Build Your SaaS

"This is like unveiling Banksy."

Show Notes

Today, we are joined by a very special guest: Dave Giunta! 

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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
Guest
Dave Giunta
Web Developer, Ruby on Rails, Designer, Photographer, Filmmaker

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.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2020. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

Helen:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor.fm.

Jon:

And today, Justin, we have a special guest.

Helen:

What? Yeah. Who who do we have?

Jon:

Do. Dave Junta.

Helen:

Junta. Had a

Speaker 3:

feeling that was gonna happen. Yeah. Nice.

Helen:

Welcome, Dave. Thanks for having me. You are more popular than John and I combined on this show. That is

Speaker 3:

a horrible travesty. I'm sorry.

Helen:

The, and folks at home, I can actually see Dave right now. He is a real person. He is not a ghost or a spirit. Indeed. I mean, he has lots of spirit, but he is he's not even wearing a mask.

Helen:

Like, we get to see this is like unveiling, Banksy. Wow. It's like unveiling Banksy, Daft Punk.

Speaker 3:

Just keep going. That's great. No no pressure whatsoever. That's good.

Jon:

Isn't the masked singer a new show on TV?

Helen:

Yeah. Are you hearing about? Like, our version of the masked podcast. Did Def Punk get unmasked? Is that is that something I heard?

Jon:

I don't know. They showed up at the Grammys and won an award in mass, didn't they?

Helen:

Yeah. Yeah. But then someone told me that people knew who they were now, which kinda maybe

Jon:

I think people know who they are. There's some French guys with I mean, they have I mean, I think people know who they are. They just never show up in public.

Helen:

Okay. You so there's you think there's in France, people kind of know who they are?

Jon:

I think so. Yeah.

Helen:

Okay. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Hey.

Helen:

If you're French and listening right now, let me know if you know who those guys are. So we why do we have Dave on the show, John? Besides the fact that Well this is, like, I'll we could end right here, and this would already be our most popular episode. Done.

Jon:

Yeah. I thought I thought it would be really I thought it would be interesting to have Dave on because well, a number of reasons. So Dave's been working with Home Chef for a number of years, which is a food delivery service. I don't know if you're only in only in the US. Right, Dave?

Jon:

They're only in the lower 48. Yes. Okay.

Speaker 3:

Stop. What's the lower lower 48? Alaska or Hawaii.

Helen:

Oh, okay.

Speaker 3:

So we basically only The lower forty eight. We deliver to anywhere that FedEx will deliver within 2, 2 days shipping from our 3

Helen:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Production facilities across the country.

Helen:

Interesting. Okay.

Jon:

So, yeah, you've been there since day 1. Right?

Helen:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And you're not necessarily software as a service, but you are a subscription service, more like food as a service or food delivery as a service.

Speaker 3:

F dash.

Jon:

So I think I think it yeah. I think it would be I think it would be interesting to kinda hear what it's been like to work from, you know, day 1 in a super small company to where it's at now. And also, obviously, given the current situation, like, what you're noticing with food delivery and food supply chain with everything going on with with COVID 19 and, stuff like that. I think that would be pretty interesting.

Speaker 3:

So I I actually met the founder. I for a while there, I was, I was a mentor at one of the early coding boot camp things, like, where people go to, like, learn how to code and they it's like you know, I think the one that I was working with was 3 months. It was called the starter league. And, the way there the cool thing about that program was that they assigned a one to one relationship between every student to us to a mentor. So

Helen:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Every time there would be a new a new cohort, I would get, assigned, like, here's the, you know, 1 to 3 people that I'm gonna be mentoring for that quarter. And, so the founder guy, went to that boot camp and got assigned me as his mentor. So I basically

Helen:

Okay. Who?

Speaker 3:

I watched, so his name is Pat Patel. He, he was in finance, I wanna say. Something like something investment. And I actually as I recall, it was something about, like, working with, I don't it may have been, like, series b or c or something like that. Startups though, prepping them to go raise another round of funding.

Speaker 3:

So like watching them like prepare their business, design their their pitch for funding, and so I think he's got he's got a very like sort of investor y finance kind of mind, and I think he watched so many startups go through the or, like, expose their books to him so that he could, like, do their prep work and go, like, oh my god. What are these people doing? Just, you know, and I should also say, like, he was he's a Midwestern guy. He grew up in, honestly, Indiana or Michigan, and, but he was working out in California. So I think he was seeing a lot of, like, tech startups, tech companies that were, like, getting into their 2nd or third raise.

Speaker 3:

And I think, you know, he he came from from, I think, management consulting. And so I think he had, like, a pretty good picture of, like, what is a good what's a healthy business supposed to look like, and what does it usually look like, and how are they getting money? Interesting. So I think that

Helen:

was his summary. Were you mentoring him were you mentoring him, like is this, like, Ruby on Rails mentoring? Or okay. So so this is, I heard because I think Jason Fried was talking about this. This is, starter school in Chicago.

Helen:

And it was like, you could go and learn Ruby on Rails. And you're one of the mentors there, and this fellow shows up ostensibly to learn Ruby on Rails.

Speaker 3:

Correct. So the that program actually had 3 things. They taught, they taught, design, they taught front end development, and back end development, and you could sort of like pick your track. Okay. This dude did all 3 of them at once.

Speaker 3:

Wow. Okay. But he was basically, like, jacked in full time, and I was his mentor assigned for the for the back end development on the Ruby on Rails one. But we just got to be really good friends. And so, like, shortly after he graduated the class, he, like, he was trying to think about what he would go do next, and, I I actually went and looked up some old emails.

Speaker 3:

He was looking at, like, buying a food production company out the suburbs and, decided, you know what? Like, I think this would be better if I just built it myself. There's, like, not enough there to warrant continuing on that path, so, I think I'm gonna buy it my I think I'm gonna build it myself, and I was like shit rock up, go do it, that's amazing.

Helen:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So I was sort of a I was a presence in the sense that I was around. I watched him build it. He reached out to me several times like asking for advice. There's several bad decisions that I, suggested to him that are still in the code base and have tormented the dev team that I run, you know, for

Helen:

This that is ultimate, mentor accountability right

Jon:

now.

Speaker 3:

Totally. Yeah. But I that's just that's just software development. Right? Like, you know, every time you make a a development decision, you're you're basically screwing yourself at some point later down the road.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I can definitely feel that.

Helen:

Just to just to pause right there. So this is this this guy is a finance guy. What was his name

Speaker 3:

again? Vitalik.

Helen:

Pat. Okay. So Pat's a finance guy. Why the heck did he decide to go into food production?

Speaker 3:

It's an interesting it's an interesting question. I I honestly don't know if I could give you, like, the full story. My understanding is that he grew up either in in fairly rural, like I said, Indiana or Michigan. I think his grandfather had a, a farm. So he was sort of sort of, like, very close to food production in a in a very specific kind of way, but the truth is he watched, companies like Blue Apron, and HelloFresh.

