Justin: 00:00

This podcast is brought to you by honeybadger.io. Honeybadger is error monitoring for your web app. They have a podcast, FounderQuest. Stop what you're doing. Stop listening to the show.

Justin: 00:11

Go and subscribe to FounderQuest right now. They just started season 2. And after you've done that, go check out honeybadger.io and start a free trial.

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: 00:41

And I'm Justin Jackson, and, I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm. Man, I had I had a little bit of stage, fright there. I I was like, oh, I I need to have a witty quip. But Yeah.

Jon: 00:57

I thought you were I thought you were about to throw 1 in.

Justin: 01:00

Apparently, I'm not I'm not, I'm not so sharp. I was just telling you offline that I got woken up this morning at 5 AM because American Express called me.

Jon: 01:10

And I hope it was I hope it wasn't an emergency.

Justin: 01:15

Hello, American Express. This is an emergency. They got through because I had it on do not disturb, but they called twice in a row. I wanna know, folks out there, what emergency did American Express discover at 5 AM that required them to call me twice in a row?

Jon: 01:36

But they didn't leave a message.

Justin: 01:38

And they didn't leave a message. It's not looking so good. They probably

Jon: 01:42

had they probably had an emergency special deal for you.

Justin: 01:45

Emergency special deal. I do have an American Express card, which I've never used. Is American Express a big deal in the States? Because it's always seems like the 3rd class citizen here.

Jon: 01:55

Yeah. For I think for a long time, a lot of places didn't support it for some because I think the fees are higher

Justin: 02:01

Okay.

Jon: 02:02

For for fees that the business pays.

Justin: 02:05

Yeah. Transaction fees. Yeah. I'm I'm looking at my email. There's no message from American Express to say, you know, my card got stolen or something.

Jon: 02:13

Probably safe to ignore it.

Justin: 02:15

But the problem is 5 AM is the worst time to wake me up. Yeah. Because then it's, yeah. Anyway, enough about that. Hey.

Justin: 02:24

What did we ship this week?

Jon: 02:26

We shipped our enhanced private podcast

Justin: 02:29

Yes.

Jon: 02:30

Which most people won't notice because while it is live, it is not publicly accessible yet.

Justin: 02:36

Yeah. Yeah. We I actually heard Rob Wallach talking about this on Startups For the Rest of Us. Like, how do you, you know, do you put features in beta? Do you have feature gating?

Justin: 02:47

And so our kind of pipeline is we have the local development machines, then you set up a staging server that's like a public web server that you and I can get into. Right? Yep. And then once we feel like things are production ready, we deploy to production. But in this case, there's a feature flag.

Justin: 03:10

Correct?

Jon: 03:11

Yep. There's a feature flag, and we're we can set it on certain accounts. So only only, the $49 and above levels can access it, but even then, we have to turn it on for them. Mhmm. And I think the main reason was because while we didn't have all of our marketing material done yet Mhmm.

Jon: 03:31

To sign up, it's also still sort of limited in that it can only support up to a certain amount of private subscribers. Yeah. So it's not gonna work for everyone. And I think we wanted to test it out, and you had you had a test case that you tested out yesterday with the mega maker club that you run, and then there's a few customers that have reached out that we wanna offer it to, and maybe they can test it out

Justin: 03:58

Yeah.

Jon: 03:58

If they, you know, have up to a certain amount of subscribers.

Justin: 04:01

So Yeah. And this is actually a good, rubric for figuring out how much how badly do people want something. Because Yeah. We've been kind of teasing that this is coming. So when people email us, I would email back.

Justin: 04:21

I have this auto reply that says, hey. We're actually working on this feature right now. Here's a quick demo. I have a quick demo video. And would is this something you think you would use?

Justin: 04:32

And they typically respond with questions, pricing, and other things. And then they'll say, oh, definitely. When this is live, let me know.

Jon: 04:39

Mhmm.

Justin: 04:40

And so now we're going to manually get back to them, and let's see how bad they want it.

Jon: 04:46

Right. Yeah. I think it's a good seems like a good approach.

Justin: 04:49

And I I think some folks miss this a little bit. They if you go live too quick, there's and there's no threshold for people to have to crossover, I think you miss some valuable learning time.

Jon: 05:04

Yeah. I think I think there's still a lot we can learn from the potential customers about what they need.

Justin: 05:10

Yeah. Exactly.

