Justin: 00:00

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Justin: 00:14

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Justin: 00:35

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Jon: 00:53

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a Web App in 2019. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

Justin: 01:01

And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm. Alright. Saturday night, March 2nd.

Jon: 01:14

Where Saturday night.

Justin: 01:14

Where did February go? It it goes by so fast.

Jon: 01:17

I don't know. I'm I'm okay that February is gone now.

Justin: 01:19

Really? Was was Yeah. February is kind of dreary?

Jon: 01:23

Well, it was dreary. I got sick at the end of it. The horrible cold. It was cold. It was really cold.

Gavin: 01:29

I think the I think February included the

Jon: 01:31

days where it was, like, negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Justin: 01:33

Oh, yeah. Yeah. My friends in Edmonton, I think, just had the coldest February in 40 years.

Jon: 01:41

Yeah. I could do without February in general. They could just skip it from now on.

Justin: 01:46

That's a that's a that's a funny one actually. Because February is kind of a dreary month. So, yeah. All right.

Jon: 01:53

I'll, I'll Or just rename it to something that sounds more chewy.

Justin: 01:57

Let's rename it to Mexico. Yeah.

Jon: 02:00

That works.

Justin: 02:01

Just just everyone head to Mexico for February, come back. Because I actually like March quite a bit. March April,

Jon: 02:08

I'm okay with.

Justin: 02:10

Yeah. Now, sorry. I I we started later than I wanted to. I I had to drop my kid off at the theater. You were at the office, but

Gavin: 02:19

I was at the office.

Jon: 02:20

I had a random run-in.

Justin: 02:21

Oh, yeah. Who'd you run into?

Jon: 02:22

So I was at the office for a little bit. Mike Hurley, if anyone knows who that is, is

Justin: 02:27

Oh, from Relay.

Jon: 02:29

Co founder of Relay dot f m, which is a huge podcasting network that has a bunch of really popular shows. I met Mike at, I think, the first XOXO.

Justin: 02:42

Yeah. That's where I met him too.

Jon: 02:43

And then you met him in the year after, and we've just stayed in touch, over the years, like, pretty much just through the Internet, but I've seen them from time to time. But, I had no idea this thing was happening. They were doing a live recording of the Mac Power Users podcast

Justin: 02:58

Oh, no. At which

Jon: 02:59

is on related. Fm.

Justin: 03:00

At cards.

Jon: 03:01

And, at card at the theater. And, as so I gave him a huge hug and just said hi and talked to him for a few minutes. And, yeah, it was really weird.

Justin: 03:10

That's so crazy. I mean,

Jon: 03:11

it's great.

Gavin: 03:11

It was

Jon: 03:11

so good to see him. I haven't seen him in years. But

Justin: 03:13

He's just like a jet setting celebrity now.

Jon: 03:17

Yeah. He's a he's a podcast celebrity for sure.

Justin: 03:19

He has his own Wikipedia page. Wow. He's like he shows up at that podcast conference and and signs autographs.

Jon: 03:28

Yeah. Wow.

Justin: 03:29

That's it is kinda weird. The Internet creates a weird, celebrity culture.

Jon: 03:35

It does. I mean, Internet famous to you or I is, like, people normal people would be, like, who, what, who cares?

Justin: 03:44

Yeah. Like, if you went out if you went out into the streets of Chicago right now and said, have you heard of Mike Hurley?

Jon: 03:50

They're like, the basketball player? And I'm like, I don't know. Is there one?

Justin: 03:56

Crazy. Well, that's cool, man.

Jon: 03:57

Yeah.

Justin: 03:58

And, were you just were you at the office to work on transistor stuff? Or Yeah.

Jon: 04:03

Yeah. I was just finishing up a few a few things I had kinda started throughout the week. It's a nice nice place to focus.

Justin: 04:09

Yeah.

Jon: 04:10

Nice quiet and quiet and, yeah, I don't know, peaceful on the weekends.

Justin: 04:15

Your your house is quiet and peaceful though too. Yeah. So what is it about the office that makes you wanna go there?

Jon: 04:23

There's a desk to work at.

Justin: 04:25

Got it.

Jon: 04:26

Yeah. Mostly a desk. It's just just nice. There's no there's less distractions, I would say. Yeah.

Jon: 04:34

I think that's I think is in. Yeah.

Justin: 04:36

There's something about that, about getting in the zone. And I especially when you're building something on the side, I think so much so many of us are doing it at home. Like, you know, waking up early, doing it, working on the at the kitchen table or something.

Jon: 04:50

Yeah. I, if I was to do this full time, I I wouldn't. Yeah. I would not work at home. I'd have to find a way to, like, rent an office space or something or continue to work out of that office.

Jon: 05:02

Maybe that might be weird, but

Justin: 05:05

I think you have to.

Jon: 05:07

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would I would I think I would probably go crazy or just never leave and get stir crazy and, like Mhmm. End up watching movies during the middle of the day or something, which I suppose would still be an option, you know, if I needed a a mental break.

Justin: 05:24

Break. Yeah.

Jon: 05:25

Yeah. That's probably a that's probably a topic for an episode once I do ever, you know, go full time with this thing. Yeah. How how do you how do we work?

Justin: 05:36

How do you stay focused?

