Justin Jackson, welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast.
Hey, Cortland, it's good to be here, man.
It's good to have you.
You are the founder of Transistor,
where you provide podcast hosting and analytics.
And I've got to say, you guys are really killing it this year.
You launched the public in August of last year, 2018.
Is that right?
That's right, yeah.
About a year ago, you hit $10,000 a month in revenue
in April of this year, just three months after that.
That was July, we're recording this, what is it, August?
And you're already tracking past something like $30,000
a month in revenue, which is amazing.
So first of all, congratulations, it's been super fun
to watch all this go down.
Yeah, thanks, it's been really a ride.
I don't know how else to say it.
When we launched, I thought it would take us about five years
to get to this point.
And to have it happen faster,
it was gratifying.
This is just you and your co-founder, John, right?
Just two people, no employees.
That's right, yeah, just John, Buddha, and myself.
And I believe you're entirely self-funded.
So no angel investors, no venture capitalists,
just what you're putting into the business.
That's right.
Although, we can talk about this later,
there was a stretch where I was really feeling
the cash crunch personally.
And I was looking at investment
because it was almost overwhelming.
But we managed to make it through that
and now we're in a pretty good spot.
Yeah, I'm making it sound like it's all sunshine
and rainbows here, but there's definitely a touch stretch
before you launched where it was looking a little
like deer in the headlights, what's going to happen?
What about your expenses?
How much does it cost you to run a business like Transistor?
Coming for gross margins of 80% or higher,
one big expense that people wouldn't see
on our top line revenue is we have affiliates.
And some of those affiliates bring us quite a bit of business
and we pay 25% ongoing revenue to them.
And so those affiliate checks haven't gotten too big yet,
$2,000 to $3,000 a month on affiliates.
And everything else is pretty standard, I could look it up.
But we use all the same hosting providers
and one thing we always have to keep an eye on
with podcasting is bandwidth.
And this is something I didn't expect.
I thought that you just pay for the hosting,
but I never thought, wait, you actually have to pay for
these files to get transferred to millions of podcasts,
listening apps around the world.
And a lot of these apps will download the episode regardless,
whether it's user initiated or not.
If they're subscribed, they will get the episode.
And these files can be 20 megabytes all the way up to 250 megabytes
if they're really big.
And so that was a big thing we had to figure out as wow,
and one cent or two cents per gigabyte transferred.
Sounds so cheap, doesn't it?
But when I looked into it, I realized, wait a second,
this is going to significantly impact our ability
to make this a business.
And so we've had to figure out a lot of that stuff out.
So we've got a ton of different stuff to talk about,
but let's start with Transistor itself.
And why are your customers using it?
So just like you need hosting for your website,
you also need hosting for your podcast.
Every time you click Play in Apple Podcasts or Pocket Casts
or Google Podcasts, those apps are downloading or streaming
that file from a podcast hosting platform somewhere.
And so a lot of people think you just submit your podcast
by who they re-host the feed.
You still need an original feed hosted somewhere.
So you need a hosting provider that can generate this RSS feed
and also host the files.
And then most podcast hosting providers
also provide analytics.
How many people are downloading?
Where are they listening from?
What are your most popular episodes?
How many downloads on average do you get per episode?
All of that inside of Transistor.
And then we also provide the website.
So if you don't want to manually update your WordPress site
or whatever, you can host the podcast website on Transistor
and every time you publish, we automatically update
your website as well, which has been really popular.
Way more popular than we'd like sometimes
because it also means we're in the CMS business,
but actually in all of podcasting is messy.
Everything about it is messy.
And we provide hosting and analytics,
but one of the main things we provide is customer support.
Helping people to get their podcast published
and out into the world and answering all of the questions
they have along the way.
And I think probably most anti-actors should do,
which is solving a very straightforward,
dare I say boring problem, podcast.
People need to have their podcast episodes hosted somewhere.
People needed to have their podcast episodes hosted somewhere
before you came along with Transistor.
In fact, this problem has existed and been solved
by numerous companies for decades now.
Whereas on the flip side of things,
today we're living in what you might call
the golden era of podcasting.
Startups, in fact, creating solutions for podcasting,
making podcasts more social, connecting listeners
to each other and to hosts,
providing a bridge between podcasters and advertisers
and things like that.
Why did you choose such a straightforward,
well-trodden problem like podcast hosting
instead of one of these newer, flashier unsolved problems?
Oh my God, I have so much to say about this.
First of all, one of the things we noticed
before we launched is that the market had momentum.
What this looks like is we could see lots of people
signing up for other podcast hosting platforms.
For example, our first customer was Cards Against Humanity
and John was working for them at the time
and so he's in meetings and they're planning a new podcast
that they're going to fund for a year
called The Good News Podcast.
Already there's something interesting about this
company who's spending money for a whole year.
They're not just spending money on the hosting.
They're paying two people's salaries.
They're going to pay for equipment.
They're investing, let's say, 200 to 300,000
probably right off the bat on a show.
Well, that's interesting because there's momentum there.
You can see they're willing to spend money on this thing.
The more we looked at it,
and I noticed an uptick in people
interested in publishing shows.
Similarly, the whole creator-maker movement
I think lends itself naturally to podcasting,
but also the corporate PR communications people
were starting to read all of these New York Times
op-eds about podcasting and they were taking note
and so you had this movement that we could see.
I think in most cases you do just want to solve
the most boring problem that has the most momentum,
meaning if I have to spend a bunch of effort,
this comes from April Dunford actually.
She's written a book on positioning.
She says, if you have to spend a bunch of effort
trying to communicate what your product is,
you've already lost me because human beings are lazy.
When we encounter something new,
we immediately want to use something we already know about
to put it in a box.
