Build Your SaaS

What does Jon think of Tailwind CSS?

Show Notes

What's new with the Transistor team?
  • Justin has a Halloween candy hangover.
  • Desktops vs laptops for dev work.
  • Transitioning from your personal equipment and software to stuff the business pays for.
  • Where are we in our Shape-Up cycles?
  • Our new marketing website is suffering because it's "un-shaped work."
  • The benefits of working with a partner.
  • "I'm realizing how single-threaded human beings are."
  • What does Jon think of Tailwind CSS?
  • At what stage of a customer's business lifecycle should you get them as a customer?
  • How many customers did we get because Basecamp switched to us?
  • "Make software that will be worth using for ten years."
  • New features - how should we communicate those to customers?

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Creators & Guests

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

What is Build Your SaaS?

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

Jason:

This episode is brought to you by Postmark. They've got a new podcast I wanna tell you about. It's called Talking Email. If your app sends email or you use email in your business, this is a must listen. Recent topics include how to think about email for your SaaS, how to design your emails, and solving extreme email deliverability mysteries.

Jason:

We've had a few of those. You can subscribe at postmarkapp.com/podcast.

Jon:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buddha, a software engineer.

Jason:

And I'm Justin Jackson, and I've got a Halloween candy hangover.

Jon:

What's your favorite candy?

Jason:

Oh, man. I mean, my favorite candy is never in the candy jar. I like Big Turks.

Jon:

That's a Canadian. That's gotta be Canadian.

Jason:

Oh, really? I like Turkish delight. Those are probably my 2 favorite.

Jon:

I'm a big fan of Reese Reese's peanut

Jason:

butter cup. Oh, man. I got so many of those. We ran out of candy last night for Halloween, and I I had to drive and get some more. And so I picked up another box of 90, candies, and half of them are Reese's peanut butter cups.

Jason:

So

Jon:

Nice.

Jason:

I should have sent some your way.

Jon:

Good choice. I'm sure there's, well, they're all on sale today, so I can just go and buy them for half the price or less.

Jason:

Make it a business expense.

Jon:

Yeah. Right. Research.

Jason:

How many trick or treaters did you get last night?

Jon:

0.

Jason:

There's no kids that just go from house from, apartment door to apartment door?

Jon:

No. Not really. I think I think most of that happens in other neighborhoods. It's, like, more, I don't know, family neighborhoods where there's houses and stuff. Yeah.

Jon:

Certainly nothing like like when I grew up. It's just like a small town just running around the houses that are decorated.

Jason:

Yeah. It is there's nothing like Halloween. Halloween is it it is pretty fun. My my kids were so excited about it. Yeah.

Jason:

They they were they were pretty jazzed, and they they got a lot of candy last night. Nice. And I which meant I ate quite a bit last night as well. Yeah. I think we're gonna call this well, first of all, we're on kind of a a new system here.

Jason:

I'm, on my phone. And, so that's how you and I are talking to each other. And then I'm I've got this, this at875r Audio Technica mic going into a portable field recorder called the H4n Pro. Mhmm. We're trying this out because I just upgraded my computer to an Imac, but that's in, like, kind of the big co working room.

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

And where I normally record isn't here. So normally, I'd bring my my my laptop over here, but I can't do that.

Jon:

Yeah. Dust you got desktop life. I've never I I haven't had a desktop since 2,004.

Jason:

Oh, yeah. What's that?

Jon:

I don't I don't know. It'd be it'd be an interesting situation. I feel I would have I I mean, I would definitely have to have a laptop.

Jason:

It's funny because on Twitter, people are talking about it, and a lot of people have done what I've done. But what they did is they bought a cheap, either a Chromebook or a MacBook Air or a refurbished MacBook Air.

Jon:

Yeah. That's probably what I would do if I was in that situation. Chromebooks don't really they can't really do development stuff.

Jason:

Yeah. For development, it it wouldn't be great. Yeah. It's gonna be interesting. So, I've had this MacBook Pro.

Jason:

It's a late 2,000 13. I got it in 2014 when I started working with Sprintly.

Jon:

Mhmm.

