This week on the program, Justin and Jon talk about:
The new Transistor UI, and how folks are responding to it.
"Damn the torpedoes!" – seeing if our update worked in IE11 after we deployed.
Tobias Lütke, Shopify: “All the trends have been accelerated. The pandemic has moved everything forward 10 years. So now we need to build 2030 level software in 2020.”
Will we still be supporting Internet Explorer in a decade?
Show Notes
This week on the program, Justin and Jon talk about:
The new Transistor UI, and how folks are responding to it.
"Damn the torpedoes!" – seeing if our update worked in IE11 after we deployed.
Tobias Lütke, Shopify: “All the trends have been accelerated. The pandemic has moved everything forward 10 years. So now we need to build 2030 level software in 2020.”
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 2020. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:
And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor dot f m. Hey. Every time you make it we make it through that now without laughing, I I like, I always have a little bit of, like, giggle in the back of my mind.
Jon:
Yeah. That's
Justin:
true. I didn't mention it before because I was like, oh, we we would just Yeah. Descend into that again.
Jon:
Is it the perfect storm of weird mindset and something funny?
Justin:
I heard from some people that that enjoyed that. They thought that was fun that we just couldn't get get through it, and you can't help but laugh when other people were laughing. Yeah. Good. So I can't just start off.
Justin:
I I I had a a Canadian holiday yesterday I didn't tell you about.
Jon:
Yeah. 1 one of I don't know. 50. Do you I think you've at this point, it's, like, half a year as a holiday for you.
Justin:
I was like because so yesterday was Victoria Day, which is where we what is what what did Chris say it was? It's where we celebrate Queen Victoria.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
And I don't even know if they do this in England. This is just, this is just Canadians making up reasons not to work, I guess. Yeah. But I was you know, I I woke up and I was like, oh, it's a holiday today. And the kids, you know, didn't have any school work or anything.
Justin:
And so I was answering support tickets, but I was immediately in holiday mode and didn't even think to tell you or anybody else that I was not really going to be around. And then, like, in the afternoon, I logged into I I was, like, had time, and I I went into Slack, and you're like, hello? Are you there? What's going on?
Jon:
It's okay.
Justin:
I'm so sorry. If if if I ever don't show up for work, either something terrible has happened or it's just a Canadian holiday.
Jon:
Or it's a holiday. Alright. 5050 chance. Chris said, yeah. Is the celebrate the birth of the queen and consider the beginning of summer.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
And then he said, if you guys wouldn't have fought the British, you could have had more holidays.
Justin:
Yeah. That's right. Canada's I heard on a podcast the other day that Canada is oh, it was Mike Myers. He was talking to Conan, and he was saying, Canada is an interesting country because we were born without a mission. We we were basically born without a purpose.
Justin:
Like, the, you know, the British kind of were here, and we are we are neither British nor French nor American, but we are strongly influenced by all 3. And I thought that was such a interesting way to put it. Because Conan was saying, why do so many funny people come from Canada? Jim Carrey, John Candy, Mike Myers. And he was like, you know, I think it's because, you know, we're born without a mission.
Justin:
We're we have influences from the British, the French and Americans. But, we're we're a country of observers. So we're always observing, you know, what's going on in the States, what's going on in England. And we're kind of able to make these observations about, you know, these other dominant cultures. And then
Jon:
And then build a society that's better
Justin:
than that. Yeah. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe we're just okay. Like, we're gonna take a little bit from the French.
Justin:
We're gonna take a little bit from, you know, the the Brits. We're gonna take a little bit from the United States, and we'll mix it all together. And then you have, you know
Jon:
And then you have, poutine. I was just gonna say that. Yeah.
Helen:
Poor little gravy on top, and you have Canada.
Justin:
Gravy.
Jon:
I will say poutine is pretty Yeah.
Justin:
If you can get if
Jon:
you can get if you can find a good one, it's pretty good stuff.
Justin:
So, John, besides there being a Canadian holiday, on was it Tuesday or Wednesday, Big, big release for Transistor.
Jon:
Wednesday. When we it was a week later than we had, I think, initially said from a previous
Justin:
episode. Pretty good, though.
Jon:
But not bad. So is that last, you know, few percent of a release of the hardest to get done. Yeah. We released our new reworked dashboard With Little bit of a reorganization, redo redesign.
