Build Your SaaS

Also: we were wrong about our target market.

Show Notes

More honest updates from Jon and Justin on what it's like to be building Transistor.fm:
  • People can't believe that we're using this in production.
  • Why SaaS feels better than other businesses we've been involved with.
  • "Kubernetes sounds like a Russian swat squad."
  • There's a temptation to over-engineer things; but there's only two of us working on Transistor!
  • The enterprise sales process seems like it's too much for our small bootstrapped company.
  • Looking back, we were wrong about who are customers were going to be.
  • You won't believe what Justin's been sending to customers. šŸ˜³

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Show notes:

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Creators & Guests

Host
Jon Buda
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Host
Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Editor
Chris Enns
Owner of Lemon Productions

What is Build Your SaaS?

Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.

Justin:

So yesterday, I was in my co working space, and I was talking to John on Skype about our new sponsor, Redash. And I got off the call, and someone lifted up their head and said, what? I'm literally using Redash right now. Folks, if you know SQL, You can go from nothing to a dashboard in 30 minutes or less. Anyone who mentions that they came through this podcast, build your SaaS, gets 50% off for the 1st 3 months.

Justin:

That's crazy. Go to redash.io.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. It's the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we do as we do as we build transistor Dot FM. We doing this.

Jon:

Doing the transistor.

Justin:

I you know, I think I have this because I went to business school. I have my degree in business management. And one of the things I think about a lot is really the only way to learn business is to do business. It's it's really hard to learn from, you know, a a teacher or a textbook.

Jon:

Yeah. It's, that's probably true about most things. I mean,

Justin:

Yeah

Jon:

Programming. Really, it's really I mean, the academic computer science is so far removed from Building web applications or iOS applications?

Justin:

Yeah. And, I mean, I think podcasts and books and, you know, getting together at conferences. All of that can be helpful. But, yeah, you really have to do it. And It's almost like I I've said this before, but I remember listening to podcasts like this one.

Justin:

You know, people chronicling their journey and having so many opinions, you know, on the sidelines. And then when you're in it, you just realize, wow. It's a lot different when you're in it. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

I mean, it it feels It's just different. Everything changes when your when your day to day is now building and doing this thing. And I think it's good for people like, I was definitely naive in my aspirations. I think, aspirationally, you know, I wanted this. But I think naivete is okay, but it definitely changes.

Justin:

Once you're in it and you're there, you're like, okay. Well, I now Now I understand the reality side of this.

Jon:

Yeah. There's always you know, there's a lot of people that talk about, I don't know. Work, life balance and Mhmm. You just you know, you have the opportunity to craft your own schedule. I think, you know, we're obviously trying to do that, but, like, Once you're in it, I think it's a lot different and that it's it definitely is, like, hard to to shut it off at times.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. Totally. It's certainly something that, like, you can yell from the sidelines and be like, oh, just take a break. And it's like, well, okay. It's a little harder than that.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. And it it's so much of it depends on the business you're in and the product you're building. And, although I will say, I think, you know, contrasting this with the kind of business I've been running for the past 3 years, It is a lot different in that you know, the business I was running before, I was doing online courses, and that's very like, you build up to this launch. And it was just like a ton of work.

Justin:

And you're you're kind of just think about what we did in August. Mhmm. You're kind of doing that every 3 months.

Jon:

Yeah. And

Justin:

that contrasting what we have here where every month we're just building on what we did last month. But there's no it's not like we have to do this massive energy intensive launch every, you know, quarter. It's just you're kind of iteratively building

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

On this thing. That part feels way better.

Jon:

Yeah. Some some crunch time is probably okay, but that's not every 3 months sounds exhausting.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you were saying before we started recording, you were talking about, you were just having this chat with somebody. What was that about?

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. So It kinda got me thinking about a few things, but a friend of mine, Joe, who's actually helped us out with with a couple things, on transistor is a DevOps manager. He does a lot of just Systems architecture and, like, really kind of advanced advanced hosting and and platform Building with all, you know, all the all the the crazy stuff nowadays, Kubernetes, and all these things that I'm like I've heard those things. I don't know what they do.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I mean, I just kinda know what they do. But

Justin:

Kubernetes sounds like a, like, Russian SWAT squad or something.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

Like, who got them? Oh, it was Kubernetes.

