Build Your SaaS

Jon and Justin debate the pros and cons of being a "transparent startup."

Show Notes

How transparent of a startup do we want to be?

There's an app called Buffer that really kickstarted the "radical transparency" movement with startups. Over time, they've revealed almost everything: how much their employees make, their company's revenue metrics, their internal emails, and their hiring process.

But is this something that we want for Transistor.fm? Listen to the episode to hear what we decided. ;)

Show notes

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Creators & Guests

Host
Jon Buda
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Host
Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Editor
Chris Enns
Owner of Lemon Productions

What is Build Your SaaS?

Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buddha, a software engineer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson, a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor.fm. Alright, John. We're back again on our Back

Jon:

on schedule.

Justin:

Back on schedule on a regular Friday call. I think every podcaster in the world wants to have a few episodes in the can. I'm I'm doing, you know, curly braces right now. It because if you we basically record the show on Friday. Chris, our editor, edits it over the weekend, and then we publish on Tuesday.

Justin:

But that gives us no margin for travel or being sick or, you know, something goes crazy at work. So we have to figure that out. One of these days, we'll we'll record a bunch back to back, and then we'll just have some

Jon:

look up. Yeah. Have a bloopers episode.

Justin:

Yeah. Just have have a backup plan. Although, actually, one backup plan we could do is do some interviews. I think, for anyone that's listening that's trying to start a podcast, the number one thing I heard at MicroConf, the number one thing I've heard in email is, how do I get more listeners? And a great trick is to interview people that have big audiences.

Jon:

Yeah. Because, yeah, that would be great.

Justin:

So that that's something we could try. I I shared this story at MicroConf because I'd forgotten about it. But when I started Product People, we didn't have, you know, really that big of an audience. I think we got up to, I don't know, a 100 or 200 listeners or something. And we really wanted to get interviews with all these people, all these heroes, these product heroes of ours.

Justin:

And we're like, how are we gonna do this? And so the trick was we had an email list, and I emailed those people, and I just put a poll in the email that said, which of these 5 people do you most wanna hear on the podcast? And it was people I wanted to talk to. And then the number one result was Patrick McKenzie, Patio 11.

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

And so then I emailed him and said, 38% of our listeners wanna hear you on the podcast. And so, and you are our number one choice. And so, I didn't have a relationship with him back then And that's what got him on the show. And that was our first really big bump Nice. In terms of listeners.

Justin:

So

Jon:

Yeah. That makes a huge difference. So I think we have we have a few people interested Yeah. That have that have kinda reached out and want and wanna talk about their story and what they're building.

Justin:

Yeah. Totally. Totally. And I think the show has got enough traction that we could be pretty choosy about who we get on the show. We really wanna hear, you know, good stories.

Justin:

We wanna hear about people who are, you know, maybe have done it in the past successfully, but are maybe also building something new. We'll do that some point in the future. We wanna get into the main topic right away, and it's something you and I have thrown back back and forth. And that is how transparent of a start up do we wanna be. To me, the transparent movement started with buffer because they said we are going to tell people about everything.

Justin:

We're going to tell them how we hire. We're gonna tell them how we fire. We're gonna say, this is our process for making decisions. So they when they hire, they say, listen, if you can't have all of your stuff open, like, they publish all of their salary information.

Jon:

Wow.

Justin:

And so they're kind of taking this to the extreme. And I guess that's part of our question today is how how transparent do we wanna be? And for a lot of, you know, startups, you know, what people wanna know is revenue. Like, how much money are you making?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And that's often the question people ask on podcast interviews. So, hey, what are you doing in monthly recurring revenue? And and some folks are like, I don't share that information. And other people are like, oh, yeah. We're really open about that.

Justin:

We're doing 10 k a month or whatever.

Jon:

Do you think do you think it do you think the people who are doing really well are more open to sharing that number?

Justin:

I mean, yes. That's and I I noticed a right message. My friend, Brennan's company just went

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

They just went transparent. But they they've been working on this for a while, and they just hit 10 k. So it's almost like once you hit a certain number, then it makes sense. There's enough social proof like, oh, like, we're over 10 k. It's a good time to be transparent.

Justin:

Yeah. So I think I think when you hit a certain, you know, for revenue, it's like, if you're struggling, you don't really wanna share that information.

Jon:

I I don't think yeah. For us, I don't think we're struggling. We're just new. Yes. We're growing.

Jon:

I guess we have no reason not to share it if we if we wanna go that route.