Jon: 05:37

How do you stay focused? How do you work?

Justin: 05:39

Definitely, getting out of the house, I found, has been really helpful for me. And there's, you know, I'm in a Slack where a guy he built a a backyard shed office, which is interesting.

Jon: 05:52

Yeah. I I know someone who did that. I don't know if it's the same person. But

Justin: 05:57

I I it's actually I think it's gonna be a bigger trend because there's so many people freelancing and working from home. And I think what people realize is that it's actually, like, we have these different zones in our contextual zones. We've talked about this before, but, you know, home is kind of for me where I relax. I actually don't even like visitors. I I just like home is where I eat cereal and I sit in my sweats, you know?

Jon: 06:23

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's sweatpants mode Yeah. When you get home is definitely a thing.

Justin: 06:28

And so to go from sweatpants mode to, like, work mode, I I needed a a contextual shift. I need to go somewhere else.

Jon: 06:37

Yep. Yeah. I I historically have not been great at that when I kinda work for myself.

Justin: 06:42

Yeah.

Jon: 06:43

It was, like, jump into work immediately when you wake up in sweat pants, and then realize that it's 2 PM and you haven't taken a shower Yeah.

Helen: 06:51

Change on your sweatpants.

Justin: 06:52

Oh, man. That that, like, festering when you've just been in your house all day and just, like, oh, I yeah. I and I actually get a lot of energy from being out of the house. The the like, when I get out of the house, that's where I kinda come alive.

Jon: 07:06

So Yeah. Totally.

Justin: 07:09

Yeah. Anyway so I don't think it's good. You know, people are people wanna know how to, I'm sure people have different ways that they're working right now. I'm sure this is a struggle. If this is something you've struggled with and you're listening right now at transistorfm or at johnbuda at m I justin, love to hear from you as always.

Justin: 07:28

Yep. What have, what have you been working on? What what did we kinda get done this week?

Jon: 07:34

We got a couple, well, big big things, but in small big things, small features, seemingly big. They're they're still big and unfinished, I'd say. So the first one that I was had been working on for a while kinda, like, went back and forth on it and tried out different things and ended up just going a really simple route was integrating, the Spotify analytics into our analytics, page Mhmm. For the show. So if you submitted your podcast to Spotify through Transistor, you historically had no way to know how your show was doing Mhmm.

Jon: 08:15

Or how many listens you had

Justin: 08:17

from Spotify.

Jon: 08:18

Yeah. Because, they store the media files on their servers, and so we don't get, like, instant analytics for each download. Mhmm. So they have an API that you can you can grab reporting for a day at a time for each show that's on Spotify through our connection. So, basically, every day every morning, we grab analytics for all the shows that we sent over to Spotify Mhmm.

Jon: 08:51

From the day before. So we get the previous day's analytics for each episode of each show that was listened to.

Justin: 08:57

Gotcha.

Jon: 08:57

So then we kinda, like, integrate those back into the analytics and kinda backfill it for the previous day. So we we've been collecting those for a long time. It was just sort of a question of how we wanted to display those. So, I did a simple sort of a simple way for now where your daily analytics and downloads from Spotify will just be included in your overall analytics for each episode, for total listens, for, like, total monthly lessons, they'll be included in that. But also ads in Spotify as a as a popular player in the popular players chart that we have.

Jon: 09:36

So I was poking around. Our for this show, it's low. It's, like, 2% or something like that Mhmm. Which isn't actually that surprising. Some other shows, it's so small that it doesn't actually show up.

Jon: 09:50

Oh, yeah. It's like it's like 4 downloads out of 400 overall or something like that. So it's like it says it's a player in there, but it doesn't actually show up in the chart.

Justin: 10:01

Gotcha. It's not showing anything yet.

Jon: 10:03

So there's a ways to go. I mean, this this is, like, the first step, I think.

Justin: 10:07

Yeah. I mean, this is this is something people have been wanting for a long time.

Gavin: 10:12

Yeah. And I would imagine once they see

Jon: 10:13

it, they'll probably be like, that's it? Like, what?

Justin: 10:16

Yeah. I I probably I'm actually looking at a show right now. They have 72% of their listens happens on Spotify. Wow. Yeah.

Justin: 10:25

And they had a they had a really big jump. I they must have kinda hit the Spotify featured or algorithm or something because they have a ton of streams on 1.

Jon: 10:38

The whole, like, walled garden platforms are I don't know. They're a little annoying. Spotify in general because they store the files on their servers. Mhmm. And then I think the Stitcher do that.

Jon: 10:51

Yeah. Someone else does it.

Justin: 10:53

Yeah. Stitcher does that. Yeah.

Jon: 10:55

So I I I don't even know how we record Stitcher downloads right now. We might not, if that's thing.

Justin: 11:03

Yeah. I should actually look and see.

Gavin: 11:06

Or if there's a way to get them.

Jon: 11:07

There's a

Justin: 11:07

way to get them. And they they might be they might actually be doing a little bit differently. And to be honest, like, ever since they were acquired, I haven't kept up to date with what their new plan is. Stitcher used to be a, quite a popular podcast player because it was the only way to stream episodes, for a long time.

Jon: 11:29

Okay. And it

Justin: 11:29

was the only one available on Android for a long time. But, it it has since kind of become not that important for, for, you know, in terms of popular podcast players. And yeah. It's it this whole idea of the walled garden is definitely been contentious. Oh, yeah.