Jon: 05:11

And it may be it may be a good fit. It may not at this point. I mean, it's still, I think, a lot there's a lot of other features we wanna add to this Mhmm. Eventually, but I think we'll figure out what those should be by talking to the customers that might want it.

Justin: 05:28

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The this is, I think, also in past products and past features I've done that have not worked out, they have failed this test, which is if you make it hard to sign up or hard to access the feature or product, do people still do it? And even if you think about the way we launched Transistor, we had a landing page.

Justin: 05:55

That was the only way you could sign up. And it just said, you know, a brief description of what it was and who we were. And when people join that email list, we eventually invited them to a paid beta.

Jon: 06:08

Right.

Justin: 06:08

And once we had people willing to jump through all of those hoops and still become customers, I I was I mean, I didn't know how it would turn out, but I I had a better feeling of, okay, this is something that has momentum on its own. Right? You don't have to, like Right. You don't have to pull somebody over the void to get them. And I was I was testing out an idea, probably 4 or 5 months ago, just working on a little side project with my friend Dominic, which was this idea of being able to capture user research.

Justin: 06:50

And we did the same thing. We had a landing page that described what it was, little demo video, and a mailing list. But I could just tell, like, the responses I was getting to the emails, People were interested, but they weren't, like, really driven.

Jon: 07:10

Mhmm.

Justin: 07:10

Like, Trello and Google Docs and their current ways of collecting customers' research were already working for them.

Jon: 07:20

Right.

Justin: 07:20

But, hopefully, with this feature, and we won't know until we test this out, people are willing to really work even work hard to get access to it.

Jon: 07:31

Yeah. I hope so. I mean, I I I would love to have, you know, a handful of people using it, using it a lot, using it every week or every couple weeks.

Justin: 07:43

So we did the test with Mega Maker Club. I there's a maximum of 500 private subscribers you can add, and I maxed it out. And we ran into, just a minor hiccup, I would say.

Jon: 07:56

We did. Yeah. I actually I think yeah. It was something I wasn't expecting, but maybe should have. So we for our transactional emails, we use an email service and, rightly so, they don't want you to just send out hundreds of emails immediately at the same time.

Jon: 08:17

And when you uploaded the CSV of your subscribers, it emails them all basically at once when those accounts are created. Mhmm. So it was 5 100 500 emails being sent through our email service, and we got an email saying our account was, like, suspended for I forget, like, an hour or something.

Justin: 08:36

Yeah. We thought we were a spammer.

Jon: 08:38

Which yeah. Because we're over the 100 emails per hour limit

Justin: 08:43

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon: 08:43

Which seems low, but we're also not in a paid account yet. So I emailed them asking them if that limit is raised if you pay. Yeah. Because, like, we don't we didn't need a paid account because we don't send a lot of emails.

Justin: 08:55

Yeah. Although we could be sending a lot more.

Jon: 08:58

With this with this feature, we could be.

Justin: 09:00

Yeah.

Jon: 09:01

So it it was also, like, a little unclear on what happens when you reach that limit. Like, your account is suspended, but there's also documentation on their website that says, like, messages go into a queue on their end. Okay. So I was like, I don't I think all the emails were sent Yeah. But I don't I'm not positive, and I don't know if while our account was, like, on hold or suspended, were other emails being sent?

Jon: 09:28

Like, people needing a password reset.

Justin: 09:30

Oh, yeah.

Jon: 09:31

Yeah. So I I'm waiting till you're back from them. But Yeah. That was a minor hiccup. I I mean, we didn't test it with 500 real emails on staging.

Jon: 09:42

So it's, like, kind of a little

Justin: 09:44

Honestly, this is the kind of thing that I feel you can only really test in production. This is why feature gating is a good way to do it. Just turn it on one one account and, and use it in a real use case. So Mega Maker is a private membership site for bootstrappers and has more than 500 members. This is perfect.

Justin: 10:09

This is a perfect testing ground. And the other cool thing is because Mega Maker has a Slack, I was able to get all this real time feedback from people trying to add the private podcast to their favorite podcast player. And then, I think even more importantly so and for them to go through all the onboarding. So we know at least with the kinda techie audience that is Mega Maker, most of those folks were able to add it fine. There's a few hiccups with Pocket Casts that I think is on their end.

Justin: 10:42

But for them to experience the what makes a private podcast unique, which was I delivered kind of this 16 minute just raw, you know, it's just me talking into the microphone about my journey, you know, starting in, I don't know, starting way back when, 2008 till now.

Jon: 11:08

Yeah.

