We have some explaining to do
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 dotfmandspots dotfm and anything else we feel like building. I'm getting I'm getting a lot more sassy in those.
Jon:Physical products? We could build a cabin.
Justin:We do we do have physical products. We have stickers and T shirts.
Jon:That's true.
Justin:And pretty soon, what I think the next thing we should do is, make mic cozies. Is that Is
Jon:that a thing?
Justin:Is that what they call those things that, like, show the logo, like, the the radio logo?
Jon:Oh, I don't know.
Justin:What are those things called?
Jon:Yeah. Right.
Justin:I call them mic cozies. I think that's a better name for it.
Jon:Yeah. That works. Let's do it.
Justin:So before we get too far, we have a very special episode this week. We we we apologize for missing the last 2 weeks. We'll get into why in a second. But before we do anything else, we need to shout out somebody, Kevin Markham. Do you know who Kevin Markham is, John?
Jon:I do know who Kevin Markham is.
Justin:Kevin Markham is very special because he is our 1st Patreon supporter. And we need to give him, as many shout outs as we can this episode because he found our secret Patreon link in our show notes. We didn't really announce it. He just found it and plunked down. I think it's $10 a month.
Justin:Yeah. And the the when we were building this, the, the thing we'd we'd said was, we would give people a shout out if they gave us $10 a month. And, we forgot we promptly forgot to give Kevin a shout out.
Jon:And also and also didn't, yeah, and also didn't record episodes 2 weeks in a row.
Justin:That's right. That's right.
Jon:So we I think we owe Kevin a couple shout outs. Mhmm. And Thanks, Kevin.
Justin:Yes. Thanks so much. We don't normally shout out the you know, your URL, but because Kevin we have abused our relationship with Kevin, I wanna say he's doing data science tutorials@patreon.com/dataschool. So if you're into data science, go check that out. I'm assuming that's like doing stuff in R and other stats languages.
Justin:Could
Jon:I think could be Python.
Justin:I think that's what, I think that's what data scientists do. Real time follow-up, Amy Bauer Bowser Rollins, sorry, says, the they're not called microphone microphone cozies. They are called, microphone flags, but it does that doesn't seem intuitive, she says. So that, there we go. That's what they're called.
Justin:We need to make transistor flags.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Although, on this live video, you can't see this. I can move my our logo so it sits right on top of my microphone. So I there's there's augmented reality flags. That's it. Nice.
Justin:We could sell those. Those are a lot cheaper to make.
Jon:Gotta make it gotta make an app.
Justin:Yeah. Gotta make an app. I think augmented reality was the cool thing about the the Apple, the new Apple Keynote that just happened. They they showed out
Jon:Yeah. I feel like they're building up, they're building up a lot of software in preparation for something else they're gonna do in the next couple of years probably around glasses that don't look like crap.
Justin:Interesting. I
Jon:think I think they're because they have a lot of software. They have developers making stuff and getting used to it, and I think they're gonna probably do something pretty big. Inch? I just obviously, no one knows what. But I
Justin:like this segment. This is, John's future tech predictions.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:New segment, people.
Gavin:We could we could do that sometimes.
Jon:Give me give me a few beers, and I'll just start rattling off my tech theories.
Justin:Yes. I think we should I I had a a pretty, not viral tweet, but a lot of folks responded to this thing where I asked, you know, what trend is just getting started now but will be big in 5 years? Nongaming Twitch streams was 1, which we're doing right now. So we're already ahead of the times. Digital well-being was another one.
Justin:I think that's gonna be big. Yep. Like, mindful applications. My Yeah.
Jon:That's already pretty big.
Justin:Lots of folks saying augmented reality. Yeah. Some really cool remote work actually was another really big one that folks remote work's always kind of been around, but a lot of folks talking about it now. So yeah. Interesting.
Justin:Yeah. I like I like that idea of of, I'll have to figure out a better jingle for it. But so
Jon:we have some other we have some other Patreon shout outs.
Justin:Yeah. So our friend Adam Devander. Adam has been, one of my longtime customers, one of my longtime cheerleaders. I think he's at Zapier now or Zapier, however you wanna say it. Okay.
