You forgot $20,000 in your snowboard pocket
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor.fm. Alright.
Jon:Oh, it already feels like a long week, doesn't it? Yeah. It's too it's Tuesday.
Justin:Tuesday at 6:59 PM Pacific time.
Jon:Late late evening recording session.
Justin:Yeah. It's, like, 2 in the morning where you are. So
Jon:yeah. It's basically I should be sleeping.
Justin:Yeah, folks. We're we just keep trying to record the show whenever we can, and, it it might become the Wednesday show. We'll we'll we'll see just naturally.
Jon:Then it'll become the Thursday show, and then we'll just keep we'll end up back at Tuesday.
Justin:Back at Tuesday, and then that that's like time shifting. People won't know what what, iteration we're on. That's kinda ideal, actually.
Jon:We're recording episode 30. That's
Justin:a Woah.
Jon:That's a that's a good number.
Justin:Oh, yeah. The decades. The the tens. Those are big Yeah. Those are the big ones.
Jon:The tens.
Justin:The other day, our friends over at the Art of Product podcast were saying I think this is correct. They were saying that they had record they had 250,000 downloads. It's pretty impressive. I don't know how many episodes they're on. We have, 64,112 downloads.
Jon:Oh, nice.
Justin:So we're getting up there too. Eventually, the show is going to hit a 100,000.
Jon:It is. And then we'll have a big celebration.
Justin:Yeah. We should do something. If you have ideas what we should do for 100th 1000th download, is there a way we can, can we put an Easter egg in the 100 thousandth download so that whoever is listening to that, we can go, hey. Guess what? You're a winner number 100,000.
Jon:Maybe.
Justin:It's like the Willy Wonka golden ticket. Yeah. I that would be no one's done that before. That would that's actually a really interesting idea.
Jon:It is.
Justin:Can I tell you this idea I had for a show that I don't want anyone else to steal?
Jon:Well, we're recording it. It's gonna be live.
Justin:We're recording it. Don't steal this idea, but, I mean, you guys can try. But I originally had this idea. I thought it would be fun because I love when the Internet, kind of meets up with real life. And so I used to do this thing where I would get people would give me their their SMS numbers.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And I I amassed this big list, like, I don't know, 2,000, 2,000 numbers. And I would text them all at the same time, and I would get their responses in Slack. And I'd be like I I would just text them and say, just take your phone and take a picture out your window right now. And then I would get thousands of text messages back from people about, like, photos from around the world of what they were doing and stuff.
Jon:Oh, that's amazing.
Justin:It was so it was so cool and, remarkably, PG.
Jon:Yeah. That's surprising.
Justin:It yeah. Surprisingly, PG. Actually, people can text that number. I'll find it for them, and they can text me. I I get it.
Justin:I get a notification in Slack when people text me this
Jon:Yeah. Number. But the but the dynamic insertion of a thing I mean
Justin:that would be cool.
Jon:I think we talked about this at in Portland at XOXO where there was a a show that was using dynamic ad technology to randomly insert different endings into a into a fiction show or, like, different like, depending on when you downloaded it, you would get a different story or something.
Justin:Okay. So I I didn't hear about that. I'm I'm curious to hear more about that. But, friend of the show, Bill Bill Irwin Yeah. Over at I think he's at midroll.
Justin:He was telling me about a show no. He had an idea for a a news show that would dynamically update the content based on the time of day or your location.
Jon:Right. That would still be yeah. That's still be tough because of how podcast apps download it in the background. I suppose it will work for locations to some extent.
Justin:Yeah. Let me I'll try to find the exact the the Twitter search engine is actually remarkably good and fast. Like, I'm gonna go Bill Irwin from Bill Irwin, and then I'll put dynamic. Let's see if this shows anything. Oh, here we go.
Justin:Are there any podcasts that dynamic dynamically change their editorial content based on your location? Example, a national news podcast adding a local news story segment. Just detecting their, you know, their geolocated IP and saying, oh, Justin is in Vernon, British Columbia. Well, there was a forest fire there. We're gonna add in.
Justin:So it's like, the New York Daily show.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:But just for me, just for little old me here in in Vernon, British Columbia, it gives me a little story from my hometown. That that seems technically possible.
Jason:Yeah. It would be it'd
Jon:be tough to, I feel like, generate enough content Oh, yeah. In enough local areas. Yeah. Maybe you could use, like, text to voice technology and just read it out loud.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Just read it. That way that that's actually pretty cool. We're we're designing stuff here on the show.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:Let's do some Patreon shout outs.
Jon:We have we have a new person.
Justin:Yeah. Do you wanna do I don't recognize his name. Who is this?
Jon:This is Darby Frey from Chicago. He's a friend of mine, developer. He's working on, he's got his own side hustle, with this app called Lead Honestly. Lead honestly dot com, I believe is the URL. Sweet.
Jon:It is a a tool to sort of facilitate, like, 1 on 1 meetings with your team at the office.
Justin:Oh, cool.
Jon:Now it's pretty neat. I actually use it at, at cards and black box.
Justin:Sweet. Oh, yeah.
Jon:So, yeah, he's in Chicago. He actually just ran the Chicago marathon on Sunday. So congrats to him. It was really gross rainy weather.
Justin:Nice. Did he you didn't run it?
Jon:I did not. No. Have you run a marathon? Yeah. I ran I ran 2, Chicago marathons back to back, like, 3 or 4 years ago.
