The problem with podcasts
Hey, folks. Justin Jackson here. Before we get into the episode, a heads up. My audio in this episode is not very good. We were broadcasting live, and the audio that got saved from that session did not save a high quality version.
Justin:So I apologize for that. We're gonna fix it for next time. Let's get in to the show.
Jon:Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm and spots dotfm. We should keep mentioning that too, I guess.
Jon:We should. We should. One day, we'll build it.
Justin:One day, we'll build it. You and I just had a nice chat offline, and, I think we should jump right into the topic. I'll set it up as some with some background. Part of our customer value prop feels weird even saying that, but people ask us for that all the time. You know, one of the things we said we wanted to do is Transistor helps brands build their audience through podcasting.
Justin:Do you think that's still true? Like, is that how do you feel about that right now?
Jon:Not really. I think that's where we wanna go. I don't think we're necessarily doing that. I mean, we have the tools for you to publish it. I don't think we necessarily have the tools or are giving people the tools to increase their audience necessarily without without our help, I guess.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:I would agree with that.
Jon:And that's a tough that's tough. I mean, it's that's that's what you think too?
Justin:Well, I think that's, yeah, I think that's where we wanna go. I think that is our focus, and, you know, that's what we're kinda betting on. One reason I I I keep trying to define that is because I feel like we need to know who this is for and how it helps them. And this kinda goes actually back to that that post I I was writing about, I was talking about earlier. I just published this to my newsletter.
Justin:It's called, why many products struggle and only a few succeed. We'll have it in the show notes. Justinjackson.ca/pentup, all one word. But the the whole idea of the post is came from reading this newsletter, this podcast newsletter by Nick Quah, I think his name is. And he has this line that's just drilled into my head.
Justin:I have this feeling that everybody's drilling for oil in the same spot because some other guy found oil there. And that question I mean, that statement freaks me out. Right? It's it's, like, really scary because I don't want us to be a brand that's just drilling for oil where everyone else did.
Jon:Right. Yeah. I mean, I I think we've seen that before in other, other segments of, I guess, the tech industry or SaaS or whatever you wanna call it. Online music streaming, comes to mind. I mean, there's project management tools, certainly.
Jon:There's still a million of those. Although, we just discovered one at at Black Box and Cards that I didn't know was around, and it's amazing.
Justin:Are you gonna switch?
Jon:We did. Yeah. We we were using Pivotal task management mostly, but, it's called Clubhouse.
Justin:Okay.
Jon:Clubhouse.i0. Friend recommended it. I it seems new, but it's like it does so much and is so fully featured that I it's hard to imagine that it hasn't been around for years, but it's just like it's like if you put Pivotal and Trello together and then add it on a bunch of other awesome stuff. It's really good. That one stands out, and it it kind of they were also drilling for oil in the same spot, but they I mean, they're doing a really good job, but, also, I didn't know about them.
Jon:So, you know, a friend recommended it, and I probably would not have found out about it otherwise. But, like, they're doing it slightly differently and better, so the incentive to switch is there. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. There's there's obviously a bunch of different dynamics that have to happen for a product to be successful.
Jon:And Yeah.
Justin:I mean, even for them, they're going to need to eventually capture enough of the market that they can it's almost like you always have to own the market. You have to be the thing that people think about where in that particular niche, you know, that's what people think
Jon:of.
Justin:And so Yep. Maybe Clubhouse will become what people think of once they've tried everything else. They're like, okay. You know, I tried Trello. I tried Basecamp.
Justin:Didn't work. And now there's this one thing we know works similar to what happened with Slack, I think. The for Yeah. Like, were you guys using other things before Slack?
Jon:We used when I started at cards, that was, what, 3, 4 years ago. We they were using, I wanna say Bitbucket, but that's GitHub. That's a GitHub thing. The one that's owned by Atlassian, I think, HipChat.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Yep. Yeah. I had used Slack with, some other personal stuff. It was still really new, but, yeah, they were using HipChat and then switched to Slack and never looked back.
Justin:And do you remember why they switched?
Jon:I think HipChat just it wasn't doing anything new, and, like, everybody was using Slack.
Justin:It's see, this is why do people switch? What what makes one thing better than me?
Jon:I I don't I don't really remember why, but, it it was the new thing. I mean, it was hip chat would have worked fine. I mean, it's a chat room Yeah. With files that did most everything the same, just not didn't have all the integrations, didn't there was motivation there somewhere.
Justin:Well and, see, sometimes the new thing lasts, and sometimes it doesn't.
Jon:Right.
Justin:Like, sometimes, like, Google Plus is the new social network, but everyone flocked to it, but it didn't stick. Right?
Jon:Right.
Justin:And there's actually I I I've been meaning to watch, watch, read this book, Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday. He spoke in Chicago when I was there. And I'm trying to find this one line, but we're basically, one of their points is that humans tend to use what other humans are using or humans tend to do what other people are doing. So if it feels like everybody is using Slack, that's almost sometimes enough motivation to switching. Like, you don't you don't wanna be the loser that's not using Slack.
Justin:Right?
