Build Your SaaS

Bootstrapping, starting a software company, getting traction, finding cofounders?

Show Notes

Jon is away, so Justin is tackling these questions:
  • "When you were early on and desperate, were you tempted to take investor money?"
  • "How do you position yourself in a crowded market? What's your marketing plan look like?"
  • "How do you prioritize feature development? Are new features coming from customer feedback, intuition, or some combination of both?"
  • "Are you planning on experimenting with paid acquisition channels?"
  • "How can I get a job at Transistor.fm?"

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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:

Hey, folks. This episode is brought to you by redash.io. Supercharge your SQL skills, you'll be immediately more productive. If you're already working with databases, this is the tool you need. No complex tools to master, just you and your data.

Justin:

Like I mentioned, I've got friends that use Redash and love it. Anyone who mentions that they came through this podcast will get 50% off for the 1st 3 months. Just try it now. Go to redash.io and tell them you heard about it on build your SaaS. Hello and welcome to build your SaaS.

Justin:

This is the behind the scenes story of building a Web App in 2019. I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. And along with my co founder, John Buda, who couldn't make it this week, we are building transistor dotfm. Just got back from a conference, was speaking at Pod Summit in Calgary.

Justin:

Wanna say hello to anyone that was there. And thanks to Ernest Barbaric for putting on the conference. It was really nice to meet some real customers. There's something and this we'll get into this a little bit later. But there's something about getting out of the building and actually going and meeting and talking and listening to your real customers face to face.

Justin:

It adds so much context and color to the daily interactions you have when you're, like, on chat or whatever. There's just nothing like it. It was so valuable. And, hopefully, we'll have some video of that talk soon. But today, because John's not here, I'm going to be answering your questions.

Justin:

I I got a bunch of questions on Twitter and in Slack, and I'm also recording this live. So hello to everyone who is listening or watching live, and I'll be answering questions from the live viewers as well. Alright. Let's get right into it. The first question is an audio question from Val.

Speaker 2:

Hey, Justin. So my question is this. When you were at 700 MRR, were you tempted at all to take investment to go faster? And if so, what kept you saying no? Believe that you will get to 20 k soon, something else?

Justin:

Alright. So great question from Val. Yeah. So when we were at I I talked a little bit about this last episode. Around July of 2018, I was starting to panic quite a bit.

Justin:

We'd been working on transistor for about 6 months, and we were just about to launch publicly. We were about a month away from our official launch. We had about 51 early access customers and $781 in MRR. And I remember using this tool that that, BearMetrics has called forecast. And it, if you go to forecast.bearmetrics.com, I plugged in our numbers.

Justin:

Right? So okay. I said, at launch, if we start with 1500 MRR. Right? How long will it take us to get to $21,000 in MRR?

Justin:

And I think when I plugged all the numbers in, I see said, you know, we grow by 10% a month, 5% churn. It would have taken us 5 years to get there. And at the time when I was recording that episode, you can hear it in my voice. I'm thrashing. I'm I'm worried.

Justin:

And it's because as bootstrappers, when we're building something new, we walk a fine line between, you know, on one hand, it just takes so much effort to launch a product. And on the other hand, we need money to live. And it can it can just feel hopeless when you're at the beginning, and you haven't even hit a $1,000 MRR. But you know you'll need so much more just to pay your bills. It can be debilitating.

Justin:

So would we have taken investment? We did consider taking investment because I was really thrashing at the time. I was worried that, you know, it was just going to take too long for us to make any money at all. And if you read a lot of the blog posts, on my site, justinjackson.ca/bootstrap, A lot of the the articles I'm writing at the time are are me just, like, thrashing about worrying about how we're gonna make this work. In particular, there's this article called Bootstrapper's Paradox that goes into all of this.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, we considered these new bootstrapped funds like earnest and tiny seed. I think they're good options, Ultimately, we decided to hold on. One of the reasons we were able to hold on is that my other business, Mega Maker, just picked up. And it was bringing in enough money that we I could pay my mortgage, and I could feed my kids.

