Build Your SaaS

How to communicate (and make decisions) with your co-founder.

Show Notes

What’s been happening?

  • Is the Macbook Pro 2013 the best computer ever made?
    • Jon's review of the new Macbook Pro: the screen, the keyboard, the thinness are great. He doesn't like the touchbar, and it crashed a lot initially.
  • Thanks to Bill for the Spotify introduction!
  • We tried out Amazon Transcribe and it was hilarious

Main topic: Partner communication, making decisions

We got a question on Twitter from Dennis Martinez:

“How often do you both keep in touch with each other talking about the product in an average day/week? How important is daily communication?”

Jon and Justin have different decision making styles:
  • Justin is "quick start." He likes to make decisions quickly, and have a fast momentum.
  • Jon is more thoughtful and detail-oriented.

Having this balance is important!

How we communicate:

  • Daily communication: Slack
  • Weekly call: Skype
  • How we make decisions: consensus.

Takeaways

  • This is the benefit of doing a small project before you launch something bigger.
    • Example: where are we going for lunch? (XOXO), what source control are we going to use? (small project we did before Transistor)
  • Partner with someone who is trustworthy, autonomous.
  • Make sure there's enough overlap in your timezone.
  • Ensure your co-founder has enough time to dedicate to the project.

Show notes:


★ Please review us in iTunes ★
Thanks to our monthly supporters
  • Pascal from sharpen.page
  • Rewardful.com
  • Greg Park
  • Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
  • Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
  • Bill Condo (@mavrck)
  • Ward from MemberSpace.com
  • Evandro Sasse
  • Austin Loveless
  • Michael Sitver
  • Dan Buda
  • Colin Gray
  • Dave Giunta

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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:

You know what? My son configures this whole thing. He changed my name on my phone to Snoop Dogg, and I don't know how to change it back. Your timer is 30 minutes, Snoop Dogg. But this was an upgrade from what it was before, which was fat Hobbit.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buda, a software developer.

Justin:

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we launch transistor.fm. Alright, John. So it's always a challenge with these shows.

Justin:

You know, we there's always banter beforehand, and it's almost like we're I sometimes wanna just, like, say, no no more banter because the off the cuff stuff is so fun when when you're Yeah. Kinda going back and forth. You know?

Jon:

I feel like we need to need to record that part of it or just say we're having a meeting and do and do it another time.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, technically, I'm recording from the time we like, my call recorder starts automatically.

Jon:

Okay.

Justin:

And so I'm recording I'm I I mean, I'm recording you all the time. I've got tapes and tapes of

Jon:

Oh, no.

Justin:

Of just John Buddha. I've got a folder in Dropbox.

Jon:

That's trouble. I don't know if I'm comfortable with this partnership.

Justin:

I had a few thoughts. 1 is and maybe I'll take a picture of this, but I was looking at my computer, and I've got so much stuff plugged in right now. I've got a webcam so that you can see me in high fidelity. I've got this USB microphone the ATR2100, by the way, which is a great kind of intro level podcasting microphone. Then I have, into the Thunderbolt slot I've got an ethernet cable because Wi Fi can be so intermittent when you're when you're recording.

Justin:

And, here. I'm gonna take a picture of this on this side, anyway. And I I don't, like, at home, are you on a Imac? What are you on at home?

Jon:

I'm on a a a new 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

Hooked hooked up to a monitor, but I have to open my laptop up to use the camera because the monitor is not the camera.

Justin:

Gotcha.

Jon:

But it's all it's all piped into 1, Thunderbolt 3 connection

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

That powers everything. And then I have this blue snowball ice microphone hooked up to the Thunderbolt 3 dock that I have.

Justin:

Okay. Got it. So you kinda use, like, and the now I'm I can't remember the vintages of MacBook Pros. Is yours was there a difference between the 2013 late edition and 2015? Like, did they make you don't have USB c or anything like that.

Justin:

Right?

Jon:

I have USB c. I have the new Okay.

Justin:

So this is the new one.

Jon:

It's it's all USB c, which is great and also a disaster.

