Once you launch, you're immediately behind
Oh, man. I'm starting to feel that stress.
Jon:Yeah. Me too.
Justin:What are you stressed about?
Jon:I don't know. I just feel like there's too much to do.
Justin:Yeah. Me too. I think this should be the show right here. I don't how did this happen? I I think for me, it's there's a lot of stress about travel because I know I'm leaving.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And I know I have to do a talk, and that stresses me out. What where is it coming from for you?
Jon:I just feel like I've been just fixing bugs and stuff and not actually doing any feature work. Mhmm. And then we're talking about private podcasting stuff, and we have this huge list of other things that we haven't started.
Justin:Yeah. Just stresses you out more.
Jon:Yeah. Pretty much. It's okay, though.
Justin:Well, let's let's just keep going. I think this should be the call.
Jon:What did you send me a link? What? Oh, that. That's Oh, yeah.
Justin:Because now we decided to switch to Google Docs.
Jon:Right. Remember? Oh, yeah.
Justin:How how come their their default is Arial?
Jon:Why is it all highlighted?
Justin:Because I'm gonna change the font to something else. Oh,
Jon:okay. I'm gonna record right now.
Justin:Do you need to visualize your data? Try redash. You'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes. Go to redash.io and you'll get 50% off your first three months when you mention this podcast.
Jon:Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. It's the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buddha, a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing follow along as we build Transistor dotfm. Tell me more. You the you've we've got this big backlog. We did go through it and cleaned it out a little bit.
Jon:Yeah. We did. I think struggling dealing with struggling or dealing with is kind of the push and pull between, like, fixing bugs or improving small parts of the app. Mhmm. You know, helping out customers with customer support, and then also trying to leave room to think about new feature development Mhmm.
Jon:Which I haven't really felt like I've been able to do. Mhmm. And it's probably mostly my fault for not for not really, I don't know, structuring my day in a way that would allow for that large amount of space to do that. Mhmm. It doesn't help that it's hot as hell here right now.
Jon:All of a sudden, there's this massive heat wave, and, like, if I don't wake up in the morning and work out, I can't really do it because it's too hot, and I didn't and I didn't do that today
Justin:Gotcha.
Jon:Because I got a little extra sleep. But then when I woke up, it was already, like, 85
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And humid. And, like, I can't ride a bike. I can't run. I could go swimming, but by then, the pool was closed. Yeah.
Jon:Lap swim. So then it's like, alright. Now I now I gotta fit that somewhere into my day Mhmm. Somehow, or, like, I have to go to the gym, which I don't really enjoy doing. So it's like I'm juggling all of these things in my head simultaneously.
Justin:Yeah. I think I think a lot of that is the overwhelm. That's where it comes from. Yeah. Is that just feeling like it's more the feeling, like, I have lots of things in my brain that are that are not allocated and aren't even completely, like, there's not I don't even exactly know what's in my head.
Justin:You know? Yeah. It's just the the general idea that there's a big list up there that stresses me out.
Jon:Yeah. And, like, we have a list outside of our heads Uh-huh. As well.
Justin:I think this is where going back to the way base camp shapes their work might be helpful for us. By the way, Jason Fried reached out to me and wants to I I posted just a clip of you and I talking about this on LinkedIn, and he commented on it and said he wanted to come on the show and talk about it.
Jon:Oh, nice.
Justin:So I think that'll be what did he say? He said week after next. So not next week, but the week after that. He he'll come on and talk a little bit more, which I think could be helpful. Yeah.
Justin:Because I think part of the problem is I'm even looking at your backlog right now. And we have you know, as a customer, if my RSS import fails, better feedback to customers about Spotify submission status, ability to have multiple episodes embedded in the player, analytics, CSV download. And those are really all not related.
Jon:Yeah. Not at all.
Justin:And I I can see I guess it depends on how you like to work, but I can see it's not like we have a theme right now that is kind of driving everything. It it's like, partly, it's just, like, okay. Well, what am I gonna pick off today?
