Break out
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2020. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build Transistor dot fmsummeredition. Midsummer update, John.
Jon:Midsummer pandemic 2020 edition. How how's it going? It's been it's been a while. It's been a while
Gavin:a month.
Jon:I don't know.
Justin:Yeah. Since we Yeah. It's been a it's been a month. We were just joking offline that we haven't really taken a lot of time off.
Jon:Not really. Not so much from Tringistra. I know you took a break from social media.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:I was never really super active. I did delete my Facebook account.
Justin:Oh, good.
Jon:That felt nice. Don't miss it one bit.
Justin:Was that after you were watching the the stuff with Congress? You're like, that's
Jon:in fact? No. No. This is no. This is, like, well well over a month ago.
Justin:It is amazing how much brain space that stuff can take.
Jon:I wasn't even really using it. I was just like it felt good to just get rid of it. It's like cleaning out your house or spring cleaning. You're like, I don't use I don't wear this shirt anymore.
Justin:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It it wasn't sparking joy for you anymore.
Jon:No. It hasn't for years. So it's
Justin:just like
Jon:it's such a stream of an anxiety stream.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. And and, I mean, even not recording the podcast, it is sometimes good to not do things. Like, I I have felt like I've had more, just time to enjoy the summer. Like, I have I'm going to the beach, going mountain biking, you know, just kinda taking it easy.
Justin:And, but on the other hand, I'm always conflicted because it feels like I need some time away. But then there's this buildup of, you know, like, things I wanna talk to you about or just things in my head. And, I mean, you and I were talking before this. Like, there was obviously a buildup. You know?
Justin:Like, I think we both were kinda like, oh, wow. Like, we gotta talk about this, and what are we gonna do about this? And, you know, the you you can't have too much time elapsed, it feels like.
Jon:Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you we were just setting up and sort of forgot how to even record the podcast. Right?
Jon:That's like
Justin:That's that's how you know.
Jon:What apps do I open in what order and what
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. What is this? How does this work? Well, one thing I think that will be helpful for our listeners is I've I've as I've been talking to other people who are starting a SaaS, mostly, you know, Bootstrap founders, 1 or 2 founders, one thing I've noticed is they basically, if you if you're bootstrapping a sass, you're probably going to need more trials than you think.
Justin:And I don't know if you can remember, like, when you were freelancing, how many leads did you get every month?
Jon:That's a good question. I mean, I don't know the number, but it was certainly more than I could take on, but also I sort of weeded you know, like, weeded them out Mhmm. Beforehand.
Justin:Yeah. I mean, I always felt like I was lucky if I got, you know, a handful of inquiries. Right?
Jon:Yep.
Justin:And then if if you convert and when you're freelancing, I mean, how many clients would you take at a time? Like, maybe 1 or 2?
Jon:Probably. Yeah. 1 or 2. I don't think I ever tried to do more than that.
Justin:It it there's a little bit of a paradigm shift. I know a lot of folks who are, you know, bootstrapping a SaaS or starting a SaaS. Their their business experience might be the only experience they might have is consulting or freelancing. And, you know, when you're consulting or freelancing, you want kind of a healthy number of leads coming in because, you know, that you're gonna need to, you know, convert maybe roughly 25% of those or something or 30%.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And you convert 30% of those leads, and you'll probably have enough work. Right? And if you don't have any new leads for a few months, you might be worried, you might be like, ah, I kinda need something else. But, it it's not it's not uncommon, you know, during the summer months, for example, to not have any leads, and you just kind of plan for that in your year.
Jon:Yeah. Right.
Justin:But SaaS is a lot different, mostly because the price points are smaller. Right? So if you're selling something at $19 a month, or $39 a month, or $99 a month, even let's say, 2.99 a month, you the nature of the business, you're gonna need way more folks kind of coming in coming in every day to Yeah. You know, with some interest.
Jon:Yeah. Contracting is, yeah, way different. I mean, you're gonna get 1 maybe you land 1 client, and it's a a $10,000 contract or something.