Justin:

Okay. Well, this is would be good to talk about it because I've heard so many complaints about those new computers. Actually, our friend my friend Kyle Fox has one of the new ones. We were just talking about him. Kyle, we were talking about you.

Justin:

And, he did not like that new one at all. I think he returned it or he was thinking about returning it. He was really disappointed with it. And I'm just looking at this machine I have right now. I love this machine.

Justin:

This is probably my favorite computer I've ever owned. It's still fast. It's still hot. And the big thing is I use these ports all of the time. And Yeah.

Justin:

I don't know how I would deal with it. Like, I I I really need I need 2 USB at a minimum and at least some other kind of port like a thunderbolt or whatever so I can plug it in plug in my ethernet cable. And so, like, would I be able to do that with your computer, or I would have to how would I do it?

Jon:

No. You would have to buy a separate dock, or you'd have to get a bunch of Apple dongles that cost, like, $30 each. So it's great. The the promise of USB c is amazing. Yeah.

Jon:

You can hook up one thing to it and have all these other connections. It can power your computer. It can do data. It can do all this stuff. But what the it's just we're not there yet.

Jon:

Like, the ecosystems aren't ready for that. So I have a Thunderbolt 3 dock, which also includes an Ethernet connection, a bunch of regular USB 2 point o or whatever connections, an SD slot

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And all that stuff. So I plug in my computer into 1 I have one plug. It plugs I plug in my computer. It powers it, hooks it up to my display, and hooks it up to this dock that can do all this other stuff, but you're not traveling with

Justin:

it. Yeah. Like, the dock just brings it up to the level. See, that's the other thing. I was doing some filming the other day, and I just can put that SD card right in my machine Yeah.

Justin:

Grab it.

Jon:

It's great. I mean, it's a pro machine for photographers. Why does it not

Justin:

Yeah. Why so I don't I don't know if I'm gonna upgrade. Have you been happy with like, are you happy you made the switch? I mean I mean, you are mister Ruby on Rails' latest release candidate guy.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

So maybe are you just, like like, being ahead of the curve?

Jon:

My previous laptop was getting kinda old, and this was what was available. I don't know. It's okay. It's a mixed bag. I the screen's amazing.

Justin:

Yep.

Jon:

The I really like the actual I like the new the new keyboard. Yeah. The keys are the keys are flatter, but they're, like, noisier. Okay. The the touch bar is really stupid.

Jon:

I don't use it. Yeah. The lack of USB ports was annoying. I don't really care anymore. It's it's really thin, but I'm I'm just, like, looking at my computer trying to figure out what I hate about it.

Jon:

It it it crashed a lot in the beginning. Yeah. Like, it would just stop working. Yeah. I don't know.

Jon:

Physically, it's beautiful.

Justin:

Function it seems like, functionally, there's there's something that was missing. Like, I haven't rebooted this machine. It hasn't crashed in Right. Ages. Like, it just keeps running and running and running.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

And I don't know. Like, if they came out with a new machine next year that said, this is basically just like the 2013 MacBook Pro, But Yeah. Better screen, more memory, and a bigger hard drive, I'd be like, okay. I'll take it.

Jon:

Yeah. We'll we'll see. I I feel like they've been getting a lot of blowback on the touch bar. I hope they don't like

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Kind of hope they just get rid of it, honestly.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

It's either they get rid of it or they start rolling it out on, like, all their external keyboards as well. And it's They

Justin:

just need to keep, like, a place to put down your thumb so you can log in fast.

Jon:

Right. Yeah. They can they can figure out a place for

Justin:

that. Yeah. Okay. So we got that. I I wanted to talk about I don't know what you think about this, but we had a meeting this morning.

Justin:

I had to wake up super early, 7:30. I well, the meeting was at 7:30 AM Pacific. Do you think we should talk about this?

Jon:

Yeah. We can talk about it. Yeah. 9:30 my time.

Justin:

9:30 your time? And it was like What time was it in London? It was like 3:30 his time, I think.

Jon:

3:30. Yeah.