Speaker 3:

Like, both of those companies had existed or, like, they were had started and been around right around this time. And I think he was looking at them going, like, oh, maybe maybe I could do something like that. And then, like I said, he found this other this other food production facility or company out in the suburbs, and he was like, oh, maybe I can turn that business into, you know, I can grow that business into being a competitor to Hell Fresh or Blue Apron or something like that. Yeah. So it's interesting too being pretty midwestern.

Speaker 3:

We have definitely taken on that, that mentality for a long time. I think Home Chef was one of the first meal kit companies to get to profitability. We've taken, you know, by most accounts the least amount of of investment, like, outside investment. And then last year, we were sold to, or purchased, I guess, by acquired, I guess, maybe is the right terminology, to Kroger, which is a large grocery store company in the United States. And so that was, wow, maybe, like, 18 months to 2 years.

Speaker 3:

Going coming close to 2 years now, since we've been Says May 23rd. Yes. There you go.

Helen:

2018. There you go. 200 mil is what it says here. Do you do you wanna update the Crunchbase profile right now on air?

Speaker 3:

I think that's above that's, like, a couple levels above my pay grade on that one. So I'll go ahead and leave leave that one alone.

Jon:

So when when was it when was it started originally?

Speaker 3:

I think Pat started in, like, 2014.

Jon:

And from my understanding, not many of those companies are profitable. Right? I mean, it it doesn't like the other ones? I

Speaker 3:

Blue Apron's been having a hard time for sure. I think HelloFresh has done pretty good for the last, year or so, last couple of quarters. They've been doing well. But, yeah, you know, the meal kit business has been an interesting one in that. I I maybe it's like any any sort of, sector where, like, you know, there there's an interesting novel idea at first.

Speaker 3:

You get a bunch of people to come in and try and, like, figure it out and then they, the competitors explode and then they contract. Right? And so we definitely went through that same kind of cycle. Interestingly, like I said, being fairly midwestern, we, have never really we've always been like this the third ish, meal kit service in the country and and sort of like proudly 3rd. That that third position, I think, allowed us to be smarter with our money, a little bit more responsible with what we were doing, allows us allowed us to grow at a little bit more of a sustainable pace.

Speaker 3:

What the, like, city of big shoulders, like, Chicago sort of, like, way might be the, like, you know, put your head down, kind of grind it out a little bit, and, focus on the work and not on the flesh.

Helen:

Yeah. That's interesting. That in some ways, that's kind of what where transistor is.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Helen:

Yeah. And there is something do do you know who Rodney Mullen is?

Speaker 3:

That is he I That He's the CEO of Kroger. Right?

Helen:

No. No. Rodney Mullen, the skateboarder.

Speaker 3:

Skateboarder. No. That's funny. I the CEO of Kroger's name is Rodney something, and I thought it and then

Helen:

I think it actually

Speaker 3:

is with an m. Weird. Can cut that part out.

Helen:

Right. Right. Yeah. Nope. Nope.

Helen:

Chris, keep that part in. Rodney has this great saying, which is, you know, he was climbing the skateboard ranks in the eighties, and he got to number 1. And then he said, you know, you only get to number 1 once. You only kind of win once, and after that you're just playing defense. So he got to number 1, and then all he worried about was playing defense.

Helen:

And for him, it sucked the life out of skateboarding. He didn't enjoy it anymore. And you kind of see this in any any company that's kind of number 1, and in our field, it's Libsyn. And they're just have to be so much more conservative because they don't wanna do anything too crazy and lose their base. They don't wanna rock the boat too much, but they're constantly fending off their competitors.

Helen:

Right? And it's kind of like, yeah, if you're number 1, you've got a target on you. But if you're number 2 or 3 or 4, and it's a fairly good industry, You can kind of sit there and, you know, just kinda work away. You don't have to spend a lot of money defending your position.

Speaker 3:

It's interesting because the way you just described it sounded a little like, like taking it easy. I might say that there that it's less about taking it easy and more like having an opportunity to do better work because you aren't putting a bunch of pressure on you. Not and not just better, but, like, more fulfilling maybe. Yeah. The ability to really enjoy enjoy the work.

Speaker 3:

You know?

Helen:

Yeah. And so, obviously, you've been with Home Chef for a while. How long have you been there now?

Speaker 3:

So like I said, I was there right at the very beginning. I watched him I watched Pat build the first thing, and then but I was contracting, separately, and so I missed maybe, like, the first year or so, year and a half of Pat building the company. I was just sort of like an outside, occasional interloper. But then I joined in, 20 16.

Helen:

See, this is like this and how many people work there now?

Speaker 3:

So the company so we have, like, sort of two answers to that. Right? We have the office staff, like, the people who are, like, the the corporate people, of which one of I am one of, and that were, a few hundred. And then we have our

Helen:

our

Speaker 3:

production facility, like, the people who work in the plants and pack all that stuff, and of that, we have a couple thousand.

Helen:

Okay yeah wow all right and maybe for and when you joined it was how big?

Speaker 3:

You know I actually don't know what the production facility size was when I was there, but the office staff we were like less than 30. 30, 35 maybe somewhere there. Okay.

Helen:

So it's at least tripled since you've been

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Staff. Absolutely. Actually, the dev team alone, when I joined, I was the the we had a CTO, that Pat had hired shortly before I started.

Speaker 3:

It came it came on full time, and then we had they had a, another boot camp grad who was, like, another guy who went to the same boot camp. Actually, I referred him to Pat. So, like, the dev team was really small. I was, like, number 3 on a contract basis for a while, and then we we sort of, like, gradually built up we sort of quickly got to 6 and then and then took a a very gradual grow growth. And right now, we're about 35, including managers.

Helen:

Okay. Wow. Alright. Have you ever worked for a company that big, John?

Jon:

No. Never.

Helen:

Yeah. Me neither. So Never. That I mean, that's one question I have is, like, do you like it? Have you liked it?

Helen:

Can you talk about that?

Speaker 3:

It's an interesting yeah. I don't know. Like, the the size alone kinda scares me. I had one other, like, super large company experience. I worked at Discover Card for, I think, 3 years or so.

Speaker 3:

And so working at a credit card company, a Fortune 500, super corporate, this is definitely different than that and we're not really at that scale either. So from in some ways, we still feel scrappy relative to that. Right? Mhmm. And in fact, like, some of the things that I I know the exec team, it's I think we've only lost one exec post the, post the acquisition.

Speaker 3:

So, like, it's it's a lot of the original people who've been around for, like, the longest time, that are still involved. So, like, everybody at the in the top portion of the company remembers this time when we were super small and, like, how that felt, the way the company operated, the kinds of choices that we would make, like, trying to move quickly and be scrappy. And, and so we a lot of that same discussion happens a lot right now. We're constantly trying

Helen:

to even though we've

Speaker 3:

gotten really big and our processes are complicated and, and there's a lot of impediment to moving fast that we've, like, just that are just sort of ossified around us. You know?

