Build Your SaaS

What happens when you get a bug before bedtime

Show Notes

Jon and Justin talk about:
  • A stressful Rails 6 upgrade (and how it broke the app).
  • We often use data to make decisions, but we don't often examine the underlying data we're using to make decisions.
  • How do we know if our marketing efforts are effective?
  • "What's happened to your data since last quarter?"
  • "If a billion people are listening, but not reacting, does it matter?"

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Show notes:

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Creators & Guests

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

What is Build Your SaaS?

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

Justin:

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Justin:

If you've ever had to send a password reset email, a welcome email, You know, all those emails your app needs to send and actually have delivered, Postmark does that. And right now, you can visit postmark.com/loves/buildyoursass. Use the coupon code, build your sass. Get a free month

Jon:

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

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson, and I want to sell my shares in transistor and start a, river rafting company.

Jon:

Nice.

Justin:

You wanna join me? Why don't we both just sell our shares?

Jon:

Let's do it. Can I throw my computer out the window?

Justin:

We we had a bunch of stuff happened last night. I I'm not even really sure what happened because, I have this normal, like, pattern of checking customer support before I go to bed at night. And, yeah, I I opened it up and noticed that you were, chatting with a bunch of people who were had run into some problems.

Jon:

I also made the mistake of checking it. And I was actually

Justin:

What time is this for you, by the way?

Jon:

This was, like, 11:30.

Justin:

Oh, okay. 11:30. So

Jon:

I probably should have already been asleep by then.

Justin:

Okay. So this is already past your bedtime. You're

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You're already, like, in bed. You've calmed yourself down. You've you've had your your night tea. You've Yeah. Been, you know, done your little meditations.

Justin:

Yeah. And now you've gotta get out of bed to deal with it.

Jon:

I already read a little bit. I was like, okay.

Justin:

Then tell me what happened next.

Jon:

So we started to get emails of or, yeah, support messages about either the Embeddable player not working or people who are trying to upload episodes and do stuff in the dashboard not working, all of which depends on JavaScript. And previous in the evening, I think it was, like, 7 or 8 o'clock at night, which was stupid. I deployed I mean, you kinda wanna do it when I don't know. People aren't necessarily in the middle of the day, but we're we serve people around the world, and so people are, you know, working kind of all day. So I deployed a bunch of code that we had been testing on staging, one of which included an upgrade to rails 6, which really wasn't it wasn't a huge upgrade as far as, like, anything changing necessarily.

Jon:

We're not really using a lot of the new stuff that they have in it. I just kinda wanted to keep things up to date, but and everything seemed to work fine. Like, I didn't notice any problems on my end, which is weird that I didn't because these people that were, you know, messaging us saying they were having problems, we're using Chrome on a Mac or

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Firefox on a Mac or you know, it's like the same exact technology we've been using. So what I'm still honestly not entirely sure what happened, but the customers were getting the new HTML served up to them, obviously, through our web servers, which includes a reference to our JavaScript files, which are compiled on every deploy and read from the Rails app through our CDN, and they're served through the CDN. So they were either seeing 404 errors of these files not being found or they were somehow getting an older version of the file, but it I don't know. It's it's really weird. I ended up having to just expire all of our JavaScript and CSS files manually, but something something in Rails was not working like I thought it should or it had in the past where each time you deploy it, you know, it bundles up JavaScript files into 1 file and sort of compresses it and, you know, removes white space and then adds a what they call a digest into the file name so that each if the contents of the file have changed, it gets a new file name so that the cache is automatically busted.

Justin:

And Gotcha. So what's what's supposed to happen is the browser is supposed to recognize that there's a a new version of that that JavaScript file.

Jon:

It's an entirely new file name. It's it's like, they shouldn't they shouldn't read a local a locally cached version of the file at all because it should be an entirely new file name. But that part of the deploy process didn't seem and it wrote a new file. It was just the exact same file name. And so our CDN was not reading a new version of the file.

Jon:

It's really weird because it was a new version of Rails. The files the JavaScript files had changed, so the content should have changed or the even the the time they were last modified, which should affect the, the file name. So, anyway, we got it working. It was just it those are those are the worst kind of bugs where, like, you really don't understand why it happened in the first place. Yeah.

