Build Your SaaS

Jon and Justin try to decide how much to charge for Transistor.

Show Notes

We're hoping to launch Transistor officially in July 2018.

And that means we need to figure out a pricing strategy. What types of tiers and plans should we offer?

SaaS pricing examples:
Patrick Campbell, from Price Intelligently, says there are three aspects of a pricing strategy:
  1. Positioning: who are the right customers for your product? How will you target and attract them?
  2. Packaging: what features are included in each tier? What value does each type of customer want from your product?
  3. Pricing: putting a price on your tiers that reflects the value your customer receives.
Where did we get stuck? Jon and I started by looking at who had signed up for early access to Transistor:
  • Hobbyists – podcasting for fun, two people talking, no advertising.
  • Prosumers – side-project podcasting, may have a bit of income, want to go pro.
  • Solopreneurs – solo founders building smaller tech products. 
  • Small tech teams – teams of 3-10 people building larger software products.
  • Bigger brands / enterprise companies.
This list brought up a question: how do we define our target customer? Is "podcast hosting and analytics for professionals" too broad?

Here's our homework for this week: we're going to let this simmer, we're going to talk to smart people about pricing, and we're going to come back to this next week.

Question of the week:

Tweet to @jon and @mijustin and let us know: how should we price our SaaS?

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:

That would be an awesome feature, actually, is if podcast players had a mode where if you scream while the hosts are talking, it records it and automatically sends it to the host.

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 web developer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor dot f m. Hey, John.

Jon:

Hey. Happy happy Monday.

Justin:

Yeah. It's Victoria Day here in Canada where we celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria. She must be really old because we've been celebrating her birthday for a long time. Every year, we just keep celebrating. Man.

Justin:

But did you wait did you stay up till 1 in the morning to watch the the royal wedding?

Jon:

I did not watch the royal wedding. You know, I felt I've well, I saw some stuff online. Yeah. Do

Justin:

you have people in your circle that are really into it?

Jon:

Yeah. My parents, they were gonna wake up at 4 in the morning, eastern time, but they actually ended up recording it instead and waking up later,

Justin:

which Oh, nice.

Jon:

Like, I don't know why you'd wanna watch it live if you can just record it.

Justin:

Yeah. They they they that team is responsible to just record it and and watch it.

Jon:

But they did. Yeah. They were they were they were interested in it. I think they had they had taken a trip to England a number of years ago. And, I mean, it's a it's a pretty big international cultural event, I guess.

Jon:

You don't see that stuff that often.

Justin:

It's so weird, though, because especially for America because Yeah. You guys have thrown off the monarchy. That's like the whole that's the whole reason your country exists.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

I mean, Canada, the queen's still on our money. So Right. You know, we we are we have kind of a a cultural, obligation to care. She's technically the head of our government. So and this, you know, this prince Harry.

Justin:

Right? Yeah. He's 6 in line to the throne. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. It is. I think it's interesting what people find interesting, isn't it?

Jon:

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's yeah. People were really fascinated by it.

Justin:

Yeah. Talk about segues. Today, we're gonna talk about pricing. Hope you're interested. I I wanted to get into this topic right away.

Justin:

First of all, because you've got a meeting in a bit, and we we don't have as much time. But, you know, as we've gone along, I've had this kind of growing anxiety about pricing, and I thought it would be interesting if you and I talked talked about it, kinda hashed it out live.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And the as a background, you know, initially, when we met, I was the one that was kind of pushing us to go up market. I was like, you know, I think we can and you had had some conversations, you know, there at the office about people that were saying, you know, a lot of podcasting services are too cheap. And I think, you know, eventually, we got really excited about having a premium product at a premium price point.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And maybe the equivalent we were saying, let's be the WP Engine of podcast hosting. WP Engine is kind of a premium WordPress hosting platform. When they came out, everybody thought they were crazy because they were competing against Bluehost, who it Bluehost is, like, $5 a month, and, WP Engine starts at 49. Sorry. 35.

Justin:

They go 35, a 115, and 290. Wow. They just raised their prices.

Jon:

Wow.

Justin:

So there was part of me and, I think, part of you that was interested in that model. Right?

Jon:

Yep. That's yeah. If I remember correctly. Mhmm.

Justin:

You know, there's competitors in our niche that start at $5 a month. Libsyn, I think. Yeah. Libsyn starts at $5 a month. There's Pine Cast starts at $5 a month.

Justin:

And, you know, that there to to make a living at $5 a month is extremely difficult, and there's a lot of smart people in our space like Jason Fried and Patio 11 and, you know, folks that say, listen, You've got you've got to charge more than 5, 10, 15. You're it's just very, very difficult to make SaaS work. And I think we one of our first episodes, I divided a million by 10 times 12. Right? So $10 a month over 12, you you know, 12 months.

Justin:

If If you wanted to make a $1,000,000 a year, how many customers would you need? And it's 8,333.

Jon:

Yeah. And It's a lot.

Justin:

It's a lot.

Jon:

I mean, it's right.

Justin:

That's

Jon:

Yeah. More customers means more support.

Justin:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked about how, in the past, we've both worked with startups that went after the low tier and really suffered. Right?

