Build Your SaaS

Don't waste time and money building something people don't want!

Show Notes

Play this episode | Download MP3

Jon is busy launching our new podcast analytics feature, so this episode features Justin's talk from MicroConf 2018 in Las Vegas.

You need more than product/market fit. You need alignment between you as a founder, your market, and your product.

In this episode, you'll hear Justin's step-by-step approach for:
  1. Identifying who you are, and what you want
  2. Choosing a market
  3. Discovering what they want
  4. Shipping a (small) initial solution

Show notes

T-shirt contest!  Leave a review you’ll be entered to win a limited edition Transistor t-shirt!
★ Please review us in iTunes ★

Thanks to our monthly supporters
  • Pascal from sharpen.page
  • Rewardful.com
  • Greg Park
  • Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
  • Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
  • Bill Condo (@mavrck)
  • Ward from MemberSpace.com
  • Evandro Sasse
  • Austin Loveless
  • Michael Sitver
  • Dan Buda
  • Colin Gray
  • Dave Giunta

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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.

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.

Jason:

And And

Justin:

I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor.fm. Everybody, Justin here. Welcome back to build your SaaS.

Justin:

Little different episode this week. I'm just back from Las Vegas. I was speaking at a conference there. And so John and I hadn't had time to meet up and record a new episode. He's also been busy releasing our analytics feature.

Justin:

It's live inside of Transistor and looking really good. Obviously, we're going to iterate on this. It's going to get better, but nice to have, more fully featured analytics setup inside of Transistor. For this episode, what I thought I'd do is share my talk from MicroConf with you. It was entitled an unconventional way to validate your product idea.

Justin:

And I get into why I think it's unconventional. And I think it'll be interesting for you because a lot of you are trying to validate your idea for a web app or a product. And, also, it tells a lot of the transistor story. So let's get into my talk. Let's give a warm welcome to mister Justin Jackson.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Do I have a remote? Yeah. I'm coming.

Justin:

We forgot that part. I've been wanting Are you gonna need this? Perfect. I've been wanting,

Jason:

Iron Maiden as my intro music forever.

Justin:

Like, every talk I've Iron Maiden as my intro music forever, like every talk I've ever given. And today, Xander made it happen. Everyone give Xander a hand over there.

Speaker 4:

He runs this whole show.

Justin:

Here's a little bit of history about me. I, I've been doing SaaS for 10 years. Start in 2008 when I was 28 years old. In 2015, I wrote a book called Marketing for Developers. Has anyone read that?

Justin:

Anyone here? Oh, nice. Woah. Thank you. And, that allowed me to go full time as a solopreneur in 2016.

Justin:

And I can remember wanting to do that forever. Like, listening to Mike and Rob in my car while I was driving an hour to work and being, like, I can't wait till I can go independent. And that happened 2 years ago. And this year, I'm building, a brand new podcast hosting application with my buddy, John. I'll tell you a bit more about that later.

Justin:

But this is the title I gave my talk, an unconventional way to validate your product idea. And you might have looked at that and gone, well, what's so unconventional about it? And I'm gonna tell you. But to illustrate it, I wanna tell you a story. You guys okay with a story right now?

Justin:

Yeah. All right. Let's tell a story. I started snowboarding in 1995. 15 years old.

Justin:

Anyone here snowboard too? All right. Put your hands down. How many skiers we got here? Lame.

Justin:

No, I'm just joking. So I started snowboarding in 1995. And almost immediately I started dreaming. Look at that punk kid there. Oh, 15 year old Justin.

Justin:

Frosted tips. Almost immediately I started dreaming about opening my own snowboard shop. And in 2003, made that dream happen. I opened a snowboard shop with 3 friends, sorry, 2 friends. And this was a huge mistake.

Justin:

This is our grand opening announcement. What is this? May 1, 2003 was our grand opening. The real deal. And in 2005, we closed the shop.

Justin:

And I don't know if has anyone here been in retail before? I don't you don't realize how much money it takes to start a shop, even a little one. And once we'd gotten rid of all of our unused inventory, paid suppliers, paid employees, paid to get out of our lease, all those things. I was $85,000 in debt.