Jon:

I mean, it's it's like you're telling your computer to do a thing, and it's not doing the thing. And so I was already tired and frustrated, and I think I mentioned to you. I'm like, I'm just throwing my computer out the window. See you in the morning. Yeah.

Jon:

But I don't know. I mean, people are just people understood, and they were, like, they were nice about it. I think I think you were doing support from your phone because you have an Imac now. Right?

Justin:

Yeah. But I no. I I I was using my old laptop at home. So I initially, I was doing it from my phone, and then I'm, like, okay. This is weird.

Justin:

And because I I was testing things on my phone, and they were working for me, which is that's the worst where the customer is seeing something, but you're not seeing it. I'm like, okay. Let me just check this in multiple browsers on my laptop. And so I pulled out the old laptop and and started testing it. Everything's working.

Justin:

I'm like, what what is going on here?

Jon:

It's like the deal deal works at the works on my machine, rationale of fixing a bug. Well, I don't know. Works on my machine. It's fine.

Justin:

Yeah. I'm I'm almost wondering, like so some of these folks, like, do you think they were caught in the deploy?

Jon:

Like, they just happen

Justin:

to be using the Like, they just happened to be using the site when we deployed?

Jon:

I don't think so. It was hours after the fact. So they were

Justin:

Interesting.

Jon:

Presumably, they were seeing the latest HTML because that code is what's being run, you know, through the web server. But Yeah. It's really weird.

Justin:

Yeah. And I think what what is also tricky in this this modern age is we're leveraging caching. Actually, let me ask you one more question. I noticed that after you redeployed the site, it took longer to reload some of those pages, especially the analytics page. Is that because you busted the cache that second time?

Jon:

That that's a different issue. That's that's because every time we deploy so there's 2 different caches we have. 1 is the cache that our CDN cache, which are for our file for JavaScript, CSS, and our image files. So those those get cached kind of like they get cached on the CDN, but then they also get cached locally in the browser if nothing has changed. And then we have another cache that's run on AWS, which is running in Redis, which is this, like, key value store that caches content that doesn't need to be rerendered.

Jon:

So that's actually where we cache things like your analytics. So so every you know, in the background, our analytics are constantly running and updating that cache, but then when I deploy, it's basically set right now to blow it away and then rerun it, but that takes a while. So, like, if you were if you have if I have deployed something and then you go to your analytics page, it may not immediately load, I mean after it's loaded it has already like prime to cash and set the data for you, but that first load is slow unless it's already precached behind the scenes. So that's, something different, but that I'll you know, we're gonna we're working on analytics right now for this for this period of work we're doing. So that might, you know, might be part of that if I can fit it in.

Jon:

It's kind of improving how that works.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, caching in of itself is kind of an interesting area to to think about, because that even what you just described, we're we're caching things on well, we can be caching things on multiple servers in multiple ways using multiple services. Right? Because we we cache some stuff using Cloudflare.

Justin:

We cache some stuff using a, ours. Do do we cache some anything on AWS? Or

Jon:

No. None of the none of the assets are on AWS. We're caching we're caching, like, block basically, like, chunks of HTML are cached in Redis and then read out of it so that they don't have to be rerendered, so it's a lot faster.

Justin:

Yeah. And then also the browser is caching things locally.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

It's amazing that any of this works at any of the time at all.

Jon:

I know. It is.

Justin:

And then and then often, like, the the platforms we build these things on are also caching things in different ways. Right?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

I'm even thinking of statemic will cache things, and, yeah. So there's all this and caching is an incredible idea, like, the

Jon:

Yeah. It's a great it's a great idea for performance. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, but it can be a little frustrating. No. I mean, it's just gonna take some a little bit of research to see, like, kinda what happened and how we can get around it.

Jon:

I think the the main takeaway is just don't deploy after 1 PM or something, which I should know.

Justin:

But Oh, man. Yeah. I I I think the lesson also is, like, when those things are happening I mean, it's a little bit easier for me because, the the weight of all that isn't on me. But I I've been in those situations, and I know what that feels like. Like, oh my god.

Justin:

And you're just you're going you're just going through every scenario you can think of to fix it. But on the other hand, we it's also nice to just go, well, you know, these are just computers, and this is just Internet. And this is just yes. It's important for our customers, but nobody is gonna die. Yeah.