Jon:But it's not like people are using it and hating it. They're recommending it, and it's it's personal recommendations go a long way for anything.
Justin:Yeah. Word-of-mouth. Exactly. This is actually, this is exactly kinda hitting on what I wanna talk about today, which is and it's a big point in Ryan's book that ultimately, the only thing that matters with anything is word-of-mouth.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And how do you generate word-of-mouth? And I you know, like, I think if we think about Slack, like, if Slack if everyone had switched and it sucked, I think people would have been like, okay. Well, I'm not gonna use that anymore. But it became one of these apps. And actually, I think one of the reasons it succeeded was it was just more fun than HipChat, but it became something folks would talk about in a coffee shop.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it was also free to sign up and start a room, and then you can invite your friends for free. So it just spreads. It's like, I guess, Cards Against Humanity is kind of an example, but that's it's a physical product, but you get a group of people together in a room, 8 people, and one of them has the game. In the early days, if everyone enjoyed it, everyone in that room's gonna go buy it.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:And then it'll just spread and they'll they'll have a one of those people will have a party with 7 other people who don't have it. Most of them will go buy it. Yeah. That's where I mean, it's it's word-of-mouth, and it's I don't know how that translates into the podcast market. I guess the good thing about podcasters is that they talk a lot.
Justin:Yeah. That's right. That's right. Well and I think as we're exploring this question so just going back a step here. I open this up by saying, you know, what we're gonna talk about today is this value prop that we said we're gonna give our customers.
Justin:Transistor helps brands grow their audience through podcasting. So, one of the things we've kind of aligned ourself around is helping our users increase the number of downloads they get every month. Mhmm. And so if I log in to our account, for our show, we you know, we're that's one of the things we're looking at is, do we do we get new subscribers every month? Right?
Justin:And I'm looking a lot at, let me just click through here so I can remind myself. So right now, we're at 1200 subscribers. Transistor, one of the things it does for you is it it helps estimate how many podcast subscribers do you have? And, you know, I wanna see. Is that number increasing?
Justin:I wanna see. Do are we getting more downloads? Right? And so last month in July, we did more downloads than we did in June, and that's encouraging to us. And we know that that's the same kind of feeling our audience wants.
Justin:They want they want more listeners. Right?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so this means we have to figure out new and novel ways to promote other people's shows. And, you know, that could mean features like this new YouTube thing you just built. You wanna talk a little bit about that that
Jon:Yeah. So I we had a how did that even start? I think we had a customer who was like, hey. I just I just posted, I turned my audio file into a YouTube video and uploaded it to YouTube, and my my listeners have been, like, really loving it and thanking me that I do that.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And I know I I've seen this before, and I I knew was Joe?
Justin:Joe. Yeah.
Jon:Joe Work Joe Workman? And so I knew that Google had an API for YouTube. I had never really used it. I think I used it once to, like, read information from it but never create the YouTube video. So, I didn't go that deep yesterday.
Jon:I didn't I actually created a Google account for Transistor so that we can, use OAuth to authorize people to hook their accounts up to transistor.
Justin:Cool.
Jon:But what I did do was use a a command line tool for for Mac and and Linux called ffmpeg
Justin:Oh, yeah. I remember that.
Jon:Which is which is, like, has been around forever. It's open source. It just it can convert so many different files into other audio or video files. It's it's incredible, but the command line interface is a little bit clunky. But, what you can do is take, you know, take your audio file for an episode.
Jon:You can pair it up with either a video or an image that's like a, you know, video resolution image, 720p or whatever it is. Basically, tell FFmpeg to run that image on a loop so it just is a static image in the background and then merges that with your audio file and turns it into, an MP 4 video file Yep. That can then be automatically uploaded to YouTube with their through their API. And so you can title it the title of your episode. You can upload your show notes right to YouTube, probably tag it.
Jon:I'm assuming you just choose the account. Once you connect YouTube to Transistor, you can, choose which account or channel you want to upload it to, and then it'll just do it in the background when your episode publishes. It would be pretty cool. Yeah. I think it'll be nice.
Jon:I mean, YouTube is huge. People watch, listen to a lot of stuff on there.
Justin:And when I asked Joe, I'm like, why are you doing that? Like, why are you uploading, you know, all your podcast episodes to YouTube? He said, well, there I I have tons of people in my audience who already subscribed to my YouTube YouTube channel, and watching a new YouTube video is just part of their routine right now. Right? And so he's like, if I can automatically put a new video in my YouTube stream, then I can reach my audience where they're already at, which is, you know, an advantage for him.
Jon:Yeah. Right. It's it's less work for the audience. Mhmm.
Justin:So we could focus on building more tools like this. Like Right. We could automatically syndicate to SoundCloud. We could automatically we already automatically syndicate to Spotify.
Jon:We can auto auto tweet Facebook. Maybe Oh,
Justin:yeah. You can
Jon:you can auto
Justin:Yeah. I mean, that's a feature I I think we should definitely build is as soon as you publish an episode, Transistor will automatically create a tweet, Facebook update, LinkedIn update. You're gonna have to create a LinkedIn account for that, John.
