Build Your SaaS

Predictions for 2020

Show Notes

Justin and Jon talk about:
  • What's happened this year.
  • "You shouldn't be worried about that, but you should be worried about THIS."
  • The SaaS gold rush: “Building, Owning (& possibly Selling) a profitable remote SaaS business is the new American Dream.” – Tyler Tringas
  • It’s harder to get the American Dream these days. “Productivity has increased by 80 per cent, but median compensation (that's wages plus benefits) has risen by just 11 per cent during that time. The middle-income jobs of the nation's postwar boom years have disproportionately vanished. Low-wage jobs have disproportionately burgeoned.” – Harold Meyerson, 40-year slump
  • More companies will take a stand on privacy: they’ll stop using Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, etc...
  • Privacy-focused companies like Fathom Analytics will become more popular.
  • Profitable SaaS companies + wealth founders will turn their attention to climate change
  • Less open startups.
  • Simon Bennett tweet: "Unfortunately, I am stopping publishing SnapShooter numbers from now on."
  • Small retreats > conferences

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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.

Justin:

This podcast is brought to you by Clubhouse. If you haven't tried it yet, there are really no excuses. You can get it free for up to 10 people forever. Go to clubhouse.io/build.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buddha, a software engineer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm.

Jon:

Was it the this is the last time we can say we're building a web app in 2019.

Justin:

That's right.

Jon:

I think.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I do we have one more episode after this? I can't remember.

Jon:

I don't know. I think it'd be New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve

Justin:

is the Well is the last episode?

Jon:

When it would come out wasn't it'd be New Year's Eve

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

I think.

Justin:

Well

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

This could be the last time you and I record.

Jon:

Could be. We'll just have we'll just we'll have a text to speech generator just, like, do our show for us.

Justin:

Hello from New Year's Eve party.

Jon:

So, yeah, it's the end of the year and the decade. And

Justin:

Ben, we missed 1 week, and we can barely talk to each other. Yeah. It's weird. I I haven't had time to really think about that.

Jon:

Yeah. Me neither. I mean, in general, it's been good. It's been exhausting. An office made a mindset, man, 2019 has been quite the decade because so much has happened this year.

Jon:

Just I mean, personally, for business and, like, in the world.

Justin:

In the world. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Politically, this was a very weird year, especially if you're in the UK or if you are in the United States, and probably other places too.

Justin:

I'm those are just the places I'm thinking about.

Jon:

Yeah. I I probably have lots of thoughts that

Justin:

are not very well, kind of formed in my my head.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I'm not I'm not sure they're really gonna form until I take a little bit of a break.

Justin:

Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons I actually love the New Year. Some people don't like, you know, thinking doing new year's reflections or New Year's new year's goals. But I like that time of saying, okay. What happened this past year and what am I gonna do next year?

Justin:

So I usually write a a year in review post for my blog, and I always find that quite helpful to process month by month what happened. And, normally, when

Jon:

you look back on a year like that, month by month, like, oh, wow. Yeah. Back then, I

Justin:

was struggling with this, and, oh, wow. Look how fast things changed this way, both up and down. You know, you you Yeah. You realize that the human experience is sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down. And having the the space to kind of reflect back on a whole 12 months at a time.

Justin:

Yeah. I like that. Do you do any sort of year end?

Jon:

Not usually. No. But I think I probably will this year. At least at least personally, I'll write it down personally or something. But

Justin:

Yeah. You don't even need to publish it, but I what I often I'll I'll actually, like, look at that month, and then I'll, like, look at my calendar for that month and then go back through my photos from that month. So Right. Like, just in your on your iPhone or Google Photos or whatever, go to that month and go, okay. Let's just see what pictures I took that,

Jon:

you

Justin:

know, during that time. Or sometimes I'll go back to what I've written or tweeted about. We could go back to this podcast. This podcast, I I've been relistening to some of our older episodes, and the the, time capsule that it this is when you're doing this almost every week, I there's this trend in Bootstrap Founders recording podcast, and I I can't recommend it enough. Even regard this despite the fact that we have a podcast hosting platform, like, just the act of sitting down with somebody else who's going through something similar at the same time, you know, whether it's Art of Product Podcast or Bootstrapping Web or Val Sobeys Bootstrapping SaaS or Bootstrapping Digest by Ashley Baxter, Product Journey.

