What's the most important metric for a web app?
Chris, we're gonna now have to make this an explicit episode.
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:You sound so good today.
Jon:Nice.
Justin:I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor.fmandspots.fm. How are you doing this Monday, John?
Jon:Monday evening. I'm good. I'm a little little tired. Had a long bike ride yesterday.
Justin:What was it? You sent me a photo.
Jon:That was, yeah, that was me as we approached the city, Chicago skyline. That was about 8:30
Justin:Wow. At night. You're doing some night riding.
Jon:Yeah. We didn't mean to. We, we rode to a brewery that was 35 miles away, 33 Floyd's Brewing in in Indiana. And,
Justin:Oh, you went to a different state?
Jon:We crossed state lines. Yeah.
Justin:This sounds like one of those those good ideas that you get, like, on a day, and then you go and do it.
Jon:Yeah. It was a good idea. And then, yeah, you know, you go to the brewery and hang out and have some lunch. They have really good food, have a couple of beers, and then I think we hung out there a little too long. It's not that we had too many beers, but it just started getting late.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:And, we're like, well, it's gonna take us longer to get home anyway. We should probably leave, and then, it started getting dark, which was fine. There's a lakefront path in Chicago, and it's pretty well lit. And it was nice weather, but it was, it was like a 12 hour day from from when we left to when we got back.
Justin:Sounds ink that sounds incredible. That sounds So
Jon:we did just
Justin:like a good adventure.
Jon:It was a fun adventure. I'm I'm a little tired. I don't feel as bad as I thought I would today, but I'm I'm a little tired.
Justin:Well, sometimes you need that. You need you need some adventure. That adventure is the spice of life.
Jon:It's true.
Justin:It's it's not enough to just sit behind a computer screen all day That that
Jon:Sure isn't.
Justin:The pixels can't can't please you. They can't fulfill you the way that the real world can.
Jon:Yeah. They can. There's a whole big world out there.
Justin:I think that's the spoiler from, Ready Player 1.
Jon:Right. Yeah.
Justin:If you haven't seen it, Yeah. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Real life is pretty good.
Jon:Pretty good even if virtual reality is pretty awesome in the future.
Justin:Hey. Let's, kick things off with some Patreon shout outs. Do you wanna do some of these?
Jon:Yeah. We should. We have a new Patreon or a patron. Actually, a good friend of mine, Dave Junta, threw in some bucks. I know Dave from a long time ago.
Jon:Sweet. My first job here, we stayed friends, and he is currently working at Home Chef, which is based out of Chicago.
Justin:Sweet.
Jon:Yeah. So thank you, Dave.
Justin:Yeah. Thanks, Dave. He looks like a
Jon:He's been
Justin:Ruby on Rails dude.
Jon:He is. He is. Yeah. He's a Ruby on Rails guy. He he knows Vim really well.
Jon:I was always amazed at his shortcut ability to memorize keyboard shortcuts.
Justin:Does he know how to exit Vim?
Jon:I hope so at this point. Yeah.
Justin:Maybe that's why he's so good at it. He never figured out how to get
Jon:out. Maybe. So thank you, Dave.
Justin:Yeah. Thanks, Dave.
Jon:That's really awesome.
Justin:And then we also have Kevin Markham, patron number 1. And, just because we forgot to mention him in the past, we're gonna say hello again and tell you to go check him out at patreon.com/ dataschool or dataschool. Doesn't matter how you pronounce it. And then, last but not least, Adam Devander from Portland, Oregon. And you know what?
Justin:He he heard us give him a shout out last week, and he said, oh my gosh. He's like, I was planning on going to xoxo, but I didn't. But he said, you you 2 you 3. Sorry. We were staying on Alberta Street, like, a couple blocks from his house, like, really close.
Justin:Yeah. Oh, no. So he's like, ah, I wish I'd been paying more attention to social media because I would
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Called you up. I'm I'm surprised we didn't just see him walking around
Jon:Right.
Justin:In line for Pine State Biscuits.
Jon:That's true.
Justin:They probably just avoid that place like the plague. It
Jon:Probably. It's probably like voodoo donuts. Right?
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. It Pine State Biscuits is good, but you do have to wait quite a while to get the biscuit. Right. Which is
Jon:It's a good biscuit.
Justin:It is a good biscuit. It's true.
