You drew a prototype on that napkin from Portland
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buddha, a software engineer.
Justin:And And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm and spots dotfm. I like that reminder to build spots dotfm.
Jon:Yeah. That's a thing that you keep thinking about. I still I have your I have your, your sketch you drew me
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Portland with me.
Justin:On the back of the napkin?
Jon:Yeah. It's some piece of paper. I don't know what it is, actually.
Justin:Yeah. It's not quite a napkin. It's true.
Jon:Some piece of paper we found.
Justin:So we this is our second try doing this episode. We we had 1 was it yesterday we're recording? And
Jon:Yeah. I got booted out of a room, and I couldn't find another one. And then I had another meeting, and so here we are again starting over.
Justin:Here we are again. And we were actually kinda on fire in that episode, so we're debating whether we were going to include it or not include it. At the very least, I think we'll post it for our Patreon supporters who are this is a good that's a that's called a segue.
Jon:That's a good segue.
Justin:We have Kevin Markham. We have Adam Duvander and David oh, what is Junta?
Jon:Junta, you got it.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Thanks so much to the to those folks. Yeah. This Patreon thing's been a real kind of surprise. We just put the link into well, Transistor has a special place to put a a Patreon link.
Justin:And how does it work again? Some players will show a a a special icon?
Jon:Yes. So at at the least, overcast will show a dollar sign icon, in the interface if you're listening to an episode that has a special HTML tag in the show notes. And I also noticed if you look at our at our show notes in overcast, the actual link that says support us on Patreon is green.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I noticed that too.
Jon:And I don't know if any other players also support that. I maybe they'll pick up on it and start doing it.
Justin:Yeah. I've heard Breaker is going to. If you are on Overcast right now, scroll to the bottom, and you'll see there's a green link in there in the show notes for the show. Yeah. It's kind of a cool thing that Marco's done.
Justin:I just started my own personal Patreon. I and I did it because I want to I was I I just wanted to experiment with it. It was something that I saw other people using, and I always kind of wrote it off. But lately, I've been thinking, you know, no matter what happens in my life, I want to keep writing, and I want to keep podcasting. So if Transistor works out, great.
Justin:I want to do that. If if, you know, if this makes a $1,000,000,000, that's great. But no matter what, I wanna keep writing, and I wanna keep podcasting. In order to do that for a long time and to be able to do it vulnerably, and honestly, I was like, I should try Patreon out because that just seems like the place where people support the content that they love. Right?
Jon:Sounds fair. Yeah. Give it a shot. It's been going well, though.
Justin:And, well, it's been surprising. I mean, it's it's just like anything else. I think you have to it it's not something that you turn on even for someone like me that has you know, I've got a a fair sized audience. It's not something that just, you know, all of a sudden, I'm making $20,000 a month on Patreon. But, so I'm expecting it to build over time.
Justin:But as I was thinking about it, I was like, man, what's interesting about Patreon, because I support people on Patreon as well, is it feels different than Kickstarter, even though they're both crowdfunding. For example, I I supported this band, there's this old punk rock band called mxpx, and I I supported their Kickstarter. And it was like, I'm glad that I supported it. The you know, I wanted the album to come around. And so the album you know, it was a kick starter for their album.
Justin:But the more I think about it, the more I'm like, man, I would love to support the band on Patreon because I kind of just wanna be an insider. I Mhmm. Like, the the I got their album you know, I could have downloaded their album as a part of the Kickstarter, but I never did because I can just listen to it on Apple Music. I don't care about that as much. What I care about is, you know, I want kind of the inside look into their life, into their business, into their music.
Justin:And if there was a way for me to support them monthly and kinda get that look and get, you know, support them in an ongoing way, I think I would. And that seems to be kind of the advantage of of Patreon is you get this I mean, everyone, manages it differently, but you get this kind of behind the scenes look.
Jon:Yeah. And, obviously, I've never been in a band, but it seems like at a certain point, Patreon I mean, if they were making a certain amount of money, then they wouldn't you know, it sounds like being in a band is this grind of touring and releasing an album and recording and maybe not making that much money on an album.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Maybe it would lessen some of that, and you could they could kind of support themselves and and record their music a little more freely.
Justin:Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Jon:Who knows? But yeah.
Justin:I think all of this stuff I I mean, obviously, with you and I building Transistor, I've been thinking about all of these things more and more. And, really, it's all crowdfunding. Like, you're you're you're always getting your funding from somewhere. And, you know, sometimes it's customers and investors. Sometimes it's just investors.