Justin:
I think we actually undersold it. I think once once you showed me everything that was on staging, I just felt like, wow, this is feels like a major release. It actually feels like so much is new here.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, it almost nothing is new on the back end. Mhmm. It is a 100% new on the front. Like, it is completely redone.
Jon:
Most of the HTML, all the JavaScript, all the CSS is just brand new. Yeah. Which, you know, I probably underestimated how much work that would be. But
Justin:
I mean, this is really I mean, you talk about refactoring UI, which is the book by Adam and Steve. This was refactoring UI. And the games that we got, partly because I think you were able to go through every single page and sometimes just rework how things were working on the page and the interactions on the page. And so when we released it I mean, I I was you showed me the final kind of version on staging. And it just it really got me excited.
Justin:
Like, I don't think I've been this excited for a long time about something we've released with Transistor.
Jon:
Yeah. It was a big it was a huge change.
Justin:
And it just felt like we need to tell the world about this. I ended up doing this big press release and sent it to some outlets. And, you know, it just felt like this is, this is a big change and feels good to have it out. And especially interesting because we were in that slog for so long of, you know, working on it. So to have it out in the world and for it to actually for all that potential to finally be realized
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Did it feel good for you too?
Jon:
It did. Yeah. It's, it's always a little bittersweet for me because, like, I think we've talked about this before where the the process and the building is the part that's enjoyable, and then you get it out and it's like, it's a relief, but then I don't know I don't know what it is.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
It's probably a combination of stuff. It's a relief. It feels good, but I know there's this inevitable long tail of fixes and people saying that, like, this doesn't work. Mhmm. I have a hard time going into, like, marketing mode.
Jon:
I mean, I know you, like, you went and pushed it and, like, went and marketed and did a great job of that. But, like, getting getting all this feedback, even though it was positive, was, like, it's not I don't really know what to do with that.
Justin:
Yeah. So you don't even like hearing, like, all the people that liked it?
Jon:
No. I do. It just takes me, like, a while for it to settle in.
Justin:
Interesting. It's a Because, like, it it it I don't know.
Jon:
It almost sets expectation that I I I don't know. I think it's it's just like the constant imposter syndrome where, like, I know people like it.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
But it always feels like it's not enough. It's hey. It's just weird. I can't wrap my head around it all the time. I should probably think about that more and figure out what's what's up with that.
Justin:
Yeah. So I I mean, is it just like an anxiety of, okay, I've I'm finally putting this thing out into the world that I've worked on, and now people can have an opinion about it. Yeah. Probably. Okay.
Jon:
Let's try some of that. I also start thinking about, like, the next thing that I wanted, you know, because this is this will definitely help us build some things a little faster because we're not sort of hamstrung by these, you know, other libraries that we used before Yeah. And, you know, design systems and stuff. But I sort of immediately, like, move on to the next thing without really, maybe celebrating is the right word? Celebrating with what we what we put out?
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And that, you know, part of that too is this and most of most of the responses, I think, were great. By by far, the majority were were great. But there's there's always these other customers that will come back and say, hey. This is great, but, like, what's what's the timeline in this one
Justin:
thing that
Jon:
that we haven't released yet? And it's just like this flood of of new things that
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
We sort of have to, like, categorize and and say either no to or, you know, we thought about that or we're gonna work kinda later.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, I I I totally get both sides. I get your your feeling of I mean, it was a lot of work.
Justin:
And when you work on something for a long time, I think there is, yeah, kind of this low level anxiety about, like, how are people going to react? And sometimes any reaction is just overwhelming emotionally.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
It's like, I just don't wanna hear any input, good or bad. I just need to, like, rest. It's like it's like finishing a marathon and immediately someone sticks a microphone in your face and goes, so tell me, what was the experience like? And and you're like, can you just, like, give me a second to go have a shit and, like, eat a Mars bar?
Jon:
How did you feel? How do you feel now? Terrible.
Justin:
Exactly. Yeah. I can I can get that? And maybe that's something we can work into our cadence, is you know, and Basecamp kinda has this. Like, they'll do a major release and then they'll have that cool down cycle.
