For most folks, bootstrapping means self-funding your business from revenues. It means not taking Venture Capital, not taking Angel funding. It's a little bit of a religion and like so many religions different people have different definitions of what it takes to "fit in." Some people say you can't even take money from friends and family. If you take any outside money, you're no longer a part of the bootstrappers club.
Responses from Des Traynor, Jason Cohen, Natalie Nagele, on the Bootstrapper's Paradox.
Show Notes
What does "bootstrapping" mean really?
For most folks, bootstrapping means self-funding your business from revenues. It means not taking Venture Capital, not taking Angel funding. It's a little bit of a religion and like so many religions different people have different definitions of what it takes to "fit in." Some people say you can't even take money from friends and family. If you take any outside money, you're no longer a part of the bootstrappers club.
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 software engineer.
Justin:
And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor.fm and spots.fm. I I feel like we gotta change. I almost feel like we need to change that that, that intro to, follow along as we build stuff SaaS together or a web app together or because the the whole point is that and, actually, this would be a good topic for a future show.
Justin:
But I have this theory that I think that you should keep your core product the core product. And if you have anything, you know, you wanna add, like, a big new feature, if that can be a product unto itself, I think you should make it a different product.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
What do you think?
Jon:
I think that's a good that's a good point, especially with spots
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
Which, you know, we haven't built it. You have a prototype. Mhmm. We talk about it a lot.
Justin:
Yeah. One day, we'll build
Jon:
it. Yeah.
Justin:
We've so much is going on with Transistor, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. We had an episode 3 or 4 episodes back called the opposite of bored money. So if you go to sas.transistor.fm/22, you'll see that episode. And then I turned it into an article on indie hackers. You always hate to see this as a blogger.
Justin:
When you post it on your site, it gets some attention, And then you post it somewhere else, and it gets, like, way more attention. And so this thing was all over the place. But the comments were great, and there was a lot of commentary on Twitter as well. And so I thought we would go through some of that stuff together and, you know, just maybe share some of these other points of view. And, you know, I think one kind of characteristic for our show is that we are fine with being dummies in public.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
We're live right now in public.
Justin:
We're live right now in public. And that, you know, learning something together or just even being open to learning is is kind of a cornerstone, I think, of our this transistor values document that we're kind of creating as we go.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, none of us neither of us have the answers. I don't think we hopefully, we're not trying to come across as knowing knowing exactly how to do this thing.
Justin:
Yeah. I mean, that is my that is my natural, propensity is to want to seem like I've got it all together, and that I've got the answers.
Jon:
But Yeah. Everyone does, and no one and nobody actually does.
Justin:
That's the beauty. That's the beauty. Oh, and, by the way, I just wanna mention, actually, because along this idea of feedback because some of this feedback, it's not quite harsh, but it's it's pretty blunt. But I wanted to mention that I got this incredible bit of feedback from Tyler Tringus. Basically, what he said is he's like, not sure why, but I woke up with some ideas for transistor, and I made a screen cast because that's what one does these days.
Justin:
Right? Anyways, no obligation to listen to me babble, but it's here if it's useful. And I just wanna just highlight that there's a lot of folks since we've launched that have tried to get phone calls with us, and that's fine if you want a phone call, but this just felt like such a gift that he was recording a video of himself, and I didn't have to jump on a call. And I could just watch it and be like, okay. And now I wanna jump on a call with him because he's given me a context in the background for what he wants to talk
Jon:
about. Yeah. That's really that's awesome. That's really generous of him and of his time and Mhmm. Of his thoughts.
Justin:
Well, I I later tweeted I just I think one of the the things that's so incredible about, I think, specifically, the bootstrapping culture is that we've been really open and willing to share knowledge, willing to give advice, willing to, you know, pay it forward, pay it backward. What you you know, there's there's folks that are really eager and to help. And, actually, even more so are gunning for us, not gunning for us, are that's the wrong word. Right? They're Rooting rooting for us?
Justin:
For us.
Jon:
Yeah. Gunning for us would be trying to, yeah, destroy us. There's probably people who are doing that too.
Justin:
People trying to destroy us, but the but they're rooting for us. And Uh-huh.
Jon:
You know
Justin:
what we didn't mention last time? We got our 1st Patreon sponsor.
Jon:
Oh, yeah. We did.