Justin:

Like, there's Bright and Early. I listen to all these shows every week, but, also, I think for the the people going through that to be able to go back and go, oh, wow. This is where we were.

Jon:

Yeah. I think I should do that. I mean, I think it's it's probably really interesting to see kinda where our heads are at.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Where our heads are at, what our optimism level was, what, yeah, what we were struggling with, was it I think were the things we're struggling with even a big deal?

Justin:

Yeah. Well and I think one thing I have learned since partnering up with you and since we started Transistor is just how waiting sometimes is the best course of action. I used to be really kind of like, no. I gotta fix this now. And I'm I'm just seeing when you look back, oh, wow, that thing I was worried about or that thing I thought we had to build or that trend that I was seeing, it ended up when you can see it over a larger time span not mattering that much or sometimes it matters more, but it's time that reveals how important something is.

Justin:

And if you make a decision, if you decide to turn left instead of right right away, you can't it then then you're you're you're going that direction, and it's harder to kinda back up. You know? So sometimes this metaphor is bad, but sometimes it's worth it to sit at the intersection and wait for your GPS to catch up before you make the decision.

Jon:

That's a good point.

Justin:

Although, on this topic, I got a little bit of a scare the other day. I we get these regular email reports from Nick Swan at sanitycheck.io. And sanity check is a really cool app. It basically tracks your keywords and SEO and, you know, how many clicks you're getting from Google over time. And I had replied to Nick saying, hey, You know, our our clicks are down from, last week to this week.

Justin:

Is is this something I should be worried about? And he replied back, and he said, well, you should be worried about that. That, you know, week to week is not a big deal, but you should be worried about that. Uh-oh. He sent me a graph from he didn't say you should be worried.

Justin:

He said I would investigate this. And Okay. And it was a graph of our organic clicks from Google. And it's basically a chart that goes up. And then around November, when we launched our new website, it starts to go down, and then it really goes down for December.

Justin:

Now December's not done yet, but that chart sent me into a little bit of a not a tailspin. Actually, I think I reacted to it emotionally better than I would have ever in the past, but I was definitely, like, okay. I gotta figure this out. So I spent, quite a bit of time reaching out to people like Ruben Gamez, who's really good at SEO, talk more with Nick Swan. I I pinged a bunch of people in some Slacks and asked them what they thought, trying to figure out what is going on with SEO.

Jon:

Yeah. That seems like it would be a hard a hard thing to pin down.

Justin:

Mhmm. It's

Jon:

like, I don't even I'd be obviously, this is kinda your wheelhouse, but, like, I don't know. You know where you start looking.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit of a a it is a bit of a Pandora's box. Like, I I I started in Google Search Console, but very quickly people were like, yeah, I can't use Google Search Console for this. It's like, why does Google give us all these tools if they're not even helpful?

Justin:

Like, all the people

Jon:

All a facade.

Justin:

Yeah. All the people who are good at this use other tools like sanity check and h refs and, you know, all these other things. So

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Nick was very kind and kinda did a deeper dive into our data on sanity check. And his best guess is that when we switched from WordPress to statamec as our CMS, static removes the trailing slash on URLs

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Which is a best practice that they everyone's saying, yeah, that's a better way to do it. So WordPress, for example, if you had, like, you know, transistor.fm/how to start a podcast, it would put a trailing slash at the end of that URL. Right. This is so That's this is ridiculous. And

Jon:

when we

Justin:

switched to static, static, you know, removes the trailing slash.

Gavin:

Well Yeah.

