Justin: 00:00

This episode is sponsored by podcastinsights.com. They've got a great how to start a podcast course. You'll learn all sorts of things like recording and editing, publishing, promotion, which we're going to talk about in this episode. It's all free. You can sign up right on their homepage, podcastinsights.com.

Jon: 00:34

Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

Justin: 00:42

And I was taking a drink of water. I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm. How's it going, John?

Jon: 00:56

It's going, pretty well. I'm, still at the office. It's snowing outside again, and the temperatures are plummeting quickly.

Justin: 01:05

I sent you a message in Slack saying you need to move to Canada where it is warm.

Jon: 01:10

Yeah. Yeah. There's a cold front or something coming on almost mostly on Wednesday, but, yeah, it's supposed to be negative 60 wind chill, which sounds fake.

Justin: 01:24

Yeah. It's gonna be cold there. It's gonna be warmer here than there.

Jon: 01:28

Yeah.

Justin: 01:28

This week, I I think I thought we would talk about how you grow your audience, how you get attention for your product, how you the the rules are kinda all the same. And this is off this Reddit thread I was just reading about. Let me see if I can find it. I'll put it in the show notes as well, which will be saas dot transistor.fm/43.

Jon: 01:53

Cool. Yeah. It sounds like a good topic to me because I also don't know much about it. Well and Which is why which is why I found a partner.

Justin: 02:01

Well, it's good. We can teach each other a few things. By the way, folks, if you have tech related questions for John, be sure to send those to us. You can reach out on Twitter at transistorfm. You can use our voicemail transistor.fm/voice mail.

Justin: 02:18

But on Reddit, this user I should get the username because they're always funny on Reddit. My Reddit name is spanky mustard because I just thought that was the most appropriate username I could come up with.

Jon: 02:32

That seems pretty appropriate for Reddit.

Justin: 02:34

But this is Discord rhyme. And he asks, we have somewhere between 500 to 800 regular listeners for our podcast, but only about a 100 of them follow us on Twitter. How do we build up our Twitter followers? And I thought this would be an interesting thing for us to talk about because the the the way that you grow number of Twitter followers, the Nate way that you grow the number of podcast listeners, and the way that you grow the number of SaaS customers is actually all the same, or it follows the same rule. Maybe to illustrate this, I'll talk a little bit about our show here and what we can see happening with the stats.

Justin: 03:21

So I just exported all of our stats into numbers. And our our this is how things kind of go up and down. So we launched the show. There's a big spike. Then we have an even bigger spike when we, promoted it on product hunt.

Justin: 03:39

And And then the numbers go down, and then they're kind of gradually, going up the last few months until recently. I think we had about let's see here. I don't know. Maybe not a ton of episodes, but 4 episodes that were down. And I'm trying to figure out what's happening.

Justin: 03:59

Right? Is is there is there something wrong with our show? You know, are John and I doing something wrong?

Jon: 04:05

People are getting burnout

Justin: 04:07

Yeah. By yeah. Who knows? Right? And so we are obviously trying to create a better show.

Justin: 04:15

We're we're not only interested in the software side of this, but we wanna actually have a podcast that's useful for people. And so I was wondering, I wonder if it's, you know, our topics. Is it the length? Is it, there's all sorts of variables. The first place I went is to our, iTunes reviews.

Justin: 04:37

And, right now, this is something we'd like to build into Transistor eventually. But, right now, I just use this little WordPress plugin called podcast reviews. And we got our first 2 star review, John.

Jon: 04:52

Oh, that hurts.

Justin: 04:53

It that people you know, that we have a lot of fans that give us 5 4 stars, but our first two star review. And, this is it. This is the review. I'll read it for you. Super mediocre.

Justin: 05:06

That's the title.

Jon: 05:09

Not just regular mediocre. Super mediocre.

Justin: 05:13

Yeah. It's not just regular mediocre. We're going super. Super mediocre advice, storytelling, and use of my time as a listener. Save your time and listen to something else like indie hackers.

Justin: 05:26

Now, by the way, I love indie hackers. I like Cortland. He's a friend of mine. You can definitely go listen to that show. It's a great show.

Justin: 05:32

But instead of, you know, getting feedback like this and getting upset, I was like, I wonder if there is a seed of truth here. And, you know, maybe John and I need to evaluate what we talk about. So what I did is I took all of our episodes, I tried to get the data. Right? So I took all of our episodes in Transistors Analytics, and I kinda mapped them out.

