Is it a good idea to be a transparent startup?
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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.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson and my pecs are sore.
Jon:I feel like my voice is scratchy. I don't know why. Or it sounds different because I'm wearing different headphones. I don't
Justin:Your voice does sound
Jon:a little bit Does it? I should have made some tea.
Justin:A little bit different. Yeah. Just a little bit. Depending on the phase of the moon and depending on anything else.
Jon:The quality of the air, I don't know.
Justin:The quality of the air. I
Jon:don't know.
Justin:Your voice can sound different. The folks at home
Jon:get that new still gonna get that new microphone.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Did you order something yet?
Jon:Not yet. I,
Justin:I asked on Reddit what folks would recommend for your voice, and I can't remember what came out.
Jon:Yeah. I looked at a few things too, and it said condenser mics are not good because of because I'm not in a professional space.
Justin:Yeah. Condenser mics And tight
Jon:are like dynamic mics are better for, like, potentially noisy places.
Justin:Yeah. So condenser mic, the most famous is the Blue Yeti. And actually, even the blue that one that you've got there, those are both condensers. They have 2 problems. 1 is they suck in all of that noise from the room and from outside.
Justin:They're also tend to be quite bassy. So they're going to amplify the bassiness already in your voice.
Jon:There wasn't there was an Audio Technica. Is that the right brand? Am I say that right?
Gavin:Yeah.
Jon:They have one that's, like it's, like, reasonably reasonably cheap, and it's USB and XLR, so I don't necessarily need to get one of those rigs. You know, I get up the mixer. I don't Yeah. Need a mixer right away.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:I don't I don't know. Yeah. I don't want that much gear. Yeah.
Justin:So You got
Jon:the option.
Justin:Yep. Those mics are the ones we recorded with in Portland. The Audio Technica 21100. Yeah. And Yep.
Justin:It's really good for folks starting off. Actually, the one that people recommend now as a replacement to the Audio Technica, which is still a great mic, is the Samsung q two u, which is similar, even a little bit more cheap. And, the sound quality is even a little bit better. So Interesting. Yeah.
Justin:A few options there. You should you should order a mic though and do a side by side comparison.
Gavin:Yeah.
Justin:Either the 21100 or the q2u to see which one you like better. Actually and one thing about mics, as someone who listens to a lot of podcasts that get submitted to Transistor, I think there's 2 things I would recommend. 1, get either of those mics that we just mentioned and get a pop filter. Because the plosives, the the p sound, is the thing that will, most negatively affect your sound. And I was recording I recorded that honey badger ad, their first ad on trend on our show in my closet with a blue yeti.
Justin:And I couldn't believe how many of those plosives, those p sounds it picked up. But just by putting a a screen in front of the mic really helps. So yeah. What what are we what's been going on so far? We started our shaping our official 6 week cycle.
Jon:Our 6 week cycle. Yeah. We, put it off a little bit because we had a few things to finish. I guess I yeah. I spent a couple days doing it so far.
Jon:Yeah. So right? Wednesday. Maybe, yeah, 2, 3, 2 and a half days.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:I think it's so we had a we had another shaping call on Tuesday.
Justin:Mhmm. Yep.
Jon:And just kinda went over a couple more unknowns and sort of made a few stories that we could made made some stories in Clubhouse that we could then use to sort of have a conversation about.
Justin:Yeah. They're kinda like anchor points. I think there has been a question about tools with all of this stuff. I I keep listening to other podcasts, like, in our space. And lots of people are talking about base camps shape up process.
Gavin:A lot of folks are like, okay.
Justin:We're gonna try this. We're gonna do these 6 week cycles. We're going to shape the work before we start building it. But now that we're in it, I it just felt like I was like, oh, man. What's the right tool for this job to organize all this work?
Justin:And Yeah. Even, like, what does it look like day to day? Because it almost feels like you and I should be on more calls almost just to, like, talk things out.
Jon:Yeah. I think that's still a big unknown for us is how do we yeah. What's what's the cadence like on this? And, you know, I think the question you had when we were going through our our document that we're building about this feature is, I think, your your main unknown was, like, where how do you where do you start? Mhmm.