Jason:

And, it was definitely on its last legs. It kept freezing. And, and plus, we're I I'm trying to get us as a company over to transistor stuff and us not using our own personal stuff.

Jon:

Right.

Jason:

And so that but that's a funny transition actually. We should talk we should talk about that. Because when you're when you're bootstrapping, when you're starting, you just use your own tools. You use the software you already had. You use your own machine.

Jason:

You, you know, you my own microphones. Like, we're using all of our own stuff. Right?

Jon:

Right.

Jason:

But once the company gets to scale, I I think that you should transfer that over. Otherwise

Jon:

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't I think when it makes when it makes sense when you need it, I don't think you have to just because you have the money.

Jason:

Yeah. Not just because you have the money for sure. But at some point, you do wanna start transferring things over. Anyway, so I need I need a new computer. So this became, our first big capital purchase with Transistor.

Jason:

And, and, yeah, I just I decided to go with the Imac because we've been waiting for those 2000 those 16 inch, MacBook Pros that they kept saying. And it just seemed like those were not gonna come out until 2020, like, late 2020. And increasingly, it feels like 2021 is more realistic.

Jon:

Yeah. I I don't I think they'll probably release something before then.

Jason:

I hope so.

Jon:

They'll have to. They're not gonna wait an entire year and a half.

Jason:

We'll see how this recording works. But Yeah. One thing I like about this is our customers are in all sorts of situations. And so I'm gonna try this this week. And there's also a a way of connecting a USB microphone to, iPhones and iPads that I wanna try.

Jon:

There's a right. You can get a lightning adapter for that. Yeah. I think what I should try to do is record it to my Apple Watch with my head with my Apple headphones. I think I think you can do, like, voice recording.

Jon:

That'd be kind of amazing if that was the future. Yes. Just do everything on your watch.

Jason:

Yeah. You just you can just, like, jump into a closet and record. Yeah. So yeah. Folks, let us know if this sounds okay.

Jason:

Hopefully, this works out. It'd be cool, I think, to talk a little bit about where we're at right now in our shape up process. Our we had originally scheduled a 2 week cool down cycle. And yesterday, we kinda decided maybe we should extend it by another week.

Jon:

Yeah. I didn't really feel like enough. I mean, there's we have a big list of small things we can do, plus we're trying to finish our marketing site, which we haven't done yet. Yeah. It would be nice to get that, you know, mental get that done and out of our out of our heads.

Jason:

Yeah. And in in some ways, it's kind of suffering from being non shaped work.

Jon:

Right. I think so. I think we should probably finish that at least at least deploy it and replace our existing site, and then whatever we do next with it, shape that stuff before we do it because I think there's still gonna be a lot of well, not a lot, but, you know, I think there's still gonna be information and different pages that we're not gonna have on there yet that we're gonna have to talk about and kinda flesh out a bit more.

Jason:

It it's weird, especially when you're learning something new or you're trying to get into a new process. It it's not like it magically switches over overnight.

Jon:

It it

Jason:

it's kind of it's like, okay. We we took 2 steps forward, and then it felt a little bit like we took a step back because we had all this kinda old work, specifically the marketing site that was just not shaped and didn't have a hard kind of, you know, cycle associated with it.

Jon:

Right.

Jason:

And so, yeah, it'll be really nice to have that out. And and so we can move on into actually, like, moving into this new process that we have, Right. Not kind of being have this old stuff hanging over our head.

Jon:

Plus, I know you wanna write more, which would be good.

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a mental weird mental block. I just unless I can publish it, I don't really wanna write. And so, I've been thinking about, you know, part of our site is written for search.

Jason:

I wanna write valuable guides that people can find. But I also I think want to start talking a little bit, like, writing more philosophical pieces, at least on the podcast industry, like having a point of view about where podcasting is heading. Yeah. And, I you know, most of my personal stuff, I just publish on my my own blog, but I think some of that stuff would fit on the transistor site. So, yeah, I'm kinda itching to get get back to writing.

Jason:

And, plus, I I wanna see if all these speed improvements we we made, how that affects our our search rankings, you know, if there's a noticeable, return on investment for all that.

