In this episode Jon talks about why he decided to partner with Justin (even though he'd already built the product).
★ Thanks to our two sponsors:
Alitu.com: Alitu removes all the tech headaches associated with producing your podcast. They take care of processing, editing & publishing your podcast. Go to Alitu.com and check out their video demo.
Podcastinsights.com: If you want to get into podcasting, check out Podcast Insights. They’re a great resource for folks who want to start and grow a podcast. Podcast equipment guides, how to make money. Join millions of readers learning all about how to start, grow, and monetize a podcast at podcastinsights.com.
Jon is tired from all the Black Friday madness. Justin is drinking flavored light beer.
Show Notes
In this episode Jon talks about why he decided to partner with Justin (even though he'd already built the product).
★ Thanks to our two sponsors:
Alitu.com: Alitu removes all the tech headaches associated with producing your podcast. They take care of processing, editing & publishing your podcast. Go to Alitu.com and check out their video demo.
Podcastinsights.com: If you want to get into podcasting, check out Podcast Insights. They’re a great resource for folks who want to start and grow a podcast. Podcast equipment guides, how to make money. Join millions of readers learning all about how to start, grow, and monetize a podcast at podcastinsights.com.
Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.
Justin:
Hey, folks. I don't believe it. We have another new sponsor this month. Alitu.com. I'll be telling you more about them later on in the show.
Justin:
Oh, and hey. How come my camera's not showing?
Jon:
Oh, are you in the closet again?
Justin:
No. I'm, in my office. Oh, yeah. USB. Sometimes it works.
Justin:
Sometimes it doesn't. Who knows? This is all black magic.
Jon:
Yep. I don't know. Okay. I think I'm good. K.
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, and I'm drinking light flavored grapefruit beer.
Jon:
Grapefruit beer is what, what are you drinking?
Justin:
Well, it's a Radler. Do you guys have Radler?
Jon:
Oh, yeah.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:
Yeah. We have. Oh, yeah. Stegall.
Justin:
This is tricycle from the Parallel 49 brand, which I believe is brewed right here in beautiful British Columbia.
Jon:
Wonderful.
Justin:
But I hope I'm right. Where is this?
Jon:
Sounds refreshing.
Justin:
Vancouver, BC. Right there on Triumph Street. So good to see you again.
Jon:
Yeah. It's been it's been a while. A week or 2.
Justin:
I mean, we talked earlier today.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
But it is actually I I read this really charming piece in the New Yorker. Did you read this piece? It's called The Friendship That Made Google Huge.
Jon:
I did not read that yet. Okay. I should do that.
Justin:
You folks, I've got it in the show notes. It's the story of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Gamowat, and they were basically 2 very early hires at Google. And it's just about, they've been doing pair programming their whole career together. I think they've Been together. I mean, since 2000 for sure, but that's when they were at Google, but even before that.
Justin:
And it's just a beautiful story of a partnership. I think anybody that is in a partnership, it's it's worth reading because Just seeing how they've worked together over all these years, how they kind of complete each other. It reminded me of Just the other partnerships I've looked at in the past like Walt Disney and Roy Disney, his brother. And I don't know. It just made me kinda feel good about partnerships and me realize the beauty of partnerships.
Justin:
So, But, yeah. It's good to be with you again
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
In the same day. It is late. It's 7:20 PM here.
Jon:
Yeah. It's 9:20. It's almost my bedtime.
Justin:
This is so late for people I need to understand. John John needs to go to bed.
Jon:
I do. Yeah. The past the past few days have been A struggle.
Justin:
Pretty crazy.
Jon:
I've just been tired.
Justin:
Well, you you folks had a really big, really big Black Friday weekend at Cards Against Humanity.
Jon:
Yeah. That was a big deal. That went pretty well. Although, a couple hiccups, but it went alright. It was fun.
Justin:
Now I I I tried to it's always amazing to me when I see like, you had told me that this was coming. Do you wanna explain to folks quick what what had happened? Like, what the the holiday promotion was?
Jon:
Yeah. The so yeah. Cards Against Humanity Generally does a holiday promotion, on Black Friday, sort of an anti Black Friday thing. Yeah. But it's always fun and funny and they they They do some cool stuff.
