Justin and Jon dive into the growing backlog of features, bugs and tasks, and talk about how they might better manage it as a two-person team. A big new milestone is reached!
Jon had a bit of anxiety over the growing backlog in Clubhouse
New ideas were being thrown into an unscheduled list, but weren't yet actionable.
Some ideas can be left alone for awhile and revisited to see if they're still worthwhile.
Ben Orenstein wants to delete your entire backlog.
6 week cycles like Basecamp does might help out - but what does that mean for a tiny team?
We hit $20K in MRR in under a year!
★ Thanks to our sponsors:
ProfitWellgives you free subscription metrics for your SaaS. Just plug in your billing system (Stripe, Zuora, Braintree, Chargebee, Recurly are all supported) and get free access to your MRR, churn, cohorts. Sign up for free at profitwell.com.
Redash is is a BI tool for people who love SQL. Connect your database, query, visualize and share your data in minutes. Mention "Build your SaaS podcast" and get 50% off your first 3 months! Sign up at redash.io
Ben Orenstein's tweet: "My new consulting engagement: you pay me $10,000 and I delete your project’s backlog while explaining that nothing of value has been lost."
Jon had a bit of anxiety about a growing backlog of new features and ideas.
Show Notes
Justin and Jon dive into the growing backlog of features, bugs and tasks, and talk about how they might better manage it as a two-person team. A big new milestone is reached!
Jon had a bit of anxiety over the growing backlog in Clubhouse
New ideas were being thrown into an unscheduled list, but weren't yet actionable.
Some ideas can be left alone for awhile and revisited to see if they're still worthwhile.
Ben Orenstein wants to delete your entire backlog.
6 week cycles like Basecamp does might help out - but what does that mean for a tiny team?
We hit $20K in MRR in under a year!
★ Thanks to our sponsors:
ProfitWellgives you free subscription metrics for your SaaS. Just plug in your billing system (Stripe, Zuora, Braintree, Chargebee, Recurly are all supported) and get free access to your MRR, churn, cohorts. Sign up for free at profitwell.com.
Redash is is a BI tool for people who love SQL. Connect your database, query, visualize and share your data in minutes. Mention "Build your SaaS podcast" and get 50% off your first 3 months! Sign up at redash.io
Ben Orenstein's tweet: "My new consulting engagement: you pay me $10,000 and I delete your project’s backlog while explaining that nothing of value has been lost."
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 dotcom. They've supported this show for over a month now. Can you can you do me a favor? Can you just go on to Twitter and thank them? They're at profit well, and just say, hey.
Justin:
Listening to build your sass. Thanks so much for supporting the show. Also, go check out season 2 of their new podcast. It's at protect the hustle.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 John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:
And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor.fm. How are you doing? Woah.
Jon:
Good. Happy Friday.
Justin:
Happy Friday. This is my
Jon:
Oh, lovely.
Justin:
This is my 3rd call this today.
Jon:
Wow. It Do you have anything left?
Justin:
I've got some I got some left. I I You just
Jon:
ate a bag of of trail mix.
Justin:
I just ate a bag of trail mix. I was that that was my status update for the day. Three calls and a bag of Trailmix.
Jon:
I
Justin:
I, I am noticing something that is going to be an interesting tension, especially for me, which is I am good at doing phone calls. I'm good at connecting with people. But the enjoyment of my week goes down significantly if every single day I have a meeting. Yeah. And so, like, this past week, I think I had things on 3 or 4 days.
Justin:
And when I looked at my week calendar, it kind of depressed me. Because one of the reasons I'm doing this is because I want freedom. Yeah. I wanna be able to go mountain bike when I want.
Jon:
Yeah. Should you should you block off Thursday Friday of no meetings? Except for the
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. I think
Jon:
at least so it ends.
Justin:
Yeah. I think I think, actually, that's a great idea is to say, I'm only gonna do calls on a certain day. I like that idea a lot actually. Because then
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
It won't get spread out. Right now, I do that thing that people say you shouldn't do, which is I send Calendly links to folks. And then just my whole calendar, any spot in my calendar is up for grabs.
Jon:
And yeah. Yeah. That would, that would kinda stress me out too. I mean, I I think I'll have less meetings than you. I do have a few calls scheduled, but, Yeah.