Justin:

Yeah. So I don't know. I mean okay. Let's go into why why would people wanna do this in the first place? What are the what's the benefit of being transparent?

Justin:

I mean, one thing is that we often learn from other companies that have shared like like an inside look of their their company. Right? Do you like those posts? Like, are you the kind of guy that digs into that kind of stuff? Or

Jon:

I like that stuff. Yeah.

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

Yeah. If they're open about, you know, expenses and and revenue, you know, it kinda helps other smaller companies get a good idea of what what people deem worthy to spend money on.

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah. And I think also there's a big a lot of talk about the Whisper Network. Have you heard of this? No.

Justin:

So Whisper Network is it's it's often used in the context of a company and when employees talk about how much money they're making. So hey, how much money are you making? How much money are you making? Uh-huh. And and traditionally, this has been a faux pas.

Justin:

Like, you don't talk about how much money you're making. And companies really don't like this usually. And again, socially, it used to be not a thing you talked about. But for, you know, especially, minorities and maybe, you know, like, women, like, there's a lot of benefit to knowing what other people make because there's a lot of intrinsic discrimination when it comes to salary. And so a whisper network is like, hey, how much money are you making?

Justin:

And there's just value in knowing, okay. Well, Bill's making this. He's been working here the same number of years I have, and he has the same amount of responsibility, but I'm making 25% less. It gives the employee a sense of where they stand. Right?

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And so if we can translate this over to startups, you know, it used to be you would hold all that stuff to your chest. Right? Like, nope. We're we're doing just fine. We're we're a successful company.

Justin:

But, you know, for us, we've got questions. Right? We've got questions about how have you done equity? How have you done, you know, how much traffic are you getting? What's your conversion?

Justin:

All that stuff is helpful to know because you need something to compare yourself to. Right?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

So I suppose the the benefit in one sense is giving back. Right? You you give back. If you find that stuff helpful, it's only fair that you do it for other people. What do you, like, maybe not like about it?

Justin:

When you hear this idea of like, hey, John, let's share our numbers. Let's share our, salaries. Let's share our, you know, pricing, our expenses.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

What kinds of thoughts kinda go through your mind?

Jon:

I mean, sometimes I think it it could kind of maybe affect how people see the the longevity of the company maybe. Like, if we're not doing well, are they gonna be less likely to sign up? Because maybe we're not gonna stick around. Yeah. Less likely to give us a shot.

Jon:

On the flip side of that, maybe they're good. They would give us a shot because we're the small guy.

Justin:

Yeah. There it's it's difficult. And take a look at that in our show notes. There's buffer transparency. If you look at everything they're sharing, it's insane.

Justin:

It's just like all the salaries, all of the revenue, you know, their values, their fundraising, emails of every single team. Oh, each email we send can be seen by any teammate. It's like, wow. Like, how would you like everyone on your team to see every email that you send?

Jon:

Right. That's Or have the option to. Right?

Justin:

Wow. At Buffer, we love it. And I was kinda like,

Jon:

oh, I

Justin:

don't know about that. There's some emails that I don't know. I don't know how I feel about all of this. There's obviously a scale of transparency and Yeah. Oh, product road maps.

Justin:

That's another thing. How do you feel about open product road maps?

Jon:

I like that idea. I like that idea a lot. Gives it gives customers potential customers a something to look forward to. They probably have questions about what we're working on.

Justin:

Mhmm. Mhmm.

Jon:

Obviously, would maybe give competition a window into what we're thinking about.

Justin:

Yeah. And that's a downside that I've heard Rob Walling, from DRIP talk about. He said he used to be really about his numbers and share all of that stuff. And then, he found that competitors started using it against him. And so, that's something to think about too.

Justin:

Part of me wants to be like, oh, yeah. Let's just share it. Like, this is great. But another part of me goes, I mean, there are competitors out there that want to, you know, win. Yeah.

Justin:

We wanna win.

Jon:

And I mean, I would I would certainly love to see competitors' road maps, but Yeah. Honestly, that might make me more anxious. Yeah. Right? Because it's just it's the 2 of us building this thing.

Jon:

Yeah. And I would probably get quickly overwhelmed about, like, how much stuff there is we could still do.

Justin:

Yes. Exactly. Spencer Fry from Podia says, why I'm not in favor of public road maps. Number 1, things change. Number 2, I want customers purchasing for today's features, not tomorrow's.

Justin:

So that's interesting. He's, you know, he's saying that's not even related to competition. He's just, like, in terms of communicating about, you know, the features that are coming up

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

This is this these are some downsides. So I could see that too. Let's just talk about revenue. Let's say we were gonna there's 2 places where you can share your revenue right now. One is Baremetrics open startups.