Jon:
So this year, they, redirected the main website to the 9 or was it Cards Against Humanity's 99% off sale Yeah. Which was a website, that sold starting at 10 in the morning, central time. Started selling A different product every 10 minutes until it's sold out. And a lot of the products only had one item for sale. Some had, you know, A handful.
Jon:
Some had a couple hundred.
Justin:
Yeah. There was like an Egyptian mummy or something at one point.
Jon:
No. It was a it was a,
Justin:
Like a statue or something?
Jon:
A a lifestyle statue of Egyptian I forget what it was. Yeah. We sold we sold a car for a $100, like a Ford Fiesta, a trip to an Antarctica. And, like
Justin:
I saw a diamond ring on there.
Jon:
Yeah. There's an engagement ring. There was,
Justin:
I saw A really old arcade game. Yes. And I was like, I should bid I should, like, try to get it, but then I was like, Do I really want that? What if they actually send that to me? It was like
Jon:
It actually wouldn't I don't think it would have let you because it was US only.
Justin:
Oh, it's US only. Okay.
Jon:
Yeah. It was it was big. It was, it it was popular, very popular. There were tens of thousands of people trying to buy these things at once.
Justin:
Yeah. Here's what's surprising to me is you told me about this and that's fine. I was like, oh, that sounds hilarious. I know that these Promotions are very popular that you know? But I was surprised by you know, I'm in about 20 Slack groups.
Jon:
And I think Yeah.
Justin:
5th at least 15 were talking about this. And then On Twitter, it was just, like, everyone is it's just the kind of thing that you have to share. Yeah. Like, if I mean, I yeah. Discovered it, you were you'd be like, I I have no choice.
Justin:
I have to share this. I told my wife, and she was really angry that I hadn't told her earlier.
Jon:
And that is What they want?
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
I mean, that's the whole thing.
Justin:
People were talking about it at the coffee shop up here in Canada.
Jon:
That's amazing. Yeah. I mean yeah. I I didn't even pay attention to that stuff because I was just trying to make sure everything was working.
Justin:
Your Your computer was on fire. You were just Which Yeah. You're just showing, like, stinging some flames.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Oh, yeah. But that is so interesting to me that a company can harness a hype cycle like that.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
And, normally, hype cycles are quite I don't know. I wanna say unstable, you know, dangerous almost. Like, they're they they're difficult to harness, especially in a repeatable way. Like a lot of folks would say, Reddit is not a repeatable, you know, marketing strategy. But, You know, on Black Friday, who's top of Reddit?
Justin:
Cards Against Humanity again.
Jon:
Every year. I mean, they just yeah. They do a great job, and I'm not really involved in any of the planning of what the event is, really. But somehow they they come up with something every year that's just, like, Ridiculous enough
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
That it it really reaches a lot of people.
Justin:
This reminds me of my friend, Garner. I'm gonna post this in our Slack he started a bakeshop in Edmonton called Duchess And every year, he makes a gingerbread, house from scratch. And this is what he made this year. I'll here this it's here in the, in the slab.
Jon:
Holy crap.
Justin:
This is Hogwarts castle. If you actually click through, you can you can scan through the photos. This thing is insane. The level of detail. And, that's him and his wife at the end there.
Justin:
I'll put this in the show notes for sure, folks. It's,
Jon:
the show. Crap.
Justin:
Show notes are at sass.transistor.fm/37. And, yeah, just go down to the bottom and, Look at I'll put Duchess, Hogwarts. And this was also top of Reddit. So in in the Harry Potter subreddit, this had 40,000 upvotes. And He does this every year.
Justin:
They auction it off for charity, and whoever buys it gets to destroy it.
Jon:
Like, they don't feel bad destroying it.
Justin:
I know. You they don't even let you take it home. So there's something about this. I don't know if everybody can harness it, but maybe the the key is that every year there's a routine to it. You you are committing to do something exceptional.
Justin:
There's probably a lot of pressure there. Like, okay, we gotta do something exceptional. Right.
Jon:
Right. I think, you know, some I think sometimes they sort of Decide to do it or not based on if they have a good I mean, if they don't have a good idea, they're just not gonna do it.
Justin:
That's nice. Yeah. You don't have to put the pressure all yeah. Too much pressure.
