When should bootstrappers get paid?
Today's episode is sponsored by Balsamic.
Speaker 2:Hi, Justin. This is Pelti. I've been listening to the podcast and hearing your struggle with how to say our name properly. Well, I've got good news for you. You're saying it right.
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Speaker 2:Just say whichever way you prefer, it's all good for us. Bye.
Jason:Try it and tell Paldi we sent you. It doesn't matter how you pronounce it as long as you spell it. Bal samiq.com. That's balsamic.com.
Jon:Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Jason:And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build transistor.fm. So last week, we had our worst week ever or worst day ever.
Jon:Worst day ever.
Jason:And the one thing that that's funny about podcasting that is that you you post these episodes every week. But in the meantime, people don't realize that life has happened. You know? I because part of me had already forgotten about this until you put it in our show notes. I've already moved on.
Jason:But there's there's people that have literally been, you know, on the edge of their seats just waiting to see, you know Waiting
Jon:for the conclusion to this to solve itself. Traumatic.
Jason:Yeah. Come on. Tie up the loose ends.
Jon:It so, yeah, it was, it was a long evening, Sunday. Well, we we recorded, yeah, we recorded after it was fixed.
Jason:Yeah. That's right.
Jon:Yeah. But so for those who forgot what happened, last weekend, we had a bit of an outage, on a Sunday due to the fact that our SSL certificates, which are run by Let's Encrypt through a a web server called Caddy, did not automatically renew themselves, which they're supposed to. And this is sort of like a number of things that happened at once Mhmm. Kinda compounded. It's a little unfortunate.
Jon:Well, rather unfortunate. Yeah. And so I kinda scrambled to to sort of figure out, like, try to get it back to normal, at least working, or at least get our main, domain, transition at FM, back up and working. That was the the main priority was that, as opposed to, like, all the custom domains that have SSL certificates as well. I got it back to working, but then in the meantime, had been emailing back and forth with, the support team at Caddy.
Jason:Yep.
Jon:And what I did was I realized that we were still using the, like, community license for Caddy, which is free, which really you should not be using for a paid service. Yes. And that does not include support or any support. So, like, I felt I felt kinda real like, really bad about emailing them and being like, hey. Our thing didn't work.
Jason:Yeah. But
Jon:we're not paying for it.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:I signed up for their startup plan, which which is last for a year for us, which is $20 a month, which is a good deal for what they offer, and that includes some support. So I ended up, you know, purchasing it and emailing them and, you know, kinda saying what happened. And the initial, guy I was working with was was pretty helpful. Except didn't didn't quite get me to the solution I wanted. So I think what happened is he sort of escalated it to, the guy who actually runs the project.
Jon:He's the lead developer on it. Oh, wow. And he he ended up, like, emailing back, I don't know, the next day or something, the day after, and sort of gave a really, really thorough explanation of what of what happened and that, like, some of the their annoyances with how it works with the service that actually does the renewals. Mhmm. Because it's it that's actually a third party service that lets encrypt runs, to sort of verify domains based on different criteria.
Jon:So, like, parts of that were failing. They sort of knew about it, and there's a way to turn off, like, it kinda revert back to this old method, which he helped me get, turned on. So, like, he was really, really nice and and, like, thoughtful about explaining what happened and, like, apologetic even though, you know, we weren't even paying for it for a while,
Jason:which Yeah. You showed me the email. It's really well written. It's kind
Jon:of Yeah.
Jason:It's very complete. It kind of it describes, you know, here's what went wrong. He started by apologizing personally. It's it's actually, it would be a good, like, case study in how to write a good email.
Jon:Like, he I don't think he really has anything to apologize for because, like, we I mean, we knew we were using a product that was not 1.0. Right? It's not a final product. Yeah. The documentation, it's it's great, but, like, it is missing some explanation about certain parts of, like, if you're doing this, like, watch out for this.
Jon:And which is kinda what happened with us is that, in fact, long story short, there is rate limiting built into certificate renewal. Right? So, like, you just don't slam the server all the time, like, requesting new certificates.
Jason:Yep.