Justin:
I wonder if if we even need to have a version of that that is you know, works better for us, which is, you know, once you get done working on something this big for you to just even just step out for a while, just be like, okay. I'm not I'm not taking any Slack messages or Justin, I don't wanna hear about anything really. Like, contact me if something's really broken. But otherwise, just
Jon:
Yeah. It's it's possible. I mean, this I think this was an exception though to how we work. Mhmm. Like, this was just Yeah.
Jon:
Took forever just because of a combination of, you know, everything that's been happening this year.
Justin:
Yeah. Totally.
Jon:
Yeah. I I mean, I think the rollout went well. There's a couple hiccups.
Justin:
Yeah. Could we tell people about our because I think this will be we we had this question of, like, we knew we knew it would probably not work in IE 11. Like and our QA was, I tested it on Safari mobile and Chrome mobile, and I tested it on Mac Chrome, Mac Firefox, and Mac Safari. And you did as well, but we didn't test it on any PCs.
Jon:
Nope.
Justin:
And we we did not test it in Edge or anything. And you were, like, asking me about it, and I was just kinda like, damn the torpedoes. Let's just do it.
Jon:
Yeah. Well, I think we we kinda rolled the dice and and saw that very few people used Edge Mhmm. Or I 11. I mean, IE 11 is just so old. We could probably make it work.
Jon:
I don't know if we should or if it's worth the time. Edge is another Edge is a weird beast on PCs because there is Microsoft Edge up to, like, version 18, which is completely different than the new Microsoft Edge.
Justin:
Oh, really? Okay.
Jon:
But it's an entirely different rendering engine and everything. So I don't know I don't know how this still works, but if you install Windows 10 from scratch, I think it still installs Microsoft Edge 18. I don't know. But then there's a new one that's built on Chrome. Okay.
Jon:
And so that actually is essentially the same thing as Google Chrome. It uses the same engine. It's the same version number almost.
Justin:
Interesting. Interesting.
Jon:
And it's updated and it's updated constantly. So you can download that. They actually have a version for Mac, which I just found out. Okay. And that one is great.
Jon:
That works perfectly fine. But Edge 18 is mostly fine, except it doesn't support some modern JavaScript functions that I used, which are replaceable with other ones. I just didn't know that. So I think I fixed everything in in edge 18, and it works fine. There's still a little, like, visual wonkiness with some of the CSS, but, I might have to talk to Adam about that
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
Actually with tail Tailwind and just, like, see if he notices these things or if he even cares about it.
Justin:
Well, I know he cares about, like, he asked me before he launched if he if if I thought he should care about IE 11 support. And I told him no. Because I said
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
You can always add it later if you absolutely need to. I gave him the same advice that I gave I gave us, which was, let's just launch. And if we get a ton of people saying it's broken in IE 11, then we should roll out some kind of fix and invest in it. But what you know, our response so far has been people have contacted us. They oh, it doesn't work in IE 11.
Justin:
My response has been I've got these, like, internal Microsoft documents that say, you know, we're not supporting IE 11 anymore. And they recommend people to switch to the latest version of Edge. And so I send that to folks. And then I say I ask them if they've got another browser they can use. And surprisingly, almost all of them have said, oh, yeah.
Justin:
I I have Chrome as well. I'm like, oh, well, just use Chrome. Yeah. It's a
Jon:
weird I don't we haven't done a very we haven't done a survey of these people, but, like, I know there's certain corporations that not that people are working in an office right now, but, like, there's certain corporations, right, that that control your computer and don't allow you to upgrade, or install software on your own. Yep. But, like, you know, from a from a dashboard perspective, I don't think it matters too much if we don't support IE 11, even older versions of Edge. But, like, where I kind of end up feeling a little bad is that our embeddable audio player doesn't work in IE 11. And, like, we can't really control who's seeing that embeddable player.
Jon:
Right? Whereas with the dashboard, we might have a customer reaching out and say, hey. I can't upload an episode, and we're like, hey. Just use another browser. But, like, if someone's listening on the web, we, you know, we don't have control over that, and they're not gonna contact us.
Jon:
Yeah. So that the the embeddable player, we can certainly make work with IE 11. It's just a matter of, updating some of our JavaScript. Like, technically, there's no reason, you know, the audio won't play or anything like that. CSS won't work fine.
Jon:
It's just mostly that I'm using, Vue JS with the embeddable player, and we'd have to compile the JavaScript down to something that works at IE 11. Yeah. So, you know, this is just a a couple days of work of making sure that works fine.