Justin:

So we would have to sign up for Baremetrics. And then there's an option to make all of our numbers public. So MRR, churn, growth, like, all that stuff, people can see it. And then there's Indie Hackers just opened up because they were acquired by Stripe. You can connect your Stripe account to Indie Hackers, and they can pull in, you know, this is how much money you're making.

Justin:

And there's a lot more. If you look at that site, it's, indiehackers.com/products for anyone listening. There's a lot more diversity there. You know, there's some sites that are doing $500 a month, and then they have this Stripe verified revenue badge you can have, which is, you know, this is how much money people are making.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

I mean, there's definitely some social proof. Like, I look at this one here. It has it's doing $30,000 a month. And I think, oh, wow. There must be something there.

Justin:

Right? Like they're obviously doing good enough. But another part of me goes, oh, man. I wonder if this like, will people sign up for Transistor because they see that we're doing a certain amount in MRR.

Jon:

Right. Maybe it's not for our customers, right, so much as other owners of startups.

Justin:

Yeah. But that is kind of our target market.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

So it's tricky to figure this stuff out. Let's let's think about what we would wanna get out of it. That might be a good way of slicing this. So what do we want? So under what do we want, we could say, well, one thing is we wanna give back.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

What would what are other things we would wanna get out of it?

Jon:

Well, we wanna give back, but we'd also maybe wanna get some feedback. Maybe that our numbers could initiate some advice or

Justin:

Yeah. Like having our numbers public could, you know, maybe invite some folks to help us out.

Jon:

Right. Maybe start a conversation around that and Mhmm.

Justin:

How

Jon:

to how to improve those numbers.

Justin:

Yeah. I I mean, I guess the other thing for us is it kind of fits with our brand so far because we have this show where we're being we're sharing our story every week about how we're building this thing.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And so it kinda fits with this narrative we've already started. Right?

Jon:

Yep.

Justin:

And we know from listener feedback, they wanna hear more of the kinda gritty stuff. Like, you know, like, what's it really like? And that it would definitely, like, if people could see our numbers, it would definitely, it would definitely help them to understand what it's like. And we Mhmm. And we wouldn't be able to hide as much.

Jon:

Yeah. I guess that's I guess the question is, are we trying to I mean, people who listen to this show and probably the people who have already signed up to use us are aware that it's just 2 of us. Mhmm. Are we trying to give the impression that we're bigger than we are? Because I mean, a lot of small companies do that.

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah. Well, what do you think? What's your opinion on that?

Jon:

I don't think we're trying to seem bigger than we are, but if people aren't aware that this is 2 of us, I think that's to look I mean, it's that's also good, I think.

Justin:

Yeah. I I personally really like the idea of almost like this is actually something I wanted to run by you. I I wanna put, like, who we are right on our home page. Like, have your smiling face and my smiling face and say, hey. We're just 2 guys building a small company.

Justin:

And, yeah, what do you think about that? What do you think about being really upfront with the idea that it's just 2 of us?

Jon:

I think I'm okay with that. Although we're supposed to we're supposed to bicker more on

Justin:

the show. We're we're supposed to fight Mars. I'm trying, Derek Reimer, Eric Norman. I'm trying. I'm trying to fight with John Moore.

Justin:

But we just agree too much. It's like, I I don't know. I think he's half Canadian.

Jon:

I yeah. Possibly. My parents grew up almost close to Canada. Well, see, it There might be some of that.

Justin:

It can seep over. During micro conf, Justin Mears, I think that's how you say his last name, told the story about one thing that really increased the respondents to a survey they sent, was adding the line, could you take 30 seconds to fill out the survey? It would really help me grow my little company. And as soon as he added little company, people were like, oh, oh, this isn't like a big corporation. It's a little company like me.

Justin:

And I think, you know, that that there's something about it that's, that can be helpful. Yeah. The the folks at Basecamp wrote about this in rework as well, which is to say, you know, one of your advantages as a small company is to just wear your smallness on your sleeve. Like, say, this is who we are. We're small, and we're proud to be small.

Jon:

From my experience in in previous working for previous startups or even, you know, more recent jobs, from the outside looking in, I think from other people's perspectives, you have this idea that everything is running well and everything's going smoothly. And

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Even for probably, like, big companies like Amazon and Google, everyone probably looks at those companies and Apple and says, wow. They must have their like, their processes are super smooth and very Yeah. Very well thought out. And I think the reality of that is that, like, most people are probably just making this stuff Right? Like Yeah.