Jon:And so if you have a number of a certain number of failures in a certain amount of time, it'll you have to wait a certain amount of time to try again. Yeah. So what was happening is that our certificates were failing. Some of the certificates were failing, the ones that were going through Cloudflare. If, like, if you're using Cloudflare to host your transistor website Mhmm.
Jon:Because Cloudflare also offers SSL. It's a CDN. It also offers SSL. Like, they couldn't talk to each other, and they were just like, those certificates were failing constantly. But in the meantime, every other certificate that was trying to renew, it wouldn't work because we're over this rate limit.
Jon:So, like, it just never for, like, probably a month, they kept failing, and we didn't have logging set up to notice this. So we had gotten some emails from Let's Encrypt that were like, hey. Your certificate's gonna expire in 30 days, and I just sort of ignored it because I thought that was normal and that they would it would be taken care of. But
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:Really, what should happen is if Caddy is working correctly, you should never actually see those emails.
Jason:Yes.
Jon:Because it'll renew it in the background. So Yeah. Anyway, the renewals got fixed and then sort of slowly everything kept you know, came back up normally, especially the the custom domain. So I don't know. There's there's, I think, a few good takeaways from that.
Jon:Like, 1, like, support the software you love. Like, if there's a paid option for software
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:And you're using it for a paid service, like, pay them pay them money. Yeah. Because, like, they're not doing this for free either. Right?
Jason:Exactly. Yeah.
Jon:And they're providing something like Caddy. It doesn't really it's doesn't exist. Like, it's kind of one of a kind as far as, like, what it offers. You know, I'd love to see them succeed and and keep keep growing and release, you know, version 1 and version 2. Mhmm.
Jon:The other thing that that's, like I think it's just, like, really interesting because we're building this thing in the open, and we're sort of honest about what's about what we're doing and the problems we face. Like, the author of Caddy actually went and listened to our episode of our podcast, and he was like, that was really great feedback that I normally don't get from customers. That was really important for me to hear, which is really cool.
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:And then also, like, I was obviously hard on myself because, like, it was the thing that I put together, and it failed. And, like, people couldn't, you know, use our service or listen to shows that were hosted on our service. But I think the fact that we kinda, like, were open and honest about what we were doing and the problems we were facing, like, I think that kind of built up some trust between us and our customers. And, like, everyone was, like, really nice, and they were, you know, they were like, don't don't be too hard on yourself. Like, you know, some people were like, I'm also part of a 2 person team, and this has happened to me, and it's hard.
Jon:And, like
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the other benefit of being transparent is there are some disadvantages. But the the advantage is you can be so much more human because you're not spending all of this energy trying to pretend that you've got it all together.
Jon:Right.
Jason:You you can just be honest and say, you know, this is what we're doing. This is what, you know, this is what's happened. And I think, especially, nowadays, you know, where people it seems like they wake up every day and there's a new story about how a new tech company has abused their trust. Just by being able to be open, there's this kind of freedom of, you know, this is us. We're not trying to pretend that we're anything we're not.
Jon:Right. Yeah. We're not trying to pretend to be some huge company with, you know, 30 employees.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. And and also just, there's some empathy when when people, you know, who are normally anonymous to each other, can actually see each other's humanity. There's a connection there. And, yeah, I think that's been a net positive for us.
Jon:So, yeah, I think things things should be back, back to normal. Mhmm.
Jason:I should also mention that, a bunch of folks reached out, with SSL monitoring tools. But the the folks at littlewarden.com, they gave us an account to use and didn't ask me to mention it, but I just thought I would mention that. We're Yeah.
Jon:That was that was super nice.
Jason:Have a a monitoring tool that they'll, they'll email us if anything happens. And
Jon:Yeah. I mean, that was I think yeah. That little warden, I think it looks like it does kind of exactly what we talked about last week.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. It'll give us notifications in, Slack as well. So yeah. It's it's nice.
Jason:The dashboard says, you know, here's your warnings. Here's, any URLs that are in the danger zone. So yeah. That thanks to them for for reaching out. And, Yeah.
Jason:I'm glad this all wrapped up. That that was a little bit stressful, but
Jon:Yeah.