And so when I say, hey, we provide podcast hosting,
it's kind of like hosting for your website
but it's for your podcast, instantly you can put that in a box.
And if you're at all familiar with podcasting,
you know what a podcast host does.
That's interesting, I might check that out.
I might recommend that to somebody.
I might use that myself, right?
Whereas if you're, so I've been exposed to tons and tons
of kind of podcast add-ons.
Add-ons can work, especially in a marketplace
that has tons of momentum.
So the Shopify app store, you've got,
you know, I don't know, thousands, millions of stores
want to make their store better
and there's tons of momentum there, you can see it.
And so you can go into the Spotify app store
and release a new app and if it helps people make more money
or what have you, then they'll probably use it.
But something innovative in podcasting,
like if you're creating a new category
within the podcasting space, you're going to have to spend
money and time communicating, explaining,
convincing people what that thing is.
And if you're bootstrapping especially,
you don't have that much money or time.
That's just the way it is.
And I think I see a lot of folks spitting their wheels
on things that seem like a good idea.
Yes, lots of, sorry, for example, lots of people notice that
there's no kind of common platform for people to leave comments
on podcasts, for adding membership options, for,
there's all these kind of add-ons you can add on, right?
And part of this is because podcasting is distributed.
It's built on RSS and there's a bunch of different podcasts
listening apps, and there's a bunch of different podcast
hosting providers, and there's a bunch of different
directories, and people look at that and go,
well, this is broken, right?
This is so complex that we need one unified place
where people can comment and discuss their favorite episodes.
And Mubs just launched something like this called Podhunt.
And I think he's actually got a good, he's actually doing
it work, but the reason it often doesn't is because you just
don't have the platform, it's distributed.
You don't have a good single channel that you can kind of
tack onto and get the traction you'd need.
And also, you're gonna have to spend a lot of time convincing
people that they need this in the first place.
And the beauty about podcast hosting is we just don't have
people are already searching best podcast host in Google.
If you're creating something that doesn't exist, that they
wouldn't even have the idea to search for in the first place,
you're already way behind.
You're already missing out on one of the best channels
for indie makers, which is just people typing stuff into
Google, right?
So I'm happy to be in a boring, competitive niche.
The other nice thing about a boring, competitive niche is
if you show up and you have any personality at all or you're
doing anything that's fresh, just by being the fresh face,
the new kid on the block, you're going to get attention
already, right?
Because people, oh, hey, there's someone new.
Lipson, they've been around forever.
They're kind of, you know, they're old.
Let's check out this new thing.
But you're automatically going to get new attention because,
hey, you're this new player in this old, boring market.
And if the market is big, you can carve out just a tiny
little bit for yourself and make a good indie business.
There's a lot of good stuff there that you just said that I
could also talk about for a very long time.
I really love that you painted this picture of how most people
are podcasting and look at things that are broken.
And when I hear a description of how people think,
number one, that's spot on, but I think people are too
obsessed with the product.
They look at the product, they look at the way that things
are built and say, this could be better.
And they're probably right, this could be better.
But that's not the only thing that goes into a business.
There's also the market to think about.
There's also distribution channels to think about.
And if you build a better product, but there's no market
for it, there's no way to get it out to people,
then it doesn't really matter.
You don't really have a business.
As an indie actor, as a fledgling founder,
you don't have a lot of time.
You don't have years and years, you don't have millions
in funding to try to convince people that this problem exists
and they should take it seriously and then try to sell them
your solution.
Ideally, they should already have done step one and you
could just move on to step two.
I get so many pitches about how people can make the indie
hackers podcast more social, et cetera.
I'm like, why do I want that?
Why do I care?
But Transistor comes on the scene and immediately I'm like,
hey, I want Transistor, I want a newer, better podcast host.
Sort of mental calculus I have to do in my mind.
And even then, even when you're sort of solving this problem
for which there's already latent demand,
it still takes a while.
It wasn't like immediately out of the gate Transistor
was killing it.
You guys still had a while where you had to catch on.
So even if you're solving a boring, straightforward problem,
you have to take the time to solve it properly
and get your first customer.
So I think it's really easy to underestimate how long it can
take to get started with a SaaS business.
Yeah, it's true.
And I'm actually really glad that Sahil from Gumroad
articulated this.
And I just keep repeating it because it is so true,
which is the market you're in will determine most of your growth.
I think people actually misunderstand what he's saying there.
What he means is that the market you're in,
the market you choose, the market you're targeting,
that's going to determine how fast you grow,
what your growth are going to be.
And think about it as like a room that you're slowly filling with a balloon,
or quickly filling with a balloon.
If there's lots of space in the room,
you could blow that balloon as fast as you want and it'll grow really fast.
But once it hits the walls and the roof, it'll stop and your growth will slow down.
So right now in podcasting,
it feels like we're in a room with lots of space
and we're pumping air as fast as we can
and it just keeps growing and growing and growing.
And we know eventually the market will hit a saturation point and it'll be like,
okay, now we're going to grow slower.
And that feeling of being in a market that's growing rapidly,
well, first of all, this is the first time I've really felt that.
And comparing it to the other things I've done and then thinking about this,
it's kind of like I never knew what Derek Sivers meant
when he was like, instead of trying to create demand,
you're just trying to manage all of this demand.
So instead of you trying to push this rock uphill
or actually instead of you trying to pull the market towards you with a rope,
you're just tugging on this thing, come on, get over here.
Easier, all of a sudden you're not pulling it all,
the market's just showing up at your door.
And I think sometimes folks build a product
and then they're like, okay, who's this product for?
I'm going to bring it to the market.
I'm going to bring this product to the market.
I think in most cases, the market actually just comes to the product.
You launch something and if it's something where there's demand,
where there's growth like Sahil says,
where there's a magnetism already there,
they will show up at your doorstep.