Justin:

Like, it Yep. It attracts, a certain type of customer that's really difficult. And, you know, there are we know that there are a lot of businesses that will pay more. Mhmm. Right?

Justin:

Like, we're we're charging a few people for early access right now that have considerable resources that could pay more.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. It's I think it's a matter of value too. If you're paying $5 a month, it's cheaper, but you may not value that service as much.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I I don't know. It's I guess it's similar to like buying, like, clothes maybe or something like a a physical product for your home where you can go the cheaper route by the $10 jeans, or you can go buy the $100 jeans, and you're gonna value them more. You're gonna, like, probably take care of them better. They're gonna last longer.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Or you might like, with my expensive jeans, I just wear them more.

Jason:

Yeah. So I they actually get usage, which is which is good too.

Jon:

Yeah. The $10 ones you might wear once or twice, and then you're like, these actually don't fit very well. I'm just gonna throw them away because they're only $10. But then

Justin:

you do

Jon:

that 10 times, and you have $100 jeans that you could have just bought and had for a couple years.

Justin:

Exactly. Exactly. We should start a fashion podcast. All this is on my mind, and my anxiety is we are getting closer to, a launch date. We're thinking sometime in July.

Justin:

And one of the things I'm doing is I'm looking at how, are are how close are we to feature parity with most of our our competition? And do you do this too, by the way? Or do you do you how much do you think about this?

Jon:

I think about it a lot. Yeah. It's hard to know when you're ready to compete if you are providing enough value yet.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

What that value is worth to people because right now we have, like, the early access pricing and everyone loves it, but it's at the a very good deal.

Justin:

Yeah. And I think that actually really hits the nerve of the anxiety is we did early access pricing for $10 a month. Let's just say it. It's $10 a month for early access. And the thinking behind it was, you know, I think our we have really good competitors that are at $19 a month.

Justin:

And I figured, well, if we if we, you know, half that, that's just a good deal for a product that is not quite ready yet.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And we've closed early access now. So that was only something we did for the people that, you know, were able to willing to come in and not have analytics and not have a bunch of features that we've now built. But they have loved it, and we've got, you know, really great, feedback from from folks. And we also have a a real variety of early access customers.

Jon:

Yeah. People that have never done a podcast, people that are importing multiple podcasts.

Justin:

Yeah. One I'll highlight is I really like the show. Karen Unland and her daughter Elizabeth have the show called That's a Thing, And it's, Elizabeth is the teenager, and she explains to her mom, who's this lovely, just a lovely lady, very sweet, she explains things like creepypasta and, Fortnite, and, you know, and it's just it's you really need to check it out, folks. Just, look for That's a Thing in Apple Podcasts. But, you know, for them, I I offered them early access specifically because, you know, it's not a business.

Justin:

They're not making any money off of it really. They might have advertisers, but it just felt good to offer them a good deal.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

But now we're looking forward to our launch, and I'm thinking, what is our pricing gonna be?

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, I don't I don't know if maybe this sort of thinking resonates with you, but I I'm thinking that people are really enjoying this at $10. Mhmm. If we double, triple, quadruple that price to start and we say, hey. We're open for business now.

Jon:

Here's our pricing. Are people gonna be like, yeah. No. Thanks. Yeah.

Jon:

That's that's way too expensive.

Justin:

Yeah. That's my worry.

Jon:

And But, yeah, it's

Justin:

Good. Well, I'm glad you feel the same stress as I do, John. This has been a good session. Okay. See you, everybody.

Justin:

John.

Jon:

We're in agreement again.

Justin:

We're in agreement again. So, yeah, I think but yeah. So that is the tension. And if you can hear me fumbling over my words, it's because I'm this is a wrestle within me of, man, we've got all these folks that really like the service right now, and they're telling people about it. And but we know we need to charge more.

Justin:

We can't keep charging that low of a monthly price forever. And we also know we want to attract a premium customer. And so I'm you know, it's, like, all rattling in my head of how do we attract a premium customer. And and maybe it's just a matter of, you know, the people that are in early access, those will be our early access folks, but our re our actual customers will only be a small subsection of those folks.

Jon:

Right. Yeah. Because you're I mean, you end up potentially alienating an entire crowd or, like, I don't know, sub crowd of of pod potential podcasters and, you know, small small individuals or, just duos who wanna do it for fun.

Justin:

Yeah. And is that okay?

Jon:

Right. I think it's okay. I mean, the tools are still there if they wanna use it. I mean, they can obviously sign up and use it. It might not be eventually geared towards them.

Jon:

But all the tools will be there for what they need. It's just there's these extra tools on top of it for the professional professional podcasters or the premium premium podcasters.

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. And another thing I've been thinking about too is, sometimes I log in to my old account with a competitor and just to see all the shows I had on there.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I had a show called 6 seconds, which was a podcast where every episode is 6 seconds. And, you know, at first, I was really excited about it, but it had no it was it was like a a fun project, you know, to see how long could I do the show for you know, how many episodes could I do of just 6 seconds? Yeah. And, you know, if I had to keep paying for that, I would eventually stop because I'm like, well, I tried it. I lasted 31 episodes.

