Build Your SaaS

When you're running a web app, there are worries that keep you up at night.

Show Notes

News

  • We’ve opened up early access! We’ve been inviting people by email.
  • We currently have 15 shows on our platform. In four months, we’ve served 2,335,033 downloads!
  • So far: great feedback and feature requests.
  • We have a bunch of folks in our trial funnel. We’ll start seeing whether people convert to paying accounts on April 6.
  • XOXO is back!

Top fears when you're building a SaaS

  • Can our servers handle the load? (So far, so good: over 2 million downloads)
  • Will the user experience be good?
  • Are we building the right tools?
  • Uptime. There's this added layer of stress, because you don't want to let users down.
  • Lack of time to build an app on the side.
  • Or, working too much and burning out!

Two co-founders can't go out drinking the same night, unless they're in the same room. 😜

How to get over your fears

  • Don't focus on your competition; focus on your customers!
  • Listen to your customers. Get on the phone with them. Read their emails. Do live chat.
  • Get paying customers as soon as you can. Listen to their feedback.
  • Your ego is the enemy. You're putting your product out into the world so people get value from it.
  • Put things in context: sure, this might not work out. But that's not the worst thing that could happen.

How to get over your fears?

Send us a tweet (@transistorfm), or email us: shows@transistor.fm. We'd love your audio clips as well!

Links


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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.

Jon:

Though I will say because of where we're at with the product right now, there's actually no way to cancel your account.

Justin:

So That's our secret sauce.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. We want you to follow along as we launch transistor.f m. So, John, how's it going today? It's March 16, 2018.

Justin:

What have you been up to?

Jon:

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Things are going good. I, I'm working at home today, and I realized that I didn't have a good microphone. And I was walking around this morning doing some errands, and I had never tried out Amazon Prime now.

Jon:

So I turned on my phone and looked up, just searched for microphones, and found one of these little blue mics or made by Blue. It's actually black. And ordered one to my house, and it was there in an hour. And I was I was hoping it would be here by the time for a call. And it turns out it was.

Jon:

It was kind of amazing. It came in like a paper bag, like a lunch bag. This is like some random guy who delivered it and called me. It was great. You're kidding me.

Jon:

$5 extra to ship it. Okay. No. So No. It was great.

Justin:

Explain this to me as someone who lives in the in the remote mountains and forests.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

There's something called Amazon Prime now. And so you're like

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You're like, crap. I need a microphone.

Jon:

Yeah. They don't have they don't have everything. They have, like, food and some other products, like a random subset of products. I don't know how they choose it, but there's like a warehouse facility in the city not too far from here. And you can actually it shows it where where it's at on a map on your phone.

Justin:

Like Uber?

Jon:

It's a Uber. It's like I think they hire, like, personal drivers who just deliver it for you. They they like it's part of that gig economy, and they just pick it up and deliver it around the city. People have used it at the office office before, but I've never have. And I was, like, honestly, really surprised.

Justin:

That's crazy.

Jon:

You don't even have to leave my house. Oh my gosh. Do you wanna

Justin:

That's like one of those things where, you know, you're, like, running around and you're like, okay. I gotta do this, do this. Oh, crap. I gotta do this interview. And for me, I'd be like, okay.

Justin:

What store Yeah. In

Jon:

Yeah. I was like, RadioShack? It's not even open anymore.

Justin:

How come you thought of RadioShack?

Jon:

There's nowhere I can go.

Justin:

You thought of RadioShack first?

Jon:

Yeah. I I mean, I

Justin:

don't Hasn't RadioShack been closed for a long time? I just love that association. You're like, okay. I need a microphone. Where do I go?

Justin:

RadioShack.

Jon:

Yeah. I also need a time machine to travel back to 2,008.

Justin:

That's so funny. Well, that's incredible.

Jon:

Yeah. So it so it's in I think it's in a lot of big cities. Obviously, they need, like, a concentration of people for it to work, but, yeah, it's pretty great.

Justin:

That is that is crazy. Awesome. Well, Nat you've got a mic at home now?

Jon:

Hi. How are you doing today? Yeah. I have a mic at home.

Justin:

I'm doing well. I'm I'm pumped up. I was just telling you in Slack. I I just got off this call with Paldi and Fran from Balsamic, And, I they actually said I recorded the conversation, but and they said I could use I could use it in podcast, so we might play a snippet right here.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Exactly what I wanna do. I wanna do a user research interview for you. I wanna be your potential customer.

Justin:

Awesome.

