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Jon: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:And I'm Justin Jackson, and I'm having an existential capitalist crisis.
Jon:Uh-oh. Guess we better get into that.
Justin:This is there's there's nothing worse than having a business partner partner. And may it'll be even worse if you feel this way too. Having a business partner who is constantly questioning the underpinnings of the capitalist system that we're building the business on.
Jon:Maybe not constantly, but, yeah, I do.
Justin:You're in that boat too.
Jon:I yeah. I wish it wasn't yeah. I wish it wasn't quite the same as it is. I mean, you're you and you even have a little bit better of a situation being in Canada.
Justin:Yeah. We have a little bit more. I I think okay. So let me tell you about this rabbit hole I fell into. And I I fall into this every once in a while.
Justin:And in fact, I think I've been falling into this rabbit hole ever since I had business ethics at university with, Jim. What was his what was is it I can't remember his last name now. Professor Jim. The conventional capitalist idea is that if your business isn't growing, it's dying. Have you heard of that?
Jon:Yeah. I've heard of it. Maybe not that exact quote, but it seems to be the general thinking.
Justin:Yeah. In fact, there's a a great quote by our friend Jason Cohen that I'm gonna get Chris to put in here where he says
Speaker 3:So now the bad news. Let's say all of this works. You create this little company and you do you have no employees or just a few employees you actually like working with, and it's chunking out 30, 40 k a month in profit maybe. That'd be nice. And everything's going well.
Speaker 3:What happens next? It keeps growing. That's what it does. That's what companies that are successful do. They don't stop.
Speaker 3:And so if it keeps growing and you don't hire people to work on support, then you're gonna give bad customer support. Is that okay? Is that alright for you? Is that the kind of company you wanted to build that you enjoy working on? And do you hire more people?
Justin:There's this idea, that companies need to grow to survive. Yeah. And I know some people disagree with this. I know this because I've been tweeting these thoughts and people are replying to me. But I think you and I have even explored this when we talked.
Justin:We actually kicked this whole thing off. You know how I fell down this rabbit hole is because when Jason Zuk, damn you, Jason Zuk, asked us what is our enough number, and then we Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. We talked about this. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. And do you remember what we said?
Jon:No. Do you?
Justin:John, it's it's 9 AM on a Friday. I feel like I'm just sending you some softballs.
Jon:Yeah. A 100 k a month? I don't know. What'd we say?
Justin:I think we said and I think it was you that said this. So this is the that's what's funny is if we can't really stop because in a SaaS business, you have churn that will eventually chip away at your business until
Jon:it is
Justin:ground down to nothing.
Jon:Right. Yeah. That's true. I mean, I I suppose we can't stop marketing. Mhmm.
Jon:It doesn't mean we have to keep growing as long as churn is kept. As long as, like, we replace the churn with new people. Mhmm. But that's not really growing. That's just sustaining, and I think at a certain point, that's fine for certain businesses.
Justin:Yes. Maybe. I this is what I'm trying to these these are the things Right. I'm trying to question.
Jon:Yeah. But, I mean, I think there was a reply to your tweet Yeah. Along the lines of if you're not growing and you're not shrinking, you're not dying. Like, you're just it depends what you wanna grow for.
Justin:Yes. So, yeah, I'm looking at these two responses. And, again, I wanna be on their side philosophically. But, there's part of this, and I'm still exploring it. I'm still trying to figure out what does this all mean?
Justin:How does this actually work? And it opens up bigger and bigger questions. Okay. Well, let let's just let's talk about 2 ideas. 1, inflation is a thing.
Justin:And now I gotta go and look into all the reasons there's inflation. But if if we said we're gonna stop at, let's say, 50 k MRR, And we're gonna just stay there year after year, steady with you know, we we account for churn, and we're just replacing that churn revenue with new revenue from new customers.
Jon:Right.
Justin:If inflation continues to be a thing, then it won't be enough because that will also chip away at our,
Jon:That's true.
Justin:And so inflation, let's say, is 3% or I don't know what it is, but 3% a year. But in order to keep up with inflation, you can't just grow 3%. You actually have to grow more than that. Right? Because by the time, you've paid if you just grew at 3%, it wouldn't be enough once it gets down to the employees and owners.
Justin:You you have to have enough to to keep them on pace with inflation.
Jon:Right.
Justin:So that's that's one reason you can't just stay at one number. The other thing is my specific angle in this tweet is, I think, at the beginning, I say, you know, the conventional capitalist in me knows that if your business isn't growing, it's dying. But the burgeoning ecologist in me knows that our planet can't sustain perpetual economic growth. For many people in SaaS. Although I was surprised by how many people don't agree with this.