Jon:

Oh, no. Yeah. So, listeners of our show may remember, we rolled out, SSL and HTTPS for everyone on their websites they hosted us through, Caddy, which is a web server. Mhmm. It's written in go.

Jon:

And, it it's pretty new, and it only recently hit 1 point o. So when we were we started using it, it was very much like, you know, a beta, but it was production ready. Yeah. And there was a 1 episode we had where things kinda fell apart in that It wasn't working how we expected, and our SSL certificate started to expire without auto renewing, which they're supposed to do, through Let's Encrypt.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And so, in response to that, we sort of reached out to, Caddy support. Mhmm. We became a paying member of their software, which, you know, I think we're happy to support. And they got back to us, tried to troubleshoot, and then the the main contributor, the main engineer on that project, Got back to me personally. Sort of, like Yeah.

Jon:

Really detailed out what happened, what went wrong, how they're gonna fix it, and, like, A general road map of where they're going with it, which was, like, really, really nice of them, and I I think made me kind of appreciate Supporting them even more.

Justin:

Yeah. Totally.

Jon:

But recently, Matt, who is the the lead developer On that project, tweeted about about the project itself, about Caddy and sort of like where they're going, and how he was rewriting a bunch of, logic in cert magic, which I think is their, like, external program that run the Caddy runs on top of, which is the the The bit of code that actually does all the certificate renewals and generation and stuff like that and talks to bullets and crypt servers. Mhmm. So there, he was sort of talking about some changes that that had been made in that Part of the service, like, upstream, on their servers and how, usually it works. So, like, chooses one way to do the certificate renewal kinda, like, randomly. Mhmm.

Jon:

And he had mentioned us. He's like, you know, normally, this works fine. It broke for 1 gracious customer, a transistor f

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And, and my friend, Joe, saw this. I yeah. I think he probably follows him on Twitter and, Messaged me in Slack and was like, you guys are using Caddy in production. He's like, gross. And I was like, yeah.

Jon:

It's actually been working really well, except for, you know, the one the one day. Yeah. And, and he's like, hey. You're a brave soul. So it sort of just got me thinking, like, out of the choices the choices people make and we make, when developing software that's, like, dependent on other people's software or other people's frameworks.

Jon:

Like, we chose Ruby on Rails, which is Now I it seems ancient in code years, but Mhmm. It was really stable and, you know, there's certain aspects of it. They're not necessarily The most high performance. Like, I think some people would be like, oh, you should have written this in Node, or you should have written it in Erlang or some other language that's faster, I guess. Yeah.

Jon:

But Yeah. But when you have to just get up and running and and choose something, That's not always, like, the best approach, I don't think. And same with Totally. Same with Caddy. Like, you can use this stuff, automatic SSL Generation and renewal with NGINX, which is, like, probably the one of the more popular, open source web servers.

Jon:

But Yeah. But it's not it's not just drop in. Like, it it I was reading I was looking how to do it. I'm like, this is This just seems like probably more problems would arise from this. Totally.

Jon:

The way Caddy sort of built it is is is really Kind of exactly how we needed it to be.

Justin:

Yeah. On one hand, I can understand wanting to go with, you know, the big enterprise grade solution. Yeah. But we got credible support from CABBI.

Jon:

We did. Yeah.

Justin:

Small company, and we got incredible support from them because they are a small company.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

In the same way that I think right now, we're giving some of our best customer support to our customers as a team of 2. Right. Because we're highly incentivized. These are our customers. This is our company.

Justin:

And We want, you know, we want the best for these people.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

We we're not just some, you know, schmoe in a corner office or in an open desk environment who's, you know, got his headphones on and just can't wait for coffee break.

Jon:

Right. Right. I yeah. I mean, I I can totally see where, my friend Joe is coming from. Like, I I don't disagree with him at all.

Jon:

Mhmm. You know, he is Incredibly knowledgeable about those tools and and does run this stuff on, like, really, really high grade, like, enterprise, systems. Yeah. But on the other hand, like, I kinda I really didn't appreciate how open Caddy and and Matt, is about building, like, much like we are. He's very open about how he's building it.