Jason:It,
Jon:A little bit.
Jason:I mean, I'd already forgotten about it. So it things move pretty fast.
Jon:Yeah. Uh-huh.
Jason:Why don't we transition into a question I wanted to ask, which is when should bootstrappers start paying themselves? And to give some context, we're almost at 10 k MRR. It's still too early to celebrate. Yeah. I think I sent you a screenshot today that says, bare metrics has us at $9,990.
Jason:So Damn it. It could it could happen even while we're talking today. Yeah. And so that's kind of our first milestone. Last month, we did $12,742 in income.
Jason:And so I thought this might be a good time to kind of think about, yeah, when should we start paying ourselves? When should bootstrappers start, paying themselves? And there's a few schools of thought on this. 1 is you just take all the money you earn, and you just put it right back into the company. You don't pay yourself anything as long as you can.
Jason:You just keep reinvesting back in. And, you know, there's quite a few proponents of this. The idea being, especially if you're bootstrapping, you wanna, you know, put all that money into acquiring new customers that you can, you know, put it into paid acquisition, put it into ads. Right. The the other school of thought is you should actually start paying yourself as soon as you can.
Jason:Because first of all, it's good to get some sort of, compensation for your work.
Jon:Right.
Jason:2nd of all, it puts you in the practice of paying yourself from the beginning. And so if you get in the habit of always just reinvesting your money back into the company, you could find yourself in a position where you just never get paid because you're so used to deploying capital. So part of me was thinking about this because I'd read this book called Profit First. And it's quite popular. It's kind of going it's done the rounds of in the business community.
Jason:And the basic idea in the book is most small businesses actually never make a profit. Many small businesses are in an enormous amount of debt. And kind of the the overarching point is that, you know, small business owners get into this because they want more freedom. They ostensibly, you know, wanna make a good living from what they're doing. They ostensibly wanna be making eventually making more money than they could in the private sector.
Jason:Otherwise, why would you be doing all this risk? The sad reality is that most of these businesses don't make much money and end up spending more money than they make. And so his solution is to use the old envelope technique. I don't know if you've ever done this or if your parents ever did this for budgeting.
Jon:I I haven't.
Jason:Where, you know, you get your monthly paycheck and you instantly say, okay. I'm gonna spend $500 on groceries. You put that in an envelope. I'm gonna spend a $100 on entertainment. You put that in an envelope.
Jason:And then when you go to the grocery store, you only use the cash in the envelope.
Jon:Okay.
Jason:And so he kinda suggests a similar idea for business, which is let's just say, we get a $1,000 deposit from Stripe. Instead of just looking at our bank account going, oh, man. We've got $1,000 in there. And, you know, just starting paying for expenses, you know, something comes up. I might say, hey, John.
Jason:Do we have enough money to do this? And you look at the bank account. You go, oh, yeah. We got money for that. And so I go away and I I spend that money.
Jason:And then at the end of the year, we look and go, oh, wow. There there's just not much left over here, is there? He recommends when you get a deposit, you automatically transfer funds into separate accounts for 3 different things. The first is profit. The second is saving for taxes, and the third is for salaries.
Jason:And whatever's left over in your main account, you use that for expenses. But it's kind of a mind hack.
Jon:Okay.
Jason:Instead of instead of just leaving everything in one account and just always think like, right now, we've got a bunch of money in our business bank account. And instead of it fooling you into going, well, and there should be enough for taxes in there, and there should be enough for, you know, some salaries. There should be enough for expenses. Instead of just kinda always thinking, oh, yeah. There's a big chunk of money in there.
Jason:You are always setting aside the money you need for each of these things. And to start, he gives you some rough percentages. So 5% for profit, 15% for taxes, and 50% for founder salaries.
Jon:Okay.
Jason:I know you've got some questions about this, but just to kinda end this part, I would say that I think the beauty of this is that, especially with percentages, this is something we can implement regardless of how much revenue we have. So last month, we had $12,742 in in income. That would mean we could set aside $637 for profit, $1,911 for taxes, and then $6,371 total for salaries, which in our case would be $3,185
Jon:each. And that is yeah. That's 70% of all the revenue.