Justin:
Yeah. But Yeah. And it's a it's a tricky it is a tricky balance for sure.
Jon:
Yeah. But but it it's it's I mean, it's what? The year 2020, and we're still, like, feature flagging based on the browser you're using. It's just weird. It's just like, what year is this?
Jon:
And we're like, we have a story that talking about, like, maybe we should have a pop up warning in the dashboard that says if you're using I 11, you should upgrade your browser. Like, that used to happen when people were using, like, Netscape 4.
Justin:
I know. I honestly just wanna send Bill Gates a bill just to say like, look at all the additional work you've caused developers around the world. Like, how much GDP has been lost? Well, actually, it's probably GDP created. How much GDP has been created?
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
Because if people have to spend all these extra cycles fixing Yeah. IE. It's just Well, it's yeah.
Jon:
It's good to see Microsoft embracing open source now. Yeah. Like, they're they're using, you know, the whatever. Chromium is the browser engine that it's based on now. And, like, that's open source and,
Justin:
Yeah. The the new Microsoft is definitely, interesting in terms of open source and, you know, what they're doing. But that's how folks can see it. I was super excited about it. I shared it everywhere.
Justin:
It's also I think If
Jon:
there are
Justin:
I think a good recommendation for folks is to share, well, there's a few things here. One, having a business partner is helpful in this regard. Because all of those insecurities you were feeling or those feelings you were feeling, I wasn't feeling those. I was able to look at what you had produced objectively and get excited about it and Yeah. Take it and go, look at what we've done.
Justin:
Like, this is incredible.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, launch day was, like, we were 2 different people.
Justin:
Yeah. You're,
Jon:
like, super gung ho and excited. I was like,
Justin:
Yeah. I don't know why. Like, I should Exactly. But maybe we need more of a passing the torch kind of thing. Like, it's a relay.
Justin:
Like, you It's
Jon:
like I hit the deploy button and then just go hide in the closet
Justin:
for Yeah. You just go hide in the closet with some
Jon:
pudding. Shit.
Justin:
Yeah. I wanna introduce a brand new segment to the show called free ads for bootstrappers. This is something Jane Portman started over at user list. And today, I wanna tell you about scraping b scrapingb.com. It's a web scraping API that takes care of proxies and headless browsing for you, so you'll never get blocked again while scraping.
Justin:
Companies like SAP and Zapier use them. So they got they got both sides of the market, you know, that big enterprise and Zapier. You can trust them too. Go to scrapingbee.com. It's kind of a cool thing.
Justin:
Let's talk about this quick. I listened to this interview with, is it Tobias Lutz? Tobias? I
Jon:
think so.
Justin:
Tobias Lutz? Good, good, well, he's German, but now he's Canadian. The founder of Shopify. He had, interview with Guy Raz on how I built this. And I think as a founder, I found it encouraging.
Justin:
Did did you give it a listen?
Jon:
I did. Yeah.
Justin:
And, yeah. What what did it hit you the same way as it hit me? Because part of me was, you know, I'm still, I think, thinking about these questions of mission and vision and purpose, and, you know, what's going to drive us. And I just found his thinking on that quite kind of refreshing.
Jon:
I'm not
Justin:
sure if it hit you the same way.
Jon:
I mean, it I related to it. I don't know if it hit me quite as hard as it hit you. It when I listen to that, I he they're in such a different place, I think, and their impact on the economy and small businesses is so massive right now.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And their ability to help out these small businesses, you know, set up an online store to help sell stuff online when nobody can come into the to the store is just, like, their ability to to to actually push change forward is just incredible. And, like, I think we can relate to that a little bit, but we're much smaller and we're you know, our focus is, like, yeah, we can help, you know, small businesses and small groups get the word out to their customers, their friends, or, you know, we keep people in touch, I suppose, to a certain degree.
Justin:
It sir certainly, part of it is the way you decide to, you know, what perspective you decide to have. Because you could be cynical about e commerce as well. You could say, oh, well, e commerce, what that's just, you know, that's just perpetuating the capitalist machine. And what good is that? You're just you know, you're enabling all these direct to consumer brands that are just gonna be producing garbage.
