Build Your SaaS

A change of plans. And, Jon and Justin go over their launch strategy for Transistor.

Show Notes

How to build anticipation for your product launch

  • Have a mailing list! Email them consistently during development.
  • The week of launch you should send the following emails:
    • Pre-launch announcement: "We're launching in a week!"
    • Day before announcement: "The launch is tomorrow. Here's how much it will cost."
    • Launch day email: "We're launched! Sign up here"
    • Day after email: "You've still got time to sign up."
    • Launch discount is ending email: "This is your last chance to register"
  • Use services like Product Hunt, Product Hunt Ship, BetaList, to build anticipation.
  • On Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, Instagram: constantly send out product updates.
Building anticipation before you launch is the most underrated tool you have for your product launch.

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.

Jon:

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

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor.fm and spots.fm. We might have

Jon:

we had we had a little bit of feedback from the last episode saying that people were worried about our lack of focus. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. Maybe if we maybe if we rename the show build your sasses.

Jon:

Build your sasses. Yeah. I don't know. I think we're focused. It's just on 2 things.

Justin:

That's that's right. That's right.

Jon:

They're they're related.

Justin:

They're related. It's kind of like Intercom has multiple products within their big thing.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And we had a feature that we were going to build inside of Transistor, and now we just all the feedback I've gotten is that we should definitely build it outside of transistor. And, you know, it just makes sense to have it as a separate product. Now if you don't know what we're talking about, you gotta go back to the last episode which is you can find at sas.transistor.fm. I see spots was the last episode. So if you wanna catch up on that.

Justin:

But, yeah, really great to get feedback. I've actually the most feedback I've ever received on an episode.

Jon:

Nice. That's good.

Justin:

Tons and tons of DMs, tons of emails, tons of folks, you know, reaching out. So, yes, we're working on spots.fmgo there to sign up and hear more, but our current focus is to launch transistor officially, publicly to the world, and that's gonna happen this month. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. It'll happen this month by by August 1st, by 31st. By the 30th.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When does yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

Initially, we thought you might come to Canada.

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

And, hang out here in the Okanagan and, or in, what what's north of here? In Kamloops. We were we hadn't decided yet, but and that was the plan. And then I got a DM from Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. This was just a few days ago, I think.

Jon:

Uh-huh. Yeah. Last week.

Justin:

Yeah. And he said, yo, are you busy July 25th to 26th? And in my mind, I'm like, well, that's when John's supposed to be here. But then he says, reason for asking, I was thinking of paying to fly someone out to, MC Laracon. And you came to mind, you can say, hell no if you don't want to.

Justin:

And I'm like, wait a second. Lyricon this year is in Chicago. And and so I messaged him back, and I said, hell, yes. I would like to do that. Yeah.

Justin:

That's the plan. I've booked my tickets, and I'm gonna arrive on July 24th. I'm gonna hang out at Laracon. I'm going to be emceeing. There's a lots of incredible, speakers, Adam Wavin, Taylor Otwell, but also Jason Fried and Ryan Holiday are gonna be there.

Jon:

So you're gonna you're gonna sneak me in the back door. Right?

Justin:

Yeah. That's I I was thinking I might need to make that, like, what is it, a condition? But I I didn't negotiate when I had leverage. Now I've he's already paid he's already paid me. I have no I have no negotiating power.

Jon:

Yeah. Just open a fire escape and let me in.

Justin:

Yeah. I'll just you know what?

Jon:

Should be should be fine.

Justin:

Yeah. You can just come in with me. Yeah. That's the plan going to hang out there. Definitely, if you're at going to be at Laracon, reach out and say hi.

Justin:

After the conference, you and I are going to be heads down together in Chicago 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th.

Jon:

Finishing up. Yeah.

Justin:

Finishing up. We'll try to have some fun while I'm there too.

Jon:

Yeah. I'm sure we'll have fun.

Justin:

But that's actually not that many days, and I think we're really gonna wanna, like, hammer. Right.

Jon:

Can I get up to 5 5:30?

Justin:

Yeah. Get up at 5:30.

Jon:

5:30 wake up call.

Justin:

Are you a jogger?

Jon:

I I'm a runner.