Justin:Yeah. And and you know what else is different is you are willing to put in a lot of effort for those clients. Right? So you might I mean, not everyone does this, but, you know, you might be willing to go to a few meetups and, you know, talk to some people, and then do a coffee meeting, and then, you know, do an initial, you know, a little bit of initial work and then add a bigger contract later. There's kind of this, like, build up that is expected, or it might be, you know, they email you and you email them back, and then you do a phone call, and then, you know, you do an estimate.
Jon:Yeah. But even then, it doesn't even end there when you get the actual contract. I mean, you're always you're you're in contact with that with that client all the time.
Justin:Exactly. And so I was trying to quantify this on Twitter. I said the biggest problem I see for SaaS who target SMBs, small medium businesses, is they're not getting enough trials. You'll probably need more than you think. Now, the the disclaimer here is that every product is different.
Justin:Every product category is different. Your price points, you know, will affect this. Your cost to acquire a customer will affect this credit card upfront, all that stuff. But most of the founders I've talked to, I for, you know, for these tweets, I I I pinged 3 or 4 of my friends who have SaaS businesses.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And, generally, it's a it's a same pattern. It wasn't until they hit about 200 to 300 trials per month that they felt like they were finally kind of making it work. It was like that's when they got to ramen profitable. And, you know, I think for most folks in the US, Ramen profitable is probably around 10 k MRR per founder.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And, you know, you and I said a pretty good business would be 25 k MRR per founder, because, you know, if like, a software developer in the United States, it's pretty pretty easy for them to make $200,000 a year. I shouldn't say easy, but that's not uncommon. Yeah.
Jon:Senior senior level. Yeah.
Justin:Senior level. And so at 25 k MRR per month, if you have very low expenses and after you've paid your payroll and your server costs and everything, you could probably do about $200,000 a year in salary.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so if you want to hit that number, and your product is priced, you know, let's say $39 to $99 per month, and you're asking for a credit card upfront, which I do recommend. It's not always true, but in most cases, especially if you want to prove demand, you wanna have credit card upfront. And then if you get a conversion rate from trial to pay that's between 40 60%, you're gonna need a 100 of trials per month to kind of ratchet up to 10 k MRR and then beyond. And, you won't get that right out of the gate, but I think what I'm seeing is folks who have done consulting in the past, and now they've been working on their SaaS for 6 months or a year, and they're getting, like, 3 to 5 trials a month. And that's just that in every case I've seen, especially if you're targeting SMBs at a lowish price point, you know, anything below $1,000 a month, you're gonna need more trials.
Justin:And, yeah, I I think it's worth mentioning just because a lot of this is one of those things that I I never knew what to expect. Like, what's good? What's bad? What what should I and whenever you give numbers publicly, you're all and I'll I'll paste this tweet in the show notes. You know, there's people immediately that go, wow.
Justin:Wait a second. If it's you know, if you're doing this, you're you're doing fine. And my whole point is that, yes, there's a lot of variables. But just to give you a ballpark, I think most founders you know, if you're a single founder or you're dual founders, you're probably going to want 200 to 300 trials per month at least. And for us, personally, when we hit 200 trials per month, that's when I went full time.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And then I think actually, let's that's a good question. Let's look at when because you went full time in August.
Jon:Yep.
Justin:So August, we were doing 300 trials per month. And it's gone kind of up and down since then, but we probably average 400 trials per month right now. I talked to another friend who has a higher price point than us, and they're doing, 250 trials per month. I talked to someone else that's has a longer running company than we do and a lower price point, and they're doing 500 to 600 trials per month.
Jon:K.
Justin:And so I those are just numbers, but I think if you're building a SaaS, my worry is if you're just trying to nurture in the same way that you did when you're consulting, you know, you're, like, talking to these people every day and you're, like, you're just gonna get your heart broken because
Jon:Yeah. Probably. But there's probably also if you're if you're doing that many trials, I'm wondering if there's a certain amount of effort you can put into keeping, like, improving the percentage of people that stay, Right? Without too much effort and trying to figure out what that is, instead of instead of spending the marketing on finding new trials or, you know, putting effort into getting new trials, maybe put a little more effort towards keeping the trials you already have and making sure they they don't switch you to another competitor or just, like, have questions or, yeah, get confused, stuff like that.
Justin:Totally. Ben Orenstein's got this tweet, from yesterday. He says, seems like the more entrepreneurial experience someone has, the more they focus on retention over acquisition.