Jason:That's 70% of all the revenue. And then that would leave 30% for other expenses.
Jon:Right.
Jason:Especially from the founder salary perspective, I like this. Because, obviously, $3,000 isn't enough for either of us to live on. But it gives us something right now. And it also hopefully, we could we would be able to see this grow over time. So we would if we keep these percentages, we would know.
Jason:Okay. Well, if we're gonna if ours if our monthly payroll is going to be 20,000, if we work backwards, we know, oh, our total income is gonna have to go up by this much in order to to hit that.
Jon:Right.
Jason:And it gives us a reasonable benchmark for for that. But in the meantime, we are paying ourselves. We're not, you know, we're not just starving ourselves all the time.
Jon:And then remembering that, hey, we should pay each other.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:And find and, like, figuring out some random amount.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Jon:It it
Jason:gives you a monthly practice. Okay. So I'll shut up. I know you had some questions about this. Yeah.
Jon:No. I I like this I like this idea a lot. It makes a lot of sense, as far as, you know, divvying up income by percent and sort of, you know, putting aside a certain amount for for this or that. Like, I guess when I was when I was contracting, I would always put aside 30% to pay taxes, or I would pay you know, you could pay quarterly and pay early.
Jason:Mhmm. So that
Jon:I at the end of the year, I wouldn't be like, oh my god. I owe, you know, all this money for taxes that I already spent.
Jason:Yes.
Jon:So I get that. So I guess my question on this is 5% for profit. What what does that actually mean? Like, why are you what do you do with that profit? Because from my under and I guess that's that ties into, like, the 15% you're saving for taxes because from my understanding, and we're we're, you know, finishing up our taxes right now for the company Mhmm.
Jon:Is that you're only paying in you're only paying tax for a c corporation on profit. And maybe and maybe this profit first model is geared more towards, like, LLCs or, like, sole proprietorships where where the the tax situation is different?
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:Or or does that tax money go towards you and I paying taxes on our founder salary? Like, I don't.
Jason:Sure. Yeah. So, and I I'm gonna have to I I'm just kinda quoting from memory now. But first of all, let's just go to the the the profit thing. He he he talks about this in the book.
Jason:He's he talks about, this because I felt this too. Like, no way. I don't wanna any I don't wanna pay taxes, so I'm gonna always show a loss every year. First of all, the IRS doesn't like it if you're always showing a loss. Eventually, they never look into your books.
Jason:Second of all, the the the trap he sees people getting into is that they just end up overspending. They end up prioritizing spending over actually making money in the business. Profit really should be the kind of the the cream what's the gravy. Yeah. There we go.
Jason:The profit should be the gravy. This is the reason we're doing it. It's like, yeah, the the company will eventually pay us hopefully a market salary. But then over and over and above that, we want to get some sort of dividends that reward us for being owners. Right?
Jon:Right.
Jason:And at least in Canada, those dividends are taxed at a much lower, rate. I think, let's see. C corporations are now taxed at a flat 21% income tax rate. By the way, that's much higher than Canada. I think we have a 15%.
Jon:And they just lowered it here, I think.
Jason:So generally, what happens is that the corporation is taxed at a lower rate than your personal tax rate, and then dividends are also taxed at a lower rate, for you individually. So eventually, we are going to hopefully wanna return profits as dividends to shareholders. Yeah. And the author, his name is Michael. I can't pronounce his last name.
Jason:Michael m. What he says is just to getting in this habit is the important piece. Whether you distribute that profit as dividends or not is besides the point. The important part is the practice and that you're getting in the habit of doing this automatically every month, you know, as money comes in. It could also, it could also, in our case, in the beginning, it could just be a way for us to have a a security fund, meaning we we can, you know, I think you can even invest these, you know, invest money as a corporation in index funds or in in other investment vehicles.
Jason:But it might be a way for us to have a, you know, a security fund. If something really bad happens, we would have this kind of secret pot of money that we can we can use.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. Yeah. Or a Christmas bonus, whatever, which would be a I mean, it would be a dividend.