Helen:

I mean, one of the reasons I ask is because one of the topics I've been exploring lately on the show is like, this is called build your sass. And clearly, that's just a means of getting the life that you want. And I think because there are so many bad companies and bad bosses and just not great setups for folks, A lot of people are looking to start their own software company, build their own thing. And but, increasingly, I'm just like, I I mean, I've kind of always known this, but not everybody is gonna be able to build a profitable company. And, also, depending on what you want, what outcome you want, like, if you just wanna have meaningful work and a decent salary and good work life balance, sometimes the best thing for people to do might be to just get a job or negotiate a raise or, do consulting work, but just for better clients.

Helen:

And I I talked a little bit about this with Marie Poulin. And so, yeah, I think getting getting other people's perspectives on the show is good because even though we're kind of focused on building our own thing, I think sometimes people need to think again about the outcome they want and then work backwards and go, okay. What is actually the the the most efficient or the best or the most likely way for me to get there? And, you know, I think there's gonna be some folks that are just always like, I need to build my own thing. But other people, like, the the best life for them is to just find a great place to work or what have you.

Helen:

You know?

Speaker 3:

I think we I think people also discount things too quickly. Like, they make some assumptions about, like, oh, a big company or a company of x y z size is not gonna be able to be to fulfill the life that I think it can. But the truth is, like, companies are just people, and people are malleable, until we build a whole bunch of systems and and rely on them to, like, fox us in. But, you know, a good manager can make a shitty job feel fantastic. You know?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Yeah. That's very true.

Helen:

Yeah. And I I guess I mean, I haven't worked for a company that big, but, you know, I've I've, worked for agencies. Right? And that's an experience. And I've worked for startups, and that's an experience.

Helen:

My experience overall has not been, like, incredible. Like, there's been a few maybe standouts that were that were pretty good. But my experience as an employee was never like, you know, I just this is the best. My friend, Jathon, in in Kamloops has often told me, like, well, maybe you just had bad bosses. Like, that's that's just all there is to it.

Helen:

And so I'm I'm, you know, I'm willing to concede that. But overall, it just seems that there's a lot like, corporate America could do a lot more. They have a lot more work to do there, you know, to actually making jobs that are fulfilling, to making treating people like humans, to, giving them some autonomy. And maybe some of this is personality based too. I just, like, I just did not like asking somebody if I could go on vacation.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Helen:

It just bugs me. Or, like, you know, having to say in Slack, like, hey. I'm going like, I don't wanna tell people where I'm going. You know? Like, just I don't that I I didn't like that idea that that my boss somehow became my, I guess, my boss.

Helen:

Right.

Speaker 3:

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Helen:

So, I mean, maybe this is person there's two sides to this coin. There's the personality of the employee, and then there's also the the culture of the the company. Right? But you would say that your experience has been pretty good. Like, do you get do you have, like, do you do a lot of greenfield development?

Helen:

Do you you get to do you get to do some some of that stuff?

Speaker 3:

Let's be clear. It's more of a liability for me to be writing code these days than, so, like, I've I'm I'm fully pulled out into management at this point. Gotcha. For the team, we we have a pretty good mix, I would say, of some new stuff that we build. It's it's interesting being in the tech team at a company that is ostensibly a manufacturing company.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. There's a bunch of dynamics that that are, honestly, really great, like, especially relative to building a product where the product is the tech. Like, there's so much more pressure and, and risk that comes with every single line of code that you write. Whereas while we, of course, we have a customer facing website and a mobile app and, like, all of that stuff, the a very large chunk of what we build is for our internal team. It's, you know, products for our culinary team, products for our production associates, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3:

The that internal stuff is, like it's high risk in the sense that a lot of the business rides on it. Mhmm. But it's like you can physically see and talk to your stakeholders. You can watch what happens when you push something out. If there's, if there's a failure, it's like yeah.

Speaker 3:

I guess I guess there's more stuff that we've built lately that was like it's a critical thing that needs to get that needs to be up, and we need to have processes in place in order to make sure that they are and they stay up. But, you know, the stress level of operating that type of technology is way lower in my experience.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Helen:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, partly because any feedback you get is hopefully gonna come through internal channels

Speaker 3:

That's right.

Helen:

As opposed to someone, blasting you on, Twitter or something. That's right.

Jon:

That was my experience with with Black Box too when I worked there. It was you know, we were building software, but really it was a

Helen:

It was infrastructure for It

Jon:

was yeah. It was, right. So, yeah, it Black Box was, you know, a fulfillment company with software behind the scenes, but really most of the stuff we built, right, was internal for our team to manage all these shipments and warehouses, and some of the software was for the warehouses.

Helen:

Actually, while we're while we're on this top while I've got 2 fulfillment people on the on the line here, can we diverge for just a second? Because we're in the middle of this coronavirus, pandemic. And one of the things that I've been honestly spending too much time on away from Transistor is thinking about local retailers, local restaurants, all this stuff, and what kind of world we're going to live in after this. There's a couple the world could go back to the way it was before. That seems unlikely.

Helen:

And so, you know, as I'm thinking through, okay, what does the what does Main Street look like after this is done? And and how and how do we live in a future where, Jeff Bezos just doesn't own everything? What do you guys think about are there opportunities? Like one idea I had was maybe retailers, local retailers need to be banding together and doing their own warehousing and delivery. What you know, there's there's talk now about maybe more cloud kitchens.

Helen:

Maybe cloud kitchens is going to be the note the new restaurant that people start. Do you 2 have either any thoughts around that stuff about how, like, post COVID, maybe there's a chance for independent businesses to come back and leveraging some of this technology that's, you know, that you guys have worked with in the past? Or is it too hard? Is it too big? Does it have to be centralized?

Helen:

You guys both Just a just a

Speaker 3:

a hard a hard shot. Yeah. The gears are

Jon:

the gears are moving.

Speaker 3:

Here's my my my initial take at that is maybe. The warehousing, moving physical product is a capital expensive activity. It's the sort of thing that, like, you you need investment in order to do. Like, you maybe like, so the idea of, like, getting a bunch of smaller folks to come together and maybe they do they, like, pool their warehousing and do it together is an interesting idea, but it also is it's like you have to spread that risk of the massive capital expense expenditure that you're gonna put out to, like, rent that kind of space, and the employee size is, like, a very different kind of employee than you're looking for to go work in a plant in like a fulfillment center than the kind of thing that you're looking for when you're like gonna, you know, you're hiring somebody to work, you know, the front of desk or whatever in your in your, coffee shop or something like that.

Helen:

Yeah. I I just wonder See and this is the this is where my I'm naive is, like, the model in a lot of cases has been like, you you you folks have a centralized production facility?

Speaker 3:

We have 3 of

Helen:

them across the country. And so the the question I'm asking, which could be, again, completely naive, is, like, retailers all have stock. And there is a potential world where if I go to order a screwdriver at Bill's hardware store and he doesn't have it, Shopify automatically recommends Tom's hardware store, which is just right next door. Bill gets a little affiliate commission for it. I buy it from Tom, and it gets shipped out.