Justin: 11:49

No. We we we show Stitcher. Yeah. I have a show where Stitcher is 3% right now of the the product people show. Inter what's Spotify on product people?

Justin: 12:02

Does it even show up? No. I don't have I don't even have enough to to show up there.

Jon: 12:10

Yeah. Right.

Justin: 12:11

But, yeah, this walled garden thing, what some people don't realize is that Apple Podcasts, which has been the biggest kind of podcast player and directory, they don't host the files. I I have to tell this to people in coffee shops all the time. Whenever you click play or download in Apple Podcasts or iTunes or really any of the other players, it is downloading that file from Transistors media server if if we're the podcast host.

Jon: 12:41

Yeah. Exactly. So

Gavin: 12:45

yeah. These these places that sort

Jon: 12:47

of store these files locally on their end, it I don't know. It just sort of I mean, I I wonder if I get it.

Justin: 12:54

Mhmm.

Jon: 12:55

But, so I just feel like it just kinda goes against the whole, like, open RSS feed type of thing where they're taking something that you control and now they control it without really no telling you kind of.

Justin: 13:09

Yeah. A lot of people probably don't realize that when they submit to Spotify, Spotify is grabbing their feed, rehosting those files. And we've actually had customer support problems because of this. Yeah. Like, what what if some of them,

Jon: 13:26

some of them have been, hey. I uploaded new audio, and it's not showing up on Spotify. Or, I changed the title of my episode, and it didn't change in Spotify. And we're like, well, we'll ask.

Justin: 13:40

Yeah. And right now, mostly to we have to there's no way for for our customers to resolve things directly with Spotify. They have to go through us as a middle person. So they contact us, our support, and then That's the

Jon: 13:53

whole that's the thing that's annoying.

Justin: 13:54

Because if if they were just using RSS, as soon it almost instantly. As soon like, as soon as they make a change in that RSS feed, it is available to update any client, any directory, anything. It depends how frequently they update it on their side.

Jon: 14:13

Yeah. I mean, especially the media file, if they upload uploaded a new audio file, that would be available immediately, if if those places are not storing the file locally

Justin: 14:22

Mhmm.

Jon: 14:23

You know you know, I think, you know, places like Overcast or whatever that that sort of keep pulling RSS feeds for changes, it's up to them and how they how they sort of update shows if information changes. And if they if they only add new episodes or if they're always updating all the old information, which would be that'd be tough. I mean, I can imagine Marco, who runs Overcast, has dealt with that and is probably, like, really frustrating at times Yeah. Dealing with terrible content or whatever.

Justin: 14:57

Yeah. I and so what is this pass through mode? What what is that? What's that about?

Jon: 15:01

Yeah. So last week, I think we talked about Spotify emailed us with a few API updates that help us out a little bit here and there, but the one thing they mentioned is you can submit the show to Spotify with this pass through option as either true or false.

Justin: 15:18

Okay.

Jon: 15:20

So if you set pass through to true, they don't cache the file.

Justin: 15:23

Really?

Jon: 15:24

So every download through Spotify hits transistor.

Justin: 15:27

Interesting.

Jon: 15:28

Which would be cool. You know, obviously, it costs us bandwidth now Yep. If we wanted to do that. So I emailed them back, and I asked a little bit more about it. And if we wanted to, could we retroactively turn all of our shows to pass through, and they said we could.

Jon: 15:45

So for analytics purposes, that would be actually be great.

Justin: 15:49

Okay. What why would it be better?

Jon: 15:50

I I think it would just kinda put the control back into us. Right?

Justin: 15:53

Gotcha. Because right now, you're having to kind of go in and backfill from the previous day.

Jon: 15:58

Yeah. Backfill from the previous day as opposed to recording the download as it happens.

Justin: 16:03

It's not as real time this it's not as real time the way we have to do it right now.

Jon: 16:08

Exactly. So we actually miss out on some stuff like hourly listens for the current day

Justin: 16:12

Mhmm.

Jon: 16:13

Are not added in. We can't really go back and, like, reprocess all the downloads if we need to and wanna change stuff.

Justin: 16:19

Gotcha.

Jon: 16:21

We just I think we just get a bit more accurate information.

Justin: 16:24

Yeah. And if we if we ever wanted to do dynamic ads or dynamic content or anything like that, this would Right. Also enable that. Because if they're caching the file Right. Then you can't update it kind of dynamically.

Jon: 16:37

Yeah. So I'm actually I'm wondering if a lot of, like, hosting platforms actually use the pass through option. I think it's been an option for a while, but it sort of was like a private unknown thing, I think.

Justin: 16:48

Gotcha. Asked

Jon: 16:48

for probably because a lot of people were asking for it. So, so we'll we'll keep investigating that.

Justin: 16:54

Yeah. It is interesting because I mean, for a small player like us, it is that that you're always kind of choosing on one side. We don't have to pay for the bandwidth for those. Right. And bandwidth can be really expensive, especially some of these shows that go crazy on Spotify.

Justin: 17:16

You know, that can cost a lot of money. On the other side, you know, we give up so much control to them. Have we talked about externalities yet on the show?

