Business vibes

Welcome to the panel where two bootstrappers talk about building a better life and a better business. I'm Justin Jackson, the cofounder of transistor.fm.

And I'm Brian Castle. I am creating things over at buildermethods.com.

Well, Chris will probably put this in the audio version too, but we did we we have a little app that I vibe coded right before we started, which just shows we planned out the episode, all of our segments. Today, we're gonna talk about the Transistor Retreat, Builder Methods revenue, maybe a postmortem on that episode I did with John on Build Your SaaS, Agent OS competitors and hiring. We've allotted some time for each one. Right now, we're in the introduction section, and we've got eight minutes left.

Yeah. And I just wanna say, like, Justin sort of looks just, like, sprung on me that, like, you know, you've you've vibe coded this little app Yeah. To manage these segments. We're both looking at a timer. I'm I'm getting very stressed out about this timer happening right now. But but, yeah, this should be fun. I I feel very unprepared, but here we go.

I mean, I like it. I like I like that. I I mean, this probably doesn't fit with your form of planning as much as mine, but I love they'll just like quickly it's like, okay. Hey. Let's what are we gonna talk about? Give it a time.

I I mean, as I said, like, I I would like to at least try some form of segments. Like, this is cool that you have this now. You know? But and, like, maybe between now and the next episode, we could start to, like, throw in just random ideas. Like, oh, that would be good to talk about for ten minutes.

You know? You brought up a good idea, which is about this idea of having recurring segments as well. That's almost like another thing on top of this. You know?

Yeah. And I feel like there's always a bunch of stuff that comes up throughout the week that I'll forget about by the time we get to Thursday. Mhmm. But if I can if I can just chuck it into a card or something Yeah. And then, oh, what was that thing?

You know? Yeah. Then it's going. Alright. Well, let's move to the next segment. We'll see if this works. So this should just move us to the next thing on our list.

Oh, it did. Hey, it works. So All right. So, yeah, transistor retreat. So when did you get back?

We just got back on That's a good question. Feels like we The thing is we did the retreat from like Sunday to a Friday. But then Helen, Michael, and I stayed an extra three days to go to a podcast conference in Calgary. So the the idea for this year was we'd get the whole team to fly into Calgary, and then we would drive to Banff, Canmore. We stayed in Canmore.

That looks amazing, by the way. Like, we love going to national parks, and that's been like, I would love to get up to Canada and and check out Banned. Dude. The photos and stuff that I've seen just look incredible.

It was so fun.

What I'm always curious about with company retreats, and I'm always this is something I'm always, like, very jealous of of, like, fellow Bootstrapper friends who have these, like, small companies with a small team with, you know, revenue that a staff that that that that supports the idea of getting everyone together for for these retreats, you know, once or twice or more a year. Yeah. So what I'm always curious about is, like, what is the structure? How do you plan these things? What have you learned, like, works well or doesn't work well in terms of just agenda, if you will?

Let me I'll bring it all in, man. I'll bring it all in. Yeah. It was really fun. So John missed last year's retreat in San Francisco. So we we had hired Michael Michael Green, who's here in a bright pink sweater. He's always visible in every photo. But but John and Michael had never met. We had never had all of the team together, all six of us in one place.

That's cool.

So that was the big goal. It was also I'm from Alberta. It's my home province. And it was just it was I've always kind of wanted the team to come and see the Rockies and Banff and Lake Louise and Canmore. They're beautiful places that I grew up going to when I was a kid.

Nice. How far is that from where you live?

That's about a six hour drive, something like that.

Okay. Yeah. That's a that's a that's a whole day.

Yeah. It was a day. It was a day. But really great too.

So, like, how what's the balance between hangouts, like outdoor activities versus, like, business chatter or business activities?

This is actually really challenging because the you know, some folks on the team are like John really likes to get together and work. Especially when when John and I paired up initially, we would do these founder retreats. But they were really like times for him and I to focus, go heads down, and just like work side by side. And we've tried to replicate that with team retreats. And we realized it's just it's just really hard to get work done.

