Build Your SaaS

Justin shares with Jon what he's learning at MicroConf, a conference for self-funded startups.

Show Notes

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:

You know, even extroverts need some rest every once in a while, John.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 20 18. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor dot f f m. How's it going, John?

Jon:

It's going well. How about you? You're, been traveling a bit.

Justin:

Yeah. I'm in Las Vegas. We're doing this live from Las Vegas, and apologies to our all our listeners. This episode's going to be a day late. Just with me traveling here, I'm at MicroConf, which is I think they describe it as the biggest conference in the world for self funded startups.

Jon:

And That sounds sounds right up our alley.

Justin:

Yeah. It's it's right up our alley. I

Jon:

I should've gotten a ticket.

Justin:

Yeah. You know what? Actually, next year, you should come for sure.

Jon:

Yeah. I'd said. It sounds great.

Justin:

There's 2 kind of additions. There's 2 conferences back to back. 1 is growth, and that's for anybody already making a full time living from digital products. And then there's starter edition for people who are just kinda ramping up or looking for an idea or about to launch or have launched and are just trying to get up to a full time income. And so I'm attending the growth edition and then I'm speaking and I'm seeing the starter edition, which starts tomorrow morning.

Jon:

Oh, cool.

Justin:

Yeah. So, I thought it would be interesting to because I'm here and I'm having all these conversations, it's like one of the few times you can kind of run into your people. And

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

It's interesting, you know, there's for example, I've run into a lot of people who are listening to our show. And when you see a real human being in front of you that's like, oh, yeah. I listened to your show. I'm really liking it. That's it's, it's a totally different experience than getting a tweet or an email.

Justin:

You know Yeah.

Jon:

It makes I'm sure it makes it so much more real.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. At real. And also, I think it's given me the opportunity to say, okay. But I'm glad you're listening. But what could we do to make it better?

Justin:

Like what, you know, what what can we do to make the show more interesting? Or and then, you know, I've had lots of conversations about transistor. And then there's also some great talks that have had, you know, just, a bunch of insights for us as we're building this thing. So

Jon:

Yeah. I'm sure.

Justin:

If, if you don't mind, I thought we could just kinda riff on that for a bit. Just talk about what I've been experiencing. That

Jon:

sounds great. I'd love to hear what you're learning, and I'm sure, our listeners

Justin:

do too. Cool. I I I think that the the the bit of I'll I'll start with is that, I've gotten some feedback. So for for the podcast, Derek Rymer and Eric Normand say, we wanna hear you make some decisions and fight it out on air. Alright.

Justin:

And, I thought that was funny. And as I was thinking about that, I was like, you know, you and I make a lot of decisions in Slack, and then we kinda just come back here and report, you know, what decisions we made. Yeah. And I think what some folks are are are well, what these two guys are saying was, you know, I I I wanna hear a little bit of the the drama. I wanna hear a little bit of, all what what got you here?

Justin:

You know? So you made a decision, but what was the back and forth up until that moment? And I said, well, I mean, sometimes it means me suggesting something and John saying he's gonna think about it for 2 days.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

So it might be a really long podcast.

Jon:

Yeah. Or just boring.

Justin:

I guess it all depends on how fiery we

Jon:

get. Yeah. Well, maybe we can you know, maybe for the one of the next upcoming shows, we can think about a topic that we need to decide on and just actually decide on it on the air.

Justin:

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. And, actually, what one thing Derek said, he is, Rob Wallings co founder in drip, and they've had an interesting transition. They were acquired by Leadpages.

Justin:

I think a couple years ago. And, they both recently left Drip. And so this is kind of a big big deal, a big transition, and they're sharing a lot of their thoughts about, you know, what that acquisition experience was like and then what it was like working on the product post acquisition. But he said, you know, some of his favorite moments with Rob Walling is when Rob would come into the room and say, okay. This is going to sound crazy, but what do you think?

Justin:

And, he said often, you know, Rob's initial idea wasn't quite right, but it was enough to kick off some thoughts in Derek's mind where he'd be like, oh, wait. You know, you're not you're you're on the right track, but it's not this. It's this over here. And then they would have these kind of really great moments. So I don't know if we can capture that on on, on radio, so to speak.

Justin:

But I thought it was kinda interesting, kind of a fun idea that maybe one day, yeah, we'll we'll say, okay, let's decide something on air and then people can hear our back and

Jon:

forth. Sounds like people want people wanna know how the sausage is made, so to speak.

Justin:

Exactly. I I have heard a lot of folks really like our, dynamic though because it it it it definitely feels like it's coming from 2 perspectives. And, you know, it's 2 different human beings trying to make forward progress on an idea. And so that's the part people have liked that that tension between, you know, you know, the the way I might wanna do things and the way you wanna do things and then still moving forward on, okay, how are we going to build something that customers want? So that's been really encouraging just to have people go, yeah.