Jon:Which I guess I just sort of I didn't really think about that because to me, it there was a starting point, but I think after we we talked about it and I explained how I would start building it
Justin:Yeah. Kinda
Jon:made more sense. It it,
Justin:Yeah. I was thinking, like, what view like, would you start with building a specific view? Or would you, you know, would you start with the model and just go from there?
Gavin:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:I think I sort of explained it as, like, more of an inside out method where you're sort of starting with, like, this the the core piece of it. Mhmm. Building some fairly janky views and rails and just, like, using it as almost like a sketchpad. Yeah. We know we know what we wanted to accomplish, Not necessarily exactly how, but, like, gotta start somewhere, and Rails Rails is very good about, you know, prototyping pretty quickly and testing things out.
Justin:Yeah. And you actually got fairly fairly far. Like, what did you what do you kinda have right now?
Jon:There's a couple views. There's a new model, adapted some old code to kind of be used along with this. But it you know, it's it's these views that you have to manually type in in URL to go to. There's no links or no navigation built in for it yet. You gotta it's a basic a basic form and a basic list of stuff, and you can remove an item, the new model, the new, you know, the new piece of data that gets created.
Jon:There's some things that happen behind the scenes to send an email, but, like, there's not a lot of the lower level, like, permissions and stuff like that that doesn't really need to be there yet just to test it out. So, like, pretty much any you know, we haven't deployed this, obviously. It's only locally that we can use it, but this feature will be locked down to certain accounts, and, like, that's not in place at all. There's no there's nothing like that. So it's it's just very basic so that we can get to a point where we can probably deploy something to staging so that we can test it out in a real environment, test out the flows, test out you know, does this does this work?
Jon:How does this feel?
Justin:Now we're kind of dancing around what we're building. I think we've talked about this in the past. I think I think we could talk about it. Although, just a a quick sidebar, because people have asked, you know, how about as being a transparent startup and how that feels. I will say as at this point, I think initially the idea of being transparent was really beneficial for us.
Justin:At this point, I'm starting to feel a little bit more paranoid.
Jon:I know. Yeah. I I feel the same way.
Justin:About what even talking on this podcast, and it's gonna suck in some ways because even talking on this podcast about we're doing, you yeah. You can go a little bit crazy thinking that peep competitors are going to be listening and and, you know, doing things that you're doing or taking note or
Jon:Right.
Justin:Whatever. And I'm still not decided about that. There's part of me that wants to be, like, it's fine for us to just talk about everything. And, you know, we're still gonna be far enough ahead that it's not going to matter.
Jon:Yeah. But is it is it too early in our cycle to to even know whether or not this thing is gonna be launched? I mean, not they might not.
Justin:Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. Especially if we use that circuit breaker technique, which is if it's not done, we just put it on.
Jon:And we could start testing it out and be, like, you know what? This doesn't actually work.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. Because I think it is more interesting for listeners if we tell them what we're building.
Justin:And even on the revenue front, we've been sharing all of our revenue numbers. I think recently that's been I know this is a big sidebar, but, I think recently that's bugged me more.
Jon:I know. I I it feels less and less comfortable, and I don't know why. Like, there's obviously these bigger companies that are making 1,000,000 of dollars a month that are still fine with it. I don't I can't really put a finger on it.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Like, ConvertKit is fine with sharing their numbers, and they have huge numbers in buffer as well. I think part of it is that it's ended up causing me more kind of public drama. Because because people can see it, they make assumptions about what's because there's only a little bit of the story there.
Justin:Even though you can see how much revenue we're making every month and everything else, there's only a little bit of the story there. And but all folks are seeing is, oh, you guys are at, you know, 25 k a month. That's a big deal. And one thing Jordan Gall said from Bootstrap Web, he's like, listen. Like, most folks don't realize that even at a 100 k MRR, there is still a lot of expenses that people don't see a lot of, you know, even the idea of paying taxes and affiliates and infrastructure.
Justin:Like, did you see ConvertKit's AWS bill? Did you see that post?
Jon:Oh, that was really yeah. We should link to that post. That was really interesting.
Justin:And there it and someone today has a It
Jon:kinda it kinda blew my mind. I mean, I I've obviously been trying to keep our costs low, but, man, that was I would I would that'd be great to have all that power. Yeah. But it it would wipe us out.
Justin:Yeah. It's like their bill is, like, $65 or something.
Jon:Yeah. Just their database bill was, like, 25,000 a month.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Their relational database service, 19,000 a month. That's like almost as much as we make in a month. Right?
