Do startups need specialists or generalists?
Hey, folks. We recently switched to Clubhouse for our project management. And the reason we did it is because they've struck a great balance between simplicity of something unstructured like Trello or Asana, but with the organization and power of something more robust like Jira. And I know folks, nobody likes their project management software. Clubhouse is project management software.
Helen:You'll actually like, You can get 2 months for free by visiting clubhouse.io/build.
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 Buda, a software engineer.
Helen:And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm. And, actually, if you've heard us say that URL before and you've never visited, you've never checked us out, go check us out, transistor dotfm. Just open it up on your phone right now because we're because we're working hard on it.
Helen:Right, John?
Jon:Yeah. Right. Exactly.
Helen:We want people to see it. Although Check
Jon:it out. I
Helen:I have to say, this is a topic probably for a different time, but, you know, we launched that site in August. And I think one of the the mistakes you can make that's easy to make is you launch a marketing site, and then you just leave it.
Jon:Uh-huh.
Helen:And so I've tried, like, tweaking little things here and there, like, just making sure I stay on top of it. Like, folks, if you're listening right now, when was the last time you changed your home page? Tweet us at transistorfm or at John Buddha at m I Justin. Because it's easy to just leave it.
Jon:It is.
Helen:And so
Jon:You're busy working on other things.
Helen:Yeah. And but it this is the way people find out about
Jon:you. Right.
Helen:So I actually one thing I just added, I don't know if you saw this, is because I'm the thing it's the Internet. Like, you can try something, and then you can remove it. You can but if you go to our home page and just near the header, I just put in this tweet from someone who switched. Because I I felt like we didn't we had lots of screenshots, but not very much human faces, like real people who have used it. So, yeah, I just put this tweet right in there.
Jon:I didn't know you did that. Yeah. Nice work.
Helen:I just I just did it. By the way, I've switched from using embedded tweets to images. I think it's better for page load loading. For for page speed
Jon:I'm not entirely sure how Twitter loads theirs. It might be asynchronous JavaScript, which would be fine. It should be.
Helen:The other problem is that Firefox and a few other browsers are now blocking cross domain iframes. Is that what they're doing? It's like they do you remember us talking about this? So some folks would load our homepage when we were embedding tweets, and all they would see is the block quote. They wouldn't see it like a style tweet.
Helen:Oh, okay. Figured out that Firefox is blocking the not just from Twitter, but, you know, I'll find it and put it in the show notes. Tweets embedded on non Twitter websites. Yeah. They are being blocked by by Firefox.
Helen:It's a setting you can take off, but, you know, I had multiple people who were like, what's going on here? So, yeah, I I think images is the way to go.
Jon:Cool.
Helen:So what have you been working on thinking about wrestling with this week?
Jon:I I spent a lot of time over the weekend and, I guess, the end of last week working on, researching, talking about, episode numbering and and seasons and things like bonus episodes and trailer episodes and how those sort of fit into the flow and and, like, sequence of your podcast.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:We had several questions from customers, or problems where they're like, well, hey. I added this episode. It's a bonus episode. It doesn't really have an episode number, but the way our system was working is that it would automatically, like, increment episode number to the next episode.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:So, like, if you had episode 100 and then added a bonus episode, the bonus episode would be episode 101, which a lot of people were like, it's not really episode 101. Mhmm. I don't want it to show up that way on, the transistor website. It's it's interesting because it doesn't really like, the episode number for iTunes doesn't necessarily matter. It it they use it for, like, ordering purposes.
Jon:So, anyway, I think when we originally built this, iTunes had sort of just announced their new tags that they supported, which were episode number, season number. And then they had different types of episodes, which are, like, full episodes, bonus episodes, trailer episodes. Yeah. And there wasn't really their documentation was not really clear on what your options were for using those and like, what are the requirements? How should you number them?
Jon:It should you number them. So I I read a lot of documentation. It's sort of spread out. But what I what I came up with was episode numbers are not technically required.
Helen:Okay.
Jon:You can have them. You cannot have them. They sort of do affect how things are order ordered in iTunes if they're there.
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:These tags are these tags are specifically for iTunes. I think some other applications are actually using them. Yeah. Other other podcast apps and directories.
Helen:Question.
Jon:Yes.
Helen:If I have episode 101, 102, and then I have a bonus episode, and I don't give it a number, how does Apple show it?