Justin:Oh, wow.
Jon:Yeah. Took a took a break.
Justin:Did you listen to a lot of podcast while you're running?
Jon:I didn't listen to any music while
Justin:I were in the race.
Jon:Nothing? No. I tend to tend to just like like to run without music.
Justin:You just like to you just like to drive yourself crazy with your thoughts.
Jon:Yeah. Music might have helped in the in that one, but when I'm training, I don't really listen to music that much. I just sort of enjoy being outside.
Justin:Crazy. Yeah. Also, we have Kevin Markham, Adam Duvander, and David Guinta. Juinta. Juinta.
Justin:Ah, I I was like, oh, I I got it right again, but, no, I didn't. Sorry about that, Juinta. Dave Junta. If you wanna support us on Patreon, if you identify with what we're saying, if you, are building your own side hustle, if you're bootstrapping, if you're, you know, you just appreciate us bleeding all over the Internet every week. Just look for the Patreon link in the show notes.
Justin:Or if you're in Overcast, it's a green icon at the bottom of the play screen. And I think I'm gonna set a goal. I haven't done this yet, but I think our first goal is, we have an amazing editor, Chris Chrisens. And it would be nice if we could get up to the point where Patreon is paying for our editing.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. That's we have 4 episodes a month roughly.
Justin:Yeah. So that's we're still a ways off. I think we're we have enough to pay for 1 episode 1 episode's editing. And, yeah, we're just gonna keep going. So
Jon:Yeah. So yeah. Thanks thanks everyone for supporting us.
Justin:It is still seriously crazy to me that that even works. Actually, I got another message from somebody who had said that they just put that link in their show notes and just magically, people started supporting them on Patreon. So folks, that's built right into Transistor. If you're not using it, check it out. Actually, in on that note, someone else, Jason Resnick, who has a couple shows on transistor.
Justin:I'll find the names of those shows in a second so you can check them out because I I think that's important for folks to see those. A show called Live in the Feast. I think they're both for freelancers. Anyway, he said he has also, from his show, gotten a few customers. Let me see if I can find it here.
Jon:Nice.
Justin:So he said, just listen to this week's Build Your SaaS episode. People, when they text me, they don't call it Build Your SaaS. They say BYS. BYS. BYS.
Justin:That it's like a little, little acronym our fans have made up. I thought I'd share some results from having the podcast. I've had 3 customers in the past month come by way of my show. And, he also sold 2 of his I think he has a downloadable, like a course or something, and he sold 2 of those as well, and had someone join, this coaching program he's doing. So
Jon:That's really that's awesome to hear.
Justin:That's pretty cool. Yeah. And, again, not massive numbers. I mean, he's got a respectable podcast, but we're not talking about, you know, insert name of popular show here. You know This American Life.
Justin:Numbers or I'm Marc Maron. This is my podcast, WTF. These are just folks that are putting out a show, you know, every week or every day and get a dedicated number of listeners.
Jon:And That's cool.
Justin:Yeah. I'm
Jon:still amazed at how people find shows. Like, even our show. I don't. Yeah. Like, people just random people that find it, I it's it still baffles me.
Justin:Well and the way people find it is through word-of-mouth. It's Yeah. It's just people saying because folks that are into the same stuff talk to each other. If you have shared the show with a friend, thank you. Actually, I would like to know if you could tweet us at transistorfm or people are reaching out to us all sorts of ways.
Justin:They find all sorts of interesting ways to find us. However you'd like, tell us how you heard about the show. That would be quite gratifying, and we might, yeah, read your read your story out on the web on the next episode. Ask Rez. That's Jason's other show.
Justin:So ask Rez and live in the feast. So, yeah, those are it's really gratifying to get those those updates. Is there any other notable shows that have just started that we should be shouting out right now? Last week, we shouted out Supercomputer. There's a there's a show.
Justin:My hometown is Edmonton, Alberta, and, Karen Unland and Mac Male, That's a real name, Mac Male. They have a show called speaking municipally, which is just all about local Edmonton news and local Edmonton politics. And, it's actually starting to get up there in the downloads too.
Jon:Oh, nice.
Justin:My apologies for forgetting the other host. But, anyway, I think that's a really cool show, just kind of a local interest show and, obviously, another show that would probably benefit quite a bit from Patreon.
Jon:Awesome. Yeah. I'd love love to hear more more local local shows pop up.
Justin:Yeah. It's it's such a good medium for if you you know, you're in a one specific area and you just wanna talk about things that are going on in your town, what a great medium. Right? Like, you you you have this built in audience of people who are also interested in those things. Yeah.
Justin:Alright. So let's I thought this week we would do some follow-up again because we've been talking about what metric should we be focused on, what what metric should we be trying to improve. On the Twittersphere this week, there is this Mailchimp article that was being passed around. Mailchimp, was on the cover well, the founder of Mailchimp, Ben Chestnut, also a real name, was on the cover of Forbes Magazine. He's, this is the Forbes 400.
Justin:Are these the 400 wealthiest Americans?
Jon:Oh, wow.
Justin:And Ben is the cofounder of Mailchimp. And, I've highlighted this one section that I think is interesting for us. It says Ben and his cofounder Dan Kurzius have both profited richly from their patience. With $600,000,000 in revenue, Mailchimp is in the black and has more than doubled its estimated valuation to 4,200,000,000 in the last 2 years, giving Chestnut, who's 44, and Kurzius, who's 46, its sole owners stakes worth 2,100,000,000 each. So on paper, they are billionaires.