I yeah. That's how I would think of it. Like, that to me seems to be the the most business value that you can get here is is the hangout and the relationship building. Yeah. And a lot of that can happen like through activities too, like hiking or whatever. But like like also, like if I were a part of this company, like I wouldn't get any work done, even if we're supposed to be working right now. Yeah. Like, I I I when I work, I need to be alone in my studio. Like,

I Yes.

I'm not like a unless we're really, like, collaborating on something together. But, yeah, to me, it would be more about the FaceTime and Hangouts. And and, like, I feel like I'm I'm curious to know about, are there any are there any business conversation activities that you get to do because you're in person? Like, whatever, like strategic planning, vision for the year, whatever, that that kind of stuff?

Yeah. So I really actually liked how we did it this year, which was, you know, first day, everybody kind of gets up for breakfast. We have breakfast together. We drove out to Banff. We did a bunch of sightseeing in Banff. That's all these photos right here. We just walked around, saw these incredible falls, took a nice photo. Now, Jason got sick right about this point, so we're really thankful that we had we had at least one nice team photo. But there we are in Banff. Yeah.

That's awesome.

The second day was all about this is, I think, the part that other teams should copy because we wanted to do something together. But, like, working and finding work time and all that. So what I did is, by this point, Jason's sick, which is really unfortunate. So he's in his room suffering. But I broke the remaining people into teams of two.

I like how it's two different teams doing the same thing.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it this part was really fun. So if Jason had been around, I would have I would have had a partner as well. But just to see folks yeah. Here's, you know, Josh and Helen are starting to discuss. They ended up doing a whole it was really fun to see how the different teams did things. Like, they actually created a whole slideshow and recorded an m p three. Like, they recorded their own trailer episode. Then we got And to

get identify, Did like, common friction points? Mhmm.

So basically, we all got after probably two hours, this was two to three hours in the morning. So I asked them to, like, actually explore it. What do you notice about the process as a creator? How could this process be improved? How can we improve that first run experience getting to that magical experience when you get to publish an episode?

I think that is by far the hardest thing from a product standpoint. Even if you're scratching your own itch with your original product idea, once you have a lot of users and once you've been at it for a bunch of years,

Mhmm.

It's it's so weird how, like, the closer you are to your to your product, like, the farther away you get from what it's actually like to use it.

And so we spend a lot of time on the episode creation page. First of all, this page has just gotten longer. It's gotten more complicated. For a new user, there's things that, like, don't make sense. Mhmm.

Yeah. That seems like the kind of thing like again, like, yeah, even if it's not gonna be an actual project that you ship, like, next month, it's still just the experience. It's like the memory of like what it was like to be in the shoes of a first time customer. Like that's gonna stick with everyone on all the different projects that they work on the rest of the year. Right?

That's right. Yeah. So, really enjoyed this part. Yeah, it was fun to see how the different, like, Michael and John had a very different approach to Helen and Josh. It was it was just fun to have that kind of that kind of brainstorming collaboration. Everyone felt like it was it was worth doing.

Do you do any sort of, like, maybe, like, you and John sharing information with the team about your vision going forward? Like like topics or strategy planning stuff that, like, rest of the team just might not be in the loop on most of the time? Anything like that?

Let me go back here. And so the other thing that John and I did this year that I think we did better than past years is we really tried to set, like, what was going on with us and our intentions and our focus before the retreat. We met three or four times, and that was really helpful. So that was the first day, though. That that was basically as as much work as you're gonna get done on a retreat, I found.

Was this that so that photo that you that you sent me Mhmm. Was that was that from the photographer?

Yeah. Yeah. Thought

so. I was like, I I that was one of the things I was wondering about. So you sent me this photo, you know, like, week ago of your team, like and you're all, like, laughing at the table at this breakfast restaurant or something. And I was like, that either looks staged or AI generated or, like, it's too perfect. It looks like it's from some, like, catalog for a for, like, a college campus or something.