Jon: 17:26

I don't I don't think so.

Justin: 17:27

So do you do you know what an externality is?

Jon: 17:31

Not not exactly. I mean

Justin: 17:32

It's it's basically an expense that a business incurs, but it's not doesn't show up on their balance sheet. So if I have a factory and I just dump our waste in the river, and I don't know what he knows about it. That's an externality. There's a cost for that, but it it's not, it doesn't show up on the company's balance sheet.

Jon: 17:57

Right.

Justin: 17:57

And in a sense, right now and I'm sure this wasn't intentional. But, one of the externalities that Spotify has is that we do a lot of their customer support for them.

Jon: 18:09

Yeah. I mean, it's costing us time.

Justin: 18:11

Yeah. Because every because we get a lot of questions. Now we do to be fair, we actually do customer support for Apple. We do customer support for lots of people. Right.

Jon: 18:20

I mean, you know, I, I yeah. We kinda have to, I think, as as the platform, because a lot of people are just they don't they don't know where to go. They don't know where to start.

Justin: 18:28

And sometimes these platforms, you know, their docs aren't that good. They're they're hard to navigate. I I think it's interesting to bring it up though because often, it's the small business that is is kind of bearing that weight. Right? Because we want to give our customers a great experience.

Justin: 18:45

And for for us, that means going the extra mile. I mean, I will I will I will show people step by step how to submit their podcast to Apple Podcasts. But that's not even my platform. I'm just Right. I'm just Yeah.

Justin: 18:59

Helping people get get in there. And, yeah. I think I think there's some externalities right now that, that are kind of frustrating. But

Jon: 19:08

That's that's what we're here for.

Justin: 19:10

That that's well, that's what we're here for. And we're also we're stuck. We we we we can't really take a stand and say, well, we're not you know, we don't have the power in that relationship.

Jon: 19:21

Right. And, I mean, I think the thing going forward that we have to watch out for is is Spotify, like, downsampling audio? Are they changing the audio at all?

Justin: 19:30

Mhmm.

Jon: 19:31

And if and when they start adding in, like, advertisements, like, you know, our customers might be a little upset about that or if they alter the audio in such a way that isn't really up to their standards. Mhmm.

Justin: 19:44

Yeah. Yeah. Because we would we would hear about that if they all all of a sudden downsample everything to, you know, with 48 kilobits or something. That people would get upset, you know, that would be yeah. Interesting.

Justin: 19:59

So that is that's the it's kind of the first, pass or the first iteration of our Spotify analytics is available right now. I think this is actually huge. I know you were saying this feels small and it's very basic. But, for me, this is huge because it's something our customers have wanted. We can finally show Spotify on the dashboard, which is a question a lot of folks had.

Justin: 20:25

Where is Spotify? Why is it not there?

Jon: 20:27

Right.

Justin: 20:28

And so it gives our customers at least a unified view of what's going on.

Jon: 20:33

Cool. So what, yeah. What are you what are you thinking about?

Justin: 20:35

Well, I mean, there's a few things I I thought I could talk about. I related to this, I think, is this idea of, we've all heard people say, you know, don't just stand there, do something. And it feels like so much in business and work is about, like, don't just stand there, do something. You know? Like, something happens and it's like everyone's expected to react right away.

Justin: 20:59

We've we've kind of, valued or maybe maybe overvalued how fast we can react. I wonder if sometimes the best plan is to just do nothing. Just wait and see what happens. And maybe a good example of this is the latest Apple pod podcast kerfuffle. We'll just switch this is kind of always just us ragging on the platforms.

Jon: 21:25

This episode is entitled Justin and John complain about

Justin: 21:30

Yeah.

Jon: 21:31

Other platforms.

Justin: 21:31

Multinational. But Apple sent out this email on February 27th to all podcasters. Big deal. We actually podcasters don't hear from Apple very often. And so when when they send out an email, it is, like, top of Reddit.

Justin: 21:47

It's top of everyone's talking about it. And they had a bunch of suggestions, but they were they were negative suggestions. Meaning, if you do this, you will be penalized. Now some of this was kind of good stuff. Stuff that we're already doing and suggesting for our customers.

Justin: 22:06

Basically incorporating the metadata that Apple the Itunes metadata in the podcast feed. We're already doing that for our customers. The the the one that stood out that everyone started talking about was they said that podcasts with episode numbers in the titles would be penalized, meaning they would be removed from the directory. And, we don't do this on our show, but there's tons of shows that do this very big shows that put in the title, they'll put, you know, EP and then the number or just the number. And this is kind of a holdover from a long time ago.

Justin: 22:46

It's still helpful, I think, in some podcast players for people to see which episode, you know, this is.

Jon: 22:52

Mhmm.

Justin: 22:53

But Apple has a a value now that you can include in the RSS feed that allows you to identify that number. So, you know, you don't need to put it in the title. So their way is better.

Jon: 23:06

But Yeah. I get it. I it's a cleaner, like, I'm sure they they're looking at it, like, aesthetically, and they don't want it to say episode 22 and then episode 22 title.

Justin: 23:16

That's right. Yeah. It it just it it it makes sense. But this idea that some folks would have to go through, like, 100 or even thousands of episodes and remove their, you know, number from their title. People were writing blog posts about this.