Jon:We're in
Justin:a good mood. I like this. We're gonna we're gonna have a fun one. We I thought this week, we would talk about something that's kind of, not kinda kinda yucky or blacky or
Jon:Yeah. I see our notes here. It says black Black. Next to it.
Justin:Right in the notes.
Jon:One of those one of those acronyms that I never really understood what it meant.
Justin:I've had many, startup job where the CEO, he hired me, and then he he would take me you know, meet with me the first time. And he would say, alright, Justin. What we want you to do is we have a number of weekly KPIs we want you to meet. And that basically means, well, KPI stands for key performance indicator, and it would be a big spreadsheet full of metrics, marketing metrics, or, you know, a bunch of lines. So there would be one for how many visitors did we get, how much traffic did we get, how many people did we get signing up to our email list, how many new Twitter followers do we have?
Justin:All sorts of things.
Jon:So make all those numbers bigger.
Justin:Make all those numbers bigger. That's your job. And, you know, I would dutifully put these numbers in every week. Incidentally, as a sidebar, I think the in most cases, when you have a job, your job maybe this is only with certain certain companies, but, really, your job is to only make the boss happy. That's really all that matters.
Justin:You you might get in there going, oh, like, my purpose here is to further the mission or no. It's not. Your job is just to make the boss happy. That's it. So the boss wants KPIs.
Justin:You give them KPIs. But, in this case, we're the boss. Yep. And so we get to decide what we wanna track. And there's this great episode of startups for the rest of us with Mike Taber and Rob Walling.
Justin:Episode 260. They talk about the one metric that matters. Let's play a quick clip from that episode.
Jon:Alright.
Speaker 3:And, essentially, the idea here is that you should only focus on one metric at a time, and that metric is the one that is supposed to be moving the needle in your business. If you only have one metric that really matters, then you can essentially ignore everything else that's going on, whether and in your case, for example, if you're tracking MRR and that's the one metric that matters the most, then you can essentially ignore all these other things like the conversion rate and the number of the visitors to your website. A lot of those things can just go right out the window.
Justin:So what they're talking about is there's all these things we can focus on, and we could have create our own spreadsheet. Right? We could create our own spreadsheet of all these metrics we wanna track, how many new episodes are being created, how many total podcast downloads is our system, you know, hosting? There's all these things we could track. But in the beginning, it's more prudent to just kind of focus on one thing, what matters most.
Justin:Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about that so far?
Jon:It makes sense, to me. I mean, you you can't really, yeah, you can't really put your focus on too many things at once. Otherwise, you're just gonna I think none of them would necessarily grow.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Especially, we're we're doing this on the side, and the our biggest risk is getting spread too thin. Yeah. And, also, I think, you know, the the truth is a lot of those other KPIs really don't matter.
Justin:And so focusing on the ones that matter and kind of getting rid of all the garbage that doesn't, ultimately, hopefully, that'll help us grow the business faster. I like this next part. This is where, Rob talks about, he's talking to Noah Kagan who started AppSumo and how Noah ended up with this one metric that was different than what Rob had. Let let's play that now.
Speaker 4:One point early on when Noah Kagan was building AppSumo, I had talked to him, and we were talking about kinda what you're focused on. It was like focusing on one thing. And at the time, I think I was doing it was early in Hiteo, and I was talking about, yeah, it's just MRR. I was focused on he said, I'm focused on growing my list. He said, it's it's the number of subscribers total and number of subscribers we're adding each week or each day.
Speaker 4:And I remember thinking, oh, how interesting that he wasn't focused on there was not it wasn't focused on revenue, wasn't focused on profit, wasn't focused on deals per month. There's a bunch of other things that you could look at, but at that point, he knew that to get where he wanted to go, he had to build that list. And that's kind of why I look at at MRR as a SaaS founder is that to get where I wanna go, I need to get that to increase. And there's a bunch of ways to do it, but it does give you focus. The other thing is it tells me what not to look at.
Speaker 4:As an example, I don't at this point, when we're in heavy growth mode, I don't look at profitability.
Justin:By the way, if you're making your own show, one of the things that I'm trying to get better at is being not just a creator of content, but also, what's the word, a curator of content. And I'll often have these clips in my memory. You know, I I remember listening to this episode. And being able to retrieve those and bring those to the surface for, in this case, our audience, I think, is really helpful. So if you're making your own show or if you're you know, I do this all the time in blog posts as well.
Justin:This is a great way to you can kind of bring a bunch of different ideas from different people altogether in one place, and it's really helpful for people.