Jon:
But but the amazing thing is is, like, every year they do these things. And every year, People are like, this isn't real. This is fake. Like, they're clearly not gonna send this stuff to people. And then there's all these replies Elsewhere, they are like, no, they will because they've done it before.
Jon:
Like, they're definitely true to their word. And it's like people just don't I just don't think it's real because it's so ridiculous.
Justin:
And oh, I'm I'm googling this right now and, like, everybody wrote about it. The Verge.
Jon:
Yep. Well, they yeah. They have, they send out press releases too. So Yeah. It's like a it's a very coordinated, well planned thing.
Jon:
I mean Yeah. They do a good job that of that.
Justin:
Anyway, that's really cool. I can see how that would be a lot of work keeping that Yeah. Keeping that going.
Jon:
Every year, it's like, this is the year I'm not gonna have to do much in it. I do.
Justin:
That that's a good point, folks. Behind every really cool sexy marketing stunt, there's a John Just sitting there trying to keep the servers up.
Jon:
Yelling at the computer.
Justin:
Okay. We're we're gonna get into some more listener questions today. But before we do, we have a couple of sponsors. Now last week, I told you about podcastinsights.com. If you wanna get into podcasting, check out this site, podcast insights.com.
Justin:
They've got great resources for anyone who wants to start and grow podcast. This is a question we get all the time. What equipment should I start with? How do I make money? Remember all those things in chat we're getting where people are like, how do I monetize this?
Justin:
They have all of these really well written guides on those topics. So, yeah. Go to podcast insights.com. Join millions of readers learning all about how to start, grow, and monetize a podcast. And tell them that Justin and John sent you.
Justin:
Now our second sponsor is alitu.com. And this is another piece that a lot of folks have a hard time with when they're getting started. And that is producing the content, the actual recording editing putting music in making it sound good well this is what alitu.com does that's a litu.com. I hope I'm saying it right. This I I might have some Canadian pronunciation on this.
Jon:
It's Alitu. Yeah.
Justin:
Alitu. Okay. So, the one thing I'll I'll say is go to their website and there's a video there, a video demo, That shows how you can basically record your podcast as if it was live and then completely automate the production of a podcast. It's really really cool. So if you're looking to save time in your like, if your podcast is taking you too long to produce, alitu.com might be the answer.
Justin:
Awesome.
Jon:
What do we have? Do we have any announcements, this time?
Justin:
Yes. Baremetrics.com/open. We are now an open startup. And what that means I'm not sure if we're gonna do this forever. Yeah.
Justin:
But for now, We are sharing all of our revenue metrics. So, You can go to barometrics.com/openandtransistors there. You can see our monthly recurring revenue. You can see net revenue. You can see how much we're paying in fees.
Justin:
There's actually a lot of things in here I didn't even know myself. Our annual run rate, lifetime value, like, so many things. And, We talked about doing this a long time ago. Basically, we said, you know, once we get going this is something we would be interested in trying. And the you know, I think the advantage for us right now is there's we've benefited from other folks who have shared their knowledge when they started their companies.
Justin:
And we want to kind of pay some of that back or pay some of that forward. And so no promises. We're not saying we're gonna do this forever. Absolutely. But for now, I think it could be really interesting for folks to check out.
Justin:
And there's tons of other Open startups there too.
Jon:
Yeah. It's a great company. Yeah.
Justin:
Alright. Let's get to some listener questions. John, last week, I answered Vineet's question about start up equity.
Vineet:
Just wondering how, you both split equity in transistor FM. You're both doing so much different things, like your network, your skills, but at the same time, Transistor had already a bunch, built and had an amazing fast first customer. I'm curious, to hear how you guys got into the details of the decision, negotiated, to place it, you're both happy. Love to hear how you guys, thought about it and, what decisions you made. Right.
Jon:
I mean, it's yeah. It's a good question. I wish there was a complicated answer. I don't think there is. I mean, it like I said, I think back in some earlier shows, I had sort of had the intention of Doing this on my own, you know, built it to a point where, the Good News podcast could launch, early in the year, and it was very much sort of A beta or an alpha even, it works, you know, enough for them, but it wasn't really ready to open up, and share with the world.