Justin:

Well, apparently, that's important for Google. It it it basically treats that as a I don't know if it's a redirect or or what. But, essentially, Nick's like, you know, I think what Google Google's just confused that, oh, the traffic used to be clicking to here, but now it's clicking to something else. And so they he he said your the the clicks are being re at reattributed to those URLs, they're kinda going back up again, and, yeah, it it'll probably just be a blip, which is probably another good example of maybe you shouldn't freak out and change a bunch of things. You know?

Justin:

If if this ends up being a 1 month blip, then

Jon:

Yeah. But I you know, on the other hand, it is important. We do get a lot of traffic from, you know, articles you've written and people searching for certain podcasting topics. And

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah. And and there's always a fear when you change something like your website that, oh, maybe we had some magic before that.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And growth revenue growth has flattened out, and so there could still be something there.

Jon:

Yeah. Did we do do we look back at last year and how things were going this time? Like, I wonder if it's the end of the year or if it's just we've reached a point where it's gonna flatten.

Justin:

Yeah. So things did slow down around this time, but I think there's other things at play. And one of the nice things about having a scare, like, this is it it makes you go down the rabbit hole and talk to a bunch of smart people. And so, you know, as I'm speaking with folks saying, what is this? What's going on here?

Justin:

They're giving me ideas and they they've seen this all before. They've got enough track record that they go, okay. Here are some things it could be. And one thing that they've mentioned is that, you know, sometimes, these things can be caused by competitors putting ads. You know?

Justin:

And Google's actually showing more ads. So one person said, like, we get a lot of traffic for this article I wrote on free music for your podcast. And they said, if you search that on Google now, you are the number one organic hit, but you are at the bottom of the page because there are 6 ads above

Jon:

Yeah. It's so bizarre. I know it was like, DHH was getting into this with someone again. It's like Yeah. I mean, it's it's kind of absurd.

Justin:

Base camp has been pretty ticked about this. And and so just being aware of that's been interesting. I I actually found I gotta I still have to talk to this affiliate, but I was I was searching on DuckDuckGo for Transistor because I was like, oh, I wonder if more people are switching to DuckDuckGo if, you know, how we rank for different things. And so I searched for transistor podcast, and there's an ad for transistor above our our listing, and I'm like, I don't remember paying for this ad on DuckDuckGo. I I think DuckDuckGo uses Bing as their ad.

Jon:

Is it yeah. Or is it is it a very nice customer advertising for us?

Justin:

Yeah. Like, what's going on here? And so but even then, like, it's like, why would you I don't want an ad above our organic search result, but it's an affiliate. We have this affiliate program. They're running this ad for transistor podcast on Uh-huh.

Justin:

On the Bing ad network. So, basically, stealing stealing Yeah. Stealing customers that should just be coming to Transistor because it's our brand. And then And

Jon:

we don't explicitly disallow that, do we? I

Justin:

think it's in our

Jon:

At the moment?

Justin:

I think it's in our terms of use. Regardless, I'm gonna have to talk to this person.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, sneaky, but

Justin:

It's a little bit a little bit underhanded.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

I'm not mad. I'm I'm just like, okay. We gotta we gotta shut that down. Anyway, so, yeah, I've been I have been doing these deep dives into SEO. I think we're gonna get into this.

Justin:

We've got some predictions for people building SaaS, people bootstrapping

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

After this message from Postmark. By the way, if you just want to look at an incredible bootstrap company, Wildbit, who is the parent company of Postmark, they're the folks to look at.

Jon:

They Yeah. I I always said that if I wanted to to work a job again, a full time job, like, they're one of the companies I would work for, but they barely ever hire. They they seem like a really, really good company.

Justin:

Yeah. They're on the shortlist, for me as well. And they yeah. The Postmark is their flagship product. If you need to send transactional email from your application, everybody does.

Justin:

These are welcome emails, password reset emails. You know, there's all sorts of emails that we send on a daily basis from our applications. And when those emails get lost or flagged as spam, that means upset customers. If you don't want upset customers, head over to postmarkapp.com/loves/buildyoursaaS and use the coupon code build yoursass. You'll get a free month of sending.

