Build Your SaaS

After last week's cliffhanger ending, here's the follow-up. What's going to happen next with Transistor?

Show Notes

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 Buda, a web developer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor dot fm. Alright, John. So this is part 2 of who knows how long this series is gonna go?

Justin:

Part 2

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Of, if you haven't listened to last week's episode, go to sas.transistor.fm and listen to our Voltron needs more fuel. And I got quite a bit of feedback. We got quite a bit of feedback from this episode. Some people were worried. Some people were anxious.

Justin:

Some people were sweating and concerned. We had early access customers contacting me saying, are you are you guys gonna still be around? This is one of the downsides of having a transparent process is your customers listen to your show and go, wait a second.

Jon:

Well, all you also opened with the line, this is not working.

Justin:

Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah.

Jon:

So

Justin:

I I think I think sometimes, because extroverts say so many things in a day, the weight of what we say, it does it for us, it doesn't have the same weight as it might for other people. Because I'm just figuring things out as I speak them out of my mouth. Sure. And so I you know, for me, these are just I I said, yeah, I said that, but I was that's because I was figuring things out. I wasn't making a proclamation.

Justin:

But if you're the type of person who mulls on something for weeks weeks weeks and then speaks, I could see how that could be stressful.

Jon:

Indeed. More like more like myself. Mhmm. Although I knew where you were coming from, so I didn't find it too stressful.

Justin:

That's good. So just to set everyone at ease, Transistor is still going. We are still moving forward. We are still planning on launching in July. We both still wanna do this for a long time.

Justin:

All of that is true. And at the same time, we are just acknowledging that this is probably going to be a slow growing business. Would you agree with that,

Jon:

John? I would agree with that. I think that's kind of where we landed.

Justin:

And I I don't know if we mentioned this the last episode, but, you know, depending on your business, well, we don't really know what's going to happen until we launch. And so, sure, we might launch and we might get, what? Let's see here. Just doing some math. We might get a 1000 customers on launch day.

Justin:

Right? And all of a sudden

Jon:

That would be amazing.

Justin:

All of a sudden, we're I I think the the thing I presented to you last week, which was actually really interesting because, last week, what you said I I said I gave you 2 scenarios. I said, imagine we get $20,000 worth of revenue from customers tomorrow. $20,000 a month. How would that make you feel in terms of maybe, you know, stepping away from your day job and pursuing transistor full time? And you said

Jon:

that would make me feel pretty good. I would I would definitely I would definitely think about it. Mhmm. I I think I said, you know, there would be obviously, I couldn't leave right away and this and that.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And then, I also presented a scenario where we got funding, $200,000 in funding. How would that make you feel? And that that was a little bit how would you say?

Jon:

I was less I think I was less excited about that. Yeah. Because you there's still the added pressure of getting it to work. Like, it hasn't. If customers signed up and we had, you know, $20,000 a month immediately Mhmm.

Jon:

That's a that's a sign that it's working and it's going in the right direction, I think. But funding is no no guarantee. You obviously have more runway to work on things.

Justin:

Yes. Yeah.

Jon:

But you could still end up in the same spot where it doesn't work and you're back, you know, looking for a job or back in an old job or something like that.

Justin:

Yes. Yeah. And so we were we're just thinking through scenarios. And, again, we we haven't launched yet, so we don't know. But being conservative and actually, we're both you and I are both quite conservative, in terms of, you know, how we think about these things.

Justin:

I you know, if we get if we launch and we have a $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue, I would be very pleased with that. And that would become our base for the future. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And in terms of how long like, how fast we would grow month over month, that's really hard to tell. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. I mean yeah. Yeah. It's almost impossible to tell right now.

Justin:

Yes. Although I will put this there's a a SaaS it's called sassulater.com. I'll put this in the show notes. This will allow you to create different scenarios in terms of, you know, month over month growth and churn and how long you would how fast you would grow with each of those. And, you know, it's fun to do those things and to calculate and say, okay, well, you know, how what what are some different scenarios you can you can look at, but we don't know until we launch.

Justin:

So we're moving forward. We're gonna launch. But it's very likely that it's gonna take 1, 2, 3 years for us to get to a point where this business can support 1 or both of us full time.

