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[00:00:00.240 --> 00:00:37.920] This podcast is hosted by transistor.fm hey everyone welcome to build your sass this is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2023 i'm john buddha a software engineer and i'm justin jackson i do product and marketing follow along as we build transistor.fm we uh we reached episode 150.
[00:00:37.920 --> 00:01:50.840] uh yes episode 150 good milestone i we we just hit another milestone in terms of total episodes published on transistor yeah over a million episodes which is pretty cool that's awesome a lot of episodes you know we're still a small little company but one million episodes is uh that's that's significant we're we've hosted a lot of audio we have to set up a behind the scenes um master feed for all of them and then just we have to listen to all of them at like three times speed just get like every episode that'd be hilarious to just get i mean that would that would actually probably be difficult because i was i was thinking it'd be cool to have an ai that just summarizes every episode on transistor every day it probably costs you a fortune take forever and cost a fortune yeah because every day i think jason's recording that right uh oh no he's recording new shows every day so every day we get about sometimes 30 new podcasts created, 40 new podcasts created um every single day on transistor.
[00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:57.720] It's one of those things that i've tried to communicate to folks about this idea of volume.
[00:01:57.720 --> 00:02:04.600] Like in any business, you need a certain amount of volume, a certain amount of momentum out in the world.
[00:02:05.240 --> 00:02:11.960] And for us, it means hundreds of new people signing up every month.
[00:02:11.960 --> 00:02:17.560] That's to make this business work, even though our churn is quite low.
[00:02:17.560 --> 00:02:21.160] I think we're around 2.5% churn.
[00:02:21.160 --> 00:02:24.760] So, and for the prosumer product, that's incredible.
[00:02:25.080 --> 00:02:35.480] But even with just 2.5% churn, we still, in order to grow, we need hundreds of new trials every month.
[00:02:35.800 --> 00:02:38.440] And then you take that even further.
[00:02:38.440 --> 00:02:41.240] We're converting a lot of those trials to paid.
[00:02:41.240 --> 00:02:49.480] It's, I won't give the exact number, but it's above 70% of people who start a trial convert to paid.
[00:02:49.800 --> 00:02:59.720] And then you think, how many visitors does it take to, you know, to get a trial?
[00:03:00.040 --> 00:03:05.080] And I think those numbers are bigger than people realize.
[00:03:05.080 --> 00:03:16.840] That you need a lot of traffic that then turns into a trial or a lead.
[00:03:16.840 --> 00:03:27.400] And then for us, we just know we can reliably convert, you know, a big percentage of those folks to paid.
[00:03:27.400 --> 00:03:29.160] Because there's a lot of competition.
[00:03:29.240 --> 00:03:30.600] I mean, people have choices to make.
[00:03:30.600 --> 00:03:47.200] Well, and that's the other element that I think is tricky is like there has to be enough momentum in the world towards your type of product that there's enough of that percentage that you can reliably get for your business.
[00:03:47.840 --> 00:03:57.760] My guess is it takes about 100,000 visitors of like people that are interested in podcast hosting.
[00:03:57.760 --> 00:04:05.440] About 100,000 visitors would lead to maybe 2,000 leads, something like that.
[00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:11.760] And then you want to be able to convert, in our case, a big percentage of those because it's credit card up front.
[00:04:11.760 --> 00:04:12.160] Yeah.
[00:04:12.800 --> 00:04:22.240] And that's just like, if you think about that, like 100,000 people with intent visiting your website.
[00:04:22.560 --> 00:04:28.160] And then even then, you're only getting, if you're lucky, 2,000 of them.
[00:04:28.480 --> 00:04:30.720] It's, it, it's wild.
[00:04:30.720 --> 00:04:31.520] Yeah, it's pretty wild.
[00:04:31.520 --> 00:04:31.760] Yeah.
[00:04:31.760 --> 00:04:32.880] It's big numbers.
[00:04:32.880 --> 00:04:48.000] I mean, the other thing kind of related to this that Jason said before, and I agree with, is that, I mean, having having more customers and having a large customer base that uses your product every day is just more fun to work on.
[00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:58.160] Like before this, I mean, I hadn't worked on anything like that, and neither had Jason really where it was like something that actually took off and had some traction and had people using it all the time.
[00:04:58.160 --> 00:05:01.600] So, you know, you're getting feedback every day.
[00:05:01.600 --> 00:05:05.760] You push out a change and immediately people will find it, even if we haven't announced it yet.
[00:05:05.760 --> 00:05:06.800] And yeah.
[00:05:06.800 --> 00:05:07.200] Yeah.
[00:05:07.200 --> 00:05:10.640] I mean, there's nothing worse than like working on a product where nobody's using it.
[00:05:10.640 --> 00:05:11.040] Yeah.
[00:05:11.040 --> 00:05:16.160] It's like, what's you're just making guesses and pushing stuff out and no one sees it or uses it.
[00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:17.920] Oh, for sure.
[00:05:17.920 --> 00:05:24.160] Jason Cohen's been writing these great articles lately, and he has one called, Excuse me, Is There a Problem?
[00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:32.920] And his byline for the article is: Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem.
[00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:36.600] This article explains why so you can avoid their fate.
[00:05:36.920 --> 00:05:39.080] Highly recommend that folks get into this.
[00:05:39.080 --> 00:05:50.360] He has this awesome flow chart, which just talks about like, you know, is there 10 million plus people or 100,000 plus organizations that have this problem?
[00:05:50.360 --> 00:05:52.200] No, the market's too small.
[00:05:52.200 --> 00:05:55.240] Do you want no employees or a niche high price?
[00:05:55.240 --> 00:05:57.400] Well, maybe you can still do it.
[00:05:57.400 --> 00:06:07.400] So it's like he really goes through all these different elements that you need for a company to succeed.
[00:06:07.400 --> 00:06:19.400] And one of those things is you want to, before you build something, you're really just guessing, you know, and guessing actually sucks.
[00:06:19.400 --> 00:06:21.400] It's what's frustrating, right?
[00:06:21.400 --> 00:06:32.680] It's like putting yourself out there constantly and nobody's responding to what you're doing, whether that's a new startup, a new product, a new feature, or a podcast, even.
[00:06:32.680 --> 00:06:36.920] If you're getting no response, it's not very fun.
[00:06:36.920 --> 00:06:38.440] No, it's terrible.
[00:06:38.440 --> 00:07:01.000] But as soon as you get response, and if people are actually using your product to do some sort of job in their lives, man, that's when it gets exciting because then even if they're giving you feedback you don't want to hear, it still means somebody cared enough to use your product, put in their credit card, and then give you some sort of feedback.
[00:07:02.120 --> 00:07:08.200] And yeah, that is in terms of going to work and working on something.
[00:07:08.520 --> 00:07:15.520] And we're such a small team that folks like Jason are in customer support chat all the time.
[00:07:15.520 --> 00:07:19.600] He gets to see the response to a new feature.
[00:07:14.920 --> 00:07:21.520] He gets to hear the feedback.
[00:07:21.840 --> 00:07:23.920] He gets to see how people are trying to use it.
[00:07:23.920 --> 00:07:27.840] He gets to see what it means in their lives, you know.
[00:07:27.840 --> 00:07:32.720] And that is a powerful force.
[00:07:32.720 --> 00:07:33.040] Yeah.
[00:07:33.040 --> 00:07:39.760] And, you know, being a small company, one person can make a change that affects a large amount of people, which is kind of cool.
[00:07:39.760 --> 00:07:40.480] Exactly.
[00:07:40.480 --> 00:07:41.360] Exactly.
[00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:46.880] I think for a lot of employees at bigger companies, they just never get to talk to the user.
[00:07:46.880 --> 00:07:49.840] You never get to see who's actually using it.
[00:07:49.840 --> 00:07:59.600] And this is one of the advantages of small independent companies: not only do we get to talk to users, but we actually care.
[00:07:59.600 --> 00:08:04.640] And this becomes a competitive advantage: to show up at work.
[00:08:04.640 --> 00:08:13.920] And when someone messages us in chat, we care enough to be like, we're going to answer this.
[00:08:13.920 --> 00:08:17.200] We care enough to think, okay, we're going to make this better.
[00:08:17.520 --> 00:08:24.160] And that's just such a different experience than the way most products get built, you know?
[00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:37.600] Yeah, I really haven't been on, I mean, I haven't been on a team like that either, but I can imagine like, you know, it's probably fun working on a team and building something, but then you might be building it for six months to a year and then it gets released and no one's used it yet.
[00:08:37.600 --> 00:08:38.000] Yeah.
[00:08:38.320 --> 00:08:44.800] And then, I don't know, you're not going to hear directly from the customer because you're two, three steps removed from that process.
[00:08:44.800 --> 00:08:53.600] You're 10 layers down, and there's, yeah, I think this is the advantage of starting and building independent product companies.
[00:08:53.600 --> 00:09:09.640] And it still has the same difficulty that in the beginning, you've got to find something that people want, you've got to find something that you can reliably provide, you've got to find something where you've got some sort of marketing advantage so you can actually attract customers.
[00:09:09.640 --> 00:09:16.120] But once you do it, it really is better for the employees, for the team, and for the customer.
[00:09:16.120 --> 00:09:24.440] They just get a better product, better service, and then the people who go to work every day have a more gratifying life.
[00:09:24.440 --> 00:09:26.200] Yeah, definitely.
[00:09:26.200 --> 00:09:27.320] Talking about teams.
[00:09:27.320 --> 00:09:28.360] Speaking of employees.
[00:09:28.680 --> 00:09:33.880] Speaking of employees, we just hired Josh Anderton.
[00:09:33.880 --> 00:09:34.520] Yeah.
[00:09:35.080 --> 00:09:41.080] And I thought we could talk quickly about why we hired, how we hire at Transistor.
[00:09:41.080 --> 00:09:42.440] This comes up every once in a while.
[00:09:42.440 --> 00:09:59.320] And I think Josh, like Jason and Helen, is a good example of how we think about hiring and the kinds of job to be done that we're hiring for as owners and just how we think through all that.
[00:09:59.640 --> 00:10:01.800] So, yes, we hired Josh.
[00:10:02.680 --> 00:10:04.280] He started on the 11th.
[00:10:04.280 --> 00:10:07.720] So he's just, oh, this is his one-week anniversary.
[00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:10.360] So, yeah, we hired Josh a week ago.
[00:10:10.360 --> 00:10:23.880] And if you've been following our updates, you know that he'd been working with us as a contractor since, I don't know, at least six months, I'm guessing, something like that.
[00:10:24.280 --> 00:10:29.400] I hired him to help me with some stuff on the marketing site.
[00:10:29.400 --> 00:10:36.760] And then we also had him build a new podcast website theme for us, which we just released.
[00:10:36.760 --> 00:10:45.280] If you are a, if you want to try it out, actually, and even if you're not with Transnistria, if you go to freepodcastwebsites.com, you can try it out.
[00:10:45.280 --> 00:10:46.960] It's called Cardboard.
[00:10:44.680 --> 00:10:51.760] Very unique theme for podcast websites.
[00:10:52.400 --> 00:10:53.040] Yeah.
[00:10:53.040 --> 00:10:56.960] And yeah, so let's go back a bit.
[00:10:57.760 --> 00:10:59.760] Let's go back to the pandemic.
[00:10:59.760 --> 00:11:09.600] And this is, I can't remember exactly when this happened, but there was definitely this feeling.
[00:11:09.600 --> 00:11:15.440] And I think even listeners to the show had mentioned like, man, John kind of seems down.
[00:11:16.080 --> 00:11:23.280] And you were kind of, maybe you want to, do you want to describe that feeling at the time?
[00:11:23.920 --> 00:11:31.120] Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, let's see, I left my job in August of 2019, right?
[00:11:31.120 --> 00:11:35.120] So had a few months there before the pandemic hit.
[00:11:35.120 --> 00:11:36.400] And then that's interesting.
[00:11:36.640 --> 00:11:37.680] It wasn't that long.
[00:11:37.680 --> 00:11:39.280] You didn't have that long before the pandemic.
[00:11:39.360 --> 00:11:39.840] It really wasn't.
[00:11:40.800 --> 00:11:44.560] I mean, I was like super energized, you know, when I left my job because it's like, oh, this is great.
[00:11:44.560 --> 00:11:45.840] I could spend all my time in this.
[00:11:45.840 --> 00:11:46.640] This is awesome.
[00:11:46.640 --> 00:11:47.120] Yeah.
[00:11:47.120 --> 00:11:47.440] Yeah.
[00:11:47.440 --> 00:11:49.920] And then I think, you know, pandemic hit.
[00:11:49.920 --> 00:11:51.680] Everyone's sitting at home.
[00:11:51.920 --> 00:11:54.320] We had, obviously, had the luxury to work at home.
[00:11:54.320 --> 00:11:56.000] And we were working at home anyway.
[00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:57.680] So there wasn't much of a transition there.
[00:11:57.680 --> 00:12:12.720] But it just got like too easy to kind of sit around, take breaks, not maybe not work or just like piddle around on little things that they weren't weren't big features.
[00:12:15.600 --> 00:12:17.680] It was hard to get motivated.
[00:12:17.680 --> 00:12:21.520] And I mean, some of that was pandemic related.
[00:12:21.840 --> 00:12:28.160] Some of that was just like, you know, lack of social things going on outside of working.
[00:12:28.160 --> 00:12:34.440] And it was like you, and you know, and I think I didn't really even realize it at the time, I don't think.
[00:12:35.080 --> 00:12:38.360] But I was just like, you know, things were going well.