Speaker 3:

So, so, I'll start talking. Okay?

Justin:

It was a customer development call, and I was you know, it's one of those things, like, I think everybody, myself included, even as an extroverted person, nobody wants to get on the phone and and listen to people or talk to people, but it is every time I do it, it's just so helpful. And so this was I've done a few of these calls now. I did one with Mike Vardy last week, and just getting on the phone with people, in this case Slack, and hearing, you know, asking them questions like, okay, so if you're going to do a podcast, what would be your obstacles? What would you use it for? Do you even want a podcast?

Justin:

You know, all of those kinds of things. What else are you doing for, you know, that's like this? Like, are you doing video or blogging or whatever? And just to sit across from real human beings and, you know, be able to hear what they have to say, hear what their life is like, hear what their companies are like. It's so helpful, and you really don't get that sense from anything else.

Jon:

Well, I've talked to, Alex Cox, who's in the office. She's part of Cards Against Humanity, and she's on a couple of pretty popular podcasts. But I was just asking her more of, more of some questions about the product itself and, like, what she would be looking for for analytics and what features are missing from other ones and stuff like that. It's just it's so much more enlightening to to do that in person or or over the phone or video than than, like, a Slack channel or anything.

Justin:

Yeah. You you get a sense of their, like, you can watch their body language and the intonation of their voice. So I shared with you this clip from Mike where he got really excited when I mentioned this one thing. Like, you see his face kinda light up. And you just don't get that sense over email.

Justin:

Like, there's no way for them to say there's no way for you to notice it. Right? And I'm sure it's the same with you when you were talking to Alex. You know, what what's most important to you? What's really a struggle?

Justin:

That stuff kinda bubbles to the top, and you get a sense right away. It's really rich.

Jon:

Definitely.

Justin:

Cool. Well, actually, this would be a good time for us to, maybe just update folks what's been happening, since the last time we released an episode. What have we been doing? What have we what have we been doing, John?

Jon:

What have we been doing? A lot of behind the scenes stuff, but we we opened up early access to a handful of people, and we've been inviting people by email to test out various plans we have, with some with some nice discounts. Mhmm. And currently have about 15 shows on the platform.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I'm not sure if all of them have episodes yet, but, I think most of them do.

Justin:

Yep. Can we tell folks yeah. Can we tell folks how because we've it's been going for about 4 months.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Transistor has been able to host podcasts for about 4 months. Can we tell people how many downloads we've done so far?

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. Let me look. It's about 2,300,000 already. It's pretty awesome.

Justin:

That just blows my mind because there's, like, you know, a handful of people using it. There's, you know, all these early access customers are creating shows, and that's just so many downloads already. Yeah. It's kind of mind boggling.

Jon:

Yeah. And, like, really Yeah. It is. A lot of great feedback from everyone who's using it. A lot of good feature requests and, like, pointing out bugs.

Jon:

Yeah. That we've, you know, tried to fix or just, like, something's weird.

Justin:

Should we tell people about we had we had our first hiccup, our first infrastructure hiccup. Remember on Twitter, they they were saying something was happening. I can't even remember.

Jon:

Oh, yeah. It was our SSL certificate on our CDN was, like, too strict, and it didn't work with Android 7. Like, it wouldn't allow people to download episodes on Android 7, which is really interesting. Like, I don't know how old Android 7 is or what what number they're at now, but that was the thing. So we had to kind of loosen up the the type of security that SSL certificate uses to allow it to be used on other platforms.

Justin:

Weird one be because folks were contacting I because I wake up later than you because I'm, West Coast. And so the first thing I check is Slack, and I'm in this one Slack group. And someone had DM'd me, one of the early access people, and said, hey. I can't listen to, oh, no. It was someone who had listened to my show.

Justin:

I can't listen to this this show actually on Pocket Casts.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I was like, oh.

Jon:

Yeah. It was Pocket Casts for Tingroyd. Wow. And and they were they were aware of it, actually, and, like, they were the ones that kinda pointed us in the right direction.

Justin:

That might play into our topic. Today, we're gonna be talking about fears later on. What else? More news. We've got I mean, I think one thing is we've we have a bunch of people in our trial funnel.

Justin:

So it's a it's a 14 day trial that we're offering right now. Is that right?

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. 14 days.

Justin:

So so folks sign up with their credit card, and then they they have 14 days to try it. And our first person that signed up is we'll see if they convert to a paying account on April 6th, basically.

