Build Your SaaS

Also: have you signed up for your app with your own credit card?

Show Notes

Lots of interesting items this week:
  • Justin got a personal message from an NFL player
  • Jon moved everyone over to the new CDN
  • Podcasting has a lot of confusing paradigms for users
  • It took two days of transferring files (just under 1TB)
  • Justin signed up for the Transistor as if he was a customer
  • He live-streamed the whole thing (got tons of good input from live chat)
  • Jon is wondering how we're going to handle hate speech on the platform

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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:

Today's episode is brought to you by Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Wireframes, the OG of wireframing tools. They've been around for 10 years, and it's pretty much perfect for when you have an idea and you wanna put it down on paper, so to speak. It you know, it's digital, but it'll help you clarify your ideas, your app ideas, your UX ideas, your UI ideas. It'll help you communicate with developers, designers, investors, maybe even customers. They have several versions to choose from.

Justin:

They have a web app, a desktop app, and versions that integrate with Confluence, Jira, or Google Drive, check them out at balsamic.comorbalsamic, depending depending on how you spell it. They're great people and tell them that John and I sent you.

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.fm. You know, when I was saying my name, I, I said this to you, but my friend, Paul, my friend, Paul Jarvis, who's quite a well known author. He's he's an amazing guy. He, is always trolling me about how there's so many professional athletes named Justin Jackson.

Justin:

So if if him and his wife are watching football, he'll, like, take a screenshot of like the NFL, Justin Jackson. Cause he's no he knows that, like it's, it's like I wrote a blog post about it. It kind of when all these Justin Jacksons started popping up in the NBA and f l NFL, it ruined my Google search results. And, you know, for a while there, my business was really dependent on my personal brand. And so I was like, oh, what are we gonna do?

Justin:

So it's kind of become this joke. Well, there's this app called Cameo where you can pay, I don't know what it is like $25 and you can get someone to create a video message for you or a friend. So he bought one from Justin Jackson, the NFL player. Actually, I'm gonna get Chris to put in a clip of that right now.

Speaker 3:

What's up, Paul and Justin Jackson? Coincidentally. I guess we have the exact same name. So, look, man. There is a hierarchy of Justin Jacksons, and I'm probably not even at the top considering there's another Justin Jackson in the NBA.

Speaker 3:

So look, man. It's just how it goes. Sorry I ruined your Google rankings and, you know, when they type in Justin Jackson, the search engine, your business isn't the first one to come up. I apologize. But, hey, man.

Speaker 3:

It's life, and it's how it works. So we all gotta deal with it. Alright, man. Have a good one.

Justin:

But, yeah, it was just so funny. Like, I'm sorry. I messed up your Google search rankings. And the the other thing you said is you said, listen, There's a hierarchy of Justin Jacksons. He said, I'm not I'm in the NFL.

Justin:

I'm not even at the top of it. Alright? You just gotta live

Jon:

with it. That's hilarious.

Justin:

See, this is again, you're so John Buddha, Dan Buddha.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, there's not.

Justin:

The Buddhas.

Jon:

Yeah. There's not there's not many. There's not many, I I think I've run into, like, one John Buddha on the Internet, but it was he he spelled his name with

Speaker 3:

an h.

Justin:

There you go.

Jon:

But, yeah, it's, I pretty much get, like, whatever screen name I want.

Justin:

Yeah. You're Which

Jon:

is interesting. No no John Buddha, you know, 30 sixes or whatever for me.

Justin:

Underscore 36.

Jon:

Yeah. Right.

Justin:

Well, what have you been working on, thinking about, wrestling with lately?

Jon:

Mostly, I guess, mostly working on. I managed to get a decent amount of stuff out the past week. Not too much not too much wrestling, I would say. Some thinking, but mostly working. Mhmm.

Jon:

So I know last time we talked on the show about the whole, like, Apple Itunes episode numbering

Justin:

Oh, yeah.

Jon:

Fiasco that happened and how we kinda, like, walked back on that. But that did bring up a number of of issues within our application Yeah. Around episode numbering and season numbering and episode types, like bonuses and trailers. So I rolled that out finally, which kinda, like, loosens the restrictions around episode numbering, and and you have to sort of turn on season numbering if you want it. Seasons won't really be surfaced unless you want them explicitly.

