Jon: Hey everyone.
Welcome to build your SaaS this is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2022.
I'm Jon Buda, a software engineer.
Justin: I'm Justin Jackson, and I do marketing.
Helen: I'm Helen, I do customer success.
Jason: I'm, Jason, also a software engineer.
Justin: We got the whole band together.
Jon, this is the, this is the most people we've had in our recording, uh, closet.
Jon: It is, we'll see how this works.
It's pretty, it's pretty tight in here.
Justin: Well, it's good to have.
I mean, the whole reason we started this show is because we knew if we were going
to be working on transistor, we needed to.
Have a podcast and feel what it was like the podcast.
Uh, did Jason, is this your first podcast ever absolute first
podcast ever absolute first, Helen.
I know you've been on, you've been on quite a few podcasts actually as a guest a few times.
Yeah.
I can think of at least three or four times.
I've heard you as a guest.
You've been on SA uh, startups for the rest of us.
Yeah, that's
Helen: true.
Yeah.
And probably about five, five or six.
Justin: Yeah, perfect.
Jon: Seasoned veteran,
Justin: a seasoned veteran.
Well, I think so just as a background, uh, Helen started working with
us full time, April 27th, 2020.
And Jason started working with us.
Full-time August 3rd, 2021.
So Helen's one year anniversary is coming up and then in the summer
it'll be one year for Jason as well.
That feels like that long Helen.
Helen: It does.
Yeah, I guess, um, with me kind of starting in kind of like a temporary
kind of, um, capacity in 2019, it feels a lot longer because there's kind of.
No differentiation between, um, part-time and full-time, it's just, it's just all transistor.
Justin: Yeah, that was, that was the, the nice thing is that you were helping us out part-time
and then able to move into a full-time role.
How about you, Jason?
How does it feel like you've been working for us forever or does it feel brand new?
It kind of feels a little bit
Jason: like.
The time sort of has a weird amount of distortion over the last couple of years.
So
Jon: yeah, it feels like both for me with Jason, just because I know James for so long.
Yeah.
I've worked with him before, so it's like, kind of feels like a long time, but also doesn't.
Justin: Yeah.
I mean, sometimes it feels like we've always because we do these weekly meetings.
We just had one.
Sometimes it feels like we've been doing those forever.
And then, uh, other times it feels like, wow, we're still just a new team trying to figure
out how to work with each other and how to, you know, make, make this work as a, as teammates.
You know, I thought it would be just to ease in to us all for being on the show together.
We were just in this meeting and this idea of the.
YouTube integration came up.
Uh, and Helen, maybe you could describe, like, how does it come up in customer support?
When what kinds of things are people asking when they mentioned this feature?
Helen: A lot of things as we get really great feedback about the integration,
um, it's kind of something that perhaps.
Some translates to customers.
Don't even know that's there.
It may be a little bit tucked away, but I guess the people that do find it, um,
take the time to let us know how much they enjoy using it and how helpful it's been.
Uh, just to kind of like syndicate, um, the podcast across to YouTube and just to correct.
Put that audio and a video format and also do their back kind of go through and do their
back catalog of all previous episodes and kind of get those onto YouTube, like immediately.
So, uh, yeah, I guess, um, mostly it's positive feedback and then the kind of
questions we get are, you know, what else can it do as sort of a way of changing things?
Changing things around or, um, adding more custom features like
custom artwork and things like that.
Um, yeah.
So I guess mostly it's kind of positive feedback and people wanting more of the same.
Justin: Yeah.
Now this is a deep cut for build your SAS listeners because this YouTube integration
played, it played a key role in early episodes.
John did well in the sense that we talked about it a lot.
Uh, in this, uh, because it was a pain initially.
So I, and maybe you don't even remember.
Do you remember, like there was like issues about it.
It caused a lot of customer support initially, and then.
What exactly happened like for awhile, Google implemented a new,
Jon: no, I am.
Yeah, it was, it was painful.
I mean, it worked for awhile.
There was, we had to get, we had to go through this verification process to, to
increase our number of accounts that could connect through our API integration with.
I think at one point we were a, at like only a hundred people could actually author
accounts to transistor through YouTube.
And then in order to raise that, you had to go through this verification process that
included, like recording a video and telling you about telling them how you used it.
Uh, and it took, it took like six or nine months or something like
that to actually get it approved.
And I w and Google is like a, sort of a black box of emails if you
ever want to send an email to them.