Justin:On in real life, they're probably millionaires. But Yeah. $600,000,000 is a lot of revenue.
Jon:That's a lot of revenue, yeah, for a mailing what I guess started as a mailing list service mailing list company. I mean, I don't remember when I became aware of them. Yeah. Probably early 2000 or mid or something.
Justin:Yeah. So that this is the part I found interesting for you and I because we've been kind of thrashing about about, you know, bootstrapping and how hard it is and what should our timeline be. And, you know, with our current growth rate, we'll hit $20,000 in 5 years. And, you know, we're getting all sorts of feedback from some of the the Webb's, grandfathers and grandparents. And one of the comments that I got from DHH in a comment thread was, if it takes 5 years to get to the point where the business can pay 2 salaries, it's possible that the business isn't destined for the long term.
Justin:And I think I thought that was actually a fair thing to say. The it obviously depends on a lot of factors.
Jason:Yep.
Justin:And, but that's just one perspective. And, the Mailchimp story is interesting. Let me read this section here. Mailchimp launched in 2001 and remained a side project for several years earning a few $1,000 a month. Who's that sound like, John?
Jon:Sounds like us.
Justin:Sounds like us. Then in 2007, so 6 years later, when it hit 10,000 users, only then did Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius decide to commit full time.
Jon:Yeah. So I wonder first thing that comes to mind is, like, what did they do in those 6 years? I mean, they had full time jobs, but, like, what what what did Mailchimp look like in 2001, and what did it look like in 2007? And, like, what what changed? What did they build?
Jon:Like, I don't.
Justin:I believe they were consulting. I believe they had a company called Rocketship or something.
Jon:Okay.
Justin:CEO of the Rocket Science Group.
Jon:Rocket Science. So they were rocket scientists?
Justin:So they I believe yeah. I believe rocket science was just a consulting company.
Jon:Okay. So then maybe they built Mailchimp out of that to as a thing to use for their clients or something, but then
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:They they obviously didn't just, like, build it and let it sit and grow Yeah. As you really wouldn't be able to do, but, you know, I guess from my thinking about it from our point of view, what would transistor look like in a 6 year span from
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Day 1 to to 6 years in the future? Like, it would probably be drastically different in some respects, but
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:You know, even even as a side project. But
Justin:Yeah. Are are are you saying, like, what did they do in that time to even hit that scale?
Jon:Right. As as a as a, you know, as part time, like, whatever, entrepreneurs, if you wanna call it that, how much time could they dedicate to it? What did they accomplish in those 6 years? I mean, obviously, they hit 10,000 users, which is no small number, but, like, what Yeah. What what How how did they how did they work on it?
Jon:What did they work on? What what did they, like, focus on?
Justin:And Yeah.
Jon:I I don't think we I don't think we know the answers from that from this article, but that is sort of popping into my head.
Justin:Yeah. So there's this other article, another interview that he did in 2012. I'll link that in the show notes, which you can find at saas.transistor.fm. And this is episode 30. So just slash 30.
Justin:The person asks, what were you doing before Mailchimp? And he says, I ran a web dev agency called the Rocket Science Group. Pretty much sucked at it. So and they said that they the reason that they built it is they had customers who needed to send email newsletters, and the software is really bad. So they had some kind of, like, scrap code lying around.
Justin:They modified it, turned it into an email newsletter app, opened it to the public, set up some Google AdWords, and basically forgot about it.
Jon:Wow. I
Justin:don't know how true this narrative is, but can you imagine? That would be
Jon:That'd be amazing if you one day, you, like, remember like, remember that one thing we built? Let's log in and check it.
Justin:Yeah. It's, like, it's the equivalent of leaving $20 in your snowboard jacket. And then the next season, you're on the chairlift, and you reach in your pocket and you go, there's $20 in here. Accept that $20.
Jon:Yeah. It's turned into a lot of money.
Justin:It's turned into $20,000.
Jon:You bought some Apple stock in 2001 and forgot about it.
Justin:Yeah. Just left it in your snowboard pocket title. So he said I guess that's that
Jon:I guess that's what we need to do now.
Justin:Yeah. We just need Let's just
Jon:this is the last episode, and we're gonna forget about it.
Justin:Forget about it. This is a time capsule. It's just going in the dirt, and then, yeah, 6 years from now, that'll be, what, 2,000 2024? Oh. No.
Justin:Is that right?
Jon:Yeah. Yes.
Justin:Wow. So in 2024, in the future, we'll we'll, like, look at our numbers again, and we'll be like, holy shit.
Jon:And then we have 6 years left before the planet devolves into a climate disaster.
Justin:Yes. That's true. Then we'll have to use all of our money to save the planet, but that's a story for a different podcast.
Jon:It certainly is.
Justin:By the way, I think people should read that, that latest article. It really bummed me out, but Yeah. I think it is I'll find it. It is 5 I read the one on 538. We can still do a lot to slow climate change, but will we is the Yeah.
Justin:The article. This is pretty much up to you Americans, by the way.
Jon:Not yeah. We're not really, leading in that arena right now. Sorry. I did my I did my best.
Justin:Well, you've got an election coming up, I think.