Jon:

Mhmm. Numbering is is is more free form. It's they still have to be numbers or, you know, they can't be, like, letters and stuff like that, but they can be empty. They can be duplicates. We're not, like, forcing anyone to sort of have unique episode numbers that are sequential.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And that and that's more of a thing around, like, sometimes you don't want an episode number. Sometimes you want the same episode number if it's a bonus episode for the previous episode or a trailer for the next episode.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So all that's rolled out. Seems like nobody really had any big issues with it. People that were were having problems before kind of, you know, welcomed it and seems to be working well. There's a couple small other updates we can we can roll out for our hosted websites for surfacing things like episode numbers and and season numbers and stuff like that.

Justin:

Yeah. We don't show that right now on the No. Websites. We show it on the landing pages. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And, like, not there's not that many shows that have more than one season because that whole hierarchy is pretty new.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And I don't think every application, every podcasting app supports it, but, as as far as listening goes

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I iTunes certainly does. So,

Justin:

You know, this, this this update in particular actually brought up something, a challenge that I think maybe a lot of apps have this, but I it's particularly acute with podcasting. Is on the one hand, you have folks starting a show for the first time. And the more options you present to them, the more confused they get. Podcasting is already confusing Right. On its own just to because it's it's so outside of the paradigms people are used to.

Justin:

I record a video, I upload it to YouTube. What's the problem? In podcasting's case, it's you record some audio, you upload it to a hosting platform that you choose. And then it would be as if that hosting platform was distributing it to Vimeo, to YouTube, to Wistia, to Periscope, to, you know, just name all of the video sites.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And so it's a new paradigm. And I can see people, you know, getting in and, you know, hitting, like, episode numbers and season numbers and bonus numbers and bonus teasers. And and the it's it's a really it's a lot to kind of handle when you're just trying to get to that first bit of success. Right.

Jon:

Or you know? Yeah. Exactly. And if and if it's not clear on how an episode number affects things or if they need 1 or, you know, they don't obviously, they don't wanna feel like they're doing something wrong or incorrect. It's kind of like loosening up the restrictions we had, which which, you know, at the time at the time we built it, it was kind of our best guess at how that worked.

Jon:

But after reading all the iTunes documentation, I think I got a better handle on how at least how Apple wants to use things like episode numbers and seasons and and trailers and bonus episodes. So

Justin:

Yeah. And, on the other hand, I mean, this is what gets me excited. Like, even doing updating things like episode numbers and thinking through these things. What I like about working on the web is it is so updatable. We can continue to push this forward

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And make it easier for customers of at whatever stage they're at, accomplish what they want to do. Get make the progress that they want to accomplish. And that's exciting to me even even if it's something as banal as, you know Right. Here here's episode numbers. There's so many opportunities for good UX in just in that small area.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was there was yeah. There was a little bit of work that I think had to happen behind the scenes too to make sure that that people's, links on their transistor websites didn't break

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Because we were acquiring episode episode numbers, and you had the option to turn on, URLs for your website that were based on the episode number.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

So now that there's the option to have no episode number, like, what do you do for that episode? Basically, episodes no episode number. Now, obviously, they don't have a URL with an episode number. It's just the the the previous one. Yeah.

Jon:

But, you know, it's something that, like, you just sort of have to, you know, not forget to do or write some tests for in your code and make sure they all still work. So when you roll it out, it's not all broken.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

And then the other thing I think that I haven't really gone back and looked at is is how this update affects things like Apple Podcasts and how how your podcast is gonna look in the app. Okay. Yeah. With with with this show, with Build Your SaaS, we only had one season. We obviously still have one season.

Jon:

Yeah. But we were publishing the season number in the RSS feed. Mhmm. Which actually does affect how it looked in Apple Podcasts. It would say, like, season 1, and then it would list off all the episodes for that.

Jon:

So now that it's updated, I actually need to go back and look, see if they update it because we now no longer even report the episode or the season number in the RSS feed.

Justin:

Yeah. I'm not seeing I'm looking right now. I'm not seeing a season number.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

It shows by year. That's how it organizes it.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

We did

Jon:

I should still show things like trailers and stuff like that. But Yeah.

Justin:

We have trailer. And oh, this is interesting. So it shows up in iTunes. The first one shows up as episode 1 trailer.

Jon:

It had that's because that episode has an episode number of 1, and it's a trail it's a trailer. So that's what I kinda figured out after reading all this documentation is that Apple assumes that you can either have a trailer with no episode number, which is just a trailer for the show or the season Mhmm. Or you can have a trailer with an episode number, and it's actually a trailer for the next episode.

Justin:

Yeah. And we have episode 14 trailer. Then we have bonus.

Jon:

We

Justin:

have episode 17 trailer. So, yeah, we've got some of this kind of these not like

Jon:

But yeah. But I think you I think when you actually publish those episodes for us, I think the trailers are actually like teaser. You sort of had, like, a teaser episode.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. They were teasers for the next episode. Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. So there might be something where we have to go back and actually, like, renumber some episodes.