Jason:

Okay.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And so that's when we'll start getting a sense of, you know, are people willing to pay for this? What obstacles so one obstacle for sure is I'm guessing if they don't have a show already published by the time their trial expires, they're gonna be much less likely to pay. And so we're starting to figure out, I think, you know, what indicators, what are the positive indicators that someone will pay, and what are some of the indicators that someone might not convert to a paid account. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. We we, yeah, we should definitely follow-up with those people, and they don't choose to stay. But I will say because of where we're at with the product right now, there's actually no way to cancel your account. So not and that's not really a feature.

Justin:

That's our secret sauce. So

Jon:

much as we just haven't built that part of it yet.

Justin:

Well, this is what people tune in for. They wanna know. That's what I like about this show, actually. I've I've had a lot of good feedback from people that are building their own products, and we're gonna try to be as transparent as we can about, you know, the real stuff that we're dealing with. I think one one of the nice things about us doing the show weekly is we'll just be able to, you know, remember, okay, what happened this past week?

Justin:

Oh, yeah. We had that trouble with that SSL thing, and, you know, we've got one more bit of news. But, you you messaged me that XOXO is back.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. So I I saw this. I I think a friend emailed me or messaged me or something. So XOXO, for the people listening, is the festival in Portland that that Justin and I met at, 4 years ago, 3 years ago.

Jon:

And, you know, they they always sort of say that this year is gonna be the last year or whatever. And in 2016, they did say this was gonna be the last one ever, possibly. And they took a year off and now they're back. So in 2018, this year in September, they're gonna do it again. So it's xoxofest.com, I think.

Jon:

Yeah. So, yeah, it's kind of interesting because that's where Justin and I met. So if anyone's interested in going into something like that, it's really a great place to to meet some like minded folks.

Justin:

Yeah. Especially at the intersection of, you know, art, design, technology,

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

All that stuff.

Jon:

Yeah. I think it yeah. I think it'll be a pretty interesting year because of everything else that's happening in the world. Yeah. I mean, I don't know.

Jon:

It's probably gonna be more of a well, look, like, large group therapy session. Like, I feel like that's what it's gonna be.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And, actually, right now, all you can see if you go to xoxofest.com, you just see the old landing page. You have to go to 2018.xoxofest.com, And it's just a live video of this artist drawing some art, and then it just says September 6 to 9, 2018. Super smart marketing, actually, because you're instantly kinda you know, okay, there's an event coming up, but you don't know anything else.

Justin:

Sign up to get notified. It's interesting because there's this real person that's, like, making this art as you watch. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy.

Jon:

Cool. Maybe we'll do a maybe we'll, yeah, maybe we'll record a show there together

Justin:

That would be awesome.

Jon:

In person.

Justin:

So if you want all the links for the show, by the way, you've gotta go to saaas.transistor.fm. And what else do we wanna say? Oh, we just wanted to say thanks to all the folks that have signed up early and tried it out, who have given us feedback, who let us know about bugs, who have been really patient, who have really kind of risked taken a risk in, you know, signing up for an account and hosting a show with us. Some people have created their first podcast ever. And, you know, and that's as as low fi as, you know, speaking into their iPhone and publishing it, all the way up to, you know, people that have established shows, that have imported their podcast, and, you know, have thousands of listeners and are really trusting us with, with everything, you know, hosting it and delivering it.

Justin:

So, yeah, we just wanna say thanks

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And, keep the feedback coming. Alright. So let's get into this week's topic. You you suggested this one, and I think it's so it's such a good one to to think about and talk about the fears you have when you launch a new company. So we're we're gonna get vulnerable here.

Justin:

John, maybe why don't you start? What what are some things that you're maybe scared of right now that you're thinking about? The things that keep you up at night as we're, you know, 4 or 5 months into this?

Jon:

Yeah. Mine are a combination of let's I guess, business and technical, if I'm on that end of things. You know, things like, is this thing gonna be able to handle traffic? Because we have, you know, one at least one pretty popular podcast that releases an episode every morning and most pod catchers will download that at the same time across, you know, however many thousands of devices. You know, am I am I building this thing correctly in a way that can scale, that can that's gonna make sense when I look at the code again in a month?

Jon:

Are we building the right tools for people in the interface? And know, is it usable enough? Is it is it super confusing for people?

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Are they gonna like are they gonna end up putting in all their information for their show and it's just, like, incorrect or gets garbled or something happens or, like, a feed gets messed up and won't be imported to iTunes? I don't think about all this stuff at the same time because I'd probably go insane. But, yeah, from a technical aspect, it's that type of like, I don't know, trying to prepare for the unexpected. Yeah. Right.

