Jon and Justin are tracking a bunch of stuff this week:
We're moving from WordPress to Statamic CMS
"I had no idea how to set up PHP on my laptop."
We want to treat our marketing site the same way we work on our product
We're trying to optimize our PageSpeed (our current mobile score is 63, we want to get over 90)
"And then you came in a like a magician and lazyloaded the JavaScript"
"Collaborative software work is egalitarian. It doesn’t matter who did what, as long as the team is collectively accomplishing something greater than any one person could have done alone." – Jonas Downey
Why the pull request is a great social technology.
Revenue update: August has been our slowest month (for growth) thus far. Is this a seasonal slow down?
Our churn numbers (compared to other SaaS)
★ Thanks to our sponsors:
ProfitWell. If you’re earning recurring revenue from Stripe, you need this tool. It will show you all of your business metrics: MRR, LTV, churn. Sign up for free: profitwell.com
Jon and Justin are tracking a bunch of stuff this week:
We're moving from WordPress to Statamic CMS
"I had no idea how to set up PHP on my laptop."
We want to treat our marketing site the same way we work on our product
We're trying to optimize our PageSpeed (our current mobile score is 63, we want to get over 90)
"And then you came in a like a magician and lazyloaded the JavaScript"
"Collaborative software work is egalitarian. It doesn’t matter who did what, as long as the team is collectively accomplishing something greater than any one person could have done alone." – Jonas Downey
Why the pull request is a great social technology.
Revenue update: August has been our slowest month (for growth) thus far. Is this a seasonal slow down?
Our churn numbers (compared to other SaaS)
★ Thanks to our sponsors:
ProfitWell. If you’re earning recurring revenue from Stripe, you need this tool. It will show you all of your business metrics: MRR, LTV, churn. Sign up for free: profitwell.com
Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.
Justin:
This podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign. They make a customer experience automation platform. This means they offer a lot of tools, email marketing, marketing automation, sales and CRM, messaging. But here's the thing. They don't force you to use the whole suite if you don't want to.
Justin:
If you have some powerful sales and marketing tools already, but you want a platform to connect them all, you should go over to active campaign dot com / build your sass. That's build your sass, all one word. You'll get a free trial, a second month free, and 2 free one on ones.
Jon:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:
And I'm Tustin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor.fm.
Jon:
How's it going, John? I'm a little tired, but I'm good. It's the end of the week. It's late.
Justin:
It's Friday. We always record on Friday. May maybe that's a mistake.
Jon:
Later in the day on Friday. I've just been, like I've had a hard time waking up this week and, like, really focusing.
Justin:
Well, if you wanna feel better about your day, just listen to what I've eaten today. So at 2 AM, I had 2 Okay. Banana and peanut butter sandwiches, washed down with some milk. Then I woke up. I had, 6 cups of coffee.
Justin:
And, then, I realized I needed to make my boys lunch, so we had eggs.
Jon:
So I
Justin:
had 2 eggs, some ham, some toast. And then, we drove up to go mountain biking, and I ate a bag of chips and, a bunch of pepperoni sticks.
Jon:
How old are you? Are you in college? What is this? Do you have pizza
Justin:
for dinner? Almost, actually. We had pizza for dinner last night. It's it's been an interesting dietary adventure over here.
Jon:
More coffee. I think I I drank too much coffee yesterday, and I have a feeling I I I may have a a slight addiction to that. I think I might need to cut down. It's like it was too I was, like, jittery. I don't get that way often.
Jon:
I did not I did not feel good. I think I was having a hard time focusing, and I was like, I'm gonna have caffeine to help me focus, and it did the exact opposite.
Justin:
I just love bringing myself right to that edge, though. Like, where you're drinking it, you're like, oh, this is so good. It's comforting. It's just I don't actually
Jon:
It is. Yeah.
Justin:
I don't understand the people who can just have one.
Jon:
But I think the problem is you always think that one more is gonna is gonna, like, make you more productive, and then you reach
Justin:
Yes.
Jon:
Or whatever. And then And then it's just milk.
Justin:
And then you can't sleep. That might have been my problem last night. Yeah. I think I've been drinking too much too.
Jon:
Probably.