Justin: 05:58

But just imagine a stacked bar chart that shows our episodes over time. And so, like I said, last 4 episodes were down. My hypothesis was if we did more topical, actionable advice kind of shows specifically for software founders that our downloads would increase. And so Mhmm. The first kind of in this series was 4 episodes ago.

Justin: 06:23

That was how to find the right customers for your software business. And that one has a big spike. It's kind of it's it's probably in our most 10 most popular episodes so far. And so okay. Well, maybe we've got something there.

Justin: 06:40

Right?

Jon: 06:41

Mhmm.

Justin: 06:42

And I think, you know, actually, I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about this. But this could make sense if people, like if people are coming to this show because they're starting their own software company, they don't necessarily wanna just hear you and I shuck and jive, even though that's pretty, pretty fun. Like, there are certain podcasts that we listen to just for educational purposes. Right?

Jon: 07:08

Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I find that I find that occasionally too just in my day to day listening. It doesn't have to be about business or technology, but, there's definitely certain episodes that I will take away more from or anything at all, and I'll and then I'll share that with a friend and be like, hey.

Jon: 07:26

This is a great episode for these reasons. Yeah. Totally. That's how listenership would go up is if your people are talking about it more.

Justin: 07:33

Yeah. And, again, it depends on the kind of show, like Roderick on the line, which is a very personality driven show. It doesn't matter what the topics are. You don't care. You just wanna hear them, John Roderick and Merlin Mann, interact.

Justin: 07:48

Right?

Jon: 07:49

Mhmm.

Justin: 07:50

But, you know, if someone is searching for, like, how do you build a SaaS company or saw podcast, software startup podcasts, and they find our show, really, they there's something there's a job in their life that they are trying to do with the show. Right? They they want more information. They want to learn something. They want to go for a walk and come away with 3 or 4 takeaways.

Jon: 08:20

Right.

Justin: 08:21

And so I think there's, a kernel of truth there that applies to building products, increasing your Twitter followers, and growing your podcast listeners.

Jon: 08:34

Yeah. I mean, I you know, in defense of that 2 star review we got of his review, like, if he's listening to our show and he doesn't take anything away from it, and it's clearly gonna be a waste of his time.

Justin: 08:46

Yeah. Exactly.

Jon: 08:47

You only have so many hours in the day. Why would he wanna spend an hour of it listening to us talk about something that isn't relevant to him?

Justin: 08:54

That's right. That's right.

Jon: 08:55

Yeah. Right.

Justin: 08:56

And so I the the line I wrote down was and I I don't wanna hurt anyone's feelings, but people won't just like your thing just because you made it. And I think sometimes we as makers, people who create things, whether it's software or podcasts or even tweets, just because we're putting something out there, that would be incredibly self serving of us to say, well, I've put this out there. I made this. Therefore, it is valuable. That's not really how it works.

Justin: 09:31

Right?

Jon: 09:32

Mhmm.

Justin: 09:32

And maybe, actually, we've talked about this before, but remember you had a Instagram app or something? What was that about again? Something you tried before?

Jon: 09:41

Oh, god. Yeah. You would hook up your Instagram account, and you could choose a photo and, like, pixelate it and then basically purchase a print of it as, like, a poster.

Justin: 09:57

Okay. And and how did that work out?

Jon: 10:01

It didn't. I had one person buy something, and it was a coworker. And I spent a lot of time building that.

Justin: 10:08

Yeah.

Jon: 10:10

But I you know, like I said, I have no idea how to give the word out.

Justin: 10:12

Yeah. And,

Jon: 10:13

like yeah. It's clearly not something that anyone really wanted or cared about.

Justin: 10:19

Yeah. And, again, there's I think there's, there's there's a balance here. Like, sometimes you just need to make a thing and put it out and see what the reaction is. But and and I think anytime we make something, it does hurt a little bit when we put this thing that we've created out into the world, and no one responds.

Jon: 10:42

Right.

Justin: 10:42

Like, were you do you remember being disappointed? What were some of the feelings you had once you

Jon: 10:47

Oh, yeah. It was yeah. I was disappointed. I was like it's like, oh, I thought I would at least get, like, a handful of orders a week or, like, one order a week. It was, like, one order total.

Jon: 10:58

Yeah. I, like, tried to I tried to promote it. I posted on, you know, Twitter, I think Facebook, and I was using it at that time. And people were like, oh, it's cool. And then nobody bought anything.