[00:12:38.360 --> 00:12:42.040] Like, we could have just kind of taken it easy, right?
[00:12:42.040 --> 00:12:43.400] It was things were going well.
[00:12:43.400 --> 00:12:49.880] We didn't need to necessarily build anything huge, but you know, work is motivating and gives you a sense of purpose and fulfillment.
[00:12:49.880 --> 00:12:55.240] And like, you don't want that necessarily missing, especially if you're just sitting around home all day.
[00:12:55.560 --> 00:12:57.480] And so I don't know.
[00:12:57.480 --> 00:13:00.520] I don't remember how it came up with Jason.
[00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:01.880] I think I had been talking to Jason.
[00:13:01.880 --> 00:13:04.040] He was talking about leaving his job.
[00:13:04.360 --> 00:13:06.440] And then maybe I mentioned to you.
[00:13:06.440 --> 00:13:24.120] I think we'd had discussions about it before that I was like, I wonder if, because I had had this experience of, you know, I would like to motivate myself and I would like do a live stream.
[00:13:24.120 --> 00:13:39.720] And the, the, that feeling of having other people kind of come alongside me and work on a problem, or I'd bug Adam Wathan or Jack McDade or, you know, somebody or somebody in Mega Maker to like, hey, let's do a call and like figure this out.
[00:13:40.360 --> 00:13:43.240] And I found that very energizing.
[00:13:43.240 --> 00:13:50.600] And I think I'd said to you, you know, I wonder if maybe you could find, you know, someone to pair a program with or something.
[00:13:50.920 --> 00:13:51.560] Yeah.
[00:13:51.560 --> 00:14:01.000] And then, yeah, I think Jason maybe had reached out to you and you were like, hmm, I wonder if we should maybe hire him.
[00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:08.200] Yeah, I think maybe, yeah, I mean, I think he was, he was telling me about leaving his job, and I was like, kind of jokingly being like, oh, man, maybe we should hire you.
[00:14:08.520 --> 00:14:12.760] And then, like, he was like, yeah, like, let's talk about that actually.
[00:14:13.080 --> 00:14:15.440] Yeah, at this point, Jason had already moved.
[00:14:14.520 --> 00:14:18.640] He was, he was in Chicago, he moved away.
[00:14:18.640 --> 00:14:20.320] And so he was, I mean, he wasn't in town either.
[00:14:14.840 --> 00:14:21.360] I couldn't really hang out with him.
[00:14:21.520 --> 00:14:23.920] But I think we kept talking.
[00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:24.800] I don't know.
[00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:26.400] I don't remember how long that process was.
[00:14:26.400 --> 00:14:26.880] You met him.
[00:14:27.520 --> 00:14:29.200] We all talked together.
[00:14:29.840 --> 00:14:35.520] And then we gave him an offer in August 2020.
[00:14:35.520 --> 00:14:36.080] Is that right?
[00:14:36.080 --> 00:14:36.880] July, August.
[00:14:36.880 --> 00:14:41.760] And I had, I mean, I had, I think my only apprehension at the time was like, wow, we're going to hire someone else.
[00:14:41.760 --> 00:14:43.760] We had just hired Helen.
[00:14:43.760 --> 00:14:46.640] And I was like, whoa, like, are we going to be able to do this?
[00:14:46.640 --> 00:14:57.520] But the flip side of that, I was like, very pro because I felt like it would be, I had a sense that it would be a big upgrade for your quality of life.
[00:14:57.520 --> 00:14:58.000] Yeah.
[00:14:58.160 --> 00:15:10.240] Because you and I could talk, but in terms of like having someone that's working alongside you and going back and forth on code stuff, I could never really do that for you.
[00:15:10.240 --> 00:15:19.520] And every time you had like a call with like Jack Ellis or, you know, you met with somebody else, you always came back from those meetings kind of visibly fired up.
[00:15:19.520 --> 00:15:27.520] Just it's fun talking to other people that are smart, that know their shit, and that you can like bounce stuff off of.
[00:15:27.520 --> 00:15:31.200] Yeah, I mean, you know, everyone has a different way of looking at things.
[00:15:31.200 --> 00:15:34.800] And yeah, sometimes it's like, oh, that's like such a simple idea.
[00:15:34.800 --> 00:15:36.240] I never would have thought of that.
[00:15:36.400 --> 00:15:36.720] Yeah.
[00:15:36.720 --> 00:15:37.200] Yeah.
[00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:40.640] So I felt like it would be a big upgrade.
[00:15:40.640 --> 00:15:45.280] And then Jason came on and it was like almost noticeable from day one.
[00:15:45.280 --> 00:15:51.600] It was in the same way that we hired Helen, and it was like, wow, this really improves our lives.
[00:15:51.600 --> 00:15:52.080] Yeah.
[00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:54.560] It also helps us serve customers better.
[00:15:54.560 --> 00:16:07.480] But I think what was interesting in both cases, in my mind at least, the leading motivation was we want to make our lives better as founders.
[00:16:08.440 --> 00:16:11.640] Because you're right, we could have just kept going as a two-person company.
[00:16:11.640 --> 00:16:17.800] It was technically possible for us to do all the customer support ourselves.
[00:16:17.800 --> 00:16:24.360] And it was technically possible for you to stay as the only developer on the team.
[00:16:24.360 --> 00:16:25.000] Yeah.
[00:16:25.320 --> 00:16:30.040] And, you know, that would have been achievable.
[00:16:30.360 --> 00:16:33.560] But there was all of this quality of life stuff.
[00:16:33.560 --> 00:16:35.560] Like, yeah, at what cost?
[00:16:35.560 --> 00:16:42.200] I mean, it would have been especially, you know, given how much we grew, like it would have been, that would have been tough.
[00:16:42.200 --> 00:16:43.640] It would have been really hard.
[00:16:43.640 --> 00:16:50.680] And so the motivation being, primary motivation being, hey, let's upgrade our quality of life as founders.
[00:16:50.680 --> 00:16:53.160] Let's give us one less thing to worry about.
[00:16:53.160 --> 00:16:55.800] Let's take some things off our plate.
[00:16:55.800 --> 00:17:04.840] Let's balance out and smooth out and share the weight of responsibility of serving all these customers.
[00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:09.240] And, you know, for you, the weight and responsibility of keeping all the infrastructure up.
[00:17:09.240 --> 00:17:13.960] I'm sure that was a huge thing when Jason came on and all of a sudden you have someone else that's like sharing that load.
[00:17:13.960 --> 00:17:14.840] Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:14.920 --> 00:17:17.800] I mean, it's a huge, a huge relief.
[00:17:17.800 --> 00:17:28.200] I mean, plus, you know, together we made a number of upgrades and Jason, you know, worked his magic on the code and made things a lot more reliable.
[00:17:28.200 --> 00:17:32.600] Obviously, built a bunch of new features that we otherwise would not have.
[00:17:32.600 --> 00:17:38.040] So, yeah, I mean, from day one, yeah, it was, it was a great, I think it turned out better than we could have expected.
[00:17:38.040 --> 00:17:42.600] And plus, you know, I get to go to work with another friend every day.
[00:17:42.600 --> 00:17:43.960] Exactly.
[00:17:43.960 --> 00:17:47.520] So, I think I was kind of watching all of this.
[00:17:47.520 --> 00:17:50.320] And for a long time, I just felt like, well, this is perfect.
[00:17:44.680 --> 00:17:51.680] Like, we've got Helen, she's great.
[00:17:51.840 --> 00:17:52.640] Jason, great.
[00:17:52.640 --> 00:17:53.680] John and I.
[00:17:54.000 --> 00:17:58.400] And, you know, you and I had our retreat last year, and that was amazing.
[00:17:58.400 --> 00:18:02.640] And then we went on this awesome team retreat with Jason and Helen, and that was amazing.
[00:18:02.640 --> 00:18:05.600] And I was feeling overall just like, wow, this is perfect.
[00:18:05.600 --> 00:18:07.920] Like, we've got the perfect setup.
[00:18:08.560 --> 00:18:19.120] But I started to have more and more moments of lack of motivation, lack of that spark and that energy.
[00:18:19.440 --> 00:18:30.880] It became harder for me to do those kind of live streams and ad hoc calls, partly because we're more, I kind of felt bad actually.
[00:18:30.880 --> 00:18:45.520] When we were like the underdogs and really kind of building stuff up, it was like, okay, well, I can grab someone's time for free because we have no money and we have, but I started to feel like, I kind of feel bad about, you know, asking people for free time.
[00:18:45.520 --> 00:18:57.040] And so I started hiring different contractors for different things and found that really got me unstuck, gave me motivation, gave me purpose for my day.
[00:18:57.360 --> 00:19:05.520] And in many ways, the pair programming metaphor, I think, is so helpful for a lot of things in life.
[00:19:05.520 --> 00:19:12.960] Having someone that's kind of there with you, it's like if you have to clean the backyard by yourself, you'll procrastinate on that all day.
[00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:17.360] But if a friend says they're going to show up at your house and help you clean your backyard, you're going to do it.
[00:19:17.360 --> 00:19:18.080] You know what I mean?
[00:19:18.080 --> 00:19:20.800] Like, it's it's incredibly motivating.
[00:19:20.800 --> 00:19:25.040] If you're going to, if you say you're going to go for a run at 6 a.m., it's like, ah, maybe I'll do it.
[00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:27.520] But if a friend says, I'm going to be at your house at 6 a.m.
[00:19:28.080 --> 00:19:29.520] That is 100% true.
[00:19:29.520 --> 00:19:30.920] I mean, yeah, the same thing with Jason.
[00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:37.640] Like, I definitely worked more, but it was more fun because it was like, oh, we're working on this thing together.
[00:19:37.640 --> 00:19:38.680] Let's talk about this.
[00:19:38.680 --> 00:19:39.800] Let's do it.
[00:19:39.800 --> 00:19:40.440] Yeah.
[00:19:40.760 --> 00:19:41.080] Yeah.
[00:19:41.080 --> 00:19:43.800] I mean, otherwise, I would have just been like, oh, we should do this thing.
[00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:44.760] But like, I don't know.
[00:19:44.760 --> 00:19:46.760] There's some video games over here.
[00:19:47.080 --> 00:19:47.480] Yeah.
[00:19:47.800 --> 00:19:48.600] And the couch.
[00:19:48.600 --> 00:19:50.280] I could just hang out.
[00:19:50.280 --> 00:19:51.320] What's the rush?
[00:19:51.320 --> 00:19:57.720] And I think as founders, especially when you're doing a remote team, you need that motivation.
[00:19:57.720 --> 00:19:59.720] Otherwise, look at where we both are right now.
[00:19:59.720 --> 00:20:03.080] We're both in these tiny little offices by ourselves.
[00:20:03.080 --> 00:20:15.800] And without some another human being kind of there, it's easy to be just like kind of glum or to lose your motivation.
[00:20:16.440 --> 00:20:39.960] And I mean, there was also just things I was running into that I built the first version of our marketing site myself with, but it took a big push for me to get myself in a kind of web development mindset, learning about Tailwind, learning about Laravel, learning about the Statimix CMS.
[00:20:39.960 --> 00:20:51.800] And I could do it, and it was, it was really heartening work, but I just recognized like, there's some of the stuff I just don't want to make that big of an investment in, you know?
[00:20:51.800 --> 00:20:52.120] Right.
[00:20:52.440 --> 00:20:56.280] And you were, yeah, you were talking to other people a lot about it too.
[00:20:56.280 --> 00:20:57.480] And I didn't know any of it.
[00:20:57.480 --> 00:21:00.760] So I was like, I can't really hop in here and help you.
[00:21:00.240 --> 00:21:00.920] Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:00.920 --> 00:21:10.040] And I think there's just like that feeling of, I really wanted you to have as much time on the product as possible, you know?
[00:21:10.040 --> 00:21:18.480] Anyway, so I started having that feeling of like, man, I think I need kind of what John and Jason have, but over on the marketing side.
[00:21:19.040 --> 00:21:23.120] And so I hired a few contractors to help me on some different things.
[00:21:23.440 --> 00:21:27.200] And eventually I started hiring Josh more often.
[00:21:27.520 --> 00:21:32.400] And then it really helped my motivation.
[00:21:33.840 --> 00:21:41.200] And eventually I said to him, Can you just book a bunch of times in my calendar where you and I get on a call?
[00:21:41.520 --> 00:21:46.960] And I found, so he would book maybe two sessions a week.
[00:21:47.280 --> 00:21:51.520] And I just found myself so fired up during those sessions.
[00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:54.080] And we're able to look at the site together.
[00:21:54.240 --> 00:21:56.160] I'm like, okay, we need all this built.
[00:21:56.160 --> 00:21:57.600] And he would go away.
[00:21:57.600 --> 00:22:01.920] And then the next call, he would have all this stuff to demo for me.
[00:22:01.920 --> 00:22:10.880] And just having somebody that could execute my vision and even like go back and forth and offer their own ideas.
[00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:28.880] And creatively, that energy was just like it felt way different than those are the best kind of people too because they, you know, you have this idea in your mind and then you explain it and they go away and you're like, I don't know what they're going to come back with.
[00:22:28.880 --> 00:22:33.520] And then it always just like surprises you and you're like, wow, this is better than I even would have expected.
[00:22:33.520 --> 00:22:34.080] Yes.
[00:22:34.080 --> 00:22:34.560] Yeah.
[00:22:34.880 --> 00:22:37.120] And I mean, that's the hardest part, right?
[00:22:37.120 --> 00:22:43.520] Is often just having someone being able to do the work while you're focused on other stuff.
[00:22:43.840 --> 00:22:50.240] And it really is a multiplier in so many ways in terms of actually practically getting things done.