Jon:They will show it. Bonus episode, that's a good question. I think at that point, they sort of default to the publication date. Okay. I think I think in the Apple Podcast app, they show bonus episodes and trailers separately.
Helen:Gotcha.
Jon:So trailers actually show up, like, at the top of the season if we're using seasons.
Helen:Okay.
Jon:The way Apple yeah. That that that's still kind of, like, up in the air, and that's still a good question, because there's no real way to test that instantly with Apple.
Helen:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:And they didn't really have any documentation about it. So what I sort of found, though, was that you can have a trailer without an episode number, which means it's sort of the trailer for your show or for your season.
Helen:Yes.
Jon:If you have a trailer with an episode number, it can be the same episode number as the episode that it's a trailer for. Mhmm. And it will actually display it. It's like, hey. This is a teaser for episode 2.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:So on the flip side of that, you can have a bonus episode without an episode number that's just like a bonus episode for the show. Mhmm. Or you can have a bonus episode that is tied to another episode that has the same episode number. So you can have episode 100, bonus episode 100, which is, like, bonus material, and then it'll show up in iTunes as, hey. This is a bonus for episode 100.
Jon:Oh,
Helen:that's pretty cool, actually.
Jon:So actually, like the way we had it before is that you each episode had to have a unique episode number and it had to have an episode number. So that's where it was kind of tripping people up. Yeah. So loosening that a little bit and saying you can not have an episode or if you don't want, you can make it the same as another one. That's fine.
Jon:It's not really gonna affect it's not it's not gonna affect iTunes in any way, and that they're gonna, like, reject episodes. They just potentially show up differently.
Helen:Gotcha.
Jon:So I I fixed a bunch of that, kinda loosened our requirements, and then also added in another advanced setting for a show where you can optionally basically have to, like, turn on that you want to use seasons.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:And that'll allow you to set the season number. If you only have one season, it's actually won't put the season number in the RSS feed, so it won't some some podcast players and directories were, like, displaying episodes oddly if you have 1 season even though if you didn't really use a season or didn't weren't gonna you have a second season.
Helen:Yeah. So This actually brings up a good point that I wanted to discuss with you, which is this tweet I read from Jeff Morris junior at jmj on Twitter. Do you follow him? No. I think he's the, I think he's the product manager for Tinder.
Helen:But he often has kinda interesting tweets. And he said, the best digital products create a feeling of craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is easier to feel with physical products like leather goods. Ways to design digital craftsmanship. And he has three points.
Helen:Tell the story of the makers, which is what we do right now. Give your product a distinct personality, and include Easter eggs. Those were his three ideas. And, I think one thing that you're really good at is craftsmanship. Like, if there's a difference between me making stuff on my own and making stuff with you, it's like you have a really high quality a high bar for the stuff that you make.
Helen:You want it to look a certain way and feel a certain way. How have you like, now that we've been thrown into the fire, and we're having to add things, we're having to respond to customers. I think it gets a little bit harder sometimes to maintain, like, so how are you feeling about that? Like, what are some of the things going through your head on that front?
Jon:I feel okay about it. I mean, it is definitely difficult when you have, let's say, 4 or 5 people coming at you with questions related to, let's say, episode numbering or seasons that are all somewhat related.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:But there there's specific problems within the same area. And I think you would even post it on Slack something, and I'm like, I think the thing I'm working on is actually gonna fix that problem as well. Like, it Mhmm. I'm not directly fixing that, but it should actually fix it.
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:I think it's sort of like I mean, we talked about last time. It's sort of this mentality of, like, taking a step back and not reacting immediately to it and sort of doing some extra research, gathering some extra requirements. Yeah. Because I I thought I had had a plan. I thought I had had a good idea of how I was gonna approach this stuff, and then I read a bunch of documentation and kind of just changed that entirely.
Jon:So I thought fixing this was gonna be a pretty simple quick fix, but it actually took, I don't know, 5 or 6 days longer than I had anticipated. Because I I wasn't just wasn't ready to, like, start it.
Helen:Yeah. Well and that's what we've talked about before. You you can't just always react. Sometimes you need the time to kind of carefully consider what you're going to implement. And now that I've been in this business for, you know, how whatever, 10 years, longer than 10 years, I've seen how quick kind of knee jerk reactions, how you pay the price for those later on.
