Build Your SaaS

How we're going to use investment to fuel Transistor's growth

Show Notes

This week, Jon and Justin talk about new developments with Transistor:
  • We've taken over $100,000 in funding (from our customers!)
  • We harken back to July of 2018 (right before our official launch), when Justin was stressed about money.

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Show notes:

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Creators & Guests

Host
Jon Buda
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Host
Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Editor
Chris Enns
Owner of Lemon Productions

What is Build Your SaaS?

Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.

Justin:

This episode is brought to you by ProfitWell .com. Now, if you're like me, you have questions about your business, questions that you can't answer by looking at Google Analytics. And here's 2 questions I just had. First, how many new trials do we get every month? And second, what's our conversion rate like for those trials?

Justin:

Like, how are we doing? And so I logged into ProfitWell. I clicked on revenue trends, and then they have this trials section. And right away, I got answers to both those questions. We have a 143 active trials right now.

Justin:

And last month, our conversion rate on those trials was 55%. If you want these answers for your business, Sign up at ProfitWell.com.

Jon:

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

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor.fm. Excuse me if I I'm distracted. There is a A a dancing, not a seagull.

Justin:

What's the other bird? The the other city bird. I

Jon:

was gonna say pelican, but that's that's a water bird. I know what it is. It's on the tip of my tongue.

Justin:

How come I?

Jon:

A pigeon.

Justin:

A pigeon. Yes. A dancing pigeon right outside my right outside my window.

Jon:

Is it wearing a top hat?

Justin:

Yeah. He's he's I mean, he's wearing a big a big sun hat because it's hot here in the Okanagan.

Jon:

Lucky you. It's, I don't think summer's gonna come to Chicago this year.

Justin:

Oh, no.

Jon:

It's, it's kind of a bummer. It's You have 60 yesterday and gray and 60 today and gray.

Justin:

Oh, man. We we gotta get you out of there.

Jon:

I think I think it has a lot to do with the lake. The lake is just so cold this year still that it really affects the whole area. Wow. Like like Michigan?

Justin:

88 today. Wow. Yeah. It it's been Yeah.

Jon:

I'm wearing, like, a thick, long sleeve shirt here in this, like, short sleeve Beach shirt, Elmo? I don't know what

Justin:

Yeah. We're in we are in full on beach mode here, man. We were

Jon:

You got a you got a good spot there. It's like I I feel like you were snowboarding 3 weeks ago. Now it's like you're at the beach.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. It's it I mean, it heated up fast for sure. And this is kinda like Prime time because the forest fires haven't started.

Jon:

So it's

Justin:

kinda like May, June, and then 1st part of July are Really, really nice. And then now the the the climate change, kind of situation as we get fires in August. But

Jon:

Yeah. That's fun.

Justin:

Yeah, folks.

Jon:

I guess we just don't get summer. It's a bummer for Chicago because everyone looks so forward to the summer because the winter is just freezing. And then to do the to get this weather is kinda like a slap in the face.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. We don't have very much of a shoulder season. It's like The winner stops, and then someone switches on the lights, and all of a sudden, we're in beach mode. It's a it's a weird place here.

Jon:

Yeah. It is.

Justin:

So I think I've got something I've been thinking about

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

Partly because we're about 15 Months in, it's almost July right now. And last episode, I talked we talked about wouldn't it be fun to go back to some of our Old episodes. Did you end up listening to anything or no?

Jon:

I didn't. No. No. I didn't.

Justin:

Well, I just went back to see, like okay. Like around this time, what were we thinking about? And I have this solo episode, July of 2018. I think it's called The Money is Bored. I'll put it in the show notes.

Justin:

Oh, the opposite of bored money. And it it's kind of an interesting time capsule, because it's me honestly speaking into the microphone and kind of revealing what was really going on at the time. And, you know, at the time, I was pretty stressed out about money, I think. We'd been working on this I mean, we launched this podcast in March. So it'd have been March, April, May, June.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

So The honeymoon was kind of wearing off, and I was starting to think, like, when is this gonna make any money? We had just opened up beta invites.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

I don't know if you remember that time. Like

Jon:

I do. It It does seem like a long time ago. Yeah. But it's not.

Justin:

It's it's not that long ago. No. And so we had just opened up Beta invites, and we had about 51 early access customers and about $781 in monthly recurring revenue. I just remember at the time thinking, man, we've been working on this. I mean, you had already been working on this before We we teamed up.

Justin:

And then it's like, okay, March, we are fully into this. March, April, May, and, You know, we're still going, but around May, I'm starting to feel like, okay. Well, you know, we it's gotta be coming soon. And then June. Okay.