You don't have to go knocking on their door like a traveling salesman going,
hey, you got to buy this new thing, right?
They're already saying, no, no, no, I'm going to look you up on Google,
I'm going to drive my car down to your shop
and I'm going to show up where you're at.
And I keep trying to articulate this because
as someone who's been trying to do business since my whole life,
the feeling between, the difference between being a traveling salesman
and showing up at people's doors and trying to convince them to buy
and having people just show up at my door is, I don't know, it's night and day.
And the growth potential of a business,
even if you're an indie entrepreneur, you still need growth.
And in some ways, you need to grow maybe not as fast
as a venture-backed company because they're basing it on user growth or whatever.
But in terms of revenue, you want to grow as fast as you can,
especially in those early days, because if you don't make enough money soon,
you might starve, your savings might run out.
And so these principles are important.
We can't afford to make mistakes,
in terms of who we're targeting.
And I think now that I've gone through this process,
I'm advocating market first as opposed to product first.
And in some ways, I've been saying this for a long time,
but it's become particularly vivid now.
It really is about the market.
And if you can find a market that's hungry for something
and just provide the solution that they're hungry for,
they will show up to eat if I want to continue the metaphor.
I love that you're so enthusiastic about it.
I think it's the kind of enthusiasm that can only really come
from having experienced both sides of this equation
and seeing how hard one is and then how amazing the other is.
I think it will probably be obvious to listeners somewhat
from the way that you talk about these things,
that there's a lot of time helping to educate SAS founders
and helping to teach them, especially bootstrappers.
And you've done that primarily through content.
I think you first popped onto my radar three or four years ago
when I first started Indie Hackers,
and I've always mentally put you in a similar bucket
to the one that I place myself.
You've been writing, you've been blogging,
you've released courses, you've written books,
you started at least four podcasts, I think.
I'm subscribed to at least one of your newsletters.
In this sort of educator role,
you're also doing a lot of learning yourself,
and a lot of it is very theoretical.
You're not actually building
a straightforward normal SAS business yourself.
Now you're actually at the helm
of a SAS business of your own.
How much does one learn through reading
and talking to other people
versus how much are you learning
by actually being in the driver's seat yourself,
learning from experience?
I think those are kind of symbiotic, is that the right word?
Because when you're actually doing the work,
so some of my best ideas for blog posts came out of
what I was doing as a product manager during the day.
Man, this is frustrating.
Wow, this is hard.
Oh, wow, this worked.
Oh, this didn't.
And so those insights felt so powerful and vivid
when I was experiencing them,
and so I'd write about them.
I'm also getting exposed to other voices
that help kind of guide you along the way.
I remember the first day at my job,
first day in the software business, 2008,
my boss hands me a copy of Getting Real by 37signals.
And that book just kind of blew my mind open
to all of the ways you could run a business
and all the ways you could build a product.
I was discussing their new book quite a bit, Shape Up,
which I highly recommend.
And being exposed to other thinkers then
kind of informs what you do and what you try,
what you experiment with,
and I think they're both necessary.
So part of the learning process happens through experience,
which then sometimes prompts you to do some research,
which then sometimes prompts you to get
something to do.
I think also I've always been someone who likes to learn in public.
And so when I encounter something that's difficult,
for example,
when I was thrashing about in the early days of Transistor,
we haven't launched officially yet,
we're at $750 MRR,
and I'm starting to feel the money crunch.
Hey, you've been working on this for six months.
When are we going to see some money?
And I'm just kind of thrashing in public.
Like, what do I do about this?
Do I get investment? Do I hold on?
And in that process, I brought in some people that I trust,
who had different perspectives,
primarily in this case, it was DHH and Jason Cohen.
In some ways, I moderated this public discussion that they had
about the different ways to think about funding
or not funding your business early on.
And that was really helpful to have these folks who were experienced,
who had different points of view, give me their thoughts.
And I was able to kind of synthesize that and go, okay,
now for Justin Jackson, what does that mean?
And then make a decision and move on.
And I think there's immense value in figuring things out in public
and then sharing those things with other folks
because it might resonate with them too.
One of my favorite talks is by Gail Goodman.
She was the CEO, I think, of Constant Contact,
an email marketing company.
It was basically about how long it takes to get to scale
and how to sort of navigate that slow growth period.
You're talking about the first six, 12 months of Transistor
being kind of a slot where right now you guys are crushing it
with the revenue growth.
But early on, it was pretty slow going.
Why was it so slow and walk us through these early days
and what you were thinking at the time?
The original calculation I did that prompted all this angst
because barometrics has this forecasting tool,
forecast.barometrics.com.
And I had a conversation with my wife.
My wife says, hey, how are things going?
You and John have been working on this thing.
You're putting all your energy into it.
What's happening?
And I go, well, we have 50 beta customers
and we're at about $750 MRR.
And she goes, okay, well, how long until it's paying our bills?
Well, let me figure that out.
And so I'm thinking we're going to launch August 1, 2018.
What's the best case scenario?
Well, maybe best case scenario is that we double MRR.
Okay, that would be $1,500.
Okay, well, if we grow at 10% month over month,
that's pretty good.
And we have 5% churn, that's probably about right for our industry.
How long will it take us to get to $20,000?
And it was 60 months.
And just looking at that, I thought, that is such a long time to wait for a paycheck.
And I think it would have been fine if John and I,
I always joke about this, maybe I should stop,
but I always joke that John and I are old.
I'm going to turn 40 next year.
So we're both in our late 30s just hanging on to our 30s by our fingernails.
And maybe I say we're old because I kind of feel like often we're the oldest people in the room when it comes to tech, right?
Why do you look younger than I do?
This is ridiculous.
I got all sorts of face filters going on right now.
But you can just feel, I've got four kids.
We both have mortgages.
