Change is in the air
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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 and I've been up since 5 AM. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm.
Jon:Do you have a new a new sleep schedule? What are you
Justin:I'm still I think in some ways, I'm still on that New York sleep schedule. It's still getting me a bit, but I was telling you the the dog woke me up early. And I'm one of those people. If you wake me up, especially there's, like, a like, if you wake me up between through after 3 AM, I am not going back to sleep.
Jon:Right. Yeah. That makes for a rough day.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. So we'll we'll see how I do. The nice thing is that when you have a flexible schedule, you can always take a nap.
Jon:It's true.
Justin:So we're doing this call early on a Friday. I'm hoping to do some mountain biking after this.
Jon:We'll see
Justin:if it happens. But
Jon:Yeah. Nothing like throwing yourself down a mountain when you're tired.
Justin:Well, it's that whole fight or flight thing. Right? Yeah. It gets something,
Jon:Yeah. It's gets gets the adrenaline flowing.
Justin:So, John, I I don't know if you can feel it. The seasons are changing here.
Jon:Are we talking about the weather? It's it is a little chillier in the morning.
Justin:A little chillier, but I'm saying there's something else going on. And that is there's been a big increase in the number of support tickets we're getting. Yeah. We we've Especially the last 3 days.
Jon:Yeah. We wake up to, like, 20 plus questions Mhmm. Maybe, some days. Mhmm.
Justin:And it's been really quiet. You know, some days, I it feels like I answer, you know, 3 to 5.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:But the last few days, wow.
Jon:So do you think it's so August was slow for us.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Slower. Do you think it's that August is now ending, and everyone's, like, back in the office and their managers are just like, hey. Yep. Hey. We got this money.
Jon:You gotta do something with it.
Justin:Mhmm. I I mean, I think there's a lot of motivations. I think that's one of them. Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. We got hey. We got this money.
Jon:We've yeah. I mean or it's like things that were talked about before in August break and are now being investigated.
Justin:That's right. Also, I you know, when people have summer brain, it's just they don't wanna think about work. They're just thinking about, you know, like you said last week, going to the lake. They're thinking about, you know, the kids are out of school. So they've they're trying to figure out stuff for their kids to do.
Justin:And but I'm even feeling it. Like, I'm kind of gearing up. Like, my kids go back to school in a few days, and it's like, okay. What big project are we gonna tackle next? You know?
Justin:So I have actually this we'll see if this is true. I think an increase in support tickets, at least for us, is a leading indicator that revenue is going to increase. Because whenever we've been, like, crazy with inbound tickets because remember, these are inbound tickets from customers, but also potential customers.
Jon:Right.
Justin:So whenever we have an increase in support tickets, we we get an increase in revenue.
Jon:Yeah. We should keep a note of that. I wonder if we can see how many tickets we get over time. I don't know if that's a thing we can do.
Justin:Yeah. We can. In August, we were down 9% in terms of conversations created. Okay. Let's see.
Justin:Let's go back. And then in July, we were also down 10% in terms of new conversations created. So let's see what June was. Was June I mean, some of this is gonna be difficult because, but, June was up 14% from the previous month. So we had we were up in June, but July August, we were down.
Justin:And, May, we were up 17%. So so far, the trend is holding true that, Yeah. April, we were down 4%. Some of this, will also probably be related to how much, on button, we were up 5%. It it seems generally to hold true that there was an increase in support tickets while revenue is going up And but summer has been lower, at least double digits lower.
Justin:So we'll see what happens. May if if September we see an increase, we'll we'll know. You had we had a call yesterday where you were telling me about, 2 interesting conversations you had about enterprise sales. What what was that about?
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. They were sort of they were separate but ended up being related. So after, the race
Speaker 3:Oh, by the way,
Justin:people wanted an update on the race. I don't know if we ever did that. They they said, has John done the race yet?
Jon:I I did the race. So it was the half Ironman in Traverse City, Michigan.
Justin:Traverse City, which you say is beautiful.
Jon:I've It's it's a great city. I, I mean, I grew up in Michigan, but I really didn't spend any time in Traverse City. I mean, occasionally, I think my family and I would stop there on the way up north, but it's on the water. It's like
Justin:a Oh, yeah. The Google images for Traverse City is just a a big beach.
Jon:It's, it's on the water. It's on a bay. It's got I mean, I think in the last decade, it's really kind of, like, gotten big. Right? So it's, like, got a lot of good food and breweries and just, like, outdoor stuff and trails and beautiful water.