Jon:Oh, I closed mine down years ago.
Justin:So I'm Yeah. There's I mean, that would those are cool features for sure.
Jon:There's a lot of apps in the social media space that do that for you, but not really with a podcast focus. I'm thinking of things like, Sprout Social, which is in Chicago. There's all these platforms that sort of, like, let you manage your social accounts from one place, which is you know, I don't think we would build anything like that, but at least having you broadcast publish once, broadcast everywhere type of thing.
Justin:Right. Yeah. And, I mean, it's another opportunity for integration for we could integrate with buffer and Sprout Social and MeetEdgar and all these other apps. But I think there's still one big problem. There's an elephant in the room, and I think we're going to have to help folks deal with it first.
Justin:And this is not this is hard for me to say even. But before you get distribution for that thing you're making, whether it's a product or a podcast or a blog post, or it doesn't really matter what it is, Before you try to amplify it and get it into a bigger audience's hands, you need to make sure that what you've created is good. Yeah. And I'm most podcasts are not that good.
Jon:No. I mean, you know, the oh, that old what's that old saying? Content is king. So you have to you have to still create compelling content that's well spoken and or well written. Or
Justin:I mean, yeah. That's that's just the that's the low watermark.
Jon:Yeah. So that sounds good, that, you know, is edited is yeah. Yeah. It's And
Justin:at the end of the day, you could have all of that. It could be great audio quality. It could be edited well. It could be, you know, all but if it's not entertaining consistently so Right. You know, some shows hit it big out of the gates, and we've seen this because we can see, you know, all the stats on the back end of Transistor.
Justin:We care about our customers' stats. We want them to be reaching a bigger audience. And one thing I've seen, a pattern I've seen, is some shows just hit it really big out of the gates, but the concept just doesn't have legs. It's it's not enough to make people want to, you know, listen all the time. I I I found this especially with daily shows.
Justin:Again, folks, if you're listening at home, I'm gonna say all sorts of things that are my opinion. They're not necessarily John's. They're not necessarily transistors, and you're not gonna like some of them. I I'm just I'm just saying what I think. But I think unless people are begging you for a daily show, I think a daily show is very difficult to maintain over a long period of time because from what I've seen, daily shows just accumulate in people's podcatchers.
Jon:And if Yeah.
Justin:And if if it's the idea is it's a quick 5 minute or whatever, I I don't think people are going to eventually, people get tired of them. And they they create such a backlog that they're like, okay. Whatever. I'm just gonna unsubscribe, and I'm done.
Jon:Yeah. I think there's 2 there's 2 different types of daily ones. I I feel like there's the ones that are time sensitive and and have to do with the previous day's events, and then there's the evergreen ones, like, let's say, the good news podcast is sort of a good example. They're they don't really deal with topics that are timely. It's just, like, interesting stuff, and it's 5 minutes, and you can catch up on the week's episodes in 25 minutes Yeah.
Jon:You know, on in the car or, like, at home on a Saturday morning. Right? You can play the whole week.
Justin:Yes. And so, obviously, like like, The Daily if you look at The Daily, I think that's New York Times. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, it's super popular.
Jon:I can't I can't listen. I can't keep up with it. Yeah. I I I subscribe, and I listen once a week. And then I'm, like, have so many other shows to listen to, and I don't have a commute to work.
Jon:So I don't have that downtime to listen.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. They get it gets backed up.
Justin:I was gonna tweet the other day. So I was like, I rarely have to drive anymore, but sometimes it's just nice to go for a drive to listen to some podcast.
Jon:Yeah. Or, like, go on a 5 hour plane flight.
Justin:Yeah. Like, I I need to I need to jump on a plane and go somewhere.
Jon:It used to be for me. I need to get on a plane so I can get work done because there's no Wi Fi. Yeah. But that that's they're slowly going away.
Justin:Now you just wanna get to podcast inbox 0 or whatever.
Jon:Yeah. I don't I don't I don't personally stress out about it too much, but I know that some people do. Yeah. But, yeah, you're competing for people's attention in a really crowded space. There's what iTunes says there's, like, 500,000 shows on iTunes, which I'm sure most of them are bad.
Jon:I mean, first of all, like, who is making all these and, also, where are they hosted? Because, like, does does Libsyn have 200,000 of those? Like, I don't they've been around the longest probably. They might.
Justin:They probably do. They probably have. Do. Most of those. Yeah.
Justin:By the way, folks, we're trying an experiment today that John did not agree to, which is we're we're broadcasting live right now on YouTube and Twitch. For some reason, Periscope didn't work. But there's a few people. There's actually people showing up right now.
Jon:Yeah. This this might void our agreement.
Justin:Yeah. This this might void our partnership agreement.
Jon:It it might.
Justin:But one person, Brian said, John, you need a commute.
Jon:I don't need a commute.
Justin:Anyway, if you're if you're watching live right now, I would love to know what you think about what we're talking about so far because this is a great opportunity for you to actually give us some live feedback. What shows you listen to? What makes you stop listening to a podcast? If you're not listening live, please tweet us, at John Buddha, at m I Justin, or at transistor FM. And let us know, like, how does this resonate with you?