Justin:

Nobody is going to like, these we obviously don't wanna make customers upset, but there's there is a little bit of, you know, solace knowing that it it's gonna be alright. Yep. Ultimately, we're gonna be okay. But yeah. Glad we got it at least figured out.

Justin:

Although, I guess, now we gotta dig in and and and Yeah. What what is the root cause?

Jon:

Yeah. It's it's really bizarre. Something changed somewhere in some something with rails or one of the gems that handles, like, all the assets and stuff. So,

Justin:

yeah.

Speaker 3:

We'll see.

Justin:

And just working through that, that is tricky. We're because now you've you've gotta go through the kind of the whole are you gonna is it the what are you looking at? Are you looking at the deployment pipeline, or are you just looking at every gem? Are you just scouring

Jon:

GitHub issues? It's the deployment pipeline. And I I know I know what I yeah. It's GitHub issues. I know what I wanna search for, which is basically, like, how do you force the assets to have a new file name when you want them to

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Rather than

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Whatever at the whim of whatever Rails is doing.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So I kinda know at what point that happens and what at what point I'd like to be able to override some stuff if I need to. But, Yeah.

Justin:

Part of me is is glad that we experienced this, because it I learned something.

Jon:

But it's it's also, like, something I have experienced before. It's just that you for it happens so infrequently that you forget about it. And then you waste and then you waste an hour, like, coming back to the same, like, conclusion or answer that you had years ago.

Justin:

Now you'll just build it. In the future, you'll say, hey, Siri. Remind me what happened last time. Go through my personal archive, Siri.

Jon:

Yeah. Or I'll write something into our code base that every time I deploy, it just yells at me to check the file.

Justin:

Sweet. Yeah. Why don't I talk a little bit about our friends at Clubhouse? Clubhouse is back sponsoring the show, and we're really excited mostly because now they have this really generous free plan that is perfect for bootstrap startups. For teams up to 10 people, you get Clubhouse for free forever.

Justin:

So, I mean, you know, maybe John and I stay a a 2 person company for 20 years. We could use Clubhouse for free for 20 years. But if we decide to, you know, grow and take over the world, then we can pay when it makes sense to do so. So if you wanna sign up for Clubhouse now, we've already had tons of people on Twitter reach out, say they've they're they signed up because of this. Clubhouse.i0/build is the URL to use.

Jon:

Awesome. Yeah. That's still super awesome they did that.

Justin:

Very, very helpful. So just on my side, one thing that I did yesterday is I emailed our big list about private podcasts. Yeah. Which felt good. I I I realized I I had been on a monthly cadence, around kinda like 12th to 15th of every month I've been sending 1, but I didn't send 1 in October.

Justin:

And so, nice to get back on that, kinda mid month routine of sending out something to the big list.

Jon:

So that was our entire that was our big a big list. Right? It wasn't targeted to any one particular group.

Justin:

Yeah. It wasn't targeted. This was just everybody. So I I previously sent out an email just to folks on the $49.99 tier. And, we had some folks that started using the private podcasting feature because of that.

Justin:

And then this was okay. Let's get everybody on our list, which is mostly people who have signed up for an account at some point. But we we also used to have just a public newsletter sign up, like a waiting list before we launched. So this list has evolved over time. And, so I think it's about 29100 people or something like that.

Jon:

Do we do we ever look at how, like do we track the open rates? Do we actually look into that and see if it's actually people are still reading it?

Justin:

Yeah. So, I mean, open rates I actually had a tweet storm about this the other day, which is we often use data to make decisions, but we don't very often examine the data we're using to make decisions. And so open rates and links click through rates in emails can vary, but it's not always because less people are opening or less people are reading. It's because the what is tracking those things, sometimes they become less effective. So there's a tracking pixel in an email that when you open it, if you load images, we can track, oh, that person opened the email.

Justin:

And if they click on a link, we can track that as well. But there's also 2 ways for people to block that stuff. Those stats seem to be most helpful when you look at them as a trend over time. So, overall, are we at about the same open rate as we normally are? And if there's ever a spike, like, if something ever really you know, you're a normal open rate, let's say, is 30%.