Jon:
I mean, at Carnegie Insulinity, we would have meetings quite often.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
There were rare there were early days without meetings, and it was just a large even though you get things done, it's a large interruption into your
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
Your, like, your heads down time.
Justin:
Yeah. And I think also, just in terms of the life that you and I want, we we got into some of this in last episode. What are we doing this for? Are we doing this so that we have some flexibility so that we can take off in the middle of the day and just be like, okay, I'm I'm going offline for a bit. Yep.
Justin:
And if that is the goal, I don't wanna sacrifice that for, you know, Now there clearly, there's gonna be sacrifices. But I think we can orchestrate our lives a lot more than we think we can.
Jon:
Yes. We are totally controlled. Yeah. We're the only ones who are in control of that, I think.
Justin:
Yeah. We had an interesting conversation this past week that I I thought I wanted to just kinda bring out and bring into the light here. Do you wanna kind of describe it a little bit?
Jon:
Yeah. I think I had sent you a message, that I was wanted to have a call about our our backlog and our project management tool, which is Clubhouse. Mhmm. I was kinda, like, spinning my wheels a bit as far as, like, what I should be working on because we have a huge backlog. We have some things that are in a, I guess, ready for development bucket.
Jon:
Mhmm. I have a couple of things that are in development in various states, but, like, it was hard for me to look at that list and be and know exactly what I should be doing. Mhmm. To me, it's it's all fairly important. I mean, there's bigger there's big and there's small stories, but, like, all of them at some point should probably be done.
Jon:
Mhmm. But we hadn't really we hadn't really sat down and together and prioritize any of it. And, so it was it was kind of starting to stress me out a little bit.
Justin:
This was an interesting call for me because it revealed just how a few things. 1, I've been working independently by myself since 2,000 2016 right now. And I so most of my priorities and my work to be done, it was all in my head. I would make myself my own checklists, but, you know, when you are doing things by yourself, you just nothing is going you're never going to be as, detailed as you would be on a team. And you're coming out of this team environment.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
Where I'm assuming I know every team has its challenges, but I'm assuming there were a lot, like, detailed specs. You had some sort of protocol for how stories product stories were written. Right.
Jon:
Yeah. It was it was definitely much more structured, which, you know, I don't necessarily think it needs to be for us, but, you know, we don't really have incredibly detailed stories. We don't really have, any designs or mock ups that have been uploaded or even, you know, napkin sketches that are uploaded and attached to stories. So it's I think it was a it was a couple of things. It was not knowing which story to pick up because we hadn't really discussed what was important right then.
Jon:
But, also, once I would pick one up, like, what the exact what's the actual problem we're solving, or how should this story be approached? Like, we throw stories in. Mhmm.
Justin:
It's kind
Jon:
of as they come in or bugs pop up or someone has an idea, but there's not really not much of it's fleshed out generally. So in order for something to be in our, let's say, ready for development bucket, that should really be ready for anyone to pick up and start. It should be, you know, a detailed spec of kinda what what the problem is it solving, maybe some technical issues around it or whatever. But maybe some sketches, maybe some mock ups, some of the YouTube videos you do sometimes to explain things. But, yeah.
Jon:
So that's kinda where I'm coming from is.
Justin:
Yeah. No. I thought again, I thought it was just so great, and I'm glad that you brought it up. And that's why I wanted to bring it up on the show because, I mean, there's so many things here. We're we're figuring out how to work together, which is already a challenge.
Justin:
You got 2 independent people and they somehow have to figure out their own process. And it's different than joining a team because when you join the mothership, when you join the Borg, you kinda do what the Borg have already figured out. Right?
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
So you I think I've been on 3 teams now, 3 different teams with different processes and different ways of writing stories and things like that. And, yeah, each one was different. And in each case, I had to,
Jon:
I
Justin:
had to mold myself to
Jon:
Assimilate. Yeah.
Justin:
I had to assimilate. And so I think that's parts interesting. And really, like, getting things done is an interesting topic in of itself. We were mentioning this new Basecamp book that's out right now called Shape Up. It's, I think basecamp.com/shapeup, written by Ryan Singer, and is a description of how they work.
Justin:
What did you think about it? I know we haven't read the whole thing. But
Jon:
Yeah. I haven't finished it all. Yeah. I from what I read, it, you know, it certainly resonates. I mean, I think I've, you know, read a little bit about how they work just a lot, you know, throughout the years of of kind of following them in their process, and knowing some of the folks that work there.
