Build Your SaaS

We visit Oregon to answer some big questions about our business.

Show Notes

Jon and Justin do a founder retreat in Portland with Darby Frey and Shay Howe (Lead Honestly). We hashed out some ideas for:
  • How do you start building a really big feature?
  • What does version 1 of our "dynamic content" feature look like?
  • Setting up Mixpanel: creating event triggers, funnels, and onboarding.

★ Thanks to our sponsors:

  • Balsamiq: They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-designers. Get in the zone, and I feel creative right away. Try out their free trial: balsamiq.com
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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: Today's episode is brought to you by balsamic.

I want you to check out something they have on their site.

They have this little online course called intro to wireframing.

It's made for founders, product managers and anyone else who wants to
learn the basics of how to create user interfaces that are easy to use.

And it's really designed to make you to live there.

It's designed to make you go from zero to decent.

In a very short amount of time.

Uh, I've actually looked into this course too, and it's helped me a ton.

You can check it out at balsamic.com/learn.

Slash course

Jon: Hey, everyone.

Welcome to Build your SaaS.

This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019.

I'm Jon Buda, a software engineer, and

Justin: I'm Justin Jackson.

I do product and marketing.

What's the next part here.

Follow along as we build transistor.

Got it.

I had some people say they were upset that Chris doesn't turn my voice into a robot.

Robot voice.

Cause it used to be like friends, I'll start not a fan, but now
it's just, I don't know if he's gotten lazy or we had a robot voice.

Yeah.

I don't remember that.

Yeah, that was like original.

Huh?

So John, we are actually doing this different than

Jon: we are.

We're recording.

In person for the

Justin: first time ever yet where it's kind of weird actually, when you can
look at you kind of, I don't know if I like this, so, John, what are we doing?

Why are we in person?

Jon: Uh, we're in Portland, we are doing a founder retreat, uh, to get some face to face time.

That's a plan, a few features that we've been trying to plan for a while.

Um, you know, catch up in person, hash out, some ideas, sketch a few things out.

Uh, I think that's, that's the idea, right?

Justin: Quite a bit of, uh, folks that were asking, like, how do you do these retreats?

Because I've gotten in a few of them developing different.

Is this the first time you've done something like this?

Yeah.

Jon: Well not, no, not exactly.

I mean, I've done some sort of retreats where it's pretty much just all coding.

Justin: Okay.

Like you just got away and retreats.

Yeah.

You got to wait to do some, do some work.

Yeah, I think this one has been good.

We wanted to talk through some stuff like a bigger feature
dynamic content, and we've got, we've got some of that.

Yeah.

Jon: Yeah.

We got, uh, we, we, uh, had a good discussion.

I think we let, we landed in a good spot.

Justin: And so maybe let's go through like the advantages and disadvantages
of, um, cause I asked you like, while we were at getting coffee.

Do you feel like you get more done when we're in the same place?

Jon: Yeah, well, yeah, I think it depends on what you mean by like what type of work.

Okay.

Um, tell me more.

Well, it's a little harder, I think, to get deep into some code, um, just because there's more.

I dunno, discussion happening.

There's not necessarily a place to go just like into a
room by herself with some headphones in and do some cardio.

That wasn't necessarily what we were trying to do.

Yeah.

There was, there was a decent amount of coding that we did get done,
but, um, uh, that's I mean, that's really the only downside for me, but.

As far as do you have?

I mean that obviously the advantages outweigh that.

Justin: So what are the advantages for you, do you think?

Jon: Well, I think it's, it's a little bit faster.

We've been, you know, faster to come to a decision on a new feature.

We're trying to hash out.

Cause we don't, we don't generally talk.

For Skype, other when, other than when we record.

Right.

So if we're trying to plan something out, it's generally a bunch of slack messages that
may be, you know, asynchronous and it takes awhile to sort of come to a conclusion on

Justin: something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, I think like being together all the time isn't necessary, but there's definitely
an advantage to sometimes just sitting across for the per the person and hashing things out.

Yeah.

Um, so maybe we could talk a little bit about how we, how we figured out this dynamic content thing.

Yeah.

W what were the, some of the struggles we had with that one?

Jon: I think when we initially thought about it, it's, it's a lot to bite off.

Cause the, the topic is, is pretty large.

Like it's, you can, you can kind of, it can get out of control pretty quick.

Right?