Justin:
Like, there's all sorts of ways to look at it. But I think, in the the the positive way he's looking at it, I think, is valid in that he's saying, you know, we've seen people enabled by the platform, and there's there's a lot of people doing a lot of good with the platform. And, I think it's similar for podcasting. You know? Like, there's some people misusing the platform.
Justin:
There's some people not producing very good shows. But on the other hand, there's, like, people using Transistor that are creating incredible shows that are also having a meaningful impact on their lives as hosts and on their listeners' lives. Yeah. And so I thought there was some there was a little bit of crossover there between us and them even though they're like they they serve a 1000000 customers, and we serve, you know, in the 1,000.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it was interesting talk hearing him talk about kind of adapting to the change and sort of having to kind of look into the future almost and build software differently immediately. It's just I mean, it just how do we how do we make this easy as possible for current physical stores to sign up for a shop? How do we how do we build tools that allow for, like, curbside pickup and delivery and stuff like that?
Jon:
And we've I've you know, locally in Chicago, there's been some of that too with a company called Talk.
Justin:
Okay.
Jon:
Which it's a international service, but it's for restaurants. Right? And they they do, like, reservation. It's a reservation and payment system for high end restaurants.
Justin:
Okay. Yeah.
Jon:
But they they like, in a week, they completely changed our platform to to update and work with, like, curbside pickup and just all these additional features to allow restaurants to, like, keep up with demand and stuff like that.
Justin:
And Oh, this is cool. I haven't seen this yet.
Jon:
Yeah. It's, it was started cofounded with one of the guys that, co owns, Alinea, which is in Chicago, which is one of the best restaurants in the world.
Justin:
Oh, cool.
Jon:
So they started it for that because, like, there's just yeah. It it it's cool. It's, you know, just those systems that adapt that way. Yeah. And can actually have a massive positive change.
Justin:
Well, that was the I think that was my biggest takeaway, and I think it'd be interesting for our listeners is that they were thinking, okay. You know, curbside pickup and delivery, that's going to be something that's important in 2030. And so they had already kinda thought that far ahead. And then when the pandemic hit, they did a meeting, and the meeting was, okay. All that stuff we thought wouldn't hit scale until 2030, that's been accelerated by 10 years.
Justin:
So now it needs to happen now in 2020. And I found that perspective so interesting. 1, because they were clearly thinking ahead and and looking at the trajectory of the of their sector and going, where is this leading? And just guessing still, but going, what are the touchstones we can see that might be applicable in 2030 if this trend continues? And then when the pandemic hit, they just extrapolated and they said, oh, wait a second.
Justin:
All that stuff we thought was going to happen is happening now. The landscape changed really quickly. And
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
I think for for me, that immediately made me think, okay. Like, what is the because it's even just an an interesting exercise competitively, which is sometimes we're so stuck in the in the now and we're just thinking like, okay. Well, we're just gonna, you know, build for what people want now. It's an interesting idea to think, yeah, but what does podcasting look like 10 years in the future? And how could we incorporate some of that now?
Justin:
And as an example, I I don't think it's like it's not like all of a sudden, like, it's gonna change radically. All that that could happen. It's most likely going to continue to follow seeds of change that have been planted already. And so, like, I can imagine private podcasting, for example, being built in to a lot more apps. So that it's just there there's more of a a built in nature for it as opposed to some of these other hacks we're doing right now.
Justin:
Mhmm. Certainly, pod platforms like Spotify are going to try to own it themselves and just do private podcasts that only work on Spotify. I think that'll be a thing as well. We're already seeing that. We know they're testing that internally.
Justin:
Like, Spotify has their own internal company podcast. I think the creator economy is really heating up and accelerating. Like, platforms like Substack and Patreon and Podia and Gumroad are all accelerating. And Shopify, they're a good example as well. Because more and more people are realizing they want to build resilience into their lives.
Justin:
And, as someone who's personally benefited from that, like, when we were building Transistor, the income I was getting from this private community I run called MegaMaker, that if I didn't have that, I would have not been able to do Transistor. And so I can see that accelerating. I think there's going to be more people like me who and, like, journalists, former journalists, former authors or sorry, not former authors, but authors, radio personalities, broadcasters. These are all going to be people that are looking for new ways of living and doing work. And I can see, you know, Substack and platforms like that accelerating.