Justin:

That's a confirmed open rate. And then if it spikes to 50%, you might go, oh, wow. That's that's interesting. What happened there? But most of the time, it just hovers around the same open rate.

Justin:

And, every once in a while, I'll go in, and I'll just, call the list. Anyone who hasn't really opened anything in the last, you know, 5 emails or something, I'll just remove them. So yeah. I mean, what I generally try to look at is how many responses do I get to those emails, or how many people mention the those those, those emails, and then how many people do something because of the email.

Jon:

That seems to be more important than if they just open it. Right? I mean, we, obviously, we got a lot of responses. But I I mean, I I hand we got a handful of responses I noticed about questions about wanting to upgrade Yeah. Which is great.

Jon:

So, obviously, it worked.

Justin:

Increasingly, especially as we become more sensitive to tracking and, you know, our personal privacy and things like that, I I I mean, Superhuman that that big fancy emails start up that everyone, kinda gushes about. They got into some hot water about this. Right? They had they were tracking opens and clicks in their software. And this has been a default in email marketing software forever, email newsletter software forever.

Justin:

And, I mean, some people complained about it, but the blowback they got from that was in some ways surprising to me because this is this is something that, you know, people have been doing forever. It's not it's not a new thing. And, they eventually, I think they removed it or they removed it as a default. It's going it's an interesting time for people, especially people who previously really liked using data to make decisions. Yeah.

Justin:

I think we're almost going back to the old school of, you know, where you would you would spend a bunch on advertising. And the old joke was, you know, I know half my advertising doesn't work, but I don't know which half. Right? So you you you still gotta spend all the money just to get that 50% that does work. I I think my thinking on this has evolved early in my career in marketing.

Justin:

I wanted all the data because it it made it it you at least had a way of making decisions. Right? And it was Right. Also sometimes just nice to report to your boss, like, hey. Here's what here's what the data shows.

Jon:

Yeah. But it just feels so I don't know. Now it feels, like, really impersonal and kinda gross. It's like potential customers you're you wanna reach are just, like, numbers, and they probably have weird terms for them. Like, I don't know.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. It it does depersonalize things. And so, yeah, I think I'm I am shifting more to okay. When we do something, when we send an email newsletter, when we publish a podcast, when we publish a blog post, when we make an announcement, the what we should be looking at is the responses to that.

Justin:

And, you know, if it's a product launch or a feature launch, we're looking at okay. Responses is 1 piece, but then how many people actually convert? How many people upgrade in in this case because of private podcasting? Mhmm. And, there's also a timeline for that.

Justin:

Right? So people might have heard us talking about it 3 months ago, and then they might have seen the email newsletter in passing and said, oh, you know, I really gotta look into that at some point. And then 6 months later, they're in a meeting, and the boss says, we wanna do a private training podcast. And they go, oh, yeah. And that's when they sign up.

Justin:

There's multiple Yeah. Touch points along the way. So yeah. I think what what's encouraging is that we we have gotten some responses, and we have gotten some people who wanna upgrade, which is great. But I I do think this is a kind of a bigger topic in general, which is, especially in marketing.

Justin:

What data do we use to make decisions? Maybe we also need to look back in the past and go, you know, that data we were looking at before to make decisions, was that data good? Or was that data meaningful? You know, Facebook, there I I put this in the the tweet thread too, but Facebook is in a lot of trouble right now because they over estimated the number of views, videos we're getting by, a a huge factor. I think it was up to a 150 times or something.

Jon:

Which I don't understand. Did they just make a number up? I mean, they obviously track it. They just did they just they just inflated it artificially.

Justin:

Well, who knows? But this is why how the like, unfortunately, most people don't look at the data and how you got the data with any sort of rigor. So we see page views, and we just accept that as fact. Or we say we see video views, and we just accept that as fact. But in Facebook's case, like, scrolling by a video might have counted as a view.

Jon:

Oh, yeah.

Justin:

And so but publishers were making big decisions based on that data. They were saying, woah. Facebook video's blowing up. And a lot of companies changed their business model, switched entirely to Facebook. And in some ways, you can't blame them because, you know, they they see these big numbers and they go, well, this has gotta be like, we gotta go where the engagement is.