Justin:

I I I I really dig that.

Jon:

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. It's I I think it would be a lot of a lot different dynamic if if it was, you know, 2 developers talking about it or 2 2 marketing guys talking about it. Yeah.

Jon:

Plus we just have different I think we have slightly different approaches. And

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The and a lot of podcasts are like that.

Justin:

It's, like, either for developers or for business dudes, but there's not a lot in the middle. And we're we're kind of in that in that zone.

Jon:

So We're blazing a trail.

Justin:

Blazing a trail. It it's actually, again, I I already said this, but it's been really, both gratifying and just, I don't know, interesting to hear to have people come up to me and say, hey. I've been listening to the show. So thanks for everyone that's done that. There's also I've also been able to talk a lot about transistor.

Justin:

People are curious. Right? I've been going to this conference for the past 3 years. And so Yeah. People know a little bit about my story and so that, hey, what's going on with this new thing?

Justin:

And what do you think the number one question people have about it is.

Jon:

What's the price

Justin:

no not what what's the price the number one thing is why do I need transistor don't you just upload your podcast to Apple Itunes or something? And so to have that, to have that response over and over again, there's definitely a trend and it it shows a little bit of the friction we're up against. Hey. Do do you run into that too? Like when you're talking to people?

Jon:

Yeah. They're like, what is we are they're like, what is it? What is it? What is a podcast host?

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think once I'm able to say like, the first thing I say is, well, if you're going to have a podcast, you need a place to to host your m p threes. You need a place to track your analytics.

Justin:

You need a place to generate a podcast. I was gonna say worthy. Podcast worthy feed. The right feed for podcasts. You might need a place to, you know, generate your podcast website, And that's what we do.

Justin:

And once I say that people are like, oh, okay. That's that makes sense.

Jon:

Related well, we had a customer ask a question, and they were like, related to kind of one of our new features. And it's like, well, if, you know, if you don't if you don't just automatically submit my show to Apple, then how do you turn that off? And I'm like, no. You can't actually do that.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. People don't understand. And I think they have a a a cursory understanding that, you know, there's Spotify and you can get your show on Spotify somehow and there's Stitcher, and you can get your show on Stitcher somehow. And so, you know, the pros, the pros the pro about podcasting is it's built on this open platform called RSS, which means you choose where you want to host your feed and you choose where you wanna host your media.

Justin:

And then all these other places like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, etcetera, they are directories that consume that feed. But in most cases, when people click download or play, that's streaming off, in our case, Transistors server. And so, unfortunately and then but there's people like Spotify that reconsume the feed. And Uh-huh.

Jon:

I

Justin:

was having a I got to meet, our first I think it was our first customer after cards. I'm not sure. But Joe Workman, we've talked about him before.

Jon:

Cool. Yeah.

Justin:

And so I got to shake his hand. He he was looking real dapper. He was wearing a bow tie. And, he has a show called Weaver Radio, if if you folks wanna check it out. But just he's just been super pumped about having a podcast, about being able to, you know, he's got this whole community in, I think it's called Rapidweaver.

Justin:

So it's folks that use this one web development tool called Rapidweaver and that's kind of his target audience. And they say he said they're really responding. But even talking to him, I'm like okay, so I'm glad it's going well but what are some things you wish you had? Or you know, what what are some things you've run into? And, he's like well, I I wish I knew how many subscribers I had I have.

Justin:

Like what is that possible? And I'm like, you know, in the old days a lot of folks used FeedBurner for that. Yeah. And there's, you know, advantages and disadvantages. And I said, but there there's not really a great way of doing that.

Justin:

And part of it is that there's no mechanism within RSS to say, you know, here's here's how many people are subscribed to this feed. We we just don't really know.

Jon:

Yeah. It's it's weird that, like, you are subscribing to a feed technically, but you don't know how many people are actually subscribing to it. Yeah. Because you can you can consume it in so many different ways, and you don't know if if, you know, it's the same person. Like, you could subscribe on you could subscribe in Itunes on your phone or in on your computer, and, technically, that's 2 separate subscribers.

Justin:

Yeah. I

Jon:

mean, it's really it's it's really hard to to nail that down. So I think

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Or so now it's it's common to have, like, unique downloads or something like that.

Justin:

Yeah. And and for example, you can you can get a a sense by if if you look at every time you release new episode, whatever that peak is is likely the number of people who are subscribed because all of their pod catchers are downloading the show at the same time. Yeah. And again, this is the beauty of RSS is the the data was meant to flow one way. So the the feed goes out one way, but nothing comes back in terms of analytics or tracking.

