The 21 Days Before My SaaS Launch

I find it fascinating to get a behind the scenes look at how entrepreneurs do the things they do. This is usually provided in the form of a blog post or a conference talk that is essentially a post-mortem of some kind regarding a certain situation or timeframe.

The downside of these post-mortems is that they’re always filtered in some way. One common form of filtering is through the lens of hindsight. The author or speaker sees the results and makes some educated guesses about what went wrong and why, doing their best to extrapolate on the results of the decisions they made to educate others.

Another form of filtering is one that glosses over the realities of the day to day drudgeries of what was really going on behind the scenes. There are multiple reasons for this.

The first is that the day to day happenings are sometimes quite boring when contrasted against the whole picture. Another is that there’s quite simply not enough time to cover all of the details in a meaningful way. And finally, there’s probably a certain amount of ego preservation. Nobody wants to look bad in front of their peers. After all, fear is what stops many people from doing anything at all.

My upcoming product Bluetick.io has been in the public eye for some time now. That’s helpful in that people are aware of its existence in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t be. It would seem like that’s a huge advantage.

The reality is somewhat different.

I feel a ton of pressure for it to do well because there are so many eyes on it. This is especially true in light of my last product AuditShark, which I have to chalk up as an abysmal failure. I had a really hard time letting it go because I felt that same pressure for it to succeed. I pressed on, even in the face of evidence that it was never going to work, mainly because I equated the success of my product as the success of me as a person.

Fortunately, they’re not the same thing. And although AuditShark was ultimately a failure, I also learned a lot along the way.

When are you launching Bluetick.io?

I’ve pushed off on a public launch of Bluetick on three different occasions. The first time, I backed away because even my alpha users weren’t using it. It simply wasn’t solving a problem for them yet and it needed work. A metric ton of work if I’m being blunt about it.

The second time, was an arbitrary date I’d written down targeted as the beginning of the year. Quite frankly, it still wasn’t there yet. There were scaling issues, usability issues and some of the integrations simply didn’t work very well. My early customers were just starting to pay for it, but it was still a bit too soon.

The third time I back off from a public launch was around MicroConf. This was a little out of my control. The product was ready but there was just too much going on at the time and it was the first time we’d run two conferences back to back. I didn’t have the time to spare.

However, the delay gave me another couple of months to help push the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) to where I wanted it to be when I finally launched.

I announced on the podcast this morning, that it’s finally ready and have a launch date.

Here’s the plan

Exactly three weeks from today is Tuesday August 1st. That’s my planned public launch date for Bluetick. I’ve been doing reasonably well at most of the things you would expect to be doing leading up to now. Customer development, onboarding, adding web pages, building the mailing list, etc.

It’s not perfect and there’s a lot more that could be done but given all that I have going on I can’t say I’m displeased with my progress. Is everything ready? Absolutely not. Am I embarrassed by anything in the product. For sure.

It would be nice to spend another 6 months working on it but that’s neither an option, nor is it realistic.  There’s no “good” reason stopping me from doing a public launch. That means that right now, it’s crunch time. This is where I think it gets interesting. And this is where you don’t usually hear a lot about what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’d like to share what’s happening on a day to day basis during the launch in a way that you wouldn’t usually see.

Join me “Behind the Scenes”

Every evening for the next 3 weeks, I’m going to record a short, 5-8 minute video. I’ll tell you what’s going on behind the scenes in preparation for the public launch of Bluetick. You’ll hear what’s going well, what isn’t and what my plans moving forward are.

Keep in mind that these videos will be largely raw and unedited. That’s intentional. Don’t expect a lot of polish. They’re intended to capture the essence of the Bluetick launch story as it happens. Whether it’s good or bad, you’ll hear it there first.

So how do you get them? Easy. Just subscribe to the mailing list below. I’ll send you a daily email with a link to the latest video that you can watch at your leisure.

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If you prefer to watch a few of them first, you can check out the first day of the series or the list of entries for the entire series before you decide to follow along.

Wait… Did someone say whiskey?

How could I forget? The full title of this series is “The 21 Days Before My SaaS Launch – With whiskey to drown the sorrows”. At the beginning of each video, I’m going to introduce you to a different whiskey that I’m sampling for the evening.

I expect a lot of things to go wrong during the next 3 weeks. If there was ever a time to drink alcohol every day, it seems like this would be it.