Jon:
And, you know, I always kinda knew that they had these autonomous teams that they put together to work on a feature for x amount of weeks, and then yeah. There were some there were some good nuggets that came out of that.
Justin:
Yeah. I I like the idea of 6 week cycles, which is what they don't they don't like the word sprint. They don't like the idea of sprinting. And, a 6 week cycle, that's a month and a half. That we've we actually tried this idea previous to you, like, before when you were still working a full time job.
Justin:
And I think it would be interesting for us to do a version of this. Yeah. That one challenge we'll have is the way I understand it is that they shape the work before they start that 6 week cycle. So Ryan says a small senior group works in parallel to the cycle teams. They define the key elements of a solution before we consider a project ready to bet on.
Justin:
So they're defined at the right level of abstraction, concrete enough that the teams know what to do, yet abstract enough that they have room to work out the interesting details themselves. Yeah. And I I think when you're a team of 2, you have to definitely you we can't work in parallel, obviously, we we but Right. We're gonna have to come up with our own cadence of planning work and then completing the work.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, it's gonna be interesting because we are we're the we're the senior leadership team, and we're also the teams who who are gonna build it.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
So those can't be done at the same time necessarily. Mhmm.
Justin:
Yeah. And also, I think there will be, there's this temptation, at least for me, to go okay. Because I was starting to think, okay, 6 weeks cycle, our next 6 weeks cycle. And I was thinking, okay. One thing I would love to get done is get this new marketing site out the door.
Justin:
I I don't think I need 6 weeks, but I think that's a good you know, that would be a good thing for me to do.
Jon:
So I
Justin:
was like, okay. I'll take that on. And then John could take on something else. Maybe he works for 6 weeks on and maybe it it we start we give ourselves some space at the first bit. Like, we give John 6 weeks to finish the multi episode player.
Justin:
And that would include things like, you know, if you need to learn some new JavaScript library or whatever.
Jon:
Right. Yeah.
Justin:
But there's I think there will the because we're a team of 2, you think like, if if my focus is on the marketing side and your focus is on the player, we could also be missing out on our both of our having 2 heads on, you know,
Jon:
a a a
Justin:
particular thing. Right?
Jon:
Right. Yeah. I mean, I yeah. I don't know how this was gonna work out, but we should probably well, I think their book and their whole process, they talk about how they have, like, a 2 week cool down after each 6 week cycle to sort of I don't I don't exactly know what goes in in those goes on in those 2 weeks. But
Justin:
I think they, like, do that's where they they'll write bugs. For write bugs, they'll fix bugs.
Jon:
Maybe we do a 6 week iteration where we're working on a feature or 2 features. Mhmm. So one one each. Mhmm. But then there's a 2 week period, or maybe maybe it's 3 weeks where we do pretty in-depth planning for what's next.
Justin:
Mhmm. Yeah.
Jon:
To get put together.
Justin:
So In the cool down.
Jon:
So that we know we know what each person is gonna work on next. And during the 6 week period where we're each working on something, we can jump in Mhmm. Kind of in help and sort of if someone has a so one of us is having a problem or is stuck or whatever. We we each know, like, what this thing is supposed to be Mhmm. So we can tap in and just, like, lend a hand or whatever.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
Yeah. I I like that idea. The the there's one thing that I I don't wanna say I'm I I I've been totally bad at, because I think I'm getting better at it. This idea of cadence, of having this rhythm to your work. And for us, that rhythm is going to have to accommodate all sorts of things.
Justin:
It's gonna have to accommodate this shaping period that base camp talks about, you know, where you shape things and you get things ready. And then it's gonna have to accommodate the work. And then it's gonna have to accommodate, you know, the kind of the cool down period. It's also gonna have to accommodate this idea of we want to have a life outside of work.
Jon:
Right. Yeah. There's also bugs to be fixed and customer support to be handled and other business stuff that needs to be done. So, yeah, I think the interesting thing here reading this book is that this is a team of 50 people Mhmm. Or a company of 50 people with teams that are developers and designers together.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. You know, those teams are isolated from customer support Mhmm. And they're isolated from all the other business things that happen Yeah.
Jon:
Whereas we are not. So it's gonna certainly be, I think, a much different cadence. Mhmm.