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like I I think I kinda said, I'm I feel like I've largely been in bug fixing tiny improvement mode
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Which, is good. It's necessary, and, you know, it may mean that any of the new features we've been thinking about adding or talking about aren't, like, crucial to the success of transistor. Like, it maybe it's in a good place. Yeah. And the bug fixes are necessary, but it it just sometimes kind of feels like a little bit of a slog where it's like you're helping customers with the same problems.
Jon:The the things you're fixing aren't necessarily reducing that.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And a lot of it a lot of it is, you know, general questions just about, like, how things work or maybe we're not surfacing. Like, our onboarding isn't complete enough to answer these questions. Or
Justin:You know, especially because I've been listening to other podcasts with, you know, like, Bootstrap Web, Art of Product. And, you know, people these are all common problems. Here's a tweet from Brian Cassell. He says, rolling out a SaaS product. For months, it's calm, organized, steady process.
Justin:Research, build, research, build more. Then once you cross into first users and customers, you're all of a sudden behind on everything. Docs, onboarding, marketing, product support.
Jon:That sounds about right. And especially as we grow, I think it just kind of escalates. Yeah. Right? Which is good.
Jon:I mean, it's a good problem to have. People are interested, and they're signing up, and we're helping them. But at what point do you ignore those requests? I mean, you kinda I feel like you kinda have to schedule it. Right?
Jon:And just say, like, I'm gonna I'm gonna do support for an hour, and then I'm gonna cut it off. Like, I have to cut it off because I I mean, I maybe you do too. I tend to jump in there right when things come in. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I think our listeners, as they're hearing this, I think their response is going to be, it sounds like you folks are at the point where you need to hire someone to do support.
Jon:Possibly.
Justin:And because that is, increasingly one of the things that takes up our time.
Jon:Yeah. And I think I yeah. I think we both agreed that that would probably be our first hire, to someone to do support.
Justin:And and we we are in an a messy industry, unfortunately, or fortunately, where it's just no matter how many docs we write and how good our onboarding gets and everything else, I think there's always gonna be folks that have questions. Yeah. And, you know, to be honest, I'm kind of the same way. If I, you know, if I know I can message the founder directly or get someone on live chat right away, I will do that as opposed to, you know, browsing through a bunch of docs because it's maybe who knows? Like, you know, it just feels like well, if I can get the answer right now, I'd rather do that.
Justin:And Adi Pinar has this old, talk that he gave ages ago, where he says, you know, the dirty secret about software as a service is that most people are actually paying you for the service, not for the software. So I mean, even even kind of, lean organizations like Basecamp have a sizable number of folks in support. So, yeah, it might that might be one thing because I think it does. I even if we hired somebody, we would still be doing support. And it does feel like, you know, I've had, for example, on my side, I have I've had this marketing site on my plate forever.
Justin:And I feel like I just I really just need 10, 20% to finish the last 10, 20% and just get it out the door. Mhmm. And, I think that's part of the the issue is just it's easy to get to just do the everyday things.
Jon:Yeah. But yeah. But in the meantime, you're probably still thinking about that site in the back of your mind. So it's, like, still taking up mental energy.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think this is why cadence seems so important, especially when you're a small team. If we had a line in the sand saying our we are starting a 6 week cycle on August 1st, and the theme of that cycle is going to be the multi episode player, and we're going to finish it in 6 weeks, that I think that would change a lot of things.
Justin:You know what I mean? Like, just having that that thought of note, this is what we're doing and cleaning off even our, like, all of this other stuff. Like just, again, going back to that Ben Orenstein tweet. Right? Just like, just remove it all from our all of these cards, all of these tickets from our screen and from our brain, because it it is just a wall of stuff.
Justin:Like Yeah.
Jon:It I mean, I can I can hide that bucket? Yeah. Which, you know, might help, or just only show the things I'm currently assigned to, which I can do. So right. Part of part of it is maybe, I mean, not taking care of not take not using the tool we have
Justin:Yeah. Honestly, I think
Jon:most effectively. But
Justin:I think we could we could we did we did a big kind of we we moved a lot of things into I an ideas folder. I feel like we could do that again, because even there are things here we definitely wanna build, but it's about focus.