Jon:

I mean, because it's just it's just you and I and it's just me on a technical end and like, if something breaks, I gotta fix it. If something happens in the middle of the night, you know, I'll be asleep. If I want to go on vacation, it's like, well, I got to bring a laptop now just in case. Yeah. You know, might have to get, like, a really small MacBook or something for that.

Jon:

Yeah. White one. Stuff yeah. Stuff

Justin:

like that. Yeah. It's so funny because when I wrote I wrote this blog post about why I'm building a SaaS in 2018, and some folks pointed out that I'd written kind of an an incendiary blog post about SaaS companies a couple years earlier. I think it was SaaS is ready for disruption or something like that. And I kind of referred back to this conversation I had with Nathan Barry where I asked him, you know, why are you switching from selling, you know, online courses, which he'd been doing, to building ConvertKit?

Justin:

And, you know, I was just kind of boggled by it because I I was I had come from the opposite side. I had been working for SaaS companies, and I was looking kind of longingly at Nathan's world where all he had to do was, you know, upload his course materials to a provider, and he didn't have to think about any of the infrastructure.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You know? Like, if his if his host went down for an hour, nobody was complaining or not that many people were complaining. Uptime for him wasn't even an issue. Right. All those issues that you have to think about when you're building a SaaS, and it is there is this added layer of stress, especially for you, isn't there?

Jon:

Yeah. There is. For sure. I mean, it's I've been doing things like this or trying to or been working with people in SaaS for a while. And, like, it's certainly gotten easier over the years, and there's more tools and, you know, you can get, there's, like, tools to watch your your apps and your technology to see if it's down.

Jon:

It'll notify you and and stuff like that and, like, you know, using whatever the cloud, if you wanna call it, having multiple servers that can just be spun up. And if one breaks, it's not a big deal. But, yeah, you kinda wanna build things in a way that, there's some sort of, like, fail over or, like, it's it's there's some sort of fail safe. Right? If, like, one thing breaks, something else is gonna work in its place.

Jon:

But yeah. It's stuff like that. I mean and it's, yeah, luckily I haven't had too many of those bad things happen over the years. So when when they do, you you hear about it immediately and it's like, oh, God, I have to fix this. You're like, I'm at dinner and I have to fix it.

Jon:

I have some friends that that built an online game a few years ago, and it was just 2 of them. It was like an iPhone massively multiplayer game. And they were working together. For a while there, like, things were in a sort of a tricky spot and, like, things were crashing for no reason. And they would like to go out and have dinner and drinks and stuff, but they they basically made a rule that, like, if one of them goes out, like, for the night to go whatever on a date or something, the other person has to sleep.

Jon:

Wow. It was like they they couldn't both be out drinking unless they were together.

Justin:

Man. So the rule is never drink together.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You're allowed to drink alone?

Jon:

Well, you can drink together. You can drink together. You can't drink on the same night if you're not together, in case you're not near a laptop or something, right, to fix it. So

Justin:

Oh, man. It just it just shows you how like, building software, especially software as a service, where you have to have servers and they have to be up and, you know, there's it has gotten a lot better, but, you know, I both software as a service companies I've worked for and even the companies I've consulted for, there's just always that one person that's kind of responsible, and it's almost like they have to be always on notice. So you've always got this thing in the back of your mind of

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Okay. And, you know, the way we used to share that at these other companies is, you know, we'd all get notified. So whoever woke up from the notification would, you know, get to it right away. But eventually, you've got to contact that one person that can fix it, and they're just under a lot of pressure to okay. I gotta fix it.

Justin:

You know? And I think that is the downside to SaaS is Yeah. There's just kind of this cognitive load of we've gotta take care of this infrastructure and make sure that it's working. Because at the end of the day, no one really cares about us and our problems. Our customers just want us to, you know, serve the podcast website, serve the podcast feed, make sure the episodes download fast, make sure it plays in every single podcatcher.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And if we can't deliver that, they don't they don't care. They don't care that we wanted to go out for dinner or, you know, that we got woken up at 3 in the morning. Yeah.

Jon:

I mean, I I remember from one one past thing that happened, in a previous company was was kind of unavoidable, but there's no real way to plan for it. It was like the web host we were using, their whole, like one of their data centers just got, like, attacked by some massive denial of service attack and that all the DNS was screwed up. Like, you just couldn't you just had to wait for them to fix it. And there's like, like, you know, you could say you're sorry, but in the end of the day, like, the customer doesn't care. They're like, why didn't you have a backup plan?