Justin:

So the, you know, the pressure to have Transistor start making money right away was lowered. The other thing is that we just got I mean, lucky is hard. I don't I don't know if it was just luck because we've had this feeling that, you know, we were in a good market, but we've been growing about 20% month over month since we launched. And we're just over $18,000 in monthly recurring revenue right now. And so to me, like, right now that seems crazy.

Justin:

But I do remember being at that 7 that $700 stage and being, like, how are we ever gonna make it? This is never gonna happen. So I I definitely know how that feels. And really, there's no good answers for any of this. I I would be careful that, you know, if things really don't start happening within I don't know.

Justin:

I mean, you have to give yourself your own time limit. I think for us, we were saying, you know, if if things really don't get traction a year or 2 after launch, we need to can this project and move on. And no investment is going to fix a bad market or bad product or bad timing. So those are the factors you have to consider. But, for us, I do remember us considering investment.

Justin:

I don't think it's a bad option, but ultimately, we decided to just hang on. Next question was on Twitter. What would it take to work at transistor.fm? So it's very likely we're not going to hire anybody for a long time. Right now, 50% of revenue goes to salaries.

Justin:

So if we make 20 k in a month, we'll take 10 k of that and say, okay. This is for salaries. And because there's just 2 of us right now, that 10 k gets divided by 2. So we each get 5 k. And we really, I don't think we're going to hire anybody until we're both making about $100,000 a year.

Justin:

I know for some folks that's way lower than their current salary. Other for other folks that's way higher. For us, that's about where where we need to be. Both of us, we're making over a 100000 beef when we started transistor, and, that's kinda where we'd like to get back to. So until we're both at that 100 k mark, we probably will not hire.

Justin:

When we do hire, my guess is our first person will be someone in customer support. It's just right now, we cover customer support pretty good, but it'd be nice to have someone in the European or Australian time zone that could cover the time when we're sleeping. And, also, sometimes, you know, we're in this business for to have a good life, and so we want the freedom to be able to go skiing or mountain biking or whatever, and not worry that people, you know, were not able to provide really great support. So I think that's who we're gonna hire first. In terms of, you know, what would improve your chances, I'm looking for someone who's used the product, someone who's passionate about podcasting, someone who has a show, someone that already understands how transistor works, someone who's been following our journey, all of those things would would help your your chances for sure.

Justin:

But like I said, that's probably not going to happen for a long time. Next question. We had quite a few on Twitter. Actually, I'm gonna do this video. I'm gonna do this audio question next.

Justin:

So let's let's listen to this one here. This one is from Simon Bennett in the UK.

Speaker 3:

Hi, Justin. It's Simon from the UK. I've got a question about positioning. I've just launched a new product called Automate. Ly, which is all about creating automatic email workflows around Stripe events.

Speaker 3:

So customer created, failed payments, etcetera. I'm trying to position where it's it's quite a busy market, and there's competitors competing on different features with myself, or I'm trying to compete with them. So I was wondering how you've positioned Transistor and how that's evolved, because obviously the podcast hosting market is quite hot. And it's definitely got busier since you started. So, you know, how's your, positioning evolved?

Speaker 3:

And, how again, same question about your your marketing plan. How's that chain or how is that formed and how is that evolved, since you started out? Thank you very much.

Justin:

In the beginning, we definitely benefited from my audience. I'd been building an audience since 2008. I had a following on Twitter. I had a following, on my website. I had a email newsletter.

Justin:

I had a lot of podcast listeners. I built a bunch of relationships with people that we were able to leverage. And that definitely helps, who you know and who knows you. Those are 2 really, yeah, just helpful assets to have when you're launching anything new. You know, after we started getting paying customers that weren't, you know, directly connected to us in some way, we started noticing a trend.

Justin:

And one of the trends was people really like the fact that you could create multiple podcasts on Transistor, but pay only one price. And so that positioning in a busy market made us unique. Most hosts charge, you know, per show, and that really helped. It also helped that our interface was simple and well designed. There's some players in the market who have haven't updated their interface in a very long time.