We've been wanting to do dynamic content for awhile.

Um, a lot of our competitors do it.

Yeah.

Although it's a little bit tough to sort of, you know, look at
our competitors and say, well, they're there, they're doing this.

Let's do the exact same thing and all of it and try to finish it

Justin: quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's actually a good point.

Like there's a, there's kind of two ways you can respond to that stuff.

On one hand, you can go, okay.

You know, folks clearly want this because our competitors are doing it.

But on the other hand, you almost have to.

Kind of shut that out, like be aware of it, but then shut that down and go, okay.

But what CA what do our customers want?

Number one, and the second part is what can we

Jon: reasonably, what do we want to

Justin: support?

Or what can we even build with the resources we have?

Right.

Jon: So the, I mean, coming into this, we were like, all right, we
want dynamic content that gets inserted into, you know, shown outs.

Uh, we want dynamic.

Banner ads and sponsorship ads to show up on your website, like images and things like that.

And we want dynamic audio insertions.

So you can do dynamic ads or promotions in your episodes themselves.

Yeah.

Uh, and that's a lot, I think that's a lot to plan out for a version one.

Yeah.

We want it to, and then we kind of got into the, into the weeds a bit.

Yeah.

Especially for the audio insertion, like technically how would we do that?

Can we, can we do that right now?

And how do we, how do we do it?

It doesn't, you know, bogged our system down inserting audio and
rewriting files and, you know, re and coding things and stuff like that.

So, yeah,

Justin: I think one thing that was interesting for me is because I haven't
worked on a team time and so just you and I having to sit down and yeah.

Hash out what that looked like was weird for me, because I haven't done, I don't know how
you do that at cards or other jobs you've had like exploration of how this feature looks

Jon: or yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it was, it was good.

I think we, you know, we started somewhere that we thought would work.

Um, as we talked about it more, the obvious, uh, Some of the edge cases and
the problems came up pretty quickly, like, well, we do this, what about,
you know, it's going to affect this in this way and get into those problems.

You sort of take a step back and rethink it and say, all right, is there a different way to do this?

Yeah.

Justin: Um, yeah, no, it was helpful for me is it felt like we were kind of, you know,
we were exploring different ideas, but it wasn't until I said, okay, let's think about.

Like us and our podcast, how would we use this?

And so I was able to go through this kind of use case or this scenario of, okay.

I log into transistor.

What I want is to tell folks about like a special event that's coming.

Yeah.

Maybe we're like in Portland and we're doing a meetup.

Okay.

So what do I want that to look like?

I go to a menu called dynamic content and then I've got options.

Right?

I've got a text placeholder for a special announcement that will appear in the show notes.

And then I've got an audio placeholder for special announces.

That would play like before the episode.

Right.

And so I think once we started talking through that of, okay, well,
do I want some of these things to just have a general setting that's
kind of always there and then a more campaign date-based setting.

Right.

And it wasn't until I went through that flow that.

I was able to kind of see, okay, we've got some options here.

There's two different paradigms and we've got to figure out which one we want to go with.

Um, and I think

Jon: even before that, we had been talking so much about dynamic audio insertion.

I think we eventually came to the conclusion that it's probably not a good place to start.

Justin: Yeah.

You have to figure out how to like visualize the wave form.

Jon: Do we want to, we want to plan and build this thing that might take
several months to do and lots of testing and build out this UI to edit,
uh, your audio wave form and put insertion points for different audio ads.

Yeah.

Which may, which people may or may not even

Justin: want.

Yeah.

Or,

Jon: yeah.

Do we want to build a different interface?

That's that allows you to add audio to the front of your show and that's it.

Yeah.

Which is significantly simpler.

Justin: Yeah.

There was a few times where we had to, we were kind of going off into
the weeds of, you know, what would that be look like to visualize the
wave form and then have, you know, mark in and mark out spots and.

We just had to ask ourselves, like, but we don't really know anything.

Like, we don't know how our customers are going to use this.

So starting at a really base level and just releasing that.

Yeah.

Jon: Which I, which I still think would be hugely beneficial because
anything at the front of the show is obviously going to be listened to the

Justin: most.

Yeah.

So just to clarify, we decided we made a decision.

To start.

All we're going to do is give people the option of doing pre-roll audio,
which is at the beginning fairly easy it's way easier technically.

Right.

Although

Jon: that's not even going to be version one of the dynamic content.

