Build Your SaaS

Jon and Justin answer the question: how is Transistor.fm going to compete in the crowded podcasting market?

Show Notes

A story

In 1999, Basecamp started a blog called Signal vs Noise, which they billed as “Strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech.”

It had a huge impact on their business. By 2009, over 100,000 people were subscribed. Later, in their best-selling book Rework, they said:

“When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention – they give it to you. This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write a blog, tweet, make videos – whatever.”

Nowadays, it’s harder than ever to get people’s attention. Channels are saturated. There’s enormous competition. And many folks are growing feel overwhelmed by all the content.

So what’s Basecamp doing in 2018 to build their audience? They're focusing a lot of their energy on their new podcast, also called Rework.

What we learned

Businesses like Basecamp, eBay, and Code Pen have discovered the power of having a branded podcast. There are lots of challenges: creating and syndicating the feed, creating a compelling podcast website, producing a regular show, and calculating ROI.

So we want to make Transistor the best way to create a podcast for your business.

We already have our first paying customer: Cards Against Humanity. Their show, The Good News Podcast, which is hosted on Transistor.

"Branded content" sounds like a really dirty word. But it doesn't have to be.

Focusing on businesses, rather than DIY or hobbyist podcasts, has some advantages:

  • Businesses have more money to spend, and they value their time more.
  • Many hobbyists are looking for the lowest price. Businesses don't mind paying more if there's value.
  • Businesses are highly motivated to spend money when it helps them make progress.

What We Urge You to Do

When you're building a new product, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Why would someone use my product over what's already out there in the market?
  2. What opportunities exist in this market?
  3. What advantages do I have?

Links

Thanks to our monthly supporters
  • Pascal from sharpen.page
  • Rewardful.com
  • Greg Park
  • Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
  • Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
  • Bill Condo (@mavrck)
  • Ward from MemberSpace.com
  • Evandro Sasse
  • Austin Loveless
  • Michael Sitver
  • Dan Buda
  • Colin Gray
  • Dave Giunta

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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:

I think we're technically supposed to clap at the same time for Chris to, balance up the audio, but he seemed to be able to do it fine last

Jon:

time. Hello. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is a behind the scenes story of building a SaaS in 2018. I'm John Buda, a developer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson, and I'm a product guy, marketing guy. And we want you to follow along as we're building Transistor. Fm. Which is a podcasting platform and also a software as a service business. How are you doing, John?

Jon:

I'm doing well. How about yourself?

Justin:

Good, man. This is our second episode, and, you've been working all day at cards. You're a little bit tired.

Jon:

Little bit tired. Got my iced tea here.

Justin:

And I'm drinking tea, hot tea.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

I had a long day too, and I ended up, before we recorded this, I'm like, can I just go for a quick walk? And it's amazing what getting outside and walking does for the soul. Have have you been outside yet today? Do you walk from the cards off?

Jon:

I went outside for lunch. Yeah. But it's a very industrial zone.

Justin:

Okay. Is it is it close to Oprah's studio?

Jon:

No. It's not. That got torn down. That's now in the McDonald's headquarters.

Justin:

Oh. Oh, man. That's just that's a little bit Yeah. Unfortunate.

Jon:

Yep. Harpo Studios is no more. It's now McDonald's.

Justin:

Oh, I just remember when I visited, the 37 signals office, you have to walk by it, and it was kind of like a circus in front of there. There's, like, people holding signs, wanting to get into the show.

Jon:

Yeah. I worked by there for a summer as well, but I think it was sort of there was nothing nothing going on at that point. It was sort of sort of empty.

Justin:

And actually talking about Base Camp, I wanted to tell a little, Base Camp story. 1999, Base Camp started a blog called Signal Versus Noise. That's actually pretty early if you think about it because Mosaic came out in 93. I don't even know if like blogger was out then, but they started this blog which they build as strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech. And I can't remember.

Justin:

Do you remember when you started reading that blog?

Jon:

I don't

Justin:

Or did you ever read that blog?