Jon:

Yeah. It was it was funny. I think yesterday, I was I've been working on it with you as well. And we deployed a bunch of updates, and I I opened it up on my phone, and it was really fast. And then I went back to our old site, and it was definitely slower, but it also just looked really bad.

Jon:

Like, it's just not it's not great on mobile at the moment. It just look everything is just Oh, for sure. Kind of a mess.

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's going it it's jarring, almost.

Jon:

It is. Yeah.

Jason:

I I also the I've noticed how much better I work when you and I are working in tandem. Mhmm. I and it's been an interesting experience for me because I think there's a lot of my past was, you know, I'll figure it out on my own, and I'll figure out creative ways to solve problems. And I don't need a partner. I'll just, you know, livestream this and get people who show up on the livestream to help me, you know, live code stuff, and and all that stuff is valuable.

Jason:

But as soon as you and I were both rowing in the same direction in the same boat Yeah. Like, you made really, sometimes small changes, like, you changed the background color of the header from this kind of bright yellow to our dark color.

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

And it instantly just improved the look of the whole site. And it wasn't something I had even considered. And you can just see how this kind of TikTok between 2 people who are, like, you know, passing the ball back and forth or, you know, rowing together or whatever the, you know, the metaphor is. It really can be helpful. And to have somebody that's all already kind of in that mind space thinking about the same stuff you were thinking about at the same time.

Jason:

Mhmm. And I did notice I I don't think I'm great at it yet, but I did notice that with private podcast too. Both of us kind of going in the same direction on the same thing. It it forced me to be thinking about just this one thing and what we're gonna do with this one thing. Right?

Jason:

Yeah.

Jon:

I think I think that's,

Jason:

Do you feel the same way? Or

Jon:

Yeah. I do. Yeah. Pain? No.

Jon:

No. No. It's been good. I it would have been great to work in the marketing site together before, but it was just there was too much to build with private podcasting. Yeah.

Jon:

But, yeah, I think, you know, we're we're obviously a really small team, and it's not like we can split off into multiple teams and work on multiple features at once. Mhmm. So I think going forward, that's probably how we should how we should do this except, you know, unless it's just small small fixes or small changes.

Jason:

Yeah. I I think so too. I think I think this is kind of a revelation for me. Even thinking back on other teams I've worked on, the the approach was always like, okay. What are you doing, Bill?

Jason:

Okay. You go in that direction. K. Alice, what are you doing? Okay.

Jason:

Yeah. You go in that direction. Okay. What are you doing, Mike? Yep.

Jason:

Okay. And then it's like everybody is working on their own thing in their own cave And having a single team focus, and even, like, a single organizational focus, I think this idea that we could have all all of these, these, what do you call those, in computing? Parallel threads or Yeah. Right. You know, like, that that that guy's working over on that, and it's just gonna turn away and come back with some great stuff.

Jon:

I think it's definitely a beneficial way to work. I mean, I don't know if I don't know if things will get done faster if we both work on it, but I think they'll be done better. Mhmm. And we'll be happier with the results. Like, you know, if if you or I go and do our own thing on our on our own time and just knock it out as fast as we can, like, yeah, we'll get it done.

Jon:

Mhmm. Maybe maybe a week faster. I don't know. But Yeah. I think we'll probably make assumptions that aren't aren't right or that we should have talked about with the other person.

Jason:

I'm just realizing, and maybe it's it's naive, but how single threaded human beings are?

Jon:

I think it it kinda relates to a single person multitasking, which is really sort of not an actual thing that humans can do.

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Like, you're not you can't really do 2 things at once and actually do them both as well as if you were just focusing on one of them. Mhmm. Only humans are made to split your split your attention.

Jason:

Yeah. And this has become a recurring thread on these other boots Bootstrap podcasts. Jordan Gall and Brian were were just talking about this on Bootstrap Web, how they've been focusing like, Jordan's been focusing more on product. And he's like, man, when you're focused on product, it's really hard to also think about sales and marketing. Yeah.

Jason:

And Brian's been, like, really focused on product, and he just switched to marketing. And he's, like, it is just so hard to think about both at the same time.

Jon:

It is. Yeah. I mean, that that's why I think that's why I couldn't help you with the marketing site. It's not that I didn't want to. I just couldn't mentally switch to that and and actually provide any any help.