Justin: 11:08

And that's some that stuff I probably wouldn't reveal just publicly. But with this group, I was fine to record this thing and put it out there. And people, kind of, right away started to get it. When the person said, Pete Marcano said, I'll be honest, when I listen to the build your SaaS episode on this feature being launched, I didn't really think much of it. Listening to this episode connected the dots.

Justin: 11:35

This is awesomely game changing. And then Bruno kinda concurred. He said, yeah. I thought that'd be a cool he thought, yeah, that'd be a cool feature. However, I was only imagining the way I had seen it done until now.

Justin: 11:47

Getting the email was a pleasant surprise. Most importantly, the way it was implemented was really nice. Well done. So

Jon: 11:54

Cool.

Justin: 11:54

People are now able to actually experience what would this be like to get an, you know, an internal podcast invite from your CEO to send, a private podcast update to all of your investors, to have a private podcast that's just for family where you update each other on what's happening and get the kids to talk into the microphone, to have a private podcast that used with a membership site to have you know, to join a company, and you get welcomed with this audio kind of sequence of here's how we do things at Acme Inc. Right?

Jon: 12:36

Yeah. It's it was yeah. It was great. You were posting the feedback, and it was, yeah, it

Gavin: 12:39

was awesome to awesome to see. Does that

Jon: 12:42

so you have a Slack channel for this. Does that does the fact that the people were able to respond to it, did that make you want a way for them to respond in Transistor?

Justin: 12:55

I mean, that's a good question for the future. This is why we're gonna need to get other people using it. I think so the the one thing I did is we also have forums. We have a discord discourse forum. Now now that discord is out, I always mix up those 2.

Justin: 13:12

Discourse. And in the show notes, I said, if you wanna reply to this episode, go to this thread. And a bunch of people did, and I was also able to, embed the iframe in that thread with the, the actual playable episode.

Jon: 13:30

Mhmm.

Justin: 13:31

And so for me, I think that's going to be the best way to do it, because I don't want another place where people talk. And I'm wondering for, like, if you're if I was a CEO of a a 100 person company, and we already have Slack, I would be, like, yeah. If you wanna respond to this, just go to this thread in Slack, and I would link to it that way.

Jon: 13:51

Yeah. It's possible to integrate with Slack.

Justin: 13:54

I I mean, that yeah. That would be another thing. Yeah. You could you could have it automatically published there. I I think my guess is that most folks are going to have some sort of internal mechanism that's already in play, and that'll be kinda more important.

Justin: 14:09

I think the the more crucial bit that will be some form of single sign on, which which you did some investigation on. What what did you find by the way during that? Because you called a provider. What was the

Jon: 14:27

Yeah. So we've we've had a couple of potential customers who have large they're large companies, and they have a lot of employees. Mhmm. And so they they were like, we would love a private podcast system, but we need to use single sign on with our current authentication provider, whatever that may be. It might be G Suite or it might be active directory, something like that.

Jon: 14:51

Mhmm. And, like, the basics of this stuff makes sense to me, but I've never really integrated with it. It's it's a lot different than, like, let's say, log in with Facebook.

Justin: 15:02

Okay.

Jon: 15:04

So I talked I sent an email to auth 0

Justin: 15:08

Okay.

Jon: 15:08

Which is a, authentication single sign on provider, but they also offer as a developer, they offer a way for you to have your system authenticate with another person's authentication system. And then if, let's say, an employee is already signed in to G Suite for this company, they're already automatically signed in to Transistor.

Justin: 15:39

Okay.

Jon: 15:40

But that's not quite what we want. It's like we basically wanna wait for these large companies to almost, like, sync up their employee directory with us

Justin: 15:51

Mhmm.

Jon: 15:52

So that we can it's like an integration where they would sign in. They would give us access to their employee list with email addresses so that we could then, on their behalf, email them a link to the private podcast. But then, also, as employees are added or removed from their company, they would they would be removed from Transistor.

Justin: 16:17

Yeah.

Jon: 16:18

But, like, after talking to Auth0, it's, like, not apparent that that's how it works.

Justin: 16:24

Okay.

Jon: 16:25

So it's still a little confusing. So if anyone out there has really done integration with with SSO, let us know. But, like, we don't need

Justin: 16:35

We basically We don't need Yeah. We just need a way of

Jon: 16:38

We don't need people to sign in to us. Yeah. I mean, it's possible they that would be fine too, but, really, what we need is a directory and some sort of, like, webhooks or callbacks when, an employee is added or removed.