Yeah.

Justin: We're going to start with text placeholders 1.5.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think this is another case where, uh, you know, some people say don't focus on your competitors.

Don't look at what your competitors are doing.

Right.

But see.

And some of our competitors and how they've implemented dynamic content and seeing
how, um, I don't know if I, you know, basically how bad some of those UIs are.

Like, it's hard to actually, it's a tricky thing to execute

Jon: on it, to solve,

Justin: to do it simply.

So if we can look at a, a really well-funded competitor and say, okay,
well, they're having problems pulling this off in a good way, then.

Maybe we should just step it back.

So

Jon: ultimately, what did we, what did we decide on here?

We have, we're just going to kind of start with a dynamic insertion of.

Like text and links into your show notes.

Justin: Yeah.

Yeah.

So the use case would be, um, we'd type out, Hey, we're in Portland
from, you know, July 29th to 31st or 30 or whatever day it is.

Yeah.

And um, if you want to join us, click here.

Meetup or something.

Yeah.

And that would automatically, then the user can say, I want this
to appear in all of my shows, backlog that's the benefit, right?

Is that you can set it for, you know, I want this campaign to appear, you know, This time period.

And it automatically inserts that text and link in all your show notes.

You don't have to go back through 300 episodes.

Jon: Yeah.

And then the idea, I think down the road is to be able to
package up multiple types of dynamic content into a campaigns.

For this month, I want the pre-roll audio, the dynamic content into my
show notes and maybe, uh, like a sponsor image in the show notes as well
with a link they all show up for a month after that is over, they go away.

They're replaced with something else that you schedule ahead of time.

Justin: Yeah.

Cool insight, actually that we could create these different types
of content and then people could create their own campaigns with it.

And it was from us thinking about.

You know, this month balsamic and clubhouse are sponsors.

So how would we want to, you know, use dynamic content for those advertisers?

And I was like, oh, wow, it'd be cool.

If you could automatically put it in the show notes and also have a
banner ad on the website and that sentence actually being together.

Cause you're just like going back and forth.

It's really

Jon: cool.

I'm not sure we would've come to that conclusion.

I mean, maybe, maybe this makes the case for us doing a video calls
more often, or at least video calls that are not just us recording.

Yeah.

Justin: Some people have asked like how, how often you and I talk.

And it's really only on this call.

Right?

Which is actually good.

Like every week we have we're forced.

It is, but we're not planning features.

No, no, that's true.

That's true.

So this is probably a good time to talk about our other sponsor clubhouse.

They've been good to us.

They've they've sponsored the show for two months and it's, it's actually really
fun having a sponsor that you, that you use all the time, because it's easy to.

Talk about it, right?

Exactly.

Oh, we used, uh, epics for the first time on this retreat and epic is a
collection of stories that in this case we, we created one called dynamic content.

And I think one of the benefits is that it's a separate area of the clubhouse UI.

And so if you want to like, avoid all the other noise,
like all the other stories staring you in the face.

Yeah.

You can go app.

Add a bunch of stories and then you can even tag those within them.

So we have like a tag for V1 and we were able to say, okay, this is just.

The first version of it and then V2.

Yeah.

And

Jon: then you can kind of see as, as you finish off and deploy the stories
for the epic, you can see how far along it is and how much, what percent of

Justin: the epic is finished.

Oh yeah.

I forgot about there's like a progress indicator.

Yeah.

Which would be really helpful actually.

Bigger team and you had to, okay, what's this project that, you
know, I got to go to this meeting, got to report to the boss.

So yeah.

Club has been great to us.

If you folks haven't tried it yet, go try it.

You get two months free when you use this URL clubhouse that IO slash build.

So we also spent quite a bit of time on mixed panel and maybe I
think I want to like, cause there's a lot of people listening.

Are probably in the same boat as us.

So you're building a new app and ideally in an ideal world, you would launch your
web, your marketing website and your app, and you would have a bunch of analytics
tracking kind of set up, but in re in the real world that doesn't always happen.

Right?

Yeah.

I mean,

Jon: this was a good, I think this was a good thing for me to work on.

I know you've been wanting it for a while.

We kind of had to decide how we wanted to integrate mixed panel into the app.

Um, and I'm not obviously a marketing guy.

So in the same sense of like previous episodes where I've said, if I
was to start a company, I would just tweet about it a couple of times.