Justin:Is this make you, you know, when you're when you're picking podcasts, when you're listening to podcasts, what makes you stop listening? And what shows do you get tired of? What makes you, you know, get tired of a show? And I think there's something about all that that is, interesting to us right now because we're trying to figure out how to, you know, help people who are making shows. And I think I just think a lot of folks are making shows that people aren't listening to.
Justin:And Yeah.
Jon:I think so.
Justin:And it makes me sad. I think there's I don't know. It could be different. And so the question I wanna ask, and we're probably not going to be able to figure this out this episode, is how can we help people make better podcasts? And maybe to start with, let's just keep going on this thread, which is patterns we've noticed so far that don't seem to be working.
Justin:So going back to Nick's quote, which is so great, I have this feeling that everybody is drilling for oil in the same spot. Yeah. Because some other guy found oil there already. So they listen to well, the big one is every show sounds like This American Life now.
Jon:Probably probably they'll probably start signing like The Daily soon or something like Cereal. There are people who start doing more of those.
Justin:Yes. There's something about this. With 550,000 shows to choose from, what's going to make this next show that someone starts work? Nick has 2 he thinks makers have 2 options. Number 1, build something that does the same thing for the same audience but does it better.
Justin:You know, maybe The Washington Post I think The Washington Post is doing this. They're starting a show to compete with The Daily. Okay. But Nick says, if you're gonna do this, you better bring it. Like, you really better be way better than what else is already out there.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:Or option 2, identify and pursue a pocket of pent up demand that is yet to be unleashed. So instead of creating the same show that everyone else is creating or the same form using the same format everyone else is using or having the same sorry. What's that guy's name from This American Life? Hi. This is this is, where I think I think we just failed as
Jon:man. It's on the tip of my tongue.
Justin:This American Life, what's that guy's name? Everyone wants to be him. I can't think of it either. Ira Glass.
Jon:Ira Glass.
Justin:There we go. Brian in on Twitch had it before I could even Google for it. Ira Glass, everybody sounds like him now. Right? Yeah.
Justin:And instead of going out and finding a new pocket of oil, a new, you know, digging deep for the gold.
Jon:A new a new energy source.
Justin:Yes. A new energy source. Tirelessly. They're they're just trying to do the same thing that everyone else is doing. There's gotta be tips we can give people that I think at least could help them, you know, create shows that are unique.
Justin:And so one thing I mentioned is I think, I think most people should not be doing daily shows. That's that's one tip. I think daily shows are really difficult to do from talking to people, from actually like, I'll go into a coffee shop, and I'll say, show me your podcast player. And when I people show me their podcast player, there's a lot of daily shows that are just built up there.
Jon:That's a tough one. I I you almost wanna make it so that your show, your your episode that comes out is like an event for people. So I I've been listening to the wilderness recently, which is, a show from the Pod Save America guys or one of them, and it deals with, like, the history and history and history, current, and future of the Democratic Party in America, but it comes out every Monday. So they released, like, 4 episodes upfront that he had done, like, 8 months of work on. Yep.
Jon:So this is, like, intense. Like, he researched. He interviewed. And then every Monday, there's a new one, and, like, I look forward to that. Like, oh, it's Monday.
Jon:I can listen to the next episode in this, like, story they're telling about the Democratic Party.
Justin:Yeah. You want the one thing in in the old, in my improv days and even my public speaking days, I used to have this mentor that would say, the best thing you can do is leave them wanting more. Yeah. Like, if you if you, like, have them in the pocket and, you know, in a you're doing a talk or something and you've just got it in the pocket and you know that they're enjoying it. You know that they're just hungry for it.
Justin:And you leave it just like you want you've got maybe 10% more to say, and that's where you end it because Yeah. You want them to check out the next talk. You want them Yeah.
Jon:I mean, I mean, that's yeah. That's that's modern television.
Justin:Yes. That's right.
Jon:It's I think it's good it's good storytelling. I don't know. Maybe it's manipulative in a way, but it is good storytelling and and ways to good wood good ways to build an audience.
Justin:Well, I mean, I I I now I gotta defend whether or not this is manipulative.
Jon:Maybe not me I don't know. Not in a bad way, really. I mean, it's it's like you're getting people addicted to us.
Justin:Yeah. I mean, that's an entirely different discussion, I think, is I I think another thing is I think I think not all podcasts should last forever. Like, there's been so many shows that I really enjoyed for a season, and they should've just ended it and done something new with a new concept because I would've followed that host somewhere else. In fact, I think more shows with popular feeds should consider starting new shows in that feed. So, you know, let's say you build it at Lickas, for example.
Justin:We've built it ourselves up to a what it was, a 1200, 1200 subscribers on build your SaaS. I don't know if I wanna do this show forever.
Jon:Right. I mean, at some point, we have built the SaaS. And then I mean, it's never gonna be done, but it's there's only so many things you can talk about.