Helen:And you really have to count the cost in this business. Like, you have to count the cost of every decision. You can go overboard. Like, this is where software engineers sometimes over engineer before they need to. But I'm talking about making design decisions.
Helen:Right. And thinking through, like, how will this new thing that we want to add, how will that impact the future? Is there a better way to do this?
Jon:Right. You wanna keep it you wanna keep it simple enough so that people don't necessarily have to think about it, but flexible enough to when they do, they can do what they need to do. And that's
Helen:That's right.
Jon:It's like making complex things simple is the hardest
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:Part about designing software.
Helen:Yeah. And, really, you can't you can't just kind of prognosticate from the sidelines on this stuff. Because until you're in it, you don't like, the like, one popular kind of design meme is, and I'm gonna I'm gonna share this because we just did this. But sharing, like, a bunch of advanced settings in a, in a in a section, you know, that's like a a design anti pattern. They're like, no.
Helen:Just make it simple. But the truth is once, because this is actually something else you added is now our customers have the ability to change their RSS feed URL.
Jon:Yep.
Helen:And when you've done that for your customers, like, hundreds of times manually, eventually, you're just going to add it into the advanced settings. And, one change we made is we we had all those advanced settings. And I said, well, why don't we put that in,
Jon:what do
Helen:you call, an accordion?
Jon:Accord yeah. Yeah.
Helen:In in some ways, actually, one way, I think, to still have that feeling of craftsmanship is to use a design framework. We're using semantic UI. So as, you know, as a product person, I can go into semantic UI and I can say, what elements are available to us? And then I can say, oh, well, maybe this accordion would be a good fit for our advanced settings. But now we have this big advanced settings section.
Helen:And certainly, like, Anchor doesn't show any of that stuff. They they have a very a very simple app. But we know for our customers that we need that section. And so, you know, there's there's always, this tension between, you know, making something that's well designed, that's simple, that hides the complexity. But sometimes you have to show the complexity.
Jon:Sometimes you have to, yeah, allow people to see the complexity. Yeah. So I think I think hiding that section behind the accordion was a good idea, especially it could just kept growing. Like, there are these all these cases where people were like, I need to do this one thing, but not everybody needs to do it. So it's like it just kept growing.
Helen:Yes. And and, actually, an interesting we'll give some homework to the the listeners. I'm sure a lot of people have already read this, but Cathy Sierra's, badass book, making users awesome. Part of what she argues for is not making not necessarily making products less complex. She gives examples like, you know, Photoshop is incredibly complex and and not intuitive to use out of the box.
Jon:Mhmm.
Helen:But she says the that complexity in many ways is necessary. We shouldn't be, you know, handicapping products, just because we have this desire to make them simple. Sometimes you need to leave the product complex because the user to in order to make the user awesome, you need to give them all that power. And and that power often means complexity. Right?
Helen:Cool. Yeah. So, yeah. Users, you can now change your RSS feed URL. That's been,
Jon:yeah. Yeah. And it'll yeah. So the way that's set up is that you can your RSS URL is based on the title of your show when you create your show, but never really updates if you change your the title of your show.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:So now you can go in. Yeah. You can change your RSS URL. If you had already, let's say, submitted that to iTunes, your old you'll your old RSS URLs will actually redirect to your new one as well. Nice.
Helen:I was gonna ask you about that.
Jon:So there's, like, sort of a history of of
Helen:Oh, that's so great.
Jon:It's all set up to, like, automatically redirect. So
Helen:Love it. See, that's that's a good example of hiding complexity. Like, you've changed the RSS feed, but most people wouldn't know that you need to redirect those, that there might be certain people subscribe to the old one directly. And so by you just automatically doing that for the user, it's a gift. It's it it makes them more awesome because all of a sudden you're getting them the superpower they never knew they had, which is, oh, wait a second.
Helen:All the old subscribers that are subscribed to the old feed just automatically get redirected. It's all just clean.
Jon:It's redirected. Apple Apple should pick up the redirect and change it internally. So
Helen:Yeah. Just don't switch off of transistor because then you'll lose the redirect. Right. That's great. And and that's probably a good, transition into one of my updates for this week, which is, we had this story to build a status page for Transistor.