Justin:

So as a background, you might have heard that Spotify now supports podcasting. And there's 2 ways to get your podcast into Spotify. Number 1 is I think they send you to a Google form. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. And so you put your podcast in that Google form, and it seems to kinda just go into an abyss, I think. Like Yeah. Who knows if you'll ever hear back from them? The second way is to use an authorized partner, like a podcast host that's become an authorized partner and has it built into their app.

Justin:

Right? Right. And, basically, if you you you know, there's a button or a check mark that says, I wanna submit this to Spotify, and then it goes directly to Spotify. And we've been interested in that from the beginning. We're like, we think our customers would like this.

Justin:

But the the problem was like, I think you wrote an email. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. I I tried to get a hold of someone there, and they kept directing me to these other email addresses, which would just result in this autoresponder about how to submit your podcast

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Which is not we were just trying to become one of these aggregation partners.

Justin:

Yeah. And, I mean, I tried all my usual tricks. I posted on Twitter, hey. Do I know anyone at Spotify? And, you know, I got a few responses, but those leads didn't go anywhere.

Justin:

And then Spotify Cares or whatever reached out and sent me back to that same Google form. Uh-huh. And so I think we both had this feeling like, okay. Like, we are you know sometimes when you feel like, it was almost like the same as, like, okay. Does anyone know Britney Spears?

Justin:

Like, we need to get ahold of Britney Spears, and I don't know why why did I choose her as an example.

Jon:

But I don't know.

Justin:

But but how would we ever, you know, get a meeting with her? Like, it just felt like that. Like, there's many, many levels we need to go through to actually get to the person we need to talk to.

Jon:

Right. We're new. We're small. We have, like, a couple popular podcasts, but maybe we have to wait for them to reach out to us or something.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

It's sort of unknown.

Justin:

And, I mean, it's funny. This is a recurring theme, but XOXO comes back into our life because in the 2nd year I went, the 3rd year you went, I think that was 2015, we met this guy, Bill. Shout out to Bill if you're listening. And Bill at the time was working for NPR, I think. Was he working for NPR?

Jon:

He might have been. Yeah.

Justin:

He was already kinda in the podcast industry, and he now works for I probably shouldn't say who he works for, but he works for another big

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

Player in the podcast industry now. And I was just like, he actually I I think I mentioned we have this little kind of group chat for all of us XOXO buddies. And I mentioned that you and I were working together on Transistor and he was like one of the first people to say, hey. Yeah. Congrats.

Justin:

And then I was like, wait a second. Bill might have a contact at Spotify. And so I asked him, and he did. Yeah. He did.

Justin:

He did. And so he basically sent an email for us, like, say, introducing us to this person at Spotify, and that's who we talked to you this morning. It's kinda crazy.

Jon:

Yeah. We had a call with London. It was a good call. So we'll see what happens. Yeah.

Jon:

Move forward with that. It's exciting.

Justin:

I think the lesson there is, like, we've we've kinda hit on this a couple times too, but relationships, people, it it I it feels like Bill's intro, it helped us, like, go through a 100 layers of, you know, like, if we had to really grind and, like, start at the bottom and work our way up, it would have taken a long time. But he helped us

Jon:

Cut through.

Justin:

Yeah. He cut through.

Jon:

Really? A lot of red tape.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's so awesome when you when you get an experience like that. It just, like, almost feels like magic. That's good.

Justin:

You said you were you you wanted to tell me something about Amazon Transcribe?

Jon:

Yeah. So you posted on our Slack channel. Hey. Are aren't we trying this out already? And it was a link to Amazon Transcribe, which I had signed up for the beta, assuming that they would contact us, letting us know we could use it.

Jon:

But, apparently, it's just live now. And for those of you who don't know, Amazon Amazon Transcribe is a service on AWS where you can upload a MP 3 file, and it will attempt to transcribe it into text and also do speaker identification, so it identifies who's talking and will actually note that.

Justin:

Okay. Yeah.

Jon:

So I tried it out this morning with our last episode.