Jon:

Mhmm. So I think I'm I'm incredibly happy to support them in what they're doing. You know? As much just as a lot of customers are happy to support us in what we're doing And pay us, you know, $20 a month.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I think there is this The the benefit of being a 2 person team is and honestly, this is why I think it it will be hard to hire. I definitely I definitely don't wanna grow past 5.

Justin:

That's probably naive. But Yeah. 5 to me is just The all of my favorite teams have been 5 people. And now right now when we're 2, there's just So many things we can optimize for. Right.

Justin:

So, like, I've I've been trying to rebuild our marketing site on statemic, and I'm doing all these live streams. And, You know, with the CMS, you can especially one that's kind of as flexible as statimec, you can do all sorts of things. You can build special templates and blocks, and you can, use Laravel to program all sorts of things and ways to manage the content. And as I'm building the homepage, I said, you know what? All I want here is static HTML.

Justin:

Mhmm. I I'm just gonna put a big blob of there's, like, a an overall template. But then inside that template, I just got this other blob called home page, basically. And and folks were like, I'm doing this as a live stream, so there's all these commenters who are amazing. They're helping me out, but they work for big companies with, like, multiple levels of QA and multiple users.

Justin:

It's the big thing. And so they're, like, oh, no. No. No. Like, if you're gonna do the homepage, you need to have build a home page builder, and you need to, you know, abstract this over here and push this over here.

Justin:

And I said, folks, this is just 2 people working on this. We both know HTML. There's no greater joy than being able to go in, especially to your homepage, and just tweak things in HTML and, you know, push things up to get and then have that then go live. That is the best Yeah. Feeling ever.

Justin:

And we can do that as a team of 2. And I I think there's something, the the joy of building a company when you're small is you don't need to over engineer.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

You don't need in if If anything, it slows you down. Like that beaver builder plug in for WordPress.

Jon:

That thing. I just fight with that thing.

Justin:

God. Like, it it it takes all of the joy out of building a website.

Jon:

It's a really yeah. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. I mean, I if you're just building a home page and you don't need to extract out templates that you might reuse some other time, like, why why do it?

Justin:

I I don't even know if even in the cases of these big companies, how much how often are they actually I don't know. I I I questioned some of that stuff. Now, like, building a, you know, a collection for a blog. Makes sense. Right?

Justin:

That that's something that you wanna have kind of programmed.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

But that that's where the the any sort of programming you do is going to work with you. And so, like, this new site, it has a blog. It's perfect. Yeah. But almost All of the pages have this oh, the pricing.

Justin:

That was another thing. Pricing

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Page. I wanna be able to, like, edit that was the other thing. They were like, okay. Let's let's create a big field set for the pricing table. And I said, god, no.

Justin:

Because that's where things get terrible. You you want me to create a field set, you know, where there's a thing called plan and then price and then options, and you're just putting me in a box. We've been building HTML tables since the, you know, HTML. I don't know when they came out, but, Look. We can do this.

Justin:

And now it's of course, it's not tables. But

Jon:

Yeah. You can still use them now. It's fine.

Justin:

You you can still use them. But, you know, I was able to find a a preexisting kind of code snippet from Tailwind and just basically just plopped this right into this page and then edit it. And it's, like, already way better than what we have. And I'm sure, like, once you start editing it or whatever, like, it just makes it so much simpler as opposed to as building something in Beaver Builder where we're, like, having to go into it's, like, 4 modals in and then edit all this stuff. And then you've gotta figure out What what what is styling this page?

Justin:

Is it the plug in?

Jon:

At some point,

Justin:

I hate it.

Jon:

Like, I just Yeah.

Justin:

I hate our pricing page. I hate it so much, and it it's It's my in some ways, it's my fault. Like, I I, you know, I I had to build it with Beaver Builder.

Jon:

But Right.

Justin:

Just being able to edit the HTML is so much nicer. Yeah. Are we gonna put that into production? Hell, yeah.

Jon:

You

Justin:

know? What do you what do you think the trade off is, though? Like, at what in what times should you not go with the indie solution. Like, where where's the line for you? If if someone comes out with a new, I don't know.

Justin:

New gem. And you're like, okay. I could put this in, but, like, how do you determine if that's if it's good enough?