[00:22:50.240 --> 00:22:54.480] But on the human side, just enjoying my job more.
[00:22:54.480 --> 00:22:59.600] I was just coming to work feeling like this is freaking amazing.
[00:22:59.720 --> 00:23:14.440] And even like, it's funny because, of course, with Helen, Jason, and Josh, we're hoping that we overall were hoping that we serve customers better, that we increase the number of customers we have, all those things.
[00:23:14.760 --> 00:23:25.000] But I was like, even if these changes to the marketing site get us no new customers, it's still worth it for me because I'm having more fun.
[00:23:25.320 --> 00:23:26.760] I'm enjoying it more.
[00:23:27.560 --> 00:23:32.600] We're putting stuff out into the world, and I feel like, wow, Josh and I did that together.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:45.800] And it's that same kind of feeling I had with you and I, like, we came together and it was like the sum of each of our parts really is more than either of us could do individually.
[00:23:45.800 --> 00:23:46.280] Yeah.
[00:23:46.520 --> 00:24:00.920] And it's really exciting seeing this team come together where the sum of all these parts of Helen really thinking about customer success all day and really strategizing around that.
[00:24:00.920 --> 00:24:07.640] And then you and Jason really strategizing around code and product and infrastructure.
[00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:23.640] And then having over on the marketing side, Josh and I think about, and then all of us mixing together in Slack and team meetings and going, you know, sometimes all coming together and strategizing and thinking and throwing out ideas.
[00:24:23.640 --> 00:24:32.760] And it just felt like, wow, like this is a bigger, a bigger, better machine, a bigger, better.
[00:24:32.760 --> 00:24:33.160] Yeah.
[00:24:33.160 --> 00:24:33.400] Yeah.
[00:24:33.400 --> 00:24:39.240] So that was the motivation was primarily for me a quality of life improvement.
[00:24:39.240 --> 00:24:42.840] We built this company to give us a better life.
[00:24:42.840 --> 00:24:44.360] What is the company for?
[00:24:44.480 --> 00:24:49.600] The company is to give the team members and their families a better life.
[00:24:49.600 --> 00:24:52.320] That's how I, that's how I view it.
[00:24:52.320 --> 00:25:02.320] And the product is to give customers a better life, to improve, to help them do whatever they set out to do with a podcast.
[00:25:02.640 --> 00:25:15.840] And that distinction is really important and motivating for me because every day I show up going, I know this is the best job that John Buddha has ever had.
[00:25:15.840 --> 00:25:23.200] And I want to make sure that the company continues to do its job of giving John a better life.
[00:25:23.200 --> 00:25:24.640] That's motivating to me.
[00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:25.680] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:25.680 --> 00:25:30.480] And then as we've brought more people on, it's like, I know this is the best job Helen's ever had.
[00:25:30.480 --> 00:25:32.640] I know this is the best job Jason's ever had.
[00:25:32.640 --> 00:25:36.080] I know this, I want this to be the best job Josh has ever had.
[00:25:36.400 --> 00:25:38.480] And how are we going to do that?
[00:25:38.480 --> 00:25:40.320] Well, we've got to keep working on the product.
[00:25:40.320 --> 00:25:42.320] We've got to keep signing up new customers.
[00:25:42.320 --> 00:25:44.080] We've got to reduce churn.
[00:25:44.080 --> 00:25:47.360] We've got to make it enjoyable.
[00:25:47.360 --> 00:25:52.720] You know, we've got to add things into our everyday life that makes it worthwhile.
[00:25:52.720 --> 00:25:55.840] We've got to give them a piece of ownership.
[00:25:55.840 --> 00:25:58.320] You know, all these things kind of come out.
[00:25:58.960 --> 00:26:03.680] And yeah, it's that piece is motivating to me.
[00:26:03.680 --> 00:26:16.320] And in some ways, all the product stuff, like making customers' lives better, even that feeds into eventually making the company better so that the stakeholders in the company have a better life.
[00:26:16.320 --> 00:26:22.480] Yeah, I mean, there's there's many, many days where I'm like, I don't quite finish what I was working on or what Jason and I were working on.
[00:26:22.560 --> 00:26:25.280] I wake up and I'm like excited to get back to it still.
[00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:26.800] And it's like five years in.
[00:26:26.800 --> 00:26:27.920] Yeah, totally.
[00:26:27.920 --> 00:26:29.360] Which is which is great.
[00:26:29.360 --> 00:26:39.640] Like, yeah, there's nothing worse than like showing up at work at your job and you're like, oh God, I got to continue working on this mess of an idea that someone else had.
[00:26:39.640 --> 00:26:56.280] Well, I mean, this is this has been the motivating factor so many times for us where we feel, and in many ways, we're lucky because in order for this company, in order for the company to have a higher purpose, like making people's lives better, you have to be making sales.
[00:26:56.280 --> 00:26:57.320] You have to have revenue.
[00:26:57.320 --> 00:26:58.760] You have to have margins.
[00:26:58.760 --> 00:27:01.160] We were lucky that we found this thing.
[00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:01.800] It worked.
[00:27:01.800 --> 00:27:03.720] We were able to execute on it.
[00:27:03.720 --> 00:27:10.920] And we were also able to get lucky enough that it became a financial engine that helped us to have a better life.
[00:27:10.920 --> 00:27:12.760] So that part's lucky.
[00:27:12.760 --> 00:27:34.200] But, you know, showing up for a company that you think doesn't care about you as an employee, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't give a shit is, it's just incredibly demotivating for a human to feel like you have no purpose, to feel like your work actually doesn't matter.
[00:27:34.200 --> 00:27:38.360] I think everybody at Transistor feels like my work matters.
[00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:40.040] You know what I mean?
[00:27:40.040 --> 00:27:46.120] And that is such a good feeling that we could provide that for ourselves and other people.
[00:27:46.440 --> 00:27:56.440] So just to expand on it more, so we've hired Josh full-time to primarily assist me, partner with me on the marketing side.
[00:27:56.440 --> 00:27:59.640] So that means building stuff for our website.
[00:27:59.960 --> 00:28:04.920] It means doing some projects like building podcast website themes.
[00:28:04.920 --> 00:28:15.000] But because he's also just a good full-stack web developer with Rails experience, eventually he might start to work on stuff on the app side as well.
[00:28:15.840 --> 00:28:17.040] Yeah, I hope so.
[00:28:17.040 --> 00:28:28.560] Yeah, I mean, practically, like the utility is Josh can execute on the technical and design stuff when it comes to building web stuff.
[00:28:28.560 --> 00:28:33.440] He can just do that way better at a higher quality and faster than I can.
[00:28:33.440 --> 00:28:42.960] Him being this full-stack developer that can help us on a variety of projects also made him a good hire from a utility standpoint.
[00:28:42.960 --> 00:28:45.920] Like, oh, wow, he could do a lot of jobs for us.
[00:28:46.560 --> 00:28:54.080] And the fact that he had been a longtime customer user of Transistor, had used transistor with many of his consulting clients.
[00:28:54.080 --> 00:28:58.320] He was also editing podcasts for a bunch of different people on the side.
[00:28:58.320 --> 00:29:10.560] So he had seen the product from a variety of perspectives as a podcaster himself, but also as somebody who was offering podcasting services to other folks.
[00:29:10.560 --> 00:29:17.760] That really kind of rounded him out as, you know, a good option for hiring.
[00:29:17.760 --> 00:29:25.360] But again, I think, and anyone that wants to work for a small startup, I often hear people, oh, I want to really work for a small company.
[00:29:25.360 --> 00:29:33.440] I think figuring out what the job to be done is for the boss, what the boss actually wants, is important.
[00:29:33.760 --> 00:29:41.360] And the blunt kind of general answer is bosses hire employees to make their lives better.
[00:29:41.360 --> 00:29:50.960] And that could be, it could be something that's very utilitarian, like I'm just looking for someone to take this off my plate and do the job better than I can.
[00:29:50.960 --> 00:29:56.480] But it could also be emotional, which is, I want to work alongside somebody.
[00:29:56.480 --> 00:29:58.320] I want more energy in this place.
[00:29:58.320 --> 00:30:01.880] I want more people with a positive attitude around this place.
[00:30:02.440 --> 00:30:08.200] I can't tell, there's a few times I've been a part, I've been at startups where they've had layoffs.
[00:30:08.200 --> 00:30:10.360] You know, they would lay off a bunch of people.
[00:30:10.520 --> 00:30:17.800] I wouldn't get fired, and I would go to the CEO and go, What, like, I'm just curious, like, why'd you keep me?
[00:30:18.120 --> 00:30:25.400] And sometimes the answer was, you're just a positive, high-energy person that's nice to have around.
[00:30:26.040 --> 00:30:36.440] And I think there's that idea of people are hiring people to do jobs in their lives.
[00:30:36.440 --> 00:30:40.520] And some of it is just like emotional.
[00:30:41.160 --> 00:30:42.760] I just want to be around somebody that could.
[00:30:43.000 --> 00:30:48.120] I mean, that's kind of why, like, you know, early on, that's why I kind of agreed to bring you on.
[00:30:48.120 --> 00:30:53.480] Like, when I had started that and didn't really want, necessarily, want a partnership.
[00:30:53.480 --> 00:30:53.880] Yeah.
[00:30:54.200 --> 00:30:57.240] But I thought about it and I was like, yeah, I don't know.
[00:30:57.240 --> 00:30:58.200] It makes sense.
[00:30:58.200 --> 00:31:00.600] You're a nice, high-energy guy to have around.
[00:31:01.560 --> 00:31:11.480] Which is why we had to solve this glum problem because, you know, if I'm not high-energy or nice, then it's time to show me the door.
[00:31:11.480 --> 00:31:11.880] Yeah.
[00:31:11.880 --> 00:31:16.520] So those are the reasons we picked Josh.
[00:31:16.520 --> 00:31:20.120] And I think it's also interesting to look at now.
[00:31:20.120 --> 00:31:22.120] We've hired three people.
[00:31:22.120 --> 00:31:27.720] In every case, Helen, Jason, Josh, we've hired somebody we've known for years.
[00:31:28.040 --> 00:31:34.680] So I met Helen in the Mega Maker community, and Josh also in the Mega Maker community.
[00:31:34.680 --> 00:31:37.320] And you had worked with Jason previously.
[00:31:37.320 --> 00:31:39.480] Yeah, and has been friends with him before that.
[00:31:39.480 --> 00:31:42.120] And even the way John and I met.
[00:31:42.600 --> 00:31:47.520] This is the thing people sometimes forget: is that John and I met in 2014.
[00:31:48.640 --> 00:31:53.760] It would be four years until we started working on transistor together.
[00:31:53.760 --> 00:32:05.600] But in the in-between time, you keep up with people, you check in with them, maybe you see them every year, maybe you're chatting with them, maybe you're sending them the occasional note.
[00:32:05.600 --> 00:32:12.560] Like those things matter and relationships matter.
[00:32:12.880 --> 00:32:19.200] And I think another nice thing about a small company is we don't need to hire a ton of people.
[00:32:19.200 --> 00:32:33.600] And it's given us this option of every time, you know, I'm kind of looking around for like who could I hire as a contractor, which both Helen and Josh were contractors first.
[00:32:34.800 --> 00:32:41.120] And that's usually, I think, going to be the first step for us: we're going to hire people as contractors.
[00:32:41.120 --> 00:32:51.840] And, you know, when it comes time to, you know, we get that feeling of like, ah, it'd be really great to have a full-time member of the team.
[00:32:52.160 --> 00:32:59.520] The first folks we're going to look at are folks we've worked with in the past as contractors, former co-workers.
[00:32:59.840 --> 00:33:04.480] And we've hired many contractors over the years.
[00:33:04.480 --> 00:33:10.320] And of course, we couldn't hire them all as full-time people, but that's part of the step.
[00:33:10.320 --> 00:33:19.520] Yeah, I mean, you know, we certainly could hire someone we didn't know, but man, that would that would be much different.
[00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:25.120] I feel like, unless it's a certain type of person, it takes a while for people to like really get used to each other.
[00:33:25.120 --> 00:33:28.880] And like, it's just, yeah, that'd be tough.
[00:33:28.880 --> 00:33:36.440] I mean, there's obviously a great people out there who would be a good fit, but for, yeah, for our, for our case, I think it just makes a lot of sense.
[00:33:37.160 --> 00:33:56.280] I wish people could see the tension because when you're thinking about hiring somebody, there's even in each of the cases, Helen, Jason, Josh, even though we knew them before, we had worked with them before, that decision is still weighty.
[00:33:56.840 --> 00:33:58.840] It weighs on you as a founder.
[00:33:58.840 --> 00:34:21.640] And until you've been a founder and you are personally responsible financially for other people's families, I don't think people can fully understand the weight of feeling like we are going to take another risk or movement or additional responsibility on our shoulders as founders to provide for somebody else.
[00:34:21.640 --> 00:34:24.200] It's just a heavy decision.
[00:34:24.200 --> 00:34:29.960] Not to mention like financially, obviously, but like, is this person actually going to enjoy working here?
[00:34:29.960 --> 00:34:33.080] And like, in Jason's case, like, all right, we're going to hire Jason.
[00:34:33.080 --> 00:34:34.120] Like, obviously, I like Jason.
[00:34:34.120 --> 00:34:35.240] He's a friend of mine.
[00:34:35.240 --> 00:34:38.760] But is he going to get in here and like open the code up and be like, wow, this is garbage.
[00:34:38.760 --> 00:34:40.200] Like, what did you do?