Justin:

And, people were getting tired of of using it a clunky software. So having, you know, software with a better experience, was something they were looking for and was another way for us to stand out. Our audio player, a lot of people like that. A lot of folks liked our built in website. And, you know, a lot of it has just been about being top of mind however we can.

Justin:

And some of that again has come from my audience and just me being out there a lot. Some of that's come from our affiliates, and they have, you know, authoritative websites that get a lot of traffic for different keywords. And they recommend us, and they recommend our customers as well. But having these folks review our site and say, here's the advantage of going with Transistor. You know, that's been great.

Justin:

Having having folks that recommend you on a daily basis. So just any customers that came through the door, we've been trying so hard to give them a good experience, to to treat them so well that they would happily tell their friends. And, you know, on on Reddit, for example, I've noticed our customers jumping in frequently when, you know, people say, hey. What what do you think about Transistor versus this, you know, hosting provider? And our customers will jump in and say, here's what's great about Transistor.

Justin:

So, Yeah. I think all of that has helped. In terms of a marketing plan, I I I don't really have one. I I basically have things that I wanna do. And every day I get up and I look at, you know, the options.

Justin:

Like, here are some blog posts I could write. Here are some things I could respond to. But I don't have an overall plan, like, that's, like, 6 months or even a year into the future. I'm very much, you know, waking up every day and going, okay, what do I think is the best use of my time? And so much of marketing to me, it feels like, is about what's going on right now.

Justin:

What is what's happening right now and, using that as inspiration, responding to that, especially using customers words in headlines and blog posts. And so if somebody is asking me a question right now, I feel like, okay. I'm gonna answer that question as a blog post and then, you know, that that becomes marketing, I guess. But I you know, I'm responding to something in the moment. So that's how I do it.

Justin:

That approach might change as I go along. But, I'm I'm very much I think we end up emulating our heroes. And Jason Fried is one of my heroes, and he has a very kinda laissez faire, attitude towards planning, especially really advanced planning. And so, yeah, I just have a list of things that I'm trying to, you know, I of ideas. I wake up in the morning and look at the list and decide what I'm gonna do.

Justin:

Another Simon asks, when starting from scratch with no audience, would a landing page with maybe some Facebook ad, Google AdWords make sense? And, I asked, this Simon more, like, for more details. Like, you know, what is this product that you're thinking about building or what's the audience? And he said, it's a SaaS product in the fitness market, and he wants to make a product for personal trainers and dietitians. So then I followed up and said, have you already had conversations with a lot of personal trainers and dietitians?

Justin:

And, he said, I've only talked with a few old colleagues. 3 years ago, I worked in a fitness chain. Here's kind of my thinking about this. Until you've talked to a bunch of real human beings in person, I I wouldn't be thinking about paid acquisition or anything like that. I think it's okay to create a landing page, but I would recommend that you read the mom test.

Justin:

It's a a book, that's been kind of circulating around bootstrap circles lately. I was reading it on the plane. It's really good for describing how you can do customer interviews practically. And I can't see any other way to really get a sense of a market other than talking to people face to face and asking really good questions. The question you would wanna be asking, Simon, is, you know, going to personal trainers and dietitians and asking them, hey.

Justin:

What kind of software do you use to run your business? What was the last app that you paid for? What's a product that you started using and then canceled? How do you manage these kind of tasks? And their answers are going to be really important.

Justin:

Because if everybody says Excel, and there doesn't seem to be any problems with Excel, like they're not volunteering information about how Excel is broken and how they can't run their business that way. I think you've already got your answer. There's no sense in spending money on, a problem that isn't a problem yet. So that would be my suggestion is go out, first read the mom test, and then go out and actually talk to some real potential customers. Don't tell them about your idea.

Justin:

Just ask them what they're already using. And, or what they've canceled or, you know, ask them about their current behavior, not whether your idea is good. And if it makes sense at the end of the conversation, you could say, hey. I'm working on a project. You can go to this website and sign up if you're interested.

Justin:

And that's where your landing page would come into, you know, come into play. Alright. Let's, answer a few questions from the live chat here. How do you come up with good ideas, and when do you know which one you should work on? Well, this is again, it's hard to answer these things sometimes because I've had plenty of bad ideas.