Jon:It's a good one. No. I I I like that clip. I I especially like the part he said about it allows you to focus. I think I mean, we I think we've experienced that before where you I think you lose track of your your key metric that you're currently working on, and we just sort of have all these ideas come up and and requests and brainstorm for new for new features or, you know, whatever it may be, and then, you kind of lose focus on what your original goal was, like, even previously that week.
Justin:Yes. Just as a as an aside, I I just noticed there's in our support software, there's this insights tab.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:How many new cases do you think we've had, let's see, in the last month? How how many incoming conversations did we did we do?
Jon:Oh, wow. I never looked at that.
Justin:30 days.
Jon:65.
Justin:So we completed there was a 110 conversations created. So a 110 cases. 92 were completed, and 97 customers were helped.
Jon:That's a lot.
Justin:That is a lot. That that's that's in 30 in 30 days. And sometimes, that's just conversations created. It doesn't tell you number of replies. Right.
Justin:Yeah. What was our highest day? Highest days are weekends, oddly enough.
Jon:Maybe maybe these people are also doing their shows on the side.
Justin:Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. There's a wow. I yeah.
Justin:We just had a ton on Yeah. Saturday, September 8th.
Jon:Yeah. We get a lot. So apologies to the people who we still haven't fixed problems for. There's a couple lingering.
Justin:There's a couple lingering, and it shows you how hard this can be. We're getting a lot of inbound, and we really want to build something that's awesome for a lot of people. Main skill set of a product person is really in not just collecting feedback, but digging deeper and actually getting down to what these folks are trying to accomplish and what the majority of our users are trying to accomplish and then delivering the best possible thing for them.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And sometimes what people articulate as what they want isn't actually, actually, you know, it isn't actually the the the the thing that is going to get them to where they need to go. And so digging deeper and saying, hey. That's really interesting idea. You know, what are you hoping to accomplish with that? Or Right.
Justin:You know, what are you where are you hoping to get to? Those are the conversations we need to be having, and they're awesome.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've yeah. Like, let's say, for instance, we've had a lot of requests lately for an API, Mhmm. Which we wanna build and we will build for a number of reasons.
Jon:But one thing I keep asking and replying with is, like, what, like, what are you trying to accomplish with an API, which will lead me to sort of build it a certain way or put more of a focus on one particular aspect of the API.
Justin:Yeah. I I know we're kind of we're kind of on on in the side right now, but, I think one thing there's 2 things I think of. 1 is that these conversations take time. It's it's if you're going to dig in deep like that, you know, even you just responding to a a query and going, what are you hoping to accomplish? You've already guaranteed that you're gonna have one more reply.
Jon:Yeah. Right.
Justin:If you already have an inbox that is full, one more reply, you know, that that can add a lot of weight to your day, but it's the work we need to do. So it's challenging. It really is. All of our fellow builders and makers and bootstrappers out there, this work is tough. And, actually, the second thought I had there is between you and I, I think one thing well, especially you, you've got a really good bullshit meter.
Justin:Sometimes, you know, when I'm discussing things with you, I'm just spitballing ideas, and Yep. You have you are particularly attuned, it feels like, to, do we really need that? What Yeah. What is that actually for?
Jon:Right. I mean, I'm just like, well, that seems like either a lot of work or a lot of work for a little payoff or, you know, not worth it now.
Justin:It's helpful to have that. It's helpful to have that that pushback on, you know, for on both sides for for us to say, well, to question each other all the time. And so, again, folks, if you have a cofounder, I think you wanna be having those conversations for sure. So back to this this idea of main metric, Rob said, basically, if you have a SaaS business, the main metric is going to be MRR, monthly recurring revenue. And I I found that interesting.
Justin:It it there of all the things we could track, that one because we could track how many new paying customers are we getting every month. That could be 1. How many new trials are we getting every month? But one thing about MRR is it it seems to hit a bunch of, a bunch of things for us. One is, you know, we're going we're we're trying to build this into a business that can support us and, eventually, maybe some other people.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And that that means we have to be kind of laser focused on getting to a a a certain monthly number. And we've kind of roughly said you know, I for me, it's like I see the 5 k, the 10 k, the 15, and then the 20. Like, those all seem like milestones.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:Is it is it the same for you?
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And there's certainly a point where it would be worth it for both of us. Do it full time.