Justin:

Yeah. But Cool. I mean, part of me is excited because just even looking at this in iTunes, it is actually nice to see, like, this metadata. Oh, this is a bonus episode. Oh, this is a trailer for this next episode.

Justin:

Yeah. So as much as, you know, some podcast industry veterans like to, kinda crap on the, the I the Apple Podcast app. It's actually not too bad. It it's it's No.

Jon:

I haven't, you know, I haven't used it in a while, but it's, seems good. Yeah. Still it's still the it's still the best one to sync shows to your Apple Watch if you have one. Yeah. Cool.

Justin:

What what else you've been working on?

Jon:

So, a couple of things that that were smaller, but but kinda took a while. This past week, I finally finished up I think I actually finished last night or this morning moving over every other show that we had, to our new CDN. So we had talked in previous episodes about kind of switching to this new CDN that we have. Mhmm. And we were, like, kind of testing it out in a handful of our biggest shows.

Jon:

Yeah. But it seems to be going great. So, we sort of just set up a little script to run through and transfer everything over to the new one. It took a long time. It's, like, 22,000 files, but almost a terabyte of data.

Speaker 3:

Wow.

Jon:

And, it's interesting that the API that they have that for the service we're using, like, occasionally will time out. It's really odd. I need to actually email them and see what's up, but, just kinda have to had to, like, build in a bunch of, like, air handling and stuff like that. See, like, if this thing aired out, just retry it until it works, and then so I can run these scripts in the background, right, without worrying about it. Yeah.

Jon:

And just let them go, like, all night or whatever. But it finally finished. So all of our shows now are on the new CDN. It should be, you know, super fast. It's been interesting looking at, like, the bandwidth charts and kind of seeing the the spike over the past couple days as the new shows kick in.

Justin:

Yeah. But,

Jon:

you know, no one should really notice anything different.

Justin:

Yeah. If anything, it should be faster to download shows. Yeah. So, this is yeah. This is really great.

Justin:

I never thought I'd be this excited about CDNs and

Jon:

I know. Right?

Justin:

It's just it's so exciting. Because this is really the progress that we give people has nothing to do with hosting. They have goals they want to accomplish for their business or for their brand or for, you know, the their audience. But at a at a really kind of base level, this is what we're offering people. The hosting of their audio files and then the distribution of those audio files around

Jon:

the world. It is it is literally the backbone of what we're doing Yeah. As far as infrastructure and and cost. So Yeah. To kind of find one that kind of find one that, like, fits fits us the best is pretty exciting.

Justin:

And and how much bandwidth do you figure we do a month right now?

Jon:

We're probably up to, like, I wanna say, like, 25 terabytes already. Wow. Like, it just it keeps growing, like, pretty quick.

Justin:

It's so crazy.

Jon:

I know. I mean, you know, you like, you think back to that episode we did about how we started our our, like, tech careers and how we started with, like, downloading stuff on the Internet over the modem.

Justin:

Yeah. I'm like Yes.

Jon:

To as a kid that age, to think about what 25 terabytes is

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Is, like, mind blowing.

Justin:

Oh my god. You yeah. You just could not even like, that would even record even, like, downloading what is today, you know, a podcast Yeah. Over, you know, a 50 megabyte podcast over a 24100 baud modem.

Jon:

It's like a couple days. I mean, it's I didn't even know how long that would take.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking for a quick calculator. But yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

It was just too much.

Jon:

Yeah. So, yeah. We should be in a good place, for that stuff now, which is exciting. On the flip side of that, I know we had a couple support requests around people saying that uploading new episode audio files was slow. Mhmm.

Jon:

And this one, I it's happened before, and it's, like, really bizarre and kind of confusing as to why it's happening. So the way our uploads work is we have you can upload a file with a progress bar in the in the app itself, in the UI. And it it's essentially just uploading it directly to Amazon Yeah. Which then, like, in the background, will process the file if it needs to be re encoded, if it's not an MP 3 and stuff like that.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So you'd you know, you'd think it's Amazon, so it's it's be super fast. But I was trying to do some research as far as, like, what would affect that, and there's it's hard to say. There's, like, a number of things that can affect upload speeds, directly to s 3. Yeah. But, s 3 does have an option to turn on this, like, accelerate, like, this accelerated bucket mode Yeah.

Jon:

Which means that it can it can, like, speed up certain requests. So I turned that on. We'll see if it works. We'll see if it it helps out any because I know you noticed it too, but then I did it. I was doing it.