Jason:

I

Justin:

was 25. And it really sucked. And I want to tell you what I learned from that because I think it applies to us as we're building digital product businesses. There's a lot of similarities. Lesson 1.

Justin:

Choosing the right customer is more important than what you sell. Let me illustrate. Snowboarders oh, sorry. Put it another way. Snowboarders are fun to hang out with, but they make shitty customers.

Justin:

And here's a picture that will tell you everything you need to know about my customers. This is Fockler. That's his real name. And he was my buddy, snowboard buddy. Used to hang out, great snowboarder.

Justin:

But, he does it look like this guy has money? No. He spent all of his money basically on food and a lift ticket. He was like a ski bum. Believe it or not, I hired this guy.

Justin:

And we have all sorts of stories about Faklar, but what I'll tell is we had this, like, high kind of rafters area. And one day I went up to, like, clean it. And I saw a sleeping bag, a pipe, and some Doritos.

Jason:

And I

Justin:

was like, what's going on here? And I realized that Fockler was living in the snowboard shop. So if you're trying to sell $800 snowboards, not a great customer. Who you sell to matters a lot. Lesson 2, starting small is almost always better than going big.

Justin:

And when I was dreaming as a teenager about having a shop, this is what I pictured fancy lights, nice fixtures, 100 of 1,000 of dollars worth of inventory. But in truth, I should've started like this, hawking snowbirds out of a van or a truck or something. Because the lessons you learn when you start small are and what you experience when you start small, just gets magnified when you go big. So you get to discover, do I like this customer? What's it like serving a bunch of Focklers?

Justin:

You know, what's it like ordering all this inventory? You get to experience all of that when it's small, and the stakes aren't as high. And so, if you decide to get out, like, I don't like this, it hasn't cost you as much. Right? And this is I I'm gonna quote Derek Sivers a lot.

Justin:

He's basic you don't really need to listen to me. Just bring up servers.org and read that long talking. But he has this quote, For an idea to get big, it needs

Speaker 4:

to start small. Lesson 3.

Justin:

I think the way we start businesses historically is wrong. And, you know, this is kind of the way I started the real deal. Right? Biz plans pro. This is this has been around forever.

Justin:

You have a dream, you launch it, and then you make money. Right? That's the idea. And this has been around for a long time, and we've started to figure out, this doesn't always work. Isn't always effective.

Justin:

So we've we've modified it a bit. It's evolved. So we went to Biz Plans Pro 2000. And now it's like, Have a good idea. Validate it.

Justin:

Launch it. And then you make money. But even this is not enough. And this is what I mean when I say, I think I'm going to present an unconventional way to validate your product idea. It's not enough to have an idea, do a bit of validation, and launch it.

Justin:

You need more than product market fit. That's kind of my thesis for this whole talk. And I think you actually need 3 things. Market founder fit, product market fit, and founder sorry. Product founder fit.

Justin:

So market founder fit is exactly that. Who are my customers? Do I like them? Are they easy to reach? Are these people that I want to serve every single day for the rest of my life?

Justin:

Right? Product market fit. That's what we all want. That's what we're all looking for. You know, it's having a good market and then finding a product that satisfies that market.

Justin:

And then the third one, a lot of people don't think about this. Product founder fit. Is this product a good fit for what I want? Is it a good Does it match up with my values? Does it get me where I want to go?

Justin:

Alright. I put this in here to remind me to breathe. Doing a lot of meditation these days. Trying to calm myself down. Alright.

Justin:

That's enough talking about me. I'm going to quickly talk about you folks here. Why are you here? I want you guys this is audience participation. You're gonna put up your hands when I ask you.

Justin:

So how many of you are here because you want to find a product idea? Put up your hands.

Speaker 4:

Nice and high. Nice and high. Don't be shy. Alright. Put them down.

Speaker 4:

How many of you are here because you need to choose a target market? Put up your hands

Justin:

Nice and high.

Speaker 4:

Right. Put them down. How many of you are here because

Justin:

you want to validate your product idea that you already have? Put your hands up. Okay. Man, there's a lot of participation over here. I I don't know what's going on over here.