Jon:And that's ultimately, I, I think the goal here is to, you know, build a product that is making money for for us to, you know, live our lives, but also provide provide value for the the customers that are using it. We're not trying to, you know, milk everything we can out of all of our customers and kinda screw them over. But Mhmm. Yeah. Definitely keeping an eye on on the MRR is is, is definitely for us the the the main metric.
Jon:I mean, you know, we're not we're not a startup that is dependent on free downloads of their app. Mhmm. Like, user number of users, we're not we're not doing, you know, in app purchases and stuff like that. So
Justin:Yeah. Well and I think MRR really is a lightning rod for everything. If you're not providing, a service that's helpful to people every single month, Basically, every every time September September every time the calendar rolls over, we have to prove again to folks using Transistor that this is worth their time and their money if people aren't getting value anymore, if it's not helping them improve their lives, if it's not something they need, then, they cancel, and then we get churn.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's interesting because we have we have our payments channel in Stripe or in, in Slack that's hooked up to Stripe, and we see we see new subscribers, we see, when people are charged, and we see when people cancel. Mhmm. And, you know, it's always it's disheartening a little bit to see people cancel.
Jon:A lot of those, I think, are trials that people are not continuing with. Yeah. But I think the ones that are more impactful are the ones that you know have been customers and you helped and they cancel after a couple months of paying. And you're like Yeah. That that sucks because they already they paid, and they found some value in it, but then ultimately not enough, so they they left.
Justin:Yeah. And, I mean, we're we're still early on. And so Yeah. Certainly, we're going to, we're going to especially after a big launch and getting attention on Product Hunt and other things, you're going to see, a bump in cancellations. Just as a note, I this is completely anecdotal, but one of the things about having this drip inside of, Slack is you you start to notice trends.
Justin:And Hotmail addresses, Yahoo addresses, very high cancellation rate, and, nothing against folks that use Yahoo or Hotmail. But, and we don't wanna we don't wanna make too many have too many conclusions about that. But I think one thing I've noticed with other SaaS companies is that a company domain in the email address dramatically decreases the chance of churn.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And this is, one of the reasons I think we wanna go after that b to b market is that folks that are just doing it as a hobby or or, you know, podcasting is not easy. And, you know, there could be someone on a team at a technical company, a software company. Prof ProfitWell is a great example. They they became, they're they're doing a show on our on on transistor called Protect the Hustle.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:They have people in house whose whole job it is to create that media. And their KPIs are
Jon:how
Justin:many downloads are we getting? How many people are engaging? You know? They've got their own list of things that they're responsible for, and you better be sure that they're highly incentivized, you know, to keep that podcast going.
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely.
Justin:So interesting also contrasting, for metrics, we use ProfitWell and the Stripe dashboard.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Churn rate inside of the Stripe dashboard, I think I think that includes trial customers, which is not a great metric. Inside of ProfitWell, our churn in August was 3.8%. Our churn so far this month is 2.3%. I think I'm getting this right. Yep.
Justin:Churn in July was 1.4%. So, and that is just based on revenue churn, which I think is a little bit more helpful for us.
Jon:Right. Is Stripe stripes higher, I would imagine, because it's based on Yes.
Justin:Trial level. Is we're at 10.3%, but I think that k. Includes those trials that never paid. Yeah. There something about MRR that I also like is definitely that that becomes your our primary focus.
Justin:Like, is that number increasing in a meaningful way every month? But then I go one thing I've been thinking, you know, that's helpful with KPIs, with metrics, tracking metrics, is I don't know. I had this thought of, like, maybe I should try to get 10 new people to sign up this week. Right. Like, push push myself because, you know, this isn't gonna be easy.
Justin:This is this is hard. Building software is hard. And if we're gonna get to our goal of a certain amount of money per month, there's you know, certainly, it'd be nice if all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of people showed up tomorrow, but that's that's not going that's unlikely to happen. Certainly, it'd be nice if Jeff Bezos invested a couple million.
Jon:If you're listening, Jeff.
Justin:If you're listening, Jeff.
Jon:Which you're probably not.
Justin:He could be.
Jon:He already built his set.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:He's got
Justin:So, you know, if those things aren't going to happen, what can we do? And, you know, one thing is, well, let's try to get more users. Now that's that's not the primary metric. But as soon as I'm thinking, like, how do I increase MRR? I'm thinking, well, there's some secondary metrics.