Justin:Dan Weaver is our other Patreon. Thank you, Dan.
Jon:Yes.
Justin:Yeah. So if you find our secret Patreon link, and you give $10 or more, you will get a shout out on the show. Now we have it in our show notes, which is the best way to make something a habit.
Jon:So what have we been up to lately? What we missed a couple recordings.
Justin:A couple recordings. So I remember why we missed last week, but I don't remember why we missed the week before.
Jon:It was Labor Day in the US and, I believe, Canada.
Justin:That's right. Yeah. This is And
Jon:I was in Michigan hanging out with my family. Yep. You were probably hanging out with your family. Yep. We, didn't end up recording that, yeah, that weekend at all.
Jon:Yeah. And last weekend, obviously, was we were in Portland together for XOXO. Yes. We you brought a microphone. We should have recorded.
Jon:Yes. For whatever reason, we didn't. Yeah. We were tired in the morning. We were just kinda
Justin:That seems to just always happen. It's it's hard to, yeah, it's hard to figure that stuff out. Conferences and events are so much work already that, yeah, it's it's tough to to, actually sit down and record something when there's people to see and you're out. And, you know, XOXO in particular, I think, is quite an exhausting conference because the topics are really deep. This is not your your conventional tech conference.
Justin:We're talking about really deep issues like, you know, fair representation and, you know, how some there are certain groups that, you know, the Internet has not been kind to. And Right. Just rolling with all that material can be quite difficult. So
Jon:Yeah. It is. And for for me, I think you probably handle this a better. For me, the amount of social time and talking
Justin:Oh, yeah.
Jon:Can, like, take its toll on me.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:Conferences like that, I enjoy because I get to kinda get out of my shell a little bit and meet new people and talk to talk to people. But, like, after a while, man, I just get I'm I get so tired and worn out. Yeah. Not that I'm bored or anything. It's just, like, talking and
Justin:Yeah. Did I I have a question, actually. When so we stated that we shared an Airbnb, which which is pretty fun. I'd I'd originally booked this Airbnb for my family because I thought we were gonna drive down. And, then we ended up deciding.
Justin:It was 1st week of school. We're not taking the family to Portland. So then I asked you and your friend, Mike. Mike's my friend too, but he's your long time friend. If you would cancel your hotel rooms and stay with stay with me.
Justin:And I think I think we realized it was it was it was a pretty nice place, but it was really well. It was you you you 2 became my de facto children in in that setup.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:There's a there's a bunk bed situation.
Jon:Bunk beds. Bunk beds are children's toys in the closet.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:It was definitely set up for a family.
Justin:Yeah. It was a good place for family. On on Alberta Street Yeah. Folks have never stayed on Alberta in Portland. Good place to stay.
Jon:That was a nice area. Yeah.
Justin:But, when I I yeah. Every time we got back from the conference, we would spend quite a bit of time just hanging out in the
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Now for you, is that, were you just overtired, or is that, like, kind of important decompressing time? Do you like to have time where you're kinda hanging out with your friends afterwards?
Jon:Yeah. I do. Yeah. Small small groups.
Justin:Small groups.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, if it was, like, hanging out with 10 people, I probably would have been overwhelmed. Yeah. But if it's a couple of people and you can hash hash out the day and talk about stuff, or even, you know, we talked about, we we had we go into a deep dive of, like, pre Internet computer, like, bulletin boards.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. We had a little bit
Jon:I remember that.
Justin:A little nostalgia session.
Jon:That was fun. Yeah. If it's a bigger group where yeah, it's same with like big dinners, right? I forget what the rule of thumb is. If it's like more than 6 or 8 people at a table, like you can't really talk to everyone
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Or something like it's like it just becomes overwhelming. Yeah. But yeah.
Justin:Interesting. Okay. I Yeah. Because I I find, like, I would get home, and I would be I was more tired than you and Mike for sure. I was, like, ready to go to bed.
Jon:Yeah. During the day at the conference, I know you, we talked with Dan, Meisner a lot.
Justin:Yeah. Dan. We met Dan from Pacific Content.