Justin:
We we have a secret Patreon. Actually, if you folks can find this, folks that are listening to build your SaaS, if you can find our Patreon link, because we quietly rolled this out and didn't tell anybody about it. And all of a sudden, we had someone supporting us $10 a month. And for most transistor customers, if they had 2 of those, they would, pay for their account.
Jon:
Yeah. That feature isn't live in overcast yet, is it?
Justin:
No. He made a big it's it's live in Anchor.
Jon:
I wonder if Marco mentioned that and then wanted he just wanted some people wanted to give some heads up and have them develop it Yeah. Well build it. Well, I
Justin:
think he's gonna do I think his I think his development cycles are just a lot slower. Yeah. Anyway, so back to the topic at hand. So I thought we would go through some of these reactions.
Jon:
So before we go into the reactions, do you wanna clarify what your thinking is on the term bootstrapping? I think there's a lot of Well,
Justin:
and this was kind of the the whole reason for the article was, like, bootstrapping so bootstrapping means self funding your business from revenues, or at least that's one definition. It's basic it for most folks, it means not taking venture capital, not taking angel funding. It's a little bit of a a religion. And so like many religions, it has different people have different definitions of what fits in. Right?
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
Some people say you can't even take money from friends and family. Then you've taken investment and you're no longer a part of the bootstrappers club. Some folks say, you know, it's it's trying to start something small and without a lot of cost and validating that there's really a business there. And then just, you know, in as you increase cash flows, you put that money you earn from customers back in the business. You keep doing that over and over and over again until you get to a sustainable level, and then you start paying yourself.
Justin:
Do you think that's pretty clear?
Jon:
Yeah. That's what that's what I yeah.
Justin:
Anyone in the live chat have anything a a different definition? Let us know.
Jason:
That's how
Jon:
I feel about it.
Justin:
So that's kind of the definition. And the poster children, the poster child for bootstrapping, I think, for most folks, is Basecamp. Yeah. I can't think of another what's I mean, they were they were the ones that really popularized the term as far as I know.
Jon:
Yeah. They I mean, I think they were the first ones that I became aware of anyway.
Justin:
They've definitely been the most vocal. When they wrote, Getting Real, which was their first book, a lot of people don't know about Getting Real. This is this is the book that that like blew my mind. I read it in 2,008 and it's called this Getting Real, the smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. And the, you know, the cornerstone of that book was build less, fund it yourself, less mass, lower your cost of change.
Justin:
These are all just titles from the book. It's a series of essays. And, you know, a lot of people in the software business read this, and it kind of became their business bible.
Jon:
Mhmm. Yeah. I wonder if it was more or less a reaction. Well, unintentionally, a reaction to, like, the dotcom bubble that burst in
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
2,000 and sort of, you know, just a rethinking of that of how to build a business online.
Justin:
That's actually really good context because there's always context for all these things that emerge. Yeah. And yeah. The context was so they launched Basecamp in 2004, but the dotcom bubble was in 2001?
Jon:
Yeah. 2,099, 2,000 Yeah. Maybe 2,001.
Justin:
Yeah. I think it I think it really kind of came yeah. Roughly from 95 to 2000 was the the period of
Jon:
But I think it took a while for it to get took a while for it to recover.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
Because I couldn't I had a hard time finding work during that time. Can
Justin:
you tell me a little bit about that? Because, you know, I was I was a, you know, I was a geeky kid, but once I graduated from college, instead of going into computers, I went into the snowboard industry.
Jon:
Okay.
Justin:
And so I kind of missed this. What
Jon:
Yeah. Well, I was I mean, I was in school when it happened, but I had I had an internship in in Kalamazoo, Michigan in my col college town for a summer at this, it was like an advertising firm, digital. I mean, it was basically an agency to some extent. Mhmm. But they did a lot of custom applications.
Jon:
And during the height of it, they, you know, moved downtown, built this amazing new office. And then I think within a year, they were out of business because they just lost all their clients. Okay. So they weren't venture backed, but they all their clients just dried up. And I don't think that company exists anymore.
Jon:
And then after I graduated I mean, this is 2003. Google is still super new. I mean, it's 3 years old at that point, maybe.
Justin:
Okay.