Justin:Right? Maybe I need to get more try to push to get more trials. Maybe I need to push to get new paying customers. Maybe I need to, do a bunch of more work to make sure that our current customers are having an incredible experience, and they then spread the word to their friends.
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, there's also the current customers and and new customers even. The difference between increasing your customer count versus your MRR is that you can increase your MRR by by getting more, like, higher value customers Mhmm. With our different tiers that we haven't you know, we might need to reconfigure some of our tiers to make those, you know, more appealing.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. So I I there's a lot I think there's a lot to play with inside of that.
Justin:Yeah. It's so interesting what it makes me think because it's kind of like the 5 whys, but a little bit different. So I go, I want to increase MRR. And then instead of the 5 why's, it's more like the 5 how's. So how are you gonna do that?
Justin:Okay. Well, to go back, if I'm gonna get more MRR, I'm either going to need to get more paying customers or have more expansion revenue or decrease churn. Okay. Well, we still have very few customers right now. Churn isn't a big issue right now, so I'll ignore that one.
Justin:Expansion revenue could be a thing, but, oh, to do that, we would really need to figure out how we can offer more value to folks so they upgrade. And then all of a sudden, that goes into product development. Okay. Well, what are some things that would, you know, help us to get those customers? And then I think, oh, maybe we need to rejig, you know, our download limits.
Justin:Maybe, this new promotion feature I've been, you know, talking about the last Yeah. Couple weeks, maybe that needs to be in the higher tiers. And so you just start to it it it kind of opens your imagination to all these things that you would need to do in order to accomplish this goal that you have.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, ultimately, it's gonna be work. It's not like we can just, yeah, I mean, it's not like we can just talk about wanting to increase MR and not really do much work or add add add new features or bring more value to the table.
Justin:Yeah. I think what's helpful about it is that it really clarifies what we should be doing with our energy. Because MRR is such, it's an unforgiving metric, you can't just, like, we could go out and get a bunch of bad deals and, you know, increase MRR 1 month, but we would, you know, feel it, feel the pain, the next month.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so it's unforgiving. If we're going to do it and make it sustainable, we need to
Jon:Exactly.
Justin:Make the product better. But it it just gives me that, that that kind of clarity that I think is so difficult sometimes when you're doing work, which is, maybe I should just, you know, take more speaking gigs, or maybe I should try to get into more industry newsletters, or
Jon:Right.
Justin:Maybe I should be, you know, trying to I don't know. There's all these other things we could be doing. But you know, we get we when a request lands in your inbox, you can kind of weigh it up against this one metric, which is, will this in any way help me to improve or increase MRR?
Jon:I mean, that
Justin:yeah. Oh, it sounds like you're gonna say something.
Jon:No. I have a I have sort of, like, a secondary metric. I don't know if it's a good time to
Justin:bring that up. Sure.
Jon:It's kinda related to that, though. Like, you know, you talk about MRR and increasing increasing customers and going out and and adding, you know, new trials each month. The one thing that that I sort of thought of was another metric, which isn't like a mess it's a performance indicator, I suppose, but it's it's like the number of support requests we get versus the number of customers. And is that, like, hopefully, that's not growing at the same rate because, you know, as we get more customers, we don't really want more support requests. We want the the thing we're building to get easier to use.
Jon:And, hopefully, you know, the the goal is to, you know obviously, there's gonna be a lot of support requests and questions at the beginning, which will lead to fixes or help documents being written. And, you know, as you get more and more customers, hopefully, the product will have become self explanatory and easy enough so that you don't just generate a bunch of support requests and generate more work for us.
Justin:Yeah. Totally. I'm I'm going to link, a blog post by Nathan Barry. He has this one actually, 2. 1 is, it's called The Cash Problems from Self Funding Rapid Growth.
Justin:And one of the problems he talks about is getting support under control.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:He said, we actually didn't need to have to cut our expenses to be more profitable. Instead, we just needed them to increase a lot more slowly. And he said, you know, while they were growing, it felt impossible because the the growth was just putting this kind of crippling load on top of the support team. And, basically, they they figured out 2 things. 1 was their weekly ticket volume was increasing but slower than the rate they were acquiring new customers.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And the support queue levels were staying fairly steady. So they were keeping up with the new volume, but they could never get ahead. And so once they he figured out those two things, he was able to get his support queue under control, but it's tricky. Right? You it's like he's basically the it it's a similar problem to what we we might be facing, which is, wow, we get a bunch of new trial users, but that at the beginning, it really there's a lot of weight there.