Justin:You know, how much MRR is enough is a silly question because in the current model, your business has to keep growing or it will eventually die. And I'm actually surprised that folks are debating that as much. Like, I'm not sure if they're debating it from a, the standpoint of, like, they wish it were different, or they just believe it is currently different.
Jon:Right. Yeah. I think there's also a big distinction between growing sustainably to keep your business alive and growing. It is devouring everything in your path.
Justin:Yeah. And I again, I'm I'm I'm right there with you.
Jon:But
Justin:but I'm I'm even I'm questioning some even deeper things, which is every business needs to grow from 0 to their enough number. Right?
Jon:Right.
Justin:And then there is a lot of folks that say, once you've reached your enough number, even that is not enough because churn, inflation, and then, actually, many other dynamics of our global economy will require you to keep growing. Or will, at the very least, make you reliant on other growing sectors. Like, the in even to replace churn, you need something to be growing somewhere in the world. Unless Yeah. Unless the world is a perfect cyclical system, and I think there's a number of reasons why it's not, you can't even just replace churn and tread water without there being growth somewhere else in the world.
Justin:The does that make sense? Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. It does. Yeah. I understand what you're saying.
Justin:Okay. So now let me let me just. And I realize listen, folks. I'm not I I might be a complete idiot here, so feel free to respond to any of this. But even the growth that's required for a small business to go from 0 to enough, if we have 1,000 or millions of small businesses around the world and emerging economies in China and India that also want to go from 0 to enough, Even that is an incredible amount of growth.
Justin:Does that make sense?
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And I'm just trying to wrestle with some this really big thought thinking, whatever, of wow. Like, we are really built on a system that is unsustainable. And there's folks in in my in this tweet thread that are saying, you know, it doesn't have to be based on, you know, I said, resource extraction, population growth, and energy usage. You know, some people are saying economic growth doesn't necessarily depend on increased resource extraction, population growth, or energy usage. And again, I maybe I'm an idiot.
Justin:But unless the world economy is a perfect cyclical system, it has to be based on extracting more resources, having more consumers come online, and using more energy. And if we look at our history so far
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:I think we could say that the the current economic system we've had since It's not a
Jon:it's not a great track record
Justin:at all. Since Adam Smith. Yeah.
Jon:Right. I mean, I think we're in a particularly unique position right now in that growth is still sort of chased at all costs and it's not being Mhmm. In in most most respects. It's not they're ignoring the the downsides of, yeah, trying to grow slower or or using different types of resources or recycled resources or different types of energy. Yeah.
Jon:I mean, it's a tough position because obviously as an as a company, you want to grow. And if those technologies aren't available yet, then you don't really have much of a choice. Unless you're a huge company like Apple, and you can just build your own.
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:Basically power system.
Justin:Yeah. But even, like, let's just talk about Apple for a sec because, again, part of me, there's there's this part of me that just wants to just naively be like, yeah, Apple's gonna take care of it. And they're they're already doing a great job. And, you know, they every product announcement, they'd say, now we're using 20% post recycled aluminum.
Jon:Or they're great at marketing.
Justin:Yes. And I'm not I'm not even trying to be, cynical and say, you know, those things aren't worth doing. But if we take Apple's, Apple's business as a whole, it is still reliant on resource extraction. They they aren't they aren't in a cyclical system, not even close to, recycling most like reusing most of the the materials in their devices. They're reliant on increasing population or at least tapping into bigger populations than, you know, like, they went from the United States to China.
Justin:In fact, they're not doing as good lately because China's economy is not doing great. And energy usage. So that may be one where potentially, people can reduce their impact. But the way our grids work, yeah, Apple can be on solar, but they're they're still relying on a grid that is not solar. Right?
Justin:Like, at nighttime when the sun's down, and they need to keep their Icloud servers up, they're not they're they're not using batteries. They're using the grid, and the grid is using coal and natural gas and everything else.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:I I I'm only bringing this up because I really wanna ruin everyone's day.
Jon:I mean, it's obviously a good thing to think about. You can't ignore it. It it is it is such a huge problem now that it's really hard to become overwhelmed by it if you let yourself. Like, if you just think of the scale of everything in this world, it's unimaginable almost. Like, I look at the amount of waste that, like, I don't know, a grocery store makes in a day and then scale that out to the entire world, and you're like, how is this even work?
Jon:How does anyone eat? Yes. Like, it it's it's kinda crazy.
Justin:I I think so, you know, is it Yvon Chouinard, the founder of, Patagonia?
Jon:Oh, yeah.