But I think what happened.
They were sending it back to the wrong email address or something, but there was
just like no way to hear back from them.
Yeah.
And no support and or anything like that.
Finally got it figured out.
So we turn it back on, but there was definitely a time where we were thinking
of just removing it because I mean, we removed it from the app for a bit for new
users, but yeah, we were just going to cut it entirely because it was kind of a pain.
Justin: Yeah.
So now.
This is that's the background.
And this is what's interesting about bringing on new people is that I think it's
pretty easy, especially when you've been working on something from the beginning to
just get a cranky about things like this.
Just be like, I mean, I've had conversations with people where I'm like,
we're just going to tear this thing out.
Like it's just a pain.
And all I have is the old memories of doing customer support and people going,
it's not working or it sinked wrong, or now it's not it's disconnected.
And when you have those early experiences, sometimes it's like, okay, well, that's
just the way it's going to be forever.
But, uh, maybe this is a time for us to reevaluate that with the.
The fresh blood we got here on a show.
I
Jon: don't know if Jason's really touched that at all
Justin: though.
Have you touched that yet?
Jason?
Jason: I haven't.
I've looked at it a bit only because it's sort of loosely related to
some of the audio processing stuff.
Um, but I've w I've
Justin: withheld jumping in, does it process like the processing stuff?
Is it, uh, is that still a problem?
Does it process like having to process all of that video and stuff?
Is that still a problem?
Is it.
Okay.
No, it's,
Jon: I mean, it's slower than audio, but it's not, it's not terrible.
It's, you're basically stitching together an audio file and an image, an image that's on
a loop of like one or two frames per second.
And you stitch it together with the same command line program
we use for our audio processing.
Justin: Okay.
And Helen, have we, cause I I'm actually a little bit disconnected
from this now is do we get a lot of bugs of complaints about the YouTube.
Do you have that sense of like, this is maybe the sense we used to have was it
was too costly to support this thing.
How do you feel about that?
Yeah, I guess
Helen: that's one consideration when you kind of build an integration, you always end up
doing a little bit of support for whatever company you're integrating with, whether
that's YouTube, um, you know, apple, Spotify.
Um,
Justin: just so just as an aside, what if we were, if we're going to
talk badly about, uh, other companies, who do we do the most support for.
Out of all the companies.
Do you think what's, what's our top three or four, do you think I'm
Helen: amazing.
Neutral,
Justin: like Switzerland.
I mean, apple and Spotify have to be up there.
It feels like we do a lot of support for apple, Spotify still, but I don't see YouTube as much.
Helen: Where we were answering.
There are lots of questions about why the tube intubation isn't, wasn't working, um, and kind
of trying to set people's expectations based upon, or perhaps not having had an update
from, uh, or kind of clear communication.
I think we are fortunate that a lot, lots of our partners do kind
of communicate well with us though.
So, um, we can kind of pass on that information.
It was more a case of like educating people on how.
Things kind of changing their expectations on how things are going to work.
Um, so what are the, what is the scope of the integration?
You know, are they expecting something to happen that isn't actually part of the
feature set of the actual integration?
So, um, yeah, a lot of it's just kind of passing on the information and helping
people based on our previous knowledge of perhaps fixing various issues 10 times over.
Justin: Yeah.
But, but it has YouTube been coming up as much.
Is it, is it like in terms of it not working in terms of there being customer support or is
it more just people are interested in it now?
Helen: No, I think it's, um, since the, um, kind of off issue was fixed,
there's very little support need really.
Um, but the trouble is if something does go wrong it's then how do we go about.
Communicating with Google to fix those issues.
So if we did expand upon the integration, um, you know, how, how many more
kind of features, what kind of speech set can we support, um, without kind
of having better communication with
Justin: the YouTube side of things?
That's actually an interesting way.
I haven't even, I've never thought about it like that, where.
You, one of the questions you're asking right now, Helen is like, well, we could
make this better and promote it more.
But if something goes wrong, who would we talk to?
Like, do we have any channel to YouTube right now?
Because now we have it with apple and Spotify, but
Jon: I don't think we do.
I don't think we ever have.
It's like almost no support for the API stuff beyond just a bunch of times.
Yeah, unless probably unless you're a huge company and have a direct contact,
but
Justin: yeah, that's th that would definitely be an issue on the flip side.
Like I just had, I think I posted this.
Slack, but Jonathan Stark, who does the ditching hourly podcast?