Justin: 16:54

Yeah. I'm wondering if Zapier Zapier would be a better fit because I mean, one nice thing about integrating with Zapier is people already want us to have Zapier Zapier, triggers and stuff for other features, but this seems to make sense. You know, if new member is added to Slack, then add to transistor. If member is removed from Slack, then remove from transistor.

Jon: 17:27

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a

Justin: 17:29

little bit duct tapey, but

Jon: 17:31

Yeah. So I I, yeah, I was hoping OfficeHero would be, like, a really simple solution. It's also expensive

Justin: 17:36

Mhmm.

Jon: 17:36

For us. So we basically have to, like, relay the cost onto the customer, which would probably be fine for enterprise style accounts. But, I I can I'll still have to follow-up, I think, with them and ask them some more questions. It might might still be an option.

Gavin: 17:52

Mhmm.

Jon: 17:53

I I can definitely see where it would be a nice feature for these large companies to not have to manage a list of people in multiple places.

Justin: 18:02

Yeah. It's almost like we want something else. We don't want the the auth. We want the contact sync.

Jon: 18:12

Right.

Justin: 18:13

And I know this is a problem that's been around forever. So I'm wondering and I know some people solve it through Zapier or Zapier. But there's gotta be other better ways of doing this. Like, maybe, Clearbit does this, I wonder. No.

Justin: 18:31

But Clearbit's more like CRM. Yeah. Anyway, folks Yeah. Out there have any ideas, let us know. You know who has to deal with contact management?

Justin: 18:39

ActiveCampaign. Thanks to ActiveCampaign for supporting this podcast. You know, a lot of folks wanna be able to send email and do all this fancy marketing automation stuff, but they don't wanna spend 100 of dollars a month. You know, maybe they're just getting started. Like, you and I, John, when we got started, what was our budget for email?

Jon: 19:00

$0. $0.

Justin: 19:03

And then now we're paying, you know, for this stuff. Well, with ActiveCampaign, you can get started, well, for free because you get a free trial when you go to active campaign dot com / build your SaaS. And here's the thing. Paid plans for all of these other providers usually start $39, I think. I just checked today.

Justin: 19:20

ActiveCampaign, you can start for as low as $15, and that includes the marketing automation stuff. So it seems worth checking out activecampaign.com/buildyoursaaS. With that URL, you get a second month free, a free migration, and 2 free one on ones where you can talk to a member of their team. They'll you can ask, you know, how do these marketing things work? How do these triggers work?

Justin: 19:45

How do I migrate my existing automation flows? They'll help you with all that. Go check them out, activecampaign.com / build your SaaS. Another great Chicago company there. Right?

Justin: 19:59

They're Chicago.

Jon: 20:00

Yeah. They are.

Justin: 20:03

Cool. Alright. So, where do we wanna go next here? Let's talk about, let's actually, this one's kinda spicy. Let's let's quickly address this because, what happened to spots dot fm?

Jon: 20:20

I

Justin: 20:20

was just thinking about this the other day. Long time listeners will remember that there was a time early in our development. I don't think we even had we launched?

Jon: 20:32

I don't think we launched yet.

Justin: 20:34

And, I had this idea in the middle of the night. And I woke up the next morning all excited and burst into Slack, and said, John, we gotta build this thing. And I was very excited about it. And the idea was, you know, we we had beta customers at the time, and I thought I I was having customer, conversations. I I I'd flown to Edmonton, and I'd gone out for coffee with some of our customers there.

Justin: 21:11

And one of our customers, Karen, said, you know, business owners are saying if it was as easy to advertise on a podcast as advertising on Facebook, I would do it in a second. And that seems so compelling to me that the idea that people could easily book spots on shows. There was some some marketplaces like this already, but I didn't like the way they'd been implemented. And it also felt like having transistor would be a huge advantage for us.

Jon: 21:44

Right. Yeah. It I think I think it was and still is a good idea, but I'm glad we didn't do both of them.

Justin: 21:53

Yeah.

Jon: 21:56

I don't I don't know if I don't know if, like, you were kind of, like, hedging your bets and hoping that one of them would work out.

Justin: 22:03

Yeah. Maybe? Yeah. Because it was early on.

Jon: 22:06

Yeah. I mean, it yeah. It was early on when we weren't making any money at all.

Justin: 22:09

Yeah. Maybe I was flailing a little bit.

Jon: 22:12

But, but it's I don't think there's anything wrong with, like, giving up on an idea.