Justin:

They hardly ever do deals because their service is really topnotch. Like, the the amount of that their deliverability rates, are better than anybody else in the industry. So even if you just wanna try them out for a while and see, maybe this will solve your headaches. Right? If you're using some other platform that lets you share, IP addresses with some other shady senders and none of your emails are getting through, head over to Postmark, and, that should make all the difference.

Justin:

Alright. Let's get into some predictions. This was actually your idea because I was I was gonna do some predictions about the podcast industry, and you were like, no.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Nobody cares about that.

Jon:

Yeah. I don't I don't know. I mean, maybe some people do, but I feel like our audience cares more about building a building a business rather than a specific industry that we're in.

Justin:

Yes. Yeah. I agree. This that was a good I I unfortunately, I had written out a bunch, and then I looked in Slack, and you're like, hey. Does anyone even care about this?

Justin:

I'm like, oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jon:

I mean, you might. You might. You could write an article about it.

Justin:

I think I will write an article about it. Those those bullet points will not go to waste.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

But you're right. Our our audience are folks who are, you know, building SaaS or have built a SaaS, you know, they dream of building a SaaS, I've said from the beginning, I I think our listener is the hero of this story. They're just, you know, watching us and thinking about how that might apply to their life. Yeah. Let's get into some of these.

Justin:

Number 1, the SaaS gold rush isn't done yet. This felt like a weird one to write because in some some ways, I felt like the, you know, I remember right after 37 signals launched base camp, there was kind of this initial gold rush of indie bootstrapped, you know, maybe funded SaaS as well, but lots of people wanted to do what Basecamp did.

Jon:

There were a lot of I think there there were a lot of companies that were starting up out of other companies or agencies or yeah. I I remember that too. 2004, 2005, there were a lot of little little software projects that were starting up Yeah. That were SaaS companies that were coming out of, I don't know, design agencies or development agencies that I think people were trying to emulate what 37 signals did.

Justin:

Yeah. And a lot of those didn't work out. There's a lot of postmortems. You know? Hey.

Justin:

We were an agency, and we tried to do what Basecamp did, and it didn't work. And so, yeah. I I it feels like we've had a few waves of this. And I was one of those people who were a little bit cynical at the time, saying, okay. It's done.

Justin:

Like, you know, the because that there were so many companies that died during that initial 5 year period where it didn't work.

Jon:

But that's every that's every industry, I think. I mean, if you think of software as a service as just another type of company, the people are never gonna stop starting companies. I mean, restaurants fail all the time. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Jon:

Retail stores fail all the time. Yeah. But then some succeed wildly and some succeed enough.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. So, yeah, I don't I I I don't know if it's a I don't know if it's a gold rush or if it's just it's it's mature enough now. I think there's a lot of resources to know how to do this.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's way more information for sure. Although, has it gotten easier or harder? Or Yeah.

Jon:

I don't know.

Justin:

I mean yeah. I I there's this Tyler Tringus had this interesting quote. He said, building, owning, and possibly selling a profitable remote SaaS business is the new American dream. What do you think about that?

Jon:

I don't know. I I have a question here. What is the American dream? I mean, it's a little bit existential, but what I I don't know if it's really I don't think it's unique to America, but, it's hard to say what the dream is. I mean

Justin:

I'm I think I think the dream has just be become I want to have a reasonable life. I want to have a place to live. I want to not be in my car commuting 2 hours a day. Now, there's these quality of life things. I wanna be able to raise a family.

Justin:

I wanna be I don't wanna feel like I'm being crushed all the time.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And I think a lot of people don't realize this. But demographically I'll put some of these links in the show notes. There are baby boomers have owned a substantial amount of the wealth in North America really since the seventies. There and generation x and millennials and now Gen z, Like, we are, when boomers were at in their thirties, they owned way more of America's wealth than we do than Gen x and

Jon:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Justin:

Own in their thirties.