Jon:

Right. That's a good question. I mean, for for Rails and stuff, it's that's hard to say because it is good. I mean, it is I would say it is enterprise grade. Mhmm.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Are there gonna be points where we spin off, like, smaller apps that are maybe more efficient for a certain thing, probably. Mhmm. I could see that happening. For Caddy, I was definitely initially pretty hesitant to use it just because I did read some, You know, performance comparisons between Caddy and NGINX and stuff like that. And it it made it look like Caddy was just horrendously slow.

Jon:

Mhmm. But, like, it's it's not for our use case. Like, I think There's a certain there's a certain scale at at which point, like, you know, I I don't know if we're gonna keep using Caddy forever. Maybe not. Maybe maybe, you know, as they grow and continue to build it and come out with new versions, like, it might it might be totally fine.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

At a certain scale, you know, I guess you have to sort of just, like, compare compare any sort of, like, Probably that might pop up at certain skill. Like, I don't know. Maybe it's limited by the number of SSL certificates you can have.

Justin:

But Yeah. Some of this is some of this is rational, and some of this sounds emotional to me. Do you agree or no?

Jon:

I think so. Yeah. I mean, some of it's certainly rational. Like, you know, it it's, Like, it's it's the web, and there are inherent, like, security risks and problems and NGINX and it's it's like family of plug ins and and modules are, like, well vetted against, You know, hacking and malicious things like that. Caddy is a few people, So maybe not so much?

Justin:

But maybe there there's also this tension. This comes up all the time. There's this tension between, Oh, wait. They're smaller, so they don't have they can't protect against, you know Right. Vulnerabilities as much.

Justin:

But guess what? There's less people

Jon:

Yeah. And you know what? I'm sitting here, and I went back and started reading, Matt Holt's Twitter feed. And he has He has a pinned tweet from April that says, here it is. My my, master's thesis on h t t p s.

Jon:

It's like, okay. So probably you know, he's like, she's done some research.

Justin:

That's right. This is why I think some of it is emotional. Meaning, Like, the more I get to know we'll take Caddy as an example. The more I get to know them, the more I just trust them. And, I probably lean more on the emotional side than rational side, where I I'm a people person.

Justin:

I wanna do business with people, I wanna do business with people I can trust.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And, you know, these and to me, you the way you earn my trust is through your actions. What you repeatedly do

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

That shows me it doesn't matter what you have in your marketing site. Doesn't matter what you have in your docs. Prove it to me.

Jon:

I mean, he could he's Yeah. He could have come back and said, you guys are doing it wrong. Like, you didn't you didn't read the manual. Like, good luck.

Justin:

Exactly. And and I think this is a good, thing to note for people building businesses. You know? Like, I have I've I get these DMs from people who I've never heard from before. And they say, hey.

Justin:

I'm launching on Product Hunt. You know, can you Can you leave us a review or something? Mhmm.

Jon:

I

Justin:

said, I don't even know you.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

I've never and this is a product that I just wouldn't normally use. Like, everything about this is jarring as opposed to I mean, Joe's a good example. If Joe asked me for a favor, I I'll do anything for him because he's consistently proven to be helpful.

Jon:

Yeah. Right.

Justin:

And and this is I think and this can't be forced. I I also get a lot of people messaging me and saying, you know, how can I help you? I wanna help you. It's like, no. You gotta this is our lives are are layers and layers of of actions, and you can't you can't just hack your way, you know, through this.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

You have to just consistently show up every day and, do things that matter, do things that help people, do things that earn trust. And that's how you can then, you know, the and the again, the people that I do favors for are my friends. They're the people that have proven themselves. They're the people that I know I can trust. So I don't know.

Justin:

If if Kyle Fox comes out with new software, I just know Kyle Fox is amazing. And so I'll I will I don't even have to look at it. I'll just I I trust him so much. I'll be like, this if it's from Kyle, it's worth doing.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I I I think people sometimes miss that part. So so far, I'm impressed with what Caddy's doing. And it also shows you that you can't just do this once. Like, every once in a while, you and I might have an off day. And you you really have to watch this when you're doing customer support because, I mean, you drink lemons for breakfast

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And then you go in to do co Yeah. To do, support. Not so good. Hey?

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, yeah. There's been a few times where I've been frustrated with Spotify. I'm just like, oh, these Spotify. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. Well and that's a good example too. I mean, I think we've got a good contact at Spotify now. But, honestly, My experience with big companies is they're just big, and it's hard. It you get lost.