Jon:But yeah. Okay. So yeah. So the profit is like you're not net yeah. I mean, obviously, you're not bound to keeping this money as a profit at the end of the year if you don't want to.
Jason:That's right. Yeah. You don't have to distribute it. You can keep it in the company if you wanted to. But the the idea is you're kind of putting it aside.
Jon:Mhmm.
Jason:The same goes for taxes. And the way he described it is you you are, this is both for the employer side of income taxes. Right? The employer has to pay a portion, as well as your corporate taxes. And we might have to modify this depending on what rate we're taxed at at a corporate level.
Jason:For example, if it if it's 21%, then we would need to, you know, we would have to adjust this. That would be 21% on profit. Right?
Jon:Profit.
Jason:So he's saying take 15% of your gross income, cash coming in, and set that aside for both your, you know, your side of the taxes and also for your corporate taxes.
Jon:Yeah. Because our our employee tax situation for both of us is is still not set in stone. Like Mhmm. I don't have a w two set up yet. Yeah.
Jon:So transistor is not paying taxes on behalf of me or not paying half of my tax.
Jason:That's right.
Jon:Yeah. And you live in Canada, so it's, like, totally different.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But I think it's I I like this idea of, you know, no matter what you make so, again, this past month, we would set aside $1,911 for taxes.
Jason:And just that idea of, no, we're just gonna set that aside. And if at the end of the year, we end up paying less tax, that's great. Then all of a sudden we have more profit. But there should be no surprises at the end of the year. You know, we we come to the end of the year.
Jason:We look in our tax account, and there should be more than enough money to cover corporate taxes.
Jon:Right.
Jason:And then there's the idea of, of founder salaries. What do you think of that idea of us starting to pay ourselves now at this point? So one thing I'm suggesting is we just had March, is we would actually distribute $3,185, to each of us for this past month.
Jon:Yeah. I like I like that idea. It's I think it's yeah. Like you said, good to get in the habit. Sort of is I don't know.
Jon:I mean, it's an incentive, I guess, to, like, make sure that it's still growing every month. Like,
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:Like you said, it's not it's not gonna cover all of our expenses, obviously, to live on. But yeah, it's definitely like an incentive for the hard work that we're both putting in.
Jason:In some ways, this is the metric, the personal metric we should really care about, which is on one side, we we did this because, you know, we are, we we're really interested in the podcasting space. We're really excited to help give customer success in this space. But in terms of personal motivation, we're personally motivated to have this, you know, provide a great life for us. And, you know, when we're looking at top line revenue, that's interesting. But where this really hits the road for both of you is, wow.
Jason:That paid my mortgage this past month.
Jon:Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah. Right.
Jason:And I I think that could be personally quite motivating. And I think this could apply to anybody. You know, even even folks who are making a $100 a month, they can set aside 50% of that and go, wow. I'm I made $50 this month. And there's something about having that feeling of this I've earned this money, and I can now kinda, you know, deploy that however I want is a really great feeling.
Jon:Especially if you are, you know, if you're using this method where you're you have, like, a safety net built in where you're not paying yourself money that you should be paying taxes. Or, you know, like, you still you don't have to worry about overspending. Yeah. So that's I think it is a great it looks like a great tool to get into the habit of, like, being responsible about your money.
Jason:Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So, John, you know what I'm gonna do right now? I'm gonna go into clubhouse.
Jason:Io. I'm gonna click create story. I'm gonna choose our business admin kind of, project, and I'm gonna put pay John and Justin salary for March. I'm gonna click create story, and look at that. It's right in Clubhouse.
Jon:A good segue.
Jason:Once again, this episode is sponsored by Clubhouse. Go to clubhouse.io/build and get 2 months free. Now it's no secret that John and I are fans of Clubhouse. We've been talking about it a lot, but we're not the only ones. Today, I was just all I did was search for the URL Clubhouse dot io, and I found this fellow, Steve Corona, asking, what do you use for tracking your product engineering backlog?
Jason:Looking for something one click above a spreadsheet without going full blown Jira. Now he wasn't he wasn't asking us specifically. I don't even know Steve Corona. But he was just asking Twitter. He was asking into the void, and 2 of the responses he got were both unprompted by us or Clubhouse, both from Clubhouse.
