How big of a market should you target?
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Jon:Hey, everyone welcome to build your sass. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019 I'm John Buddha a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson, and I I can't believe it's 2019, actually.
Jon:We're we're halfway through 2019.
Justin:Oh, follow along as we build a transistor dotfm. 2019 still feels so new.
Jon:It does.
Justin:Wow. I it still kinda feels like 2018 to me.
Jon:I know. I almost I almost say that every time.
Justin:When did we start this company? Like you and I, when did we sign our partnership?
Jon:To January 2018.
Justin:January 2018. Okay. Yeah. So we this is a this is a 2018 story. A story that started in 2018.
Jon:Yeah. Officially in 2017.
Justin:Officially in 2017.
Jon:In case
Justin:it I
Jon:was I I was I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork for the state of Illinois.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:The actual incorporation date was in May of 2017.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. That's gonna be well, those dates will get hazy as we as we go along. But, yeah. And we launched August 2018.
Justin:Yep. So it's hard tracking all these things. So we're actually coming up this August will be our 1 year anniversary of launching. Yeah. Okay.
Justin:It it some days it feels like I've been doing this for 30 years.
Jon:I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.
Justin:I don't know. Just you get so used to it. You know?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:One thing I've been trying to synthesize is the feeling we've had launching Transistor and comparing it to the other projects I've done and the other SaaS businesses I've run. Mhmm.
Jon:Do do
Justin:you do a little bit of this too?
Jon:Yeah. I do.
Justin:And also comparing it to, you know, businesses that my friends run and businesses that have open metrics on the Internet. And one of the reasons people listen to this show is they're building their own product. And I'm I'm always kind of thinking about how can we be helpful in, you know, as we're going through this journey, how can we be helpful for folks? And so I've been writing a lot about, basically what it means to choose a good market lately.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And I've had, I think, the last three blog posts on my personal site, justinjackson.ca, have been on this, and I've been tweeting about it a lot. And probably I've probably spent too much time talking about this and then sometimes arguing about this on Twitter. So if you'll allow me, John, I just wanted to go through some of my thinking on this. And I will I will allow it. You know, you one of the great things about working with you is that you don't let me, you you're okay to push back on on my ideas.
Justin:So if if, if you wanna push back a bit, that's fine too. It has felt different launching transistor. And there's this feeling that's difficult to describe when you launch something and there's just a lot of momentum in the market. So I've had businesses where, you know, I launched a product or I mean, I've I've had businesses since I was in high school. And then I ran a couple of skateboard shops in my early twenties.
Justin:I worked for a snowboard manufacturing company. I've had all these experiences. And then I've got into digital products and working for software companies and launching my own book and courses and other things. Yeah. It's it's been interesting to contrast those experiences with what is happening now.
Justin:And the way I I kind of described it was, have have you ever gone fishing?
Jon:Yeah. All the time. Okay.
Justin:Oh, you're fishing?
Jon:Well, not all the time. But, yes, I've gone fishing quite a bit.
Justin:Okay. So the last, like, five things I've written have fishing metaphors in them, but I am not a big fisher. So so you can certainly poke holes in in anything I'm about to say. But have you ever gone fishing and been in the same spot all day and only had a few nibbles?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, nor yeah. Normally, nothing is caught. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. And so I was thinking about that feeling because I've had a few experiences where we've gone out and you sit in the boat all day and it's just like you're sitting in the boat and nothing is happening. And I've also had the experience of going out, on the ocean once, and it was like every time we cast out our rod, we caught a fish.
Jon:Yeah. But did did that person have radar sonar?
Justin:John, you're really fucking with my metaphor here.
Jon:I know what you're saying now.
Justin:Yeah. So I think, you know, that that feeling that people can have is similar in a lot of ways to launching a business. And I've definitely had experiences of feeling like I launched this thing out there. And it's just doesn't feel like anything's happening. And I'll try all sorts of lures.
Justin:I'll try all sorts of bait. I'll try, you know, different spots. But no matter what I try, it just doesn't work. And I think that the same thing and the same feeling applies to business. In business and in fishing, the problem is almost always related to one of these things.