Justin:

I only got one more. So you guys better lift your hand. How many of you are here, you've launched, but you want more customers? Alright. Alright.

Justin:

So I'm gonna try to help all you folks with, a product validation roadmap. And it's based on all my years of experience doing SaaS. It's based on my 2 years being solo. But it's also, I think we have an interesting time in my history because I've just launched a new SaaS with my buddy, John, called transistor.fm. So I've got some history.

Justin:

I've made some mistakes. I've learned some things. And now, in some ways, I'm right where a lot

Speaker 4:

of you are at, because I'm launching this brand new thing. So this is going

Justin:

to be a step by step approach for identifying who you are and what you want, choosing a market, discovering what they want, and shipping a solution. Are you guys ready? Does this sound good? You guys are with me? How about you right there?

Justin:

Are you with me? Okay. Good. Here we go. Section 1.

Justin:

You might want to bring out some paper and a pen for this because I'm going to ask you some very personal questions. Question number 1. What's your motivation for wanting to build a product? I've been doing these coaching calls where people call me. They pay to call me.

Justin:

And what they want often is they want me to validate their product idea, Which is a bad idea. I got on a call the other day with this kid. He's a handsome kid, you know, curly hair. And, I said, Okay. Well, what are you, what are you doing?

Justin:

He's like, Well, I want to do arbitrage for a cryptocurrency. And I'm like, I have no effing idea what you're talking about. Like, I'm your I am not your target market. But what I could ask him is, what do you want? What do you want to get out of this?

Justin:

What's your motivation? And if you haven't written this down, I want to build

Speaker 4:

a product so that I can what? You want to quit your job? You want

Justin:

to spend more time with your kids? You want to snowboard more? You want to, I don't know, travel more? You want to have more wealth? What do you want?

Justin:

Because there's no sense in going through this whole product validation process if you don't know what you're aiming for. And you'll never know if this product is a good fit for your life unless you've, written this down. So write this down. I want to build a product so that I can blank. Question number 2 is what do you value?

Justin:

James Clear has this great, list of core values. You can go there to get the full list. But, you know, creativity, impact, integrity, adventure, family, wealth,

Speaker 4:

spirituality, peace. What do

Justin:

you value? And this is important because you want to make sure this matches up with whatever product you decide to pursue, or what market you tried to pursue. If you want peace, don't serve a bunch of marketing jackasses like me. Right? We're going to make your life chaotic.

Justin:

Here's another question people don't ask very often. How rich do you want to be? And it's important, you know? Do you want to be very wealthy? Are you shooting for $1,000,000 a year?

Justin:

Higher than average, 300 k a year? Financially secure, a 150 k a year? Maybe you just need your basic needs met, 50 k to a 100? Write this out. What are you aiming for?

Justin:

Okay. So we've just talked about you. Talked about what you want. And the next stage, instead of just saying, you know, I want to do this, or I have an idea to do this, I'm gonna advise that you choose the group you want to serve. Who do you want to serve?

Justin:

A great business isn't really about you and your dream. That was the problem with the real deal. That was my dream. It was all about me. A great business is about helping your customers achieve their dreams.

Justin:

Right? So don't start with an idea. Start with a group of people you want to help. And you really need to do this. Figure out who you want to serve.

Justin:

And here's a little tip. This is something I've learned recently. Just talking to a lot of founders, being involved in a lot of SaaS businesses, doing a lot of consulting. Some markets are just bigger, easier to reach, and more profitable than others. So it pays to think about this.

Justin:

It pays to do some research now before you launch anything. And here's a few ideas for finding your market. All you folks that put up your hand for looking for a target market. How do you currently make a living? What kind of customers do you serve at work?

Justin:

You know, these are the people already paying for your expertise. What communities do you belong to? What do you do better than anyone else? Those are, like, good, like, places to look. You're already in the banking industry as a Laravel developer, well, you've got the banking industry.

Justin:

They're already paying you, and you're also a part of the Laravel community. Right? Here's an example. Ian Landsman.

