How fragile is the prosumer SaaS market?
Hey everyone, welcome to build your saas. This is the well, hold on. I wasn't reading it. Start over. Hey, everyone.
Jon:Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2020. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson, and I think I'm losing my voice again. Follow along as we build transistor.fm.
Jon:Were you screaming too loudly on Saturday when Biden won the election, or what was happening?
Justin:I mean, there was definitely a lot of cheering going on in Canada.
Jon:I mean Me too.
Justin:The there's definitely folks who support, Trump here, which I have I have I do not understand it, but his politics do have appeal outside of the US. But the vast majority of Canadians that I know and love, are pretty happy to see him out of White House.
Jon:Unfortunately, 70,000,000 people still voted for him here, so I think we still have a long way to go.
Justin:Yes. Yeah. And we'll try not to get in too much of an accident. I've I've Yeah. I've been on Twitter, like, just Yeah.
Justin:Fighting too much, I think.
Jon:Was a nice it was a nice moment of joy, though, for at least
Justin:Oh, yeah. I mean, just seeing everyone celebrate, and I'm see, I can't I can't help myself but get into it.
Jon:We don't have
Justin:Yeah. I yeah. Okay.
Jon:So let's just Maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Let's leave it at that and move on. Oh,
Justin:man. So but I am relieved. I think it is going especially domestically. And when I say domestically, I mean well, yeah. Domestically, but also for the world economy.
Justin:I think, a new administration is going to be welcome. I am worried about the economy, and I'm and connected to the economy is COVID 19.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And, yeah, there's just a bunch of things that really need to be addressed. So, yeah, I'm I'm hoping I mean and there's even a new administration, this is going to be difficult to manage all of this. There's there's Yeah.
Jon:There's always a transition. It's kind of COVID's kinda getting out of control, so it'll be a bumpy winter.
Justin:And what what's what's amazing to me is how many people are starting businesses still, and in certain categories, how well businesses are doing. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, okay. When is, you know, when is, like, the next wave of economic despair going to come?
Jon:Right. I mean, I think there's a delayed you know, there's gonna be a delay, I think, in terms of other larger corporations doing lay rounds of layoffs. Certainly, certain industries have been fine and have even improved, but other ones have been just decimated. I don't know what Mhmm. I don't know what's gonna happen this winter as far as travel and leisure and restaurants and music venues and all these other places that, you know, employ a lot of people.
Jon:Yeah. It's gonna be it's gonna be tough.
Justin:Yep. Yeah. And at the same time, we're seeing anyone really in the I I guess we'll call it the online creator or online maker category. These categories are really on fire right now.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And I I've kind of, like, openly wondered how soft that market is. Meaning, if if a lot of those folks are using their personal credit card to, you know, buy Mailchimp so that they can start an email newsletter or, you know, pay Squarespace so they can start a blog, How soft is that market? You know? Like, how, fragile is it?
Jon:Yeah. We've we've seen it a little bit with Transistor. I mean, we've had we've had people who bought a subscription a year ago, year on a yearly basis, and it Mhmm. Recently, expired or was about to, you know, re up for another year, and a lot of people have reached out and said, hey. We can't really actually make this work this year.
Jon:We gotta cancel
Justin:it. Mhmm.
Jon:So, yeah, we've seen that. I it's it's out there, and I I get it.
Justin:Yeah. It's out there, but it still doesn't seem significant enough. And it's just it is interesting, like, how like, if you were in the travel industry Yeah. Like, this is not good. Restaurant industry, not good unless you're creating ways for restaurants to survive.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:You know, like online ordering and things like that. But you you always kinda wonder, like, as you're stacking these layers, when when the foundation of the layers starts to crumble, you know, how much is it crumbling, and when is that does that affect everyone who's built a business on top? So if we use restaurants as an example, you know, they're they're ordering food from food wholesalers, they're paying Mailchimp for their email newsletter, they're paying Squarespace for their website. At what point does, you know, the restaurant industry collapsing then kind of go up the chain and then cause everything else?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, I think you saw that with the auto industry in 2008, right, when it was kind of collapsing and it but it also affected all the other small distributors who provided parts and labor for the larger car companies. So, yeah, it's definitely
Justin:We like you said, we've seen some folks like it maybe we've had some customers, churn, but overall, our churn rate or, actually, our churn rate is low as low as it's ever been. This might be instructive for people who are looking for opportunities. I I think the the creator economy is is only going to grow. And, you know, when I, like, started doing, like, independent stuff, like selling, you know, self published books and stuff like that, I thought I was late then, and now I'm just waking up to the fact that, no, this is just getting started. Like, the only people that were doing that before were people in the tech industry, and now this is expanding kind of beyond that niche.