[00:34:40.200 --> 00:34:41.800] I don't want to work on this.
[00:34:41.800 --> 00:34:42.360] Yeah.
[00:34:42.680 --> 00:34:43.080] Yeah.
[00:34:43.080 --> 00:34:54.920] Well, and also just like you, you can be, you can know somebody, but there's still that thought of like, what's it going to be like when they're actually on the team?
[00:34:54.920 --> 00:34:57.880] Like, how is that going to change the team dynamic?
[00:34:57.880 --> 00:35:05.080] And, you know, that team retreat, I think, really cemented the fact that we've got something special here.
[00:35:05.080 --> 00:35:06.760] It might not last forever.
[00:35:06.760 --> 00:35:15.000] We want to enjoy it while we can, but we also want to be as protective about that, this thing we've built as we can.
[00:35:16.320 --> 00:35:27.840] And every single person, even though we love them and we've, you know, we had worked with them previous, there's still that thought, that, that worry of how is that going to affect the team?
[00:35:27.840 --> 00:35:30.560] You know, how is that going to affect the team dynamic?
[00:35:30.560 --> 00:35:31.840] And it's heavy.
[00:35:31.840 --> 00:35:36.720] And I think once you understand this, hopefully we're painting a picture here.
[00:35:36.720 --> 00:35:43.840] How much more of a risk is it to get a cold call or a cold email or a cold resume from somebody?
[00:35:44.160 --> 00:35:47.680] It's just you have to travel so much more ground.
[00:35:47.680 --> 00:35:51.920] You're taking such a bigger risk on hiring that person.
[00:35:52.240 --> 00:35:54.480] And I honestly can't imagine it.
[00:35:54.480 --> 00:35:58.960] I can't imagine having to make an even bigger jump.
[00:35:58.960 --> 00:36:00.800] Yeah, especially with a small team like us.
[00:36:00.800 --> 00:36:04.080] Like, yeah, I mean, adding in one person to a team of four.
[00:36:04.400 --> 00:36:04.960] Yeah.
[00:36:04.960 --> 00:36:08.880] That's a huge, I mean, yeah, how's everyone going to interact?
[00:36:08.880 --> 00:36:23.200] And like, it, it probably is why there's a lot of big companies are shitty to work at because they just need to hire people and the they they have to put it out for tender and they have to, you know, they have to do all those things.
[00:36:23.200 --> 00:36:32.800] And it's just, you really don't know what this person is like until you've had a bunch of shared experience with them.
[00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:44.160] It takes, what, 72 hours of time for somebody to become an acquaintance and then even more hours for them to become like a closer friend.
[00:36:44.160 --> 00:37:00.120] That's that's an investment of time that you just don't get getting someone's resume and then being like, let's bring them in for an interview and a second interview and asking them, you know, what's the biggest professional hurdle of their life so far?
[00:37:00.120 --> 00:37:10.360] You know, sell me this pen or, you know, like, show me a time where you really had to figure out.
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:13.080] Like, what do you see as your biggest weakness?
[00:37:13.080 --> 00:37:14.360] Yeah, what's your biggest weakness?
[00:37:14.360 --> 00:37:18.280] It's like, well, that's not deep enough.
[00:37:18.520 --> 00:37:24.280] You really can only get a sense of a person once you've spent some time.
[00:37:24.280 --> 00:37:44.600] And even then, like any relationship, there's this ongoing risk for all of us that each of us is still, any of us, if we're not taking care of our own shit, are at risk of becoming assholes.
[00:37:44.920 --> 00:37:49.560] And then there's also just life stuff that can happen that can affect people individually as well.
[00:37:49.560 --> 00:37:52.200] So there's always a risk of other stuff.
[00:37:52.200 --> 00:37:58.360] But when minimizing it and hiring folks that you're like, you know what?
[00:37:58.360 --> 00:38:00.520] I feel good about this risk.
[00:38:00.520 --> 00:38:03.400] I feel good about this, bringing this person on.
[00:38:03.400 --> 00:38:11.960] We know enough about them that, you know, we can do this and it's going to be a net positive.
[00:38:11.960 --> 00:38:13.800] You can only get that with shared time.
[00:38:14.120 --> 00:38:15.000] Absolutely.
[00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:17.880] That's, yeah, so congrats to Josh.
[00:38:17.880 --> 00:38:19.800] We're really excited to have him on.
[00:38:19.800 --> 00:38:27.240] Helen is celebrating her two-year work anniversary this month, which is just wild to think.
[00:38:27.240 --> 00:38:27.800] It is.
[00:38:28.200 --> 00:38:37.720] Like we've said multiple times, having Helen, Jason, and now Josh, it's just been just awesome to work alongside these people.
[00:38:38.040 --> 00:38:39.960] And yeah, that's how we think about hiring.
[00:38:39.960 --> 00:38:43.960] My guess is we will probably not hire again for quite a while.
[00:38:44.200 --> 00:38:47.200] We took a, we didn't hire anybody last year.
[00:38:47.200 --> 00:38:52.800] So Helen and Jason both got hired in 2021, nobody in 2022.
[00:38:53.120 --> 00:38:55.600] Josh now in 2023.
[00:38:55.920 --> 00:39:00.320] I think it's going to be a little while, especially with the economy the way it is.
[00:39:00.320 --> 00:39:06.640] We're, and you know, all this Section 174 and all this stuff.
[00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:08.000] Texas stuff.
[00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:09.440] Yeah, I don't know.
[00:39:09.440 --> 00:39:11.840] I don't even know what we would customer the hire for.
[00:39:12.240 --> 00:39:14.800] I think customer success, maybe.
[00:39:15.040 --> 00:39:18.560] That's still one area that I find a hard.
[00:39:18.560 --> 00:39:20.400] Some of this is just my personality.
[00:39:20.400 --> 00:39:24.880] I personally find it difficult to turn that part off.
[00:39:24.880 --> 00:39:28.320] Like if I'm on vacation, I'm answering tickets.
[00:39:28.320 --> 00:39:31.280] And you got to stop doing that.
[00:39:31.280 --> 00:39:31.600] I know.
[00:39:31.600 --> 00:39:31.840] I know.
[00:39:31.840 --> 00:39:33.200] I got to stop doing that.
[00:39:33.200 --> 00:39:37.520] I mean, we have everyone pitches in, which is great.
[00:39:37.520 --> 00:39:38.560] It's just so nice.
[00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:44.160] Like Helen, while we're sleeping, is covering all those hours.
[00:39:44.160 --> 00:39:49.200] And it's so nice to just know somebody's taking care of it while I'm sleeping.
[00:39:49.760 --> 00:39:56.960] And I could see in the future us maybe hiring someone customer success, but one of the things we do is wait and see.
[00:39:56.960 --> 00:39:59.120] So now we've got one person on the team.
[00:39:59.120 --> 00:40:03.520] Jason's on vacation right now, hopefully not opening his laptop.
[00:40:03.520 --> 00:40:08.960] And, you know, now Josh is going to be able to pitch in and help with customer support.
[00:40:08.960 --> 00:40:11.120] And it's gotten way better for sure.
[00:40:11.120 --> 00:40:26.400] Like it used to be you and I would leave on a trip or something and it would be like, okay, well, hope they got Wi-Fi at the campground um i i have been able to turn my brain off more as I'm away.
[00:40:26.720 --> 00:40:28.960] So we're going to see it is it is a lot easier.
[00:40:28.960 --> 00:42:08.800] Yeah, I think now with Josh and someone else to help answer support tickets yeah we'll be able to do that absolutely cool i think we should end it there we've been we've been chatting for a while um is there anything you want to talk about in terms of features and stuff we're working on another thing that maybe listeners can keep us accountable john and i need to do our founder retreat and uh we got yeah we didn't we were gonna go snowboarding the winter and now it was 85 in chicago last week i don't think there's much snow left yeah i think april or may is well probably not april it'll probably be may are you doing anything in may may or june no um may or june yeah john john and i need to get together we should do a summer summer yeah exactly well yeah june i guess summer i don't know uh so yeah we're gonna work on that i'm working on some video studio stuff but i can talk about that next week we've got the patreon feature out we talked about that already anything else we want to chat about um yeah i mean the new the new theme came out i think on josh's second day which he worked on you know previously but that was a nice welcome gift yeah and getting to see people use it uh already we're gonna try to get him to work on another one he has already got some other ideas but those those themes that that podcast website feature that we built is it's really an app within an app we have yeah it's it's quite flexible i think what you can do with it so there's i mean there's there's a lot of stuff like that which i think will bring josh in on within the app of like we've been talking about updating, for example, like embed players and customizability forever.
[00:42:08.800 --> 00:42:09.440] Yes.
[00:42:09.440 --> 00:42:12.720] And like, I have ideas about it, but i did we've just been busy with other stuff.
[00:42:12.720 --> 00:42:13.280] Yeah.
[00:42:13.280 --> 00:42:13.520] Yeah.
[00:42:13.520 --> 00:42:16.000] That would be awesome actually for you and josh to pair on that.
[00:42:16.000 --> 00:42:23.200] I think, I think you two would would energize each other when it came to like throwing back ideas and stuff.
[00:42:23.200 --> 00:42:24.080] Yeah, for sure.
[00:42:24.320 --> 00:42:32.240] There's other stuff Jason and I have been working on around like campaigns and dynamic audio and things that we're gonna we're gonna release pretty soon, which should be kind of cool.
[00:42:32.240 --> 00:42:34.320] And then I think we can announce this now.
[00:42:35.280 --> 00:42:43.600] I mean, anybody could see from looking at their feed, but the acquired podcast switched to Transistor, which is really awesome for us.
[00:42:43.600 --> 00:42:44.640] We were fans of that show.
[00:42:44.640 --> 00:42:48.960] If you haven't heard of it, it's like hardcore history, if you've ever heard that podcast.
[00:42:48.960 --> 00:42:57.840] But for great companies, they go through the history of it used to be just tech companies, but now it's any great company.
[00:42:57.840 --> 00:43:02.640] They just did a two-part series on Nintendo that is excellent.
[00:43:02.960 --> 00:43:04.640] So highly recommend.
[00:43:04.960 --> 00:43:05.920] There's a lot of good episodes.
[00:43:06.080 --> 00:43:07.840] The Taylor Swift episode is amazing.
[00:43:07.920 --> 00:43:08.800] Taylor Swift episode.
[00:43:08.880 --> 00:43:12.000] The Walmart episode is actually very good.
[00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:14.400] The Sony episode is very good.
[00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:29.040] They do just an unbelievable job at researching, doing the research on these companies, and then giving it this narrative that's like these are sometimes two, three-hour podcast episodes.
[00:43:29.040 --> 00:43:32.880] And I'm a fan.
[00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:38.800] Like when they drop in my, my, in Overcast, it's like, I'm listening.
[00:43:38.800 --> 00:43:39.680] It's great having them on.
[00:43:39.680 --> 00:43:40.720] They're super nice guys.
[00:43:40.720 --> 00:43:42.320] So yeah, give it a listen.
[00:43:42.320 --> 00:43:43.760] Give it a listen.
[00:43:43.760 --> 00:43:48.800] And yeah, John, why don't we thank the fine Patreon supporters?
[00:43:48.800 --> 00:43:50.880] Anybody can support us on Patreon.
[00:43:50.880 --> 00:43:56.320] Go to sass.transistor.fm slash supporters if you want to see the other folks.
[00:43:56.320 --> 00:43:57.600] But yeah, who do we have?
[00:43:57.600 --> 00:43:59.200] Yeah, thanks everyone for supporting us.
[00:43:59.360 --> 00:44:33.320] We have Pascal from sharpen.page, the folks at rewardful.com, Greg Park, Mitchell Davis from recruitkit.com.au, Marcel Follet from WeAreBold.af, Ethan Gunderson, Anton Zorin from prodcamp.com, Bill Kondo, Ward from Memberspace, Russell Brown from Fotivo.com, Evandra Sassi, Austin Lovelace, Michael Sitver, the fine folks at Fathom Analytics, Dan Buddha, my brother.
[00:44:33.320 --> 00:44:33.960] Hey, Dan.
[00:44:33.960 --> 00:44:37.720] Colin Gray, Darby Frey, and Dave Junta.
[00:44:37.720 --> 00:44:39.480] Junta.
[00:44:39.800 --> 00:44:43.080] Tell Junta he needs to update his Patreon photo.
[00:44:44.040 --> 00:44:44.680] All right.
[00:44:44.840 --> 00:44:45.480] Darby.
[00:44:45.480 --> 00:44:46.360] Darby Frey too.
[00:44:46.360 --> 00:44:47.160] Dan Buddha.
[00:44:47.160 --> 00:44:48.680] Fathom Analytics.
[00:44:48.680 --> 00:44:50.360] Just a faceless smiley.
[00:44:50.360 --> 00:44:54.200] Yeah, go update your Patreon photos, folks.
[00:44:54.200 --> 00:44:56.120] And thanks for listening.
[00:44:56.120 --> 00:44:59.240] If you like this show, please recommend it to a friend.
[00:44:59.240 --> 00:45:00.440] Just text them a message.
[00:45:00.440 --> 00:45:02.520] Hey, you should listen to this episode.
[00:45:02.520 --> 00:45:04.760] And we always love hearing your feedback.
[00:45:04.760 --> 00:45:08.680] Tweet at us, email us, pop into the live chat.
[00:45:08.680 --> 00:45:10.600] Just say, hey, I listened to the episode.
[00:45:10.600 --> 00:45:12.120] We really appreciate it.
[00:45:12.120 --> 00:45:13.800] Talk to you later.