Jon:
I don't know. I forget exactly the timeline, but this is, you know, after the dotcom bust and all these companies that had venture capital just went out of business because they weren't actually making any money.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
And then as far as finding work in web design and programming, like, it was there wasn't much. I mean, I looked around and there were, like, a handful of companies, but nobody was hiring. There were small agencies that kind of were started, I don't know, through friends or something like that, but there weren't these there weren't big companies that you see these days, you know, hiring people out of college. Yeah. It's like your your options were, like, Microsoft or Google or not even Apple at that point.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. So I just went off and did my own thing and started started building websites for people and made no money.
Justin:
And was it like was there a feeling of it's just hard to make money? It's hard to make a living doing this computer thing?
Jon:
Yeah. But you could see I think you could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like, you this was the beginning of, like, this the web standards movement, and you could see these people who were who were gaining popularity and kind of paving the way for something, which was kind of a fascinating time to be involved in. It's a lot of a lot of people teaching and teaching these new technologies and, writing books online. And that was a pretty small community at that point, but you could see you could see the, you could see where it could go, I think.
Justin:
Yeah. Well and within that context, that's when, you know, you know, Basecamp is a design agency at this point. They started getting, you know, quite a bit of attention for their blog, signal versus noise, and they decide to launch this new application called Basecamp in 2004. And, you know, things were still kinda it was like web stuff. Like, Salesforce had just kinda launched around that time, but it was unclear whether this was going to work.
Justin:
And Salesforce had gone the traditional route and had raised a bunch of money. Mhmm. And so 37 signals launches Basecamp, and it gets a lot of attention. It starts, you know, off the bat it's it's doing pretty good and then they write this really opinionated book called Getting Real, which is all about basically saying whatever Salesforce just did, don't do that. You're you've you've gotta bootstrap it.
Justin:
You gotta make it simple.
Jon:
Yeah. When when I when I became aware of Basecamp, I mean, it the light kinda went off when you sort of did some back of the napkin math, and you were like, well, they're selling this for I don't remember what they started at. They have multiple plans. Right? 10, 20, $50 a month.
Jon:
And then you and you multiplied that by, you know, a 1000 customers or 10,000 customers, and you were like, wow. This is Yes. Like, they can make this work pretty easily.
Justin:
Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That's, I don't know if you've ever like I always keep Solver open on my my machine. Mhmm.
Justin:
The, it's like just like a math app. And so I'll always be like, okay. $39 times a thousand or sorry. Times a 100. Well, that's already $39100 a month.
Justin:
And then if you have a $99 plan and you get 20 people, well, now you're already up to almost $6,000 a month. And then if you decide, oh, you know what? I'm gonna add a $49 plan in there too. And you get and this is all just make believe money. Right?
Justin:
But you can start to see how it can all add up. And, yeah, I think a lot of people were kinda doing that. They were like
Jon:
Yeah. I think so. And they were, you know, they were seeing how it could be sustainable.
Justin:
Yes. So that that's the background. The one thing I talk about in this episode and in this blog post, which is called, Bootstrapper's Bootstrapper's Paradox, is that that story that we've been telling ourselves is not entirely correct Because Basecamp launched in 2004, stopped taking clients in 2005, And then but we're still serving clients. Right? They were still doing some consulting.
Justin:
And then in 2006, they did something that a lot of people ignored, which is Jeff Bezos bought shares from each of them personally. And DHH has this article called the day I became a millionaire. Because we don't really we don't they they they haven't publicized what that deal was. But Right. The day I became a millionaire is the day that Jeff Bezos bought some shares from him.
Jon:
Because it valued the company at a certain amount or whatever.
Justin:
That's right. And so that changes things quite a bit in terms of and the reason I say it changes things, it's a lot of people in this bootstrapping religion have said, nope. This is how you do it. You start you know, we've got all these cheap platform as a service things we can use like AWS, and it's so much cheaper to start a a web company now, and all you have to do is you just evenings and weekends, you just build this thing. You get some customers.
Justin:
And then from your profits, you build it up, and then you've got a business. Just like 37 signals.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
But the truth is, that's not what they did.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
And that's not to say that that purest form of bootstrapping can't work, but I just thought it was interesting because I think part of our tension is that, I'm self employed, and so I don't have any kind of insurance money. I have to make a living from whatever businesses I'm doing. And so part of that is mega maker. And, you know, that's been giving me a pretty good living in the past couple years. Now that I'm focusing so much more on transistor, I'm kinda feeling like, man, I wish I just wish we had a 100, 200, 300 grand in the bank so we could Right.
Justin:
You know, focus on this.