Speaker 4:

I like Ian. There's a

Justin:

few people, in this community that just will not put up with my bullshit, and Ian's one of them. But he got the idea for HelpSpot when he was working at a college, Because their support desk system was a mainframe with a terminal connected to it. And it was all, like, command line based. And it was just a pain, and he thought there has to be some a better way to do this. And so he built something in the browser.

Justin:

He called it Help Spot. And guess who his first customers were? Colleges and universities. Why? He was working for a college in a He was working for a college.

Justin:

So the the, where you work can often be a good place to start. Factors to consider. How do they spend money? Do they spend money? How big is the market, and how easy are they to reach?

Justin:

Here's another great example. Forsberg. He decided to target Shopify stores. Why? There's 500,000 plus stores paying $29 to $299 a month.

Justin:

That's a good market. We know it's big. We know they spend money. And we also know that on average, they spend another $30 per month on add ons in the Shopify app store. So built a couple, Shopify apps, and he's doing about $275,000 in revenue every year.

Justin:

A lot of it is that he chose the right market. How easy are they to reach? I'll use Adam Wadden. He's speaking right after me. But, Adam Wavin's got a great market.

Justin:

Really, it's PHP developers, specifically those that want to learn Laravel. But that's a lot of people. And are they easy to reach? Yeah. Adam says that a lot of his business comes from Twitter.

Justin:

So he can hang out on Twitter and he has a direct channel to his market. There's also events like Laracon, where you can go and you can meet them face to face. There's online communities like Laracasts. So you want to make sure your market is easy to reach. Right?

Justin:

If your if your market's, I don't know, Tibetan monks, who don't use computers, that might be tricky. Right? Alright. Section 3. This is the one everyone wants to skip.

Justin:

Customer research. Now you've chosen your market. Now you've got to research them. What are the big pain points that already exist in this market? So Bjorn was like, man, it's really hard to print shipping labels for Shopify stores.

Justin:

So that's the first app he made. How did he figure that out? He was in the forums day after day after day, and he noticed it kept kind of bubbling up. What are the things that are bubbling up? Simmering in the community or the market you're targeting?

Justin:

What do they search on Google? You know, what are What kinds of questions are they asking every day? There's a few tools you can use, to figure some of this stuff out. Productvalidator.com is a brand new one. Answer the public is another one.

Justin:

Ahrefs is another one. But this is what Product Validator looks like. I put in podcasting. I go to the questions tab, and then it gives me a bunch of common frequently asked questions. These are helpful.

Justin:

You know? And there might be some pain points

Speaker 4:

in here I want to address. And I'm

Justin:

this is what I'm asking. The other thing you should do that no one wants to do, I'm I am extroverted as hell. I've been here since Sunday for growth. I have not stopped talking since then. Even I don't like getting on the phone and interviewing customers.

Justin:

I know it's hard, or potential customers. But you have to do it. Because the, the information you get while you're on the phone with someone, just, it doesn't compare to anything you can maybe get on just watching people on Twitter or guessing. You actually get them on the phone. Here's a few things that have worked for me.

Justin:

They might not work for you, but I write case studies for my blog. And I that's a great way to get someone on the phone. Hey. I wanna do a case study on you, for my blog. Can we do a phone call?

Justin:

Here's one. This is an email I wrote Paldi. I was writing a book, and I wanted to feature him. It's just a great excuse to get him on the phone. Right?

Justin:

And so we had a Skype conversation and, I was able to ask him some of these questions. Hey. What are you working on right now? What's something you're looking to improve with, in his case, balsamic this year? What's something you'd like to accomplish, but can't?

Justin:

What's holding you back? Oh, this number 3, just write number 3 down because it shows so much. What was the last product, service, or tool you bought for work? If they can't think of something, then maybe they don't buy products. And maybe that's a bad market.

Justin:

Right? If they're like, I can't remember. Well, what's your least favorite tool that you have to use right now? What kind of tasks are you currently doing in Excel? That's a really good one.

Justin:

And what product do you wish existed but doesn't yet? And again, you're just looking for the trends, what keeps coming up over and over again. This is an example from micro conf. I typed GDPR into Slack and a bunch of things pop up. It's a hot topic.