Jon:Which was great. Super nice guy. Had a lot of good chats about podcasting, but you could talk about it a lot more than I could. And I think at one point, I was like, you know, don't don't be offended if I just sort of, like, leave this conversation at some point because, like, I for whatever reason, I just can't I can't talk about it that much.
Justin:Too much. You had you got to your limit.
Jon:Too much.
Justin:Yeah. That was a really interesting conversation. Yeah. I got to meet Kevin Blank. Kevin is in the, the, chat right now.
Justin:Also, hello, ninja parade. That's a friend from the Laravel community. We got merch madness in on Twitch. For anyone listening to the audio version of this, we sometimes record these live, and you can watch us on Twitch, on Periscope, on YouTube. But, yeah, really great to see a bunch of folks.
Justin:Yeah. So that that's why we didn't record these past 2 weeks. I just wanna mention 2 interesting conversations I had. So one was with Nate Smoyer. I think I'm saying that name correctly.
Justin:He's a transistor customer, and I think this is interesting because it shows that, the power of podcasting even when you don't have a big audience. So he's just started his show. I think he's in real estate or something like that. And he says he's been he wanted to use the podcast as a, you know, a a prospecting tool. Like, how can I get more clients?
Justin:And I I think he's been doing a show for 2 or 3 weeks or maybe a month or I'm not sure how long. Not very long. And he has already got he said he signed a dream client 2 weeks ago because of the podcast, talked with another one yesterday, Got invited to lead a panel and live podcast for an industry event, and this is all in a really short time span. I I think that's interesting. It it shows the power of podcasting and, how people are getting value out of Transistor.
Justin:Also had coffee with Kyle oh, Kyle Marshall, from Media Lab in Calgary, and he was an early customer as well. And he also used the secret Patreon link that you can insert. And he said he he put it in, didn't tell anyone about it, and got a Patreon supporter right away. He published his episode. So this is Very cool.
Justin:Yeah. It's it's, neat to see when you can build features or even just build software and have real people using it and, you know, getting value out of it.
Jon:Yeah. And get and get, yeah, getting value outside of just recording a podcast. Real, like, business value out of it.
Justin:Yeah. And your friend, I'm sorry. I can't remember her name now, but she's starting a podcast with another fellow that we met at xoxo all around Siri Shortcuts.
Jon:Oh, yeah. Alex. Alex. Alex Cox. In the yeah.
Jon:It's already it's up. It's already so Alex is on Alex is on a number of other shows too.
Justin:Oh, yeah. She has there's Refresh.
Jon:She's the resident podcasting,
Justin:I think it this it must be it's either oh, maybe it's Supercomputer is that show.
Jon:It's super yeah. It's Supercomputer.
Justin:Yeah. So check that show out. Got to talk to Matthew at XOXO, and, he was just saying, I really appreciate what you 2 have built. And Yeah. I I think that is the advantage of going to events.
Justin:If you're not someone who normally goes to events, you will be surprised how if you if you do go to, like, an event where the people that, you know, the people in your market hang out in, you'll be surprised how many people go, oh, yeah. I'm a customer, and I love it.
Jon:Yeah. It's great. It's great to hear. Yeah. Matthew was the he was part of the team that built the software.
Jon:It was called, like, a workflow or workflowy or something like that
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:That Apple purchased and has since turned into Siri shortcuts, which just I believe just released today in the new iOS 12, which sounds really cool
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:As a way to, like, automate Siri, and build your own, like, set of tasks that can kind of, like, play off each other.
Justin:That's right. For I think for productivity geeks, shortcuts is gonna be huge. Yeah. You're gonna see a lot of anyone who is already into, you know, productivity hacks is going to be checking out. And it actually has a lot it it could have a big impact on, on podcasting because these are voice commands that are trying to replicate some of the utility you have on Alexa and Google Home.
Justin:And so Yep. There is Pandora just added Siri shortcuts. So I think we'll see Cool. You know, them in a lot of
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. As more and more apps add support, I think you what it is you can, like, chain them together. Right? So it's like an example, I guess, would be, like, let's say, podcasting.