Helen:

And so the the the storage is distributed, as opposed to centralized. And, certainly, you don't get some economies of scale there. But I guess that the question in my head is because I've run retail shops before. I run a couple of snowboard shops in my early twenties. And, you know, we would have, I don't know, 200 pairs of shoes.

Helen:

We would have, you know, 20 snowboards. We'd have probably a 100 skateboard decks. But all of that inventory is just siloed. There's no way for the there's no network effect. And so I'm wondering, do retailers already have enough stock that if it was networked together and if the technology was there, like, if they were all like, if Black Box was a distributed platform instead of a centralized platform for a warehouse or whatever, is there a world where they could kinda leverage that network effect and compete?

Helen:

Because now all of a sudden, they have way more inventory.

Jon:

Maybe. I mean, I think Black Box was attempting to do that. We never really got to it.

Helen:

You think I could get a job at Black box now?

Jon:

I don't know what they're hiding. Yeah. I don't know. It's tough. I mean, it there's so many I I don't know.

Jon:

So many questions come to mind when I think about that is, like, if you order from Bob's hardware, but it's only available at Tom's hardware, does Tom have the the staff on hand to actually pack it and ship it? And what if there's a huge influx of orders? Then everything's just gonna be super delayed if it's not centralized at one place that is just for shipping. So it seems like there needs to be a huge change of people's consumption habits in the US. I think people people have gotten very used to the ease of ordering on Amazon and having everything come in a day or 2.

Jon:

Yeah. I think those those expectations have had

Speaker 3:

to be

Jon:

scaled back.

Speaker 3:

Hasn't isn't this basically Amazon? Like, Amazon has that. Right? Any anybody can make a store and sell on Amazon, exactly the same kind of, like, effect that you're describing where, you know, some it's out from one seller, but it's available from another one. The the the thing to build is the competitor to Amazon.

Speaker 3:

Right? Like, the marketplace that aggregates all these people together, it just doesn't feel so bad.

Helen:

Well and there's other thoughts too, which is and it would be interesting to know how, how Home Chef did this, because you must have had to have a local test first. But traditionally, with tech platforms, we always think centralized. Right? It's Amazon Web Services and everyone uses that. It's Amazon's, logistics and distribution and warehousing, and everybody uses that.

Helen:

It's Uber, and that's it. Like, it's it's winner take all. And there is maybe another paradigm, which is on the local level. Can small independent shops actually band together and create something that's viable that is actually works. Right?

Helen:

So let's just say in my dream world and Chicago is great for this because Chicago is one of these places. Portland is one of these places. There's some of these places where there's really independent, kinda scrappy, bootstrapper, spirit. Right? You've got all these local shops, and they they band together and they form a delivery co op that is has, you know, electric vehicles and whatever.

Helen:

And they figure out how to staff it. They figure out how to, you know, make all this work. The technology piece is the crucial part. Like, if you could make the technology if you could compete on platform the same way that Amazon, like, with Amazon, you could almost do it. Because then an order comes in, people get in the habit of supporting local.

Helen:

Right? Maybe there's a local portal. Maybe you just go to any retailer. And if they don't have it, they recommend it from someone else. And then there's a guy on a a ebike that's at your house in 15 minutes.

Speaker 3:

Wow.

Helen:

And so now you're so now you're faster than Amazon. Now, of course, I this is this is just like this is the kind of these are how all of John and I product How do you how do you

Jon:

put the 75 inch TV on an ebike?

Helen:

I mean I sue I there might be some Priuses in there too. Who knows?

Speaker 3:

My question is how are you gonna keep the big people from coming on there onto that into that platform? How are you gonna keep so that let's even just take the 70 inch TV example. Right? How do you keep how do you keep Best Buy? Like, the moment you create a market a marketplace like this is, like you said, winner take all, I think it's winner starves all.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. Like, as soon as that big fish notices another channel, another opportunity to, like, jump in and and this is a way to to capture some market share. Oh, and there's a bunch of local, like, I think that would be that might be your larger challenge. Right?

Helen:

So what's the difference is it is the difference margins? Because in the podcast industry, we again, John and I almost have an advantage over all of our competitors, mostly because we're just 2 people. And and so we can we're we're treated by customers on par with Lipson and Simplecast and whoever else is big. Right? You know, I was in New York.

Helen:

Spotify invited me to their head headquarters just the same as everybody else. Right? And, they're like, so it's just the 2 of you. Hey? It's like, yeah.

Helen:

It's just the 2 of us. And is it is is there some markets like, is podcasting just one of those niche markets where the big people don't wanna play and so we're protected? Like, email marketing was kind of like this. Right? Like, Google never wanted to never wanted to compete with Mailchimp.

Helen:

And so Mailchimp kind of had this you know, they could just kind of operate. But are there some markets?

Jon:

Seems like it's a lot easier for markets like that, like podcasting and emails, newsletters because there's no interaction with the physical world. Like, that that's where things get tough. And then, like Dave said, you need a lot of capital. Like, I don't you probably could not have done Home Chef without investment money.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I think it'd be really hard.

Jon:

Right? I mean, I think it'd be almost impossible.

Helen:

And it it's because of like, where do you invest the money? Is it all in, production and warehousing and logistics?

Speaker 3:

I mean, yeah, the answer there is for sure, but I think it's more like you invest in, the capability of doing something more efficiently. So, like, one of the so there was there's obviously been several competitors that have gone under, relative to us. Mhmm. One of them, which I'm forgetting exactly which one it was, but they had this idea that they were like, alright. Well, you know, we just took a $100,000,000 in funding.

Speaker 3:

So we're gonna go build, you know, 15 production facilities across the country, and that'll allow us to do same day delivery, from our website. And they launched that in like and they lost all 15 of them in the span of a very short period of time. I feel like that is a trap and one of the reasons why they went out of business is because they, they didn't like this thing that you invest in at the scale that you're that you are in the hopes of being at a larger scale and where that investment will pay off is, you know, if that's if that gap is too large then that could be a company killing, event, right? So, Home Chef opened we had one facility in Chicago and we grew out of that facility. We opened another, a second facility in California, and, and then within a few months after that we grew into our 3rd facility in Atlanta and it was interesting to watch how those 3 facilities that we grew over a relatively longer period of time, what that experience was like because we had a very efficient plant in Chicago.

Speaker 3:

We, like, worked out a whole bunch of processes, and by the way, like, I'm not I'm not talking about, like, we invested a bunch of tech. I'm talking about, like, the people on the ground in those facilities worked out how to ship things, how to pack things more efficiently, and they were doing it with like paper and tape and, you know, the for the longest time, we were, like, keeping track of counts on a clipboard outside of the dock. You know what I mean? The kinds of super scrappy things that you do when you are that small, growing slowly or, like, being being cognizant of how you are investing that money, how much money you're taking, what you're doing with that money, and having the, the capability to grow in a very slow and more protracted way means that, when we opened our second facility, we brought some of our best people from Chicago down to that second facility and they were able to grow and do all of that same kind of process without much encumbrance. And then we were able to take lessons back from that.