Justin: 22:17

Yeah. Yeah. At all. I just think it's fun to talk. We haven't talked about you and I haven't really even addressed this.

Justin: 22:23

You know? It just kinda got, swept away. And, yeah. I I think it'd be and actually, I was just listening to art of product podcast. And they were interviewing the founder from Todoist, I believe.

Justin: 22:38

And there's they just started a new product called Twist. And he said, starting a second product. He said, I go if I could go back and not start the second product, I would. He says it's just so hard. And the idea that you and I were gonna do that as a 2 person team is kinda crazy.

Jon: 23:00

Yeah. That would have been rough. Although, I think spots is a much simpler, like, technology build.

Justin: 23:07

I'll I'll talk about how my thinking's evolved a little bit, and I think this will give folks an idea of how we are kind of implementing shaping, or at least the way I think about it. Lately, I've had this idea that just built into Transistor that we if folks want to turn on an option for their show to become sponsorable so you have a little indie podcast, and you just go into your show settings and it you know, something like make this show sponsorable. That will then show up on their website and on their landing pages. Hey. You can sponsor this podcast.

Justin: 23:44

A business could then go in and click that button, and they could sponsor multiple shows this way. But they would, one one kind of formulation of this is that they would basically take over that show's monthly subscription. So we would we would we would have to in our back end, we would have to add right now, we have this idea of an account owner who's basically the billing contact. We would have to add this a new, identity called sponsor. And the sponsor can say, I wanna sponsor this show for a year.

Justin: 24:22

And so it just flips to that the sponsor's credit card, and then they get charged for a year. And then after that, it just flips back to the, account holder's credit card.

Jon: 24:36

Mhmm.

Justin: 24:37

And so that's just an idea. It's not something I we're gonna build, but that's kind of, that's that's an evolved way of thinking about that.

Jon: 24:46

Yeah. I think I think there's still bits and pieces we could take from the brainstorming for spots and put it into transistor.

Justin: 24:53

Yeah. What what do you think about that idea, by the way? Is there is there some pretty big technical hurdles on implementing something like that?

Helen: 25:00

I think

Jon: 25:00

there's any technical hurdles. I'm wondering if there's any finance, like, hurdles. I don't know if it would be it would be better for the customer to still pay and then have the the sponsor pay them as far as, like, accounting goes? I don't Yeah. Like, for tax purposes?

Jon: 25:20

I don't really know.

Justin: 25:21

Well, I'm guessing that the my guess was that this was the least complex way of doing sponsorship. Because Mhmm. Otherwise, we have to provide some sort of flow through to the customer. There's ways of doing this in Stripe where you can, you can basically facilitate a transaction to a 3rd party. But the the the the billing of that like, the way that's implemented from what I've seen, at least I I I'm an advisor for Podia.

Justin: 25:53

And it seems that that's not always easy. And then there's just all these other problems. We they we gotta train customers how to connect to Stripe, how to, you know, the the it just seems like there's a lot more that can break. One thing I like about it is I I because I really like indie podcasts. And the biggest threat to an indie podcast is that, you know, just as a noncommercial thing that they can't afford to continue paying the monthly fee.

Justin: 26:24

But there are tons of businesses that would love to reach different audiences, and this could just be a great way for them to become a patron of the arts, a patron of, you know, this independent podcasting movement. And I wonder if it would help us reduce churn. Maybe. Because all of a sudden, a business is, like, what's so let's say they sponsor, you know, 5 podcasts, and that cost them a $100 a month. For them, that's, like, that's the I mean, they could sponsor 10 podcasts that cost them $200 a month.

Justin: 27:04

Right?

Jon: 27:05

Right.

Justin: 27:05

Yeah. That's that's that's nothing for them. Right?

Jon: 27:09

Right.

Justin: 27:10

And, and so they could do that in perpetuity and not even notice. Whereas, $20 a month for an indie podcaster, you know, that might be, a fair chunk of change.

Jon: 27:26

Mhmm.

Justin: 27:27

So

Jon: 27:27

Yeah. That could be something.

Justin: 27:29

Could be something.

Gavin: 27:31

Put it in the ideas bucket.

Justin: 27:32

It's gotta go to the betting table.

Jon: 27:34

Immediately, my mind goes to all of the edge cases that come up. Yeah. I'm, like, what if the show stops? What if they don't want the sponsor anymore?