Jon:Yeah. And we've done a lot of that, I think. Mhmm. I mean, you know, we've had people who wanted to leave or try to leave or, we just talk
Justin:We don't let them. Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:You can't leave. Sorry.
Justin:When they when they hit cancel, we just go, you can't leave.
Jon:You have to call this phone number and it goes to a blank number. It goes nowhere.
Justin:Yep. Yeah. We tell them to send a DNA sample and, the last 3 years of their tax returns. Yeah.
Jon:And then we fax it to them, and they fax it to us, and then we'll we'll send them a written letter in 6 to 8 weeks.
Justin:That they have to sign and then get back to us.
Jon:Classic strategy.
Justin:Yeah. Totally. But yeah. So I think you're right. This is kind of in that ramping up period.
Justin:You know? And, again, like, when we started, we launched, in August, we had 75 trials that month. And then the next month, we only had 70. And then the next month, we only had 63. But and then it started to kinda build up from there.
Justin:You know, you get to just around a 100, and then you get to 200. And, eventually, you're gonna hit a ceiling. Right?
Jon:Yeah. Right.
Justin:Unless I mean, unless you can unless there's some levers you can pull to increase growth and if the market is so big that there's just tons and tons of room to grow. Right? Then you'll maybe you can increase the number of trials you get every month. And there's also a ceiling in terms of how much you can handle. Right?
Jon:Right.
Justin:When you're ramping up, I think if if you're thinking, oh, I wanna have a nice little business, nice little SaaS business that's bringing in, let's say, 20 to 50 and up in MRR every month, that's hundreds of trials. And, if if you're really trying to nurture just a few people and just trying to convert a few people, you know, maybe you can do that at the beginning for a few months, but I I'd hope by, let's say, the 6 month period, after some consistent effort, you should have hundreds of trials coming in. And this is, I think, another this is kind of one of those bellwethers. Is that is that the right word?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:The leading sheep of or flock with a bell on its neck. An indicator or predictor of something. Yeah. So this is a good bellwether of whether you're on the right track. Because if you're not seeing those trials, you know, that could mean there's just not a lot of demand for your product category.
Justin:It could mean that maybe there's something wrong with your product and marketing. But my sense, especially from the folks that I'm, you know, trying to help out, my sense is in most cases, they're just in a category that doesn't have a lot of demand. And they're trying to nurture these, like, very niche leads. And it's it's just not gonna give them the volume they need to, you know, have hundreds of trials coming in. And then if your credit card upfront, you're converting, hopefully 40 to 60% of those and or more even.
Justin:And, you know, getting up to that number where even with some churn, you've got a healthy amount of MRR every month.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And every little lever you pull helps. But I was trying to think, is there a word for you know, at the beginning, like, you know when a customer signs up and they immediately start asking us about stats?
Jon:Like, you mean as in analytics?
Justin:Yeah. Like so they sign up. They've had their podcast for a couple weeks, and they're going they start asking us about their numbers. Like, hey. How come I'm not seeing, you know, average, you know, subscribers yet?
Justin:Or
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:You know, I I had 10 downloads the 1st day, but now I only have 5. And there's this phenomena when the numbers are low, they really don't mean much. It's not until you get into like, if you're if you're in single or double digit numbers, it's just like the one person you know, if if you had 10 listeners and one person decides to quit listening, well, that's gonna be a huge percentage of your overall listenership, but it it probably doesn't matter at that point because it's not until you get into the thousands of listeners that those trends become meaningful.
Jon:Right. I don't know I don't know if there's a word for that.
Justin:But you know what I'm talking about.
Jon:Right? Probably something within statistics. There's probably some term for that.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's like your sample size is low, but there's just this other thing, which is, you know, like and I I think everyone's fallen prey to this. It's like, you know, you you launch a new website or something, and you go, woah, my numbers are up 3000% from yesterday to today. And and then the next day after that, they're down 20,000%.
Justin:It's like, oh. It's like, okay. Well, you don't you don't need to worry. At that point, none of that is significant yet. And, you know, in podcasting, really, you can't get any significance out of the numbers until you're in the 100, but likely to the thousands of downloads.