Justin:

You can see the pain. Right? People are struggling with this. And so if you are a compliance person or whatever, maybe this is a good thing for you to focus on. It might be a bit late now, but this is what I'm saying.

Justin:

Like, these are the the examples you're looking for. Oh, yeah. Also in forums, this was a coaching client I had. He's like, Sorry. I have to cancel.

Justin:

I have to wait until after this GDPR hell. You know, it just keeps it coming up over and over and over again. You're like, man, there's something here. So then you summarize your research. What patterns emerged?

Justin:

What would you say this is a patio 11 thing. He says, focus on the number 1 or 2 thing that is on someone's mind. It's like they wake up that week and they're going to work, and they're like, I gotta solve this and I gotta solve this. Or this thing's in my way and this thing's in my way. Those are the things you want.

Justin:

And what would it mean for them if you solve that struggle? What would it mean for you them if you solve that struggle? Even just looking at that now, it connects to the human beings. Right? We're not just putting apps out into the world.

Justin:

We're solving problems for real human beings. Like, real people that get up and put on a shirt and get into their car and drive to work. Like, those are the people we're serving. Right? Okay.

Justin:

Section 4, write out your hypothesis. And I've I had a version of this last year and I improved on it. So if you came back, this is a better version of the one I gave last year. This group wants this outcome, but struggle with this thing. I can help them by and then you just daydream.

Justin:

What are some ways I could help them with what I have right now? Like, how could I help these people? And if I did, what would their life look like after? So just using podcasting as an example, you know, many tech businesses want a branded podcast, but they struggle with getting listeners. I can help them buy and then I just start day Oh, improving their show art and description, getting them more ratings and reviews, making their episodes easier to share.

Justin:

What would their life look like? Well, now their podcast has more downloads and their business has more brand awareness. Right?

Speaker 4:

Section 5. Are you

Justin:

guys still with me? Everyone still awake? Feeling good? Alright. Start helping now.

Justin:

Again, Derek Sivers, the sage. If you want to be useful, you can always start now with only 1% of what you have in your grand vision. Doesn't this sound like something? Like the real deal a little bit? You know, the snowboard shot?

Justin:

It'll be a humble prototype version. It'll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you'll be

Speaker 4:

in the game. And so I want

Justin:

you to ask, what's the smallest possible thing you could do that would validate your hypothesis? So here's again, here's my hypothesis, right, for podcasting. Okay. What can I do now? Well, I could start a consulting service.

Justin:

Right? I could start DM ing people and say, Hey. I heard you want to start a show. I'm really good at writing titles and descriptions and making show art. What if you pay me, I don't know, $404100 for that?

Justin:

And I'll do that for you. Right? That's something I could do right now. No code needed. No funding needed.

Justin:

I could create a video tutorial and I could sell it for $39. I could do that right now. I could create a WordPress plug in that pulls in reviews and ratings from around the world and shows it in, WordPress site. Pretty simple. Not too much work.

Justin:

Right? I could create a podcast title tester. Right? May just a simple utility, maybe something I could build in a couple days or a week. What could I build right now that might test this out?

Justin:

And this is just so true. Everyone wants to jump to big, big, big, but starting small puts a 100% of your energy on actually solving real problems for real people. Human beings, these people you're going to serve. Alright. After you've done this, if you actually do this, by the way, if you actually do this, you will have results.

Justin:

You at least have some information about whether you should keep going or not. And now you can evaluate results. What does initial validation look like? You put something like this out into the world. So if I said, hey, I'll do your show titles and descriptions and you pay me, that's pretty good validation.

Justin:

I know that there's people out there that are willing to pay for that kind of service. Pre orders are pretty good too. Email address is kind of like the bare minimum. If you can get someone to give you their email address, that's pretty good validation. I like this quote too because, you know, a lot of people try to ask folks for what they want, and the truth is people can't really articulate what they want.

Justin:

It takes a lot of

Speaker 4:

research. You got to do

Justin:

a lot of observation. You got to read between the lines. You got to interview, but when you interview you have to say Ask questions like, well, what was the last product you bought for work?