Yeah. Yeah. This is this is one of those photos too.

And I was wondering, who is taking that photo? The

the other reason I like it I mean, it's nice to get a bunch of photos of the team. And, unfortunately, Jason's not in this one because he he managed to be there for the the morning photo shoot, but then he was just not feeling very well. That's the photographer there. What I like about it is that you get this other person that kind of comes into the team, and they kind of disrupt things. They they're setting up shots.

John looks like a big dude.

He I mean, if you actually see us where's us side by side? He he's him and I, he's slightly taller than

me. Okay.

He's like five nine, I think.

That's always the weirdest thing with Internet friends. You never know how tall people are.

I mean, the first time I met Helen, I think Helen is five ten or something like that. Like, what is going on?

These photos. Alright. We want you all to just play in the water. Well,

but this is what I'm talking about. You set up the opportunity for this. So this was like just happened. We were out in the water and we were we were taking photos around this lake. And then Michael goes out and then I go out and then Josh goes out.

She knows the area.

Yeah. It's like a guided tour, basically.

I'm curious to know, like, like, when you started when did how far out do you plan these retreats? And how often do do you do them once a year or do they more than once? Once

a year.

And like when But when you started planning it, did you have a main goal in mind? Or was there a reason for like, I think we're due for a retreat?

No. We have them every year around September. So we've been doing this every single year. Even since John and I were just doing it, the two of us, we found like I get the kids back to school. And then either mid to late September

That's always a great time weather wise too.

Yeah. It's still like, you know, the leaves are just changing color in a lot of places. It was still warm every day. So we do it every September, and we start planning it, like, more seriously, basically six months out. Mhmm. And this year, Helen helped us a lot. She helped do a lot of the the planning. So she she booked the photographer. She helped us book the lodge. We had a big upgrade. Usually, John and I plan everything, and it was just so nice to have someone else on the team help plan it.

This was one of those things when I was doing audience ops, which at its height grew grew to about 25 people or so. Mhmm. But when I say 25 people, it was like 20 mostly contractors. But it that was a weird team because it was like it was contractors, but it was like everyday contractors who worked there for years. Mhmm.

so Mhmm.

Like, I always kicked around the idea of doing a retreat for that team. And we've had people all over the world, mostly in The US, some in Europe and stuff. And, like and I never really got it to work where just like logistically, it made sense to bring everyone into one location. Mhmm. Funny enough, the only the only time I did actually was so we had we had like 20, like, I don't know, like 20 people or so in in The US and Europe, and then we had like five people in The Philippines.

Oh, nice.

And we did, a dinner and stuff. And, like and and it was, like, funny because, like, the basically, like, only people I've ever met in person from the Audience Ops team are the people in The Philippines. And all The US people, I've only met, like, one or two of them.

It's crazy. I mean, the the bigger the team, it it definitely gets more difficult. It every time we get together, we do have this moment where we're all sitting around. And I say the same thing every year. It's just like, wow, it is so great for all of us to be together in one place.

Sure. Yeah.

And

Between the lodging and travel and all that.

Yeah. We also always feel like, man, it would be nice to do them more often. So it feels like once a year is bare minimum for a remote team. You just need FaceTime. You need relational time.

Love it.

Yeah. It was really helpful. So that day after the photoshoot, the afternoon is kind of when John and I have our fireside chat where we talk about where we're headed, where we're thinking what we're thinking about strategically, where we see the industry, how, you know, we're thinking in terms of, you know, the direction of the company. We talked a little bit about our desire to take some time off this year. Or in the next few

episode with John, was that recorded before or after?

That was recorded before. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. And then they can ask questions if they want. It's also kind of about, you know, we try to look at, from our perspective, what we see as kind of not working well and what we want to improve.

Any like big takeaways or or learnings that you were kind of surprised or didn't expect to take away?

