Justin: 00:00

Do you have a small team? Are you doing that solopreneur thing? What if your project management software didn't cost you anything? Well, Clubhouse has just announced a new free plan for teams up to 10 people. Try it now.

Justin: 00:16

Clubhouse.io/

Gavin: 00:22

build.

Jon: 00:31

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.

Justin: 00:38

And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing. Follow along as we build Transistor dot

Helen: 00:47

FM.

Justin: 00:48

How's it going, man?

Jon: 00:50

Good. I was just jamming out to the new Beck album.

Justin: 00:53

There's a new Beck album?

Jon: 00:55

Yeah. It came out today. Wow. It's pretty good. His he he has it's his 14th album.

Justin: 01:01

Now on the spectrum on the Beck spectrum from experimental and weird to poppy and radio friendly, where does this one fall?

Jon: 01:13

Oh, that's a good question. It seems like a little bit in the middle.

Justin: 01:17

Okay. Sweet. I'm gonna have to check it out. I felt

Jon: 01:21

There's some weird there's some weird stuff on it, but that's usual.

Justin: 01:24

Have you, listened to the new, DJ Shadow album? Were you ever into DJ Shadow?

Jon: 01:30

I was into DJ Shadow. No. I didn't know he had a new one.

Justin: 01:32

Yeah. I yeah. I've just started listening to it. It's it's a double album. And the way I understand it is the first half is just instrumental, like, kind of the instrumental stuff you would expect from DJ Shadow.

Justin: 01:47

And then the second half is, like, MC's rapping over beats he's made. Yeah. So, yeah, I I introducing was like it blew my mind when that came out. That was

Jon: 02:00

That album is ama yeah. It's an amazing album.

Justin: 02:02

And at first, it felt like I know I wasn't the only one that discovered it, but of my friends, it was the only, like, cool album I discovered before anybody

Jon: 02:15

else. Nice.

Justin: 02:17

So we got a few things to talk about. I thought we would open up with something that Peter Sum noticed on Twitter. He said, hey. Are you not doing Baremetrics open startups anymore?

Jon: 02:32

When did he notice this?

Justin: 02:34

Probably about 15 minutes after I turned it off. Oh, wow. And, actually, it's interesting because it the the thread was Des Traynor was mentioning that the new CEO of Microsoft has added the 800,000,000,000 to their is it 800,000,000,000 or 80,000,000,000 to their market cap?

Jon: 02:59

Probably 80.

Justin: 02:59

Probably 80. And I just did some quick, like, math and said, oh, that's a 160 a 160,000 times transistor's, valuation. And I'm I'm sure Peter was looking at that and then was like, oh, I'm gonna go see what Transistor's doing on open startups.

Jon: 03:22

Oh, yeah.

Justin: 03:23

But couldn't find it.

Jon: 03:24

So what what for people that don't know, what is what is open startups?

Justin: 03:29

So, if you go back in the archives, you can hear John and I talking about this. The the idea is behind open start ups is that you just share all your numbers. You share everything. You share how much revenue you're making. You share how much each employee is getting paid.

Justin: 03:47

You share, the idea is to be transparent, And people have different reasons for this. Some folks do it for marketing. Do you remember kind of our rationale behind why we decided to do it? Because we did it on bare metrics, and we did it on indie hackers.

Jon: 04:06

Right. I think well, I think we did it because we're just trying to be so transparent about building a company on this show. Mhmm. And that was one aspect of it.

Justin: 04:17

Yeah. You know, in the beginning, when you're wondering what it's really like to build a SaaS, you do kinda wanna know, well, how does a company grow? And if you go back I mean, if you go back in the archives, because the company, at least the iteration where you and I are working on it together, it's coming up to 2 years. Right?

Jon: 04:44

Yeah. It is. Yeah. It'll be yeah. 2 years in well, I guess in January.

Jon: 04:50

Right?

Justin: 04:50

In January. Yeah. You started telling me about it in December. Actually, you might have started telling me about it in November, and then the Cards Against Humanity show launched in December of 2017.