He just like impromptu raved about that YouTube integration.
Like you said, I just found this and he's like, it just feels like magic.
Like suddenly my show is on YouTube and in parallel right now the podcast
industry is talking a lot about YouTube.
Tom Webster with Edison research is saying, listen, all you all,
you cranky old podcast purists.
You might not like YouTube.
You might think that nobody listens to podcasts on YouTube, but the truth is
people do listen to podcasts on YouTube.
It's becoming, um, I can't remember.
It's like number two, I think in terms of actual, um, listens.
And so he said, you can try to avoid it, but you're just, you're
just avoiding the inevitable.
It's something that you're just going to have to accept and.
Movement the big conference.
The keynote speaker is the new head of podcasts at YouTube.
We need his email
Helen: address.
Yeah,
Justin: yeah, yeah.
That's a good point.
I should get that.
Uh, I'm actually going to be, I'm not going to that version of the conference,
but they're the same time I'm in LA for family vacation is the conference.
So maybe I should try to sneak out and go to one of the parties and.
Get that guy's email.
What do you think about all this, Jason?
What are some of your thoughts about whether we should improve this feature?
Promote it more, or should we just hide it?
Keep it in the closet?
Yeah, it's
Jason: interesting.
The, I mean, we've gotten, we've gotten a few people that have pinged us about doing.
Like video podcasts.
So it's like this, this is sort of, you know, copying audio with some static image
to YouTube, which to me, like you said, I don't know who was sitting there going
to YouTube to listen to something like, I don't, I don't know who that person is.
Apparently they, they exist.
But, um, but certainly getting, getting into more video content, that stuff
starts to make a lot more sense.
Justin: I don't know how you and John think about this cause you actually have to build.
But when you're hearing customers and remembering being a customer yourself,
like when I was a podcaster, it's just like anything that happened.
Automagically.
I published something.
And then a series of auto, automatic magical events happen.
Like I publish an episode, it automatically tweets it for me.
It automatically publishes a little video on YouTube for me.
It automatically, you know, one thing I would love to do is first to automatically
create little promo video clips that can get published on LinkedIn and Facebook.
And there's something about that feeling of it just happening.
Like all this, this, this magical sequence of events happening every time you
publish, you know, we've talked about like, uh, well with private podcasts, we
automatically email all of your subscribers.
And there's just this kind of magical thing.
Like, well, I don't need to do that now.
I don't need to notify everybody about the episode.
It just happens.
So what for you and John, like, what are some of your thoughts?
Like when.
Because it is cool.
Like there's something cool about it and we could make it cooler.
Like right now it's just a static image, but we could put a little
wave animated wave form on it.
We could, uh, automatically generate an image like Helen, you were saying someone was
asking about, I didn't quite understand, like there's people expect you upload a thumbnail.
And what's the expectation and what did they want, what were they saying?
Yeah,
Helen: so people are already going to the trouble of adding individual episode artwork.
Um, and there was kind of an expectation that, that aren't work with that.
Maybe a unique custom thumbnail for the video.
Um, whereas currently we just use one static image, which is both the thumbnail and
the background image for the entire video.
So at the moment, any podcast episodes that get uploaded all have that kind of same image.
Um, and it would be kind of nice if you've got different guests each
week to have that artwork showing
Justin: up on YouTube too.
And Jason, you see how this.
Inner laces with the stuff we're doing with podcasts websites,
which we can talk about in awhile.
But if we have a, an object called host and an object called guest, and both of them have
a image attached to them, it's theoretical.
We could generate those cool images automatically that have like the host image and
the guest image and the name of the podcast.
Right?
Yeah.
Jason: That'd be cool for sure.
Jon: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of stuff we could do to improve it.
Um, I dunno where it's, where it's at on our roadmap.
I mean, there's a lot of custom images and backgrounds, animated backgrounds, and
right now, like, you know, we we've had the YouTube integration around for awhile
and then we also added dynamic audio.
So you can add ads and stuff like that to your audio, but that
stuff doesn't get sync to YouTube.
Yeah.
I think probably kind of impossible because you can't replace a video on YouTube.
Yeah.
Uh, and we don't really mention that right now in the YouTube integration.
We're not like, you know, your, your audio is going to be in sync on YouTube.
It's just, whatever gets uploaded at the time that the episodes published
is what's going to be on YouTube.
Yeah.
That's a really good point.