Jon:

But once I got into it the past this past week, like

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

It's been great. I could dove into it, did a lot of design work that I haven't done in a long time.

Jason:

Mhmm. What do you what do you think of Tailwind so far, by the way?

Jon:

Oh, yeah. So we're use yeah. We're using Tailwind CSS, which I don't it's I I like it a lot. I'd never I've never been against it. I just didn't know it.

Jon:

I didn't know how to use it. So I think what they've built I think what they've built is great. It's super flexible. It took a little bit to get up to speed with how they think about it and how it's supposed to be used. Like, it is very much a, mobile first Yeah.

Jon:

Design. Like, you have to think about things in mobile first, and then you add in all of the differences for different device sizes. And Yeah. I had to took me a sec to, like, wrap my head around how they wrote things. But it's great.

Jon:

It's it's super flexible. You know, once you get it down, you can make changes and kind of understand how things are working super fast and don't have to build your own components necessarily.

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Well, it'll be it'll be fun to see how, how how you like it moving forward.

Jon:

No. I could I could see it being useful for, you know, future redesign of of the dashboard. Mhmm. But I I still have a lot of questions, but I think I think it could could be nice.

Jason:

The only way to work through those questions is we just gotta keep working on the site. And then Yeah. As you I think and one thing I I have liked since you and I have both started working on the marketing site is having the marketing site in some sort of version control, like being able to branch out and work on things and then branch back in, and having nothing in a database. So, you know, because content and design and structure, they all kinda relate. And so sometimes when your content is stuck in a database somewhere and not in version control.

Jason:

Right? It's just like somewhere in a database. And then, you know, people are are, changing things. And often on WordPress, people are just changing things on the live site. They're not even Right.

Jason:

Controlling anything. But to have you work on a branch and then me be able to look at it and, you know, approve it and merge it or comment on it and have it work into our regular development workflow, that just feels like a game changer. And I haven't had that at any of the other startups I've worked at because we've been on WordPress.

Jon:

Yeah. That was that's always been an issue I've had with WordPress is that the data itself is totally separate, but also because it's in a separate database, but that data usually is tied to design. So how do you work on both? How do you how do you develop locally and have it I know there's a I know there's probably services that sort of replicate your database locally or something like that. But

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. No. This has been yeah. It's been nice.

Jason:

Hey, John. Guess who's back? Guess who's back? Back again. Guess who's back?

Jason:

Tell a friend. Guess who's back?

Jon:

Who's back? Clubhouse is back. Clubhouse is back.

Jason:

As a sponsor. And I'm super excited about this because what do you what do bootstrap startups not have in the beginning? Money. Money. And guess what?

Jason:

Just have it. Clubhouse made their product free for teams up to 10 people, I think. Let me just check my notes here. Wow. Yeah.

Jason:

It's so they emailed us the other day, and they're like, yeah. So, yeah, you were paying for your account. Well, guess what? Now it's free. And, yeah, free for teams up to 10 people.

Jason:

So if you're looking for a good alternative to Trello, to be honest, that actually allows you to integrate with GitHub. It's built for software development teams. You don't have to worry about, you know, paying a bunch for project management software. This is the time to try Clubhouse. Go to clubhouse.io/build.

Jason:

That's our special URL. Try Clubhouse out for free. And thanks for to Clubhouse for sponsoring this show.

Jon:

It's awesome. Not even a free trial. Just a free plan.

Jason:

It's just a free plan. It's just That's a good deal.

Jon:

I wonder I wonder how that's working out for them.

Jason:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's the other question is, like, as a business. But I can see it because this is how Kayako got us.

Jason:

Mhmm. Right? Kayako got us with a free plan when we had no money. And, eventually, we had money. And, eventually, they reached out and said, hey, it's time to upgrade.

Jon:

Well, they also got rid of their free plan.

Jason:

Yeah. They got rid of their free plan.

Jon:

It's kinda the opposite of what Clubhouse did.

Jason:

Yeah. It'll be interesting to see. I I could see it because if we do grow past 10 people, it's very likely we'll just keep using Clubhouse. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. It's easier to it's easier to upgrade than to switch to something else.