Justin:So number 1, wrong market. So you're targeting the wrong fish. You might be I don't know. You might be it might be salmon fishing season, but you're targeting perch. Yeah.
Justin:Wrong spot, so you're not where the fish are hanging out, or wrong bait. You're not offering them something that they want.
Jon:Right. Can I add another one to that?
Justin:Sure. Yeah.
Jon:What if the fish aren't feeding?
Justin:Or wrong time.
Jon:So yeah. Okay.
Justin:Explain that a little bit more. Actually, I don't
Jon:I've mostly gone fishing with my dad, and it's it's been a while, but he, he goes fly fishing a lot. Mhmm. That is really dependent on the time of day and, like, the weather and when the fish are actually feeding. Mhmm. Because if you're casting, you know, a fly out and they're not feeding, you're not gonna catch anything.
Jon:Mhmm. But the fish might be there. They're just, like, hiding.
Justin:Yes. And and this reminds me of something Jordan Goll said, which was right market, right product, right time. You really need all 3. And so with fishing would be right place, right bait, right time. I know it, it, it sounds cliche, but the only way to get the fish you want to catch is to find out which waters they're congregating in, what kind of bait they like to eat.
Justin:And I guess in your case, what time they are feeding. And, you know, as I've thought about all my business experiences, as I've reflected on my friends and the other businesses I've seen, it seems like if you can't find fish or customers, it's because a) the fish you want are exceedingly rare. I think there's this, this golden what's it called? Golden perch. I'll find the I'll find the actual, golden trout.
Justin:So the golden trout is a small fish that lives 10000 feet above sea level in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. So just to get to these Alpek and lakes, you you need to backpack or horseback in. And they're elusive. So a lot of folks will make the 5 mile hike and be disappointed because they can't catch this fish. It's just really hard to catch.
Justin:And it feels like in business there that happens too. Sometimes folks choose a a target market that's just really elusive. It's difficult Yeah. To, to, reach in an efficient way. And so, so yeah.
Justin:That's number that's a. And then, b, the fish you want are sorry. Exceedingly rare is a. The fish you want are hard to catch is b. The fish you want are inaccessible is c.
Justin:And the fish you want don't congregate in groups where you'll have a chance to catch them. So, you know, maybe, I think the the Blue Marlin is like this. Like they're in the ocean, but it's just really hard to find them. It's like a big ocean, and they're not congregating in groups like some other fish might. So, you know, there are some fish that all feed together and you can just go out and cast and you can, you know, pull in, for example, salmon all day long.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:I was actually I didn't get a lot of pushback from this, but I did get a little bit of pushback. And I think it was me my me saying that, you know, for us and a lot of other businesses I see, you increase your chances of success if you fish where there's a lot of
Jon:fish. Mhmm.
Justin:And the idea there is, like, if your total addressable market worldwide is a1000000, it's going to be theoretically and you're fishing in that body of water. Let's say there's a1000000, there's a1000000 trout in your lake. Well, there's gonna be a much higher chance that when you cast, you're gonna pull out trout. As opposed to I guess we could take that that golden what did I say? The golden trout.
Justin:You know, the you could go and cast all day for that fish, but they're just not as many of them out there. And it feels like the market you choose is one of the most important kind of foundational decisions you'll make. And you could have an incredible market with really hungry fish and give them a mediocre product and still do okay. But con con conversely, I think you could have an incredible product, but a really terrible market. And it doesn't matter how good the product is.
Justin:If the market is bad, it's gonna be hard to have any sort of success. I I
Jon:mean, I would agree with that. I'm not gonna argue with that.
Justin:Oh, and this is was the other thing that was a little bit, controversial. Was that I think it's a good sign if you're at a fishing spot and you see good anglers pulling out
Jon:fish Mhmm.
Justin:You know, this means that with the right bait and the right skill, you can catch fish too. And there some of the pushback I got was folks saying, well, in a niche with very few competitors, it's actually better. So if you show up in a niche and there's not very many competitors, that's a good sign because you can own the niche. You can, you know, you can be the only one there. And what I was pushing back against was, first of all, I think we've overestimated how small of a niche you can have on the on the Internet.