Jason:So this this fellow, Ryan Teague, responded saying, hey, I use clubhouse. Io. It's as easy to use as Trello with more features if your team grows. We've grow outgrown Trello, plus I loathe the multiple board issue with Trello, which is one of the big advantages of Clubhouse is you get all of these you can have multiple boards or multiple projects all in one view. It's really great.
Jason:Try it out.
Jon:Yeah. You can move stories between projects. Yeah. It's it's it's, it's very flexible, I would say.
Jason:Yeah. It I I it's it's one click above spreadsheet without going full blown Jira. I love it.
Jon:That's a good
Jason:It's a good good slogan. To try it out, go to clubhouse.io/build and get 2 months free. Yeah. So what do we wanna talk about next? Do you wanna quickly just tell folks about the billing update you did?
Jon:Yeah. So, since let's see. It's been in our backlog for a bit, but we had a a number of we have a number of requests come in every week that's like, hey. How do I, switch my billing cycle from monthly to yearly? Mhmm.
Jon:And or how do I upgrade from the starter package to the, the professional package that you offer?
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:And up until about an hour ago, we had to do that for you. So what I what I rolled out was the ability for customers to actually change their billing, their billing plan, their subscription plan Mhmm. And switch and, like, upgrade to a new tier, or, change their current tier to annual pricing or upgrade to a different tier that's annual pricing so they can, you know, pick whichever plan works best for them. The changes are immediate. You know, it'll kick in and and offer the new the new, package right away.
Jon:Along with that, it's kinda knocked up 2 birds with 1 stone here. We also get a lot of requests for the ability to see your billing history and how much you were charged each month and download an invoice. Yep. So I rolled that out as well. So from your account settings page, you can now view your billing history and download a a PDF, for each, each invoice that you've had.
Jason:Yeah. And these are the things like, as a user, you know, you you want to be able to change your own plan, like people don't want to have to contact us to do that. And, second is, you know, during tax season, especially, a lot of folks want to log into all of their vendors, and be able to click on billing history and then download, you know, just click download, download, download and download all of their their invoices. Right? So they can just wrap those all up in a in a drop box folder and, send it to their accountant.
Jon:Yeah.
Jason:And so I I love this. I actually found it a tweet where where someone is saying, you know, if you run a service where you don't allow me to download all my monthly invoices, I know that I hate you a little more every tax season.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's a good reminder. Like, I honestly didn't even think about that use case, but I should have. Like, it seems like kind of a no brainer.
Jon:And, again, like, you know, we we waited to build these out because it just there was more important things to build. It wasn't that laborious for us to, like, go and change someone's subscription plan. Yeah. You know, until you get, like, a few a week, and then you're like, alright. We could we could be saving, like, a half an hour for 1 of us every week once this is done.
Jon:So at, yeah, at a certain point, I guess, it's it's kinda like build it build it when build it when you need it.
Jason:Build it when hurts. I think Build it when
Jon:it hurts. Yeah.
Jason:Is is the because there's so many things we thought would be a big issue that we were planning on building. And just people never requested it. And so and so in some ways, it's nice doing it this way because when if it's so painful for us, like, it's like, oh my gosh. I got 5 requests this week for this. We just gotta build this to free up our own time.
Jason:And Yeah.
Jon:And it's, you know, it's a totally, like, unsexy feature. It doesn't do anything cool for the podcasting space, but, like Mhmm. Saves us some time. Yeah. Saves customers saves customers time too.
Jason:Oh, exactly.
Jon:Looking around and asking how to do it and being like, what am I missing?
Jason:Yeah. I think it's actually a a good opportunity a lot of people miss is, for example, with Transistor, there's often a billing contact that's signing up for the account, but they're not involved in production at all. All they do is pay the bill. And so one great way to serve them is give them the bills. So at tax time, when they're responsible for writing out their expense, you know, thing, you you make it it easy for them to do the one thing they need to do in your account.
Jon:Although, I think you did just make a new, a new feature request for us, which is I would like to download all of my invoices at once for the year.