Justin:
And so it made it makes me think for Transistor, you know, maybe it means we do have to step outside of pure podcasting. And we need to we might eventually need to incorporate other elements. Maybe, you know, we there's just all sorts of ways you can go.
Jon:
Shopify, as as an example, was sort of already working on some of this stuff. I don't but, you know, it it could have been any world event that changed anything. It could have been something that they weren't even thinking about. Right? Like, obviously, they weren't thinking about we need curbside pickup because of a pandemic.
Justin:
Oh, I I really wanna talk about this. K. Keep going.
Jon:
For us, like, for us, I don't, you know, I don't think it's gonna be we're in a different position because we're not dealing with physical goods, but, you know, it could be something like Google comes out and offers free podcast hosting for everyone. Right? So, like, what do we do, and what do we do in that situation? Because that would probably a bunch of people leave us. They might
Justin:
Would they, though?
Jon:
Come back. They might not.
Justin:
Don't we have a problem with Spotify?
Jon:
Yeah. That's true. We've had people come back and leave and come back.
Justin:
We've had people go to Anchor and then come back. We actually I think, by in terms of imports, Anchor is our number one imported.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
So I I mean, I think it it is good to ask those questions too. Like, what are the possible threats for sure? But something else you said, I just wanna go back to. You said, obviously, they were already working on this and they couldn't have predicted it. I was listening to the Sam Harris episode with, he was interviewing Jonathan Haidt, I think.
Justin:
And he said they were talking about luck, and I disagreed with them because there there was people he was basically saying, you know, some of these companies that have done well, they could have never predicted that this was gonna happen. Right? Like, the the companies that were already working on stuff before the pandemic hit, like, how would they have ever known? And Yeah. And, and also he was saying, you know, like, the restaurant industry has been affected by kind of just dumb luck.
Justin:
Like, they it's not their fault that, you know, that they've been affected so poorly. I mean, so greatly. But we've always known the restaurant business was hard and was extremely exposed to, like, recessions to like, the restaurant business has always been operating on the on a razor's edge. And so it's not that surprising that some sort of world event pushed it over the edge. We've known for a long time that it's a difficult business with very low margins and an incredible amount of complexity.
Justin:
And so I disagree with this idea that we can't know beforehand. If you were in a restaurant before this bit we've we've seen how many restaurants just had no savings and no backup plan. Yeah. And that that that that that's not dumb luck that they've now gone on to business. That was maybe a characteristic of that sector.
Justin:
And I'm not saying it's good or bad. I mean, it I I would love to see restaurants succeed, and I'm doing everything I can to help some of my friends with restaurants succeed. But it you know, the folks that have done well, like my buddy at Ratio Coffee, they already had takeout and like, takeout as a part of their model. They already had a website. They already had an online store.
Justin:
I'm I'm not saying I don't feel bad, but the writing was on the wall. Like, if you were a restaurant and you didn't have a website, you didn't have a way to order online, you didn't have a way to do pickup, and you weren't exploring ideas around delivery. You know, like, certainly pizza places and and Chinese places have done better because they both did takeout and delivery before this. And so I think building in resilience, you can do that before something happens. And, also, the these natural kind of trends that are that are picking up steam right now, they they generally get accelerated by world events.
Justin:
Like, to me, remote work was an inevitability, and it was just a matter of time.
Jon:
Yeah. It would've, yeah, it would've gotten there. Just definitely it definitely accelerated it. I mean, I've had a number of conversation with friends that are like, this is I actually prefer this. This is great.
Justin:
Yep. Like And but and the right we we could have seen that by observation, talking to how many people hated their commute. Like, if if that many people at home just are are feeling this is what I mean when you this is what it is to observe a trend, is noticing something that many people feel but has not yet been fully articulated. It's not fully yet, like, revealed. And so you're just observing people and your own feelings.
Justin:
So for me, driving to work every day, I was like, I fucking hate this. Like, I just hate being in the car for an hour into the city and then finding parking and then coming home and being tired and exhausted and grumpy. I hate this. And then noticing how many other people felt that way, it wasn't hard. There's so many angry people on the road.
Justin:
Like, you get middle fingers, you get people you can tell people are stressed out and they're not enjoying it. And so, and you could tell, like, property values around downtown were quite high because people wanted to live close to where they worked. Right?