Jon: 11:10

I mean, you know, it's a pretty small it'd be a pretty small market

Justin: 11:15

Yeah.

Jon: 11:16

For anyone to really want that. Yeah. I thought it would be bigger. I thought people would be interested in it just because I built it and give me money. And they they think they would think it was as neat and interesting as I did.

Jon: 11:29

Yeah. But, you know, it doesn't happen that way.

Justin: 11:32

Yeah. And and embedded in this Reddit question, I I'm not sure if you picked this up. I'm gonna read it again. But, you know, he's he's asking tips for increasing Twitter followers. And, actually, I'll expand.

Justin: 11:42

He he has a little bit more. He goes, we only about a 100 of our listeners follow us on Twitter. It's possible that this is a totally normal rate, but I'd really like to bump that up if I can. We tweet an average of 2 to 3 times a day, Always stuff related to our podcast topic and often retweet interesting posts from more popular accounts. I do use hashtags when I remember, but so far that hasn't been effective at all.

Justin: 12:08

Most of the advice I find online involves follow spamming, which I find extremely annoying. So what else can you do to build up your Twitter followers? And again, this is a a completely reasonable question, but there's a little bit of, a strain of self focus here that misses this point that people only listen to podcasts or follow Twitter accounts or buy products for one reason. What's that reason, John?

Jon: 12:46

I don't know.

Justin: 12:49

The the only reason people do anything is to make their lives better. That that's it. Right? Like, if if nobody's signing up for Transistor for any other reason, then they have a place they want to go. They have a way they want to improve their lives.

Justin: 13:07

And so Transistor is a vehicle for them to make progress in their life in some way. Maybe their boss said, you need to start a podcast for the company. And so they're like, okay. Transistor is a way for me to start a podcast for the company. Maybe they want to, you know, grow their audience.

Justin: 13:26

And so Transistor is a way for them to grow their audience. But they're they're not just buying this because they want us to feel good. Right?

Jon: 13:35

And Right. Oh, that would be yeah. That would be silly.

Justin: 13:38

Yeah. But isn't it funny how when we create something, so much of our emotions are wrapped up in it? Like, you know, how come more people aren't following me on Twitter? How come no one cares about this thing I just created? It's all focused on us as opposed to the people we're trying to serve.

Jon: 13:58

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately right. It goes back to yeah.

Jon: 14:02

People aren't going to like your things because you made it. They're not going to like your tweets because you wrote it. It has to be they have to connect to it some way and gain something from it as to improve their lives in some some meaningful way.

Justin: 14:15

Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. And so the the way to bump up the number of followers or subscribers or sub SaaS subscribers you have is to do more of what your audience wants.

Justin: 14:30

That, and I know that. Okay. Sure. That sounds super simple. Like that sounds easy.

Justin: 14:35

How do you do that? We're going to get to that in a second, but I that's the foundation you're going to build this on. And so we are in you and I are in our support chat all day. Right?

Jon: 14:48

Mhmm.

Justin: 14:49

And that's kind of where we're picking up what our audience wants. We we're we're starting to get some answers on, you know, where are the obstacles in their way of of making progress. Right? And so Right. You know, sometimes I think the debate we have these days is, like, is this just something cool?

Justin: 15:13

Like, is this the equivalent of an idea that people thinks is cool? Or is this actually something that's gonna help them make progress and get

Jon: 15:22

Right.

Justin: 15:22

To where they wanna go?

Jon: 15:24

Yeah. And is it related to another person's request? And can you build one feature that sort of accomplishes both things, so you can, yeah, you can pick up on, you know, common problems that people are people are having and common common, you know, features that are missing.

Justin: 15:41

Yeah. Common bits of friction.

Jon: 15:43

Yeah. Mhmm. What

Justin: 15:44

would he say is what's a big one right now that we've noticed just to give that as an example to people?

Jon: 15:50

A big one is kind of like what happens after I import a podcast. Like, alright. I imported my show now. Is it, like, automatically in Itunes?

Justin: 15:59

Yeah.

Jon: 15:59

Is it what do I what do I do? And we have doc we have help documents for that, but, like, it's not it's not clear enough after you actually import your RSS feed the steps you need to take to, like, really be switched over.

Justin: 16:12

Yeah. Yeah. And So And the other thing I like about chat is it gives you more background. Sorry. And just as inside, we use Kayako for real time customer support chat.