Justin:

You seem like a runner. I'm not a runner, but that that

Jon:

You could you could rent a bike.

Justin:

I could rent a bike. Are you that fast?

Jon:

Well, no. I'm saying if you want a bike Oh. I I could bike too. I'm not I'm I'm decently fast. That's why I say I'm a runner not Really?

Justin:

Wow.

Jon:

Or is that a is that a Canadian thing?

Justin:

I've never even thought about that. I I'm really not in that world. And so if you said I'm a runner, in my head, I would be like, oh, he's he jogs. And if you said I'm a jogger, I'm like, okay. Well, that's running.

Jon:

Yeah. They're similar. I think I've just they're the same thing.

Justin:

Like, if I'm going for a jog or going for a run?

Jon:

Yeah. Jogging, I've jogging, I get this picture of, like, somebody in a in, like, a sweat suit. Oh, that's Jogging. Oh, that's like a

Justin:

that's not how you jog?

Jon:

Sweat band. No.

Justin:

Well, maybe we'll get a run-in there. Have you take have you taken those days off work, by the way?

Jon:

Yeah. I gotta put that in the calendar. It's coming up.

Justin:

So, hopefully, John takes it off work. Otherwise, I'll just be hanging out in Chicago by myself, people.

Jon:

Well, it's only it's a Friday and a and a Monday.

Justin:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I thought maybe this episode, we could talk briefly about what we wanna accomplish both before I get there and while I'm there. This is kind of our our launch month, and I know a lot of folks out there are interested in, you know, what's kind of the checklist of things you should do before you launch and leading up to a launch. And so, yeah, I thought we'd go through some of those things.

Justin:

First of all, I have this launch checklist I use with all my clients, and I think there's kind of, what is it, 5 or 6 elements you need before you even move on. The first is a landing page. We've got that. 2nd is a mailing list slash waiting list. We've got that.

Justin:

We've got about between the build your SaaS list and the transistor list, we've got about a 1000 people on on those lists. You need to have a network of friends, influencers, peers, folks that you can reach out to when you do launch. You need a list of channels you're gonna use, like how are you going to promote this launch. Is that, you know, ads? Is it going to be an event?

Justin:

Is it going to be, you know, PR, product hunt, whatever? And you need some media assets. So do you have a demo video? Do you have hopefully, a logo? Do you have banners?

Justin:

Do you have screenshots? All of those things. And I feel like in that sense, we're in pretty good shape.

Jon:

We're pretty we also have a podcast.

Justin:

We also have a podcast. Yeah. So that those are the kinds of things you wanna be thinking about. We have you know, this is, I just got kinda average downloads per show, and this show is number 2 or 3, I think.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

We we get about 1900 downloads per show on average.

Jon:

That's not bad.

Justin:

So I think, that's 90% of podcasts never get to that number, if I'm correct. If I if I remember correctly. So that is pretty impressive. 80% of all shows don't get 1100 downloads in the 30 1st 30 days. So, yeah, we've been able to build a good audience here of folks that are invested in the story.

Justin:

The the the biggest mistake I've seen people make is they just build in a cave and Yep. Then they go to launch, and there's Just

Jon:

Nothing. Crickets.

Justin:

Just crickets.

Jon:

That's how I would do it if it was just me.

Justin:

And I think one thing one thing I talked about on the art of product podcast with Ben and Derek was that anticipation and building anticipation is the most underrated kind of marketing strategy you can do. So everybody thinks like, oh, I launch and that's when the marketing begins. And the truth is, like, the most kind of crucial moment you have is before you launch because you're able to build up this anticipation. People are waiting for it. My wife is, looking forward to the the new, Basecamp book, the Jason Fried and David's new book.

Jon:

Oh, yeah.

Justin:

And she's, like, every week, she's kinda like, I wonder when that book's gonna be out. Like, she's thinking about it. She's waiting for this book to get launched. And, you know, she's checking Amazon all the time. She's probably on a waiting list.

Justin:

When the book comes out, she's going to be the first one to order it.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And that's what anticipation does. It's it's there's it's a lot easier to build that momentum beforehand than after. After it's kinda already happened. Right? It's like it's like wishing someone happy birthday on Facebook the day after their their their birthday.

Jon:

Yeah. I've been guilty of that.