Jon:

I didn't notice anything. I mean, I was I was uploading, like, a 50 megabyte file in, like, you know, 30 seconds or something.

Justin:

And it it must be hard to debug that stuff because it could be anywhere. It could be It is.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, it could be just like Amazon, for whatever reason is, like, throttling that bucket or region because a lot of stuff is happening. I don't it's really, really hard to say. And

Justin:

that was right around the time that all that Facebook and Instagram stuff was happening too. Like, I wonder if there's a if everything's impacted at the same time.

Jon:

I looked at, you know, to kinda get in the weeds a little bit, I looked at, a number of other options. So we use, this uploader called drop zone, which is, like, this JavaScript library to to help with, like, uploading multiple files at once and having progress bars and be able to upload things, like, in the background. And that integrates to a certain extent with with Amazon and uploading directly to s 3. Mhmm.

Justin:

But

Jon:

they have this option to turn on what they call file chunking

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

Or multipart file uploads, which essentially, like, splits the file up into different, like, portions.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

We have a 50 megabyte file that might say, like, alright. This 50 megabyte file, we're gonna split this thing up into 10, 5 megabyte files.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

And then we're gonna upload those all at the same time.

Justin:

Gotcha.

Jon:

And then once they're all done, we recombine it into one file, and then you can kinda, like, pull the URL from s 3 and store that to do whatever you need to do.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And I tried that, and it seemed to work okay, but it wasn't recombining the file. It would just, like there'd just be, like, 10 parts in s 3.

Justin:

And Oh, yeah.

Jon:

I mean, there's I think there's we could look into that later, but

Justin:

Yeah. That might that seems like maybe too much complexity.

Jon:

I just you know, I think my my developer brain was like, I need to make this as, like, as fast as possible.

Justin:

Yes. Yeah. And

Jon:

it went down this rabbit hole and was, like, wait a minute. This is gonna be, like, far more work than I want it to be.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, I mean and and yeah. Diagnosing that stuff is I think the tricky part because especially with software development, so many of these solutions end up being simple.

Jon:

Yeah. And I you know, it's it's really hard to say because, like, it's either simple or the the the variance and the the things that you can't control. Like, let's say okay. So I'm in I'm in Chicago. I think when I tried this at first, I was at the office, which has gigabit fiber.

Jon:

Mhmm. Like, both ways. It's, like, incredibly fast.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

You're you're in Canada on the West Coast.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I believe our s three server, like, endpoint is in the East Coast of the US. Gotcha. So that could affect it. And, like, our customers who are having this issue, like, I don't know where they lived. I tried it, you know, back at home, and it was seemed to be fine too.

Jon:

It's, like, really is that stuff's really hard to to sort of, diagnose, like you said.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. There's so many variables there. Yeah.

Justin:

Yep. Well, if

Jon:

anyway, well, well, you know, we'll see how this how this accelerated mode or whatever.

Justin:

Yeah. And I mean

Jon:

see how that goes.

Justin:

If if folks out there in listener land have have done things at their work that have worked for diagnosing things like upload speeds, taking into consideration all of the factors, let us know. That that would be I actually I was chatting with a friend the other day who I used to work with. We were just doing a catch up call. And I was like, so what are you doing now? And he said, well, I'm in a startup that basically monitors and diagnoses problems with with microservices.

Justin:

And I was like, oh, this is brilliant. Because if you think about, like, a modern company and how many or a modern software stack and how many microservices there are in there

Jon:

Oh, man.

Justin:

And, like, diagnosing, like, if something happens, what part of the stack is it? Like, where where is it? And this this tool that they're building can, like, actually monitor right down to the event level and can quite quickly, from what I understand, diagnose problems. So

Jon:

I was

Justin:

like, man, that that'd be great. If you had a you know, you wanted to raise a bunch of money, that's a good company to build right now.

Jon:

Yeah. Totally. Yeah. These people are people are loving the microservices.

Justin:

Yeah. So on my side, one thing I did yesterday that I've been thinking about doing for a while, but I was scared to do because I knew it would bring up way more to do's than we would have time to to to complete. But I felt like it was probably a a good time to do it. We launched in August of 2018. And there are things that I have not looked at since August.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Meaning, what's it like to go to our marketing website, sign up with a credit card, and just try to create a show? And, I decided to do it live on a live stream. I'll put the show the link in the show notes. This is mighty episode number 50. So if you go to saas dot transistor.fm/50, you can get the show notes.