Justin: 16:25

So our users can go into Kayako and they can, they can just chat with us as real time as we can make it. Often, you know, we're not right there right away, but we'll get back to people preferably, you know, within a few hours at the most. And when you're doing that, you can kind of dig into like, okay, what's going on in your life right now? Like, what events led up to this point? And, you know, they might have a boss that's breathing down their neck thing.

Justin: 16:52

Like, hey. I told you to transfer our podcast from this host over to Transistor. What's going on? Why is it taking so long? How come I can't How come the new episodes aren't showing up in Spotify?

Justin: 17:03

Right?

Jon: 17:03

That's another big question.

Justin: 17:04

Yeah. And so we wanna give our audience more of what they want. We wanna remove obstacles that are in the way. We wanna remove the friction, make it easy for them to grow their audience, make it easy for them to reach more people with their podcast, make it easy to publish a show, make it easy to, please their boss. Right?

Jon: 17:32

Right. Yeah. And I think kind of going back to that Reddit post about, we're doing all these things that we're tweeting 4 times a day or hashtagging and this and that. It's like it's not so much about the amount of content or Effort. The amount of amount of outreach or effort you're trying to put out there.

Jon: 17:50

I guess you could relate that to trying to figure out how to improve the post import process in our in our case. Like Yeah. We're not just gonna, like, quickly do something and start making all these small fixes. We're gonna, like, collect all this data and feedback we have from customers and figure out a longer term solution that would kind of help everyone out. Yeah.

Jon: 18:12

And then, you know, so in the case of this Reddit user, maybe maybe they don't post as much, but they post better, more thoughtful content.

Justin: 18:22

Exactly.

Jon: 18:23

They will get them followers, and these followers will be like, hey. This person's posting, you know, good content. Maybe you should follow them. I don't I don't I don't I don't really follow anyone. If they're just posting a lot, I probably will unfollow them.

Justin: 18:34

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I I think sometimes we just need to think about why do we even what makes us choose products and people to follow on Twitter and podcasts? Like, what was the last show you subscribed to?

Justin: 18:51

Can you remember what it was and how you heard about it?

Jon: 18:54

Well, this weekend, I listened to an episode of the Joe Rogan show, which I never do.

Justin: 18:58

Okay. So what led up to that?

Jon: 19:00

Well, I follow Michael Pollan on Twitter, who's a a, you know, a science writer for various publications and has written a lot of books mostly on food, but I think he's just a fascinating guy.

Justin: 19:13

Mhmm. And he

Jon: 19:13

had a new book out, and this was actually an older episode from the summer, I think, when his book came out. I mean, someone had retweeted it, and it was a 2 and a half hour interview with Michael Pollan and Joe Rogan, and, like, I listened to all of

Justin: 19:26

it. Mhmm.

Jon: 19:27

It was great. And I, you know, I don't I wouldn't say I subscribe to the show, but, like, then I look back at all of his old interviewer interviewees and see who he had on. It's like, oh, this guy actually interviews a lot of interesting people. Yeah. For whatever reason, Joe Rogan rubbed me the wrong way at one point.

Jon: 19:41

I was like, it's kind of annoying, but he's actually, like he gets really good guests.

Justin: 19:45

Yeah. He gets really good guests. He's definitely, he's kind of bro y. So that A little

Jon: 19:51

bit. A little bit.

Justin: 19:52

Yeah. So if that turns you off, then, you know, But I I I think the underlying, principle is interesting here, which is that episode. So I just searched Michael Pollan, Joe Rogan in the Twitter search bar right now. And when the thing first thing that pops up is a tweet from Gaston Marion. And all he says is good episode, and then a link to the episode.

Justin: 20:17

Yeah. That episode was good enough. The content was good enough that this person decided to copy the link from their, you know, their podcast client, go onto Twitter, write good episode with their thumbs, Paste in the the the link and tweet it. Right? That means there's something there.

Justin: 20:39

And if Joe Joe Rogan you know, even Joe Rogan, if he has an episode that stinks and he's trying to tweet about it over and over and over again, that doesn't mean it's gonna get shared more. People respond to good stuff that in some way improves their life.

Jon: 21:00

Mhmm.

Justin: 21:00

And so if you don't have that, really none of the marketing advice works. And this again applies whether you have a software product, if you're trying to increase your audience on Twitter or your podcast. Take that to heart. And now I think I can get into some specific things. You already have kinda highlighted some of this, which is just like, number 1, give people something good and useful that they can use.