Justin:

Okay.

Jon:

And it it worked pretty well. I did an okay job at at at figuring out who we were

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

As speaker 1 and speaker 0. But some of the transcriptions are kind of funny. It got my name right, John Buddha.

Justin:

Wow.

Jon:

But it j o h n instead of j o and Buddha is spelled like Buddha, the god.

Justin:

Oh, so the this Deity. They're kind of they're kind of like religious. They gave you the Christian spelling of your name and then the Buddhist spelling of Buddha.

Jon:

Yes. Yeah. Exactly. So and then it's, hey. I'm John Buddha.

Jon:

They're welcome to build your CESS, c e s s, is the behind the scenes story of building a web app 2018. I'm John Buda, software developer. This is and this is a few words. You're you're just in, Jackson. Just and in are separate.

Jon:

What? Follow along as we lunch transistor.fm. And then you were in Edmonton, but it also said that you were in Evanston at one point, which is actually near Chicago, oddly enough.

Justin:

What?

Jon:

So it's good. Yeah.

Justin:

But I don't know if it's, like,

Jon:

ready for us to use for transistor and, like Yeah. As an option for people. Right? Like, you wouldn't really wanna post this No. Necessarily.

Justin:

Yeah. It seems like all So we'll we'll see. All those auto transcribe things, they still need a human element. I know Yeah. Courtland Allen over at Indie Hackers.

Justin:

If you if you haven't checked out Indie Hackers yet, by the way, that's an incredible community. But Cortland uses he started using an automatic transcription thing, and he didn't like it so much that he he's just hired someone manually to transcribe the whole show. Yeah. And I mean, all all this

Jon:

all this stuff is, like, machine learning and text to speech. You know, it'll get better. It's like Siri. It'll get better over time, and they'll learn. But Yeah.

Jon:

Who knows how long that'll take, especially with a podcast where, like, people might be talking at the same time. There's music. There's, like, ads. There's Yeah.

Justin:

How do you do all that? My my thing about, like, voice recognition is I always think about my kids when they're really small and they couldn't pronounce things. And my little my youngest would be like, Siri. Siri. Siri.

Justin:

Show me the fattest cat. And it it was like it would never get it. It was it would never understand what he was saying, and he was so frustrated. And he would just get increasingly frustrated. So I think, you know, when when it can when it can accurately understand a 2 year old the way an adult can

Jon:

Right.

Justin:

Then I'll be a believer. Alright. So let's get into our main topic. We got a question on Twitter from Dennis Martinez. He asks, how often do you both, John and I, keep in touch with each other talking about the product in an average day or week?

Justin:

How important is daily communication? And I think he he asked this question. He's got a partner, and he might feel like, you know, there's not enough communication. So you thought this might be a good topic to talk about?

Jon:

Yeah. I think it would be.

Justin:

So, I mean, I think we could use, like, as a story, to keep it real. We recently had to make a decision about whether or not to hire a web designer to build out well, web developer to build out our website.

Jon:

Yeah. Our our marketing website.

Justin:

Our marketing website. Yeah. And we had a a couple options. 1 is you could have built it. 2, we could hire someone else.

Justin:

3, I could have built it, I guess. And I guess, 4, we could have just gone with a simpler solution. Like, we want I wanted to build it in WordPress. Even that was actually an interesting discussion we had to we had because Yeah. Initially, there was a little bit of, like, should we do WordPress or not?

Justin:

And and so I think those stories are good examples of, you know, the communication and might illustrate, you know, how often we're in contact. And maybe even more important, this isn't exactly in Dennis's question, but how we make decisions. So there's the communication piece. But Yep. How often you talk isn't probably as important.

Justin:

I mean, it is important, but it's not as important as how you're actually making the decisions.