Jon:Sure do.
Justin:So I'll put this in the show notes as well. I think I think people should read this. And, actually, talking about motivation, the only way for this to work, for climate change to be stopped, it can't just be people taking less hot showers and, flying less on the airplane, although that will definitely help. There's nothing wrong with doing those things. But it there's going to have to be a massive, top down approach to climate change.
Justin:It just won't work any other way.
Jon:Yeah. There has to be. Be. I mean, we're yeah. We're way past the point, I think, of small things working in a in a reasonable time frame.
Justin:Yeah. Like, switching to, paper straws is not going to help here. And I think there's there's this, there's this hilarious article in The Onion. What's the title? It's something like the the idea that it's all up to this, like, poor individual, which, again, we we we definitely have something to build, but climate experts say only hope for saving planet lies with people who save napkins from takeout order.
Jon:I love the onion.
Justin:So for sure, there's a piece we have to play. Like, one thing I have tried to do personally is, take less flights. So I Yeah. I think I used to fly 6 times a year, and I've reduced that down to 2 or 3 now. But and, again, this is not so much of this is, like, grandstanding.
Justin:I'm not trying to say any of that. Top down approach. But part of that, I think, will be companies will have companies have enormous economic
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:And social influence.
Jon:Yeah. We're we see some of that. I think Apple's been leading the way with at least their energy programs.
Justin:Yeah. And even in this Forbes article about Mailchimp, I actually didn't get to that piece, but they're starting to give away tons of their money. And, they just donated $10,000,000 to help Georgia nonprofits because they're in Atlanta. Yeah. And, you know, I think there is as we're thinking about being entrepreneurs, right now, we're just thinking about putting food on the table.
Justin:That's, like, our first goal. But if we ever do make it well, if we ever do make it wealthy, John
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:I think we need to make a pact right now that we're gonna use, that money for good.
Jon:Yeah. I'm I'm down with that. Let's do it.
Justin:We just we just agreed right here. Anyway, if you are a millionaire or a billionaire listening to this right now, please go read that article. And, if you have ideas on how you could help Yeah. Reach out. We'd love to have you on the show.
Jon:Please do. Anyway, back back to, back Back
Justin:back on track. Back on track. Oh, anyway, I wanted to say this next part. So back to this interview with Ben Chestnut. He says, in 2005, we noticed so remember.
Justin:They just forgot about it. Yeah. In 2005, we noticed it was a better business than our web dev agency. It was growing faster than us humans, and its recurring revenue was basically keeping us afloat. So we decided to take all of 2006 to wind down the agency business, beef up Mailchimp's features, and then they officially hit the reset button in 2007 and became a product company.
Jon:Wow.
Justin:What a weird story.
Jon:It is.
Justin:I I think the the lesson here is there are so many paths.
Jon:Right.
Justin:There are like, our journey is not going to look like anybody else's.
Jon:No. I'm sure we'll look back 6 years from now, look back, and have an interesting story to tell.
Justin:Yeah. And, again, in hindsight, maybe this really is what happened, or maybe it's not what happened. But it it is interesting that I think there's something to be said about really pushing too hard for growth early on.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:There's there's this Twitter thread, NDVC, who we've talked about on the show before. Someone replied to one of his tweets in this kind of talking about this Mailchimp article. And Evan Heiner said, I think there's an underappreciated superpower to having the time to figure out the nuances of a market. The that approach is counter to picking a singular hypothesis, attacking it at max speed for 18 months, and then either hitting your mark or shutting down.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:Right?
Jon:Yeah. I I agree with that. I mean, I think even even for us, like, what what we have now isn't it's close to, I think, what we talked about, but it's not it certainly has changed already. I mean, we're not we didn't just pick we didn't just pick a set of features and run wild and and quit our jobs and go all out building a thing that may or may not be helpful to anyone. Like, we're sort of we are sort of slowly learning more about the market and and what, you know, customers are are sort of requesting and what's helpful to them and what's helpful to us.
Jon:And
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. Well and think about if if you're really attacking something, like 18 months. We're we launched in August, so we're we're not even 3 months in. We don't like, you don't really know or learn about your churn until you are months into something.
Justin:You know, people can hold on to something on their credit card for 6 months and then decide to cancel.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:And so we still don't know what we don't know. And, I think there is something not to say that aggressive growth is bad, like, I think we could do that way we could do it that way too, but there is something nice about just saying, okay. Well, let's we're not gonna just, you know, lay back and ignore this thing. I don't think we'll we we we'll exactly follow the Mailchimp path, but we can keep tweaking this and improving it.
Jon:Yeah. You know, it might you know, in the next whatever years, depending on how this works out and shakes out for us, like, you know, personally and professionally, there there might come a time where we can we cannot build new features for, like, a month
Justin:and just
Jon:do support and and market it, try to grow it without, you know, like, really working on new things Mhmm. We can probably you know, there might be new ideas coming out of that period of time, but I think it's even wise to, you know, sometimes step back and maybe just stop building for a a time.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:You know, we're obviously not even close to that point yet. But
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, we have time, and we have energy to, continue to build this and bootstrap this on the side. Yep.