We've been in this industry for a long time.
Sometimes I'll say, I feel like Rocky.
I feel like Rocky and Rocky III.
I've just had a bunch of battles.
I'm all beaten up.
My joints are sore.
And I'm just looking for something to carry me through.
And so all of this feeling is kind of weighing on me.
And yeah, I think it was like, well, what's going to happen?
And then we launched and instead of growing 10% month over month, we grew 20% to 30% month over month.
Which at the beginning, it still feels quite small.
When we launched, we did get to 1,500 MRR.
But then the next month it was like 1,800 or something.
And then the next month it was like 3,000.
All of a sudden you hit 10, and then that 20% to 30% starts to really pick up.
It's like you go, like you said, we went from 10% to 20% pretty fast.
And in some ways, Gail Goodman's talk, which is great, didn't apply to us as much.
Because the long slow SaaS ramp of death is five years.
But ours was like a year and a half.
And I think this is another reason.
And I want to be careful here because I realized in some ways we're just in a lucky, fortunate situation.
But on the other hand, like Jason Cohen says, he's like,
bootstrapping is already hard. Why are you making it harder?
I think indie makers can make it way easier if they just choose the right market that has momentum already.
That has good distribution channels already.
And you definitely have to pick your battles.
I think project management software is hard.
That market would be difficult.
But maybe there's still a chance.
But something like WordPress hosting, you've got Jason Cohen there.
Something like email marketing.
You've got ConvertKit there.
There was already a 3,000 pound gorilla in that space.
And Nathan carved out a space for him and his team.
There are certain markets where folks can come in and make a big enough splash that they can attract customers to them without as much effort as trying to build.
When I tweet about this stuff, people reply and go, well, what about the light bulb?
What about the automobile?
I go, well, yes, there are certain inventions that required an enormous amount of capital or an enormous amount of time.
I would say leave those for other people in most cases.
I mean, you can do that. If you want to sign up for that road, I would say read the Walt Disney biography.
Because that book is just about Walt Disney who believed in this new technology called animation that nobody else believed in.
And the slog of his life, like he he ate shit for 10 years before he got to Snow White.
Ten years.
And if you read it, it's just like it's year after year of bad deals.
And just grinding out these little shorts for theaters that nobody cares and like nothing is working for them.
And then they finally get Snow White and that's great.
And then they have another trough of sorrow that lasts forever.
If you want to sign up for that, if you want to sign up for to be the next Elon Musk, that's fine.
Go do that. But recognize what you're signing up for.
It's like if you're a parent and you have kids and you want to have a good lifestyle, don't do that.
Instead, build a product for an existing market that has momentum.
There's already movement. You don't have to create any of that.
You can just it's like being having your boat plunked into a rushing river where you don't really have to paddle that much.
You just have to steer as opposed to being plunked into like a stream where you're really paddling hard, right?
Maybe that's too Canadian of a metaphor. I don't know.
Yeah, I think I get it.
I like that you mentioned earlier that one of the good things about learning from other people is that
when you're doing things on your own, you're going to have a very limited perspective.
You're going to have your own experience and that's it.
But when you read a book by 37signals, when you listen to a podcast,
you get to hear all these other perspectives of different ways to do things.
The first time and the startup landscape,
the only perspective we ever really heard was the high growth VC funded starter perspective,
which tends to equate startups for better or worse with inventions.
The idea that you need to do something world changing and it needs to be tremendously huge,
or you need to just die and then come back next time.
I think one of the things I'm trying to do with the Andy Akers podcast
is show people a different way by showcasing stories like yours
where it's okay to not invent something completely new.
Looking at a high level about being part of a really fast growing market,
about being part of an ecosystem that allows you to not make it harder on yourself as a bootstrapper,
one of the things you've talked about is looking for something that's growing and has momentum.
We talked about looking for things that are sort of, not to say old,
but established where you can come in and breathe some fresh life into it and stand out from the older players.
One of the things that I look for a lot is look at where money is changing hands.
I think podcasting is growing as an industry, but what are people actually paying for?
They're probably not paying for sharing podcasts on Twitter.
That doesn't seem to be where most money is changing hands.
It seems to be advertising, it seems to be hosting, et cetera.
So even within a fast growing sort of market,
you can look at kind of narrowing out on where the actual value is
by seeing where money is exchanging hands.
What else would you say people should look for
if they're trying to follow your advice
and choose a market that's healthy for their business?
Yeah.
It's so good because this is exactly, you want evidence.
Where's the evidence?
I love this book by Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test.
Love that one.
It's a great book.
I've been trying to articulate that idea again, and he just kind of put it so clearly.
You can't base your business on what you think people might do,
or even worse, what they say they might do.
They want to see what are they doing right now,
or what have they done in the past.
And so I like to observe or in conversation, go,
hey, what's the last thing you paid for?
Like if you're starting a podcast, for example,
you shouldn't ask, would you listen to a podcast like this?
I would say, hey, what are the last five podcasts you subscribed to, and why?
And if they're listening to a lot of podcasts about,
if they're listening to Product Hunt Radio, Indie Hackers, Build Your Sass, Art of Product,
it's like, okay, those are the last four podcasts you subscribed to.
It's likely you'll subscribe to a new one if it's different enough
or it has a unique perspective on that thing, but there's already momentum there.
They're going to go from their prior actions that this is something they're likely to continue to do in the future.
And so, yeah, I mean, we could see, for example, Cards Against Humanity
is investing a bunch of money in podcasting this year.
What are they going to need?
They're going to need the staff, that's going to be most of the money.
They're going to need equipment, and they're going to need podcast hosting.
And when John is in that meeting, he can hear people go,
should we host this thing? Should we host it here or over here?
And it's visible. They are about to make a decision, right?