Justin:

It's just not the same. You know? No. Like, oh, okay. Well, the the big event's already gone by.

Justin:

So I feel like we're pretty in pretty good shape. So what are some of the things you wanna do on on your side before I I arrive in Chicago? What are some what are some things on the product side we need to get done?

Jon:

So let's see. We have we've decided on our initial pricing and our plans. Mhmm. You know, we'll see how well those work out. I have built in support for that, but it's not.

Jon:

There's no real sign up page yet with options and and that you can choose from. So, you still have to be invited, and we choose a plan for you. So, that needs to get finished up, so we can link to a sign up page from our marketing site. Yeah. So I'll finish that up.

Jon:

There's a bunch of additional analytics that, you know, we have planned out or we've gotten recommendations from from.

Justin:

Mhmm. And when you say analytics, you're talking about the actual podcast stats.

Jon:

Yeah. Down download stats. Well, you know, more detailed analytics, things like per episode, I don't know, time of day, location, physical location. Mhmm. What type of devices they're using, you know, running averages over certain periods of time.

Jon:

Yeah. So a lot of that stuff, you know, we have all the data. We just have to bring it out and expose it and make it make it nice looking.

Justin:

Yeah. That that I think that's probably the biggest chunk of work we have left is Yeah. Is just, exposing that and, figuring out a nice way to display it. It it probably won't be perfect when we launch it. It's not going to be, you know, everything we've ever wanted in podcast stats, but it would be nice to add, you know, 2 or 3 more elements.

Justin:

I think for me, I I still would really like the podcast client stats. So are they using Yeah. Apple Podcasts? Are they using the new Google Podcasts? Just to get a sense of where folks are at.

Jon:

Yeah. I keep I keep going back and forth. You could I mean, you can drill down to so many different unique clients. Mhmm. Or you can you could do it by platform.

Jon:

You could do iOS versus Android, or, you could also do desktop versus mobile versus tablet.

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah. I think why the reason clients is interesting is if, for example, if all of your if a big chunk of your listeners are coming from overcast Yeah. Then you want to be able to run ads inside of Overcast. And so there's there's these advantages to, you know, having

Jon:

Yeah. You you get a better sense of your audience, and you can you can target ads and know your demographic kind of. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. And also even to know how many people are listening in the web browser, all that stuff is is really helpful.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. So there's that that stuff will get finished up. There's a lot of little things. There's a few little bugs and just nice little additions will add to the embeddable players.

Jon:

Some probably some copywriting within the interface and just, like, general onboarding. Mhmm. You can't actually cancel your account yet, which is something we we've had to do for a couple customers Yeah. That, you know, just wanted to try it out and and weren't using it. Yeah.

Jon:

So there's there's actually no way to do that on your own, which, you know, isn't a terribly difficult thing. We just haven't gotten around to it yet. Not not we're we're not trying to prevent anyone from leaving.

Justin:

Yeah. It's interesting too. Just a comment on that. The the folks that have canceled, which is fine. People cancel all the time.

Justin:

They were more of the hobbyist DIYers. Mhmm. And so I know we've talked about that on the show. We talked about that with Patrick, Patrick, not Collison, Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently. And it's clear, you know, the high value customers, they're much less likely to cancel.

Justin:

You know, Mike Varty put his podcast over to Transistor, and he's he had to, like, hire somebody to manually go through all of his his website and put it in the new embedded player. He's not going to do that again. You know? That Right. That's a onetime thing.

Justin:

We can also announce this is finally public. Big announcement. Good stuff dot f m, which is a podcast network run by Chris Enns and, Kyle Roderick. They, and Chris is the one who edits our show. They have switched over completely to Transistor.

Justin:

So all of their shows, including the at YouTube podcast, which is for a while, the at YouTube podcast, increased the amount of traffic to our website by, like, I don't like, 10,000 times or something like that. Like, it was like in a an like, there was a big show going on or something, and they were

Jon:

Oh, wow.

Justin:

Broadcasting. And the the player was on this really popular YouTube website.

Jon:

That's a real ZooTV moment. Nice.