Jon:You could record a podcast on your phone Mhmm. Maybe, and then have it automatically, like, upload somewhere else and post somewhere. And maybe that's a shortcut you could build and say, like, hey, Siri. I don't know. Like, publish my last episode or I don't know.
Jon:I I just made that up, but you could you could build that out yourself and tie together a bunch of different apps.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I I haven't had a chance to play with it. Is the new iOS out today?
Jon:I think it's today.
Justin:Oh, wow. Okay. I'm gonna have to check that out. Yeah. Alright.
Justin:So I thought for a topic today, we would talk about the size of the podcast market. That was one of the the comments we had about our last episode. We talked about revenue. And, you know, we've been exploring this idea of what does it really mean to bootstrap a software company. There's a lot of misconceptions.
Justin:For example, I just wrote a newsletter this weekend that said, you know, we all we we treat I I'm trying to deconstruct a lot of the base camp mythology. Because a lot of folks think that bootstrapping means you just with the power of your laptop and your skills and cloud computing, You can launch something on the web, and then people will pay you. And then you take that money, and you build your company only from what customers have paid you. But in reality, that is not how most bootstrapped businesses are built. That's that's a very, very narrow view of what it means to bootstrap.
Justin:And, it just doesn't reflect how most most folks have built their businesses. It's just not true. Right. And, you know, one thing that 37 signals, now Basecamp did, that a lot of folks don't know about, is they were doing consulting while they were working on Basecamp. They were also selling digital products.
Justin:Like, they had a PDF download, which was like a a search report for ecommerce companies. It was it was $99. They also did, workshops, like how we work workshops, how we design workshops. And then they also did on-site training. And I found this great newsletter update, in from way in Wayback Machine where Jason is giving this update.
Justin:And, here. Let me see if I can find it. The blog post is called Unconventional Bootstrapping Round 1. But the, yeah. And I have this great screenshot of, you know, this research report they were doing, on-site training.
Justin:The the workshop cost $395 to attend back in 2003.
Jon:Wow.
Justin:But they were diversifying with multiple streams of income. And, you know, now we think of Basecamp as this very single product focused company. They they only do Basecamp. But at the time, they had a ton of stuff going on.
Jon:They really yeah, they did.
Justin:And, he Jason writes this this this annual update. He goes, 2003 was a good year for 37 signals. We got back on track after a challenging 2 1,002 post bubble season. So I I love that update because it just gives you this this view into their world where it's like, man, they were it was like they they got hit by that 2,001, 2,002 post bubble season. They were struggling.
Justin:What do they do? They have to hustle.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so they're creatively figuring out ways to fund not just Basecamp Development, but their lives and their company. So I thought that was, yeah, that was kind of interesting. But there was a listener who said, you know, you can't just talk about revenue in a vacuum. You have to talk about the size of the market. And we've touched on this briefly in the past, but I thought we could kinda go over these things.
Justin:And maybe what I'll do is I'll read out the stats, and you and I can react to them in real time.
Jon:Let's do it.
Justin:Alright. So, we've given this stat before. How many podcasts are there? The estimates are that there are 550,000 shows on iTunes and over 18,500,000 episodes.
Jon:So more than you could ever listen to.
Justin:More than you could ever Well, it's like it's like
Jon:me it's like music, Apple Music or Spotify. I mean, there's millions and millions of tracks, and you're not gonna listen to 98% of it.
Justin:Yeah. How many Maybe. How many albums are on iTunes? There's not a good Google scraped, let's see. How many albums on Spotify?
Justin:Maybe that'll that'll give us something better. No. There's not. I mean, I'm sure there's it's an enormous amount. It must supersede, podcasts for sure.
Jon:Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big market. You know, I think the question for us is how many of those are quality?
Jon:How many of those are still active?
Justin:Yeah. How many downloads do they get?
Jon:How many downloads do they get? The other thing I think that we are we've talked about before and I think we're aware of is that podcast hosting running a podcast hosting platform, like, it's not it's not an it's not a type of application or service that's gonna get, like, hockey stick growth where you release it and you make a post and all of a sudden everyone's gonna sign up and start using it because they you really have to have a motivation to either start a new show or switch from a previous host. Yeah. So, like, while the market is huge, it I it's a big market. Yeah.