Justin:Like, there's this idea that, you know, because of the Internet is so big, any niche will do. And I just don't think that's true. And obviously, I'm talking in generalities, but it just doesn't feel like any niche will do. If you are targeting and I think this is the example I gave before, but, you know, people with pet turtles that want little knitted caps for their pet turtles.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:You know, that's already a small market. I don't know how many turtle owners there are in the states, but it's already a smaller market than, say, dogs or cats. And then you're you're narrowing it even more. Like, we are only targeting the people that want little knitted caps for their turtles. And maybe that's a straw man.
Justin:Like, maybe I'm just giving a ridiculous example, but I just don't think that any niche will do. And I also think, generally, especially for bootstrappers, that if you show up in a market and there are no competitors, I think that's a bad sign.
Jon:Except somebody has to be first.
Justin:Somebody has to be first. Yeah. How many times does that happen though?
Jon:Like Yeah. Not that often.
Justin:Like, what businesses were first that we even can think of? Blackberry?
Jon:Were they?
Justin:I think that
Jon:I Palm?
Justin:I mean, yeah. Maybe Palm was the first Palm wasn't the first to the smartphone market. I think it was blackberry, and then, Nokia had a smartphone shortly after. And so, you know, I I think we also overestimate the importance of being first. I think being first can help a lot.
Justin:You know, in some ways, base camp was first, and that's been a or early, we'll say.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Being early is definitely an advantage, in some cases.
Jon:Yeah. But even then, I think even if you're first, you're you're now kind of in the in the boat of trying to create demand Mhmm. Where there where there might not be any. I mean, you know, base camp was was scratching their own itch and obviously built a good product that people really wanted to use, but, like, I don't know. Was that was that market there even?
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Or did they sort of build it up over time with these but, you know, they had the blog posts and just how they
Justin:That's an interesting question. We you know, when they launched, their enemy was Microsoft Project.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:And so they, I think, took a lot of customers from Microsoft Project, which kinda brings up another interest another I think I hadn't thought of, which was, you know, about 38% of our customers switched to us from a different provider.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And if you don't if you don't have that, if there's not an existing market already there that can switch to you from a different provider
Jon:Right.
Justin:I think that's a a huge disadvantage. You have to do so much education work and so much you basically have to create the whole market yourself.
Jon:I mean, yeah, we I I think we were in a good spot for all of the all the points you made. Right? It's, the market, the time. What's the other one?
Justin:Good product, good market, good timing.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. And again, I don't wanna I'm really trying to be careful not to, you know, thump our own chest too too strongly here. Because trust me, John and I are petrified that that all of the growth we've had so far is going to disappear. But and we are just one data point. But I do feel like there's something here.
Justin:And the more again, the more I dig into other friends and entrepreneurs I know and their story and their numbers, like, they'll show me their financials. The more I look at Baremetrics open startups, the more I ask Patrick Campbell, who is the the CEO of ProfitWell. He's got tons of data in the background as well. You know, as I'm talking to all these folks about, you know, what does the data show? And anecdotally, what do we see?
Justin:It just feels like the market is so important. And I think there's something counterintuitive about that now, which is, you know, no. I wanna be the only one, and I wanna be in a niche where there is no competition. And this even this idea of niching down and, you know, on the Internet, I could just I could choose anything and and make it work.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And I I I just wanna put up some caution flags to say, I don't think that's true. And maybe sometimes there are exceptions. But especially if you're bootstrapping, I think you'd need to pay so much attention to the market. Not just how many there there are of them, but, you know, how hard are they to catch? Some markets just are, you know, they've got more money and they're more motivated, and they're easier to reach than others.
Justin:And it would be a shame, you know, for folks to waste time as I did in some ways. I I think about this a lot in terms of, like, local businesses because you really see this with a local business. There's a Yeah. There's a potato restaurant that just closed down here in my town. And again, we got about 30,000 people.
Justin:This guy made baked potatoes. And I loved I loved this place. It was like quick, go get a baked potato. But most people I knew could only have a big potato may maybe every month. And his it was just too big too small of a niche.
Justin:It's a small town, and then he's chosen this very distinct niche, which is baked potatoes. That's part of what I'm reacting to here is, man, when the market is small, there's a lot of things get that get harder. Whereas, you know, there's a few restaurants here that sell fries, and you can basically sell fries all year you know, all day long
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:To anybody.
