of course, producer Sonja is lining up some amazing excursions to hot springs, thermal spas, and a distillery. microconfeurope.com, if you want to check that out and grab your ticket, tickets will never be cheaper than they are today.
And, if you or your company are interested in supporting the event and getting in front of a couple hundred founders, mostly focused on B2B SaaS, you should consider sponsoring. Shoot us a note at sponsors at microconf.com and my trusty team will get back to you ASAP.
The first topic of the day is about a TinySeed company called BlinkMetrics at blinkmetrics.com. And of course, I did get permission from the founders to tell this story. I was going to anonymize it, and then I was talking to Nathan Tyler, one of the co-founders, and mentioned I was going to talk about this on the podcast, and he said, oh, just use the name. Just tell them what we're up to.
And I really appreciated that, because the story is an interesting one. So we accepted Blink Metrics into TinySeed earlier than a lot of other TinySeed companies. Nathan has had a nice exit under his belt, and so he's a serial entrepreneur, and he's someone who we put faith in him and his co-founder to execute.
And so they were building Blink Metrics, it's purely as a B2B SaaS, and had some early traction. And so they came into a batch, I don't even know if it's 18 months ago, I lose track of it these days. And what they found is what they were selling wasn't resonating. Their product market fit was very weak or non-existent, and they were struggling to make sales and struggling to retain people, tweaking with the pricing. But in true entrepreneur startup founder form, they have iterated so quickly. They've tried a lot of things, and they've been right on enough of them that they're starting to be some traction. So Nathan, in particular, and I have gone back and forth with Loom videos and Slack voice messages where we have these async conversations about approaches that he and his co-founder are trying. And one of the things he eventually decided to try, and he was asking me, you know, what I thought about it, it was the approach of, look, I think I want to kind of do some consulting, project-based work to serve both as revenue for the company, because the company wasn't really making any money, but also as customer development to find out what people really need. And before I continue, Blink Metrics, the H1 today, is take your business reporting out of spreadsheets for good. You know the data is somewhere in your CRM, finance and operations tools. Blink Metrics pulls it all together into live dashboards that finally answer the questions your individual tools can't. And as you've heard me talk about on this show, building analytics dashboards is a tough space because they're often vitamins, not aspirins. And that's what Blink Metrics was running into. And so they decided to take a pretty bold move. And if you go to their custom dashboards page today, you can see they have just three pricing plans, and they are effectively one time. So they have a $5,000 one custom reporting dashboard done in 30 days, done for you. And it's a lot of custom code and custom integrations with apps. And there's a $10,000 one if you need a few more things, and then there's a custom one starting at $25,000 and going up from there. And I've seen folks try to do this, right? I've seen SaaS founders both inside TinySeed and out, try to do the consulting to product. And it is challenging. There's a lot of challenges that go along with it. If you can't see commonalities, you know, between all of the projects, then you're basically just a, you're just a dev shop. You know, you're just a project shop. And if you can't charge enough to make really strong margins, then you find yourself just on this hamster wheel of never-ending writing code and you can't productize it. And it's a trap that we see a lot of, well, a lot of consulting firms and agencies fall into. And, you know, they're never able to get away from that instant infusion of cash when you can charge $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 for a few weeks worth of work. It makes it hard to then go try to build a business on $50 a month. And so Nathan and I had a lot of conversations about this. And the interesting thing is he came back, I don't know, a month or two after one of our conversations. And he said, well, yeah, I've been generating between $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month in this project work, and we are learning a ton. And I thought to myself, both he and I, realizing that it's not recurring revenue, I was talking down about it, you know, and being like, yeah, this is really, it's just, it's kind of not working, you know, and you have this consulting stuff you're doing. But then he said, well, some of it is turning into recurring revenue. So some folks are paying, I don't know, $500 or $1,000 a month, like it's pretty nice, substantial amount of MRR with most projects. And so the MRR is actually starting to build. And this is, I mean, talk about customer development. You know, most people don't do customer development to this level where you are truly building mostly custom software and then able to find the commonalities. But the really interesting thing was just how I was like, yeah, it's not SaaS, so it's the revenue isn't worth much, right? That was kind of the way I was talking about it. And then I realized, it's pretty incredible. Like, think about what they've done. That within a month or two of deciding to do this, they're bringing in, again, between $10,000 and $20,000 a month of, it's project revenue, but it's cash. It's cash that allows them to pay the bills and to keep the company going. And I just had the realization at a certain point that, as entrepreneurs, we often just make things out of nothing. Like, from nowhere, suddenly this business is a six-figure ARR company that will support both the founders until they can figure out how to turn this into recurring revenue. And it's such an incredible luxury that we are able to do that. Like, I asked Nathan, I said, you know, 10 years ago, when you're working a day job, did you ever think you could just spin up a business doing $10,000, $20,000 a month effectively overnight? I mean, they had a website, that was it. They didn't have a bunch of incoming leads or anything, and all of a sudden, this business is doing this. And he said, no, I kind of take it for granted these days. And that's the thing when you talk about entrepreneurs that execute and just get it done, we just kind of take it for granted. And I was doing that in our conversations as well. I actually asked him, I said, I don't think you have to rely on traffic, but like, how are you finding these new clients?