Jon:There's free alternatives. There's, you know, people don't wanna switch because they're just used to it, and it's fine.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the most common question we get is why should I switch from wherever? And I think increasingly, we're we have better answers to that, and we have some features that we're gonna be releasing soon that, you know, kinda edges up even more. And, you know, this promotions feature, which we've talked about in in previous episodes, that feature, I think, will be a game changer for us in terms of really defining this is who we are, this is who we're for, and this is what we this is what transistor does for people.
Justin:Yeah. There's a lot of competition out there. Your comment about, like, we can't really look like look at that as our potential market because it's really hard to get people to switch from one host to the other. Really, our our market is for businesses and professionals and brands and personalities that have always wanted to start a show, and we know you're out there right now listening to us. And if that's you, transistor.fm.
Justin:But the you know, that's our market. It's folks that are thinking about it, who have said, oh, I really wanna start a show. I've got a great concept. I just need to get started. Or, you know, I I've seen how podcasting can help other businesses.
Justin:I wanna start a podcast for my business or, you know, I I have a great co host and a great topic. We just need to get going. This is awesome. Chris just posted his his, referral link in the chat.
Jon:No. I'm not.
Justin:That would be fine. Go go ahead, Chris. I I respect the hustle. Transistor.fm/questionmarkvia equals chris. We do have a lot of folks signing up for the, the referral thing.
Justin:And Yeah. I think it's kinda cool, actually.
Jon:Yeah. We had to keep on top of that.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. We have to we're gonna pay out those in bulk right now, so
Jon:I think we we just we just got an email from that company, Rewardful, about some updates. I haven't really read it.
Justin:That's that's how many podcasts there are. Here's I'm gonna tell you some stats that concern me, and then I'm going to I think we can we'll do the dark side and the the light side. 64% of the US population is familiar with the term podcasting, up 60% in 2017. So that's 1.
Jon:K.
Justin:I'm gonna keep going here. 44% of the US population has listened to a podcast ever, up 40% in 2017. 26% listen to a podcast at least every month, that's up from 24%. And 17%, 48000000 Americans listen to podcasts weekly, up 15% in 2017.
Jon:Up yeah. From 15%. Yeah.
Justin:If you look at the growth rate over time, it is not growing at a crazy rate. Every year, it notches up a couple percent. So 17% this year, up from 15% last year. And I would say that that does concern me in a sense because there are some people who are investing in podcasting because they are hoping it's going to be the next YouTube.
Jon:Right.
Justin:They're hoping it's going to be the next big thing. I think so far, we haven't seen that happen. Podcasting has been around for a long time before you Yep. Before YouTube even. It's been around.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so
Jon:Apple, yeah, Apple added a long time ago.
Justin:Yeah. It it gets its name from the iPad. Yeah. And, you know, it it it has never had this kinda hockey stick growth that a lot of venture capitalists and other folks are looking for. Right?
Justin:It it just has never, grown that fast.
Jon:Right.
Justin:It's slow and steady. Every year, it adds a couple percentage points, at least in terms of the data we have right now. We could take this a few different ways, can't we? Now one thing that would be interesting is how many people want to start a podcast? Has that changed?
Jon:I think so. I don't know if we have that number. Yeah. I don't know. These numbers, I don't know if they can it's I don't know if they concern me too much.
Jon:I mean, it's growing, but it's already it's a it's already a big number.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:Like, well, 48,000,000 people listen to a podcast weekly. It's that's a it's a big audience.
Justin:Yes. It's a big audience, but the there's other folks that will say, like, you know, radio. Do do they call it terrestrial radio? Is that what they say? Yeah.
Justin:So AMFM is still huge, huge, huge compared to podcasting.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Also, in terms of the number of advertising dollars that gets put into podcasting, I think podcasting hit 350,000,000 last year, but, radio advertising is in the billions. On one hand, you're right. Like, that's that's a big group of people, 48,000,000 listening to a show every week. And, you know, our little show gets 1200 listeners a week or something, like, regular listeners. Let's just see here.