Jon:Well, that kinda made me think of are are donuts big in Canada?
Justin:Mhmm. Oh, huge. Yeah.
Jon:So, yeah, I mean, you know, that they got even bigger in the last few years, especially, you know, everywhere, really. But in Chicago, there's obviously a lot of donut shops. But there's one that opened, and it was like it just sort of, like, focused on weird donuts.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:Like, they had they had some normal ones, but it was, like, you know, the bacon covered maple whatever donut. Yeah. And, like, they were good Mhmm. But you can only eat those so often. Yeah.
Jon:And then this other place came in called Stan's Donuts, and, like, there's lines out the door still all the time, and this other place closed all its doors. Yeah. Like, they just they closed up. Like, I think people just got there just wasn't enough demand for weird donuts.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:Like, give me, like, a glazed or, like, an old fashioned donut any day.
Justin:Yes. Yeah. So what you're saying is that the the shop that just has glazed and old fashioned that sells kind of the staples that appeals to the biggest audience, they're doing okay.
Jon:Yeah. They're doing great. I mean, they're great. Mhmm. They have a lot of locations and, you know, it's always busy no matter almost what time of day it is.
Jon:It doesn't even matter. Yeah. But, and they still have a few weird donuts, but, like, they don't focus exclusively on the weird donuts.
Justin:Yeah. And as I counterpoint to that ratio here in Vernon, they do donut Friday. So they do crazy donuts, but only one day of the week. And, that's working really well for them. But the owner, Andrew, he knows if he does donuts every day of the week, it would lose its appeal.
Justin:Right?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it's probably a big drawing point.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The example that Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, that he gave this example of, you know, choosing a small niche market is tempting. But where there's no competition, you know, like, okay, I'm gonna choose a small niche market, no competition. But he said, you know, it sure is easy to sell ice cream on a crowded beach on a hot day, even if there are 5 other ice cream stands.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And this idea of going where the people are and there's momentum. And maybe that's the part I don't wanna lose. Like, maybe if there is this small, like, total market of a 1000 people worldwide, and they're super excited, and there's so much momentum, and they all congregate in the same place, and they're easy to reach, maybe you should go after that niche. But generally, I think you wanna go where there's a lot of people hanging out and there's momentum. There's excitement.
Justin:There's movement. There's there's something going on. And just that feeling of sitting by a river all day and not getting any bites versus sitting, you know, in this ocean liner. And I, we were just casting all the time and getting all these fish is such a different feeling. And I think it's something worth at least thinking about if you're building your own business.
Jon:So you've been arguing on Twitter all day?
Justin:Oh, no. Not just all day. This has been, like, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Yeah.
Jon:That's what the Internet's for. Right?
Justin:Yeah. I've been I've been spending a lot of time on this. And maybe it's too much. I I I I don't know. And certainly, these folks that I'm debating with, I hope that they're not, like, upset.
Justin:Like, I totally respect them and where they're coming at, but it just feels like there's something here that and podcasts are sometimes good for kind of filling in some of that nuance. So it'd be interesting to hear what folks at home think if there's if they've had different experiences or, you know, they feel like, you know, maybe there is some truth to this. I I think the the primary thing that's motivating me is I just have some friends that own local businesses and that own internet based businesses. And I've seen this happen. And I've seen this happen in my own life of just like sitting on the shore and you're not getting any bites and how frustrating it is.
Justin:And I just think so much of it has to do with the fish you're choosing to go after and whether you're in the right spot to get those fish and if those fish are easy to catch at all. And so if you're if you are frustrated like that, I think it it's worth figuring out if this is a market problem. And maybe it's not. Maybe it's a product problem. Maybe it's a timing problem.
Justin:But in most cases, it seems like the most significant lever lever? The most significant lever is the size of the market and the momentum in that market.
Jon:Yeah. And I think I think we sort of stumbled upon it. And and, yeah, I think it's probably good to step back and actually give it some thought as to, like, why Yeah. Why our numbers keep going up. Mhmm.