Justin:At some point, like, are people gonna wanna hear about, okay. What'd you do today? Well, I fixed a few bugs. I answered 500 support tickets.
Jon:Right.
Justin:Like, it it's not entertaining, and we could have this feeling of, like, well, this is just what we do. We just every you know, all the time, we we go and listen to I mean, we go and tell people about what we did because that's what we do. We create the Build Your SaaS podcast. And I'm not I'm not even talking about, like, the Build Your SaaS podcast. Like, that's not interesting either.
Justin:But, to be entertained. And, you know, maybe even right now, maybe we need to stop doing this show.
Jon:Yeah. We yeah. We could do a season 2 that's something else.
Justin:Yeah. And but but my point is we don't even have to call it build your sass. Like, we we can take the same feed and say, create a new title, new show art, everything, and all of a sudden, it's a new adventure. It's a new season, but a totally different show. And maybe, you know, instead of just you and I talking, every week, we, you know, we say, okay.
Justin:This week, we've got Jason Fried on the show. We're gonna argue with him for 30 minutes.
Jon:Yeah. Or we bring on, hosts of shows that we host, like, podcast hosts, and we talk about we still are talking about podcasting, but in a different different topic.
Justin:Mhmm. Exactly. So I think that's something people should consider is that you don't have to do the same concept indefinitely. Because think again, just think about your own experience. Like, okay.
Justin:Here's a good example. One of my favorite shows, Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin have some of the best cohost chemistry I've ever heard. They have a show called Back to Work. I was a huge fan of the show when I was commuting. Like, this was the show that that took me through the doldrums of driving into Edmonton.
Justin:Their chemistry is unbelievable. They've got all these inside jokes. They're just really they're great together. But the show is supposed to be about productivity, and it's almost like it's time for them to do something new. Try and I think I think their show I think their episodes are about an hour long.
Justin:Every once in a while, like, every couple months, I'll be like, okay. What's what's going on with Back to Work? But I don't listen every week like I used to because it's like, it just seems old and tired.
Jon:Yeah. I can see that. I mean, it's, you know yeah. Same with, like, a TV show that's gone on too long.
Justin:Yeah. But if they decided to do a like, just even just with the same feed, like, And And instead of it being, like, I'm looking at their website right now, an hour and 11 minutes long, an hour and 21 minutes long, I just can't do those shows anymore. Yeah.
Jon:It's hard.
Justin:But if it's a 20 minute or a 30 minute show, I might listen again.
Jon:Yeah. But on a different different topic with the same chemistry.
Justin:That's right. Different topic, same chemistry. That's, yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Jon:So on that note, maybe a side note to the hour long podcast, maybe something that we can suggest to people is to have to talk slower but for the same amount of time. So when people like me listen to it at 2 times speed, it sounds okay.
Justin:Are you talking to to me specifically right now? No.
Jon:No. No. Not you. No. There's a lot of other hosts that talk pretty quick, and then
Justin:I like this new challenge.
Jon:Crank it up to almost up to 2 x speed.
Justin:John is getting sassy. This our new our new podcast is called John is Getting Sassy. Yeah. No. I yeah.
Justin:I I think trying new things and actually getting real feedback from real listeners and not being afraid of them telling you what they think. Mhmm. You know, I I ask folks all the time what they think about the show. And, you know, one thing that has sometimes been difficult is, Justin, you can talk forever. And if you don't give John space to speak, it just doesn't happen.
Justin:And so that was good critical feedback, and we're I'm working on it.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Or or I think what
Jon:I think another one of those was, like, give John space to talk about technologies topics and things like that.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think
Jon:it was something like that.
Justin:Yeah. No. No. There's a lot of technical people that listen to the show.
Jon:It's obviously easier for me to talk about that than it is marketing or
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So we we, like, we want that feedback.
Justin:And for example, we could change our show so that it's, like, 15 minutes of tech talk and 15 minutes of business talk, and that's just the format every week. Right? We could change our show so that one episode, we just talk about a tech topic and it the show description says, you know, Tech Talk Tuesday. And that's, you know, that's like John's episode to dive in deep. And maybe I'm not even on that show.
Justin:Maybe you're just talking to somebody about scaling rails.
Jon:Yeah. Right. Yeah. I have someone else on talking about technology. Yeah.
Justin:So I I think people can't be scared to mess with the format and try new things. And, you know, you get immediate feedback. I had one person at a conference say, I have this podcast called Mega Maker, and he's like, man, I love your show, but the intro music goes on too long. So the intro music goes, and I go, in this episode, I talk about something. Welcome to Mega Maker.
Justin:And then there's this big, long, heavy metal guitar riff. And he's like, just get rid of that heavy metal guitar riff. I'm like, okay. I'll try it out. Tried it out, and I got, like, a torrent of tweets of people going, what the hell, man?
Justin:Why'd you take And, like, some this I love this image. Some people say, like, they're that. They were listening on their earphones, and they've got their hand like, they do the air guitar, and they've got their hand ready for the next big riff, and then it didn't come. And they're, like, so distracted. So, you know, yeah.