Justin:Yeah. I think we have some yeah. 1,231 subscribers for the show here. That's, you know, the and for us, that number of people has been great. Those are diehard fans that are really invested in what we're doing here.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:The question for us, and it's not something we have a lot of data around, is our hypothesis is that there are going to be more personal brands, more businesses, more, you know, folks who wanna do podcasting professionally that are going to want to start new shows that will want to start a show on Transistor.
Jon:Yeah. I think I think that's a accurate hypothesis. Like, I, yeah, I think it's becoming, you know, more well known, you know, slowly, but I I don't know. Starting a show is is easier now. Mhmm.
Jon:You can test it you can test it out pretty easily. You can make it sound good, you know, with a few few small tricks here and there. Yeah. I I've seen a few jokes around, I don't know, on the Internet or Twitter or something like yada yada yada is the new I wanna start up or starting a podcast is the new Yes. Whatever.
Jon:Yes. I'm gonna start a band or something like that.
Justin:That's right. It's becoming a little bit of a meme.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:But what other evidence do we have right now that our hypothesis is correct? Because there's a lot of people listening to the show that wanna build software, and we can all just come up with things off the top of our heads and go, I think this is true because I really want my software to succeed. Right. So are we just blindly believing this as truth, or is there other things that we've seen that are making us go, okay. I think there's something going on here.
Jon:Well, I mean, for me, in the office I'm in, like, it seems like everyone has a podcast Yeah. Or there are multiple. I mean, it's I know. I mean, I'm in a space that's probably a little bit different than most offices, but there's I don't know. There's tons of shows being recorded out of here.
Jon:Coworkers have started shows, multiple shows.
Justin:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And and, I think so folks always wanna know anecdotally. Sorry.
Justin:Folks wanna know what the the data says. So what what does the quantitative stats say? And I think you need to look at those for sure. But one thing, one thing about those that kind of data is it's a lagging indicator, meaning you have to go out, you have to do the survey, you have to process the data, and then you report on it. And the challenge, as we've seen with some presidential elections, is that sometimes the data that you're collecting quantitatively does not actually represent reality.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And so the there were folks in the presidential election, for example, that were on the ground, you know, hanging out in communities and were saying, you folks don't understand what's happening. On the ground, this is what we're seeing. And we know it's not reflected in the data yet, but this is what we're seeing. And, sure, if it's just, one area, then that might not be meaningful. But once you can link together a bunch of qualitative data, so observed data, anecdotal data, once you start linking those together and you're saying, well, this is happening that's not being reflected in these official stats we're getting.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And I think what's interesting about podcasting is it's starting to pass the coffee shop test, which is something I just made up. And I don't know if you do this, but this is I I spend a lot of time in coffee shops, and I one of my favorite things to do is just to eavesdrop Yeah. On on what other people are talking about because it it helps give me a pulse of what normal, unquote, normal people are thinking about, listening, engaging with. And it was one of the reasons I I knew that, the iPhone was gonna be huge is I was on the bus, and people are talking about it. Like, normal non Apple nerds are saying, wow.
Justin:This new phone's coming out. It looks really interesting. And you could you could kinda feel the energy building, same way with Netflix. Once once I started I I was, like, one of the first people to do the cord cutting, you know, where you you cancel cable and you just go all in on Apple or whatever. And I was a weirdo forever.
Justin:But as soon as we started having, you know, at parties or whatever, people would say, oh, yeah. I just quit cable and got this Apple TV. Have you heard of this thing? You just get this Apple TV, and then you use Netflix, and it's there's no commercials. It's as soon as it starts to pass that test, I go, this thing is going to be big.
Justin:And Yep. Increasingly, podcasting, I'm, you know, I'm in the coffee shop, and I'm hearing normal people, like, just normal, you know, parents out after school with you know, talking to other parents going, have you heard the latest Tim Ferris? Yeah. And it's like, wait a second. What's going on here?