Justin:Like, that's when and over months of time. Right? And there's something of this effect here as well. Meaning, you could have 5 trials and then convert 3 of them and go, yes. Like, this is it.
Justin:I got something here. But if 2 of those people churn in a given month, which is statistically possible. Mhmm. You know what I mean? Like, ah, this is why we need a stats person on the the line right now because, well, the the the the chances of 2 people canceling in a month are very high.
Justin:Whether you only have 10 subscribers or you know what I mean? Like, it's just very likely that if 2 people have 2 people might decide, well, I'm gonna cancel. And, and that could that that obviously, if you only have a few customers, that feels bad at the beginning. And what I'm trying to say is that you you the the whole point with something like SaaS is that you're gonna have 100, but really thousands of customers, and the if if lightning strikes one day and you have 5 people cancel, which could happen at any day regardless of the sample size
Jon:Yeah. Do
Justin:you know what I'm getting at?
Jon:Yeah. Totally. I mean, we've had days like that. Yeah. It's you have to sort of take take a step back and look at the bigger picture and say, oh, well, like, 10 people canceled today, but, you know, in the grand scheme of things, we actually had, like, hundreds of trials, so it's kind of not a big deal.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Right?
Justin:Yes. And I wanna say your risk tolerance, but, you know, once you get to our stage or ConvertKit's stage, that's even like, I I look at ConvertKit's, like, how many customers they lose every day, and I'm just like, oh my god.
Jon:Yeah. It
Justin:just it it would it's it would be painful for us to lose that many. But for Nathan, he's probably just like, yeah. Well, this is just the way the business runs. Like, at this scale, losing thousands of customers every year is not a big deal. It's just like that's how it goes.
Justin:But if you're only able to bring in 5 trials a month and you're losing you know, in a given month, you know, you lose 2 or 3 people, it's just a much it hurts more.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so there's gotta be you've got to get to a scale where the model works. Meaning, software as a service as a business model works when you have, in most cases, thousands of subscribers. And that's whether you're bootstrapping, that's whether you're venture funded, whatever, you know, and obviously, you know, if you have way more employees and way more funding, you need thousands more customers. But in general, there's, like, this certain floor you have to hit. It doesn't matter if you're bootstrapping or you're venture funded.
Justin:You've gotta hit this certain number. And my best guess is that's, you know, hundreds of trials every month, and it goes up from there.
Jon:Yeah. That makes sense.
Justin:Hopefully, that's helpful to people that are looking for some kind of, some kind of number. You wanted to talk about this analytics thing. What what was kind of on your mind there?
Jon:Yeah. So we we've had analytics, you know, for a while, obviously. And as we've grown, they become kind of more and more cumbersome to deal with as far as performance of analytics. Right? It's it's sort of a, intensive process to, calculate analytics and display them in a meaningful way to customers and sort of give you, you know, a time time series data and show charts.
Jon:And
Justin:Yeah. Which is why, like, when when people are starting companies, if you're trying to bootstrap, like, you know, something that requires a lot of data, tracking, people often are warn you against it.
Jon:Right.
Justin:Don't don't get into that because it's expensive.
Jon:Yeah. And we're not, you know, we're not necessarily an analytics company, although, I guess, some you could you could take that viewpoint, but they are a big part of the app and a big part of, you know, the value that customers get out of Transistor, right, is seeing how well their podcast is doing over time and comparing it to other episodes and all this stuff. Recently, I don't know. Well, I guess the last several months, it's been ongoing for a while, right, where the way the analytics were written, the way the database was kinda laid out from the start worked fine for a long time. But as we've grown and, you know, gotten into the tens of millions of downloads and all that stuff, it just hasn't necessarily scaled well.
Jon:And I think I I don't think I would have been able to build it a different way had it, you know, knowing what I knew at the beginning. Mhmm. And over the at least over the past month, it's just kind of gotten worse and worse where we have these background jobs that are sort of aggregating data down into the, the day time frame. Right? We have downloads that come in constantly, like tens and tens of thousands a day.
Jon:Mhmm. Those apps get aggregated down and say so we can say, like, this episode got 25 downloads on this day and this other episode got 50 downloads on this day. And then this this episode got 10 downloads from Apple Podcasts and 15 from Overcast. Right? And those are all different entries.