Speaker 4:

How did you find it? Those kinds of things.

Justin:

A great example of this from microconf lore is Jason Cohen of WP Engine. And as the story goes, before he built WP Engine, he'd done his research, he'd chosen the market, he'd observed all these struggles, And then he thought, okay, how am I going to validate this? So he would go and pitch this to people, just like you and I would. Like, hey, I got this idea to build WordPress, WordPress hosting system that's scalable, that doesn't crash when there's a bunch of traffic, that has really good security, You know, it'll automatically disable plugins if they get infected. Would you pay for this?

Justin:

And if they said, Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'd totally pay for this. He said, okay. Can you write me a check right now for your 1st month?

Justin:

And he didn't cash it, but having that validation of that check was like, okay. I'm on the right track. People are willing to write me a check for something that doesn't exist. Right? There's some other trends you can also look for.

Justin:

They're not quite validation, but they're good signals. What's your target market investing in? So in the podcasting space, I noticed Rework I mean, sorry, Basecamp just launched this Rework podcast, hired 2 full time people and built a podcast studio in the office. I'm guessing it's like $200 a year. That's a pretty big investment.

Justin:

Right? That's a good sign. What's getting a lot of publicity right now? You've got to be careful with this, but sometimes, you know, the publicity is a good sign that There's something bubbling underneath

Speaker 4:

the surface. And what are

Justin:

people struggling with? If you just keep seeing stuff over and over again on Twitter and Slack. Slack especially, if you're doing client work. How many of you are doing client work and you're in your client's Slack? Put up your hands.

Justin:

You got to put on your researcher hats and just see all the product decisions that are being made in Slack. And note those down. They're talking about what they're gonna buy. Right?

Speaker 4:

How do they make those decisions? What are the struggles they're having in there? Okay.

Justin:

So I'm going to summarize the process, and I want to thank Rob Walling for coming up with the stair step model. I've modified it a little bit, but this is Rob's original idea. At the base level, you start with a small free offering. Free tool, tutorial, resource. Kind of what I said.

Justin:

If that works out, you go to the next level. Right? Small paid offering, service, plug in, workshop. If that works, go to the next level. Build a simple product that delivers value.

Justin:

If that works, go up to the next level. Put more features in, charge more, do a bigger launch. And I'm gonna, kind of, wind down, and show you how this has worked with Transistor. And I think I'll have some time for questions. So if you have if you've had questions so far that you've noted down about product validation, note those right now because I think I'll have some time for questions.

Speaker 4:

So here's how this works for transistor. First of all, I had

Justin:

a built in advantage. Remember at the beginning when I said, Who are you? Right? Like, what are your strengths? What are your values?

Justin:

What do you want? Well, one of my strengths and advantages is I was already podcasting. I've been podcasting since 2012. This is my first show

Speaker 4:

I did with Kyle Fox called Product People. This is

Justin:

my new show called Mega Maker. And, I just launched another show called Build Your SaaS, It's actually a terrible name because people can't tell if it's like sass as in sassy or, it doesn't work audibly as well. But I had This is an advantage, you know. I've been podcasting for a long time. I had already seen some of the trends, some of the struggles.

Justin:

And I also noticed something else that

Speaker 4:

was really interesting. So I eventually

Justin:

I was getting a lot of people requesting, like, phone calls, Skype to pick my brain. And it it just became too much. And so I came up with this rule. I said, I live So I live in British Columbia, not in Vancouver. I live, like, right in the middle of nowhere, like mountains and trees.

Justin:

And and I said, If you make it to Vernon, BC,

Speaker 4:

I will buy you a coffee. And it just cut down on all the requests quite

Justin:

a bit. But surprisingly, a lot of people have done this. Already in 2018, I think I've had 4 people do this. And some people fly in for it. It's crazy.

Justin:

And in each case, I'll take them out for coffee, we'll sit down, and they'll look at me, and they'll go, Justin, this is so weird. I say, Well, why? And I say, I've been listening to you for years, and I feel like I have a relationship with you, but we've never talked.