Justin:

We're getting closer to launch. July, we're right before our official launch, but I'm like, looking at the numbers And 5 months of work and thinking it's $781 a month in revenue.

Jon:

Can't live on that.

Justin:

And, I mean, part of me at the time was encouraged because I remember we sent out those invites and Just being so thankful that anybody responded and became customers.

Jon:

Right. It is kinda crazy to look back on it now.

Justin:

Because you're you don't know what to expect. And maybe No.

Jon:

Not at all.

Justin:

And maybe a little bit of this was the prelaunch jitters because I knew that August 1st, we were going to I was gonna fly to Chicago. And we were there's kind of we're leading up to all this expectation, but we don't know what's going to happen. And we were, like, throwing around numbers, I think, because we didn't you we don't wanna get our feelings hurt in some ways. Right?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And going, okay. Well, let's say we launch on August 1st, and we double MRR to 1500. I just remember feeling like, okay. That's probably realistic. But then I was, like, punching in the numbers into, like, forecast calculators and things.

Justin:

Because I and maybe it was, like, even, you know, talking to my wife and her her going, so how's transistor going? You know? And going, well, you know, we've Got a few $100 in MRR, and we got some customers. And she's like, well, how long do you think you know, she's just asking the practical questions. Maybe the same questions your parents would have asked you around Thanksgiving.

Justin:

You know? Like so, Jon, where where is this headed?

Jon:

Yeah. How's how's the little fun side thing coming? And

Justin:

and I said, well, I don't know. And I I punched the numbers into a calculator, and it was kind of like, oh, man. Like, if we double MRR on launch to 1500, to get to 21,000 in monthly recurring revenue, which I kind of had it in my mind as, like, that's a good baseline for Jon and I to somewhat replace our full time salaries. Assuming 10% exponential growth and 5% churn, it would take 5 years. And then I multiplied 5 times 12, and that was 60.

Justin:

And I thought 60 months. That's a long time to wait for a paycheck because it's not like you're just in in a sense, I was like, I had already switched from my other business activities. This is where the pressure came from, I think. Right.

Jon:

Yeah. You were you were fully in this mode. I don't think. I wasn't quite there yet. Obviously, I'm still.

Jon:

Yeah. But

Justin:

Yeah. Your attention always came from the time and energy perspective, and mine was always financial. Yep. And so In that thrashing, you and I started talking about money and taking whether we should take investment. And do you remember what your current your first kind of How you felt about that was?

Justin:

Like, what was your first reaction to the idea of should we take investment?

Jon:

I think it was no. Yeah. Or was it I or was it yes? I don't I mean, I think it was no because yeah. I'm pretty sure I was I was in the no camp.

Justin:

Yeah. I think your your immediate reaction was no. And then you were like, well, let's consider it. And we we looked into some of these new bootstrapped funds. You were also actually you had gotten, initially, the we were getting these venture capitalist emails.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And you were also like, maybe we should talk to some of these folks. I can't remember if you replied to 1 and you heard back from some of them. And, so we were exploring it anyway. Like, what would that look like?

Jon:

Yeah. I think we were sort of excited by it. The idea that People were contacting us, and we're excited about what we were doing. And I don't maybe neither of us had really experienced that. We're like, oh my god.

Jon:

Like, oh, people are people are Into us.

Justin:

Yeah. Like, they're noticing us. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Justin:

It's like being on the sidelines of the junior high dance, and no one has ever asked you to dance. And then all of a sudden you get a new hat and everyone's asking you to dance. I don't know. Why did I think of Is

Jon:

that all it would have taken? It was a hat?

Justin:

The the the magical middle school hat. Yeah.

Jon:

Well, I thought we had only known.

Justin:

I already have a great show title for this, but Magical middle school hat is another contender. So, yeah, I think we were like, okay. This is pretty good. So it's interesting because it's 15 months later, and we've actually taking Investment, but not in the way that you would think. You've pro you might not even looked at these numbers yet, but I just looked at our total Gross revenue to date.

Justin:

Starting in March of 2018, we've done a $109,600 in gross revenue.

Jon:

Wow. I have not looked at that.

Justin:

The weird thing about taking investment is you're taking money now, And investors have the expectation of a return in the future, and you're taking money now because you need The money. Right?

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

But it's interesting to think, and I realized that we've been incredibly Fortunate. But 15 months, you know, fast forward 15 months. So we have stressed out Justin. Actually, we're really fast forwarding 12 months. Stressed out Justin in July Mhmm.