Justin:

Anyway so, yeah, good stuff dotfm. Go check them out. But they're likely not going to switch again. Like, switching has high costs for them. And so those high value customers, folks that are serious about it, folks that aren't going from 0 to 1, but are going from, you know, step 3 to 5 or whatever, those make great customers, and, that's something we're going to be thinking about as we, you know, keep going here is how can we attract more of those high value customers?

Justin:

How can we serve them better than anybody else?

Jon:

Let's see. We have to actually finish and publish our homepage Yeah. Which I we we talked about before, which is a separate, WordPress, instance that is a little bit easier, for us to edit and put together.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. So there's still some tweaks on that that need to happen. Honestly, like, I'm starting to get frustrated. I just wanna I just wanna publish it.

Justin:

Yeah. It's at the stage everybody knows this. Like, I don't know what you call this law, but the last 10% of a development project is always the part that takes the longest. And so 90% of the work has been done, and there's this last 10%, little details, little things that need to be fixed, little bits of copy that need to be added, and we are just dragging our heels. And it's one of those things that once it's it's not doing us any it's not helping us to have this thing unpublished.

Justin:

Right? Like Right. We just need to get it out. And so, yeah, that's something that in between everything else we're doing, you're still working full time. I'm still trying to run my business.

Justin:

There's all these other things that we need to do. That's just a little thing that we just need to hammer on and get done, and we'll feel so much better once that's

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Once that's done. I wonder if we should just let people know where it is right now so they can go and look at it just as a, like I don't know. Maybe maybe we'll be there.

Jon:

We'll wait.

Justin:

I I like I like there to be some pressure, like, okay, now we gotta get this thing out. The other thing we need to do is is, kind of flesh out our actual site analytics, so Google Analytics and Mixpanel. Just another tip for those of you launching, this is often something that gets missed in the launch, and there's so much good data you're gonna miss out on. If you're not capturing it during the launch, you're not going to have a good baseline for knowing, you know, how hard is it to get new leads, how well did we convert folks that came through because of the launch. Just having that stuff in place before you launch is so helpful.

Justin:

Mhmm. And I've I mean, I've worked on teams, especially consulting clients, that hadn't had this in place for months after launch, and it it it really just even have a little bit of information can be really helpful. So we need to get that done too.

Jon:

Yeah. That's the big stuff.

Justin:

Yeah. That's that's kind of it. I think there's nothing else we really need to do before you know, as a part of building anticipation, we're going to be emailing our waiting list a few times. If you're not on that, just go to transistor.fm. We also signed up for product hunt's ship service which like has a waiting list there that I haven't actually emailed yet.

Justin:

So, I need to message them and say, hey, here's our plan. We're launching soon. So a few things there that need to be done. The other thing about anticipation is you need to have people thinking about your product before launch day because they need to prepare. Like, they they need to have kind of stew on it.

Justin:

Like, oh, yeah. Do I need a podcast? Do I know someone that needs a podcast? You know, always maybe we should use this platform for the podcast we're gonna launch at work. They need time to think about that, and just bringing it up all at once the day of really doesn't serve you that well.

Justin:

So if you have a Twitter account, if you have a mailing list, if you have if you're using Product Hunt Ship or if you're using beta list or any of those services, make sure you reach out to those folks.

Jon:

Again, not not stuff I would have known to do, if I was doing this

Justin:

myself. Cool. So what what do you think we'll focus on while we're there? What what are what are gonna be the things we do in the 4 days leading up to launch?

Jon:

Let's see. I mean, there's like you said, there's a lot of launching announcements, preparation Mhmm. Our hitting up our mailing list, actually finalizing, like, final final version of our marketing site. I'm sure we'll go over it and copyright it and redo some stuff. I would imagine we'll we'll, like, write some help documentation or maybe record a couple videos Yeah.

Jon:

About how to use the how to use it, some some screencasts.

Justin:

And there's always, like, testing you should do. Like, do some final, like, onboarding testing, test your sign up process, test it with a real credit card, you know, do, test your site analytics, make sure your payment processor is working. All of those things, those are things you wanna do before launch day.

Jon:

I would love to make sure that it looks good on mobile because I know a lot of, you know, at least 50% or more of people will be looking at this on their phone.

Justin:

Are and you're talking about the the marketing site and the app?

