TMM008: Daniel Hicks - Poster Child for the 20 Mile March

Daniel Hicks is the founder of TTB Tamer, which is a software that helps microbreweries report their tax obligations. His software helps track the amount of alcohol a brewer produces and creates all the forms to be sent into the government. I was impressed at how Daniel followed the formula from The Foundation and (surprise! It works…) ended up creating a SaaS. I think the biggest takeaway for me was his persistence and single-minded focus. He wanted to create a SaaS that helped microbreweries and didn’t stop moving forward. Daniel could have quit so many times, but he didn’t, and so he has a company now and he was able to quite his day job.

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Timecode
03:00 Friendly niche. All microbreweries want to help each other out.
06:00 How Daniel contacted the market (E-mails scraped from brewery association)
07:30 How Daniel caught the entrepreneurship bug
09:15 Daniel finds the core problem/idea
09:45 Don’t get too big. It’s hard to execute the idea when you have no money.
12:00 How he built the MVP.
13:15 Found his developer was already his roommate
15:30 Customers were told that he will fix the problems they find in the software
17:00 Daniel sends 10-20 e-mails a day and chips through his list of 6,000 brewers
19:00 Daniel’s lead gen funnel = FB ad > email optin > PDF > teaching sequence
20:43 Scaling problems
21:45 Daniel likes to respond to customer emails in 2-3 minutes
23:00 How Daniel will expand into the related wine/spirit markets
24:30 The longterm vision of his company
25:40 Joy from simply doing what you want to do.
26:45 Keep it practical yet fun
28:00 The biggest struggle has been just to keep going even on tough days
30:00 The habits that Daniel kept while working a full time job