Justin: 27:42

Mhmm. Mhmm. And and this is a perfect example of a feature that I think if it's fighting for its place, it would really need to fight hard because it is, it is definitely outside of the core feature set that people are setting up for. And it might become a competitive advantage in the sense that, you know, this is something that people want and causes them to stick around. Yeah.

Justin: 28:09

It's it is it's not it's not a core feature set. And the more of those kind of features that we add, the more difficult and complex the app becomes.

Jon: 28:21

Right.

Justin: 28:21

Anyway, I just thought people would wanna know. I I think if you go to spots dot f m, it just forwards now.

Jon: 28:26

I think so. Yeah.

Justin: 28:28

So spots dot f m, rest in peace.

Jon: 28:32

Until we revive you in some way.

Justin: 28:34

Until we revive you. But I it's really nice having this shape up language from base camp in terms of how we think about ideas now. I think, you know, going back to that moment in time, your response would have been, okay, Justin. Let's just bring this to the betting table.

Jon: 28:54

Right.

Justin: 28:55

And this idea has to compete against all the other ideas.

Jon: 28:59

Yeah. And it may not win.

Justin: 29:00

And it might not win. It might it might it might come, you know, show up round after round and never win.

Jon: 29:07

And just get beaten And just get to a bloody a bloody pulp.

Justin: 29:11

Wow. This really took a dark turn. Hey. Quick question for you. Now that we're done that first cycle, our first shape up cycle, 6 weeks.

Justin: 29:22

We're in technically a cool down period. How do you how do you feel about it?

Jon: 29:26

Well, it feels like I'm taking a deep breath.

Justin: 29:29

Mhmm.

Jon: 29:30

I guess. I I think we were supposed to end we finished we did finish on Tuesday

Gavin: 29:37

of Tuesday. Yeah. What date was that? The

Justin: 29:41

15th? Technically, we we deployed it to production on Wednesday. Yeah.

Jon: 29:45

You know, the idea was so we finish it, and then we go into this cool down cycle where we're doing other small like, we're not really working on another feature necessarily. We're not even really shaping a feature. We're sort of thinking about things, but also fixing other bugs or

Jason: 30:05

Mhmm.

Jon: 30:06

Finishing, like, little one day or half a day things.

Justin: 30:09

Yeah. Although, we we are gonna have to shape something during these 2 weeks, aren't we, so that we have something to work on in the next big cycle?

Gavin: 30:18

I guess that's up to us.

Jon: 30:19

Right? If we wanna take this period as a cool down or do other things, and then the shape the shaping is another this is, like, the next week. Mhmm.

Justin: 30:27

And then we start a cycle. Yeah.

Jon: 30:29

And then we start a cycle.

Justin: 30:30

So you I mean, part of me did did feel like you that, oh, man. It's kinda nice to have a a breath. You know?

Jon: 30:40

Yeah. Yeah. Because you asked you asked me, do you feel like we're flailing?

Justin: 30:43

Yeah.

Jon: 30:44

But I don't I mean, I guess in some respects, like, you yeah. I I kind of wanted to just jump into something else and and fix some stuff, but it was nice to kinda take a break and, like, look at our list of little things that we wanna do and Mhmm. Choose a couple which we haven't really done yet, but there's there's a number of of, little things we can work on that would improve.

Justin: 31:09

Yeah.

Jon: 31:11

You know, it would it would reduce, I don't know, customer support on our end or make, you know, 1 or 2 things easier for customers.

Justin: 31:18

Yeah. I mean, one thing we could try to do is try to launch this marketing site.

Jon: 31:23

Right.

Justin: 31:24

That would that would be although that might be too big once we get into it. But yeah. It it I think I think this is the idea behind the cool down is that you're just kinda like it feels like a weekend, where you're just poking around the house, doing a few projects here and there. Yep. Incidentally, we've had a ton of customer support lately.

Justin: 31:47

And, which again, if you go back, I I think is a good sign, because more customer support generally means more revenue. But, it it has felt like, wow. We're we're answering a lot of questions right now. And, that's taking up a fair chunk of our time, I think.

Jon: 32:04

It is bringing up these issues that can be worked on in the cooldown.

Justin: 32:08

Mhmm.

Jon: 32:09

Like, we've had a number of in the last week, even customers who are like, hey. I have a podcast under my account. We need to switch them to this other account. Mhmm. How do we do that?

Jon: 32:21

And we have to do it behind the scenes for them.

Justin: 32:23

Mhmm.