Jon:
And Justin contacted me, soon after the new year and, you know, asked if I had thought at all about, You know, having a co founder, he was he was looking to sort of spend his energy on something new, for the year and really, really put his energy into something. And initially, I think I was just like, I don't really want to. Nothing against Justin, But I really just want this thing to be my own. And then the more and more I thought about it, it's very, like, Very much, like, complimentary skills to mine where, you know, I don't I don't have marketing skills. I don't have the network that Justin has.
Jon:
And so in that respect, like, I just thought about it more and it made sense to to work on this thing together. As far as how we came up with our split, which is Just 5050. I mean, I think it was just that's just the easiest way to do it. Like, really, I mean, You know, it wasn't even though I had a bunch of work done, like, Justin brings a lot to the table that, like, he's already Done. And that he, you know, he knows how to market this thing.
Jon:
He knows how to kick this thing off, from the get go. So it just kinda made sense to Just say, alright. Let's you know, this thing is still early. Let's do a 5050 and see what happens, and let's not argue about this one piece for too long and just see what we can do.
Justin:
I think it's a very personal decision. For me, at least, I just never wanted to feel like, Okay. I've joined this thing, but John only gave me 10%.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
And, you know, what does that mean in terms of my effort? I want to be giving this everything I have to make sure it succeeds. I I never wanted to feel like I was holding anything back. When we decided to do 5050, I was like, okay. This is this is feels like a good fit because now I feel like I'm in it.
Justin:
Mhmm. But I think I can see, at least for me, if I felt like, oh, I'm not getting the same share, but I'm you know, every time I'm answering support, I would be like, oh, god. Like, you know? Right. Here I am.
Jon:
Yeah. And how do you measure you know, If it was like a a 6040 or 7030, like, how do you how do you measure 30% effort Mhmm. Versus 70? Like, Now we gotta track time. It's just, like, let's just put as much work as we can to this thing.
Jon:
And
Justin:
Yeah. There's actually a really interesting clip from the season of startup where dating ring. It's a following a startup called dating ring. And the the 2 cofounders are talking about how much equity they got.
Startup Podcast:
Lauren had used a bunch of online tools to arrive at the equity numbers for each of the 3 partners. Over 50% for Lauren, A bit under 40% for Dating Rings technical cofounder, Katie, who has since left the company, and a bit under 10% for Emma. At the time, Emma was coming to this equity discussion with very little bargaining power. But now, after 2 years in the business and Countless late nights and weekends working, that initial split was feeling less and less fair.
Justin:
Mhmm. In their case, it was one of the things that poisoned the well. Just as they kept going, It was this thing that festered and festered and festered with the cofounder that had not gotten Very much equity. I'm not sure if it's the ultimately, the reason they, you know, kinda broke apart, but It could've you can see how something like that confessed. Yeah.
Jon:
There's probably some resentment on one side. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that.
Justin:
So, again, it's and, Honestly, I talked to 2 or 3 people when John and I were making that decision. I think you should talk to people you trust. I think You should, you know, think about what you want. If the only thing that's gonna motivate you is an equal share, then that's what you have to ask for, or you have to go start your own company. And then you get to decide there too.
Justin:
Right?
Jon:
Yep. We have another question from Gavin.
Gavin:
Hi. This is Gavin picking. I have a short question for John this time. So as the Technical guy here. You're building all the cool features inside of Transistorafib.
Gavin:
I wanna start a podcast up for, my company. I wanna set it up and start and I'd like to put under my account to get started with and add some of my own podcasts. And if I convince them it's worth continuing and and moving on, obviously, we'll wanna transition over to account. So is that a feature you've built yet, you envision building? Is it hard to move an account?
Gavin:
Hoping that that won't be a problem later Ron and won't mess up anything as far as internal linking or maybe the way you've got stuff set up for storing files and buckets according to account. So is that something you guys have accounted for? Something easy enough to do?
Jon:
It's a good question. We actually have a story for this in Pivotal because I kinda felt like this would Actually, be a be an issue and people would request this. Short answer is no. You can't do it yet, but it is, Like, behind the scenes, I can certainly go in and and move things around in the database and hook up a different Stripe account, things like that. But there's no There's no automatic way to do it.