Helen:Mhmm. So, you'll see these on, like, GitHub has 1. You know, Twilio has 1 and it's often like status.twilio.com. You know, it's a sub domain. And that the idea is if something happens with your app, if your app server goes down, if, you know, if your what like, marketing website goes down, if your media server goes down, and people are having problems
Jon:Mhmm.
Helen:They can go to status.transistor.fm and see what's going on. And, it should actually help us as a, as a, you know, doing customer support because we can say, oh, you know, there is a problem. Just go to status. We'll update you Yep. You know, there.
Jon:Yeah.
Helen:And, so we had the idea of hosting it on GitHub Pages. A lot of folks don't know that you can actually host static websites on GitHub for free. And so we thought that would be a good starting place instead of us, you know, paying for a service that does this. Let's just have a static page and build it. And so I noticed that this was in our in Clubhouse as one of the stories that was available.
Helen:And I thought, you know, I'm just gonna try to do this. And I didn't use semantic UI though. I I've been wanting to learn Tailwind. And so I'm like, I'm just gonna use Tailwind, which is, built by my friend, Adam Wathan. And, Yeah, I'm going to build this with tailwind and then get the first version out, which I did.
Helen:I actually did it as a live stream, which is something I've talked about before. It's like a good way for me to learn is to push myself to just go live and try to figure it out. And, the nice thing as someone who's learning, a lot and is still a beginner is that when people show up in the comments like, there's, like, probably 3 or 4 times where I was like, okay. Well, I'm stuck. I guess I gotta stop.
Helen:And people in the comments were like or in the live chat were said, oh, no. Just try this. And then I try it. It didn't work. And then they'd suggest 2 or 3 other things, and it would work.
Helen:And it just unblocked me so that I could keep working on this thing. Yeah. So that's up right now. My next step is I'm going to try to style it using Tailwind, but so it matches our brand. And, I've got a little bit of help because Adam did this.
Helen:I forgot about this. But back in, when was this? Back in October 2018, he rebuilt the transistor sign up page that you'd done using Tailwind. And so there's a whole livestream, on YouTube that where he did that. So I'm just gonna follow his his his instructions, and and do it.
Helen:So
Jon:That's handy. Yeah.
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:Awesome.
Helen:Yeah. It felt it felt good. And again, I I think I've talked about this before. But to me, it feels like the world is increasingly becoming full stack in the sense of I think everyone's going to have a core competency and a core skill that they're good at.
Jon:Yep.
Helen:But in but if you are a marketer, you're going to need to learn some basic, you know, development skills. If you're a developer, you're going to need to learn some basic sales skills. I think everybody's gonna need to learn to be a better writer. I think doing things like this for me is helping me, like, learn more. I wanna round myself out.
Helen:I wanna become more full stack. So yeah. It feels good to actually ship stuff.
Jon:Yeah. It's interesting that you say that that it's, like, moving towards full stack, which I guess I agree with, but but also, like, there's still, like, really I feel like there's still a heavy movement towards, like, specialization. Mhmm. Which is the opposite of that.
Helen:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:You know, like, people you're you get hired because you know react or something. That's, like, all you do.
Helen:Yeah. No. I agree. I think this is a good counterargument. Let's fight it out.
Helen:The even the people that are specializing. So, I mean, there there were special specialists that knew COBOL back in the seventies. And, the truth is most of them had to learn other skills at some point in their career. And I think eventually, the what the the reality is you can't just be a specialist forever. Maybe in a few cases you can.
Helen:You know, there's people who learned Erlang way back when, and there's they've just done Erlang forever.
Jon:Well, now those Cobalt folks, they're getting lured back into these old systems and probably making a ton of money. Yeah. No one knows it.
Helen:There's some of them for sure. Yeah. But, again, like, you can't now those COBOL folks, when they get into, you know, the they get hired and the boss goes, okay. We've got this front end built on the web. We need to somehow you folks need to figure out how to how to connect this back end we've had running this power plant for 30, 40 years to a front end.
Helen:It's just not enough to just stay in one lane anymore. I think Right.
Jon:No. It's not. I
Helen:there's tension between these ideas. I I realize that, but especially for bootstrappers, especially for startup folks, especially for folks working on small teams, I think full stack is the the direction you wanna go. Now maybe I've never worked for a big company. So maybe in the big corporate world, specialization is still winning.