Jon:

Right. And and even at that point, know, we may have to hire someone on to customer support. Who knows? Like, who knows? Mhmm.

Jon:

It may it may be longer. Yes. Maybe shorter. We might have to support other people. You know, it's really hard to say.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Now the nice thing about being in this boring business, it's basically the web hosting business. Nice thing about being in the web hosting business is it's infrastructure everybody needs. It's not very sexy. You know, it's like, I the sexy part is making the show, but the the hosting part I mean, it can be sexy. Analytics and all that stuff.

Justin:

But it's a very kind of, utility driven business. Nice thing about it is it's gonna grow slow, but it I'm hoping churn will be low. I'm hoping that, people will stick with us for a long time, and it's just gonna be a really, you know, a really nice stable business in the future.

Jon:

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I mean, maybe this is a topic for another show, like a like a prelaunch fears show. Mhmm.

Jon:

I have a feeling well, I don't know. I I I'm sort of suspecting that it's gonna be that there's a lot of, lead up to starting a show. Right? You gotta you gotta want to start a show. Yep.

Jon:

Some people might sign up and try it out. Mhmm. But I have a feeling there's gonna be more of, like, a longer tail for people to, like, choose to switch to us

Justin:

Mhmm. Mhmm.

Jon:

And then stay with us and maybe start new shows with us. Mhmm. Yeah. But, yeah, it's an interesting business because it it it's not a thing you can just, like, necessarily sign up for and start start a show. I mean, you have to have some

Justin:

That's true, actually. And, actually, that's where the the comparison to the web hosting industry breaks down is it's really easy to type something out on a keyboard and have a blog. It's a lot harder to create something that sounds half decent.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And, you know, I know great writers. That that was the problem when the New York Times, they started doing videos with all of their reporters and columnists. And the videos at the beginning were terrible because they just were not charismatic, interesting people. They they knew how to write, and they knew with an editor, they could sound, you know, intelligent in writing. But, man, listening to them in audio or video form was painful at the beginning.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And the other thing is that, you know, maybe churn will be higher than we think because someone tries out a podcast for 3 months and then doesn't like it and then wants to cancel. Right. So there's just so many unknowns. And the problem that we we kind of brought up last time is, you know, we want to do this we want to be able to focus on this, but on one hand it would be nice to have more of John's time. You know, you've been really busy at the day job.

Justin:

On the other hand, I was feeling the financial pressure of, you know, it's way easier to work on transistor than my other business. I'm working on my other business about 50% less. And as a result, it's my other business is doing about 50% less revenue. And so there's constraints and constraints are part of the beauty of life. We don't want things to be comfortable, but these are the constraints we have and we're trying to work our our way through these.

Justin:

Is that kind of where we're at?

Jon:

I think that's where we're at. Yeah. Yeah. We had a call the other night about kind of about that. Mhmm.

Jon:

It's a ran random phone call for a bit Yeah. About

Justin:

Oh, yeah. That was just that was just me calling and just, like, un unloading on you.

Jon:

But I think we I think we came out of that in a good spot.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon:

I I should have a decent amount of time this weekend to to work. You know, I've kind of been excited to get back into the transistor code and build some new stuff. It's gonna be a heat index of a 105 degrees Fahrenheit in Chicago this weekend, so I'm just gonna stay inside and

Justin:

Nice.

Jon:

Not be outside too much unless it's 6 in the morning.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're gonna have some time to work on it, which is great. We left the last episode with a little bit of a cliffhanger, which is you know, we were talking about the different funding models, and, we went through angel fundraising.

Justin:

We went through VC fundraising. We talked about just staying the course and bootstrapping. And then I had this other idea that I said, here's a crazy idea, and, that's where we kinda left it. So I wanna briefly kinda describe some of my thinking around that. And, as always, folks, if you I know some of you are just awesome, amazing listeners.

Justin:

Whenever you have you're listening and you you wanna be a part of the conversation and you tweet us at transistorfm or John or I are both on Twitter, you comment in Breaker, you comment in Castbox. By the way, Castbox, they've raised more money than I thought. 26,000,000.