Justin:

Similar to email actually, when you send out an email, it's meant to go out one way. The only way to track it are these hacks that we've added later like link tracking, pixels, like tracking pixels. So Mhmm. I I was I've described a little bit my experience on YouTube and how it's different than podcasting and just not controlling where my content, like, how my content gets displayed, what ads get put on it. You know, YouTube has everything.

Justin:

And the beauty of podcasting is that it's so distributed. No one's going to own it, but there are these disadvantages. So one thing I Sure. I told, Joe was that there we are getting more data from Itunes now. And, eventually, we'll get be getting data from Spotify.

Justin:

So

Jon:

Yep. It

Justin:

it's it's plausible that we'll be able to give people the number of, subscribers they have in Apple Podcasts and the number of subscribers they have in Spotify.

Jon:

Yeah. We should we could yeah. We could probably generate some sort of, like, guesstimate, educated guess

Justin:

Yes.

Jon:

Overall how many people you might have.

Justin:

That's true, actually. Maybe we should just give our best guess too. That just so people have a sense. I also wanted to talk. I had this great talk with Ruben Gamas.

Justin:

He's the founder of Bidsketch. He's one of those people that when I come to MicroConf, I just he's one of the people I wanna talk to. And, we have this thing here called the hallway track, which is just a made up term to mean you're you're just kinda walking in the hallway, you know, going to your room and you run into somebody and you have a great conversation.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And Ruben's built an incredible business. He's he doesn't reveal his numbers, but he's one of the most profitable self funded startups I know about. And a very small team. I think he's got 3 or 4 people. And so kind of in our wheelhouse too.

Justin:

Like, we're, I mean, we might grow to 30 people, but I think you and I are kinda thinking, ah, at the beginning, it'd be nice to be smaller. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. You're supposed

Justin:

to disagree with me, John, so we can have a little fight. So he had so many interesting insights. Also, he's the kind of guy like, I I've gone to Portland and visited them as well, and he'll sit down and he just does not put up with any of my b s. Like, you know, if I'm trying to be charming or or kind of, like, I I really want him to accept this idea I'm presenting, he's just very rational and objective and, you know, there's there's no getting around his kind of the truth as he sees it. And so kind of a good person to talk to.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And so he said, you know, the first thing he told me is he said, be careful not to chase people who aren't already in motion. Instead, optimize for folks already searching for podcast hosting. And I think this is somewhat based on his experience, building his business, which was almost all built on SEO, people searching for freelance proposal template. Mhmm. And, I as I was thinking about that, I was thinking you know, I think one thing and this isn't necessarily bad.

Justin:

It's a little bit of a reflection of my personality. But a lot of what I do is is is kinda based on, you know, I'm gonna make some phone calls and I could probably take someone from being like, I'm kinda interested in a podcast to like, yeah. I wanna start a podcast. Like, I I like doing that. I like being able to say, you know, hey, I think you should have a show.

Justin:

And they're like, I don't know. And and and having that challenge of convincing them.

Jon:

Yeah. That's a very hands on approach, though. Right? It's not really it's hard to optimize for that. Yes.

Jon:

Because it's just there's only one of you.

Justin:

Yes. Exactly. And I think that's the a big part of the mistake I've made in the past is I've leaned too heavily on that. And so, I think talking to Ruben, I was like, oh, okay. Great.

Justin:

This is exactly what I need to hear. And, what he was saying is he's like, this feels like as I was describing the industry to him. Because at he thought, oh, don't you just upload it to Apple? And but as I described to him how it works, he said, okay. You know what this feels like?

Justin:

This feels a lot like the early days of website hosting. So if you think back to, you know, the early 2000 or even, early WordPress hosting. Right? At first it was like people were just installing WordPress themselves, on their own host. But eventually, this whole new breed of web hosts emerged that made it easy to host a WordPress site.

Justin:

So I think there's some parallels there. Do you think did you kinda do you kinda see it?

Jon:

I think so. Yeah. I'm trying to think back on the early days. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was a mystery back then.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And in order to host WordPress, it was still very manual. You're creating your own database. You're setting up WordPress.

Justin:

You're Yeah. Yeah. And I think Matt Mullenweg probably got a lot of the same questions we are. Like, wait. Don't I just because at the time, WordPress didn't have their own hosting.

Justin:

It was like, well, wait. Don't I just go to wordpress.org and, like, create a site there? And he would have to say, no. No. No.

Justin:

You you you host it yourself. You choose the host you want. It's open source. And and so he's like, we what we should do is go back and see what worked for the the people that were early in that business. And so he had, like, I I gotta ask him what he meant by this because I I have this as my note.

Justin:

But he said, like, create a directory.