Jon:

I did. Oh, yeah. I did for sure on, yeah. I had a lot of blogs in Google Reader before it went dead. Yeah.

Jon:

That was one of them for sure. I don't remember if it was before or after I started using Basecamp. So it might not have been that early. Could have been 2003. I don't I'm not

Justin:

Oh, well, that would have been earlier than me because I remember getting introduced to it in 2008 when I started working in the software industry. My boss said, hey, you got to check out this PDF called Getting Real, which was a like an ebook they'd written. And I remember reading it in a night and then I was just like: okay I gotta find everything by these these guys and found signal versus noise. Well, apparently, like, by 2009, over a 100000 people were subscribed to that RSS feed in probably Google Reader or something. Yeah.

Justin:

Incidentally, isn't Jason Schellen, that guy we met at XOXO, didn't he did he invent Google Reader?

Jon:

Oh, I forget.

Justin:

I thought he was the Google Reader guy. I think so. Let's see. Yeah. He was the founding product manager of Google Reader.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, a 100000 subscribers, that was huge. That was, like, what everyone wanted back then.

Justin:

If you started a blog, there was those little feed burner subscriber, counters.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I never got past like a 100, I think, when that was the the trend. But they had a 100,000 And in their book, they said, this quote this kind of stuck with me. This is from Rework. When you build an audience, you don't have to buy people's attention. They give it to you.

Justin:

This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write blogs, tweet, make videos, whatever. And I was thinking about that because nowadays, it's harder than ever to get people's attention.

Jon:

I would say so. Yeah. I mean, feel like people are going to great lengths to try to get people's attention. I mean, commercials don't really work for me. I barely even watch commercials anymore.

Justin:

Well, even look what, your employer, Cards Against Humanity, like, the the

Jon:

Yeah. They don't ever they don't advertise. They just do stunts. I mean, it's that's the way they advertise.

Justin:

Yeah. I think it's just it's harder than ever if especially if you're a little independent business, Channels are saturated. There's enormous competition. We've also you and I have talked I think last time we talked a little bit about tech fatigue, but there's also definitely content fatigue.

Jon:

Yeah. There's so I mean, even compared to 2009, especially 1999, like, there is so much more out there. It's overwhelming. So you Yeah. I kinda have to pick and choose.

Jon:

And if and you find something you like and trust, you might as well stick with it.

Justin:

I actually don't subscribe to signal versus noise anymore, partly because I don't have a RSS reader.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

But apps like Nuzzle and before that maybe Flipboard and Pocket, they kinda took over my blog consumption for a while, but now I'm just like I can't even bring myself every night, I'm just I might read tweets because they're so short, but it's harder

Jon:

and harder books now.

Justin:

What are you reading right now? I'm reading Sapiens.

Jon:

I just finished, the Da Vinci biography by,

Justin:

Oh, no way. Walter Isaacson?

Jon:

Walter Isaacson. Yeah. The Da Vinci biography was amazing.

Justin:

Oh, wow.

Jon:

Really, really well done. I'm gonna read that.

Justin:

I wanna get more into biographies.

Jon:

Such a fascinating guy. It's it's definitely a dense book, but, like, if you're into that if you're interested at all in da Vinci, he was just, I don't know, seemed like an amazing person who just sort of had a wide variety of interests and sort of went down these rabbit holes that all sort of influences art. And then I read, Altered Carbon, which is that new show on Netflix.

Justin:

Oh, I haven't heard of that either.

Jon:

Friend of mine recommended that science fiction book.

Justin:

We're gonna we'll put all these links in the show notes. Yeah. Sass.transistor.fmsaaas. Not to be confused with sass like sassy. But it is.

Justin:

It's harder and harder to get people's attention and people kinda go through phases, But it's interesting to look at what Basecamp is doing in 2018 to build their audience because they're focusing all of their attention on this new podcast they're doing called Rework, similar title to their book. And one of the questions we wanted to answer this episode is how are we going to compete in the podcasting space? And that's probably a pretty good question. Hey.