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
It's not surprising to me that a more flexible way of working is the desired if if that's what, secretly, what millions of people are desiring, as soon as that opportunity presents itself. And we can see, observe, like before coronavirus hit, like buffer would put out a remote work position and would immediately get 750 applicants. It's because people want it. You can see Yeah. This innate desire.
Justin:
The big lesson for me from this this pandemic is not so much that it's it's dumb luck that some industries have fared better and others have not. It's like, we already knew that ecommerce was going to be the growing dominant trend. That wasn't that wasn't news to anybody. It got accelerated, but these kind of world events generally accelerate existing trends that are already going up. They don't, it's I I I can't think of an example where a trend got a trend that was not already accelerating got accelerated.
Justin:
Like, Slack was already on the upswing. Zoom was already on the upswing. Bicycles, like, tons of people are buying bicycles. But bicycles were already on the upswing Mhmm. Before this.
Justin:
And it it's not like all of a sudden, like, no one had even thought about getting a bicycle. And, you know, like, people interest in bikes had already increased. You and I both bought new bikes in the last 12 months. That might be personally the biggest expense you and I have either of us have spent in the last 12 months.
Jon:
As far as restaurants too, I maybe it's maybe it's, you know, the the trend was actually moving towards in a couple years, like, a lot of restaurants would have closed anyway. I mean, it's
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
It's always been a tough market. You know, there's a lot of new restaurants opening and closing in Chicago all the time. And I maybe what comes out of this is that, you know, there's obviously different business models, but maybe, you know, food is more expensive at restaurants because they need to make a profit. They need to pay their employees a living wage. And
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
Maybe that's this is the catalyst for that change, which is unfortunate because if food's more expensive, less people are gonna maybe go out, less people have access to it, but, like, if it's not a sustainable business model, then something probably has to change.
Justin:
Yeah. And, I mean, the other trend that was accelerated was, you know, this whole Postmates, DoorDash idea of getting food to your door. Now I don't like the you and I were talking about, like, those business models. It is ridiculous. There's that great piece on Substack.
Justin:
Oh, I got to find it. You probably read it. I'll put it in the show notes. DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage. Did you read this?
Jon:
I did. Yeah.
Justin:
Yeah. So I'll put it in the show notes. But if capitalism is driven by search for profit, I'm quoting here, the food delivery business confused the hell out of me. Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they're getting screwed.
Justin:
Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems, and customers get annoyed by delivery fees. Okay, folks. It it if if this is the predominant trend, you can see where where it will inevitably lead to a certain extent. You know at the very least it's unstable. And so something's gotta change.
Justin:
Right? And, yeah, I think for restaurants, there's going to be more cloud restaurants where it's just all delivery. There's going to be more Portland style restaurants where you have a neighborhood restaurant that probably has a lot of outdoor seating. Austin has a lot of this as well, you know, where you'll have a bunch of outdoor seating and that's Oh, and there's that place probably Big Star. Big Star.
Justin:
Yeah. So Big Star could theoretically, with some distancing, operate fine in this new economy.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
That's it'll be interesting what folks think about that. I I I just I think the it is most likely that especially in terms of when there are threats like recessions, like pandemics, political instability, economic instability, existing trends, especially existing trends on the Internet, will be will accelerate. They will not decelerate. The old business models that were already decelerating will just decelerate faster.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
I could be wrong, though. So do you want to talk about bug bounties quick? What what what's the issue we're dealing with here, and what's our what's our question?
Jon:
It was, yeah, it was a question that came up probably a month ago, but, we just got another reply on it is that and this has happened, you know, a few times throughout the last couple of years where we get somebody emailing us or using our customer support saying, hey. I found a security hole in your platform. Sometimes it tells what it is, sometimes not. But then, once in a while, they'll ask for if we have a bug bounty system, and they're kind of asking for some money for discovering this bug. And I think we've been struggling a little bit about how to respond to these.
Jon:
Yeah. Some of them are it's, like, hard to know if he's what what angle these people have. Right? Are they just, like, they're being nice and they it's just really hard to know why they target us.
Justin:
And it's it's it's hard to know, like, what what's on the back end of this. Like, is this just a friendly developer out there that does this? Or is this, you know, 5,000 developers in India who are constantly doing this? And then there's if you if you make them mad, there's a denial of service attack on the other side of it.