Jon:

There's probably a lot of, like, manual stuff happening behind the scenes and, like, grunt work. You probably think Amazon's, like, this automated robot run company, but it's not even close to that, I doubt.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

So I think us giving out how we work and the struggles we deal with Mhmm. As well as, you know, comparing those to other people who have shared the same things. Maybe you can break that illusion that, like, running a company is an easy thing. Or Or the ones that are succeeding are doing something different than other ones because they're probably not. Yeah.

Jon:

Like, behind the scenes.

Justin:

Yeah. I actually really like that idea of breaking the illusion because I think that's what people struggle with. They always think, oh, I must be doing this wrong or

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Well, those folks must have it all figured out. But if you could see how, you know, in our case, how we're really struggling and we really don't know everything. You know, it I think it also plays into something we've talked about before, which is really being careful about your ego. Mhmm. That's that's one of the most potentially damaging things is if we have there's almost like this startup ego where it's, you know, they're they're like, we've got everything figured out, and we're super a type.

Justin:

And, you know, we're flying around the world raising money. And, you know, we've we've got this going on and this going on, and we're in this meeting. And and it it's almost like creating it it's creating all of this illusion, just like you said Yeah. That they've got it all together, that they're super successful, and then you their company fails, and you read the post mortem, and it's just devastating. You realize, wow, they were a mess.

Justin:

Yeah. And one way to combat, you know, that danger is to be really transparent to say, this is what we're there's nowhere to hide. It's it's almost like it's very stoic in some ways

Jon:

to say We're a mess, but we're open about it.

Justin:

Yeah. We're a mess, but we're open about it. Show title, Chris. I think in terms of pros and, like, what we want, if we're trying to pursue less ego and being less full of ourselves, that is helpful. Even I found myself as I was talking at MicroConf.

Justin:

I'm just, you know, I'm a I'm a storyteller, and it it was easy for me to to have that temptation to wanna, like, almost give this impression that wasn't real. Right? Like, oh, yeah, things are great and everything's perfect and, you know, we're killing it, we're crushing it. And I can just see that being really damaging when you build up this illusion, and then it looks like you're just working so hard, and you're so scared that that might all come crashing down.

Jon:

Yeah. I think I think for us, maybe the openness that comes with sharing our numbers or our process or anything related to that, the openness of that and writing about it is probably a good way to like, it's almost like therapy. Like, it's a step back and actually Mhmm. Think think about how we've been building the company and running the company so far.

Justin:

Yeah. Therapy and self reflection. I think that's a really good point. Because as you're talking about it, even as I was sharing a video, I'll I'll put it in the show notes. We rolled out analytics.

Justin:

Spoiler alert. We're gonna we're gonna talk about this at the end, but we rolled out analytics, inside of Transistors, so podcast analytics. And then the next day, we were talking back and forth in Slack, and John's like, you know what? I think bar graphs would be better here. And I'm like, oh, yeah.

Justin:

That that is a that that's a better way to visualize this data. And so we did this other update. We had 2 updates back to back. And as I was creating this video showing people the feature, there's this huge spike in our podcast listener analytics. And just publicizing that, I was I realized how helpful it would be for people to see, like, our listener base was, like, way down here.

Justin:

And then what was made the difference? Well, it was launching on Product Hunt.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And you can just see it in the bar graph. It's it's like small, small, small. 3 to 400 people subscribe, and then it jumps up. And then we figure we've got probably an average of 1500 people that subscribe to this show. Yeah.

Justin:

So I think sharing that information and so it's less of a black box. That might not work for other people, but at least they can see, like, oh, here's one way you can step up. Here's one way, you know, oh, what I gotta do is I gotta find a bigger channel than what I have already. You know? You give them a path forward.

Jon:

With, you know, financial numbers too with Transistor, we could eventually relate you know, have a have a graph of our revenue. And if we had some sort of large marketing push or some promotion, like, we could tie that back to something, I'm sure, and have this have a similar spike in revenue. Mhmm.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. Like, share the share what's working for us in terms of, gaining more revenue. Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. Let let's go back to the idea of financial transparency because I think that's that's the big one in my head. That's kind of the decision I wanna make this this show. Is are we going to in our case, I think the first step would be to hook our numbers up to indie hackers. Yeah.

Justin:

So how would you feel about that? How would you feel about us just connecting Stripe and letting people see how we're doing at this point?