Justin:

Yep. But my experience with smaller companies, especially good ones who have people who whom I trust working there. Yeah. The that that makes all the difference. And we also have I'll talk about this after the the break here, but, we also are able to Get really honest feedback from people.

Justin:

So if we don't show up, there's gonna be people who we trust, which is important, who can give us that feedback and go, hey. You know what? You really dropped the ball here.

Jon:

Yep. Yeah. And that's I I appreciate that almost as much as the, probably just as much as the positive feedback.

Justin:

Totally. Yeah. Alright. Let's take a break. This episode is also brought to you by ProfitWell .com.

Justin:

Patrick Campbell, I love this dude. He, I've met him in person a bunch of times at conferences. He is just doing all this work on helping SaaS companies with their metrics, with understanding how to price intelligently. We He came on the show. We had him as a guest on the show, if you look through our archives.

Justin:

But, ProfitWell .com. It gives you free subscription metrics. So all we did is we authenticated through Stripe, and all of a sudden, we had all these reports. Monthly recurring revenue, churn, cohorts, like, all this stuff just right there for us. And, honestly, we were talking about this before.

Justin:

We don't log in to the app that much Yeah. Because we get these emails. Right? And the emails will say, hey. You're you're ahead.

Justin:

Like, we set this this monthly goal of how much we wanna grow each month. And then it just So we kind of set this baseline, and then it just tells us how we're doing. Hey. You're 25% of your goal, 23 23% through the month. Really helpful to know k.

Justin:

Are we on track right now? How are we doing compared to last month? So if you wanna get these emails, if you wanna log in and see the dashboard and everything, I think you should check it out. Sign up for profitwell.com. And, you know, if that little chat widget pops up and they say, hey.

Justin:

Just say, hey. Heard about this through the build your SaaS podcast. By the way, I think they they are a customer of ours, and they are getting ready to, release season 2 of Protect the Hustle. Nice. So if you are, at your podcast player right now, which you are.

Justin:

Just as you're listening to us, just scroll up, click the add podcast button, and search for Protect the Hustle, because I think season 2 is about to drop. Okay. So before the break, I was saying, I wanted to come back to this idea of people giving us on his feedback. And I've been doing some experimenting with Instagram. I actually personally don't use it anymore.

Justin:

I just find it's It's bad it's bad for you folks. Just get off Instagram. But for podcasts, A lot of podcasters share their shows on Instagram. And so I'm trying to interact with people there. And Ali Abdaal, who has a show with us called not overthinking, really great show, and was kind of like a surprise hit.

Justin:

Like, I I I think I'd seen him and, is it Tamer? I'm sorry, Tamer. I'm probably saying your name wrong, but I I'd seen them around Twitter and, you know, didn't then saw that they signed up for Transistor, and it it got a lot of traction, but he messaged me. And this is, like, that just great unfiltered feedback that I love. Okay.

Justin:

So he goes, Hey. PS. I was meaning to send you a message. The charge more episode where the others were talking about how Transistor doesn't seem to be aiming at brands given how the majority of users are on the cheapest plan. So remember we had that kind of there was that big pricing debate we had.

Justin:

And, I did a live, kind of a debate with Ben Orenstein and Jordan Gall. He said, I noticed you've changed your messaging to the host for all your podcasts rather than podcast hosting for brands. And he said, when I was deciding who to use for podcast hosting, Transistor was the first thing that came to mind because I've been an email subscriber for ages. But the brand focused messaging made me hesitant about using it. I'm glad we went with Transistor because it's awesome.

Justin:

But just wanted to let you know that the brand thing felt like you know, what the brand thing felt like from an amateur creator perspective. First of all, thank you so much, Ali, for sending that to me. And again, Ali has earned my trust. I don't want all of you guys just shitting on me now.

Jon:

I don't

Justin:

want you to all yeah. Okay. Justin's up for some unfiltered criticism. We're gonna let him have it.

Jon:

Send it all to Justin.

Justin:

But as someone I trust, I was like, this is so nice to hear this this feedback. And I I I wanna tell people something I think we were wrong about. If you go back in our initial episodes, John, you and I were talking about how we wanted to be the WP p engine for podcasting. WP engine being this kind of premium WordPress hosting service. You know, if if you it's funny to hear us, like, go back and listen to those episodes.