Justin:

It was fun, but it doesn't really have, you know, like, my business, MegaMaker. I've gotta keep doing that show because that's my business. There's a lot of things riding on that show doing well.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

But, you know, these other little side projects that I did, you know, I had one right when I was learning how to podcast called Podcast Champion. And, you know, I did 3 episodes of it, and then I felt like I learned everything I needed to kind of do my other show, so I stopped. Yeah. Right. And if I was paying for those shows, even if it was 5, $10, I would have probably canceled because I would you know, I don't need I don't need that.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

I don't I don't I I don't wanna just keep paying for something I'm not using. But Cards Against Humanity, I mean, even if they stop doing this show, which is something I think about a lot, they're gonna keep paying to keep it online because it's a it's a thing that they've put out into the world. It's like a cultural artifact. It's it's their point of view. It Yeah.

Justin:

You know, it has meaning for them, and they've got the budget to keep it online forever just like they've got a budget to have a website and everything else.

Jon:

Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, they may they may eventually want sort sort of, like, archive pricing, which I think we have touched on before. So that's that's also an option where they're not gonna add new content, but still wanna have the media online.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And so, actually, as we're one thing we're gonna go through, together, I think, is Patrick Campbell. I reached out to him on Twitter. He has a company called Price Intelligently.

Justin:

And, basically, all they do is consulting for SaaS companies around price, and they've got a book out that is free to get. It's called SaaS Pricing Strategy. And, you and I made it through some of it together. Yeah. We didn't read the whole thing, but we were there's pieces of it I definitely wanna touch on.

Justin:

And one of the things they talk about in it is kind of you if you think about a grid of pricing, there always has to be kind of a core driver that you base your pricing around. So for Basecamp for a long time, it was number of projects. Yep. For Slack, it's number of users. Mhmm.

Justin:

And in both of those cases, that model makes sense. So, you know, with Slack, every time you add someone new, it costs you another whatever it is.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. That makes, yeah, makes total sense for them.

Justin:

And Jason Fried has a a lot of stuff online about why they chose projects for Basecamp initially. They didn't want to charge for more people because they they want projects to be more inclusive. They want Mhmm. More people to come in. They want more people to, you know, engage with the project.

Justin:

They don't want people to be sharing accounts just so that they can see what's going on in the project. And so he said, you know, a lot you know, whatever. I don't I'm, kind of expanding on this, but a lot of their clients were had multiple projects. So multiple projects becomes a good variable to brace base your pricing on. If we look at WP Engine, usually, in the pricing matrix, it's the first line that's their main variable.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And WP Engines is number of sites. So for startup, you get one site. For growth, you get 5 sites. For scale, you get 15 sites. Hootsuite, which is some pricing I'd actually like us to look at, as a part of this conversation, they they're really interesting.

Justin:

They start at $19 a month, and that is basically for a like a solo professional, and that's for 10 social profiles. But then it jumps up to $99 per month for 20 social profiles and then $500 per month for 50 social profiles. So the main driver is number of social profiles. And then, in addition, they've got things like well, if you've got that many profiles, you probably need 3 users, and then their other ones have more users. What do you think about kinda what do you think our core economic driver is for

Jon:

Yeah. It's good. I mean, I've thought about this in a number of different ways. I mean that for, let's say for podcasting, there's, there's a, I feel like a couple different things. There's like, downloads and traffic you could base it off of.

Jon:

There's

Justin:

And Libsyn has done that route.

Jon:

Right? There's storage storage size, storage amount, which I think some places do. There's, you know, pricing per show, obviously.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

You could do something around team members per show, but I don't know if that necessarily makes sense because you're not for Slack. That makes sense. I think because a new team member is gonna use their thing a lot and constantly, and it's it adds a lot of overhead for them, but and then there's, there's like premium of premium feature set, which is a little different, or, like, you could sign up for an account with transistor that includes 5 shows. Mhmm. Where I no more shows are extra or something like that.

Jon:

But probably for us, it's based on the show, number of shows

Gavin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Per show.

Justin:

Yeah. See, I I've I've gone back and forth on this too because I think as we try to get to feature parity with our cuss our competition And I imagine I might get some tweets and emails about this. People saying, ah, don't worry about your competition. And I've definitely said that in the past, But the the truth is the way people evaluate podcast hosting is they go they open up a bunch of tabs, and they go, okay. What does Simplecast have?

Justin:

What does Libsyn have? What does what does Transistor have? And when they're looking, you know, across each, you know, comparing and they're going, well, okay. This this product here has everything that transistor has, but it's cheaper. Mhmm.

Justin:

You know, that will play into their decision. And so we needed to be at least at feature parity. And I'm talking about basic features. Like, right now, for example, a lot of people are getting into these audiograms

Jon:

Yep.

Justin:

Where you can you can, upload a little clip and turn into a little video. And that might be something we add in the future, but to me, that's not you know, that's that's extra. Not everyone's gonna use it. I'm just talking about analytics, you know, a good podcast website, You know, Spotify integration is becoming, like, a kind of de facto. You need to have it now.

Justin:

And also thinking about what comes up with our customers so far, like, what are they asking for over and over again. And I feel like we're almost there. Like, we're very, very close. In fact, I think we could we could do a public launch tomorrow and, you know, launch at, you know, a higher price point. And I think we would be, there are definitely advantages that we already have over the competition I

Jon:

think so. Yeah.