Justin:

I would say that what's been helpful for me is putting things out in public. So, you know, even a tweet is something you can put out in public, and then see how people respond. See what resonates. And, I've done this with blogging. I've done this with podcasting.

Justin:

Just putting ideas out in public and seeing what resonates or observing what other people are publishing and what's resonating. And so with podcasting in particular, I just noticed that a lot of companies were starting podcasts and building podcast studios. A lot of executives were, you know, wanting to start their own podcasts. There's almost like this switch from marketing to PR, and podcasting is very much a PR exercise from a brand point of view. Also, just lots of regular people wanted to start podcasts.

Justin:

And the there just seemed to be a lot of public evidence that this was a thing. And so, you know, when John came to me with this idea of, you no, I'm gonna build transistor. I thought, even though it's a crowded market, I felt like there is enough going on here that we could get in. And, maybe we're not on the ground floor, but this is kind of like, there's a lot of momentum in podcasting right now. And I actually, that that's another good follow-up is I look for where where there's momentum.

Justin:

So if it looks like there's a lot of excitement around a topic or there's a lot of excitement in a specific niche, right now, for example, Spotify is a really kinda hot area. There's lots of momentum there. They're launching lots of new things. The the app store is really popular. And so if I was gonna start a new business, I would probably be looking at markets like like Shopify, because it's so like, there's just stuff happening.

Justin:

And certainly, there's a lot of competition there. But one thing I I think I've learned in the last couple years is that for there to be a lot of competition and a lot of movement and a lot of excitement about a specific niche is not necessarily a bad thing. People think that podcasting is competitive right now. One of the things I mentioned in my in my talk that I just gave in Calgary is that we're really you know, people say, oh, there's 700,000 shows. Like, you know, how can I compete with 700,000 podcasts?

Justin:

And I always say, well, that that's still pretty small compared to, how many blogs there are. There's 500,000,000 blogs, 22,000,000 active YouTube channels, and 700,000 podcasts. And then, you know, you whittled that number down even more. 75% of podcasts are no longer in production. So there could be, like, a 175,000 active podcasts right now.

Justin:

And this is a hot market. Right? Podcasting is a is a hot market. I would also say that most podcasts are still not that good. Like, there's just a lot of mediocre shows, and a lot of podcasts are doing the same thing.

Justin:

They're all trying to be Joe Rogan, or they're all trying to be Ira Glass. They're all trying to be Sarah Koenig from Serial. We can do better than that. And so I would look for the areas that seem to be really kinda hopping right now. Let me tell you about ProfitWell, another one of our sponsors for the show.

Justin:

They provide free subscription metrics to help you identify opportunities, and also tools to help you reduce churn, optimize pricing, and grow your subscription business end to end. They have season 2 of their podcast Protect the Hustle coming out soon. Folks, I'd like you to go to iTunes, listen to the trailer, or open up Apple Podcasts in your app, listen to the trailer. I'm gonna I'm gonna search for that right now and give you just a little taste of what protect the hustle is going to sound like. By the way, this is a great trick for anyone creating a new podcast.

Justin:

If you create a trailer, it shows up in Apple Podcasts first. And so that's what the folks at ProfitWell have done. Listen to this.

Speaker 4:

What is hustle? The word hustle dates back to the 16 eighties from the Dutch word, hustle, which means to shake or to toss. The very core of the word is around shaking up and pushing forward which is why plenty of the dictionary definitions have some derivation of movement or energy. As queen Merriam Webster quips, hustle is to obtain by energetic activity. The core core of hustle was around changing your environment and shaking things up to produce large scale action.

Speaker 4:

Sometimes, that was very positive, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps or running that extra sprint in practice. But other times, it was more negative. Pool hall hustling or slinging rock. Hustle was initiative and and not accepting your circumstances and doing everything in your power to change. Hip hop embraces Alright.

Justin:

So check out ProfitWell's Protect the Hustle. And if you have a SaaS business, sign up for profitwell.com. Get free subscription metrics for your business. We use them at transistor, and thanks to them for being a sponsor. Alright.