Justin:You know, 10 years ago, they would have been talking about Oprah, and now they're talking about Tim Ferris? Like, this this there's something going on that is observed, you know, at my last family reunion, we have all sorts of, you know, folks at different ages and different political stripes and different, you know, different stages of life, and they're all listening to podcasts.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, I I've I've encountered this with my family and my friends where it's it's along with or sometimes in place of, you know, what are you watching these days? It's, what are you what are you listening to? What, you know, what what podcasts are you listening to, or, are you caught up on this one? I really like this one.
Jon:Yeah. I just talked about that, recently with my brother and then my dad too, and we're just, like, recommend all the same ones. We can talk about them. It's yeah. It's like it's like a TV show.
Jon:I mean, it's
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:It's be it's a it's a fixture of of, the culture now in society.
Justin:Yeah. And, again, maybe maybe we're wrong. Maybe we are in a, admittedly white educated, group. Right? But I'm I'm seeing this in other groups too.
Justin:It's not just, you know, it's not just one particular demographic. It seems to be multiple demographics, and it is kind of like, you know, in the old days, it would be, you know, what apps do you have on your phone? Now it's Yeah. You know, what what are you listening to?
Jon:Well, I think what's great about it too is that it is very accessible. Mhmm. It's free. Yep. Smartphones are not necessarily expensive, especially in the US and and, you know, probably Canada and Europe and stuff.
Jon:It's not the device itself is not inaccessible. You can listen to it on the web for free. Mhmm. Every every phone, whether it be Android or iOS can, you know, has podcasting listening apps. Everyone's got headphones.
Jon:Everyone walks around with headphones. Yep. So it's it's a very you know, it's you don't have to sign up for a cable fee. There's no, you know, subscribe to Netflix. You don't need some big piece of equipment for it.
Jon:Mhmm. So really, it's a it's a very approachable market. I think my my worry is that as it grows, it's gonna become more and more commercialized in a way that is detrimental to podcasting.
Justin:Yes. Some folks might try to to lock things down. And Yeah. Yeah. The Yeah.
Justin:And in the the live chat here, you know, folks folks have said a few things. One is it is still lots of work to produce a podcast, a good podcast, you know, in terms of editing and other things. It's not as easy as composing a tweet, which is both a pro and a con, you know. If it it means that for example, I I'm not one of these folks that feel like podcasting needs to be democratized. I think podcasting is broadcasting, and you need to be you need to have good we always say good content, but it needs to be entertaining.
Justin:It needs to be interesting. It needs to be compelling. And, there's, I did a a Twitter poll on the Transistor FM Twitter account, and, the the results are basically, I said I was trying to get at, like, what are most podcasts doing wrong? And so I would say, you know, too many podcasts are, you know, too long, have bad sound, aren't regular enough. But the number one response, 32% said, too many podcasts aren't entertaining.
Justin:And so the the the the problem, you know, even people always complain about bad sound. But, you know, Seth Godin has a podcast that is called Akimbo that I just love. I think it's excellent. And the the his sound quality is not great. It's kind of echoey in the room.
Justin:You know, his editing's pretty good, but the what keeps me coming back is that his sound is good enough, but the show is so compelling. It doesn't need to be democratized. The bar is high, but if you can create something that's interesting and compelling, then, you know, you have a good chance of carving out some listenership for yourself.
Jon:Yep.
Justin:I think that's a pretty good overview of of how many folks there are, that branded podcasting is growing. We I'll link this up in the show notes.
Gavin:There's
Jon:Yeah. It's a it's a it's a big market. It's not growing super fast. Obviously, we have some concerns that we are aware of, but Mhmm. I don't know.
Jon:I think I think it's I feel like it's still in its in its infancy to some degree. Yeah. Or yeah. We'll see.
Justin:And who knows? There's all of a sudden, every car manufacturer could come up with a podcast receiver, and, you know, all of a sudden Yeah. People just click the radio, and they're listening to podcasts. So, yeah. Anyway, that's something we might come back to.
Justin:Check our show notes. By the way, I'll I'll add in some other some other evidence for the increase of branded podcasts. Good articles by Fast Company and things. Let's, let's close the show out with just a few app updates. So Yeah.
Justin:What have you been working on?
Jon:So there's a lot there's a lot in the works. I Haven't released anything big lately, but there's a a number of 2 or 3 big things that will will get out the door soon. The one thing that we did release, that maybe no one really noticed was kind of reengineered, how we how we categorize, downloads.