Jon:
Yeah. And whether or not Basecamp needed to do that at the time, I don't know if I don't know if they really needed the money, but it certainly eased their anxieties, I would imagine.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. The well, can can you imagine? Like and we've played this game before, especially in that scenario, because this is not an investor that's that's going to be, like, on the board or an investor that's looking for a 10 x return. Bezos bought those shares, and he was just interested in supporting these guys.
Justin:
So Right. It's play money for him. He's like, yeah. Let's, I'm gonna buy, you know, whatever it was. It would it might have been 0.005 percent of the company.
Justin:
And he's just like, I just wanna it was probably I'm guessing 1 to 5% or something. I don't know. You know? And let's just say, you know, maybe they're doing super good and they're doing a couple $1,000,000 in revenue by that point. If you've got I mean, they had a team of 5, 7 people or something.
Justin:
$2,000,000 is pretty good, but it's not like that's you're not in the clear at that point even with $2,000,000 in revenue.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
You know, 7 people at a $100 each. I I mean, who knows what they if that's what they're spending, but that's $700. And then other, you know, expenses on top of that usually add 30% per employee. So Yep. Let's say their costs were 910,000 a year.
Justin:
So, you know, maybe they were clearing a1000000 at that point every year, but nothing was certain. And then Bezos comes along and says, you know, how would you fellas like to take some money off the table? Now to be fair, we actually did get some response after I wrote this article, and we haven't responded to any of these. But I'd say 2 or 3 people came out of the woodwork and said, you know, we're not Bezos level money, but we might be interested in doing something similar.
Jon:
Yeah. We haven't really talked to him yet. We could.
Justin:
We could. I think one thing that's holding me back is it's like it's really it's nothing against these people because it seems very generous that they even wanna talk to us. But when you're in our position, your time is so precious, and there are so many people that wanna jump on the phone with us. And it really is hard to pick and choose what, like Yeah.
Jon:
It is. Yeah. Even replying and then setting up a call and all this stuff takes time. And even even recording this call today Yeah. Like, I obviously love talking to you, but I I haven't gotten much done on transistor this week.
Jon:
Yeah. Right? So, like, this is an hour and a half that I'm not working on it.
Justin:
You're you're just evaluating the value of this right now? You're like, I don't know.
Jon:
But no. I mean, it's it's obviously valuable.
Justin:
Good catch. Good catch. Yep. By the way, you folks on, Periscope that are giving us all these hearts, I love that. I I see the hearts.
Justin:
Thanks for giving us the hearts. Those are great. Yeah. We got this is I just wanna mention this. This person here on Twitch was like, the the Twitch name is official fasten, says, this is so random.
Justin:
I'm a big fan of Art of Product, Build Your SaaS, and Startups for the Rest of Us. So those are all podcasts, and ours is in there, obviously. And then he says, I was browsing Twitch before bed, and I found this. So he he was just, like, on Twitch, and he's and he's like, what the heck? Build Your SaaS is live?
Justin:
Okay. Well
Jon:
Wow.
Justin:
Okay. So that's the background, And I just thought that was interesting that the poster child for bootstrapping, the pure form of bootstrapping, took this money and what that would have meant. And so another kind of keystone of the of the post is this, and I'll show it on screen here for those folks at home, but is I used forecast dot barometrics.com to figure out, you know okay. And, actually, maybe I'll just do this live because there's a couple ways of doing this. I'll show you the first way I did it and then so our starting MRR right now, I think we're almost at 1200.
Justin:
1,175. Yeah. Let's just use that one. So 1,175. I initially calculated it using this exponential growth type.
Justin:
You can choose linear, which means, you know, how much revenue are you gonna add each month, or you can or you can do it exponentially. Initially, I said, well, if we start at, you know, whatever, 1,175 a month, and we grow 10% a month, How long will it take for us to get to $20,000 a month? And I chose 20,000 because that roughly feels like the time where you and I could both focus on this full time. Yeah. And using that model, it would take okay.
Justin:
See, if we start at 1,175 a month, it would take you can't go past 60 months. It won't let me go past it won't let me go past 60 months. But, you know, in the original calculation, it was like, it's gonna be at least 60 months, 5 years, before we even get to the point where we can do this. Right?
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
Yeah. So that was I included that in the post, and then we had some some commentary. So one something one person said, Natalie from Wild Bit, who I think is incredible, She says, I think you're highly underestimating those numbers. You should see a much better, faster growth rate in the early days. 10% off 1500 a month is a $15 plan.