Jon:

Right. Because usually yeah. Usually, what we're talking about is leading up to making some sort of decision.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. I mean,

Jon:

it's a new it's a new business. There's tons of decisions to be made. And, yeah, generally, it's always leading up to, you know, saying yes or no to something.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly. And by the way, I'm gonna, I don't think we've shared this before and I'm not sure. Maybe I can anonymize this somehow, but before we signed our partnership agreement, we had a bunch of questions that we went through, like partnership questions, like team structure, ownership structure, how will an owner make an how will each owner make an income apart from transistor? And then one of it was how will decisions get made?

Jon:

Mhmm.

Justin:

And so I said, I like the way Jason and DHH have run base camp. If there's an argument, it's whoever's most passionate about it wins, but they have to deal with the customer support. And do you remember what you said in here? I don't. No.

Justin:

You said, I think consensus based, which in our case is both of us agreeing to do something or not do something. If there's disagreement, we argue our case really hard.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's pretty much what's happened.

Justin:

This decision that we made to hire Adam to build our website is really new.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

What was kind of the the process there?

Jon:

Well, I guess leading up to that, the process was, you had this desire to split off the marketing aspect of Transistor into its own website so that you or whoever else is is doing the marketing, can update things faster and have it be, you know, built behind the CMS

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jon:

So that I don't have to deploy the Rails app just to get some new material material up there, which, you know, from my perspective, is not something I'm used to. I haven't really done it that way. Mhmm. But I totally see the benefit to it. Then it was, how do you wanna how are we gonna host this website?

Jon:

Mhmm. We could have gone with AWS, which means we would have had to spin up it I know our own server and then install WordPress on it or go with something like middleman. So it's a static site, which is, like, another thing for you to learn. Isn't quite as easy. You know, I looked around for other CMSs that were not WordPress.

Jon:

I just have this I used to use WordPress, like, 10 years ago.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

It's changed a lot, obviously, but it was such a pain in the ass near the end of it to, like, deploy it, keep it up to date, make sure it's secure. It still get hacked all the time.

Justin:

Yep.

Jon:

Our you know, I look at our log files once in a while, and it's like people are trying to access the WordPress login even though we don't have WordPress. It's like people still try to hit it, and they try to exploit it.

Justin:

Oh, interesting.

Jon:

Because it's pocket because it's popular.

Justin:

Yeah. Oh, I I didn't I mean, there's So you're seeing that on the transistor logs right now?

Jon:

Yeah. I see it once in a while. You see, like, WP login dot PHP. Someone's hitting it because they're just, like, seeing if it's there. And then they'll try to brute force and attack and, like, get in the admin and

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Screw around with it, which I think is my main apprehension with something like WordPress. Yeah. We ultimately just decided that that's the easiest way to go. We use a third party host to sign up. You know, we don't have to host it ourselves.

Jon:

It gets updated automatically Mhmm. To to newer versions. I think they they kinda keep a handle on security, which is great. And then for the design of it, we had had some initial designs made a long time ago, which I had sort of started to implement in the Rails app. Never quite finished.

Jon:

It didn't really get that far. Yep. And, you know, in in Slack, you'd posted you were like, hey. Adam has some availability. He's a great WordPress developer.

Jon:

I'd love to get and he, you know, he can turn around the site in, like, less than a week, which is great. And, you know, I was initially, like, hesitant because it's it's extra money. Yeah. I could technically do it, but I'm also busy building the app itself. Right?

Jon:

So there's a lot of other things within the transistor app that need to be finished and worked on or started.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

So I sorta like you were, like, ready to go and, like, send him some money and get get things signed. Yeah. Like, that that day, which was a couple days ago. Yeah. I was like, alright.

Jon:

Let me let me think about it for a sec. Let me, you know, see what it would entail if if I were to build it and Yeah. What that would mean. I had some questions about, like, what we would get back and kinda like how he would go about building it. Ultimately, I I came around and

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

You you argued your case strongly, and we we agreed to it.

Justin:

This is so funny because it's like the same pattern. We've seen this pattern a couple times now. And, incidentally, this is the exact same pattern in my marriage. This is the exact same pattern in anything else I've done is I'm just like, quick start. Like, come on.

Justin:

Let's do this right now. Let's get moving. Let's go. And in your case, you're like, no. Let's think about this.