Justin:I think one thing that's become clear to me as I've been kind of thrashing around for a definition of bootstrapping is that so kind of pure bootstrapping that, you know, the way people think about it, which is only funding your company from customer revenue. So investing very little in the at the beginning. You and I both put in money at the beginning, but it was very little.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:And only investing your time and your sweat equity and then just allowing reinvesting the the profits from the business back into the business, and doing that, you know, continuing to do that until you hit scale.
Jon:Mhmm.
Justin:If you're going to do that, I think you basically need to have a very stable form of income already happening. So you have to be working a full time job or you have to be, you know, full time consulting and you've already got, you know, a client pipeline working for you, I think the myth is that you can, like, you know, get Amazon Web Services, create a company on Stripe Atlas, and then be at scale in a couple months.
Jon:Yeah. I'm sure it's happened, but I
Justin:Oh, yeah. It definitely happened. The and it would be significantly easier if you if if we were younger, if we didn't have a mortgage. Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:I would have a family. Like, all of that stuff. I think, you know, right now, we've we're MRR is it says it's over $25100. I mean, you could probably live in you know, I don't wherever the digital nomads are living these days
Jon:Yeah. Thailand. Thailand. Probably Thailand.
Justin:You could be a person and do that. I I have a friend that just young younger, couple, actually. They just sold their business, and they're in their early twenties, but they moved in with her parents for 3 years. Mike, what's Mike's last name? The founder of FreshBooks.
Justin:He lived with his parents for years while he was building that. Mhmm. There's this whole, unglamorous side to bootstrapping no one no one ever talks about. A lot of the companies we know, like FreshBooks, and it they were making very little money
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:For a long time.
Jon:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, it yeah. It's it can it can take its toll in a number of ways, I think. Yeah.
Jon:I would certainly, right now, love to just be hanging out on the couch. I mean, you know, it's been a long day. And, like
Justin:Oh, right at this moment, you mean? Yeah. You're not talking, like, in general in your life. Like, you're not ready for the couch
Jon:Oh, no. Not at all. No. But certain days.
Justin:You're saying today was a tough day at work, and then you had to come home and splash some cold water on your face and then get in front of a microphone.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and and, you know, I mean, I hear what you're saying. I do have the stable income and it helps.
Jon:Mhmm. It certainly does. And it's still obviously really exciting to work on this stuff after hours. Yeah. But there's definitely days where I don't want to.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:And I mentally am just done. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. And, again, maybe down the road, we get up to $5,000 in MRR, and then we go, you know what? Maybe it's time to take some funding.
Jon:Or Right.
Justin:Maybe we get to $10,000 MRR, and we both say, let's both, work halftime at our regular thing and work halftime on transistor.
Jon:Right. I think for both of us, there's opportunities to do freelance in the in the roles we have. Mhmm. Con contract, part time, if if we, you know, wanted to or needed to. I'm not you know?
Justin:I actually think this is a really important point because if you're thinking about bootstrapping and I am differentiating a little bit from self funding. I know some people don't like there to be a differentiation, but if if you have a bunch of money from another business or from a family inheritance or whatever, that's great. And you can use that to pay your living expenses and your so your salary while you build something and maybe the salary of another person or whatever. That's awesome. That would be different than what John and I have been doing so far, which is just building something on the side, funding it only from what we get from customers.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:And, depending on where you're at, like, if you don't have a bunch of money sitting around that you're willing to risk, that's the other thing, will you allow yourself or will your significant other allow you to risk Yeah. Your money? Nathan
Jon:risk.
Justin:Nathan Barry had to do this. He had to talk to his wife. I've got it on, video. Not him talking to his wife. Him telling me about it.
Justin:But That'd
Jon:be weird if you're in the room.
Justin:Hey, hon. I just brought Justin along just to record this. But he had to talk to his wife and say, hon, I'm gonna try to stop doing my other business, and I'm gonna invest all of the money I've made. Maybe not all of it, but a significant amount. That's our money.
Justin:You know, this is the money that we have in the bank. I'm gonna invest that in this new business called ConvertKit that's at, you know, $1500 MRR or something. And, you know, that that might she was willing to go for that that risk. But, if if your significant other or even you are not willing to make that risk, as hard as it is to work a day job or work as a consultant during the day or whatever you have to do to put money to put money on the table to put food on the table, If you are going the bootstrapping route, do not delude yourself into thinking that you know, you're gonna magically hit scale really fast, especially if like like like John and I, you're you're getting into your forties and that you've got higher expenses than in your twenties.
Jon:Like, the grays are coming coming out a little faster in the beard.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. If you've got some gray hairs in your beard, keep your day job.
Jon:But yeah. I I yeah. I mean, getting maybe back to Mailchimp, their example, like, I I don't like, I doubt they just forgot about it, but I obviously don't know how they worked on it, how much effort they put into it on the side. Like but the focus of having only a certain amount of time to do it, I think, is a really good motivator. Mhmm.
Jon:And I I see that in, like, the amount of time I have to work on it and sort of the the things that we focus on, and and I take the time to to work on, you know, on the weekends or whatever. Yeah. And then also, you know, also the pressure of taking all of your money and investing it into your into bootstrapping and doing that full time, but having the the pressure to make money to live on
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Obviously, in the example of David Berry. Right?
Justin:Nathan Berry.
Jon:Nathan Berry.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:You know, he's obviously gotta, like, not let down his family.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:And, you know, I think you're sort of in the same in a similar situation.
Justin:Yeah. Totally.