Jon:I know.
Justin:Yeah. I'll definitely link to this. So anyway, let's close the sidebar. But I don't really have any conclusions except that Yeah. I'm I'm starting to feel less comfortable about it.
Justin:And, I think the other thing is that I think initially, it was helpful for the bootstrapping community, and I think it was also made sense because a lot of our customers were intact. But now looking at our in our inbound, it's just we that is not really our market anymore. Most of those folks wouldn't care.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And in some ways, it would even now we're talking to bigger enterprise companies. And I think if they knew, it would almost hurt our our pitch to them. You know? It's like, oh, well, these guys these guys are making less than we spend on, you know, putting fresh bananas in the kitchen every month for employees. Right.
Jon:So We got us we got a message in in our support system, I think. It was just like, one day it was, like, is it really just YouTube building this?
Justin:Which I think part of me is cool with that part.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Because, you know, I don't I don't wanna pretend we're something we're not. And even with these big enterprise companies, it's fun for me to be able to say, you know, like, we're a small company. Don't don't expect, you know, don't expect that we have 300 folks working here that are, you know, like, this is who we are. And it does allow us to be a lot more relaxed.
Jon:Yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see where it goes. I mean, I think we'll probably we can talk about whatever we're building as soon as it makes sense. Do we have something to show or something to preview?
Jon:Or Mhmm. Like, once we know more once we have a better idea. But Yeah. Totally. I guess back to the whole back to the whole Yeah.
Justin:So back to shaping.
Jon:1st 1st cycle. Yeah. I mean, I'm generally, I think, feeling pretty positive
Justin:about it. I am too. I I did like the idea that we we had this is the most it feels like we've thought about an upcoming feature. And these touchstones we put into And so now we have a place to collect all this information that we're finding out about, you know, this research we're doing. Because we're still in this phase of the project where we're there's tons of unknowns.
Justin:We're figuring stuff out.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, we we have a very we know what the destination is, but not necessarily, like, the exact directions to get there. So there are still a lot of unknowns as we build this thing out, I think, and I think that's gonna be that's gonna kind of inform how often we talk. Mhmm. Like, I asked you this today, and I was like, you know, are we are we still just talking once a week and then the rest of the time we're just building?
Jon:Or, you know, does it make sense to just hop on a call when it makes sense if we're both available? Yeah. Just to, you know, share a screen and run through some some prototypes or just talk about something that came up that's like, oh, we thought maybe we could do this, but, actually, it has to be this way or, like, this probably won't work or this might be potentially really confusing for somebody to use.
Justin:Yeah. I think that makes sense because I mean, really, a lot of this is about what works for us as a team. And to have whenever it's possible to have kinda high fidelity information being shared, that seems helpful. And maybe sometimes that's a call. I record a lot of videos and, you know, that that can be an effective tool.
Justin:Sometimes it's just text. But a call and screen share just seems to make sense if if it's just a quick, like, hey, you got, you know, 5 minutes to look at this. That makes sense.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And we're small enough that, you know, we still have really big chunks of time of unbroken focus if we want it. Yeah. So I think if that ever started to, you know, get hurt, then, yeah. We would want to, adjust it. But right now, it's seems like, yeah.
Justin:Let's jump on a call. Let's figure this out.
Jon:So yeah. Well, I guess we'll, you know, see how it goes. I'm cautiously optimistic. There's obviously other ways to do feature building and
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And project management. Yeah.
Justin:There does seem to be lots to like about it. So we'll keep updating folks on that. Let's do a little bit of follow-up from last episode. I think I think that could be interesting. So one response we got, we we were talking about this new super cast business.
Justin:And one listener wrote in and by the way, we love it when folks write in and and email their thoughts. They were wondering if we were a little bit biased, in terms of discounting the idea of a market for supercast because we we kinda discounted Supercast a
Gavin:little bit, or at least I did,
Justin:and then immediately brought up how successful Patreon has been. And so Right. They were wondering, like, what's the difference between those 2? Like, I was saying that supercast doesn't pass the mom test, which is, this book that Rob Fitzpatrick wrote, which basically says people will continue to do what they've already been doing. It's much less likely that if they say, oh, if they if they promise you some sort of future behavior that it'll actually come true.