Justin:

Like, it wasn't that long ago, but, man, clueless in some ways. We were clueless. We had this idea. You know, we will choose our market. Who do we wanna serve?

Justin:

And a lot of this came from me. We wanna serve businesses. Yep. Because businesses have money. Businesses, you know, are starting podcasts now.

Justin:

And Some of that prediction came true, but and and we optimized for it. Right? We were like, okay. We're gonna choose our niche. Here's our niche.

Justin:

We're not gonna go after everybody. We're gonna here's our niche. It's businesses who want a podcast. And eventually, that synthesized itself into, you know, Transistor is podcast hosting for brands. Mhmm.

Justin:

I think what we've learned is that maybe You don't get to choose your market as much as you think you do.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

Maybe the market is the market, meaning The market is anybody that wants what you have.

Jon:

And you just have to sort of, yeah, listen to Listen to that market. Kinda like see where it's heading or see what's, you know, What's popular?

Justin:

That's right. It's like you might you might decide to put on an event. And you're thinking, you know what? The only people that are gonna like this event is young hipsters. Maybe I don't know.

Justin:

Maybe it's a a night of jazz or something. So you you you say, you know what? This is for young hipsters. That's all who's gonna care about this. And so you just put all of your marketing into attracting young hipsters.

Justin:

But all of a sudden, you know, a baby boomer just happens to hear about it. And they're like, I love jazz. So they tell all their friends. And so now you look at the lineup and you go, oh, wait a second. Sure.

Justin:

There's some hipsters here, but where'd all these baby boomers come from? In the same way that, you know, when my wife and I went to the John Fogarty concert, I think a lot of those the old folks that were there were, like, where are all these young people coming from?

Jon:

Yeah. Probably. Yeah.

Justin:

We're, like, streaming music. You know? Like, we we can we can hear John fog we discovered John Fogarty through Spotify. Yeah. And there's these markets you might not have thought of.

Justin:

And I've been wrestling with this because I think for a long time, I was advocating for people to always choose a niche first, and then go after that niche in a you know, with all your messaging, with the way you build your product, etcetera.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And I think there's still some of that that's good advice. But when I was in Portland, and I went for dinner with Ruben Gamez. And he told me about the new product he's building, and I was kind of discussing this thing, like, you know, I we were gonna be, like, just for businesses, but I don't know. We've got all these other creative people on there, and people trying podcasting out. And, You know, I I feel like maybe we failed a little bit in our positioning.

Justin:

And he's like, Justin, with this new business that he's doing, which is his biggest competitor is DocuSign. Mhmm. His business is called Docsketch.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

He's like, all I'm doing is I'm putting this out there, and I'm seeing who shows up, and then I am interviewing and researching those people. And it's kind of like saying, okay. We're gonna have a block party. Let's see who shows up. And then deciding, you know, okay.

Justin:

What does this community need? Well, if everyone who shows up at the block party is a family with young children, well, then as a community organizer, You kinda know. Okay. Well, we need to maybe start building some things for young families. If everyone who shows up as a senior citizen, okay.

Justin:

Well, we gotta, you know, maybe Yeah. Make more things for seniors. And so he's been, like, doing some things that folks say not to do. Like, he did an AppSumo deal. Uh-huh.

Justin:

I said, why did you do that, man? Like, everyone says don't do those AppSumo deals with software as a service businesses. He's typically, you'll do, like, a lifetime deal for, like, you know, like, lifetime of transistor for $99 or something.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

And he's, like, for the learning, man. It I just wanted to see who signed up, who is willing to pay, and I'm going to start creating my marketing for the people that showed up hungry. Right? I'm not going to create my marketing for this this niche market that I just came up within my brain.

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Yeah. It's just been interesting to process that. Especially since I think in the original episodes, there was a little bit of not tension, but debate, because you were surrounded by all these creative kinda independent podcasters. Yeah. And I was, like, no.

Justin:

We don't want those.

Jon:

Right. You remember that. Yeah. They're like, they don't yeah. They don't stick around.