Speaker 3:

My point in in all of that is like those are the things that you spend your money on, you spend your money on being able to to do things more efficiently, being able to hire a little bit larger staff, being able to, you know, I I guess another thing that we invest in is, like, capital equipment, like, equipment that can do a thing that we can do by hand, but it does it automated, you know, that kind of stuff. And even there, we've been very conservative about how we've how we've placed our bets there. It's been one of the reasons why the company has been able to sustain itself on very on relatively much less investment.

Helen:

I wanna make sure we get a chance to talk about, like, how COVID 19. COVID 19's affected, like, your world and your your business and everything. So, yeah, what's that been like? Has there been a noticeable change?

Speaker 3:

So you were we were talking earlier about, like, finding fulfillment in your job. And, I think that that is kind of how I would characterize the like, working in a company our size. It's crazy how, like, we didn't do anything in to to to change the world. Right? Like, our our world changed around us, and all of a sudden, we were considered an essential service in a, in a pandemic.

Speaker 3:

Now all of a sudden our efforts go from how do we acquire, a bunch of new customers to how can we feed the most people. It's a completely different it's like a it's like a, mission of the company kind of change, you know? And what's crazy is, like, we didn't it's not like we needed the pandemic to make that kind of shift. Right? We could have made that type of shift.

Speaker 3:

We could have said, like, we're gonna be a nonprofit company who is focused on feeding the most people in the world, we'd be a very different type of company. Yeah. It's been interesting as a it's been interesting working for a company where, like, we had one set of targets, one set of goals for the company, and have the world change them for us. And, you know, it's interesting. Like, there's been a bunch of things just being intact.

Speaker 3:

Right? So just just, like, what some maybe nuts and bolts of what happened, massive influx of orders, way more than we were expecting. And you saw this, like, across all of the, all of the meal kit companies. Within the span of, like

Helen:

In every market? Like did you see it like a wave coming in? Like Seattle first and then other places or?

Speaker 3:

Well, we saw I mean, we saw most of it happen within the span of, like, 1 week. Like Wow. The company made a decision that we're going to close our office and everybody's going to work from home on a Thursday. We started working home on a Friday and then like that's pretty much when everybody in the, you know, in the country started closing stuff down. Over that weekend, the CEO of Kroger called the CEO of Home Chef and was like what can you guys do to expand the amount of, product that you're building and shipping to our retail stores?

Speaker 3:

Because, like, we can't we can't keep our facility our our our grocery store shelves filled. So whatever you can do. They asked us to basically double the amount of retail output that we were doing previously.

Jon:

So by that by that, you mean sending the kits to Kroger owned stores, not in not individual household. Right?

Speaker 3:

Correct. Correct.

Jon:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

So this is, like, this was the first weekend of, like, some of the more major shutdowns happening. Right? And so, like, people were making massive runs to the grocery stores, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. The next thing that happened after that was the massive wave of e commerce online orders, for delivery. Right?

Jon:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

We grew in that 1st week by 15%, which a company our size, we haven't grown by double digit numbers in or percentage points in probably 3 years. It's been a long time since we've seen that sort of, like, week over week growth. And so it got actually to the point where, we had to stop taking orders. And so as you can imagine, like, the tech team doesn't have a road map for, like, how do you stop people from ordering? We only have road maps for how do you make more people order, you know.

Speaker 3:

So we had to very quickly we had to very quickly stand

Helen:

up. That. Don't you just delete the button element? Just just you you just, to

Jon:

Just disable the form.

Helen:

Isn't it called just, 404?

Speaker 3:

That is not a very good user experience, Justin.

Helen:

You only give every, like, 5th person a 404. That's right.

Speaker 3:

So we had to be kind of creative. We had to come up with we had to come up with mechanisms for, still taking people's orders, but, you know, the thing that we ended up doing is pushing their first delivery out a week. So we basically moved their volume from the from the next week to the following week, and and I wanna just say, like, part of the reason we had to do that is because as a business like we are, that inventory problem that you were talking about earlier, like, we have that same problem. Right? We only procured enough, you know, ingredients or whatever for, the size of week that we were planning to have, and those orders are the size that you know, they take weeks to get more product in.

Speaker 3:

So we were scrambling to find additional product to a deal you know, to handle the kind of additional growth that we were getting. So we needed to do so those kinds of things. We basically maxed out, our production. One other thing is, you know, again, like it's you talk about the big companies and how they are, they're evil, but they they have they have some massive power that, again, when the world shifts their focus to something more more meaningful or more useful than just profit alone. It's the that level of resources is kind of amazing to see it put into action.

Speaker 3:

So Kroger gave us, I think I'm allowed to say this. So I I we can maybe check and make sure. Chris, Kroger Marker here. That's right. Kroger basically gave us, access to 2 of their facilities because when they when they called our CEO and said hey we need you to double your output, they also said we're going to give you these 2 facilities, 1 in Indiana, 1 in Wisconsin.

Speaker 3:

Can you stand them up? And that meant like okay we have to figure out we have to train them and how to work, we have to get them able to ship product, and this was all going to retail stuff so they had all the shipping and logistics and stuff worked out there, I guess, already. But so like, that would not have been possible. Most of the other company, the meal kit companies, don't have access to, a parent company that's of that size that can see this problem and say okay, here is here is just a massive amount of resources that you would not be not normally be able to get access to.

Helen:

Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 3:

On the flip side, another thing that we're doing here in Chicago, yet another thing, I guess I'm not sure if I can talk about, making deals with other other companies who are who are in the food business, but also, kind of shut down. So for instance, there are companies that make food for, like airlines, like the the meals that you eat on the on the airplanes. Yeah. Those guys, they've got facilities where they produce all of that food. They've got food handling experience.

Speaker 3:

They're like certified by the by the states in order to do all that stuff. We're making deals to to put those people into operation to be able to start producing to doing some some of the functions. We do a whole like, portioning piece where we take raw ingredients of, at a bulk size and turn it into the size that you need for a specific recipe. All of that stuff we can outsource to, local companies. All of that's like a lot of why we do that too is not just because that's a good thing to do for those companies.

Speaker 3:

It's also good for us because we need to be doing the things that you do in order to keep people away from each other in our facilities. We need to limit the number of people that come into our facilities and work just to stay safe so, it's an interesting time and again like I said like the the way that the that the that a situation like this just shifts your focus a little bit. Yeah. You know?

Helen:

Yeah. I mean, it well, it's like a totally different like you said, you went from how can we acquire more customers to how can we feed more people. That feels even more than a little subtle actually. That's quite a Yeah.

Jon:

That's a pretty that's a pretty big shift.

Helen:

Big shift. Yeah.