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

So I'm get I'm I'm thinking maybe he was thinking like, like the word like in the early days, it was like where to get your WordPress site hosted and there's a directory. So that's one way to, like, get, you know, get traffic. Oh, he did the other thing he said is go back and and see what kind of backlinks these, website hosts are getting. So, you know, what worked for them might work for us in the podcast hosting industry.

Jon:

Oh, sure.

Justin:

If other podcast hosts are Bluehost, how can we be WP Engine? And I was thinking about you had a talk with Max, I think you were saying. Yeah. And he was was it was he complaining about podcast analytics?

Jon:

Yeah. He was complaining about analytics, from a different host and saying they were sort of all over the map and changing. He couldn't couldn't quite figure out what was accurate. Yeah. But but he also has talked to me before about the fact that he wants to host his podcast somewhere, but also have the flexibility of WordPress to build a podcast site, but have have the podcast host, you know, being transistor or someone actually power the WordPress site and automatically cross post

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

New episodes with a player to, like, a particular, category or topic on your WordPress site. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So, like, he want, you know, he wants to have all these extra pages and and like the the the features that come along with this whole ecosystem that that WordPress provides with all these extra plug ins, but also have the ability to not have to do double posting between

Justin:

Yeah. Like

Jon:

a transistor and WordPress.

Justin:

Yeah. And I think there's 2 use cases there. Actually, if you're listening and you want this, give us some feedback because one use case I see is that we host the m p threes and we host the feed, but we just give them an easy way to create a post automatically on their WordPress site for the the episode. Like, that becomes the the shareable episode landing page or show notes. And then the other one is we host the m p threes and but the but we allow them to we automatically post that to WordPress as a a post, but the podcast feed is generated on the WordPress site.

Justin:

And so, I'd be interested in in knowing what people want. I know some people want the feed generated on their WordPress site. I personally want the first one. I want transistor to do the feed and then, and the MP 3 hosting but I just want, you know, the ability for it to automatically post to my site as a as a post. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

So, anyway, the the my thought was thinking back to that conversation you had with Max is that's very much, Bluehost versus WP engine kind of conversation. And the reason people switched from, you know, these cheaper hosts to these more expensive premium hosts is like, for example for me, I would, you know, my blog would get on to Hacker News and then traffic would spike and then Bluehost would crash. And so I would miss out on all that opportunity. Or Bluehost, you know, they I would have an old plugin installed and then it would get infected with a virus and then my whole site would go down and my database would be infected. And so WP Engine dealt with both of those things.

Justin:

They can deal with crazy traffic spikes and they automatically update your plugins if there's any sort of security vulnerability.

Jon:

That's that was a huge benefit. I remember I mean, that was a huge pain in the butt back in the day.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

You'd have to automatically yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. And so I I think we need to think about what are the things that people struggle with at the low end that maybe we can tackle on the high end. And, maybe this is a good time to, jump down in our notes here. Brian Kassel did a a talk on how he automates his podcast, but the first part of his talk was just this big list of things he doesn't wanna do when he's creating a podcast, and I just thought it was so it was like perfect kind of customer, development work just listening to his talk. So here's the things he doesn't wanna do.

Justin:

He doesn't wanna find interesting people to interview. He doesn't wanna research those people. He doesn't wanna handle inviting those people and scheduling them. He doesn't wanna handle audio editing and mixing. He doesn't wanna handle writing show notes, links, and transcriptions.

Justin:

He doesn't want to design a feature image for the show. He doesn't wanna handle upload and publishing it to WordPress. He doesn't wanna handle sending new episodes to an email list. He doesn't wanna handle posting new episodes to his social media accounts. He doesn't wanna email the guest that their published episode is live, and he doesn't want, to automatically have to generate reports on listener stats and trends.

Jon:

Yeah. So these are things he doesn't want to do at all or he doesn't wanna manually do.

Justin:

Yeah. He

Jon:

wants someone else or or it to be automatically done.

Justin:

Yeah. Sorry. And the the the only thing he wanted to do was get on the microphone and having an interesting conversation. So he was like, when I make a podcast, what do like, mostly in terms of, like, what do I like? What like, what's the part that gives me energy?

Justin:

What's the part I feel like I can fit into my busy schedule? Oh, well, it's doing the interview, having the conversation. But everything else it takes to produce a podcast, I don't wanna have to handle that. Now he's he's launched a productized service that does all this stuff. So in some ways, he's kind of promoting his own thing.

Justin:

But looking down this list, what are some things you think that transistor could do with software and and, you know, help like, maybe are there some things we could check off Brian's list that we could do automatically?

Jon:

Certainly uploading and publishing to WordPress. Mhmm. Sending new episodes to email list. Yep. Posting new episodes to social media accounts.