Justin:You've heard of him?
Jon:Is that the guy?
Justin:Yeah. I might be saying his first name wrong.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:It's y v o n, Shwinal.
Jon:Oh, yeah.
Justin:I'll I'll paste this link in the show notes, Fast Company, an exclusive interview with Patagonia founder. And he actually kind of echoes something you just said, which is you're you're kind of alluding to the fact that, you know, maybe it's impossible for human beings to completely eradicate the growth and harm we do to the environment, but we can at least slow it down.
Jon:I feel like there is a point where it is I mean, things have to change. Consumer consumer habits have to change, but then, obviously, growth slows down. But I have to wanna believe that there's there is a point where things things like energy usage and resource extraction become less of a problem. Mhmm. As either recycling gets better, we can figure out ways to use different resources that are renewable or and energy usage becomes a 100% renewable.
Jon:Mhmm. Which I think it kind of has to
Gavin:Mhmm.
Jon:At some point. Otherwise I mean, kinda done. Like Yeah. But, yeah, I think you could and you could still have growth at that point if it was actually sustainable.
Justin:Yeah. And this is actually reminding me in 2016, I wrote this this blog that is called virtual reality could save the planet. But the one of the the ideas I had in this is that, okay, if growth is if our economy does need growth, like, the current economic model requires growth. Again and this is debated. Like, there's some people who debate this that say the economic model doesn't require growth.
Justin:I I'm still not seeing it, at at least from an evidence of what has actually happened. The the economy is not cyclical. What one solution that's interesting in terms of slowing growth is that, and then again, we have to look into the numbers. But digital consumption, requires energy, and it requires the fabrication of devices that people consume the digital things on. But theoretically, it could it can reduce real world resource extraction.
Justin:Like, in 2009, there was a steady. Cleantech concluded that purchasing 3 ebooks per month for 4 years produces a 168 kilograms of CO 2 throughout the kingdom's life cycle compared to the estimated 1,074 kilograms of CO 2 produced by the same number of printed books. So a 168 kilograms of CO 2 versus 1,000. I feel
Jon:like that's one of the only examples of that, though. Like, what else you can't it does not gonna feed you. It's not gonna Yeah. It's not gonna I mean, I guess it it could it could make things like travel and business travel less of a requirement, but even that stuff is going way up. I mean, even that is growing.
Justin:Yeah. But there's at least the potential see, I think because eventually, human beings just don't wanna have a place to stand. Right? We we just wanna have a philosophical place to stand that lets us sleep at night. And this is why people take positions on and some of them are just unrealistic, but there's there's some some some solace in knowing why at least I've I've kinda resolved that existential crisis in my brain.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And I think I think where I'm kinda going is and it, again, it it's a little bit naive, but it's like, well, maybe all we can do is slow down population growth, slow down resource extraction, and slow down energy consumption. As long as humans are a thing, we are going to continue unless something really crazy happens that I I just haven't thought of. Like, unless we can create an almost completely closed loop cyclical system. But those don't really exist. Like, even Earth is not a closed loop.
Justin:It it gets energy from the sun.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And most of what we of the material we have here is was deposited, you know, 1,000,000,000 of years ago or whatever.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But it feels like the the most practical and ethical thing to do as capitalists in 2019. And I'm talking to you and I, like, we're we've talked also about, like, air travel and, like, all this other stuff. Is for us to say, how can we slow down our personal consumption and how can we slow down our, you know, our businesses consumption, I guess. And how can we how can we how can we also maybe be okay with slower growth from a a revenue standpoint, I guess. Do you understand how tricky this gets?
Justin:Like,
Jon:it It is tricky.
Justin:Is anyone still listening? If you're still listening, tweet us at transistorfm. It's it's just so hard. It because you can have basically, we wanna figure out how are we gonna live our lives, how we're gonna run this company, how are we gonna wake up every day? Like, am I gonna buy this cup of coffee or am I not?
Justin:Am I going to replace this MacBook Pro or am I not? Am I going to encourage people to listen to podcasts or am I not? Each of those I mean, like you said, I I guess you can't think about it too much, or you just drive yourself crazy.
Jon:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I you could become completely overwhelmed by just right. The scale of everything happening.
Justin:Yeah. But on the other hand, one of the things I think about in some ways, one of the reasons I'm thinking about this now is because and this is kind of, leads into our next topic. But we have enough revenue in transistor that I have relaxed a lot. And I I now have more space to think. And so, you know, I'm trying to take care of my emotional, well-being.
Justin:I'm trying to take it, you know, I'm but I have more space. It's just, like, I I'm not I'm not, kind of desperately trying to find the next dollar to feed my family.