Jon:

So did it did did all of this like, I'm I'm thinking here about, like supply chain and where you're getting your your ingredients from. Did it and how you know, you're you're planning like a week ahead or whatever it is?

Speaker 3:

A quarter.

Jon:

A a quarter. Okay. So did this did this immediately end up changing, like, your menu, like, the available options you have to pay depending on, like, what ingredients are gonna be, I don't know, out of stock sooner? Or

Speaker 3:

So because our menu turns over every week, our we have basically a comp an almost complete turnover of our warehouse every week of what we have in our stock. Right? So from that perspective, we have like, we forecast out 5 weeks of, like, here's how many orders we think we're gonna get in 5 weeks. We place preliminary orders with our suppliers, and then, like, that order gets, you know, closer and closer to real as we get closer and closer to the week that we're gonna ship. So supply wise, I think we were, in less of a concern, there.

Speaker 3:

I think the bigger concern for us was the complexity of our operations. So we ended up pulling a bunch of menu options off of our, a bunch of meals off of our menus for a couple of weeks. That was so that we could serve, so that we could fulfill more orders to more customers. So, like, if you imagine a, like, what do you call it? Like a conveyor line or whatever, and you've got a bunch of spots for meals, the longer that conveyor line is, the more people you need to staff that, the more complex it is, the longer of our facility by reducing the size of that line, reducing the number of possible combinations of meals that a customer could possibly order.

Speaker 3:

And again that decision was made, under the guise of that goal, that shift. How can we how can we feed more people? We could limit the the number of people that we can serve, or we can limit the amount of choice that customers have in serving one.

Helen:

This is gonna sound like a kind of I don't don't know how to say this, but, like, when you say feed more people, is there is the is the fundamental problem right now that people are being unfed? Like, is can you put that in context for me? Like, what is that how does what's the context around that?

Speaker 3:

So what are the reasons why people leave their house right now? Like, you get put under a strict stay at home order, the only reasons you leave your house are to go get food. Yeah. So and we know that those are the riskiest activities that those people are going to be doing every day. So I think that's the reason why we've seen so much of an influx in our service.

Speaker 3:

It's not just convenience, it's also, this is one less trip to the grocery store I have to make for a lot smaller number. Maybe I can take the grocery store run that I did for 2 weeks and make that last for 3. Like, you know, it's it's that kind of thinking that I think the whole country is in right now. And so that's that's sort of like the the way that I would characterize that.

Helen:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I yeah. I I touched a a debit pad at Safeway 4 weeks ago, and I still can't I'm still worried about it.

Helen:

Yeah. How are you

Speaker 3:

guys doing on the anxiety level? Let me just ask that because the 1st week of, of all this, I mean, I think everybody was kind of, freaked out, but

Jon:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

I mean, like, I definitely went through a series of days there where I was totally convinced that I had it. Like, every

Jon:

Yeah. I

Speaker 3:

was like, man, I feel like I can't breathe very well right now. What's going on?

Helen:

Yeah. Yep.

Jon:

Any any sort of headache

Speaker 3:

That's right.

Jon:

You're like, what is this? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

That's right.

Helen:

Yeah. Yeah. No. And I have allergies this time of year anyway. And so, like, already that that that pressure on your chest where you feel like you can't breathe, that's we you know, you I get that anyway.

Helen:

So, yeah, I I think I'm past that a little bit, mostly because now the the mania has passed. Like, now we're used to, like, these case numbers. And unfortunately, death counts just keep going up. But we're so at first, they were surprising, but like anything else, you get acclimatized to it. And so I think I I'm definitely, like, not on Twitter all the time, just like you know?

Helen:

And then I also like my initial thing is like, Okay, I got to crunch the data too. And I just become one of those tech bros that are opening up Excel and trying to figure out the solution or whatever. So, that's passed because it's like, okay, I'm not scientist or an epidemiologist or whatever.

Jon:

Definitely. It definitely helps to limit your exposure to news.

Helen:

Yeah.

Jon:

And or or limit it to, like, one source you trust and that's it. Because, yeah, I was just, like, reading stuff nonstop for the 1st week. I'm like, this is this is awful. This is the end of the world.

Helen:

The the less dense urban areas, our experience of this is so much different. I mean, we're we're under similar kinda stay at home orders. But, like, people say in New York City, all you hear is ambulance sirens all night. And, like, here, it's just not like I've heard a few people, you know, through the grapevine that have been hospitalized, but it's not as intense. You know?

Helen:

And partly because our vectors are, it seems, are just way there's just way less. Like, I we have no elevators here. So your chances of being in an elevator and somebody sneezing are just really low. Yeah. So that that part has been interesting too.

Helen:

Because at first, I definitely had the the anxiety. And then, in some ways, it's almost dangerous being out here because you just don't experience it. It hasn't hit yet, you know? And, until there's testing everywhere, then, you know, I think it's gonna be yeah. It's just gonna be kinda like, okay.

Helen:

Well, now, I just live in my house, and now I'm just waiting for the day when I can get tested, really. Like Pretty much. And even that has been weird. Like, do do you have kids, Dave? Do you have any little Juntas?

Helen:

The you know, now it's just like at first, it was almost un like, I could just couldn't stand it. And I was sad that I lost my office and sad that I you know? And now it's just like it feels like this is just our life now. Right? So

Speaker 3:

See, I think I think the trick is gonna be, are you able to change the exasperated nature that you said that into a more joyful one. Like, I've been thinking about this a bit lately about, like, what is the what is the right level of panic to continue to have as this goes on? Like, we've we've been home for more than 2 weeks now. We're very careful whenever we go out. Like, I can reasonably say there's not a chance I've got it, and I I am hyper vigilant about the very few opportunities that I can come in contact with somebody who might give it to me.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So now I have to find a way to like just be comfortable in the existence that we have, and the truth is my working experience has actually gotten significantly better in ways that I don't know that I might have, that I might have counted on. For instance, it's so much better when someone is remote to have everybody on the team be remote.

Helen:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Your experience in meetings is so much better. Your experience, like, the amount of communication that has increased as a result of us not being in the office has been exponential. Mhmm. It's it's unbelievable. You know, we can all hate on Slack and the always on sort of nature of it, but I think that I think that there's, like, a there's a positive way to turn this working environment this or there's a way to turn this working experience into a positive thing, but it takes people thinking about it in that way.

Speaker 3:

And I kinda wonder if, like, the longer we keep, you know, asking people, oh, how are you doing, man? Are you you know, everything okay? Like, the more we treat this situation and people with, like kid gloves around it, I wonder if we aren't prolonging that experience. Which isn't to say that I want to discount the the the craziness of the situation

Helen:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

But it's like I wanna get to a place where we are reacting responsibly. You know what I mean? Yeah. With the appropriate amount of of of, tension and concern.

Helen:

Yeah. Yeah. And there's certain things that this has pushed people into. Like, John and I have been having way more just FaceTime calls that are personal in nature. It's just like it is those, Hey, how are you doing?