Justin: 23:33

They were making YouTube videos. Like, there's it was it was everywhere. And on our side, we started to get customers asking us to make tools to remove the episode numbers from their titles. And this is not it it it's not as easy. Like, we could make a tool that did maybe one show.

Justin: 23:54

But, you know, some people use EP. Some people use just the number. Some people put it at the end. Some people put it at the beginning. Right.

Justin: 24:01

It it And if you had a number in your title, how are we to differentiate that? Like, if it's like 100th anniversary, well, how are we to differentiate that from an episode title? So it's messy. But then on March 1st actually, this is super weird. On March 1st, Apple sends 2 emails.

Justin: 24:24

I don't know if you saw this.

Jon: 24:26

I didn't I didn't get the email.

Justin: 24:28

Okay. You didn't get the emails. So this is super weird. They sorry. On Thursday, February 28th, so the day after, they send out just this really quick email that looks like it was almost like not proofread.

Justin: 24:45

It was kind of a little bit, like, sloppy. And it just says in bold letters, your show won't be removed for for having episode numbers in the episode. And it's like

Jon: 24:55

I know.

Justin: 24:56

Just, like, really spells it out. So they they clearly gotten a lot of feedback about this. And then this is after we have we haven't heard from Apple in a long time. And then on March 1st, we get another email that says the same thing, But then they added a couple more paragraphs to it.

Jon: 25:16

So kind of a weird, Yeah. Someone hit send on accident. Or I

Justin: 25:20

don't know. Or they just decide to get something out super quick, and then, they sent the same thing out again, but with more stuff. Yeah. It's super weird. My point is now, like, we could have reacted really quick.

Justin: 25:34

We could have, you know, sent out an I was gonna send an email to our customers explaining all this. That was my initial kind of, like, reaction was to go, okay. We gotta we gotta let our customers know. We gotta stay on top of this. We but and I'm sure there's times to do this to react quickly.

Justin: 25:53

But in this case, now there really is no story. That Right. People who have episode titles, episode numbers of their titles can continue to do that. They're fine. I think in most cases, that's probably the better way to go.

Justin: 26:09

Yeah. To not react so fast.

Jon: 26:11

Yeah. Take a deep breath. Kinda think about it. Yeah. I'm glad they sort of followed up and and because yeah.

Jon: 26:22

I mean, it it's not surprising they got tons of feedback about, like, what are you doing?

Justin: 26:28

I think the the the thing that it makes me think and some of this is from following Jason Fried for so long, and he just has this kind of methodical I mean, this is the way it appears anyway. But just thoughtful, don't react too quickly. Let things kinda sit and simmer for a bit. And the the more I've done that in my life and especially in work and with business, those those kind of knee jerk reactions, I never make good decisions. No.

Justin: 27:00

It's it's like when I try to act quickly, it's not like I'm doing my best work or my best thinking or my best decision making. And I think this comes back to this idea of, like, making good decisions is hard. And there's this whole phase of exploration where you're just figuring out what you don't know, and you don't yet have a clear picture of where you're going. And you're kind of pushing this rock up the hill. And it's not till you get to the top that you can see you have a perspective of, oh, I can see now where I'm going.

Justin: 27:31

And then at that point, making the decision is easy. And in this case, it kind of felt like that. Like, okay, I'm gonna, like, read all the material. I'm going to see what other people are doing, but I'm just going to wait. And then when the dust cleared, I just felt like, oh, well, it's easy now.

Justin: 27:50

The decision Yeah. Is easy to make.

Jon: 27:53

Yeah. I will I yeah. I agree with that. I will say that this whole thing kind of added a little bit of extra perspective to another problem we've been having recently Okay.

Justin: 28:04

What's that?

Jon: 28:05

Which is related to this, which is it's very much related to the episode number field Mhmm. On in Transistor and how when you edit an episode, you can change the episode number.

Justin: 28:16

Mhmm.

Jon: 28:18

And that's the episode number that we have in there is basically there only for Apple.

Justin: 28:22

Gotcha. Yep.

Jon: 28:24

But we also use that number to display the episode number on, within our dashboard and, I think, within our our hosted websites. Mhmm. Yeah. But we we restrict it to be a number.

Justin: 28:36

Yeah.

Jon: 28:36

It has to be an integer. It's not a free form text field, and that's because Apple requires that to be a number. Mhmm. So it actually like, that number, it specifies how the episodes show up in the podcast app. Like, in what order they show up.

Jon: 28:54

It's not really the release date necessarily.

Justin: 28:56

Mhmm.

Jon: 28:57

Because you can, like, have a release date be different from an episode number, and it show up differently, which is super confusing. But we have some customers who are like, I just added an episode. It is episode, I like, the previous one is episode 22. Mhmm. I just added this other one.

Jon: 29:16

It's a bonus episode. It's showing up as episode 23, but it's not actually episode 23. Yeah. So I'm like, okay. I need to think about that and how we do that.

Jon: 29:27

So, honestly, we need to have like, I this sort of brought it the picture a little bit clearer as far as, like, how people use it and how iTunes needs it. So we really just need, like, a separate field that's, like, behind the scenes, it's setting up so numbers for Itunes, and then people can fill out this free form field that's, like, whatever you want it to be, like, bonus 1. Yeah. Or and, like, because you can't use that to order it in any way.