There's no way.
There's no way for a customer right now to like delete it from YouTube within transistor.
And then re-upload it.
Which we've done for people manually, but there's, you know, there's all sorts of
little things that have really, I mean, the YouTube integration, we haven't really
touched in a couple of years probably.
And besides Jason and I working on fixing a bunch of bugs with our scheduling system.
So we had, we had, uh, a few problems with people with the Twitter integration being
like, oh, I pumped by publishing episode.
Yeah.
Uh, it didn't get automatically posted to Twitter.
We're like, that's weird because it looks like it should have.
Yeah, so we had, there was something we did where we updated our scheduling
system and kind of broke it and we had to figure out this whole timing.
Uh, and that's kind of where the magic breaks down.
Right?
It's like, it's magic until it's not.
And then Jason and I have to like dig into it and be like, why, what is happening?
Justin: Yeah.
Yeah.
Jon: And I honestly forget what we, what the problem was.
Jason: I don't know that we ever, like, it was some kind of weird timing issue.
Like I don't know that we ever completely tracked down what the issue
Jon: was.
It was, I think we did figure it out and it was really.
I don't, I don't remember.
Jason: Maybe I just expunged it from my brain.
Cause I didn't
Justin: want to know.
I mean, that's the other point is.
Uh, underneath every magical feature is a developer that might be stressed out about it.
That it's all going to break
Jon: for.
The magic is actually someone who's manually running a bunch of things every hour.
Yeah.
It was not the case for us, but
Justin: it's like, people love that hot water when they turn on the taps, but
the plumber knows what's really holding everything together, down in the base.
Jon: Right.
There's some guy with a blowtorch on a pipe, eating the water.
Justin: I'm somebody that gets up every morning and hits the pipe without wrench.
Get to go.
And again, yeah.
Well, I mean, I think the other thought I had when you were saying that John was
sometimes in product development, like you can have ideas, like we've had this, this
loosely held philosophy called wait and see.
Right.
Like, should we do this?
Well, let's wait and see.
And sometimes that's a reaction to the market.
Like, let's just see what the market does.
Like does the market still want this thing in six months?
You know, like six months ago or maybe it was a year ago, everybody was super
excited about, uh, live audio rooms, like clubhouse and Twitter spaces.
And, uh, you know, w we were kind of like, well, let's wait and see.
You know, it turns out that that is not as it's still around, but it's not as frothy
as it was, but the same can be true with product development, meaning, wait and see.
And there's, we can already see there's like all of these, um,
adjacent things that we're building up.
Like we're building up podcast website.
We're building, which may eventually mean we generate automatic images for
the social image on podcast websites.
And then that's one piece of this.
And then as the product that kind of gets the scaffolding and the product gets built
up sometimes when you wait, uh, maybe in whatever six months we'll go, you know what?
The timing is kind of good now for us to augment this.
Cha, uh, integration.
Jon: There's definitely.
Yeah, there's that, there's definitely one piece that we've been
working on in the background that.
Having dynamically generated images for us.
We kind of need that, but we haven't built it out yet.
So once we have that in place, we can kind of use that technology for a couple
of different things, which would be nice.
Justin: Well, and even like, uh, transcripts are now, uh, an, uh, an object in transistor
and maybe in the future, it'd be like, it's actually not that hard to add, uh, transcripts
on the video, you know, when we render it or, uh, so there's all this other stuff
that comes to get built up at the same time.
I think we should talk about a little bit about podcasts website stuff.
Yeah.
You guys okay.
To change gears and anything else, Jason or Helen that you felt
like we should be talking about?
Jason: I still think we should have a bouncing transistor FM logo
in the background for the YouTube
Justin: videos.
Yeah.
Like the bouncing DVD logo.
Yep.
I agree.
One of the things we talked about.
After John and I did our founder retreat was this idea of how do we become the
most recommended podcast hosting option?
And I think like John, I mean you, that website, the podcast websites we have, so.
That's one of the benefits, right?
And this is something you did when you were building simple cast as well.
You, you start a simple cast account and you get this beautiful,
uh, built-in podcast website.
So you don't have to host it on WordPress and everything.
And we did the same with transistor, but the initial one you built was like,
no, never really intended to be for.
Right.
No, it
Jon: wasn't.
It was, it was, it was built for the cartoons, humanity podcasts
that they did the good news podcast.
And then we just sort of just stuck with it and expanded on it a little bit.