Justin:
It's it's you know, I gotta have something. I've I quit drinking booze. And so Yeah. Oh, you did too.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, I haven't yeah. I haven't had any in a couple months now. I think I think that's easier than coffee. Like, I've definitely stopped drinking coffee before, and it is annoying.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. That
Jon:
Like, it is some serious physical withdrawal.
Justin:
Kids are I quit drinking booze, And my 2nd youngest goes, well, what about coffee? And I said, shut the door. No way. I I can't give up everything. We we would just become poor.
Justin:
I I wouldn't accomplish anything of worthwhile. Getting lots of nice comments from all of our beautiful listeners, Michael Dorinda over in Australia, Down Under. Just, listen to them all. He said, I finished the full Build Your SaaS backlog. And, actually, now he he also except he just finished what he thought was the backlog, but then he realized he actually has 3 more to go.
Justin:
So but he said he loved following along with the journey, hearing our progress. Also hearing how we've developed as hosts. You know, we we've gotten better, he says. So that's good.
Jon:
Yeah. I'm a little I'm a little afraid to listen to the early ones.
Justin:
It it'd be good because it it'll give you a perspective of how far you've come.
Jon:
Yeah. We've I we have gotten a lot of good feedback, though, from people. It's it's it's nice to hear that we are, you know, people find comfort in our in our story or or, like Mhmm.
Justin:
Yeah. That's exactly it. Support support support and comfort. Yeah. Because they they're on this journey too.
Jon:
No. It's not it's not easy to do. It's it's, it's easy to for it's easier to forget that there are other people out there doing something.
Justin:
Yeah. Josh Anderton, who is building Upscribe in Langley, British Columbia. He had some nice things to say about the show on Twitter as well. Just said, yeah. He it, I think it resonates with him because he's on the same journey.
Justin:
Right? Trying to build something that matters, trying to make all of this work. So, yeah, thanks everyone for listening. And if you are listening right now, feel free to reach out to us. You can tweet us at transistorfmor@buildyoursass.
Justin:
That's a thing. Some people, I think, wonder if they should build have a Twitter account for their podcast and for their brand, and I think it's a good idea. Makes it easy for people to to answer or mention you. But, yeah, if you have something to say I
Jon:
think it's still I think it's still a useful platform.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. You've been
Jon:
Amongst the other garbage that's on there. But you can I think feel like the thing with Twitter is you can ignore it pretty easily?
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That was actually some other feedback we got as people were enjoying your hot takes about Facebook.
Jon:
Oh, nice.
Justin:
From last time. Well, let's tell people what we've been working on. Since last week, I'd I'd say most of our time has been spent on the new marketing site.
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. You've been you kinda kicked that off. Had wanted to kinda, like, move away from WordPress. I think we both did.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And with a with a goal in mind of of having it be very fast.
Justin:
That's right. So spending a And
Jon:
and a little bit easier to easier to manage and, like, less reliant on just a bunch of plugins that make no sense.
Justin:
Yeah. We wanted something that was a little bit more of a dev driven CMS. I think something where we could have all the templates and stuff version controlled. I also like having content version controlled because I always have this nightmare about losing everything. I've I've I've had to rebuild sites from, like, cached versions on Google before.
Justin:
And it was like, not fun.
Jon:
No.
Justin:
So, and also, I wanted to be able to edit, you know, HTML directly if I wanted to and not rely on the CMS. But for, you know, doing things that CMSs are good at, which is, oh, hey. Here's I wanna write a new blog post. I wanna, you know, a collection of articles. CMSs are are good at that stuff, and I wanted to be able to use something, you know, that I like writing in.
Justin:
But at the same time, I wanna be able to open up a code editor and go, I just wanna edit the home page and only edit HTML.
Jon:
Right. And not have to, yeah, edit some HTML and then push it to Git and have to be live in 10 seconds as opposed to fighting with WordPress and its WYSIWYG editor and then punching it in the face sometimes and then still not getting where you wanna be. Totally. And then closing your laptop being rich. Maybe that's just me.
Justin:
One thing that is I have noticed that's true. Adam Wavin often says he has a, a low tolerance for pain. Like, if anything if something is really a pain in the ass to use Yeah. And, I this that that it keeps coming up with developers. I'd say that is definitely true for you.
Justin:
Like
Jon:
I think it is. I I get really frustrated for, like, a day, and then I finally get it. Like, with with so we're using static. Is that right? Is that my standard?