Jon:I obviously give you tons of credit for, like, doing this in the with a with a family, a large family.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. And that's that's an ongoing journey. Like, I'm still figuring that out. But, yeah, I I I just I feel like this has been helpful for me to kind of go through all of this investigation into some of these other stories, some of these other bootstrap origin stories, these legends we've told around the the Camp Fire and actually said, well, what really happened there?
Justin:And is the story we've been telling actually accurate? And I think the the thing I took from this Mailchimp story is bootsheppers need to be more patient and maybe keep their day job. And as as hard as it is, that that pressure that some folks are putting on themselves to treat this like a fully formed, mature business right away.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:You know, there's so many things that can happen, and evolution is a slow process. Just that slow evolution can be really healthy too.
Jon:Yeah. Absolutely. And not to mention, I yeah. Like I said, this the the physical, I think, the physical toll I can take on you to just, like I don't know. I think that you can work 12 hours a day every day Mhmm.
Jon:Is just taxing. I mean, maybe maybe you can when you're younger. I I know I did it more for sure, but
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:I can't anymore. I that sort of reminds me of I was on Twitter earlier today, just for a second, which I don't go on very often. And I it's another DHH tweet or a retweet or something, and he he was he retweeted a photo that someone took at a WeWork office. Oh, yeah. Saw that.
Jon:And it's it's this photo of a jug of water in the WeWork office, and it and it it's like I don't it's weird. There's cucumbers in it. There's what looks to be grapefruit, but then there's strips of cucumber that were, like, somehow carved into a message. It's really anyway, it says don't stop when you're tired. Stop when you are done.
Jon:And then, obviously, DHH is kind of against this, which it just it just promotes, like, burnout. Yeah. Like, actually, you should probably just stop when you're tired.
Justin:Yes.
Jon:And, you know, take a break. Go to sleep.
Justin:Yes. Yeah. Book. And there isn't I don't know. Hard work is important.
Justin:Like, the more the older I get, the more I recognize that life is really about walking in between 2 extremes, like walking in the middle, walk the line like Johnny Cash says
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:And holding 2 things, in parallel at the same time that are opposites. On one hand, you need to work really hard. But on the other hand, you can't work too hard, and you need to rest. Like, those things are both true, because no one accomplished anything except for, I guess, Mailchimp. They Mailchimp is the ones that they're the only ones that accomplish something without working hard.
Jon:Yeah. Now and now they're billionaires.
Justin:Now they're billionaires. But for the rest of us, we're probably going to have to work hard, but we have to do this within reason. And this path you have in your head about the way it has to be, maybe you should look at that from a different angle. Maybe you should question that. Mhmm.
Justin:Maybe you should have people in your life that can say, yeah. Maybe that's not the right way to go.
Jon:Yeah. Maybe step away for a bit. Yeah. I think I don't know. I feel like we're maybe seeing some backlash, and we have maybe for a little bit backlash against that culture of working till you die.
Jon:Mhmm. The death march the death march, as my friends have called it.
Justin:And and here's the other thing. Unfortunately, we can't really split test realities because we could do a split test where in one version, we just don't, you know, we don't kill ourselves investing into transistor. We just kinda let it go and kinda grow organically. And then in the other version, we just, like, stay a blade, and we drink Red Bull and blah blah blah, and see what actually happens.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:It it's kinda like Donald Trump feeling like he's a big he's a he's a successful businessman. Right. They say if he invested in the stock market, like, that money his dad gave him, he would have been, you know Wealthier. Yeah. Would have been wealthier.
Justin:Like so here, you know, he's out there hustling super hard, but we don't have a split test for that reality.
Jason:Right.
Justin:So why don't you just do the one that feels sustainable and doable and, take care of yourself? Alright. Let's move on. I wanted to talk about this feedback we got from Jeff Hellman. I actually really appreciated this.
Justin:He he reached out on Twitter and then sent us a message through our chat widget. He thinks talking about our key metric. So we had initially suggested it's MRR. We need to be focused on growing MRR every month. And increasingly, based on this feedback we're getting from our wonderful listeners who can listen with a what what is that?
Justin:You know, a a critical ear. Mhmm. And and they can read between the lines. And I think the overall consensus is no. MRR is not your key metric.
Justin:That is the outcome of focusing on the right metrics.
Jon:Right. Yeah.
Justin:And he thinks we have 2 core metrics that we should track and actually really like these, especially the first one. Number 1: episodes added. So he feels like episodes added directly measures engagement usage by your subscribers. A decrease across all subscribers is a warning sign, and decreases for individual subscribers predicts churn. I think there's a little bit more nuance that we would have to add to that statistically.
Justin:But what do you what do you think about that idea?
Jon:Yeah. I never really thought about that. I mean, yeah, if if episodes added or I guess another way to think about that is, like, per show, is there, like, a cadence of episodes being added new episodes being added to a show Mhmm. Across across like, if you're not adding episodes to a show, you're not using our service.
Jason:Mhmm.
Jon:You're probably gonna leave because you don't have a use for it.
Justin:That's right. And and probably another piece and, actually, is this his second piece? Yeah. So his second piece. Oh, that's so funny because I read this initially and I was like, ah nah, you're wrong.
Justin:But now I see how one number 1 leads into number 2, which is episode plays because they don't get they don't get value from adding an episode unless people are consuming the content. Right. And so he feels like our pricing should definitely be based on this because it is both your key cost driver and the core unit of value. It's consumption is the core unit of value.