Jon:

That's a lot of money.

Justin:

That's it. That is insane. What are they doing with that money? There's also Podyssey, which is another app you can comment on. There's listener notes or listen notes.

Justin:

Anyway, if you guys have feedback as we're talking, please reach out. You can even record your audio and email it to us shows at transistor. Fm. Here's the here's the the thought process I had. Whenever you raise money, you give out you give away a portion of your company.

Justin:

That means with VCs, that means they want you to grow really really fast. So, you know, those VCs that are investing in Castbox, 26,000,000, they're hoping Castbox becomes the Netflix of audio. That's what they're betting on. And, you know, if we took venture capital, they'd be saying, we hope you become the WP engine of podcast hosting. But you have to give up a portion of your company, and it comes with a lot well and you have to do kind of a roadshow for 6 months.

Justin:

You have to have a, you know, pitch deck. You have

Jon:

to do

Justin:

all this stuff. That's exhausting. I don't know if I wanna do that. Now fund strapping is still interesting. That might mean we raised $250,000 and maybe the expectation is that we would grow to, you know, $5,000,000 a year in revenue, and we would pay dividends to our investors who would eventually, you know, wanna make their money back plus a nice return for the foreseeable future.

Justin:

And, you know, that maybe that's something we'll do sometime. We'd probably only do that if you were comfortable quitting your job to work full time on Transistor. It wouldn't make sense to do that unless, you know, we got the the engineering side of the business kind of full time focused.

Jon:

Yep. Right.

Justin:

So that leaves either bootstrapping it, which is great, or thinking about other creative ways to fund our continued work together. And I I think I had a guy, Johnny. Johnny, if you're listening. Johnny, drove from Vancouver to Vernon yesterday to have a beer with me, which is about a 5 and a half hour drive. So, that was

Jon:

I hope you paid for the beer.

Justin:

I paid for the beer. Yes.

Jon:

Alright.

Justin:

And, you know, Johnny was asking questions about this. He's like he he was trying to figure out, you know, what are you what are you trying to accomplish with this? Because I told him this crazy idea that I'm about to tell you guys. And I said, well, a lot of this depends on what you want. And really, I just wanna build stuff with John.

Justin:

I wanna build stuff with people I like and build stuff for people I care about. And, you know, that's kind of it. And I want to be able to feed my kids and pay my mortgage in the process. That's what I want. And I think a lot of people get really product focused and maybe that was even folks going, you know, in response to our last episode, like, well what about what about transistor?

Justin:

Don't you care? Of course we care about transistor, but transistor is not the end goal for me. Transistor is a vehicle

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

For working on something meaningful with people I like and serving a group a community of creators and business people that I like. And and so through that lens, I think from the beginning, we've been asking ourselves, how can we have the life that we want? How can we work on the things we want to work on with the people we want to work on? On? All of those things.

Justin:

There's a reason we're not building an app for mortgage lenders. Right? We just Right. We don't care about it. We don't really wanna serve the that group.

Justin:

There's nothing wrong with that group, but that's that's not what we want. And so as I'm thinking about, okay. Well, here we are. John and I are working good together. That's one of the things that's going well.

Justin:

How can we continue this? John's not quite ready to quit his job yet, so that's, you know, that's one thing. I'm feeling like I'd like to work more on the stuff that john and I are working on so how can I do that And so the idea I had was to go back to something that we've been planning on doing from the beginning which is spots? Dot fm. You folks can go there right now.

Justin:

There's something up and actually if you're interested in this feel free to sign up. And here is the the pitch for this. If advertising on a podcast were self serve like facebook, I would do it in a second. That's something that came out of a customer interview I was doing in Edmonton. And this is something that you and I had thought about before.

Justin:

We were thinking about building some sort of, way for podcasters that more easily get advertising on their show inside of Transistor. In fact, we were thinking about adding it quite early. And then one day, I think I came to you and I said, I think this is a separate app.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Because this is something that all podcasters should have access to and even like folks with a YouTube channel could use it. Anyone that is gets sponsored or has spots to sell like ad spots, they could benefit from something like this. And the idea is you would be able to put in your schedule of future episodes. So John and I are gonna have an episode every Tuesday. And we could say if you want to sponsor this episode we have 2 spots per episode and in our case it might cost $250 per spot And a business that was interested in advertising could go to spots.