Justin:
So, hopefully, you'll charge more, have more customers. I would argue 5 years to $21,000 is not something worth pursuing at all.
Jon:
What do you what do
Justin:
you think about that?
Jon:
That's pretty, it's a pretty blunt statement. I mean so she's saying she's saying she thinks it'll it'll grow faster than that
Justin:
Yeah. She thinks
Jon:
because of the early days and if it actually took 5 years to get there, it's not even worth Yeah. Doing it.
Justin:
Yeah. She's saying 2 things. 1, she's saying, I think if you fellas are doing things right and you have a product that, you know, is worth pursuing, it's gonna grow faster than that. And number 2, she's saying if there's a product that you're working on that's gonna take you 5 years to get to $21,000 in MRR, it's probably not worth pursuing. Pretty pretty blunt.
Justin:
But, again Yeah. I appreciated it because I think, you know, I want I don't want people to sugarcoat things to us. I wanna know the real truth. Right? We're not living in a fantasy world.
Justin:
This is our our real life. The other thing that Josh Pigford mentioned, so Josh is the one that built this forecasting tool, in the comments, he said, there's a few other things you can do. So he said, if you do nothing else except reduce churn from 5% down to 3% in that scenario I just presented, your runway to hitting $21,000 in MRR goes from 60 months down to 40. So the problem with all this, like, what if math is it's pretty easy to change numbers around.
Jon:
But it's it's actionable items where you can try to think of ideas of of reducing churn. Mhmm. You know, how how do you do that? Do you offer discounts? Like, I haven't really thought about it, but Yep.
Jon:
Sure there are ways.
Justin:
Yeah. Exactly. And he says another suggestion is to use linear growth instead of exponential as it's a number that's realistically attainable long term and gives you a much better estimate of where you could be in the next 12 to 24 months. So let's play that game. Alright?
Justin:
Let's go back to the forecast tool, and I'm going to switch it from exponential growth, which says, you know, every month we're gonna add 10%, to linear. And the the growth curve looks a lot different here. So starting MRR $1,175 Let's say we could add well let's first of all let's say $500 a month. If we added $500 a month, how how far would we get in, let's say, 24 months. Let's always say 2 years, and with 5% churn.
Justin:
Well in that case, 24 months, we would be at $7,423 in 2 years. Whatever. Okay. That's what yeah. Kind of interesting.
Justin:
Whatever. Let's say we can let's go up again. Let's say we could hit $1,000 in new MRR every month. Well in 24 months we would be at $14,000 per month. We're getting pretty close there.
Justin:
That's like, okay, in 2 years.
Jon:
So that's including churn. Well, if it's $1,000 of new revenue every month, would that be 24,000? That's that's including churn?
Justin:
Including churn of 5%.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Yeah. Okay. Let's do it again with $1500 growth per month. Well, in 2 years, we would be at $21,583 per month. Again, these are all just games I'm playing, but, you know, if we wanted to hit in a year, we wanted to get to let's say, you know what?
Justin:
No matter what, we've gotta hit, you know, $20,200,000 in a year, then we would need to grow at $2,100 of new revenue every month.
Jon:
Yeah. That's that's a lot.
Justin:
Now yeah. That that could be quite a bit, but it it gives the the nice thing about playing the what if game is you get a sense of the different paths available to you. Right. And it helps you to be realistic. We know you know, if we kinda keep trucking along at what we're doing right now, I think, reasonably, it'll probably take us 5 years.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
But if we say, okay. Well, good work, boys. You you you launched. You've got some customers. Good work, but that's not enough.
Justin:
You you're gonna have to do more if you're gonna hit some targets.
Jon:
Well, I think it's where a couple things come in. Obviously, we have to do more outreach, more advertising Mhmm. Whatever that may be. But, also, I think that's where our other ideas might come in. Mhmm.
Jon:
You know, complimentary apps that make that also make money Yeah. Which is obviously a lot more work.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
But if it's a different audience, you know, you can sort of grow them separately
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
Even if they're somewhat connected.
Justin:
Yeah. Exactly. And I think our other thought with that play is that if there is one that's maybe not growing as fast, we can sell it too. It becomes an asset that's salable.
Jon:
I think we know we knew going into this, and I think we've talked about it a few times on the show. We we'd never really expected transistor to be like this out of the gates massive hit hockey stick growth because it's you have to wanna switch or you have to have a show you wanna start.