Justin:

Let's examine the details. Let's think of alternatives. And I think this is really one of the benefits compared like solopreneurship compared to partnership is, yeah, when you're solo, you can move at your pace. So if you're a quick start, you can move a lot faster. If you're more kind of thoughtful and, like, you really stew on things, you can move a lot slower.

Justin:

But there's disadvantages to both of those things. Right? Yep. And Yeah. And so the you're never kind of balanced out.

Justin:

I'm always just rushing into things, but I'm not always considering the repercussions of that. And also just there's an opportunity cost that I think is sometimes worth just, like, pausing on and, like, part of what what we're saying is could we spend our money a better way? Could we, you know, leverage this a different way? Do we wanna maintain control, like, complete creative control? There's all these other kind of good questions.

Justin:

And I think when you're, you know, when you're when you're solo, you don't get that benefit of the other kind of side of things.

Jon:

Right. Yeah. I mean, for me, I I will. I'll think about things and overthink things and think about all the bad things that could happen to a certain extent too much to the point where, like, I might just not ever do it. Yeah.

Jon:

Right? And then and then where where are you? Like, you haven't done anything. And and none of those bad things can even happen because you never did it.

Justin:

Yeah. It's almost also like another person can help you to, you know so in my case, when I wanna move fast, sometimes what you've said is, well, we could move fast, but then we would we would not. You're pointing out what we might miss if we move too fast. In a the reverse is also true, which is when you're trying to move root too slow, I'm saying, well, if we move too slow, we're gonna miss out on, like, the the momentum we could have gained by

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

You know, moving quick. And I I I think increasingly the older I get, I realize that the best kind of way to be is in tension between 2 extremes. You don't want to be too far on one side. You don't want to be too far on the other side. But when you're kind of holding tension between 2 opposite spectrums, it's hard.

Justin:

It's harder, but it's kind of like the best way to do things. Right? It's like Yeah. You're just, like, holding things, like, okay. We gotta move fast, but we can't move so fast that for example, that we, I don't know, compromise our customers' data, or we wanna move fast, but we can't move so fast that we hurt someone's feelings.

Justin:

Those kinds of things I think are, you know, important to consider. And the the when when we're talking about partnership, I think this we talked about this in the other episode, but this is kind of why you want someone who balances you out in some way. I don't think there's always, like, a a magic, you know, a magic partnership. Like, oh, it's gotta be a designer and a developer, or it's gotta be a marketing guy and a developer or whatever. I think it as long as that person balances you out in some significant vectors, And especially with this kinda quick start and and kinda more, like, wait.

Justin:

Let's think about this. That's super important.

Jon:

Yeah. It's definitely it's definitely a good balance. I think it's it's been working out pretty well.

Justin:

You know what I might post? I'm actually revising this, but I have a post on my website. I'll put it in the show notes. It talks about have you ever heard of Roy Disney? Yeah.

Justin:

So that was Walt's brother.

Jon:

Uh-huh.

Justin:

A a lot of people haven't heard about him, but and a lot of people don't know that he was actually the, I think, the equal cofounder in the Walt Disney Company. And there are a lot of people who say without Roy, Disney would have never succeeded. So Walt was kinda like the big dreamer, like, go out and kinda make a mess of things sometimes. And Roy was much more kind of reserved, very operational, really detail oriented. And so, they balanced each other very very well, and I think it's just a great story about how partnership can can really work well.

Justin:

Why don't we talk a little bit about do you wanna just kind of describe how we communicate?

Jon:

Like Yeah. So, I think our main mode of communication is Slack. We have a Slack channel, with multiple different rooms for different variety of different, topics. You know, we just post, like, random things we find in the podcast world, updates about customers, you know, questions that we have about whether or not we should do this or that. Mhmm.

Jon:

I'd say that's where most of our decisions are made.

Justin:

And we're talking quite a bit. I mean, we're talking every day for sure. It's pretty consistent right now. Who know it's it'll be interesting to see how that if that changes, but we're basically touching base, like, throughout the day, every single day.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What else? I mean, there's email, obviously, with this and that.