Jon:I think I think that's probably the case. Yeah. I haven't worked for a big company there, so I wouldn't really be able to speak to that.
Helen:Well, there's limits to this too. The other trend I've seen is that designers cannot get work unless they unless they have multiple things that they can do. So if, like, Nick De Sabato is a designer, but he has overlapped a marketing interest, a ecommerce interest
Jon:Mhmm.
Helen:A, you know, he he does, AB testing. So, I mean, he might say, well, now I'm a specialist in the AB testing world or whatever. But to me, he just became more full stack. Like Yeah. He he knew design.
Helen:He knew front end development. And it he just kept adding skills. And to me, specialization is saying, no. I'm just a designer. All I do is go into Photoshop and build mock ups.
Jason:Right.
Helen:And at least from my perspective, those kinds of designers are having a hard time finding work.
Jon:Yeah. I think
Helen:The designers I see getting hired are more a full stack maybe is just a bad word, but they've added other skills. They've used this overlap technique, that Sean McCabe has talked about. And I guess Scott Adams, the cartoonist, kind of talks about this too, where you take, you know, something you're pretty good at, and you overlap something else you're pretty good at, and you overlap something else you're pretty good at. And then you become kind of the unique individual that Yeah. I mean, I
Jon:think, you know, I think the best developers, designers I've worked with have certainly been that way where they can sort of they can do it all. There's they still probably specialize in one thing or another, but
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:They can. And they know they know enough about other areas to really, you know, know where to know where to start, or they know what they don't know, I guess. Yeah. So they they know they know enough about a thing to know. I there's still a lot I need to know about this.
Helen:Exactly. Yeah. Next, before we get into our final segment here, I wanna talk about one of my favorite companies, Balsamic. They have sponsored this episode. And, I've actually been good friends with Paldi, the founder, for a long time.
Helen:He's from Italy. He's like the most lovable person in technology. I've got I've got some funny stories about, Paldi and and I, may all tell them in different different episodes. But he recently told me they're expanding their offering at Balsamiq. So if you don't know them, they're basically the perfect wireframing tool for SaaS founders.
Helen:You don't have to be a UX professional to use it. This is exactly what we're just talking about. You know, in terms of specialization, if you're just a product person and you're not a designer, you can drag and drop. You'll have all your ideas on kind of digital paper, ready to talk about it with investors, developers, and designers. And they've just added a whole section to their website that teaches you how to wireframe regardless of what product you use.
Helen:They have courses on UI design, quick articles like, you know, when should you use a checkbox instead of a radio button, inspirational videos. And you can get all of this at balsamic with a q dotcom/learn. By the way, we didn't hear about whether or not that was a Easter egg at the end of the last episode. If I'm saying balsamic correctly.
Jon:Oh, balsamic or balsamic?
Helen:Yeah. Balsamic or balsamic. I think we've all already recognized that most Canadians, we don't go awe. We go, ah. Yeah.
Helen:I think that's the difference. And so
Jon:I I talked about this as well with a friend, on Saturday that I was having dinner with.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:And
Helen:Like you're saying you're saying, I gotta tell you about something annoying my partner does.
Jon:I don't even know why it came up, but I I did mention the JavaScript thing.
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:But he but he brought up a good point. He was like, I have this friend or friends or someone that I know that lives in South Africa or South Africa. And they like, let's say you have someone's named Deborah. Right? Yeah.
Jon:And then there's also an animal called a zebra.
Helen:Deborah zebra. Yeah.
Jon:But they're spelled the same, and people in South Africa call zebras zebras, which makes total which makes total sense because that's how that's exactly how
Helen:Yeah. Let's get some consist consistency. Yeah.
Jon:Anyway
Helen:That's a good point. I like this. I like this.
Jon:Language is language is an interesting thing.
Helen:Alright. What's next, John? What else have you been kinda thinking about?
Jon:I've been thinking a lot about, this idea of private podcasts.
Helen:Oh, yeah.
Jon:Something I think we've talked about a bit. We've gotten a lot of requests. Like, last week, we had, like, 5 or 6 people at least send us a message through our support system being like, hey. Do you support private podcast in this way? What happens if I give out this private podcast feed and I have an employee that that leaves or gets fired.
Jon:Yeah. But they still technically have access to this thing. Yeah. So I feel like there's something there, and I don't know what the answer is yet. Yeah.