Jon:I mean, you know, obviously, I think I'm I'm biased. I think we built a a great product. But Mhmm. Like, you know, we definitely we definitely hit in a market at the right time.
Justin:Yeah. There's this fellow on Twitter that's doing this interesting analysis on all the bare metrics open startups. And he basically thinks he can graph, what our ceiling will be for MRR. And it's pretty interesting. I'll I'll link to it.
Justin:So he and some of these numbers could change, but he uses our net churn rate and current average revenue per user to determine what are the ceiling on our monthly recurring revenue will be. And right now, I think it it it levels off at a $100,000 monthly recurring revenue. And, he says, wow. Talk about headroom. Transistor is in a great place to continue growing.
Justin:The other awesome thing about Transistor is that this maximum is very misleading. Oh, if you look at their customer growth rate, it's clearly trending up into the right. So, so each month, their maximum MRR is going to grow higher and higher until their sign ups level off to a steady pace. And that might not be for quite a while. So, yeah, it's it's interesting.
Justin:All this stuff is interesting. And I having been on again, having been in some with some products that did not grow like this and did not feel like this, it just feels like, man, I I can see how the market determines most of your growth. That's a, that's a quote from Sahil at Gumroad. He says, the market you're in will determine most of your growth. And it feels like every month that passes, that just becomes more real to me.
Justin:So anyway, hopefully that's helpful or at least thought provoking. And, Yeah. We'd love to hear from you if you've got comments on that. John has got some some things to say about integrations. But first, I wanna say thanks to another new sponsor, Redash.
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Jon:I had not heard of them before. I'm gonna have to give that a try sometime.
Justin:Yeah. Well, that's why
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Justin:It feels like I could use this. And maybe it's the kind of thing I need someone to set up a few queries for me to start. But
Jon:Yeah.
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Justin:Definitely check it out. Redash.io. So tell me Cool. About about what you've been thinking lately. Something you've been wrestling with a little bit.
Jon:Yeah. I I don't know if it just sort of came to a head recently, but, you know, we we try to expand the the basics of podcasting by adding external integrations to other services. Right? So we have we have these services where we can, auto post, your episodes to YouTube, like, convert it to a video.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Post it to YouTube via the API. We can auto tweet when a new episode comes out.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:We can you can, hook your account up through your your show, your podcast up to, Spotify and have it automatically show up in Spotify and then get, analytics, back. You know, we have, like, mailing list integrations. Yep. Things like that. And that's all, you know, generally done through these external third party APIs that these services run.
Justin:Mhmm. And this kinda goes along with the narrative, which is, you know, integrations are good. Like, you wanna give your customers integrations.
Jon:Yeah. They're great. I mean, it it really I'm not saying they're a bad thing. Obviously, like, the Internet isn't running on APIs these days, integrations, and everything is talking to each other.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:But for whatever reason, lately, it's, I'm looking at our error reporting dashboard, which generally is is pretty low, but it's almost all entirely from these integrations. So it's like, you know, these errors pop up from YouTube or Twitter or Spotify, and you can tell, like, how many times it occurs. Mhmm. And they kinda look in the details. We're using century.io, to do all of our error reporting.
Jon:And, almost all of it are just, like, edge cases or, like, weird things that happen with APIs that you can't really predict sometimes. So it's like, let's give an example of YouTube. So someone hooks their podcast up to YouTube, they have to choose a playlist for it to upload to. Mhmm. Then in, you know, in our app, in the background, we're automatically scheduling these episodes to upload to YouTube when they go live.
Jon:Mhmm. Meanwhile, let's say that person goes into their YouTube account and deletes the playlist, but that we don't have it set up to necessarily notify our app that it's deleted. So now, like, every time that video is gonna try to be uploaded, it's like, no playlist ID.
Justin:Oh, yeah.
Jon:Does doesn't exist, and then there's an error.
Justin:It's like dependencies on dependencies.
Jon:And now it's like, how do we how do we report that back to the customer in a meaningful way? How do we how do we figure out a way to for these people to, like, reconnect to a new playlist or reinitiate these videos to be uploaded if they want or or just disconnect it automatically. Mhmm. You know, Spotify has some some weird things with their API where it's like, you know, you can't submit a show with a duplicate name. Yeah.