Jon:So it was the 1st year they've ever done a race in that city. So it was, the the crowd I think the crowds were great. People was people were super nice. I think the town itself was really excited about having the race there. Mhmm.
Jon:So they're like, you know, you're you're on the run or the bike, and there's just, like, people sitting in their lawns cheering you on.
Justin:No way.
Jon:Yeah. It was cool.
Justin:Oh, that's nice. That's some that's some nice Americana right there.
Jon:It was. It really yeah. It was cool. But I finished the race, like, did I think I did pretty well for the first time.
Justin:Yeah. This is your first time ever doing something like this. And, really, like, your first time in a bicycle race. Like, the bicycle portion. Right?
Jon:Yeah. That was rough because I trained in Chicago, which is entirely flat. Yeah. I didn't really train super hard for the biking part. Mhmm.
Jon:So it was it's just by far my weakest, portion of the whole thing. And Traverse City is that area is really hilly, and the course itself was very hilly, and it was just kinda brutal. Like, I was just cursing every hill, but I made it. I mean, it was it right. It was beautiful.
Jon:Like, beautiful weather, beautiful scenery. You're just, like, out in these, like, rolling hills, and you pass by, like, farms, and there was a there was a bunch of, like, hops being grown in 1 farm.
Justin:Oh, man.
Jon:It was cool. It was really cool. It was it was tiring, but it was it was overall a really cool experience.
Justin:That's awesome. Next year, you're gonna wear a GoPro and livestream the whole thing. Yeah.
Jon:I think that's illegal.
Justin:Oh, really?
Jon:Yeah. They have a pretty strict rules. You can't ride you can't ride with your phone. You can't ride with headphones. You can't you can't basically ride
Justin:with headphones? No. They don't
Jon:allow you to. Because I think what I think what it is is that they don't want people, like, coaching you.
Justin:Oh, no way. So you
Jon:can't have your phone. You can't have anything that's that's, like, cell phone connected. You there's no drafting in the bike portion. Like, you have to stay 6 bikes bike lengths behind the person in front of you.
Justin:A lot of rules in this.
Jon:It's a lot of rules. You can get, like, yellow cards and, like, be stuck in a penalty box and stuff. I mean, it's really, like, for for
Justin:time did you spend in the penalty box?
Jon:I haven't spent any.
Justin:Did you get 5 minutes for fighting or anything like that? Yeah. Do they have a rule against fighting? That's a good question.
Jon:I don't know. I don't probably. I don't know what that would fall under. Maybe not explicitly.
Justin:Okay. So the
Jon:biggest penalty is for littering. If you, like, are eating something and you throw it on the ground, you get, like, a 5 minute, 10 10 minute penalty or something.
Justin:Wow. Well, of course.
Jon:But, like, you gotta be responsible. You know, for me, actually, the penalty would have been nice because it would have been a rest. But, like, I I wasn't I wasn't trying to win the race, so it wouldn't have mattered.
Justin:You're, like, searching for a Big Mac wrapper you could throw
Jon:on the ground. Right.
Justin:Okay. So you you did this with somebody, a friend.
Jon:A friend of mine. Well, so I, yeah, I had a friend that I grew up with that I swam with growing up who did the race as well. He came up from Texas. But independently of that, I ended up having some friends who were at their, lake house in Michigan.
Justin:Okay.
Jon:So after the race, I visited them for a couple days, And, they so they're they live in, San Francisco area, and, they're both sort of involved in, like, sort of some startup type stuff, but also companies that are not necessarily in, like, the traditional Silicon Valley, like, software startup space. But Okay. But deal a lot with, like, enterprise contracts and just, like, still technology. Like, my friend, we both graduated with a computer science degree, and he went on to do architecture. So,
Justin:so he so they're, like so he's in a different industry, but still doing or familiar with enterprise sales.
Jon:Yeah. And he he does a lot a lot of work with technology, within his his space. Mhmm. So so I was just sort of talking with them one night about some ideas that we have for transistor and how that might that might translate to us having to do inner enterprise sales and pursuing bigger enterprise clients and how those types of sales usually work. Because usually usually when you go to, a software product's website, and it's like, we have an enterprise plan.
Jon:Call us or email us for details,
Justin:and we can figure out.
Jon:I've never worked for a large enough company to even know what that means.
Justin:Yeah. Me neither. Those forms were always, like, just a big blocker. Like, okay. Well, I'm not gonna call these folks.