Justin:There's a lot of people who want to start their own business or want to release, creative work, whether it's a podcast, a blog, or a book, or a video, or anything, like, people want to do this. And the younger generation, like, this is exactly what they want to do. They they've been raised on YouTube influencers. Right?
Jon:Yeah. Right.
Justin:So it'll be interesting to see, you know, how how big of a market this ends up being, but I I think this is still very early. And there's, you know, there's gonna be a lot of people retiring early too, and they wanna they're going to want to be creating online. So it's not just young people.
Jason:So, yeah, it's something I'm just kind
Justin:of thinking about, and I think I think everybody, even if your business is doing good, you're kinda like, okay. Like, what is going on out there?
Jon:Yeah. It seems like a precarious, I don't know, situation at the moment. Yeah. And I think people are getting you know, they're optimistic about this news that came out about a potential vaccine today, but that's obviously not gonna happen until the middle of summer anyway. But it Yeah.
Jon:But, yeah, it's who knows? It's gonna be a rough winter, I think.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be interesting to see how we all cope because we've we've all been out in this nice weather
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And being stuck inside, and then it's like you can't eat on restaurant patios and things like that.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Why don't we quickly talk about stuff new stuff we've released? Because I I think we we haven't released an episode in a while, and there's a bunch of new stuff in Transistor that's worth talking about.
Jon:There is. Yeah.
Justin:So first up, we had the Zapier integration.
Jon:Uh-huh.
Justin:And this was an interesting one because we hired, our friend Mike to
Jon:work with
Justin:us on this.
Jon:Yeah. So, yeah, Mike worked on it. It's great to work with him. So that this is built on top of the API that we released, which we haven't actually fully released publicly yet.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:So I have to sort of request access to it, which I don't know. That'll change at some point. We'll just turn it on for everyone. Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:It was fun.
Justin:It feels like it's been battle tested enough Yeah. Already. People have built stuff on it. The Zapier integration is now using it. Yeah.
Justin:It feels like we're
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:That that API should just be turned on for everybody.
Jon:Yeah. The Zapier integrate that was fun to work on, with Mike. I know it was I think it was interesting for him because he kind of always wanted to build something on it and never had the opportunity and didn't know too much about how it worked, but obviously figured it out pretty quick. Mhmm. So there's only a handful of things you can do with it through transistor, but that even that handful of things you can do combined with other integrations, just enables a ton of different things, like things that I wouldn't even think of and other customers might think of.
Jon:But it's mostly around episodes being published or created. And, if you have one of the enhanced private podcast subscriptions, there's a bunch of features around subscribers being added and removed or the ability to add or remove a subscriber. So, but it enables lots of different things. You know, if you add a subscriber on through a transistor, you can fire off an action that will do something somewhere else. Or if you have a new, let's say, Patreon subscriber, you can hook it into Transistor to add them to your private podcast automatically and have them be emailed.
Jon:So I think there's a ton of possibilities, so it's gonna be interesting to see what what people come up with.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of the cool thing about Zapier is that you're not limited by your own imagination. Now the user, who in our case is the creator and, you know, they're the ones who are doing creative things with
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Transistor. They get to be creative in how, you know, they wanna use this, and they can stack a bunch of, integrations together and, you know, and they have it automate a bunch of tasks or, enable them to collect payments and have a private podcast. There's just so much cool stuff.
Jon:Yeah. Or if you're doing
Justin:a corporate podcast, you could, like, notify a bunch of people by email and over Slack.
Jon:Right. Yeah. We had someone today even ask about they wanted to do something along the lines of backing up their audio and images to s 3 on Amazon automatically, but they're, like, wanted us to build it in the transistor. And I'm like, you might be able to do that through Zapier. I don't know, but you can always try it out.