Jon:

Yeah. It's a great question.

Justin:

So maybe you were saying before we started recording, like, at its kind of base element, there's not a lot of difference between the different podcasting hosts.

Jon:

Right. I mean, they all essentially do the same thing. Right? It's a they're all a platform which just collects data per episode and collects an audio file and outputs an RSS feed. It can be read by any or read by any, podcasting app and iTunes and, probably has some analytics in there as far as, much and who was downloading each episode.

Jon:

I mean, that's the core of it really. And they all do that. I think they all have little bells and whistles and, you know, maybe one's designed better than the other. One's cheaper than the other. So it's it's tough to stand out, I think.

Jon:

I I mean, it's Yeah. I think sort of like brand loyalty. Once you're in 1, you're just like, I like it, and it's working well. I'm gonna stick with it.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And, actually, when we were doing some research, we've got this big Dropbox paper document called podcasting thoughts. And I asked folks, you know, how did where do you host your podcast? Why did you choose that host?

Justin:

And, my friend Adam said, you know, I'm using this one here, and I started with this one here. And the reason I left was because the first one made me wanna kill myself.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And then he just searched for something, and he was like, okay. Well, this one's pretty cheap and pretty good user experience, so I've never even thought about it since then. Right. And this is a problem for us because Mhmm. We're in a very competitive space.

Justin:

We have, we're trying not to pay too much attention to the competition. This is something else we were talking about beforehand but I think one of the biggest mistakes product people make is they focus too much on what the competition is doing and not enough on the customers they wanna serve. I think your competitive advantage is always how well you know the customer, how well you've observed the real struggles in their life, and how well you're helping them overcome those things.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

But in our in this competition table, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. So I have 13 competitors that I wrote down. I'm sure there's 20, 30 other ones that we don't even know about.

Jon:

Probably.

Justin:

And they're anywhere from Bootstrapped all the way up to, Anchor is probably the big one. They have $14,400,000 in funding. And so there's a lot of competition out there for people that wanna host their podcast somewhere.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely there definitely is. And I think I've run into this before too, where you you can sort of focus on your competition and you can say, well, well, company X just did this and that looks amazing. And company Z just did this and that looks amazing. Let's, let's do something similar.

Jon:

And then you never really end up putting anything out and you're just focusing on competition and how you're behind. And, you know, I think you've got to kind of focus on the core of your product and how that helps the customers do intend on, you know, trying to lure into your your platform, I guess. Yeah. Or have, you know, transition or have people sign up from scratch.

Justin:

It feels like one of the trends we observed is that Basecamp's not alone. There's other companies like eBay, CodePen, Mastercard. They've all discovered the power of having a branded podcast. Actually Fast Company just came out with an article I think today or yesterday about this very topic. We'll have that in the show notes as well.

Justin:

And the different and Fast Company's article is called branded podcasts are the ads people actually want to listen to. And it's interesting. Did you listen to the startup podcast at all by Gimlet?

Jon:

I'd, listened to the first season. Yeah.

Justin:

So There

Jon:

was more than one, I think. Right?

Justin:

Yeah. The first season's the best one, but that's essentially a branded podcast for Gimlet. It's the the story of how they were building their company. Similar to what we're doing right now, we're talking about here's here's our journey. We're kind of sharing as we go along building this this web app.

Justin:

And the interesting part is that I think sometimes, you know, branded con like, branded content sounds like a really dirty word. Right.

Jon:

And

Justin:

I think what's different about podcasting, especially when it's done well, is that you can tell a story or you can, do a show. For example, Cards Against Humanity. Their show, the Good News Pad podcast, which was our first paying customer, their show has really doesn't talk about Cards Against Humanity at all.

Jon:

No. Not at all.

Justin:

It's just, like, 5 minutes of good news every day.

Jon:

Yeah. They're not even there's there might be a link to it, but they're not really They'd mentioned it once or twice. But, yeah, it's ultimately just brought to you by a company, and here's a fun thing to listen to on your way to work.