Jon: 05:05

Yeah.

Justin: 05:06

And then

Jon: 05:06

So, yeah, it's yeah. It's I mean, it's the code itself is over 2 years old

Justin: 05:11

Mhmm.

Jon: 05:12

Which is weird to think about.

Justin: 05:14

But even it's weird to think that you and I have been working together for 2 years.

Jon: 05:19

Yeah.

Justin: 05:19

It doesn't that doesn't seem that seems too long.

Jon: 05:23

It does. Yeah. Time is weird. I mean, I was just thinking about this today. I remember I it's I was just finding it hard to believe that it's already Friday.

Jon: 05:30

That's only and that's only 7 days. Because I was like, Justin just told me to have a good weekend, and it's already Friday again.

Justin: 05:38

That's true.

Jon: 05:40

What what the hell?

Justin: 05:41

What happened?

Jon: 05:42

Like Time is weird.

Justin: 05:44

Time is weird. Another topic, actually, I I think we should talk about sometime, which reminds me that we really do when you can, it it helps to enjoy the time you're in right now.

Jon: 05:59

Yeah.

Justin: 06:00

But so back to so Barimetrics. So Barimetrics has amazing analytics, revenue analytics for SaaS companies. Josh has done a really good job of, building these dashboards that look incredible. And if you go to barometrics.com/open, there's a bunch of startups that are that are showing people their revenue numbers. And you can even drill into, like, MRR, and see, like, growth and churn, and it's really detailed.

Justin: 06:37

And at the beginning, I felt I think both of you and I felt like this is a good idea because we're sharing our journey, and we're starting from nothing. We're starting from 0. And, like, I mean, there were times in the beginning where it was really hard. I was writing blog posts at the time called called the Bootstrapper's Paradox, which is like I was starting to freak out because, you know, we'd been working on it for 6 months or something, and we had $750 in monthly recurring revenue.

Jon: 07:17

Right. So

Justin: 07:20

I think it made sense for a long time. But from the beginning, we said we weren't gonna do it forever. May could you tell me because we've talked about this privately. What have been some of your feelings lately about having our numbers public?

Jon: 07:33

I feel like it's motivation for other people to to use it for particular reasons. Like, I don't know. We got we've been getting, I think, more and more emails of whether or not they're legitimate or not of, you know, people wanting to partner up or

Justin: 07:50

Mhmm.

Jon: 07:51

Invest or I don't know. Something like that. Or just, like, I've gotten random emails of, like, congratulations on hitting such and such MRR. Like, let's talk about I just ignore it.

Justin: 08:03

Yeah.

Jon: 08:06

I don't yeah. I don't I I mean, I think we're certainly past the the main struggle point.

Justin: 08:14

Yeah. It's

Jon: 08:14

hard to it's hard to put a finger on why I wouldn't necessarily want them out there anymore. It's like

Justin: 08:21

Yeah.

Jon: 08:21

We almost have to, like, justify it now. Yeah. Or something like that. Or internally, I feel like we have to justify it in that. It's this weird, like, imposter syndrome where I feel like we don't deserve it just or something like that.

Jon: 08:38

It's weird.

Justin: 08:39

Yeah. Yeah. But no. I think that's I think that's actually well put. Like, so much of it is just a growing discomfort about having the numbers public.

Justin: 08:53

Discomfort in the sense of we know our competitors look at it and discomfort in the sense of we know I mean, it I'm sure it has encouraged new competitors to enter into to the the category.

Jon: 09:10

Yeah.

Justin: 09:10

I mean, I'm not opposed to competition, but you don't necessarily wanna say, come on everybody. Like, you know, like, if if you find a good surf spot, you generally just wanna keep it quiet.

Jon: 09:22

Right.

Justin: 09:26

So and I think the other thing for me personally is just it started to give me more stress. Because now it it's almost like people know your secrets when they're talking to you. Like, you have this weird these mental games, like like, have they been looking at our numbers? And is this Right. Is this comment on Twitter, is this cynical because they just know about all my numbers?