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. Static. People often think it says satanic, which I like I like even better. I think they should just adopt that.
Jon:
Be a good name for a
Justin:
satanic.
Jon:
A good
Justin:
name for a CMS. Just, yes, just own it.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
But statamic. Yes.
Jon:
It's funny because I've been using Ruby for the last, you know, however many years, decade.
Justin:
And You're used to it?
Jon:
I'm used to it and all of its quirks, and you are not. Mhmm. So Mhmm. When you were trying to set up our main application, which is in Rails, Ruby on Rails, it was really frustrating for you. And you're like, this makes no sense.
Jon:
How does anyone do this? And I had the same experience with static because it's based on PHP, and I have no idea how to set up PHP on my laptop and actually run a website through it anymore. It's been I mean, it's been years. I I, you know, I used to do it, but it it's totally different than it used to be. There's all these other tools now, plus you have to set up stat for for statamics, which is based on Laravel, which I didn't know really.
Jon:
I didn't really understand how was built until I talked I talked to,
Justin:
Jack McDade.
Jon:
Jack, the creator.
Justin:
Right? He's the he's the founder. Yeah.
Jon:
Yeah. You got me in touch with him, and I asked him a few questions about it. He's super nice about it, but I it didn't really make sense, and it finally clicked. And I was like, oh, it's built on Laravel, which is basically Rails for PHP. So he he built this thing on this PHP framework, it kinda totally made sense after that.
Jon:
It was still difficult to set up.
Justin:
Which is the exact opposite experience I had was that it was, like, easier for me to set up then because when I tried to set I think I've just got years years of Rails craft on my machine. And so when I tried to install our app, I needed someone sitting beside me to, like, walk me through all the steps.
Jon:
I it's it's it's night. I mean, it's I still don't every day is a little easier, and I'm not doing too much with it yet.
Justin:
But Yeah.
Jon:
It makes it makes more sense.
Justin:
Well, I'm I'm glad that I've convinced you so far to use it because, I for me, I choose technology. And actually, I think we all do this. We we choose even developers who feel like they're super rational is we often choose technology based on people like us do things like this. And so all my friends are in the Laravel, Vue, statomic world. And so when I saw statomic, I was like, oh, man.
Justin:
This looks cool. And then when I met Jack, I was like, okay. Jack is cool as shit. I want I wanna hell I wanna use his thing. And, and then we collaborated on my personal site, and it came out so nice.
Justin:
And I love writing in their editor. The editor for for those of you that don't like the new Gutenberg editor with WordPress, try statemic once because the editor is actually nice to write in. So I had a little bit of, you know, religion that I'd already hooked my wagon to. And then I had to convince you. But I I just realized, like, oh, wow.
Justin:
There's so much of this that is about what you're used to and what you're willing to put up with. Right? Like, if all of your
Jon:
I have an absolute total bias against PHP, But it's there's no really there's no rational reason for it. It's just that when I used to use it,
Justin:
it sucked.
Jon:
I found something better at the time, and it was great. And then I just just, like, kind of forgot about it.
Justin:
I think also there's something about me because I'm I'm really learning kind of at the same time how to, you know, contribute code to our rails app, but also I'm learning all this Laravel stuff. And so because I haven't gone through years of pain with any of these things, everything just seems magical and wonderful to me. Like, it just all seems like, oh, wow. This is, like and I I don't know how much pain is too much. Like, I'm just going through things.
Justin:
Everything seems challenging for me, you know?
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
But I have liked that we can both work on it together. Like, I've you've just started like, up until now, I haven't even been doing pull requests. I've just been, you know, contributing directly to master. But now, you know, you I've you had a poll request today, and it was like, oh, yeah. This is this is nice actually for us to be able to work on the marketing site as if it was the product.
Jon:
There's really no great way to do that with WordPress.
Justin:
No. There's some people working on it.
Jon:
Because the content is separate. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's hard.
Justin:
Yeah. And, why don't you tell folks what you did? What what your pull request was today?
Jon:
So the one about our our chat widget?
Justin:
No. No. No. Oh, but that I mean, that was amazing. That, we we should definitely talk about that.
Justin:
So
Jon:
What was the other ones? I already showed you.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. We can we'll we'll come back around to that. Stay tuned, folks.