Jon:Like, if a whenever an episode is published, just have that thing grab the URLs for the audio and image files and use a Zap to, like, fire it off somewhere else Mhmm. Which I think is possible. Yep.
Justin:Yeah. I think it'll that's the other nice thing about it is it really does for a small team like ours. It it gives us the opportunity, like, instead of us saying no all the time, we can say, you know what? It's probably possible to do what you want to do through Zapier.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And we don't have to build it or maintain it. We just have to build and maintain our API and then, you know, build and maintain this Zapier integration. So instead of us having to build 100 or 1000 of, you know, different integrations and triggers and
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:Automations, we can just build one thing. So, yeah, this is really cool. People are already using it.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:The next thing we released is podcast locked. Do you wanna tell
Jon:me what
Justin:that is?
Jon:This is a new XML tag for your RSS feed that is not really it's not very widely supported. It's very new, but it it kind of came out of the need for people to be able to protect their RSS fees a little better to have them not have them be automatically or not have them be imported into other services without their knowledge, which kind of depends on those other services supporting it, which only only a couple do, and they're pretty much only the smaller independent ones like us. But it allows you to basically kinda like domain names, right, where you can you can go into transistor and say, I wanna lock this podcast. It it will put an RS or a XML tag in your feed that says this podcast is locked. If another service that supports it gets a request to import the feed, it will actually not let you do it.
Jon:Mhmm. And on the other on the flip side of that, we won't import feeds that are locked, so you actually have to unlock it on your end before you're able to import it into our service. And then related to that, we actually turned on, email verification too. So if you're importing an RSS feed, we actually send an email to the email that's listed in the RSS feed as the owner. And then that email has to be approved and clicked on, and then the import can proceed.
Jon:So Yeah. Kind of another step in the right direction. I know places like Anchor, we're seeing a lot of RSS feeds imported. They were just being pirated and rebroadcast under a different name and all. It's just
Justin:This actually gives me hope because, you know, the open ecosystem of RSS is messy. And one of the disadvantages is, you know, on a on a owned platform like YouTube, they can lock down everything. You know, people still have illegal, like, you know, downloading apps and stuff, but it's just a lot harder to do. Mhmm. And with RSS, it's easy.
Justin:All the enclosures are right there. Like, you can just, like, go Yeah. Go and find it.
Jon:I mean, even even with this lock tag, like, you can still see the whole feed if you even if it's turned on. It's not Mhmm. Like, there's nothing stopping you personally from importing it and pulling things down. But
Justin:Yes. But what I like about it is to me, this is the right amount of flexibility and openness, but it's allowing us in the ecosystem to police it ourselves. So if this American Life doesn't want people to be honest, like, import their RSS feed wherever Mhmm. Any reputable hosting provider now will not, you know, will will, recognize the locked tag.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's been great. And it it's actually kinda cool, that it's like I was working with other, like, owners of other podcast platforms that do the same thing we do, and everyone's cooperative and friendly and nice and, like Yes. It's it no one's no one's trying to, like, you know, prevent other people from doing this or steal people's customers.
Jon:It's it's great. I think I think that shows kind of how healthy the ecosystem is and how well the businesses are doing.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah.
Jon:Maybe if maybe if businesses weren't doing well, it'd be a different scenario.
Justin:But Yeah. Yeah. When when when when we get into the Hunger Games, we'll see how nice it is.
Jon:You're right. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Next up, we have the big one. Easily submit your podcast to Spotify, Apple, and other podcast players. So a new distribution screen.
Jon:Yeah. There's, like, a yeah. We didn't have this before. It was kind of all over the place, but there's one centralized distribution area now where you can kinda see where your podcast is submitted to and included in, but also, you know, easily submit your podcast to several different directories and podcast apps. It's a little messy.
Jon:Some things are a little bit packed together because there's just no good way to do it, but it does make things quite a bit easier for a number of services and a good starting point for a lot of people to be able to submit to a handful of places pretty much instantaneously after they had their first episode.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. This is huge. There's a a Tesla podcast that just signed up. And I was kinda watching them because they were reaching out on Twitter.