Justin: 09:50

And so I think that played into it. And, I mean, honestly, the other thing, right now our growth is still good, but I know it's not always gonna be positive. And I didn't want the additional stress of, like, when we hit our first, dip in you know, I've I've been listening to all these other Bootstrap podcasts. And eventually, companies stop, MRR stops growing in the same way. Do you know what I mean?

Justin: 10:25

Like, right now

Jon: 10:25

Yeah.

Justin: 10:26

Our our growth is you know, MRR growth increases 15%, but that can't be sustained forever.

Jon: 10:34

Right. And there probably will be months where it'll actually be less than the previous month.

Justin: 10:39

Mhmm.

Jon: 10:39

Even though we'll be at we'll be at a level which is comfortable, but it's still, like, there are months probably where it's gonna dip.

Justin: 10:45

Yeah. I mean, if you're at a $1,000,000,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue, if you're growing at 1%, that is pretty amazing.

Jon: 10:54

Yeah.

Justin: 10:56

And so I just didn't want the stress of knowing that my numbers were out there and, you know, when we have our first dip oh, this is a good way of putting it. I don't wanna have to act like a performer in that situation. Do you know what I mean?

Jon: 11:11

Not exactly. No.

Justin: 11:13

In some ways, I you can worry more about the audience than the problem that's in front of you. Worry more about appearances than actually thinking critically about what you're doing.

Jon: 11:28

Yeah.

Justin: 11:29

And you see companies fall into this all the time. You know, Elon Musk has to maintain a public image on one side. Right? And that that performance anxiety of I'm performing, and I don't wanna you know, I've got this audience, and I'm basing things on their reaction can really be a huge distraction from, wait a second. Let's let's just, in a safe place, think about what do we need to do now.

Jon: 12:05

Yeah. I'm sure we'll still talk about it. Yeah. Like, when whenever that month happens, I'm sure we'll talk about it, and we'll I'm sure we'll talk about we'll still talk about numbers and expenses and

Justin: 12:17

Mhmm. Exactly. So, yeah, we've turned it off on VeriMetrix, and we've turned it off on Indie Hackers. So I hope it was helpful for people while we were doing it. And, I I you know, there's still some company.

Justin: 12:34

I I actually noticed buffer is no longer on there. ConvertKit is still on there, but buffer is not. And so, yeah, it'll be interesting to see, you know, why what folks do with it. I think it's good for a season. I don't think people should do it forever.

Justin: 12:53

You're working on something new in in our our, our shape up process?

Jon: 13:00

Yeah. In our not not 6 week cycle. Mhmm. I don't even know how many weeks we said it was. 2 or 3.

Jon: 13:05

It was pretty short.

Justin: 13:06

Yeah.

Jon: 13:07

Wanted to get it done before Thanksgiving. Yeah. US Thanksgiving.

Justin: 13:11

Yeah. When is it that's that's, like, that's this weekend or

Jon: 13:14

next week? Next next Thursday.

Justin: 13:17

Next Thursday. Okay.

Jon: 13:18

It's late late in the month, 20 7th Yeah. 28th.

Justin: 13:24

I I'm it's like all the Canadians are just waiting for Black Friday. It's like, why is Black Friday so late?

Jon: 13:33

Why is Black Friday at all?

Justin: 13:34

I mean, let's see. What? Yeah. So we're working on analytics. What was the first step of that project?

Jon: 13:46

The first step is to be able to export certain aspects as a CSV. So we've had that we've had that request quite a bit of, like, hey. How do I export my analytics so I can analyze them on my own or put show them to someone else? So, that's done. We could actually probably roll it out today, and that includes an export of all your episodes over time Yeah.

Jon: 14:17

By day, and you can you can see how many downloads you got per day per episode, over different time periods.

Justin: 14:24

Mhmm.