Jon: 32:23

We do have a story in Clubhouse for this. Like, allow allow a podcast to be switched to another account Yeah. Without us having to help. Yeah. So, like, that might take a couple days to work on, but it would save us a bunch of time down the road because it's not gonna be the last time it's gonna happen.

Justin: 32:42

Yeah. And it's a it's a totally awesome, like, it's a totally awesome feature because it means people are staying within transistor. Right?

Jon: 32:53

Right. But it feels good to finish it. Yeah. You know, it feels good to finish it, but like I normally do, it's like feels good, but then I start thinking about all the things we haven't done for it yet. Yeah.

Jon: 33:10

It's like, oh, there's a lot left, and they're kinda big.

Justin: 33:13

Yeah. Like, what what's big that we still need to to

Jon: 33:18

Oh, I think I think mostly it's, like, how do we handle these larger customers?

Justin: 33:22

These enterprise billings?

Jon: 33:23

Private pot enterprise or, like we've had a number of questions about security

Justin: 33:30

Mhmm.

Jon: 33:31

Of this feature and, like, how do you prevent, you know, information or audio from getting out

Justin: 33:36

Yeah.

Jon: 33:37

Which we don't really have a great answer for because it's not it's not exactly, like, locked down that tightly. Mhmm. Yeah. But also, yeah, billing for larger customers. Like, we don't have we don't have customizable enterprise plans at the moment.

Jon: 33:53

Stuff like that. Like, how do we, how do we support these larger customers if, you know, if we actually want to? Mhmm. It's possible. Like, I think we've talked about in the past with larger clients like that.

Jon: 34:06

It might be more work than it's worth.

Justin: 34:09

Yeah. I and I think we'll get a feel for that once we I mean, yeah. Right now, my my take is we don't overpromise, you know, what level of security not security, but privacy, basically. What level of privacy do you really get with a private podcast? And what I keep telling folks because I just don't wanna go down that path of saying, yeah, this is totally secure.

Justin: 34:34

You you don't have anything to worry about. I'm like, even if it was encrypted. So let's say you can encrypt audio, which is technically possible. If you send me an encrypted audio message on Imessage, and I listen to it, there's nothing stopping me from using a screen recorder or even a a third party external microphone and recording that and then releasing that.

Jon: 34:59

Right. And so Yeah. I mean, we yeah.

Justin: 35:01

Some of these customers are stressing me out going, this is so secure. Like, we can't this can never get out.

Jon: 35:06

Confidential information. We're like, I I don't wanna deal with that.

Justin: 35:10

Yeah. And, like, don't don't publish it on the Internet then. Like, don't don't even don't put it in Slack. Don't put it in anything.

Jon: 35:19

Right.

Justin: 35:20

Like, have have they not read the news? Did they not see how, like, memos from the White House and Amazon and everything get out? Like, that's how it happens.

Jon: 35:29

Right.

Justin: 35:30

So I I yeah. We'll see how how those discussions go. We had a a a topic to talk about budgeting. But let's move that, I think, to next week. Folks, if you really wanna hear us talk about budgeting, let us know on Twitter.

Justin: 35:47

Basically, we're trying to think about how we should spend our money.

Jon: 35:51

We should go we should start a new podcast called budgeting your sass.

Justin: 35:54

Budgeting your your SaaS. It's just like us going through, like

Jon: 35:59

It'd be us, like, we we'd have a bunch of, like, calculator noises. Yes. Are are you are you

Justin: 36:05

Sound effects? You're thinking about the post production. I like this. I like this.

Jon: 36:09

Probably would not be very exciting.

Justin: 36:11

No. No. No. People might listen though. That I mean, that it would probably actually be way more actionable than, a lot of the stuff we talk about.

Justin: 36:19

But maybe to end just because we kinda touched on this. This idea of pushing back on customers. I've been thinking about this a lot. And, recently, and I'm not sure if you've seen this tactic before, but, a an app will say, hey, here's a a a templated email you can send to, you know, your provider to ask them to integrate with us. And so did you notice a bunch of these piling up in our

Jon: 36:50

Yes. I did. I was gonna I was gonna ask you about it, and then you brought it up first.

Justin: 36:54

So, basically, all of a sudden like, within minutes, 5, 6, maybe, I yeah. Probably 5 or 6 of these emails came in all with the same request for us to integrate with this 3rd party. And so I kinda instantly saw, okay. So they just, you know, send out an email or gave people an easy way to email their their provider. And I think there's always this this tricky dance you do when somebody requests a feature.