Jon:Yeah. It's probably a $1,000,000. Yeah. So, generally, I mean, what it sounds like what happens there is they they have sort of, like, a base they have base rates that are pretty expensive because, generally, an enterprise, plan will involve some sort of, like, dedicated support or, like, a dedicated support person for your account.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And we're talking, like, 1,000 of dollars a month to start.
Justin:Okay. Like so 2, 3, 3 grand.
Jon:Yeah. Or or even even more. I mean, it obviously depends on on the the software or whatever it is. But, so you generally like, you'll call or email or whatever you set up a call with the company, and you'll talk about what your needs are. And my friend was like, you know, as someone who has dealt with these enterprise contracts, you don't you don't wanna have any sort of, like, variability or ambiguity in how much it's gonna cost every month.
Jon:It's like you come up you decide on a number, per month or per year or whatever. You have a contract. It's, like, 12 months a 12 month contract at $2,000 a month. Now, like, some some software packages are always, like they're, like, per seat licensing. Right?
Jon:So, like, if you have
Justin:Like Slack or something.
Jon:Yeah. Or, like, GitHub. Right? So you can you can
Justin:So what do they do for that stuff?
Jon:You can add a new user for, like, $5 a month extra, but then it's gonna change your next month's bill, which Mhmm. For an enterprise client is a pain in the ass because they depend on, like, consistency.
Justin:Okay. So they don't like that. They don't like this idea of, like, hey. We added a few more people.
Jon:Right. Just add
Justin:it to the bill.
Jon:Yeah. So in terms of, like, Slack or GitHub, like, the enterprise plans probably include, like, up to, let's say, like, a 1000 employees. Right? So you're gonna pay you're gonna pay, I don't know, $5 a month for up for up to 5,000 employees who can access this account. If you hit a 1000 employees, like, you would renegotiate your contract for a new number that is a set number.
Jon:But now you have, like, up to 2,000 employees or something like that. It it basically takes, like I mean, they want consistency in how much they pay a month, but they also don't wanna have to, like, have an HR person go in and, like, manage all this stuff and be like, now I need to, like, upgrade our plan or add a new employee or deal with or, like, have to update our invoice for the next month that it gets generated.
Justin:Gotcha. So they would also this is where that single sign on stuff, that SSO stuff comes in where Yeah.
Jon:I know we talked a little bit about that too.
Justin:Yeah. They don't they just want it to be, you know, you you auth through your Google Apps account. Or actually, no. You don't even auth. Right?
Justin:They they can just automatically add users if they auth as a as a company.
Jon:Yeah. I believe so. They would connect up their company to, let's say, Transistor. And if a new employee is added and that employee is logged into, I don't know, Google or Office 365 or whatever it is Mhmm. Then they're they're granted access to to our software.
Justin:So did you get a sense of because because this came out of this new feature we're thinking about building, and I I had introduced this idea of maybe doing some sort of per user billing.
Jon:Right.
Justin:Either a one time setup fee or, you know, recurring monthly fee. And so this kind of, goes counter to that, doesn't it?
Jon:It does. Yeah. It it actually is, yeah, quite a bit different than what we had been thinking. But, you know, I neither of us have experienced enterprise plans like this or managing a plan or, like, the process of negotiating a contract. Mhmm.
Jon:So, like so along with that, like, there's a base price or something like that for an enterprise plan, but, like, most most, customers that are signing up for an enterprise plan probably have different pricing just based on their needs, and it's all just sort of, like, negotiated behind the scenes.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. There's not as much transparency into this. Right. I actually saw this this startup called Capiche, capiche.com, I think.
Justin:And they're trying to this is probably illegal. They're they're trying to, bring more transparency to enterprise pricing. So if you go to their website, it's, like, anonymous in Portland, and they have one for SendGrid and what their quote was.
Jon:Is that, like, Glassdoor for
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's kinda like
Justin:Glassdoor for enterprise,
Jon:quotes. That's kinda weird.
Justin:Here's one for Twilio. We were able to negotiate a 50% discount for the 1st year. So people are just sharing, like, their their
Jon:experience. Variability. I mean, I I think that ties into the the next thing, which is this call I had with, kind of a big name, CDN provider. Mhmm.
Justin:Because we're we're thinking we might need to
Jon:Yeah. So there's there's a couple features here. There's a couple features, that we might want that are not in our current plan that would have to require us to upgrade to, like, an enterprise plan. Right? So, again, the process is I emailed this I emailed out and said, hey.