Justin:
But so
Jon:
I'm gonna I'm gonna go look it up.
Justin:
We've been living in, Google's page speed insights a lot lately. Because one of the big things I wanted to do was optimize this site. You just found it?
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
Optimize this site for speed. And if you go to page speed insights and put your own site in there, you might be surprised how low your mobile score is, which is the one that really matters increasingly. Our competitors, one of them, their mobile score is 32 out of a100, which is definitely in the red and not good.
Jon:
That's an f.
Justin:
That's failing. Another big competitor, huge competitor actually, 12. So, and I was kind of upset. I think our current score is, like, a 63 or something. And I was like, no.
Justin:
This has gotta be all the people I know in search engine optimization say, if you're not over 90, you are leaving rankings on the table. And, that obviously matters a lot to us. So I wanted to you know, this is something I want I care about. But I spent the a long time yesterday optimizing our images. And I I did a whole video on it.
Justin:
I can share that in the show notes. And it was good. I learned how to we can generate WP images, webp images, sorry, locally with JPEG and PNG fallbacks. We size them all locally. Everything happens locally, and then we push that up to the server so it's all static.
Justin:
And then based on the viewport, the browser will choose the size, the actual, you know, the actual, the smaller file size, which is important. And so got all that working. And then but our score was still a 78. It's like, what? And so I'm looking through everything, and then finally, I'm just gonna take our chat widget off.
Justin:
So I remove that. We go from 78 to a100, Like like that. I was like, okay. And so then I tested another chat widget. It went up a little bit.
Justin:
And then you came in like a magician, like a wizard, and you said, why don't I just lazy load this chat widget. Right? Is that what you did?
Jon:
Yep. Basically, I took so, yeah, I took, the JavaScript that they give us, which is basically just a script tag you paste in.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And used most of that, but I had to rewrite a little bit of it, to basically not load it in the page until 3 seconds later. I mean Yes. It's like wait 3 seconds and then inject it into the page. So that helps. I mean, I don't think anyone's gonna know.
Justin:
Well, it helped a lot because our score went from, 82 with this other chat widget to a 100. And that's the best score I've for me, getting that score was like a big success because I knew now, okay, this is possible. We still have to add a little bit more content. So I think I gotta you you you said, well, let's just put the speech speed score to the side for a second. Let's add all of our content, and then we'll come back to this.
Justin:
But just being able to know that it was possible made me feel great. And now it's like, okay. We're gonna finish this homepage off. But I when we deploy it, I just wanted to know, like, okay. This is going to be meaningfully faster for people on mobile and more importantly for Google.
Justin:
Like, when Google's crawling it, I want them to say, okay. We're gonna give these folks a a better score because it's fast.
Jon:
I think that PHP tool is definitely interesting. It does it does give some good feedback.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
I mean, for me, it's like I I never really worried about that. For for I've just never I think I've always yeah. I just I was just never concerned about it. I mean, there's there's not I feel like on the the new marketing side, I think it's still not done. There's still not a there's I think it's still missing content.
Jon:
Right? We haven't really finished it. So I don't know how that's gonna affect it. I'm not sure I would have necessarily gone the, like, efficiency route first. But I can I can totally see how, like, it gets addictive, And you're like, I will need to cut off?
Jon:
I need to shave off.
Justin:
Yes. Well and because a lot of the the home page isn't done, but every other page and blog post from our old site is on there. And so I wanted to know that at least we're on a solid foundation because I don't wanna go so far down this rabbit hole without being like, okay. This is at least possible.
Jon:
Right. Yeah. I think I think I think we can we can move forward now with confidence and add more content and know what is gonna affect it and what we can move.
Justin:
And I'm I'm running all these other pages through, like pricing, blog posts, and they're all 90 to a 100.
Gavin:
Okay.
Justin:
Some of these will have more images.
Jon:
And, like, it yeah. It's also that page speed thing is a little weird because it actually changes every time you do it. It's not always it's not always the same. I mean, it
Justin:
It's it's true that there is some variability. I've I've heard from other folks that a variability of 3 is kind of normal. But, yeah, there's some, like, really important posts, like how to start a podcast is getting a 100 right now. And and these are things we're hoping to rank for. So and honestly, on the homepage, people can go and check it out right now.