Justin:

Yeah. And and enjoy. So there's there seems to be, when it's done well, a real opportunity here. And Basecamp's definitely taking advantage of it in the same way that folks were following their blog from 1999 up till now. Now people have the same kind of feeling about podcasts.

Justin:

It's a way to build trust. It's a way to share your story. Maybe more importantly, it's a way to share what you're learning. And, at the same time it has this side effect or deliberate effect of creating awareness about your business and your product.

Jon:

I think it's effective, to a point. I mean, as long as you're not overtly selling something directly, I think you have to obviously come up with good content, compelling content, something to sort of have the audience interact with and respond to. Mhmm. But if every, you know, 2 minutes you're saying, hey, this is brought to you by so and so. Please buy this at this website, then people are probably gonna get sick of it.

Justin:

Yeah. It doesn't work as well. A good example actually is the Mastercard, podcast. I

Jon:

I

Justin:

brought myself to listen to it, and I couldn't believe actually how good it was. The the website just as a small little brought to you by Mastercard, and it's essentially talking about, you know, running a small business.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And, you know, it's kind of like, He Man. Did did you grow up with He Man?

Jon:

Oh, yeah. By the power of grace, God. Yeah. I definitely watched He Man.

Justin:

He Man was He Man was real cool. He Man was, like, my one of my favorite shows growing up, but the whole show is designed to, you know, basically sell the toys. But there was some value there. You got the cartoon. It made you wanna participate in that world, and then you go out and buy the the the toys.

Jon:

Yeah. You know, I haven't I haven't I haven't watched cartoons in so long that I've I I'm assuming that's still the case. Right? I mean, transformers is the same way. It was made to sell the toy.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jon:

It would Yeah. The toys did not come afterwards.

Justin:

I always really wanted Castle Grayskull, but we we never got it.

Jon:

Castle Grayskull from the Masters of the Universe collection. He Man and Beast Man each soul separately. Yeah. I never got that either. We should go get

Justin:

it now. We should we should see how much is Castle Grayskull on eBay? Hey. Somebody tweet us at transistorfm on Twitter and tell us how much Castle Grayskull is. We wanna know.

Justin:

And, actually, Waelin Wong, who is one of the producers of the rework show, I like how she put it, because, you know, there's some debate. Is is branded content okay? And she has an interesting perspective because she was a traditional journalist before she came to Basecamp.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So my background is in very traditional journalism and print journalism at that. So I trained at the wires, which is an extremely old fashioned way of coming up in journalism. My first job out of journalism school was covering financial markets for Dow Jones Newswires in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So I have instincts about what makes a good story.

Speaker 3:

I have instincts about how do I do a good interview? How do I talk to someone? And then it was a matter of just adapting that to audio, adapting an interview to audio, adapting script writing and story structure. And that has come over time. And, obviously, I'm still learning, but I felt like I had the basic fundamentals of reporting and storytelling.

Justin:

So I think for our audience, one thing that might be interesting is how, you know, how do you choose what customer to go after? What we're thinking about doing, what our plan is, is to start by focusing on businesses who want a podcast. So Transistor might become a platform, not for podcasters, but for businesses who want a podcast. Now we're not adverse to, having people that wanna use Transistor just for their own personal shows. We already have a few of those on Transistor.

Justin:

But in terms of us trying to earn revenue, for the business, our theory is that it's going to be better to focus on businesses rather than DIY hobbyist podcasts, etcetera. Yep. Maybe you should talk about some of your feelings about that. Like, what what are some of your thoughts around that?