Justin:

But I I think the lesson learned is you've you have to go beyond engagement. It can't just be page views, podcast listens, video views, email opens, clicks. What happens after? So if you put out a podcast, how many people respond on Twitter? Right.

Justin:

Which by the way, if anyone's still listening right now, if you could reach out to us on Twitter and just say, hey, Right now, I I heard you guys talking about that. We always appreciate it when people reach out. So, yeah. The it it those that's kinda how we have to to gauge things. And from a business perspective, I think this is important too because, you know, in the past, I've launched things where it felt like I was getting initial traction because there was a lot of attention.

Justin:

There was a lot of views. There was a lot of clicks. But, ultimately, that stuff doesn't matter. You could have a 1,000,000,000 views and only get one sale. That is completely possible.

Jon:

Yeah. There's something yeah. There's something wrong in there if it's you get a ton of views and nobody actually cares about what they're viewing or wants to move forward. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it'll be interesting. I I think this is one topic that the Bootstrap community is for sure gonna be talking about is, you know, marketing data.

Justin:

How do we make decisions? Is our data any good? What what what data points should we be making decisions based on? And, I also think there there's a, a tendency to go, oh, well, a 1000000 page views. That's interesting.

Justin:

But my friend, Malin, who is a data scientist, he he has a saying where he says, any, any, like, data point you have should be a ratio. Meaning, you compare it to something else. So we have a 1000000 page views. Well, that's not significant on its own as compared to

Jon:

what? Right.

Justin:

As compared to last quarter, as compared to other companies of our size, as compared to our industry, as compared, you know, as compared to what? What what is the, you know, to make that that meaningful, it can't just stand on its alone on its own. We can't just say, well, this podcast gets 5,000 listens every episode. Okay. Well, why is that important?

Jon:

Yeah. Does anyone respond to us? Does anyone actually care and listen?

Justin:

Mhmm. I also think we we don't go far enough because sometimes we'll say, well, as compared to last quarter. Okay. But, maybe last quarter, there was 3,000 Russian bots, you know, working away, and those have been filtered out. Right.

Justin:

Like, what's happened to your data since last quarter? We don't ask those questions. We we're just like, well, the numbers are up or down. We have to dig deeper. Right?

Justin:

And this happens on Google Analytics. People go, oh, wow. Look at all these new page views I got. And that's, like, okay. Well, let's really dig in.

Justin:

Like, where did that come from? Is that is that even

Jon:

Yeah. What are they what are these people doing when they got there? Are they talking about it? Are they are they tweeting a link to it? Are they sharing it?

Jon:

Are they

Justin:

Exactly. I I mean, there's people on Twitter who have way more followers than I do. But when I look at their tweets, their their tweets get no responses. And so, obviously, follower count isn't an interesting metric on its own. If your metric for success is well, but how much engagement do I get?

Justin:

Do I get and do I get a bunch of replies when I when I tweet something? Is it is it, you know, moving people in any sort of way? That's what matters.

Jon:

Yeah. Right. I mean, you can, yeah, you can yell into the void as much as you want, but if no one's listening, then who cares? Mhmm.

Justin:

Or or if a 1000000000 people are listening but not reacting, then who cares? Right?

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

So and and this is why revenue is it's a very blunt metric, but it is it ultimately, it's kind of like the best metric because it's like, okay. Well, things are up or they're down. Right? We're either getting

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, yeah. People yeah. I've had a lot of people ask me, like, how many how many, paying subscribers do you have? Like, I have honestly, I don't know.

Jon:

How many podcasts do you host? Yeah. Few thousand, but I don't really know because what we've been looking at is the revenue, and is this gonna work for us to, like, make a living? Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. And and, certainly, once our growth slows down, we're going to be looking at different metrics. Like, we're gonna be optimizing different things. And that's where we'll go, okay. There seems to be a correlation between the number of podcasts somebody starts and their lifetime value as a customer.

Justin:

And we might try to, you know, leverage some of that information. But I I I'm just looking back over my career, and every time we got really fancy with the data and we started to we tried to make decisions based on, like, a really sophisticated model, it it just it ended up not, you know, which can be frustrating when, you know, you're not growing. And you're just, like, why are we not growing? Like, what what is causing this? Because you want an answer, like and and then that's where you might go into the data and go, okay.

