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Podcasting changed my life. Jon and I teamed up in 2018 to build Transistor.fm: a modern podcast hosting and analytics company. Upload your audio to Transistor, and we'll distribute it to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin Horek and his fellow learner. Co-founders listen in his groundbreaking leaders, discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit llearner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Welcome back to the learner.co show today. We have Justin Jackson. He's the co-founder of transistor John and Greg, what are you excited to? Well, I guess not really learn, I guess, from Justin, cause we've all known him for, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years at this point. What are you hoping we talk with Justin today?
Well, this is going to be a fight episode because it's a bit of a reunion. We all worked with Justin for years. All the listeners should know that and Justin has become quite the well-known indie developer and he's got a pretty big following of people who follow his, his, His bootstrap story. He's very open in various ways about his journey, starting a, an indie bootstrap company, and he's been very successful with it. I'm excited to hear it to catch up.
And, I gotta be honest, even though I've known Justin actually probably the longest of the three of us. He is a kind of guy, who's a lifelong true lifelong learner and there's always something that'll pick up from talking to Justin. I will for sure learn something today. He is also just raw energy. It is quite fun to talk to Justin. His, his internet following is quite deserved.
I also find what I always find fascinating about Justin is he's very much a trial and error type person where he's willing to just like try one thing. If it doesn't work, I can keep iterating on that. I think that's always been kind of really inspiring to me from just like watching him as he's become, well, I don't know, internet famous or however you want to call it. Right. Like just the, and how he's he tried to hack getting articles on the top of like hacker news and then, he figured out how to do that. Once he figured out that he was like doing that with other things and I always kind of find that fascinating.
Yeah. That's pretty cool.
For sure. I know.
This is going to be fun.
All right. I'm going to show Justin welcome to the show.
Hey, we're having a little reunion here.
Yeah. I love it. I, Greg and John are also going to join on this episode because the four of us have actually worked together for a number of years and we've all known each other for what? 10, 15 plus years.
Yeah. The last time I worked with anybody physically, like in the same space was with you guys. I haven't worked with anybody in the same space since we were together.
Wild. That's what, six, seven years, eight years ago, maybe.
I went remote in 2012. Okay. We left that team in 2014. Right. So yeah. Working with me drove you away from ever wanting to work with anyone else. Again, It's quite the transformation. Yeah. Talking about things I've learned. Yeah. Just to get out of the office. Now there's actually times I there's actually there's benefits to having a remote team like this company that I co-founded with John Buddha for a long time, while it's still to this day, he's in Chicago and I'm in Vernon, British Columbia, and there's advantages to having a team like that. There is something about working alongside people in the same space. That's that's good too. There's definitely trade offs there. It's not, it's not an easy one is better than the other. It really depends.
Well, you can both.
Go harder.
Yeah. You've done both and you've worked obviously together and you've built a startup together and apart. What are the pros and cons of that?
I mean, I think for bootstrapping product, there's a lot of benefits to doing it remote. If you have a pretty good partner and a pretty good connection with that partner. If you start like from the beginning, I didn't want to move to Chicago. John didn't want to move here. It was clear were going to have to work that way. It was kind of baked in to what were doing. The hard part is that your communication has to be way that our, so the, what I've learned in that case is, and I'm still not great at this. I need to have a phone call with John every week for the relationship to be in a good place. Okay. Leave that too long in the same way with your significant other, if you leave, if you don't communicate on a weekly daily basis, you can kind of gradually drift apart.
I've, we've definitely experienced that you drift apart. It's like, man, like we are just not being nice to each other or we're getting into arguments about things. It's because we don't have this like personal connection. For me, especially, I can just get into a zone where I'm oblivious to the fact that we haven't talked on the phone in like six weeks. It's just easy for me to keep going the way I'm going. I don't have like a natural alarm bell in my head. That goes, oh, wait a second. Like, you really need to talk to this person. I just don't have that sense. I've had to build it in as a, just a check mark. Like did I did John and I have a phone call this week. Did we talk about something and try to initiate more of those calls. I mean, there's lots of advantages too.