Jon:

Yeah. Emailing a guest about their published episode. There is a half finished feature that I have for transistor that is, like, you can assign a guest to a show.

Justin:

Oh my gosh.

Jon:

And have, like, a photo and a Twitter account and an email and stuff, and it would show up on your site and all these other things. But,

Justin:

I didn't know about that

Jon:

kind of an yeah.

Justin:

That would be that would be

Jon:

I had started that a while ago. Yeah. It'd be cool.

Justin:

That would be really cool. It it was just awesome looking at this list and going, wait a second. You know, I mean, it's not, it's not like it's easy, but we could we already have an we already have an integration with Mailchimp and ConvertKit. Maybe the next step in that integration is as soon as you publish an episode, it just sends those show notes out as, email newsletter. And so Yeah.

Justin:

And maybe eventually we can take a you know, we could have some sort of image generated for the player and, you know, people click on the player and then it opens up the actual, you know, website player. But that's something we could do and thinking about how, in this case, Brian's saying this would make my life better. Like, if I didn't have to worry about this, here's where I am right now, and here's how you could enable me to have this better life. I I think also posting new episodes to social media accounts. Like, I'm doing that manually for our show.

Justin:

Why couldn't we do that with software? That that's completely possible. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. You totally can. I think we we could probably cut this list down by half fairly easily. The other ones are a little more difficult.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. The the first half of his list is is more difficult, but, the, yeah, the the the last half of his list, I was just like, oh, this is this is awesome. Like, we're we're, what look at all the opportunities here. So Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. That talk was really fun. Is there anything else that's come up that kinda like that? Like things that people do manually that you think, you know what? We should just do that with software.

Justin:

Like it's completely possible. I was thinking about those little those little social media things that people make, those little social media videos. That's Yep. Potentially automatable.

Jon:

Media videos. Yeah. I feel like a lot of it's around notifying people

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

About about new episodes. Things like, yeah, pulling in analytics from other services. The last one here is reporting on listener stats and trends. Mhmm. A lot of times people need to sort of pull together these reports for advertisers.

Jon:

I think there's an opportunity there to sort of have, like, a, like, an analytics landing page for for, like, potential advertisers to kind of, like Yeah. Maybe show, like, these unique links that can show, someone else, like, what what your traffic is like

Justin:

Yeah. Like for

Jon:

your show.

Justin:

Yeah. Like give give people, a a link that they can just share and it just has real time stats. Like, this is how many downloads our show gets. This is, you know, all all those kind of things. Yeah.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Totally. Well, and that reminds me of, this talk by Justin Mears. He is the co author of traction. He did that with Gabriel Weinberg. As an aside, I think I've seen this strategy a few times where someone so Gabriel Weinberg had a big name because of DuckDuckGo.

Justin:

He was the founder of DuckDuckGo. And Justin at the time didn't quite have the same profile, but somehow he connected with Gabriel and said, we should write this book. And now Traction has become kind of the must read book for startups and marketing. And now Justin is associated with that book because he connected with someone with a higher profile than him.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I think that's a good strategy for, for a lot of things. Right? Like, when when you're starting a business, getting a high profile customer at the beginning, if you're partnering up with a cofounder, partnering with someone that has a That's what

Jon:

I do with that's what I do with you.

Justin:

Except sometimes you might not want that profile.

Jon:

I was like I was like his his Twitter Twitter account follower counts higher

Justin:

than mine. That that that was your criteria.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Anyway, I think I think it is a good strategy and he had this awesome talk. I I actually spoke with him at, the AppSumo conference and he he gave a very similar talk there, but just hearing it again was interesting. And one of the things they did was they they they they essentially started sending more emails. So one way that they reduced churn is they set up a a bunch of trigger emails. So whenever someone took a particular action inside the app, they would say, oh, hey.

Justin:

Thanks for taking this action. Here's kind of the outcome it's going to give you. And so there was just the series of emails going, oh, hey, you set up so for us it might be, hey, you set up your show. Awesome. Here's your next step or you know here's what it means for you.

Justin:

In particular, his app, is kinda like social proof. So it it's I'm not sure if you've seen this, but FOMO will, like, pop up and say, you know, John b from Illinois just bought transistor 2 seconds ago. And then it'll come the it's like a little notification kind of widget thing. And the idea is it gives social proof. So if you're looking at a a pricing page, all of a sudden you see, you know, 3 little notifications pop up that go, oh, you know, Janet in Ohio just bought transistor.

Justin:

Oh, you know. And and it gives you the sense that people are, you know, oh, other people are buying this product. Right. And so one of the emails they sent that was very effective is here's how much money you've made with FOMO, with our product. For us, you know, we're gonna have the reports within transistor.