And that's my advertising campaign.

That's the whole budget.

And so similarly I would basically just install Google
analytics and then be done with it and do nothing else.

Install, any triggers don't sell any sort of, uh, funnels.

Um, so kind of getting us some insight into like why you wanted to integrate in the mixed panel.

Yeah, it was good for me to hear.

And then, um, then we had kind of had to decide how we wanted to do it.

So there's like the job.

Yeah, JavaScript library, or you can hook into, or there's like
the backend library that you can just submit directly to their API.

Justin: Yeah.

I want to pause there actually, because I think one of the benefits of having a co-founder
is at least for me, it's easy for me to delude myself into things like to be like,
okay, I need mixed panel, but there's nobody sitting across from me going well, why?

Yeah.

Well, I need it so that we can track funnels.

Well, why.

If I can track funnels, I can see how, uh, effective our marketing, you know, campaigns are.

Okay.

Well, why is that helpful?

And just to be able to go through some of that and have to
create a case for this is why we should spend time on it.

But when you're working alone, you can just be like, well, I need to refactor the whole app today.

That's what I need to do.

And then, and then there's no one across from you
going well, is that really the best use of your time?

Like, I really need to be on Reddit today.

It's it's, uh, it's important.

Jon: So I think I know for me that I think that took
a little longer than I thought you seemed to think.

Less time than you thought it would take.

Justin: Yeah.

I mean, we spent, we spent some time on it, for sure.

Like that was most of the development work this weekend was us working on mixed panel.

So the basic

Jon: premise of it from my point of view is we're going to, we sort of
track this funnel from when they hit the marketing page to the signup page.

Um, there's an event for when they sign up.

Yeah.

Uh, and then there's event an event 40.

They have added their first show.

And then their first episode, or if they've imported a show from a different provider,
which gives you insight into, did this person sign up and actually use it or not?

Justin: Yeah, I think that's the important piece is
like a lot of analytics software, like Google analytics.

It just collects a bunch of stuff, but it doesn't
necessarily answer the questions you want answered.

Like most business owners want to ask.

Channel like what marketing channel brings us the most lead Google analytics,
unless you're, unless you've set it up, you know, in a certain way.

Um, won't tell you that.

It would just say, well, here's your traffic.

Here's some refers, but you might want to know.

Okay.

Well, what kinds of, what kinds of actions lead to.

More sales.

Right?

So in our case, we have guesses, like, I guess that if someone is, uh, creating
a podcast and then uploads an episode, they're more likely to pay and not churn.

Right.

But that's a guess I don't really know.

Right.

So we want to be able to set up some, some tracking to say, okay, well, let's get some insights.

What people are doing just for folks out there.

These are the general kind of rules of thumb.

These are the things I'm going to be looking at.

So for a credit card up front app, which is what we have, we have a 14 day trial.

Um, generally you will visitor to trial conversion to look at like 0.7, 5% to 1%.

And that's because there's some friction there.

You gotta, you gotta take out your credit card.

Right.

Um, but the trial to pay.

Um, conversion should be about 40 to 60% because, uh, they've been vetted in a sense, right.

You know, that they at least have a credit.

They're they're more serious maybe than if they would just sign up for free
right now, if you don't have a credit card upfront, which is a bit of a debate,

like for bootstrappers, if you should, if you should do this at all, but you
want visitor to trial like 5% and over, because there's just way less for it.

You want that to be a lot higher and then trial to pay.

Do you want eight to 20%?

So those are the numbers kind of the general numbers I've always used.

And that's what I want to look at is how, where are we kind of on that spectrum?

Do you have any guesses?

I don't know, actually.

I mean, I know we get a ton of traffic and, you know, in terms
of who actually signs up, we got a fair number of sign-ups.

Um, but you know, it's probably in the 1% range actually,
but we won't, we won't know until, until we see.

And actually my guess is we are converting at a higher percentage.

I think we're converting over 50% for sure of trials, but I have no idea

Jon: or how long they stick

Justin: around.

Yeah.

How long they stick around.

Um, and this actually, so some people might ask like, why Mixpanel.

Cause, you know, you can do some of this in Google
analytics, you can create funnels and Google analytics.

Um, Mixpanel also does, uh, notifications.

So you can do email notifications, SMS notifications, and, uh, in app notifications.

And when we first launched transistor, I had a.

Kind of a new customer onboarding flow that I did in MailChimp.