Jon:We're looking, and we're interested in maybe some of these features on the enterprise plan. Mhmm. Got a got a call set up, spoke to this person, and, I mean, it was kind of what I just talked about. It's like, you know, they they were like, our base price is $5 a month.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Now you don't need all the features, so we can knock out some of that. You don't need a a dedicated support person, so we can knock off some from that. But, like but based on your usage, it would still be, like, $3 a month, but it's also the end of the the billing cycle, and we'd like to get some new people signed up so we can give you a discount. And he's like, what are you willing to pay? And so I'm like, maybe this.
Jon:And he's like, well, we can maybe work with that. So it's all it's like buying a car, I think. It's, like, depends it depends on when you talk to them, how But how, like, you know
Justin:By the way, I think you should get a discount if your computer is currently on a cardboard box on a table. Like, if you're if you're if you're if you're if your computer is, like, you're bringing your computer up or your monitor up and it's just sitting on a cardboard box Yeah.
Jon:Probably.
Justin:I think I think you should say, hey, listen. What's the cardboard box discount? I I think if your LinkedIn profile shows you just, like, working at your kitchen counter in your boxers, there should be a discount for that.
Jon:Right. I mean and it also yeah. It also feels a little strange to be, like, we need the enterprise plan, and it's 2 of us.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. So We just all we want is we want the the the, you know, the tiny company superpower plan.
Jon:Right. It's like we wanna be enterprise, but we're not. Mhmm.
Justin:Well, we don't wanna be enterprise. So that's the whole thing. What's the plan for the people who don't wanna be enterprise? Yeah. This this enterprise labeling is, you know, it's discriminatory against us.
Justin:We don't like it. We we don't accept that label. We we we want, the
Jon:The bootstrapped plan.
Justin:The small business plan that's but we want it to be powerful.
Jon:Right. So, yeah, it was, both of those both of those talks were pretty interesting in in light of us maybe needing maybe needing some enterprise plan, but also Yeah. Actually selling an enterprise plan. So Mhmm. I think I think that just sort of goes along with this whole idea of shaping an idea before we start on it and, like
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Jon:You you just don't you don't know you don't know much at the beginning without really I mean, we had assumptions. I think those may or may not still be wrong. Mhmm. I don't know if that's necessarily gonna change our initial release of this thing we're doing, but, like, I think it'll certainly affect, like, subsequent iterations of it.
Justin:This came up in our phone call yesterday about how you almost, like, making budget decisions like this for us and infrastructure decisions, which, you know, typically, we you say, well, that's a chore. That's outside of product work. But as we were having the call, it became apparent, like, no. We need to shape this. This this needs to go along with this whole shaping framework we're we're using from base camp.
Justin:You know, this needs to come to the betting table, and we need to decide if we have an appetite for this fiscally. Like, you know, do we have an appetite for this in terms of all the changes we'd have to do to our infrastructure to make these new enterprise features work, that we're that we'd be buying? And so that part was that was interesting to have that feeling of sometimes those business decisions just get made in a split second. Well, yeah, let's whatever. You know?
Justin:Right. Fuck it. Let's just go with it. And, as we were talking, we had this feeling of and, also, there's just something about a salesperson saying, hey, come on, man. You gotta make it make a deal make a deal where at the end of the quarter and kind of pushing
Jon:you along. You know, that's, that's that's what that's why they're marketing people. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Justin:But but to be able to take back control and slow things down
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And say, okay. Well, let's shape this. What is this for? What are our other op what are our alternatives here?
Jon:Yeah. Do we do we absolutely need the things that this new plan is gonna offer? Like
Justin:because,
Jon:I mean, I don't think I mentioned, like, it it was a significant increase in what we're paying right now per month.
Justin:Yeah. It was like,
Jon:You know, like
Justin:A 1000%. No. 5 x? Yeah. 5x.
Jon:5x, maybe 8x? Yeah.
Justin:So yeah. A big jump. And I think also as business partners I mean, you brought up some valid things for some valid points from the infrastructure side of, like, you know, we could really use this stuff. But it was the first time I had heard about it.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And so I haven't had time to chew on it mentally at all. And had this actually gave me some clarity about, you know, sometimes I'll present things to you that I've been chewing on for a long time, and you'll kind of be like, and Yeah. Because I I haven't thought of
Jon:I can't make a decision. Immediately.
Justin:But it when I was on the other side of it, and you're saying, you know, I could really use this for on the infrastructure side. I was, like, okay.