Justin:Okay.
Jon:Yep. Previously, sometimes, a download or a listen would be categorized incorrectly as far as, like, what app was listening to it.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:We were we were missing some applications from our list of supported applications. We were there were some false false, positives, posit positives, negatives, false positives, where things were being incorrectly identified. So if, you know, in a couple of cases, some of our our customers were were seeing that, like, other, the category other was the app that like 80% of people listen to. And just like, that's a little bit suspect. So we were just some of our app detection was a little bit incorrect.
Jon:So I reran that. None of the download numbers changed, but your, your breakdown of how it was listened to should be much more accurate.
Justin:Oh, cool.
Jon:As well as I reran all the downloads and categorized regions for a number of countries. So Canada, the US, and Australia have either states or provinces.
Justin:Oh, really?
Jon:So downloads are now being, counted on a individual, like, state or province level. We're not displaying that in the map yet, but that will be coming next as well.
Justin:Oh, cool.
Jon:So you'll be you'll be able to zoom in on the US and Canada and Australia and see, like, what what states are popular and stuff like that.
Justin:Interesting. Australia, I think, is our oh, United Kingdom is our second most popular Okay. Then Canada and then Australia.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. It'd be nice to see what where everyone's listening from. Still finishing up, Spotify analytics ingestion. So, along with downloads, like, there's no way that, people can listen on Spotify and have that be reflected in Transistor yet.
Jon:They kind of keep all that data in their system. But if you have submitted your show to Spotify through Transistor, We have API access to all their analytics on a day by day basis, so we'll pull that into to your numbers, soon.
Justin:Sweet.
Jon:We've we started working on some translations Mhmm. International translations for people's customers' podcast sites. If you host a a site on your transistor account for your show, we're gonna have a a drop down with, a handful of other languages that kind of, make the the interface elements, you know, buttons and links, internationally translatable to things like Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, I think, for now.
Justin:Yeah. That'll be great.
Jon:So so we're building that out. And then the big one that is hopefully coming soon that I worked on yesterday a bunch, is this new integrations tab that I'm building out. Mhmm. So we're gonna move some things there, like your newsletter integration and submitting to Spotify. And then there's also 2 new integrations, which are hooking up your Twitter account and or your Google slash YouTube account to transistor Mhmm.
Jon:So that you can auto post auto post, episodes, notifications to Twitter when, when they're published, and then also auto post, audio to YouTube. So we'll convert your audio to a video file and automatically upload it to your YouTube channel of your choice. So, yeah, that stuff's coming along pretty well. I'm just kinda just putting the finishing touches on the the integration stuff, but it's
Justin:That'll be so fun.
Jon:It should be pretty cool. Yeah.
Justin:Sweet. Yeah. So that's that's, we should probably have that. You some of that stuff might get rolled out this week even.
Jon:Yeah. This week, I I I would say a lot of that stuff, yeah, late this week, next week this weekend, probably.
Justin:Cool.
Jon:So we'll, we'll send out an update newsletter people probably.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. We we like to keep people informed at what's coming down the the pipe. Yeah, folks. I think we're gonna end it here.
Justin:Thanks again to everyone that showed up live. Oh, we gotta give a shout out back to Kevin Markham. Thank you so much for
Jon:Thanks, Kevin.
Justin:For being our first Patreon. Patreon.com/dataschool is his.
Jon:Patron number 1.
Justin:Patron number 1. And, we are transistor.fm on the web. You can reach out to us on Twitter at transistorfm. And, this show is build your SaaS, and the only way that people find out about it really is by telling a friend. And so or just even telling folks on the Internet.
Justin:I I've noticed it's showing up in, indie hackers quite a bit. Folks saying, hey. What are the best, you know, indie podcast to listen to or shows about bootstrapping? And, some folks posted this show in that comment thread.
Jon:Cool.
Justin:We really appreciate every time someone mentions the show. Yeah. Just thank you for doing that, and thank you for listening.
Jon:Yeah. Thanks for listening.
Justin:And we'll see you next Tuesday.