Jon:Yeah. And I think with that space probably comes obviously comes with it The space to, you know, take care of your emotional well-being, but also the space to think about stuff like this and and try to find better ways to run a business or
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Which we well, I think, you know, in in some respects, like, companies like Apple and Amazon, they're so big and have so much revenue that they kind of have the ability to do that too. Like, they have Mhmm. So much r and d money Mhmm. That places like like Apple, whether we think of them as, I don't know, some forward thinking, like, progressive company, they are doing a lot of good work in that area. Mhmm.
Jon:Whereas, like, I look at Amazon and especially Jeff Bezos, and, like, he's using his money to, like, build a rocket to Mars. Like Mhmm. Honestly, who gives a shit? Like Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:Like, space is interesting and amazing, but, like, use that money here and, like, develop some sort of I don't know. Let's have
Justin:some problems.
Jon:Some new power source or the food system. I was listening to, the latest Ritual podcast or one of them with the founder of Impossible Foods Okay. Yeah. Burger and stuff. Yeah.
Jon:It was it's a really interesting conversation, but he's basically trying to reform the entire food system by essentially eliminating the need for meat. Mhmm. And he yeah. He's not building a company to target, like, vegans and stuff like that. He's like, I wanna build I wanna make food that people who eat meat wanna eat.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:Because it eliminates the need to eat meat. He's like, I don't really care if vegans like what I make. Yeah. That's not the big issue. Like, he his view is, like, he's, like, the the commercial agricultural system is the biggest problem right now to solve.
Jon:Mhmm. Like, it is such a resource hog. It's incredible. Yeah. So people like that, you know, he I gotta give him credit.
Jon:He's trying to do big things.
Justin:Yeah. And maybe that is in a and maybe, and again, maybe this is naive, but maybe that is the path forward is to say to recognize that these big existential problems exist. That we have we we have built our society on an extremely complicated system that very few of us actually understand.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And that that that has all sorts of inputs and outputs and, cycles and underpinnings that we have never considered. No.
Jon:It's all still just a super antiquated system.
Justin:It's an antiquated system, but Everything
Jon:is run on technology that was made, like, a 150 years ago.
Justin:Oh my god.
Jon:Burning fuel.
Justin:Oh my god. I've got a I've got a sidebar that I'll I'll get to after this. But maybe Pat Brown, that's the guy that you were just talking about. Maybe he's got the right idea. And maybe the founder Patagonia's got the right idea.
Justin:He's a little bit more pessimistic. But the the simple way forward is to do the best you can with what you've got. And maybe in the pursuit of, for example, eliminating the world's addiction to meat, Maybe once you get there, just like solving a complex software problem, maybe once you get there, that opens up new possibilities, like new structural philosophical possibilities for where we go next. But the problem right now, like you've said, the problem right now is that we've got so many companies and people that are that are just addicted to growth and to to growth for growth sake, to accumulating 1,000,000,000 of dollars and then spending it, you know, burning it, trying to get to Mars. That may be the reformation of that is what gets us to the next platform where we can go, okay.
Justin:Now we can see a little bit clear. We've given ourselves some breathing room. We've slowed growth down. And now there's actually a way to make this more of a closed system or a cyclical system, or maybe that's not possible. But, I mean, humanity won't go forever.
Justin:I'm not that that's another thing as well. But I'm just thinking for the the, you know, our context, our time, the time we've been given, maybe that is the way forward.
Jon:Yeah. I mean yeah. I think so. Fortunately, I think a lot of humans are pretty short sighted, and their only concern is their time on the planet. Mhmm.
Jon:They're like, yeah. I don't really care what happens after. I just want money. I just want money because I've I'm told that that's what I
Justin:need. Although, I wonder if most humans, like, most humans feel that way. Like, for me personally, you know, there's there's that theory of sorry. Is anyone still listening? For me, personally, there is has been kind of an enough number in terms of, like, what I need to live.
Justin:I think I'm basically there. Like, you and I will you know, we're gonna we're gonna get into this in the next topic maybe. Yeah. Essentially, since April, my basic needs and my family's basic needs have been met, and that removed a mountain of pressure off me. And I'm a white male, college educated in Canada.
Justin:Imagine, you know, there's there's billions of people, especially in India and China, who would, you know, gladly switch places with me. And I I don't think they necessarily want a Maserati. They just want to get to a place where their basic needs are met in a in a reliable way.
Jon:I think that's probably what most humans want.