Justin:

But sometimes just emailing those reports to people and saying, hey, here's how your last episode did. You know? It was published a week ago. Here's how it did. And just giving people a sense of Yeah.

Justin:

You know, here's what it means, in terms of what you've done.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, it I think that's kind of a great way to remind people of the value they're getting because they are, you know, yeah spending money with

Justin:

us. Yes exactly. And the way he presented it was you know if someone's thinking about cancel you wanna give them reasons not to cancel. And so if they don't hear from you for ages and ages and ages and they're just kinda like, you know, should I use that or you know, like one trigger for us for sure that we're gonna have to implement is, hey, I see you haven't uploaded an episode in about 4 weeks and, you know, and that means they've probably lost momentum with their show. And so how are we going to help them regain momentum?

Justin:

And it might just be saying here's some tips to, you know, get started again or just, hey, just reply to this email and just tell us what you're struggling with. Is it, you know, you just can't get your co host on the phone? Is it the editing is too hard? Is it, you know, what is it? And that's something I'd like to enable you know pretty soon I think is just help tracking and seeing okay up if someone hasn't uploaded an episode in 4 weeks, we should probably check-in and just say, hey.

Justin:

How's everything going?

Jon:

The opposite of that is, like, yeah. They they hit a 1,000 downloads total or something like that.

Justin:

Yeah. So celebrating the wins too.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

The other interesting thing, he had this great email that he used to get more reviews. He's basically he said, thanks for using our app. Here's a big favor. Take 30 seconds and then this is the key line. He said, this is the line that they added that changed everything.

Justin:

Take 30 seconds and help me grow my little business. And he said, when they added that in, people it it went from, you know, this big unknown potentially huge corporate entity to, oh, this is just a little business like us. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And so people were much more willing to give them a review or help them out when they use that line like hey help us grow this little business. It's just and for you and I know it's just like it's just John and I were just here trying to build this build this thing. Yeah. If you could help us with a review or you could help us with whatever that would be really helpful. I mean, there's so many other talks.

Justin:

Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe talked. I I missed that one because I've seen him speak at MicroConf a few times, but, I've got I've got all the notes for, for this in our show notes so you can go and read the MicroConf talk notes. They're done by my Do

Jon:

they, do they ever release videos for MicroConf? Is that a thing they do?

Justin:

They used to, but now they just release it kind of internally just for, like, folks that went and yeah. I think the the one thing about Patrick's talk, you know they asked him word-of-mouth for stripe spread fast was that deliberate decision on you know you're in John's part or did it just happen he said we just lucked out. He says the things we were competing against were comically bad. Our competitors forced you to fax things to them and so he just said basically there's this huge kind of boiling simmering desire for something better

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, they yeah. They had a really interesting approach, and I don't know if it it was deliberate or if it's just their background as developers, but they really they obviously took all of a market, which is payment processing, which is just really, really tough to get into as a customer, but also is terrible to integrate with as a developer. And so they they I think they built the API first before anything and then built their website That's powered by the API, but they really targeted developers. And even myself, you know, I, I used it really early in the day, but I was promoting it.

Jon:

I was like, you gotta use Stripe, like, as a, you know, as an employee in a in a company, I was like, we should use Stripe because, like, it's so much easier to to build with. Mhmm. So I think I think that went I think that probably went a long way for them.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

It's just like developers were the ones promoting it.

Justin:

Yes. And I think, you know, one one thing I've been encouraged by is that we're getting we have about 50 early access customers and there's a handful about them that are already sharing it on Twitter and things. I think Jason Resnick, I saw a tweet from him saying, I'm just loving he and he switched from a competitor. And he's like, I'm just loving Transistor. Like, it's been such, he said, it's been an absolute pleasure to, like, use it on a daily basis for his his podcast.

Justin:

That's great.

Jon:

That's great feedback.

Justin:

So it you know, when you have something like that where people are like, this is just great. I've been waiting for something like this. That's a good sign. So yeah. All these notes will be up and available for folks.

Justin:

I think maybe what we should do now is is talk about just I I one thing I wanted to try is moving our what's been happening section to the end of the podcast. So we're gonna try to do the main topic earlier and get into the meat and then for all you folks still listening out there that are curious about, you know, hey, what are we working on? We could talk about that at the end, kinda like the after show.

Jon:

It's like the the post the post credit scenes of movies these days.

Justin:

That's right. The the the post credit scenes, secret scenes, whatever you wanna call it. Yeah. And so, yeah, why don't you tell us about the new feature you just, you just deploy?

Jon:

Yeah. This was, yeah, it kind of happened quick. So, it's been a busy week, for me, like outside of transistor anyway, but, as I try to, you know, at least pick off small things we can tackle

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

This this idea came up a couple of different times recently. I think one was a customer you had talked to. Mhmm. And then another one was from, Adam Clark, actually, who is relaunching his show.

