Blue Live: Finance & B2B SaaS Strategy

In this second session with Joe Maracic from LoudEgg, Manny dives deeper into the business side of building Blue — financial sustainability, B2B SaaS economics, and hard-won lessons for founders.

Topics covered

• How Blue stays financially sustainable as a self-funded company
• The economics of B2B SaaS pricing — why we moved to per-user pricing
• Competing with VC-backed companies on a bootstrapped budget
• Advice for founders building their first SaaS product
• The role of community and customer feedback in product development

Full Transcript

Introduction and Background

Joe: Welcome to this second Blue live session. Joined today by my good buddy Francois and of course Manny, founder of Blue. Emanuel, we call you Manny, right?

Manny: Yeah, everybody calls me Manny. That’s right.

Joe: Thanks guys for taking some time to go over Blue, go over other project management system tools as well. The SaaS landscape, I guess we’ll cover a little bit of everything today, right?

Manny: Yeah, exactly. I thought we’d deep dive on a couple of interesting features in Blue and then talk more in general on the SaaS landscape because I had a lot of questions in the last couple of weeks on that.

Joe: That’d be great. We definitely want to get to some hard-hitting questions like, especially here’s one I had for you that I’ve been thinking about: is blue your favorite color, Manny?

Manny: Yes, it is. My previous company was red, and I found that a lot, you know, it was great to begin with because it’s very loud, but then when you have to go to the office every day and you see red, red, red, then it sort of gets to you over time.

Joe: Francois, thank you also for joining because you’re one of the first, I think, Blue users, correct? When it was beta?

Francois: I’m Blue user since January 2021, I think. I’m using it nearly every day for my work. That’s one of my main tools for trying to work with my clients on their projects.

Business and Financial Strategy

Manny: I’ll give you the numbers from the previous campaign. We put it on there in December 2020, and then we went into 2021. We actually left it on for about 10 months. I think we exited August 2021. So it was 10 months, and we actually made about 30k after revenue share and so on. It wasn’t a huge deal for us. It was great to get a lot of feedback, but in terms of actual customer numbers, it wasn’t crazy.

Joe: So going on AppSumo was a good idea? Coming back was yeah?

Manny: Yeah, it was interesting. It was definitely an interesting challenge. I wasn’t expecting it to take over my life for a whole week, I’ll be honest.

Joe: So that the idea to come back was really to connect with agencies?

Manny: Yeah, we want to do later towards the end of this year and then into next year, launching a reseller program similar to Go High Level where agencies can pay a yearly fee for a right to resell full white label and then sell to their clients. I see this as a very sustainable, very long-term growth channel, something that the big competitors are not doing.

Joe: You could be an advisor for founders. You could be actually a good adviser. You know, you have Blue the project management tool, and then Blue advisor, financial advice for that’s a big important part of being a SaaS founder which I think a lot of people are lacking in.

Manny: Exactly. We use a company, a bank called Relay Financial. They have this built-in Profit First methodology. You can actually set up the automation in the bank account. That’s really useful. I think it’s one of the key things to do.

The way we follow is a methodology called Profit First. The idea is that you get revenue from customers, in our case everything’s through Stripe, and it hits our bank account into a special account that’s set up to automatically split the funds. It sends 20% of the funds to a basically locked account for profit. That’s the first thing that gets moved. Then the rest of it, 80%, goes to an operational account. That 80% is then my budget to run my business.

Blue Product Overview

Manny: Let me go ahead and share my screen for everyone. We did do a session a few weeks back with Sarah that kind of shows more of a walkthrough, a deeper walkthrough of Blue, but we’ll try to do a quick whatever I want to do.

Manny: Cool. Created a special company today called Quiet Tech. I think a few things - we still communicate ourselves as a project management tool, but I would say 90% of use cases is actually a Process Management tool. This is something that we have to improve our communication on in the coming months.

I wanted to show an example of what you can do with Blue in terms of a very common use case: sales CRM. What we introduced, I think it was earlier this year, was the ability to actually sort of merge two projects or two processes together so you can link the data. Typically what happens with a sales CRM setup, you’ll have your kind of workflow that you can create in Blue. These are lists, and from left to right, these are your step-by-step process. Each business really needs to think of what their unique process is, but this is a sort of simplified example.

You might have “unqualified”, so you’re not sure if this customer is going to be a good customer for you, if they have a budget and so on. You’re going to have discussions, so you can move this over to qualification. You’re typically going to prepare a proposal, send it, do some final negotiations, and then closed won, closed lost. Blue supports this very nicely.

We’ve also got some tags here for service. For instance, I can click on service B and that would then filter everything out except focusing on deals that have service B. If I click on a deal, you can see that everything is auditable here. All the changes are made, and you can see I’ve got some custom fields here on the left. I have an amount, which is what I want to try and sell the customer for, then I’ve also put in here my cost.

