Years after selling MicroConf, Mike Taber is making $24k MRR from his products while building yet another.

Early in his career, Mike Taber cofounded MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us with Rob Walling. Then, he built FounderCafe and Bluetick, which currently bring in roughly $24k/mo . And now, he's working on InboxFusion.

Needless to say, this isn't his first rodeo. Here's Mike on how he does it. 👇

Self-employed since 2005

I’ve been a self-employed entrepreneur since 2005. I cofounded MicroConf and the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, both of which I sold to TinySeed. Rob Walling and I also cofounded FounderCafe, a private online community for self-funded software entrepreneurs.

And more recently, I founded Bluetick.io, a warm and cold email platform that sends as much as 900k+ emails per day at peak times.

I'm also working on a new product called InboxFusion, which will offer a unified API for interacting with any mail server.

Finding and validating an idea

The original intent for Bluetick was to provide a platform for interacting with existing customers and prospects in a repeatable way, but the product found profitability with people looking for cold email tools.

As the number of bad actors has increased, I’ve been actively looking for ways to step away from cold email and providing a unified email API seemed like a logical product to develop. That's where InboxFusion comes in.

Google and Microsoft each have their own APIs for interacting with their mail servers, while third-party email providers tend to rely on direct IMAP connections. There are code libraries that exist for each provider, but each of them is different. And there are thousands of email providers and most of them don’t follow every email-related RFC, so there are a lot of edge cases and special conditions you need to account for, depending on the email provider.

I’ve had dozens of conversations with other developers and entrepreneurs about the challenges of incorporating their customers' email accounts into their apps and the same problems kept coming up over and over again. So there was a clear pain point.

And I've had entrepreneurs ask to partner with me to tap into the data provided by Bluetick, but it made more sense to redesign the email synchronization engine from the ground up and offer it as a stand-alone product.

When I decided to explore this option, I pitched the idea to the next two people I spoke with. Both quickly agreed to become paying customers and this kicked off my development efforts. Since then, I’ve been pitching the idea to other people interested in partnering and the interest shows that there’s a demand for this type of product.

Longer than expected

I thought building InboxFusion would be really straightforward because I already had a ton of code written for Bluetick that I was planning to repurpose. What I’d completely forgotten about was how much additional time and effort it takes to just build the basics.

The simple things you need for an app, such as authentication, user management, permissions, and a slew of other boilerplate features can be provided by most application frameworks or starter templates, but there’s still a big learning curve associated with them. Learning how they work and experimenting with them is time consuming.

I had expected to have a functional prototype in about eight weeks. Instead, it’s taken almost twice that to get a basic prototype in place due to the learning curve associated with the new framework I selected.

Fortunately, when you’re working with a really small pool of beta customers, you can cut corners to speed things along. For example, rather than supporting every email provider on day one, I decided to focus my efforts on only supporting Office 365. This allowed me to push other email providers to the future, as well as more complicated features like sending emails.

And, in the meantime, I'm fortunate in that over the last several years, Bluetick has been profitable enough to pay the bills and has allowed me to put money away to create some financial runway while I work on InboxFusion. I’ve recently taken on some consulting clients to keep me from eating into too much of that, but it’s definitely a challenge to juggle all of the different responsibilities when I have blocks of hours dedicated to clients.

Tech stack

Bluetick was built using C# on the backend, AngularJS on the front end, Microsoft SQL Server for the database and Redis for caching. It was hosted in Microsoft Azure, so using other Azure services like Virtual Machines and Azure Blob, Queue and Table storage was a natural fit.

I decided to use the commercial license of Abp.io as the startup template for InboxFusion. The core of the application still uses C# for the backend, but the front end uses the latest version of Angular rather than AngularJS. I also switched to using Postgres for the database, because a Microsoft SQL Server and ten Windows Server licenses were costing me $10,000/year just for the software and maintenance. I’m still using Redis for caching and will support Azure Blobs, Queues, and Tables for some of the data storage. Eventually, I’ll expand this to other providers.

The biggest challenges I’ve run into have been the learning curve associated with transitioning from AngularJS to Angular because it uses Typescript instead of straight JavaScript. It’s not difficult, but it’s been time consuming because the code tends to be structured differently.

Leveraging AI for learning

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how helpful ChatGPT has been. The areas I’ve found ChatGPT to be the most helpful have been explaining example code, writing utility functions, and modifying front-end UI code.

Code examples don’t always come with good documentation and it tends to make assumptions about how much you know the library functions in the framework. With ChatGPT, you can copy/paste the code, ask for an explanation, and it saves so much time getting an answer because the alternative is to do a bunch of searches and hope you come across the right explanation.

Utility functions can be somewhat tedious to write, especially when they involve regular expressions or semi-complicated logic. You can explain the problem you’re trying to solve and then refine the answer until it does what you need.

I’m not a great UI designer, so when it comes to things that should be simple to do, like aligning elements on the screen, all you need to know is which CSS class to use or style properties to add. But if you don’t know what those are, it can take forever to get it right.

The big caveat is that you really do need to know what you’re doing and double check its work because it often misses edge cases or has misunderstood what you wanted. It’s not as if you can ask it to build large sections of the codebase properly. But if you know what you’re doing, you can gradually build pieces over time.

Multiple streams of income

I make money in different ways, depending on the product offering, but most of them are subscriptions. Both Bluetick.io and FounderCafe.com are monthly subscription services.

The InboxFusion.com product I’m working on is going to initially launch with only a monthly subscription as a SaaS, but will eventually transition to a split delivery model where there will be SaaS and self-hosted offerings. I’ve not yet decided on how to license the self-hosted offering, so that’s something I’m going to need to figure out.