Like we have a really nice work-life balance. I get to live where I want to live. He gets where he live, where he wants to live and it's made it easier for us to hire people because we're already used to working like this. Jason, our other employees in Ohio and then Helen is in London. I feel like we've been able to like, if the team feels good, it feels the way we work together feels good. We certainly have a lot of autonomy. Like we have one meeting every week where we talk to each other, but other than that, everyone's just kind of working on their own thing and yeah, so far it's worked out. Okay,
Cool. So we know you on this podcast very well, but for our listeners, let's get the background. Kevin, how you, you do this every time. You were great at the intro yet. So, it's usually before we get to that,
Okay.
Let's hear about like where you grew up and where you went to school.
Okay. I grew up in a Stony, plain Alberta, little town, west of Edmonton. It was little when I was growing up there, it was like a dusty agriculture town. My high school was like 75% cowboy hats.
Hats.
No. Oh no. I was in the, I was in the, the, the, the minority that got picked on, for sure. There's, there's like the punk rock kids and then the Cowboys and I was a punk rock kid, but yeah. Grew up in Stony, plain, went to school there and took French immersion Graduated in 1998. What else do you want to know? I went to Edmonton for college. So I yeah. Went to business school, basically got my degree in business management,
The skate shop too, at one point.
Yeah. Yeah. I've done a bunch of things. Once I graduated once, I'd my first two years of, well, let's back up. I start, my first business was in grade 12. I was okay. I ran some raves in Stony, plain, and basically missed out on a lot of grade 12, just skipping class. So I could organize these events. And they did really well. I had my first kind of taste of entrepreneurship in high school. In college, I ran my own web design and like wedding video business. And I did that all through school. Once I was in university, I started working for a nonprofit that works with teenagers. During that time I did that for eight years. During that time, I, on the side, I started at two snowboard shops with my brother and a friend, the friend that helped me with those rave businesses. And I learned a lot there.
We can talk about that later, but we ran these two shops for four or five years, and then they closed in 2005. I lasted two or three more years with the non-profit and then really didn't know what I was going to do after that. Had like told a few people I was quitting. I got a call from Greg, which in retrospect, like, I've actually thought about that a lot, because I was like applying for jobs. Like, I, I applied to be a sales person for a window and door manufacturing company, which would have truly been awful. But.
The, you would've crushed out it though.
Well, maybe it would have been soul crushing too. I think I had.
This double-edged sword there for sure.
I've had this thought a lot about like, we're all we all know about the glass ceiling, which is like, you can see opportunity above you, but you can't get there because there's a glass ceiling. I think that part of my life, I had like a shrouded ceiling. I didn't know what was possible. Like, I didn't know what opportunities exist because I just hadn't been exposed to them. My like once, like the reason I started a snowboard shop is because those were the only businesses I could see around me in Stony plain. Like the people who ran businesses were on main street. That's all there was. I didn't know anybody, even though I'd been into computers since I was a kid, I didn't know anybody that had like a computer business or internet business or a software business. I was applying for jobs, like I think if I hadn't, if I'd taken any of those jobs, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Because Greg called me and introduced me to whole world of internet startups and technology and software, and even just the way we worked as a team, like that was all so new to me. It really opened up this shrouded ceiling. Now I could see what was possible, what was out there. It had a big impact on my life. I, I got involved in tech in 2008, when I started working with all of you and then that I've been working in tech ever since, and basically in SAS and software as a service since then. So yeah. Did work with mailout for till 2014, I think, and then started doing some consulting for some startups in Portland and San Francisco. In started releasing my own products probably around that time, and then started working with John on transistor in 2018. Almost 10 years after I started working with you guys, I eventually was building and running my own software company.
Interesting. You guys met through young life, right? Was that job? Yeah. Okay. That's one job you mentioned. Yeah,
Yeah, yeah. Great.
I do have to interject, I, because the reason you got that call and I was upset about it at the time. It was because I didn't want to poach you as an employee. I was like, This guy seems like he would be awesome to work with, like he's into computers. He's very, I saw some of your work that you've done in that. Okay. This is really cool. How he structured these things. He's a very thoughtful on this part and great energy, all of that kind of stuff. I was like, Justin would be amazing to work with. I, I told your boss or mutual friend, if he ever leaves, you call me that day because I want to hire him. I want to work with Justin. And he didn't call me that day. I was so mad.