Speaker 4:

And that trend, that the fact that it impacted people like

Justin:

that, that podcasting impacted people like that, made me feel like, there might be something here. Maybe this is worse worth investing in as a product. It motivates people. There's something going on here. The other thing I noticed is when I launched marketing for developers, 75% of the people who bought were podcast listeners.

Justin:

How many of you have ever listened to a podcast that I've done? I just wanna see. Holy shit. Wow. Okay.

Justin:

Thank you. So it's a powerful medium. So before I even got to base level, I already had some experience. I had some ground level experience. Right?

Justin:

Then I started doing some blog posts and tutorials on podcasting, and they did really well. In fact, most of my stuff isn't very SEO friendly, but the stuff I was doing in podcasting was getting a lot of search traffic. This is good. This is a good sign. After that I graduated to doing, some paid courses around podcasting, some paid courses around doing branded content.

Justin:

That was doing really well. And then I just noticed this trend of all these businesses launching podcasts. Start up. This is essentially a branded content piece for Gimlet Creative. Right?

Justin:

I'm sorry, Gimlet Media. CodePen has a podcast. There's all these tech companies They're starting podcasts. It's the, it's a new channel for them. And then in, the growth conference, Brian Kaslow was saying 64.35%.

Justin:

That is so precise. Of his customers came from hearing him on a on a pod, podcast. Really good signs. Alright. So we're noticing Okay.

Justin:

There's some movement here. We've got some initial validation. Oh, people are willing to pay for this. Woah. People are investing a lot of money in branded podcasts.

Justin:

So then we built an initial version of transistor dot f m. We did it in about 6 weeks. I say we, but John built it. And then we sold one paid plan to Cards Against Humanity. A lot of people say, how did you get this customer?

Justin:

Well, John works for Cards Against Humanity. Right? That goes back to what I was saying. Where are you Who's already paying you for your time and expertise? So this was a great first customer to have.

Justin:

This customer, this, show's done really well. They've done about 3,000,000 downloads since they launched. And the feedback was so good that we said, Okay. Oh, and the other trend that we noticed, this kind of came up while we were doing this, Google is now, ranking and crawling audio. So they're they're transcribing it in the background and then showing in search results.

Justin:

And if you're on Android, they'll actually show you the audio episodes in search results too.

Speaker 4:

That's a good sign for branded content. Right? You get

Justin:

a sense of how I'm, like, kind of layering this up? Like, man, this looks good. This looks good. This looks good. And so, after all of that, we decided to add some more features, add some billing features, like be able to charge people without sending them an invoice, and then open up early access.

Justin:

And we did that in the last 2 months. This is kind of what the product looks like today. And, this is what our early access invites look like. And this is my last slide. We're right now, we have about 56 people.

Justin:

John told me to turn off the early access. We were getting too many. So we had 56 early access customers. They have to put their credit card in, and already there's a 14 day trial, and already 39 people have converted to paid plans. And so that's how we validated Transistor so far.

Justin:

And that's it. That's all I've got for you. Thanks for listening, guys. Alright, folks. That's it for this week's episode.

Justin:

I hope you enjoyed that a little bit different, and I hope you got something out of it. If you did, please tweet us at transistorfm. You can also tweet me, m I justin. That's the letter m, letter I, Justin. And guess who finally tweeted on Twitter.

Justin:

7th sign of the apocalypse, John Buddha at John Buddha. He is now replying to your tweets. It's incredible. I can't believe it happened. You folks made it happen because you kept responding to the show.

Justin:

Also, remember, we have got a t shirt contest going on right now for anybody that leaves a review in iTunes. So go to iTunes. In the app, you just scroll down, you click 5 stars, and then you must write a review to be entered in the contest. Contest goes till the end of May, and you'll be the winner will receive a exclusive, one of a kind transistor t shirt. I just got mine in the mail the other day.

Justin:

Maybe I'll link that up in the show notes. You can get those at saas dot transistor.fmsas.transistor.fm. Alright. I'll see you next week where I'll be back in the saddle. Back in the saddle with John?

Justin:

No. Where John and I will be hosting this again together. See you then.