Jon:And it it was just getting cumbersome. And I was I was basically just applying, like, band aids to this thing and hoping it would it would last, but I'd have to, like, routinely go back and check our background jobs to see that they hadn't stacked up. And once in a while, we'd have these issues where the the database would just be doing way too many things at once, and it would just completely, like, all the database requests would just get, like, queued up in this in, in the queue system in within Postgres. Right? So people's requests were just super slow.
Jon:We get a lot of support requests. They're like, hey. Look. Dashboard isn't working. I can't log in or I can't do this or that.
Justin:Oh, like, it would it would lock the whole app.
Jon:Well, yeah. It's just yeah. It it the the database is overwhelmed trying to get through all the requests that have sort of built up
Justin:that Yeah.
Jon:The other the other requests for, like, looking up your user via your email address is just, like, in the queue somewhere and times out.
Justin:Yeah. Right? And and emotionally, like, this is affecting you emotionally. Like, you you you're frustrated.
Jon:It's it's just a hue it's a huge amount of stress that I just constantly think about, like, what when is it gonna, like, like, alright. Now it's fine. It's fine for now. It's fine for, like, a while. When's it gonna pile up?
Jon:When's it gonna be a problem? Yeah. And it just kept happening to the point where I was, like, you know, looking into all these other solutions, trying to think about different ways to do it. And and and looking at these looking at these services are, like, 100 to 1,000 of dollars a month to handle these massive analytics databases, which Yeah. Which, you know, looking at ours, it's not it's not that big compared to, like, what other people are doing at all.
Jon:It's not it's not huge.
Justin:Owning and running a SaaS is so much like owning a house. Like, there's just like it's like, you know, something goes wrong with your plumbing, and you, like, kinda fix it one time. Like, okay. And you're just like it's in the back of mind. Like, oh, I hope that doesn't, like, start leaking again.
Justin:And then it starts leaking. You're like, oh, fucking shit. Like, damn it. Goddamn. Fucking death.
Justin:And then because it just the smallest thing can then trigger
Jon:And then you hire a plumber, and you throw money at the problem.
Justin:Yeah. Then you hire the plumber and the plumber goes, well, you know, to fix this, you're gonna you're gonna have to redo all the pipes, man. You're gonna just give me at least 20 k. And then you're like, oh, god. And
Jon:So, yeah, I I talked to a a couple friends, and they were like, oh, we all we could do this. We could do that. Maybe, you know, you can look into this or there's this service, but it's gonna most of the things that I was looking into at the time were gonna completely change how we handled analytics, how the data was stored, how it was processed Mhmm. Which maybe maybe would have future proof things a little more, but probably would have been really expensive. It was technology I didn't know, so it would have been, taken a while to finish.
Jon:But at the same time, I'm still trying to, you know, patch it and fix it and just getting frustrated and, like, I sort of reached my limit of knowledge of of Postgres in the way we were using it.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:And so I think I think you had mentioned, you know, maybe you should email these two people, couple different people. Yeah. One of whom was Jack Ellis who is the cofounder of Fathom Analytics.
Justin:Yeah. I was like, someone I know someone who has experience with analytics.
Jon:And and, like, when you said that, I was like, that is actually a great idea because they're an analytics company. Right? That's what they do. I'm sure they run this problem.
Justin:And the other thing about Jack is, like, you know, some people I could think of had, like, enterprise experience, and they'd be like, what? I could just, like, fire up Big Blue and then you just reboot. You know? Yeah. You And you gotta sharp the
Jon:Or yeah. You gotta buy a pay for an Oracle database, and it's 200 k.
Justin:I was like, I I'll bet Jack has figured out something progressive that works at our scale.
Jon:Yeah. And so I emailed them and just kind of explained what I was going through and what we're dealing with. And, I think the next day, I had a call with him. Yeah. I just talked to him.
Jon:I hadn't talked to him before. I mean, I, you know, I know his name and I know of, you know, you know of him and he's a they support our podcast.
Justin:Mhmm. And they
Jon:use Transistor. Yep. We use Fathom. Yep. And he's the the nicest guy ever.
Jon:And so we had a call and talked for, like, an hour and a half.