Justin:

And thinking, How am I ever gonna get out of this? We're we're we're screwed. It's this is hopeless. Fast forward 12 months, and it's like, Well, you've actually had customers invest over $100,000 in your business.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, they yeah. It's a it's a good way to think about it. The customer as the investor I mean, yeah. They're customers.

Jon:

They're, yeah. They're investing, and Hopefully, they're getting their moneys they're getting the return on investment

Justin:

Yeah. Which is

Jon:

and I think they are. I've moved had a lot of customers come back to us and say, you know, I got I immediately got 2 customers from my show that I launched and Mhmm. Yeah. Sign new contracts and things like that. So

Justin:

Yes. There's, and so far, churn is quite low.

Jon:

In case you can't think of it as an investment since we didn't we weren't relying I guess, all the revenue immediately to pay ourselves?

Justin:

Yeah. And, I mean, the other thing is that We've just started taking salaries. It goes up every month, but we're paying ourselves like, right now, it would be about $50,000 each per year. Mhmm. The it's just weird to think about it this way.

Justin:

Because, like, with Kickstarter, you take up front orders from your customers, and that becomes the investment that seeds the business. Mhmm. And With with us, we it it was slower. It's more on the back end. But really, like, that $100,000 that customers have invested in our business, That would have been a really good angel round.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

That would have been $425,000 checks.

Jon:

It would. Yeah. And I guess the question is if we had done that, would we would we be in the same spot? Or would we be Would we have rushed things? Would we be worse off?

Jon:

Would we have

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Taken an early investment and said, alright. You know, we're both gonna Quit our jobs and do this full time.

Justin:

Yeah. That

Jon:

And then would we, like hey. It's impossible to say where we'd be, but I think, Obviously, the constraints we had worked for us.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, it's you can't split test reality. It feels like now and, again, this It's so time is so weird because I remember being so stressed out and feeling like I was just being squeezed at that moment in time. And, again, like, the cards just kind of I wanna say the cards fell our way. You know, that

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

That it it just you know, we got some really good hands. It's always hard to figure out how much of this was luck and how much of this was, You know, our combined, whatever, 15 years building audiences and building podcasting technology and, You know? All the skills we've acquired and all the connections we've acquired and you know? Clearly, the groundwork of our lives Led us to where we are now. I I'm more, like, just kind of trying to compare these situations and the the feeling I had then and the feeling I have now.

Justin:

I Certainly still get anxious about some things, but, you know, there's enough money. I'm getting paid Enough every month by transistor that I can cover my family's costs, and I still have other business revenue coming in, so I'm fine. And Now I'm so glad we stuck to our guns.

Jon:

Yeah. Me too. I I think we would have even been more Stressed out? I know I know you were stressed out obviously about money, and that's not like, I'm not brushing that off, but I think we might have been more stressed out had we taken money on Mhmm. Yeah.

Jon:

Because of the pressure there to actually, like, Deliver. Like, you now you're on now what you're building is like someone else someone else's money is involved. And

Justin:

And you know that you're gonna have to You're gonna have to pay that back. Like Wistia, I just read that blog post. I I sent it to you too. And they they have a great episode on, I think it's called the Reboot Podcast. I'll put it in the show notes.

Justin:

They took, I think, a relatively Low amount for a venture backed startup, 1,300,000 or something. But they just had to they decided that they wanted to buy out their investors. In order to do that, I think they had to raise over $13,000,000. So they took on $13,000,000 in debt to Pay back their investors. And I think there was other things too.

Justin:

I think they wanted to pay out some of their employees to give early employees a little bit of,

Jon:

Yeah. Was the I did read that, but it wasn't clear if the debt they took on was that is that just like a loan? They got, like, loans? Yeah. It wasn't other investors.

Justin:

No. No. They they took on what's called debt financing. So

Jon:

Oh, okay.

Justin:

Basically, you know, once you get to that scale, there are lending institutions that'll, you know, that'll give you money.

Jon:

And I think, yeah, it sounded like the business itself was on the line. I mean, basically, if they didn't pay it back, they would have lost the company.

Justin:

That's right. So That's those are the terms. If they don't if if they can't make their payments, the the bank

Jon:

We repossess the business.

Justin:

Repossess the business. Yeah. So there's risks there too. But just interesting. Like, wow.

Justin:

That's a big that's like, Let's just say that's a 10 x repayment. When when you need something in the short term, you don't always think of the long term repercussions. Right?