Justin: 21:26

Right?

Jon: 21:28

Right.

Justin: 21:28

And I I think of my friend Steve Schoger. He started, how many how many followers do you have, by the way, on Twitter?

Jon: 21:36

Do I have?

Justin: 21:37

Yeah. Let's check.

Jon: 21:38

I don't know. A 1,000, maybe less? Not not many. I've been on there for ever.

Justin: 21:43

Okay. So John John Buddha's got 1,248 followers. Check this out. Steve Schoger, I think it's a couple years ago. He had 436 followers tweeting all day, every day.

Justin: 21:58

Nobody cares. Then Adam Wavin, another friend of ours, says, Steve, nobody cares about, like, I don't know, what concert you went to or what food you're eating or whatever. Your designer start giving people advice about design. And so Steve just starts tweeting these bite sized UI advice tweets. And I I have an example here.

Justin: 22:22

So it's kind of like, don't do this, do this, and he's got a little screenshot. And he starts doing this. Well, in less than it's I think in a year and a half, he went from 436 followers to 20,000 followers. I was pissed.

Jon: 22:37

I Substantial. I

Justin: 22:38

was I was pissed because I've been on Twitter a long time, and it took me a long time to grow the audience I have. And Twitter and Steve just, like, blasted past me in no time. But it goes to show, if if you're giving people something valuable, they're gonna follow you. They're gonna share your stuff. They're going like this tweet here that I use as an example, that's 2,278 likes.

Justin: 23:04

It's because it's valuable. Like people, people engage with good stuff that makes their life better. And so if you wanna increase the number of followers you have on Twitter, start tweeting helpful stuff.

Jon: 23:18

Yeah. Stop tweeting about your sandwich.

Justin: 23:20

Yeah. Stop tweeting about your sandwich unless

Jon: 23:22

Unless it's a really good unless it's a really good sandwich, and you wanna recommend a place to go buy it.

Justin: 23:26

Yeah. Unless you have a 4 step step process for making the perfect sandwich.

Jon: 23:29

Yeah. Or that. Yeah. Right.

Justin: 23:32

And, again, this is what we've been trying to do with this show. We've been trying to be more topical, more advice driven, more outline driven shows. And so far, people are liking them a lot more.

Jon: 23:44

So I could, yeah, I could probably personally use that advice. I mean, I've been on Twitter for, I don't know, since 2,007 or something.

Justin: 23:50

Mhmm.

Jon: 23:51

And I really only ever used it to consume, like, kind of industry content Yep. And and and interact once in a while with with people that I follow and sort of, you know, admire or whatever. But I I've never really been one to contribute too much on it and, like, share a lot of knowledge that I have. Yeah. So that's one thing.

Jon: 24:17

I also don't necessarily use it for a lot of personal stuff and don't get into, like, posting about this and that concert I went to or whatever.

Justin: 24:23

Again, it depends on what you want. Like if if you're just fine with using Twitter as a small little thing and you you like tweeting about your sandwiches, that's great. But if your if your goal is to increase your audience there, or if your goal is to increase the number of podcast listeners you have, or if your goal is to increase the number of customers you have, then you need to engage in practices that will know day by day help you get to that goal. One good trick for developers that wanna increase their Twitter followers is the site carbon.now.sh. And what this allows you to do is create and share beautiful images of your source code.

Jon: 25:09

I was just thinking about that of a way to, like, how do you how do you share? So you can't share your source code on Twitter, really.

Justin: 25:16

Yeah. So this will create a screenshot of your source code, all highlighted properly. And if you, you know, you're working away in, your rails app and you finally make progress on a specific thing that you're blocked on, that's a great thing to share. That's how it was useful to you. It might be useful to other people.

Justin: 25:38

Just, you know, copy the, the source code, paste it in here. It'll create this beautiful image. Describe the the fix the best you can. And that is something that, you know, if there are other rails devs out there that are looking for, you know, they people want help in their everyday life. Right?

Justin: 25:57

They wanna they're they're trying to make progress.

Jon: 26:00

Yeah. There's all kinds of problems that I've, like, figured out solutions for that really didn't have didn't have, like, easily searchable content on anywhere on the Internet, and, like, I didn't post about it. Mhmm. Yeah. I was just like, yay yay me.

Jon: 26:13

I fixed it.