They're about to make a decision, and they've probably made this decision in the past with other things, right?
And so there's a template there that I think you can start to recognize.
If you are working a full-time job, get yourself in meetings
and talk to someone to how those decisions are made.
If you're in Slack and the boss goes, hey, we need something that will help us generate graphics faster.
What have you folks used?
And people will say, oh, I've used Canva.
They'll start to recommend things.
That's where product decisions are being made.
And it's actually one reason, even though it's super distracting,
multiple Slack groups, because all the time people say, hey, what have you used for this?
And then you get to see what people recommend and why they're recommending it.
There's momentum there. You can recognize it, right?
So I think some of those are some things I've used to kind of try to quantify.
Is something going on here?
When we were going to launch Transistor, we knew we had Cards Against Humanity.
And so before we had really kind of finished the product,
I started going around, going, hey, John and I are starting a new podcast testing platform.
Cards Against Humanity is our first customer.
That's a nice social proof there.
Would you switch to us if we offered you this?
And I probably asked 20 or 30 people.
And I'd say about 10 to 15 said yes.
And so I had this group of people that said, yeah, when you launch, I'll switch for sure.
Some of them were switching for other emotional reasons,
like relationships I built up over time.
But just the fact that they were willing to do that,
yeah, I would switch for something with an updated player, a better embeddable player, or better analytics.
Yeah, I'll do that.
It's like a no-brainer for them.
Do you think I missed anything there?
Is there something that you've seen work that I'm not talking about?
There's nothing obvious that I think we're not covering.
But I think it's a lesson that I hope people take to heart and learn vicariously through our conversation,
rather than having to experience trying to prove their product to somewhat resistant customers over and over again for years,
before they finally decide that the market actually is important.
And there is a lot you can do early on to sort of analyze the market and decide whether or not it's a good one,
before you sort of jump in and for sure will on everybody else.
I mean, a counter example would be project management software,
which I think is a really hard market.
You could prove me wrong, but from my observations it's difficult.
And the reason it's difficult is if you go to someone on a team, and listener,
I'm going to ask you this question right now through the airwaves.
When was the last time your team switched to project management software?
And what did that process look like?
Now, if you're like most teams, you'll go through a list.
Well, first we tried Jira, and then we tried Basecamp.
And that didn't work because Al and engineering didn't like it.
And then someone recommended Monday, and so we tried that.
And there's a list of products that people have tried.
And as you're going through this, you're like,
oh, wait, there's a few things about this market.
That's not a committee. That's a bad sign.
If Janet in engineering likes it, but Mark in marketing doesn't like it,
and they have to kind of duke it out, all of a sudden it goes from,
this is not an easy decision.
It's made by over a lot of months.
People are trying lots of them and are often not satisfied.
And so that's a bad sign too, because it's going to take something really special for people to switch.
So I think these are the kinds of things you can observe and take note of before you jump in.
I've worked for a project management software company,
and I know from experience how hard it was to get people to switch.
And you can get that information just by asking people,
when was the last time you switched?
When was the last time you switched before that?
How hard was that?
What process did you go through?
How much did you pay?
You can ask those questions now based on their past behavior and decide,
is that something I want to sign up for?
The common theme behind everything you're saying is what you mentioned earlier,
which is look for proof.
Because that's not proof that they would use your thing.
Look what people are actually switching to, what they're actually recommending,
what they've actually tried in the past.
You can't argue against that.
If someone's tried something, they tried it, they paid for it.
If someone is just complaining that they get too much email or Slack is too distracting,
I've started project management companies in the past.
That was a bad idea.
I started companies in the past that tried to help people with email overload
because so many people were complaining about feeling overloaded with email.
Guess what?
No one's paying to alleviate that pain, no matter how many people complain about it.
I was sort of talking to customers but not talking to them in the right way.
Imagine if you ask them like they come to you and they're complaining,
oh man, I'm so overloaded by email.
Oh, so what have you done about that?
Well, nothing. I just want to talk to you about it.
If you haven't been motivated enough to search for a solution, that's a bad sign.
If you were motivated enough to search for a solution but all you wanted were free solutions,
that's not a good sign either because indie hackers need to make a living off the things they create.
These are conversations you can have right now and you really can't delude yourself.
You can't just base it on some aspirational dream that you have that this will make a difference
because it has to because I thought of it and because it's so clear this is broken.
There needs to be something more than that
and that's why I like this idea of, okay, well, what are people actually doing about it?
Prove it to me that this is such a big deal in your life that you've already shown some initiative
in finding a solution and paying for it.
I want to talk about a couple of the inflection points in Transistor's history
with how you've grown your company.
You already covered one, which is in the very early days, how did you get your first beta users?
From you reaching out to people and doing things the hard way.
But in August of last year you launched and that's when you flipped the switch to turn on growth.
What was that process like? How did your launch go and how did you go about getting customers in a different way then
than you were beforehand?
Sure. I think our first group of customers, our first hundred, maybe about 75% of those came from my audience and network.
And then some of them came from John's network in Chicago.
He was plugged into Cards Against Humanity, which was kind of a creative hub, lots of folks in that community.
And initially I thought, you know, I've built this great big audience.
That's going to be a primary driver of our growth going forward.
And it turns out, no, we still get customers from my audience.
But it's not the primary driver of growth.
It helps for sure.
But it's not the primary driver.
I'd say we launched on Product Hunt and that made a big splash.
But the real kind of things that helped were, number one, our affiliate program.
We had a few folks that signed up that drive a significant amount of business to Transistor.
Also just search, like people searching for podcast hosting and looking for something fresh and new.
What else really helped?
Going on podcasts helped as well.
So I've been surprised by how many folks said, oh yeah, I heard about Transistor on a show that you were on.
And it sounded great or they connected to our story.
That was another thing.