Jon:

Yeah. But not not much.

Justin:

Not much. A little bit of collaboration using Dropbox Paper.

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

We should be using, Pivotal Tracker more.

Jon:

Yeah. I guess I had started a Pivotal Tracker account for all the development work, which I use pretty consistently. And then you have a Trello account.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

Which sort of serves a similar purpose. We could also potentially use GitHub issues Yeah. For stuff. So there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to just track, like, development process. I've always liked Pivotal because it's easy to organize, but, it it doesn't it doesn't work well for some, like, non, like, development and product stuff.

Justin:

Yeah. I think we're still figuring that out. What's the I noticed that FogBugz has a new thing that, like, is supposed to incorporate a lot of this stuff. It's like I can't remember what it's called now, but it I mean, there's always project management is is such is such a hole.

Jon:

I think, ultimately, it is about communication, but, ultimately, it's like, as long as you have a place to put your stuff that you don't forget it

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

And you can mark it as done and, like, update people and people get notified. Like, I think that's that's, like, the bar that you have to that you have to hit.

Justin:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jon:

We have a weekly call, which started as a weekly call and turned into a weekly podcast recording. It was, you know, supposed to be like a weekly update, make some decisions for the next week kind of thing. Yeah. But I think I think maybe it works better as if we just make decisions throughout the week.

Justin:

Yeah. And, I mean, we'll probably evolve that a little bit. I think the other thing we're still trying to figure out, especially because we're both this is a side project for us right now, is, you know, like, are we gonna do, like, Basecamp does 6 week iterations, and we've talked we've thrown that around like, okay. What can we accomplish

Jon:

Yeah.

Justin:

In the next 6 weeks? And kinda, like, have a goal and then a way to review that goal. And a lot of that stuff is tricky, like, when you're getting started and you're kinda doing things whenever you have time.

Jon:

Right. It's hard to get into a into a rhythm with that.

Justin:

And so I think we're kinda being patient about that, but those are the kinds of things we'll probably implement next is, you know, really kinda choose a a way of running projects that works for us. But right now, I think it's working pretty good. We kind of pick things off as we go. And, yeah, we might who knows? Like, maybe we're gonna need a a lot of this depends on how fast you wanna move.

Justin:

Like, if we wanted to make more decisions and move even faster, we might decide, you know what? We need it. We need another call a week or we need Right. You know, some more structure around this or whatever.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's difficult. I mean, I think, you know, as long as we keep each other updated with their schedule. I think you said something last week about having like, you really, like, felt like there's a lot of momentum, and you sort of had to you felt like you had to jump on it and work on it, like, while the fire was hot.

Jon:

Mhmm. Something like that. Right? I forget the exact words, but which is great. And that that happens occasionally.

Jon:

And, like, last weekend, I worked on a Saturday and worked for, like, 7 or 8 hours.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

On transistor and got a ton of stuff done. Right? But, like and I I would love for that to happen every weekend, but it's it's not going to. You know? But, like, when it does, you just go with it and kinda just not go as much as you can.

Justin:

Yeah. There's actually product wise, we got a lot of things in the pipes that are pretty close to being done. And, yeah, even and you were able to knock off some some small stuff, like

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:

Now we have, this is gonna seem so small that we have XML site maps for all of our podcast sites. And Yeah. That is I have this hunch about podcasts actually being good for SEO. And, when you have a site map, you can submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. It allows Google to tell you, you know, crawl all your stuff really quick and then, also tell you if there's any errors and things.

Justin:

And so now all of our current customers can use that. I I just little things like that that get released. It's so exciting, like, when you see movement like that.

Jon:

Yeah. There's a yeah. It's nice it's nice to work on, like, a big thing. Like, I was working on our embeddable player Yep. Which is close to being done.

Jon:

And then once you kinda wrap that, get that into a good point, you just kinda, like, go through the list and pivot and knock off some small stuff that's sort of been, like, sitting there and, like, gnawing at your brain for a while. You're like, I can finish that quick.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. So good.