Justin:
Marketing.transistor.fm. The the one thing I wanna add that's not there right now is just, a mention about how you can start multiple podcasts on transistor and not get charged for additional shows. And, I'd like to start with actually a pretty minimal homepage. Like, right now, it only has 2 sections. I'm thinking maybe 1 or 2 more sections, and then just I wanna see how this performs compared to the other one.
Jon:
Right. It is it is very minimal. I'm curious to see if people who are unfamiliar with podcasting necessarily will will know will learn enough to actually start a trial.
Justin:
But we can always deploy it and then have a baseline and then test it against the baseline too. So does adding more content improve things, or does it not improve things?
Jon:
Right. I mean, it's you know, do people wanna scroll down a slightly larger page and actually see a few more features and explanation of, like, what we do?
Justin:
I don't know. That's the thing that's the thing I wanna know is, like, how much does that actually help? For a long time, ConvertKit, they have a longer page now, but for a long time, they had a page that was basically all above the fold with one button. And sometimes simplicity helps because people arrive on the page and they're just like, okay, well, might as well just try this thing out. Right?
Justin:
And it's hard to know without testing it. But, yeah, I think we need a a bit more. I I asked some folks, on Slack the other day, and they said, well, there's there's one thing that I keep hearing about Transistor that's not on this page, and that is that you folks do multiple podcasts. So, yeah, so we're gonna keep working on it.
Jon:
Yeah. Cool. So the, the, this pro this Pro request I found
Justin:
this morning.
Jon:
So you I don't know. Whenever a month ago, maybe, you had I think you'd worked with Adam Wadden. Right? Because because you were using Tailwind CSS on the website. Yeah.
Jon:
And it doesn't Tailwind doesn't really include any JavaScript to to handle any sort of interactions. It's just CSS. So you wanted a way on the mobile view to trigger the nav menu to open up with JavaScript. And so you used Vue for that, which is I you probably learned a few things. But I was looking at it, and it was like, it's such a simple it's basically a click that adds a class to a thing to display the drop down menu for mobile.
Jon:
And, you know, going down this road of optimization, like, we don't need to load the entire view library as well just to do that. So my pull request was removing that and just writing it in vanilla JavaScript. So I think it took our I think it took our compiled JavaScript file down from, like, 40 kilobytes to, like, 800 bytes to the I
Justin:
didn't realize that.
Jon:
Yeah. Which, actually, 40 k 40 k for an entire view library is still really good. I mean, that's not that's not huge. That's, like, the size of jQuery or less.
Justin:
Yeah. Yeah. This was I so this is I wanna talk about this in a little bit. But first, I wanna thank profitwell.com for sponsoring this episode. If you are earning any sort of recurring revenue from Stripe, you should just sign up for ProfitWell.
Justin:
It will show you all of your business metrics inside a dashboard, MRR, LTV, churn. In a little bit, John and I are gonna talk about something we're discovering in ProfitWell. But if you're not using it yet, it's free. Go to profitwell.com. You just connect to Stripe.
Justin:
It's like a one click connect, and it will pull in all of your Stripe data and then start giving you meaningful information. And if you do sign up, just let them know that you, that we sent us. That we sent this. That you sent that one. If you do sign up, just let them know that we sent you.
Justin:
There we go. I wanna bring up this blog post in relation to you overriding all this work that I did. All this meaningful code I wrote. All of this, you know, the this. I was so proud of it.
Justin:
I'd finally written a bit of
Jon:
Using the new the hottest new
Justin:
view library. I had avoided JavaScript forever. And now I, you know, I'd written something. It was so it was there. And then John just came in and just took a big eraser and just wiped it out.
Justin:
In the in the poll request, I just I linked to this article. It's by Jonas who works at Jonas Downey, I think. Is that his name? Yeah. Jonas Downey.
Justin:
Mhmm. He works at base camp, and he has this blog post called nobody really owns product work. It's in the show notes. I highly recommend it. Did you get a chance to read this, by the way?
Jon:
I did. Yeah. Uh-huh. I did.
Justin:
And, what did you think, by the way? Did did you agree with it? Did you resin like, what was your your takeaway?
Jon:
Yeah. I I I totally agree with it. I mean, it in my experience working on teams, like, I I think I've experienced both sides of that where you've worked on something for a long time and you're super proud of it, and it goes out to the world, and then someone else on the team comes in and just says, oh, there's a there's a better way to do this. I'm gonna redo it and, you know, improve it. Usually.