Jason:

Yeah. And this is something I wonder if people don't consider enough is how costly it is to switch, and when is a good time to get customers like, what the at what stage of a customer's life cycle should you get them at? Right. Meaning, if there's a brand new startup that's just starting starting out, they're making all sorts of decisions about what kind of tools they're gonna use. Many of those decisions will stick for a decade.

Jason:

Yeah.

Jon:

I mean, the cost to switch is not only monetary. It's the time that it takes for everyone who's using it to get used to it or move things over or yeah.

Jason:

Well, even think of, like, this negotiation you and I are doing. It's like I'm like, I really wanna use Tailwind for the marketing site. And so we're, like, negotiating this.

Jon:

Right.

Jason:

And then eventually we try it. And if this works, like, if this doesn't become something that you hate working in, when we make our next hire, you know, our next front end developer hire, we're gonna say, well, our marketing sites built in Tailwind. So that's that's what we do here. Right? We're making this decision that is and maybe, actually, we should this is why we should, really take more time to make decisions because, you know, you're kinda stuck with these things after a while.

Jason:

Right?

Jon:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Jason:

Even, like, you and I record our show using Skype, and there are other options out there. But once you get in the habit of doing something, you know, one way, it's really hard to get out. And, you know, we do get a substantial amount of our customers who switch from other platforms. And so and when I ask them why they've switched, it's usually a something extremely painful or pokey that's caused them to cross that threshold of, like, okay. Like, I'm gonna I'm gonna switch.

Jason:

Right? Yep. Or it's a a really kind of fundamental social shift in their peer group. So that we haven't really talked about this that much, but that base camp, base camp switching to us and David Hanamura Hansen doing that big rant did bring us a bunch of attention from people who kind of identify with, like, okay, these are my people. And I'm not sure how many sign ups we got from it, but there's definitely a noticeable, like, oh, I should check these guys out because people like them are using Transistor.

Jason:

Does that make sense?

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's it's a yeah. I don't know. Pure is it peer pressure?

Jon:

Is that the right

Jason:

It's total.

Jon:

It's it's very it's a very persuasive thing.

Jason:

And, so back to my other thread here. The people who use Transistor for the first time, this is the first tool they've used for podcasting. If we do everything right, this will likely be the tool they use for podcasting for a decade. And that it's just interesting thinking about that. 1, from an acquisition perspective, for folks out there that are listening that are on this journey themselves, sometimes it does make sense to get people early on.

Jason:

Right? In the startup stage. I was listening to the Rework podcast, and one thing they're going to try is they're gonna get this list of, LLCs that are formed every year in the states. Mhmm. And they're gonna figure they're gonna reach out to those folks maybe and, and offer their software to them because they're brand new companies.

Jason:

Yeah. And, the other thing this makes me think of is, wow. If people are trying us now and they're gonna use us for the next 10 years, it it almost makes me wanna make better software because I wanna make software that's gonna be worth sticking with for 10 years. Right?

Jon:

Well, yeah. Well, I think that's what we're doing.

Jason:

Yeah. No. I I Yeah. I think so too. But it it it gives me that spirit.

Jason:

You know? It gives me a thinking of if people are, you know, at a podcast meetup and they're saying, hey. What do you use for podcast? Those thing and to think of someone saying, you know, in 2020 no, wait, that's that's next year. Yeah.

Jason:

What's what's 10 years from now? 2029. Oh, yeah. I've been using Transistor for the past 10 years. It's great.

Jason:

Yeah. Like, just imagining that and going, okay, well, wow. What do we have to do every single day? How do we have to show up every single day for our customers in the future to go, oh, yeah. I've been using Transistor for oh, wow.

Jason:

It's been 10 years now. Yeah. They're they're amazing.

Jon:

That'd be, that'd be an amazing goal.

Jason:

Yeah. I mean, we're we're just thinking 6 months at a time right now.

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

Not even. We're thinking 6 weeks at a time.

Jon:

Hopefully, it functions well in in the, the apocalyptic wasteland of 10 years from now.

Jason:

That's all people are gonna be able to do. They're gonna be holed up in their bunkers.

Jon:

Yeah. They gotta stick inside with their air filters, and they're drinking their filtered urine.