Justin:It's okay to try things and then get the feedback and, you know, eventually gonna make a decision.
Jon:As far as what to talk about, how to do it, I mean, there's this American Life. There's a reason it's popular is because it's well done, and there's a reason it's copied is because that format works.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:But I think within that space, there's room to make it your own.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. You you've how are you gonna compete with This American Life?
Jon:It's a well produced show with good music and and quality, recording equipment, and it's, you know, it it's a lot of work. It's someone's many people's full time job to make that show, so it's I think you can get close on your own. But
Justin:Yeah. And and Brian here in the chat is saying, you know, he well, he say he says it's not the format that works. It's that Ira Grass. Ira Grass. Ira Glass is a trained pro.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so some upstart who's starting their own show on Transistor and they don't have, you know, they just don't have that broadcast training. Why would you go and compete head to head with Ira Glass? Why would you try to dig in his oil well? Why not try to drill where you've got the advantage? Right?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so, you know, one good example might be, remote Ruby, which is a show on transistor remote ruby.transistor.fm. You know, Chris Oliver and Jason Charnes, they know Ruby. And so, they don't sound as good as Ira Glass, but people are interested in their show because they're interested in rails. Right? They have a built in advantage there.
Jon:Right. Just like it's yeah. Like, it's much easier. It would be much easier for me to host a show on my own or lead a show, I think, if it was about rails or about programming than it is for me to lead a show about building a product or marketing a product.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Are you saying are are you trying to break up with me?
Jon:No. No.
Justin:There's actually some other good comments in here in the in the chat here. Dio Glaines, says, for me, podcasts are learning and getting new ideas. Best episodes are the ones that have some sort of well defined topic, and the length for him is also important. So 25 to 30 minutes is ideal. Hour long podcasts are just too long.
Justin:I I I think a lot of folks don't also realize that people are making their decision when they're looking at their phone. Right? Like, they're looking at they're going through all the podcasts they could listen to, and they're like, oh, that one's an hour and 30 minutes. Well, I'll leave that one. Right?
Justin:Oh, this one's 15. Okay. I can I've got 15 minutes. That's how people make their decision. And so the length is important.
Justin:One idea I have for folks is if you are doing a longer show, if you have an hour long interview show, do the hour long interview show, but then make a shortcuts episode or a a hot takes episode sorry, podcast. So take the best, you know, 10 minutes from that show, like, where you really got into it, and just make that a stand alone episode on a different show. So if people wanna listen to the whole interview, they can. But if they just want, like, the real, like, meaty bits, like, here's what Britney Spears has to say about podcast hosting, you know, that that becomes the 10 minute episode. I think this is the second time I brought Britney Spears on.
Jon:Yeah. That seems like an out of date time.
Justin:I don't know what I'm I don't know why I'm doing that. Anyway, I I think that's an idea. You could have an hour long version, a 30 minute version, and a 5 to 10 minute version. Right? And that's all from the same amount of content.
Justin:You're just editing it differently. And Yeah. It becomes a different show each time you mess with the format. By the way, on on Transistor, you can do this really easily because you get unlimited shows. You can create unlimited shows on one account.
Justin:If you look at, like, my account, I've got there's tons of shows in here. And so if you wanted to try a new format, that's something, you know, we allow you to do really easily. I think one thing people do need to think about is if they're if they're if they've really been pushing a show and they're not getting the downloads they want, it might be time to try something different.
Jon:That's true. Yeah. It's it's good to know when to close it up, move on.
Justin:And And in some ways, we were lucky with this show, like, just out of the out of the gates, we had people that were interested. And we were only getting, you know, 20 downloads per episode. I think you and I would be like, okay, we gotta try something else.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Something now, see, now, we've been recording for a while, but something else I wanted to talk about was, you know, again, how do how can we help people make better podcasts? You know, there's this new tool out called Alitu, Alitu, which is, it's an editor that allows you to, like, make podcasts really easily. And I tried it out, and it's interesting. It's basically, like, editing in the browser. Let me see if I can log in to my account here and just so you can, like, define like, you upload your theme music once, for example, and then every time you upload a new episode.
Justin:So I could just, like, take this episode we just recorded and be like, Okay. I'm just going to pull it into Alidu or upload it, and it automatically puts our intro music at the beginning and at the end. And you can just publish it like that if you wanted to. But then, they also have if you wanna edit out pieces, you can do that on the web. And I think this idea is interesting, but I could I also have ideas on how we could do something like this better.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And to me, this is kind of the missing piece. This is a pocket of pent up demand because people need help creating better episodes. I was thinking about an idea that's a mix between these two things. So, yes, give people help with the editing, but allow them to actually record their show in the browser as well. So, for example, imagine you go you log in to a web app.
Justin:You click record new show. You can hear the theme music playing in your in your earbuds. And on the screen, it starts giving you the text for your intro. So ours is, you know, you say, hello. Welcome to Build Your SaaS.
Justin:Well, that appears on the screen so you can start, say, reading it at the right time. Right?
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And then, basically, it gives you a script for the whole show. So this week, I'm talking about this, and it it keeps giving you, what do you call that? Like, a teleprompter
Jon:for Right.