Justin: 29:57

Yeah.

Jon: 29:58

So this is like a display field for the episode number, not necessarily Yeah. Used for any sort of, like, ordering purpose.

Justin: 30:05

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. That totally makes sense to me. The could semantics, man, they're so hard.

Justin: 30:13

But if you in your head, if, like, you're like this like for us, this is episode 47, 48. Sorry.

Jon: 30:21

Right? 48.

Justin: 30:21

So if you go to saas.transistor.fm/48, you'll get our show notes. But if I put out a bonus episode

Jon: 30:30

Right.

Justin: 30:30

That's just 5 minutes. In my head, I'm, like, no. That's not an episode. That's just a bonus. I don't want that to show up as 49.

Justin: 30:38

That it doesn't deserve 49.

Jon: 30:40

But people should be able to go to transistor dot f m slash bonus 1.

Justin: 30:44

B 1.

Jon: 30:45

Yeah. And b 1 and see it.

Justin: 30:47

Yeah. Exactly. So I I can understand the customer's perspective there, but I can see how it gets messy on our side. Those those kind of problems actually excite me a lot more because it's it's this challenge of making what is complex on our side simple for the customer.

Jon: 31:05

Exactly. Yeah. And it's it's yeah. It's it's a challenge. It's actually fun to figure out.

Jon: 31:09

Mhmm. I think, initially, it's like there's a phase where you're like, that is annoying and frustrating.

Justin: 31:14

Yeah.

Jon: 31:14

And then you right. And then you think about it, and you don't do anything. It's the research phase. It's the thinking about it thoughtfully, and then you come to a conclusion where you're like, oh, yeah. Are you like taking a shower?

Jon: 31:28

And you're like,

Justin: 31:29

Yep. You got it. So, John, we just recently switched project management software.

Gavin: 31:37

We did.

Justin: 31:37

We were using Pivotal, and now we're using something new.

Jon: 31:41

We are.

Justin: 31:42

What are we using?

Jon: 31:43

We switched to, Clubhouse, which is something that I've actually been using for,

Justin: 31:53

maybe a year. Okay. Wow.

Jon: 31:55

At cards at cards against humanity and black box, maybe, I don't know. Almost a year, I'd say.

Justin: 32:00

Yeah.

Jon: 32:01

And we were using Pivotal there as well. Seemingly came out of nowhere. I it's been around for a couple years and, like, just sort of fell in our lap, and we were like, holy crap. This thing is awesome.

Justin: 32:14

Yeah. What what, what I remember about it is we were in Portland hanging out with some other people, and you and Mike were talking about it. We're like, so I've never heard 2 developers talk about project management software in such a long term.

Jon: 32:28

Because there's never one that's like most of the project management software I've used is, like, there's always something about it that is just, like, of super annoying. There's never one that just, like, works well for kind of any way you want it. Yeah. And or or, like, doesn't look good, and it's just like a mess. Yeah.

Jon: 32:49

And this was just like, where did this come from? This is awesome. Yeah.

Justin: 32:52

I think that's kind of the the beauty of it. It's project management software that brings, for software development, but it brings everybody together. So think about something like Jira. It's very overwhelming. It's it's an overwhelming platform even for developers.

Justin: 33:07

But for product folks, marketing support, it's even more taxing. And Clubhouse was designed to be developer first, but simple and intuitive enough that all teams, even a jackass like me, can enjoy using it. And, this is really cool. Visitor, visitors listeners of our podcast can sign up for 2 free months of Clubhouse by visiting clubhouse.io/build. You got that?

Justin: 33:36

I I chose build because I didn't want people typing up Sass.

Jon: 33:40

Yeah. That works. That's great.

Justin: 33:41

I I I thought so clubhouse.io/build. Since I've actually released this URL, I couldn't believe because I can see who signs up with it. I think I had 5 people in a day sign up and try Clubhouse, and they got 2 free months. So

Jon: 33:59

I hope I hope they like it because it's honestly, I I would recommend it if they weren't even sponsoring.

Justin: 34:05

Yeah. I mean, that's kinda how they found us is that we were talking about it on the show saying, man, this is this is really great. In the show notes, I'll include a a screenshot of how we're using Clubhouse. So thanks to them. I think we got a few minutes to go through a few more things.

Justin: 34:22

So you, well, yeah. What did you just do? You were doing you just saw sort of billing update?

Jon: 34:28

I did a billing update. I did I don't know if we talked about it last week or not. I

Justin: 34:31

don't think so. No.

Jon: 34:32

Yet. Okay. So I, I was realizing I was looking through Stripe and realizing that we had a lot of customers that were basically in Stripe marked as, like, unpaid. Their subscriptions were unpaid, which means they had at least one invoice that, failed to be paid, like, 4 times because it it retries, like, intelligently over time

Justin: 34:54

Mhmm.

Jon: 34:55

Which then marks their subscription as unpaid, which puts their account to, like, this delinquent status, which means they're, like, overdue for payment. Yep. And Stripe, we have it set up so that Stripe will send out an email when your payment fails, like, the last time. Right?

Justin: 35:11

Okay. Yeah.