Justin:

The gently mad.

Jon:

The gently mad and and wanted a special feed for his subscribers or his, like, Patreon subscribers. I forget exactly what it was. So so the feature is private podcast feeds that are password protected.

Justin:

Yes. Oh, you were able to get were you able to get password protected done as well? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Justin:

Okay. Because I I was just thinking, like, just a private feed, like, give people the ability to generate a private feed, but you've actually got password protection working too.

Jon:

Yeah. It was pretty simple, actually. So, I thought about it, and I was like, yeah, that would actually be pretty easy to do. So what you can do now in transistor is have the option to well, 1, you can disable your feed entirely if you want because some people don't wanna use the transistor feed and don't want it even visible or accessible because it can kind of affect if they if they're hosting a feed somewhere else, or building it on their own, it could you know, if someone finds the transistor feed, it could affect how things get ingested elsewhere.

Justin:

Oh, yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. But along with that along with that, you can say, I want my feed to be private and password protected. And what that will do is remove a link to your feed from your website if you use the web But if you were if you wanted to, like, share one of your episodes, publicly, it would actually remove the the RSS link from the player itself.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

What it'll do is automatically generate, like, a random username and password for the feed Okay.

Justin:

And

Jon:

just give you a new link. I give you a new link to your feed that you can copy and give to your whoever wants to listen to it privately, and they can subscribe to it manually in Itunes or Overcast.

Justin:

That's so cool.

Jon:

So they don't even have to enter a username and password, and it just gets generated on its own. And that username and password have to be either supplied with the URL or entered in, when someone visits the RSS feed to even view it and subscribe. Yeah. So it's not like we're we're not necessarily creating a a, RSS feed URL that's necessarily like ops ops you obfuscated. I can't say that word, like we're not, we're not like randomizing the, the feed location.

Jon:

We're just like protect password protecting their existing Obfuscated. Obfuscated. Yeah. That's a tough one.

Justin:

I always had a hard time with that one too. I was just gonna say I used to be on a team and there was a point where we were building a feature where we needed to obfuscate something. And every time I tried to talk to our CTO about it, he would just laugh so hard watching me struggle with that word.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And it was like three times a day I'd have to say it. I was like, ah, this is frustrating. Yeah. And and that, just a quick shout out, Dan from CrowdRiff was the the person that wrote in to ask about that feature. He had a really cool idea that he wants to instead of doing, email newsletter for his company, for his team, he wants to do, like a private podcast just for the team.

Justin:

And I thought that was such a great idea and kind of right in our sweet spot of, you know, businesses that want a podcast, but it was a use case I hadn't considered, which is businesses that want a private podcast just for internal use. So Yeah. Here's a message from the CEO. And instead of him having to write things out, he could just dictate it on his iPhone, upload it to Transistor, and then have this private feed that, you know, everyone on his team gets. Mhmm.

Justin:

So yeah. Yeah. I think it'll be cool.

Jon:

I thought that We use that. I mean, I yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. I just thought that was such a cool idea, and he only wrote in about that on April 27th. So I'm, like, writing him back as we do this podcast and saying,

Jon:

hey. Yeah.

Justin:

We were able to get that done quick. It's, like, done right now.

Jon:

And then adding Adam Adam had sent me a message too, and he was like, I'm relaunching the gently mad, and I I'm looking to do this. And is it possible? And I'm like, it's not possible, but I can look into it. And then I think I just finished. I just rolled it out that day.

Jon:

It was like this past Sunday. Yeah. And it was, it was fairly simple. I mean, it, you know,

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

It wasn't too bad to do. So that's that's live now in in your show settings if you are already a customer of Transistor.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. I'm looking at this right now. We've got a nice new advanced settings section. So yeah.

Jon:

There's some other stuff in the in the to do list to add to that.

Justin:

Yeah. This is really great.

Jon:

Other than that, that's I think that's the biggest that's the big main feature.

Justin:

Yeah. We talked about the better uploader. That's done.

Jon:

Yep.

Justin:

And next up is analytics. We we really wanna get analytics done because it's kind of the last big feature we need before we do some sort of official launch. And, actually, the other thing we're working on is the WordPress site. I haven't had time to, it's it's done. Adam Clark just finished it, but I need to get in there and and get some content up.

Jon:

Our main, main marketing site.

Justin:

Yeah. For the marketing site. So Yeah. Once we get analytics done and once we get the main WordPress site done, I think we're pretty much kind of going to be ready for an official launch.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

I mean, what we haven't really talked about this, but in my mind, I'm thinking probably it's probably 2 to 3 months away. But what what do you think and what is that too fast or too slow in your mind?