Justin:Here's, you know, this and this. Also making it easy. Like, I think one great show format is having people leave voice messages and then asking you a question and then answering that question in the show. Being able to quickly, like, grab here's a question from a listener. And then in the web interface, it just goes, like, right in there.
Justin:And then they can say, okay. Up next. And the transcription is just going with this. Like, up next, I've got a question from, you know, Eric in Alabama. And then it automatically plays Eric's clip.
Justin:And then you go, Oh, well, that's a great question. Here's my answer to it. You know, so more like kind of like podcast recording and production on the rails. Mhmm.
Jon:It's kind
Justin:of an interesting
Jon:Could be.
Justin:Yeah. Idea, right?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Now, obviously, we're limited in what we can build. But that this is I'm just saying those are the kinds of things we could do. Like, part of the problem, there's so many things to think about when it comes to creating a show. Even for you and I right now, it'd be nice if on screen it said, you're at, you know, 45 minutes. Time to wrap it up.
Justin:Right?
Jon:Yeah. People are gonna start getting bored. So if if you're at this point and you're bored, sorry. But no. It's yeah.
Jon:I mean, the tools are part of it, I think. That's not everything. You can have great tools and still produce a really boring podcast, but I think that goes it kind of segues into the next thing, which is education that we can maybe provide for people, which is how to craft a good show. Like, how do you how do you set up a good narrative? How do you interview people well?
Jon:Because, obviously, there's you know, if you're a writer like, anyone can write, but there are ways to write well. There's ways to write fiction well. There's ways to write nonfiction well, and that stuff just takes, like, tons of practice and education and Mhmm.
Justin:Totally.
Jon:That for radio or podcasting. Yeah. So the 2 the tools that, you know, what what you were talking about could sort of push people in that direction.
Justin:Yeah. But you're right. I mean, this is kind of a a common thing we keep going back to. Like Derek Siver says, you know, don't try to build a big impressive app. Just try to do it manually first.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so one thing we could do is, you know, like, we're broadcasting this live right now. We could do live broadcasts where we just help people produce and record better shows. And we could have guests that really know what they're talking about. We could you know, there's all sorts of ways we could educate people on making better shows. And so, yeah, I think that's that's one option is is just trying to teach people how they can make better shows.
Justin:And then the other idea was some sort of done for you services, which we've thrown around before. Our friend Adam is doing this with Podcast Royale, and he kind of takes that exact approach. He's not just an editing service. He actually, like, helps you create the concept for a show. He, you know, he really helps you craft the whole concept.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And, I mean, we could get into that business. We could, you know, we could do a partnership with someone like Adam. We could you know, there's ideas around that. I also had this idea early on. Part of the problem is, you know, people just not knowing how to craft a good show.
Justin:We could do, like, podcast hosts as a service, as in, like, someone that is good on mic that calls you every week and says, alright, You know, whoever you are, like, let's talk about your business this week, and what do you think about this? And then being kind of the interviewer for the person who wants a show, but, you know, they just want someone to call them up and say, okay. It's time to record and here's what we're talking about. Sounds like a lot of work. But I those are some things I think we should be considering.
Justin:Anyway, let's leave that for now. Folks, if you've got ideas, feel free to reach out to us, all the places I said before. Also, if you're on Breaker or Castbox or any of those apps that allow you to comment, just leave us a comment and I'll try to go in and and answer your questions right in those apps. We already talked about the YouTube integration. Anything else we should talk about, in terms of Transistor?
Jon:I mean, on the topic of integrations, there's a number of integrations that I've been thinking about and maybe, like, just starting to poke around with.
Justin:Okay. Yeah.
Jon:Some of it comes from from, customer customer requests. So the cool thing is is that you have all these services that all have APIs, and they all have, OAuth support. So you can sort of, link up, you know, let's say, Google or Dropbox to Transistor. Transistor then gets some sort of privilege to that account that, you know, you can read or write to it. It's all a fairly common interface.
Jon:Like, each service obviously obviously has their own API, but, you know, you can do things like publish to YouTube. You could do something like hook up your Dropbox account in a particular folder to Transistor so that anytime you drop a file into Dropbox, it automatically adds it to Transistor as an episode an unpublished episode. There's off off off offonic? Off Auphonic. I don't know how to say that.
Jon:It's a it's another podcast service that will I think it allows you to edit your show, but, also, you can easily run it through, like, a sound compressor, I wanna say, or, like, basically, it makes your voice sound better.
Justin:Yeah. It it levels all the audio for you, and it actually does a really good job.
Jon:Yeah. Levels audio. So you can you can build an integration that allows you to hook up your account to transistor so that anytime you upload an episode, I think, to Transistor or maybe Auphonic, it would it would auto level it and basically send it back. What else? Yeah.
Jon:Those those are, like, the 3 big ones I've been looking at right now. So it's it's all around the publishing, like, workflow sort of and and, like, not having not requiring us to build those things from scratch.