Jon:

There's a lot, yeah, there's a lot of things that have changed since the seventies to accommodate that happening.

Justin:

And and and you I think that's what's driving a lot of this. When I, you know, hear people talking about wanting to start a software company, it's because the it's the same reasons that come up all the time. My job sucks. I don't get paid enough. A lot of people who get paid well, quote unquote, still have side hustles because it's just not enough.

Justin:

Like, even though, like, I I often say when when when I was a kid in the eighties, a $100,000 a year was a good salary. Well

Jon:

Oh, yeah.

Justin:

Fast forward now, it's still a $100,000 a year is still what a lot of people wanna just get to. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. That's still that's still a fantastic salary.

Justin:

It's still a fantastic salary, but if you think about the chain, that's a that's a you know, from the time I was born till now, that's 40 years. And Right. And we're still using the same benchmark for what is a good salary.

Jon:

Yeah. I think, yeah, I feel like in that time, the amount of support you get from, I don't know, I guess, the government or just in general has just weakened Mhmm. To the point where, yeah, that might not be enough because people have this massive amount of debt or they get a medical bill they can't afford.

Helen:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And it's I yeah.

Justin:

There's there's more pressure on people. There really is. I when when my parents my parents' generation, they encouraged all their kids, me, you, all of our friends to go to university. Because in their generation, if you went to university, that was such an advantage that you were guaranteed to make more money than all your peers. Well, every every parent had that idea, and they all sent their kids to university, And that the value of that degree really didn't, well, the degree didn't hold its value.

Justin:

There's so much supply

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

That that the undergrad degree became undervalued.

Jon:

Right. And the cost of it the cost of it skyrocketed so much that even if you came out with a job, you can't pay it back for 30 years.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

And it's Yeah.

Justin:

Exactly. So we're working harder to get to that 100 k a year job, and I think people look at software and tech companies and go, okay. Well, maybe that's my ticket. Maybe that's the only way I'm gonna be able to make this work. And

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You know

Jon:

It's honestly a unfortunate in me Yeah. Because in many respects.

Justin:

Because it it creates a desperation, and it's it's it's hard to create things out of desperation, but I think more and more folks are gonna try. And maybe they I think we should. I mean, the my favorite thing in the world, my absolute favorite thing, is when a bootstrapper starts a company that carves off some market from a much bigger company.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Like, whenever that happens, it's like, okay. It's it feels like Robinhood. You know? Like, we're oh, yeah. We're we're taking a little bit of that revenue, and we're redistributing it.

Justin:

And yeah. That that tech does level the playing field in some ways, where in the old days, you had to have all this infrastructure to start a restaurant or all this infrastructure to start a manufacturing plant. But now with all these tools, mostly who which are owned by large multinationals like Amazon. But with using these tools, we can at least we at least have some leverage.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I would say it's it is easier to start one, maybe harder to succeed given that the Internet has become mature enough to where there's just, I mean, there's millions or billions of people on it, but there's so many pieces of software that accomplish the same thing that it's harder to break into any market maybe. And, like, what the I don't know what what undiscovered markets there are yet.

Justin:

Mhmm. I see, my my take on this now is don't look for undiscovered markets. Do what Ruben Gammes is doing with Docsketch. Go after DocuSign. Mhmm.

Justin:

Go after this massive company that has millions of users, millions of people in motion buying this thing, using this thing every day, and carve off steal some of their market.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, I I think the the part about that is that if you do succeed well enough, it's possible that DocuSign would just come and buy you.

Justin:

Yes. Or

Jon:

or offer you so much money that you couldn't say no. And then Mhmm. Which is great for you, but

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

Bad for everyone else.

Justin:

Well, actually and let me get let me, go to one of my other predictions, which is, I think, as the independents earn more wealth, this is what I hope happens. I think Gen x, Millennials, Gen z, I think we are more conscious than any other generation more socially conscious, I hope. And, a lot of for example, you and I give 1% of gross revenue to 1% for the planet. Mhmm. Our friends, Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis do the same with Fathom Analytics.