Justin: 26:15

This is kind of a side benefit. But by kind of sharing your work as you go along, it has the benefit of helping other people, which is really great. It has the benefit of growing your audience, which is good for you. But it also kinda, like, creates a journal or a record of the progress you're making personally.

Jon: 26:36

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'd I'd love to go back and look at that. I mean, it also sort of, you know, lend some legitimacy to what you're doing.

Justin: 26:44

Yeah. Tell it.

Jon: 26:45

Like, hey. Here's you know, if you're I don't know, looking for a new job or something, you're like, oh, hey. I did all this stuff. I posted about it.

Justin: 26:51

Yeah. Show your work. People can see. So, folks, if you're a rails dev out there, go follow at John Buddha. He's gonna have some hot, hot programmer tips coming soon.

Justin: 27:03

But seriously, go follow John Buddha right now and tell him that you did say that you were listening to episode 43. Yeah. So that's a good tip. Just give practical advice, be helpful, as consistently as you can. Another trick that we've used here on this show is, ask your listeners to tweet at you while they listen.

Justin: 27:27

So if you have a podcast and you're trying to increase the number of listeners in or the engagement, or the number of followers, just say like, hey, if you can hear us right now, go say hi to at John Buddha and say, hey, I'm listening to episode, you know, 43. I would love some rails tips on Twitter or whatever. Yeah. So just having that call to action creates interactivity. It, it takes a while for all these things to grow.

Justin: 27:57

So, I guess the software application here is if you want more people to know about your software product, you kinda have to talk about it a lot.

Jon: 28:08

Yeah.

Justin: 28:08

You have to give people opportunity to know about what you're doing. It takes a lot longer than you'd think. Right?

Jon: 28:14

Yeah. I mean, you just definitely have to keep keep talking about I mean, it sort of relates to a conversation I had here with a customer of ours who was like, you know, we started a Patreon page. Mhmm. And we really need to, you know, we we need to get some money so we can keep running the show. Yeah.

Jon: 28:31

And, like, how do you how do you do it? What are what are the tips? I'm like, just talk about it every episode. Like

Justin: 28:38

Yeah. And

Jon: 28:38

they're like, well, I just I don't know how. It feels weird. I'm like, no. You just have to link to it. You have to talk about it.

Jon: 28:44

And, you know, if you don't keep getting the word out and keep talking about it in a non, don't know, invasive way. Yeah. But if people get something out of your product or show or whatever, they're gonna, you know, hope you stick around.

Justin: 28:57

Yeah. And the the key there is you need to clearly communicate what them, you know, buying your product, what them contributing to your Patreon, what them following you on Twitter, what them subscribing to your podcast. You have to clearly communicate what does this get you? Like, why would you wanna do this? And so I support the sleep with me podcast on Patreon.

Justin: 29:23

Because when I'm really anxious and I need to fall asleep, that podcast helps me fall asleep. And before every episode, he'd say, hey, listen. If you get value out of this podcast, if this helps you fall asleep, you know, 2 nights a week, that's, 8 times a month. What's that worth to you to get a good night sleep? And I'm like, dang.

Justin: 29:46

That that's worth a lot. And so by clearly communicating what I'm getting out of it, I that that's what motivated me to, you know, search him on Patreon and then support. The, here's another example. I support, this this comic book artist on on Patreon. And partly, I just want more of the comics.

Justin: 30:12

Like, I love the comics. But he also said, hey, if you support at this level, I will draw you into the comic. And so there's a there's a clear benefit there. Right? Like, it it doesn't just have to be like the super utilitarian practical reason that people, you know, pay for things or engage with things.

Justin: 30:32

No. Sometimes it's just for fun.

Jon: 30:35

You're now you're now a part of comic book history.

Justin: 30:37

Yeah. No. I mean, if you

Jon: 30:38

if you paid that amount, I don't know.

Justin: 30:39

But I yeah. I did. I I think I pay him. He's my highest Patreon. I I think I pay him $20 a month.

Jon: 30:46

Okay.

Justin: 30:47

And he sends one comic. I I'm not sure if it's every month or every 2 months. So, I mean, it's quite a bit of money if you sit think of it per comic. But

Jon: 30:58

Right.

Justin: 30:58

For all the other benefits I get, I'm happy to pay it. Yes. You you've you've got to talk about it a lot and way more than you think. The old rule, I don't know how scientific this is, but is that you needed 7 touch points before anyone would take action about your product. And so again, this this this is true for everything.