Jon:Yeah. I'd be I'd be interested in talking to Jason Fried about this because, I mean, their process now came out of a company that is much, much bigger than ours, and I like, I'm curious to to know what he thinks about something, like, a work style like that, but for 2 people who are doing everything. Mhmm. I don't I don't necessarily know if it will apply directly to us. But
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think that there would be some this is actually where the wisdom of people who are more experienced, I think is helpful. You know, even like, it's almost like I could hire anybody. Maybe not anybody, but I could hire a a a professional organizer to come and watch my day.
Justin:And for sure, they would be able to go, okay, well, you might not realize this, but you spend a lot of time doing this kind of work. And that is why you're not able to focus on the these big rocks that you wanna move. Right? And, on the flip side, there is also this other thing that I I don't want us to lose sight of, which is we both seem to even hearing what you were saying about exercise and how important it is to you, instead of that being, like, a another task that is burdensome, that's like that's for that's for folks that are working jobs. People who are working jobs have to figure out how they're gonna get to the gym.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But people who are bootstrapping their own company should have the freedom to go, you know what? I'm going to the gym right now. Yep. And it's not a another task. It's just it's an exercise in freedom.
Justin:And so which means we need to make space for that. Like today, I I woke up at 11:30 AM this morning, and I never do that. Like, I'm almost always up at least by 8 o'clock.
Jon:Yeah. I don't know the last time I did that.
Justin:And today, I just woke up at 11:30, and I was like, what happened? And it's because I was camping, and I had a bunch of bad sleeps. And then I got back, and my brain started working overtime. And so I was up till, like, 2 in the morning, a bunch of nights, just thinking about ideas. And so I needed to catch up.
Justin:And part of me was, like, kind of panicking a little bit. Like, oh my god. Like, I leave for New York right away. I need to write my talk for Laracon. I I'm probably behind on Kayako support already.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:You know, I haven't talked to John all day. He's for him, 11:30 is probably, like, I never know time zones. Right? You're in central.
Jon:So, like Yeah. It's like 1:30.
Justin:Yeah. It's 1:30. I'm like, John's whole day's gone. This whole day is messed up. You know?
Justin:But we the again, we we're doing this because we don't want to live a conventional life. Right. And so there's, there should also be this feeling. Yeah. I, of just creating space for life.
Justin:And, the more I talk about this out loud, the more it feels like in order for one thing we're gonna have to do to get create more space for our lives is to get someone to do support because Yeah. It is kind of the constant thing that, you know, even if I'm in New York next week, and then if you join me are you gonna join me, by the way?
Jon:Thinking about yeah. Thinking about it. I should
Justin:If if you join me, we'll both be in New York, and it you know, I'm going to be in meetings. I'm I there's just gonna be large stretches of time where I can't be drinking from this fire hose Right. That is, you know, all of our incoming. So I think, yeah, that's something we're gonna have to think about is, you know, again, the the base camp folks always say higher when you're when it's painful. And it feels like it is getting to be painful.
Justin:And, I think we could start who somebody was telling me on Twitter that they started it was a listener to the show. They said they started by just hiring folks on an hourly contract.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And, so that worked well for them because then you don't have to go through the
Jon:Yeah. I mean, that yeah. Ideally, we would find someone who is who is knowledgeable the podcasting space to a certain degree. So there's, like
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Just the the concepts of how things work and how things are connected and just sort of, like, necessary.
Justin:Yeah. Let me tell you about a trick that I, I think will help after this message from ProfitWell. This episode is brought to you by profitwell.com. I wanna tell you about Patrick Campbell, who's the founder of ProfitWell, and then Heaton Shaw, who is, a friend of mine and is kind of one of the he's one of the Silicon Valley gurus. He's he's always, giving out wisdom on Twitter.
Justin:And they are teaming up on a new video series that breaks down what people actually think about your favorite products. So if you're building a product, you're not gonna wanna miss this. You can sign up for early access by going to transistor.fm/profitwell. That's just a redirect I set up that will take you to this type form that they have, for early access. But yeah.