Justin:I mean, I think that's still a huge problem. Like, the amount of growth that would be required in our current system to get them there is is, woah, is yeah. Mind if
Jon:I maybe I don't know. I mean, I've done no research on this, but it seems to me that it could probably be done Mhmm. Now with some sort of redistribution of where people are putting their energy.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:All these other things are happening and growing at the expense of people living just basic healthy lives.
Justin:Again, even if no one's still listening is anyone still listening? The for you and I, I feel like this is important to talk about. Because we are in a position where we now have space to think about what we're going to be do what we're going to do with what we've been given.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And, like, if people like us, like, 2 white dudes in North America that have built a software company, if we can't think about world problems and really wrestle with these big, hairy, confusing topics, I don't know who can. Like, there's so many so much opportunity for us to do some good in the world. And even that is difficult to do well, to do good in the world that's not egotistical or
Jon:Right. Like, selfish or self serving in some way?
Justin:Yeah. Or just naive. Yeah. Right? Like, missionaries going to Africa or something.
Justin:Right. But again, even those problems, if who else in the world is equipped to do to tackle that stuff? You know, there's, there's a lot of problems in the world, but I don't want to be the kind of capitalist who just gets comfortable and then says, okay. Well, that's it. Like, you know, I'm done.
Jon:I got mine and screw everyone else.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, I know I think we've talked about this before. I don't think either of us are really in this for the money necessarily. Like, it provides a a a life and a level of comfort, but beyond that, it's not like I mean, I, for 1, am not here. I'm not wanting other these huge things that are expensive or extravagant Yeah.
Jon:At all. Like, past a certain point, I think that I don't know. There's research on this, like, 70 or $75,000 a year, like, past that Mhmm. Really provides no extra, I don't know, happiness or amount of comfort really. Like Mhmm.
Justin:Although, I I just wanna I'm sorry to be such a such a asshole, but that $75,000 number, I there's something that's always bugged me about that because it's been $75,000 for, like, 5, 10 years or something.
Jon:Oh, okay. Maybe it's 80.
Justin:The the principle applies. But yeah. The
Jon:There is an amount past where
Justin:like Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Really matter. Yes.
Justin:Well, folks, let's take a break.
Jon:Deep breath.
Justin:Deep breath. Let's talk about some, some really ethical capitalists. Honey Badger. There this podcast is brought to you by honeybadger.io. They are error monitoring for your web application.
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Justin:What do you think we should talk about next? Should we talk about should we talk about, how we spend our money? Or yeah. What do you wanna talk about next? Do we wanna talk about SSO?
Jon:There's not a whole lot to talk about SSO. I honestly haven't looked at all the feedback yet. Yeah. We can briefly talk we can briefly touch on it. Like, we brought it up last week as something we're looking into for our private podcast feature.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And thank you to everyone who's given us feedback. Like, there's a lot of we got a lot of really good feedback from listeners
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:About just different approaches, and people have reached out and said, hey. If you wanna hop in a call sometime, I'll talk it talk about it with you or do a video call. I can show you how we do it. Mhmm. So thank you to everyone.
Jon:I Yeah. I I haven't looked at it all yet, really. Yeah.
Justin:I I think one of the challenge was challenges with that topic. We're talking about single sign on right now. One of the challenges with this topic, and it became quite clear as we got these responses, is that your the advice you are giving really depends on what planet you're from. Does that make sense? What do you think I mean by that metaphor?
Jon:I don't know. Can you please elaborate?
Justin:Meaning, on some people's planets, they are working in an enterprise organization or serving enterprise organizations. This is their world. They wake up every day. That is what they live and breathe. And they are used to, providing service at a certain level with a certain amount of infrastructure, with a certain amount of sales teams and, you know, developers on staff and
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:A certain level of complexity. The planet you and I are from is very different. It's a planet of 2 people. And we are not sure if we want to build that kind of infrastructure on our planet. We don't know if we want to, you know, let's let's really expand this metaphor.
Justin:Like, we could we could create a spaceship docking station that accommodates little spaceships, and that doesn't require very much work. You know, it's just a little simple airlock, or we have to be able to accommodate the Borg. And, like, if the Borg pull up with their ship, they need, like, you know, thousands of airlocks, and they need us to authenticate through their, whatever. And, you know, it it gets a lot more complicated. And, as I've been parsing some of the responses, my first question has always been, okay.
Justin:Well, what planet are you on, Advice skipper. Because the advice might be good, but if it doesn't match, you know, with what we wanna do like, so just SSO on its own is a whole level of complexity. And it it's it's again, if you're in that world, you might say, well, no. It's not a big deal. We do this all the time.
Justin:This is just how we do things. Yeah. People like us do things like this.