Justin:Sometimes it's you know, it's all crowdfunding. And I don't know. Maybe in the past, I had this idea of, like, Patreon. That's just like, you know, for donating to things. And I'm realizing now that it's actually a lot more than that.
Justin:And, you know, like, there's this one, comic I I support on Patreon. I mean, I'm paying to get the comic, but I'm paying for, like, this whole other experience as well. And I'm also paying because I just wanna see his good work continue. Right?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:But that's no different than you or I paying for, like, an a mobile app that we really like.
Jon:No. It just probably more of it goes to the creator.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. I mean yeah. Exactly. I think that's yeah. That's the point, I suppose.
Justin:That's the point. Like, the at the end of the day, people are producing work, whether it's an app or software or writing or music. And we, as the customer, are paying so that the good work continues. People always get upset when when their favorite app gets acquired and shut down. We're always like, man, why couldn't you just ask me to pay?
Justin:Because I would way rather you continue than not. Likewise, you know, there's a I have some writers that if I knew they were gonna stop writing, I would I would be like, okay. Well, we gotta figure this out because I want the good work to continue. Right?
Jon:Absolutely.
Justin:Okay. So that's Patreon. Yeah. Really interesting. Last week, we talked about the one metric that matters, and we were thinking that maybe our one metric for transistor is MRR.
Jon:Yeah. I think that's where we ended up.
Justin:I there's some people that responded to that episode that said, you know, maybe that shouldn't be our one metric. For example, Adam Wavin sent me a message and said, I wonder if MRR is a little bit of a cop out for you folks because, you know, that, of course, you're a software as a service business. You know, you want to increase monthly recurring revenue. That that's what every web application wants to do. Right?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And so he thought we should focus on increasing downloads because we're a podcast application, and what our customers want is downloads. And so if we make that our North Star metric, the one thing that we're trying to increase every month, In his mind, more downloads means more success for our customers, means more potentially, more customers for us, etcetera.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:What do you what do you think about that idea?
Jon:I think it's that's that's an interesting idea. I mean, it it doesn't necessarily correlate into more customers, I don't think, but it could. I mean, it depends. If we have one, like, runaway hit that uses our service, then our downloads are gonna spike, and that's not necessarily good for us. I mean, it considering bandwidth is our number one our number one expense, but it could be a good metric to focus on.
Jon:I mean, it's a it's a a number you can see grow. It's a graph you can see increase over time. Mhmm. It obviously means if it's going up that or maybe, like, averages per month go up, not necessarily total downloads, but averages per month go up. It means that there's more people listening, and there's probably more episodes, which means there's more customers.
Justin:That's right. Yeah. And those are kind of things I said too. I the on one hand, you know, that could be true, like, if we increase downloads. But, you know, we have some customers that, you know, they could increase their downloads quite a bit, and it wouldn't result in more revenue.
Justin:And so I don't know. I'm not sure. I it's it's tricky. It'd be interesting, you know, what companies like Vimeo and Wistia, who are in the video business, what they use. Yeah.
Justin:There's someone in the live chat here that's saying, you know, maybe look at the dynamics that occurred with he's saying vid.me. I'm not sure I'm not familiar with them, but, you know, there's other businesses out there that are similar to ours in the video hosting space, in the you know, obviously, there's lots of podcast hosts. But also in the web hosting space, this is all they're all similarities. And so there might be something we could look at there. By the way, if you are in the video hosting space and you have some insights for us, reach out.
Justin:My DMs are open. M I Justin on Twitter. The letter m, the letter I, Justin. The one problem is that you don't really know what's going on with those other companies. And so on the outside, they could look really successful.
Justin:But on the inside, they could be like, we have this one really popular show, and it costs us so much money in bandwidth. And we're not making any money on it, and it's really stressful.
Jon:Yeah. That could happen. Some of them I mean, we're obviously bootstrapping this. Some of them might have funding and they can just push for that number, not really worry about it for a while, hope that increasing a certain number of downloads or whatever it may be ends up generating customers, and then they can cash out and sell their customer base and then shut the service down or whatever. But Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. That's a tricky one.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. This vid. Me that someone just suggested in the, in the chat, If you go to that page, it says goodbye for now. They've it says Vidme has moved on to another dimension.
Justin:And it sounds like they're the problem they ran into is that they used too much bandwidth. And so they just couldn't they just couldn't compete.
Jon:Right. Yeah. I mean, it's it's, to some extent, a race to the bottom of giving away as much as you can while charging less and less money. Mhmm. So you're competing with, you know, YouTube and Vimeo and these large companies that are either pub public or well funded or profitable.