Justin:Yeah. I I think it's worth addressing that because anyone else who's building a SaaS company might be in a similar situation. Like, why not? Go you know, Patreon's doing great. Why not just go after that market?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, I hope we didn't come off too negative. I mean, obviously, like, I think it's cool that it's cool that they built a product, and I hope it does well. I mean, more, you know, more podcasting is better for everyone in the space.
Justin:And I tried I I tried one out too. I I should link this up. I, I did a demo of glow.fm. It was, it was cool. Like I used it.
Justin:I'm like, oh, wow, this is really cool. And maybe if we weren't using Patreon, maybe we, we would use it. There was definitely some cool things about it. I think the difference is that Patreon is venture backed. They have $47,000,000 and they got that money because they were really creating a new product category.
Justin:I think most bootstrap businesses, especially should not pursue that strategy. I actually have, I was just rereading Stewart Butterfield's we don't sell saddles here essay. Do you remember that famous essay of his? No. Okay.
Justin:I've got a pretty good tweet thread on it, and I'll include that as well. But the whole the the the kind of highlighted piece is where he says, what Slack is selling is not the software product, not the set of features, specific implementation, because he says there's just not that many buyers for the software product. He's speaking back in 2014. And then in brackets, he says, people buy software to address a need they already know they have or perform a specific task that they need to perform, whether they that is tracking sales, contracts, or editing video. So in this essay, he's basic Stewart is saying, that's not what Slack's about.
Justin:Slack is creating a new category. We're selling, you know, we're not selling a group chat system. We're selling organizational change. And more power to them. That's that's, trying to carve out this whole new idea, this whole new paradigm that's never been tried before.
Justin:But as I was reading that, I was like, wait a second. Bootstrap startups are different. And anyone building a smaller software company, the goal is to not to change the way people behave. It's to recognize where people are already in motion and to build solutions for the direction they're already headed. Mhmm.
Justin:Like, we're we're not creating the waves. We're riding them.
Jon:Right. Yeah. That's a good distinction.
Justin:And I think that distinction holds true here for Patreon too. They, you know, Patreon is trying to create a whole new category. Their business model isn't sustainable. They're losing tons and Right.
Jon:I was just gonna ask that. Are they are they successful? I mean, they're successful in one metric and that they are, like, they're the go to platform for this, but they're not a sustainable business.
Justin:Yes. Even with all that funding, they haven't figured out a way to make it work. And I think the third thing that applies to Patreon is they're not just for podcasters, they're for all creators. So they have a huge potential audience of video creators, journalists, musicians. And so from a VC's perspective, Patreon may have passed the mom test in that there are thousands of creators actively looking for a way to earn a living.
Justin:There's evidence and momentum with Kickstarter and Gumroad and and other things. So a venture capitalist might go, okay. This passes the mom test because we can see all of these creators in motion. But from an individual entrepreneur's perspective, especially a boot strapper, Patreon wouldn't have passed the mom test because, you know, most artists and creatives aren't making any money. Only 2% of creators right now on Patreon make a living wage.
Justin:And so from that perspective, you know, you might be able to evaluate it as a business opportunity and go, okay, well, maybe there's not enough here for us to bet on that direction.
Gavin:Does that
Justin:make sense?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Again, we could be wrong. Supercast might be a big success. Glow. Fm is really cool if you're trying to create a paid podcast. Of course, the the the challenge most podcasters have is like, especially the folks that are pursuing that kind of model is you just need a lot of listeners.
Jon:It seems like such a hard market to create because the volume is not there. Like, I I have a hard time believing that these popular podcasts will just wanna switch to this private model where people pay. Like, they already have a huge audience. It seems to be working well for them. I I maybe maybe they know something I don't or we don't.
Jon:But Yeah. It just seems like it seems like a tough road.
Justin:Yeah. There are people for ideological reasons that don't wanna use Patreon. And so there might be a market there. But again, we're talking about such a tiny group of people. Like, the percentage of podcasters that wanna monetize in this way is already quite small.
Justin:And then of that group, the percentage that have an audience big enough to have any sort of success using that model is even smaller. And so, yeah, I, it just, it still, to me feels like a hard, a hard sell, but Yep. I'm I'm just, yeah. Just updating folks. I I I think what's more interesting is for people looking to start a business as they're evaluating opportunities.