Jon:Right. But that's someone, yeah, coming from that world where it's just how it's done.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:It's maybe not the first integration they've done with it. I I think I think looking at the feedback even and talking about it last week and kinda what we're looking for, like, single sign on might not actually be what we want.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:It's more of a directory syncing, which isn't really single sign on.
Justin:Yeah. Although the more I've explored it, this is what bugs me. Is that there is for authentication, there is this protocol called single sign on. And it's just become and now there are plug and play utilities for that protocol, like Auth0 and Okta and all these other things that got suggested to us. And they're expensive, but a small little company like us could implement them with maybe minimal difficulty.
Justin:And they provide a way of having a third party who is trusted, like Google, say, okay, we are we you Transistor, and you, big enterprise company, are going to use a third party to entrust the, identity of all these people. Like, we're gonna auth through them.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But there is no simple protocol, which is actually bonkers to me, that doesn't use SSO for HR contact sync. Now in the marketing world, we have contact sync, like Mailchimp. And we we do you and I do this with Transistor. We have a a way of through the Mailchimp API of querying a Mailchimp list of theoretically bringing people in, taking people out, you know, putting people on lists. Right?
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:But nothing seems to exist. Like, there's no easy protocol that's universal because we we can't just we can't just build it with 1 company. And they they say, well, we use, you know, internal HR, bits. And we're, like, okay. Well, we'll integrate with internal HR bits.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I it's weird because people throw around SSO as as if it's, like, the standard protocol. And that's what it is, but it's might be, and but there's all these companies doing it slightly differently.
Justin:Yes. So I I think that's that's part of the challenge. And I was talking to a guy at, we have this Geek Beers meetup, and, I was talking to this fellow last night about it. And in some ways, we were both looking at each other like we're both from a different planet. Like, he's saying, well, what you want?
Justin:Like, that no. Nobody does that. Like, if especially if you're gonna serve enterprise customers, like, they don't do that. And I'm saying, well, if they don't do that, maybe I don't wanna be in that business.
Jon:And he's like,
Justin:well, you're crazy because everyone wants to be in that business. So I and, of course, there's always the question of, well, maybe there is a simple way of having some sort of authenticated, secure contact directory sync for, like, employee lists.
Jon:Right. Well, there's there's LDAP, which is potentially supported by a lot of different like, that is a that is a standard protocol.
Justin:Oh, lightweight directory access protocol.
Jon:Which might be supported by a lot of those other, like, single sign on platforms. Like, let's say, I don't know, Google or Microsoft or whatever.
Justin:Well, I know I it it it seems like this would be pretty not easy. But if everybody in the world was using active directory
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:It it sounds like, okay. Well, we could do this easy. Like, okay. We'll just we'll just integrate with active directory, and now we're done. You know, you're every enterprise in the world uses it, but they don't.
Justin:So that's the problem. Some people use active directory, and some people use Google Suite, and some people use, you know, probably stuff we've never heard of. And it just it's it's weird to me that there's no Zapier or Zapier for this problem. And and maybe just people are using Zapier. Like, that's that's the the solution.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, the ideal flow that I'm thinking of is you're a customer with transistor and you wanna have a private podcast, and there's a page that says, sync my contacts.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:And you maybe you choose a provider that you use, and you click okay, and you authenticate, and give us access. Mhmm. And then maybe there's groups of people within that list that you choose you want to add to transistor. Mhmm. And anytime anyone is either added or moved to from that group, they are given access or revoked access to a private podcast.
Jon:That's it. That's all I think that's all we need. They're really we're not we're not really dealing with authentication because that's not how we've thought of this.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:But maybe that's what we needed. Maybe that's what we need to do. I don't know. It's it's hard to say.
Justin:It looks like now I'm looking at it. There there is something called Google Cloud Directory Sync. And I wonder if we could just start with, like, Google Cloud Directory Sync and, Active Directory Sync. I think one thing that worries me is that even if this is the best solution for us personally, the SSO is just the the buzzword that keeps getting thrown at us from clients.
Jason:Mhmm.
Justin:And if that's what they want emotionally, we might have to deliver that because we can't just say they'll they'll say, do you have SSO? And they don't might not even entirely know what that means. They just know that their IT team said, listen, this is how we integrate with things like people like us integrate with apps like yours, like this. This is how we do it. And so we might emotionally there just might be too much momentum there behind SSO where they're like, no, this is just the way we do it.
Justin:I'm like, okay. Well, that's not ideal because SSO would require each of your employees to click on a link. It's just gonna add another step in this onboarding process. Like, they have to click on a link, and then we just add their email address to our our record. Right?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, yeah, we're right. I mean, Yeah. We're looking for the simplest solution for both us and our customers, and they may not overlap.