Justin:

Let's go back to the questions on Twitter. Woah. Wow. There's lots here. From Brian z, how do you prioritize feature development?

Justin:

Are new features coming from customer feedback, intuition, or a combination of both? How do you balance between marketing and product? Okay. So, well, new features the the big thing with new features so far has been this process we call wait and see. And we have to use it because John is currently employed full time and doesn't have a lot of time.

Justin:

So when we get feature ideas, other, you know, from customers or from ourselves, we just have to wait and see. Because John can't he only has limited bandwidth and can't build everything that comes in the door. The great thing about this is you really see what's important when you wait. The features that just continuously get, you know, people are asking for them continuously, those you see that pattern of, okay, this is really important to people. We should look at this.

Justin:

And even then, we're you know, that's not, a for sure thing that we should build. We wanna dig into people who ask for different features and really say, okay. Well, how do you think you'll be using this? What are you doing? How are you solving this problem currently is the right question to ask.

Justin:

And when we ask those questions, we get a better sense of what they're asking for and whether we should build something at all. How do you balance between marketing and product? Yeah. It's it's pretty much divide and conquer. John does a little bit of marketing and customer support.

Justin:

I do a little bit of, product development and programming. But, yeah, we've pretty much split those tasks evenly. Although, I'll say for us, product is everything. We both are thinking about the product all the time. We're both making prototypes and mock ups all the time.

Justin:

So, you know, that's something we both work on. Will Preston asks, how did you go about growing a mailing list? And was it important to you? We are starting a retro clothing brand and thinking about running giveaways, but having a limited budget. It's really slow.

Justin:

I would write blog posts. And at the end of the blog post, I would say, if, you know, this was interesting to you, sign up for my mailing list. And I did started doing that in 2008. I had under a 100 subscribers for probably, you know, the first two years. Maybe in the first 4 years, I got up to 400 subscribers.

Justin:

Then I started a podcast called product people, and I would ask people to sign up for the mailing list all the time. That probably got me up over a1000, and everything just kinda built on top of that. So, it just was really gradual. If you look at in ConvertKit, if you look at my my chart of, you know, subscribers, it's really gradual still. And, you know, maybe a few new subscribers a day or something like that.

Justin:

I think it's still important, but it's not something that you can just, like, turn on and and have it start working. It it does take time. I think for Transistor, one of the interesting things we did is we launched with a landing page that just said, you know, coming soon, a new podcast hosting platform. Sign up here if you're interested. And in that case, you know, we were saying, here's a new product that's coming down the line.

Justin:

And if you're interested in it, sign up. And in that case, people have intent. They actually, you know, are at least interested enough in the product that they're willing to put in their email address. And I think by the time we launched, we had probably close to a 1000 people on that mailing list. We were also able to build that through product hunt's ship feature that allows you to get into their upcoming section.

Justin:

And, I think we got an additional 300 subscribers from that. So you might consider that if you're looking for a place to, you know, get some more interest or sign ups from. Alright. Let's keep going. Andy Pickle asks, how many ideas did you go through before you found something that made any money?

Justin:

Oh, 100. I mean, maybe not 100, but the first paid product I launched, you know, post 2,008 was a little ebook called amplification. And, you know, that that launched and made a little bit of money partly because I'd already built an audience by then. And then the next thing I launched was the mega maker community, which is still going to this day. Then I launched, marketing for developers.

Justin:

Actually, there's a few failed attempts in there. I I launched a I was thinking about, stopping the Product People podcast. And so I thought I would want I would sell, like, kind of like a CD box set, not an actual box set, but a virtual box set of, like, behind the scenes interviews and video and, you know, show notes and things that didn't get aired. And, you know, we had a lot of subscribers, and so I thought at least somebody would be interested in it. And I didn't sell one copy.

Justin:

So I I definitely had some failures in there. And I mean, yeah, between when I started roughly in 2008 until now, there's been dozens and dozens of ideas. I I think that's part of the process is trying things, learning, failing, having some success, you know, building on that success, comparing that to, you know, other things you've launched. And then, you know, you you almost are like a surfer. You're able to ride bigger and bigger waves.