Jon:
Mhmm. But as far as The tech stack goes, there's really not much that can go wrong. I mean, his question was kind of like, you know, what do you do about media assets and how are those stored in a bucket and those? Is that bucket siloed by different accounts or is it in a different way? And it's actually, like, per show.
Jon:
So, you know, in the database, all you have to do is, like, associate that show with a different user and then hook up that user's Stripe account, have them sign up On Stripe for a transistor subscription and then move the just move the show over and associate with a different user.
Justin:
Yeah. All we're really doing is is is creating a, like a new relationship with the billing system. Right? Like, that's Right.
Jon:
Exactly. Yeah.
Justin:
That's it.
Jon:
Yeah. So as far as, like, you know, have we thought about it? Yeah. We've we've certainly thought about it. And I I think there's a pretty good way to do that where it's basically, like, I wanna move this thing over to someone else.
Jon:
Basically, like, Type in the email address, send them an email, they have an account, they can accept it and just, like, it moves it over. Mhmm. If they don't have an account, it's just like, alright, sign up for an account. And when you Finish your sign up. It just it just moves, you know, the show over to their account Yeah.
Jon:
Behind the scenes. You need It just changes changes the relationship.
Justin:
Gavin's question actually brings up something in my mind that I'm just gonna process out loud right now. This idea we have this we so we have a starter plan that allows you to have unlimited shows up to 5,000 downloads per month. And we've thought, you know, we're gonna probably do something something with the higher tiers at some point. We're gonna be adding some pro features. They definitely we have some folks on the higher tiers and it definitely lends itself more to company accounts.
Justin:
But this idea of these small accounts because part of what Gavin was saying is, you know, I might wanna test this out for some somebody. So Right. The ability for them to, you know, create a show under my account and test this out. But then if it gets rolling for it to be able to kind of go off and be in its own account, initially, I was looking at that kind of like a threat. Like, oh, man.
Justin:
We can't have people just, like, housing other people's shows underneath their account. But now I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking That's kind of that could be kind almost a a acquisition strategy where we go, sure. If you're within your, You know, the download limits start as many shows with friends as you'd like.
Jon:
Yeah. In the box.
Justin:
Start a show for your employer. Start a show for your school. Start a show for Anything. And if it takes off, then you just say, yeah. We can easily get you your own account, over here and move the show over there.
Justin:
Now, don't do this right now, folks, because we don't have the tech the technology to do it yet, but that that's an interesting idea that entry level tier, which is great for, you know, solopreneurs. It's great for personal brands, but it might be great for hackers and people that are just, like, Experimenting creatives. And, you know, they want to help people start a show and then kind of Almost like, get it to the seedling stage and then, okay, we're gonna go plant that somewhere else.
Jon:
Exactly. So, yeah, we'll, you know, we'll roll that feature out at some point soon. Mhmm. Well, soon ish. Yeah.
Jon:
Next next year.
Justin:
We're not promising anything, but
Jon:
I've promised things before.
Justin:
Yeah. That is actually I I want to briefly address that. I think, One thing we're realizing and this is common knowledge in software, but you have to be very careful about what you say you're going to complete. Yeah. And it's because no matter how big your team is, no matter how fast you move, No.
Justin:
It doesn't matter. Priorities change, and we I think That's something we're gonna be more careful about is that, you know, when people ask if we have this feature, what I'm trying to say is it's something we've thought about, But I can't give you any center to timelines. So Yeah. If you don't wanna sign up for the features we have right now, you probably shouldn't sign up because We just can't promise features in the future that we never know what's gonna happen. You know?
Justin:
Yeah. I
Jon:
mean, most most of the feature most of the, you know, suggestions we have are great and it'd be awesome if we could build them all next month, but That's not gonna it's not gonna happen.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. And and and just even being honest that, you know, Like, we're working on this HTTPS thing, and it's it's getting there. But there were some complications. You know, some things that we thought would work out didn't work out.
Jon:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. It just sort of my my plan changed a bit Yeah. In terms of, like, the actual solution I was gonna use Changed, but
Justin:
Yeah. And so And then,
Jon:
you know, we talked about it earlier today where, you know, it's just like it's hard to find a large block of time to work on these big features. Mhmm. Yeah. It's been kind of a struggle.