Jon: 35:12

For you to go and, like, update your account settings,

Justin: 35:14

but I

Jon: 35:14

think a lot of those emails go into spam or they're just not seen. So we had we had, like, a handful of customers who had been using our platform for months

Justin: 35:23

Mhmm.

Jon: 35:23

Without without paying. For them, like, I don't think it's not really their fault. Like, they don't if they didn't see the email, they would they wouldn't know. They'd just be like, oh, it still works fine. Mhmm.

Jon: 35:37

And so I implemented an update that would actually, like, have this callout in transistor that says, hey. Your account has has been unpaid since this point in time.

Justin: 35:49

Gotcha.

Jon: 35:50

It it actually, like, prevents them from adding new episodes to their show, which is a pretty good incentive for them to pay Mhmm. Without trying to be, like, super annoying or, like, I don't know, mean about it.

Justin: 36:03

Yeah.

Jon: 36:05

It just sort of points them to, like, go update their payment information.

Justin: 36:08

Yeah.

Jon: 36:10

But what it also does is actually attempts in the background to collect unpaid invoices from the past, which could be more than 1, at which point they'd get, like, a bunch of emails and charges on their card at once.

Justin: 36:23

Gotcha.

Jon: 36:26

Which we've actually had some customer support for. Be like, why did I just get charged 4 times in a row?

Justin: 36:31

Yeah. Although people have been pretty understanding about it.

Jon: 36:34

Yeah. Yeah. But I can see where they'd be, like, that's weird.

Justin: 36:39

Yeah.

Jon: 36:40

Where'd that come from? It was working fine a few days ago. So, you know, I think the update's been good. We actually have collected a bunch of, like, lost revenue or would have been lost revenue. Going forward, you know, I don't think people will go more than a month without paying an invoice because they can't do anything on their show.

Jon: 37:04

So I think going forward it won't be as big of a deal. Mhmm. And this this largely, like, came out of, I think, an article that you had sent my way

Justin: 37:13

Yep.

Jon: 37:14

About it's on the churn buster blog.

Justin: 37:17

Yeah. I know those folks. They're they're great.

Jon: 37:20

Yeah. We'll add we'll add a link, in the in the show notes, but the basic premise is, like, you know, don't necessarily, like, automatically cancel someone's account if they're not paid. Like, give them the option to to pay and, like, get back into a good standing.

Justin: 37:35

Mhmm.

Jon: 37:36

They actually had a a couple other recommendations, which I guess we could do going forward, which is, like, let them choose how many old invoices they wanna pay.

Justin: 37:43

Gotcha.

Jon: 37:45

Yeah. Which could be interesting. Or, you know, they were like, just pay the last one and, like, forget about the rest. Yeah. And just, like, they can be marked as, like, uncollectible debt for your taxes or something like that.

Justin: 37:58

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon: 38:01

But, yeah, that that was a good that was a good blog post. It's, like, don't necessarily, like, remind them every month that they have an upcoming payment. Just charge them, send them a receipt. Mhmm. Let them know that it let them know a payment failed, but but also, like, don't don't email them when their card's about to expire because a lot of cards these days will there's some new system that, like, automatically updates the expiration date if the card number doesn't change

Justin: 38:34

Yep.

Jon: 38:35

Which is cool. I I actually didn't know that. So, anyway, I I think it's it's a super like, automating that stuff is a pretty big deal for for SaaS companies.

Justin: 38:46

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I I mean, we have a a Slack channel that's dedicated to Slack. Sorry. To Stripe payments.

Jon: 38:52

Yeah.

Justin: 38:53

And Mhmm. I mean, you will see failed payments all day

Jon: 38:57

long. I mean, every day it's, like, a handful. And I see him and I'm like, ugh.

Justin: 39:03

Yeah. It's and it it's frustrating because it could mean so many things. Sometimes it means, often actually with Stripe, the one I see quite a bit is the banks sometimes won't trust the charge the first time. And it's specifically with Stripe. And so they'll just return a code that says, do not honor.

Justin: 39:21

But what that means is that the customer just needs to call the bank and say, hey, I want these charges to go through. But Yeah. Sometimes the customers don't know about it.

Jon: 39:30

Right.

Justin: 39:31

And yeah. I mean, we're providing a service. We need to get paid for it. And so staying on top of that stuff is super important for us.

Jon: 39:40

Yeah. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's kind of, like, once you start seeing the notifications, it's kind of it's kind of amazing how often it happens.

Jon: 39:49

Mhmm.

Justin: 39:50

Yeah. I think it would surprise people, you know, they'd think, oh, well, you know, you guys have all these customers and payments are just rolling in, and it's great. But there's, like, a lot of failed charges. And it's actually to get to the bottom of why they're failed is is not always easy.

Jon: 40:09

Yeah. Sometimes it's just, like, payment it's just, like, card declined is the code. You're, like, okay.

Justin: 40:15

Yeah.

Jon: 40:15

I don't know what that means.

Justin: 40:16

Yeah. It could mean that their their card is full. Like, there's so many things.

Jon: 40:20

Yeah. So that was that was a big change. There's, still a number of things as far as, like, managing your your subscription within Transistor, that I need to finish up. I was actually working on today, which is, like, upgrading if you wanna, like, switch to yearly

Justin: 40:34

Yeah.