Justin:Yeah. And, you know, we have to we're going to have to figure out some creative ways to, you know, do support more efficiently.
Jon:Yeah. Or, you know, recognize trends in the in the requests and sort of surface that help in the app a little better or guide them along Mhmm. When they're trying to do something in particular.
Justin:Yeah. This this second blog post I'll link to, they they figured out a few changes that that actually helped. One was just to improve the quality of their responses, and I think one thing that's nice about ours about maybe slowing down on growth is that when we do get those customer support requests, we're able to maybe improve our documentation, as we go instead of or improve the product when we need to. Instead of just all you're trying to do is Nathan compares it to doing the dishes. It's like if the dish pile keeps growing, you're just you're not thinking about improving improving the process.
Justin:You're just like, oh, I'm just gonna grind through this.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But once you finally get the dishes done and you can sit back and go, okay. What would be a process or a habit or something I could do to improve this situation?
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely.
Justin:You know, you really need margin to do that.
Jon:Yeah. It's hard to really hard to think about it in a meaningful way when it's just piling on top of you.
Justin:Yeah. And that that that does seem to be the key, doesn't it? I'm terrible at this in terms of just, like, I'm just gonna grind it out. And then if you get in that habit, you just end up grinding forever and never kind of getting on top of it.
Jon:Yeah. You're not really diagnosing the problem.
Justin:So that is that is something else. I know we just talked about one metric, but I think one of our secondary metrics is that kind of meaningfully, contributes to MRR is support. And Yeah. On one hand I don't know if I wanna share this, but I just will. Whatever.
Justin:Like, ours our response times for support are not great.
Jon:Yeah. They they vary.
Justin:They vary. Yes. And I want to improve those. But in order to improve those, you know, it's gonna mean, okay. We gotta make the product better.
Justin:We gotta make our onboarding better. We've got to improve our documentation. We've got to, you know, maybe aim for a different customer. Right?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And, this is one test I did with in in past jobs. I did exactly that calculation you were talking about, which is per tier per pricing tier, how many how much support time Mhmm. Do we spend per tier? And we had a really low kind of self-service tier that was gobbling up, like, 80% of our support time.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so, there's nothing wrong with those people. They just weren't the right customers for us, and we ended up canceling that tier, and grandfathering everyone in. But support then went down once we did that. You know, those are the kinds of things we probably wanna be thinking about.
Jon:Yeah. I think so.
Justin:It it almost feels like I like, I don't know about you, but I've kinda had my foot off the gas pedal in terms of especially in terms of wanting to promote Transistor
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:Because it just felt like we needed time to, first of all, listen to the customers we already have and then get a few more things out the door.
Jon:Yeah. I think I think there's definitely some, well, some, yeah, some new features that we wanna get done soon here and all just a few areas that need some ironing out that'll actually, I think, reduce support requests quite a bit. Mhmm. It's great having people sign up, you know, organically. It's being it's being, recommended to people, which is awesome.
Jon:Mhmm. But, yeah, we haven't we haven't really done that a large marketing push. And I think, you know, some of the stuff we're working on now is will be will be, beneficial. Mhmm. People will like it.
Jon:You know, as much as I would love
Justin:It it doesn't do us any good to just, like, go harebrained after that and at you know, just that's all we're gonna do. Sometimes you just gotta take a breath and go, okay. Well Yeah. How are if we're going to get there, what are we going to do to condition ourselves? You know, it's like running a marathon.
Justin:You don't you don't just, like, jump right into it. Sometimes you, like, train for a bit, and you're like, okay. Well, that was a good 10 k. But before I jump into that 25 k, I'm just gonna take a breather here and, you know, work on some conditioning, work
Jon:Focus on my form. Yeah. It's yeah. I totally agree.
Justin:You're are you are you training for triathlon right now?
Jon:No. I, I might sign up for 1.
Justin:You might sign up? See say, I'm I'm just trying to make this, applicable to you. Yeah. But that's exactly it. Like, you as you're thinking about doing this next thing, right, getting to this next level in your fitness or or however you wanna say it, you're thinking about, like, okay.
Justin:Am I ready for that? Well, you know, how's my Yeah. How's my biking? How's my swimming? How's my running?
Jon:What's it gonna take? How am I gonna train? Do I need new equipment? Who am I gonna reach out to to ask about how to train or who can I train with? Yeah.