And it really hasn't changed since 2020, I mean it's or 2019, or no, 2017, late 2017.
Justin: Think about how many of those websites have been built.
Yeah.
Like, including, like when you think about in our industry, We don't have super high
churn, but you know, let's say it's whatever 3% churn that means there's like, it could
be 6, 7, 8 thousands, 8,000 versions of that website have been built at some point.
It's crazy to think about.
And it
Jon: definitely, I mean, it it's showing its age and people request things all the time,
but we just haven't added really anything.
. Justin: Yeah.
And we have people like doing crazy hacks.
I mean, in some ways it was, it was cool because you got to see how far people could
take that simple design you're dead, like,
Jon: right.
And then you can, you can post in custom CSS.
I mean, it's basically like a MySpace page.
Right.
You could kind of do whatever you wanted to with CSMs.
Justin: Yeah.
Which was cool, but it was time to, to.
Build something else.
So, uh, maybe Jason, why don't you describe how you and John started working on this?
So we said, okay, we want.
Build a new system, and this has always been too big of a project for us.
So like, we're always like nervous about it.
Cause it's basically we're building a CMS and then we have to figure out how
we're going to template it and all that.
So how did you and John start working on that?
I think we
Jason: both kind of been thinking about it the same way.
Like there there's like a lot of interrelated stuff that we want to build.
Um, John had thought about using liquid, um, which is it's a templating engine
that Shopify uses, um, to let people sort of build their own sites or purchased
sites off the shelf and roll them out.
But, um, like rather than kind of revamp our existing.
Websites.
It made a lot of sense too, to build a framework that we could build several
different websites or a bunch of different websites on, and then people
can roll out these different themes.
Um, so that was sort of the approach that we took.
Um, and we've been working, we've been working on that.
Um, as we speak
Jon: technologically though, it's gone through a couple of different thought processes.
Like I think we w we kind of.
Went back and forth on this a lot, Jason and I about how to actually build this
thing and like serve up the websites.
And I don't know if you want to speak about that, Jason, but your initial ideas for like
a standalone, a standalone app that runs the website templates from like kind of.
Infrastructure.
Jason: Yeah, well, a couple of different iterations.
Like the very first thing that, um, that I was thinking about doing is, is just
rolling out sort of having an engine that, that builds a static website
and that just like lives somewhere.
Um, I always sort of moved on from there on to, um, a completely separate
application from chances for FM, um,
Justin: Why did you move on from that idea?
Yeah, that's a good
Jason: question.
Um, I think it was really just around, I think the main problem was, um, SSL, right gen.
Um,
Jon: yeah, it was.
How do we do that and get everyone to have their own custom domain with SSL
without having to like kind of rebuild what we do or we would have had.
And mess with our DNS, I think a little too
Justin: much.
Yeah.
Got it.
Okay.
I mean,
Jason: there's certain, there's certainly something compelling about it.
Um, like if you just have static files that you're serving, you can,
you can serve them extremely quickly.
Um, but yeah, the nuts and bolts around it, we're just going to be too complicated.
I think a
Jon: lot.
I think a lot of the discussion too was like, how do we build this in a way that
when we roll it out, customers won't notice they want us to do anything.
They want to have to change their DNS.
They want to fill out.
I think if we had gone a different route, people would have had to
basically update their DNS settings in transistor or in their, in their, you
know, wherever they buy their domains.
And it's just trying to avoid that pain for customers, I think was kind of a big
Justin: deal.
Yeah.
That's a good point once you get that set up.
Okay.
So how did, so then how did you go on from there?
You decide you're not going to go to the state.
Generate a route.
What, what did you do next?
There
Jason: was, there was still sort of this, this idea of like the, that the websites
would like live on this separate thing.
Um, and I'm, uh, I'm a big fan of go and sort of often looking for places.
Did you have it.
But it made a lot of sense because there, there is a liquid engine implementation
and go that's really, really fast.
Um, just sort of on a whim.
I, I built out like a little like proof of concept one day to, to try that out.
And it worked pretty well.
Um, but we wound up running into a bunch of technical challenges as well, also, um, having.
Having a liquid engine and go, and then our actual,
Justin: um, and you try to its initial implementation and go, is, is that,
but is that the receiver application you built or is that the next thing?
Jason: Um, yeah, so this is the receiver.
So this actually worked out really well because we wound up using, um, this go tool as, uh,
like a development tool rather than the actual.