Jon:Twitter Twitter doesn't let you tweet the same exact tweet more than once, which, obviously, you shouldn't be doing that. And we ignore those, but, like But
Justin:you have to account for all of that. That just creates all of these edge cases.
Jon:Yeah. It's like you can't you know, you build these things initially, and you can't really predict every exact way someone is gonna use these things or or every, you know, requirement from the API. And most of most of them have good documentation, but Mhmm. There's always just external events that are out of your control. And, like, the this past weekend or maybe it was Friday or forget which day.
Jon:YouTube was down for, like, 2 hours.
Justin:Oh, I heard about this.
Jon:So I think it was more than just YouTube. It's like a bunch of Google APIs were just down.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And they didn't really work, and, like, we, you know, we we have these videos that get scheduled to be uploaded, and then it's you know, if you're in our dashboard, you can tell if they're being processed, but, like, it didn't really handle that well.
Justin:Mhmm. So,
Jon:like, these things were just failing in the background, but it said they were processing. People were like, where are videos? How do I resubmit it? Yeah. Of which there is no way to do it.
Jon:Yeah. So, like, it just it ends up causing confusion, I think Mhmm. On the customer's end and quite a bit of, like, customer support requests that that, you know, you can't you might not necessarily be able to handle. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. You know, this has made me actually rethink this idea of integrations. Because there is there's certainly some utility for the customer. But for 80% of our customers, the thing that's the most important is please publish my audio into my RSS feed and have that go out to all of the podcast players that support the RSS feed. And that is really what I want.
Jon:Yeah. That's it. I mean, that's yeah. That's the the basic product. Right?
Jon:And we kind of decided to add these things on as kinda nice to haves. Yeah. But but it sorta can kinda get in the way of, like, the the core of the product and and, like, improving that.
Justin:Yeah. I think I I especially kinda regret the YouTube one.
Jon:Yeah. It's a bit it's a bit of a resource hog. I mean, I guess, at some point, we could reevaluate it. I mean, it's not like we have to have it.
Justin:Yeah. I think people I think people like it. And, again, this is where it gets tricky because the reasons people like things are sometimes more emotional than rational. Although, sometimes there's rational reasons. Like, if you have millions of YouTube subscribers and you want them to get your podcast every once in a while in a special podcast playlist, that would make sense.
Justin:But, anecdotally, when I go and look at, you know, folks that have that are cross posting their podcast to YouTube, not just from us, but from any podcast hosting company, the plays on those videos are very low. And so if you're if you're doing this in hopes of getting more distribution, it's actually not helping, it it seems in most cases. We also don't have a way of including those views in your podcast analytics. And so it's it's just again, like, I think maybe there's a few edge cases where it really is worthwhile for the customer to have that integration live. But I in in retrospect, I'm like, I also think that I we need to be careful in the future about implementing things.
Justin:This isn't always a good rule, but just implementing things that we really believe in. And I think if I had an actually, you're good at this. You're good at questioning me about whether I really believe in this thing I'm proposing. Because I think if I'd thought about it for a bit, I'd be like like, I never listen to podcasts on YouTube. I don't know anybody else that does.
Justin:I don't know anybody who has a show where YouTube like, just uploading audio to YouTube is a significant driver for their show. I don't personally like that experience of seeing a bunch of just thumbnails in my YouTube subscriptions. And so, yeah. I think there's something about that integration in particular that in retrospect feels like a mistake. Even though it's really popular.
Jon:It is. Yeah.
Justin:So yeah. I I think this is I think that's it's a good and maybe another good warning for our fellow, you know, SaaS compatriots that there's this narrative that integrations and investing in integrations is a good thing. It's like always a net win because, you know, more people will want to use your app. You're making it more powerful. Sometimes they'll promote you, you know.
Justin:Mhmm. But yeah. I think and and then again, with Spotify as well, you know, it's hard to figure this out. Like, we kinda needed to have Spotify out of the gate because they weren't the only way to get into Spotify was if your hosting provider had an integration with them. But now Spotify has released this dashboard where you can submit yourself.
Justin:And it just doesn't seem that big of a deal.
Jon:Right. Yeah. It's yeah.