Jon: 14:26

There is a export of popular podcast players. Sim similar. It's, you know, downloads per day, per different app that you set up Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts and apps like that. So you can kind of see how different players change over time.

Justin: 14:43

Yeah.

Jon: 14:44

And then there's an export of, like, geographic locations, so countries, over time Yeah. And how those change. So I think those will be really useful to a lot of people.

Justin: 14:59

Yeah. It's perfect example of a request that comes up all the time that's not just, like, a nice to have, but you can tell I I can especially tell if I'm doing some of that. Like, if I'm if I'm manually, like, trying to put stuff into Excel and then, you know, crunch data for our customers, it's like, okay. We should probably just have this for our customers. This will be useful.

Jon: 15:23

Yeah.

Justin: 15:25

And then the second one is an actual, graph of podcast players over time.

Jon: 15:32

Yeah. So it's actually, it's similar to the data you get if you export, but it's a chart, a line graph of comparing multiple different, podcast apps at one time over time

Justin: 15:45

Mhmm.

Jon: 15:45

To see how those change rather than this, like, donut chart we had.

Justin: 15:50

Yeah.

Jon: 15:50

Which was percent a percentage basically, overall percentage of the players at like, of all time. Yeah. It wasn't you couldn't compare compare anything. So I I think it'll be useful still. At at a glance, it's different.

Jon: 16:07

Yeah. I mean, you get a different it's different.

Justin: 16:11

Yeah. I think this one this one to me felt like it really benefited from the shape up process. Like, we've been we've been kinda rolling this around in our heads for a long time. We've talked about it over and over, and then we actually sat down and said, okay. Why are we doing this?

Justin: 16:29

Who is this for? What are they trying to solve when like, what's the who is this for, and what is it for? Mhmm. And how will we measure success? Like, how will we know we've hit the mark?

Justin: 16:40

And to me, it's people who are reporting every week and going, hey. This week, we had a we did that promo on Spotify, and Spotify plays jumped up by 30%. And here's the graph that shows it.

Jon: 16:55

Yeah.

Justin: 16:56

Those are the kinds of stories we've been telling as we were experimenting with it. And it also felt, at least to me, that it was the most because the CSV export, I I mean, I was I could interact with you a little bit on that, but, you know, and talk about, you know, how it might look and all that stuff. But this one here, having both of our brains kinda thinking about it seemed helpful because, you know, I'm I, like, jumped into Mixpanel, and I was able to bring one perspective of, hey. This is how these line graphs work in Mixpanel, and maybe we could have something like this. And then you basically took that paradigm, and you had it you had it that day.

Justin: 17:38

Like, it was it was a pretty quick, it didn't take you very long.

Jon: 17:43

Yeah. I had a I had a good idea of how our charting library worked, but had to still learn a bit of new, JavaScript for it. Yeah. But, yeah, it's, it was interesting because it's like I had a sample dataset that was super small, so it looked fine with 8 different players. But then I I looked at all of the different players that we have in our production database.

Jon: 18:09

Yeah. Basically, wrote some sample data around that, and it's, like, 25 different apps, and you can't obviously plot those on a chart at the same time.

Justin: 18:18

Yeah.

Jon: 18:19

It's it just looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Justin: 18:23

So which we are selling on Etsy now. Yeah. It's it's another it's another income stream.

Jon: 18:30

Alright. Reproductions. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it was just a, you know,

Justin: 18:40

Is that what they call Trial

Jon: 18:41

trial and error.

Justin: 18:42

Yeah. And those those kind of decisions are called are those called affordances? Where see, I always misuse words, but because in that particular case, what we're rolling around now is how are we going to limit what the customer can see here in a way that's helpful? So Yeah. Is it really helpful for them to see 30 different podcast players?

Justin: 19:10

No. What are they actually trying to do? What what are what's the the point here? And, you know, me to to be honest, we could probably limit it to 5 podcast players and be fine. But going through some of those scenarios, what does this look like if your podcast isn't very popular and you don't have very many plays?