[00:45:31.080 --> 00:45:35.000] Podcast hosting is provided by transistor.fm.
[00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:46.240] They host our mp3 files, generate our RSS feed, provide us with analytics, and help us distribute the show to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
[00:45:46.240 --> 00:45:57.440] If you want to start your own podcast or you want to switch to Transistor, go to transistor.fm slash Justin and get 15% off your first year.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.240 --> 00:00:37.920] This podcast is hosted by transistor.fm hey everyone welcome to build your sass this is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2023 i'm john buddha a software engineer and i'm justin jackson i do product and marketing follow along as we build transistor.fm we uh we reached episode 150.
[00:00:37.920 --> 00:01:50.840] uh yes episode 150 good milestone i we we just hit another milestone in terms of total episodes published on transistor yeah over a million episodes which is pretty cool that's awesome a lot of episodes you know we're still a small little company but one million episodes is uh that's that's significant we're we've hosted a lot of audio we have to set up a behind the scenes um master feed for all of them and then just we have to listen to all of them at like three times speed just get like every episode that'd be hilarious to just get i mean that would that would actually probably be difficult because i was i was thinking it'd be cool to have an ai that just summarizes every episode on transistor every day it probably costs you a fortune take forever and cost a fortune yeah because every day i think jason's recording that right uh oh no he's recording new shows every day so every day we get about sometimes 30 new podcasts created, 40 new podcasts created um every single day on transistor.
[00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:57.720] It's one of those things that i've tried to communicate to folks about this idea of volume.
[00:01:57.720 --> 00:02:04.600] Like in any business, you need a certain amount of volume, a certain amount of momentum out in the world.
[00:02:05.240 --> 00:02:11.960] And for us, it means hundreds of new people signing up every month.
[00:02:11.960 --> 00:02:17.560] That's to make this business work, even though our churn is quite low.
[00:02:17.560 --> 00:02:21.160] I think we're around 2.5% churn.
[00:02:21.160 --> 00:02:24.760] So, and for the prosumer product, that's incredible.
[00:02:25.080 --> 00:02:35.480] But even with just 2.5% churn, we still, in order to grow, we need hundreds of new trials every month.
[00:02:35.800 --> 00:02:38.440] And then you take that even further.
[00:02:38.440 --> 00:02:41.240] We're converting a lot of those trials to paid.
[00:02:41.240 --> 00:02:49.480] It's, I won't give the exact number, but it's above 70% of people who start a trial convert to paid.
[00:02:49.800 --> 00:02:59.720] And then you think, how many visitors does it take to, you know, to get a trial?
[00:03:00.040 --> 00:03:05.080] And I think those numbers are bigger than people realize.
[00:03:05.080 --> 00:03:16.840] That you need a lot of traffic that then turns into a trial or a lead.
[00:03:16.840 --> 00:03:27.400] And then for us, we just know we can reliably convert, you know, a big percentage of those folks to paid.
[00:03:27.400 --> 00:03:29.160] Because there's a lot of competition.
[00:03:29.240 --> 00:03:30.600] I mean, people have choices to make.
[00:03:30.600 --> 00:03:47.200] Well, and that's the other element that I think is tricky is like there has to be enough momentum in the world towards your type of product that there's enough of that percentage that you can reliably get for your business.
[00:03:47.840 --> 00:03:57.760] My guess is it takes about 100,000 visitors of like people that are interested in podcast hosting.
[00:03:57.760 --> 00:04:05.440] About 100,000 visitors would lead to maybe 2,000 leads, something like that.
[00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:11.760] And then you want to be able to convert, in our case, a big percentage of those because it's credit card up front.
[00:04:11.760 --> 00:04:12.160] Yeah.
[00:04:12.800 --> 00:04:22.240] And that's just like, if you think about that, like 100,000 people with intent visiting your website.
[00:04:22.560 --> 00:04:28.160] And then even then, you're only getting, if you're lucky, 2,000 of them.
[00:04:28.480 --> 00:04:30.720] It's, it, it's wild.
[00:04:30.720 --> 00:04:31.520] Yeah, it's pretty wild.
[00:04:31.520 --> 00:04:31.760] Yeah.
[00:04:31.760 --> 00:04:32.880] It's big numbers.
[00:04:32.880 --> 00:04:48.000] I mean, the other thing kind of related to this that Jason said before, and I agree with, is that, I mean, having having more customers and having a large customer base that uses your product every day is just more fun to work on.
[00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:58.160] Like before this, I mean, I hadn't worked on anything like that, and neither had Jason really where it was like something that actually took off and had some traction and had people using it all the time.
[00:04:58.160 --> 00:05:01.600] So, you know, you're getting feedback every day.
[00:05:01.600 --> 00:05:05.760] You push out a change and immediately people will find it, even if we haven't announced it yet.
[00:05:05.760 --> 00:05:06.800] And yeah.
[00:05:06.800 --> 00:05:07.200] Yeah.
[00:05:07.200 --> 00:05:10.640] I mean, there's nothing worse than like working on a product where nobody's using it.
[00:05:10.640 --> 00:05:11.040] Yeah.
[00:05:11.040 --> 00:05:16.160] It's like, what's you're just making guesses and pushing stuff out and no one sees it or uses it.
[00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:17.920] Oh, for sure.
[00:05:17.920 --> 00:05:24.160] Jason Cohen's been writing these great articles lately, and he has one called, Excuse me, Is There a Problem?
[00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:32.920] And his byline for the article is: Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem.
[00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:36.600] This article explains why so you can avoid their fate.
[00:05:36.920 --> 00:05:39.080] Highly recommend that folks get into this.
[00:05:39.080 --> 00:05:50.360] He has this awesome flow chart, which just talks about like, you know, is there 10 million plus people or 100,000 plus organizations that have this problem?
[00:05:50.360 --> 00:05:52.200] No, the market's too small.
[00:05:52.200 --> 00:05:55.240] Do you want no employees or a niche high price?
[00:05:55.240 --> 00:05:57.400] Well, maybe you can still do it.
[00:05:57.400 --> 00:06:07.400] So it's like he really goes through all these different elements that you need for a company to succeed.
[00:06:07.400 --> 00:06:19.400] And one of those things is you want to, before you build something, you're really just guessing, you know, and guessing actually sucks.
[00:06:19.400 --> 00:06:21.400] It's what's frustrating, right?
[00:06:21.400 --> 00:06:32.680] It's like putting yourself out there constantly and nobody's responding to what you're doing, whether that's a new startup, a new product, a new feature, or a podcast, even.
[00:06:32.680 --> 00:06:36.920] If you're getting no response, it's not very fun.
[00:06:36.920 --> 00:06:38.440] No, it's terrible.
[00:06:38.440 --> 00:07:01.000] But as soon as you get response, and if people are actually using your product to do some sort of job in their lives, man, that's when it gets exciting because then even if they're giving you feedback you don't want to hear, it still means somebody cared enough to use your product, put in their credit card, and then give you some sort of feedback.
[00:07:02.120 --> 00:07:08.200] And yeah, that is in terms of going to work and working on something.
[00:07:08.520 --> 00:07:15.520] And we're such a small team that folks like Jason are in customer support chat all the time.
[00:07:15.520 --> 00:07:19.600] He gets to see the response to a new feature.
[00:07:14.920 --> 00:07:21.520] He gets to hear the feedback.
[00:07:21.840 --> 00:07:23.920] He gets to see how people are trying to use it.
[00:07:23.920 --> 00:07:27.840] He gets to see what it means in their lives, you know.
[00:07:27.840 --> 00:07:32.720] And that is a powerful force.
[00:07:32.720 --> 00:07:33.040] Yeah.
[00:07:33.040 --> 00:07:39.760] And, you know, being a small company, one person can make a change that affects a large amount of people, which is kind of cool.
[00:07:39.760 --> 00:07:40.480] Exactly.
[00:07:40.480 --> 00:07:41.360] Exactly.
[00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:46.880] I think for a lot of employees at bigger companies, they just never get to talk to the user.
[00:07:46.880 --> 00:07:49.840] You never get to see who's actually using it.
[00:07:49.840 --> 00:07:59.600] And this is one of the advantages of small independent companies: not only do we get to talk to users, but we actually care.
[00:07:59.600 --> 00:08:04.640] And this becomes a competitive advantage: to show up at work.
[00:08:04.640 --> 00:08:13.920] And when someone messages us in chat, we care enough to be like, we're going to answer this.
[00:08:13.920 --> 00:08:17.200] We care enough to think, okay, we're going to make this better.
[00:08:17.520 --> 00:08:24.160] And that's just such a different experience than the way most products get built, you know?
[00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:37.600] Yeah, I really haven't been on, I mean, I haven't been on a team like that either, but I can imagine like, you know, it's probably fun working on a team and building something, but then you might be building it for six months to a year and then it gets released and no one's used it yet.
[00:08:37.600 --> 00:08:38.000] Yeah.
[00:08:38.320 --> 00:08:44.800] And then, I don't know, you're not going to hear directly from the customer because you're two, three steps removed from that process.
[00:08:44.800 --> 00:08:53.600] You're 10 layers down, and there's, yeah, I think this is the advantage of starting and building independent product companies.
[00:08:53.600 --> 00:09:09.640] And it still has the same difficulty that in the beginning, you've got to find something that people want, you've got to find something that you can reliably provide, you've got to find something where you've got some sort of marketing advantage so you can actually attract customers.
[00:09:09.640 --> 00:09:16.120] But once you do it, it really is better for the employees, for the team, and for the customer.
[00:09:16.120 --> 00:09:24.440] They just get a better product, better service, and then the people who go to work every day have a more gratifying life.
[00:09:24.440 --> 00:09:26.200] Yeah, definitely.
[00:09:26.200 --> 00:09:27.320] Talking about teams.
[00:09:27.320 --> 00:09:28.360] Speaking of employees.
[00:09:28.680 --> 00:09:33.880] Speaking of employees, we just hired Josh Anderton.
[00:09:33.880 --> 00:09:34.520] Yeah.
[00:09:35.080 --> 00:09:41.080] And I thought we could talk quickly about why we hired, how we hire at Transistor.
[00:09:41.080 --> 00:09:42.440] This comes up every once in a while.
[00:09:42.440 --> 00:09:59.320] And I think Josh, like Jason and Helen, is a good example of how we think about hiring and the kinds of job to be done that we're hiring for as owners and just how we think through all that.
[00:09:59.640 --> 00:10:01.800] So, yes, we hired Josh.
[00:10:02.680 --> 00:10:04.280] He started on the 11th.
[00:10:04.280 --> 00:10:07.720] So he's just, oh, this is his one-week anniversary.
[00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:10.360] So, yeah, we hired Josh a week ago.
[00:10:10.360 --> 00:10:23.880] And if you've been following our updates, you know that he'd been working with us as a contractor since, I don't know, at least six months, I'm guessing, something like that.
[00:10:24.280 --> 00:10:29.400] I hired him to help me with some stuff on the marketing site.
[00:10:29.400 --> 00:10:36.760] And then we also had him build a new podcast website theme for us, which we just released.
[00:10:36.760 --> 00:10:45.280] If you are a, if you want to try it out, actually, and even if you're not with Transnistria, if you go to freepodcastwebsites.com, you can try it out.
[00:10:45.280 --> 00:10:46.960] It's called Cardboard.
[00:10:44.680 --> 00:10:51.760] Very unique theme for podcast websites.
[00:10:52.400 --> 00:10:53.040] Yeah.
[00:10:53.040 --> 00:10:56.960] And yeah, so let's go back a bit.
[00:10:57.760 --> 00:10:59.760] Let's go back to the pandemic.
[00:10:59.760 --> 00:11:09.600] And this is, I can't remember exactly when this happened, but there was definitely this feeling.
[00:11:09.600 --> 00:11:15.440] And I think even listeners to the show had mentioned like, man, John kind of seems down.
[00:11:16.080 --> 00:11:23.280] And you were kind of, maybe you want to, do you want to describe that feeling at the time?
[00:11:23.920 --> 00:11:31.120] Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, let's see, I left my job in August of 2019, right?
[00:11:31.120 --> 00:11:35.120] So had a few months there before the pandemic hit.
[00:11:35.120 --> 00:11:36.400] And then that's interesting.
[00:11:36.640 --> 00:11:37.680] It wasn't that long.
[00:11:37.680 --> 00:11:39.280] You didn't have that long before the pandemic.
[00:11:39.360 --> 00:11:39.840] It really wasn't.
[00:11:40.800 --> 00:11:44.560] I mean, I was like super energized, you know, when I left my job because it's like, oh, this is great.
[00:11:44.560 --> 00:11:45.840] I could spend all my time in this.
[00:11:45.840 --> 00:11:46.640] This is awesome.
[00:11:46.640 --> 00:11:47.120] Yeah.
[00:11:47.120 --> 00:11:47.440] Yeah.
[00:11:47.440 --> 00:11:49.920] And then I think, you know, pandemic hit.
[00:11:49.920 --> 00:11:51.680] Everyone's sitting at home.
[00:11:51.920 --> 00:11:54.320] We had, obviously, had the luxury to work at home.
[00:11:54.320 --> 00:11:56.000] And we were working at home anyway.
[00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:57.680] So there wasn't much of a transition there.
[00:11:57.680 --> 00:12:12.720] But it just got like too easy to kind of sit around, take breaks, not maybe not work or just like piddle around on little things that they weren't weren't big features.
[00:12:15.600 --> 00:12:17.680] It was hard to get motivated.
[00:12:17.680 --> 00:12:21.520] And I mean, some of that was pandemic related.