Jon:But I
Justin:just haven't thought about this. And what I like about the shaping process is the the company's leadership is kind of always chewing on things in the background. And but I can't chew on it unless it's been introduced. Hey. Here's an idea.
Justin:What do you think about this? What if we did this? And then, you chew on it kind of in the background. Okay. Yeah.
Justin:That's a thing. Maybe we should think about that. What are the repercussions of that? And then, you you know, we might have a phone call another phone call about it and go, okay. How could we shape this work a little bit more?
Justin:And then actually dedicate a cycle to it. Okay. We're gonna spend 2 weeks. What's our appetite for this? 2 weeks to go through the enterprise sales process, to negotiate something, to implement something.
Justin:Do we wanna do that? Right. And if we do, then actually commit to it. But a lot of those business slash infrastructure decisions are so easy to just, like, make and go, okay. I guess we're gonna do it.
Justin:And then it can chew up all this time and energy that you didn't kind of anticipate. Because you're you're thinking, well, it's not product work. You know?
Jon:Right. And and and the features we're talking about are, like, not immediately actionable by us. Like, there was a reason we are looking into them in the Mhmm. And they will help a little bit in the in the short term, but, like, it's not really a thing that I can use right away. Like, one of one of them is, but, like, the other one is, like, it'd be nice down the road.
Jon:Mhmm. So we'd be sitting there paying for this thing and not really using it, and it'll just be a little. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. And let's take a break right here so I can tell you about a brand new sponsor, the web developer's secret weapon, honeybadger.io. I love these guys. Ben, Starr, and Josh, they actually host a podcast on Transistor called Founder Quest, one of my favorite new shows this year, founderquestpodcast.com. They even have a official announcer man that does their intros and outros.
Justin:You gotta listen to this. Hold on. Let me play it right here.
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Justin:So folks, go check out honeybadger.io. Let them know that Jon and I sent you. This may so the the flip side of this discussion is, do you think after these two conversations it's possible for a small bootstrap company like us to get enterprise customers?
Jon:I think so.
Justin:Yeah. I'd be interested to know, Ben Orenstein, if you're listening, how do you I I wanna know how Tuple does this because I know they have per seat pricing. But I wonder if they're doing fixed bids for their enterprise clients. Like, they're offering up to 500 seats for whatever. I know from what I can tell, Ben is saying that, you know, getting bigger teams onto 2 people.
Justin:They have, it's a pair programming tool. Has been very profitable for them. It's been a good move. And they're one of the few small companies that I know are doing enterprise sales. Oh, actually, I got, a message from a listener.
Justin:This was interesting. Let me just pull it up. So this is Sarah McMullen. She says, here are the top five things she learned developing products for the enterprise. Oh, and then it became 10.
Justin:So she's saying, you know, if you're considering going after enterprise customers, here's things to consider. Number 1, IP ownership. It makes you clearly define what is yours because this is stuff you have to define in the contract. Right?
Jason:Mhmm.
Justin:Number 2, support and maintenance. Really forces you to figure out what to develop because you will be contractually obligated to support it moving forward. That kinda scares me actually.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Number 3, scale. This is possibly the number one thing. You get a massive audience all at once, especially through global corporations. So you have to be able to scale all of these for example, if people are using SSO and they have 3,000 employees, and all of a sudden, all of those employees become users of Transistor all at once. What does that mean for scale?
Justin:Not just infrastructure, but, support as well. Right. Security. She says, as much as it is a pain in the ass, having to go through rigor with respect to pen tests, security standards, etcetera, does make your product better. Although some can be overkill.
Justin:I can see
Jon:that. Yeah. I think we would we would still have the option to say no to to to, let's say, enterprise customers that were requiring us to jump through a bunch of hoops. We'd just be, like, no.
Justin:Yeah. And we have done that so we have done that so far.
Jon:Not a good fit. Yeah. We have. Yeah.
Justin:We're, like, pretty close to signing, I think well, we've signed some other kind of enterprise level folks, But the one that we just went through was the first where there was a lot of due diligence.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And there were some things I was like, we just can't I I just can't go through that due diligence,
Helen:that
Justin:that part there. And it's it is a negotiation because then their team came back and said, okay. Well, we'll we'll just keep going without it. Number 6, saying no. You think it's hard to say no to a small business?
Justin:How about a big whale? You learn quickly the art of negotiation. So I can see this actually, especially, you know, if even now, you and I kind of get a little bit giddy whenever a big name company signs up. Yeah. Like, when you see a big brand name that you recognize, you're kinda like, oh, wow.