Justin:

That people have mentioned. Yeah. But on on the flip side, we definitely need to have be at at least ground level. Right? We need we couldn't launch without analytics.

Jon:

Right. There's still a lot of yeah. There's a lot of things like documentation we gotta fill out and, you know, sort of, like, help guide people to actually what happens after you sign up.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

As far as, yeah, as far as basic features, I think we're 90% of the way there.

Justin:

So the other kind of trend in the industry is a lot of our competitors have one price point. Like, Fireside is just $19 per month. And so, and that's for unlimited storage, unlimited downloads, etcetera. And I think one challenge with that is there's there's no way with one pricing plan, there's no way for you to say, you know, this is like the base, and then up here is the premium.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I think there are a lot of things that have come up in conversations that would be great premium features. And I mentioned some of these in Slack the other day. I'm trying to think of what some of those were. One was voice mail support. Mhmm.

Justin:

So you go to sas.transistor.fm/voice mail, and you can leave us a voice mail. Don't do that. You can't do it yet. But, you know, that would be a good a great premium feature. Now, you know, is that enough?

Justin:

Can we just add a bunch of premium features and say, you know, this is for just anyone who wants a podcast. Here's the base plan. But if you want these crazy features, then you've gotta pay more.

Jon:

Now you're up to the professional, you know yeah. The Yeah. Plan.

Justin:

What do you think about that route?

Jon:

Yeah. I like that. It's I think it's just gonna be it's gonna be tough to nail down what those features are. And, like, as we add new features, do some of them get added to the starter plan? Does some of the game added to the pro plan?

Jon:

Does some get added to both? Mhmm.

Gavin:

How

Jon:

do we determine what a pro feature is?

Justin:

Yeah. I

Jon:

guess what whatever's beyond just uploading media and having an RSS feed Yeah. Essentially.

Justin:

Yeah. So I I think we've kind of brought up 2 questions. And, again, listener, I apologize. Some of our shows, we have a lot like, an outline just nailed down, but we knew this was gonna be a lot more kind of us free forming it. So, hopefully, if you're listening right now, you enjoy this type of free form discussion where we're really struggling.

Justin:

But I think we've I think we've identified 2 things. One, we need to figure out what our core kind of variable is. Is it number of shows? Is it whatever? And then underneath that, we need to kind of highlight what are the pro features that we're only going to add to those pro accounts.

Justin:

And then number 3, we need to figure out, you know, how much we're gonna charge for each of those. And I didn't get very far in Patrick's book. I wanna bring this up because he's probably screaming at the Yeah. At this podcast player. That would be an awesome feature, actually, is if podcast players had a mode where if you scream while the hosts are talking, it records it and automatically sends it to the host.

Justin:

Like, you could see the frustration points. Like, everyone's like, oh my god. Get me on the phone with John and Justin right now.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

But his where he recommends starting is with personas.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And so, John, if you were gonna say if we were gonna develop some personas, you know, some some profiles of the type of people that use Transistor, what would that look like?

Jon:

Of current customers or people we want?

Justin:

Well, it feels like the advantage we have right now is that we've done early access, and so we've attracted all sorts of people. Right? One we've already mentioned is hobbyists, and there are definitely, you know, hobbyists, and I think, maybe right above them would be prosumers. So hobbyists are people that start shows for fun. Right?

Justin:

2 people talking.

Jon:

Yep. No advertising, really. They just have a topic they wanna talk about.

Justin:

Yeah. Prosumers are I think it's a side project, and there's maybe a little bit of money.

Jon:

But there's probably a there's they probably have a goal in mind to to advertise something or or may get some awareness around something else they're doing?

Justin:

Yeah. And, eventually, I think they wanna go pro. Like

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Everyone who starts a show like that, most of the time well, some of them not. Some of them just you know, they've got a camera podcast, and they just want to make enough money to pay for the show and get some free gear. Mhmm. So what's above prosumer? I would say maybe solo founder, solopreneur, small business.

Justin:

Yep. And, actually, in our case, I think we can actually say solo solopreneur. We can Solopreneur. Solopreneur. Yeah.

Justin:

Because if we look through that list, I'm just on our admin dashboard. As I go through this list, a lot of these folks are, you know, like, Joe Workman is a solopreneur. Adam Clark is a solopreneur. Ashley Baxter is a solopreneur. So these are all customers.

Justin:

I've already mentioned them on the show. I'm not just, like, reviewing our customers when they don't want us, but these are folks that are, you know, they're individual founders running companies. Above that, we do have some small tech teams.

Jon:

Above that would be yeah. I don't know what that would be. Not not necessarily small business, but

Justin:

I'm thinking, like, there's a a company called Trained Up that has an account with us, and that's not a solo founder. That's a small little team. I think around 5 people.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And, you know, they're using a podcast for communing with communicating with their customers, trying to get more listeners, you know, sorry, trying to get a bigger audience. So I think that that to me and specifically tech, These are not, like, mom and pop flower shops and things like that. When we go through the list, those small teams are tech companies, generally.

Jon:

Yeah. They're probably the earlier adopters, I would say.

Justin:

Yeah. But that could be a great a great way for us to niche down on who that customer is, which is we're not just going after small teams. We're going after small tech teams. And, also, we should say with the solopreneurs, they're almost all in tech as well. Okay.