Joe: I love the flexibility of it because I’m using it right now in two different ways. With other project management tools, I kind of have the same format for each company, but with Blue, I have multiple styles that I’m using. On some, I’ll just list the projects on the left side and do the Kanban view there, where on others I’ll just have certain workflows on the left side. I feel like Blue is one of the more flexible project management tools. Is that because you created it so that it could kind of adjust to the user more than other tools?

Manny: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it’s based on my experience speaking to a lot of different businesses. It’s very difficult for me to guess how somebody else should run their business, and also, why should I? There’s different industries, and this is also the challenge of building a horizontal SaaS business where we’re not vertically focused on any specific industry. You have to make things configurable.

Future Plans and Development

Joe: AI is at some places in Blue but not extensive. Do you have any plans, future plans for AI in Blue like analysis or project reports?

Manny: Yeah, absolutely. Not a well-known fact, I’m actually doing my masters on large language models, specifically on document evaluation using LLMs. Essentially, it’s how to scan thousands of documents and extract meaningful data and patterns. So that’s my thesis. So yeah, for sure we’ll be building that out.

I haven’t jumped on the AI bandwagon super strong yet just because I wanted to see what everybody else is doing and then build out something thoughtful. Right now we have two main features. One is a summarization of discussions within records. So if you have 20 comments, you can click summarize, you’ll get a summary and then action points. And then auto-tagging, so you can auto-tag your entire project using AI, or you can tag a bug, select only a few of them, or even an individual record.

What we want to do in the future is using AI as an enabler. Imagine that right now if you want to set up a project according to best practices, you either need to really think through that yourself or read our documentation or get on an onboarding call. Ideally, I think AI could really help with that in the future. So you can describe your business, your process, what you’re trying to achieve, and then it can build out your project workflow, your automations, your custom field structure, and even across projects like referencing.

Also with the dashboards, right now you have to manually set them up and you’ve got to have a bit of knowledge for that. It’d be much easier to be able to just type that and the AI has got context of all of this data and then actually build this out.

Joe: Do you have any other SaaS product?

Manny: No, honestly I see this as something that I want to do for a multi-decade thing, make it my career. I’m not looking to do this and spin it off, sell it, and then start something else. I’m very passionate about project management and workflows, and I’m fortunate enough that it seems to be working out. So I sort of want to dedicate myself to this.

User Experience and Onboarding

Joe: Francois, because you’ve been using Blue for so long, do you feel like you would like it added or are you comfortable with having separate CRM or invoice things?

Francois: I prefer it to stay project or process management and not a CRM or invoice thing. I’ve got another solution for that anyway. I think it’s better to focus on what Blue is made for, and if people need such kind of stuff for invoicing, it’s really, really big stuff to make and I don’t think it’s worth it. I think it belongs in your finance system, in your QuickBooks or your Xero.

Francois: I’ve got a question for Manny. It’s about the new editor. You asked about the code, it was not possible to put code in the chat, and you replied that you were working on a new editor on the chat section. That can be interesting.

Manny: So right now we’re using two different editors in Blue. The wiki and the docs use something called Tiptap, which is an open-source, really nice editor which has a lot of real-time features. That’s the one that we also want to port over to the record comments section. The current one is actually using an older common system called Trix, which interestingly enough was developed by Basecamp, another project management software, and they open-sourced it.

However, it’s got some limitations. Basecamp in a similar way to Blue, they’re also very much about simplicity. So it’s not surprising that their text editor is relatively basic. Now we’ve heard feedback from yourself, Francois, but also from hundreds of other users that they want more power and flexibility there too. So we’re going to be moving the Tiptap, which is the wiki and doc editor which is much richer, over to the comment section as well.

Joe: Here’s a question, Francois. From Mael, I was thinking as well, do the customers think the interface is easy to use?

Francois: It depends. In fact, when I was using Blue at the beginning, Blue has really evolved. Manny hasn’t talked about it, but it’s really important to understand that the product has really had a massive evolution in few years. Of course, it’s more complex than it was before, that’s true, but it’s more powerful also. So yes, it depends on the client. I think if you onboard them a little bit, if you make a little video to explain how they can get to the information, it’s all right.

Closing Remarks

Joe: If you missed it, the beginning, check out the beginning of this video where we dive into more financial strategy, some other good things. Maybe we could do this again. Next time we’ll do it in French, Francois will host, I will sit here and just nod, I’ll smile.

Manny: We could do it every week, every week in a different language.

Joe: Check out Francois. Francois does some nice videos, reviews. Francois, your company is Visit 360, right?

Francois: Yes, Visit 360 Pro. That’s the name of the company.

Joe: Thank you, thank you everyone for joining. Sorry we ran a little bit long on this one. Thank you again Manny, Francois, you guys are the best. Hope everyone has a good weekend and let’s do this again sometime.

Manny: Wonderful, thank you so much. Pleasure.

All: Bye, see you.