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

I think that's one of the things we were trying to wrestle with at the time was, okay. You know, it'd be really nice to have the money. In some Senses, it wouldn't have really solved any of our problems. Like, all of a sudden, let's say we were paying me out of Money we had took as investment, that would have felt wrong to me in some ways. And I I just couldn't think of anything else we would use the money for.

Justin:

Like, it would have it would have just been kind of sustaining me until, you know, We got to scale, and you were able to go full time. It just seemed kinda silly.

Jon:

Right. And I I I still kinda feel that way. Like, I still feel like if we took money in now, we wouldn't know exactly what to use for it. Like, we'd pay ourselves more and maybe Advertise or hire I maybe we'd hire a person. I don't know if I don't think we're ready for that either.

Jon:

But yeah. I'm really glad we kind of stuck to Stuck to the path we're on.

Justin:

Yeah. And I I think that was the other question you were asking was there there's this thought of, like, if we take the investment, Then it'll at least take our money stresses away. Right? Like Mhmm. Okay.

Justin:

Then we'll have money in the bank, and then we don't have to worry about having money in the bank. Because we'll have money in the bank, and then we can just focus on other things. But I'm not sure if that would have been true. I think Yeah.

Jon:

You yeah. We'd still would have worried about money in the bank Or money in in a different place. Yeah.

Justin:

And so it introduces this weird tension because I remember going through all that and kind of thrashing. And, you know, like, that's when I I wrote David Hannah Meyer Hanson, and I was like, You know, what do I do? And and he's in some ways, his response was like, yeah. It's hard.

Jon:

Yeah. Right.

Justin:

I I remember at the Time. This is what's weird about being in 1 position versus another. At the time, I was like, well, easy for you to say. You're Freaking rich. You know?

Justin:

And but now that I'm in this position, I can understand what he was trying to say, which is You you are clearly stressed out about your short term problems. But as someone who can who's you know, he's not stressed out stressed out about those things. And when he looked at our our kind of trajectory, he's like, well, you don't know anything yet. Like Yeah. You you haven't launched.

Justin:

You don't have even 2 or 3 months worth of data yet.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You like, you why would you risk all of that on taking investment and maybe diluting yourself. Right? So if if we had taken investment and then we launched, and then maybe we grew at 5% a month. The fact that we were growing at 5% a month, would would that have been enough knowing that we had $200,000 in the bank. Does that make sense?

Justin:

Like, if we took $200,000 in investment and then we launch and then it grows at 5% a month, Would we have been okay? You know, like, maybe there there's a there's a risk of diluting yourself of being, like, well, you know, it's growing some, and we've got money in the bank. So maybe we should keep working on this project.

Jon:

Right. And we might We might draw things out a bit and, like, I yeah. I mean, yeah, you remove that constraint. So, yeah, I think you're Probably we'd be making decisions slower, and who knows if they'd be better. Mhmm.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, you really yeah. You really don't you really don't know until you know. Like, you you have to, At some point, make a decision one way or the other. I mean, I guess that's life in general.

Jon:

Right? You have to have to choose something. Yes.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And, Obviously, this is like, I don't think we're saying taking investment is bad, but it's clearly a pretty personal decision, number 1. And number 2, I think just as again, it feels like such a it feels like an asshole move for us to even be talking about this because, like I said, I feel like we've been really fortunate so far. Right.

Jon:

We have. Yeah.

Justin:

And again, everything could fall apart.

Jon:

It could. We'd cut back 13 months from now and be like, our MRR is back to $700. Yes. The podcasting industry is over.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, that that's the funny thing about time, isn't it?

Jon:

Wish we woulda taken that money. Yeah.

Justin:

We're like we're like emailing all those venture capitalists back. Like, please give us your money. And they're like, no way, bro.

Jon:

We don't touch podcasting with a 10 foot pole. We're done.

Justin:

Yeah. We We're out. We listen to your show. You're dead to us.

Jon:

But right now, It feels I it feels kind of amazing. Like, I would not I would not have guessed this 6 month 6 months ago. I wouldn't I wouldn't have Yeah. Really predicted we'd be here.

Justin:

And I I think that's the funny thing about time. And so for anyone who's at the beginning, I first of all, I just wanna say, I am so sorry you have to go through that pain. I think it's it's necessary. I know exactly how you feel For folks that are starting out and they have all the stress, there's so many layers of stress. Is this going to succeed?