Jon:

I'd I think 2 to 3 months is probably fine, if not sooner. I mean, there's depends how we launch it, I guess. I mean, we can open it up to more people with the expectation that it's still not finished finished. Yeah. Obviously, it's not gonna ever gonna be really finished, but there's a lot of things like documentation we need to write and Yeah.

Jon:

A lot of copywriting for the, you know, our marketing site and copywriting within the interface just to make things a little bit smoother. And that that always probably takes longer than you think.

Justin:

Yeah. I think, actually, our homework for next week and listeners, again, if you're still listening right now, thank you. By the way, we love hearing from you folks. And so if you tweet us at transistorfm or tweet us individually, John at John Buddha or at m I justin. We really try to respond to those.

Justin:

So if you're listening, just say, hey. I'm still listening. This is our homework for next week, is we need to have a launch date because I think without a launch date, it's just going to be easy for us to keep pushing things out. And, maybe we've been a little bit too laid back about that. Maybe we just need to say, you know what?

Justin:

Here's the day. Yeah. Let's launch on that day and, you know, give us enough time to do it, but actually commit to a day so that

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Not only can we keep ourselves accountable, but just also, you know, there's people out there wait we've closed early access. So if people are waiting to get on the platform, they wanna date too. Yeah. What do you think?

Jon:

So I can book also so I can book a flight to Canada so we can launch it in person.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. We should do that. That would be fun, actually. We should do something like that for sure.

Jon:

Yeah. We should.

Justin:

Cool.

Jon:

Push the big red button and launch it.

Justin:

Yeah. Is it has someone made, like, a big red button that's, like, a USB thing that people can use for launches?

Jon:

I think there I think there are buttons that will, like, will, like, run your deploy scripts or something like that.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. That I

Jon:

I'm not surprised. I would not be surprised.

Justin:

That'd be that would be super fun. Cool. Anything else we should share with people you think?

Jon:

I think that's probably covers it.

Justin:

One thing, the the the stats for this show are still awesome. So on, like, the day we launched these episodes, we're still getting about 1400 downloads. So thanks to everyone who shared the podcast. Thanks for we're getting lots of, reviews. Oh, yeah.

Justin:

We're getting lots of reviews. Oh, yeah.

Jon:

We got we got a t shirt contest we got to talk about too.

Justin:

We have the t shirt contest. So what was the deal? It was by the end of May. Anybody who leaves us a review before the end of May will be entered in the transistor t shirt contest. Just go to Itunes, search for build your sass, click 5 stars, and you have to leave a written review and we have gotten more and unfortunately, I'm not in that section of our website that does this.

Justin:

This is another thing I would love to have within the transistor interface is for us to pull in worldwide reviews. Right now we're just doing it with the WordPress plugin so it's clearly possible for, you know, us to figure this out. So we have got, and I noticed international, like they're from all over the world. It's not just, in America. Okay.

Justin:

Kevin Vanderlicht, He says the from the United States says, this show is the bomb. John and Justin are super open books about starting their SaaS startup. Provide a good amount of actionable advice while also having stories and funny segments. Their episodes on fears of the startup was enlightening and good to hear. Get on it.

Justin:

Subscribe now. Thank you, Kevin. We've actually got a ton of new ones. Wow. We've got one from Switzerland.

Justin:

Stefan Turke? Turke? Nice to hear the behind the scenes of transistor FM and how you handle it with your other businesses. For once, there's a podcast close to the reality of a majority of human beings on the earth who cannot physically hustle with only 3 hours sleep a night. So these are great.

Justin:

These are great, folks. Yeah. So, yeah, just keep these coming. We appreciate every single one. John, where can people find you on the Internet?

Jon:

Find me on Twitter at John Buddha, j o n b u d a, or, my website, johnbuda.com.

Justin:

Awesome. And I'm m I Justin on Twitter and Instagram and, justinjackson.ca. Still silent. Still radio silence from godson.

Jon:

Twitter. I know. I know. Keep pestering me. I'll I'll break at some point.

Jon:

Maybe soon. Maybe this week. Maybe this is the week.

Justin:

I think our approach needs to be, impeach Trump. Because if we can get Trump out of office and off Twitter, I think then John will return to Twitter.

Jon:

Let's do it.

Justin:

I'm trying to figure out which is easier. Just getting John back on Twitter or getting getting Trump off Twitter.

Jon:

I don't know.

Justin:

And as always, folks, please, if you're interested in hosting a podcast, go to transistor dot f m. Sign up for our early access list when we do the official launch. You'll be the 1st to hear about it. And we would just love for there to be more audio shows, more podcasts out there. So get over there and we will talk to you next week.

Jon:

Sounds good. Have fun in Vegas, Justin.