So Steve Jobs said, hey, we want to include this in iTunes. It's actually benefited podcasting considerably. Now there's disadvantages and advantages of centralization versus decentralization. But philosophically, I believe that the mess you get with decentralization is actually worth it in the long haul, because it gives creators optionality.
Welcome to Metacast Podcast Episode 20. This is a podcast where Ilya, my co-host, and I bring on guests that are doing podcasts and explore the podcasting landscape. Today for episode 20, we have Justin Jackson from Transistor.fm and many other things we'll get to shortly. Say hello, Justin. Hey.
Hi everybody, good to be here. I like talking about all these things. I like talking about podcasts, I like talking about the podcasting landscape. So yeah, excited to be here.
Arnab obviously talked to you before. I mean, I knew Transistor.fm, but you know, you and I never met. And I was asking today, Arnab, how do I spell Jackson? Is it like a C-K or an X? Because I couldn't find you in LinkedIn. He's like, like Michael Jackson. Okay. So I was thrilled.
Not like Michael Jackson. Nice! Yeah, perfect.
Nice! Perfect! Perfect! Alright, so Justin, in terms of an introduction, so you have Transistor.fm, which is your main work right now, and then you have a few podcasts, newsletter, you're very popular on Twitter. Tell us a little bit more about what's going on.
I've been in the software industry since 2008 and kind of worked my way up to being product manager at different startups and then in 2012 I finally got a remote job and I moved here. I live in kind of a ski town in British Columbia in the Okanagan Valley
So one of you is from Vancouver, right? Yes, I am. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so we're in the Okanagan Valley and When I moved here my friend back in Edmonton Him and I used to go to Out for Beers and talk about product all the time and we had talked about starting a podcast but once I moved away it kind of pushed that idea to the fore and
He said why don't we do this podcast now? And so in 2012 we started a podcast called Product People where we interviewed some of our favorite product people a lot of people startup founders bootstrapped startup founders people we dreamed of Talking to Jason Freed from 37signals patio11 previously at stripe a bunch of folks that were we were just like man could you imagine if we could ever talk to that person and we made this list and we started interviewing them and
I just really fell in love with making podcasts. I've been listening to podcasts for quite a while I had a iPod video classic that I used to listen to dignity on Startups for the rest of us back to work like there were all these shows that I loved and I'd always been into Radio and talk radio in particular and so I was like, okay, I think I'm gonna love this
So yeah, we started that first show. I loved it. And even when he didn't want to do the show anymore I wanted to keep it going and so I had a show called Product People then I had a show called build and launch which was me exploring launching Independent projects and startups and then I had another show called mega maker where it was kind of that but multiplied even more where I did a hundred projects in a year and
those podcasts eventually became an online community called mega maker for people who wanted to bootstrap their own projects and That's been going now since 2013 and
You know, I've been consulting along the way. I've been doing some startup work. I Created a course called marketing for developers and then in 2014 I met John Buddha who's my co-founder he had built the first version of simple cast and wanted to get some folks who really understood podcasting on the platform and so he asked me to come on there and Review it and I gave him a bunch of advice and then we became friends and then that partnership ended for him and later in
2017 he was working for cards against humanity and they wanted to launch a podcast and he thought you know I'm gonna build another podcast hosting platform and started talking to me and eventually we decided we're gonna work on it together and so signed partnership docs early 2018 and started a new podcast called build your sass which just covers our whole story of building this product and this company together and now we have three employees in the UK US and Canada and
Things are going really well. We've really built a business that we're proud of We love our customers and we have a really calm work environment We've done some things right and we've gotten lucky along the way and all of that is translated Into kind of what we're living now and it's been great
Cool. So you mentioned you had this podcast where you sort of documented your journey of building a company. That was right around the time when the startup podcast by Gimlet was around. Like who was first, you or they?
Justin Jackson, Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Cereal came out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And when Serial came out, that tipped the American listening. So, shortly after Serial came out, 51% of Americans had ever listened to a podcast. And that was the first time ever that it was the majority of adult Americans had ever listened to a podcast. So that was happening. You had the rise of Gimlet and the Startup Podcast and what they were doing. And even like in coffee shops, I noticed people were in lineups starting to talk about the podcast they were listening to.
These things kind of all started to coalesce. And then when John told me he was thinking about doing another podcast hosting company, I thought, this wave is building. I didn't think it was building into a massive tsunami. It's not the same as other markets like online video or email newsletter software or CRM. Just every year, podcast listenership grows 10, 15%. And it has this nice steady growth curve.
But the fact that we were now flipping over to this new era where the majority of Americans now were going to be discovering podcasts and then becoming, increasing their listenership. So they would go from listening to a podcast once to maybe listen to a podcast every six months to three months to every month to every week to every day.
And then their daily listening habit generally increases as well. So they go from listening to 20 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day to 40 minutes a day, 50, et cetera.