Um, website itself or the actual like web server itself, um, which is, it's sort of
an easier, like it's a command line tool.
So it makes it a little difficult, um, for a lot of people to use, but it it's
easier to implement for us then to build some kind of like editing front end.
So you can create templates and save them in different folders.
Um, like if you've ever played around with Shopify, it gets, it gets really complex.
And to.
To build the UI around that it would take forever.
Whereas this just lets you kind of just build stuff locally on your computer
and you can immediately see what it looks like and you don't have to there's
there's no like crazy UI around it.
Justin: Yeah.
You just connect it to your account API, Helen.
You got it set up.
Right?
Did you try
Helen: it?
Yeah, I've tried it.
Yeah.
Um, then, uh, kind of looking at the receiver and looking at different liquid tucks and just
kind of, um, Getting a good understanding of like the kind of structure of what it is that
we're building and how it's going to work.
Um, and I kind of appreciate that really cause uh, taking like a kit, a bit of an
incremental approach to build a new features, um, especially from the support side of
things, because, uh, it's kind of tempting sometimes to kind of release a fully fledged
feature, um, both to your customers and to your support team at the same time.
Um, and it's kind of nice to be.
Part of, um, that process of just having that general base level of knowledge
enough to build upon as changes get made or as, you know, new, new kind of
updates come out and things like that.
So, yeah, we've kind of got to make sure that, um, I've got enough knowledge
to be able to troubleshoot that.
So the issues don't necessarily take up John Jason's time
Justin: in the future.
Yeah.
I think this is all the, also the advantage of having a team that, where
everybody has some technical knowledge, you know, For you to be able to set that
up for me to be able to set it up, right.
Like, and actually get it going and go through all the, I went through
all the dumb questions with Jason.
Uh, but you know, having, and you've worked with liquid in the past when you
were working with other companies, right?
Helen, like you've, you've seen this templating language before.
I think convert kit uses it.
Yeah.
ConvertKit
Helen: uses it.
Um, I've used Shopify in the past, um, and kind of having an understanding
of how their theme structure works.
Um, well, now it's kind of interesting to kind of be part of that and just to be able to.
Hopefully share that with our customers and future.
So we can kind of give them a better understanding, educate them, right.
Health articles, and documentation on that as well.
So yeah, kind of teaching me at the same
Justin: time.
Jason: I was just going to say that that's a lot of the win with, um, cause
there's a lot of different routes.
We could have gone for creating templates, but using, um, using liquid and doing things
in a similar way to how Shopify did them.
Sort of immediately makes this accessible to however many hundreds of thousands of people
have, have like built themes on Shopify.
Jon: Um, yeah, we ended up rebuilding our current or the classic 10th
that we call it, which was the original template we launched with.
We rebuilt that.
Liquid and rolled that out a couple of weeks ago.
And you know, the idea is if we did it right, and nobody would notice, and I
don't think anybody noticed, did anyone
Justin: notice Helen?
No.
Don't think so.
Oh, there we go.
Again,
Jason: it almost didn't feel like it happened.
Like we, we, we sorta, we did like all this work.
We were like rebuilt basically like the engine and internals of a car.
And then months later, like flip the switch and then heard nothing and
Jon: nothing.
Helen: It's kind of like maybe a couple of questions about, um, different individual
elements within the website, but nobody said, have you completely replaced my entire
Justin: website?
Yeah.
Jon: So then the idea, then the idea is we'll, we'll keep slowly
building out additional templates.
Um, I have one I built it's already in use by our website for build your SAS, but that's it.
And
Justin: then we'll have to see if anyone notices.
Jon: Yeah.
W we have a couple people.
Or at least one person lined up to build a new template and we'll just go from there
and, you know, add a handful of templates that people can choose from and switch
between and customize in different ways.
And, uh, eventually I think the idea is to potentially open it up for
people to create their own templates.
Uh, however, however they want to, and just use our liquid system, but we'll see where
Justin: that ends up.
Yeah.
And then we, Jason, you also added localization.
Uh, which is like different language you can, it's actually pretty cool.
I didn't realize you're going to do it this way, but you can just add like,
um, uh, um, what do you call, what do you call an appendage to a URL?
Uh,
so why don't you explain how that works?
Cause it's really neat and it's already live like it.
We already have a few
Jason: languages.
That's like one of the huge wins.
Well, there's, there's like a few things that we get out of putting everything into.