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And DNS has become a new one.

Justin:

If you're technically inclined, you know, that these, denial of service attacks on DNS is kinda like the new favorite. And if you don't have a way of so now what folks are trying to do is figure out switchovers so they can, you know, they can if if that does get attacked, you can switch it over right away. But it's tricky because there's a lot of factors. And again, the customer doesn't care. They're just like, okay.

Justin:

That's fine. But the the truth is I can't access your app. And so it Right. It it's almost the the as a service part really comes into play here. I remember this old interview with Adi Pinar.

Justin:

I think I always say his name wrong, by the way. But he was one of the original founders of WooThemes, and he had this quote from years ago where he said, you know, let's be honest, folks. A big part of what people are paying for with the software as a service part is the customer support. It's the service part.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

And, you know, if if Microsoft off like in the old days, if Microsoft Word stopped working, you would never call Microsoft. Right? You you would call that that person that, you know, that was into computer stuff. You would call your local, you know, computer technician or something. Or if you're in a big company, you would call IT.

Justin:

But with SAS

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

It's us. They're contacting us. They're like, we're paying you monthly.

Jon:

Yeah. And they might be contacting us at 4 in the morning because they're, you know, in English.

Justin:

That's right. It's interesting because I think some of this brings up like the you have the fear, and then there's, you know, the the next natural question is, okay. So how could we deal with that? And, you know, one of the ways we could deal with that is we could hire more people. But at this point, we just can't do that.

Justin:

When you're bootstrapping, you have money to hire other people. And so there's this gap when you're starting out. You're, like, you know, rolling this big snowball or rock up the hill, and, you know, you're just like, okay, I hope we can get to the top. Because we know once we get to the top,

Jon:

it'll you

Justin:

know? And there's as soon as you have money, that solves some of your problems. Right? You can you can hire people, etcetera. But

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

Yeah. We're just kinda waiting, aren't we?

Jon:

We are. Yeah. Still pushing that rock up the hill. Other than that, I mean, aside from the technical stuff, it's just sort of the, you know, personal side of things. Do I have enough time to build this thing in, you know, because I'm really excited about it, and I just I wanna work on it a lot.

Jon:

But I also have a full time job. So this ends up you know, transistor ends up being sort of like nights and weekends Yep. Or, like, days days off I take off from work or something like that. And, you know, do I have enough time to build this thing appropriately? Can I set enough so I can I set aside enough large blocks of time to, like, really dig into it?

Jon:

Because it's hard to work on it like an hour of time.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And, you know, doing that without overworking to the point where I'm burning out, and, like, you know, harming personal relationships I have or ignoring people or just gotta try to keep it balanced.

Justin:

Yeah. But,

Jon:

yeah, that's definitely.

Justin:

That's a huge fear for me too. Especially, I think, now that we've seen like, just on Twitter the other day, I saw this other founder I've talked to a bunch of times. And, he had a cofounder as well. And he said, you know, we've invested so much in this idea, and we were really working hard on it. And and they were doing a podcast about it.

Justin:

They were, you know, they're being really transparent about it. And, they said, you know what? We're burning out and we're running out of money and we need to step away from this. And it that's it's so hard when you're building something from scratch, and you're just getting going. And, you know, on one hand, you've got competitors that have been around longer, so they're

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You know, they're already they've got a machine. They've got a team. They've already got everything. They've got the the name and the space. Like, they're so far ahead of us.

Justin:

And then you've got these funded companies that are also coming along, and you're just like, oh, man. How are we ever going to get everything done with just 2 people Yeah. Without killing ourselves, without, you know, without having all this pressure crush us. And figuring that out, I think, is is challenging.

Jon:

Yeah. I think, you know, you can look at competitors as obviously inspiration for for new ideas. Not not to, like, pull ideas from them, but, you know, see what they're doing wrong and try to try to correct some of that stuff. But it's like you said, it's it's easy to be overwhelmed by that and say, we're new in the space and it's all these people who are established. But I think at some point, you just sort of have to, like, force yourself to ignore that and

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Just build just build the best thing you can and not really compare yourself too much to those

Justin:

people. And it's funny because we keep kind of we keep drifting into antidotes to fear here. But I think that is one is like one antidote to fear. Like, if you fear your competition, for example, just don't focus on your competition. Focus on your customers.