Justin:

FmsaaS and could sponsor our show. As I was thinking about, I wonder if there's a way for us to, you know, for us to move forward, maybe there's something I could do with spots that would, you know, that would help us get keep this train running. So give me the income that I need to keep working on our business and, also maybe fund other things like if we need to hire someone in customer support or you know. And also, the more I shared this idea with other people, the more people said, that idea seems quite pressing. Like, maybe you should work on that right away because that somebody is going to do that, and maybe it should be you.

Justin:

And since since we've, you know, thought about this, there have been other people that, you know, have started working on ideas like this. And so we started to feel the some of that pressure. Right? The more I thought about it like, this is the idea that started to keep me up at night. Like, there's I just like, I want this for myself.

Justin:

I want this for my friends that have shows. And we started getting emails from really, like, podcasters that have huge audiences. And initially we thought the whole idea is people want the software the ability to, collect advertisements on their site, self serve for the business, the podcaster gets paid directly and this is it's like Calendly if you're familiar with that app but for podcast sponsorship. So you send them the link and they see all your available spots and they can pay right there. But as we did more interviews, I've probably talked to I don't know.

Justin:

You can go to spots. Fm/ story and you can see the whole kind of story so far. I think I've talked to like 20, 30 people about this since March. And the more I talked to folks they said well that's great like that piece I definitely want. But inevitably the second question is what if I can't fill my spots?

Justin:

You know what do I do then? And right now the systems that exist are just ad marketplaces that take 30%, and they take 30% no matter what. Like, you you you know, advertisers contact you. You say, oh, well, just go to this place. The the advertiser goes there.

Justin:

The marketplace takes 30%. You get 70%. And so it became clear that if we were gonna do spots, we would probably have to offer both. Both the soft the self serve platform and this matchmaking between podcasters and advertisers.

Jon:

That's the harder part.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

I mean, that's building a network of, yeah, potential advertisers who have a budget, who

Justin:

Lot trickier, for sure. And, you know, all of this is going around my head, and I'm thinking about, you know, maybe I could use spots to help kick start fundraise for all of John and I's work. We could I could raise a bunch of money using spots, and it would pay for all the transistor stuff. It'd pay for all the spots work. It would you know, maybe we could hire a few people.

Justin:

Pie in the sky kind of thinking. And as I talked to more people about that, like, I talked to John about it, I talked to my wife about it, More more and more people said, Justin, that is gonna be so much work for you to, like, try to you know, are you gonna start a bunch of shows that you know, like, what are you gonna do here?

Jon:

Right. It seems like you'd be spending more time, again, raising money than you would working on the thing. Mhmm. So your your idea, if I remember correctly, was to to basically try to sell have a, like, a a spot that's, like, a week of work. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. You would sell you would sell a week of basically our time to build transistor.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And then in return, we would try to figure out a way to, promote the person or the company who's basically sponsoring us.

Justin:

That's right.

Jon:

Yeah. Right.

Justin:

And and thinking, oh, yeah. I could just, like if I could if I could get, you know, $2,000 a spot, and, you know, I'll do video for them and I'll, you know, I this big list of things. Yeah. And, you know, people that know me know that I get into these things all the time where I I I start thrashing kind of about for, like, a way to get where I wanna go, and I'm not always thinking clearly. But the nice thing is it's the crazy idea that gets the ball rolling.

Justin:

And so I presented this to you, and you're like, that's and I presented this to my wife, and she's like, Justin, that's just and the more I presented it to people, the more people were like, that just seems like so much work. They're like, sure. Maybe you can do that for, like, on a smaller scale. Like, maybe you can, you know, sell spots on your YouTube channel, but maybe just do one spot a month. It's not going to fundraise your whole company.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And then I had a conversation with Sean McCabe. I'm using this new Marco Polo app. I just invited you to it too, but it's kinda like a walkie talkie. Like, you can send little video messages back and forth, and it it's just kind of a neat way of you leave someone a message, and then they can reply when they've got time. But if they're live like, he was in the airport, so he was just around his phone.