Jon:

They don't you know, they're not gonna pay the The premium prices, they're not you know, they're gonna cause a bunch of customer service.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And I yeah. I don't really think any of that necessarily came true. I mean, maybe for some customers, but, we certainly haven't turned those people away.

Justin:

No. Yeah. I mean, there is some of it that's true. Like, it there are some customers that require some customers require more work than others.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And this this seems generally true at the On one side of the spectrum, you have, like, hobbyists and DIY folks. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have, like, mega enterprise. It feels like most of your support can be in either of those camps. Like, if we have an enterprise company sign up, I've actually started turning some of these folks away because I'm like, we cannot go through your process. Mhmm.

Justin:

Your process is just too much. It would crush us. You want us to, like, sign these these state documents and, like, go through all this, you know, all you wanna rewrite our terms of service? Yeah. I know.

Justin:

It's You wanna pay by check, you know, that's mailed by carrier pigeon? It's almost like crazy to think that like, whenever I looked at our customer list, I kept thinking, no. This is just for brands. It's just for brands.

Jon:

Yeah. Where where are the brands? There's no brands.

Justin:

I mean, there are brands.

Jon:

There are. Yeah.

Justin:

Some of that came true. And, certainly, I think we wanna build some features for those folks because I think that's where our expansion revenue is gonna come from. But, man, we've got so many great shows.

Jon:

I, I think I think we were wrong, but I think we were wrong in a good way.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

I I, you know, I I think you can always look back on it With hindsight and say that, oh, yeah. That actually makes a lot of sense. Like, I, you know, I think most good companies or business people are sort of They keep their ear to the ground and, like, I don't know. They pay attention to what's happening As opposed to trying to predict everything.

Justin:

Yeah. Totally. But, you know, another interesting thing is, you were telling me about a big company that in Fintech that you were saying like, they wanna ask us some questions.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

But you said transistor just came up in their meeting.

Jon:

Yeah. From a cup yeah. Like, from a couple people.

Justin:

And I think, like, turning people away. It's like, I know there's metaphors for this, especially in music. Like, you know, there's a certain genre of music, and then a new group gets interested in that genre. And in certain decades, it was like, no. You folks don't belong here.

Justin:

And they'd get turned away at the door even though it's like, no. Those people are into what you're doing. And I think there is that that risk. Now on the other side, there's this risk that you try to be all things for all people. You know, we know we can't build features for everything and for everybody.

Jon:

Yeah. There's definitely you're right. There's definitely a lot that I think we've thought about, but then sort of put on the back burner.

Justin:

Yeah. I just think that's been an interesting realization.

Jon:

It'd be interesting to listen to I haven't really listened to old episodes.

Justin:

Every once in a while, I listen to a few, and I'm, like, that that maybe in our year end review, like, our 1 year anniversary of the launch is gonna is gonna be, in a couple months. Might be interesting to go through some of that.

Jon:

Yeah. Could be.

Justin:

Why don't you quickly talking about stuff we're building, you know, you're pretty heads down at your day job, but you've you've been you've managed to put out a few things.

Jon:

Yeah. There's been a couple. I guess the biggest one I've been working on is the Updates to our audio embeddable audio player.

Justin:

Okay. Tell me about this.

Jon:

So we we have a lot of Well, we have currently an embeddable audio player per single episode, or you can have one that actually just shows the latest episode in your show. Yeah. But we got a lot of requests for hey. I wanna I have a a single page for my podcast. We're not you know, we're not hosting, our podcast website through Transistor.

Jon:

We have a single page. We would love to have a player that just Has a playlist in it, and you can, like, poke around and play, episodes from a single player. Mhmm. So Kinda thought about it a while and how I could adapt what we have to that, and, got quite a bit of it done yesterday.

Justin:

That's, that

Jon:

one You know, it's a

Justin:

People have been wanting this.

Jon:

Essentially, the similar looking style. It uses the exact same player and and markup and everything like that, but it's just, like, Added on it's, you know, a tall obviously, a taller embed with a playlist you can scroll through and play episodes directly from there. And,

Justin:

Yeah. That's gonna be huge. Because some folks just have a landing page, and they just wanna be able to say, go to my podcast.com and then embed instead like, right now, they can embed specific episodes or their most recent. But you know, and they'll pay. Like, there's WordPress plugins that do this that actually cost, you know, a fair amount of money.