Jon:I'm not just gonna, like, sign up and go, well, I'll be ready next summer. I don't I don't really have to worry about it. It's just that that would be a disaster.
Justin:Exactly. And and it's so similar. I mean, if if you stayed in that mode forever, if you are always just thinking about it and just asking people and researching, you know, hopefully, someone would say, okay, John. Like, you you either do it or don't do it. Right?
Justin:You've you've
Jon:I've also talked about it for a long time and never signed up. So the first step is signing up, and they're always pretty far in the distance. Like, the one I'm thinking about is at the end of August next summer. Right? So the signing up is the incentive, I think, to to sort of push forward and
Justin:Yeah. And the metaphor or the analogy for us is is that we've launched we have according to Churn Buster Churn Buster according to Churn Buster is a great product. My buddy, Matt, runs that. It's a free plug, Matt. According to ProfitWell, we are over $2,000 in MRR right now.
Justin:Nice. And that's our highest number, so I'm I'm just gonna take that one.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:So we've launched. We're at $2,000 MR. This is great, but that's kind of like, in my mind, running a 5 k or a 2 k. Now if we're gonna get if we're gonna run 25 k. What is 25 k?
Justin:Is that a half marathon
Jon:or full? I think it is a half
Justin:Oh, sorry. Marathon? I'm I'm speaking in
Jon:You're you're speaking Canadian.
Justin:Speaking Canadian.
Jon:A a marathon is 26 miles out of 25 k is
Justin:The races I see here in Canada are 5 k's, 10 k's, 25 k's, and 50 k's.
Jon:Yeah. It's weird. It's weird because the US does 5 k's, and they do 10 k's. And then they just go to, like, 13 miles or 26 miles. I don't it's really weird.
Jon:And then people are like, how much is a 5 k? Like, 3.1 miles, which we're behind. I'm sorry. Rest of the world, we're we're not on the same system. Yeah.
Jon:It's it's ridiculous.
Justin:But it it is it is a good analogy, though, of, okay. Well, we've just done our 2 k. What's it gonna take to do our 5 k? And Mhmm. I think it it is Sometimes it does take some conditioning.
Justin:Sometimes it does take, you know, getting more things in place so that you can get to that next level. And, it's it's better to do that and set yourself up for success than just to you know, you can sometimes sign up for a 5 k and not train and maybe a 10 k and not train. But Yeah. I I don't I don't think I told you this, but we we we went for a run-in Portland. I was sore for 3 days after.
Jon:You were. You didn't sound like that.
Justin:I was like John got up, and he's like, I'm going for a run. And I hadn't run-in, like, years, and I'm like, yeah. I'm going too.
Jon:Yeah. I'm like, alright. Come along.
Justin:I thought
Jon:you were like you were go you're like, I'm gonna run to the I'm just gonna run to the end of the street with you. Yeah. And then you just kept going.
Justin:That street just kept getting longer.
Jon:It did. It was a nice street.
Justin:My wife was kept going, how long did you run? What what did you do to yourself? Oh, no. Anyway so, hopefully all that conversation is helpful to folks listening. As always, if you want to, respond to this, we love hearing your comments.
Justin:Reach out on Twitter at transistorfm. You can also comment in breaker and cast box. And, I try to jump in and answer those whenever I can. Let's before we go, let's do a few app updates. What do we what do we have going on this week?
Jon:So we haven't I think last time we talked, we still haven't really deployed anything new, but I am still finishing putting the finishing touches on this integrations, area that I'm building out, which includes, the new Twitter and YouTube integration where you can set your episodes to either auto tweet or auto post to YouTube I see. Where convert your convert your audio into a video file and post it to your YouTube channel. And, I think that one, you you posted something a couple weeks ago, a quote that was like
Justin:The first 90%
Jon:takes 90% of your time, and the last 10% takes 90% of your time, which I think is pretty accurate for this one.
Justin:Yeah. That's that's just the the rule of doing software development.
Jon:And then we have a lot of requests, which I I understand. A lot of this comes from Chrome changing some stuff too where, people are requesting that they can do a custom domain with transistor and have SSL built into it Yeah. Which you could which you can do now, pretty easily and freely with, Let's Encrypt. So we just have to sort of build that into our infrastructure. That's just some upgrades that need to happen on our Amazon AWS stack.
Justin:Sweet. That that'll actually be so big. Yeah. It'll be great. When I got that, with my web hosting provider.
Justin:You know, in the old days, getting those SSL certs was so painful.