Jon:
Like, it's usually a huge improvement. Or or let's say that feature is not actually as useful as you thought on the outset when you started working, which isn't really your fault because usually someone else had actually come up with, or a group of people had have agreed to build this thing, and you build it and it it comes out. And it and it's easy to, I think, take it the wrong way and say that someone else is coming in and destroying your hard work. But on the flip side of that, like, I've definitely been on teams where there's no ego. It's just like, oh, you have a better way to do it.
Jon:
That's awesome. Let's all learn something from it. Mhmm.
Justin:
Yeah. Let's That part is key, I think. And something that Poldi said, which is from the outset with his company, he was just optimizing for learning. I for me, like, I just wanna optimize for learning. So Adam Wadden teaches me something new that allows me to put something on the site that wasn't there before.
Justin:
That's amazing. John's able to come along and go, oh, oh, that's good that that's built, but now I can see a better way to do that. Here's how a better way to do that. To me, that's amazing.
Jon:
There's probably even a better way to do it. I think you can do the same thing with CSS.
Justin:
Yeah. There's a way of hiding it.
Jon:
And and no Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With, like, the target target selector, I think. I think we can do it without JavaScript at all, which is even better.
Jon:
But that's like Yeah.
Justin:
Yeah. That's much too much optimization. We're just gonna we're gonna forget everything else. We're just gonna become optimization machines. But I really like Jonas' the way he he articulates it, which is, you know, collaborative software work is egalitarian.
Justin:
It doesn't matter who did what as long as the team is collectively accomplishing something greater than any one person could have done alone.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, he even goes as far as saying, like, the quote unquote product owner doesn't actually own the product. They're they just own the accountability for decisions of what to build.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, that that's like that's a dictatorship if someone owns it at the top and is, like, basically saying no to everything or yes.
Justin:
Yeah. I think this is why the having a collaborative culture is, in some ways, is different than the way I've worked. I think even a lot of teams out there, some of whom are listening right now, think that they're collaborative, but they actually have this handoff culture that Jason Fried talked about 2 episodes ago, where the, you know, the higher ups decide what we're gonna build next. And then they handed that vision over to the product manager or the product owner. And the product owner writes up the specs for that.
Justin:
And then they hand it over to the designer. And the designer, you know, designs the mock ups how they think it should look, and then they hand it over to the developer. And the it's like, you know, sequentially, it's a sequential workflow. Instead of no. Together, we are going to collaboratively build this as a group and get all of the kind of back and forth and, you know, oh, I've got an idea here.
Justin:
Let's try this. The let's just pair a program on this and see what you you know, I wanna see how you do things. All of that is, really different than the way I've worked before.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
So I I like this idea of kind of taking the ego out of it and, thinking, like, really, this is just bits and bytes anyway.
Jon:
Yeah. I think it's it's it's really easy, I think, to sort of if you if you don't actively work against it to, I don't know, build this culture of, like, jealousy and and, like, behind the scenes sort of, like, talking behind people's backs and be like, I can't believe you took my code and threw it in the trash. You know, I think it also kind of speaks to sort of who you hire
Justin:
Totally.
Jon:
And kind of the process upfront to to, like, go through the interview process and really Mhmm. You know, hire people more, not not just based on their talent, but on on their, I don't know, personality, I guess, I would I don't know if you call it that.
Justin:
Yeah. Exactly. And this is why the poll request is such a a great technology because it's not like you're just going rogue and just, like, going in and changing something and then committing it. And then, like, you know, like, 3 months later, I'm like, oh, I gotta show you guys this view code I wrote, and then I go in and it's gone. You know?
Justin:
The like, I'm I'm at my my high school reunion, and I'm showing people the view code I wrote, but it's not in it's not there anymore. The, you know, the poll request is great social technology. Hey. Here's something I'd like to to do. What do you think?
Justin:
You know? And then I can go in and look at your code and go, okay. Well, I don't completely understand what you did, but I kinda understand it. Like, okay. I can see this a little bit different.
Justin:
And if I need to do that again, I'll probably go back and look at your code and go, okay. Let me see if I can replicate this and do it John's way. Mhmm. So if obviously, like, culture is important and, you know, the personalities at play is important. And then process.