Justin:
That's right.
Jon:
And then stick with it
Justin:
Yes.
Jon:
For a while. So Yeah. I think I think we're right in that. I think we're right in assuming that. Yeah.
Jon:
Just have to keep that in mind as we try to figure out how to get new customers.
Justin:
Yeah. Exactly. Here's 2 things we're considering for Transistor that I think we can share. The first, we don't have to go into details on this, but we launched with these plans. And if you if you haven't listened to our episodes on choosing pricing, we've got a series on that, and they're really good about how we arrived at, basically, we have 3 plans, $19, $49, and $99 a month.
Justin:
And they are all based around number of downloads per month. 5000, 15,000, 45,000 respectively. We needed a place to start, and so that's where we started. Right?
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
But one thing now we've got real data about people who have wanted to switch, real data about people who did switch, and that might be something we can play with. Right?
Jon:
Yeah. I think so. I mean, we've had a mild concern from potential customers who I think are are coming from platforms where they pay one price for unlimited. Mhmm. But it might be one price per show whereas we offer a limited show.
Jon:
So it's Yeah. But they have they might come with this massively popular show and be like, wow. That's gonna really is the benefit really there for me to switch for, you know, x amount of dollars extra a month?
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. What would our show show be, by the way? We would be in April, we had 11,600 downloads.
Justin:
May, we had 10,000. June, we had almost 9,000.
Jon:
So we're going down.
Justin:
July, we had well, July, we went back up 9,241. Yeah. And August, we still have a chance of breaking the record. Folks, please share the podcast so we get more downloads. We're at 8,200 and 66 right
Jon:
now. Okay.
Justin:
And so we would be, yeah, we would still be in starter, but we would be trending towards the middle plan, which is 15,000 downloads. But, I mean, if we add another show that goes crazy, then, you know. And I think the thing is podcasting, it really depends on your audience and your show. Some shows get so many downloads that, you know, like, I've got friends that are like, I wanna switch to you, but I'm doing 20,000 downloads. I have a friend that's saying I'm doing 90,000 downloads per month.
Justin:
We wanna be able to serve some of these folks, and and it it's tricky. Right?
Jon:
Yep.
Justin:
So that's one thing we're thinking about is switching our pricing. Be and I was just imagining what would it be like if all of a sudden it was just a no brainer. It's like you've got 3 shows on another platform, but you're paying per show. So let's say, you know, let's say you're paying $15 per month per show, but you've got 3 shows. Well, now that's $45.
Justin:
Imagine if it was like you could have unlimited show. And every time you think about starting another show, you're like, I can't because it'll cost me more
Jon:
money. Yeah. $15. I don't know if it's gonna be popular. Yeah.
Justin:
But imagine if you're and let's I wanna add another show. If if our ranges our download ranges were like, oh, I get unlimited shows plus this many downloads per month, And it was just a big enough number that people were like, okay. No brainer. I'm switching. Mhmm.
Justin:
That's kinda what the feel I want. I want people to feel like, okay. And if someone does have a crazy show, like a 80,000 downloader Why did I say that? An 80,000 downloader.
Jon:
The mythical 80,000 downloader. You
Justin:
know, if you've got a show that's doing 80,000 downloads, the I want it to be you know, maybe you're only paying less. Maybe you're paying whatever, but you want our features. You want our analytics. You want our stuff. And so you're like, okay.
Justin:
I'll go to the $99 plan. It'll give me all the downloads I want, plus I'll be able to add new shows, plus I get all of the other benefits that we're adding. And in that $99 tier, we might start saying, you know, this is just for the $99 folks. So that's one thing we could do. Right?
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of room to play, I think, with the pricing.
Justin:
The other thing we could do let's see if I can do some live coding on our website right now. You know, we've got a menu that says, you know, here's your dashboard. Here's the episodes where you add episodes, analytics. We have a team section where you can add this is something a lot of people don't know is you can add theoretically, if you were a podcast network and you wanted to, you know, just put a bunch of shows under your transistor account, you could do that because each show you create, you can add people with their own logins to that show. So a really kinda powerful use case there if you are, you know, you're thinking about creating a show.
Justin:
But I'm just gonna add a new item here. I'm gonna see if I can do this live. Oh, and then we have a a menu called social and apps, and then we have an item called website. So if you want us to host your website but we've been wanting to add a new one called either called ads or promotions or something like that. I'm just gonna call it promotions for right now.