Justin:

How's the launch gonna go? Am I gonna is this company gonna grow more than it is right now? Will this ever Make enough money to support me and my family. Is the thing that I'm giving up right now, which is that opportunity cost that a lot of people don't consider, In some ways, we delude ourselves into thinking like, oh, well, when this is making, you know, in our case, 21,000 a month will be great, but that's not great because we need some sort of repayment for all of those Months where we weren't getting paid.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

The opportunity cost there. Plus, it's not just enough to get paid back for the months you weren't getting paid. You also should be compensated for the risk you took. Right? Like, there should be and, obviously, you wanna minimize that.

Justin:

But The the the stress and, like, think about all the evenings and weekends you've worked. Mhmm. There There should be some sort of compensation for that.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, I can't I can't make that time up. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know if I don't know if money fixes that.

Jon:

I it's I mean, it's a thing. It's a thing. It's a tangible thing you can give yourself, but, Yeah. There's really I mean, there's no getting that back.

Justin:

That's true. And that that but that's the thing. That's like, at the very least, there should be a monetary compensation for the investment. And I as someone who's been a business person for a long time who's always kind of been like, oh, well, as long as I'm just like, I make it to just making enough, we'll be fine. And Now I'm that I'm, almost 40.

Justin:

I'm I I I'm looking at my life and going, oh, wait a second. No. That's not how it works. You can't just Build something that just allows you to kinda barely get by, because you are giving up so much in order to do this.

Jon:

I I suppose it could work if you're not giving up all of your time, and you're making something that you can Bye on, but, like, you're mostly enjoying the day.

Justin:

Yeah. I I think what I'm trying to push people to think about is just that There is some, I think, dangerous thinking in there, and I'm speaking from experience. I'm Speaking from somewhat as someone who, you know, launched 2 snowboard shops in my early twenties. And The idea of if you're gonna take risks, first of all, you should you should try to minimize those risks. But second of all, make sure the thing that you're risking on.

Justin:

Like, if you're putting it all on black careful. There's a poker metaphor coming. If you're putting it all on black, but the pot is only $20, Why are you risking it all on black? That that that's not that's not worth risking it for. And so I'm just I think I'm challenging folks to think, you know, is this thing that you're risking your life for and the opportunity, Is there enough there that you can see that makes you feel like this is gonna be worth it?

Justin:

And, again, I know the answer is partly as well, how can you know? And, again, it's it's just not fair for me to to to, in some ways, evaluate this because I realized this is just so fortunate that we're here, but there's something about this that I think is important. And getting investment won't solve all of those problems. The fundamentals at the end of the day are what's going to prove or disprove your thing. I wonder for bootstrap companies, especially if you're not getting those answers after a couple years, if, you know, it's time to bet on a different pot, or do something else.

Justin:

Let's just hold that thought for a sec and talk about Redash. This is, a quote from a Redash customer. In 20 minutes, I was able to achieve something in Redash that I've been trying to do with powered by I hope I'm saying that right. Powered by for the last year. But powered by just doesn't support the data flow I needed for it.

Justin:

That's what Redash is about. You can take your SQL knowledge, supercharge it with extra powers, and then be immediately productive. There's no complex tools to master, just you and your data. And my friend, Marty, uses it, and he says he uses it for querying across Multiple data sources via Presto. I don't know what that means.

Justin:

And sometimes he'll create fancy dashboards from those queries.

Jon:

I'm assuming you can. There's a feature called Presto in Redash, and you can probably combine multiple data sources together.

Justin:

Jon Which actually sounds pretty nice. Jon, that's your homework for this week. And your homework as well, listener, because anyone who mentions that they came through this podcast gets 50% off the 1st 3 months. Go to redash.io and say, hey. Build your SaaS sent me.

Justin:

I don't know, Jon. Any any more thoughts on that?

Jon:

Not really. I, no. I'm just pleasantly surprised as to where we're at now. And, like

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

It's, you know, appreciative of all the customers that Started with us early and stuck with us and sort of supported us and

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Gave us problems to solve and gave us, you know, feedback, Good feedback, you know, and bad feedback?

Justin:

Mhmm. Yep. It's there's I think similar to early investors. Like, your 1st investors are always hold a special place in your heart because they believed in you when, you know, It was early. Mhmm.

Justin:

In the same way, customers that come on early, I you know, like I said, like, there's a few customers like Joe Workman, like Mike Vardy, Ashley Baxter. And there's I mean, there was 50 of them. Right? Those folks, and they know who they are. I mean, I'm willing to help them anytime because I'm so appreciative of what they did for us.

Justin:

And since then, we've just had all these other people who have come. And the great thing about having customers invest in your company is that, hopefully, they're the ones getting the immediate returns.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

They invest $19, and they get a $190 worth of value. You know what I mean? Like, I I I treated this the other day. I mean, I when I was a kid, I used to listen to talk radio all the time. And I would look up, you know, like, how much does it cost to start your own radio station?