Justin:Nice.
Jon:And he was he shared his screen and was, like, going through a code. Right? Going through Fathom Code and showing sort of showing me how they deal with processing incoming page views. Right? Their their system is really the same as ours.
Jon:I mean Mhmm. When you get down to it. Right? They deal with page views for a site. Mhmm.
Jon:And we deal with download we would deal with downloads for a podcast and podcast episodes. Yeah. So they're they're processing incoming page views all the time and we're processing downloads all the time. And so he just sort of walked me through his thought process of how they deal with this stuff, how they batch things together and aggregate data. It just sort of clicked and made a lot of sense, like, how he thought about things.
Jon:And they're in the process of changing things again because they're they're growing a lot. Their analytics are huge. Right? They deal with much a much bigger problem than we do. So they they have to sort of, like, build a a version 3 or whatever of of something.
Jon:Yeah. But he was explaining how they currently do it, and and it's a it's a very similar setup to what we have. It just was so nice to to get out of my own headspace and me thinking about this stuff the same way over and over and talk to someone who kind of had a slightly different perspective on how to do it. Mhmm. And then within a week I had sort of like fixed everything and reworked, you know, how we handle backlogs of downloads coming in and how we batch them together in the background.
Jon:And
Justin:Yeah. And, oh my god. Like, you showed me that
Jon:reorganize some of the table. Yeah.
Justin:You showed me that graph from AWS.
Jon:And Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's like, can can you tell me when we deployed the updates? And it was like this just significant drop in in everything in Postgres.
Justin:It's like everything gets calm. It's like everything was crazy, and then it's
Jon:It was yeah. It was just frantic these frantic up and downs every hour as we compile data. And then, like, after this, it's just like this smooth line. It's like smooth water.
Justin:Yeah. I mean, that's huge. Getting out of your own head and
Jon:To me, that's, like, the disadvantage of having a small team like us. Right? Where I'm the only engineer.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:So there's not really anyone to to sort of, like, talk to you about the stuff necessarily or, like, just bounce things off, bounce ideas off of. Yeah. So I think if you're, you know, if you're in our position and you have a small team and there's like one main engineer, probably really beneficial to have a network of of people you can reach out to, just for like mentorship or just, I don't know, just to talk about engineering engineering problems. You know? Like
Justin:This this is the unfair advantage, is who you know and who knows you and having those relationships. I was gonna say, like, this is the unfair advantage bootstrappers have, but that's not quite fair because it's more than that. You can't just be a bootstrapper. It's you know, we've built relationships with people over time, and then we've been able to reach out to those folks. And we've built trust, and they trust us.
Justin:And, you know, I mean, I'm DM ing people every single day.
Jon:Yep.
Justin:You know, there's certain people I can I can, like, do I there's certain people I can DM, and there's certain people I can't DM? Like, I can't DM Elon Musk for advice, because he doesn't know who I am. But there is a network of people who I do trust, and I think it's even a this is the so I'm just of 2 minds of this right now because on one hand, I'm like, oh, isn't this great, this thing that bootstrappers have? Because, you know, in in some of the companies I'd worked for, we would hire a consultant. And we didn't know if the consultant knew their stuff, and this is very common in databases.
Justin:Right? Like, nobody on the team knows anything about databases, so you bring in a consultant, and you're paying them 1,000 of dollars a day. And, you know, they're in your system, but you don't know what they're doing, and you're just hoping they fix it. You you don't know if they're good or not. But in this case, I was positive that Jack was gonna know his stuff.
Justin:I trust him. I've seen his work. I've built a rapport with him behind the scenes. I use his product every day. I just know I listen to their podcast every week.
Justin:Like, there's just this, like, this immersion and this trust and this relationship that make that transaction different, and we would do the same for them. I mean, I've given Jack and Paul tons of information about
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:You know, like, where, what to expect at different different stages, and and I'm not gonna do that for just anybody. And so that's the this is the part I'm a little bit, I just feel bad about talking because it is kind of the only word I can think of for this is, like, it is a bit of a cabal.