Justin:

Yeah. And I'm even thinking about all all the BS I post in Slack for us. You know, I'm I'm really excited I discover stuff. But there's so much of, you know, oh, a competitor just released this, or

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

It it's not actually helpful because that's not coming from our customers. They're not asking for that stuff. That's just stuff our competitors are putting out.

Jon:

No.

Justin:

And maybe that's not right for our customers. Maybe our customers don't care about that. Maybe their customers don't even care about that. We don't even know. And so I think that's one good antidote antidote is just staying really close to your customer.

Justin:

It's also a good antidote to, I think, the fear we have. Because so much of the fear is letting customers down. You know? What if our servers crash? What if but if we're in close relationship with our customers and, you know, we're talking to them as much as we can, we know they know that we're open to their feedback.

Justin:

They can we have a little communication widget right on the website. By the way, you can do that, transistor.fm. If you go to the the website in the lower right hand corner, there's a little widget you can use to contact us. We're trying to get better at answering those right away. But, you know, that's the antidote is that if you have a good relationship with somebody, you can say, hey.

Justin:

You know what? Sorry. We messed up here. We're this is what we're doing to fix it. And there's a lot more understanding there than and a lot less fear than, oh my god.

Justin:

We've got hundreds of customers, and they don't even know my name, and they don't care. You know?

Jon:

Yeah. I really enjoyed actually doing the customer support in in previous, SaaS, you know, ventures I was I was in because it was, again, a small company, and I was building the thing, but also doing customer support. I actually I really enjoyed talking to customers and sort of, like, hearing from them and, like, fixing their problems and seeing how how happy it made them. Like, having them suggest something new and being able to maybe roll it out in the same day and be like, here you go.

Justin:

Yeah. That's cool. It's such a good feeling actually being connected. Yeah. There's nothing there's really nothing like it.

Justin:

I think that's for me, in terms of business fears, my biggest fear, and I think a lot of product people have this, is am I building are we building the right thing? And that's not just, like, are we building the right podcast hosting application? But are we just are we building the right thing at all? Like, is pod a podcast host the right thing at all?

Jon:

Right. Maybe it'll turn into something else. I have no idea, but that's certainly happened a lot in the past.

Justin:

Yeah. And I think I think about this a lot because like a lot of other folks, I've launched things that haven't worked. And, especially early on when I was just starting to build things and I was really emotionally invested. If they didn't work out, I would just be, you know, devastated. Because it Yeah.

Justin:

Can you relate to that too?

Jon:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you're putting, you know, a part of yourself in the thing you're building, and it's like a personal failure. Yeah. I've I've yeah, I've built a couple of small things by myself and I was like, oh, this is so cool.

Jon:

Like, people are going to spread it around. They're going to buy stuff. It's going to be great. And, like, one coworker bought something and that was it ever. It was like this tool that you could hook up your Instagram account to and, like, download these canvas versions of your photos that are like you could mess around with it and, like, pixelated and stuff.

Jon:

It was pretty cool, but Yeah. I used it. Yeah. On the market.

Justin:

Yeah. And and especially when you're you really this is where there's, like, this tension in when you're building a company. There's this tension between what I want and hope for and what the market wants and hopes for. And so on one side, it's like, why are we doing this? Well, you and I want a better life.

Justin:

We want we wanna own our own thing. We wanna run our own business. We wanna earn revenue from it. We want, you know, all of those things that are very us focused. And if those didn't exist, we probably wouldn't be doing this.

Justin:

Right? There's there's this personal motivation. But on the other side, you almost have to, like, start with that. Okay. What motivates you?

Justin:

Why are you doing this? Why, you know, why podcasting? Why is it why is it better than anything else? But then you almost have to set that aside and go, okay. Okay.

Justin:

We're done that. Now what how are we actually making the customer's life better? Do they care? Do they want this? You know, is this product validated?

Justin:

How do we validate this idea? How do we validate this market? Yeah, that is such a tricky piece because you almost have to ignore your feelings and just be like, Okay, I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm gonna push this side of me over there, and I'm just going to stay completely focused on other people. What do they want? What do they need?

Justin:

What do they really you know, what will really make their life better? How can I make this easier? You know? Do I you know, even thinking, like, we're setting people on this treadmill of creating podcast episodes. How are they gonna maintain that?

Justin:

Like, you you can start to feel some of the the pressure. Right? It's it's a really tricky balance because at the end of the day, I just want people to like my stuff and pay for it.