Jon:I can see I can see the benefit of it in having this, like, private app for your company, for your employees. Mhmm. Where you can get some amount of control about who can see it.
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:So there so there's an account aspect, but there's definitely, like, easier ways to do this and I and better ways to do it. And I actually my friend that I was talking to on Saturday had some good ideas about it. There are ways to actually integrate with things like, Google Apps or Microsoft
Helen:exchange
Jon:exchange or the or, these directory services for a company so that Okay. Authentication is actually tied to that. So let's say you have a company of a 100 people, they could log in or sign up to get access to this private podcast through their Google apps. If that person leaves the company and no longer has an email, they just don't get access anymore. Interesting.
Jon:Which is super interesting. Yeah.
Helen:Because people have asked that, and I've always kind of been, like, ah, like, how can we integrate with your exchange server? That just sounds like a nightmare. Yeah.
Jon:I mean, basically, you wanna, yeah, not have to deal with, like, emails and passwords for these people.
Helen:Yeah. Yeah. That would be interesting. And and I of course, the the tension is, should we add this to transistor, or is this, like, a different product? You know?
Jon:Right. I mean, yeah, it's a it's definitely a premium. It'd be a premium offering, I think, for transistor or possibly a separate product. I'm not sure.
Helen:I I think what I had some thoughts that about this too. I think we added it to Transistor, it would be a whole new tier, like an enterprise tier. Yep. 199, 299 a month or something. And, because it would require more support.
Helen:It would require, you know, this whole other it would be it would require supporting more users, which is the the difficult part.
Jon:Right.
Helen:Right now, you know, we have a team section, but most teams on transistor are 1 or 2 people. And it just means we don't have to support as many people. But as soon as we have thousands of people from IBM signing up to listen to a podcast
Jon:Yeah. It depends how we do it. I don't know if those people would necessarily be reaching out to us for support.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:Or if sort of whoever is in charge at the company to run the podcast would so maybe we'd still only have, like, one point of contact.
Helen:Yeah. What I like about it is it's it it gives us a potential for expansion revenue. So we could say, if you want just a normal private podcast feed with basically one username and password that you share with people, You can do that right now. We have that in our plans right now. But if you want this enterprise secure, very private, like, you have to authenticate each user
Jon:Mhmm.
Helen:To to listen, that's 299 a month. And, you know, this is what we provide for it. And, you know, the questions get a lot harder there. Like, those enterprise clients, already had some of them contact us, and they ask hard questions about security, about, you know, they want their IT director to talk to us, and then they have this audit checklist. And
Jon:Right.
Helen:You know, it would it would have to be I know some competitors are charging, like, $500 a month for this. Right?
Jon:Yeah.
Helen:And it's because it just takes more time. But if there's enough interest, you know, maybe it'd be worthwhile. And I could see
Jon:Yeah. It feels like it feels like there's something there.
Helen:And I could see other people using it different ways too. Like Yeah. You know, if you are someone who really wants every single listener to have their own username and password, like, maybe you're starting a membership site or, you know, whatever, I could see you you might want something like this. Although, you probably couldn't afford those big enterprise rates.
Jon:Right. Unless you're charging for your memberships.
Helen:Yeah. I'm just saying, like, membership sites are you generally you know, those businesses, they don't they probably don't pay any they don't have any services they pay 2.99 a month for.
Jon:So, yeah, I think there's something there to to look into, whether or not you know, part of me thinks that it'd probably be pretty beneficial to try to build native apps for iOS and Android, but you can do that with you can do that fairly easily now with, like, React Native where you can build it once and it rolls out to so we'd we'd we'd have, like, a transistor app in the App Store that
Helen:Yeah.
Jon:That you would you would authenticate into through your, like, through this whatever system we built, basically authenticate into your private podcast. You'd listen to the podcast through that. Mhmm.
Helen:So
Jon:that way it's, like, it's very secure. It's very private. No one can really, like, grab the audio. And then that would that would keep track of, you know, new episodes rolling in. You could maybe download them to your to your app itself and and listen there.
Jon:That's obviously a much bigger that's a much bigger build than just, like, building out a simple website. But
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:I think I I don't know. I think there's something there. Yeah. And and that there's not really anyone doing it or doing it well.