Justin:And then, I was watching them sign up and upload their first episodes. And in the old days, we would have received, like, a bunch of customer support tickets. And they would have also been kind of stuck. Like, they get their first episode up, but they don't get that magic of being able to say, hey, this is where it is. And I just saw a bunch of tweets come through, like, okay, everybody.
Justin:It's up on Spotify, and then it's up on Podcast Addict, Breaker, Player, Listen Notes. So you know that they just went through and clicked each of those submit buttons in our on our distribution list, and it's just so fast compared to what it was before. Yeah. And it gives you that that feeling as a user of of joy. You know?
Justin:It's just like I've created this thing, and now I'm sending it out to the world on all these different channels. So I think, like, emotionally, this was the most resonant, you know, feature. We had people
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Sharing it on Twitter, like, oh, look how easy this is. This one's really cool.
Jon:Yeah. There's it's definitely a good start. I think there's still still a handful of things I wanna finish up as far as confusion around importing and switching hosts and things like that. And, yeah, it's it's a good start, I think.
Justin:Yeah. And, related, you created this distribution checklist. It's actually like an onboarding checklist.
Jon:Yeah. It's just kind of an interstitial screen, but, you know, you see if you before you can submit your podcast to directories, it doesn't even let you do it. It just tells you that, you know, you're missing artwork. You're missing you know, you have to have at least 1 episode uploaded. You have to choose a category and choose a a language for your RSS feed before you can submit it anywhere.
Jon:So it prevents people from getting confused as to why maybe they're if they're trying to submit to have a podcast and they're missing something, why you know, what what are they missing? Or just kind of prevents extra customer support, but also kind of, I don't know, let people fill out their podcast a little better.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Actually, sidebar. I'm not sure if this is related to the election. It probably is, but and actually I've also noticed that, like, Helen and Yatunde are getting to tickets just before I can even get there.
Justin:So often I get to my office here on the West Coast and, like, all the tickets are gone. So I was trying to figure out, like, is our volume down or are they just getting to tickets faster or is it the election or is it related to all these new features we just released, which actually, you know, is reducing our support volume.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it could be yeah. Could be any number of those.
Justin:I mean, messages received is down month over month, but it's it's really hard to tell, like, there's there could be so many because it's also, like, our sales channel. So
Jon:Right.
Justin:I can't tell if, you know, if this is overall
Jon:I would imagine last week, especially there's probably part of it was due to the election.
Justin:Yeah. Like, October is down, but it's all kind of within the realm of there's nothing, like, dramatic. You know?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:So we'll have to see what happens in November. But, yeah, that those things, getting to release all of those at once, that was that was pretty big for us. Like
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. That was a that was a long time coming, and a lot of a lot of interrupted work based on how our moods are feeling and how we're feeling, how much we're able to do in a given day. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Should we talk about that a bit? Like, just
Jon:Oh, I mean, I was I mean, I I think we were both kinda feeling it, but I was there were weeks where I got almost nothing done because I was just stressed out about the state of the world and
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Wasn't sleeping well and, would sit down to do work and just kind of poked around for a while. Yeah. I got I got little things done. I would have to, like, take a break and just start something new. Like, I didn't I hadn't finished the distribution page yet, and then I started on, updating how our importing process worked because because I couldn't focus on the other one.
Jon:Yeah. There's a lot of a lot of wheel spinning happening.
Justin:I wonder if other people are better at this than we are. Like, it just seems like there's some folks that and I don't know if this is better, but, you know, I have some friends who are just able to ignore the world and just focus on work. Like, they can continue to crank stuff out. But for me, personally, like, yeah, when there's the state of the world to me, like, touches everything. And so, you know, whether I'm worrying about politics or climate change or whatever.
Justin:Yeah. Sometimes it's just like or if it's just something in my personal life, like, it's it's hard for me to shut that off, like, if I feel crappy. It kinda, like, just permeates everything, you know? Well, I mean yeah. Or the we're we're human too, and I I and, actually, you said something that was, I think, interesting, which is like you're like, man, I'm so glad we have this recurring revenue business right now.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it's It's so stable. It a lot yeah. It really does allow you to step back and take a break or just like, I still felt bad about not being able to work and get much done, but, like, there's times where you just you know, you can do customer support, and that's enough.