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, the app the app's a little more difficult just because of kinda how I built it. It wasn't necessarily a mobile first. But Mhmm. At least at least the sign up, page and and those pages sort of look the public facing portions of it.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Should be should be pretty good to go. But, yeah, mobile I mean, mobile analytics are so high these days. It's you know, you see an email or a tweet on your phone, and then you yeah. You're gonna open it up. And if if it if it's cut off because it's a desktop site still, there's, like, really no reason to not optimize for that these days.

Justin:

Yeah. And, really, what we're talking about is launch sequence. So what's gonna be the sequence of events that happen as a part of the launch? And so we're we're also going to record an episode together. Can we we can use Cards Against Humanity's Studio, you think?

Jon:

Oh, yeah. We can, yeah. I can book some time in there. There's a couple couple different recording studios that we can use. I honestly have no idea how to use the equipment, so I'll have to learn how to do that.

Jon:

I mean, we could, you know, we could potentially, like, hit the button while we're recording. Right? Like Mhmm. Yeah. Launch the thing.

Justin:

I'd I'd want some ringers for sure to be, like, ready to buy because could you imagine if it's just like, okay. We're not gonna say anything until we get our first sale. And then it's just like this long silence for hours and hours and hours. And the other thing a lot of people don't think about is you're not just announcing things once. So you're going to have launch day.

Justin:

Right? But then you're going to have, you're going to have the next day, like, next day, hey. You can still sign up. And then some sort of incentive for people to sign up now. So, hey.

Justin:

We're doing a discount or, you know, we're offering this bonus, and that ends, you know, on this day. So you should at least be sending 3 emails, but the folks I know that are really good at launching, they send 5, 6, 7 emails during launch.

Jon:

Wow.

Justin:

And a lot of it is just because this is your window. Those 1,000 that, you know, group of a 1000 people that are on our list, they've been waiting for this, and this is our chance. And so, you know, they might get the first email and go, oh, yeah. I need to talk to my partner about that. And then they get the 2nd email.

Justin:

They still haven't talked to their, you know, their cofounder. And so then the 3rd email comes and they're like, oh, I'm gonna book the meeting. They have the meeting. They decide they want it. And then the 4th email comes and they're like, oh, yeah.

Justin:

I I need to sign that up. You know? So it it's going to take multiple emails. And, what we have, we have a real simple kind of automation set up in Mailchimp right now. As soon as somebody becomes a paying customer on, you know, in Stripe that triggers an automation in Mailchimp to remove them from our launch list.

Justin:

Or sorry. They get flagged as a customer. And so at that point, they get taken out of those, those launch emails. And this is something you can even set up as using the Mailchimp automation feature, or you can just manually have these emails and, you know, manually schedule them to go out. You know, here's launch day.

Justin:

The the other important email no one sends is the we're launching tomorrow email. That Yeah. That that one is so key because then it keys people up. Okay. They're launching tomorrow.

Justin:

I'm gonna get ready. You know, here I go. So I think I've identified yeah. Four emails. Launching tomorrow.

Justin:

Hey. Just heads up. We're gonna be launched tomorrow at 5 AM Pacific or whatever. Then the launch day email, it's here. You can sign up here.

Justin:

Here's all the information. The next day email. Hey. Remember if you haven't signed up yet, here's your chance. Registration closes.

Justin:

You know? And then the final day email, which is okay. Registration is closed.

Jon:

Good stuff. See, what I would have done is write one tweet and then be like, I launched, and then leave it at that. And then nobody would sign up.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, you can do that too.

Jon:

That doesn't work.

Justin:

It can work for some people, but the for most people, it doesn't. And even on Twitter, all the, like, that same sequence you do in email, you should also be doing on Twitter. You should also be doing everywhere else. Like, you have that same, like, hey. We're launching tomorrow.

Justin:

People just need to know. I have so many friends that have launched something, and I had no idea.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And they said, well, I tweeted about it. And I go back and I'm, where did you tweet about it? And they they have one tweet. No. Twitter is like a rushing river.

Justin:

You drop your tweet in, and then it's gone down. Like, you need you need to remind me probably way more than, you know, you're comfortable with.