Justin:

So above small tech teams.

Jon:

Is it, like, brand, like, large brands who are

Justin:

Yeah. I I think this is the big jump is then we get into brands or enterprise. Although some of the our customers in the space would not wanna be called enterprise.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

But it really jumps up here because those folks if we look at this list of hobbyist, prosumers, solopreneurs, small tech teams, and then those brands enterprise folks, it gets big there. Like, it is it is a a big difference between, you know, the kinds of companies that are there. And and even I'm including in that, under brands, enterprise, like podcast networks. Or do you think that's fair? Do you think we need to break that out even more?

Jon:

No. I think podcast networks would be in there as well. So that's that's a lot of different personas. Right? But it

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

We're not gonna target each one of those, the different plan.

Justin:

That's right. And so I think we have to decide I think we're we we're aligned when we say we're probably not going to target hobbyists. They've just got too many free options. Right? Like, Anchor, SoundCloud.

Justin:

We have hobbyists that are using us and that are happy to pay what they're paying, but, you know, if we raise the price if we doubled or tripled or quadrupled the price, they would be like, okay. We're we're out. Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. This is, you know, yeah, this is getting expensive. I don't know if we reintroduce some sort of plan down the road. It's always possible.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, the nice thing about that is if if you if we have, you know, friends that are starting side projects, of course, we're gonna let them use, you know, like, if you're our friend, call us. Like, we'll help you out. Like, we're we're not monsters, but it's not a great customer for us to go after. It's just very like, b to c is a really hard play.

Jon:

Yeah. It's tough.

Justin:

Solopreneurs, small tech teams, and brands, that to me is those are worth going after. And those are actually most I would say I mean, there's a lot of prosumers on our list right now, but there's a lot of small businesses specifically in tech. And, again, tech is very broad for me. Mike Vardy, who has a really popular productivity show and productivity business just announced that he's gonna switch to transistor. That's a he's in productivity and time management and all that.

Justin:

But to me, that's in kind of the tech world. Like, it's it's, it falls under that umbrella. Yeah. So if these are our personas, I think we have to decide where do we cut it off. Are we gonna go all the way to to prosumers, or are we gonna say, no.

Justin:

We really wanna focus on, you know, just big brands and Yeah. Tech teams.

Jon:

I guess there's another one in here, which is like so there's hobbyist, but then there's and then there's prosumer that has maybe a it's a side project. Do you consider that the prosumer to be like someone who has a podcast that's really popular? Like, it's not they're not necessarily trying to sell something. It's just like they have a fun podcast, but they have, like, 50,000 listeners, and they have Yeah. Good amount of advertising.

Jon:

Because I've I've spoken to people, you know, in Chicago and at the office who are like, we'd love to use transistor.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And they're very popular shows. Yeah. They would probably potentially pay more money. They're not they're not a hobbyist. Yeah.

Jon:

Like, it's something they're very, very serious about. They have a long history of podcasting and are well known.

Justin:

See, this is what gets tricky is that I'm seeing there's there's there's not 50 shades, but there's a few shades of this. This is how I know John's gonna be a good partner because I can say the worst jokes, and he he actually laughs. There's different shades of this, and a little some of it is a little bit of your circle and a little little bit of my circle. Right? So my circle is very, like, very solopreneur, very, like, building an online business, very like, they're almost all building software.

Justin:

And Joe Joe with the the Weaver Space stuff and the Weverse Report, he's a perfect example. Like, he has an amazing business. It's just him. He's making really good money selling software online, and that's kind of one shade. But on the other shade, we have a lot of this kind of Chicago podcasting folks.

Jon:

And Yeah. Or, like, people connected to that network who Mhmm. Who have a network of shows that they wanna add or a couple individual shows that are very popular with within the podcasting world.

Justin:

Yeah. And I've struggled with this even in our messaging. Initially, I thought our headline would be the best way to create a podcast for your business. And as I went down that road, I saw a subsection of our customers that don't identify with that. And so I've switched it to, professional podcast hosting and analytics or podcast hosting and analytics for professionals

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Which feels like a bigger umbrella, but I'm worried that I've dulled the sword a bit. And maybe I don't need to be worried about that. We also have folks that are, you know, starting a you know, folks that have podcast networks.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And that they are running a business, like, it's a business. So Karen Unland, who I just mentioned, her business is running the Alberta Podcast Network, which was which was modeled after what you have in Chicago with the Chicago podcast

Jon:

Cooperative. Yeah.

Justin:

Cooperative. Yeah. And, you know, she's trying to run it like a business. She wants to have a big sponsor that kind of pays for things. She and she has kind of a social mandate as well, but and so there there's some different flavors here that you've just kinda brought up that, you know, it is I think we could fit both shades under, you know, all of these definitions, but what's tricky is they may not identify like that.

Justin:

I think if you look at the messaging of our competitors, I think that's why they have such a hard time too. Yeah. They just always just end up saying, this is the simplest and easiest way to start a podcast. And it's like, okay. But who is this for?

Justin:

Who are you building this for? And what are they struggling with in particular? And when I think about a small tech team and what they need out of a podcast, it becomes really clear or much clearer what we need to build. Mhmm. Right?