Justin: 19:31

What does this look like if you have 50,000 listens per episode and all of the apps are you know, they're in the double digits. But even then, as you start to say that out loud, you're like, okay. Well, if everything's in the double digits, that's a limit of 10. Right?

Jon: 19:50

Yeah. It's interesting. It's it's a mix of, is this useful to look at with all of this information or should we limit it? And is it even useful to give people the option to to to, like, dig down that deep and see all these tiny apps that I mean, I I think we're going on the assumption that most people are gonna wanna see how their people are how their listeners are listening.

Justin: 20:20

Mhmm.

Jon: 20:21

The majority how the majority of their listeners are listening. Yeah. So that they can make decision to target different Whoever. I don't know. Different apps or Android versus iOS or something.

Jon: 20:33

So

Justin: 20:33

This is probably a good time actually while you're still working on it, and I've got screenshots to reach out to some of those customers that I know are doing weekly reporting and and say, hey. What do you think about this? Like, this is kinda what we're working on. Does this make sense? Because really understanding the customer's context, like, you and I aren't creating weekly reports on this podcast.

Justin: 20:58

Like, we don't report to anybody. So we don't know what that's like to have to go into an office and, defend the the company podcast. Like, it has to it has to compete for resources and time and everything else.

Jon: 21:14

Yeah. So I think yeah. I think our goal with all this and including all the the other analytics, updates we wanna make is just, like, at a glance, is this page useful and to to most people and then giving them the ability to export data so that they're not, like, pigeonholed into how we present it, and they can use that data however they want.

Justin: 21:38

Mhmm. Yeah. Totally. You know who really understands data and representing it well? Postmark.

Justin: 21:49

Postmark is another sponsor for this week, and, they do transactional email delivery for apps like yours. If you've ever had people complain that they're not getting your email, even you know, sometimes, some of these providers, it'll say the email was delivered, but the the recipient's saying, I didn't get it. And Postmark solves that problem. In fact, if you search on Twitter for people who are upset with the other providers, almost always someone recommends Postmark. And right now, you can get a free month of Postmark if you go to postmarkapp.com/loves /buildyoursass and use the coupon code build your sass.

Justin: 22:36

That's all one word. You'll get a free month. Postmarkapp.com /loves/buildyoursass.

Jon: 22:44

Nice. Yeah. I don't I don't know if any other, developers or SaaS SaaS app builders are list are listening to this and have this this experience, but it seems like most support, channels will get quite a few emails that are like, hey. I tried to reset my password, and I didn't get the email.

Justin: 23:06

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon: 23:07

Like Yeah. All the time.

Justin: 23:09

Yeah. And even with this new private podcasting feature we built, one of the features I wanted in it was, yes, we're gonna email them a link, but let's have a way in the dashboard for us to copy the link because Yeah. You just always want another way of doing things.

Jon: 23:26

Yeah. There's so many reasons an email doesn't show up, and you probably don't want it. At least you can eliminate your email provider as being one of those.

Justin: 23:34

Yeah. Yeah. I thought it would be interesting because to talk about this list, top podcast hosts. This was, listen notes dot com, did a, basically, using the Apple Podcasts API, did this big dig into all the data. And I sorry.

Justin: 23:56

I, John, I didn't send you the link for that. I'll put it in the show notes, but I I just put this in our own spreadsheet. And, I think what's interesting to me about this list, and you folks at home can go and check this out, is just to see it's representative. You know, here's all the players, like, all the competitors in the space, and then you can see how many podcasts are being, published on Apple Podcasts from each. Now our number is about we have about 4,000 podcasts total on Transistor.

Justin: 24:30

And what does it say? Is it for us, is it 2,000 2,000 podcasts on Apple Podcasts?

Jon: 24:39

I think so.

Justin: 24:40

Yeah. I think it's around 22100, 24100, something like that. For example, who who who did Basecamp just switch off of?