Justin:
So Yeah. I think there's there's definitely a Here's another little bit of transparency. Hopefully, John's okay with this, but, we have a cool feature which is a Spotify integration. You can submit your show to Spotify through our app. The challenge is Whenever for some whenever someone imports a show from another provider to us, we have to manually contact Spotify and say, you know, this show used to be with this host over here.
Justin:
Could you please switch that over to this new RSS feed? We have to send an email every single time.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
And that's not even the most there's other complicated things about that specific integration right there. But, You know, our integration with YouTube is also, the the it just I I guess part of what I'm saying is Once you start building software, you realize how careful you have to be about what you build, What you integrate
Jon:
with
Justin:
and Yeah. And because you don't see all of the costs upfront.
Jon:
Yeah. You can't. You can't. I mean, When you start building it, you only know as much as you know at that point, and all these things either are not documented or they just show up or, you know
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
Things in terms of Spotify, things change. And Yeah. Yeah. You you can't know everything.
Justin:
I can't you can't know anything but everything, but it feels like I'm going to be a lot more wary. You know? Like, initially, I was like, we gotta have Spotify. That's the best thing.
Jon:
Right.
Justin:
But, you know, in retrospect, I mean, hopefully, they they fix some of their stuff, but, You know? Yeah.
Jon:
I hope they automate some stuff.
Justin:
There's so much manual emailing right now. And
Jon:
Right. And and the fact that they, like, opened up this portal for Podcasters to submit their own show, which, honestly, if that had existed before, we probably wouldn't have done it.
Justin:
No. I mean, it's
Jon:
just like really frustrating. Yeah. And there's no easy way to move a show from our integration with Spotify to, you know, someone's personal account. But you just can't do it. You gotta email and I it's
Justin:
Yeah. We're learning. And and really, You don't know about any of this stuff until you do it. This is I was talking to another founder today, very an experienced founder, And he was saying, Justin, you and John are doing great because you're first time founders. And part of me was like, wait a second.
Justin:
Now I've done other things. I've I've worked in SaaS since 2008. I've Yeah. Owned my own companies. But the truth is until it doesn't even matter how high you are on the org chart until you're wearing the captain's cap.
Justin:
It you don't know what it's going to be like and Mhmm. I think we're really seeing that now.
Jon:
Yeah. Definitely.
Justin:
Alright. Let's get into the next question from Jason Rez. Jason was one of our early customers. Big shout out to him. Go listen to his show.
Justin:
He's got the ask res with I think 3 z's. Or do you say Zed? What do you guys say?
Jon:
Z. Yeah.
Justin:
You guys say z. Okay. Yeah. Three z's. He wants to know how you build awareness for podcast.
Zed:
First of all, awesome platform. I love Transistor. Makes my life so much easier. But the question that I have for you guys is and I'd love to hear both of your opinions on this is, what would you consider is the number one Way to increase awareness for a podcast. Alright.
Zed:
Thanks, guys.
Justin:
I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I I've changed my tune a little bit, and this is after seeing many, many podcasts. And this is after seeing, Talking to folks like Dan Meisner at Pacific Content. I think podcasting is very useful For established brands or people with established audiences that want to build trust with their existing audience and organically grow that audience. So Conan O'Brien just released a new show.
Justin:
Our friends over at Earwolf are involved with that. I see Bill. Our friend Bill Irwin is was tweeting about it. My guess is that shows doing pretty good on the charts. I haven't looked lately, but, we could check right now and see, you know, where where is Conan needs a friend.
Justin:
And, actually, we should use Chartable for this. Chartable.com. Those are some of our friends as well. Oh, yeah. Conan needs a friend is number 3 right now.
Justin:
Right. Yeah. I mean,
Jon:
it's yeah. Conan O'Brien.
Justin:
It's Conan O'Brien. Now I I wanna even say, like, The audio quality on that show is surprisingly kind of echoey. I don't know what's going on with their studio. Despite the audio quality issues, whatever, it's Conan O'Brien. And he's interviewing Will Ferrell.
Justin:
He's interviewing, you know, Popular people. So podcasting is really good. Now you don't have to be Conan level, But it really works if you have an existing audience. And that could be a 100 email subscribers. That could be, You know, 500 regular visits to your blog.