Helen:

And there's part of that practice that I think is just healthy and that it would be good if that continued. And I I mean, I think the other thing it's made us think of a little bit is John and I are still wrestling a little bit with, like, what is our greater purpose in the world, and with the company. And we've experimented a little bit. We donate some of our profits to 1% for the planet. And, you know, we're excited to like, we're both excited about podcasting and getting people's voices out there and doing all of that.

Helen:

But they're they're, you know, having something like, for example, you have had this shift of we need to feed more people. And there's something big and motivating about that. And I think, if there's a stair step of finding personal motivation, it feels like John and I are looking for that next stair step, that next thing that's going to motivate us. And there's a few different forks in the road. There's a few ways we could go without right?

Helen:

Like, we could say we're gonna try to hire as many people as we can.

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, this whole thing hasn't affected us nearly as in a way that it has affected you, Dave. Like, it didn't it didn't change our business, you know, to a different sort of direction.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Jon:

We're still doing the same thing. I think there's maybe a little more interest in the whole private podcasting aspect where companies are kinda keeping their employees up to date because nobody's at the office, but we didn't really have to shift necessarily and be like, oh, wow, we have to change things. Mhmm. Drastically. So it's been, yeah, it's been interesting to sort of, like, you know, we didn't lose our jobs, we didn't have to let anyone go.

Jon:

We didn't the only thing that changes is we have to stay at

Helen:

home. Yeah. Well and

Speaker 3:

it but I can't tell if, like, you guys are bummed about that. Like, if you guys would have preferred for there to have been a larger shift so that your day to day reality and existence could be more in line with, like, the day to day existence of the rest of the world?

Jon:

I don't know. I I don't I don't think I was wishing for that.

Helen:

Yeah. Yeah. No. It's like the tension is more for me, like, I'm just so thankful right now. We don't know what's gonna happen.

Helen:

Like, again, there we haven't hit. There's other waves of this that have not hit yet. Like, the unemployment rate in United States and Canada is going to be that is we've never experienced something like that as a society. And so, we see the indicator, but the results are lagging. And so, I think all of us are kind of waiting like, when is that tsunami going to hit and how big is it going to be?

Helen:

And there's also this wall of consumer debt and business debt that's coming too. So, that'll even be behind that. Right? And, I think in some ways, I'm still bracing for that. But one of the things I really like about Transistor and the business we've built is that it's given us this margin.

Helen:

And I think part of at least my reaction to all this is like, how can I use the margin we have right now in productive ways for society? And, again, I think, so far, the only thing we found as a company that makes sense is we're going to contribute to these bigger causes like 1 Percent for the Planet. And we also have a bit of a megaphone because we've got this podcast and other things. And we wanna use that as well. But that's kind of like my next question for myself.

Helen:

And then I think John and I are wrestling with it too. It's like, okay. What is our next reaction to this? If the if a lot of the world is not okay, how do we do something about it? And in some ways, it's on one hand, it's almost made it harder because we were already feeling that pressure before.

Helen:

We're kind of if, you know, if we got down about something, it would be, you know, this feeling of, like, like things were already tough before societally. But, you know, maybe this will this whole event will be a catalyst for some of these things that we care about just personally. Like

Jon:

Mhmm.

Helen:

You know, maybe we be we we get some of that same spit and vinegar that David Hanna Murray Hanson has. Maybe not in the same way, but, you know, to to start using some of our influence and margin and, you know, whatever resources we have to, in some way, impact society in a better way. But we're still searching for what exactly that is.

Jon:

Yeah. At the moment, it it still, I think, feels a little weird to just go about your business as if everything's the same and sort of sit down and try to write some code and add a feature or redo a feature when it's just really, really difficult to focus on that. Mhmm. Because you're like, what does it really matter in the grand scheme of things?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Well but isn't isn't part of that just like a mental shift, though? Because when you think about when you think about pod I mean, people have been talking about how podcasts are are a good a good escape from reality already, and it's a thing that integrates into your life in a very, real and easy way. Maybe more especially when you have a commute, which, I understand most people don't have right now. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

But I wonder if there isn't like, if I just even connect a couple of things from this call, like, you, Justin, were talking about wanting to help small businesses to be able to recover.

Helen:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

The biggest thing that small businesses need to be able to recover is, is to create an audience that they can hold on to. The biggest thing that keeps people from that keeps people going to Amazon instead of, you know, their local, whatever down the street, to enable the kind of feature that you were talking about is, you know, people need to know to look for those, those people, that person down the street. When it's easier to find Amazon, when it's easier like, that that is the the insurmountable thing, and you guys are perfectly positioned to make a meaningful impact on that. Perfectly positioned to work with those, small businesses and help them create a voice, create and it's not just about like podcast quality or whatever, it's about what are they talking about in in this time. Why are they what are they talking about when their business is actually shut down?

Helen:

Yeah. No. That I mean, that's see, there's also this thing that's a good reminder because there's also this thing of, once you're in a business and you're running it like, John and I have forgotten about a lot of the dreams we had before we launched.

Speaker 3:

Oh, say more about that.

Helen:

Because they've they've faded. Well, just, you know, when we launched before we launched, a lot of it was based on how can we empower individual creators. And we did I mean, we were talking about you know, how can we give a voice to businesses and things like that. And we also talked about doing a lot more. When you're dreaming, it's like we thought, oh, maybe we'll produce some of our own shows.

Helen:

Like, we'll, like, you know, we'll we'll hire a producer, and we'll have our own, like, in Slack. The the channel for this podcast is called Our Shows. It's it's plural because we initially thought maybe we would have more than 1. Mhmm.

Jon:

But

Helen:

then you get in it. And then, you know, day to day, you're just like helping customers. And you also see kind of the way the tides kind of come in naturally. And you just end up kind of responding to those things. But, you know, that again, if if we if we were able to go out on our retreat, maybe that's what we'd be talking about is can we can we resurrect some of those dreams?

Helen:

Yeah. And how can we And maybe, again, the simplest thing is for us to just keep doing what we're doing. Like, every time I write another knowledge base article and I create another tutorial video, I'm enabling somebody to theoretically create some audio, put it out into the world, and connect in a meaningful way with an audience. Yeah. So but the it's it's it's it's tricky to figure to to figure that out when you're in stream.

Helen:

You know? Yeah. And may I don't know, John. Like, you've said in the past, like, like, you get excited about podcasting and the tech, but you're not, like, are would you say you're as excited about helping podcasters or, like, what how do you how do you quantify that?

Jon:

I'm excited about that part. I'm I'm not I'm not necessarily excited about recording more shows because that's just not something I'm ex I mean, no. Like, for for real, though. Like, I'm not as excited about that as well. Yeah.

Jon:

I'm not an I'm not a natural talker. I'm so, yeah, I'm not excited, but I'm I like helping people kind of get their voice out there.