It was just like automated, but it was really, um, dumb.

Didn't know what they'd done in the app.

It didn't know.

So for example, if someone's importing an existing podcast from
a competitor, they don't need to know how to record a podcast.

They've already done it.

And so I ended up disabling that and.

Um, but I've been wanting to reimplement it because it would solve a lot of problems to be
able to tell folks like our biggest problem right now is people upload their first episode.

They're not immediately aware that they have to submit their show to iTunes.

And so to have some sort of automated trigger of this person just signed
up, they created a podcast, oh, they've uploaded the first episode.

Now we can send them an email that says, here's what happens next.

You need to.

Submit this to iTunes Mixpanel does that.

It also does some stuff that like bare metrics and
ProfitWell does like, it can track churn for you and stuff.

Um, and it's kinda weird.

Like it feels like, I think one thing that's odd is that
all of these apps are collecting user data, like Kayako.

We've got, you know, information about customers on there.

We've got information about customers and Stripe.

We've got information about customers and Google analytics.

We've had information about customers in MailChimp, like when they open a newsletter, but there's
kind of like not one place where you can get a good picture of who your customers are, where
they're at in their world, where they're at in your app, and then kind of respond appropriately.

And I think Mixpanel's the best for that.

We'll see.

Yeah.

We'll see.

I did look into other ones like heap and, um, there's a few other
ones that are, that seem reasonable, but I've used mixed panel before.

Cool.

Do you have any, any, uh, like comments about
implementation in Mixpanel that you want to talk about?

Yeah.

I mean,

Jon: we ultimately chose more of the backend.

So we're just submitting directly to their API as actions happen on our app.

So initially there's a JavaScript snippet on our marketing site.

And then, um, another, there is another snippet on our sign-up page
that actually tracks the fact that they viewed the signup page.

And then there's a cookie that's set that sort of tracks you across those pages.

And then if you sign up with ours, Um, there's going to be this event that happens
in the backend that submits directly to mixed panel that, um, creates a profile,

says when you signed up, when your trial started and then sort of like ties
that cookie into your user ID there, uh, I mean Mixpanel's documentation, right?

It's really pretty straightforward.

Um, it's kinda cool that you can, you know, set up test, like set up other
projects within mix panel and just sort of test things there locally.

Justin: Um, can you tell me, tell me why you didn't want to install the JavaScript on the app side?

Our dashboard,

Jon: an app is not sound like a big JavaScript app.

We're not, we didn't build it in, you know, react or view.

Why?

Justin: Why not?

Jon: I just wasn't, I didn't know it at the

Justin: time.

Okay.

Are you, are you opposed to it, like not at all, where do you kind of fall on that?

Jon: I don't, I don't particularly want to build like a single page app Java script, but,

Justin: um, by the way, the, uh, we have a new customer, uh, Uh,
Honeybadger, uh, they have a podcast on transistor called founder quest
and they talk about, uh, they built their initial version in backbone.

You remember back then and, uh, as a, like a single page
app and they talk about maybe why that was not the case.

Yeah.

I can,

Jon: I can see the benefit from, from a certain standpoint, like interactivity and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Ultimately like our, our app doesn't have a lot of JavaScript, hooks and events.

So if you're clicking around and doing things or adding
an episode, there's no real JavaScript hook for that.

So.

I just used the Ruby gym.

So, you know, if you're familiar with rails, let's say you
add a new episode when that episode is successfully created.

I just fire off an event in the background that sends a request
to Mixpanel and adds an episode created event user's profile.

Um,

Justin: so you found, you didn't really need the JavaScript?

No.

No.

Okay.

Jon: I don't, I don't know.

I don't really know how we would use it.

I mean, we could track like page views maybe

with

Justin: that.

Yeah.

Cause you were saying like in rails you would have to
have like something that, that, um, fires the JavaScript.

How does that work?

Like it, well, it's either.

I

Jon: mean, it would either be, you'd have to, okay.

And the button clicks and say, if I click this button, does create an episode fire office event.

The episode might not.

It might like not validate, not actually create.

And then the only way then to do it would be if the episode was created successfully,
you'd have to like inject a JavaScript snippet into the page to run some Java script.

So it's just not, it, it would basically be the same thing
as using the Ruby gem and submitting it to the back end.

But.

A little

Justin: clumpier.