Jon:

Well, I guess if a business had you know, they have obviously more resources. They have more not not even in terms of money, but they have more resources in terms of people, to research topics, to professionally produce it, design resources for a website. Like I said, I'm not I'm not averse to, you know, having individual podcasters or networks, who wanna start a network of podcasts join up. Mhmm. But I think there are plenty of other platforms for them to use if they want, or maybe they're already using 1.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

I think we can maybe provide some extra one on one help for businesses who have never done podcasting, who wanna who wanna start it up, who need advice about, you know, what to talk about, how to edit it, the best way to promote it, things like that. So I think maybe it's, you know, less of a software as a service where we don't there's like no it's like a no touch service. Right? We're not helping anyone. They sign up, they do everything.

Jon:

Maybe it's not that maybe it's, you know, they sign up and we reach out and we say, Hey, we know, what are you looking to do? How can we help, start a 1 on 1 conversation with them?

Justin:

Yeah. And he actually, even when we were talking to our lawyer, one of the things he said, he's like, oh, I've got a podcast, but my biggest, pain point is that, you know, I recorded my end of the conversation. My co host recorded their end. I have no idea what to do with these files. You know?

Justin:

What what do I do? How do I put them together? Right. And that might be something that we can, you know, help people with. There's also the idea of, like, what do you wanna get out of this business?

Justin:

And there are podcasting platforms that are run kind of like, you know non profit side projects. And you know they're just happy to help the podcast ecosystem and that's great for those folks. Those they don't typically last forever, but you know for people that want to do that that's that's fine. On the flip side, there's Anchor who has all this funding and they they they basically need to find some sort of ad revenue, model. And so, you know, they're offering a free podcast on their platform.

Justin:

And, you know, for people that just wanna have a personal show, that might be a great fit for them.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

But for us, we want this to be a business that can eventually at least provide for you and I, and maybe in the future will provide for other employees as well. And so, if we were charging, let's say, $10 a month, that's $120 a year. And let's say we wanted to get to a $1,000,000 in revenue, a year. Guess guess how many $10 subscribers we would need? A

Jon:

$1,000,000 in revenue?

Justin:

Yeah. It's it's not

Jon:

1,000 I'm doing.

Justin:

No. So I what I did was I I said $10 times 12, that's a 120, divided by a1000000. That's 8,000 333 customers. Now that's not a ton, but if you've ever tried to get your own customers before and you've ever tried you've ever been in a SaaS business, so this is gonna be the 3rd SaaS I've been involved with, you know that acquiring customers takes work and is often very slow. And, this is these numbers are not just static.

Justin:

Like it's not like you get 8,333 and that just stays like that forever. You have churn. You have people canceling. And then hopefully, you're acquiring more customers than are canceling. But just as a rough, you know, on the napkin calculation, 8,333, that's a lot.

Jon:

Yeah. That is. I mean, yeah, at the start of a company like this, You're celebrating every every paid sign up. I mean, you're, you know, you're cheers and beer when you reach 10 people and 20 people and a 100 people.

Justin:

Yeah. Ex exactly.

Jon:

So I think I think the other the other thing that comes to mind too for for focusing on businesses is that I I think you, you have to then rely less on alternate ways of making money off a podcasting platform or, or like helping individuals make money. So you're, there's a lot of other platforms that are like, we're gonna dynamically insert ads into your podcast and we're gonna, yeah, you know, try to upsell our service within your podcast for a lower monthly fee. And we're gonna, you know, build all these like other money making portions of the platform. Whereas, you know, if you can focus on a business, they're gonna basically be advertising for their own company and their own needs, and you're not gonna have to sort of focus on this, like, hijacking their platform to put in your own audio ads or other people's audio ads.

Justin:

That's such a good point because the message you put out in your marketing, in your product, the way you you you, format your product, the way you, mold it, It it really determines what kinds of customers you're going to attract. Right? And just thinking about the complexity and maybe the ickiness for us, it might be fine business for other people, but the ickiness of having to figure out dynamically inserted ads for Ford and Casper and all these other folks, you know, putting ads in the middle. You could be having a really important conversation and then they can just insert the ad right there. And again, that's fine for Stitcher.

Justin:

That's fine for the folks that use them. But the great thing about running your own business is you get to decide what kind of business you run and what kind of customers you wanna work with.