These templates.
Um, so we have this like translation filter that you can put on anything.
So you just kind of like name a thing.
So like the label has episodes and then you've got that in French and
Spanish and German and whatever.
Other languages we have.
Um, yeah.
So you can just tack on a query string appendage and
see what it looks like, but you would generally just pick the, uh, the low California website.
So we went and looked and we we've, we have thousands of.
English language podcast.
Um, but if you rolled out a website, it was still going to be like the buttons and links
and stuff were all going be, um, in English.
So we're sort of going through those in order of how many we have the most podcasts.
So, um, Justin, Justin just did French for
Justin: us.
Yeah.
I just did the French translation it's live, which is so cool.
Like.
Helen, you must see this in support.
Like there's people ask about that all the time.
There's a French podcast, but all of our labels were in English.
Right.
Helen: And also the fact that our support staff.
Helps to communicate in other languages, but yeah, websites aren't.
So it's definitely been kind of a deal breaker for some, um, customers in the past
that they, you know, they want to release a website that they may use for their company.
That's primarily in the Netherlands.
And, you know, obviously it's, um, we can only provide English only navigation.
So even if they put their own content and the page, um, in whatever language they
choose the sort of navigation and the core.
The core keywords of that page are still in English.
So yeah, I think it's, um, it's been something that's on the list for a long time and it's
nice that we sort of slowly rolling out.
Jon: Yeah.
Well, we knocked that out pretty quick.
Jason, Jason built that really quick.
I don't even think we weren't even really planning
Justin: on doing that again.
This is the advantage of having other people here.
Yeah.
I, I also like how we do, we, we do that weekly meeting where Helen
kind of leads us through all of the.
Things she's noticed in support because I think it can, it can get easy to
just forget about how people our customers are feeling and reacting.
Like it's, it's easy to have blinders of like, you know, I make an English podcast.
And so why would anyone need labels that are in other languages?
And just having someone on our team, that's constantly bringing that stuff up to us
and going now listen, like people are.
Saying like it would be nice to have, uh, you know, some, the labels in a different language.
Uh, and there's been a few times where Helen's brought something up and then
you were, well, any of us, like any of us can immediately make that change.
That's.
You know, causing the friction.
We see these
Helen: trends and patterns emerge over time as well.
Like it's the same thing keeps coming up week after week.
Um, kind of convinces us there's enough.
Um, the month to make that change, especially if this kind of like a big amount of work
involved, um, we've kind of got to be convinced that it's, um, with making that change.
Justin: Yeah, totally.
Um, what, yeah, what else do we want to say about websites?
We're getting close.
Right.
Getting close.
You're you're building a theme picker right now, John.
Jon: Yeah, we're getting close.
Uh, I would say the new theme should be available.
I don't know, maybe next week, next week.
Justin: Nice.
How are we doing in terms of our yearly plan?
Outline?
Let's just say click here.
So we set our first.
What's going to be on podcast V1, and then the cool-down was going to be February 14th, 2015.
Did you guys do a cool-down February 14th to the 25th?
Jason: We forgot to cool down.
Justin: He didn't, he just kept grinding and then cycle two was supposed to
be February 28th to April 8th, and we thought we'd still be working on podcast
websites and maybe the embed player.
We definitely haven't gotten there yet.
Um, so we're, we're, we're pretty much on we're, we're kind of where we thought we'd be.
Jon: Yeah.
I think we're doing pretty well.
I think, I mean, we should probably get through all the websites.
So if we really wanted to do.
Justin: In these two cycles of work, I think so we're
Jason: just talking about it yesterday and like that theme picker and each theme can
be configured a little bit differently.
Like they'll have different colors or some toggles or whatever, but once,
once that's out there with a new theme, that's sort of, that's the whole thing.
Like that's new websites, new website themes.
Jon: Yeah.
There's another, uh, big part of this, which we haven't really talked about.
It.
Dealing with like free accounts for people,
Justin: but oh yeah.
Yeah.
Let's save that for the next episode.
We do.
Cause I think, I mean, going back to like, what's driving this, obviously we want to
make the experience better for customers.
We want to make the experience better for us like supporting these old templates
that were never really meant to be.
Distributed at this scale.
And ultimately we want to have more people using transistor and yeah, we want to bring in
Jon: new customers.
That was the, that was the definitely the big driving force.
Yeah.
Justin: Yeah.