Justin:

And so for me personally, marketing for developers and mega maker were pretty big waves. And then I saw this big wave coming called podcasting, and had already had a bunch of experience in it. So I thought, okay. This is a this is a wave we're worth paddling out for and riding. Travis Fisher asks, what's the hardest part of both having a family and bootstrapping a SaaS for you?

Justin:

For sure, it's that in between time when you haven't when you're not making any money. And you have to you're just kind of stretched between these two realities of how am I going to make it? This is so hard. Yeah. That that's the hardest part.

Justin:

And now even, like like I mentioned earlier, transistors cutting $5,000 checks for John and myself each month. And that's been a huge help, in kind of alleviating a lot of that stress and anxiety. Are you guys planning on experimenting with paid acquisition channels? This is a question from Sean Quinn. Yes.

Justin:

But we're not sure exactly how. One thing is I really feel like Facebook is kind of a yucky company, and I don't wanna give them our money. And so we're we're not completely opposed to it. But I will say, even though a lot of our audience is on Facebook and Instagram, I I just and we're active on both of those platforms. I don't feel great about giving them our money.

Justin:

And so if yeah. We'll have to figure out what we end up doing there. How did you know that you and John would be good business partners? We this is a question from Duncan McLean. We had hung out a bunch.

Justin:

I I we knew each other. We met in 2014. We had hung out at least once a year. We had worked on a few projects together. We had been vulnerable with each other.

Justin:

Like, we'd shared some vulnerable parts of our lives with each other. And I think that created trust. I felt like I could trust him. Yeah. Those those were some of the ideas.

Justin:

I also knew that he was an incredible builder and programmer, And I really like the stuff he built before. So, Borsch asks, any counterintuitive advice that worked for you? Yeah. One, it's okay to target a really competitive market. People tell me all the time, like, why did you launch a podcast hosting company?

Justin:

There's so many of them. And I think, like, Jason Cohen has this quote, like, yeah, you can target a really small niche. But at the end of the day, it's really easy to sell ice cream on a hot day at the beach, even if there's tons of either ice cream stands. Or, you know, if you're selling, kettle corn at the fair. There's so many of them selling kettle corn, but everybody seems to be doing okay.

Justin:

Right? It's because if there's a mass of people there, if there's a bunch of excitement there, there's just more chance that you're going to get a piece of the pie as opposed to, a place where there's it's, there's nobody in the market. Right? There's no excitement. There's no movement.

Justin:

And so, I think definitely look for where there's a bunch of excitement, where there's a bunch of movement even if there's a lot of competitors. Alright. We've got a bunch of questions on the live chat here. Was Product Hunt crucial for your platform growth? This is from Karl Monson.

Justin:

It helped a little bit. The problem with Product Hunt is that it's not very intent based. Meaning, the folks that go to Product Hunt aren't looking for podcast hosting. They're just looking for cool new products. And so you get a lot of noise in there.

Justin:

I think where it helped a little bit was in creating a splash for this podcast, and creating a splash when we launched. And sometimes just creating a splash and having people remember your launch is helpful. So I think I think it can be helpful. I don't think it was crucial. If I had a $1,000 to build an audience, how should I spend it?

Justin:

This is a question from Mike Walker. I think invest in a good microphone. So 60 to a $100 will get you a pretty decent microphone. Invest in a good webcam, invest in high speed Internet, and have a decent computer, and then start a podcast, or start a live stream, or do some writing on your blog. Yeah.

Justin:

That's basically it. And writing doesn't really require any special equipment. Podcasting just requires a pretty good microphone. And if you're going to do video, you should at least have a pretty good webcam. But I think those those things, that's where I'd be spending my money.

Justin:

Yeah. It it just takes time that the market you choose and what you're offering that market is way more important than any kind of money that, I think you'd be spending. Dipesh asks how to price the SaaS offering. I think you start by looking at where your competitors are charging, and then you talk to customers, listen to customers. Hey.

Justin:

What are you paying for right now? You know, how did you make a decision on what to buy? What, what features, have you paid more for? Ask questions that are based on their current or past reality. Don't ask them, hey, would you pay $99 for this?