Jon:
Right. Yeah. If, yeah, if you deny them, make them mad, then they black list you. If you actually pay them, then you're on a list of, like, hey. These people pay out.
Jon:
Let's go find all the bugs, and they can we can make a bunch of money this way. Yeah. So I I'm just I I don't know how other people deal with this. Like, if we're a bigger company, maybe we would have a bug bounty program. I don't know.
Jon:
But, like, right now, we don't.
Justin:
Maybe that's the way we respond is we're we're just a small two person company, and we we don't we don't have a bug bounty program right now.
Jon:
Like, hey. Look. If this guy wants to give us, like, step by step instructions about how to fix it, sure. Well, maybe I'll throw some money Yeah. Their way.
Jon:
Like, it's but that's not what it is. It's like, hey. We found this thing.
Justin:
Yeah. And
Jon:
give us some money or else
Justin:
Yeah. And, also, some of them they just there's a pattern. Like, they all kind of notice the same things that are like, okay. Yeah. We know that's the thing.
Justin:
Like, that's a known thing. It's not like it it's not like they're noticing a a crazy vulnerability that we had no idea existed. And even, like, this thing that he noticed, it's not like, a major issue. It's just like that we know what that is and, sure, we got to fix that, but it's Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:
So I don't know. I I it'd be interesting to hear what the leader the the listeners think.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. If if you're a small company and you have dealt with this, like, what do you how do you handle it? What do you do? Do you actually pay people?
Jon:
Do you, just say thanks and move on?
Justin:
Or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let us know, folks, on Twitter, or where however you find us. You folks are finding us.
Justin:
There's some contact info in the show notes too. John, let's, let's finish oh, yeah. Before we leave, look at the screenshot from my my household Internet use. Notice something in March April? Uh-huh.
Justin:
So our limit for the house is a 1024 gigabytes, which is a terabyte. Right?
Jon:
So that's your limit on your Internet service? You have limit?
Justin:
Yeah. Like a like a bandwidth, limits.
Jon:
Okay.
Justin:
They haven't charged us for this. But March, I think we went over by 2 or 300 gigabytes. And April, I think
Jon:
we were
Justin:
200 gigabytes over.
Jon:
Wow. Oh, a tear that's, like, not much.
Justin:
Oh, we're we're doing pretty good, you're saying.
Jon:
Yeah. No. I don't think a tearaway is a lot, especially if you're streaming all kinds of stuff. You're
Justin:
I mean, we got 6 people who are streaming stuff nonstop here.
Jon:
Like YouTube constantly. Right?
Justin:
Oh, and, like, my 14 year old son is, like, probably downloading all sorts of illegal stuff constantly. We're we're probably like a we're probably a node for for file distribution. There's a who knows who knows what's going on there? He he has a laptop that he just doesn't use anymore. He's just plugged it into our router, and it's just always running stuff.
Jon:
Oh, no.
Justin:
Oh, you're
Jon:
gonna have the authorities come to your doorstep.
Justin:
Except in Canada, they can't. In Canada, they can't get our information.
Jon:
Oh.
Justin:
They they email the like, we have we've received a few emails where they the the ISP emails us and say, we've been contacted by whoever. Yeah. And, you know, I I talked to my son. I'm like, okay. You can't do this.
Justin:
We're getting warnings here. But
Jon:
You can't keep downloading Pixar movies. What are
Justin:
you doing? Well, I
Gavin:
mean, I
Justin:
was Pixar would be quite tame compared to
Jon:
Alright.
Justin:
I think what he's doing is you can you can host, like, watch parties with your friends on Discord, but you have to have the the video file if you wanna stream it altogether. Uh-huh. So I think he's been downloading horror movies, and they all watch the horror movie together on Discord. Oh. As as their anyway, folks, we hope you're doing well.
Justin:
John, why don't you say thank you to our patrons?
Jon:
Yeah. As always, thanks to everyone, on Patreon. We have a new supporter, Anton Zorin. Anton Zorin. Thanks, Anton.
Justin:
Yeah. Totally.
Jon:
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Justin:
Thanks, everybody. Hey. One of the best ways you can support the show is to text it to a friend. That's how most people discover shows. It's just Imessage, SMS.
Justin:
Hey. I was listening to this on Overcast. You click the share button. Text it to a friend if you enjoyed it. And we will see you next week.