Justin:But meanwhile, we have to do all the support for this. And It
Jon:does it does sometimes feel like we're doing support for Spotify.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Well
Justin:and did I don't know if you saw this, but, so NPR did something funky to all their podcast feeds. Did you hear about that?
Jon:I did.
Justin:So the founder of Breaker was just mentioning that, like, that caused their support team an enormous amount of work.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah, because I the customers don't they don't know whose fault it is. Like, they're not gonna contact NPR.
Justin:Yeah. Well and they might not even realize it's NPR's problem. And, like, in their mind when they open up the app and, you know, this American life doesn't play, that's like a problem with the app. And it could be. That's the thing.
Justin:Like, you would, as a customer, I might do the same thing. I might be, like, contact the podcast player and go, hey. What's going on here? You know?
Jon:But this
Justin:American Life isn't playing. But it's not in this case, it wasn't their fault. But they really had to assume the burden of all of that support. So I think there's yeah. The more you kind of increase these dependencies with other folks.
Justin:The other thing is and actually this would I hate to say this. This is almost be a blessing now. But, the the the risk is sometimes you can integrate with folks and, you know, your customers really love that integration. But then the partner, the integration partner can deprecate that API. And all of a sudden, you're something your customers have come to rely on is no longer available.
Jon:Yeah. And you have to find a workaround or just kind of sunset it.
Justin:Yeah. So, I mean, there's certain ones that seem to be just far less hassle, like, our integration with all of the email service providers, Mailchimp and Convertkit. Those Yeah. Basically just work, and they work as intended. And there's not really any problems with those ones.
Justin:They they're and they're not resource heavy. I don't think I can't think of anyone I've had a problem. Very, very few customer support requests.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:So it probably depends on the nature of these things. But, yeah, it's it's something to consider. And if, yeah, if our listeners have had maybe they have their own horror stories they wanna share, but I think it's something kind of keeping in mind. And the other thing I was thinking about was if you if your business depended entirely on one of these platforms like, Shopify was down the other day too. Did you hear about that?
Jon:No. I didn't.
Justin:Shopify was down for hours and hours and hours. And so, you know, all my friends that I know that run businesses on Shopify, which in some ways is a great business. Like, you've got this captive market of 100 of thousands of stores that are spending money on Shopify. And if you offer them something they want, they'll pay you as well. Mhmm.
Justin:But the downside, the risk is if Shopify goes down, your business goes down too. It's kinda like they take everybody down with them.
Jon:Yeah. That's, that'd be a tough spot to be in. Yeah. As a provider, it'd be.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. And Definitely. And so they were just, you know, tweeting to their customers and emailing their customers and saying, you know, we're Shopify is down. It's affecting us too.
Justin:But they basically just had to wait for Shopify to get
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it's their has one is people's livelihoods too. It's man.
Justin:Yeah. And this is kind of where the so there is downsides to what we're doing. We're very similar to, you know, email service providers and that were built on this open standard. So email is an open Internet standard and RSS is an open Internet standard. The disadvantage is we end up doing a lot of support for a lot of different clients.
Justin:You know, like Yeah. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, etcetera.
Jon:Yeah. And you you wanna help, but you also sort of sometimes just wanna be, like, here's a here's a document. Go read it.
Justin:Mhmm. Yes. But the I think the advantage of this open distributed system is that if Apple Podcasts goes down, and it has, it's not affecting every single podcast listener. And it's it's not like, this isn't a huge deal. The other thing that's helpful is that, we actually have this offline component, which means most folks have already downloaded the episode to their podcast player kind of in the background.
Justin:And so let's say Apple Podcasts goes down. It's not a huge deal if you've got podcasts to listen to. So yeah. The all of these things are interesting. There's there are, what do you call it?
Justin:Pros and cons to lot to all these things. Right?
Jon:Yeah. And I I will say as a developer, I actually I enjoy building these things. Like, they're fun.
Justin:The integrations. Yeah.
Jon:It's like, oh, man. This is cool. I can
Jason:do this, and then it's on here, and you can do this. And
Jon:Mhmm. Mhmm. It automatically does this, but there's always a yeah. There's definitely a downside to it.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I think going forward, we will definitely be more wary.