Jon:I mean, Vimeo, I don't I think they're still private. Right?
Justin:I I yeah. I'm not sure. It's actually it's it's, aroused my curiosity because I wanna go, like, check that out now. How how is Vimeo doing? What are they doing?
Justin:Are they yeah. I can't remember if they're Wistia might be private. I think maybe it was Wistia that just did a buyback.
Jon:Oh, maybe.
Justin:A debt buyback, I think. Yeah. Video startup Wistia to buy out investors with $17,000,000 in debt. Just happened. So, yeah, that's, that's what Ben is saying here in the chat too.
Justin:Yeah. They just bought their investors out. So, wow. You know, there's all there's all sorts of different models, and it's why you can't really look at your customer, your your competitors because who knows? Who knows how well Libsyn is doing or any of those other competitors we
Jon:have? Right.
Justin:We don't know.
Jon:We can, yeah, we can guess. We can say, oh, they've been around a long time. They probably have a lot of customers, but who knows? I don't know what their financials are. They've probably a large team.
Justin:And the other thing we don't have in podcasting is there are no publicly traded podcast hosting companies? I don't think there is anyway. Joshua
Jon:Sharfstein: No, I don't think so. Joshua Sharfstein: And
Justin:so, we can't look at the the financials.
Jon:Right.
Justin:So I love it when people reach out after shows. Like, Adam was just like, hey. I think you you he wanted to push back against these things that we were saying. Wait. Someone's saying Lipson is public.
Justin:No way. Oh, wait. They are public. Really? They're on the stock exchange.
Justin:What the heck?
Jon:No kidding.
Justin:Okay. We gotta check into this. This is this is the advantage of real time. People can check our facts for us. This is this is
Jon:Decorated syndication.
Justin:Yeah. They they're public. So we should be able to see their financials then.
Jon:I think so. Yeah.
Justin:Alright. Well, we're gonna do that. Maybe not live here on the the podcast, but their their stock price is a dollar 64.
Jon:I had no idea. Wonder when they I wonder when they filed for that. Sure. We'll find that out too.
Justin:Yeah. We'll find that out. We'll report back. But that is cool. We're gonna be we will be able to check out their revenue reports and everything.
Jon:Yeah. Cool.
Justin:Love it. Okay. Well, thanks thanks for that insight. I do appreciate it when people message us after and give us some pushback and say, have you thought about this? You know, maybe you're not you're not maybe MRR shouldn't be your one true metric.
Justin:And maybe Adam's right, like maybe it shouldn't be, but on the other hand, maybe downloads shouldn't be our our metric either. We also had, feedback from Daniel who said, Justin should just get out and sell. So
Jon:Start the marketing machine up.
Justin:Start he's like, come on, Justin. You're you lazy ass. You should be you should be pulling your pulling your weight. If you want to increase your numbers, you've gotta turn on the selling machine. Use your network to get into big companies, and find the people who are in charge of PR.
Justin:Sell them on the idea of podcasting, not on podcast hosting. Guide them through how to start up a podcast, what kind of equipment they should use, teach them about content, how to market their podcast, where to host your podcast is such a trivial thing. That's not the barrier that's not the barrier to entry. By the way, I agree with you so far, Daniel. My hypothesis is that companies like IBM or Microsoft or even Procter and Gamble have never even thought about having a podcast.
Justin:They are old and outdated. That's, actually incorrect. We know, we there are entire companies like Pacific Content, that are doing work with all of those companies to help them produce branded podcasts. Yep. So well, we had an interesting conversation with Dan Meisner about this very thing.
Justin:John Buda almost didn't make it through this conversation.
Jon:Yeah. My, my introversion was was catching up with me. I needed to go sit in a corner.
Justin:But, you know, Dan has a lot of experience, producing content for big brands. And I asked him I said, you know, what kind of brands are you working with? It is all the big brands. All the big brands are thinking about podcasting. And, partly because it's a hot topic right now, Partly because, you know, a lot of PR people are thinking about it.
Justin:You know, a lot of management and CEOs are listening to shows. So it is there it the the wheels are turning in corporate America.
Jon:I think it's it's still a relatively inexpensive, advertising method
Justin:That's right.
Jon:Compared to their other multimillion dollar campaigns.
Justin:That's right. One thing Dan did say, though, is this this kind of education that, that Daniel is talking about here, you know, where you're you're trying to go out and convince them to sell them on the idea of podcasting. The problem with that, according to Dan and other people I've talked to, is if these people are not already in motion, if there's not someone on their team that has already decided that we are going to start a podcast, that is a very difficult road for you as a singular entity to go out and try to convince people Yeah. To start something that they didn't even know they wanted 5 minutes ago, especially if they're not already into podcasts.