Jon:Expensive and just and, like, confusing to upload these files that are, like, munched together into one other file.
Justin:A fairly common embarrassing thing that would happen even to big funded startups is their SSL cert would expire. Yeah. And, this would happen, like, every once it would it would be like TechCrunch news. It's like, oh, someone's SSL cert just expired. And some of those SSL certs, depending on what you got, they took 48 hours to renew.
Jon:So it
Justin:was just a mess. But let's Yeah. Let's encrypt. If you set it up correctly, I know you
Jon:Auto renew.
Justin:Yeah. You have I think you have to run a script to get it to auto renew. Is that right?
Jon:Yeah. There's a there's a web, a web server I'm looking into that a a friend of mine used called Caddy. We can we can link to it, c a d d y. It's this, it's a replacement for NGINX and Apache
Justin:Oh, cool.
Jon:But it's really fast and has it's basically its purpose is that it has lots of built into it. So it handles auto renewal. You basically just make a request to a custom domain that is pointed to your servers via DNS or whatever, and it automatically just, like, does the stuff. Wow. So a friend set it up and, like, it'll take a little bit of work.
Jon:But once it's set up, it it sounds it sounds really great.
Justin:Yeah. This looks really, really good.
Jon:It's pretty cool.
Justin:And, again, it's it's a simple I mean, it's not simple. It takes work to do it, but it's one of those magical things that when you give that to customers, it makes their life better.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:All of a sudden, they they have a secure site. It's being you know, it affects their search rankings. It like, they quit getting that question from their boss, like, how come I'm getting this warning? Even iTunes now, they they're they want there to be a, you know, HTTPS, feed URL.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so Yeah.
Jon:I think they're gonna require it soon. I don't think they require it yet, but they definitely will.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:I mean, it just like it's a pretty small thing you can do to to ensure that, data is being transported around everywhere securely and encrypted.
Justin:Yeah. So Sweet. Well, those are gonna be great. I continue to do these dumb programming questions, live streams, and I'm learning a lot. I I actually haven't used transistor as an example too much yet.
Jon:But Yeah. We can we can do one. We can live live, I know you wanna try it with, Versus Versus Code has some code sharing. Yeah.
Justin:And I actually had some people join my session the other day, and I could see their cursor going around. They they didn't wanna change anything while I was while I was doing stuff. But, Visual Studio Code is it's solid. Microsoft is onto something here. The the one the one I I don't know if I mentioned this last week.
Justin:This will be the final thing before the episode ends, dear listener. But I I heard people talking about it going, oh, Visual Studio is so good. And I know about Visual Studio. I've been in a dot net shop. That's where I started in software.
Justin:So I know about Visual Studio, but I thought people were using Visual Studio for web development. And so I I downloaded it, and I'm like, I don't understand why you folks like this for web development. It's brutal. Right. And then, finally, there's, like, kind of this embarrassing moment where people are like, oh, no.
Justin:No. You We meant Visual Studio Code.
Jon:I'm
Justin:like, Microsoft, that is the worst branding fail ever.
Jon:Right. Because it yeah.
Justin:If if it's a separate thing and I know this is like a a like, look at the the business guy, you know, suffer here. And that's fine. But on the other hand, I'm like, man, I can understand why beginners like, this has nothing to do with my ability to understand, you know, how to construct a loop or how to you know, it doesn't have it has nothing to do with me actually coding. It's just, like, the the barriers for me that I have to go to go through just to just to do simple things. Like, I just wanna have the right environment, and I had this embarrassing thing happen, which was I download the wrong thing, and it was like, man, this is no good.
Justin:And then if it wasn't for the nice people around me, I wouldn't have known. So
Jon:Thank you, Internet.
Justin:Thank you, Internet. Well, Internet friends. The Internet itself was very helpful. Yeah. But Internet friends, who are willing to take me aside and go, actually, it's it's actually not Visual Studio.
Justin:It's Visual Studio Code. I went, ah.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:Anyway
Jon:Cool.
Justin:So that's it for this week, folks. Check back next Tuesday for another episode. By the way, we would love to, get more questions. I know we don't have a voice mail set up right now, but if you want to email us questions, just shows at transistor.fm. If you want to tweet us questions I know that you folks listen to this and you're you have thoughts and things you wanna know about.
Justin:Send those to us, and we'd love to do a q and a episode.
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely.
Justin:Alright. Talk to you then.