We've been chronicling our journey on the Build Your SaaS podcast.
And that's actually maybe, I don't think it will ever be the main driver of your business.
I think search engine optimization needs to be the first for most businesses.
Word of mouth needs to be a pretty big one too.
But the emotional connection that people can have with you as founders
or as a company I think shouldn't be overlooked.
I would say about 20% to 30% of our growth, I'm just guessing.
But 20% to 30% I would say could be attributed to us sharing our journey, to being open,
to talking about our struggles, to saying this is what worked and this is what didn't.
And some of the folks listening to our podcast where we just every week say,
oh man, well this was hard, they're cheering for us.
And they work for big companies with big budgets.
And so when the boss, when they're in those meetings, the boss is saying,
hey, so what should we use for podcast hosting?
They go, oh, you know what, Transistor would be great.
And it's because they have an emotional connection with us.
I'm the primary driver but I think it's often overlooked.
But yeah, the big ones were search engine optimization,
the affiliates have really helped.
And that was almost an accident.
My friend Kyle Fox was building this product called Rewardful and he begged us.
This shows you actually sometimes how much tenacity you need to have.
He's my friend and he had to reach out 10 times
and he finally got that code snippet at our website and was working.
So he reached out and we wanted an affiliate program but it got moved forward
because he was so tenacious.
And then I was on Matt Giovanni's podcast
and a lot of affiliates listened to that show I guess and they signed up from that.
And so that kind of, you know, I don't know, you could call it luck
but it's also just kind of doing the work, getting out there,
telling people what you're working on, telling people what's available
and making some sort of connection with folks so that they are motivated to sign up.
That's a lot of different things that seem to be going your direction.
I want to talk about those things.
I want to talk about perhaps maybe a few things you tried that didn't work.
First, let's talk about SEO a little bit.
You mentioned that SEO needs to be first.
This is why you said market is more important than product
because market is huge, it's sort of the upper bound for how big you can grow.
SEO is also probably the biggest channel online.
So many billions of people are running billions of searches on Google every day.
It's ridiculous.
It's such a driver of traffic and as any hackers has grown,
and it looks at other similar sites and how they've gotten big,
it almost always seems to be they're really good at SEO.
How have you gotten Transistor onto the SEO radar in such a crowded market
where there's so many other podcast hosts, you have so much more longevity than you?
What helps in certain markets to start is having some good affiliates.
For example, if you search best podcast hosts,
that first page is either ads or these blogs that review podcast hosting sites.
By having a relationship with some folks that are affiliates,
that they want to make money off their blog,
that increases the chance that they're going to write about you and link to your site.
That helps your overall search ranking.
It's going to lift your boat as well.
The other thing has been to do experiments,
and I'm almost hesitant to talk about this one because it's been a good hedge for us,
but I will anyway, private podcast hosting as a keyword was something I recognized
using tools like Ahrefs and other things.
I started to write content about how to start a private podcast,
and that's driven a lot of qualified traffic to us.
Now, it's not a ton of traffic, but the people that click end up on our site
and end up starting a conversation on our chat widget
and then end up converting into customers.
That was an opportunity I observed just by using some of the tools.
Also, once you get some initial traction,
this is why I think it actually does make sense to launch on Product Hunt
and get that splash and get people thinking and knowing about you.
Because when they show up on your site, you're going to start to notice trends.
One of the ones we noticed was a lot of folks were asking,
hey, can we do a private podcast?
I want to do some training with some employees.
Once we recognized that and we launched the initial feature
and people responded to it, I said, okay, well, we should double down on this.
Then you write the content, you put it out, and then you see what happens.
I'm not sure, private podcast hosting.
That was the first page for that, for private podcast hosting.
That was how we fell into that one.
Sharing your story helps too, because if you're sharing an interesting journey
in a transparent, vulnerable way, that resonates with folks.
It's more likely that they're going to write about you,
they're going to want to interview you on their podcast,
they're going to want to share your story, and that in turn turns into links for your show.
I think the benefit of, sure, there's a lot of competition for SEO
in terms of podcast hosting, but it's not like it's unreachable.
We can compete in that space, we can write good content,
we can help people to start a podcast, for example.
How to start a podcast in 2019?
Well, I'm going to write about that and start sharing that,
and then people start to find it and land on our site.
It's cool to hear how harmonious all of this is for your business,
your product, your market, your distribution channels.
You're not thinking about these separately,
but they're all informing what you do in one particular area.
The fact that you're using affiliates is actually helping you with SEO.
The fact that there's certain SEO keywords that drive a lot of traffic
is actually shaping the direction of your product
and how it works together and builds on itself.
It's not shocking that you're growing so quickly,
because not only are you in a great market,
but you're also making sure that your distribution channels
and your product development decisions
take full advantage of what the market wants.
This is, by the way, a market decision as well.
Certain markets have better distribution.
Certain markets have certain distribution channels that work for them.
In the hosting market, we could already see this.
When I talked to Ruben Gamez about,
hey, I'm thinking about launching Transistor,
what do you think?
He goes, hmm, this sounds a lot like the hosting business in the 90s.
He was right.
It's a lot like the website hosting business in the 90s.
His instructions to me was, look at what worked for them back then,
and try to replicate some of that.
That's a good sign.
That really works.
It's search.
This is why choosing the market is helpful.
If you choose a market that doesn't have any channels,
then you're already going to be grinding a bet.
It's not that many things to think about.
Before you start your company,
we've listed three or four things.
It's not like you've got to do eight months of research here.
But if you think a little bit about your distribution channels,
a little bit about your market and the customer problems
and how much money they're making, et cetera,
that could solve you many years of heartache and pain,
starting the wrong business
and not being able to get into customers' hands.
The thing that makes it hard is you have to pass each of these things
through an additional filter,
and what ends up on the bottom can sometimes feel like,
wow, there's nothing really here.