Justin:Just because a big venture backed company is currently making waves in a given category. Doesn't mean that's good evidence
Gavin:to jump into that category.
Jon:I get I'm I've just been really wary and so I just I guess a little negative of that whole model these especially with places like Uber and Lyft and, like, companies like they seem great at the beginning. They're venture backed. It's, like, seem to be addressing this need that people had, and it just it keeps getting worse and worse. Like, it it it's creating more problems than it is solving, and they're not making any it's not a sustainable business. So the the venture backed I mean, it's always a gamble, and you're creating you're creating a new market, essentially, but, and that's that's the that's the gamble these investment firms are taking.
Justin:Yeah. Exactly. For most people that are building a business or want to start a business, just so they have, you know, maybe a better life, maybe more freedom, maybe, you know, they're just tired of working for someone else. Those are not good bets for sure.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And, I I I think one thing that I'm just presenting for people to think about is the different how you evaluate an opportunity. And one of the ways you wanna evaluate the opportunity is, okay, my potential customers, what are they currently using? Yeah. What how did they get to that decision? Do they pay for it easily?
Justin:How may how many decision makers are there? How often
Jon:do they switch? I mean, Supercast, I would hope, did a lot of research before they built the whole thing. I mean, they must have seen a need and talked to people and and, otherwise, that's a huge
Justin:Yeah. Which is another good point. Like, all of us folks, armchair quarterbacking on the side, don't know what other people are seeing. Most of the guesses people have about Transistors business are so wrong. Like, people guess about what kind of customers we have, you know, what what where we get our customers, what kind of people stick around.
Justin:Tons and tons and tons of assumptions that for me seeing the actual data, which is who is actually signing up, you know, where do they come from? What are they trying to accomplish? Most of the stuff people guess on the outside is just they it's wrong. They don't because they're not seeing the data we see. So this could be a case of that too, where there's some data that we're not seeing.
Justin:Let's take a break. Hey, John. I got a question.
Jon:Yep.
Justin:What sound does a honey badger make?
Jon:I would think a high pitched screeching noise.
Justin:You think kind of like a monkey? Like
Jon:Yeah. I think so.
Justin:Okay. Well, click on that link there and listen to this. You can even fast forward a little bit just to listen. What what does it what's a honey badger actually sound like? How would you describe that sound?
Jon:Kind of like a monkey, but like a dog barking and or breathing loudly.
Justin:This sounds like a wild animal.
Jon:It does.
Justin:Well, that's because the folks at honeybadger.io are wild. See what I did there? About DevOps monitoring. They do exception monitoring. They do uptime monitoring.
Justin:They do check-in monitoring. If you have a web app, you need it. Head over to our friends at honeybadger.io and start a free trial. And let them know that we sent you. Really like those guys.
Justin:They got a good show too. Found your quest, which I think should be starting soon. Hey. Yeah. Honey Badger, where's your podcast?
Justin:You said you're starting up in the fall again. Waiting for that new episode. We also had a listener feedback about this, and I think it's a, interesting question. You mentioned the need to accrue 10 k MRR in a reasonable amount of time. Do you care to elaborate on this time threshold?
Justin:Is it different for every company or market? You know, if at 6 months you haven't met x amount of MRR, should you just quit? And what year should you quit? So this is an interesting one. I think, obviously, this really depends on what you wanna get out of this.
Justin:Like, the outcome you're looking for. And, the market you're in, the product you're selling, whether or not you're willing to take a loan or investment. Right.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. How much it's physically wearing on you to work on this if it's your other job or
Justin:Yeah. I think that's the part I was gonna bring up. I think for us now in retrospect, that first year where we were working on Transistor, but you were working a full time job. And, I was focusing a lot on transistor, but we weren't really paying ourselves anything.
Jon:Right.
Justin:That was hard on both of us.
Jon:It was. Yeah. I think we were lucky in the we got to where we were a lot faster than we thought. I mean, we had a we had a 5 year goal of getting to where we were. Right?
Jon:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, at the end of that year, if we were only at, like, 5,000 a month, I I don't know. We might have just called it quits and
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Said this isn't working. I mean, it's it's yeah. I guess it it does depend on, you know, what you wanna get out of it. Like, I think we both knew we wanted to do this full time and, you know, leave our leave our job or, you know, for you, work on your other stuff a little less and focus more on this. But had that not been the plan, like and we were okay just working on it on the side slowly, like, you know, maybe we would have kept going.