Justin:

Yeah. So I did I just went live and said, okay, folks. I'm just going to do everything from, you know, Google best podcast hosting application to finding Transistor to signing up. And what was interesting was in the comments, you know, I'm trying to pretend that I don't know, you know, anything about transistor. But, of course, I do.

Justin:

And in the comments, people were picking up on things that I was kind of brushing over. So they'd be like, well, wait a second. Does it say you get a 14 day free trial on the sign up page? And I said, oh, I don't know. And and I went back and looked, and I couldn't see it.

Justin:

And then I'm like, oh, maybe we don't. And then someone found it. It's like in really small letters right below the button. And I thought, oh, well, maybe that would be an interesting split test. For example, changing the headline to I think right now it says, you know, create your podcast with us or something.

Justin:

We could say, you know, start your 14 day free trial in the headline. So things like that were really interesting. And basically, what I was trying to experience and check for is, you know, what's the sign up flow like? What's the first impressions like? What kind of onboarding do we have right now?

Justin:

Where could I see a new user getting stuck? What parts of our UI are not very intuitive? What welcome emails do I get? I I'd completely forgotten, like, what and initially I had we had one that was just kind of like in the rails app that a welcome message that sends. And then I had also sent set up a Mailchimp sequence, but, be I I disabled it because people were getting the the rails email.

Justin:

Plus they were getting our Mailchimp email. And then also sometimes they were getting our newsletter email.

Jon:

Right. And you

Justin:

can We

Jon:

had some feedback from people that were like, you you're sending too many emails.

Justin:

You're sending too many emails. And you can filter you can, you know, you can filter for all that stuff. And what I really should do is create probably event based emails in Mixpanel, which I've done before, but it just takes time. And I'm also trying to think through what's actually best for the user. So, you know, it's a best practice now to send, like, a sequence of emails and, you know, event based emails especially.

Justin:

But I'm just questioning all of that. Like, maybe just one welcome email is enough if we can make it amazing. Or Yeah.

Jon:

It should have enough content, I think, to to sort of point people in the right direction.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I I kind of agree with you. Like, I know we set up the welcome email, but I've also signed up for services, and I just, like, completely disregard the welcome email.

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

Yeah. And so, like, I maybe there's something that's a little more valuable to people than just that.

Justin:

Well and I mean, that's the idea behind event based triggered emails. And you can do them well. It's just that more often than not, they're not done well.

Jon:

Right. Like, you know, you uploaded your first episode. You you hit a certain number of listeners. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. Yes. Exactly. And, I mean, it I don't wanna I don't wanna disregard anything without testing it first. And I think we will eventually test more kind of sequential emails.

Justin:

But right now, I just wanted to get a sense of what does it feel like to get that email? And, you know, I think one thing people forget is people are often reading that email after they've already been in the app. Right? Like, they sign up, they get in the app. So you almost need to be thinking, okay, what do they need to hear now?

Justin:

Like, what and probably it it's like, it's very likely, especially with a new app like ours that needs still needs a lot of finesse. It's probably likely they got stuck. And Right. You're still in that first 48 hour window where you could get them unstuck, get them to some success, and have them stick around for a long time. But if you miss it, if they don't get some success, then, you know, you might you might lose them.

Justin:

And that was one really helpful thing in the chat. I I think if you go to the YouTube video, you can still see the live chat as it goes on. And one of the helpful pieces were people saying, okay. What does the what's the what does success look like for a new user?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And I said, I think it's 2 things. I think the first bit of success is when you upload your episode and you can share it with a friend. Yeah. Like, oh, it's done. And now you can share it with a friend.

Justin:

And I noticed even things like we show a little, a message once they upload an episode. But I think we could make those more, targeted. So when they upload their first episode, you know, congratulations. You've got your first episode. You can share it now with somebody here.

Justin:

And and really kind of earmark that moment. Like, this is significant. You did upload your first episode. This is great.

Jon:

Good. Yeah. That's yeah. I haven't I should I should run through that too because I haven't since since building it and launching this thing, in in the summer, like, I haven't really gone through it with with the context that we have now of all these other people Mhmm.

Justin:

You

Jon:

know, filing support requests and and us, like, answering these questions. So that would actually be, like, really, really interesting.

Justin:

It well, instantly, as I was going through it, I was thinking of the 100 of interactions I've had and gone, oh, wait. This makes so much sense. Yeah.

Jon:

You're I would need to rebuild this entire thing.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean and there's some of these things actually we we noticed early on, but we were, like, well, we just gotta launch. Like, we can't we can't sit on the pot forever. Right? And so I I I think there are things that we knew, but now that we're in it, we're just like, so much of us is just trying to deal with the current problems.