Justin:

Like, even to have that thought of we want to do good with the the money that we earn. We recently saw Stripe and Shopify, which are big now, but they started as indie companies just like you and I. And Stripe is still tiny compared to my, Mastercard.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You know, they've both made commitments to decarbonize, to invest in, in technology that's gonna fight climate change. And, I sent you this, this podcast.

Jon:

Yeah. It it is. That was really interesting.

Justin:

I I'll I'll put it in the show notes. It's on the Ezra Klein, podcast. And, I mean, part of it is really debilitating, But I think part of me as I was listening to that, it got me fired up to say, okay. If are we gonna try to do something about it or not? Do we realize that it's already the 11th hour?

Justin:

Is that the the saying? Like

Jon:

Yeah. The 11th hour.

Justin:

Yeah. It is the 11th hour. So what are we gonna do now with the resources that we have, with the influence that we have, with the money that we have? And to be honest, it kind of fired me up for 2020 thinking, what could Transistor do? What could this little tiny company do to help deal with this, to fight this problem that is I I don't wanna just be lulled into sleep just to, you know, go to tech conferences, and we're all just talking about, you know, the smartest people in the world are are putting all their energy into figuring out the best way to fight churn.

Jon:

Right. Up until now yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Jon:

Well, yeah, as far as the climate up until now, it's been mostly mostly talk anyway. But

Justin:

Yeah. But what could I mean, you and I, we can we could, at the very least, we can we can pressure Amazon in our little way to say, like, get, all of you said they promised that they were gonna have most of their, servers server farms running on renewable energy, and they haven't followed that promise. So let's put some pressure on them. And all of our listeners that are listening also use Amazon products. We can email them.

Justin:

We can bug them. We can post on Twitter and say, this is unacceptable. You're you're the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest companies and one of the wealthiest people, Jeff Bezos, in the world. Do something about it. Like, if they give 1% of their gross revenue Right.

Justin:

To investing in solar tech for their their, server farms, they could they could solve this problem. And Yep. A lot of it is just about waking people up and saying, we do need to do something about this. We have to at least try.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I think well, 2020, I think, though, we have predictions for 2020, but maybe this is for the decade. I think the decade of the twenties is gonna be important in a lot of different ways. Like, the things that could happen or might happen or hopefully will happen will affect the world for, you know, obviously, decades decades to come.

Jon:

But Mhmm.

Justin:

One thing from that podcast that also got me fired up is I can't remember the the person that Ezra was interviewing. He's an Australian physicist. But he said the the big failure is we haven't painted an attractive picture of the future. We've it's just been doom and gloom. It's like you're going to have to take less warm showers.

Justin:

You're not gonna be able to travel anymore. You're going you know, it it's just bleak.

Jon:

Yeah. And, yeah, the stuff he talks about is great. I mean, I I totally get that. We have to we have to paint the potential future, which is achievable in a way that's like, hey. This is actually gonna be better.

Jon:

You're not gonna have to cut back. It might be different.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

But it's actually gonna be better. No. The one thing that that stuck out to me was he was talking about, radiant floor heating.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

And how it's it's much more efficient and a better way to heat your home. And he's like, what people don't realize is that if you have radiant heating in your home, now you don't have this forced air, gas powered heater, so you don't actually even need to have carbon monoxide detectors.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

You don't get you don't get dust bunnies in your place because there's no air isn't just blowing around. It's all just coming up from the floor. Mhmm. And if you sleep at night when it's cold out, you're not gonna wake up with a dry throat because the

Justin:

air isn't dry.

Jon:

Mhmm. I'm like, oh, man. That's that's a super like, that sounds way better.

Justin:

That hit me too. Like, just that simple painting the picture of what the future could look like. I came home and I was like, okay. We're getting radiant for you. Yeah.