Jason:

Listening to pods. Listening to Can we have drinking their filtered urine as the show title, or is that too much? I don't know. Okay. I'm looking at your notes.

Jason:

Yeah. Releasing features.

Jon:

So we have a couple we have a couple things. So in the cool down, we also released a couple small features

Jason:

Yes.

Jon:

Recently, which were the ability for someone who's on a paid account to transfer a podcast to another account.

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

Which is something we we've done a lot for people, but just behind the scenes. But it happens quite often enough to where it was a thing that we wanted to build. Yeah. So it's you know, you entered an email address, and if that person already has a transistor paid account, they just can accept the transfer and then get the podcast. Otherwise, they're asked to sign up.

Jason:

Yeah. This is actually a super cool feature, by the way. Yeah. I I know it seems small, but one of the things I love about Transistor is, you know, if you have a Transistor account and your friend wants to get into podcasting, you can say, hey, just use my account for now. And what this feature allows you to do is, you know, you start your your show on your friend's transistor account, and then you're like, oh, you know what?

Jason:

I want my own account now. You can you can sign up for an account and transfer your existing show from your friend's account over to your account, and it's all built in now. Yeah. We had to do it behind the scenes before.

Jon:

Yeah. And there were a couple there were a couple scenarios that we couldn't actually do because if you were a team member of that podcast but didn't have a paid account, there was no way for you to actually sign up for Transistor with a with a credit card. Mhmm. Unless we deleted your account. And then you just sign up with the same email.

Jon:

So

Jason:

Which from a revenue standpoint

Jon:

Not great. We also fixed that.

Jason:

Yeah. We're just leaving money. Like, people are like, well, I wanna give you my money. And we're like, okay. If you wanna give us your money

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

We have to delete you, and then you have to sign back up.

Jon:

Either that or take a picture of your credit card and send to us, and we'll sign up for you.

Jason:

Yeah. So this is this is a big deal.

Jon:

Yeah. And then a couple of small ones. We implemented, web sub in the RSS feeds, which is the new name for what was called let me get let me see if I can get this right. Pub, sub, hub, hub, which is which is a a publish subscribe sort of, mechanism, I guess. Yeah.

Jon:

It's a it's a much more efficient way to handle checking to see if there's new episodes in your RSS feed.

Jason:

Because what happens right now?

Jon:

What what happens right now is you have an RSS feed, and then places like Apple and Spotify and Google will just constantly check the RSS feed to see if there's new episodes, like, hundreds of times a day. Yeah. Which is kinda crazy that that's how it still works.

Jason:

Like, if you look at our unique traffic for transistor, it's insane because we

Jon:

have it's yeah. It's just RSS feeds getting hammered. Yeah. So what what it's not very well supported yet, but Google Podcast supports it. Yep.

Jon:

But WebSub allows you to submit an RSS feed to this central, like, hub, I guess, that Google actually runs. There's you can you can run your own, but Google runs this one. So you basically say, hey. This RSS feed is now on this hub. Anytime there's a change to it, we're just gonna send a notice to that hub that said that says this RSS feed has changed.

Jon:

We're not gonna say what changed, and then that hub will then send out notices to everyone who subscribed to that RSS feed in the hub that says this thing changed. Can you check it now? As opposed to them checking it all the time.

Jason:

This is how most systems work in modern web development. Right?

Jon:

Yeah. You don't Yeah. No notification. Like yeah. Like, notifications on your phone and stuff like that.

Jason:

Yeah. There's, like, some sort of triggering event.

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

That that pushes that thing out instead of it'd be like your phone constantly checking all of your friends' phones if to see if they'd sent you a new message.

Jon:

Right. Yeah. It's kinda it's crazy. I mean, it I I hope more directories and apps support it. Yeah.

Jon:

It's cool. It's there. It's supported. So as, you know, as new apps, support it, it'll be ready to go. I think I think right now what it means for us and for transistor customers is that people who have their show on Google Podcasts will see new episodes sooner.

Jason:

Yeah. Very common thing is people people publish a new episode and go, hey, it's not on Apple Podcast yet. Yeah. It can take sometimes 2 hours for it to show up.