Justin:
And I think what's challenging with all this stuff, especially actually with base camp stuff, is that you read it often and I'm like, this is such a great idea. It's so inspiring to think about how they work, you know, But then you have to fit this into your own reality. And sometimes I get a little bit stuck wondering, okay, what's the best fit for us? And as opposed to maybe just what pad bad patterns are we stuck in that we're not willing to admit or something.
Jon:
You know
Justin:
what I mean? Like, it's just hard to figure that out.
Jon:
Yeah. The other thing too, I think, as far as the cadence, thinking back on some of the book is it might've been the forward that I think Jason Frieder out, but just like trying to get out of this trap of getting frustrated with long iterations and and features that take forever, and then you finally finish it, and you're, like, not you're not really proud of it. Maybe it's not in great shape. And then you're sort of, like, exhausted and a little bit, I don't know, disheartened about it. And then then then you have to sort of start the next iteration, and it's like Mhmm.
Jon:
And then you do that over and over, and you're just, like, worn out.
Justin:
Yeah. But Yeah.
Jon:
So I think, yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be tricky, I think, for us to sort of maintain some sort of balance with all all of the things that we have to do, not just have 6 weeks to build the thing because that there's so much other other stuff that's gonna come out.
Justin:
Yeah. And, I mean, ideologically, this is the other problem is that, ideologically, I have this idea of us just being this 2 person company where you and again, that might work out fine. But at the same time, you wanna be open to ideas like, well, maybe we should hire some some folks to do customer support. You know? Right.
Justin:
I I think also there's this there's this other element of doing things at the right time in the right order as you grow up. Meaning, Basecamp just wrote this book that is the cumulative knowledge of all of their years growing and building since 2004 or whatever.
Jon:
Right. Right.
Justin:
And so for us to think, well, we are just going to hop on that train and just get up to speed already, there's a little bit of out of orderedness of that. Yeah. Whereas right now, we are at the stage and maybe this stage is ending. That's part of the tricky part. But we are at the stage where it's still really helpful for us to be answering customer support and identifying with our customers and seeing how we can actually improve their lives when we make good product decisions.
Justin:
And if we rushed out of that phase too quickly, it's kind of like trying to grow up too quick. You know?
Jon:
Yeah. Because then right. Then then you're adding in now we're managing someone who's doing customer support.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And we're spending time teaching them the system and how to respond and
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
What types of problems you're gonna run into. And
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. And, again, I think part of the challenge with all this stuff is figuring out when to do that. May I think we'll know. I I I think we're getting closer and closer to that that time where we will wanna hire somebody.
Justin:
But I I don't want us to try to jump too many steps. I want us to go through all of the phases of development. You know, we're a baby right now. We're not gonna jump right to being, you know, a 40 year old adult. We've gotta go through adolescence.
Justin:
We've gotta, you know, you know, we gotta go to college. Yeah. And, I I love base camp. I love this idea of doing things the base camp way. Like, I love it more than I should probably.
Jon:
I think it's easy to be enamored by what they do based on the the things they write and not necessarily being in the mix. Mhmm. Yeah. But, yeah, I I don't know if I don't know if we we don't obviously have an answer for this right now, but I guess we'll kinda try to see how we can structure this. I mean, we're gonna try to use Clubhouse.
Jon:
They have a new iteration feature that's, I think, still in beta. It's pretty pretty bare bones, but it allows you to sort of set a start and end date to iteration and then assign stories to that iteration.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And I don't know. I mean, maybe we end up doing something like customer support is we only do that in the mornings.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
And then during that 6 week iteration, we have, like, days of the week that are dedicated to bug fixing, and then the rest is just feature work. I like, I don't
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
I mean, we're gonna have we're gonna have to do something because it's not we can't just build things all day.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. And, again, there may be there will be a good cadence that we come up with that, you know, I'm fine to answer more customer support tickets than you if it if it's kinda like doing arbitrage, you know, helping carve out your time.
Jon:
Hopefully, what happens is as we grow and build more features and fix bugs, like, the customer support will be reduced because we're actually noticing we're noticing patterns and problems that people have that can be fixed by updating the interface or improving our onboarding. And, like, maybe that's a 6 week iteration. It's just like, let's redo onboarding to take care of all of these support requests that we keep getting. And then that would potentially reduce customer support. Although, maybe it would also increase people signing up, which also increases customer support.