As our commutes increase, yes.
Yeah, the funny thing is that we actually saw listening during the pandemic when a lot of people were working from home. Listening actually stayed steady and actually increased for a lot of people. They were finding new times to listen to podcasts when they were doing the dishes or walking the dog or whatever.
Yeah, and I think it was like a connection to the outside world that you were desperately seeking during that time.
Are you too familiar with the Jobs to be Done framework?
Yes, yes, but you might need to give it to the author or listener.
Sure. So Jobs to be Done was popularized by Harvard researcher Clayton Christensen. He's the one that came up with the idea of disruption, disruption theory. So these small startups can disrupt a larger incumbent. And that was his first big book. And then he wrote a second book called Competing Against Luck. The Jobs to be Done theory had already been around. He didn't come up with it, but he popularized it. The idea is that we don't just buy products every day for utilitarian
reasons. We buy products to do jobs in our lives. And often these jobs are emotional. So a coffee, we're not just buying the caffeinated liquid. We're not just buying the caffeine and what it does for us. We're buying a bunch of other things, right? There's the ritual of making your coffee in the morning. There's the nostalgia. Oh, this is like how my parents used to do it. There's the idea of going to a coffee shop where you might see some friends or it's a famously the
third place. So there's all of these other emotional jobs that come with coffee. You know, even here in my office here in this coworking office, coffee is often an excuse to go for a walk with somebody else in the building, right? Hey, who wants to go for coffee? Well, podcasts have many of these emotional jobs. Like you mentioned, a lot of people listen to podcasts for human
connection. A lot of people listen to podcasts to get human insight that they wouldn't normally get because in the long form people often say things or reveal things that are very human that as a listener you can identify with, it's like, Oh my gosh, I didn't know anyone else thought that way. Or I didn't realize other people had that experience or wow, I've always wondered about that. And it creates this parasocial connection, but it's still a connection, a human connection.
You know, that's a big reason. A lot of people listen just for that, but there's other jobs too. You know, in the morning I like to listen to business podcasts as I walk down to my office The job to be done there is get me hyped up, get me excited about the day, put some ideas in my head so that when I get to my desk, I can feel activated and ready to do some work for the day.
Right. Yeah. Funny tangent here. So I spoke to a colleague of mine, I asked him if he listens to podcasts and he's like, yeah, I used to listen to podcasts from 2016 through 2020 during the Trump administration era. Because he said that, you know, we're getting a bit political here. He said that he was just so annoyed with Trump and everything, but he wanted to get that content,
but it would always like agitate him. And over the years, he said that he started to associate podcasts with Trump and with being kind of a bit antsy, you know, after Trump was gone from the office, he stopped listening to podcasts because he had this negative association with podcasts. The job to be done, he hired the podcast to do for him is like to agree on something. Yes.
Yes, yes. Or that was the effect. I mean, this is the reason actually product is so hard. It's the reason creating anything is hard is that you want to connect with a job to be done. And there was tons of political shows during the Trump administration and they were very popular. And then the news shows were also very popular. So The Daily was a very popular show because people
were just, I got to find out what's happening. The flip side of that is that if that was the job to be done once Trump was out of office or once they got so frustrated with all the negative news, then podcasting was no longer doing a job for them. The role for a podcaster in that case would be to convince those folks that there's actually other jobs to be done. There's a really funny one called Sleep With Me. And the idea is it's a really boring podcast where
the host tries to put you to sleep. So if you're staying up with anxiety, you can put this on and it's just distracting enough. You're not thinking about your day or whatever. And then eventually for some people it helps them fall asleep. So there's other jobs to be done that could be brought up. And you know, that's a great thing about the medium is people are always finding new ones. So there's still hope for your friend.
I thought the job to be done for the Sleep with Me podcast was different.
It's got a good title.
Very catchy.