Jon:

Good. Knock, you know, knock the check mark off. Yeah. Feels good.

Justin:

Cool. So just to close things off, I think here's let's give our listeners a few takeaways. I think there is a benefit to doing a small project before you launch. We were thinking about even all the decisions you and I had to make before we became partners. Like, when we're hanging out, we had to decide, you know, where are we gonna go for lunch?

Justin:

And Yeah. Those little decisions allow you to practice some of this stuff. And I think this is again, if your if your partner is just this anonymous person on the Internet that you've never hung out with, Kinda it makes things trickier, I'll say. Also, doing a little project beforehand. Like that little project we did before, what were some of the decisions we had to make?

Justin:

Like, there was like like what? We decide, like, if we're gonna use GitHub for source control.

Jon:

Yeah. GitHub. You know, I guess, what the partnership who's gonna be in it. Yeah. What else we set up?

Jon:

I think we used maybe had a Pivotal account. Yeah. I'm not sure. It's similar, but, yeah, it gave a it gave you a good sense of, like, how people how you can work together.

Justin:

Yeah. Or your Yeah. So I think doing smaller things, projects, hanging out beforehand, that's one takeaway. And then, besides, like, partnering with someone who's trustworthy, who's autonomous, is there anything else you think? I mean, being in contact, I think, is important.

Justin:

So having like a Slack channel or some sort of way that you can get in touch with each other. Maybe like, how much do you think time zones affects this?

Jon:

I don't think it's been too bad, really. I mean, we're not we're 2 hours apart.

Justin:

Yeah. But if you were in lawn if you were in London

Jon:

Yeah. That'd be tough. Or, you know, Australia is like a

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

We'd you know, we'd be awake for, like, 2 hours at the same time.

Justin:

Yeah. Don't partner with Australians. That's the takeaway. No. I'm just joking.

Justin:

We love you, Australia.

Jon:

No. I I don't think it's been too bad. You know, I generally you know, I have a full time job anyway, so I'm busy in the mornings when I get up. And then you'll be around later, and it's, you know, you might you might do some stuff later at night too, which is maybe after I go to bed.

Jason:

So Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jon:

We still have a decent chunk of time during the day that we're both awake.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. So make sure the time zone's reasonable, I guess. There's enough overlap. Probably even more important is make sure that your partner is available.

Justin:

If they're super super busy or if they're not willing to make the time.

Jon:

Yeah. And making excuse making excuses to not, like, show up or missing calls and sort of not being honest about it. Yeah. A huge deal.

Justin:

Yeah. Cool. I think those are good takeaways. Where can folks find you on the Internet, John?

Jon:

On Twitter, John Buddha, j o n b u d a. Instagram, same deal. Website, johnbuda.com.

Justin:

And I'm the letter m, letter I, justin, m I justin on Twitter and Instagram. You can follow Transistor on Twitter, transistorfm or Instagram. We're transistor.fm. Also, go to our website transistor.fm and sign up for the early access. I'm not sure how much longer we're going to be doing that.

Justin:

So if you're interested, sign up for that on that email sign up, and we'll notify you when we open up more spots. But, eventually, if we're gonna end early access, I think we're getting close

Jon:

Yeah. To kind

Justin:

of a good group of people. So if you wanna get in now, now's the time. And the only other thing I'll say is you've just finished listening to the show. If you're on iTunes or Apple podcasts, if you could just scroll into there and leave us a review, 5 stars, whatever. We've got a bunch of reviews.

Justin:

Actually, I'm gonna read one from the United Kingdom. Dean Leighton James says, already some great pointers on getting your SaaS going in the right direction, and he's only a couple episodes in. Definitely a priority listen for each new episode from now on. So thanks, Dean. If you want to leave us a review, please just go do it now or you'll forget, and we really appreciate it.

Justin:

Even if it's just 2 thumbs up, the Woodward in Canada, just give us 2 thumbs up. That's perfect.

Jon:

Perfect.

Justin:

Alright, folks. We'll see you next Tuesday.