I also have a book that I sell from my website called The Single Founder Handbook which is a one-time purchase. And I do consulting work, primarily for small software companies and have a handful of entrepreneurs who I work closely with as a business coach.

I’ve been using these revenue streams to fund various pet projects and more recently, the development of InboxFusion. Collectively, I peaked at $24k MRR earlier in 2024 and most of the growth has been from a very small handful of customers who continue to add mailboxes to Bluetick

I don’t have any employees so my primary costs are my cloud infrastructure, software licenses, health insurance, and my salary.

Growth: Build the right audience

In 2015, I published a book called The Single Founder Handbook. I was also the cohost of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast from 2010-2019 before I sold both the podcast and MicroConf to TinySeed. This gave me something of a platform when I publicly launched Bluetick in 2017. 

But none of these channels I previously had access to resulted in an influx of customers that made the business profitable.

Conventional wisdom says that you should build an audience, but the subtle nuance is that you need to build “the right” audience that’s specifically interested in your product. If they opted into your marketing for any reason other than the product you were offering, chances are it’s not a good fit and won’t result in any sales.

Growth: Pivoting and expanding

For more than three years, I pushed back on most prospective customers who wanted to use Bluetick for cold email but failed to get traction with warm email follow ups. Finally, I relented on that stance and quickly landed an enterprise customer who immediately transformed the entire business.

Entrepreneurs want to think of themselves as smart and talented, but sometimes you land a good customer due to sheer dumb luck. Bluetick happened to be around long enough that they had something to look at and there was a willingness on my part to offer a large discount relative to the competitor they migrated away from in order to land them because I knew it would make the business profitable.

When I asked how they found Bluetick, they literally went through a list of every vendor they could find who might provide cold email. That list was a spreadsheet of around 30 companies, half of which they filtered out very quickly. They contacted the remaining vendors and only half of them responded. They had seven or eight initial calls with the vendors and Bluetick was the only product that made it to the second round.

We agreed to an eight-week paid trial, which started four weeks late and only lasted for three weeks. At that point, they were satisfied it would work for them and Bluetick went from monitoring 30-40 mailboxes to over 400. At peak usage, they had nearly 2,500 mailboxes connected to Bluetick.

This brought its own set of scaling problems that needed to be dealt with immediately, at the expense of all other initiatives. At the same time, it allowed the business to scale from sending less than 1,000 emails/day to upwards of 900,000 emails/day.

Missed opportunity: SEO

I tried a bunch of other marketing approaches to land customers, but none of them really moved the needle. Those approaches included submitting the product to various product aggregator websites/tool lists, partnerships, cold outreach, podcast appearances, and social media.

One approach that I dabbled with but never dedicated a lot of time to was SEO. In retrospect, that’s probably the biggest mistake I’ve made. I should have doubled down on generating long-tail content to drive people to a mailing list.

Unfortunately, the time required to support my enterprise customer ended up leaving me very little time and energy to devote to marketing. There were time and focus tradeoffs to be made, and I’ve fallen miserably short on that front.

Enterprise risk

Most of the growth over the last few years has come from customer expansion revenue rather than adding new customers. The downside of this is that there’s a very high concentration of revenue on a small number of customers. This means that revenue can swing wildly from one month to the next and it’s completely out of my hands.

The big takeaway here is that when you have a lot of revenue tied up in a small number of customers, you should try to mitigate risks to your revenue stream. If a single customer churns or runs into their own business problems, your revenue will drop accordingly. Essentially, the profitability of the business relies on factors outside of your control. That’s not a secure or sustainable business.

The goal with InboxFusion is to move away from a business where the revenue can fluctuate so dramatically from one month to the next.

Find your people

The most important piece of advice I’d offer to indie hackers who are just starting out is to find your people. Leverage communities — there are tons of them.

Beyond that, make sure you identify a repeatable way of acquiring new customers. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then you’re not going to land new customers. Marketing and self-promotion can feel sleazy, but if you genuinely believe that the product you’re selling can solve the problem that people are having, then it’s up to you to take the initiative and let people know that your solution exists.

And keep learning. There are plenty of books and resources that people can leverage to help move their business forward. I’d be remiss in my responsibilities as an entrepreneur if I didn’t mention The Single Founder Handbook here. I am also the co-founder of a private, paid online community named FounderCafe.

I would also heavily recommend books like Start Small, Stay Small by my cofounder, Rob Walling. And the in-person conference we cocreated called MicroConf.

What's next?

My main goal for 2025 is to launch InboxFusion publicly and get it to a point where it’s making at least $10k MRR by the end of the year.

I still have a fair amount of development work to do, but the basic MVP is only a few weeks away from being usable. At that point, I’ll need to work directly with my early access customers to integrate it into their applications and identify any areas where the product falls short.

At the same time, I’ll be doing direct outreach efforts to various SaaS vendors who seem like they could benefit from the application as part of a direct outreach effort. I don’t expect that this will be easy. There’s going to be a lot of juggling between technical, sales, marketing, and onboarding tasks. Having done this before, I know that it’s never easy and lack of focus can often kill forward progress.

I don’t foresee any major roadblocks, but I’ll definitely need to pay attention to compliance and security. The industry is generally trending in the direction of requesting that the SaaS vendors they deal with have a solid handle on their compliance, which often amounts to a SOC 2 compliance initiative. Larger companies will require this, so even if it seems like overkill for a one-person company, it’s going to be necessary.

You can follow along on my website and X. Or check out my book, BlueTick, FounderCafe, and InboxFusion.