Justin:Yes. Exactly. But, man, this is the benefit of a podcast right here. It's because, again, I don't know if anyone's still listening. But for us, you and I to have a chance to just hash that out, like, verbally, it feels like we if anybody in the world could listen to that and go, oh, I see the full picture now.
Justin:I understand now why this isn't just an easy decision for you.
Jon:Right.
Justin:There are many variables at play, including what kind of company does John and Justin wanna run? What kind of customers does John and Justin wanna serve? What kind of due process does John and Justin want to do every time they get a new customer? And then on the other side, what do these types of customers want? Even it might not even be what's best.
Justin:They just want for like, will you SSO?
Jon:They want they want what they use, and they want what their employees use.
Justin:Yes. So
Jon:it's so it's not confusing.
Justin:Or they just want what the boss told them to get.
Jon:Right. Yeah.
Justin:Well, we don't do SSO. Okay. Well, the boss told me to get SSO. I don't wanna get in
Jon:trouble. Yeah. It it is a good it it's great that we have this space to hash this out, but also, to get feedback from
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:People.
Justin:Yeah. Because this is, I'm sure lots of other people are are on a similar similar path or have had to deal with similar things. Do you want let's talk quickly about money. We had this thing called budgeting. And we, we got a few people that responded to us on Twitter and said, yeah, I want to know about budgeting.
Justin:But they wanted to know about it differently than I was thinking about it. Specifically, how has our budgeting evolved over time?
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And by budgeting, we're talking about, money that how do we spend our money?
Jon:Right.
Justin:And we've had other episodes about this. But I think we could summarize it by saying, early on, we spent as little as we could. Yeah. In fact, looking at those profit and loss statements from the early months is almost hilarious.
Jon:How cheap it was?
Justin:How cheap it was. I I think, like, early on, you were you were pretty, like, no. Let's keep cost down. Right?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, I I still feel that way.
Justin:By the way, what what's driving that? Why do you feel, like, we should keep cost down?
Jon:Oh, I just think it's it can be easy to throw money at problems.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:And that may not always be the best solution to that.
Justin:Mhmm. But why why not just throw money at problems?
Jon:Because I think once you start doing it, it just it it spiral out of control. Okay. And now and, like, you know and now you're dependent on $5,000 infrastructure costs per month. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Jon:That's pretty much it. I mean.
Justin:Yeah. And and and and I think the the kind of, maybe the overarching philosophy behind that is that the from what I've gathered from you, whatever we have in profit, we can then distribute to you and I.
Jon:Yeah. Okay. That's true.
Justin:Yeah. Okay. So we're we're keeping cost down because Or,
Jon:you know, or, you know, hire someone or Yes. Right.
Justin:Distribute other places like you and I, employees, or maybe, other projects, going back to our first discussion that that we, that we might wanna embark on.
Jon:Right.
Justin:Early on, we spent as little as we could. And that I think that makes sense. This was a side project. And we just didn't have the money. Like, we didn't have the money for email marketing.
Justin:We didn't have the money for hosting. We used those Stripe Atlas credits for a long time.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. That lasted for a long time.
Justin:So we signed up for Stripe Atlas. And as a part of that, you get $3,000 in credits or something?
Jon:$5,000 in AWS AWS credits. Yeah.
Justin:We used Kayako early on because it was free. Every and every single $20 purchase we talked about.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And some of that, I think, was, even philosophical. Like, we're not going to get addicted to spending money on things because you're caught controlling your costs is kind of the the one thing you can do to make sure you don't get to trouble in the future.
Jon:But there was there's also a psychological component to that to to say, like, oh, our business is profitable. Mhmm. Yeah. From the start. Yeah.
Jon:From the first two months or whatever.
Justin:That's right. Yeah. We've had, I'm just looking at our our cash flow over the years, since, January 2018. And, yeah, at first, these numbers are so small. Like, little, like, $700 profit.
Justin:And then the next month, 485. And then the next month, we had a loss of 267. But then we popped back up 1,002.70. But you I think folks at home can see these are very small numbers. So if this is a side project for you, I think getting into that habit of being very frugal, you know, finding ways to do things cheap or, free is a good good thing to do.
Justin:When we went full time, it feels like so April July of this year, it feels like things changed a little bit. We we opened up the purse strings a little bit there.
Jon:Yeah. I think we're yeah. We're in a much better position to look look deeper at the finances and how we're doing and actually say, oh, yeah. We can spend money on this. It's worth it.