I think, I think that first scenario actually creates a lot of false positives in analytics
because a lot of these analytics programs use JavaScript, but you're just tracking the click.

You're not tracking like the actual completed event.

Right.

So if you're

Jon: building, you know, an interface with reactor or view, um, You're not reloading the page.

So you're going to submit an episode.

It's going to submit everything in the background to your API and then get a result back.

And when that result is returned back via JavaScript, then you could fire an event.

Yeah.

Justin: Yeah.

So do you think, I mean, it feels like one of the advantages of that.

Using Ruby on rails.

We had an episode about this, but there's just like mixed panel has,
you know, it wasn't great Ruby documentation, but there's enough there.

Yeah.

And when you have a mature kind of, um, you're, uh, you're
building a mature framework, all that stuff seems to be very

Jon: mature.

So it's, you know, Maybe it looks like their documentation is old and out of date.

Not at all.

It was,

Justin: it was fine.

Yeah.

That's fine.

All right.

Mixpanel, reach out to us.

You can sponsor the next, the next month to build your SAS.

Um, yeah.

So that's kinda what we got accomplished this weekend.

Um, anything else you, you felt like was significant about you, either of those
things like talking about dynamic content or implementing this mixed panel stuff?

I think

Jon: it was good to do both of those in person.

I don't know if we would've gotten them done as quickly.

The mixed panel stuff I think was particularly like to talk to you in person about it.

Kind of like what kind of events we needed to record and

Justin: like, where do we go from here?

So like, we're going to go back home.

Now we have stories written out for dynamic content.

Is that is the plan that we're just going to start, like working away at those?

I think so.

Jon: Yeah.

I mean, There are.

And I think that, I think we have, uh, enough to at least start.

I don't know if I'd necessarily be writing code immediately, but yeah, there's
some other, you know, sketching we need to do based on what we talked about.

But

Justin: yeah, like we want to sketch out what the actual screens will look like.

Jon: I think what the flow might be.

I think some other edge cases might pop up.

That's catching it out, but those, I think, I think
we're ready to get started with that and maybe test it.

Um, it might be, it might be one of those features where we
feature flag it to like our show, to test it out for awhile to

Justin: see how it works.

Another benefit of this retreat just came up in my mind, which is, I think I was
telling someone like it's gotten way harder since we launched to work on features.

Right.

Because now we have 600 some customers.

Well, yeah, we're

Jon: doing support part of the time.

And then, and

Justin: there's just so much more signal.

Like there's more signal and more noise there.

People, you know, have things they want to do with their podcast.

And so they're suggesting, uh, making suggestions, which is
great, but we were discussing this article that Heaton Shaw wrote.

He, he was the founder of Kissmetrics and.

He would talk about these Heaton bombs, which is he would just get
an idea and then he would come to the team with the idea and kind of
like, just throw off the whole steam roller through kind of, yeah.

And I think.

That that's like a risk, regardless, regardless of your company.

Like you can, you can just like, you can say, oh, I got this idea or I saw a
competitor do this, or a customer wants this, so we should stop everything and do it.

But preparing for this weekend, we had to say, okay, what's important.

Like what's going to move the needle for our customers in the future.

And I think that kind of focus is really helpful every once in a
while, because then it becomes really clear, like, yes, there's tons
of things we could work on, but what really matters these two things.

Yes, David.

Jon: So hopefully when we both get back, uh, we don't lose the momentum because
there still are a lot of other things we need to either fix like small things.

We haven't clubhouse that probably needed to be done before we start

Justin: this.

Yeah.

So, so how, how are we going to deal with that?

Like how are we going to actually, cause there's always going to be stuff in there.

Like I'm wondering if, if we need to somehow like protect our S protect the.

This part, you know?

Yeah.

Because I mean,

Jon: I don't work on this every day, so I don't know.

We might have to like block off days and just be like, today you can work on fixing stuff.

The next time you work on it, you have to work on.

The new stuff.

Yeah.

Justin: Yeah.

And, and really for me, like I can get in there after you've
kind of set up all the scaffolding and there's actually pages.

Like I could come in and clean up content on a page
or other things, but that, that first kind of split.

Really needs to come from you.

And so, yeah, I'm trying to think of how we can protect your time and your focus when we get back.

I don't want me to answer that yet.

Maybe, maybe it's just a matter of me.

Um, Just, I think part of it is being mindful.