Jon:

Yeah. Right. I mean, I guess the validation there is if people are paying for it, then Yes. They're happy enough with it to keep paying. Yeah.

Jon:

There's certainly nothing keeping them. We're not locking them into our platform by any means.

Justin:

Yeah. I've actually I've actually started, in my little solopreneur business. I I think I might actually release this as a thing. But for you and I, I was thinking, okay. I've been, you know, I've been working on SaaS businesses forever, and I have this loose framework of, you know, how do you choose a market?

Justin:

How do you validate that market? How do you determine what people actually want? How do you validate that? How do you test it? And so I've started writing this checklist, and I'm going to keep working on it.

Justin:

And I'm actually gonna try to use it on transistor as and that's kind of going to be my antidote is if I have a a framework to go through and go, okay. You know? The first question is, you know, that stuff I talked about. Like, what do we care about? What do why are we doing this?

Justin:

But then it's like, okay. Who are we serving? What do they really want? What do they really need? And there's these check marks.

Justin:

Like, okay. I've had one conversation with a customer. Okay. Now I've had 2 customer development conversations. Okay.

Justin:

Now John had 1. Okay. Now John had 2. Okay. We're gonna keep building these, and then we form a hypothesis, which is, you know, people want this.

Justin:

And then we're gonna build it, and then we're gonna see, okay, do they pay once? Perfect. Okay. That's some initial validation. Do they pay again?

Justin:

Yeah. Okay. That's the next step. You know? And all of these elements, I think that's that that makes me feel better anyway when I have kind of an idea of what are we tracking, what's really important.

Justin:

Yes, we want this to succeed. Yes, we have egos, and we don't want our egos to get bruised. Right? And there's a there's always actually, let's talk a little bit about the ego. I don't know how important this is to you.

Justin:

It would be interesting for but there's always a like you said, when you're building something, there's a little piece of you that you're putting out. Like, when you were putting that Instagram thing out, you're kind of saying, okay. I built this.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Please like it. You know? Like, does anybody like it?

Jon:

Yeah. Alright.

Justin:

And when people didn't respond, how did it make you feel?

Jon:

It made me yeah. I mean, it was disappointing. It was, you know, I learned a lot. I learned a lot of things while building it. Yeah.

Jon:

It was it was disappointing. It, like, sort of took the steam out of it. And I'm not really like a marketing guy, so I was like, I don't really know. I don't know what to do here. Yeah.

Jon:

So I just kinda let it let it sit, and then you just sort of forget about it over time. And it's like, yeah. Right.

Justin:

You you know, the other piece that bugs me is is, you know, how you share things with people? Like, you share it with your significant other. You share it with your mom and dad. You know, mom and dad come over for Thanksgiving, and they go, so, John. So, Justin.

Justin:

Yeah. We we have different parents. I'm just using this as an example. But they're like, you know, what are you doing right now? And you go, oh, well, I'm really excited about this thing.

Justin:

I'm building this thing called transistor. It's with my buddy, John, and we think it's gonna be great. And, you know, you set that out into the world even if it's just with your inner circle. And then, you know, next Thanksgiving, they come again. They go, so how is that thing going?

Justin:

And you go, oh, well, it didn't work out.

Jon:

Yeah. One person paid. Yeah. And then it would dead.

Justin:

And and there's a little bit of your ego that's kinda like, ah, I gotta you know, they were so excited and Yeah. They've got expectations now even. You know? And then if we expand that out, and it's like people on Twitter, people on you know, you keep going and you're like, because you have to tell people you're doing it.

Jon:

No. The the other tricky part of the other fear is, like, at what point do you tell people?

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And is it is it too soon? Yeah. Is it like, hey, we're gonna announce this thing and then it's not even ready for people to use or it's like people are excited about it. Then they sign up and they're like, wow, this is underwhelming. Like, it's not really.

Jon:

Yeah. There's so much missing that I can't use it yet. Yeah. Which is good feedback, but it's like, yeah, you can't wait till the thing's done and perfect because it's never going to be. So you just have to, like

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Lighten up the door.

Justin:

Exactly. This is a bad analogy. I I apologize in advance, but maybe it's a little bit like having a baby. You know? Like, you're always wondering, like, when do we tell people?

Justin:

When is when is is it time yet? Because there's so many things that can go wrong in a pregnancy.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Miscarriage is way more common than people think. And so you're always kinda like, ah, do we tell people now? Okay. And then you tell people, and then it's almost like every fear you have as a new parent where you're you're like, is this baby gonna be healthy? Is this pregnancy gonna go well?