Jon:
But, Yeah. Yeah. But you you you sent me a message of a tweet you saw.
Justin:
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Ben Ornstein. Yeah.
Justin:
Yeah. I like this tweet. It the so Ben's a friend, and he says, here's my new consulting engagement. You pay me $10,000, and I delete your project's backlog while explaining that nothing of value has been lost. Your software project will always have a set known of bug a set of known bugs and to dos that will never be important enough to fix this week.
Justin:
Don't worry about it. You don't need to track them. They'll just make you feel overwhelmed and guilty when you look at this list. A list of 50 known issues that customers don't complain about is close to worthless.
Jon:
Yeah. It's a good reminder. I mean, I I think sometimes those bugs come up, and I'm like, I just immediately didn't feel the need to fix them. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Justin:
Yeah. I I like this a lot. I and I thought of this after our call because part of what was stressing you out was just going into Clubhouse and seeing the huge wall of
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Projects.
Jon:
Well, yeah. We had no distinction between this is an idea that maybe we should consider Mhmm. And this is a thing that we should do, but we just haven't scheduled it out or written about it. Like we had a list of unscheduled stuff. That's essentially our backlog that was full of just like ideas or brainstorms or, like, a customer send us something that maybe seemed like a good idea, but it's only one customer.
Jon:
Mhmm. Nobody nobody else is really requesting it. So I think, you know, maybe we throw a lot of those in some idea bucket. Those ideas would you'd be able to group those ideas into features that would maybe make up a 6 week iteration or or just forget about them entirely if no one else is requesting.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. And what Ben is advocating for here is similar to what Jason Fried does, which is some mental accounting on what gets requested. So Jason Fried is famous for saying, listen, I don't I don't need to keep track of all those things. The the the good ideas kind of rise to the top.
Justin:
You will know kind of through mental accounting what needs to be worked on.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
And I actually there's part of me that doesn't know if I agree Because I think there's a little bit of survivorship bias in there where you you might say, okay. I'm I'm not seeing this thing requested anymore. But part of that could be because those people got sick and left. Right? Like, they got tired of waiting and and just took off.
Justin:
And you actually have churn based on those things.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
And, again, maybe you don't need like me. I I think there's some value in having a bucket somewhere where you are tracking those things. And I think that's a good solution at least for us for right now, which is we created a new project called ideas.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
That is just we don't have to look at it if we don't want to, but when something comes up, I can put it in there. I can attach some support tickets to it and say, you know, here's the the folks that have requested this. And what I like about is is it means we're not forgetting those voices.
Jon:
And we yeah. We can always look back at it every few weeks or maybe every 6 weeks and just you know, if if it's a thing that has come up often or a thing that you just can't get out of your head, then we put that into our bucket of potential ideas that are that we're actually considering.
Justin:
Yeah. Totally. Yeah. So I felt I felt like that was a good, I I just felt like that was a good talk, for us to to hash that out. I and I think part as we're figuring this out, like, how are we gonna get this cadence, and how are we gonna get the right planning for us?
Justin:
It really is gonna come down to communication.
Jon:
Mhmm. Like,
Justin:
you and I are are going to be able to take inspiration from the Ben Orensteins and the base camps, and, you know, I'm sure, actually, our listeners will have some great feedback on this on how they manage projects as a single founder or as a as co founders?
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, I I think along with this, like, I think the book even mentioned, like, they don't they don't wanna do anything like daily stand ups and and all this iteration meetings and planning, you know, all this stuff. But day to day, I I don't think either of us really know what each each of us is doing, and that's maybe not a good thing. Like, I think we have a general idea, but it's not like, we're not we're not communicating every day about, like, here's what we're doing today. Yeah.
Jon:
Or here's what I'm doing.
Justin:
Yeah. And you you think that might be a good thing?
Jon:
I think it might be beneficial. I mean, I think if we had this if we had these 6 week iterations, though, and you're only working on one story or one epic of of multiple stories that are related, then it would probably be less of a issue.
Justin:
Yeah. I I actually like that idea too to have a you are you're talking about some sort of daily practice.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, it's probably just in one of our Slack channels of, like, hey.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
Good morning. Here's what I'm doing. Or, like you you know, we've done it a little bit, but it's not necessarily in the morning. Our each of our mornings are different times.