Jon:

Yeah. And again, you're

Justin:

you're it's not like you're doing this all the time. You're just using this one window to promote your thing, and that's that's it. So air on the side of during your launch window, really kinda go after it. The other thing I want people to consider and a little trick. This is a trick I learned from Adam Wavin.

Justin:

I probably shouldn't tell you guys, but I'm gonna tell you anyway. Sometimes so let's say you have a like a coupon 30% off, you know, for during the launch. Often what I would do in the past is I would say, okay. Well, I'm gonna open it, you know, today. And then 3 days later, I'm gonna close it.

Justin:

But, again, there's you can never anticipate how long it's gonna take people to get to your email, how long it's gonna take them for them to remember, notice all that stuff. So the trick is if you're using a discount code or something like that, just say it's going to expire eventually, like, eventually it's going away. This is the launch, but don't give an exact day because that gives you the freedom to extend that discount out while people are still interested. And then when sales dial die off, so, you know, you're not noticing any more launch sales, that's when you send your final day email going, okay. You know, it's it's time to close this down.

Justin:

You've got 24 hours to use this discount code. And, really, it serves the the customer because they get to take advantage of the deal for longer, and, it also can increase the number of sign ups you get. So little little trick from Adam Wathan. He talked about that at his micro conf talk. I'll put the link in the show notes.

Jon:

Yeah. What else what else? I haven't I was realizing I haven't seen you in person in, like, 2 years. Right? At least.

Justin:

Yeah. What are you thinking about that?

Jon:

It'll be good. No. I I was just I was like, yeah. We should do some stuff. I mean, you know, we're gonna have to work.

Jon:

But

Justin:

Oh, yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. You know, Chicago has good food. It has good beer. It has So

Justin:

I have two thoughts about this that I wanna talk about quick. The first is part of me as I'm thinking about this, like, I booked my ticket, and it still feels kind of surreal. And in some ways, all this interaction we've had online has been kind of surreal. Like, it just feels like, well, is this even real? You know?

Justin:

Is this is this a thing? And I think, emotionally, for me, I'm starting to think, oh, we're gonna I mean, we've hung out together before this will be our 3rd or 4th time, but emotionally for me it's going to be like, wow, like there's John. I I signed real legal documents that make him, you know, make us partners and Jesus, like, this is real. Like, we're building a real company. This company has shareholders, us.

Justin:

This company has a board, us. You know, but but it's got real customers now. We have 70 people that that rely on us for their podcast hosting.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

On that side, just emotionally, it's gonna be interesting because it's gonna become real. This isn't just kind of a a pretend thing, you know, if that makes sense.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. It's a real thing. I can I can give you a tour of the city?

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Eat eat some eat some Chicago hot dogs. Do not let's not eat Chicago deep dish pizza.

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

My one my one word of advice to you at this conference is if anyone's like, let's go out to, I don't know, whatever, to go eat some deep dish pizza. Yeah. Nobody in Chicago really eats that stuff. Like, it's not it's good, but it it's just it's like a pie crust with cheese. Like a lot of cheese.

Justin:

So it's a tourist thing. It's like voodoo donuts in Portland. Like, locals

Jon:

in Portland

Justin:

don't eat voodoo donuts.

Jon:

There's much better pizza.

Justin:

Well, I I I'm gluten free, so I can't I can't eat I can't eat that kind of pizza anyway.

Jon:

Are you? Yes. I don't know that.

Justin:

Yeah. I I have to, I I can drink beer incidentally. I'm I'm on the low FODMAP diet. You guys can look it up. But I

Jon:

Oh, yeah. I've heard about the FODMAP.

Justin:

Yeah. It makes me sensitive to not gluten, but the things in gluten.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

And so if I was gonna have a Chicago deep dish pizza, it'd be like this heavy layered condensed gluten free crust. It would weigh, like, a £100.

Jon:

It probably would.

Justin:

Okay. So but so the hot dogs are okay, but the hot dogs

Jon:

are good.

Justin:

Yeah. Okay.

Jon:

So, yeah, I was, you know, rest in peace, Anthony Bourdain Mhmm. Passed away a couple weeks ago. He, he he had a few shows in Chicago, and he he loves Chicago hot dogs, despises the pizza.

Justin:

Interesting.