Talking about your transistor journey, what do you do? Of the three people you said you have three people right now. And you've been, I think, in the indie making space for a while now. You build software, but you didn't come in with a software engineering like education or anything, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've always been tactical and have always been in love with the web. So front-end stuff I'm reasonably proficient at but not back-end stuff. So the beautiful thing about Partnering up with John is that he is just an awesome software engineer and product person He's the unicorn full stack developer who has a good design sense who is very good at building He built all of our infrastructure, too So with hosting we have quite a few moving parts a lot of bandwidth expenses
You have to serve the audio. You have to host the audio you have to with dynamic ad insertion. You have to Regenerate the audio basically on demand and John built the initial version of all of that The team was I'm gonna do product and marketing in the Venn diagram of engineer and marketing
There's a the middle I think is product That's where the two come together the insights that you have as a good marketer or person who's in sales or whatever are crucial for the product, but then someone who's an engineer or a builder or Good designer or whatever can also bring their sense to the product as well So we met in the middle for product But then I had marketing and promotion and he had building the product on his side and that worked really well for us
It was a the first time in my life where I felt like I partnered with someone and I Was running as fast as I could and I looked over and he's running right there alongside me It just felt like we were yin and yang It felt like we were Voltron like the sum of our parts is better than us Individually and our disposition is quite a bit different too. He's more reserved
He's likes to think things over. He does not like being in the public He doesn't want to be the face of the brand or anything like that and he doesn't really have any interest in marketing I'm definitely way more in the industry. I'm out there Observing the trends I'm observing people in motion and what they're doing what they're not doing anymore
That's kind of my piece of the pie and he's just an exceptional builder. Just very good So that was the partnership and we had done some projects in the past together, which helped He's from Chicago and every year we had hung out at this festival in Portland called XOXO which was kind of like a mix of Technology and art and design and making things on the internet So by the time we got together to build transistor, we had a good foundation and then we didn't know if it would work out
It's kind of like a marriage or a dating relationship. You're like, I guess we'll try this out See if it works and then it just worked out really well. Yeah, we hired Helen next She's head of customer success and helps us with taking care of customers taking care of live chat, especially when we're sleeping We all answer customer support all day during the North American time zone and but Helen does it while we're sleeping
We consider that role to be really important. I think it's one of the things that's differentiated us Then we hired Jason who's another back-end programmer Like he built a lot of our dynamic ad insertion stuff and then we just hired Josh to work with me on All sorts of stuff but mostly the marketing website and Podcast website themes I would like to selfishly keep him in marketing But he's very good at design and building stuff on the web. He's another full-stack web developer
We're gonna probably use him quite a bit in the product as well. Yeah, so that's the team That's how we kind of all balance each other out
Cool. So speaking of podcast hosting, because that's what primarily Transistor does, right? That's your core. How did that evolve over time? I mean, like back from 2001 or whenever Apple introduced the iPod and podcasts became a thing, like how did that ecosystem evolve?
Well, thank goodness. This is like one of those errors of history in the same way that it's so nice that Microsoft didn't invent the SMTP protocol for email because then we'd be paying for stamps, digital stamps, every time we want to send an email. Kind of this accident of history is that folks had already started using RSS. They had expanded RSS to include audio enclosures.
So you could link to an mp3 file and insert that as an item in an RSS feed and then people could listen to it and some of these early RSS feed readers actually could play audio as well.
So like you subscribe to websites, RSS feed, and it might have an MP3 enclosure in there, and then you could listen to it right in Google Reader or something.
That's right. Steve Jobs heard about this and asked the folks. There's Dave Weiner and some other folks who had been doing this with RSS asked if it was okay to include it in iTunes. And it might've actually been Adam Curry that he talked to initially. So Steve Jobs said, Hey, we want to include this in iTunes. And they said, this sounds great. And so Steve introduced it into iTunes. And then when the iPod came out, it just made
sense that iPods would also be able to listen to these podcasts. That was all kind of built in. But from the beginning it was all based on RSS. And that meant that RSS feed had to be generated somewhere because Apple wasn't doing that. And the audio had to be hosted somewhere because Apple wasn't doing that. And again, I'm thankful for it because I think it's actually benefited podcasting considerably. Now there's disadvantages and advantages of
centralization versus decentralization. But philosophically, I believe that the mess you get with decentralization is actually worth it in the long haul because it gives creators optionality. So if YouTube kicks me off YouTube, I can't bring my audience with me. They can just throw me off the platform and that's it. And you're done. And you're done. RSS,
if you don't want to submit your podcast to Spotify, you don't have to. If you move to a different podcast hosting platform, you can 301 redirect the RSS feed and your whole audience, everyone subscribed to that podcast automatically follows you to the next place you decide to host your audio files. And that optionality of being able to control your content and where it goes and how it's consumed and where it's hosted to me is a
huge advantage. It has this other advantage, which is, you know, Apple was an early leader, but shortly, you know, soon after there's all these other independent podcast apps, pocket casts and podcast addict and overcast. And you had optionality as a listener. If you didn't like the way Apple podcasts worked, which a lot of people didn't, and you wanted features like being able to listen at double speed or overcast has, um, it amplifies the
audio. So the volume is a bit higher for voice. You could go to these other independent developers and download their apps, try them out or make your own or make your own or still listen to it in a RSS feed reader if that's what you'd always been doing. So on the listener
side and on the creator side, it gave you them tremendous optionality. And then the other thing about these decentralized internet protocols, it provides tremendous opportunity for independent makers, for independent small business people, because you can build a reasonable business on these platforms. And we've seen MailChimp do that, ConvertKit do that, WordPress do that. And really actually almost any bootstrapped web company is building on open protocols,
TCP IP. It's all there. We don't have to pay for it. It's not owned by anybody and that's given us all this opportunity.
What business did Mailchimp build on podcasts?