Justin:

But being able to kinda zoom out and go, oh, wait a second. There is some things here we could do that, that would really improve the experience for first time users.

Jon:

Yeah. That's probably a good a good practice to get into for us, or for anyone really who's who's doing something like this is to go back and, like, pick out certain areas and have this, like, moment of reflection and and to go over it and kinda reevaluate it based on what you've learned in the past, whatever, x amount of months.

Justin:

Totally. Totally. Yeah. I think it's something if you're building a product, it it's almost something you should do, you know, put in your calendar every quarter. Just like, okay.

Justin:

I'm gonna sign up. I'm gonna see what this feels like.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Also getting other people to sign up and watching them. Being being able to do some of that, like, those old user testing, things where, you know, okay, I'm gonna stand behind you and I'm just gonna observe as you as you sign up for my application. Yeah. You know, those are as cheesy as it sounds. Those are really helpful.

Jon:

Cool.

Justin:

Alright. So time for our 2nd sponsor. We recently switched to Clubhouse for our project management. We're so happy to have them sponsoring episode 50 of the show. There's a few things I really like about it.

Justin:

1st, it's fast and intuitive. I started I didn't have to read any help documentation. I just got into Clubhouse. I intuitively understood how it worked. It's very fast.

Justin:

They've they've done a lot of, work to implement the Fastly CDN, which is something we've looked at as well. And, that the performance really shows. When you use it, it just feels almost native. It's just really, really quick. And, the other thing I like about it is it I was actually doing this live during this this YouTube video, but it allows people on any team to focus on their work, like, on a specific task or project, while also being able to zoom out and see how that work is contributing towards the bigger picture.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

So, you know, if you are in a bigger company, you know, this really matters to engineering VPs, CTOs, product managers, that ability to see everything and get the sense of, okay, here is the, you know, the big picture. And, I mean, you're head of tech at Black Box. Is that your official title? Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. I've been a product manager, and this is like, I lived in the big zoomed out view. But if you're an individual team member or you just need to focus and go, you know, some days I'll just go into Clubhouse and I go, okay. Just look at everything assigned to me. And it just, like, cleans it all up.

Justin:

And then I could go, okay. Just everything in marketing. And then it it just like it's it almost, is a relief to just see all these other tasks go away and go, okay.

Jon:

Yeah. It is.

Justin:

This is what I need to focus on.

Jon:

Yeah. I think I've mentioned that before where I I feel like clubhouse is is, like, almost infinitely configurable, but not in an overwhelming way. It's like you can do a lot with it in a lot of different ways, but it's not at all overwhelming.

Justin:

No. Yeah. And the the filters are super, super quick. Folks, don't take our word for it. Just try it out for yourself.

Justin:

You can get 2 free months by going to clubhouse.io/build. And we would love for you to try it out. We, we've we're happy that they're sponsoring the show. So if you've been thinking about it, just go go do at clubhouse.io/build. Oh, John, you've got a you've got a heavy topic for us.

Justin:

You've got a heavy topic for part 2. Okay. Let's get into it.

Jon:

So so something I've been thinking about I I I thought about it before, but, obviously, more recently, since yesterday, I believe. We're recording on Saturday here Mhmm. Friday. This this horrible, you know, mass shooting that happened in New Zealand

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

At a at a mosque, obviously, by someone who is, like, some sort of white nationalist hate group, you know, piece of shit. Mhmm. Yeah. In in a place where you just, like, don't think of things like these happening. Like, obviously, the US is like you become somewhat desensitized to this crap, unfortunately.

Jon:

But, like so the thing that that that kind of came to mind with this is that, you know, we run transistor, which is this publishing platform that allows people to sort of, you know, say what they want and and distribute their their opinions and their voice around the world. Mhmm. And and, like, how do we how do we as a platform handle things like hate speech? Like, let's say we have a a podcast that is just like because we're not gonna we're not gonna be aware of every show that's out that's on our platform. We're not gonna be we're not gonna listen to every minute of every episode and be aware of what they say, but, like, let's say someone signs up, and they and they have this show that is just, like, broadcasting these these ideas that are absolutely hateful and and, like, discriminatory against a certain group of people or whatever.

Jon:

Mhmm. Like, how do we handle that? Like, how do our personal beliefs

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Kinda play into that? Do we specifically come up with something in our terms of service for, like, around hate speech and the fact that we can cancel your account basically at any point we want. Mhmm. You know, we're a private company, so we can basically do whatever we want. Yeah.