Justin:

And, You know, I remember, there's a guy in my church that bought a radio station, and I went and asked him, like, how much does that cost? Like, all the equipment and stuff. It was, like, 100 of 1,000 of dollars. Yeah. It was just crushing.

Justin:

Because I I I wanted to be on radio, but I knew there was no chance. And then I went to college, and my college didn't have a college radio station. And my friends and I would record, on reel to reel tape. We would record shows, but there was no way for us to broadcast it to anybody. You know?

Justin:

We could play for our parents, but that wasn't super interesting. And to think, like, now with the $60 microphone And $19 a month, you can Yeah. Have your own talk radio station.

Jon:

It is pretty amazing. Yeah.

Justin:

And with Transistor, you can not only have your own like, you can have your own station in the sense that you can host multiple podcasts. You can be your own you can be your own NPR or your own CBC. That's crazy. You know, like, I feel like we do owe something to our customers, but what we owe them is the service that we provide.

Jon:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Yeah.

Jon:

We owe them basically the Support and the service and just, you know, the ability to roll out new features and actually give them more value than What they have now?

Justin:

Exactly. Yeah. It's awesome. The the $100,000 worth of funding from, You know? Currently, I think we have 850 customers.

Justin:

One incredible gift. And, Obviously, not for everybody, but man, has it been nice for us to have that kind of investment?

Jon:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Justin:

Sweet. Do you wanna I know that you've been super busy.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

We you're still working on the audio player.

Jon:

Yep. Yeah. That's, I did I did update a a lot more of that. A fuse little things with that, I need to finish up before it's ready to go. Just trying to optimize a bunch of things.

Justin:

What do you think about the, this is gonna let's just have a little, A little UX discussion here. So you asked me about right now in our player, the play button is on the thumbnail of the cover. And, in one mock up you just shared with me, you've moved the play button, so it's just above the title. Yep. So the reason you moved it is because the play button covers the cover art.

Justin:

One reason I don't like it moved And it you could be right. This might be better to move it, but I can I I remember being a new podcast listener and going to podcast websites and not being able to figure out how to push play?

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

And one thing I like about our player right now Is that the play button is so large?

Jon:

It is large. Yeah.

Justin:

And it just feels like, okay. I wanna play this show. I could play here. I also like the fact that that superimposed triangle reminds me a little bit of a YouTube thumbnail where the the triangle Super over is over the,

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. We I'm yeah. Certainly don't have to keep it. I think I was playing around with some updates To the mobile version of that?

Jon:

Because I think it's probably something we don't see a lot.

Justin:

Mhmm. Mhmm.

Jon:

And it was getting a little bit. I was, like, playing around with, like, hiding the art entirely on the mobile view, and it just because there's really not a lot of Space there to, you know, show the title and do everything you need to do. So, yeah, I was just at just to experiment a mock up. I can totally see your point that it is a not it is a large Area to click. It's, like, obviously visible.

Jon:

Mhmm. I just know that, like, there's so much good art artwork Out there.

Justin:

Yeah. And and this isn't I I'm not like, like, asking you to defend yourself right now. I'm the I I I thought it would be interesting for people to hear some of this. Like, yeah. What are the the trade offs?

Justin:

Because on one hand, we have beautiful cover art, which in some ways is different than a YouTube thumbnail, and YouTube thumbnails have more real estate total. You're and we have had a few complaints from folks that say, why you like, your player covers my art. Like, why why does it do that? And so yeah. It's interesting to think about what are the ways we could solve that, but what are the potential trade offs too?

Justin:

And and do you think if you changed it, would you wanna change it for the main player as well?

Jon:

Yeah. It would be for both of them. Yeah.

Justin:

It would be for both of them. Yeah.

Jon:

Because that the top basically, the top part of the Playlist player above the playlist is the same exact player.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. It's just

Jon:

that you click a new you know, you play a new, episode and just Switches everything out.

Justin:

By the way, when you're doing those mock ups, are you doing those in sketch, or are you just editing the HTML?

Jon:

That was HTML. Yeah. I actually don't have any of this stuff in sketch. Yeah. I should, but I I keep meaning to learn sketch.

Jon:

Yeah. And I don't know it that well, and we're already at version 56 or something. I don't even know.

Justin:

I mean, I'm the same way. I actually I actually like prototyping in HTML better. That's why I like frameworks like Symantec UI and Tailwind because I can just open up dev tools and just start playing around with it. And I feel like I have something real.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, I used to I used to, like, actually screenshot something and, like, cut and paste stuff in Photoshop. Yeah. Yeah. Which is actually something, Ryan Singer used to do a lot, from from Basecamp and 37 signals.