Justin:
Yeah. No. I like that idea. I think that that would be a good thing to try. I like I like Mike Vardy's, you know, every day getting up.
Justin:
And I was doing this just personally for a while. Sorry. At the end of the previous day, you you've write out, okay, what did I accomplish today? And what are the 3 things I want to accomplish tomorrow? And then you get up in the morning and you've got these three things that okay.
Justin:
These are the things I really want to, you know, these are the things I wanna do today.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
I like that. Either yeah. In the evening or in the morning posting and saying, okay, here's my plan. Even I think there would be a lot of personal benefit for that. Just like, okay, here's here's what I instead of just getting lost in the weeds of I answered 20 support tickets, and then, I just kind of mucked around on something without a real direction, I think.
Jon:
Yeah. It's also, yeah, it's also easy, I think, to finish a day and feel like you didn't do anything. Yeah. Even though you did. And so it's probably it's also easy to get into the habit of not never ending your day until it's too late.
Jon:
And I think maybe having a point where you stop and you write things that you did and things that are unfinished that you can pick back up tomorrow is a way to sort of, like, bookend the day. Yeah. Be like, alright. I'm done. I can, like, turn off and not have to, like, remember what I was doing.
Jon:
Yeah. I wrote it down. I can open my computer, and it's, like, in my face being like, oh, this is what I stopped doing yesterday. Yeah. I can pick it back up.
Justin:
Yeah. I like this a lot actually. And the other thing that I think would be helpful is that you and I have also, which I think is great, taken time away. There was there was one there was one day where I was like, I I I said hello to you in Slack, and I'm like, well, I didn't hear back from John all day. And part part of me was like, that's great.
Justin:
Like, I but the the I think that having a general understanding of like, Hey, I'm going to go mountain biking most of tomorrow. And so, you know, if you need to get a hold of me, get me on my cell, just a little check-in, you know? Yeah. And I I'm mentioning this just because inside of me, I do have a little bit of, well, I'll just say it. I have a little bit of fear when this topic gets brought up because in the past, I have been very good at working a lot, and then signaling that I'm working a lot.
Justin:
Does that make sense?
Jon:
But not actually working a lot?
Justin:
No. I am I am actually working a lot, but the the it it drove me to because I was trying to impress people or I was just trying to, there was this underlying motivation, like, I better show people that I'm working, or they might think I'm lazy, or they might think I'm not pulling my weight, or they might think, you know, whatever it is. And, I think one thing that we've explored a little bit here is the antithesis to that, which is, no, it's okay if John takes off for a day. And there should be no judgment there. Do you know what I mean?
Jon:
Yeah. It's I think it's fine for either of us to say, hey. I'm taking the day or I'm taking 6 hours, and I'm going to ride my bike to Kansas or something out or whatever. But which I suppose I could do from Illinois. I love
Justin:
these I love these subconscious desires that just get exposed in the midst
Jon:
of no. Yeah. But as long as I think as long as we we communicate that, I think that would be totally fine. I mean, I think both of us know that we're both in this for the long haul, and we're not just gonna, like, bail and, you know, disappear.
Justin:
Yeah. So so much of this is communication. Like even just me expressing that out loud right now felt good. I've never shared that with anybody that I used to have so much stress about signaling the work I was doing because I wanted it to be recognized. And I like the freedom of feeling like we don't have to do it that way, but with a different motivation, which is just like, we trust each other, but we're going to give each other a heads up on what we're doing.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
For different reasons. You know what I mean? I like that.
Jon:
To be aware enough to know when we each need a break, and that we're probably gonna need breaks at different times for different reasons.
Justin:
Yeah. Totally. Totally. Well, this wonderful partner moment has been brought to you by Redash. They've been supporting this podcast for over a month.
Justin:
And, you know, just like I mentioned before, I would love for you to get on your Twitter machine and tweet at get redash. Get redash, all one word, and just say thanks for supporting the build your SaaS podcast. I really appreciate it. Redash is a open source project, and they also have a, you know, a for profit division. But they're just like us.
Justin:
They're a small team that are trying to do good work. And for them to be generous and support, this podcast means a lot to us. You should go and visit their website and try it out. It's redash.io. You get 50% off your first three months, when you mentioned this podcast.