Jon:

Yeah. That's probably one of our bigger questions we get Yeah. Is why is it not on Apple Podcast or Spotify yet?

Jason:

Yeah. Please, Apple, if you're listening, adopt something like Pub Sub.

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

Because for us to just be able to send you a notice, an event that says, this feed has changed, and then for you to then pull the changes at that point, changes at that point makes so much more sense. Yep. Please, Apple. Please, Tim.

Jon:

Are you listening to Tim? Tim Apple, please do it.

Jason:

Hey, Tim. Can you hear me? Are you listening?

Jon:

Another small one was just an update to how when you share an episode on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere around the web, the image that gets shown is now the episode image instead of the image for the whole the entire show if you actually uploaded a different image, which is something we overlooked. We'd had it set up in other places, but, not for those sharing pages that we have. But it actually brought up another thing, which was the ability for us to auto we could potentially auto generate

Jason:

Oh, yeah.

Jon:

Images for your show that are, you know, the right size and have the right image and have the show title and some other information in it. We can it's fairly easy in well, Ruby in any language really to take a little small HTML template and then just render it as an image. There's libraries to

Jason:

do that.

Jon:

So we could actually generate these sharing images on the fly.

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. That would be cool.

Jon:

In a future in a future cycle of work we do. But

Jason:

Yeah. And did did did this bring up a bigger, like because we've done these little features. And we've also you know, our private podcasting feature has been out now for a couple weeks. Did this bring up a bigger question for you about how we communicate?

Jon:

Yeah. So I've been thinking about this the last few days, last maybe this week is this idea of, like, releasing features and updates and notifying our customers, which we don't really do. Mhmm. So, I mean, even private podcasting, we haven't really announced it yet because we our marketing site isn't finished.

Jason:

But Yeah.

Jon:

We have all these other small updates that we do, and we generally reply back to customers who are in our support queue for it. Like, hey. We fixed this thing or we've we've added this thing that, you know, you and these other people have requested.

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

We don't generally notify everyone, like, get a mailing list or, hey. Like, once a month, here's what's new in in transistor. Right? Yeah.

Jason:

I mean, we do put it we do put it in the we have a newsletter list, and I'll put I usually put a feature update in every one of those.

Jon:

Okay.

Jason:

I don't think I've sent one for a while, though.

Jon:

Yeah. I I I just wonder, like, should we should we just do that every month

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And make sure we do it every month?

Jason:

Like, have it on a a consistent schedule.

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. And the the other thing I was thinking about is, like, you know, we've we've done some interface changes over Mhmm. The last year or months or whatever, and we have talked about doing bigger overhauls to how things are organized. Right?

Jon:

So Yeah. When we make these changes, again, we don't really tell everyone we've changed something. Like, we maybe we changed the wording or the copy or where something's located.

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

And I'm just wondering internally if that is really confusing for people. If we're just Yeah. Moving the changing the UI and not tell and just expecting everyone's gonna discover it and, like, feel the same way the same way we do

Jason:

about it. Again, we've we've communicated some of this in email newsletters in the past. So I think a consistent email newsletter schedule would help because then at least it's like, okay, here's what's changed in the last week and people can kind of depend on it. You know, like, what percentage of people are you actually reaching each time you send out one of those newsletters.

Jon:

Right.

Jason:

And then there's other ways of doing this. Like, some apps, you know, show you a model as soon as you come in with, here's what's changed since last time. But as a user, I know, like, most of the time I'm, like, I don't give a shit. Like, I just you you you know, I just I gotta get back to work. Right?

Jason:

And so the giving people the information at the right time seems so challenging.

Jon:

Right.

Jason:

And we haven't really had we we've had a few big UI changes, and the way we communicated it was just in the newsletter. And it seemed to work pretty good because but our customer base is a lot smaller back then. Yeah. And so now it's like if we decide to really change

Jon:

And we will. I mean, we've definitely we have plans to sort of reorganize a lot of the interface around a show itself, a podcast Mhmm. And where everything we have now is gonna be in there. It's just gonna be moved to a different menu or the menu's gonna change names. That certainly, that type of stuff, we should probably relay that, like, the day we release it.