Jon:

Like, we when I was I was, running or helping run, refresh Chicago meetup group Yeah. In Chicago for a number of years, and we had Ryan Singer talk at one of our meetups. And he was, like, sort of, like, redoing a feature or doing some, like, On the fly, UI redesign, and he would take a website and just, like, throw it into Photoshop and, like, cut pieces out and paste them in. And, like, It looked kinda like crap, but he, like, was just, like, designing things with these, like, big block image blocks of things, and it worked. Get you know, it's it's kind of like a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than just sketching on a piece of paper.

Jon:

But

Justin:

But for right now, you're just editing the HTML. And so is that part of the process as you just, like, move things around? I mean, that's what's great about the web Is you Yeah. You can move things around and see how it feels, see how it looks.

Jon:

I mean, there's already been a a couple of small things that I noticed when I did that is that, you know, you you can click into these other panels that pop up, like, more info or or the panel to to share the show, and it actually Now it covers the play button because the play button was on the art, and now it's won't be. Yeah. So I'm like, I don't know if people care about that. Yeah. Like, will they need to pause it if they look I don't know.

Jon:

Yeah. It's hard to say.

Justin:

Oh, and then you're asking those kind of questions too. Like, what yeah. What If they're

Jon:

Now they had to close the panel deposit as opposed to just pausing it. But, like, how often did Yeah. How often are people doing that?

Justin:

How much do you look at what already exists? Like, for example, if you go to SoundCloud, I've noticed that they they impose the play button over the cover art.

Jon:

A

Justin:

few of our competitors do it more this other way where you put the play button above. How much do you consider that? Like, Is that something that you do as a part of your exploration? Or

Jon:

Yeah. I I think a little bit. Yeah. I, I I don't think I was looking at anyone in particular with those, You know, the more embeddable players I've seen, I think they do certainly influence me. Mhmm.

Jon:

I wasn't necessarily doing the research into it. But

Justin:

Yeah. So will you play with it first and then go and look at other players? Or, like, is it is it not is it more ad hoc than that?

Jon:

I think it's A little more ad hoc. I I probably look at players first, but no. I don't I'm not like tabbing between, you know, browsers and looking other one and just like redoing something. It's sort of like, Over time, I'll see these things, and they'll make an impression in my brain. And I'll probably Mhmm.

Jon:

Be thinking about it for a while and be like, well, as long as I'm doing this playlist player, I might as well think about redoing a few other things and

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And then I sort of Play around with it.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. There's not really

Jon:

a very scientific method to it. Yeah.

Justin:

A lot of it is by feel, isn't it? Yeah. Cool. Well, I mean, I'm just like, what's great about this feature is that just having a multi episode player, embeddable player in of itself, even if, You know, let's say we end up going with either of those options is better than not having the feature. Meaning, yes, I think usability matters.

Justin:

But whether the play button, you know, is superimposed over the cover art or not, I would rather just have the feature. So the broad stroke is like, this is important. And I think it's good to sweat the details. Yep. But it's nice to know that regardless of what, you know, the way we do it, customers overall will just appreciate the fact that we have it.

Jon:

Yep. Absolutely.

Justin:

Cool. I think to close, I I've just got an update on our new marketing site. I've been trying to build a new marketing site in Statomic, which is a PHP based CMS. And one of the things I wanted to test was what is the page speed score for Google? Mhmm.

Justin:

And I I'm sure there's a way to test this locally, but I don't know what it is. And so I just deployed the site to, a secret kind of web server, and, to test it. And, it's just a digital ocean droplet. One of the things I like about statemac is that as soon as you push to master, it'll automatically deploy to your your public web server.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

It took me, like, 5 minutes to do it. It was really awesome. Like, from start to finish, 5 minutes to get this set up on DigitalOcean. And then I was able to go to Google spade page speed in insights and test. Now our current WordPress site scores a 26 on the home page.

Jon:

Out of a100.

Justin:

Out of a100. That's like getting a 26% on your Yeah. It's math quiz.

Jon:

Big failure. Yeah. Fail.

Justin:

And anything they say anything below 90%, you're really leaving search rankings on the table.

Jon:

So I

Justin:

get these weekly reports from sanity check dot io, which is run by my friend, Nick. And It it's always saying, like, your page your page your speed scores are, like, 26, 24. And I'm like, this is so frustrating. And a lot of it has to do with just the cruft that a lot of WordPress plugins add.