Justin:

He can watch them live and reply in real time. And so I was pitching this to him, and he's just one of those people that, you know, he has no problems about kind of correcting folks and giving suggestions. And he said, you know, this spots thing is an incredible idea. Your vision for it is really good. But instead of, you know, doing all this work to try to promote your own spots, why not just get a few of your podcasting friends that have big audiences and try to fill their spots and take a commission on Yep.

Justin:

Those spots?

Speaker 3:

Maybe going kinda like the Tesla model of, like, start out where it's the we find advertisers for you version, and it's, you know, the 30% commission or whatever, like, start out with that.

Justin:

So instead of you trying to do create the shows and sell spots against those shows, leverage your network on both sides. Leverage your network of podcasting friends you have that want, you know, their their ad schedule to be filled, and leverage all of these relationships you've built in the software industry and see if you can be the matchmaker. And it really reminded me that advice really reminded me of Derek Sivers. He's got a great video, I'll put it in the show notes, called start now, no funding needed. If you wanna be useful, you can always start now with only 1% of what you have in your grand vision.

Justin:

It will be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you'll be in the game. You'll be ahead of the rest because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line. And the premise is you don't need a bunch of money. You don't need you know, you've got a grand vision in your head, but you could always get started now delivering just a little bit of your grand vision. And in that video, he gives the example of someone starting a movie recommendation service, and they say you might want to build a crazy algorithm that detects people's preferences.

Justin:

And Derek's like no no no. Just find one person that's willing to have you call them up every week and, you know, you call them up on a Friday and you say, okay. It's movie night tonight. Let me talk to you for a bit. What kind of things do you like?

Justin:

Okay. I think you should watch Cool Hand Luke because it's got Paul Newman and You watch it and then call me the next day and see if you liked it. And there's something really beautiful and simple about that that kind of clears away all the crap. Right? Mhmm.

Justin:

Because the truth is, I don't know if I'd like this yet. Right?

Jon:

Right. You might. Yeah. Yeah. There's no reason I guess there's no reason to build the whole system until you either know you like it or you know it's gonna work.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

So I don't know I I don't know what in between there is if it's just a lot of manual work and you have a spreadsheet that you use. Mhmm. Yep. I mean, for for for, let's say, the example of I I come back to Stripe a lot, but we we do this at Black Box quite a bit is you sort of you sort of fake a level of automation

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And you make it look like, things are sort of being done automatically behind the scenes. But, really, it's just someone, like

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Connecting to a server somewhere and running some SQL queries and doing something. Yes. Right? It's Yeah. Or whatever.

Jon:

Doing running a spreadsheet that you import somewhere rather than having it be done automatically, and then you sort of slowly pick the parts out that you wanna automate and work on those. And then Mhmm. And then by the time you're done, you don't have people manually doing things.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So that's that's kind of the idea now is that I'm going to try this with 1 or 2 friends who have, shows that that have a lot of listeners, and see if I can help them fill their spots, and take some sort of commission on that. And I'm gonna learn a lot.

Justin:

I'm gonna learn, do I like this? Am I effective at this? Do they like this? Are they willing to pay, let's say 30% commission whenever I fill one of their spots? If we are going to build software, what would it look like?

Justin:

Like, you often you don't know until you start, kind of hanging out with real human beings and trying to do the work for those real human beings, and then you realize the original grand vision you had in your head is completely wrong. And so when Sean said, you know, maybe you should just start doing this manually for folks, my initial reaction was like, no. I don't wanna do that. I no. I I got this grand vision in my head.

Justin:

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, no. He's right. I I I won't know if this is valuable for the customer, and I won't know if it's a good fit for me until I start doing the work manually. Yeah. That's, what do you what do you think about that idea?

Justin:

Like, do you think that's a reasonable way for us to to get going on the spot's idea?

Jon:

I think so. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you've thought about this a lot, you know, late at night. It's kept you up. Maybe how you would start to find advertisers potential advertisers.

Jon:

Mhmm. I don't I don't I don't know. We we haven't really talked about that much, but we did we did have that phone call the other night where we just sort of talked about this idea more, and and you were sort of just, I don't know, talking aloud and and, like, trying to figure out where to go with

Jon:

it. Mhmm.