You can't let him go. I do remember that phone call was odd because like I had just had this soul crushing week where I was applying at different places. If anyone's ever had to apply for jobs. It's just like, if you have, if they don't know who you are, it's just soul crushing. You're just like a resume in a stack of resumes. I had applied at different places and I was just kinda like sitting around my house and I got that call from you. You're like, Hey, did you quit young life? And I'm like, yeah. You're like, did you find a job yet? And I'm like, no. And you're like, yes. I was like, wow. Okay, well there's maybe something here. So yeah, it was a big deal. It's one of the reasons I've been so focused on wanting to build in public and share stuff on podcasts and on a blog and a newsletter and on Twitter or wherever, because I think the challenge most people have is they just don't know what they don't know.
As soon as you have a sense of what's possible, it can change your life. Like it really changed my life to know about this whole world. It turns out that I was well-suited for it, but I would have never known if I hadn't been given the opportunity. If I hadn't been shown like, Hey, here's, what's possible. Here's what's happening here. Here's how this is different. Here's what we've figured out in this industry that the rest of the world is just catching up to. And, I especially feel that around business because the, what I've learned about business, the most kind of crucial moments have been people who run businesses, taking me aside and saying, Hey, like, let me open up the window for you and show you how this really works or what it really looks like. I think more people understood that if more people could see what was possible, more people would be doing it, more people would be starting businesses where people would be building products where people would be, trying to do things with eyes wide open, like understanding this is what's possible, but here's also, what's hard about it.
And that's just a life-changing thing. Once you experienced that, once you have generous people that are willing to open up the, the window and show you inside,
Just, I, I think that's fantastic that you are like that you want to share that back. You've had that learning this acknowledgement or this realization, and then you want to share it with others. I think that's so cool. The way that you do it, though, you being so public, there's quite a bit of vulnerability there that, I mean, most people, when you talk about business owners, I mean, oftentimes as a business owner, it's actually really a lonely space in a weird way, because there's a feeling like there's things that you cannot share or at least the perception of that. Whether, and you've really pushed the boundary of that for probably for a lot of people to say, Hey, actually, you can't share a lot of these things that you would, that other people would never imagine sharing. It's like, where does that come from? Or how do you get to that place?
I mean, part of it was modeled for me. Like, I think you guys at mail out, did that quite a bit in terms of being transparent about, what it was like to run the business. Even like, our numbers were fairly transparent, we didn't share it publicly, but within the team, there was a lot of that transparency and then starting the podcast had a big impact on me because on a podcast you're in the space where you're really talking to people, a personal relational way and they're opening up to you, but it's recorded. People were sharing stuff with me on this podcast that I started in 2012 that really opened my eyes. Sometimes, they would say stuff off the record before or after, but that whole experience of having people share, I was curious and I was okay with being earnestly curious, like, how does this work?
What does it really like? What's really going on. Having people generously go, well here, let me show you. Eventually some of those connections turned into friendships. There was even a, a, a deeper sense of vulnerability and intimacy, where they were literally willing to show me their bank accounts and say, this is what we're doing. It was, I became friends with Adam Lavin and Taylor Ottewell. It was specifically those two opening up their bank accounts and showing me like, what kind of sales volume they were doing that really helped me to understand this thing. I talk a lot about, which is market first, that the most important decision you'll ever make is which market you go into and what are the shape? What is the, what are the dynamics and the shape of that market? What is the dynamics of that product category? What is the shape of demand in that product category?
Yeah, if they hadn't been willing to show me that stuff, I don't know if I would have had that realization as strongly. Once I realized that I, that became the lens through which I looked at business opportunities, and it was transistor was the first opportunity that came along, that kind of fit that criteria of market first, meaning there's already a sizable number of people buying in this market every day. People wake up and search for best podcast hosting or podcast hosting, or how do I start a podcast? A lot of those searches are with intent to buy. Once I could see that, I didn't know how successful we would be, but I had a pretty good sense that there was something there and that it was worth pursuing. So, yeah, that's been huge. When we started, I wanted to, in some ways really demonstrate is as long as we could, what this was like, it felt like to be in a market where there's just this kind of rushing flow of demand, where you're riding the wave.
You're not trying to artificially create demand. You're not trying to artificially create like people wanting the product. It's just already there and you're riding the wave. We made a decision for the first, I think the first $30,000 of monthly recurring revenue, were transparent with all of our financials. You could go on a website and see all of our numbers. We talked about it, like how were building the company every week on our podcast, just John and I, including like what struggles were having. Like there was a time where, I, John is working full time for cards against humanity. He, his day was like, he'd go to work for like eight or nine hours a day, come home exhausted, and then have to code at night. I had already gone independent. I had some of my own products, but I was like just spending all my time on transistor.