Justin:
Like, if you're going to collaborate, you still need some sort of process. And the pull request, just having that technology to me is incredible because it gives you the opportunity to talk about it. Nothing's hidden. It's all out in the open.
Jon:
Yeah. With the poll request and well, Git in particular, there is a history of the changes. So you can, yeah, look back and be like, oh, that's why they did that.
Justin:
Yeah. I'm I'm digging it. And I think we should before we end the episode, we should talk about, Chris, can you give us a Dun dun dun. We had our in terms of growth, August so far, we're halfway through the month, has been our slowest month. And I just thought maybe we should process that out loud to everybody.
Justin:
Yeah. So we had
Jon:
I think it's time to it's time to just throw it throw the throw in the towel.
Justin:
It's all over. I mean, we knew this would happen eventually. Yeah. We were growing 20 to 30%. And but we always had this kind of benchmark set up in ProfitWell of our goal was to grow 15% month over month.
Justin:
And we've been hitting it every single month. We hit it in July. And then August, we're, I think, around 11% growth month over month, which is still great. That means we're still growing.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
We're also because it's, it's always month over month, it means, you know, in order to continue to grow at that rate, we have always be doing kinda exponentially more revenue. Right?
Jon:
Right. Which is where which is why we get these emails from ProfitWell that's like, you're 30% behind, and you're halfway through the month. And it's, like, oh, god. What?
Justin:
Yeah. I mean, originally, our goal, like, our goal would have been to increase MRR by $500 a month. And then it was like, oh, wow. If we could grow by a 1,000 or 2,000. Well, this month, you know, that 15% growth translates to $3,361 of new MRR.
Justin:
And, we've got about $800 of new MRR this month. Oh, this is interesting. I didn't realize this. We have, $1,400 in new MRR, but we had our biggest month for churn. So we had $643 of churn this month.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, it's it's I think we'd have to dig into it more and try to figure out what is happening if we can. I mean, it's Mhmm. It's either that it's a slow month unless people are signing up because it's the end of summer.
Justin:
And that is a For whatever reason. Thing, actually. I've noticed is that people in the US take August off. And also if you've sent any emails to people in Europe, like the Germans are gone. They are they are on vacation.
Jon:
Right. I mean, yeah, I think a lot of European countries have August. They just have, like, August off. It could be that people are moving to competitors. Mhmm.
Jon:
And we haven't really looked into it. I mean,
Justin:
I could look at
Jon:
I could
Justin:
look at who these people are. Let me see here. Yeah. And I ask folks when they cancel, why they canceled. So you send, automated email to us that just says, hey, this person canceled.
Jon:
Yeah.
Justin:
And, I as soon as I see those, I send them just a manual email that says, hey. What you know, is there a reason that you that you canceled? Part of the the sense I'm getting back, this qualitative data I'm getting back is that, you know, August is a slower month. People are reviewing their credit card statements. And some folks, wanted to start a podcast, but just haven't.
Justin:
And so they're kind of like, okay. Well, you know, the the new school year is starting. Do I wanna, do I wanna keep going with this? Nah, let's let's cancel now. So I think that's part of it is seasonal.
Justin:
When you look at them 1 by 1, they really seem like, oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. A lot of these folks, you know, they they're just not doing their show anymore. We haven't had a lot of people, cancel and go to competitors this month, at least from what I can tell.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, it could be, you know, people are anxious about the economy. I mean, there's, like, you know, this worry about this global recession that might happen and I
Justin:
don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm looking at this list here. You know, like, here's a a sports show.
Justin:
They joined a network, and so they didn't need podcast hosting anymore.
Jon:
Mhmm.
Justin:
It all seems really pretty reasonable to me. There was no huge red flags from what I was getting I was getting back.
Jon:
Okay.
Justin:
And like many things, we're still so young that we need you know, we kinda need more data before we can really, you know, make make other decisions. So
Jon:
Yeah. We're just we're just we're just making assumptions at this point, I think.
Justin:
Exactly. But I think it's worth mentioning and just saying, yeah. Well, hey. It slowed down, but nice nice thing is it's still growing.