Justin:
That could be a 1,000 Twitter followers. That could be, you know, like Taylor Jackson, that could be a 180,000 YouTube subscribers.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
But I think for podcasting to work, You really need an existing audience.
Jon:
Yeah. So you're saying podcasting should not be the entry point I'm building
Justin:
it. Now you want an existing audience. Now what Dan Meisner would say in terms of building awareness is he's he would say, look At what channels you already have to your audience. So, you know, if you have an auto mechanic show And you're a moderator on the, you know, biggest auto mechanic forums online or you have, You know, a Facebook group with thousands of people in it. Well, that should be a place where you share your show.
Justin:
Famously, Dan, recommended to Mozilla that they start promoting their podcasts on the inside the Firefox browser. You know, like, when you open up Firefox, there's that that Mozilla homepage. That's a great if you've got a podcast to share, that's a great place to put it. And, you know, they listened and Podcast listenership went up. Yeah.
Justin:
So I realized some people are not going to like this answer. Mhmm. But I I really think podcasting works best when you have an existing audience. Now that being said, there are ways of for example, There's a few shows that I think do really well because of the keywords they have in the title. There's a show.
Justin:
I think the folks who run it are quite young. It's called It's really popular on Spotify. It's called Teenager Therapy. And You know, I think they're getting a lot of listeners from the keyword teenager and therapy. Like, if you're searching those things, that's what you're going to find.
Justin:
Now I could be wrong. Maybe they had an existing audience, but that's you know, I could see, You know, if if you did want to increase listenership, one way to do it is if people are looking for specific topics in the iTunes directory or in Spotify you want to just like you would do on a search engine on the web You want to hit those keywords. So yeah. I think those are a few things. We've got lots of other tips actually If you go to transistor.fm/blog, I have lots of other ideas on how you can grow your audience, grow the awareness for your podcast.
Jon:
Yeah. And this is why I wanted to work with you because, like I said, my marketing strategy would have been put out a tweet and then call it a day.
Justin:
The the infamous one tweet strategy.
Jon:
Single hate. Got a thing. Check it out.
Justin:
It's it's so bold.
Jon:
Yeah. Minimalism.
Justin:
Minimalism. Marketing minimalism.com. That's John's That's John's website. Yeah. But that's a great question.
Justin:
If other people have ideas on that, We're all ears, but I have been thinking about that thing. I think podcasting is really really great for existing audiences. Oh, the only other thing I'll say is if you have friends who are in your niche or in your sphere, you see this all the time with YouTube Stars with podcasters, they go on each other's shows.
Jon:
Yep. And Cross, yeah.
Justin:
Cross pollination? Cross promotion?
Jon:
Cross promotion.
Justin:
So do that. If you if you know other people, if you're building relationships with other folks, that's that's a, you know, another technique as well. The the final one would be don't be boring. Right. There's a I I think I retweeted this, hardcore history.
Justin:
Dan Carlin said because Dan Carlin does these 2 to 3 hour epic long podcasts. And he says, as long as it is entertaining, people will listen. It's if your podcast is boring, it doesn't matter if it's 5 minutes or 3 hours long. People won't listen. So this is also bad.
Justin:
Like, thanks a lot for the advice, Justin. You know? Don't don't be boring. That that's one way. It is entertainment.
Justin:
And so if you want more if you wanna get more listeners, You wanna make sure that folks are you know, when they listen, when you do, you know, you somehow get them to listen to that first episode, Make it entertaining. Make it engaging. Alright. Do we have one more?
Jon:
We do. Yeah. Yeah. We do.
Justin:
Okay. What's what's the last one?
Jon:
It's another quick one here. So, is this how don't know how to pronounce his name. Romay Ramenis? Ramenis? Ribero?
Jon:
Ribero? This is a Twitter question. I Believe you actually answered it on Twitter. We can do it here too.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
He started off and says introverts don't use voice mail, Which I suppose. Yeah. I don't know I don't know if a lot of people use voice mail anymore.
Justin:
That's true.
Jon:
What What, SaaS is what software services do you guys use to build and run transistor.fm? That's a good question. There's a long list of them. I guess I'll just run through them.