Justin:

That is now all out in the public. Like, there's this this tension of, oh, I hope this goes okay. And, I mean, actually now that I think about it in that way, it almost makes me feel better about starting a company. Because it doesn't seem you know, it's not the stakes aren't as high, right, with, when you

Jon:

Right. I mean, that's the thing. Like, at the end of the day, I always say, like, nobody's going to die. Yeah. We could be doing a different startup where it's like a medical startup.

Jon:

Yeah. But at the end of the day, people aren't gonna get their audio.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And that's it. It's just fine. I mean, it sucks. I don't want that to happen. Like,

Justin:

Yeah. We we sorry. We didn't deliver audio to your ear holes. That does that really seems like a first world problem.

Jon:

Yeah. Right.

Justin:

Yeah. It's interesting. Maybe that's the other antidote there is is you put things in context. Like, okay. You're you're scared of this, but what's the worst thing that could happen?

Jon:

Yeah. And you're scared and you're stressed and you're spending a lot of time on it and you're, like, staying up late and you're like worrying about it and you're working, you know, long hours and you don't sleep enough and then you kind of have to step back and be like, I'm actually like, hurting myself.

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah.

Jon:

This thing is is a Internet company.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Like, I shouldn't I shouldn't be physically harming myself.

Justin:

Yeah. I think that's one of our our we we were talking about, you know, writing some kind of value stuff, like company value stuff now while we're just 2 people. And I one of the values that seems to be emerging even as we're doing these shows is we really value human beings over technology. Would you agree with that?

Jon:

Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. Especially the more yeah. The more I use technology and the more it becomes part of our lives.

Jon:

It takes over some people's lives and it becomes a way to connect with people, but certainly get a little bit

Justin:

of control. Yeah. But even what you just said, like, okay, When you've got values like that, when you're like, okay. If this doesn't work, it's just a piece of Internet technology. Like, if if all of the electricity in the world kind of magically got removed and nobody we couldn't use any of this stuff again, the world would keep going, and, you know, the the the Earth isn't going to stop because human beings can't use tech.

Justin:

Right? Right? Like

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Grass is gonna keep growing. The sun's gonna keep shining. Like, there's some things that are more important, I guess. Life continues, and tech sure is cool, and tech can be helpful, and tech can be useful. But in the grand scheme of things, you know, humans are more important than the technology.

Justin:

And so if this doesn't work out, okay. So we put some zeros and ones up on the Internet, and those zeros and ones didn't produce the result we wanted.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Oh, well. Our hearts are still beating. We can still have relationships. We can still have adventures. We can still you know, enjoy good food.

Justin:

Like, there's all these things that are in in red in contrast are way more important than us, you know, sending sound waves over the Internet. And we think sending sound waves is important. We think it's worth doing, but I like that. I think, you know, at the if if this did fail and there's lots of startups fail, I can go, okay. Well, there we go.

Justin:

A bunch of zeros and ones on the Internet didn't give us the result we wanted. Oh, wow. You know, let let's let's keep going. Cool. Anything else we should talk about?

Justin:

That was pretty good.

Jon:

That was good. Yeah. It was pretty therapeutic.

Justin:

It was really therapeutic, actually.

Jon:

It's good to get that out there. Maybe. I don't know if there's anything else.

Justin:

I mean, there's I think there's lots of other fears. Actually, this would be a good time for us to ask you, the listener, if what kind of fears you have around building and launching things, making things, putting things out into the universe, and them being judged and used and all that stuff. You can get us on Twitter at transistorfm. We've heard from some of you already. One one person actually found, Castle Grayskull on eBay and sent it to us.

Justin:

That was really fun. So, yeah, get us on Twitter. Let us know. Hey. What are what are your fears?

Justin:

What are the things you're thinking about? You can also email us shows at transistor.fm. And if you wanna say, you know, hey. I was listening to your episode, and I'm building something. This is what I'm building.

Justin:

This is my fear. If you have an audio clip you wanna record and send it to us, we would love to play that in the show. So if if there's something, you know, you wanna share via audio, just attach that to an email and send it to us. We're gonna get a better system for that soon. You can also DM us on Instagram.

Justin:

There were transistor.fm, and you can message John on Twitter. What's your who are you on Twitter?

Jon:

John Buddha, j o n b u d a.

Justin:

And I'm m I Justin, the letter m, the letter I. Justin, thanks so much for listening, and we will see you next episode.