Jon:

I think I'm okay with it. I mean, yeah, I think, I'm trying to come at this from the perspective of someone who would wanna know this information about another company or a service that I was using.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And I think it'd be I think it'd be interest really interesting to know that stuff.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm still wrestling with it in my head too. So we've we've talked about a lot of what we want and what the advantages would be. The there is the potential that our our so how could our competitors use this against us?

Justin:

That's that's one thing we could think about. Is there is there anything our competitors could do to because right now, they don't really know. We've I mean, we've been somewhat transparent. We've said we've got, you know, roughly 60 early access customers right now. But what's a way that, you know, some of these other people in the space might use it against us?

Jon:

I don't know. Undercut our pricing, have some sort of, like, promotion to to trend like, transition away from us to them. Maybe maybe, like, if they're even aware of us as a company, they were maybe seeing those numbers make them, like, a little bit less nervous about us taking over their

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Their share of the market.

Justin:

Yeah. And is that an advantage for us? Is it an advantage for our competitors to be nervous?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And is there any is there any negatives to our customers knowing our revenue?

Jon:

Potentially, yeah. I mean, I feel like if the revenue was high enough, they maybe wonder if our pricing is too high or if they could find ways to get a discount or something like that.

Justin:

Yeah. But I

Jon:

but I don't know that. Like, this is the they're all, like, hypotheticals because we haven't done it yet. But

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, that is one disadvantage is that, we gave early access customers a discount, which is Yeah. Which is a normal practice. But that number is not really known publicly, and eventually, we're gonna launch a premium product and a premium tier, and people would be able to reverse engineer our numbers and see, oh Yeah. Well, these people are getting it for this.

Justin:

Why can't I get it for that? Right?

Jon:

Yeah. So what what do the open what are these open revenue numbers even show? I guess I'm not

Jason:

Yeah.

Jon:

I'm not totally

Justin:

Let's take a look at one. So here's one for Snap Shooter. Actually, I know this guy. So he's doing $1,547 a a month. And if we click into his thing and we click on revenue so in Indie Hackers, all they give you is monthly revenue.

Justin:

So that's a lot less information than what Barimetrics gives you. If you go to Barimetrics open start ups and you click on any of those let's click on MoonMail, simple email marketing. If you click on this one, you can see monthly recurring revenue, net revenue, fees, other revenue, average revenue per user, annual run rate, lifetime value, user churn Oh, wow. Revenue churn, net revenue churn, active customers, new customers, like, it this is a lot of information.

Jon:

Yeah. That's I'm assuming you hook up Stripe to this too.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. You hook up Stripe to this, but Baremetrics calculates all of this information for you internally, and then there's a flag you can use to turn it on, public.

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

And so, I mean, some of these I click through on them, and I look at, for example, how many coupons did were redeemed in the last 30 days? And it's like, oh, wow. There's, like, there's a ton of coupons, like, $5,000 worth of coupons redeemed in the last so, obviously, they're giving out they're giving out, you know, discounts.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And then refunds. There's a big spike in refunds at one point, you know, 1,000 of dollars in refunds and it's like, oh, man, what's going on, you know? So how do you feel at contrasting those 2? Do you is there one you feel more comfortable with or what what are you kinda thinking?

Jon:

I like the simplicity about, yeah, of indie hackers and just having it be Mhmm. Having it be a a simple chart.

Justin:

What about the barometrics approach? Would you how would you feel if we did that for transistor?

Jon:

Probably less okay right now. I mean, like you said, I think it would yeah. I don't know. It's I just opened up buffers because they have large numbers.

Justin:

Yeah. You can also click through on this too. So you can click through, and then you can you can put time, like, okay. I wanna see all their refunds in the last year. And, I mean and it just shows you, like, 6 months ago, is it up or down?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

This is a lot of information.

Jon:

It's a lot of information. Yeah. I, I mean, I would wanna see this personally for our company.

Justin:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Jon:

Yeah. I don't know. Maybe when I don't know. Maybe when we're bigger, this would be more more useful even for everyone anyone else to look at. Like

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Because at the beginning, there's not gonna be much there.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

But at the, you know, further down the road, it feels like this open like open starts with baremetrics. It makes sense when you hit around 10 k because then there's the social proof of okay, you've hit this bar and, you know, depending on what your numbers look like, then you can say, okay, well, do we feel comfortable at this point? But right now, there's so many unknowns. We just don't know. Like, we don't know what to expect and what people would think.

Justin:

So if someone's, like, googling around and going, okay, transistor review or whatever, And then they find this and they go, well, holy hell. In the last 30 months, they've had 60 cancellations.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

But it doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't say, you know, whatever. It was those were

Jon:

Their trial ended and they canceled or whatever.