Jon: 24:51

Her, was it Art 19?

Justin: 24:52

Art 19. So Art 19 has less podcasts on Apple Podcasts than we do. So you can see they're going after a different model. They're going after they're trying to highlight and shows that are going to get a lot of traffic. Right?

Justin: 25:09

Mhmm. They're, they're, I think they call themselves the enterprise podcast hosting company. And so you've got Seth Godin is on Art 19. Macaulay Culkin is on Art 19. You know, all these different folks are on Art 19, and it's either you're paying them a lot of money per month or you're using their ad stuff and making money through ads.

Justin: 25:36

And I'm I'm assuming they get some of that. So just interesting. And r nineteen's been around, I think, for 3 or 4 years. And then, you know, Lipson is the clear leader there, and they've been going forever. And then just interesting to see, like, look at all the big players underneath them.

Justin: 25:56

And, you know, it just brings up all sorts of interesting thoughts for me. Like, you know, is more always better? What does that mean? If a if a podcast host has more, you know, more podcasts on Apple Podcasts, is that better? And maybe it is and maybe it isn't.

Justin: 26:13

In one sense, it's amazing how many podcasts we have compared to some of these independents that have been around for a long time.

Jon: 26:24

Right.

Justin: 26:25

And, that was actually the most surprising part is that we are, less than 2 years old, almost 2 years old. And there's players that have been around for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years, and we're either we either have more shows than them, or we're right close. I think it was Pippa that was just acquired.

Jon: 26:48

Yeah. And By a Acast. Right?

Justin: 26:51

Yeah. Yeah. By Acast. And, you know, from a valuation perspective, you could say, oh, wow. You know, they were acquired, and, Transistor's kinda right there.

Jon: 27:06

So Yeah. That is pretty it's pretty interesting. And then there's Anchor, which is Mhmm. Mhmm. Is newer than us and is just, like, has a massive amount of podcast, but they're probably abandoned.

Justin: 27:23

Yeah. We know.

Jon: 27:24

Right? I mean, because it's because it's free and it's so easy to start a podcast, I guess, with them. Yes. And get it into iTunes that it's probably

Justin: 27:34

Well and this is actually going back to our other discussion about open startups. It was another reason I didn't always like having our numbers public is because the numbers on their own don't always mean anything. So we could say, well, look at Anchor. They're the 2nd most popular podcast hosting provider. Yes.

Justin: 27:55

But what does that mean? What does that mean for podcasting? What does that mean for what what kind of shows end up there? What kind of effort do people put into those shows? How long do they last?

Justin: 28:07

And Right.

Jon: 28:08

Is that company making any money, and can they stick around?

Justin: 28:11

Can they sustain it? It it it's actually one of the reasons actually, now I wanna know if I wanna say this publicly. Well, this kind of dovetails into our other I won't say what I was gonna say just because we have a competitor that I think listens to the show that I I just don't wanna I just don't wanna comment on this. But this dovetails into how in Slack, you said, I was posting stuff in our pod our pod industry thing, and you're like, let's just not worry about this.

Jon: 28:41

Well, yeah, it was I think a lot of it was around people doing promotions or sales or, like, new pricing with with free tiers, and it just seems like it's so easy to get caught up in that

Justin: 28:54

Yeah.

Jon: 28:55

And say, oh my god. They're all doing this. They're gonna take all of our all of our customers because now it's free or it's it's cheaper.

Justin: 29:02

Mhmm.

Jon: 29:02

It's just like this path down to 0 where everything's free. And

Justin: 29:07

Yeah. And Yeah. I think the bigger thing is, like, you even mentioned, like, do we Justin, we don't want those customers. Like, anybody who's signing up for that, you do not want those customers. Our our our pricing does act as a filter in a way.

Justin: 29:26

Right. And we already know, the type of customers that don't last. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of profiling here, But, like, profiling by, for example, Hotmail and Yahoo addresses churn way at a much higher rate than, well, definitely corporate domains.