Jon:And it would have eventually gotten to the MR we wanted, but a lot slower.
Justin:Yeah. I think there's 2 good case studies here. One is to look up, Ted Pitts at More Aware, has a great blog post on how they grew that. It's a really niche SaaS business. And it took them a long time.
Justin:It took them, I think, 10 years to get to kind of true profitability. And it's interesting seeing their perspective. And so if you read that blog post and you go, you know what? I'd be okay with that kind of growth. Then, you know, go for it.
Justin:That that's one path. The other path would be Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, who says, you know, if you're 2 years in and you still need a day job, so meaning you haven't hit in North America as a solo founder 10 k MRR. By definition, this business doesn't have good fundamentals. And I think there is something about that that resonates with me because it's so easy to chase an idea that's just never going to work. And increasingly, the business people that I see that have started multiple businesses that are successful, folks like Jason Cohen and Richard Branson, they test things out.
Justin:And if it doesn't feel right, they get out right away.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And I think part of that is because so much of the potential for growth is built into the market itself. And so you feel right away what it's like when you even as in a small little independent who's just getting started out and nobody knows who you are, there's this a certain momentum that you feel when there's just a lineup of people that want what you have. And so I know I've given this example before, but like, if it's a hot day at the beach and there's an ice cream stand already selling ice cream, and they've got a huge lineup of a 100 people. And then you pull up with your little bicycle and your your popsicles and your bicycle, you know, situation. People are gonna going to see you and are going to be like, oh, I'll just go over to that.
Justin:What do you call those? Those bicycle popsicle things? Cart? Carts. Yeah.
Jon:Cart? Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. I'm gonna go to John's ice cream cart because that line's a lot shorter. Right? Yeah. That kind of momentum is, I think, is important for businesses.
Justin:You know, you could start like, Honey Badger, they started this company that does, you know, air tracking and all this stuff. And they had big competitors. And I think people were, like, well, we'll go with Honey Badger because they have better customer support. The the that big enterprise company, they take forever to get back to us. Honey Badger got back to us right away.
Justin:There should be this feeling of, you know, there's there's something happening. There's some momentum. I always think of this story I saw on TV. There's a Canadian version of the Shark Tank called Dragon's Den. Mhmm.
Justin:And, this couple had been working on this idea for something like 15 years. It was sports trivia booklets that were supposed to be sold in the grocery aisle, like grocery lineup. And the the dragons are asking you know, these business people are asking these entrepreneurs, okay. Like, what are your numbers? And this couple's talking about their numbers.
Justin:And it's just you can tell this business is not going anywhere. They've invested all this money. They have all this sunk cost in it, and they've been doing it for 15 years. And now they're trying to get this investment from, you know, this TV show. And the people on the panel were like, why have you spent so much time working on this idea?
Justin:Like, clearly, the fundamentals are no good here. And I think it's easy for us as human beings. Like, I've fallen into this where you start a business, and you've just invested so much money and time. And the numbers aren't good, but you just fool yourself and to keep going.
Jon:Yeah. It's it's hard to give up something that you've put so much time and effort and, yeah, energy into.
Justin:So I think, again, that question's gonna the answer to that question is going to depend And maybe, like, you need some sort of circuit breaker for killing an idea.
Jon:Yeah. Or maybe you could hand it off to someone else. Or or, you know, come up with a situation where it's like, hey. I don't know. Selling is the right idea, but, if it's a product that that works and and makes money, maybe someone else could would wanna take it over.
Justin:Yeah. There there's, there's some companies that have started buying suites of SaaS products. And so, you know, a a product that's doing 3 to 5000 MRR might be a great fit for someone like that. Yeah. I think related is this this Twitter thread from John.
Justin:I think his last name is Young Fook. John Young Fook. He's quite well known in the indie makerspace, And he just talked about shutting down his app, Talk Show. And he had this great launch where there were, like, let's see, 4000 sign ups. And so, initially, he was really encouraged, like, oh, wow.
Justin:This is great. But less than 1% of users ended up making, a video of themselves. It's a video product. And so the activation was really low. And so he made the decision to, you know, it was 4 months of coasting on 0 revenue.