Jon:Right. The problem is we don't know if people are consuming it. Yes. I mean, but Exactly.
Justin:Yeah. But downloads is a reasonable proxy.
Jason:Yeah.
Justin:Now, to be completely transparent, there are a few shows that were added in August that still have 0 episodes.
Jon:Yes.
Justin:And now that could be for number of reasons. Some people are recording and have a launch planned where they're going to you know, they're they're building up to a launch and they're like, you know, we'll pay, get the website up, we'll get everything configured, and then, you you know, we'll do that in August, and then we'll launch it in November. And they're fine to pay every month leading up to the launch of their show.
Jon:Right.
Justin:But there some of these folks, you know, they aren't gonna get value if unless they add some episodes.
Jon:Right. And, yeah, and I I feel bad if they're just spending money and not using it. I mean, it's it's great for us. It's like the gym membership method. Right?
Jon:Mhmm. Yep. But I I don't want them to just forget about it and then be like, oh, crap. I'm paying for this thing that I don't use, and then not get anything out of it. Yeah.
Jon:Doesn't help. Doesn't help them. It doesn't help us. It's
Justin:Now one tricky piece is that we allow, unlimited shows. And so, some of these folks with 0 episodes actually have other shows that do have downloads and do have episodes. So for example, me, if even if we just take my account, my personal transistor account, I got shit in here nobody knows about.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:I have 2 shows that have, in my personal account, that have one one has one episode, one has 2 episodes, but they're both just ideas I had that I wanted to see and feel. Like, what would that feel like to do something like that? And so even me, I've got things like shows I've created. We should actually create is there a way to delete a show?
Jon:Yeah. Oh, you can delete a show. It's slightly it's slightly hidden. It's in the show settings page.
Justin:I should do that. Oh, yeah. I see it right here. Delete a show. I should click this button just to see what it feels like.
Jon:There's a little pop up.
Justin:Here we go. I'm doing it. Oh, wow. Oh. Oh, that feels good, actually.
Justin:Anyway, so that could be playing into it, but I really like what he's getting at here. I think I think there's something to this that would be we have a way of tracking these numbers in our admin dashboard, but I would like to see even maybe maybe we need to be charting these as trends, like, actually, statistically looking at these and going, okay. Wait a second. Mhmm. And, actually, this might be a good use for ProfitWell has that engage that engagement snippet you can install.
Jason:Okay.
Justin:And we might be able to, and then it actually connects that engagement, their activity to MRR. And so you can directly relate, you know, if folks are, you know, wow. This person has added 3 shows but no episodes. So, you know, let's let's get let's figure this out. Right?
Jon:Or, yeah, reach out to them, see how we can help. Or
Justin:Yeah. I I've been doing this manually. Like, when I see people sign up that haven't added shows, I'll email them when I see it, but that's a very ad hoc way of doing it. So We could, you know,
Jon:we could probably automate some of that.
Justin:Yeah. So I
Jon:mean, I know a lot of places do that, and sometimes it's a pain in the ass. But
Justin:Yeah. It would I I'm interesting in looking at this ProfitWell engagement thing because I've tried things like this in the past, like, with Mixpanel. And, they worked okay, but this one looks interesting. This is the first one that feels like it really connects activity and, like, so, like, daily active customers or whatever with, like, you know, customer activity by plan. And Yeah.
Justin:If I should actually yeah. We should see this because maybe they can, we can connect that to stuff like episodes.
Jon:Yeah. We don't we don't really have any internal metrics yet. I mean, we should get to that at some point of, like, a chart of, you know, episodes added per day or week or like, you know, if that number's growing, then that's good. Like, our obviously, our customers are using it. More people are signing up.
Justin:Yeah. That might even be a cool thing to make public at some point. Like, like, anonymize like, here's how many episodes people have created. Here's how many downloads. We shared last week that we'd crossed the 6,000,000 downloads Mark.
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:By the way, last week, we were we just crossed 6,000,000. We are now up another 314,000.
Jon:Wow. Yeah. I talked I saw the one of the good news podcast, hosts in the office today Yeah. Which is the the Cards Against Humanity news podcast that they they put out. And I I was like, I don't know if you've been looking at your analytics lately, but the page is broken because you have so many that I need to, like, optimize how that stuff's calculated, and it doesn't even it doesn't even load.
Jon:It just times out. He's like, hey. I actually haven't looked lately, but thanks for letting me know. So that's
Justin:Do they realize how many people would kill to be in their situation?
Jon:Oh, yeah.
Justin:Their lives are in danger. So I'll put I'm putting all these in the show notes as we speak. Some people ask someone asked on Twitter, how do we write our show notes? And I just add to this, Dropbox paper document as we go along. Yeah.
Justin:One of the advantages of having 2 people on the show is you can do that. His final suggestion, I'm still on Jeff Hellman's suggestions, is to double the pricing of our $29 tier. And, Do we have a $29 tier? Is that I thought
Jason:it was 9 no. 19.
Justin:Oh, maybe he's talking about 19. I was like, what? Maybe he doubled it for us.
Jason:Maybe.
Justin:He feels like especially if we're going after business and he has some of his own experience. He he had his own startup and, you know, they he felt like they were kind of too aggressive on entry level customers. And, yeah, he felt what like when they raised the bar on pricing and, you know, in terms of the product itself, it really really helped. And we've talked about that before. That's been my experience at startups I've worked at too.