[00:12:21.840 --> 00:12:28.160] Some of that was just like, you know, lack of social things going on outside of working.
[00:12:28.160 --> 00:12:34.440] And it was like you, and you know, and I think I didn't really even realize it at the time, I don't think.
[00:12:35.080 --> 00:12:38.360] But I was just like, you know, things were going well.
[00:12:38.360 --> 00:12:42.040] Like, we could have just kind of taken it easy, right?
[00:12:42.040 --> 00:12:43.400] It was things were going well.
[00:12:43.400 --> 00:12:49.880] We didn't need to necessarily build anything huge, but you know, work is motivating and gives you a sense of purpose and fulfillment.
[00:12:49.880 --> 00:12:55.240] And like, you don't want that necessarily missing, especially if you're just sitting around home all day.
[00:12:55.560 --> 00:12:57.480] And so I don't know.
[00:12:57.480 --> 00:13:00.520] I don't remember how it came up with Jason.
[00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:01.880] I think I had been talking to Jason.
[00:13:01.880 --> 00:13:04.040] He was talking about leaving his job.
[00:13:04.360 --> 00:13:06.440] And then maybe I mentioned to you.
[00:13:06.440 --> 00:13:24.120] I think we'd had discussions about it before that I was like, I wonder if, because I had had this experience of, you know, I would like to motivate myself and I would like do a live stream.
[00:13:24.120 --> 00:13:39.720] And the, the, that feeling of having other people kind of come alongside me and work on a problem, or I'd bug Adam Wathan or Jack McDade or, you know, somebody or somebody in Mega Maker to like, hey, let's do a call and like figure this out.
[00:13:40.360 --> 00:13:43.240] And I found that very energizing.
[00:13:43.240 --> 00:13:50.600] And I think I'd said to you, you know, I wonder if maybe you could find, you know, someone to pair a program with or something.
[00:13:50.920 --> 00:13:51.560] Yeah.
[00:13:51.560 --> 00:14:01.000] And then, yeah, I think Jason maybe had reached out to you and you were like, hmm, I wonder if we should maybe hire him.
[00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:08.200] Yeah, I think maybe, yeah, I mean, I think he was, he was telling me about leaving his job, and I was like, kind of jokingly being like, oh, man, maybe we should hire you.
[00:14:08.520 --> 00:14:12.760] And then, like, he was like, yeah, like, let's talk about that actually.
[00:14:13.080 --> 00:14:15.440] Yeah, at this point, Jason had already moved.
[00:14:14.520 --> 00:14:18.640] He was, he was in Chicago, he moved away.
[00:14:18.640 --> 00:14:20.320] And so he was, I mean, he wasn't in town either.
[00:14:14.840 --> 00:14:21.360] I couldn't really hang out with him.
[00:14:21.520 --> 00:14:23.920] But I think we kept talking.
[00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:24.800] I don't know.
[00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:26.400] I don't remember how long that process was.
[00:14:26.400 --> 00:14:26.880] You met him.
[00:14:27.520 --> 00:14:29.200] We all talked together.
[00:14:29.840 --> 00:14:35.520] And then we gave him an offer in August 2020.
[00:14:35.520 --> 00:14:36.080] Is that right?
[00:14:36.080 --> 00:14:36.880] July, August.
[00:14:36.880 --> 00:14:41.760] And I had, I mean, I had, I think my only apprehension at the time was like, wow, we're going to hire someone else.
[00:14:41.760 --> 00:14:43.760] We had just hired Helen.
[00:14:43.760 --> 00:14:46.640] And I was like, whoa, like, are we going to be able to do this?
[00:14:46.640 --> 00:14:57.520] But the flip side of that, I was like, very pro because I felt like it would be, I had a sense that it would be a big upgrade for your quality of life.
[00:14:57.520 --> 00:14:58.000] Yeah.
[00:14:58.160 --> 00:15:10.240] Because you and I could talk, but in terms of like having someone that's working alongside you and going back and forth on code stuff, I could never really do that for you.
[00:15:10.240 --> 00:15:19.520] And every time you had like a call with like Jack Ellis or, you know, you met with somebody else, you always came back from those meetings kind of visibly fired up.
[00:15:19.520 --> 00:15:27.520] Just it's fun talking to other people that are smart, that know their shit, and that you can like bounce stuff off of.
[00:15:27.520 --> 00:15:31.200] Yeah, I mean, you know, everyone has a different way of looking at things.
[00:15:31.200 --> 00:15:34.800] And yeah, sometimes it's like, oh, that's like such a simple idea.
[00:15:34.800 --> 00:15:36.240] I never would have thought of that.
[00:15:36.400 --> 00:15:36.720] Yeah.
[00:15:36.720 --> 00:15:37.200] Yeah.
[00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:40.640] So I felt like it would be a big upgrade.
[00:15:40.640 --> 00:15:45.280] And then Jason came on and it was like almost noticeable from day one.
[00:15:45.280 --> 00:15:51.600] It was in the same way that we hired Helen, and it was like, wow, this really improves our lives.
[00:15:51.600 --> 00:15:52.080] Yeah.
[00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:54.560] It also helps us serve customers better.
[00:15:54.560 --> 00:16:07.480] But I think what was interesting in both cases, in my mind at least, the leading motivation was we want to make our lives better as founders.
[00:16:08.440 --> 00:16:11.640] Because you're right, we could have just kept going as a two-person company.
[00:16:11.640 --> 00:16:17.800] It was technically possible for us to do all the customer support ourselves.
[00:16:17.800 --> 00:16:24.360] And it was technically possible for you to stay as the only developer on the team.
[00:16:24.360 --> 00:16:25.000] Yeah.
[00:16:25.320 --> 00:16:30.040] And, you know, that would have been achievable.
[00:16:30.360 --> 00:16:33.560] But there was all of this quality of life stuff.
[00:16:33.560 --> 00:16:35.560] Like, yeah, at what cost?
[00:16:35.560 --> 00:16:42.200] I mean, it would have been especially, you know, given how much we grew, like it would have been, that would have been tough.
[00:16:42.200 --> 00:16:43.640] It would have been really hard.
[00:16:43.640 --> 00:16:50.680] And so the motivation being, primary motivation being, hey, let's upgrade our quality of life as founders.
[00:16:50.680 --> 00:16:53.160] Let's give us one less thing to worry about.
[00:16:53.160 --> 00:16:55.800] Let's take some things off our plate.
[00:16:55.800 --> 00:17:04.840] Let's balance out and smooth out and share the weight of responsibility of serving all these customers.
[00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:09.240] And, you know, for you, the weight and responsibility of keeping all the infrastructure up.
[00:17:09.240 --> 00:17:13.960] I'm sure that was a huge thing when Jason came on and all of a sudden you have someone else that's like sharing that load.
[00:17:13.960 --> 00:17:14.840] Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:14.920 --> 00:17:17.800] I mean, it's a huge, a huge relief.
[00:17:17.800 --> 00:17:28.200] I mean, plus, you know, together we made a number of upgrades and Jason, you know, worked his magic on the code and made things a lot more reliable.
[00:17:28.200 --> 00:17:32.600] Obviously, built a bunch of new features that we otherwise would not have.
[00:17:32.600 --> 00:17:38.040] So, yeah, I mean, from day one, yeah, it was, it was a great, I think it turned out better than we could have expected.
[00:17:38.040 --> 00:17:42.600] And plus, you know, I get to go to work with another friend every day.
[00:17:42.600 --> 00:17:43.960] Exactly.
[00:17:43.960 --> 00:17:47.520] So, I think I was kind of watching all of this.
[00:17:47.520 --> 00:17:50.320] And for a long time, I just felt like, well, this is perfect.
[00:17:44.680 --> 00:17:51.680] Like, we've got Helen, she's great.
[00:17:51.840 --> 00:17:52.640] Jason, great.
[00:17:52.640 --> 00:17:53.680] John and I.
[00:17:54.000 --> 00:17:58.400] And, you know, you and I had our retreat last year, and that was amazing.
[00:17:58.400 --> 00:18:02.640] And then we went on this awesome team retreat with Jason and Helen, and that was amazing.
[00:18:02.640 --> 00:18:05.600] And I was feeling overall just like, wow, this is perfect.
[00:18:05.600 --> 00:18:07.920] Like, we've got the perfect setup.
[00:18:08.560 --> 00:18:19.120] But I started to have more and more moments of lack of motivation, lack of that spark and that energy.
[00:18:19.440 --> 00:18:30.880] It became harder for me to do those kind of live streams and ad hoc calls, partly because we're more, I kind of felt bad actually.
[00:18:30.880 --> 00:18:45.520] When we were like the underdogs and really kind of building stuff up, it was like, okay, well, I can grab someone's time for free because we have no money and we have, but I started to feel like, I kind of feel bad about, you know, asking people for free time.
[00:18:45.520 --> 00:18:57.040] And so I started hiring different contractors for different things and found that really got me unstuck, gave me motivation, gave me purpose for my day.
[00:18:57.360 --> 00:19:05.520] And in many ways, the pair programming metaphor, I think, is so helpful for a lot of things in life.
[00:19:05.520 --> 00:19:12.960] Having someone that's kind of there with you, it's like if you have to clean the backyard by yourself, you'll procrastinate on that all day.
[00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:17.360] But if a friend says they're going to show up at your house and help you clean your backyard, you're going to do it.
[00:19:17.360 --> 00:19:18.080] You know what I mean?
[00:19:18.080 --> 00:19:20.800] Like, it's it's incredibly motivating.
[00:19:20.800 --> 00:19:25.040] If you're going to, if you say you're going to go for a run at 6 a.m., it's like, ah, maybe I'll do it.
[00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:27.520] But if a friend says, I'm going to be at your house at 6 a.m.
[00:19:28.080 --> 00:19:29.520] That is 100% true.
[00:19:29.520 --> 00:19:30.920] I mean, yeah, the same thing with Jason.
[00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:37.640] Like, I definitely worked more, but it was more fun because it was like, oh, we're working on this thing together.
[00:19:37.640 --> 00:19:38.680] Let's talk about this.
[00:19:38.680 --> 00:19:39.800] Let's do it.
[00:19:39.800 --> 00:19:40.440] Yeah.
[00:19:40.760 --> 00:19:41.080] Yeah.
[00:19:41.080 --> 00:19:43.800] I mean, otherwise, I would have just been like, oh, we should do this thing.
[00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:44.760] But like, I don't know.
[00:19:44.760 --> 00:19:46.760] There's some video games over here.
[00:19:47.080 --> 00:19:47.480] Yeah.
[00:19:47.800 --> 00:19:48.600] And the couch.
[00:19:48.600 --> 00:19:50.280] I could just hang out.
[00:19:50.280 --> 00:19:51.320] What's the rush?
[00:19:51.320 --> 00:19:57.720] And I think as founders, especially when you're doing a remote team, you need that motivation.
[00:19:57.720 --> 00:19:59.720] Otherwise, look at where we both are right now.
[00:19:59.720 --> 00:20:03.080] We're both in these tiny little offices by ourselves.
[00:20:03.080 --> 00:20:15.800] And without some another human being kind of there, it's easy to be just like kind of glum or to lose your motivation.
[00:20:16.440 --> 00:20:39.960] And I mean, there was also just things I was running into that I built the first version of our marketing site myself with, but it took a big push for me to get myself in a kind of web development mindset, learning about Tailwind, learning about Laravel, learning about the Statimix CMS.
[00:20:39.960 --> 00:20:51.800] And I could do it, and it was, it was really heartening work, but I just recognized like, there's some of the stuff I just don't want to make that big of an investment in, you know?
[00:20:51.800 --> 00:20:52.120] Right.
[00:20:52.440 --> 00:20:56.280] And you were, yeah, you were talking to other people a lot about it too.
[00:20:56.280 --> 00:20:57.480] And I didn't know any of it.
[00:20:57.480 --> 00:21:00.760] So I was like, I can't really hop in here and help you.
[00:21:00.240 --> 00:21:00.920] Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:00.920 --> 00:21:10.040] And I think there's just like that feeling of, I really wanted you to have as much time on the product as possible, you know?
[00:21:10.040 --> 00:21:18.480] Anyway, so I started having that feeling of like, man, I think I need kind of what John and Jason have, but over on the marketing side.
[00:21:19.040 --> 00:21:23.120] And so I hired a few contractors to help me on some different things.
[00:21:23.440 --> 00:21:27.200] And eventually I started hiring Josh more often.
[00:21:27.520 --> 00:21:32.400] And then it really helped my motivation.
[00:21:33.840 --> 00:21:41.200] And eventually I said to him, Can you just book a bunch of times in my calendar where you and I get on a call?
[00:21:41.520 --> 00:21:46.960] And I found, so he would book maybe two sessions a week.
[00:21:47.280 --> 00:21:51.520] And I just found myself so fired up during those sessions.
[00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:54.080] And we're able to look at the site together.
[00:21:54.240 --> 00:21:56.160] I'm like, okay, we need all this built.
[00:21:56.160 --> 00:21:57.600] And he would go away.
[00:21:57.600 --> 00:22:01.920] And then the next call, he would have all this stuff to demo for me.
[00:22:01.920 --> 00:22:10.880] And just having somebody that could execute my vision and even like go back and forth and offer their own ideas.
[00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:28.880] And creatively, that energy was just like it felt way different than those are the best kind of people too because they, you know, you have this idea in your mind and then you explain it and they go away and you're like, I don't know what they're going to come back with.
[00:22:28.880 --> 00:22:33.520] And then it always just like surprises you and you're like, wow, this is better than I even would have expected.
[00:22:33.520 --> 00:22:34.080] Yes.