Jon:
But the way I where the when I see that email, I'm like,
Justin:
I mean, maybe maybe you need to you need to cancel your your you need to get your your your profit well. I mean, if you look at our in profit well, if you look at churn let's see. I mean, it was all pretty it was all pretty even. And then yeah, definitely July August, it's been higher. But honestly, I think that's because their people are bored at the office and this is where they're evaluating their expenses.
Justin:
Also, this is the time where people start thinking about year end. Right? Because September, October, November, December, those are like, we're getting into the last quarter here. That's that's what's happening now. Churn is still like, ProfitWell is projecting our churn to be 4.4% this month.
Justin:
Still not too bad.
Jon:
Yeah. Not bad.
Justin:
But obviously and actually, I think our business is going to be just, is going to have churn no matter what because it's you know, some people have an idea to start a podcast, but then they don't start a podcast. That's just kinda how it works.
Jon:
Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we I think we do have a number of accounts or people that have signed up that's, like, a show with 1 episode or even no episodes or something. Mhmm. And, like, they it's kinda like buying a domain name. Right?
Jon:
Yep. You buy his domain name with this aspiration of building something.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jon:
And then you don't. So it just sits there.
Justin:
Exactly. As a comparison, ConvertKit, they've just been able they've been reducing their churn a ton lately, but they're at 4.5%, which is, I think, as low as it's ever been. And that's up I mean, sorry. That's down from, November 2018. They are at 8.5% churn.
Justin:
July 2018, 7.2. So they were kind of around the 7 to 9% churn rate for a long time, and they've just managed to get it down, now to to under 5%. So I think we should care, but, I I get Yeah.
Jon:
I mean, we also, you know, we also have, I think, some some good ideas in the pipeline that should
Justin:
Yes. Yeah. Should help. Especially for the for folks out there that have been kind of hounding us to get some of that expansion revenue. And, so Ben Ornstein, if you're listening, we we we're we're we're on it, man.
Justin:
Like, we're we got some stuff planned. Just give us some time. Thanks everyone for listening. Again, hey. If you haven't if you haven't, given us a review in iTunes or Apple Podcasts, just pop that sucker open, search for build your sass, and then scroll down, and 5 stars that really, we just appreciate it.
Justin:
And, also, podhunt.app is a new place you can submit your favorite episodes to and upvote them like on Reddit or Product Hunt. So if you have a favorite episode of build your Sass, go to podhunt.app. John, we have 2 new Patreons. We've just broken $300 in monthly Patreon support. And, Yeah.
Justin:
Why don't you thank them?
Jon:
That's awesome. Yeah. Thanks everyone for, continuing to support us. We have Evandro Sassy.
Justin:
Sassy? Sassy. Know. I hope it's sassy.
Jon:
Could be sassy.
Justin:
Could be sassy.
Jon:
Like Yeah. Show. I don't know.
Justin:
Let us know, man.
Jon:
Pradyumna shimbeca. I think
Justin:
that was pretty good. I think he also goes by PD for short. So, PD, if you're listening, let us know if in the future, we can just say PD. There's an advantage here because I think PD could be the new Junta. It could be Junta, like a Junta junior.
Justin:
Right? Where people kinda get in there's gonna be a rhythm. We we got PD. We got Ben. You know?
Justin:
It I think it's got a good flow.
Jon:
We do have and Ben next.
Justin:
Just Ben Ben, you gotta let us know if you want your last name in there. We're give we're letting you be anonymous now, but you don't have to be.
Jon:
And we have Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from elitu.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedrafita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis. Mhmm. My brother Dan Buddha.
Justin:
Dot com.
Jon:
Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave
Justin:
Junta. I by the way, did you see that thing I sent you from Instagram?
Jon:
Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:
I don't I don't know. Jinta's starting to get more popular than we are. I like I I I, just kind of gave a shout out to some people at, Podcast Movement. These folks at SquadCast and then one of the people that work there or the faners said, hey. Thanks.
Justin:
Means a lot coming from you. I'm a big fan of your show. And then he just has a big hashtag that just says, Junta.
Jon:
We might have to get Dave on.
Justin:
Yeah. I I think we I think we do. That that will be a huge episode. If we get Junta, oh, man. And then I'd probably say Junta a lot.
Justin:
Yeah. I we should have him on the show, though.
Jon:
We should. Kyle Fox at get rewardful.com, and our sponsors this week, ProfitWell and ActiveCampaign.
Justin:
Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next week.