Jon:

Yeah. What's surprising to me that Is how much cruff they add even if we have, like, a caching plug in on? So they're basically injecting, like, all sorts of JavaScript that has to load and, like, render things. And Yes. It's just really kind of surprising to me.

Justin:

Yeah. It and it also it's not localized, so it'll load that stuff on every page, whether you're using that thing or not. Now I know there's a lot of WordPress folks listening to this, And I know that there are ways to optimize WordPress. You know, like if I stripped I even did a task where I stripped down our site to, like no plugins and then the default WordPress theme. And, yeah, you can score in the nineties.

Justin:

And if you have good website hosting, like You're paying at least $20, but likely $99100. So, yeah, you can optimize WordPress. But The bigger problem for Jon and I is we didn't want to.

Jon:

Right. I don't wanna yeah. I don't wanna even use those Page builders.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. We didn't 1, the page builders is a big problem anyway. Like, we just didn't want that. We wanted more control.

Justin:

We wanted to be able to write our own QML, we wanna be able to have everything in source control, and we just didn't wanna have to work super hard on this system that we weren't super excited about. So the new site scored a 92. And that's like with there's no CDN. There's that's just like a digital ocean droplet deploying and 26 versus 92, and that's mobile. So our desktop score was 99.

Justin:

And our current desktop score, I think, is 76 or something. So yeah. It's I think for us, Jon still has to play with it and see if he likes it. But I think for us, this is gonna be a better workflow for us. Just having everything stored, all your content is stored, not in a database, but in just flat markdown files.

Justin:

And those are version controlled as well. So if something messes up, you've got all these flat files on your local machine that you can restore from. Like, it just seems like a dream.

Jon:

Yeah. I guess I'm still I haven't really looked into it much, but I guess I'm still curious as to why you need a server and it can't just be Served off of, like, s 3, a static. Like, it Yeah. Static itself does not render static HTML files. It it's not like markdown or I mean, like, what's the other one?

Jon:

The other the the other static site generators.

Justin:

Yeah. So it's not it's a flat file CMS versus a static, site generator. And we can go I partly, I I I I probably not prepared to, like, be able to talk about this.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Justin:

But, I have a pretty good post on it on my website on this about why I chose flat file versus static. The new version of static apparently will allow you to deploy the static files to Okay. Wherever. You could even deploy them to GitHub Pages if you want.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

So I think that's coming in a new one.

Jon:

Because, you know, things like Jekyll, that's not necessarily a static. That's still a that's a flat file. I mean, there's no CMS, I guess.

Justin:

Yeah. Like,

Jon:

there's no CMS on top of it, but it is you're just editing markdown files, and you can you have templates and

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. The I think the advantage here is I I actually like writing in a CMS. And so I like that part of it. I like actually having the the control panel and and being able to edit things visually.

Justin:

And so I'm I I'm hoping that this will be a nice mid, a nice meeting point in the middle where you'll be able to to, edit everything from a dev perspective, but I'll be able to still have, a environment that I like using, you know, for all the marketing stuff. Yeah. It if nothing else, it's been nice to have the the learning experience.

Jon:

Yeah. It's always it's always fun to hop into something new and try to wrap your head around something.

Justin:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So folks, Yeah. If they're interested in that, they can go to the show notes.

Justin:

I'll I'll have this, link to a blog post on my personal site where I talk about kind of Why I even considered STATIMIC in the 1st place?

Jon:

Cool.

Justin:

Alright. Let's, let's Thank our patrons, Jon.

Jon:

Yeah. Thanks as always to our supporters on Patreon for making this show possible. We have a new, a returning Supporter, Colin Gray.

Justin:

Yeah. From Alitu. That was nice to see him back. Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. Alitu.com. Josh Smith, Ian Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedrafita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sittber, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, who is my brother.

Justin:

Danbuda.com. Dan needs to start a podcast.

Jon:

Yeah. He should.

Justin:

The the new rule is that if you have a podcast on transistor, I've hyperlinked your name in the show notes. And so, Uh-huh. Dan, if you want a podcast I mean, if you want your name hyperlinked, start a podcast.

Jon:

I'll have to talk to him about that.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

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

Justin:

Junta Junta dot f m should be a thing.

Jon:

It should. It's a whole radio station.

Justin:

Yeah. Come on, Dave.

Jon:

Kyle Fox, at get rewardful dot com, And our sponsors this week, ProfitWell and Redash.

Justin:

Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. If you can, please open up iTunes or Apple Podcasts and leave us a 5 star review, and we will see you next week.