Justin:Thanks to ProfitWell for supporting the show. One idea I had, I I've I was I did this test last week where there's a big podcasting conference in Florida called, Podcast Movement. And, actually and sidebar, maybe we'll come back to this. You and I wanted to talk about flights. And maybe after this, we can talk about that.
Justin:But, you know, for various reasons, it's in August this year. I'm already going traveling a bunch of time zones over from British Columbia to New York. And I didn't wanna go back home and then travel a bunch more time zones back in August again. And so we're not going this year. But I thought it would be interesting if we could find, you know, different companies will sometimes have, evangelists or, you know, representatives or, you know, folks that that can represent them at events.
Justin:And I wanted to explore that idea a little bit. And in Mixpanel, you can filter by geographic region. And, Mixpanel is the analytics software we use. And so I filtered by Florida and just reached out to I think there was probably 10 or 11 people. I wrote them each an individual email.
Justin:I would just check and make sure that they were active customers, that they had a show. And then I reached out to them individually and said, just wondering if you're planning on going to, this conference. And, a few people responded said that they were. And so now I'm like, okay, well maybe I haven't taken the next step, but thought it was like, Okay. Well, are these the kinds of people that we would want representing us?
Justin:And how would that work? You know, there's some thoughts, but a lot of that process is similar to, I think what we would do with our initial customer support hire.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Sorry. Did you say yeah at at, noncommittally? Or
Jon:No. I was just processing it, being it at the same time I answered. Yeah. Question mark.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:There's different types of yes. But as an example, I just searched UK, and that brings up because we'd probably wanna hire someone in a different time zone. That brings up 41 profiles. And I think it's just it's probably just looking for dotuk emails in this case.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:But, I know from past teams I've been on that the best customer support hires have always been, really active customers. And so if there was, you know, someone in the UK or Australia that was already a real, really passionate user, that would be ideal really. Cause they already know the system. They're already, you know, what else would I look for? I'd see if they they've already shared us with their
Jason:friends.
Justin:You know, if they there's a few check boxes there, but if they meet those criteria, then, yeah, that that would be perfect for us. Do you think?
Jon:I think so. I think it'd work. Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, obviously, we'd have to reach out. It depends on what their current, work situation is.
Justin:Yeah. We wouldn't be talking. It definitely wouldn't. It would be probably hourly. And I'd have to talk to a few folks about what is a reasonable kinda hourly wage for something like that, or our hourly freelancing.
Justin:Yeah. Payment. I talked to again, this person I talked to on Twitter gave me some of their numbers. And so, yeah, I think I'll look into that too. Do you wanna talk about flights?
Justin:Or do you wanna talk about let's just quickly talk about flights.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:This is gonna be I some of you folks that listen to this right now are they they they they they wanna hear about, you know, what we're working on, the challenges we're facing, all that kind of stuff. And this is just another kind of this one is more philosophical. So we'll try to keep it short. But again, I one of the things I think we're trying to do is build a company out of our values. And I just read this this New York Times article again about how for most folks, airplane travel is the biggest portion of their carbon footprint.
Justin:I think if you fly from New York to LA, which is essentially what I'm going to do Yeah. You know, right away here, it's that's 20% of your annual carbon footprint just right there.
Jon:Oh, wow. Of of what you should be or what the maximum you should be?
Justin:Well, now you're gonna make me look up the the the article. I'll I'll find it. But let's just say it's a big chunk of, you know, of what most people maybe what the average person is, has or something. And, you know, in tech circles, flying has just become this default privilege.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And I've been trying to challenge myself about, about that. Cause clearly I've had a lot of benefits from flying places. You and I met because we had both taken flights from our respective cities to Portland. I just wanna be mindful about it. You know?
Justin:Have you have you thought about this at all? What what I have.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, yeah, I have. It's, I mean, I think travel is amazing. It it opens up amazing opportunities and for new experiences and and everything. But, yeah, I mean, it you know, you read the news these days, and it's just, like, gloom and doom about the environment.