Jason:I mean, that would be nice if we can do it. But this Yeah. This quick the way you've implemented it right now is easy. You can just quickly go and download them one after the other. That's that's fine.
Jon:It's only it's only up to 12 clicks. Right?
Jason:Yeah. Exactly. It's good. It's good. Maybe in the last 10 minutes here, I wanted to just talk a little bit some anxiety I've had.
Jason:And I know you felt this too, and and so I thought it would be good to kind of express it to everybody listening. So it feels like there's this convergence going on. You know, every week, there's a new piece about podcasting in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Guardian. There's all sorts of buzz about it. You know, I I see, you know, our competitors, and I've heard through the Whisper Network.
Jason:I know a lot of people, and so I get a lot of whispers. You know, a lot of people are kind of whispering to me, hey, you know, I just talked to this company. They're doing really good. Like, their their sales are increasing every month. The past month, they were they did even better than the month before.
Jason:And so it feels like, wow, there's there's a lot going on right now. And it it's interesting. I think I've I've had a few different feelings, that I'd like to just talk out loud. One is a little bit of kind of, like, FOMO and anxiety and kinda almost fear of, wait a second. Like, I was fine with the way we're growing.
Jason:You know, Our our metrics Mhmm. Our revenue metrics are are public, and lots of folks are, like, yeah, you guys are doing it. But then I always had this anxiety and insecurity about but wait. Maybe we're not growing as fast as we should be.
Jon:Right. Compared to other companies that maybe yeah.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:I get that. Yeah.
Jason:And we're the only ones with our who have open metrics. And so, you know oh my god. We just we just passed 10,000.
Jon:Oh, nice. What do we do? I
Jason:I well, is it I don't know. Congratulations. Congratulations. Chris Yeah.
Jon:Put in some sort of applause with cheering noises. Yeah. Right here. Little little
Jason:confetti. Little audio confetti. Now, this could go someone's gonna churn right now, and then this is gonna go back down.
Jon:Right. Yeah.
Jason:As of right now, April 1st, April Fool's Day, 5:34 PM Pacific Standard, we are at 10,009 Nice. Monthly recurring revenue. Wow.
Jon:Now let's forget about that and move on to the next one.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. Next goal, 20 grand. Yeah. So I I've just had some anxiety around that.
Jon:Yeah.
Jason:And I I think also, you know, I I had a really exciting customer call today. And, man, every time someone asks to get me on the phone, my initial reaction is like, I don't really wanna get on the phone. Almost all the time when I when I actually call a customer who's paying, not someone who's thinking about paying, but when I actually call someone who's paying, I always am glad I did. Because I was just able to ask questions and listen. I was just asking questions for 40 minutes.
Jason:And he's telling me about, you know, all the things he's doing in the agency space and all the clients he's working with. And some of these are really big, like, big companies that are and he's like, he says everybody in these companies wants to start a podcast. Like, this is the thing, especially for executives. Like, this is this is the thing. I I I've also had this one conversation.
Jason:Just I I've kept it in my inbox because, this one gal said, you know, podcasting is the shiny new thing, especially with our executives, especially in our industry. Everyone has one. So we are late to the game. So, you know, all of our execs wanna get on the train, plus, you know, podcasts are fun. So, obviously, we're not the only ones feeling the FOMO.
Jason:Right? Like, there's other people feeling this. Yeah. I think on one side, I have kind of this anxiety of, like, are we growing fast enough? And on the other side, I'm just trying to figure out how do we triangulate all these pieces, so we can respond the best possible way.
Jason:You do do you know what I mean? Like, it feels like there's all this movement happening. And somehow we are, like, sailing a ship, and we have to navigate these waters the best possible way so that, you know, we connect with the right customers and we get to them to the right destination. And I I think, yeah, that that's actually a good way of describing it. I almost have this fear that, you know, some opportunities are passing us in the night.
Jason:Like
Jon:Yeah.
Jason:Like, oh, man. There's probably people out there right now that should know about Transistor that would love to use us but just don't know about us and we're missing them. Or, you know, we should, you know I don't know. Yeah. There's all this idea of, like, missed opportunity, I think, kind of weighs on me.