Justin:Yeah. Right?
Jon:Yeah. If your brain's not in it, then there's no sense trying to force yourself to, I don't know, be creative or get something done that just the work's gonna be sloppy and not come out good. Or
Justin:Mhmm. Well and, really, this is, like that's how you call that's how you get burnout. Right? Is Right. Is you push yourself beyond you don't you're not listening to your body.
Justin:You're not listening to your soul. And you're you're just trying to, like, cram everything into this dark box in your, you know, in your heart and then get some work done. But for me, just the like, I can see, if we wanted to, what we could do to, like, grow 300% year over year. Like, I can see that that path, but there's just something really nice and sustainable about what we've built. And Mhmm.
Justin:I think there's so many people out there that want to build a business like this. We should definitely enjoy it while we have it. You know? Like, this is, like, what people so many people want is I just want something that runs. And once it's up and running, like, you work really hard and you get the right market, you get, you know, the product right, it there's all these things that have to fall into place.
Justin:You know, a lifetime a lifetime of experience, everything. But once you get here, it is okay to, not, you know, be constantly guilting yourself because you're not working enough or whatever.
Jon:Right. I
Justin:think there's something nice about just being able to enjoy it and go, yeah. You know what? I'm not feeling good right now, and I'm gonna do whatever I can to take care of myself.
Jon:Yeah. That said, I mean, it will we will I think it does allow us to step back and, either take a break or rethink things, but there probably will be a point where we're gonna have to think about and we have talked about this a little bit, kind of diversifying what we're offering because I don't like, the podcast and ecosystem, it's not gonna be like this forever.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Who knows what'll happen or when it'll change or what's gonna change or if the bottom's gonna drop out immediately, but not gonna it's I mean, we I don't think we can depend on it staying like this forever.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. No. I've I'm I've definitely felt that. And, yeah, I don't wanna I definitely don't wanna get apathetic either.
Justin:There's, like, a tension between those things. I think diversifying is an interesting idea. Like, how do you diversify as a bootstrapper? Mhmm. That'd be a good one.
Justin:If you're listening right now and you've got ideas, reach out to us. Let us know. How do you diversify as a bootstrapper? Some of that could be, you know, like, Jason and David diversified. They took money off the table with Bezos.
Justin:That's one way. You know, Wild Bit has multiple products. That's another way. Some folks just take their earnings and invest it. Yep.
Justin:Right? There's all sorts of ways to do that. And, yeah, I I think that's an interesting topic for bootstrappers. Like, once you hit something, there's still so many risks that you're exposed to, mostly because, if somebody with deep pockets decides to come in to the market, it is difficult to fight those folks. So, yeah, let us know what you think.
Justin:Yeah. I think we should close this one off.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:We'll we'll try to get back now that we're feeling a bit better, now that we've come out of our our, our caves. We'll try to record a few of these. Let us know what you wanna hear from us these days. You know, like, we're very much just running this business now. And if you have questions about what that's like or, you know, what we're thinking or doing, reach out.
Justin:And we have a few new Patreon supporters. Do you wanna read out this list?
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks always to everyone on Patreon for supporting us even if we're not recording. We have the the Take It EV podcast. Is that the one you mentioned that talks about Tesla and
Justin:No. That's a that's a they've been with us for a long time.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:Yeah. These folks the so we have we have a couple EV podcasts now.
Jon:Alright. Cool. Ethan Gunderson, who I think I know, used to live in Chicago. So thanks, Ethan. Thanks.
Jon:If that's the same Ethan. I think it is. And, Sofia Quintero, Diogo, Chris Willow, Mason Hensley, Warhorse Solaire, Ward Sandler, Eric Lima, James Sours, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley, Russell Brown, Evandro Sassy, Pradyumna Schenbecker, Noah Praill, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray, Josh Smith, Ivan Krakovic, Ryan Ray, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitfer, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, my brother, Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.
Justin:Junta. Well, my voice kinda came back there for a second. Did
Jon:you hear it? Yeah. And finally, Kyle Fox from get reward for dot com.
Justin:Thanks everybody. We will see you next week.