Justin: 37:27

And I think part of it is tricky because you you really often, we we on the side of being polite and maybe wanting to bend over backwards to serve a customer or get a sale. Right?

Jon: 37:43

Mhmm.

Justin: 37:44

Although, you have less of this inclination than I do. Sometimes sometimes you in Slack, you're like you're like you you tell me what you really think I should we should reply.

Jon: 37:56

Well, yeah. I also sometimes do that in our customer support software, and I shouldn't because it's easy to as I realized yesterday, which I didn't say anything bad, fortunately.

Justin: 38:06

Yeah.

Jon: 38:08

But there's a way there's a way in our software to, like, add a note that way you can see. Yeah. And it's easy to not click that and then send it to the actual thread.

Justin: 38:17

Mhmm. Yeah. That's actually a bad, UI pattern in Club IO, in, Kayako. They need to

Jon: 38:22

change it. I should really not use that

Justin: 38:25

for that reason. We almost we almost maybe we should stop using it and just you go back to Slack or something because it it is dangerous. Because we can, like, at message each other when customers are so with this particular feature, I just, wrote them an email, and I recorded a video saying, okay, I use this product that you guys are talking about as well. I can't tell how us doing an integration would make the process any faster than it is now. And I recorded them a video showing them how.

Justin: 38:59

And, I mean, I was a little bit nervous, because I'm like, I don't wanna seem like a dick right now that I'm pushing back. But, I sent it to all these folks that have requested it, and already 3 have emailed back. And they've said, oh, I didn't really investigate this. They just, you know, made an easy tool for us to suggest integration with the pop up and their UI flow. And from what you shared, it doesn't seem worth the integration effort on your part.

Jon: 39:25

It feels a little scammy, but I get it. Like, I you know, it's a it's a service that wants to expand in there. They wanna integrate with other podcast platforms Yeah. To do that, and that's their way of expanding. So I I understand that.

Justin: 39:38

Yeah. Totally. I mean, it is a little actually, the I didn't even think about the dark side of this. But sending a a a potential partner a bunch of support requests in a day is not super fun. But I didn't even think about that.

Justin: 39:54

But now I'm like, oh, yeah. That's not, like, a great way to, because they've also reached out to us personally and asked to integrate. And Yeah. I should send them the same video because I just don't see how it's any better. But I think it was a good reminder that you can push back on customers or potential customers.

Justin: 40:12

So when they say, hey, I really want this thing. I try, if I can, to take the time to record a video, really go through and say, how I you know, how will this be better? Or what are you thinking about here? Can you paint the picture of what you're trying to do? Because invariably, it seems to reveal one of 2 things.

Justin: 40:33

1, they haven't really thought this through, and they're they're actually, not that serious. They're just they're just exploring in their own world what they're doing. And then I can't remember what the second thing is. You know, maybe just that the there's a better way that exists already. So they want to do something, but there's actually a better way to do what they want to do.

Justin: 41:04

And it's worth pushing back and going, okay. Well, let's just before we go too far here, let's really explore what you're trying to do. What are you trying to accomplish? And go from there. Sweet man.

Justin: 41:16

Why don't you say thanks to our Patreons?

Jon: 41:20

Alright. Thank you to all of our patrons. Patreons.

Justin: 41:24

Hey. I think it's patrons.

Jon: 41:26

Our Patreon patron patrons. We have James Sours from user input dot I o, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley from nice things dot I o, Russell Brown, Evandro Sassy, Pradyumna, Schenbecker, Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from alitu.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Peter Raffita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sitber, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha. Danbudda.com. Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schubert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Juneteenth.

Justin: 42:14

Juneteenth.

Jon: 42:17

Kyle Fox from get rewardful dot com, and our sponsors this week, ActiveCampaign and Honey Badger.

Justin: 42:23

Thanks, everyone. Dave Juneteenth, messaged me and said, hey, I wonder if this Juneteenth thing is getting out of control. You know, it's so much attention on me. He says, I I I feel like I'm I'm, you know, I'm not paying you guys enough on Patreon to get this much attention.

Jon: 42:38

Like, he can't even walk down the street anymore without getting noticed.

Justin: 42:41

And I said, Dave, this has nothing to do with you. Your name, this is this is this has gone far beyond you now.

Jon: 42:49

This is sorry.

Justin: 42:50

This is too big to fail. This is too he could he could cancel his Patreon support, and we would still say Junta every single episode. Alright. See you, folks.