Justin:

Or or there were 50 Russian hackers and we we found out that they're, you know, so I think that piece. The other thing for us to consider is I know some of the people that are doing this open startups thing, it's been really stressful for the founders because they're always comparing their numbers to other people and other people are too. So other people

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You you're inviting commentary on the Internet of like, oh, well, transistors only doing this, and these guys are doing this. And it it when you're trying to stay focused on what customers want and you're trying to stay focused on your own life and your own, you know, struggles and your own whatever, that could be an additional thing for us that might add stress to our life.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And maybe that's something to consider too is how emotionally ready are we for something like that?

Jon:

Yeah. That's a good point. I guess we're trying to decide what to do here on the show. Should we say we're gonna do indie hacker

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Yeah. OpenMetrix first, and then if we get to 10,000 a month, we'll do it? Yeah. Yeah. I'd if we get to 10,000 a month, I would be Oh, yeah.

Jon:

I I'd be super happy regardless. Yeah. So maybe that maybe that gives an indication of what our numbers are now, but

Justin:

Actually, that's an that's another advantage is, it might provide motivation.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

So when people at MicroConf, people are like, so what's your goal for Transistor? And I said, well, John and I haven't really talked about it, but, you know, next year at at this time, I would love for us to be at $10,000 MRR. And that would that's very aggressive. Right? Like

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

That that would be wow. That if we could get there, that would be incredible. But in making the numbers public might provide motivation to say, okay. Well, it's May Yeah. 11th 2018, May 12th I mean, why did I say May 12th?

Justin:

May 11th 2019. Let's we're gonna try to be at $10,000 MRR. And it it kind of puts, you know, a stake down saying, we're this is what we're trying to do, and we're trying to be accountable to the public. Right? I I would be okay with us going transparent on indie hackers.

Jon:

Okay. Yeah.

Justin:

Should we do it right now?

Jon:

Sure. Do you have do you have an account? Yeah. You have an account. I have an account.

Jon:

Yeah. How do we do this?

Justin:

Okay. So I'm gonna look up we're on indie hackers already. We're gonna do this live. We're we might regret this. This is gonna this might be the last time we figure out something on air, you bunch of jerks.

Justin:

Okay. So I'm gonna log in. Products under my profile. Transistor is incomplete because we haven't added revenue data. So if you go to indyhackers.com/product/transistor, and I'm going to hit add revenue.

Justin:

K. So here we go.

Jon:

Do you

Justin:

want me to share my screen so you can see it?

Jon:

I'm on the I'm on the page too.

Justin:

I I'm just waiting for for John to DM me and go, what the man? We why are we doing this? Here we go.

Jon:

So So

Justin:

I'm gonna share my screen with John so he can see. So connect my Stripe account.

Jon:

K.

Justin:

Click this. Oh, it's doing something.

Jon:

Connecting to Stripe.

Justin:

This might take a minute or 2.

Jon:

There's not a lot of numbers to crunch.

Justin:

Okay. So it hasn't showed us on the the chart yet, but it says Transistor has generated $1,300 in revenue in the last 30 days. Really? Nice. Wait a second.

Jason:

I suppose that's

Justin:

As as so I suppose that's possible. Right? Yeah, folks. You can see it right now. Now this number's gonna go down.

Justin:

This is what's so strange. This number's gonna go down because we we charge some folks in for annual plans, but you could see this yourself. We just did it. Indiehackers.com/product/transistors/revenue. And, yeah.

Justin:

I guess no chart

Jon:

yet. Does it does it maybe start your chart when you connect Stripe, not from

Justin:

Yeah. I'm not sure. That's a good point. Part of me is wondering if,

Jon:

It's doing some background work.

Justin:

Yeah. They're they're they're they're generating some stuff. Alright. So, yeah, folks. You should be able to see that.

Justin:

We just made a decision on air that we might regret. Let but, yeah, I think that that'll be interesting to for for folks to see. And, actually, as soon as we made this live and I saw that, I was like, okay. Wow. Now I feel like I really wanna get to 10 k, having announced it and then showing people.

Justin:

I kinda feel like that. What do you feel? Do you feel any, like, post transparency regret right now?

Jon:

No. Now I'm gonna check this thing every day.

Justin:

Yeah. In some ways, this indie hackers thing is, like, almost better. It's like a nice simple chart. Right? Yeah.