Justin:
And so in that menu, we wanna add some things and this might be a good gateway to spots Yeah. Is being able to, do 2 things that I think are gonna be super powerful. Number 1, say this person has sponsored this episode. So logo, link, all that stuff. And we're gonna we've got some cool ideas for some things there.
Justin:
Another idea that we had is the ability to, choose a bunch of episodes and say, I want to automatically insert some audio at the beginning of these episodes just for this promotion. And so they can Yeah. Upload a 30 second clip. We back up their old file. We automatically prepend the new 30 second audio clip, and it's something like Hey, folks.
Justin:
Justin Jackson here, and just wanna let you know about our transistor mega mega summer sale. Go to transistor.fm/sale. And that just inserts at the beginning of the of the episode during that promotion. September 21st comes along. I think that's the end of summer.
Justin:
That comes along and then we go, oh, okay. Promotions over. All you have to do is click promotion done, and our system automatically reverts all those episodes back to where they were.
Jon:
Yep.
Justin:
So I think that might be something we could add soonish, as a gateway to spots even, because I don't wanna build spots, which is gonna be our ad platform, a separate app, and not have all of kind of the the stuff that we wanna be able to pipe in to transistor from spots, it'd be good to have that figured out beforehand.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
Yeah. What do you think about that idea?
Jon:
That's a good idea. Just come up with that.
Justin:
I like that. That's why we do these calls.
Jon:
I'm gonna add that to the list and then ask you a question at the end of the show.
Justin:
Along with that comes the idea from Adam Wavin, which is similar, which is having a placeholder in the show notes for for promotions. So in the same way that you can insert audio during a promotion, you can also insert a placeholder in your show notes. And as soon as the promotions done, whoop, it all, you know, disappears from, you know, maybe a 100 episodes.
Jon:
I think that's a good idea. The one question I have there is I don't know the answer to this. How often and, I guess, how do the, most podcasting listening apps reindex old RSS feeds and change the show notes? Right? I know I know the if the audio is hosted with Transistor, then it's always gonna pull the latest audio file from our servers if you haven't downloaded it yet.
Jon:
Show notes, though, is another question. I don't know how often they they, like, re you know, update things like images and show notes and places like Spotify actually download your audio Mhmm. And keep it on their servers, are they gonna update their file with the new file to add or vice versa?
Justin:
This is a great this is a great question. I I was gonna see if I could, like, figure it out on the fly, but Overcast's web app doesn't show complete show notes as far as I can tell. Let me see if I can find what's the other one? Pod, pod What's the other one? Pocket Casts because they have a web player.
Jon:
Apple pulls the feed pretty often, and they do change artwork and things like that, but I don't know. Show notes and things.
Justin:
I'm not sure. Test this because we just did, we just did the, that that Patreon integration that updated all of our show notes, didn't we? Or is that was that retroactive or not?
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Yeah. Okay. So let's just see here. I'm gonna I'm scrolling scrolling scrolling. Yep.
Justin:
Okay. So here I'll show this on screen for the folks at home, but, you know, I'll go back. Our Voltron needs fuel. If you look at the show notes here, support this podcast on Patreon is already live. So I'm guessing the the podcatchers reindex quite often.
Justin:
I think the answer to that question is most of them reindex quite a bit. Like Yeah.
Jon:
I I like that idea, though. I think it's a nice in between between a lot of these services that do the, like, dynamic ad insertion, which can kind of screw with podcast players and stuff.
Justin:
By the way, there's a great episode, with Marco Arment on the podcast where he talks about all this stuff. If I'll put it in the show notes.
Jon:
If you
Justin:
don't if you folks haven't listened to it yet, definitely do that. I'm just checking on Castbox. Yeah. Castbox also has our Patreon. You know what's interesting?
Justin:
On the Castbox web player, though, they've disabled all of our links. It's with these people. Oh, I don't I've They
Jon:
don't wanna go to you this time.
Justin:
Even noticed that. They don't they disable your links. Interesting. So those are, a few ideas I had. Anything else we wanna talk about this episode?
Justin:
Did you get to say your thing you wanted to ask? No.
Jon:
I didn't. There was one tweet in here that we didn't cover, which was interesting. We don't have to talk about it long, but it was something about things like normal business traditional business loans not being available for
Justin:
Oh, yeah.