I think the biggest thing is I talked about this on the episode as well. But leading a team is challenging, especially a small team when there's two co founders. Because basically, for us to set any direction, we first need to figure it out between John and I. If we don't do that intentionally, frequently throughout the year, it just becomes hard. It's like where which direction are we going?

I'm curious to know, like, what you can share. I'm sure, obviously, there's private stuff. But like

I mean, I think one thing is just like any team, we've recognized that we often get excited during these retreats, and we'll come up with a bunch of ideas. But actually implementing those ideas is tricky. So one was just let's set some realistic expectations of what we're gonna accomplish here. The second is we we do want to get more projects across the finish line. And so what is causing us to not do that?

Mhmm.

I think our size of team is kind of peak capacity unless we decided to grow to 25 or 30 or something. I I think there's

Yeah. Or or least like the next like the next level isn't one more person. The next level is probably like a doubling or a 2.5 x of your of your team. That's right. And like add and like breaking it up into sub teams and maybe adding a management level at some point. Like

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The thing

that like, when it comes to shipping and, like, getting things across the the finish line, for me, the way that I track that Mhmm. Is is very simple. It's like how often am I able to make a public announcement of something new?

Yes.

Like, launching a new feature. And so in in, like, the Clarity Flow business, it's like how how long between my next broadcast email that's just like, hey. We just so, like, this week, we launched inner, you know, language translation. And it's been a while since we launched like a bit like something that's launchable. We're we're always shipping little improvements, but it doesn't warrant an an email announcement.

Yeah. Feel it. You feel like I'm Like I

published one yesterday, so good. But I know that every day now for the next two or three weeks, if I don't publish something, it's gonna be like, I'm falling behind. Know? Yeah. Urgency.

So we set And we also said, let's realistically, what are the priority? What's the short term priority? Short term priority is finishing this basically a way for people to listen to private podcasts in Spotify, which has been requested for a long time. Spotify has a very unique way of doing it. So it requires a lot of custom software.

That's cool.

We don't know if we can make we we don't know if we can sell that economically. We don't know feel like there's a lot of demand. But part of our our ruthless prioritization is thinking this has to be a big improvement for existing users and something that new users want. Or this has to have the potential to be a really good bet for getting new users in the door.

Mhmm. Yeah. It's always that it's always that question with like new features. It's like, is this a conversion feature to bring in new people? Or is this a retention feature to keep our customers happy? Right?

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So we did that. We did a games night, which was really great. Oh, we had a chef come in and cook us a meal. That was really fun. We had a nice space for

We do that with with Big Snow. And, you know, Brad Tunnar has been has been sort of taking over the the organization of it, the the East Side. And we've had the same chef every year for the last

Oh, that's cool.

Years, and he's incredible. He's from Montreal. He comes down to Vermont. Just incredible, incredible meals. And he he does breakfasts and dinners for the whole week.

Oh, that's And That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a few shots from from that night. We had, yeah, just a nice just a really nice night. Some of us got dressed up, some of us didn't, but it was fun to just hang out and have like a six course meal. So that basically we had two full days in Canmore. We've just finished our two full days. The next day, we got up early ish. We checked out.

are Yep.

You know, and now this spot has been ruined by Instagram. It's just it was so packed. The pictures don't do it justice. I think there was like at least a thousand people here. It was so many people. Yeah. It was like those photos of waiting to get up Everest, you know? It was like that up and down the the viewpoint. It was just wild.

That is a bummer when like these huge tourist spots get like that. Like Yeah. And then, like like, one of my favorite parks, just, like, views wise and everything is, Yosemite. But when you go there, the crowds are just so insane. You know?

Yeah. The crowds not always not always super fun. But it was it was really it was still nice to go. It was a lot of driving. We had to get on a tour bus to go to these places. Whenever I look at the photos again, even like, this was a long day. It was a long drive in the bus. We got out there.

But that's part of it. That's like it's like you're doing a road trip.