Justin:
And, I should tell you what it is. It's it's a way to connect and query your data sources, and then you can build dashboards to visualize your data and share them with your company. They have this really cool visual, editor. It's called a visualization editor. Go check it out, redash.io, and thank them on Twitter.
Justin:
Well, do we wanna say anything else about that? That was that felt like the good stuff right there.
Jon:
Yeah. That was good. Yeah. I don't we can probably revisit it as we actually implement it. Implement some some sort of structure around our days and weeks.
Justin:
Sweet. Alright. So next, John, we should talk I don't think we mentioned this last time, but we hit another big milestone.
Jon:
We did.
Justin:
$20,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Jon:
That's huge. And we have some we have some air horns
Justin:
to go on. Chris, can you give us some air horns or some something? Some, you know, people saying yay.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. It it sort of like, it kinda crept up on me and maybe you too. I don't it it happened, and I was like, oh, yeah. It happened.
Jon:
It it was it's it's incredibly exciting, but it it's hard to it's hard to really celebrate it because it's not the end. I mean, there's still a ton of work.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we hit 10 k around April 1st.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
April, May, June. So it's really been about 3 months, maybe 3 and a half months. Yeah. 3 and a half months. Yeah.
Justin:
In 3 and a half months, we doubled.
Jon:
That's crazy. And, like yeah. That's crazy.
Justin:
So, we've mentioned this leading up to this, but, again, we are so thankful to all of our customers that made this happen. Some of you believed in us very early. Some of you have signed up because of this show, because you were inspired by this show. We are so appreciative of all of you. Yeah.
Justin:
Our our next milestone I mean, we're we're probably going by tens now. And one of the questions I got today, I was on another podcast, and the host had asked for questions. And someone said, well, how come you haven't hired somebody now that now you're at 20 k a month, that will give you an annual run rate of 240,000 or something like that. 200 and right now, we're at an annual run rate of 247,000. You know, why aren't you paying yourself full salaries, etcetera?
Justin:
We've talked about this before, but right now, we we have allocated roughly 50% of revenue to salaries. And you've gotta think, on top of salaries, we're gonna have taxes. So we're trying to set aside 15%
Jon:
a month for
Justin:
that. On top of salaries and taxes, we wanna set aside some money for, profit to reimburse us for our our work and our risk. And then we have expenses. And one of the things we're definitely watching right now is how much money we're spending on affiliates.
Jon:
Uh-huh.
Justin:
I think it's roughly, these are probably this is probably wrong. But right now, it's roughly 5% of revenue goes to affiliates.
Jon:
K. That's that's a decent chunk.
Justin:
And it could go up. Right now, we only pay out once someone has hit a $100. And so we have quite a few folks that are close to $100. There will be a month where we pay those folks out, and, you know, affiliate costs will go up. So I'm a little bit nervous about that.
Justin:
I connected with Nathan Barry I'm on a chairlift right now. But, he's definitely gonna have some some good advice on that.
Jon:
I mean, yeah. It's a it's a that's a huge milestone. We shouldn't undervalue it. I mean, I think that was a that was a number we had talked about for a long time Mhmm. As a number where we could both go full time.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
Right?
Justin:
Yeah. And so, I mean, it right now it's full time in the sense that, well, you folks can do your own math. You know, 20 k in MRR, you split then half, that's 10 k. Split that between John and I, that's 5 k each. And then, of course, there's payroll deductions and everything else.
Jon:
Yep. Taxes, there's yeah. All sorts
Justin:
of things we want. We may decide to adjust our ratio. Maybe one day we will do 60% or 70% is for salaries. We haven't done really a full financial cycle yet. And so I think both John and I are a little bit conservative.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, we didn't I think we'll have to wait and see at the end of the year what sort of taxes we have to pay because, you know, we didn't we didn't really pay any last year just because we didn't have a profit to pay tax on. So we'll have to keep that in mind. Infrastructure costs? Infrastructure cost.
Jon:
You need a new laptop? Yeah.
Justin:
I need a new computer. Yeah. There's there there are there are things there for sure. And and and unexpected we still don't know what our unexpected costs are gonna be.
Jon:
Right. I mean, I think that's some of the that's some of the money we set aside right for profit and sort of just, like Mhmm. Something could come up between now and the end of the year that we're gonna have to pay some sort of substantial amount of money for it.