Jon:It's it is really hard to know what what angle to take. I mean, on the one hand, I think you're or we we as a company are, like, almost being reactionary to stuff that's happening as opposed to
Jason:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Jon:Proactive about what, you know, like, what we think the podcast world would benefit from.
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:So I think I I think we saw this early on too with with places like Anchor that came out, and they were like, oh, well, you can record from the app. You can publish. You can publish, like, with snippets. Mhmm. And we were like, oh, man.
Jon:We don't have any of that. We need that, and we didn't build any of that. Mhmm. Yeah. None of that.
Jon:So, like Yeah. I mean, it it I think it's pretty easy to get caught up in, like, the frenzy of I kinda it's there's probably a comparison to something else that that's happened in the past, but some other, you know, some other type of product. But there is a certain amount of of FOMO to it. I guess I haven't necessarily felt it maybe as much as you for whatever reason.
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:And, also, like, part of me wonders, like, is the fact that all these people are now coming to it and talk about it talking about it, like like, they have to do it and they're missing out
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:Does that mean that it's, like, the beginning of the end? Right? Like, is it are they doing it because they think they have to or because they actually should? So it's a lot of it's a lot of input to, like, think about and, like, really like, what I don't know. Yeah.
Jon:I don't know I don't know what the I don't know what the end game. I don't know what the solution is. But
Jason:Yeah. And synthesize. Well, I think, I mean, one thing that will be helpful is perspective. You know, eventually, sorry, this month, I think we're going on a retreat, right. And I think just sometimes getting away and then talking to some other folks that are in the same stage as us, and getting some perspective will be helpful.
Jason:I think also gratitude to like part it's funny, I had this conversation with this customer. And, you know, part of what it led me to was anxiety, because I was like, oh, my gosh, like, are we missing out on some big opportunities? Like, I was so excited to talk to him and hear his enthusiasm for our product. But then it just led me to this kind of dark place of Yeah, but what what happened if there's like, hundreds of people like this? And we, you know, we should be talking to all of them instead of just focusing on what is in front of us right now and being grateful for the what's in front of us right now, and, you know, just responding to the people who have, you know, who are already here.
Jason:We don't have to worry about all the ones who haven't found us yet. We just have to do a really good job of helping the people who have, you know, have already showed up. It's kinda like throwing a party. And instead of just being happy for the 20 people who showed up, you're just constantly thinking about, you know, the 10 people who didn't come.
Jon:Yeah. That's a good analogy.
Jason:Anyway, folks, if you have ever felt any of this or if you wanna, you know, commiserate with us, you can reach out on Twitter at transistorfm. You can go to our website, and we have a little chat widget, and you can talk to us there. Leave a message for us there. We're also on Twitter. John's at John Buddha.
Jason:I'm at m I Justin. And, yeah, we'd love to hear from you. We also love hearing from our Patreon supporters. John, why don't we give them a quick shout out?
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. As always, thank you to all of our Patreon supporters, really helping grow this show and get it produced in a in a well done a well done fashion by Chris.
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:I don't know if we have any new no. Nobody knew this week, but still have a good list here. Thanks to, Michael Sitver, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis of Fathom Analytics. My brother, Dan Buddha. Dan Buddha.com.
Jon:Darby Frey, Samori Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.
Jason:Junta.
Jon:Kyle from get rewardful.com, which we use for our, Affiliates. Our affiliates program. Yep. The fine folks at, Clubhouse and also Balsamiq.
Jason:Nice. I've got a I've got a quick story about Adam Devander. So obviously, the the the advantage of being an early Patreon supporter, but then supporting month after month is that people eventually learn your name. So Adam DuVander was just at MicroConf, the this conference for bootstrappers in in Vegas, and he introduced some he introduced himself to someone. He's like, oh, wait.
Jason:I recognize your name from the Build Your SaaS podcast.
Jon:That's awesome.
Jason:So, you know, this kid it's it's like a calling card. You know?
Jon:Yeah. That's great.
Jason:Anyways, thanks again to everyone who listened. We will see you next week.