Justin:

They they care about analytics, but they want analytics. They wanna know how is this growing my audience, how is this, you know, eventually helping me improve my brand or increase revenue? They have they have outcomes that they want. Yeah.

Jon:

They might also want something like an API so they can actually do other things with it Mhmm. And build new whatever, third party features on top of a platform. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. And so I think we've just identified a a kind of root struggle we have in our in our group. Like, as I go through these people already using Transistor, there is both flavors. There's both shades there.

Justin:

Some of these folks just have a really fun podcast that they do on the side that earns money, but they're not thinking of themselves as a business.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

And some of these folks, you know, like, Mike Varty is a good example. He is, you know, he's a professional. He he's thinking of himself as a brand, and he is trying to earn a living for him and his family doing productivity, advice, and time management. And that's what he does. Right?

Justin:

And so this is we might have to have a part 2 in this because I I feel like we almost need to simmer on this a bit of can we fit everybody under this umbrella? Right. Is there enough shared goals for these people and enough shared language, enough shared values that we could say, you know what? This is for these folks, everyone up to these folks. And while we're being vulnerable, I think one of my fears once we get up to those bigger brands, specifically, some of the brands we've thought about up till now, like Basecamp and Cards Against Humanity and, you know, their objectives are much more kind of touchy feely in terms of, you know, you know, like, there's Waylon Wong in in when I was interviewing her, she does the Basecamp podcast.

Justin:

She says, you know, I think a big part of the Basecamp podcast is Jason and David just wanna get their point of view out into the world.

Jon:

Right. They're not necessarily yeah. I mean, for base camp and cartoon humanity, they're not they're not directly selling their product. They are providing, I don't know, providing some new content that might reinforce their viewpoint or suggest a product, but they're not, like, they're not out there, like, wheeling the dealing and, like, selling selling things on the podcast necessarily. Just it's sort of awareness.

Jon:

It's advertising for them, really. I mean, it's

Justin:

Well but is it advertising? That's the thing. And if it is advertising, I think that's that is a shared value, you know, all the way up and down the the line. Right? So prosumers, solopreneurs, small tech teams, bigger brands.

Justin:

But it gets a little bit harder to figure that out once you get to, you know, like the Mastercard podcast. We know that they have a business objective with the show. And I I had assumed that Basecamp and KARDs and some of these other big brands also had a business objective. But, you know, it could sometimes, it might just be, you know, they've got a lot of money, and they just wanna do something fun. Yeah.

Justin:

And, I just don't know if I've ever articulated that before. Partly because I'm scared of that that mess. You know? Just trying to figure out, okay, who who is this for? Because who is this for will dictate what our plans look like and what we eventually charge because what the outcomes these people want kinda that's where you work backwards from.

Justin:

Right? And so it almost feels like we need to kind of pause here and just, yeah, maybe simmer on that for a week of who is this for, and can we fit podcast networks right alongside someone building a small little tech company? Yeah. Can is there enough shared values and enough shared desired outcomes with those groups that we can say, you know, this is for you as well?

Jon:

But then, yeah, but then also yeah. It's tough because while while pricing isn't necessarily always set in stone, it's hard to raise prices Mhmm. Later on without some blowback, but, also, it's hard maybe sometimes hard to reduce prices because people maybe it reduces the value perceived value of your product, but also, like, maybe irritates people who paid more for a while. I don't

Justin:

Yeah. Well and the other thing I think we'll wrestle with is that in podcasting, there is this cool factor. Like, there are some shows that wanna switch to Transistor that are really fucking cool. And, like, I am fans of those hosts. I you know?

Justin:

And I would love to have them on the platform just because as a fan, I feel like, oh, that would be so cool. It would be cool to be able to go to a party and brag about that. And, you know, it it makes us it makes me feel like, yeah, like, we're not just we're not just doing business. Like, we we are culturally relevant. You know?

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, there's also a a measure of, I don't know, proud proudness. Is that even a word?

Justin:

Yeah. Pride. Pride. Proud.

Jon:

I just said proudness. That's not a word at all. Pride, pride of of having a show that you admire being on a, you know, service that you built and saying, hey. Yeah. This thing works really well and well enough for these people that I really admire.

Justin:

Yeah. I've I the the challenge with that is I've just seen in my own life in the past how, like, going after people because they're cool, is a really slippery slope.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And yeah, it it's something that I I worry about because I'm you know? Yeah. It's just it's just difficult. And it when you're being pulled emotionally somewhere, it's easy to rationalize things. And, you know, when people come to Transistor, we wanna make sure that there's you know, we're solving their problems, and we're able to articulate the the struggles they're having.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

Yeah. I've I've certainly been in situations with previous companies where there are clients that we really wanted and we were like, we'll do anything to get them. We'll pull out the stops. We'll, like, put in these sort of one off fixes or features that maybe they'll only they're gonna use. And then it, it has a potential to turn into a total disaster because then you're, you're sort of tailoring this thing to one one client.

Jon:

They might leave. You might have a bunch of code debt that is just in your app that might you know, you gotta get rid of at some point or might inhibit some other feature from being built or built the right way. So it's

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, imagine if someone who's, on NPR, that gal that does those amazing, she's like everyone thinks she's the best interviewer. NPR what's

Jon:

her name? Terry Gross?