You need the right market.
You need a market with distribution channels.
You need the right market for sure.
And then you need founder fit with all three of those things,
founder product fit, founder market fit,
and founder channel fit, we'll say.
And that's, I think, where people get frustrated.
They're like, I just want to start a business.
I'm just going to choose something.
And my recommendation would be to just keep looking.
Yes, you want check marks on each of those things,
but you finally find something where there's alignment.
That, again, I feel like I'm finally somewhere
where there's alignment between all those things.
Before there was founder product fit,
but there wasn't product market fit in the sense that
there wasn't a good market for the product.
All of these things have to all kind of be cohesive.
And I'm so glad I waited,
felt the pressure as this guy that's almost in his 40s.
And I'm looking at the graph of who starts startups,
and it's all people in their 20s and 30s,
and there's this big drop-off
when people get into their 40s.
I'm like, okay, well, maybe it's just not going to happen for me.
But this continual exploration
and waiting for the right alignment to happen
in years and years in something where one of those pieces isn't quite right.
And when there is alignment, like you said,
so much of this just feels fluid for me.
It feels like, oh, yeah, this is the business I was meant to run.
It all just kind of works out.
It's not as stressful.
I'm not having to pull or push as hard.
Every day, I just wake up and it feels natural.
It's like Usain Bolt was born to run.
He still has to train hard, but it feels natural for him.
If you look at him run, it's like, yeah, that's natural.
And now I feel like I'm in a similar place.
Okay, I waited, and now we've found this thing that is a fit.
And that process, that journey, for me,
was basically two things, I think.
One, putting them out into the world.
And number two, building relationships.
That's what helped me get to where I'm at now.
When you're creating things, you're trying out different stuff.
You're seeing what resonates, what doesn't.
You're seeing what distribution channels work and what doesn't.
And when you're building relationships,
you're opening yourself up to new opportunities.
And I met John in 2014 and stayed in touch with him.
And now we have built this company together.
But if I had never gone to XOXO, in this case, in Portland,
and I'd never opened myself up to meeting new people,
I would have never met him.
And that relationship has now become this kind of crucial thing.
If he hadn't said, hey, Cardis is thinking about starting a podcast,
I'm thinking about building this thing,
then we would have never arrived here.
And the journey to get there is to build relationships
and to keep making stuff, keep putting stuff out into the world.
And that, in turn, sometimes helps you build more relationships
and move forward.
Really, I don't know if you can do it any other way.
I'm saying that's what's worked for me,
but I think that's actually what works for most people.
There's different levels of luck involved,
and I think it's possible to just sort of miss what's going on.
But I think if you take the more methodical, considered approach
and you're sort of aware of the different levers that you can pull
and aware of the different mistakes you want to avoid,
you can sort of think about it up front.
And then I've interviewed quite a few people
who just sort of got lucky their first time out of the gate,
didn't really think about things, but still all the stars aligned.
And the consistent thing is all of those factors have to align.
You can't sort of build a car with, you know, one wheel works,
the product wheel is working great,
but the market wheel and the distribution wheel are both flat.
That doesn't work. Your car's not going to go very far.
You really got to do it this way. There's really no alternative.
Yeah, and I know it's frustrating for folks.
I know there's people listening right now going,
I've been looking forever, and they're just so frustrated
because they want to find something that works.
And I just want to encourage people to keep looking,
keep challenging themselves.
What I want to encourage people back
is that they end up just choosing something
because they want something so badly and it's not a good fit.
And then they get stuck in that rut for so long.
And that's what ends up holding them back,
is that they're in an idea that just isn't a good fit.
But when there's alignment in all these things, you know.
Like when I heard John was going to build this on his own,
I said, I was made for this.
John, you got to trust me, man.
I know if we team up, we will be like Voltron.
It will be incredible. I just could feel it.
Everything was aligned.
And it wasn't like one day I was daydreaming and I said,
you know what, I should really start a podcast hosting company.
It wasn't an idea I just had out of the blue.
It was a relationship and then years and years of experiences.
And then when the opportunity came up,
it was like, this is it.
This is it.
There's alignment in all of these areas.
And we still didn't know when we launched it if it would work,
but all the signs were so good.
And then when we did a little beta launch
and the signs were still good
and better
and for the first time in my life,
I actually just feel relaxed.
I feel like I'm not working super hard
to launch another course
or super hard to try to build software on my own.
This just feels right.
You look relaxed. You sound relaxed.
I've seen videos of you on YouTube
and I can tell you're passionate about it,
but there's pressure on you.
Right now you are as relaxed as I've ever seen you.
Yeah, and a lot of other people have said that to me too.
My dad just said that. He was visiting and he's like,
man, you seem relaxed.
And it was because before I was in this constant cycle
of having to launch something new,
mostly because I needed the money.
And when that is the primary driver,
the desperation scale,
when you become desperate,
this idea has to work.
But things aren't aligned.
You're not thinking clearly.
Things aren't quite right.
You're just setting yourself up for a grind.
And we all know business owners like this.
We all know somebody who started a cafe 15 years ago.
And they did it and maybe they were passionate about it,
but they didn't consider the market.
And they didn't consider the channels
and they didn't consider all of these other things.
And now they've been doing it for 15 years
and they should have got out of it right away.
But instead they stuck to it and they're just ground down.
They started a business to give themselves a better life,
but they didn't get it.
And in some ways I'm lucky that I was able to get out of that
in a business that was not going to where I wasn't in alignment.
And for sure a few things don't happen there.
And I'm a miserable person somewhere.
And so there is some definite luck there.
But I can also see that waiting for the right thing
was a good decision.
And now I feel fully invested in this,
which by the way still might not work out.