Helen:Yeah. Well, and we know there's like, there are competitors. But, yeah, there seems to be opportunity. Part of the reasons we got here is because I tested out with just with SEO. I I created a blog post called, create a private podcast for your team.
Helen:And now we rank number 1 for a lot of those keywords. And so we're getting all of this traffic because we're number 1. And yeah. It's been interesting to see what kinds of companies, like, every once in a while in Slack, I'm like, John, did you see who just signed up? God.
Helen:Like, this is crazy.
Jon:Yeah. But
Helen:yeah. The the the hard part as a 2 person team is, can we do that? Can we serve those customers?
Jon:Right.
Helen:I and I think the traditional wisdom has been, like, don't like, there's people right now yelling at their podcast players going, John and Justin, don't get into that. It's gonna be too hard, too much of a distraction. But on the other hand, sometimes you have to challenge some of that traditional wisdom and go, well, maybe not. May maybe we could do it and wouldn't be that much more work. And it would be I mean, a 100 customers at 2.99, that's almost $30,000 a month in MRR.
Jon:Right.
Helen:Like, that's I already know from dealing with those kinds of customers in the past. Yeah. They're a pain in the ass to sign up and get onboarded, because they've got so many questions and so many hoops you've gotta go through. But once you get them, they stick around forever. They Yep.
Helen:They take very little of your time.
Gavin:Yeah.
Jon:They're very little. I mean, they're they're not necessarily these big flashy, like, podcasts. You know? They're not, like, flashy, super popular podcast, but, at some point, like, who care you don't need that. Like
Helen:Oh, yeah. I think we've definitely Yeah. I think we've definitely discovered that the the big kind of sexy, you know, podcast that people think about, those that's not where the business is. The business is in the super boring like, the company that just wants to distribute a podcast to their salespeople. The nonprofit that just wants to have a podcast alongside their blog and newsletter.
Helen:Right. The solopreneur who just wants to get, you know, a 1000 true fans and, you know, have committed listeners every week. But, you know, a 1000 a 1000 subscribers would be great for them and would help them sustain their business. Those are that's those are our customers. And, if our goal is to help even the most boring shows get connect with their audience, which increasingly it feels like that's kinda what we're doing.
Jon:Right.
Helen:Yeah. I think this might be good next step for sure.
Jon:But, hey, boring sometimes boring is okay.
Helen:No. I think I think that is the lesson. I actually, that should be that should be the title. Boring is okay. Because I think I I don't think people think like, people think of Stripe as this big sexy startup.
Helen:They have the most boring, tedious back end work you could imagine. Like, for programmers working there, I'm sure there are some programmers that are stuck in just, like they they probably have to go build scrapers for bad bank websites and stuff.
Jon:Probably. Yeah.
Helen:Like Yeah. It boring is fine. Boring is good. Most of the businesses in the world are incredibly boring.
Jon:Yep.
Helen:So yeah. I think it's a good lesson. Maybe just to finish off the show here. Jason Cohen wrote an article called Startup Kung Fu. I'll put the link in the show notes.
Helen:Saas.transistor.fm/49. And there's just a bunch of it's like bite sized wisdom, maybe 20 points.
Jon:Yeah.
Helen:All the lessons he's learned. A few things I wanted to talk about with you quick. He says MVP, minimum viable product, is the wrong idea. He says aim for SLC instead. Simple, lovable, and complete.
Helen:And I just love that idea. So he goes, for simple, if the product never claimed to do more than it does, customers are forgiving. Meaning, if you from the beginning, you say, this is just a simple product that does this, customers will forgive you. But if you are a product that's saying, well, this is just us right now, but it's gonna be so much more. Customers, you've kind of promised something to deliver something that you may never get to.
Helen:Right. And I think I mean, I've certainly fallen into the strat where I wanna say, oh, yeah. We've got so much more coming. But recently, I've been thinking and actually, I got this from Brian Cassell at from the bootstrapping web podcast. He goes he tries to, discourage people from signing up for his apps and his services.
Helen:He'll be like, is this really right for you? You know? What what he he's almost being just completely just saying, this is not the right fit for you. Or if you're trying to do this, don't bother because it's just not gonna be the right fit. And long term, that's such a great way to do it.
Helen:Because if people sign up, they know what you offer, and they're that's what they're signing up for.