And so this is like, this is the, this is what's going to draw people in,
you know, the website is one of the things that people look at, like what
does the built-in website look like?
And I mean, I think sometimes it's hard.
It's hard to forget.
Being a user and a customer, but like when you signed up for Tumblr and you started
posting stuff and there's automatically a cool theme that you could choose and
it just made you feel cool and made your content feel cool, it made you want to
share, you know, your tumbler site and, um, or even like my space or whatever else.
Used, you know, it, it felt you wanted to share it when you felt good about it.
And I think, um, this is going to accomplish that.
We're going to get it.
And it's always been, frankly, like in customer support, Helen, I don't know if he felt
the same way, but I was always a little bit embarrassed about the website, like, ah, okay.
Like I can't people would ask me about it.
Let me just set it up for you because they couldn't do it themselves
and make it look good, you know?
And it just feels so nice that we're going to have something that we can now feel good
about that we can just recommend to people.
We know when they sign up, it's going to be like, it's going to feel good out of the box.
Yeah.
Jon: And it's cool that we can just kind of add in new templates as we want.
If we find a designer who's like, I'm really excited about building a podcast website,
then we can hire them and, you know, have a new template that probably looks quite a bit
different than from what we already have.
Yeah.
Justin: Well, especially three customers, like if we have customers signing up and
they're like, you know, that's one thing Helen you could watch out for is if there's
like, That is designing client and they sign up and they're like asking questions.
That's the, you know, that's the time to say, well, Hey, let's talk about maybe
you building something because, uh, having people that are podcasters themselves,
they're putting a lot on the line.
Like when they share a transistor podcast website, they're putting a lot on the line.
This represents them.
This represents the show that they are, they're putting all this work into.
And so helping people feel good about that is such a, I know it's a, it's
an awesome job to be done for us.
Like let's help a user feel good about sharing their podcast website, feel proud.
Helen: I'm really looking forward to seeing how.
Like take it and run with it as well, because it's always been kind of impressive
to see what people have done with the existing templates, um, with kind of
even a minimal amount of customization.
So, um, yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to kind of see what.
Create with it really?
And it'd be good to keep an eye on
Justin: what people have built in.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
We're at about the 43 minute mark.
So I think we're going to wind things down before we read out our patron on supporters.
Uh, if you have questions.
If you have questions for Jason and Helen, if you want to, you know, you want to
know what's it really like working with a couple of old pieces of coal, like John and
I, uh, tweet us get ahold of us somehow.
I'll put all of our Twitter handles in the, in the show notes, except for John John's.
You can't reach John, but you can, you can reach John at, uh, at build your south.
And Justin come on or, or email me.
You can, you can email us@showsattransistor.fm.
Uh, but yeah, tweet us message us, get ahold of us somehow.
Uh, you can even go to our live chat widget and, and chat with us there.
And just, if you, Hey, I was listening to the show and I had this question.
I want you to talk about the next episode and we'll re we'll, uh, Record those somewhere.
And then we'll, we'll have some material for the next time we get the band together.
Jon: Yeah.
I'm really glad we finally got through this.
Yeah, we've talked about it before.
Um, this is fun and it's been, I don't know.
I really enjoy the team we built so far.
It's really fun working with everybody.
I think we're getting a lot of, a lot of good work done with a very small team.
Yeah.
And I know, I know initially Justin and I were both like, uh,
hesitant to hire anyone full-time.
Yeah.
But I think it's worked out really well and I don't, you know, maybe there'll be someone
else who hire, I don't know when, but.
Uh, this seems like a pretty, pretty good size for now.
Justin: Yeah, I agree.
So, John, why don't we read out our good Patrion supporters?
Uh, yeah.
Do the shout outs.
Jon: Uh, thanks to everyone as I was for supporting us in Patrion, we have Marcel filet
from, we are bold dot AAF, Alex Payne, bill condo, Anton Zoran from prod camp.com Mitt.
Harris county from the intro to CRM podcast.
Olay Coolic Ethan Gunderson, Chris Willow ward Sandler from member
space, Russell Brown from photo.com.
Noah.
Praill Colin gray, Austin Loveless, Michael, sit for Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis from fathom.
Uh, my brother Dan Buddha, Darby fray, Brad from Canada, Adam D Vander, Dave Giunta,
Jill and Kyle Fox from get reward for.com.
Justin: Thanks everyone for listening.
Tell your friends about the show.
Recommend an episode.