Jon:

And I think we sort of came to the conclusion that if you could come up with maybe, like, a prototype or some wireframes, it's not necessarily fully functional or Mhmm. You know, and maybe this is later on once you know this thing might actually work

Justin:

Yep.

Jon:

And kind of get all the details hammered out and sort of have have all the all the processes sort of

Helen:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Figured out. You know, how does someone sign up? How do they pay? How do they yada yada? Then I could take that and sort of just go build it

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

As fast as possible.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

And I think I said something along the lines of, like, if I have a if I have a project that's all scoped out and, like, I'm pretty good at wrapping my head around that and just going and building it, at least like a first version. Yeah. But if I have to, like if we're deciding and building as we go and just back and forth questions, then, like, it never really gets done, I guess.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah,

Jon:

I I think starting manually will will solidify and sort of cement those, the actual how the process might work with software. Yeah. What kind of roadblocks and and trip ups you might run into?

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So just so people are clear, I I realize some folks are still like, what what is this? This is what this is.

Justin:

On one side, this is Calendly, but for for podcast sponsorship. You send someone a link with all of your spots. They click pay. And if they pay you from your link, you get a 100% of that sponsorship money. That's what makes it better than the current system.

Justin:

Current system, no matter what, these other folks take 30%. But if you want us to help you fill your your advertising slots, like, you've got 3 left in a month, or you just want you don't you just want your spots to be full, then you contact us and you say, could you please help? You know, you guys play the matchmaker and get me advertisers for these spots. And then we use our network to hook you up with great advertisers that, through our link, sponsor your show. And then in that case, we get 30%, and you as the podcast host get 70.

Jon:

Still better than 0%.

Justin:

Still better than 0.

Jon:

Still better than nothing.

Justin:

And what a lot of folks end up doing remember, we've done a lot of research on this. So a lot of what have a lot of folks end up doing is they have spots available, and then they get right before the show or they're a month out or 2 months out, and they're like, shoot. We still have spots available. And then they do a big sale, and they discount their spots by 50% or more, and they end up making less money. So that's the idea.

Justin:

And we have some built in advantages. 1, if you are listening to the show right now and you are a business interested in advertising on podcasts, go to spots.fm and sign up for the waiting list. If you are a podcaster that would like to have sponsors, go to spots.fm, sign up for the waiting list. We also have, a big list of folks on the transistor side that are interested in both of these things as well. So we're gonna be able to leverage those connections we've already made and, you know, make connections there.

Justin:

We also have a really big network of folks, just from working in software and doing things, and, you know, there's companies out there that we know that wanna sponsor podcasts. So we'll be reaching out to them. That's that's how we're gonna start this. And so some folks have said, Justin, you're talking about building a 2 sided marketplace. That's bad.

Justin:

Everyone and and I've even talked about how building a 2 sided marketplace is bad. That's not what we're doing to start. To start, I'm just helping a few of my friends get Yeah. Sponsors for their show. And along the way, we're gonna try to figure out, a really great self serve platform for doing this that anybody could use, and that would also help us help get more sponsors for shows.

Justin:

And, we're gonna try it out. I think that's kind of what we're saying. Right? And

Jon:

Yeah. I think so.

Justin:

We are still like, this is gonna be kind of my baby right now. John's gonna be mostly focused on building stuff for transistor. We're we're basically feature complete for transistor. We have a few things left we need to do. We're going to launch at the end of July.

Justin:

I might be going to Chicago instead of John coming here. I can't really talk about that, but that that might happen. I just got an invitation today to speak at a conference in Chicago or MC a conference in Chicago, I should say. And so it might end up I'll just stay an extra

Jon:

That'd be

Justin:

cool. Stay an extra week or something and, we we would maybe launch in Chicago instead of instead of here in Canada. So, yeah, so that's the plan. Transistor is not going away. This very much aligns with transistor.