Jon:Yeah. And it and especially if the thing you're selling isn't I mean, it's not we're not selling a terribly expensive product, so that I think if you like the time that you would put into selling a company on starting a podcast and hosting with us, you'd have to sell something else. Otherwise, it would not well, I don't think it'd be worth your time.
Justin:That's yeah. Yeah. We would have to get into production, which we're not we're not opposed to anything, but there is a, well, now I'm gonna have to think of this article. I think it's, Paul Graham essay. When next time John Buda talks, I'll look this up on the Internet.
Justin:But basically basically, the the idea is the more things you add to your company, the more things that you do, the more difficult your business model becomes. So one of the reasons from the beginning I was interested in splitting spots and transistor is I want them to be 2 separate companies that have to stand on their own legs. We don't want transistor to get too complex, and if Spots is ever going to be a business, then it has to stand on its 2 legs too.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And the more things you add, if you say, well, now we're in podcast production. Well, now we're in podcast advertising. Well, now we're also in you know? If you add too many things especially early on that can be a recipe for disaster. And we know, like, Panoply in the podcast news, just got out of content distribution, and they're doubling down on dynamically inserted ads.
Justin:They've got software that does that. On the flip side, Mailchimp, which has been around forever and has made a lot of money, they are now rebranding as a total marketing company that's not just going to do email. Right. What did what did you think of that rebrand, by the way?
Jon:I thought it was interesting. I mean, it was I didn't read their whole, like, white paper, but, I liked it. I mean, they're always doing something different.
Justin:Yeah. Although, Kyle Fox I think Kyle Fox was the one who said, there's a lot of similarities between postmarkapp.com and the new Mailchimp. The the yellow is almost identical, if you if you look at both of them there. Yeah.
Jon:I didn't even notice that.
Justin:They're they're pretty pretty similar. So but I mean, yeah. Let's we don't need to split hairs over that. But
Jon:Right.
Justin:All of this to say, we are thinking about some of that stuff. The one thing that Daniel's message to me did kind of inspire I think I got this on LinkedIn, actually. I actually checked LinkedIn and got a chat message there. The the one thing it did inspire me to think about was, you know, I think I could set some and we talked about this a bit in the episode, but I could set some targets to say, let's try to get, you know, 5 new customers a day or, you know, 5 new trials a day or, you know, what have you. So Oh, this is funny.
Justin:Ben is saying, just about this Postmark, Mailchimp thing. He's saying we have a yellow website as well. So now we have to go back to the drawing board.
Jon:Oh, no.
Justin:Only one company can use that color. To be fair, our our yellow is a little bit more orangey.
Jon:It's true.
Justin:If you got, folks, I want this is your homework. I want you to go to mailchimp.com. I want you to go over to our friends at postmarkapp.com, and then I want you to go to transistor.fm. The transistor FM yellow, it is ours. No one else can take that.
Justin:What let me let me grab the, you're just gonna grab my color picker here. It is, f b c seven five d. We own that.
Jon:I forget what, yeah. Our, Dylan, our our our designer that helped out here, he named it something.
Justin:Oh, really? We have our own like, the the the hue has a believe
Jon:he did. Hold on. I got it here. Hot hot Mike.
Justin:Hot Mike. Hot Mike. Mike. Is it hot Mike yellow?
Jon:Hot mic yellow. Like yeah.
Justin:Nice.
Jon:Not like microphone.
Justin:Nice. I like it.
Jon:Hot Yeah. All the all the colors all the colors are named after recording related words. Hot mic, we got blackout, which is our, like, bluish blackish color. Light gray. It's whatever.
Jon:On air, LiveWire, ultraviolet. Yeah. Sweet.
Justin:That was actually a good investment. That was one of the Yeah. This was expensive, but we have a whole style guide that Dylan did for us.
Jon:Yeah. It was, it was it was it was good. But it was you know, it's you you give someone the the, give someone the power and the sort of freedom to just go take a take your idea and do what they want with it, which is ultimately gonna be much different than what you, thought about.
Justin:That's, so that was that was Daniel's response. And, yeah, I think I think I could I think I could start giving myself some personal goals to increase the number of customers we get Yeah. Every month.
Jon:I think I think your concern with that earlier was, are we ready to do that?