Jon: 29:47

Yeah. That's true.

Justin: 29:49

And that just makes sense. You know, if you think about it, it's like, okay. Well, yeah. There's the we don't have to comment too much on that to say, okay. There there are certain types of customers that are not willing to pay as much, that are harder to deal with.

Justin: 30:03

Like, we will never do an AppSumo deal. People also asked if we if we wanted to do a Black Friday deal. This has been interesting too. Because in the past I know you're you're, philosophically opposed to Black Friday. In the past, I've done Black Friday deals because I needed the money.

Justin: 30:23

And so there was a, I knew like, there's some years I would make,

Jon: 30:32

I don't know, $30.30

Justin: 30:36

just from Black Friday. And Yeah. That made up for, you know, all the months leading up and all the months after that wouldn't be as great. But when people ask me this year, I'm like, I don't think we'll do it because I'm not saying we'll never do it, but it it doesn't make sense. Like, we we don't want more revenue in this fiscal year.

Justin: 31:00

Like, it's not like we were we're like, okay. We gotta get as much revenue in December as we can. In some ways, we're like, no. We've got enough growth for this year. Like,

Jon: 31:09

Right. And then yeah. It it Black Friday stuff for subs for, like, SaaS businesses and subscription seems a little bit weird. Yeah. Because then you get I don't know.

Jon: 31:22

I think you have customers that sign up that are sort of expecting it to be that cheap forever.

Justin: 31:27

And we in some ways, we already do it. Like, we have an annual plan that if you pay for the annual plan, you get 2 months free, which is great which is a great deal.

Jon: 31:39

Yeah.

Justin: 31:39

You're yeah. Yeah. So and I think in future years, what we might do is we might try to promote the annual plan a little bit more. But, honestly, in some ways, my my concern about it was I just don't know what we would do with the money. Like, there's no we we wouldn't we we could get bring in a bunch more money.

Justin: 31:59

Typically, when you do stuff like that like Jason Cohen started when he was really growing WP Engine, he was selling annual plans so that he had a bunch of money in hand that he could go out and spend on acquisition, like buying ads and all that other stuff. I don't have a plan for that. Like, I I I don't I don't have, for acquisition. I don't have this, like, big plan for, like, oh, if we if we just put first of all, we're ethically, we're not going to advertise on Instagram or Facebook, so that's off the books. We've tried a we've tried a little experiment with Google Ads, and it didn't really seem to do anything.

Justin: 32:40

We might try it again, but it wasn't like it wasn't like a clear winner. So I don't have a way of, like, knowing, like, oh, if we had all this extra money, we would like, it just feels like there's no clear place to bet that money right now.

Jon: 32:57

I yeah. I also just don't know I just don't know what type of people who wanna start a podcast are sitting around waiting for a Black Friday sale to start a podcast. I'd Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Buying a TV or something is one thing.

Jon: 33:12

But

Justin: 33:13

Yeah. Totally. I I'm with you. The only thing I thought, like, maybe we could do something around, but we don't this doesn't need to be around Black Friday is, there is still something about setting people up for success in terms of having a good microphone. And I think audio even our experience, like, you started off with this little blue snowball, and then we got you that mic.

Justin: 33:39

And having a, I wanna say, a spit protector, but, what do you call that? The windscreen. Having a mic with a windscreen is a huge deal. And when I listen to all of our new customers, the the thing you notice right away is the sound quality.

Jon: 34:01

Yeah.

Justin: 34:01

And then the second thing you notice is is this entertaining or unique or interesting or compelling in any sort of way? Did you did you watch the Cybertruck event last night? The Tesla Cybertruck reveal?

Jon: 34:15

No. I mean, I saw some stuff on it today.

Justin: 34:18

People have all sorts of reactions to that design. What I was reacting to, though, was just the showmanship. The showmanship was so terrible. And

Jon: 34:27

It always is. He's an awkward person. Yeah. They're never good.