Jon:

So he has an interesting relationship with the city. But

Justin:

Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna put some I'll put some links to Anthony Bourdain's choice Yeah. Picks for Chicago.

Jon:

Okay. Okay. I have a couple of couple links too.

Justin:

Yeah. I think that's gonna be important. I mean, I think it's entirely possible to build a distributed company in 2018, but there is something about hanging out with people in real life and not just working together, but having some shared eating some meals together.

Jon:

Yeah. We gotta

Justin:

Having some fun together. Yeah. So I think

Jon:

Take take some breaks and think about what what we worked on and hash out some ideas.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. And the other thing, I've been kinda resisting this urge to add more things to this trip. And, you know, I I had all sorts of things like, ah, maybe I should do this or that. Maybe I should do some video.

Justin:

Maybe I should try to interview some people on there. I'm resisting as much as I can, but I think one thing I would like to do if we can is do a meetup. You don't even have to come if you don't want to, but I I would like to have one time where just friends on the Internet can come, hang out at a pub, hang out at a coffee shop, whether they're, you know, people that we just know in Chicago or people that, you know, have been following our journey. I think that would be fun to actually meet up with some real podcast listeners, some real, you know, people that follow us online.

Jon:

Yeah. Definitely. So I'll I'll find a good spot for that.

Justin:

Again, I mean, then we're like a tag team. So if if you're if you're introverted, scale goes you you just tag me in, and I go in, and I can just, like I'll stay there all night.

Jon:

I'll go I'll go in the corner by myself and recharge.

Justin:

That's that's a good idea for bars is they should have, introvert. I was gonna say closets, But just like you can just go in, and it's like a a float tank or or something like that. Just complete like, just it just it's in the bar, but you can go in there and just, like, hang out for 3 hours and then come back to That'd

Jon:

be great.

Justin:

There's a free business idea right there. And I think the only other thing is, XOXO in Portland, we both you have to apply to go. They have a kind of a registration process, and we both applied, and we both got in. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. We got to get in. So that was where we initially met.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I don't know. 4 or 5 years ago or something. I don't remember.

Justin:

Yeah. I think I can't remember if my first year was 14 or 15. But

Jon:

You had a monster beard.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I yes. I did.

Justin:

And for both years, actually

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

When they stopped doing it, I'm like, okay. I'm shaving this beard. Yeah. So, yeah, that'll be fun to go back. That's happening.

Justin:

The I think I don't know if the tickets are I think you can't you can't register anymore.

Jon:

But if anyone else who's listening is going

Justin:

Yeah. Snow. Definitely let's go.

Jon:

It's the middle of September, some something like that.

Justin:

Yeah. Let me just see here. I'll put it in the show notes too, but September 6th to 9th, 2018 at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Just so the comedian, Cameron Esposito, is gonna be there. She's really funny.

Justin:

There's gonna be, there's a lot of kind of live, podcasts going on. It's kind of a podcasts podcasters paradise there, really. Unfortunately, I know a lot of folks have asked if we're gonna be at Podcast Movement. I think that's the conference. We're not going to be there because we're gonna be hacking on transistor, while while that's going on.

Justin:

But if anyone is there and wants to mention transistor or spots, I'm inviting you to feel free to do that. Feel free to say, hey, My buddy John or my buddy Justin is building this thing called transistor or this thing called spots. You should reach out to them. You can make as many intros for us as you would like at podcast, what is it called again? Podcast Movement.

Justin:

Movement. Podcast.

Jon:

Podcast movement.

Justin:

Podcast movement. That's in Philadelphia. I'd love to go. I'd love to go see Philadelphia. Our friend Bill is going from, mid roll.

Justin:

Yeah. We just can't make it this year. So I think that's it folks. As always check out what we're doing. Transistor.fm if you want to sign up for the waiting list.

Justin:

Do you want to be on the launch list when we get going? And then you can reach out to us on Twitter transistor FM. You can DM John. Actually, I don't know if John's DMs are open, but you can add I

Jon:

don't know. They might be.

Justin:

You can add him at John Buddha, j0nbuda, and I'm the letter m, the letter I, Justin on all the things. And we'll see you next week. We we got a little bit of a lead up to our Chicago meetup, but we'll be back again next Tuesday with new episode.