Justin:

Just think we could have built this inside of transistor, and no one would have thought twice about it. The fact that we're deciding to build it as a separate product is, you know, you know, some people are kind of questioning that. But I think there's so much alignment between the 2. And, the other thing is it really gives me something to work on while we're while we're building up transistor, while we're, you know, a lot of the marketing plan for transistor is already in place. I've you know, all that machinery is ready to go.

Justin:

And so once it's launched, I'm expecting to be able to work on it and tweak it and help it to grow bit by bit every month. But this is kind of another arm of our work together that

Jon:

Yeah. And there's there's still room for integration between the 2, like a deep integration where Yeah. You know, there's, like, a spot section of transistor, and it just works through an API. Or, you know, obviously, we can think about that later.

Justin:

Yeah. Like, imagine if you sponsor a show on spots, but you also host with Transistor and that as soon as you approve the ad, it automatically goes into the scheduled episode as a sponsor with the ad logo. It's just ready to go. And then you go to record that episode, and in transistor, it double checks. As you upload your episode, it says, oh, you have a sponsor on this episode.

Justin:

Have you recorded the spot for this episode in your show? And, just some cool stuff you could do there. Right? Like, there's there's

Jon:

Notify the sponsor when the episode's out.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. And on on the flip side, if you inside of spots, wouldn't it be cool if you wanted to, you know, publish your listener stats publicly? We could just automatically, through the API, go and grab your listener stats. This is on average what this show gets.

Justin:

Like, that would be complete transparency for the Yeah. For the advertiser and for the the show. Yep. Or maybe there's a button inside of spots that says, you know, request stats, and it just kinda automatically filters people and then sends there's all sorts of cool stuff we can do. So, yeah, that's what we're gonna try.

Justin:

Yeah. And, and just see how it works. This is as we've said from the beginning, this is a ongoing experiment. This is we're just trying stuff out.

Jon:

Yeah. We'll see where we land. I'm excited about it.

Justin:

Yeah. Anything else we should talk about in terms of, new stuff inside of Transistor?

Jon:

Not really. There's not too much new.

Justin:

Oh, I I except I already talked about that. I I had a little feature that, for Google Podcasts.

Jon:

Oh, yeah. You you

Justin:

have a you can get a Google Podcasts subscribe badge within Transistor. That was fun to be able to figure that out in Rails and, submit the PR. And I wanted to see if there's any new notable shows inside of transistor we should mention quick, because we still have folks signing up all the time, which has been really great. Oh, yeah. There's a few I can't talk about.

Justin:

Remote Ruby is one show I I think folks should check out. That's with Chris Oliver and Jason Charms. They they're just 2 people that really like Ruby and really like Rails, and they talk every week about kinda what's new. So go check that one out. What else is new?

Justin:

There's a there's a show. I already mentioned this before, but I I think folks need to check it out. That's a thing, which is Karen and her daughter, her teenage daughter, talking about things in the teenage world that are a thing that adults don't understand. Another really great show. So, yeah, go and go and search for That's A Thing in your pod catcher and, Remote Ruby.

Justin:

Those are both great shows. Our newest customer that just signed up that I think I can talk about is TechNest, the real estate and tech show that's by Nate. And, I think that's available inside of Itunes. Tech Nest is the way you would search for that.

Jon:

Oh, Spotify update.

Justin:

Oh, yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. We we finally heard back from Spotify after their they temporarily sort of stopped taking on new podcast because they had to rebuild how they how they took new shows, and how they ingested those shows. So I I believe we're on we're, we sent them a handful of shows to get into Spotify. I keep checking, and they're not in there yet. So Yeah.

Jon:

Maybe we're just, like, in the line and then, you know, an ongoing conversation with them about how to keep automatically submitting shows that are on transistor.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. They say we're going to get set up with their API soon. So, our last conversation with them is 3 days ago, but we are in contact with them making that happen. And so eventually it will be automated.

Justin:

You will be able to get your show all your new episodes into Spotify automatically if you are a Transistor customer. Yeah, I think that's it, right?

Jon:

I think that's about it.

Justin:

Cool. So if you folks, again, want to reach out at transistor.fm on Twitter. You can also hit either of us up on Twitter. And if you have, you know, a voicemail you want to send us, right now the easiest way to do that is to record it and send it to shows at transistor.fm. And we will see you next Tuesday.