Justin:

Because people will lie to you. And again, this is, something that's hit home in that book, The Mom Test. What if we later realized we need to increase the price? How do you communicate that? I don't know.

Justin:

We haven't we haven't, crossed that that bridge yet. So Daniel Zarek asks, how did you go about finding your best affiliates? It was an accident, basically. But I get in some ways, it's not an accident. So there's this idea of increasing your surface area of luck.

Justin:

And I went on Matt Giovanicchi's podcast, Money Lab. And, have I've done a few interviews with him. Mentioned the affiliate program on his podcast. He has a ton of affiliates in his audience, and a bunch of them signed up. And they ended up being very, very helpful for the growth of Transistor.

Justin:

That's how we found them. It was slightly by accident, but on the other hand, it was just me putting myself out there. And, Yeah. Being on podcasts, making connections, you know, these are all layers of experience that kind of are on top of each other and eventually get you to the point where things start to happen. So it takes years years of experience and networking and putting stuff out there to get to that point.

Justin:

And, I'd say that's one of the reasons yeah. One of the reasons we were able able to find such good affiliates. Alright. So Will asks, what made you choose to have your company data open? And, what he's talking about is where we share all of our, revenue metrics right now on baremetrics.

Justin:

If you go to transistor.barometrics.com, It it's had some benefits for sure. 1, we've benefited from other people in the bootstrapping startup ecosystem sharing their, you know, their experience. There's so much information that's just private. And you have no idea how you're doing because you can't see anyone else's data. And so, you know, we were looking at those open metrics all the time, and we thought, okay.

Justin:

Well, maybe we should be a part of that. We also are, doing the indie hackers. That was the first one we did to kind of test out the, the waters was okay. Let's let's share some of our revenue data on indie hackers. They show total revenue instead of monthly recurring revenue.

Justin:

And so that that number's generally a little bit higher. I I think we will probably stop sharing once we get to $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Because I I think anything beyond that, is probably not as helpful and maybe detrimental competitively. Because right now our competitors for sure are checking out all this stuff, and we don't wanna give away too much information. So, Yeah.

Justin:

I think it's been good so far. I've I don't know if I would recommend it for everybody. It certainly also helped us get better advice from advisors, because they can just look at our open metrics. So, you know, other people, smart people in the ecosystem, because they're interested in our growth, They'll check our numbers, and they'll reach out by DM and say, hey. Wow.

Justin:

Here's what I'm seeing. Here's some things to think about. And so that's been really helpful too. And Mike Walker asks, have you figured out the intersection of podcasting and smart drinks? Not yet.

Justin:

Not yet. But ever since I've mentioned that I had quit drinking alcohol, and I thought that nonalcoholic beverages, like, really fancy, special nonalcoholic beverages was gonna be a trend. There's people are sending me tons of news stories and blog posts and press releases about new, products in that space. So we'll see we'll see if it makes it all the way up here to British Columbia. A lot of them are based in San Francisco.

Justin:

Alright. So hopefully that was helpful for everybody. A little q and a episode. I'd like to thank our Patreon supporters, Colin Gray. Thanks, Colin.

Justin:

Josh Smith, Ivan Kekovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pieder Pieder Piederfita. John is so much better at pronouncing that. Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Haines, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha at danbudda.com. Hey. You folks need to hit up Dan Buddha and tell him what kind of podcast he should be starting.

Justin:

Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Duvander, Dave Junta. Junta, It's not as fun when I have to say it first. Hey, Junta. Hope you're listening. Hope you're doing well.

Justin:

Kylefox@getrewardful.com, and, of course, our sponsors, ProfitWell and Redash. And we will see you next week. John will be back next week. If you are listening somewhere in the world and you just wanna say hello, tweet me right now. You made it all the way to the end of the episode.

Justin:

So thankful that you listened. Tell me where you're listening from and, yeah, what you're doing. Are you walking the dog? Are you doing the dishes at transistorfm? Or you can tweet me personally atmijustin.

Justin:

Talk to you later.