Jason:

Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. We don't we don't have any built in internal messaging system because then once you build that, it's like, now you gotta you gotta send a message to everyone. You gotta make you know, mark them as read if they read it and not show them that again. Mhmm. So that's almost an entire feature in itself.

Jason:

Yeah. And we could do some of that through mix panel, which we already have set up. Which might be a interesting way to test this is to just do mixed panel at first and see, you know, how do does that really annoy people? Or, you know, how do people respond to that? What we're looking for is the most effective way to communicate with people who care, what's changed.

Jason:

And Yeah. Figuring out, like, the right mix of I it feels like a newsletter at the very least is, like, that's, like, the bare minimum. And for major changes, you're right. Like, we should the day of, we should say, hey, this is changing. And probably we should we should give people even prewarning.

Jason:

Like, hey, just to let you know, this is coming up. Yep. Because people don't like surprises. People don't like logging in to their app their podcasting app.

Jon:

That's when you get feedback that's like, oh, this sucks now. I don't like this update. I'm I'm

Jason:

with them. Yeah. And it could be, like, the update is better for them, but it just it was so disruptive to their normal work flow Right. Of I've got 5 minutes to publish this episode before I've gotta go catch my plane, and you guys messed that up for me.

Jon:

Right. Me thinking about this didn't come from customers complaining that we've changed stuff. I don't think we've really had any complaints about it yet. Mhmm. But it's just something I think that

Jason:

that

Jon:

will that will happen if we don't address it.

Jason:

The other thing in the back of my mind about this is because in the past, you know, when I've worked for software companies, I've sent a regular customer newsletter at the same time every month. And one thing I don't like about it is how forced it sometimes is. It's like customers just know, like, oh, yeah. Here comes another email from Transistor, and, okay. I'll just ignore that.

Jason:

As opposed to just emailing people when there's something to talk about, there's pros and cons about both approaches. Like, I think we could def we're definitely kinda overdue to send one now.

Jon:

Certainly certainly when we finish our site and kind of talk about private podcasting and

Jason:

Yeah. Yeah. But even these small changes, I think, would be interesting to people.

Jon:

Right. But yeah. Even, like, yeah. Like, analytics, which we're gonna work on next, I think

Jason:

Mhmm.

Jon:

That's gonna be a huge change, and we're probably gonna want an entire email about that and what's changed and

Jason:

how to use it. Mhmm. Yeah. I think we did a pretty good job on this with bots when we started removing bots.

Jon:

Yeah.

Jason:

We sent that out in 2 newsletters. We warned them that it was coming, and then in the actual newsletter, we kind of explained it a little bit more, and we had help documentation for it as well. That felt like pretty good. But, again, our customer base is so much smaller back then. So, yeah, hard to figure out.

Jason:

Yep. Well, if you folks out there have an idea on customer communication and how you do it, I I I will tell you, I'm not a big fan of intercom updates. Like, people putting product updates in intercom. Right. It's not not a I I don't know.

Jason:

I I I wanna do this in a way that's not obtrusive, but at the same time is relatively effective. And so, yeah, figuring that out is tricky. I think we should wrap this one up because we're about at 45 minutes. Do you want to thank our Patreon supporters?

Jon:

Sure do. Yeah. Thanks to everyone, as always, for supporting us on Patreon. We have, one new supporter, Eric Lima. Thanks, Eric.

Jon:

Thanks, Eric. Jason Sours from user input dot I o.

Jason:

Travis Sours.

Jon:

James Sours. What did I say?

Jason:

Jason.

Jon:

Chase James Sours. James Sours. Dot I o.

Jason:

As in Justin, I get called Jason, like, 3 times a day. So

Jon:

Oh, man.

Jason:

I think there's some Jason is just is just the, the alpha male of the J and A.

Jon:

For whatever reason, I'm looking at this. It looked like Jason. Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley from nice things dot I o, Russell Brown, Avendra Sassy, Pradey Yumna, Schembecker, Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from aliju.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedraffita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitber, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha danbuda.com. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta. Junta.

Jon:

Kyle Fox from get rewardful dot com, and our sponsors this week, Postmark and Clubhouse.

Jason:

Thanks, everybody, and we will see you next week.