Jon:

Even as a business using another business, let's say a business is using Transistor to run a podcast. Like, ultimately, I think they should still own their own content and not have it taken over by whatever service they're pay they're paying for. I mean, they're paying for a service. They should they shouldn't really see a downside or see some, you know, ad placed in or whatever, some downsampling. Yeah.

Justin:

Exactly. And and that's going to be the that's going to be the trade off if you use something like Anchor, because eventually, they they're going to need to start running ads. And Mhmm. You know, you might have a show on there and you might, you you know, you might have strong opinions about whatever US automakers, but Anchor might say, well, we've got Ford that wants to sponsor. Sorry.

Justin:

Like

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Your

Jason:

Yeah.

Justin:

Your terms of use dictate that you have to run this ad if you wanna run the show on our our platform.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, it's you know, they seem to be taking the usual venture backed startup path, which is get a bunch of money and then acquire a bunch of customers and have them locked in your platform and then see if they can make money

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Which, you know, has worked certainly for some people, but it's, again, kinda like winning the lottery.

Justin:

Exactly. So we I know we've got a lot of listeners who are in the midst of maybe building their own product, and maybe they have an existing product, but they haven't really defined their market. And so I've got a few ideas, a few questions that I think you can ask when you're trying to figure out who am I going to serve and I think that's really the the question. You don't have to think as much about, I mean you definitely have to think about what's going to differentiate our product from what's already on the market. So that's number 1 question.

Justin:

Why would someone use my product over what's already out there? But beyond that question, I think almost all of your your thoughts should be around who you're going to serve and there's benefits to different markets. If you go, you know, if you go with the hobbyist market or the DIY market, there might be a lot more of them, but, they might not be willing to pay as much.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And, you if you want to, you know, deal with customers that have, you know, more money, are highly motivated to solve their problems, that might have to be the b2b market businesses because businesses have budgets for, you know, we want to, you know, we have a promotion budget, and we have a budget around PR, and we have a budget around branding. And, you know, if you're building actual software tools, we have a budget around software tools and it's a lot easier to convince a business like 39 dollars or $100 a month or even $400 a month is not even, most, like, profitable businesses over $1,000,000 in revenue are not that's not even a thought for them. Right?

Jon:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a drop in the bucket. I mean, they they have a budget.

Jon:

They set aside money that probably has to be spent, I think, to some degree. Mhmm. Depending on what someone's paying, whether it's less or more, I think you're probably gonna get the same amount of customer service requests from Mhmm. Person, I guess. So, like Yeah.

Jon:

Or maybe even more. I mean, it's

Justin:

I've got a story here. I worked for a SaaS company, and we had a $19 a month self serve product that was kind of targeted at DIY folks. We had a $99 product that was targeted at businesses, bigger nonprofits, governments. They're essentially the exact same product, but we made way more money off the $99 product. The customers complained way less, way less customer support, And we eventually just got rid of the $19 product because it was Okay.

Justin:

Yeah. It was so much better to serve that $99 customer who was a business and didn't almost didn't have time to, like, sweat the little stuff. But if you have someone that's just started a new business in their basement and they don't have a lot of time and maybe they're retired or whatever. I don't I don't wanna I don't wanna offend anybody, but those folks just have more time to complain and, or sometimes they're like a big fish in a little pond and Yeah. But Right.

Jon:

Or even, you know, those those people that are spending $19 a month that they're starting out on their own, that that money is worth more to them, so they're gonna wanna get more out of it and sort of find little things that annoy them more often than a Mhmm. Business would maybe.

Justin:

Yeah. Totally. So those are some of the questions we're thinking about here, and we we also wanna say we we don't know if we're right. We're we're placing a bet on this particular market. My friend Heat and Shaw always says to double down on what's already working.

Justin:

And in our case, we have one paying customer that's Cards Against Humanity. They're a business. And so it it it's at least worth it for us to double down on that for now and see what the results are. The only way you prove anything is by getting more data points. Do you guys say data or data?