Jon: 40:35

Or if you wanna actually upgrade to a different plan, on your own, you can do that. So

Justin: 40:39

Yeah. That'll be huge too. Because then we'll get that expansion revenue.

Jon: 40:43

Yeah. We've had a lot of requests for people to be like, hey, can we can I switch to yearly? Because they can't do it themselves yet.

Justin: 40:49

Yeah. Cool. That's great, man. In the last few minutes, I think one thing I'll ask you. This is good.

Justin: 40:56

This is a total, out of left field here. But we just got a, we just got a support request that says Uh-huh. Hackers are trying to get into my pit cast immediately, freeze any login attempts. My forced amendment and Transistors reputation and futures at stake. These people only care about destroying your site.

Justin: 41:15

Now, now this could be, this could be real. But my guess is it's not. But I wanted to just bring it up because I see these kinds of messages all the time. When, like when you're running a service. And so I want you to look at this, this thing.

Justin: 41:32

Now I look for his this person's account. I can't see this an account in this person's name. So I'm I'm guessing that it's this is just a some sort of fishing attempt.

Jon: 41:45

Yeah. I don't I mean, it's written poorly.

Justin: 41:48

It's written poorly. It's I don't

Jon: 41:49

know what my forced amendment.

Justin: 41:52

First Is

Jon: 41:52

that supposed to be my first amendment? Yeah. Like, my first amendment rights or

Gavin: 41:56

something?

Justin: 41:56

I think a 4 year old wrote this email. They have a they they're missing their two front teeth. My first ineminent.

Jon: 42:02

Like, I don't wanna I don't wanna make fun of it because maybe it's real. But if this person doesn't have an account with us, then I don't know. Well,

Justin: 42:08

I wanted to bring it up because I think, I I I see these all the time. And so, my my inclination was this is not real. And I I've there there's no account that I can find associated with that email address. So, I just think it's just another interesting, like, look into Sass life. Like, you get weird emails and messages from people all the time.

Justin: 42:35

And, you know, you have to figure out what to do with them. Right? So, I mean, my first thing was I was like, okay. Is this person, a customer? I don't see any have we had any other communication?

Justin: 42:52

No. You know, I'm sure we could actually check the IP address and, and be like, you know, who is this person? But yeah, just I had something else on our on our notes here to talk about, but I'm like, let's just talk about this. This is Yeah.

Jon: 43:06

We can save that for next time. Oh, man. That's interesting.

Justin: 43:09

Yeah. It's just I

Jon: 43:10

mean, you gotta you know,

Gavin: 43:11

you have to take everything seriously at first, I think.

Jon: 43:14

But I think once you get down to it, you're like Yeah. I don't think so.

Justin: 43:18

Yeah. This is, like, probably another good example of maybe you don't wanna wait too long, but you can just sit back and

Jon: 43:25

My, my friends, I think I mentioned last time about or the episode before who who sort of, like, had, their they had, like, a dashboard on their they could do stuff from their phone, like, if they're out, like restart servers and add servers and stuff

Justin: 43:39

yeah

Jon: 43:40

they they ran a game and they would a lot of kids played it

Justin: 43:44

gotcha yeah

Jon: 43:45

so they'd be dealing with like support requests from kids but then like then then like these kids be like this this other person, like, stole a bunch of stuff from my account.

Justin: 43:57

And and

Jon: 43:57

then they end up having to, like, talk to these kids' parents and, like

Justin: 44:00

Oh my gosh.

Jon: 44:02

And be like, teach your kid to, like, not be a a jerk on the Internet. And they'd be like, oh, I'm so the parents would be like, oh, I'm so sorry. They'd be like, parent these kids.

Justin: 44:15

It's so hilarious.

Jon: 44:16

So I guess at least we don't have to deal with that.

Justin: 44:18

Oh my gosh. That is crazy. Alright, folks. Thanks again for listening. John, why don't you take folks through our Patreon supporters?

Jon: 44:30

Alright. As always, thanks to everyone, for supporting the show. We have Kyle Fox at get rewardful dot com, Dan Buddha, who is my brother.

Justin: 44:42

Danbudda.com.

Jon: 44:44

Danbudda.com. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta. Dave loves it when you say that. Hey, Dave. How you doing?

Justin: 45:08

This is the advantage this is the advantage of being a Patreon supporter is that, you know, we we did a whole episode on how I pronounce Adam DuVander's name too. So

Jon: 45:17

Yeah. Right.

Justin: 45:17

You know, these are these are just the perks.

Jon: 45:20

And, finally, as we mentioned before, Clubhouse and Balsamic. Yes. Balsamic.

Justin: 45:25

Go to clubhouse.io/build and go to balsamiq.cloud. And when you sign up, just always say, hey. The build your SaaS folks sent us, and we will see you next

Jon: 45:39

week. Balsamic or balsamic? Oh, jeez. I don't know. I'm thinking of the vinegar.

Justin: 46:12

I I'm probably saying that wrong now.

Jon: 46:15

No. I don't

Justin: 46:15

know. I think it's balsamic like the vinegar, But am I just saying do I have some funky Canadian accent?

Jon: 46:21

I think probably. But maybe I have an American accent.

Justin: 46:24

Alright, folks. That's the thing. You gotta write in at transistorfm and include at balsamic and tell us how you say balsamic.

Jon: 46:34

Tomato, tomato.