My challenge was like, keeping enough money going in the door with my other stuff while building this new thing that wasn't making any money yet. You can hear some of that tension in the episodes, like there's episodes where he's like burnt out and just not doing good in terms of his time and energy. I'm feeling the pressure, the money pressure, like, and I'm like, I've got four kids I'm like, and it kind of comes through this time. Or like, my spouse is like going like, okay, like you've been working on this for, a good eight months. Like when do we see the money? When do we see the payout? You know? That's when were like considering venture capital and all these other things, but again, we want it to be transparent about it. We didn't want to have this boring, like a sheen of public politeness.
We just wanted to get down to the nitty gritty. Like if we're going to explore what it means to take on investment, I want to know what's that like, and what is, what are we giving up? We did a bunch of on air interviews with some venture capitalists and, ask them tough questions and, really kind of w w was able to, I think, sift away a lot of the noise and get some signal, like this is kind of what it means for a company of our size and all those things. So, yeah, it's been that journey of sharing that stuff was really helpful to a point, like after we got to about $30,000 in monthly revenue, then it was like our competitors. We're looking at our financials all the time and it gave them an unfair advantage against us. Eventually we decided to shut that down, because I think also a lot of the value in terms of people learning, like the hardest thing is really going from zero to 10,000 in monthly revenue or zero to 30 or whatever.
At 30 that's when we kind of started paying ourselves, like full-time quote unquote. It was like, okay, this is a reasonable time to stop being transparent about that.
Actually you could describe then, like, was there also a feeling that was associated with that time? Cause I've had that, had that feeling where you hit a certain point and John and I had it with mail out. I think he got that to you or how it with GS net when you kind of just know like, oh,
Oh yeah. Oh, it's incredible. It's it's, I mean, one hand, I think when you own a business, you always have a space line anxiety of like, really most of my personal wealth is a number on paper. That's all in transistor. The only way I can really take a significant amount of money off the table and kind of truly be, secure in that way is if we sell and we won't know what that looks like until we get an offer and then sell. Right. On the other hand, I remember, I think we paid me first. It was like, John was still working full time and he said, Justin, we got to pay you something. He's like, what if we just write you a $5,000 check every month? I remember like 5,000 was significantly less than I had been making before. Just knowing that I had this 5,000, that was there every month, I just, my stress just, and it really meant I could stop kind of flailing with all these other projects I had.
I could just stop flailing and I could just kind of rest because I knew that it was gonna be 5,000 this month and that we would increase it every month after. Yeah, I, my dad came and visited and he said, he was like, Justin, I've never seen you this calm and chill. Like, you're just this, I've never seen you like this. Cause I was in, I wanted to make it so badly as a business owner that there's, there can be this like manic, just flailing, like, okay, I'm going to, and often what we do in those times, I did this with a skateboard shop too. It's kind of, one of the negative signs is you just keep adding more things on top. Like with the skateboard shop, it was like, okay, well, skateboards isn't enough. So let's add snowboards isn't enough. So let's add shoes.
That's not enough. So let's add apparel. Well, this is not enough. So let's add another store. This still isn't kind of working. Let's add a skateboard ramp and start charging for that. It's still not working. Let's start a magazine and you just keep starting and adding more things. When I was went independent and started selling my own stuff, I had this course that was doing really well, but it wasn't enough to like, just sustain me on its own. I had to always be adding more stuff or doing more launches, or it becomes like this kind of manic, flailing that, especially once you've disconnected yourself from regular employment or consulting, there's just this like, okay, well, I can't go back to that. I just have to keep trying more and more things to make this thing work. It was just so calming to finally had like this one thing that was working and it was growing at like in the early days, like we would grow 70% some months over the pre and it was just like, whoa.
And the calming effect of that. It was like, when John gave me that first 5,000 from the company, it was like, when we decided I would get that, it was like, wow, like, okay, that's a pretty significant part of this month's revenue. Then, so that was April, may, June, July, August of 2019, we had grown so much that we could pay him and me about a hundred thousand dollars a year. It just, it was growing exponentially at that point. By the time he came on and we're both at about a hundred, it was like, wow, like this is like unbelievable. In the months after that, it just became more and more margin. Like what it meant for me personally, it was like I paid off a big loan. It just, it just happened. In some ways like the joy of running a company now we just did a year in review with one of our staff.