Justin: 31:20

So I've just mentioned Steve Shoger. Well, if people have heard Steve Shoger's name now 3 or 4 or 5 times, they might be thinking, okay, I'm going to go check this guy out because I keep hearing about him. And that might be enough for them to open up their Twitter client and search, you know, search for him.

Jon: 31:38

I just subscribed to sleep with me because that's probably the second or third time you mentioned it to me.

Justin: 31:45

There you go. Right? So Yeah. This stuff works. And, and actually, maybe that's another trick is to also remind your fans and your customers, in in in a way of saying, hey, folks.

Justin: 32:00

Thanks so much for subscribing to this podcast. If you like this show, please share it with your friends. Because that's how more people find out about the show. It's all through word-of-mouth. So that line is so important.

Justin: 32:15

And I've seen people do this with products. You know, some products will say, hey, you are one of our best customers. I just wanna thank you so much. We really appreciate you supporting our work, and we hope you get value out of the product. We're a small company, and we're looking for other people like you.

Justin: 32:33

If you could recommend us to your friends, that would mean the world to us. And that's just you being honest as a business owner saying, you could really help us out. But you have to have there has to be the the nudge for people sometimes to take that step. Do you think do you think you feel comfortable enough at this point, you know, as a as a cofounder to to nudge like that, like at a Chicago cocktail party or something?

Jon: 33:03

Yeah. I think I could. I mean, to a to an existing customer. Yeah. Or just in general talking about what I

Justin: 33:10

do. Yeah. To an existing customer. Like, if you met a a customer at a at a local Chicago meetup or something.

Jon: 33:17

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think at this point, I I wouldn't I wouldn't see it as Slimy? I wouldn't see it as slimy.

Jon: 33:25

Yeah. I mean, there's, like, the the whole networking thing I can't really get behind anymore because it's just like those things are those things are tough to get through. Yeah. Because it's like everyone's just trying to sell themselves or their thing, and you don't know anything about them. And

Justin: 33:37

Yeah. But if it's

Jon: 33:38

if it's an existing customer, it's like, hey. You know, what do you we really appreciate that you've been around for, you know, a year or so. And if if you come up to them and then, like, they know that you know who they are

Justin: 33:50

Yeah.

Jon: 33:50

That's probably huge.

Justin: 33:52

Yeah. And and I think people wanna help more than you think, especially if they're getting a lot of value out of the product. But we need to build these habits as product people or as podcasters or again, anyone who's trying to grow an audience or grow the number of customers they have, you need to get in the habit of having these regular things you do. And so one of them is just rehearsing these lines. Like, hey.

Justin: 34:21

Thanks so much for being a customer. You know what? We're we're looking for more customers like you. Like, we really appreciate people like you. Do you have other folks that, you know, I should be reaching out to or that you can let us know about or that you can talk about, you know, the product to.

Justin: 34:38

Again, with practice, you can do that in a way that is not contrived or awkward or anything.

Jon: 34:44

Yeah. And it and it starts it starts small, and you're not gonna really see I don't think you'll see growth very early, but, like, you talk to 1 or 2 people, those people are gonna talk to people, and it's you know, it'll take off kind of on its own at some point, I feel like.

Justin: 35:00

Yeah. I I just, maybe at some point, I'll we can publish a, kind of a review of this interview I did with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. And the whole idea behind his book is just the the daily practices, the daily actions that we take are, a vote for the kind of people we want to become. And if you think about this in terms of a company, like you're building a company, well, the the daily practices you put into your company become votes for the kind of company you're going to have. And that works from a culture standpoint.

Justin: 35:39

That works from a a code quality standpoint. But that also works from a marketing standpoint. What are the things that you just have as habits that, you know, you do every day and every week that are just tiny little incremental wins, but over time create these really kind of mat big results.

Jon: 36:03

Yeah. It's all very incremental, and you can't really look at it from a big picture at that point. Yeah. Like like, maybe down the road, but, like, yeah, it's so hard. You just be overwhelmed to be like, I just talked to one person.

Jon: 36:16

This is never gonna work.

Justin: 36:17

Yes. Exactly.

Jon: 36:19

But the the the day before, you talk to no people. So

Justin: 36:22

Yeah. Yeah. And one practical tip, actually, that's really working for me is this streaks app. So have you started using this yet?

Jon: 36:32

I did. Yeah. I'm, my streaks are pretty bad. Not not gonna lie.