Jon:Yeah. More wary, more, I don't know, more more testing of the thing if we ever get around to building something new. I think for the scenarios I talked about was Spotify mainly and YouTube. Like, both of the solutions for that are similar and that you you're giving better feedback to the customer and sort of giving them an option to, like, redo something Mhmm. Yeah.
Jon:When when it messes up, which is not something that, transistor handles super well at the moment.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, again, I think we'll evaluate that stuff maybe, you know, maybe one way to test it that would be interesting is to just remove the YouTube feature from all new accounts and see what happens.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Because that, you know, it there might be current people that use it. People really don't like it when things get taken away. But it feels like It's
Jon:true.
Justin:We could hide that for new users and just see what happens. Like
Jon:Yeah. I mean, you could hide it for new users and and kinda fix the problems that are there for the existing people and then maybe re enable it or
Justin:Yeah. Something. Yeah. I'm big on this, like, simplifying simplifying things. Like, Jason Cohen, when he said bootstrapping is already hard.
Justin:Don't make it harder. I just keep thinking about that all the time. And it relates to everything we've talked about today. Like what market you choose, all of that stuff. It's like, yes, you could do this, but bootstrapping is already hard.
Justin:So don't make it harder on yourself. Like
Jon:Yeah. And we maybe we did that.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Before we go today, and this is related, I just we're a podcast company. So I wanted to talk about Apple's keynote today.
Justin:It's Monday, June 3rd. WWDC, they announced a new desktop podcast app. They're basically killing iTunes. So iTunes has had music and movies and TV and podcasts. Since 2005, I looked it up.
Justin:So for 14 years since iTunes 4.9, podcasts have been in the, It's
Jon:the end of an era.
Justin:It's the end of an era. To the point actually where a lot of when people are asking us, you know, in our support forums and other things, they'll still refer to Apple Podcasts as Itunes. Right. And so it'll be interesting to see how long that takes to get rid of it. But, yeah.
Justin:So they're they have a separate podcast app on the desktop now in the same way that they have a podcast app on the phone. Also interesting, and I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out, is they are doing, basically transcription in the background. And that will allow you to do text based search in audio. So
Jon:It does Yeah. It doesn't sound like they're doing any, like, transcriptions for, like, reading purposes. No. It's Most mostly for, like, SEO and stuff.
Justin:Yeah. For search. And the screenshot I saw, I might be wrong on this. But the screenshot I saw was it actually jumped to that point in the show. So if you searched for, if I said, bamboozled banana in this show, like I just did, theoretically, you'll be able to search for bamboozled banana and and come exactly to this point in the show.
Justin:Just set yourself a reminder
Jon:to to try that out whenever they release that.
Justin:Yeah. I wonder if the beta is available now. We should test this out. So I really good news for the podcast industry. The and, it's not very often that podcasts get kind of center stage at an Apple event.
Justin:And so the fact that it was center stage both at the Apple event and at the last Google IO event, there it was podcasting was mentioned in both places. This is, I think good signs for the podcast industry.
Jon:I think so too. Yeah. I mean, you know, kinda podcast starter with Apple. Yeah. I I like that they're bringing out some new stuff.
Justin:Yes. Totally. So let's, thank everyone who supported us on Patreon.
Jon:As always, thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon for making this show possible. We have Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedraffita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Haines, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha. Danbuda.com. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave
Justin:Junta.
Jon:Kylefox@getrewardful.com, and ProfitWell and Redash.
Justin:Yeah. Thanks again, everybody. And, again, I said this last week, but I recognize a lot of names of folks that are right there with us building their own thing. And, Yeah. It just means a lot that we have this community of people and and we're all doing this together.
Justin:And, in our case, we're sharing our story, but there's other people on this list, like Simon Bennett, that have started their own podcasts. I'll put it in the show notes all the other folks on this list that have started podcasts, and they're sharing their journey as well. And I just think that's significant that, that's happening. I think it's good for I think it's good for the community. I think it's good for co founders to meet every week and talk.
Justin:Just seems like a lot of benefits, with, what's kinda happening right now. So I I really appreciate it. And we'll see you next week. Every podcast session with you now is John Buddha Between 2 Ferns.