Jon:

Data? I say data. I think it's like a tomato tomato. Right? I don't know.

Jon:

People say it differently.

Justin:

Yeah. How do how do you say Java how do you say JavaScript?

Jon:

JavaScript. Oh, see You say JavaScript?

Justin:

I say I say JavaScript. Yeah. But but that's and it's it's hilarious to people in the United States. But if you look on my Twitter, this has been a thing.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And all the Canadians are like, wait. I don't understand. You're saying it correctly. And all the Americans are like, this is the funniest thing ever. Anyway, we don't know what we're doing, but we're we're we're trying our we're basically going on you know, we're gonna double down on what's working, and we're gonna try it out.

Justin:

We're gonna try to get more data points. And if it keeps working we're gonna keep doubling down on that. Now obviously we have to execute. We have to be able to offer features and services that businesses actually care about and differentiate ourselves from, you know, the other options out there. But that's kind of the next phase we're going into.

Justin:

Maybe we'll talk about this in a future episode, but we really wanna get close to customers, talk to customers, listen to customers, and figure out, okay, what struggles are you having in your life and how can we help you overcome them? And so I've got a phone call next week with a guy who has a software company that's, you know, might be interested in having a podcast. We gotta figure out, like, maybe he'll say something that is, you know, completely opposite one of the things we were planning on doing or we hadn't even thought of yet. And I think that's the point is that, you know, you get this feedback from folks, you apply it, and then you see if it generates more sales and maybe even better generates actual, like, outcomes that the customer wants. I think I think that's about it.

Justin:

Anything else we should add?

Jon:

I was gonna ask if you're listening to any podcast recently. Oh. Any new ones aside from Mastercard.

Justin:

Okay. So I'm still, embarrassingly, I'm still listening to Macaulay Culkin's podcast, Bunny Ears.

Jon:

I've heard of yeah. I've heard that's good.

Justin:

It's just straight if you grew up in like, I was born in 1980. I think Macauley is, you can call him Macauley if you listen to his podcast first name. I think he's 3 years younger than me, but all the things they talk about and his his co host is actually really good. His co host is named Matt. What's his last name?

Justin:

I can't remember. But, yeah, it's just strangely compelling, and, I can't stop listening to it. It's every time there's a new episode, they had this really funny episode with, with Seth Green, who is another child actor. And, they have another really good one with Kevin Smith where they play this game with Kevin. And, anyway, it I I found it good.

Justin:

What what about you? Are you listening to anything?

Jon:

Nothing. Let's see. I just I think I posted this to you, but I just started listening to that. It's called the Hyacinth disaster. It's like a serialized story set in space about this spaceship that is having some problems, which is just, I don't know.

Jon:

I think it's a, there's a lot of more podcasts like that, which are, you know, it's an odd, it's an audio book, essentially. It's a storytelling through audio, you know, like old radio shows that my parents probably grew up listening to. Yeah. I've been Serialized serialized radio shows. It's good.

Jon:

It's it's well produced. I only listen to 1, but, you know, it leaves you off the cliffhanger, and then you gotta pick up the next episode and nice. And see where it goes. Yeah.

Justin:

Are you listening to it on the web or in your Podcatcher?

Jon:

I just I use the Podcatcher. Okay. It's on my phone.

Justin:

Cool. Well, we'll have both of those links in the show notes. You can get those at saas.transistor.fmsas.transistor.fm. If you wanna check out transistor.fm's homepage, right now there's a waiting list. You can sign up, and get be the first to be invited to the platform when we open it up to the public.

Justin:

And again, on Twitter we're transistorfm. On Instagram, transistor.fm. Who are you on the interwebs, John?

Jon:

I am John Buda, j o n b u d a, on Twitter. John Buda on Instagram. Johnbuda.com on the web.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson, the letter m, the letter I, Justin, m I, Justin on Twitter, Instagram, most of the things. And, you can check out my site too, justinjackson.ca. And that'll be it for this week. Thanks everyone for listening.