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Like, we're getting customers, and it's a lot of word-of-mouth, but are we ready to really, like, push for that? Mhmm. Like, ready you know, is the platform ready? Are we ready to support those customers with, you know, customer support? And I think that's still an open ended question.
Justin:Exactly. There there's tension between all of these things. And, so on one hand, it's great getting all this feedback and insight and ideas from folks who are listening right now, but on the other hand there's always on this side of the microphone there's all of these other tensions and it's difficult as someone who's building a company to know when are you just being wrong, and when are you actually just responding in a correct way to the reality as it is?
Jon:Right.
Justin:I don't know. If I mean, if you've got an idea about that, let us know.
Jon:I don't. I don't. Oh, I don't. I don't know if the the audience does. Yeah.
Jon:I mean, it's, yeah, more MMR, more customers, more downloads would be great, but that's gonna lead to more support requests. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's things we could smooth out to make to make the app a little simpler and, more straightforward so we get less support requests. But
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's hard to figure all this stuff out.
Jon:It is.
Justin:By the way, we we just crossed 2 major milestones. 1, over 6,000,000 downloads on Transistor so far.
Jon:Nice.
Justin:That is incredible. John, if we had a dollar for every download we got on Transistor
Jon:We would Yeah. That'd be great.
Justin:We would have $6,000,000. That that's what we gotta figure out. How can we get a dollar every time someone downloads podcast?
Jon:I'm not sure that I'm not sure that would take off. Who would pay for that?
Justin:There's probably I I mean, the other thing I was thinking about today, this is a complete aside, businesses that sell credits and reloadable credits are brilliant. Do you have the Starbucks app on your phone?
Jon:I do not.
Justin:Okay. I actually I don't even go to Starbucks. Well, I do. Starbucks is not my primary coffee shop. Let me say that.
Justin:This, I gotta be careful about how much I show. But, this app on my phone reloads every time I drop below $25. And it's it's just kind of once you're in the habit of using it, you know, I use it when I travel at airports and things like that. It's just a no brainer. And when it reloads, I don't I'm not thinking like
Jon:Right.
Justin:Oh, well, I it's it's like a subscription that's based on usage.
Jon:But they're sitting on your money all the time, and they're making money on that money.
Justin:Well, and and it but it reloads automatically. So it's got some of the benefits of of SaaS.
Jon:Uh-huh.
Justin:But and there's other businesses like this too. Like, well, Postmark, I think they do yeah. You get certain amount of emails per month and then price per extra emails. So they're kind of like a combination of the of both. What other credits are there, credit company
Jon:credit So there's, well, there's a lot of games that do that, but they do it in a sneaky way where you have to buy packages of credits, but nothing you can buy in the game is the same price or, like, divisible by the same amount so you always have leftover credits, and then you have to buy more credits. It's like Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you buy 2,000 credits and something costs, like, 1500 credits, and then there's nothing that costs 500 credits.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:But there's something that costs 600 credits.
Justin:Yes. Yeah. Like, every single iOS game made for children.
Jon:Yeah. I mean, it's it's smart, but it's it's tricky.
Justin:Did I want did I tell you about the time I spent $350 on Smurf berries?
Jon:No. It sounds like you're doing drugs, but I don't know.
Justin:I didn't spend this. But back when the when the, iPad was new, we had the first, you know, the one of the the first iPad, there was that Smurf game, and they didn't have any protections for buying, you know, in app purchases. And my son, who is, you know, whatever, 6 or 7, bought $350 worth of Smurf berries. Because to him, it was just I just push this button, and I keep getting Smurf berries.
Jon:Yeah. He doesn't yeah.
Justin:Oh my god. I called Apple about it and got them to refund it. The same thing happened to Jack Black, actually. He he tells a story on one of those late nights. Oh, wow.
Justin:ThemeForest, that is one where, that's another example of a a service product where you've gotta buy credits. So you can you buy x number of, well, you you do a deposit into your wallet, and then you use that money to buy, you know, website templates and things like that. Yeah.
Jon:I mean, it's yeah. It's almost like a subscription or like a it's like a funding method, essentially.
Justin:Mhmm. There's something about credits. I I because in some cases, I don't like it. Some people in the comments here are saying, I don't like that system. But, like, this Starbucks app is really, it's just convenient to have it reload.
Justin:And so I don't mind it so much. And then instead of, you know, I use this primarily for business and travel. And so when I'm doing my my, expense statements, instead of having to do expense reports for $2 coffees, I can just it's just one bulk payment. Right?
Jon:Right.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:Yeah. That makes sense.