Justin:Hey. You feel already kind of like, your fan boying a bit. You know?
Jon:Yep.
Justin:And, it is harder to to say no to some of those folks when you feel like, oh, these are these big impressive companies.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:Number 7, product guidance. Enterprises didn't get to be big overnight. They do have things they can teach you to about their customers, their way of doing business that can uniquely make your product better? That's something I didn't consider. I think because I I actually I think I have a kind of a negative view of the enterprise.
Justin:Like, they're this big lumbering dinosaur
Jon:Right.
Justin:That doesn't really get it. That somehow just by, you know, legacy is able to make money. Like, IBM. You just think, okay. Come on.
Justin:Those are those folks, like is that a smart company? Maybe they are. I don't know. I. This is probably a bad
Jon:Yeah. I mean, they're just they're so big that it's it's hard to say because I'm talking about this having never worked in one of them.
Justin:So Yeah. And especially if you if you work for startups or small companies, I think a lot of the culture in small companies is often kind of cynical about big enterprise companies. Like, oh, look at those look at that big lumbering dinosaur. Look how inefficient they are. Look how, you know, they have to go through all this process.
Justin:Look at their culture. And, maybe some of that sentiment isn't correct.
Jon:Right.
Justin:Number 8. She says, these are not fair weather clients. As painful as they can be to acquire, they won't always leave you fast. And I can see that actually being an advantage, you know, by our nature, we attract, you know, a lot of kind of upstart podcasts that just won't last, but an enterprise company, if they commit to something and they sign a contract, they're gonna, they're gonna stick around. Right?
Justin:You know that you've got them for I I mean, you were saying a lot of these contracts are these are, like, 12 months, 24 month contracts. Right?
Jon:Yeah. And if you wanna leave at 6 months, you still have to pay the rest of the contract. Mhmm.
Justin:Interesting. Okay. Number 9, complete complete let me try that again. Number 9, completeness. They also force you to ship complete features, not half assed ones.
Justin:Don't have documentation on how your API works? They will call you on it. Now that could be hard. I mean, we we always ship I think we do ship complete features. And, actually, we I think we're pretty good at documentation.
Justin:Mhmm. So may maybe this wouldn't be a big deal for us. I I think one thing that worries me about completeness is whether like, our definition of complete is often, you know, a simple first version that works well.
Jon:Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think it's you know, we we get we get requests and, like, feature requests from customers, And I feel like it would be a lot harder to ignore though. Like, we ignore them sometimes or, like, push them off or say, we don't know when we're gonna do that. But if it's someone paying a large amount of money a month Mhmm.
Jon:And it's something they probably need, it's, like, probably gonna be a little bit harder to push those off.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the pressure, I think yeah. And that goes back to what she was saying about saying no.
Helen:Mhmm.
Justin:And then the final thing she says, number 10, money. The money is great. Right. But that's obvious. Right?
Justin:She says they can still nickel and dime you, but it's not as bad. Like, they so they they have professional negotiators that are, you know, in, procurement or whatever. But they generally, you can charge them more. And, you know, this is certainly what I've heard from, like I said, Des trainer at intercom. There's There's lots of folks that say, you know, and this is why I'm curious about Tuples, experience so far.
Justin:Part of it is I just don't believe it's possible for a small 2 person startup to sell to the enterprise. But I could be wrong about that. So, yeah, it'd be interesting to hear more from, listeners. Thanks to Sarah for reaching out on that. One thing I wanted to mention quickly that I've been working on is I've been rereading this book.
Justin:Well, actually, I took his course first. Donald Miller wrote this book called Building a Story Brand. And, it's it's all about positioning, your your your product. The the the sub headline is clarify your message so customers will listen. And I was listening to the the audio book while, I was driving to Idaho.
Justin:And I think it's, yeah, it's it was really helpful just to listen to it and think about, you know, who is transistor for? What challenges are they facing? How does our product help them overcome the challenge?
Jon:Yeah. You're coming up with a story.
Justin:Yeah. There's a it's a story framework. So he he thinks all good marketing uses the same storytelling framework that authors use. And he was formerly a fiction writer. So he he was using this to write fiction books.
Justin:And then he realized that this also works in marketing. And he says the big mistake he saw companies making is that on most if you go to most companies' websites, the company is the hero of the story. Well, in 18/67, we started John, Buddha and Jackson Co. And, you know, it's all about how, you know, it's all about the company. But the he thinks the real hero of a company's narrative needs to be the customer.