Justin:

Well, it's gotta be

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Page views. Page views are down. So if we just increase page views, then it'll help. But then you go out and you just, you know, you you launch on product hunt, and you get a bunch of page views that don't matter.

Jon:

You write you write a bunch of write a bunch of click click baity headlines.

Justin:

Yeah. You you launch a but yeah. Exactly. So, Yeah. I think it'd be interesting to hear what people think.

Justin:

Feel free to reach out to us. Any do you have anything else you wanna talk about? I I thought we could maybe briefly touch on what else is going on in the podcast industry.

Jon:

I I think you might you might be following the industry more than I am. So what what is Justin, what is happening in the industry?

Justin:

Now a podcast industry.

Jon:

You mean there's other people besides us?

Justin:

Well yeah. Yeah. And this would be another good topic is how much do you pay attention to your industry? In some ways, we have not, like, we are not podcast industry people. No.

Justin:

Like, we not saying yeah. I I don't know how to

Jon:

Like, we're not spend that We're not at we're not at the conferences. We're not I don't yeah. I don't

Justin:

And not saying that we're not going to. Like, we love podcasters. We know a lot of podcasters. We are podcasters. But there's this kind of traditional industry that's been going for a while that grew out of the the blogging industry.

Justin:

And to be honest, like, the make money online kind of blogging industry, That morphed into what became kind of the quote, unquote podcast industry. And, there's some amazing people in in there, but we've just never really identified with it. But what's I still like to kinda see what's going on because, I just listened to that Daniel Ek, interview. He's the founder of Spotify. So many interesting things.

Justin:

I'll put it in the show notes.

Jon:

Which which podcast was that?

Justin:

I I can't remember. He's he's being interviewed by, a VC type guy. There's some insights in there that maybe, actually after we read the Patreon supporters, I'll get Chris to put in some some clips that I I saved. Just some interesting things to hear how he's thinking about audio. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Thing I'm trying to convey is to think very, very clearly about who it is you're addressing and not go too big too early, but actually be incredibly focused on who your customer is and who your supplier is. Also, charging for something that in the mind of a consumer, it's something that I get for free. So you have to build a ton of things behind it in order to change that expectation set, which I think is very difficult to do. We didn't go about it that way. We've we went about it by creating this very much about starting from the end and reason backward how you get there.

Speaker 3:

So it was very clear from the beginning to me that the magic experience would be, what if you had all the world's music on your hard drive? That's the feeling we wanted to invoke. Let's try it.

Jon:

And then you use the evidence from that experiment with Swedish labels

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Jon:

To sell or close the more significant labels in the US and elsewhere.

Justin:

Yeah. 100%. And one of his comments was, if you are really pursuing growth, you need to have at least a third of the market. And I don't think we are into that, but here's the what's happening in the industry. Libsyn's revenues continue to increase.

Justin:

I'm reading from podnews.net right now. Libsyn earned 10,500,000 in revenue in the 1st 9 months of 2019. This is just for their podcast business. They also have a website hosting business. It's up 14% from, last year.

Justin:

So last year was 9,200,000. Lipson has 67,000 podcasts on its platform.

Jon:

Oh, so they're, like, a 5th or a 6th of what's on Apple Podcasts?

Justin:

Yeah. They're probably a 6th. But, actually, maybe not maybe they're only a 7th, because now folks are saying 750,000, 800 1,000. So they're I would say actually, that see, now we talk about data again. As a percentage, is Libsyn going up or down?

Justin:

My guess is they're they're as a percentage, they're going down.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

So, yeah, it's interesting. So they they are growing that in terms of revenue. And I think for us to be tracking and going, okay. Well, if they grew grew 14%, in the first in q 3, we should be growing at roughly the same rate if we're just gonna be tracking with the rest of the industry. And, I mean, that could be one question we ask.

Justin:

There's

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

May maybe that's the wrong question to ask. I think it's also interesting that we have roughly, 4,000 podcasts. Actually, maybe it's 42100 now. And so our rate of growth compared to Lipson is also interesting. We should be growing faster, I think, in terms of,

Jon:

Yeah. Probably. Because they they're probably dealing with a lot of people leaving and wanting to switch if because they've I don't know. They've been around for a long time. Maybe you haven't changed a lot.