Jon:Yeah. It is. But
Justin:It I think maybe instead of apologizing for the cabal, which the the reason you have these groups of people in in the Laravel community, they call them the Laravel elite. It's like it's like, oh, these are all the people that talk to each other and, you know, know each other and support each other at launch, and they're DM'ing each other all the time. It's not fair. Right? It's like Yeah.
Jon:That was that was pretty common in the early, like, Ruby on Rails days too.
Justin:Yeah. And one part of it, we do need to be careful because if we're shutting other people out constantly, especially, underrepresented groups. Like, if if you're a woman and you just cannot get into any of these secret founder groups, you know, that that is we know like, even that that transaction you just did with Jack, like, maybe we could have found a consultant and paid $20,000 and and fixed the problem. You know what I mean? Like, if if Jack was gonna charge us, maybe that's what he would have charged us.
Justin:So it is a significant advantage. You didn't just talk to Jack, you talked to some other people you knew in Chicago. You talked like, you had all of this kind of this cornucopia of people you could talk to, and then you found one person whose situation was similar to what you were talking about, and then it
Jon:But it sort of goes back to discussion we've had before about the importance of, I don't know if networking is the right word, but it's like building up these relations relationships over time and just sort of, you know, staying in touch with you. But, like, I mean, I I sort of agree with you. Like, I don't it it is an advantage, but it's also, you know, we've both been doing this for 15 years. Right? We have a large group of people that we've come in contact with and spent time with and talked to and, like, worked with and and those networks sort of build out, like, you have to start somewhere.
Justin:Yep. Yes. Exactly. And and so I I like, lately, this is the I'm I'm of 2 minds about it, and I think they're both good. I think on one hand, these are this is something you have to cultivate over time.
Justin:It's something that you don't just do in a month or 6 months. It's it's over time, month after month, year after year. You're doing stuff. You're putting it in public. You go to conferences.
Justin:You meet people. You follow-up with people. You engage with people meaningfully online, you, you know, you you do all of the little things that build up to a relationship. And then when you have a a bounty of relationships, that can be very helpful, especially if you've built relationships with the right people. On the other hand, I think technology and bootstrapping does have a problem, in that it's really easy for white dudes to get together.
Justin:It's really easy for white dudes to do their private founder retreats together and have their private Slack groups and private Telegram chats and private Imessage groups. And I know female founders that have these as well, and I think that's helpful too. I I I don't think there's, you know it's okay for that to exist. But at the same time, I think there are some groups that are underrepresented that wouldn't naturally have an in to those kinds of groups. And I think if you have some privilege, you should also be looking to give a hand up to other people.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And it's messy. Like, you and I have been talking publicly about, you know, our our desire to to fix some of the imbalance that's in in intact. And, you know, it means I I do get a lot more inbound from people, and it it's hard. I I can't. I'm just a human being, and I have to you know, I'm trying to figure things out too.
Justin:But I do think we we have a responsibility.
Jon:Yeah. Definitely. I mean
Justin:Ugh. This is this is a bad country. People are gonna people are for sure, there are some white dudes that are mad right now. I I I just I can feel it. Sorry.
Jon:But I mean, I you know, personally, I I'm not I'm not necessarily one to, like, put myself out there as as, like, to offer help.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Just my, I don't know, my personality or whatever. I just get I don't know. There's a lot there's a lot there, but, you know, having having talked to Jack, he just made it, like, so easy. Like, he was such a good teacher, and
Justin:I
Jon:I can see I could I would see the benefit of of, you know, me personally doing doing that, like, more often, right, and just helping someone out who's having a problem.
Justin:Yeah. And you could also see how a founder retreat with Paul and Jack would make sense. Yeah. Right. Which would be great.
Justin:Right. Like, it would that would be great. The the question I'm asking now is is I'm, like, trying to go one more level and going, okay. So, yes. Like, that makes sense for us to have that retreat.
Justin:How can we make sure it's just not a bunch of white dudes sitting around? And, I do understand the frustration that some people have when they're listening to this, which is, yeah, like, you can feel like some of these are, like, private clubs that you can't get into. And I I think because I felt like that too in the past. And
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely.
Justin:Like, there's still and there's still private clubs I'm not allowed into. Right? There's there's, like, people I've been trying to impress on the Internet forever, and they just want nothing to do with me. You know, I I think there's always gonna be an element of this, but the idea and the one of my realizations about this was I don't know if you remember when Chase Reeves was saying this, but he was like, you know, at xox0, he made a point of saying, okay. Listen.