Justin:Okay. Let's get back to the feedback we got here. So quite a few folks said we should reexamine our pricing. Remember I told you we were gonna talk about this on the podcast?
Jon:Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because we had, like, a 45 minute conversation before we recorded Yeah.
Justin:And then about it? And then we were like, no. Let's save it.
Jon:Ran out of time.
Justin:Yeah. But then we're like, let's save it for the podcast and, like Yeah. Like, get kinda raw and real. Right now, if if you haven't listened to our pricing episodes, we did a a series of 3 where we talked to Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently and Rob Walling and a bunch of other folks about what should our initial model be. And their suggestion was your primary cost center is downloads, kind of.
Justin:It's actually bandwidth, but downloads is a good proxy. And the primary value that your customers want is downloads. They want more listeners. They want influence. They want to connect with an audience.
Justin:And, you know, I know just from listening to our customers on chat that a lot of them are kind of aiming for, especially when they're starting a new show, a 1,000 downloads per episode. Can't wait till I get to a 1,000 downloads per episode. That's what our pricing is based on right now. But Right. We so we we have tiers where you get x number of downloads per month per tier.
Justin:Some folks said, you know, I honestly think that that is a impediment to people signing up. Yeah. What what do you think about that? What's kind of your I mean response?
Jon:Yeah. I think that was sort of my concern going into that when we started it. It seems like we've had some, we've had some concerns from people, not, not a lot. I mean, some, some people are like, what is it? What, what happens when I get to a number?
Jon:Do I, do I get charged a bunch of money and I automatically upgraded, like, it seems like that's not enough, but, but also, I mean, they don't, they don't have a show yet. Some of these people are, are looking to transfer and they have a show and they know what their audience is and and it would be quite a bit more expensive for them. I think coming from where they're, you know, moving from. Yeah. But, but it's also like, I think you had even mentioned this prior to us, recording was it's one of those things where, like, people will vote against in in America anyway, vote against their own best interests, so they vote they vote for the let's say the party that's gonna give a bunch of tax cuts to the rich, and they they wanna be rich because that's the American dream, but they don't necessarily I don't know.
Jon:They're not there yet. Like, they're not gonna get any benefit from it.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. This it is it's tricky. I think we do need we definitely need to tweak our pricing. And when I put myself in a customer mindset, I definitely understand that, you know, even if you're starting a new show and you have no downloads, you eventually if if you said, well, you have the choice between getting 20,000 downloads and 500 downloads.
Justin:I think most folks want 20,000 downloads. And so even though you're not there yet, you still have this dream of getting there. And so you, you know, you don't wanna be have this idea of a future tax if you get successful.
Jon:Right. Right. Right.
Justin:And so I think there is some tweaks we can do there. For example, you know, I have some we both have friends that have very successful podcasts that, you know, they're looking at our tiers, and they're like, well, you don't even have a tier for us. Like, we can't even we can't even Yeah.
Jon:How do we yeah.
Justin:Get in there.
Jon:Where where do we fit, and how how are we gonna afford to pay what you wanna charge us based on downloads?
Justin:That yeah. Exactly. So we're figuring that out. Now I will say that the $19 a month plan for unlimited shows up to 5,000 downloads per month. A lot of people really like that when especially when they're exploring.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:You know, they're they're creating you know, they create one show, and then they're like, oh, I should create another show. And they might try 2, 3, 4, 5 shows.
Jon:Or they have archive shows that don't get a lot of downloads if they wanna keep it.
Justin:Yeah. Exactly. And so Yeah. The I think people seem to really like that. And, I think I was even looking the other day.
Justin:We we have very few customers out of, you know, out of let's see how many shows we have. And, sorry, I see all these folks in the chat here. We actually have, Ben has a a bunch of questions. Actually, while I'm looking this up, this is this this is a good technical question. Does Transistor do streaming or just download?
Justin:That's the first question. Okay. The second question is also from Ben. Is one download the same as 1 minute streamed?
Jon:First question is, do we do streams or downloads? We do downloads. You can stream it. I mean, you can I'll use Overcast as an example. You can play it in Overcast without downloading it to your phone, which would essentially be streaming it from the server, but it will buffer it way ahead, so it's gonna download the whole thing.
Jon:Yeah. But, it might you only might play some of it.
Justin:So just to be clear, in in our lexicon, a stream, quote, unquote, is the same as a download.
Jon:Yep. Exactly.
Justin:And and so what counts as a download? A lot of people ask that. Like, if if someone just downloads, you know, if someone just streams on overcast, like Mhmm. 30 seconds
Jon:Yep.
Justin:Does that count as a download?