Jon:

Like, it's up to us to sort of write these guidelines and say, like, if you're saying these types of things, we basically have the right to cancel your account. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. And this is this is even more acute with the recent stuff with Patreon. It's kinda like the thing if you're not running a business and you hear about it, it's the the kind of topic you're go you almost think, oh, thank god. I don't have to worry about that.

Jon:

Right. But on the other hand, you have, you know, you have people that are, like, you know, sideline coaching or whatever you wanna call it, backseat driving. It's like Mhmm. That are not running a business, but but kind of make it seem like it's a super simple thing to do Mhmm. Yeah.

Jon:

Which, you know, I guess I guess what comes to mind is Twitter, but they're a public company, so it's a lot different

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

Unfortunately. Yeah. So for us, it would actually be a lot easier to just be like, like, no. You're gone.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Like, we don't we don't even want your money.

Justin:

Yeah. Like, just buy. Yeah. Exactly. But it is tricky because the I mean, especially with all the backlash against Patreon, you know, I don't know a lot about the Patreon situation, but I know that they felt like they were banning, you know, conservative accounts that were associated with hate groups.

Justin:

But the counter criticism is that, no, you're just showing your political bias.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And, you know, Sam Harris, who has a, you know, a huge podcast and a Patreon account deleted his Patreon and wanna do something else. You know, my opinion on this, to be honest, just keeps changing depending on what I hear. You know? On one hand, I go you know, in the past, for example, I don't wanna I don't wanna, like, get too political. So I'll just say, you know, when certain folks have been elected, I was speaking out because it it I was emotional, basically.

Justin:

But I I had fans and customers contact me and say, you know, if if this is the way you feel, I don't wanna be a customer.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I said, that's fine. I will refund your money.

Jon:

If that's the way you feel, I don't want you as a customer.

Justin:

That's right. But and and, you know, that was definitely applauded by all my my liberal friends. But it's in some ways, it just reinforces the tribalism and the you know, it it doesn't

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

It's it's easy for us to say, well, okay then. You know, it it's it it it can be simple of saying, well, I I just don't want your money. And we can do that, but there's obviously gonna be a line. Like

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, there's such a big difference between free speech Mhmm. And hate speech.

Justin:

Yes. Yes. But it it does get it does get trickier because, you know, by definition, there are some religious texts that, you know, some folks might say are hate speech.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And some folks would say, well, no. They're not. And so, you know, I think even the the it'd be interesting for me to do some more research on it and what how the the, the US government defines hate speech, how the Canadian government defines hate speech,

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

How it's prosecuted, because, you know, I think that that part, you know, that would play in a little bit to how we

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

We manage this stuff.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I you know, I don't I obviously don't want our platform to be a place where there's, like, people publishing these ideas and words that are encouraging other people to sort of, you know, be violent against someone else. Mhmm. Like, you know, you can disagree with someone's political beliefs and, you know, conservative versus liberal and stuff like that, but, like Mhmm.

Jon:

At the point where it turns violent, like, that's there's a line there and, like yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. And I and I mean, again, maybe we need to we need to look at our terms of service again. And, you know, when I was working for, email newsletter platform, we said, you couldn't you know, there's like, you couldn't promote gambling sites, you couldn't promote firearms sites. Like, we just had some things in there that, you know, I'm sure had other kind of legal ramifications. But, arguably, we can put things in our terms of service that, you know, are the boundaries as we see them.

Justin:

I'll also say that in some ways, I expect that we'll have an easier time. The reason being, you have to pay to use our platform. And, you know, I know from building Mega Maker, which is a private community people have to pay to get into, the level of trolling and toxicity. And it's just, like, money upfront really filters out a lot of problems.

Jon:

That's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

Jon:

I mean, I I'm not bringing this up because we've necessarily run into it yet with transistor, but, it's just, you know, it's it's been coming up a lot in the in the news and with with recent events and stuff. So

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah. And I I mean, it's it's a really good point. And I'm sure, for example, Libsyn's had to deal with this because they're so big. They've got so many shows.

Justin:

I mean, in Anchor and SoundCloud, for sure, we'll have to deal with this because whenever you have a free platform where people can sign up as anonymous entities and publish their ideas, you're going to get all sorts of folks signing up. And I should just wrote an it's weird that you brought this up because I just my newsletter this morning that I send every Saturday was this topic. It's just called people on the internet can be

Jon:

so mean. I think I saw that. Yeah.