Jon:And it's Mhmm. You know, some days you're like, well, we're screwed anyway. What's the what's the big deal? Mhmm. And other days, you're like, well, it's you know, it is actually something I can do is fly less or Yeah.
Jon:Let's say eat less meat. Mhmm. I mean, both of those things, flying and, like, meat production is terrible for the environment. So it's really it's really no longer something you can ignore.
Justin:Well and, I mean, clearly, there is part of me that would just love to ignore it. Yeah.
Jon:And a lot of people do Yeah. Or just don't think about it very often.
Justin:I've got the article in front of me now. So take one round trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20% of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year. If you're like most people, flying may be a large portion of your carbon footprint. Overall, the aviation industry accounts for 11% of all transportation related emissions in the US, and flying is going up. More and more people are flying.
Justin:And there's this other piece to this that again is difficult to talk about. And I'm sure some folks are going to roll their eyes when we talk about it. But this idea that, yes, travel is better. Travel will give you more opportunities. It will increase your surface area of luck.
Justin:It'll increase the the number of people you meet and the number of people that know you. It's how a lot of deals get made. Even in this world of zoom and Skype and everything. Right? Yep.
Justin:But it is also a, it could be viewed as something that a privileged class gets to do at the expense of other folks.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, yeah, that's definitely something to keep in mind. I mean, most of most of, I would say, the carbon emissions in the world are are being out outputted. Is that a word?
Jon:Outputted Yeah. By wealthier countries, wealthier people, and at the expense of Mhmm. These places that aren't aren't emitting as much, greenhouse gases. So it's, yeah, it's and and they're the ones that are gonna see the effects first.
Justin:That's right.
Jon:So yeah.
Justin:It's And, again, it's it's hard to think about this stuff because it's not comfortable because it it really does kind of bring out my privilege. There's this great, episode of Spark CBC, CBC Radio here, where they talked about this. I'll put it in the show notes as well. And this this gal, Mel Gregg, she works for Intel. But she's written this book that kind of centers on this topic.
Justin:I think it's called counterproductive. I I I I'd like to read it because she's really pushing a lot of these ideas that there's this class of people that have emerged, many of whom work in the tech industry. And we just kind of go about our day in a way that benefits us, but has negative consequences, or has at least a relationship to the rest of the world that maybe we never
Jon:Right.
Justin:Think about. I think we could probably leave it there. I just bring this up because you and I are mashing our values together in the in this company. And, I mean, one thing is it was at least somewhat it was nice that we were talking about this offline, and we seem to be somewhat aligned on this because I think it would be if all of a sudden I, for example, had a really strong opinions about one way, but you were like, no, Justin. We're gonna fly 30 times a year.
Justin:That would have been tricky.
Jon:It would. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's there's I think there's there are things we can do to offset some of this. Mhmm.
Jon:We're using Amazon Cloud Services. Right? And that those obviously use electricity. Mhmm. I don't think Amazon is necessarily as committed as, let's say, Apple as far as, you know, their data centers being green.
Jon:Mhmm. But, you know, in Chicago, like, personally, we have the option here to choose a different electric provider that is, I think, wind powered. Mhmm. And we can pay them directly. We, as a company, we could sign up for something like 1% for the planet.
Jon:Mhmm. Which is an organization that you basically pledge 1% of your your, revenue to these environmental organizations.
Justin:Wow. That would be interesting because that's I've been in such, you know, since 2016, I've really been in self sustaining mode.
Jon:Uh-huh.
Justin:I've been pretty self focused in a lot of ways. And so to actually put my money where my mouth is and do that
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:That would be an interesting step for sure. Yeah. I mean, you
Jon:know, there's the pessimistic side of of me that's, like, wow. 1 person or 2 people, they're not gonna make a difference.
Justin:But Yeah.
Jon:I mean, large largely, this stuff does have to be driven by, I think, governments around the world, which in the US is failing miserably at that. But Mhmm. Hopefully, it changes soon.
Justin:Yeah. I I mean, the the the thing I keep coming back to on this stuff is that Seth Godin quote, people like us do things like this. And I just remember being in the eighties. And for whatever reason, society all just decided people like us care about the ozone. And Mhmm.