Justin:

Yes. So let's let's imagine that Terry Gross says announces she's leaving NPR, and she comes to us and says, listen. I think you guys are great. I wanna do my show here. And I can just imagine because I'm a fan of her shows.

Justin:

I've loved, like, what she's done. I can imagine me going, John, let's do whatever it takes to get Terry on the platform.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Like, let's give her a deal. Let and then Terry goes, you know, I really don't like that, you know, this thing that you have in transistor. Could you change it? And we go, oh, okay. Well and it would just this is probably unfair to Terry.

Justin:

She's she Terry, you are welcome on transistor anytime.

Jon:

And then and then and then I'm writing code that says if host is Terry Gross,

Justin:

you just

Jon:

do this. Otherwise, don't. Yeah. I mean, I've been in that situation.

Justin:

If host is Terry Gross. Oh my god. Yeah. Like exactly. And so then because we've got stars in our eyes

Gavin:

Yeah.

Justin:

And because it's a nice thing to share with the family at Thanksgiving, mom and dad, guess who's on transistor. Who? Terry Gross. You're not no way. But what you yeah.

Justin:

But that's

Jon:

not that's not beneficial to us. It's I mean, personally, maybe is a little validating, but, like, we would want that that host to talk about us, but they're paying us. So the why would they? Like, we're not sponsoring their show.

Justin:

Yeah. And so this is the tricky part is how can you be unemotional about who your customer is going to be? Because everybody wants cool customers.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Like, you know, the everybody wants that. And

Jon:

But I think I think everyone wants that so that in the hope that that person will talk about them. Yeah. But it never really works out that way because then you're just like, I mean, I've been I've been in that boat before. We're like, oh, man, I'd love to get this customer because then they'll like tweet about us or whatever and say great things, and it'll spread the word. And all these people thousands of people will sign up, but that's not their motivation to use a product.

Justin:

Yeah. And, actually, as you were saying that, I realized how, the the difference, I think, is with, you know, with a customer like Matt June Giovannucci, who just signed up, I when I think about him, I'm just thinking, how can I serve him? How can I make this product better? How can I help him grow his show? I was thinking of doing, you know, reaching out to some of our our smaller, you know, podcasts and just saying, I wanna do whatever it takes to help you grow your listenership and, you know, manually helping them.

Justin:

But with, you know, kind of the celebrities or other, like, big brands or whatever, some of that becomes selfish for the founder, where our language becomes a lot more like, oh, I wonder what they can do for us, or, oh, that would really make me feel good emotionally. You know, it make me feel proud to be able to bring that name up in conversation. Yep. Do do you see what I'm saying? There's Right.

Justin:

There's this in terms of motivation, it seems to change where the the language gets a lot more selfish or self centered when as soon as you start thinking about, like, oh, I hope they tweet about us. Oh, I hope they mention us. You know?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And as opposed to, hey, what can we do for you? Or even better is we know what we can do for you. We've been expecting you. This is what we do for a living. We know how we can best serve you because we've been listening, and here we go.

Justin:

We're we're ready. It's it's just, a different it it feels a lot different.

Jon:

Yep. I agree.

Justin:

Yeah. I think we should leave it here. One thing I I I'll, you know, kinda put out to you, John, and also the listener is I I've been looking a lot at at Hootsuite's pricing.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And there's something about it that I like. They have this It feels very accessible, like, $19 a month if you are a kind of solo professional, one user, one show. And I'm wondering if that should be our starting point, something around there. And then jumping up to $99 a month, which is if you've ever worked in SaaS, the $99 plan is kind of the it's the one it's one of the best plans to have because everything becomes easier

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

At that level. We would go from needing 8,000 customers 8,333 customers to 833 customers. So it becomes much more realistic for us to create a a business Yeah. Around a $100 customer.

Jon:

I guess yeah. I guess the question comes in, what does that include? And is it multiple shows, or is it one show, or is it unlimited shows, or is it, like Yeah. 5 shows or 2 I mean, guess we have to figure out what are what are potential customers. Are they gonna be, like, focusing on one show or multiple shows?

Jon:

Yeah. That's a big kind of a big difference.

Justin:

Well, I think what we'll do is we're gonna we'll leave this to the listener. Listener, if you're listening right now, get us on Twitter at Johnbuda and at m I Justin. And, I we want to hear what you would recommend for us. You've heard us you've probably actually noticed things as we've been talking that we have not noticed, and we would love to hear your opinion. We're not necessarily gonna act on everything.

Justin:

But if you have a strong opinion at johnbuda@mijustinor@transistorfm, whatever you want, and just say, hey, I heard the show. This is what I think you should do next. That those Twitter handles are in the show notes as well. That's atsaas.transistor.fm. I think, John, you and I should also reach out to you.

Justin:

We have a good network between us of business people we trust.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

It'd be interesting for us to share this episode with them and say, what do you think? What do you think we should do? What are you hearing that, you know, that maybe we haven't noticed? So, you know, I think you could reach out to Max for sure, some other people in Chicago. Maybe we should try to get Jason Fried, Patio 11, Rob Walling, Patrick, from Price Intelligently.

Justin:

Folks, if you're listening if any of you are listening that we just mentioned, we you you guys know how to get a hold of us, and, we'd love to hear what we're missing here. We're very open to making good decisions moving forward.