Now MailChimp built on top of SMTP. Oh, okay. Oh, this is saying open protocols. Yeah. Open protocols is the point. And also MailChimp uses RSS. You can do RSS to email. WordPress uses RSS quite a bit, obviously, and lots of other open source and open protocols. There's a lot of debate about this in podcasting because there is a lot of mess that comes with RSS and decentralization, but I've always said the benefits outweigh the cost.
So the cost is, yeah, it's way easier to upload to YouTube, but the disadvantage there is that Google now owns like 99% of online video. You have no optionality there as a creator. So the ecosystem, I think, is healthier overall.
We're seeing it play out in the current Twitter evolution right now. Centralization versus people are slowly starting to go into more decentralized, more messy, but more decentralized alternatives.
That's right, and you need both. Yeah.
I think one thing that we kind of lose with decentralization is, as a creator, you don't really have a relationship with your audience because you just broadcast and it's like a radio wave, right? Like I can drive in my car and I tune into whatever that 96.5 FM and you don't even know I'm listening, right? So people listen to me in multiple apps. So that relationship is just not there.
Well, it all depends on how you view it. I mean, if you have a YouTube channel, sure, you have a connection with your audience in that they can leave comments and subscribe to your channel. But you actually don't own that audience because YouTube could kick you off at any time and you would lose all of those people. Podcasting to me, like people say, you know, what do you look for when you put out an episode? How do you know if it was a good episode? Here's how I know if it was a good episode. How many responses did I get? Now, there's no built in way to respond in an RSS feed, although that's coming. But if someone emails me, open protocol, open
anybody, anybody can do it. Tweets at me. OK, centralized whatever. Blue skies me, mastadons me, whatever. If they find a way to get a hold of me and respond to the podcast, which has a lot of friction. And I think we often equate like more friction is bad. And I don't think that's necessarily true. I think more friction is good. People are driving home, listening to the podcast. They can't do anything at that moment unless they pull over. And then, you know, they're going to pull over and leave a comment on your episode. Probably not. They're going to drive home and they're going to be like, damn it. Justin said something.
That really made me upset. I'm going to reach out to him and then they've got to decide how they're going to reach out to me. And it could be in an email. I get those all the time. It could be in a tweet or a DM or a mastadon post or whatever. And there is much higher friction. Every once in a while, I have to remind people how they can get a hold of me. But that's not necessarily bad. And if I get 10 responses for an episode, that's a pretty good episode. I would actually prefer that. I would prefer the friction than having people just being able to mindlessly respond.
I would obviously troll me on YouTube comments, right? More friction isn't always worse. Sometimes it's better.
Your signal to noise.
Yeah, and especially we've seen this idea that the whole social media experiment, which is we're just going to give everybody a no filter, no friction way to say anything that they want at any time. I don't know if that's been awesome for society. One of the reasons I like podcasting is because it's slow tech. It's old tech. It's mindful tech.
Yeah, there's improvements that we can make. For example, cross app comments are something that we're working on with the podcasting 2.0 folks and the podcast standards project. Now that Federation is more people are talking about federated comments and things like that. Some of that might be coming.
But there is something nice about more friction, about slowing things down, about I actually have to drive home and listen to the full episode before I can respond to it just with a knee jerk reaction. Some of these things are features, not bugs. Some of these things are actually, I think, on the whole better for society than just giving people a no filter, no friction way of responding whenever they feel like it.
Let's slow it down. Take five minutes and consider what you've just heard before you reach out to me on YouTube with an angry comment. Let's just cool it down.
I think the point Ilya is making is that's totally valid, right? Like it's more mindful, both from the creator and the commenter side. What tends to happen because it's so much, so many moving parts in podcasting, is that you have to build your own machinery to figure out where these signals are coming from. Like you said, you may get it in an email or in a tweet and you have to be aware of all these things that people may reach out on.
And you don't have a normalized way of looking at metrics and things like that.
Yes, there is something you're giving up. It's true. I'm still not convinced. I mean, lots of people have tried to, for example, add comments into podcasts. The problem is that that idea doesn't actually fit with the consumption pattern because again, most people are driving. And so regardless, they're not going to get off the freeway to comment on something. They're driving. They're going to drive the whole way home and then they're going to get home and their spouse
is going to say, can you take out the garbage? And the kids skinned their knee and need some help. And there's dinner and everything. So you're going to lose people for sure. And the folks who have tried comments, you might as well be writing an email at that point. It's just like, I'm home. I'm going to think about this. Okay. I'm just going to talk about it. I'm going to just email them directly, or I'm going to talk about it on Twitter or whatever. And I'm still not convinced.