Justin:Yes. Yeah. And I actually really like this idea. It's actually one of the reasons I wanted us to build spots outside of Transistor as I've seen so many apps get really big and hairy because they keep trying to add functionality inside those walls. And I think whenever we can, if we can integrate with someone else who's already doing this well.
Justin:For example, that Alitu, I've talked to that that guy. I think his name is Colin. He says as soon as John has an API, an upload API
Jon:Yeah. I think I scheduled a call with him or someone else Okay. Just to go over how we could work together.
Justin:So, I I mean, whenever we have that opportunity, that's gonna be awesome. That's definitely what we should do, especially because we're only 2 people. You know, really, the the majority of the building is on your shoulders. Yeah. So I think that's super interesting.
Justin:Anything else we wanna talk about? Do we wanna talk about this ProfitWell thing?
Jon:Well, we talked about the Stripe dashboard last week, but they don't really send us updates on that, but ProfitWell will send us an email daily almost when it changes. So, like, we got an email yesterday that said you're 578% ahead of your goal. And and which makes it sound like we're just raking in the money, and we can retire and buy a yacht tomorrow, but, obviously, that's not that's not the case. But, anyway, it's a it's a big number. It means a lot of people signed up.
Justin:That's right. Yeah. Do we wanna I think our is our number still live on Indie Hackers?
Jon:Is. Yeah. I don't it is. Yeah.
Justin:Because I was like, I'm wondering if we can just share that number, what we're at right now. It's still pretty low. I think it's fine to Yeah.
Jon:I don't know how I don't know how often that updates.
Justin:Anyway, so we're we're at $1,263 in MRR according to ProfitWell. Up 62% versus July. Is that right?
Jon:Could be. Although, I don't know if that does it take into account people who just signed up for a trial and haven't canceled yet?
Justin:Yes. It takes into effect, like so that growth number that it's giving us right now, it's saying, we're up. Now, see, this thing changes all the time. So right now, we're up 1058% over July, and, 844% versus our goal. I don't know where how does it know what our goal is?
Jon:I don't know. Did we put that in somewhere?
Justin:No. Maybe I put, like maybe it just calculates, like, what we wanted for growth. Oh, I think I put in 10%. And so, yeah. So it's like it it's just saying every time we beat 10%, I think that then, you know, it it it gives us a good goal.
Justin:So, yeah, we launched and so we got a ton more sign ups. And, yeah, now now we're and so and, actually, that's a pretty big deal. We didn't even celebrate this. If we broke a $1,000 in MRR
Jon:Oh, yeah.
Justin:Cheers, man. Did we do that for real?
Jon:We should. Cheers. We should celebrate that. Yeah.
Justin:The the only thing that kinda worries me is that the Stripe the Stripe numbers are different. So let me just go into Stripe here quick because if anyone's listening, Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell, if you're listening, or Patrick McKenzie from Stripe, if you're listening. Yeah. Why is Stripe's numbers different? So, again, actually, I've told a lot of people about this since you mentioned it, John.
Justin:This is actually one clip that got shared quite a bit from our last show, is you saying, hey, folks. Check out the news the news MRR analytics within, within Stripe. But, yeah, the in Stripe, it says we're at $1,059 in MRR. So I'm not sure why those numbers are
Jon:Could be, yeah, I don't know, cancellations that haven't moved over to indie hack indie
Justin:Not indie hackers ProfitWell?
Jon:ProfitWell. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. I haven't even looked at what Indie Hacker says yet. I couldn't I couldn't find it fast enough, because there's, like what is it? Indihackers.com/products/transistor. We had an episode on, you know, being super transparent about our revenue, and that was what we chose.
Justin:Yeah. But if Stripe says we're over a 1,000, then we must be. Yeah. So cheers, man.
Jon:Cheers.
Justin:I'll I'll use this empty coffee cup that Brian has note Brian notices me. I keep drinking out of this, and he's, like, dude, this has been empty for, like, an hour. Bing. Eric says, indie hackers has us at 1.6 k. So Oh.
Justin:I think we just I think we just believe whatever numbers we wanna believe.
Jon:So we're over a 1,000, I think.
Justin:We're over a 1,000. I think we could cheers to that. But, yeah, who knows what we're we're actually at. But, yeah, that's exciting. That's that's a big milestone.
Jon:Cover some bills.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:Cover some costs for the company.
Justin:Oh, you know what we should talk about next week? Little teaser here, folks, is let's talk about all of the feedback we got about the Bootstrapper's paradox.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:Because there's tons of people like Natalie from Wild Bit, Des Trainer from Intercom. They all commented about that episode.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And they have things to tell us. So Oh, that might be a good episode for next week about
Jon:Let's do
Justin:it. SaaS growth and, like, how how fast you should be growing and all that. Cool. This was fun, man.
Jon:Yeah. It was good.
Justin:I kinda liked having the the live comments. It's fun. Thanks to everybody here in Twitch, like, on Twitch and on YouTube. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for watching.
Justin:Listen to our podcasts. Build your sass in your in your, pod catcher. And yeah, for for folks listening to the audio version, we'll see you next Tuesday.