Justin:
Yeah. K.
Jon:
So we use Stripe, obviously, for credit card processing and subscription billing. We use Zoho for our email, mainly because it is free and offers, domain. Well, we use the we have a free account and we use custom domains on it. Mhmm. Kayako for our support, chat and, like, our knowledge base.
Jon:
Yep. Pivotal for our kinda, like, task management, for the app itself, feature management. We use Dropbox to, you know, plan our shows that we record, our documents and, you know, share files with our editor.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
We use Slack, obviously, just to, you know, keep in touch, talk all day. GitHub for our code repository. Digital Ocean, we use a little bit for part of our CDN for Hosting our media files.
Justin:
And by by the way, DigitalOcean is one of the few we actually pay for right now.
Jon:
Yeah. It's our dirty little secret.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
So I suppose GitHub would pay a little bit, but it's just a personal account. It's yeah. Wave wave wave apps, which I wasn't really familiar with until you mentioned it, is for it does our accounting. We can hook it up to our bank account and track expenditures and, money coming in. I think we'll have to pay for that eventually to do a bunch of, you know, like pay paying ourselves and and stuff like that.
Justin:
Payroll and all that. Yeah.
Jon:
Flywheel, we paid for, I guess once, like, a yearly for WordPress for our main transistor website, the marketing website. We use century. Io for, error notification and logging for our Rails application. And, we use Amazon Web Services to host the whole thing.
Justin:
Sweet.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Do we pay for CircleCI?
Jon:
Oh, no. Yeah. We use that too. No. That's they have a all these places have really good free accounts.
Jon:
Now CircleCI does, automated, testing, runs all of our tests and
Justin:
Sweet.
Jon:
Tells us we don't really need it. I suppose the team is small, but it's good to Set that up early.
Justin:
Yeah. Just get in the habit. Yeah. So there you go. Those are the SaaS as we use.
Justin:
I one thing I would say also is the The startup, like really small startups, like 1 person or 2 person teams, not a great market for, you know, your software as a service, especially if they're starting out.
Jon:
Entry level prices for all these are pretty high.
Justin:
Yeah. So Like, they
Jon:
if we paid for all these, we'd be broke. Mhmm. Like, if we actually bought in the plan you know, so you, like, make kinda, like, make do with what the starter plans offer. Yeah. You know, eventually, I'm sure we'll upgrade a lot of them.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. So it it is a good strategy, you know, for them. You you get The the freemium strategy, you get started and
Jon:
Yeah. We're probably good customers. I don't think we, you know, have too many support questions Yeah. For a free account.
Justin:
Exactly.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
But I think there there is a lesson in there in that, you know, sometimes folks go after startups And startup can mean different things. I mean, if a startup has a lot of funding or a startup is actually a business that's been around for 5, 10 years, Those might be good customers, but folks like John and I that are just, like, running lean here, We're we will probably not be spending a lot of money on software for a while. And, honestly, like, The the customers we're going after for Transistor, we're looking for folks like established brands. I mean, they might be an established brand of 1 like Mike Vardy. You know, he's been doing this for,
Jon:
I don't
Justin:
know, years years. But, You know, he has, an established business that can pay for things. That startup that's just getting going. That is, Yeah. Just not as good of a customer.
Justin:
So Yeah. If you wanna leave us a voicemail, transistor.fm/voicemail. I'll I'll I'll clear out our queue and we will rebuild it up again and maybe do another one of these in the future.
Jon:
Yeah. Thanks again to all of our, Patreon supporters. We have Colin Gray who's new. He's actually the Founder of alitu.com that we talked about earlier.
Justin:
Mhmm.
Jon:
Samori Augusto, Mike Walker, Brad From Canada? I like how it's we have Brad in in parentheses from Canada. I don't know.
Justin:
He didn't put his last name. So
Jon:
Yeah. Thanks, Brad from Canada. Darby Frey, who I know in Chicago. Thanks, Darby. Kevin Markham, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.
Justin:
Junta.
Jon:
Friend of mine. Thanks, Dave. And then podcastinsights.com.
Justin:
Yes. Thanks again, folks. We really are appreciative that you listen to the show, and we We'll be back next week Yeah. With a brand new episode. See you then.