We're just doing just hanging out. And unfortunately, Jason Jason went home early at this point. He was really not feeling good. But, yeah, we got got a nice photo here at Chateau Lake Louise. And then we drove back to Calgary, stayed in a hotel there, had a nice, really nice dinner in Calgary. And then the following morning, the people who weren't attending this conference left. So that was kind of the whole retreat. That was that was the whole thing.

So the retreat checkbox is checked until the next one.

That's right. Yeah. Another idea we came up with that I thought was really great was we'd like to because John really likes these work sessions. And what I realized is we just need to have sometimes, like some hack weeks where just a few of us go into a spot and say, we're going to work on this one specific thing together and getting it out. And that's the focus of this trip.

Yeah. See, I I always have a hard time picturing any serious work getting done.

Mhmm.

Like in terms like, I would see it as a a an in person retreat environment shift and, like, vibe shift would be a it it would have a slowing effect. Like, I like, me and I feel like other individual contributors would would be faster working alone at home in their studio. Mhmm. But the but the in person stuff is is not only for the relationships and memories and all that, but also, like, more strategic planning, like, especially for like you and John. I'm sure it's like it's a chance to like, we're we're here.

I mean, we've we've done that as a founder retreat before. And I think, yeah, I think that that has a lot of value too. And it's just nice to have these kind of distinct units of here's what this trip is for.

Cool. Love it. Looks beautiful out there.

How are we doing on a timer? This says have we have I only been going six minutes? Is this timer

No way. I I was thinking that you probably blew past your timer, but I I wasn't gonna call it out.

I the is this timer just going really slow?

I I wonder if the timer is on a loop. I I think we might be on our second or third cycle on that one.

No. No. Because after it's finished your time slot, it's supposed to automatically go to the next segment. So

I'd be surprised if that was only six minutes.

Was anyone in chat actually testing timing us?

I mean, we it's four it's it's ten after four here. We, you know, we must have been going for at least, like, an hour.

Alright. Let's move to the next segment. Let's see if this works. Ping. Alright. You're

on. Alright. Nineteen minutes. Alright. So, yeah, Builder Methods. I think I talked about how I was launching so I had the the paid workshop that that happened about two weeks ago. And I sold I ended up selling about a 100 tickets for 25 each. And I think most of those attended Yeah. Pretty good. And then on that day, on the on the workshop is when I opened the doors to Builder Methods Pro,

which

is like the new the new membership offering. I'm thinking of it as like the the flagship product that I'm doing from Builder Methods. Mhmm. And the presentation was okay. So the the normal pricing for Builder Methods Pro is $2.99 a year. It's an annual subscription fee to be a member. The first 50 members get are are considered founding members. Yeah. And they get it for, like, what, 34% off. They get it, like, $1.97 a year lifetime.

Okay.

Right? Those 50 seats have all sold out. Oh. And and like 30 of them sold on the on the day or two of the of the workshop. Another 10 later that week, and then a few more the week after. So it actually went past 50. So it got up to like 55 and then the coupon expired. As of now, I switched it to, you're no longer a founding member. But it is still sort of early access. You get access to this Discord community.

still developing, yeah.

It's still very much in development. So you do get the same discount for the first year now. Okay. As of today, it's above 60 members. It's like 65 members Okay. Or

Hold on. Hold on. We gotta pause here. We gotta pause here. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, you did a workshop with about a 100 a 100 people signed up, maybe seventy, eighty showed up at the workshop or something like

that. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. And then, by the way, how did that go?

That was good. Yeah. My my voice was shot after it. I I was more nervous about tech issues. I was running Zoom and it's just been a really long time since I've done a live workshop presentation. Because I have to also show slides and manage a chat and all just myself. I don't have a producer with me or anything like that. But all that went smooth. I did a bunch of test runs beforehand, and that was fine.

Pascal said Brian did well. Cool.

Yeah. Thank you, Pascal. So I think that was good. I spent a lot of time on the slide deck, which is good because now that's like a template for future workshops. I'll tweak slides and stuff, but the workshop What went

was the vibe? Like were people asking questions? Was there Yeah.