Justin:
So we're and we're building up, a pretty to be honest, I would love for us to have at least 6 months worth of cash in the bank. And, even better would be 12 months cash in the bank. I there's just something about having cash, especially there's a looming recession coming.
Jon:
Yeah. It's do you do you mean 6 months for personally or for the company?
Justin:
6 months cash in the company for enough to pay 6 months worth of salaries, 6 months worth of infrastructure costs. So, basically, our our costs. Yeah. That's I don't
Jon:
maybe maybe a listener knows more about taxes and things, but, like, you're gonna if we have that in the bank, we end up paying tax on that because it's profit.
Justin:
That's right. Yep. It would be retained earnings. The benefit, of course, is that, is that we are our corporation will be taxed less than our personal tax rate.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
And, the cash gives you stability if things go bad. And so if we, we could take all of that as disbursements and just put it in our own savings accounts, but we would pay tax on that. I mean, we might, we might wanna do that too. But then, it's just really nice to have that flexibility of if there's a big storm that comes, you and I know, okay, we've got some runway where we can take care of this. But, yeah, actually, that'll be a good thing to think about it.
Justin:
I'd love to hear from our listeners. We should do it. We should do, an episode with our our accountant.
Jon:
We should.
Justin:
Where where he we can ask him about all that stuff.
Jon:
He's a he's an interesting guy. We shouldn't.
Justin:
Cool. So, yeah. So that's, that's that big milestone. We are going to New York. I'm hoping you'll be able to join me.
Justin:
In 2 weeks, I'll be there.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. You're speaking.
Justin:
I'm speaking at Laracon, and then I've booked some extra time, after the conference. And so if anyone is listening right now, and you are in the podcast industry, you work for Spotify, Gimlet, Stitcher, really, anybody in podcasting, we would love to meet with you. I would love to meet with you. I can't always promise John's gonna be there. He
Jon:
Yeah. I may be in I may be in a introverted
Justin:
John might be in his float tank. Yep. But, yeah. We would love to meet with you. I'm hoping even to maybe do a little meetup in New York if folks are interested.
Justin:
I wish there was a good way to plan all this. I've always just done this really ad hoc, but reach out on Twitter and the letter m, the letter I. Justin, you can email me, justin@transistor.fm. If you're an engineer at any of those companies, John, would love to hear from you. So, yeah, just reach out.
Justin:
We are not planning on traveling a lot. And so this is if you are in that area, this is a good chance for you to get a hold of us. We're not going to be at, podcast movement this year. So this is a a good time for us to connect if you are in NYC. Cool.
Justin:
I think that's good. Hey? Any anything else you feel like talking about?
Jon:
Not yet. Not not at the moment. I think that was, that was pretty nice.
Justin:
Well, let's give a shout out to our Patreon supporters.
Jon:
Yeah. Thanks as always to our supporters, for making this show possible. We have Colin Gray from alitu.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedraffita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Haines, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, my brother.
Justin:
Danbudda.com. Did did you guys talk about, podcasts you could do together?
Jon:
Not really. No. No. We I think he mentioned the Muppet one.
Justin:
Yeah. I think one thing to mention that I kept bringing up, and I think this is good for Dan or anybody else, is I've often said I would do this show whether we had listeners or not. Because there's just value in getting on microphones for some reason. And it makes us be a better version of ourselves. And we have these really great conversations that are recorded, but where we can dive into these deep issues.
Justin:
And, I think if you're thinking about starting a podcast, you know, I've thought about starting a podcast with my sister, for example. I thought that would be interesting or even my parents. Like, there's there's all these people that I should probably be connecting with on a regular basis. So there you go, Dan. You think of think of someone you just wanna connect with on a regular basis and start a show.
Jon:
We got, back to the list here. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schubert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Juntas.
Justin:
Juntas should Juntas should come to New York. He should. Yeah.
Jon:
Just show up.
Justin:
Do you think the magic would be lost if I met him in person? I don't know. I've I've built him up to be a giant of a man in my mind.
Jon:
I don't know. He's a good dude. I think he'd like you get you get along.
Justin:
Alright. Junta, come to New York. Crash at our Airbnb.
Jon:
Kylefox@getrewardful.com, and our sponsors this week, ProfitWell and Redash.