Justin:

And this is one place where podcasters and people who blog and people who have an opinion and can communicate online. We can paint this picture. Like, a great podcast that I I mean, maybe I'll start it, is just talking about Better Future. We'll call it Better Future. And every week, we just paint the picture of this is what it could look like.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, this is all stuff that already exists too as a thing. Like, the the guy that was being interviewed, I mean, he's like, this this stuff is here. We can do this now. We just don't we lack the willpower to do it.

Jon:

And, obviously, with in the US, like, we can't do any of it with the government we have now because they don't even care. But, like, it's it's totally achievable, and it it it would I mean, that's the thing. It it did fire me up, but at the same time when I finished listening to it, I was like, man. Nothing's happened in the last 30 years anyway. So, like, I don't know.

Justin:

Yes. Anyway, I I hope I hope that that there'll be more in there. Let's keep let's keep cranking through these because I got I gotta leave here soon. Another one I said was less open startups. Yeah.

Justin:

So you and I had been an open startup. Well, we still are in the sense we're we're sharing, but, in terms of sharing revenue numbers, I think that is going to become less popular. I noticed on Twitter, Simon Simon Bennett, who's a Transistor user and a friend of the show, said he's going to stop publishing Snap Shooter numbers from now on. And when people asked him why, he said competitors are coming in and just copying his business model exactly, copying his Mhmm. His plans exactly, copying the service exactly.

Justin:

And, certainly, I mean, competition's a thing. Anybody can enter the market, but when you give your competitors an unnatural advantage Yeah. So I think people are getting turned off by it, and the cons are start starting to outweigh the benefits. You you put, well, lots of big SaaS fail.

Jon:

Yeah. I have SaaS in quotes because I don't know if we consider these SaaS software service. I suppose they are. I mean, they're companies like WeWork, which is sort of in the middle of failing.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Uber, companies like that where really they're I mean, they are software in a sense that they have software to run the company, but they, you know, they started out smaller probably with some big venture capital, but I don't know. I I feel like people are opening their eyes finally to those types of companies that just the numbers don't make sense. They don't work out.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

So either, you know, those will start failing or consolidating or being bought, or they just those types of startups won't get as much funding as maybe they had in the past.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Another one, just a quick one. I think small retreats are going to become more popular than conferences.

Justin:

Yeah. We actually just saw MicroConf had an announcement that they're gonna do these MicroConf locals where they go and do one day events in big cities.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

But even, like, for you and I, I think we have preferred our smaller founder retreats, like the one we did with Darby and Shay, and, you know, just getting away and being in a a place together, I I think more and more folks are gonna be turning to those. Mhmm. And conferences are still at their place, but

Jon:

Yeah. I haven't there hasn't been a lot of interest personally for me for many conferences. Like, it just sounds like I don't know. Something about it sounds exhausting or, there's too there's too much going on to really get much of a benefit from it.

Justin:

Yeah. And the last one is, more a focus on privacy will be important. So I think Yeah. We'll see more SaaS taking a stand on privacy. Stop, you know, stop using Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and more privacy focused companies like Fathom Analytics will become popular.

Jon:

Yeah. I'm I'm hoping to it'll sort of put some pressure on places like Facebook and Google to change their ways. And, I don't know, see what they do with their data, but I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna hold my breath for that.

Justin:

Totally. Alright. I'm getting some frantic text messages that I need to leave here. So why don't you, thank our Patreon supporters?

Jon:

Cool. Yeah. Thanks everyone, for supporting us on Patreon as always, this year previous year. We have Ward from memberspace.com, Eric Lima, James Sours, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley from nice things dot I o, Russell Brown, Evandro Sassy, Prady Yumna Schenbecker, Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from alitu.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha.

Justin:

Danbuda.com. Darby

Jon:

Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.

Justin:

Junta.

Jon:

Kyle Fox from get rewardful.com, and our sponsors this week, Clubhouse and Postmark.

Justin:

Thanks, everyone. We will see you next

Helen:

week.