They told us the end of last year, were able to give a pretty big profit sharing bonus. And, and one of our team members said they were able to pay off all their student loans because of that. And that's just incredible. It's just like the best feeling ever. Yeah, again, it's one of the reasons I think I'm passionate about this idea of the market. It's the market that determines so much of your success because I think talented individuals can create enough of their own hype to create this machine that runs. The difference is you're always pouring in more fuel. You're always like just, you have to feed the beast so much more, but market first, this idea that the market is going to drive most of your success when you're able to rely on that. It now there's things that can happen to the market.
There's tons of things out of your control, but most of the potential, most of the ceiling is in the market. When it's really going well for indie business owners, it's a very different feeling than, being where I've been with like consulting. It's like, s**t, I need to find someone to let me build them a website for $3,000. Cause we, we got to pay a mortgage. It's very much like a lot of that. A lot of small business is his hand to mouth.
Okay. Eat what you kill is another one. Yeah.
It's very, it's very eat what you kill. Yeah. And, and I think there is this other, just like, there's the shroud, the shrouded ceiling, like people often don't know what they don't know. The only business people they see are freelancers that are struggling every month. They got to like, okay, I've got to bring in this client. And then I got it. There's no margin in those businesses, meaning there's no, it doesn't give you a bigger payoff for your time, for your energy, for your, the, what you've invested. It doesn't start rolling on its own. I think when you are able to ride the built in energy of a wave, a market wave, it's just an entirely different feeling. To your point, Greg, when you feel it, you really feel it. It's just like, wow. Like at the beginning, all of transistors customers were people on my newsletter or from Twitter or from things that, our first hundred, 200 customers were like that.
Like three or four months later, we started getting customers that were just, I had no idea who I was, had no idea who John was. They were just finding us on the internet, literally after typing in, how do I start a podcast or podcast hosting? They landed on our website, signed up for a trial and then became customers. It was just this idea that this is just happening, no matter what I'm doing every morning, people are going to wake up in the same way that every morning people wake up and go line up at Starbucks. Like Starbucks has to do some marketing to stay top on top of mind, but you go every single day, they don't have to do anything to convince people to drink coffee. That's already, that desire is already built in. You know what I mean? Yeah. Now we have to do is direct that momentum to their stores.
That's the marketing piece. That's the strategy piece. That's the operations piece, but every single morning people are going to wake up and they're going to make their way to a Starbucks and a lineup to buy that coffee. There are lots of products, categories that are like that, where the category has been created. There's tons of opportunity within that category without creating something that is super innovative and new and, like flying sure. Flying to Mars and starting a colony there that's new, that's innovative, but like 99.9% of business is in existing categories that already exist where there either is momentum or there isn't. Yeah, we've been, certainly some of this is on purpose and some of this is luck and we've been fortunate that transistor worked out in this way and really gave us an incredible life. It's the first time in all the things I've ever tried with business.
It's the first time where something has really had this kind of underlying momentum and been able to feel the pull of that energy. When you experience it's just like, it's, there's just nothing like it is exhilarating. Your desire becomes not how can I generate demand, but how can I just ride this wave of demand the best way possible? And it's super fun. Like, it's scary too, because you realize how many things are outside of your control. Like Netflix lost 700,000 subscribers this past month because of sanctions that's completely out of their control. I would say, Netflix, isn't a great category. It, it has lots of benefits to it, but one thing they probably couldn't have foreseen is that in their market that, there's always geopolitical events can affect any market and, that's happened there.
Interesting. Now I actually think that's really good advice, but how did you pick the idea for transistor and what exactly is it? I know you kind of quickly covered it, but I think we should at least dive deeper into what it is.
Sure. A podcast hosting is similar to web hosting. In the same way that Squarespace provides web hosting for anyone who wants to start a website, we provide podcast hosting for anyone who wants to start a podcast. And unlike YouTube, podcasting is not centralized. Every podcast you've ever pushed play on, including this one is hosted somewhere. You click play on apple podcasts, that MP3 is not on apple. It is on a web server somewhere that's being run by a podcast hosting company. There were a few things at the time, a few touchstones that, again, I didn't know for sure that this was going to work, but there were a few things that, using these new lenses I was looking at in terms of like, where's the market momentum that gave me the idea that there was something there. The first is that I've been podcasting since 2012, and I've been listening to podcasts since 2008.