Justin: 34:31

Yeah. And it there's some that are better than others. This one was truly just, like, oh my gosh. Just like designers can't, like, walk around and see bad design and, like, ignore it. I think for me, performance is so important that when I notice bad performance, I'm like, there are so many ways you could've tweaked that presentation and it and made it exponentially better.

Justin: 35:01

And I think this definitely applies to podcasting. You the the the quality of your audio is one thing, and then, at least you set people up for success in being able to be compelling and and actually be, you know, interesting. Something that people wanna listen to. So there's still something around that that I think we could help with, and I'm not sure how. But, look, we've thought about creating, podcast bundles where you maybe you pay for a year of business, but you get a microphone set up with it or something.

Justin: 35:39

And that might be a good promotion to do. Like, we do it once a year. Like, here's your if you prepay for a year, we'll give you, you know, whatever.

Helen: 35:46

Yeah.

Justin: 35:47

But, yeah, there's some problems with that. So, yeah, I think that's that's all I got. You good?

Jon: 35:55

Nice. I'm good.

Justin: 35:57

Alright, man.

Jon: 35:57

Yeah. Well, Let's Yeah. Keep on.

Justin: 36:01

Let's thank the the Patreons. I don't even have them in front of me. I'm gonna have to guess when I I get to interject. Well, we'll see how this goes.

Jon: 36:12

Yeah. Thanks as always to our supporters on Patreon. We have Eric Lima, James Sours from user input dot I o, Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley from nice things dot I o, Russell Brown, Evandro Sassy, Pradyumna Schembecker, Noah Praill, David Colgan, Robert Simplicio, Colin Gray from alici.com, Josh Smith, Ivan Kerkovic, Brian Ray, Shane Smith, Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Sitmer, Paul Jarvis, and Jack Ellis, Dan Buddha, my brother.

Justin: 36:47

Danbudda.com.

Jon: 36:50

Darby Frey, Samori, Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Sammy Schuichert, Mike Walker, Adam Devander, Dave Junta.

Justin: 36:59

Junta. Oh, man. The anticipation was killing me. I was like I was like, when does it get when is it? Is it oh, yeah.

Justin: 37:06

I hear it. It's coming. So, Junta, did I think I don't think I've told you this story, but, listener Mike Walker sent me he heard us talking about how I wanted to try different mic inputs. And he messaged me and said, I have a USB to lightning adapter that I bought as an extra. I'll send it to you.

Justin: 37:30

And so he he mailed it to me, but he mailed it, and all that was in it was this Apple thing and then a big piece of paper that said, Junta. And I took a picture of it and posted it on Instagram. And, Dave was like, oh, that's funny. And he's like, wait. Was that a real like, someone really sent you that in the mail?

Justin: 37:51

I said, yes. That's that's real.

Jon: 37:56

Oh, it's amazing.

Justin: 37:58

And, he liked the idea of Junta Conf. So I

Jon: 38:01

There you go.

Justin: 38:02

I mean, I said although I said, Dave, like, if we actually did that, it would be the most annoying event in the world for you to be at. Like, because it's the same joke. Like, he would just be he would just be there and be like, oh, it's Junta. But yeah.

Jon: 38:19

We could call it well, we could call it the hunt the junta conference, which is the word, but that but that's not a great word. It's more about a group of people, like, forcibly taking over a country.

Justin: 38:29

Yes. Yes.

Jon: 38:30

So probably not good.

Justin: 38:32

I'm just thinking, like, there's there's no way for us to do Junta Conf and have Dave there and not make it awkward.

Jon: 38:41

Right.

Justin: 38:44

Like, this joke yeah. This joke is funny right here in this space. In this space, everybody. But due to conflict, I think, I don't I don't know if that can exist. Is that it?

Helen: 39:00

Will,

Justin: 39:00

is there anyone else?

Jon: 39:01

No. No. Oh. Kyle Fox from get reward for that time and our our sponsors, Clubhouse and Postmark.

Justin: 39:07

Thanks, everybody. We will see you next week.