See, when you build products, there's this idea that this is a pain. This is a problem. Like, there's no way. It's not like YouTube. You can't just leave a comment, but I'm not convinced that it's enough of a pain. A lot of podcast listeners actually don't care. They, they just like, like listening to it. They don't want to respond to it. And that's okay. Some podcast listeners just love getting a shout out on an episode and that's good enough for them. Some want to leave a voicemail
and maybe there's an off chance that someone will play the voicemail and the podcast. What I like about the system right now, as much as people say, we need more interactivity with podcasts and we need more of this and that. I think if we actually interviewed most listeners and we said without any leading questions, this was the other great thing about the jobs to be done framework is there's a great book called the mom test that if you're in, if you're making podcasts, just go and interview
a thousand podcast listeners. Hey mom, tell me about how you listen to podcasts and she'll tell you, Oh, you know, I usually do it when I'm walking the dog. Have you ever thought you want to like comment on a podcast or respond to it and just see what they say? Even that's too much of a leading question. You know, I don't know how you would bring it up, but my sense is that there's far less people in motion than you might think. A lot of people are just content to listen and the folks
that do want to say something, there is just lots of channels for them to say something. And then on the creator side, you know, especially when I had my podcast initially, part of me was like, wow, I wish I could just have comments on this thing. But now that I've been on YouTube for a while, I'm like, God, I'm so glad I don't have comments on these things because it's just not
very valuable. It's doesn't make me happy. It doesn't improve the discourse, but the thoughtful emails I get from long time podcast listeners, some of whom have been listening to me since 2012. Those are the people I want to talk to. Those are the kinds of fans that I want and having more friction has been fine better than for example, again, the challenge is that if you were to come up with a commenting system where we have this problem right now with cross app comments,
something like 60, 70, 80% of podcasts, listens happen in Spotify and Apple. And unless we can convince them to adopt this, these federated comments, it's all going to be fragmented anyway. And that's part of the advocacy work we're trying to do with the podcast standards project is see if we can convince some of these big companies to adopt some of this kind of open protocol tech. But the market is in motion in the sense that there's this big machine that's already running.
There's already 60, 70, 80% of podcast listeners who are listening in their app and they're listening the way they listen and to say, well, now you've got to go over to this app to leave a comment. You're dead in the water, right? It's been tried so many times that I think the better approach with comments especially and responses is a federated approach where we then try to
convince Apple is I think the most open right now to those kinds of ideas. Spotify has been building a much more closed platform so you can respond to Spotify podcasts right now in their app, but it's not federated.
So, I had a question about that. Recently, last few years, you're seeing Spotify make so much more investment into the space. You mentioned the big benefits of podcasts starting and staying on as an open protocol, pretty much, right? Do you see any worries on that side? Yeah.
All the time. One of the biggest things. Yeah. Streaming has not been awesome for artists. And so there's already a visible effect with creatives on the music side. For podcasters, there's good and bad. I mean, the good was Spotify invested a ton in podcasting and they have grown the pie. So there is just way more people listening and way more people making podcasts because of Spotify. That's been good. I'm all for people making the pie bigger.
What's been concerning is that even though Apple podcasts was always quite slow, they were always advocates and supporters of the open protocol of RSS. So they added a new namespace into the RSS feeds. These iTunes tags that added all sorts of functionality. There was podcast cover art that was never there before. Podcast description, podcast tags, but because they did it in RSS feeds, all the other podcast apps could also add that.
So pocketcast could add it and apps like overcast actually just even use Apple's podcast index, right? So all of Apple's stuff was open. Spotify for example, has added something really cool. It used to be to make a video podcast. You had to have a separate feed with only video enclosures. But what Spotify said is, well, no, why don't we just have the video enclosure and then have a audio backup? So if they are listening and they don't want to watch the video in Spotify,
it just switches over to the audio file gracefully degrades. Yeah, it's great. But they did that in a closed system and that is a system that the rest of podcasting could benefit from as well. And right now, the only way to have a video podcast on Spotify is if you upload it through anchor, which is now Spotify for podcast or whatever. You can still have video podcasts on Apple. There's a few other apps that support it,
but this was just clearly a better user experience for the user. And it's like, ah, but we could all do that. There's no reason that has to be constrained to Spotify. I think Spotify is investment in podcasting. I've always had concerns about that, meaning I was happy they were investing in it, but I think they invested too much money. So they invested over a billion dollars in a category that hadn't yet had a billion dollars worth of advertising revenue in a single year.
That's a huge amount of money. There's a huge risk of over capitalization, which is where you pump all of this money into a category and then people start to staff up and people start to start shows and people start to build tech because podcasting is exploding and it feels like there's all this money in the category, but it's actually just smoke. There's not that much money in podcasting, not as much in terms of their investment. Right? And now we're seeing the fallout.
So now we're seeing Spotify's canceling shows. There's lots of other companies that staffed up and invested their own hundreds of millions of dollars because Spotify was doing it like Sony and you know, some of these other big tech companies and now they're closing their podcast divisions. That's the risk of over capitalization is you've got these companies that they're all keeping up with each other, but no one's figured out, is this going to work out? Is it? What's the payoff here?