Justin: 36:37

The again, just like anything else, you have to make it a habit. But if your goal is to I don't know for us, like, we want to get to $10,000 monthly recurring revenue. Yep. The question is, okay, well, what actions, what habits, what daily practices do I need to do to reach that goal? And so, you know, one could be Justin, you need to, you need to write a new blog post every week.

Justin: 37:06

And so I could create a streak that's called write 1 blog post a week. And every week that I write a blog post, it tracks my progress. And I've found tracking my progress like that really, really helpful. So if you're looking for a tool that helps you track your progress, streaks, is a really good one.

Jon: 37:26

Yeah. I I do really like it. I mean, I I will say I've been using it, but my streaks are bad. They're they're they have broken. Let's just say that.

Jon: 37:35

So, yeah, I have a couple I have a couple set up. It's like floss your teeth every other day. And it's like, I've actually stuck to that pretty well.

Justin: 37:41

Yeah. That's great. And even if you fall off the the the wagon, what I like about it is you can just start up again. So even if your streak is broken, there's a view where you can see how many days in a month you you did the thing. And so for example, one of mine is go to the gym.

Justin: 37:59

And I've gone to the gym, like, how many times here? 11 days? No more than that even. I've gone to the gym like a lot this month. And so even though my streak was broken, I'm still going way more than I would have if I wasn't tracking it.

Justin: 38:15

Right.

Jon: 38:16

There's definitely a feedback loop of, like, I feel bad when I break it. I'm like, oh, man.

Justin: 38:21

Yeah. But, again, another thing I like about James Clear's book is he says, listen. The the the the old way of doing this is like, you're like, okay, I'm gonna go on a diet and then you mess up the diet and you're like, okay, well, that's it. I guess it's all broken. I'm just gonna go eat ice cream for the rest of the month.

Justin: 38:39

But he says that when you, you know, you make a bad decision, the next choice you make, just make it a good decision. Like, there's a way to break that chain. Anyway, that that's been helpful for me in kind of building up to this stuff. I think a final one, this is a total marketing, idea for anyone growing a software product, anyone, trying to grow the number of Twitter followers, and anyone trying to grow podcast listeners. Live streaming on Twitter right now has been really effective for me.

Justin: 39:10

Twitter is, they are inside the app, when people go live, they are creating a special kind of live video bubble above the news feed. And so that means often I'll go live and I'll just get tons of people in chat saying, oh, hey. I just saw this at the top of my app. Like, it just popped up. And that means there's a kind of an opportunity right now to use live streaming.

Justin: 39:36

And all the platforms are doing this Facebook, which I've I'm trying not to be on Facebook as much anymore. But Twitter, I feel like, especially for our audiences, kind of a good place to be. And just going live every once in a while, whether I'm recording a podcast or I'm trying to figure out something in, like, programming wise, I've been getting a lot of interaction because and a lot of, like people are sharing those videos across, you know, like they're retweeting them and stuff because they see them. There's a lot of visibility. So at this point, January 28, 2019, there's an opportunity there, that might not last forever, but I think is worth exploring.

Justin: 40:21

Any anything else?

Jon: 40:23

No. I need to read that book though. James Clear's book. I have it. It's a good reminder to start again.

Justin: 40:27

So this is a good time to talk about our second sponsor, alitu.com. These folks have really if you wanna record your podcast and edit your podcast and publish your podcast on the web, This is the best tool to do that. You can upload like a normal recording from Skype or your computer or whatever. But now you can actually record inside of the web interface. And so if you're having a hard time with GarageBand or any of the other kind of editing tools out there, and you just are looking for a simple interface, a simple way to record and edit and publish your podcast, alitoo dotcom.

Justin: 41:06

Let them know that we sent you.

Jon: 41:08

And we have, our usual, Patreon supporters that we need to thank.

Justin: 41:12

Yeah. Who are they?

Jon: 41:14

Before we head out here. So we have Colin Gray from the previous dimension, alitoo.com, Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta

Justin: 41:34

Junta.

Jon: 41:35

And podcast insights dot com. So yeah. Thanks. Thanks to everyone. I think we're, we're supporting the show pretty well.

Justin: 41:43

Yeah. Yeah. We we've got a few new sponsors coming online pretty soon here too.

Jon: 41:48

Yeah.

Justin: 41:48

So, yeah. We've been really pleased with that people are enjoying the show, that people are sharing it, and that people are supporting us. And we will see you next Tuesday.