A lot of questions. Okay. And collected a lot of questions beforehand. So I had a I had a lot to work off of. But then, yeah, I had a ton of questions on it. A lot of questions about Agent OS.

Yeah. Wow. That's so valuable, Brian. Like, you just got a supercharged injection of customer feedback research desires. It's all kind of in there. Was there anything big that you noticed, like, in the discussion?

It's hard to tell because I I think one of the challenges is that they're so varied. Like, the the people are coming from different people are resonating with this general topic, but they're resonating with it in different ways. There's the individual developers, there's the team leaders, there's the nontechnical trying to go beyond vibe coding and get a little bit more serious. And it's just like everything in between. And then there's a big contingent of people who are pretty much just here for Agent OS.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, also think that like, okay, I always have a pessimistic view. I think like a healthy pessimism about things.

Is that a show title? A healthy pessimism?

Well, do think that there was some pent up demand for something like this. Right? Like I've been building up the email list and I'm continuing to build it up. Like people come into it every day. But this was the very first workshop.

Yeah. I mean, I know

how it's YouTube into the email list. And hopefully you've discovered me for the first time since my last workshop. So my next one is going be the first one you see for you. Right?

Yeah.

And so that's that's gonna be the the repeatable ongoing funnel, if you will.

You know, I always I loved this. I we actually built a version of this as a side project. I love this idea of progress bars. And I love this idea of like a waiting list where it grows until it gets to a certain number and then something happens. So it's like, hey, everybody, join my email list.

Yeah. I like that. And also, like, again, like that, like, what is it that people are buying? What's what is convincing them to buy now rather

than

just hold out? And I was a little bit afraid that like, okay, it was the it was the founding member deal. And once I sell through those 50 spots, I'm not gonna sell anymore. But I've been, you know, pleasantly seeing that like in the last couple days and today and yesterday, like people are still buying the pro membership. Wow.

Okay. Let's talk about let's talk about that part. You've sold 60 of these annual membership subscriptions?

Annual subscriptions. Yep.

I mean, how does that land for you?

That's pretty it's above 1 k MRR now, technically, Wow. On the on the Stripe dashboard.

Do we have confetti in here? Don't feel good.

It feels good. It's It's interesting because it's like there there are more customers than that on Clarity Flow, but not a lot more.

Yeah.

And this and this grew to to that number in a week. You know? So that's that's an interesting tidbit.

How did that how did that land for you? How did that feel to have that? How does it how does it resonating for you right now?

It feels good. Like, I'm definitely I'm I'm I'm definitely pretty thrilled with what I'm seeing. It's it's not a viable business that can support my full income yet, of course. But but it has the it it gives me the confidence to keep pushing, to keep going. Yeah. Like, I'm on the right track. I'm onto something here. So that's that's reassuring. Yeah. But at the same time, if I'm honest, like, the thing that I get stressed out now, it's like a new kind of stress.

Is anybody gonna show up? All that stuff.

Yeah. Is this even gonna work? So all these what ifs, right? And so that can be stressful in itself. Okay. So now we get into revenue land, and now we have paying customers. There's activity. We have members. So now it's about projects and priorities and things to ship. Were talking about like

Yeah.

So now it's just the competing Every day there's a competing priority. And there are big, big problems that have to be solved. And some of them are sort of urgent and time sensitive.

Give me an example. What's an urgent project?

Well, right now, the things that are on my mind, today, if it was possible to clone myself three, four, five times, I would wanna be working on all these things, which is shipping Agent OS two point o, shipping or creating some new content just for the members, like educational content. I did do a behind the scenes video last week to give them, like, a preview of Agent OS to give them something new. And I'm and I'm in the Discord. I've got the Discord going. But but I haven't actually created any, like, official training material that you get with Builder Methods Pro.

Okay.