Justin:

It's kinda helpful. So let's kinda wind down here and talk about what's been happening, here at Transistor. We mentioned you just released analytics. Do you wanna talk about that a bit?

Jon:

Yeah. So, yeah, we we had a a bit of analytics. Basically, it was a landing page for your show that showed the last 14 days of of listening data. Mhmm. Obviously, we've been collecting your listening data and metrics, from day 1, but just hadn't built out any any charts that really helped you dig into anything.

Jon:

Mhmm. So right now, it's it's basically, I think, what we're thinking of is, like, version 1 of this of these metrics. Yeah. Pretty simple, just like, you can choose an episode you wanna focus on or all your episodes at once. Yeah.

Jon:

And a time frame, which is either, like, 30 days from the beginning of the show, custom date range, yesterday, today. Yesterday and today, we'll break it down by hour of the day.

Justin:

Oh, cool. I haven't seen that yet.

Jon:

And if you do I'm just watching your screen. It's, like, really slow. So it's either it's either broken or

Justin:

I think I just broke it.

Jon:

There it is.

Justin:

Here. I gotta put let's put oh, wait. That's past year. Let's put yesterday. Okay.

Justin:

Cool. Yeah. Here's the hourly breakdown.

Jon:

So what I yeah. There's, like, some weird stuff for, like, I'm looking at your chart. 6 AM, there's, like, no downloads. I guess, there's only one at 7 AM. So

Justin:

Yeah. This this is for the Mega Maker show. So it got yesterday, it got 42 downloads.

Jon:

And then you can if you if you do 60 days or below, it breaks it down by day. And then if you go over 60 days, it breaks it down by

Justin:

month because it's

Jon:

it it'd be really hard to show

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

You know, 90 individual days of data on a bar chart.

Justin:

Yeah. So it's it's a it's

Jon:

a start, and it'll show for each time period you you choose. It shows either, you know, total downloads for that period, average per day. And like Justin mentioned earlier, there's you can kind of get your average subscribers if you look at an extended period of time and sort of like how what your large spikes are. Mhmm. Because that usually relates to when your episode is released.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Just because of how these, like, podcatchers download everything at the same time, which I think also, brings up the need to sort of split up data between, like, mobile apps, if we can, and people listening through a browser because it's like, you you're always gonna get a spike in downloads from people that subscribe Yeah. With Itunes or Overcast or whatever because they'll just download it generally at the same time.

Justin:

Yeah. At at some point, we might be able to approximate better how many subscribers people have by taking Yeah. Some of those spikes, but then also taking, you know, cross referencing how many of those are coming from specific clients.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

We're gonna have to make some assumptions, but we can at least assume, you know, make the best assumptions we can and say, okay, well, you're probably around this number. And so

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

If you can look at all time and you can look at, oh yeah, and you can look at like weekly kind of whatever, then you'll have a better sense of, okay, my spikes are kind of around here. And so I've got roughly this many subscribers.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. So there's, for anyone anyone listening or anyone using us right now, there's a lot of other insights and charts we can build out and numbers that we can kind of bubble up to the top. We have all the data. We have, you know, general listener location data.

Jon:

We have what they're using to listen to Mhmm. When they're listening to it. I know a lot of people have been requesting. I need I wanna know, like, when people drop off or if they stop listening before the end of the show, and I think we've talked about that before and how that how difficult that is. Yeah.

Jon:

We can probably get some of that data through the web player eventually, but it's gonna be really hard to do through individual apps.

Justin:

Yeah. There's and there is a new, open platform called it's called ping, some podping dot info.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And they're trying to become kind of like the the open platform that collects some of that data. The only challenge in podcasting is that all of the podcast players have to adopt it. And

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

I'm not sure if you saw, Marco Arment's latest thing. He's going more private with his data. So he's say he's just removed email tracking from Overcast. So you used to sign up with an email address, and then he would track all your stuff based on that. And now he's just removed it and he wrote this post about how, basically said podcast publishers have enough data.

Justin:

We don't need more. And a lot of people disagree with him but, yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, do we need more or just we do we need better? Do we need to organize and analyze the data better that we already have, I guess?

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So, like, one of the things you brought up earlier in this show was the spike of traffic we got from product hunt. Yep. And when I was building these analytics out, I had this idea that you could I don't know if there'd be a way to automatically do this, but you could put in, like, important dates into your show. Like, got featured on product hunt on whatever whatever date that let's say April 4th. Yeah.

Jon:

You could enter that that, like, special occasion, special date into transistor, and it would actually mark that on the graph

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

As, like, you got this spike. Yeah. Here's this special thing you did.