Justin:

And so For us to have that natively would be amazing.

Jon:

Yeah. It'd be cool. I think, you know, it's probably step 1 in sort of updating the player and, you know, there's other other types of, you know, I don't know, playlist. We could have a playlist feature, or you could cobble together episodes from different shows and have that be your player or Any number number of things. One of

Justin:

the things I like about Clubhouse is that the project management software we use is that you can add, like, tickets to things. Mhmm. And this is what I was gonna tell you before. So often when when when a customer support request comes in, I'll go to Clubhouse, and I'll search for that thing. And I've, you know, I've got screenshots and other things.

Justin:

So people say, hey. I want an embeddable player. And I'll be like, oh, like, We're thinking about building this. Here's what we're thinking. It's a ways off, but I just wanna get your reaction to this.

Jon:

And, you

Justin:

know, people get my reaction. But another Another another one is people want to see their episode artwork. The episode artwork on the website beside the

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Beside the the episode. And I've been referencing this image. Like, I'll just, like, go in and, like, copy it and then paste it into chat. But then I just realized what I'm actually sending people. I'm gonna send this to you right now.

Justin:

And unfortunately, this is gonna make our episode explicit. But the the story says, as a user, I want episode artwork to show up in the episode list and on the episode page. And then on the right, I have, you know, a custom image for that episode showing up with an arrow pointing at it, which is the part I always pay attention to. But just to the left is the show title.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And the show title is labeled a fuck boy, but why?

Jon:

I never actually noticed that.

Justin:

And I've been sending this to customers.

Jon:

Oh, no. Like

Justin:

So oh my god. I just And I don't know if no one else has noticed it, but I I pasted it into a chat the other day. And I'm like, so like this? And they replied, yeah. Like that.

Justin:

And then I was, like, looking up in the chat. I'm like, oh my god. What what did I what example did I send them?

Jon:

So you probably made that for a customer, right, at one point? I just saved it. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. That's right. Folks, we have all sorts of shows on Transistor. We we do not discriminate. You know?

Justin:

You can you can have some some pretty wild stuff on our on and, Yeah. This this show here

Jon:

it's funny.

Justin:

Pretty funny. So, yeah, I gotta I gotta replace that. I think that's good for this week. Anything else you wanna talk about?

Jon:

I think that's it. Yeah. The, the audio player updates should be coming soon.

Justin:

Yeah. That's gonna be awesome.

Jon:

We'll, we'll let people know.

Justin:

We've got a bunch of Patreon supporters. This week, I will in the show notes, I'm gonna hyperlink everybody that has a podcast on Transistor. So if I miss you, let me know. But, folks, if you wanna hear these folks' shows, head over to the show notes, saas.transistor.fm/62. So, John, Who are our supporters this month?

Jon:

Well, yeah. Thanks as always to, all of our Patreon supporters. We have, one new one, which is Josh Smith. Josh

Justin:

Smith. How did you mess up Josh Smith?

Jon:

I don't know. That's There's so many other ones that I should mess up here.

Justin:

Yeah. I know. You you can, like, do I see, I can't do that one.

Jon:

So thank thank you, Josh, for helping us out. Yeah. We we have, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedravita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sitfer, Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha.

Justin:

Danbudda.com. Darby

Jon:

Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.

Justin:

Junta. Okay. I gotta I gotta break in here.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

We got a tweet from Darren Spence. He says, road tripping for vacation. And I saw a sign for Junta, j u n t a, and couldn't help but be reminded of Justin saying Junta, after every time I saw the rest of it. I said I I I I sent that to I sent that to the real Junta.

Jon:

That's Great.

Justin:

He dug it. Nice.

Jon:

That's awesome. Kyle Kyle Fox from get rewardful get rewardful.com, and our sponsors today, ProfitWell and Redash.

Justin:

Yeah. Thanks so much for listening, folks. If you haven't, just head over to Itunes. Click that 5 stars for a 5 star review, or you can write us something nice. And we will see you next week.

Justin:

You you really have to watch this when you're doing customer support because, I mean, you drink lemons for breakfast. Yeah. And then you go in to do to do, support. Not so good. Hey?

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, yeah. There's been a few times where I've Been frustrated with Spotify. I'm just like, these yes. Spotify.

Jon:

Yeah.