Like I remember being at my first job and at one point the CEO came to me and said,
you know, Justin, you just have to be mindful about what you tell Mike who's there.

Yeah.

Well,

Jon: that's one thing.

I mean, I think you sometimes have a tendency to like, Stories into clubhouse and tag me in them.

So I get a notification immediately, which sort of takes me out of my focus.

Justin: That was actually a good insight.

Jon: So like maybe ads, maybe you can have the stories to the unscheduled bucket, but not tag me.

So I won't get it.

Justin: Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is what I would do.

In clubhouse, you can create a story and then you can say who the owners are.

And I would just be like, oh, well, John and I are the owners.

And so I like, why not hag John now?

Why, why wait?

But then John was able to tell me that I didn't get the importance

Jon: of it.

Justin: Yeah.

Yeah.

So John was saying like, every time he gets one of those notifications, he gets really anxious,

but that's good to know.

Feels like we.

We definitely don't hold a lot of punches.

Like you're, you're fine telling me

yeah.

Something is bugging you.

Right.

Which is important because I would have never

Jon: known.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

I mean, it's, you probably didn't know that I was getting emails necessarily.

Yeah.

I didn't really turn those off, but then I wouldn't know.

Justin: Yeah.

But it's such a small change.

It makes so much sense.

So now we have this unscheduled bucket and we don't assign it.

Anybody to the project and then, uh, really gives each of us the autonomy
to look in that unscheduled bucket and go, okay, what am I ready to work on?

And then we move that over to the ready for development column.

And, uh, yeah,

Jon: at that point, maybe there should be an owner or whoever's going to pick it up.

Mark themselves as the owner.

Justin: Yeah.

It's kind of like, it's kind of like somebody putting events
in your calendar saying, okay, this is your event now.

It's like, oh, I didn't want that.

Yeah, no, I think this is great.

Um, I will post some links in the show notes about, um, there's some
good blog posts from some other folks on how to run a founder's retreat.

Um, this is, I think probably the fourth or fifth thing like this I've done
and every single one has been different, but I really liked, uh, our approach.

Good to get away.

Yeah.

So let's uh, yeah.

Why don't we do our Patrion shout out.

Jon: Sounds good.

Uh, yeah.

Thanks as always to our, uh, supporters on Patrion can new ones this week have a few new ones.

We actually just got it.

Justin: Oh, really from a new one, a new one.

Wow.

That's that's a good timing.

We'll we'll put them in.

Oh, that's Miguel.

Nice Miguel.

I do.

Yeah.

Miguel is awesome.

Miguel is, uh, I think 17 he's young and he is like a really good developer.

He, uh, he built the, I think he built a, uh, I think it's called blog talk.

I should, I should confirm that, but, um, it will.

Read your blog posts or turn your blog posts into, um, Podcasts.

Cool.

So, yeah.

Thanks, Miguel.

Jon: Um, yeah.

Um, Miguel, uh, how do you say that?

Peter

.
Justin: Oh, that was pretty good.

We'll see.

We'll see.

We'll see, Miguel, let us know if we got that right.

Oh, we

Jon: also have, uh, Shane Smith is new Austin Loveless, uh, Simon Bennett from snatch
shooter, Corey Haines, Michael , Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis from fathom analytics.

My brother, Dan buddha@danbuddha.com.

Dan buddha.com.

Darby Frey, who is here?

Justin: Who's here.

Yeah, I got to meet him.

We should have, we should have had him down here so he could have gotten.

Mike.

Jon: So Darby works on lead, honestly.

Dot com.

Yeah.

Justin: With Shea.

Who's also here.

Yeah, she's in the room, but she's not a Patriot.

Jon: So we won't say his last name,

Justin: name, treatment.

If you're a Patriot,

Jon: uh, some Auria Gusto, Dave young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy shaker.

Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam do Vander, who we met.

We

Justin: did Portland,

Jon: Dave Giunta,

Justin: June.

Uh, now this is kind of ticks me off because I heard June 10.

Might've come to this.

I guess Darby was talking to him.

Yeah, he should have come.

We could have had him.

We could have had him say June himself,

Jon: uh, Kyle Fox, uh, from get reward flow, which is our affiliate program we use.

And as always clubhouse and balsamic.

Justin: Yeah.

And thanks so much to clubhouse.

This is their last month sponsoring us, but we really appreciate the support and we will see you.

Next week, next Tuesday.