Justin:

And, I think that, you know, there's there's definitely a lot of factors to consider. And one thing I was thinking about and you something you said that just made me think of this was, you know, if we are all aligned towards, making progress, enriching people's lives, getting to better ideas, and, like, if we all have those goals, then it's easy to talk things out. It's easy to, you know, the speech almost by definition is going to be respectful. But the problem that happens when people are, you know, speaking out of ego, envy, bitterness, and, and included in ego, I I think I'll include an inflated sense of, you know, it could be an inflated sense of religion or an inflated sense of, you know, some where you just feel like what you believe kind of trumps another person's humanity.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And, hopefully, you know, may we can use some of those ideas to, you know, if we for sure, we're gonna run into this at some point.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And to to be able to say, you know, I I think we will be able to deal with those on an individual basis and go, you know, it just seems like your goals for your podcast and our goals for the platform don't align.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And so, you know, we'll refund your money and you can go somewhere else.

Jon:

Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. So anyone anyone who's listening, like, we're obviously thinking about this, and we'll, come up with some reasonable terms of service and, figure out how best to handle it.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And for sure, like, if you if folks have ideas on how they've dealt with it too.

Jon:

Yeah. If anyone has in the past, let us know. I think, you know, I think as soon as we as soon as we get an email from someone saying, hey. The show you're hosting is is, like, saying this and that, and it's really, really horrible and hateful. Like, we'll obviously look into it Mhmm.

Jon:

Immediately and and kind of figure out a a way forward.

Justin:

Another another benefit of us you know, this is if you're thinking about starting a company, you get to decide the level of complexity you want in your life. And free accounts, they just introduce a whole level of complexity.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And, for example, I how many accounts do we have right now? I think we've got 200 and maybe it's even more than that, I guess.

Jon:

Oh, it's yeah.

Justin:

It's Oh, well, 8 836. But 836 is a lot different than the 1,000,000 or billions

Jon:

Oh, yeah.

Justin:

That these free services are going after. You know, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. They they have to deal with things at a scale that almost seem, in not human.

Jon:

You know? I mean, they have they have entire departments dedicated to policing content and probably, you know, people programming, like, machine learning to sort of figure out, like, where to look at first. You know? It's

Justin:

And and even then, they yeah. There's all those awful stories about the humans that are responsible for moderating content on Facebook and how, you know, it's, like, damaging them mentally.

Jon:

Yeah. I yeah. That story that came out was awful.

Justin:

So the the scale like, we get to decide the scale. And a problem one problem with free is that the scale gets very, very difficult.

Jon:

Yeah. Very fast.

Justin:

Very fast.

Jon:

Well, it can.

Justin:

Yeah. And the just by putting up a price, you're going to attract a certain quality, not a certain quality, a certain type of customer.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And, I mean, including I I've got 2 teenagers in my house right now, and their brains are still developing. I'm sure, just like I did when I was on ICQ, I'm sure they are saying things on the Internet that they should not be.

Jon:

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. I when I was that age, I said stuff I shouldn't be. I think back in it and be like, yeah. I probably shouldn't have said that.

Justin:

Yes. But right now, with these anonymous free platforms, you have no idea who you're talking to. You don't know if this is a 45 year old person in, you know, you don't know. It could be my it could be my 13 year old son whose brain is developing.

Jon:

Yeah. That's that's been the case forever on the Internet. I think Facebook tried to fix that, but then introduced a whole another level of problems.

Justin:

Yes. So, you know, the it's an interesting thing. I had one more thing to talk about, but I think I'm gonna push it to next week.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

So folks tune in next week. We're I wanna talk about affiliate revenue. It's been an interesting channel for us. And, yeah. So tune in next week.

Justin:

It we've got all sorts of kinda thoughts around that. John, why don't you thank our monthly supporters?

Jon:

Alright. Yeah. Thanks thanks as always to our our Patreon supporters for supporting the show and, you know, paying for our ability to edit it, so well and and get all of our mistakes out of here. Yes. Or I'm sure our blooper reel is very large at this point.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. Chris has got some dirt on us.

Jon:

Chris has Chris has got the dirt. Thank you to Kyle Fox at get rewardful dot com, speaking of affiliate programs.

Justin:

Yep.

Jon:

My brother Dan Buddha at Daniel Buddha on Twitter and Dan Buddha dot com. He just celebrated his 40th birthday.

Justin:

Oh, no

Jon:

way. Wish him a happy birthday.

Justin:

Nice.

Jon:

Yeah. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schubert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Ajunta.

Justin:

Ajunta.

Jon:

There you go. And, as we said before, Clubhouse and Balsamiq.

Justin:

Yeah. Thanks, everybody, And we will see you next week. Please, if you haven't already given us given us given us, give us, please, provide us, Give us. Provide. Provide with