Jon:That it does. It counts as a download, because we really currently do not have a way to know that they streamed or downloaded some or all of it. There's probably ways to figure that out. I will say that repeated repeated streams or downloads from the same IP address and and time of day are not counted twice, so you could technically, like, let's say if I'm at at work and I listen to it, I listen to the same episode twice in a row on a website within the same couple hours, it's not gonna count as double downloads. So it's it's it's a little tricky.
Jon:I mean, downloads are initiating a file download on the Internet. Like, you can sometimes tell when it finished, but sometimes not. So Yeah. Right now right now for us, the the simplest metric is just stream as a download, and I believe so I've been look I've been working on the Spotify analytics that we can pull in from Spotify, for the shows that use our Spotify integration, and they they call them streams, but they don't indicate, whether or not they were fully listened to or not. Yeah.
Jon:So for them, a stream is downloading for us to download as a stream and vice versa.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. So and and some, podcast hosts used, like, plays, so it downloads Listens, yeah. Equals a play or
Jon:Plays or listens.
Justin:Just to just to back go backwards a bit, In terms of business model, we're still figuring this out. What does success look like for our customers? And, you know, if we are the podcast hosting an analytics company for brands, for companies, for personal brands, What kind of success are they looking for? And, you know, the answer is, you know, it probably varies, but, you know, I know, for example, Joe were Joe Workman, who has Weaver Radio, his goal is he's got a big kind of community of customers that buys RapidWeaver add ons from him. And the more he teaches them, the more value he gives them, the more income he earns.
Justin:So every time he gives, he gets something back. And he does, you know, free conferences. He'll do talks. He'll do blog posts. So for him, this is just one more way to serve the community he's already serving.
Justin:And the more he invests in that, the more he gets back. And so, you know, he he he wants a reasonable number of downloads, I'm guessing. And, actually, Joe, if you're listening, you can you can let us know if I'm if I'm kinda getting to it here or not. But I think everyone's got an idea of what kind of what kind of value they're looking for. And it's not always like every 500 downloads I get, I get x number of revenue.
Justin:Although some people might be like that. They just know, you know, every time we increase the number of listeners we get, we increase the number, the amount of Patreon income we get or what have you. I think maybe we have to do more research there basically to figure that out. Is what value are they looking for? And, you know, are they getting that right now?
Jon:Mhmm. How does that how does that fit into our pricing tiers? Are there different sets of features or, you know, yeah, features that we could segment out into other tiers that would provide different value for different sets of people? Mhmm. Yeah.
Jon:All it's all on the table.
Justin:Just as a, the to to give folks perspective here, we have very few out of the 286 shows we currently host, We have very few since we we did early access in January. We launched publicly in August. We have very few that are over a 100000 total downloads. And so, most of our customers are still playing in, a smaller space. And, again, we've heard from some of them that are like, this is great.
Justin:I think we talked about Nate, and he does a real estate podcast. And he you know, not a ton of listeners, but he's already gotten 2 clients out of it. And he's Yeah. You know, he's happy as pie.
Jon:That's huge. Yeah. I mean, that pays for it probably 10, 20 times over. Right?
Justin:Yeah. Maybe the answer is we need to do more research, on that piece there. Yeah. So I think I think that's kind of our thinking right now as we're responding to, you know, that episode. It was great to get all that feedback.
Justin:If you have more feedback you want to send us, just reach out on one of the channels, helptransistor.fm. That will get into our queue. Right? Supportsupport@transistor.fm. Of course.
Jon:We could we could alias that. Sure.
Justin:Support at transistor.fm. If you want to, give us some feedback or reach out to us on Twitter, etcetera. I wanna give John some time in the last few minutes here to do some app updates. So, and for any of you watching live, I'm gonna show you the one thing I'm really excited about. But, John, you go ahead and start talking.
Jon:So the the biggest, the biggest change that we rolled out a few days ago was, this new integrations page or integrations tab within the dashboard, that sort of adds a couple new features and moves a couple other ones to this area, and we'll we'll keep adding to it. So the idea is we have an integrations page. That's where you go to sort of connect your show to Spotify. It's where you go to connect, your show to your mailing list or newsletter of choice that you use, and it also adds 2 new ones which allows you to connect Transistor to Twitter to your Twitter account and your Google account which allows you to 1, auto tweet an episode to your Twitter account as when it's published. So let's say you publish it whenever 10 AM.
Jon:It's gonna tweet out around then, maybe a minute after, with a link to your show page.
Helen:Yep.