And then when it becomes clear there is no payoff, you go from investing hundreds of millions of dollars every year into the category and all these people are getting jobs and all these people are building things and then all of a sudden all that evaporates and that can be really hard on human beings.
How much advertising money is there in the podcasting?
It's just gotten to about a billion a year. And I think radio, like AM-FM radio, is still way higher than that.
Justin Jackson, Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Yeah, it's still massive. It's like, so let's see here. Yeah, I mean, there's different figures here, but some say it's like 20 billion. In Russia. Yeah, it's just way, way higher in other places. And I mean, and then you look at TV advertising and YouTube advertising, Facebook advertising. These are much, much bigger. For us to have just reached a billion dollars in ad revenue, annual ad revenue in the whole podcast industry, it doesn't quite match up with all of the hype, you know?
Like for a while, the media is like, look at podcasting. It's the next big thing. It's going to be like YouTube. It's going to be like online videos, going to be like social media. And there were a bunch of us in the industry going, this is just growing 10, 15 percent a year. And it's still very small. And the amount of money actually being spent in the category is just very small compared to what's being invested in the category.
And it's still great. I still like the category, but it's not there yet. It's still very, very small. .
You have a weekly newsletter, you're doing a podcast, you're obviously running Transistor a million dollar plus. I think that's the public number, right? You said that in the Indie Hacker Podcast. That's a business with three to five people is what I'm guessing. Five people total, yeah. Right. So how do you manage your time? What's the most important things? How do you schedule your days or do you not schedule what you do?
When we were building it, it was hard. You know, it was like I was already independent doing my own thing, but I was like investing so much time into Transistor. And Transistor, it takes a while for especially a SaaS company to build up revenue. And in retrospect, it actually happened pretty fast. Like we launched August 2018 and by the next August 2019, we were both full time. That's pretty quick. But at the time it was just like, wow, this is a lot of work for not a lot of.
Money. But now because we built the business the way we did, we managed to do it without any funding. So we own the whole thing and we've been actually pretty slow at hiring. So most of our competitors who are the same size hired many more people were probably still, I think, one of the smallest podcast hosting teams in the industry. And that, you know, slow ramp up and then being very lean and having lots of margin. So lots of financial margin. It's the business is profitable now.
And having lots of time margin, energy margin. When we were going to build the company, we set out, we said, what are we doing this for? And we were like, okay, well, the product has to be able to attract customers and retain customers and all that. The product is to make the customer's lives better in the way that they want their lives to be better. So we have to fulfill that promise for people at scale. But the company, what's that for? Well, the company is for us. The company is to make our lives better.
And we just wanted to have a better life. So these days it's pretty calm. Most weeks, the only thing I have scheduled are a few podcast interviews like this. And we have a staff meeting every Thursday. Other than that, most days are pretty open. And that's the way I like it right now. I might change. I might decide to get more scheduled in the future. But these days I like wake up. I walk down to my office, listen to a podcast and then get in here and always answer customer support tickets.
We're always kind of in touch with the customer, but then a lot of it is just open space to explore open space to really ask what do customers really need right now? How can we best serve them? How can we make their lives better? And also what's just fun for us to build? What's cool? What makes us excited to show up at work every day? That's actually a big reason we've hired each time. We could have kept doing it the way we were doing it, but like we hired Helen because I just wanted a better life for just about everything.
A better life for John and I have someone come and take that off our plate. And then we hired Jason mostly because John wanted another engineer to talk to all day. Someone else to kind of bear the load of, you know, there's some stress with him keeping up all that infrastructure on his own. And so now that's been evened out. And then a big motivation for hiring Josh was to have the same thing just to have a little bit of spark in my life and fun and working with someone who's just really good at making stuff and can do it faster than I can.
Do it at a higher quality.
And is everybody on the team fully remote?
Justin Jackson, Co-founder of Transistor.com, Justin Jackson, Co-founder of Transistor.com, Justin Jackson, Co-founder of Transistor.com, Justin Jackson, Co-founder of Transistor.com, Justin Jackson,
On the company culture, I think you have the calm workspaces or a blog post like that. Are there more? Do you publish like more things like that?
On our GitHub profile, we have all of our values and we have these kind of questions that we ask ourselves before we make a decision. So let me see if I can find it here.
Yeah, while you're finding it, one thing that I really liked is you have one of the, I think, tenets to choose what you want to work on next is it has to be exciting, but it also has to be exciting a year from now. So it's not just the new shiny right now.