Jon:

Although, I I don't really know because I've never used I've never used them. But

Justin:

Well, they're in the hardest place. There the Rodney Mullen, the the pro skateboarder says, being number 1 is the worst place to be because you're always defending.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

He's like when he was, like, in in our stage, like, the the scrappy the scrappy stage of, like, trying to beat everybody else, he loved it because you're you're always making progress. Right? You're, like, you're just trying to catch up to the person who's in front of you.

Jon:

Yeah. You know you know what you know what the goal is.

Justin:

Yes. You but once you're number 1, it just switches. Now you're just trying to not lose your number one place. And, so on one hand, you wanna be conservative because you don't wanna shake the boat too much. But on the other hand, you wanna be, you know, trying new experiments and, you know, like, it it'd be really hard for Libsyn to change its UI at this point because the for for sure there would be a background.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

And they they are well, along with Spotify, they're they're the only 2 companies that are public, I think, are traded on the stock market.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. That's a good point.

Jon:

So they certainly have different concerns, which is I think why we know what their revenue is because they have to report it. But

Justin:

Mhmm. I think I think megaphone I should check. I is megaphone publicly traded? They might be. I don't know.

Justin:

Because they came out of slate.

Jon:

Oh, maybe.

Justin:

But, actually, I think I gotta check into that. But yeah. So we could actually it would be interesting to dig into that and see if they're making profit and

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

You know, where are they spending their money and all that. But, yeah, that's kinda what's happening in the industry. I will be concerned, I think, if if the leader stops growing in the sense that just they are not attracting any new customers, that would be a concern for me. That would be a, a leading indicator that the podcast industry as a whole is slowing down. Yeah.

Justin:

So it it is something to kinda keep an eye on, I think, and maybe dig into a little bit more. Yeah. I think that's about it. Oh, we one last thing is we we we did some pair programming yesterday, and we relaunched the podcast preview tool, which is, a little something I I built, I think 6 months ago. It allows you to search your Apple Podcast category, like country music, and then upload your cover art and your show title and see how you compare to all of the top shows in that category.

Jon:

And Based on well, kinda based on, like, what it looks like next to them all?

Justin:

Yeah. So I the way I always think about it, like, if I was gonna test a consumer product, I would you know, a new bottle of ketchup, I would bring it to the supermarket, and I would put it up against Heinz and see, you know, first of all, how it compares and then see how many people choose mine compared to Heinz. So many of these decisions seem to be based on what the label looks like. And so if you wanna see kinda how you match up to other shows in your category, transistor dotfm/preview.

Jon:

Awesome.

Justin:

Alright, man. Good show. Let's, let's thank the people who support us on Patreon.

Jon:

Thanks, everyone, as always. We have Eric Lima, James Sours from user input dot I o, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley from Nice Things dot io, Russell Brown, Evandro Sassy, Pradyumna Schembecker, Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, David Gray from or Colin Gray from alitu.com, Josh Smith.

Justin:

Do you wanna always say David Gray because of, the the musician?

Jon:

Yes. But I haven't listened to him in, like, a decade. I don't know why I would do that.

Justin:

What what happened to David Gray? He he he had a that big album, and he disappeared. I don't know.

Jon:

He just burned out. He he made so much money. He just just he just left.

Justin:

He changed his name to Colin and started a podcast company.

Jon:

Right. Yeah. We have Josh Smith, Ivan Krakovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedra Fita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis.

Justin:

Who just signed up to be transistor customer?

Jon:

That's awesome. Dan Buddha, my brother. Danbudda.com. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.

Justin:

Junta? I I was thinking about names for conferences the other day. Like, I was, like, oh, it'd be cool if we we teamed up with Basecamp in Chicago and did, Calm Conf. You know, like, Calm Company. But but now I think, really, to stay on brand, we need to have Junta Conf.

Jon:

Yeah. I know we can get David on that.

Justin:

Yeah. It's just Dave's the whole the speaker for the whole thing. Yeah. Dave's, like, either on stage or signing autographs. Those are the that that's the whole thing.

Jon:

That'd be great. I'll have to ask. Yeah. Okay. Kyle Fox from get rewardful.com and our sponsors this week, Postmark and Clubhouse.

Justin:

Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next week.