[00:22:34.080 --> 00:22:34.560] Yeah.
[00:22:34.880 --> 00:22:37.120] And I mean, that's the hardest part, right?
[00:22:37.120 --> 00:22:43.520] Is often just having someone being able to do the work while you're focused on other stuff.
[00:22:43.840 --> 00:22:50.240] And it really is a multiplier in so many ways in terms of actually practically getting things done.
[00:22:50.240 --> 00:22:54.480] But on the human side, just enjoying my job more.
[00:22:54.480 --> 00:22:59.600] I was just coming to work feeling like this is freaking amazing.
[00:22:59.720 --> 00:23:14.440] And even like, it's funny because, of course, with Helen, Jason, and Josh, we're hoping that we overall were hoping that we serve customers better, that we increase the number of customers we have, all those things.
[00:23:14.760 --> 00:23:25.000] But I was like, even if these changes to the marketing site get us no new customers, it's still worth it for me because I'm having more fun.
[00:23:25.320 --> 00:23:26.760] I'm enjoying it more.
[00:23:27.560 --> 00:23:32.600] We're putting stuff out into the world, and I feel like, wow, Josh and I did that together.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:45.800] And it's that same kind of feeling I had with you and I, like, we came together and it was like the sum of each of our parts really is more than either of us could do individually.
[00:23:45.800 --> 00:23:46.280] Yeah.
[00:23:46.520 --> 00:24:00.920] And it's really exciting seeing this team come together where the sum of all these parts of Helen really thinking about customer success all day and really strategizing around that.
[00:24:00.920 --> 00:24:07.640] And then you and Jason really strategizing around code and product and infrastructure.
[00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:23.640] And then having over on the marketing side, Josh and I think about, and then all of us mixing together in Slack and team meetings and going, you know, sometimes all coming together and strategizing and thinking and throwing out ideas.
[00:24:23.640 --> 00:24:32.760] And it just felt like, wow, like this is a bigger, a bigger, better machine, a bigger, better.
[00:24:32.760 --> 00:24:33.160] Yeah.
[00:24:33.160 --> 00:24:33.400] Yeah.
[00:24:33.400 --> 00:24:39.240] So that was the motivation was primarily for me a quality of life improvement.
[00:24:39.240 --> 00:24:42.840] We built this company to give us a better life.
[00:24:42.840 --> 00:24:44.360] What is the company for?
[00:24:44.480 --> 00:24:49.600] The company is to give the team members and their families a better life.
[00:24:49.600 --> 00:24:52.320] That's how I, that's how I view it.
[00:24:52.320 --> 00:25:02.320] And the product is to give customers a better life, to improve, to help them do whatever they set out to do with a podcast.
[00:25:02.640 --> 00:25:15.840] And that distinction is really important and motivating for me because every day I show up going, I know this is the best job that John Buddha has ever had.
[00:25:15.840 --> 00:25:23.200] And I want to make sure that the company continues to do its job of giving John a better life.
[00:25:23.200 --> 00:25:24.640] That's motivating to me.
[00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:25.680] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:25.680 --> 00:25:30.480] And then as we've brought more people on, it's like, I know this is the best job Helen's ever had.
[00:25:30.480 --> 00:25:32.640] I know this is the best job Jason's ever had.
[00:25:32.640 --> 00:25:36.080] I know this, I want this to be the best job Josh has ever had.
[00:25:36.400 --> 00:25:38.480] And how are we going to do that?
[00:25:38.480 --> 00:25:40.320] Well, we've got to keep working on the product.
[00:25:40.320 --> 00:25:42.320] We've got to keep signing up new customers.
[00:25:42.320 --> 00:25:44.080] We've got to reduce churn.
[00:25:44.080 --> 00:25:47.360] We've got to make it enjoyable.
[00:25:47.360 --> 00:25:52.720] You know, we've got to add things into our everyday life that makes it worthwhile.
[00:25:52.720 --> 00:25:55.840] We've got to give them a piece of ownership.
[00:25:55.840 --> 00:25:58.320] You know, all these things kind of come out.
[00:25:58.960 --> 00:26:03.680] And yeah, it's that piece is motivating to me.
[00:26:03.680 --> 00:26:16.320] And in some ways, all the product stuff, like making customers' lives better, even that feeds into eventually making the company better so that the stakeholders in the company have a better life.
[00:26:16.320 --> 00:26:22.480] Yeah, I mean, there's there's many, many days where I'm like, I don't quite finish what I was working on or what Jason and I were working on.
[00:26:22.560 --> 00:26:25.280] I wake up and I'm like excited to get back to it still.
[00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:26.800] And it's like five years in.
[00:26:26.800 --> 00:26:27.920] Yeah, totally.
[00:26:27.920 --> 00:26:29.360] Which is which is great.
[00:26:29.360 --> 00:26:39.640] Like, yeah, there's nothing worse than like showing up at work at your job and you're like, oh God, I got to continue working on this mess of an idea that someone else had.
[00:26:39.640 --> 00:26:56.280] Well, I mean, this is this has been the motivating factor so many times for us where we feel, and in many ways, we're lucky because in order for this company, in order for the company to have a higher purpose, like making people's lives better, you have to be making sales.
[00:26:56.280 --> 00:26:57.320] You have to have revenue.
[00:26:57.320 --> 00:26:58.760] You have to have margins.
[00:26:58.760 --> 00:27:01.160] We were lucky that we found this thing.
[00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:01.800] It worked.
[00:27:01.800 --> 00:27:03.720] We were able to execute on it.
[00:27:03.720 --> 00:27:10.920] And we were also able to get lucky enough that it became a financial engine that helped us to have a better life.
[00:27:10.920 --> 00:27:12.760] So that part's lucky.
[00:27:12.760 --> 00:27:34.200] But, you know, showing up for a company that you think doesn't care about you as an employee, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't give a shit is, it's just incredibly demotivating for a human to feel like you have no purpose, to feel like your work actually doesn't matter.
[00:27:34.200 --> 00:27:38.360] I think everybody at Transistor feels like my work matters.
[00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:40.040] You know what I mean?
[00:27:40.040 --> 00:27:46.120] And that is such a good feeling that we could provide that for ourselves and other people.
[00:27:46.440 --> 00:27:56.440] So just to expand on it more, so we've hired Josh full-time to primarily assist me, partner with me on the marketing side.
[00:27:56.440 --> 00:27:59.640] So that means building stuff for our website.
[00:27:59.960 --> 00:28:04.920] It means doing some projects like building podcast website themes.
[00:28:04.920 --> 00:28:15.000] But because he's also just a good full-stack web developer with Rails experience, eventually he might start to work on stuff on the app side as well.
[00:28:15.840 --> 00:28:17.040] Yeah, I hope so.
[00:28:17.040 --> 00:28:28.560] Yeah, I mean, practically, like the utility is Josh can execute on the technical and design stuff when it comes to building web stuff.
[00:28:28.560 --> 00:28:33.440] He can just do that way better at a higher quality and faster than I can.
[00:28:33.440 --> 00:28:42.960] Him being this full-stack developer that can help us on a variety of projects also made him a good hire from a utility standpoint.
[00:28:42.960 --> 00:28:45.920] Like, oh, wow, he could do a lot of jobs for us.
[00:28:46.560 --> 00:28:54.080] And the fact that he had been a longtime customer user of Transistor, had used transistor with many of his consulting clients.
[00:28:54.080 --> 00:28:58.320] He was also editing podcasts for a bunch of different people on the side.
[00:28:58.320 --> 00:29:10.560] So he had seen the product from a variety of perspectives as a podcaster himself, but also as somebody who was offering podcasting services to other folks.
[00:29:10.560 --> 00:29:17.760] That really kind of rounded him out as, you know, a good option for hiring.
[00:29:17.760 --> 00:29:25.360] But again, I think, and anyone that wants to work for a small startup, I often hear people, oh, I want to really work for a small company.
[00:29:25.360 --> 00:29:33.440] I think figuring out what the job to be done is for the boss, what the boss actually wants, is important.
[00:29:33.760 --> 00:29:41.360] And the blunt kind of general answer is bosses hire employees to make their lives better.
[00:29:41.360 --> 00:29:50.960] And that could be, it could be something that's very utilitarian, like I'm just looking for someone to take this off my plate and do the job better than I can.
[00:29:50.960 --> 00:29:56.480] But it could also be emotional, which is, I want to work alongside somebody.
[00:29:56.480 --> 00:29:58.320] I want more energy in this place.
[00:29:58.320 --> 00:30:01.880] I want more people with a positive attitude around this place.
[00:30:02.440 --> 00:30:08.200] I can't tell, there's a few times I've been a part, I've been at startups where they've had layoffs.
[00:30:08.200 --> 00:30:10.360] You know, they would lay off a bunch of people.
[00:30:10.520 --> 00:30:17.800] I wouldn't get fired, and I would go to the CEO and go, What, like, I'm just curious, like, why'd you keep me?
[00:30:18.120 --> 00:30:25.400] And sometimes the answer was, you're just a positive, high-energy person that's nice to have around.
[00:30:26.040 --> 00:30:36.440] And I think there's that idea of people are hiring people to do jobs in their lives.
[00:30:36.440 --> 00:30:40.520] And some of it is just like emotional.
[00:30:41.160 --> 00:30:42.760] I just want to be around somebody that could.
[00:30:43.000 --> 00:30:48.120] I mean, that's kind of why, like, you know, early on, that's why I kind of agreed to bring you on.
[00:30:48.120 --> 00:30:53.480] Like, when I had started that and didn't really want, necessarily, want a partnership.
[00:30:53.480 --> 00:30:53.880] Yeah.
[00:30:54.200 --> 00:30:57.240] But I thought about it and I was like, yeah, I don't know.
[00:30:57.240 --> 00:30:58.200] It makes sense.
[00:30:58.200 --> 00:31:00.600] You're a nice, high-energy guy to have around.
[00:31:01.560 --> 00:31:11.480] Which is why we had to solve this glum problem because, you know, if I'm not high-energy or nice, then it's time to show me the door.
[00:31:11.480 --> 00:31:11.880] Yeah.
[00:31:11.880 --> 00:31:16.520] So those are the reasons we picked Josh.
[00:31:16.520 --> 00:31:20.120] And I think it's also interesting to look at now.
[00:31:20.120 --> 00:31:22.120] We've hired three people.
[00:31:22.120 --> 00:31:27.720] In every case, Helen, Jason, Josh, we've hired somebody we've known for years.
[00:31:28.040 --> 00:31:34.680] So I met Helen in the Mega Maker community, and Josh also in the Mega Maker community.
[00:31:34.680 --> 00:31:37.320] And you had worked with Jason previously.
[00:31:37.320 --> 00:31:39.480] Yeah, and has been friends with him before that.
[00:31:39.480 --> 00:31:42.120] And even the way John and I met.
[00:31:42.600 --> 00:31:47.520] This is the thing people sometimes forget: is that John and I met in 2014.
[00:31:48.640 --> 00:31:53.760] It would be four years until we started working on transistor together.
[00:31:53.760 --> 00:32:05.600] But in the in-between time, you keep up with people, you check in with them, maybe you see them every year, maybe you're chatting with them, maybe you're sending them the occasional note.
[00:32:05.600 --> 00:32:12.560] Like those things matter and relationships matter.
[00:32:12.880 --> 00:32:19.200] And I think another nice thing about a small company is we don't need to hire a ton of people.
[00:32:19.200 --> 00:32:33.600] And it's given us this option of every time, you know, I'm kind of looking around for like who could I hire as a contractor, which both Helen and Josh were contractors first.
[00:32:34.800 --> 00:32:41.120] And that's usually, I think, going to be the first step for us: we're going to hire people as contractors.
[00:32:41.120 --> 00:32:51.840] And, you know, when it comes time to, you know, we get that feeling of like, ah, it'd be really great to have a full-time member of the team.
[00:32:52.160 --> 00:32:59.520] The first folks we're going to look at are folks we've worked with in the past as contractors, former co-workers.
[00:32:59.840 --> 00:33:04.480] And we've hired many contractors over the years.
[00:33:04.480 --> 00:33:10.320] And of course, we couldn't hire them all as full-time people, but that's part of the step.
[00:33:10.320 --> 00:33:19.520] Yeah, I mean, you know, we certainly could hire someone we didn't know, but man, that would that would be much different.
[00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:25.120] I feel like, unless it's a certain type of person, it takes a while for people to like really get used to each other.
[00:33:25.120 --> 00:33:28.880] And like, it's just, yeah, that'd be tough.
[00:33:28.880 --> 00:33:36.440] I mean, there's obviously a great people out there who would be a good fit, but for, yeah, for our, for our case, I think it just makes a lot of sense.
[00:33:37.160 --> 00:33:56.280] I wish people could see the tension because when you're thinking about hiring somebody, there's even in each of the cases, Helen, Jason, Josh, even though we knew them before, we had worked with them before, that decision is still weighty.
[00:33:56.840 --> 00:33:58.840] It weighs on you as a founder.
[00:33:58.840 --> 00:34:21.640] And until you've been a founder and you are personally responsible financially for other people's families, I don't think people can fully understand the weight of feeling like we are going to take another risk or movement or additional responsibility on our shoulders as founders to provide for somebody else.
[00:34:21.640 --> 00:34:24.200] It's just a heavy decision.
[00:34:24.200 --> 00:34:29.960] Not to mention like financially, obviously, but like, is this person actually going to enjoy working here?
[00:34:29.960 --> 00:34:33.080] And like, in Jason's case, like, all right, we're going to hire Jason.