Yeah, yeah. So questions to ask when making decisions. Does this decision match up with our values? Is this decision going to make our life more busy, more complicated? Is this decision going to make the company heavier or slower? And in six to 12 months, will this decision cause us to feel less excited about building Transistor? So, and this is all based
around this idea of margin. So a business needs profit margin, but a good business also creates margin or space in all sorts of other spheres of your life, your emotional health, your physical health, your relationships, your sanity, your integrity. And when John
and I set out, we wanted to create that kind of breathing room for ourselves. Unfortunately, these values didn't necessarily help us make a product that people wanted at scale with profit margins that worked, but because we built a product that people wanted at scale with profit margins that work, we were able to fulfill this dream, which was to have a company that would give us margin. And so we've definitely given up on a lot of revenue
that didn't match up with us. Like we don't do any enterprise deals, even though we've had quite a few of those people and we have the CIA hosts their podcasts with us.
Wait, the CIA has a podcast?
Yes, yeah, they do. The CIA is a bigger organization, but we weren't willing to sign an enterprise deal with them because I don't like doing those deals.
So CA has to pull a credit card to like pay for this.
Yeah, they have to pull a credit card, which they don't like doing.
Yeah, I bet. I mean, I worked in the enterprise space.
Yeah, because it just adds too much friction. And for some of those deals, we would have to double or triple the size. We'd have to get new compliance people and legal people and security people and get SOC 2 compliance and all this stuff. And that's just not what we want.
Speaking about margins, I don't know if you've read the book. There's a book called Slack. I think it's from 2002, from way before Slack existed. So they talk about this breathing room, like you were saying, in terms of Slack. So Slack being like that extra space where you can maneuver. It's based on operational theory, which says, I think the utilization of a piece of equipment in a factory should be around, I think, 60%. That's how you avoid building up huge backlogs, or if backlogs
build, you can process them. Because if you target 90 or 99% utilization, then any disruption in the process just causes everything to collapse. And the book is very, very engaging. I really love that book.
I'm gonna check it out. I'm writing it down right now. Yeah, that's very much connected to the philosophy we have. I love that metaphor of 60% utilization. I have this other blog post called the 80% principle, which is based on this was circulating for a while. The Okinawan Island people only eat until they're 75, 80% full. So the idea is they always create space. It's like you don't have to max yourself out on everything. You know, like North Americans especially love just like pedal to the metal. Turn your
camp up to 11, like just go go 110%. And I love this idea of just like leaving some room, some capacity. It's just a healthier way to live. It's that metaphor of being overly full and you're just kind of like wishing you hadn't eaten that much versus just leaving some room and being satisfied. Yeah, there's all sorts of like great metaphors like that that are awesome.
Overly full is very productive.
So, going into this, the hiring side a little bit more, tell us, like, these are great cultural values for the company to have, right? When you're interviewing or when you're meeting people, how do you kind of figure if they would fit in Transistor? And another flip side of it is, you said you intentionally try to be small, right? What's the kind of revenue runway that you try to figure out, like, how many people should we be operating at?
So everyone we've hired we've known before. There was an existing relationship. So Helen had been in this community for Bootstrappers I'd created back in 2013 called MegaMaker. And she was one of our volunteer moderators. And I just known her probably since she joined pretty early, maybe even since 2014, 2015. And she was just awesome, an awesome person, good worker. She has her degree in computer science. She was very technical. She was really good with people.
When we first needed help, I reached out to her because she was already moderating for me. I said, could we hire you just part time? I know you have a full time job, but if we can just hire you as a contractor part time, that would really help. And so she worked with us for maybe even a year before we brought her on full time. We had already worked with her and was just like, well, this makes sense, right? Let's bring her on. There's always some anxiety. Every time we've hired someone full time, there's been anxiety. But immediately after we had hired her full time, it was like this the first week after it was just like, okay,
we made the right decision. This is a huge relief. And then Jason and John had worked together before at different jobs and he was looking for something new and John and him were talking. And then John came to me and said, hey, I wonder maybe Jason would want to work here with us. And he mentioned it to Jason. Jason's like, yeah, I would love that. Yeah. So that John already had a relationship with him basically. And then Josh, the same thing he'd been in MegaMaker for quite a while. He was a long time user of Transistor. He had his own podcast. Josh and I had built different
projects together. So we've never hired someone we don't know. We've never had just like a resume show up and us hire someone based on that. It's always been somebody we know. And it's one of the benefits of hiring slowly is that if you have a reasonable network and you've worked with good people in the past, you can kind of match up as those opportunities come up. You can go, hmm. And almost always it's been like the person was already there. And then we're like, wow, like this person could come and like really offer us something that would be
nice. And so, yeah, that's how it's worked so far with us. Nice thing about a recurring revenue business is you just have regular cash flow coming in every month. And we've always grown sometimes slow, sometimes fast. But every month we've grown a little bit more than the other. And so we know that month to month, even if we take a risk and make a bet on hiring somebody, the worst thing that could happen is we could slowly decrease our revenue. Right. And we just make sure we have lots of margin above that. So as long as there's still a significant amount of revenue, we're going to have to make sure that we're going to be able to get that revenue.