Justin:We really cared. Like, we we rallied together and and solved a big problem, that could have easily kind of disrupt gone into factions of, you know, split into this group like, no. The ozone's not real. Fake news.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But it it worked. Now there was damage done. Apparently, there's a huge hole over our friends in Australia, and that that was caused in North America and is now it shifted over there. And now I think their rates of skin cancer are really high. But we at least, you know, solved the problem.
Justin:So, anyway, I think it's interesting for a few things. We'll we'll keep, Yeah. We'll keep talking about that.
Jon:Anybody anybody has any good ideas for us, let us know.
Justin:Yeah. Oh, and I I think the other thing that was interesting to me was just thinking, we can run this company however we want, and that means we can find creative solutions to things that may have just become the default for other companies. Like, of course, Justin and John have to go to Podcast Movement. Well, maybe we don't. Maybe if it's in Florida, we find a really passionate customer and ask them to be our representative.
Justin:That is an option. Or maybe we only go when it's a short flight. You know, like, next year, it's gonna be somewhere different. We we have choices. And when you are the head of the company, even if it's a company of 2, you do that responsibility is is squarely on us on deciding what do we value, and then what are we actually going to do about it?
Jon:Right. Do you
Justin:want to talk a little bit about what you've been working on? I know you've, I think it might be interesting just to talk a little bit about, like, there's been some infrastructure tweaks you've been, is there any of that you wanna discuss publicly?
Jon:Yeah. I could.
Justin:Okay. So yeah. Why why don't you tell tell us a little bit about, you know, kinda what you're working on and maybe some of the struggles you're having there?
Jon:Yeah. The biggest I think the biggest thing was we a while well, a couple weeks maybe ago, we moved over our image hosting to use a different CDN. So we're using instead of s 3, we're gonna use, Backblaze or this service called b 2 by Backblaze, which is a little bit, I guess, less expensive, but also, works really well with Cloudflare. Mhmm. As a CDN.
Jon:So having switched that over, I noticed that we were getting some errors popping up with people uploading images Mhmm. From our site directly to to Backblaze, which would just, like, throw an error, and people would get would see an error screen and not really, I think, know what's going on. Mhmm. And so I did a little research, and, like, it's a problem that Backblaze knows about and is, like they don't really see it as a problem necessarily. They're just like, well, you should set your thing up to, like, retry a couple times.
Jon:It's like this this service is too busy error that pops up, right, if if you're just, like, throwing images at their service.
Justin:Gotcha.
Jon:And it really only happens when you upload. Like, the the actual, you know, reading the image back and displaying it on the browser is totally fine. But Weird.
Justin:I I don't I don't I don't like this at all.
Jon:It is weird. It is weird.
Justin:So the idea is, like, you have to just keep kicking the machine until it behaves?
Jon:Sort of. Yeah. Sort of. Trying to I'm trying to get to the bottom of, like, their explanation and why it is an okay thing. But Yeah.
Jon:And s 3 It's just it's just that their infrastructure is set up a lot differently than s 3.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:So I had to sort of figure out a way for us to let people upload directly to s 3, but then have it basically mirrored over to Backblaze. Mhmm. Mhmm. Which works well. It led me to learning something new, which is fun, which was using, AWS Lambda functions
Justin:Okay.
Jon:Which is this kind of interesting service where it's like, serverless code, they call it. Yeah. You basically are uploading code to the cloud that runs when something specific happens. Right? So in this case, it's this little bit of Ruby code that will run every time something is added to an s three bucket.
Jon:Mhmm. So it some and some image is added to an s three bucket. It kicks off this event that says, hey. Run this code. It passes the information from s 3 to this code and does a thing.
Jon:Basically, it's just copying a file from s 3 to back place in the background. Right? So it doesn't, slow down the application. Mhmm. Which, you know, thinking about it more is sort of annoying that I even have to think about doing that.