[00:34:33.080 --> 00:34:34.120] Like, obviously, I like Jason.
[00:34:34.120 --> 00:34:35.240] He's a friend of mine.
[00:34:35.240 --> 00:34:38.760] But is he going to get in here and like open the code up and be like, wow, this is garbage.
[00:34:38.760 --> 00:34:40.200] Like, what did you do?
[00:34:40.200 --> 00:34:41.800] I don't want to work on this.
[00:34:41.800 --> 00:34:42.360] Yeah.
[00:34:42.680 --> 00:34:43.080] Yeah.
[00:34:43.080 --> 00:34:54.920] Well, and also just like you, you can be, you can know somebody, but there's still that thought of like, what's it going to be like when they're actually on the team?
[00:34:54.920 --> 00:34:57.880] Like, how is that going to change the team dynamic?
[00:34:57.880 --> 00:35:05.080] And, you know, that team retreat, I think, really cemented the fact that we've got something special here.
[00:35:05.080 --> 00:35:06.760] It might not last forever.
[00:35:06.760 --> 00:35:15.000] We want to enjoy it while we can, but we also want to be as protective about that, this thing we've built as we can.
[00:35:16.320 --> 00:35:27.840] And every single person, even though we love them and we've, you know, we had worked with them previous, there's still that thought, that, that worry of how is that going to affect the team?
[00:35:27.840 --> 00:35:30.560] You know, how is that going to affect the team dynamic?
[00:35:30.560 --> 00:35:31.840] And it's heavy.
[00:35:31.840 --> 00:35:36.720] And I think once you understand this, hopefully we're painting a picture here.
[00:35:36.720 --> 00:35:43.840] How much more of a risk is it to get a cold call or a cold email or a cold resume from somebody?
[00:35:44.160 --> 00:35:47.680] It's just you have to travel so much more ground.
[00:35:47.680 --> 00:35:51.920] You're taking such a bigger risk on hiring that person.
[00:35:52.240 --> 00:35:54.480] And I honestly can't imagine it.
[00:35:54.480 --> 00:35:58.960] I can't imagine having to make an even bigger jump.
[00:35:58.960 --> 00:36:00.800] Yeah, especially with a small team like us.
[00:36:00.800 --> 00:36:04.080] Like, yeah, I mean, adding in one person to a team of four.
[00:36:04.400 --> 00:36:04.960] Yeah.
[00:36:04.960 --> 00:36:08.880] That's a huge, I mean, yeah, how's everyone going to interact?
[00:36:08.880 --> 00:36:23.200] And like, it, it probably is why there's a lot of big companies are shitty to work at because they just need to hire people and the they they have to put it out for tender and they have to, you know, they have to do all those things.
[00:36:23.200 --> 00:36:32.800] And it's just, you really don't know what this person is like until you've had a bunch of shared experience with them.
[00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:44.160] It takes, what, 72 hours of time for somebody to become an acquaintance and then even more hours for them to become like a closer friend.
[00:36:44.160 --> 00:37:00.120] That's that's an investment of time that you just don't get getting someone's resume and then being like, let's bring them in for an interview and a second interview and asking them, you know, what's the biggest professional hurdle of their life so far?
[00:37:00.120 --> 00:37:10.360] You know, sell me this pen or, you know, like, show me a time where you really had to figure out.
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:13.080] Like, what do you see as your biggest weakness?
[00:37:13.080 --> 00:37:14.360] Yeah, what's your biggest weakness?
[00:37:14.360 --> 00:37:18.280] It's like, well, that's not deep enough.
[00:37:18.520 --> 00:37:24.280] You really can only get a sense of a person once you've spent some time.
[00:37:24.280 --> 00:37:44.600] And even then, like any relationship, there's this ongoing risk for all of us that each of us is still, any of us, if we're not taking care of our own shit, are at risk of becoming assholes.
[00:37:44.920 --> 00:37:49.560] And then there's also just life stuff that can happen that can affect people individually as well.
[00:37:49.560 --> 00:37:52.200] So there's always a risk of other stuff.
[00:37:52.200 --> 00:37:58.360] But when minimizing it and hiring folks that you're like, you know what?
[00:37:58.360 --> 00:38:00.520] I feel good about this risk.
[00:38:00.520 --> 00:38:03.400] I feel good about this, bringing this person on.
[00:38:03.400 --> 00:38:11.960] We know enough about them that, you know, we can do this and it's going to be a net positive.
[00:38:11.960 --> 00:38:13.800] You can only get that with shared time.
[00:38:14.120 --> 00:38:15.000] Absolutely.
[00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:17.880] That's, yeah, so congrats to Josh.
[00:38:17.880 --> 00:38:19.800] We're really excited to have him on.
[00:38:19.800 --> 00:38:27.240] Helen is celebrating her two-year work anniversary this month, which is just wild to think.
[00:38:27.240 --> 00:38:27.800] It is.
[00:38:28.200 --> 00:38:37.720] Like we've said multiple times, having Helen, Jason, and now Josh, it's just been just awesome to work alongside these people.
[00:38:38.040 --> 00:38:39.960] And yeah, that's how we think about hiring.
[00:38:39.960 --> 00:38:43.960] My guess is we will probably not hire again for quite a while.
[00:38:44.200 --> 00:38:47.200] We took a, we didn't hire anybody last year.
[00:38:47.200 --> 00:38:52.800] So Helen and Jason both got hired in 2021, nobody in 2022.
[00:38:53.120 --> 00:38:55.600] Josh now in 2023.
[00:38:55.920 --> 00:39:00.320] I think it's going to be a little while, especially with the economy the way it is.
[00:39:00.320 --> 00:39:06.640] We're, and you know, all this Section 174 and all this stuff.
[00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:08.000] Texas stuff.
[00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:09.440] Yeah, I don't know.
[00:39:09.440 --> 00:39:11.840] I don't even know what we would customer the hire for.
[00:39:12.240 --> 00:39:14.800] I think customer success, maybe.
[00:39:15.040 --> 00:39:18.560] That's still one area that I find a hard.
[00:39:18.560 --> 00:39:20.400] Some of this is just my personality.
[00:39:20.400 --> 00:39:24.880] I personally find it difficult to turn that part off.
[00:39:24.880 --> 00:39:28.320] Like if I'm on vacation, I'm answering tickets.
[00:39:28.320 --> 00:39:31.280] And you got to stop doing that.
[00:39:31.280 --> 00:39:31.600] I know.
[00:39:31.600 --> 00:39:31.840] I know.
[00:39:31.840 --> 00:39:33.200] I got to stop doing that.
[00:39:33.200 --> 00:39:37.520] I mean, we have everyone pitches in, which is great.
[00:39:37.520 --> 00:39:38.560] It's just so nice.
[00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:44.160] Like Helen, while we're sleeping, is covering all those hours.
[00:39:44.160 --> 00:39:49.200] And it's so nice to just know somebody's taking care of it while I'm sleeping.
[00:39:49.760 --> 00:39:56.960] And I could see in the future us maybe hiring someone customer success, but one of the things we do is wait and see.
[00:39:56.960 --> 00:39:59.120] So now we've got one person on the team.
[00:39:59.120 --> 00:40:03.520] Jason's on vacation right now, hopefully not opening his laptop.
[00:40:03.520 --> 00:40:08.960] And, you know, now Josh is going to be able to pitch in and help with customer support.
[00:40:08.960 --> 00:40:11.120] And it's gotten way better for sure.
[00:40:11.120 --> 00:40:26.400] Like it used to be you and I would leave on a trip or something and it would be like, okay, well, hope they got Wi-Fi at the campground um i i have been able to turn my brain off more as I'm away.
[00:40:26.720 --> 00:40:28.960] So we're going to see it is it is a lot easier.
[00:40:28.960 --> 00:42:08.800] Yeah, I think now with Josh and someone else to help answer support tickets yeah we'll be able to do that absolutely cool i think we should end it there we've been we've been chatting for a while um is there anything you want to talk about in terms of features and stuff we're working on another thing that maybe listeners can keep us accountable john and i need to do our founder retreat and uh we got yeah we didn't we were gonna go snowboarding the winter and now it was 85 in chicago last week i don't think there's much snow left yeah i think april or may is well probably not april it'll probably be may are you doing anything in may may or june no um may or june yeah john john and i need to get together we should do a summer summer yeah exactly well yeah june i guess summer i don't know uh so yeah we're gonna work on that i'm working on some video studio stuff but i can talk about that next week we've got the patreon feature out we talked about that already anything else we want to chat about um yeah i mean the new the new theme came out i think on josh's second day which he worked on you know previously but that was a nice welcome gift yeah and getting to see people use it uh already we're gonna try to get him to work on another one he has already got some other ideas but those those themes that that podcast website feature that we built is it's really an app within an app we have yeah it's it's quite flexible i think what you can do with it so there's i mean there's there's a lot of stuff like that which i think will bring josh in on within the app of like we've been talking about updating, for example, like embed players and customizability forever.
[00:42:08.800 --> 00:42:09.440] Yes.
[00:42:09.440 --> 00:42:12.720] And like, I have ideas about it, but i did we've just been busy with other stuff.
[00:42:12.720 --> 00:42:13.280] Yeah.
[00:42:13.280 --> 00:42:13.520] Yeah.
[00:42:13.520 --> 00:42:16.000] That would be awesome actually for you and josh to pair on that.
[00:42:16.000 --> 00:42:23.200] I think, I think you two would would energize each other when it came to like throwing back ideas and stuff.
[00:42:23.200 --> 00:42:24.080] Yeah, for sure.
[00:42:24.320 --> 00:42:32.240] There's other stuff Jason and I have been working on around like campaigns and dynamic audio and things that we're gonna we're gonna release pretty soon, which should be kind of cool.
[00:42:32.240 --> 00:42:34.320] And then I think we can announce this now.
[00:42:35.280 --> 00:42:43.600] I mean, anybody could see from looking at their feed, but the acquired podcast switched to Transistor, which is really awesome for us.
[00:42:43.600 --> 00:42:44.640] We were fans of that show.
[00:42:44.640 --> 00:42:48.960] If you haven't heard of it, it's like hardcore history, if you've ever heard that podcast.
[00:42:48.960 --> 00:42:57.840] But for great companies, they go through the history of it used to be just tech companies, but now it's any great company.
[00:42:57.840 --> 00:43:02.640] They just did a two-part series on Nintendo that is excellent.
[00:43:02.960 --> 00:43:04.640] So highly recommend.
[00:43:04.960 --> 00:43:05.920] There's a lot of good episodes.
[00:43:06.080 --> 00:43:07.840] The Taylor Swift episode is amazing.
[00:43:07.920 --> 00:43:08.800] Taylor Swift episode.
[00:43:08.880 --> 00:43:12.000] The Walmart episode is actually very good.
[00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:14.400] The Sony episode is very good.
[00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:29.040] They do just an unbelievable job at researching, doing the research on these companies, and then giving it this narrative that's like these are sometimes two, three-hour podcast episodes.
[00:43:29.040 --> 00:43:32.880] And I'm a fan.
[00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:38.800] Like when they drop in my, my, in Overcast, it's like, I'm listening.
[00:43:38.800 --> 00:43:39.680] It's great having them on.
[00:43:39.680 --> 00:43:40.720] They're super nice guys.
[00:43:40.720 --> 00:43:42.320] So yeah, give it a listen.
[00:43:42.320 --> 00:43:43.760] Give it a listen.
[00:43:43.760 --> 00:43:48.800] And yeah, John, why don't we thank the fine Patreon supporters?
[00:43:48.800 --> 00:43:50.880] Anybody can support us on Patreon.
[00:43:50.880 --> 00:43:56.320] Go to sass.transistor.fm slash supporters if you want to see the other folks.
[00:43:56.320 --> 00:43:57.600] But yeah, who do we have?
[00:43:57.600 --> 00:43:59.200] Yeah, thanks everyone for supporting us.
[00:43:59.360 --> 00:44:33.320] We have Pascal from sharpen.page, the folks at rewardful.com, Greg Park, Mitchell Davis from recruitkit.com.au, Marcel Follet from WeAreBold.af, Ethan Gunderson, Anton Zorin from prodcamp.com, Bill Kondo, Ward from Memberspace, Russell Brown from Fotivo.com, Evandra Sassi, Austin Lovelace, Michael Sitver, the fine folks at Fathom Analytics, Dan Buddha, my brother.
[00:44:33.320 --> 00:44:33.960] Hey, Dan.
[00:44:33.960 --> 00:44:37.720] Colin Gray, Darby Frey, and Dave Junta.
[00:44:37.720 --> 00:44:39.480] Junta.
[00:44:39.800 --> 00:44:43.080] Tell Junta he needs to update his Patreon photo.
[00:44:44.040 --> 00:44:44.680] All right.
[00:44:44.840 --> 00:44:45.480] Darby.
[00:44:45.480 --> 00:44:46.360] Darby Frey too.
[00:44:46.360 --> 00:44:47.160] Dan Buddha.
[00:44:47.160 --> 00:44:48.680] Fathom Analytics.
[00:44:48.680 --> 00:44:50.360] Just a faceless smiley.
[00:44:50.360 --> 00:44:54.200] Yeah, go update your Patreon photos, folks.
[00:44:54.200 --> 00:44:56.120] And thanks for listening.
[00:44:56.120 --> 00:44:59.240] If you like this show, please recommend it to a friend.
[00:44:59.240 --> 00:45:00.440] Just text them a message.
[00:45:00.440 --> 00:45:02.520] Hey, you should listen to this episode.
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[00:45:12.120 --> 00:45:13.800] Talk to you later.
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