Justin:What superpower are you giving the customer? Right.
Jon:Isn't that what, what's your name?
Justin:Kathy Sierra.
Jon:Kathy Sierra talks about. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Which is always nice when you when you read a book like Cathy Sierra's book, Badass, is great. If you haven't read it yet, you should definitely read it. When there's alignment between smart people. So his framework really kind of, I think, connects with what Kathy was saying.
Justin:Yeah. And so I've been working through, he has actually a free tool at my story brand dot com that takes you through his framework. So a character, what do they want? And that's kind of like, what's their end goal? Like, what are they setting out to do?
Justin:And then what's the problem they encounter on the way? You know, is it, is there a villain? Is there an external threat, an internal thing, some philosophical block, and then meets a guide. So, you know, in I think in his framework, the company is the guide. It's kind of like in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker meets Obi Wan Kenobi and then meets Yoda.
Justin:Right? And they kinda guide him through, they give him a plan for success. Right? And, calls them to action. And then what kind of character transformation does the hero go through?
Justin:What does the end success look like? Yeah. So I'm kind of listening to a chapter and trying to go through, one of these steps, along the way. And I found it really even if I even if I don't fill this whole thing out, it's inspiring to have somebody bring up a topic. And then to start thinking about our website and go, oh, yeah.
Justin:Like,
Speaker 3:we
Justin:really need to fix that part. And, yeah. It would be good to clarify this. And I think another book that I'd like to read, I've been listening to her on a lot of podcasts, is April Dunford. She wrote a book on positioning that is just dynamite.
Justin:April's on one of our customers' podcasts, Jason Resnick, and he has a podcast called live in the feast. Here's a clip.
Speaker 3:In positioning. If you look at the research, the research tells us that as human beings, when we encounter something that we have never encountered before, we use what we already understand to figure out this new thing. So we kinda use a reference point of what we know to figure out what the heck is this new thing I know nothing about. And so in marketing, what that means is I try to figure out what box to put you in, what frame of reference to put you in. And if you don't give me one, I gotta make one up.
Speaker 3:And if you give me one, I'm gonna grab that and run with it as hard as I can. And, usually, that framing is market categorization. So if I were to come up to you and say, hey. I got this product, and I don't tell you anything about it. I just say, hey.
Speaker 3:I got this product, and it's a CRM. I have told you nothing. All I've done is told you the market category, but I guarantee you, you just made a bunch of assumptions about that product in your head. Who's my competitor? Salesforce.
Jon:Right? And who's Yeah.
Speaker 3:Who's how much does it cost? Well, probably doesn't cost more than Salesforce. That's the upper bound. Like, they they own this market, so that's the upper bound. So I just set an upper bound on my pricing right there by telling you I'm a CRM.
Speaker 3:What what's my feature set? Well, there's the CRM stuff. Right? I can probably track a deal across the pipeline and keep track of accounts, all this stuff. Who's my target buyer?
Speaker 3:Vice president of sales. That's who you sell CRM to. Right? So but you just assumed all that stuff. I didn't tell you anything.
Speaker 3:I just said I'm a CRM. That's the market market category. So if I do a good job picking that market category and all those assumptions that I trigger in your mind are true, fantastic Because I don't have to tell you who my competitor is. It's assumed. I don't have to list every single feature.
Speaker 3:It's assumed. Right? If my pricing is in the boundaries, then you're probably not gonna get a whole lot of pushback on that. Mhmm. But if I did a lousy job of picking my market category and what I triggered was a bunch of assumptions about your product that are not true, now you got trouble.
Speaker 3:Now you're gonna have to spend a significant amount of your sales and marketing energy saying, no. No. No. Not that kind of CRM. No.
Speaker 3:No. No. Not a CRM like that. And I'm gonna spend all my time trying to unwind the damage that that positioning has already done.
Justin:So she's talking about how when you say, for example, hey, I'm starting a podcast hosting company. Instantly, most people who are familiar with podcasting know what that is. They have a bucket to put that in. Like, okay. I I know what this is right now.
Justin:And, in turn, I think it aligns with what Donald Miller is saying and what Cathy Sierra is saying. Like, you can the the customer is the hero of the story. But when you're introducing something for them, they're looking for a guide that is recognizable. Like, they're looking for a solution that fits in with a in their existing framework. Right?
Justin:April says people make decisions based on what they already know. And yeah. So anyway, all 3 of those things have been really helpful for me. I think, I'll put the links in the show notes. Maybe to close things off, do you wanna give a little bit of update on this dark mode player?