Jon:
For businesses like us. I think Natalie was talking about that where she you know? And and that's interesting because you can you know, the way you used to start a business is you go to a bank and be like, I wanna start a business. I would need this much money. Can I get a loan?
Jon:
Yep. And there's no strings attached to that. Obviously, you have to pay it back, but they're not the bank's not gonna be on your board. They're not getting a percentage of your company. Yeah.
Jon:
So I don't know. I mean, who knows? I those that might be an avenue we could Mhmm. Take. I mean, I I I think they are available.
Justin:
Natalie's comment was that they're they're a lot more difficult to get. And, actually, if you click through on that tweet, which I'll try to include in the show notes, there's a great back and forth between Natalie and Jason Cohen from WP Engine. And then, NDVC gets in there too. Bryce from NDVC gets in there and says, NDVC got mentioned again, basically. So Jason Cohen says, there are middle ground funds just starting like NDVC.
Justin:
Again, very small in quantity, but perhaps a good solution to the problem of reasonable bootstrapped financing. And then Jason Cohen also says, bank loans would be interesting. Problem is high failure rate and less predictable early on than coffee shop in well trafficked area. But SaaS is more predictable later. That he's saying, you know, part of the problem is it's it's not like a coffee shop in that at the beginning, you can't the the failure rates of a SaaS are much higher.
Justin:
But, yeah, there it is interesting. And I think, you know, the one thing we haven't talked about yet is this republic.co, which is kind of a Kickstarter version of funding a business. Right? Like, allowing using all of the the crowdfunding stuff to allow people with as little as $10 to invest in private startups. This is an interesting idea.
Justin:
So, like, Radio Public, for example, who's in the podcasting space. It's a podcast marketplace. They've raised a bunch of money doing this. How much have they raised? They've raised a 100 well, not a ton, but a 130,000.
Justin:
Their goal was 25,000. So a 130,000 from 314 investors. It's kind of an interesting idea.
Jon:
Yeah. Kind of is. Yeah. They clearly this is clearly inspired by Kickstarter design wise.
Justin:
Inspired by Kickstarter and using the same legislation. So
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
This is like yeah. This is saying, like, here's here is one way of doing it that we can use the existing legislation, get much smaller investors.
Jon:
And I
Justin:
think the idea is you get paid out. You earn a return if the startup succeeds. So I think that means that you get paid dividends. If this company makes money, then they they there's like a pool that they they put all the money into. Okay.
Justin:
Let's see. Many startups fail in investment, but some start if they are getting acquired or IPO at evaluation higher than the one time of your investment, you will earn a return. Oh, okay. So maybe this whole idea is that it would only work if you get acquired? Yeah.
Justin:
This is something I think I'd like to look into a bit more, but another interesting model.
Jon:
I the the question I had was for you, what should I work on after this? Or for the or for the channel.
Justin:
Oh, yeah. For whoever's live.
Jon:
So here's what I'm here's what I was gonna work on, maybe. We have a lot of people who have requested markdown support in their show notes along with HTML, so supporting both of those. There is this YouTube integration that I kind of started on that I could work on Mhmm. Where you can OAuth your transistor your account to your Google account and auto upload your episodes to YouTube, we'll convert it to a video format.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
There is this leaving a voice mail feature we've talked about a few times where you can leave a voice mail for a show within your browser. You can just, like, record an audio, and it would upload it to the, show hosts Yeah. And they could listen to it. There's the thing you you just talked about, which we haven't
Justin:
in his books. Yeah. He's probably right. That's that's I think that the GitHub editor I mean, the GitHub the markdown editor is the would be the biggest win for our current users.
Jon:
Yeah. I agree.
Justin:
I think that the YouTube uploader would be the sexiest win for our current users, and I think the voice mail feature would be the sexiest win for nonusers, people that are thinking about signing up.
Jon:
Yeah. That one, I think, still needs a little bit of research. But
Justin:
Yeah. So, man, I I think the YouTube one because it feels like you could you could get that one out pretty fast.
Jon:
I think so. Yeah. That'd be a fun experiment.
Justin:
Yeah. Anyone else anyone else will after the show, after the recorded show, we'll keep the live chat going for a bit. So if you have ideas on what John should work on, you can post those in the comments right now. Folks, if you're listening on Breaker, please leave us a comment in the comments box. You can also do that on Castbox.
Justin:
And if you haven't yet, leave us a rating and review on iTunes. We we love those too, and we will see you next