Justin:You know, we had a product that had the $19 plan and a $100 plan and we ended up getting rid of the $19 plan and just focusing on the $100 plan. So, Yeah. I think, all great suggestions. We're always open to hearing your feedback. Yeah.
Justin:And, yeah. Reach out to us. What do we now we we deployed a bunch of things.
Jon:We did.
Justin:Do you wanna talk about that?
Jon:Yeah. We did. So I think the last episode, we talked about how the integrations page was nearly done. It is now well, it's it's live, at least, most of it. So the new integrations page for each show is where you go to connect up to Spotify, which they also haven't they have some announcements about podcasting, which we could maybe talk about later.
Jon:But Yeah. So you go there to connect to Spotify. You can connect up to your mailing list provider, you know, Mailchimp being one of them.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Sponsor our show.
Justin:Yeah.
Jon:You can you can set up you connect to your Twitter account to auto tweet when an episode is published, and then you can also the new one we finally rolled out was posting automatically to your YouTube channel Mhmm. Which is what I ended up working on this weekend to finish up. I think it turned out pretty well, although it it was interesting. We rolled it out or I was ready to roll it out, and then we had a couple customers, like, hear about it and be excited about it and sort of was like, oh, I think, you know, it'd be cool if you could you could post automatically to a playlist within your channel because there you can, like, reorder them
Justin:Mhmm.
Jon:Which turned out to be super really easy to implement. So I just built that as well. So now you can hook up your transistor show to your YouTube account, and then you get to optionally choose a playlist that all your episodes will publish to. Mhmm. But you can also click a button to automatically upload all of your past episodes to YouTube, which worked pretty well, I think until you, Justin, just ended up publishing this show and your other shows at the same time, and it just, like, crushed our servers because it's just processing audio into video files.
Jon:So Yeah. Anyway, I got that got that mostly cleaned up. Yeah. That was awesome. But it works it works pretty well.
Justin:Yeah. That was amazing, actually, and very popular. Like, a lot of people really like that feature, and that's something we can certainly iterate on in the future. I I personally think just just as a recommendation. I I think this feature is super cool, and I think people should use it.
Justin:But I personally think you should be recording video from every episode you do. Like, we're recording video right now. We might not use it, but it's just recording onto my hard drive. And that is so much cooler for a listener to be able to see someone in real life. Mhmm.
Justin:You know, like I said, Joe Workman, one of our early customers, he already had a big audience on YouTube. And, you know, a lot of programmers just listen to YouTube in the background, music or whatever. And so for him, he's like, I just wanna reach them where they're at. And, you know, having my podcast just in audio form on YouTube Yeah. Is a big deal.
Justin:So Makes sense. Yeah. I think, that's a really cool feature, and people have have really been liking it. And it's gratifying to to see that.
Jon:It is. Yeah. Yeah. I think it turned out well. So the other 2 were, we talked about last week, which was SSL for everyone for their for people's custom domains on their for their, transistor websites.
Jon:Still in progress. I sort of didn't have time to get to that because of the YouTube feature. Yep. And then we still have to pull in all the Spotify analytics for people that, submit through Transistor.
Justin:Yeah. Our our contact at Spotify is gone. I've I've emailed him a couple times. I think he's on vacation. So we're we're we're working on all of that.
Justin:The one the one I'm I'm most excited about is, SSL. Yeah. That's the one the Mega Maker podcast is on a well, actually, product people as well, both on custom domains. And people often reach out to me and say, hey. You know, this thing's not on HTTP.
Jon:People people care, which is great.
Justin:Yeah. So when that when that comes out, I will be, like, super excited.
Jon:Yeah. I think you'd be really shouldn't have to do anything. It's just all gonna be, like, you don't even have to click a button, I don't think. It's just gonna
Justin:be Oh, we're just gonna we're just gonna make it,
Jon:default. Yeah. It'll be default. Yep.
Justin:Oh, that's so good.
Jon:Yeah. Cool.
Justin:Well, I think that's it. Anything else we should tell folks about?
Jon:I don't think so. Like I said, this is our last episode. We're gonna
Justin:See you in at See you in October 9, 2024.
Jon:Yeah. See you in 6 years.
Justin:2024 does not sound like it's gonna be in 6 years. No. That that sounds like that is way in the future.
Jon:It's, like, 5 it's, like, less than that. It's, like, 5 5 5 years and however many months. Right?
Justin:I I have to say that would be pretty badass if we just signed off right now, and then we just, like, kept our word. Like, in the next, like, 1st 1st Tuesday of October, we just showed up, and we're like, hey. We're back.
Jon:Anyone still here?
Justin:Is this is this thing still on?
Jon:Yeah.
Justin:We're back, and it worked. We're We're freaking rich.
Jon:From our bunkers underground.
Justin:Underground. Or maybe we saved the world, and it's it's fun, and we can still snowboard.
Jon:I would love to think that. I hope so.
Justin:Me too. Alright, folks. We will see you next Tuesday. Thanks again for being here and listening. Please provide for us a nice review in iTunes.
Justin:And, anywhere else you can leave a review for podcasts, that would be great. See you soon. Chris, can you can you edit that so that, like, I I sound like, Alec Baldwin's got the good voice. Right?
Jon:Yeah. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