Justin:Like, there's all these people. All of our heroes are walking around here, and everybody wants a piece of them. He said, let's just focus on our group. Let's just let's just be let's just think, okay. We're, like, ground level, and we're all in the same place roughly.
Justin:And we're just gonna, like, we're just gonna, like, grow up together.
Jon:And it worked out great. But on the other hand, I think one of the Andys was, like, making fun of us because he's like, you just hang out with yourselves the whole time. It's like but yeah. But we're, like, build you were, like, trying to, you know, build some strong friendships. And
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Jon:There's also a benefit in that, but it was also a bunch of white dudes.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's there's there's mess and problems and things to fix in all of this, but I think the nice thing is that you can look at other your peers, who are at the same level, or people who are slightly ahead of you, and you can start to form those relationships.
Justin:And, I mean, at that time, that first xoxo, I had no idea that, you know, looking back on it now, it's like, wow. Like, everybody was kind of at an early stage in their career. And since then, everyone really grew, didn't they? Like, everybody's gone on to do, other things. And, so we kind of grew up that was like our class, you know?
Justin:Like, you grow you grow up with your class, And so if you don't have a class yet, I think it's worth finding those folks. And along the way, maybe you get lucky, and you get some mentors that are way ahead of you, right? That's great too. But I think finding your class, like Paul and Jack are in our class. You know what I mean?
Justin:-Yeah. -Uh, and that a lot of the people I I'm DM ing were all in the same class. Now, some of them are way richer than I am, but that's that's fine. Like, it's still we're roughly peers. You know what I mean?
Justin:Right. So, and as, Marie Poulin tells me a lot, she thinks she sees both sides of this because she's in all these female entrepreneur groups, and some of them are just killing it. And they're doing, different businesses than the very male dominated bootstrap SaaS space. And she's always like, there needs to be more intermixing between these groups because these female founders know stuff that you dudes are all missing and vice versa as well. And so I think a little bit more, you know, a little bit more of that can be healthy too.
Justin:We can still have, you know, some male only retreats and female only retreats or however you wanna do it, but I think having more more mixing and, you know, there there can be something healthy about that. Feels like we waded into some some some some some some some
Jon:That that took a different turn than I thought it was.
Justin:Yeah. I know. Sorry. Sorry. Because there's, like, levels to this.
Justin:Right? It's like Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Justin:On one hand, yes. And then on the other hand, damn, we've been privileged, and I think it's worth exploring all the mess in there as well.
Jon:Yeah. Definitely.
Justin:Well, we've been talking for a while. Yeah. That's probably a good time to end it. Hey?
Jon:I think so.
Justin:Alright, folks. We hope you enjoyed this. John, why don't you thank the good folks on Patreon?
Jon:Yeah. Thanks to everyone, as always for supporting us on Patreon. We have Colt Borg, Mark Binder, Anton Zoran, Bill Condo, Sofia Contero, Chris Willow, Mason Hensley, Borja Solaire, Ward Sandler, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley, Russell Brown, Evandro Sassy, Pradyumna Schenbecker, Noah Praill, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray, Josh Smith, Brian Ray, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Michael Sidfer, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha, Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schubert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.
Justin:Junta. Oh, Junta. I'm not I just I just miss that. I I've I've missed saying it. I Yeah.
Justin:I I haven't seen an Instagram post from Junta in a while. What's he doing? Is he taking a break? Did he take a break too?
Jon:I don't know. I mean, I haven't been on Instagram in years either.
Justin:Oh, we we gotta figure out Maybe.
Jon:Maybe he did. I don't know.
Justin:Maybe little some summer siesta. Alright.
Jon:Probably. And, finally, Kyle Fox from getrewardful.com.
Justin:Thanks, everyone. Have a good summer. And as always, you can find us on Twitter, build your sass. Show notes are at build dot wait. No.
Justin:No. Sas.transistor.fm. Oh, man. And, yeah.
Jon:A while. Yeah. Gotta get the cobbles out of your brain.
Justin:We'll see you next time we record. See you.