Jon:

Absolutely.

Justin:

John, why don't you share with folks we have a just a few updates, on what's new with transistor. What's going on?

Jon:

Let's see. So, primarily, what we've been working on lately is our marketing site, so that is, nearly done. I don't know if we mentioned that before we're gonna run the marketing site on WordPress. Mhmm. Have the all the application is run elsewhere on, Amazon.

Jon:

Mm-mm. So it's sort of been me getting back into WordPress. It's been about a decade or more. You, you know, it, it's changed a lot. There's a bunch of new plugins and Adam Clark helped us build it, set up a lot of customizable little things that are good, but to take some getting used to,

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So we're just sort of finishing up the home page and and some other, you know, secondary pages and fixing up the mobile the mobile version of that.

Justin:

I just noticed something that you added. Yeah. That's really cool. You if you're logged in to Transistor

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Which is a Ruby on Rails app, the WordPress site says your dashboard instead of login.

Jon:

Yep. That is, I sort of noticed that Stripe was doing that. Yeah. And it's pretty easy. You're just sharing a cookie that says you're signed in, and the cookie is shared across the same domain.

Justin:

You smarty pants. That yeah. That I I I'm sure that's simple on your side, but I'm I've I'm a, wow. How did he do that with you, Degan? These these two systems can't talk to each other.

Justin:

That's great.

Jon:

Took a sec to figure that out. Yeah. It's kinda cool. That that was a I had some feedback That was from someone before customer before that was like, yeah. I mean, I wanna be able to visit the homepage if I'm logged in, but get to the, get to my app quickly.

Jon:

If I'm already logged in and I'm like, okay. Yeah. Makes sense. That's the biggest change really. There's not too many changes, within that application itself, you know, a couple small bug fixes here and there.

Jon:

Mhmm. So a few updates to analytics as far as logging downloads.

Justin:

One thing we've been trying to do is improve our documentation and improve our onboarding. So I'm working on some emails right now that go out to our new customers that just show them, you know, here's the the most common question we get right now is what's going on how do I get on Spotify? And, just as an update to that, we just talked to our we have an official, brand manager at Spotify, partnerships manager. And they, you know, they let us know kinda what's going on. And Spotify is just been inundated with requests for people to get on Spotify, both through their manual process, but also through this back end process that they've developed.

Justin:

And they've basically taken it all offline. So there's no new shows being accepted anywhere, and they're predicting right now it's gonna be it's probably be, end of June 2018 before they're able to start, accepting feeds again. So, you know, we get a lot of emails and messages from folks saying, how do I get on Spotify? And, you know, there's some shows that were able to sneak in before they had to take it offline, and they are on Spotify. But for everybody else, even, you know, whether you're trying to submit it manually through their Google form or through a partner, that's all on hold right now.

Justin:

So that's, that's Spotify update. Also, trying to share how people can get more listeners. Yep. And yeah. So and we're gonna we're hoping to launch the marketing site May 25th.

Justin:

That's in 4 days. Yep. I think, honestly, I think we should just launch it. Like, I think we should just launch it on that day. Like, if we've whatever we've got done

Jon:

Yeah. It's better than what we have now.

Justin:

Yeah. I think we should just go live. That's that's really what we're working on. We our review contest. So we've been doing this contest where if you leave a review in Itunes for build your SaaS, we will give you, we're gonna enter we're gonna have a draw for a transistor t shirt.

Justin:

That's almost over because, it's end of May, that we're doing the that till. And I wanna read a few reviews, from Canada. We have these Itunes names are ridiculous. Hasky? I I he says, or she says.

Justin:

I'm not sure. It could be who knows who this person is? Tons of great fun to listen to. Really enjoying the dynamic between John and Justin. Even they agree even though they agree on pretty much everything, you see they approach the responses from different angles, which is a great way to come to consensus.

Justin:

That is a total Canadian review right there. Let's see here. Snake Spit from the United States says so much of the media around startups revolves around the big venture capital backed companies, and there's plenty of room in the world for small partnerships to build their own thing. This is a great diary of John and Justin's journey to build their product. I'm getting a lot of inspiration listening to the podcast.

Justin:

So thank you so much for those reviews. Right now, we have 27 reviews globally, which is fantastic. I would love to see that get up to 40. 40 global reviews. So, folks, if you haven't left a review yet, just go into iTunes, go into Apple Podcasts, search for Build Your SaaS, and click that 5 star icon, and then it'll bring up the the opportunity to leave a written review.

Justin:

And we do read those. We do appreciate them. They are, really encouraging for us, and they do help the show get noticed. Also, surprising how many I last week, I mentioned, hey. If you're listening in Breaker right now, the podcast app, leave us a heart and a comment.

Justin:

And we were one of the top 20 shows on Breaker last week. We had, I think, 6 or 7 people click that little heart icon, and we had probably 4 people leave a comment. So if you're on breaker, that's kinda fun. Click that heart icon and leave us a comment. That's, that's been fun to interact with listeners in there.

Justin:

And I think that's it, John. Anything else you want to say?

Jon:

No. That should be it, I think.

Justin:

Perfect. Well, we'll see you folks next week for part 2 of our pricing decision. See you then.