The, I had been in the water kind of swimming, or if we're going to use the surfing analogy, I was at the beach. I was watching waves come in. I was watching people surfing those waves and I was kind of close to the action. Over time, like people, when I was running my podcast, I would have people approach me all the time and say, Hey, I've got an idea for a podcasting product. For a lot of years, my response was, I wouldn't get into podcasting because it's mostly hobbyists who are very DIY and don't like spending money. It was like, it felt like a bad market. Over time I saw that the tide started to shift. First of all, more and more people were starting podcasts. More and more people I knew were starting podcasts. There were a few podcasting companies. I met Josh from Zencaster.
He does podcasts recording software. I was asking him, I was like, where do you, like, how is this working? Like, where are you getting your customers? He's like, oh, well, there's just tons of lawyers that are starting a podcast. There's tons of accountants. There's tons of churches. There's tons of. He was able to kind of show me that the market was bigger than what I could see in my little bubble. It wasn't just, nerdy technologists, starting podcasts. There's actually a bigger group. So, there's that touchstone even like the coffee shop test, which is when I was in line at a coffee shop, what did I hear people talking about? I became way more observant of an interested and curious and why people do things, why people buy, why people choose one thing over the other. I just had my ears open for that stuff all the time.
When I'm in line at the coffee shop, it used to be that people were talking about what it transitioned at first. It was like, what apps are you installing on your iPhone? It became, what show are you watching on Netflix? I remember the first day I heard someone say, Hey, what podcasts are you listening to? I was like, what? Like normals are listening to podcasts. I was like, it was just this, like this moment.
Hey, listener you're okay. Is what that means. You just got, you just got affirmation. You're all right.
You're now normal. Yeah, it's been, but it just, it surprised me. My sister and my youngest sister called me and she said, this was probably 2017. She said, Hey, Justin, I've just discovered something called podcasts. Have you ever heard of podcasts? I was like, Emma, I've been doing a podcast for years. Didn't you know about this. It started to that the, the listener base started to grow. In 2017 or 2018, I think it was 2017 for the first time. The number of Americans who had listened to a podcast in the previous month clipped over 50% at 51%. It had kind of tipped the scales into the broader public consciousness. Interesting and cereal had a, had, had a big year podcast. And so it's all building up. There was also the thing, like when I was asking myself, like when John told me in 2017, he had previously built a podcast hosting provider called a simple cast, and that didn't work out for him.
Then, he ended up getting a job and the fact that he was considering it again was interesting. The kind of what made him start working on it was that cards against humanity was launching a company podcast. That's who we worked for. John said, oh, I would love to just build that for you. When he told me that I'd been kind of tracking all this stuff in the space, and again, like, it's just, it's so many layers and touchpoints, it's hard to communicate at all. I was on, I was in every podcasting forum. I was in every podcasting, subreddit. I was in the water or I was on the beach. Like I could see the waves and I could see there a big wave coming and becoming more and more. It's becoming more and more clear that if I get on my surfboard and paddle out to four, that way that might be a really good way to get.
All of these things are coming in and I'm going, I think this, I think there's, this is the year where it could really, even if it, if the growth trajectory doesn't like increase dramatically, just the fact that it's now broken into the public consciousness. I think this is kind of an interesting year. All of the players in the podcast hosting market were older. There hadn't been a fresh face in a long time. I think this like fresh face, like being the new kid on the block and the opportunity to look at an old crusty category where there hasn't been anyone new in a while is such a massive opportunity because sometimes just by being the fresh face, it's like, we got a ton of customers for people who had just been waiting for something new.
Yeah. I've.
Been, I've been with these folks forever. It's like, oh, finally someone knew someone like who's building new software, a new user experience, new design, someone who's thinking about this differently. And we've benefited a lot from that. Yeah, all of that together made me feel like, I think this is a wave worth paddling out to try to catch. I didn't know if were going to be able to catch it, like the timing, just like catching a wave when you're surfing, like the timing plays into this. Certainly our skills and resources and advantages were going to play into it. Certainly what all the other surfers like the competition was doing on that wave was going to affect us. I knew it wasn't a sure bet, but it just felt like of all the opportunities I saw, it was like, wow, we are really well suited for this wave.
It looks like this is something we should go after.