Justin:

Yeah. That was April 11th.

Jon:

Yeah. I think that would be pretty interesting. But we

Justin:

should also be able to get some of that information from the referrer data as well. Right? We should be able to see, wow. You really got a big bunch of traffic to the web player from Product Hunt.

Jon:

Yeah. To the yeah. The web player for sure. Yeah. We can do that.

Jon:

But,

Justin:

yeah. I think that would be cool to be able to flag certain events and say, you know, for sure. And especially with podcasts because in so many cases, you might read about it on the web, but your next step might be completely disconnected. You pick up your phone, open up Overcast, click the plus button, and then search Yeah. Build your SaaS.

Justin:

So Right.

Jon:

Or it's something we could call out automatically for people and say, hey. You had a big spike on this day. Yeah. Did something happen or whatever?

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. That would be really cool.

Jon:

So so, yeah, version 1 of this, we'll be researching and working on version 2. Yeah. Slowly rolling out updates.

Justin:

Yeah. And folks, if you've got, you know, things you want, we're we're listening. One of the advantages to joining a product early on is your voice just carries a lot more weight. Because right now, you know, eventually, we wanna have thousands of customers. But right now, we have 60.

Justin:

And so, you're one person out of 60, and we if you email us, we are listening. So if you've got ideas and you're a customer, please reach out. The other thing we wanted to set today was our marketing site launch date.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

What were we thinking for that, John?

Jon:

We said 2 weeks from now?

Justin:

Yeah. So 2 weeks from now is May 25th. By then, you should be able to go on May 25th 2018, you should be able to go to transistor.fm, and we should have our marketing site up. We're we're trying to this is part of our public accountability. We wanna put things out there

Jon:

and then

Justin:

try to make these deadlines.

Jon:

And then people can publicly congratulate us or publicly shame us.

Justin:

Exactly. Exactly. And what about a launch date? Do we wanna talk about a public launch date right now?

Jon:

Yeah. Do we? Maybe on the next show, I think.

Justin:

Yeah. Let's do it on the next show because

Jon:

We still gotta figure out what what we have left that we wanna finish up.

Justin:

Okay. So next show, we we will have a date for you. And, we're hoping that we can meet up somewhere maybe in Canada, maybe in the States, and, yeah, do the launch together. We think that would be fun. Record an episode together in the same room.

Justin:

Yeah. So there's a few more moving pieces there. If we if we're 2 months like, let's say we launched in 2 months, that would be, what would that June June, July. So we'd be into

Jon:

July.

Justin:

The summer. So that's, that's probably around where we're at. And Yeah.

Jon:

That's probably reasonable.

Justin:

Yeah. So we'll put next show, but we'll say for now around July, we're going to have a public launch where people will be able to sign up and start using Transistor. Folks, thanks for listening. Please, we've still got this t shirt contest going on and, lots of people have been leaving reviews. If you want to be entered in the contest, all you have to do is go to Itunes, search for build your SaaS, scroll down, click the 5 stars, and then write a review.

Justin:

Alright? There's other ways you can help us too. I just discovered there's a lot of people leaving ratings for us on breaker. So if you're on

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

If you're on breaker right now, click that heart icon and leave a comment. I'm reading those. Actually, I think I get notified when people leave a comment. So if you could if you could do that in your own breaker, that'd be awesome. On overcast, when you click the star icon and you share it on Twitter, that helps us get into the recommended, directory.

Justin:

So all of that stuff really helps. We're just a small company trying to make things work. And all of your, you know, whenever you tell someone about the show, it, yeah, just helps us out.

Jon:

Help spread the word.

Justin:

So, folks, you can reach John Buddha. He is he is tweeting again

Jon:

at Tweeting very sparingly again.

Justin:

Yeah. I I've noticed you do it in in, like, bursts.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I realized it was, it had been I forget what I tweeted. 400 and some days since my last tweet. It's like my confession.

Jon:

Right? It's been

Justin:

That's a long time.

Jon:

I know. And I was on it I was on it early and I just sorta

Justin:

Dropped off. But Anyway if you folks wanna try to win the John Buddha Twitter lottery, follow him at John Buddha. What where else are you at? You're on Instagram?

Jon:

Yeah. Instagram, John Buddha, web, johnbuder.com.

Justin:

I'm m I Justin, the letter m, the letter I, Justin on Twitter and Instagram. My personal site is justinjackson.ca, and we are transistor.fmandat transistorfm on Twitter. We'll see you folks next week.