Jon:And with YouTube and Google, what you do is you sign in with your Google account, choose your YouTube channel that you want to sync with, and it will automatically publish your episode to YouTube. It'll convert the audio to a video file and add, like, a a static background image that you can choose. Yeah. Add in add in the summary and a couple, like, another link to your, to your webpage and, that's kind of it, is a free integrations tab. YouTube is not live for everyone yet.
Jon:I think we're gonna test it out for us with this episode. Mhmm. So maybe by the time you hear this, it'll be live. Yeah. Yeah.
Jon:And, obviously, this is our our first iteration of this. So, let us know if you have any feedback. Things like for auto tweeting, we don't allow you to edit the tweet yet, but it'd be cool to allow you to edit what's sent out. Mhmm. And drop in like little placeholders for the name of the show, the name of the episode, the link to your to your, episode.
Jon:Yeah. And, same with YouTube. We have a there's a limited amount of of content you can put in the description, but you can, you can link to certain things, and then we can allow some edits to that.
Justin:I'm I'm super excited about this. And I I I posted a a tease about it, and people were just equally ecstatic because
Jon:Yeah. I hope I hope people like it.
Justin:Yeah. I think I mean, people already like the idea of it. So
Jon:Yeah. The I mean, the one thing that was surprising to me is that people listen to these things on YouTube.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:And I know people listen to music on YouTube a lot, but I didn't I just didn't realize that.
Justin:Yeah. Well and some folks, Joe Workman is another example of this. He had an existing audience that he built up on YouTube. And so he just wants to reach those people where they're at. And, instead of getting them to subscribe on a different platform, he just wants to be able to say, hey.
Justin:Here's the episode already, and he's doing it manually. He's having to rerender, I think Curtis what what's Curtis? I I don't know how to say his last name. Curtis McCall? McCall?
Justin:He also said, that was his response on Twitter was, oh, thank goodness. Now I don't have to render twice. Right?
Jon:Yeah. I mean, you know, to be fair, like, you're not uploading a a motion video. Mhmm. It is a it's a a static background, but, you know, we could eventually do things like, you know, add in a slideshow or whatnot. You can upload multiple images and tie together different things that maybe are times to pieces of the show.
Jon:So that's the, that's the biggest latest feature that we finished, a couple of other small ones that we rolled out. Another big one that's in the works that should actually be done pretty soon that I made some headway on is, free SSL for everyone for their hosted websites with custom domains, so we're gonna use Let's Encrypt to do that. So basically it's like you don't have to do anything. You point your custom domain to transistor, and it, like, auto just auto generates an SSL certificate for you. So it's all all encrypted and SSL Mhmm.
Jon:All the way all the way down. So that'll that'll be cool.
Justin:Yeah. I am so excited about that. That is it's just like that's just another one of those things that when, WP Engine added that that feature, where you can just automatically add SSL and not have to pay for it. SSL scripts used to be so much money, they used to always expire on people. And now Let's Encrypt has improved all of that.
Justin:And if we can offer to it for people for free, and now their podcast site and you have to understand that podcast websites I mean, in some ways, you could make an argument that you don't even need a blog. Just record your podcast, use Descript, to automatically transcribe it.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:Put these the transcription in the in your show notes area, and now you've got a blog that also has an audio playback button.
Jon:Right.
Justin:And so to make that, secure and just like any other website you would have makes sense. Right?
Jon:Right. So that's cool. The other thing is Spotify Analytics, which will be, I will start pulling those into our system. So if you see a jump in your downloads and you use Transistor, that's probably why because those are not in Transistor yet because they're external to our our system, but we'll pull in we'll basically end up pulling in your Spotify analytics, every day from the previous day. Mhmm.
Jon:So they'll they'll start showing up, in, like, you know, the previous day's analytics.
Justin:Oh, that'd be really cool.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:That's like one of those things. Once we can get more insight into these players, again, podcasting is always going to be open. It's always going to be on this open platform called RSS, but some of the players will share their data. And when they do, it can be helpful. It's interesting to know how far people listen and all that.
Justin:So, yeah. Sweet. Well, there we go. Do you think we I think we recaptured some of that magic. I
Jon:think so. Yeah. I think we did.
Justin:That that we had
Jon:before. Yeah. It was a good
Justin:it was a good comeback. Good comeback. I have I've gotta go pick up, I've gotta drive my son to army cadets. So I gotta end it here. Alright.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:But thanks everyone for listening, and we will see you next Tuesday. Sorry this, sorry this episode's late. We'll we'll be back on track next Tuesday.
Jon:Alright.