No, I think that's really good advice. It's interesting because like I hosted shows on other platforms before you even built transistor. I didn't move to transistor right away because it was just laziness because of how much of a pain in the ass it was to update everything. It was kind of a hobby, but now I really wish I would've just done it earlier because of how much better transistor is then all the other platforms I'm like, I've tried in the past and I'm not just obviously saying that cause like I've known you forever.
That was great. Let's just make the rest of the pockets. Just this Kevin.
He is though is like just you modernized it so much that I think your con, like when you came in, you just had this, like you supported all the modern kind of things that people wanted from podcasting software right out of the gate where it was like, I can't do this because my platform doesn't do this or how I'd have to move to this other platform to get these three other features, but I'd lose these six other things that I was using. Right. You were just like, the pros never outweighed the cons of actually moving to other platforms. When you guys built transistor, it was like, oh, Justin added this, I really need this. I was like, I don't really want to spend the time doing it. Finally you had all these features and then more than I was getting, and I was just like, okay, I need to suck it up and just do it and like rebrand and do the whole thing.
I was like, I have to move now. Right. Where it was interesting. Obviously like my other shows on you guys, and then this shows on transistor and it's just been, it's been awesome. It's cool to be able to talk to people like yourself, that I'm actually using their product. Cause as a podcast or like you maybe tried their product and sometimes you use it after, but a lot of times you don't, but like I've been, we've been using transistor for God, couple of years now, or at least a year and a half. I don't even know the last couple of years I've been a blur,
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is another thing I think we learned is that the, in some ways like my opinions on building a business went from extreme to extreme. Initially, especially when I was doing everything on my own, I was like, it's all about my audience. I just need to get as many Twitter followers as I can, as many people on my email newsletter be as charismatic and as much of a public figure as I can. My success will be directly attributed to how many people know me. I went once transistor started having success outside of my audience and I could see the power of just people seeking out a solution on their own. I almost went to the other extreme for awhile. And I said, man, audience is nothing. It doesn't matter. It doesn't help at all. Now I've come probably back to the middle, which is like really in business, just like surfing, just like anything else.
Yes. The, you can't surf without a wave. That is the one fundamental building block that you can't fake. If the market momentum is not there. If people aren't searching for a product like this or a solution like this already, it's going to be so difficult to pull them along and get them to kind of come over to your side and do things the way that you want them to do them. The market momentum has to be there. There has to be an underlying movement in your category, but if that's a given, then everything else you bring to the table really does matter. And, and the people who win are just stacking up all their strengths and advantages. If you have an audience, yeah, that's going to help. If you have a lot of people that know you, if you have a good network, that's going to help.
We got things like were able to get into Spotify early, before really before a lot of big players, because we had a connection. We knew somebody that worked there first, if you have a bunch of money in the bank, that's going to help. If you've got, if you're really good at technology and building product, that's going to help and stacking all of those advantages became, the way that we rode the wave, it was like, how are we going to ride this wave better than people who have been riding it forever? Well, we're gonna, we're product people. We, we didn't come from the podcasting industry. We came as product people who really understood what it takes to build a good product. And that was our key focus. Like, no, it's gotta be fast. No, that I'm going to spend a week optimizing our page speed on our marketing site because this has to load quick and our competitors, it takes 30 seconds to load the page.
Everything's gotta be quick. Everything's gotta be usable. Let's make this better than the competition in terms of product. And that really helped. It really helped because it became one of those reasons that people were willing to switch over. It's not like just because the market exists. It doesn't mean that, you're automatically gonna win it. All the skills, knowledge, experience, resources, connections that you have accrued to this point are, that's what you then are going to use in order to compete. All of that stuff, it like bounces off each other. It amplifies each other, one thing magnifies another, like the fact that I have an audience certainly magnifies some of our actions. Right, right. And there's a risk there too. All of these things have risks, right? Like every time I'm, every time I get political on Twitter, my business partners like, Hey, just be careful.
Fair enough. That makes sense. What we're kind of coming to the end. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, transistor in any other links you want to mention?
Sure. If they're interested in this like market momentum stuff, I've written a ton about it on my blog, Justin jackson.ca for the time being I'm on Twitter, who knows that might change,
I'm going to get banned.
I might get banned or I may decide to leave voluntarily, but I'm there at M I Justin letter ambulator I Justin, which actually has, I started that Twitter account when I was at mailout interactive. So M I is mailout interactive.
And that's.
Where we all worked. I thought, initially I thought it was just gonna be tweeting about mail-out interacting stuff. Technically you guys don't all my tweets, you.