Justin:I don't think we've talked about this yet.
Jon:No. We haven't. Yeah. We had a yeah. We had a few requests for this.
Jon:I think it was something I had actually, built I had planned on doing when I initially built our embeddable player. Like, I actually had, a CSS file for
Justin:Oh, really?
Jon:A dark play yeah. So what we're talking about here is our our embeddable, audio player is right now, it's white. Mhmm. A lot a few people have asked if they could have a dark player, so the background everything's dark, and the text is lighter. Mhmm.
Jon:So I kinda dug that up. It wasn't actually too hard to get, an initial version going, but then I've I've been slowly making, like, a few other, kinda quality of life upgrades to the player itself. So
Justin:Sweet.
Jon:Along with along with a dark mode, there will be a couple other improvements. I don't necessarily know when that'll be done, but Mhmm. It's, it's in the works. It's working and functional.
Justin:How are you feeling about, one concern I have is that we said we were gonna start our 6 week cycle on 3rd. Right. I wonder if we need to push that off. Because it would be nice to ship the dark mode player before that.
Jon:Yeah. It would. Yeah. I mean, we could do that. I
Speaker 3:wonder if we should
Justin:what about on this, either the 6th or the following, Tuesday? So the, yeah, 10th.
Jon:The 10th.
Justin:Because I'd like to have an official start to that that, you know, 6 week
Jon:Right.
Justin:Shaping cycle so we can we can have a good experiment. And then The 10th
Jon:the 10th might be good. I mean, it's Monday is a holiday for us. Yeah. Labe Labor Day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We have Labor Day too.
Jon:I mean, I think the the thing we probably wanna try to avoid is, like, pushing things back. I feel like it would be easy to fill in the gaps with stuff that we could do that are, like, a day or 2 project or finish anything. And it's, like, oh, well, let's maybe not start the 10th. Let's start, like, the following week. So
Justin:Yeah. I'm just thinking we need we need a cleanse before we start the the cycle. And if we could ship that one feature because that's really the only thing that's really stopping us from like, that's the only major thing on the books right now. Yeah.
Jon:There's a lot of yeah. There's a couple of other small things I've been slowly pecking away at, but nothing Mhmm. Nothing major.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. So let's we'll push it back to 10th. And, yeah. Try to let's try to ship that before Yeah.
Justin:Before we start.
Jon:Cool.
Justin:Cool. One more thing I'll bring up just because I thought it was interesting and interesting quote to think about. It's from this article called, unix at 50 from Ars Technica. And it says, unix came about because Bell Labs hired smart people and gave them the freedom to amuse themselves, trusting that their projects would be useful more often than not. And I thought that the whole story of Unix, which is now 50 years old, which has had incredible staying power, it's still widely used.
Justin:Linux is based off Unix. The Mac terminal is based off Unix. It's it it's it's
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it runs most of the Internet.
Justin:It runs most of the Internet. And so this idea that that came out of not a culture of oppression and hustle and grinding people but of openness and freedom and air to breathe And I think that aligns with kind of a lot of things we've been talking about.
Jon:Yeah. Totally.
Justin:Alright. John, why don't you thank our lovely Patreon supporters?
Jon:Long list of supporters. Yeah. Thanks everyone, for supporting us. We have Avendra Sassy. Still don't know if I get that right.
Jon:Pradyumna Schumbecker or PD for short.
Justin:Yeah. We had funny thing is we had somebody, tell us, a friend of his is like, oh, yeah. That's my that's my buddy.
Speaker 3:You said his
Jon:name perfect. Nice. Nice. Ben Mann, Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from l e two dot com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedraffita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sittbur, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha.
Justin:Danbuddha.com.
Jon:Our friend, Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schubert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.
Justin:Junta. I got a I got a really nice email from Junta this past week.
Jon:Awesome.
Justin:Yeah. It was really, really kind.
Jon:Nice. That's cool.
Justin:And encouraging.
Jon:Good. That's awesome.
Justin:Nice. I I replied with a heart emoji. That that's how good it was.
Jon:Nice. Kyle Fox from get rewardful.com, and our sponsor this week, ActiveCampaign.
Justin:Alright, folks. Thanks for listening. We will see you next week. Oh, by the way, go and, if you wanna talk about this episode, go to podhunt.app. And if it hasn't already been submitted, submit it.
Justin:If it has been submitted, leave a comment. We'd love to interact with you there.