Jon:But Yeah. On the other hand, like, I did end up learning something new, which could be useful Yeah. Something else down the road. So
Justin:Yeah. A a lot of I think a lot of what we are and going to end up doing because we have so many different assets, like media assets. This is gonna be a lot of our work is just kind of juggling these things and figuring out the best way to store and deliver those assets.
Jon:Yeah. Right. I mean, you know, it's, the bandwidth adds up. It gets expensive, and you're trying to sort of, juggle performance with cost Mhmm. Reliability, you know, backups of of certain things that are important.
Jon:Yeah. And so, yeah, I I don't think it's ultimately, like, a bad thing that I had to do this. But
Justin:And, just briefly before we end the show, you also had to do some work for Apple's new categories. Do you wanna talk about that?
Jon:Yeah. I do. Yeah. So, this will we should roll this out today or sometime in a couple days. But Apple announced a new list of updated categories for podcasts.
Jon:And on the one hand, it's a little weird that they're the ones sort of dictating what the major categories are for podcasting, but on the other hand, they did kind of invent the thing. So they revised their list. They added some new top level categories, like, I think, history and true crime, and another one that I'm forgetting, but and then they sort of reorganized, added a bunch of subcategories, moved some subcategories around, or removed a few subcategories that were, like, duplicates are no longer really relevant. Mhmm. And so what we had to do was was implement this new list of categories, but also remap, like, update our customer's podcast to a newer category if they're using one that was either renamed or removed.
Jon:Yeah. So we'll run that and update people's shows accordingly.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:And then if we're gonna send out a newsletter kind of letting people know to to sort of review their review their categories. They might wanna change it to a new category that didn't exist before that's more accurate.
Justin:Yeah. I the I mean, on one hand, I'm glad they're doing something. They they are kind of the, they own the spec in some ways. Right? And so everyone just kind of waits for them to add new things to the spec.
Justin:And so I'm glad they're doing something. I think the rollout was a little bit weird.
Jon:It was a little they didn't really communicate it really well as far as, like, when it's happening, what we need what we need to do to move categories is very it was just like, here's a list. Sometime in the summer, it's gonna happen.
Justin:Yeah. So we're glad it's happening. I'll I'll be emailing our customers about all these changes. And, again, part of it's exciting. People have been waiting for new categories for a long time.
Justin:And so, I'm glad that they're doing it. But, yeah, it it just means for us, there's all this kind of work that we download from these bigger companies, Spotify, Apple, Google. They introduce specs, and then we need to comply. And, I guess that's just our life. Yep.
Justin:Cool. Well, I have I have to jump on another call right now. And so I think we should probably, yeah, just close this one out. Again, if you folks are in New York and you're in the podcast industry, let me know. I'm I'm gonna get to hang out with, David Zohrab from Charitable, which is great.
Justin:I got a meeting booked with him, hoping to hang out with Bill, who's at Spotify now. But, yeah, I'd love to meet with you if you're in New York, and you're in podcasting. This might be my last flight ever. So grab grab your chance while you got it. John, why don't you go through our Patreons?
Jon:Alright. We have yeah. Thanks to everyone, to support us on Patreon here, making this possible. We have Colin Gray, from alitu.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Miguel Peter Rafita, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Corey Hanes, Michael Sittver, who lives in Chicago and emailed me
Justin:Oh, sweet.
Jon:Which was interesting about, you know, letting congratulating me on, leaving my job.
Justin:Yeah. Sweet. That's awesome.
Jon:Yeah. Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, my brother.
Justin:Danbudda.com.
Jon:Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Giunta.
Justin:Junta.com. What is Dave Junta's website? I think it's Might
Jon:it might just be his name or something. Yeah.
Justin:I think it's just let's see here. He's djunta on Twitter. Oh, he doesn't have a website listed there. Oh. Man, he he looks so he looks so smart.
Jon:He's a smart guy.
Justin:His photo, it just it just communicates, like, he could be at Oxford or something. And who else? Oh, Kyle Fox at get rewardful.
Jon:Yep. And our sponsors this week, ProfitWell and Redash.
Justin:Beauty. We will see you folks next week.