Know, we don't,
Can we edit.
That out? Kevin, can we go back? No, we didn't go.
We sold the company. You don't care.
Yeah, if people want to start a podcast, transistor.fm, we're on live chat all the time. If you have questions open that live chat window, and usually John or myself or Helen, Jason will answer,
You actually do answer. Cause I've reached out a couple of times. I think I've got you both a couple of times we've chatted on there. So.
Yeah, it's R it's another one of our secret weapons that the CEO of Libsyn is not doing that.
No, no. Fair enough. You're right. Well, and the fact that you actually get back to people cause like a lot of times that chat just will email you back and then like 48 hours later, you still don't ever apply for whatever.
It was a big thing that we did together. All that, when we're doing mail out was customer service. Right? I mean,
Yeah. Huge learning. I mean, again, this is iterative, sorry, Kevin, this has been extended.
It's going to keep going.
Oh, whatever. I'm fine. Keep going. You have, I just try to be respectful of your hour.
The first day I was at mail-out Greg handed me the phone and told me to call our customers. I remember like, I was like, well, first of all, I really didn't want to do that. It was super uncomfortable.
Fact that.
From the first day mail-out had such a customer centric culture, we all answered the phone was huge. I came to transistor, it's one of those things that I argued with John about. I'm like, we have to be w maybe not answering phones, but we have to be there. You have to be able to reach us and real time being able to answer questions in real-time for people is such a huge advantage, not just from the customer service standpoint. I learned, especially from John, like John would get so much information for people on the phone, like understanding who they were, what they're trying to achieve. John took me on some sales, like in-person sales meetings. That just blew my mind because again, I didn't want, I didn't really want to do that. I was like, oh, we got to go see customers. The first time went, it was just like a life-changing because you realize once you're in their world, you actually see what they're trying to accomplish.
You get all of the nuance of their jobs and their life and what they're there, what they're trying to do and where your product fits in. It's information about the customer that nobody else gets. I think I have the saying that really it's just born out of my experience at mail-out and subsequent experiences, which is whoever understands the customer, the best wins, that's how it works. The best way to understand a customer is to listen to them, to be in their world, to actually do phone calls with them, to actually ask questions and not leading questions, but questions that allow you to observe how they're doing things, why they're doing things, what is the job to be done? Why are they hiring a product like this at all? So, like a sales call with John afterwards, we're going down the elevator. He's just like, so you get a sense of like, when they're hiring email newsletter software, it's not just so they can send a newsletter.
This is like, so that they can impress their boss. This is so that they can feel good about their work. This is so that they can feel creative. Like often when they were using the email newsletter software, it was the only time they were allowed to be creative. It was like, for them, it was like building a PowerPoint presentation and just the fun of putting something together and getting to create something at work is a huge job to be done. You just don't get any of that information if you're not listening. If you're not in a place where you can listen. So yeah, that, stuff's huge.
Yeah. I think it was awesome.
Yeah. Transistor.fm, if you want to start a podcast and what was I going to say? There's oh, and if you're interested in the show where John and I were building transistor, it's called build your SAS. A SAS is spelled S a a S, and you can just start at episode one and hear that they're real journey as we built it over the last four years.
You can also follow Justin on learner, I believe.
As well. I'm also on learner. I've been whenever I'm reading stuff or learning something, I'm trying to post it there too.
Right on.
Very cool, Justin. Well, really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show and we'll keep in touch cause we have,
This is great. I, I just want to do this every week just to have a little mail-out reunion every week.
Yeah. Thanks Justin. Well, John and Greg, what did you guys think of that?
Well, that was a lot of fun catching up with Justin again, and it has got a lot of great insights to share it. I've got a lot of things to think about and I hope our listeners enjoyed the show.
That was super fun. I had a blast. I mean, Justin is such a character and so genuine. That was, I, I really feel like we will, we'll have to do another episode with Justin sometime. Cause there was more to talk about way more about what's going on, what he learned and I'd love to actually dive into even outside of work someday. It would be kind of fun to do on air too. I'd love just his thoughts about doing startups too, around, the, the market defines what you're going to do. Like, is there actually a demand for what you're creating and how to follow those threads about pretty great stuff for anybody who's considering starting a business.
Yeah. That was a great analogy about sitting on the beach and watching the waves. I thought that was a really good analogy for people to relate to.
Very cool.
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