So as long as we have a significant amount of revenue over and above our staff costs, which is most of our budget, we're fine. I think technically, if we really wanted to push it, we could probably hire quite a few more people. But this gives us the margin of knowing if there is a massive recession or something, we'll likely be OK.
Yeah, and I know we are quite a bit over time and we want to be respectful of your time Justin. Tell us where the name Transistor came from.
John came up with that. I had no input into that, which is probably good because I'm not great at naming things. And I think he just liked the idea of transistor radio and the idea of transistors. And yeah, he bought the domain. And actually the other thing he did early before I came is he hired a designer and got a professional designer to do the treatment. So to do the logo, do a style guide. And then he bought transistor.fm was available.
So he registered all that before we came. But yeah, transistor radio is kind of the root of it. In some ways, it's not a good name because if you came up with a made up name that combines a few elements. So, I mean, I don't love the name Libsyn, which is one of our competitors. It's hard to say. It's hard to type out. But Buzzsprout is the name of one of our competitors. And it's just a made up name that is just represents itself. Whereas if you search for
transistor, you may actually just be interested in transistors. So we have to compete against the actual literal meaning of the word. But eventually the brand starts to work for itself. And as we've seen with other things like Java, you know, now if you search Java, the coffee doesn't show up or the coffee bean, it's the programming language. And if you search up Ruby, the gem doesn't show up. It's the programming language. So the one advantage we have in
tech is because we create so many backlinks. Our search rank eventually wins. We can win over the actual meaning of the word. So that's what we're working towards on transistor.
I know exactly what you're saying because one of the options for the name of this podcast was the podcast podcast. Another podcast podcast podcast. But for the same reasons like you described, like it would be impossible to find.
And the other one was a...
Yes, yes. I can't remember who came up with PubSubHubPubSub or whatever it's called. PubSubHub. Yeah, it's just like, wow. You know, you can go unique, but sometimes that makes things more difficult. But I think in terms of brands, and this actually goes for podcast naming as well, if you can combine two words and make up your own word, that is usually a good thing because then you're not competing with all of the other shows that are called, you
know, the parenting show or the whatever, the gaming show. If your name is Joe Hogan, it'd probably be a good idea for you to just not call it the Joe Hogan show. That's something else, you know. But yeah, that's where Transistor came from. It was nice. It was one less decision I had to make when I came on board.
Nice, so I guess the emphasis of Transistor.fm is Tube FM. Tube FM, yeah. Tube Radios. Just look at my tube amplifier.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Some people could start, uh, I mean YouTube is already there, so maybe that's why, that's why I'm so anti-centralization is we're already the antithesis of YouTube. We are the transistor.
Cool. So yeah, let's conclude this. Yeah.
Yeah, this was great guys. It was fun chatting.
Now that our listeners have finished driving and maybe they are what NPR calls in their driveway moment, where they step in front of their garage, listening to the episodes and hoping that their wives or their husbands don't notice them and don't come out like, why are you still here? Like, kids are waiting. But the dog knows. So, Arnaub, which channels can people reach us to if something that Justin said upset them or something?
Yeah, send us an email at hello at metacastpodcast.com. We are both on Twitter, Instagram, all of those channels are there in our show notes. Yeah, reach out like Justin said.
You folks are on Substack as well, right? So folks can comment on there.
Yeah, we do, Substack is basically our website for the podcast and it's also a nice way to own our audience. Not necessarily like we own the people, but we actually have all of the email addresses in Substack, unlike any other platforms.
That's right, that's right. And reply to the email if you send it out as a newsletter, then people can always reply to that, which is another great way to interact.
I didn't know you could do that. That's so cool.
Yeah, just reply to us. Justin, where can people find you if you want to be found?
I'm on most places under the name M.I. Justin, the letter M, the letter I, Justin. So Twitter, if you search Justin Jackson on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Mastodon, Blue Sky, I'm on all those places. You can email me at Justin at Transistor.fm. And if you're interested in my newsletter, it's JustinJackson.ca slash newsletter.
Yeah, just briefly what you write about. Bootstrapping.
Building mostly calm companies, business ethics. A lot of it ends up being about building companies and how to build companies, decentralization, slow tech, mindful tech, all those kinds of things. Yeah. Great. Great.
Great. Yeah. And we haven't really gotten a chance to talk about many things. One of those, which was really interesting for me, is like how you build a business with small kids. I think that's what you mentioned before we started recording. You know, maybe we should have a whole episode a couple of months from now.
Sure, yeah, give me a call. We just did an episode on the Build Your SaaS podcast where we talk about that. And I have an article on my blog, justinjackson.ca that also talks about that question. So you can check that out in the meantime and then you too can follow up with me in a month or so and we can chat about it then.
Cool, yeah, and we will link to all of those in our show notes.
You're one of my favorite podcasts, the indie hacker one. I would recommend people listen to those as well. Hosted on Transistor. Great! Alright, yeah, thanks, this was awesome!
Yeah, thanks. This was great.