Justin:2 weeks after a pivot that failed to positively affect any metrics, he's killing it today, Friday 13th. And to me, this is the right decision. He tried something out. He ran it for 4 months. It wasn't working.
Justin:He tried to pivot. And the, you know, it it just wasn't there. And instead of, like, continuing to pivot or continuing to try to grind on this thing, he's going to put his energy into something else.
Jon:Right. Yeah. I think I think we probably would have come to that same conclusion.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And maybe maybe it would have been easier for us to do it together knowing that both of us sort of have a hard time giving up. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Cool.
Justin:So, yeah, I'll put all of that in the show notes. Anything else we should talk about this week? We had one more question here.
Jon:Yeah. I think this is the one I'm looking at regarding the the player we were launched. We launched a updated embeddable player with a dark mode in it, so you can toggle between light and dark. It actually includes a number of other upgrades and and improvements. But we had I kinda wanted to get it done before we started this 6 week cycle, but it because it just been, like, I had been sort of slowly working on it when I could.
Jon:And we had someone had tweeted at you, right, a question. I see that transistor I see that transistor spends a lot of time developing the web player, adding new features like dark mode, etcetera. I was wondering how's the percentage of listens on the web compared to native apps? Is the time you spend on that worth the listens you get?
Justin:Yeah. Which is Which is What's your response to that?
Jon:I I can see I can see where this person's coming from. I mean, we have a lot of other things we wanna work on. The web player is still it's still pretty popular. I mean, a lot of people embed it. It's of it's also a very, like, the number of listens aside, it's it's also a very public facing, like, entry point to transistor.
Jon:It's visible, you know, around the web and plus for me, it's, like, kind of a fun thing to work on because it's a it's a very, like, isolated little project, and I get to experiment with, you know, new technology. I learned I learned Vue JS for the, playlist player. Yeah. I mean, if you kinda have to look at it in a couple different ways as far as the value of spending time on it.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that's interesting about this question to me is it brings up this idea of there being different types of features that can perform different types of roles. So let's just say we don't even, I don't even know the numbers off the top of my head, about, you know, what percentage.
Justin:I mean, I'm guessing for most podcasts, the web player is 5 to 20% of their listens. But the player has an outsized role in marketing the service, And and also how plays an outsized role in why people sign up.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:People hire Transistor to give them a beautiful web player that they can embed on their website. Even if only 5% of their listens comes from that web player, it's still important to them. Mhmm. And it might even play in in out, like, emotionally, it's playing a much greater role than it is functionally. But that emotional job to be done is still super important.
Jon:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we get quest we get questions about it almost every day.
Justin:It's important for product people to realize that not everything we're building is purely functional. Sometimes people just wanna have a really nice audio player on their website because it makes them feel good. And Yeah. That's part of the value that we're providing is yeah. We want the functional ability for people to find your audio and be able to listen it listen to it.
Justin:We wanna be able to distribute it for you. Those are all functional things. The emotional part is people can go to my website, and my audio is published there. I feel like a, a radio personality. Right?
Justin:Like
Jon:Right.
Justin:Hey, if you visit justinjackson.ca, you can listen to me on the radio. Right? There's something about that that is emotional, and it's one of the reasons people hire us. So,
Gavin:Yeah.
Justin:I definitely think it's I mean, the player to me is something we're gonna continue to iterate on probably forever.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, there's still I know even after this 6 week cycle is over, there's I have a number of things in my head that I still wanna work on for it. Just tiny tiny improvements and compatibility with other websites and good. It's a good good question, though. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. This is great. Having all folks reply, this show is interactive, so reach out to us however you'd like. If you wanna message us privately and get to kind of top of mind, our Patreon supporters can message us anytime they'd like. And they do.
Justin:John, why don't you thank our Patreon supporters?
Jon:Alright. Yeah. Thanks as always to everyone. We have Matt Buckley from nice things dot I o, Russell Brown. I'm gonna screw this one up again.
Jon:Evandro SaaS Sassy. Sassy. Pradyumna Schonbecker or PD for short, 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, Corey Hanes, Michael Sittbur, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, my brother.
Justin:Danbudda.com?
Jon:Friend Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta. Junta. Kyle Fox, from get rewardful.com, and our sponsors this week, ActiveCampaign and Honey Badger.
Justin:Thanks again for listening. We will see you next
Gavin:week.
Justin:Transistor.fm.