Speaker 3:

I mean, there's a lot of tech to be built to enable the kind of vision that that Justin was talking about. Mhmm. Even, I think, was a couple episodes ago that you were talking about, like, how just feeling so frustrated at the fact that there are all these services and they they purport to integrate so well with each other, and in fact, it is such shit.

Jon:

Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 3:

All of the broken interconnectedness of that. Even if you guys took, put your put transistor to transistor on a code freeze and spend some time with an actual business cut like, customer, small business of whatever, and, figured out how to smooth out some of those pain points in as cheap and scrappy of a way

Helen:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

I think that would give you a lot of, feedback about what the landscape of these kinds of tools are and how they should how they could fit together in a better way, how they even if, like, there's scrappy ways that you could write write an article that explains how you did that for that that company. Pull that person from that company and do an interview with them on a podcast to talk about, like, all of those kinds of things that show people the way, that show people how to, shift their mindset for when this thing is over, and they are ready to come back.

Helen:

A slightly cynical take on that that I think Jon and I both have, And this is kinda like this is like the this is the the hidden question that all the platforms don't wanna talk about. Right now, platforms are doing really well. Shopify is doing great. Square is doing great. ConvertKit is doing great.

Helen:

Mailchimp is doing great. Gumroad. Anything that enables people to sell something online or build an audience is doing great. Cynically, we just know that it the vast majority of those folks will not be able to create a meaningful income from that stuff. Right?

Helen:

Like, the Patreon is having a huge influx of people join. And Uh-huh. I don't know what the recent stats are, but, you know, the last ones I saw was, like, something like, 90 99% of Patreon or 96% of Patreon don't even make minimum wage for, you know, what they do. And so, I mean, I have I have an optimistic take on this too. But that that's part of the cynical take is, yeah, we want to do that.

Helen:

You almost have to think And maybe it's the same for you. Like, you know, you're not going to be able to feed everybody, but as long as you can meaningfully feed some people, that's enough. And I think sometimes what gets debilitating is this idea of it's easy to think about everybody and go, Well, this isn't going to solve everybody's problem. So why should we even bother? You know?

Helen:

Like why even try if it's not gonna make a huge dent? But it will. See? See, Joe? We gotta have Joota on the program more often.

Speaker 3:

You're you're talking about you're you're taking on the the impact of the in between time, and the in between time is like the unknown. There's like governments are struggling to deal with how they are going to handle all of this situation. That's not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to have is to help some number of people. Right?

Speaker 3:

Everyone's responsibility is to help some number of people and to whatever capacity you are capable. So I think that it the way that again, I'm going off of, like, just this conversation. The people you were talking about wanting to help, the the future and vision that you were sort of laying out, that's not about what we do between now and when people are able to go outside their houses regularly again, it's It's about what happens after that. It's about how do you get those people, those businesses to thrive in that environment.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And and you gotta think about the time between now and whenever that happens as your development cycle. Like, you now have an opportunity to build something to help those people then.

Helen:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And the fact that you're in podcasting means that you you have an opportunity to show those people how to do a thing that they never thought they were good at before.

Helen:

Yeah. And, actually, when I when I frame all this stuff in terms of the next outbreak, the next time this happens, it is easier for me to be hopeful and optimistic because, this stuff takes time. It takes time to build an audience. It takes time to, make a side income. It takes time for, you know, a regular business that's never done anything like this to get good at it.

Helen:

But the story that I have in my head is that I started podcasting in 2012. And that has that starting it in 2012 and podcasting every single week month since then has meaningfully improved my life more than any other thing I've ever done. When you look at it in a long range, a long time zone, it goes, oh, wow. Over 8 years, this can really make a difference in somebody's life. In a week, it's not gonna pay your bills in a week.

Helen:

But the the long view makes me think, yes. And, podcasting isn't this thing that's just gonna, you know, grow like crazy every year and, you know, have like, we're still like a $1,000,000,000 in ad revenue last year. Like, it's nothing compared to other things out there, but it's meaningful for the people who are in it. And, Yeah. I think that is where I get encouraged thinking that, you know, in 8 years when, god forbid, the next bird flu hits or whatever, that people will have, you know, something we'll we'll be able to experience some of that benefit the way that John and I have.

Helen:

Yeah. That gets me fired up.

Speaker 3:

So my sister, owns a an education like, a dance education company.

Helen:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And I say it in in that kind of way because, like, she started in a dance studio, but she's expanded to basically teaching, like creative arts kind of education. Yeah. In and primarily in schools like the public's, the Chicago Public School System was, like, one of her major clients. So as soon as the schools were like, no one's coming to school anymore, my sister watched like a massive chunk of her business go away. But man, like, necessity is the is the mother of invention though.

Helen:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And and you're seeing this with, like, yoga studios and, like, all of these other businesses, these small businesses that relied on in person communication. They're figuring out ways of delivering their product, virtually, delivering their product in this kind of environment, and that's great. I'm glad that we are living in a time where technology can has already built something to bridge that gap.

Helen:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

That's great.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

What I am curious about and kind of hopeful for is that after this time, when they go back into their yoga studio, my sister goes back into the public schools and these programs spin back up again and run the way that they always ran before, I'm hoping that they keep some of this skill that they've built up in this time and add it to their product mix next time. This kind of like diversification like my sister is able to have a direct impact on more people than she could in the school settings

Jon:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Because and and with no change in overhead, right? Like the same teacher could be teaching a class of a 1,000 kids, she's not doing it at that size, but she could, right? Yeah. That's a much different kind of way of thinking about this time and the same is true of those yoga those yoga studios. Those yoga studios are limited by space constraints and teacher constraints and all these other things.

Speaker 3:

There is massive opportunity that comes from just shifting your mindset because you have to.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And my hope is that people don't say, well, this is what I do just for now. This is right? How am I gonna take this forward into the future?

Jon:

Yeah. I feel like that I feel like it might persist. I mean, I think this is gonna go on long enough to where it's gonna actually make make an impact on how people do things for a while.

Helen:

Yeah. And and the advantage is that that will build future resilience for the little person.

Speaker 3:

The next bird flu.

Helen:

Yeah. The next bird flu, which is what which does get me fired up. I think we should leave it there on a hopeful note. Right? That sounds good.

Jon:

Sounds good.

Helen:

That was incredible. John Buddha, do you wanna say thanks to, our patrons?

Jon:

I do. One of which is here with us. So as always, thanks to our Patreon supporters. We have Sofia Quintero, Diogo, Chris Willow, Mason Hensley, Borja Soler, Ward Sandler, Eric Lima, James Sours, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley, Russell Brown, Evander Sasse, Pratayumna Schimbecker, Noah Praill, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitbur, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, my brother, Jarby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Duvander, Dave Jukta. And Kyle Fox from get rewardful.com.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, guys.

Helen:

Thanks so much for being here, Dave.

Speaker 3:

This is awesome. This has

Helen:

been great.

Jon:

Thanks, Dave.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Really great to talk to you guys.

Jon:

Stay safe out there.

Helen:

Yeah. Stay safe, everybody. We'll see you next week.