Jon:Saves us time and trouble, and it's not gonna not gonna make us go broke.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. And and some of those topics have been as we grow, talking about the pains of growth, as you grow your infrastructure, it can't just run on those little, you know, those little servers you started with. It can't just run on, you know, what what started off as pretty cheap bandwidth very quickly turns into expensive bandwidth.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so we started being willing to, you know, if you were in our Slack, you would see John saying, hey, thinking about this. Like, maybe we should start increase our our spending on this. And sometimes it's just by, like, 300% or 2000%.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But it was because we realized we just in order to make this business work and scale it as we get more customers, or even just to serve our existing customers. This is the other thing about growth is, like, even if we just kept our, like, 1500 customers and that's it, theoretically, their podcasts are going to keep growing. Right? So even if we just stayed with the same number of customers, our scaling would have to increase because they're going to be the download numbers are gonna keep going up theoretically.
Jon:Exactly. Yeah. Theoretically. Yeah. There's, yeah, there's all sorts of background jobs happening and processing things.
Jon:It all just all takes CPU power and more database queries and Mhmm. So, yeah, putting putting a little bit of money into that. I think I still think our our costs are still really low. Mhmm. Yeah.
Jon:Which is great.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Our our profit margin still feels quite nice.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:So now I think so that was the mid stage is where we started paying ourselves, just kind of a minimal salary and then started opening up, you know, spending on things. We still debate almost every purchase. Yeah. I think what brought this around this topic around for me was that I I just bought a computer, to replace my personal computer I've been using for Transistors. So I've this one's dying.
Justin:So now the Transistors gonna buy me a computer. And, we we talked about it a lot. Like, this is Yeah. For us, you know, 4 or $5,000 or whatever it ended up being is a big purchase still. And, you know, we went back and forth.
Justin:And, what's funny is at the time, we had some accounting bugs that were that were showing we had way less profit than we thought we had. So we're I think I was kinda nervous, like, maybe we shouldn't be spending anything. I've since fixed those, and and now in retrospect, I wish I'd ordered a more expensive computer. But now the position right now I think this is a little bit dangerous position is we have profit, and we have to figure out what we're gonna do with it.
Jon:Yeah. So right. So some of that is, yeah, figuring out if we're giving ourselves raises or bonuses or are we starting to then.
Justin:Or dividends.
Jon:Dividends. Are we going to, you know, start paying for more of the services we use day to day through the company? Mhmm. Health care, phones.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Is there equipment we should buy before the end of the year? Are there things we should pay for this year, like prepay this year? The other thing that I think we should do, I can look into again, which goes back to our first topic, is joining something like 1% for the planet. Mhmm. Which is basically you sign up and sort of commit as a business to give 1% of your annual sales to, basically donate.
Justin:Mhmm. I'd I'd be into that. I'd be into that, because I think it it puts again, maybe it's just a naive action, but at least it's a starting point. Well, I
Jon:think it's good. It's, the guy from Patagonia is a cofounder.
Justin:Okay. Alright.
Jon:So I think it's it's it's one that I think is trusted, and they spend money they spend the money well.
Justin:Yeah. So these are the decisions we're making now. And I I think that contrast is interesting because the the the the fellow that asked about our budgeting on Twitter, I think was earlier on. Yeah. Early on, it is way different than the way it feels now.
Justin:And certainly the danger that I feel like we're in now is when you do have money, you you now have to think about, like, what do we do with it? Like, if if a recession hits in February of 2020, will we be will we regret buying Justin that computer and booking 2 tickets for MicroConf?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Right? Like, there's these challenging questions.
Jon:Do we take it out and bury it in your backyard?
Justin:Yes. We do. Or Trump can't find it.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And even actually, this would be a good topic for the future. By the way, how how long does your timer say?
Jon:We're at 50 some minutes.
Justin:Oh, I'm so sorry. Alright, folks. 57. Oh, god. We're gonna end it right here.
Jon:Everyone's everyone's asleep.
Justin:Everyone's asleep. John, why don't you go through our, Patreon supporters?
Jon:Yeah. Thanks as always to our Patreon supporters. We have James Sours from user input dot I o, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley from nice things dot I o, Russell Brown, Avendra Sassy, Pratiyumna, Schimbecker, Noah Pral, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from alici.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Pedraffita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sittber, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis. My brother Dan Buddha. Danbudda.com.
Jon:Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.
Justin:Junta.
Jon:Kyle Fox from get rewardful.com, and our sponsors this week, ActiveCampaign and Honey Badger.
Justin:Are you still listening? If you are, thanks. We will see you next week.