Jon:Right. Yeah. And I I think we did that.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:When we launched, we didn't really I don't think we over promised, and we certainly had things that we wanted to do. But Mhmm.
Helen:I mean, people are definitely asking us about, like, dynamic content, which is something we've talked about. In some ways, you wanna let people know sometimes what's coming down the pipe. But, Lovable, I think is the key part, of this equation. Like, people have to want to use it. And that products that do less but are loved are more successful than products which have more features.
Helen:That's a quote from his article.
Jon:Okay.
Helen:I I think this is so true. And he talks about different ways to get love. Like, you know, a really delightful user experience, the attitude and culture of the company itself, a deep connection to the psyche and work style of customers. So he talks about all the ways a product can be lovable. And that just really resonated with me.
Helen:Because I've noticed, like, the things that I buy and use are have some part of them that are lovable. You know? Like, there's something like, oh, I just love the way this feels. Or I love the way the founder thinks. Or this this user experience, this design is just delightful.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's yeah. And once you think about, like, the physical products you bought, that sort of that you're just like, yeah, this thing is this thing is great. I'm gonna recommend this to everyone.
Jon:It's great. Like, the small details are just like
Helen:Yes. Yeah. And if you listen, like, again, if you're if you have your ears open in a coffee shop and you hear somebody recommending something, listen to the language that they use and the reasons they're recommending it. And it's almost always, like, oh, wow. They really love this product.
Helen:They don't it's not, like, viable. Like, that's the minimum viable product. Viable is, like and I I think it's been a distraction to people because they're
Jon:Yeah.
Helen:They're they're they're just thinking of the thing itself rather than what Kathy Sierra kinda recommends, which is make don't make the thing more awesome. Make the user more awesome.
Jon:Yeah. I think MVP was sort of like a it's an like an acronym to rally around really then.
Helen:Mhmm.
Jon:Maybe not necessarily the most accurate one, but it was something.
Helen:Yeah. Well and I'm I actually think there's value in just having these ideas. People, like, I'm glad that there was MVP because that spawned all sorts of thinking around product design. But I I like it when people iterate on it and go, well, maybe it's not MVP. Maybe it's SLC.
Jon:Right. I mean, would you would you wanna sign up for a product because you love it or because it's viable? Yeah. Like
Helen:It's it's kinda like your marketing page says, this product has enough features.
Jon:It's it's it's fine.
Helen:It's okay. Yeah. So yeah. And complete means it's don't release version 0.1, release version 1 point o.
Jon:Yeah.
Helen:Right? And that was definitely something we did is when we launched in August, that was us saying, we feel like this is version 1 point o. Yeah.
Jon:It was done enough for the time being. Like, yeah. Yes. It was definitely a 1 point o.
Helen:And you'll know if your product is lovable because you will feel the love. And so if if you're not getting people tweeting or recommend or writing you in your customer support and saying, man, thank you so much for building this. It is just such a delight to use. I would say that there's a signal there that you need to be worried about.
Jon:Yeah. We certainly don't have people, like I said, emailing us being like, hey, man. This is this is viable.
Helen:Yeah. This is viable. Thanks for thanks so much for making the final product.
Jon:Reach out and email you and, like, you know, give you praise because it's it's, like, meh. It's fine.
Helen:This product is so basic. Thank you. Thank you. But we have gotten that feedback, and that's, to me, a good signal when I get Yeah. The feedback.
Helen:It's also a good reminder, like, if you love something, reach out to the founders and let them know. Like, just tweet at them or write an email or like, if something is enjoyable for you to use, then let the people who are making it know, because that's the kind of feedback they need. That lets them know they're on the right track. Cool. Well, I think that's probably good for this week.
Helen:John, why don't you roll through our patreons? Alright.
Jon:Thank you as always to our supporters on Patreon. Kyle Fox at GetRewardful. My brother, Dan Buddha. Danbudda.com. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schubert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Ajunta.
Helen:Ajunta.
Jon:And, our sponsors for this week, Clubhouse and Balsamic. Balsamic.
Helen:That's right. Balsamic. First of all, I know some of you were actually, like, reading along or, you've memorized those names now. If you want your name to be on that list, patreon.com/johnjustin. That's how you become a Patreon, and we really appreciate all those folks.
Helen:Health pay for editing this show. And, Yeah. We'll see you next week.