But I also have this piece about that too,
which is, okay, if this all blows up tomorrow,
will I have enjoyed the journey?
This is something else Jason Cohen said that just stuck in.
He's like, you should be having fun.
And Steve Jobs said this too,
make sure you are so passionate about it.
Because building products is so hard.
If you're not enjoying it, you're not going to survive.
And so if this all blows up tomorrow,
I'm still going to be thankful for it.
Because I enjoyed the journey from the beginning.
It just felt like, man, that was great.
That was such a good experience.
Building that product with John,
doing the things we did, serving those customers,
helping them get their audio out into the world,
amplifying these voices.
This is just something I can believe in.
That's given me a lot of peace.
Well, I'm happy for you, Justin,
and I think everyone listening will be too.
You've really put in the reps.
As I listed earlier,
you have a long career of countless launches of podcasts
and courses and books and communities
and blog posts and all sorts of things.
And now the reps are paying off
and you've gotten to the promised land, so to speak.
After such a long career,
after all the things that you've learned
since having worked on Transistor,
what would your advice be to a fledgling founder
who's just getting started?
And I know this whole episode,
we've basically not stopped giving advice.
But besides the things we've talked about,
what do you think they should know?
What do you think,
from a Zoomed out point of view,
they won't see about a startup,
but once they get into it,
they'll wish they'd known before.
Sure.
It really depends on your age, actually, I think.
So if you're a teenager and you're listening to this,
he's a kid, he's great.
Miguel Piadrofita,
he is a Laravel programmer,
and he's building stuff right now.
He's building products right now
and putting them out into the world.
He's building relationships with folks online.
If you start that early,
if you're putting in the reps early,
man, that makes a big difference.
And I would say it's similar for folks in their 20s.
For folks in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s,
one thing that helped me,
because I felt like, in some ways,
I'm washed up, I'm done.
I'm Rocky and Rocky III,
and this is done for me.
One thing that helped was this line from James Clear.
And he actually,
before he'd released his book,
he has his book, Atomic Habits,
I think everyone should read it.
But he was sitting with me in an airport,
and I was just kind of down,
just saying some of the same stuff.
And he said,
You can start right now.
Every action you take is a vote
for the kind of person you'll become.
And so the things that you become good at,
the things that you end up cultivating in your life,
they don't come out of nowhere.
They don't even come out of beliefs
or positive thinking.
They come out of what you do repeatedly.
So if you get up today,
and here's a good example,
I'm teaching myself how to code.
If I get up today,
and I code today,
and I get up tomorrow,
and I code tomorrow,
and I get up the next day,
and I code then,
eventually, if someone asks me,
Hey, do you code?
I would say, Yeah, I do code.
Now, I might be 45 by that point.
I might be as good as DHH.
But will I be better?
Yeah, for sure.
For sure I'll be better.
And so I think one thing
that held me back in my 30s
and now in my 40s was,
Oh, it's too late for me.
But you can start putting
in the reps now.
And sure, you might not end up
Arnold Schwarzenegger
because he started in his teens.
But if you start putting in the reps now,
I think that's the big thing
is you've got to put in the reps.
If you're in your teens
and your 20s, don't wait.
Start doing it now.
Build relationships.
Put stuff out there.
But if you're older,
you're not done yet.
You've got lots
and lots of years left,
and you can put in those votes
for the person
you want to become as well.
Love that advice.
And as annoying as it will sound
to people who are older than me,
I had the same feeling
about this,
and I'm so glad
that I kept pushing
and kept trying.
Justin, it's been a pleasure
having you on the podcast,
off to having you on
another time in the future
when Transistor is pushing
$100K a month in revenue,
which I'm sure it'll get to you.
Can you tell listeners
where they can go
to learn more about what you're up to,
or they can go to become transistor users?
When I can actually sign up
for Transistor
from the Indie Hackers podcast,
which I've been waiting for.
For so long.
Yeah, transistor.fm,
you can sign up there.
And you can also,
if you have to,
you can.
On Twitter,
I am mijestin,
the letter M,
the letter I, Justin.
That's kind of where I test out
material,
stuff I'm thinking about.
So if you want to interact
with whatever's going on
in my head,
that's a good place.
And I blog at JustinJackson.ca.
All right, Justin,
thanks so much.
Yeah, thanks, man.
Listeners,
it would really help the show
if you took a minute
to reach out to Justin
so I'd really appreciate it
if you just showed him some love.
I also appreciate hearing
from you myself.
I am at CSAllen on Twitter.
That's C-S-A-L-L-E-N.
If you learned something
useful from the podcast,
let me know.
Or if you have any suggestions
at all, for example,
guests I should bring on,
topics I could cover,
ways I can improve the show,
I am all ears.
It's pretty hard to get feedback
on a podcast,
so I love it when you reach out
to me on Twitter.
As always,
thank you so much for listening,
and if you enjoyed listening
to this conversation
and you want a really easy way
to support the podcast,
why don't you head over to iTunes
and leave us a quick rating
or even a review?
If you're looking for
an easy way to get there,
just go to ndhackers.com
slash review,
and that should open up iTunes
on your computer.
I read pretty much all the reviews
that you guys leave over there,
and it really helps other people
to discover the show,
so your support
is very much appreciated.
In addition,
if you are running your own
internet business
on the ndhackers.com website,
it's a great place to get feedback
on pretty much any problem
or question that you might have
while running your business.
If you listen to the show,
you know that I am a huge proponent
of getting help from other founders
rather than trying to build
your business all by yourself,
so you'll see me on the form
for sure as well as more than
a handful of some of the guests
that I've had on the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration,
we've also got a huge directory
full of hundreds of products
built by other indie hackers,
every one of which includes
for how they grew their products
from nothing.
As always,
thanks so much for listening,
and I'll see you next time.