Oh, that's the other thing. I had another sales call with a very large team, like a 500 plus engineer team. And they're expecting a proposal from me. I have to do that at some point for for like a like a private workshop engagement with them on AI.

So what's so funny about all this is there's this this mix of feelings, which I know so well, which is on one hand, it's like that vulnerability you have before you launch something is is one of the most vulnerable places you can be, which is I'm about to launch this thing. If nobody shows up, that will just be devastating. You know? And so that that alone, a lot of people have a hard time getting over that threshold. Right?

You know, I hear what you're saying. I think you're probably right that most people sort of stress over like, anyone going to buy this? Am I going to even get one customer? That actually doesn't bother me too much. I don't get hung up on that kind of thing. Sometimes I wish something would totally flop because it would It's be a clear like, okay, I can just

move on. Totally agree.

You know what actually does get to me in a way that might be a little bit unhealthy? Is now that I have this thing out in the world, especially Agent OS, but also, like, Builder Methods Pro now and and the YouTube channel, there's a lot of inbound. Every single day, I'm getting inbound. And that comes in the form of support questions, feature requests, integration requests, requests for YouTube content, questions on my YouTube channel. I don't want those to go unanswered.

There's too much.

Like, there's just no physical way that I can like, I there there's just a lot of messages that I receive that my default has to be like, I have to just ghost this one. I can't actually reply. And I that doesn't sit well with me. I don't like that.

Yeah. Managing inbound. You know, the the funny thing is that for Transistor, so much of our inbound came through our live chat app and our support email. And I definitely felt it. I mean, those first two years, first three years, I really felt it.

Totally. And by the way, I still have at least 20% of my time, there's Clarity Flow. And most of that is Clarity Flow support that comes to my inbox. And then I've got a client who I have to like deliver something So every it's like, it's all this. And so, I tend to prioritize paying customers, obviously. Like if you're a paying customer and especially if you're a client or if you're a lead for becoming a big client, I'm obviously going to respond to your email. Especially with like

And you could message that too. You could indicate that with some sort of communication or message to say, folks in Builder Methods Pro get my first attention or whatever.

That's like what I have on the sales page. It's it's the official support channel for Agent OS. You gotta be a member in there. But I also see release, like getting to the point where I could release Agent OS two point zero as a a big relief to some of that. Because right now, every single day, I'm answering questions by saying, oh, that's gonna be fixed in two point o.

Yeah.

And and what that what I need is focused multiple hours of blocks of quiet time to work on it. You know? I mean,

Caleb Porzio, it sounds like the way he deals with this is now he has somebody help him with the inbound. And Yeah. Yeah. It seems like whenever people get to from the people I've talked to, and I mean, was my experience with Transistor as well. It's just those first years is just shitty because you are. You're just being overwhelmed. You're getting pulled in a million different directions. You can't answer everything. And I think this is even more true for open source projects. It's just hell.

And also what I try to do and this, you know, this is obviously like a creator led and and like audience based type of business. So there's always gonna be this element of like just inbound comments and questions coming in. Right?

Like, I

I understand that. But the I think the thing that I try to stay focused on to to overcome it is that like what I put out there publicly on like, in YouTube videos or the documentation around AgentOS, I try to put as much effort and clarity as I possibly can into that stuff. So that, like, even if you can't get a direct answer from me all the time, like, the stuff that I put out there on, you know, in public Yeah. Is quality and it's also what really frustrates me, especially with, like, open source projects, but any even paid products. What really frustrates me is when the company does not put effort into their self serve documentation.

Yeah. That that would be a cool workshop actually. How to get AI to help you write docs. That would be, I think, pretty popular. Yeah, man. Wow. Well, congrats on getting 60 paying members. That just seems like a great start. I mean

Yeah. It's it's something.

That's that's awesome.

I am still interested in the Teams thing. I'm gonna I know I'm gonna continue to have inbound. I I had a great call with these They're they're a SaaS company and and a pretty well known one and pretty huge. They've got a team of 500. And and it's so interesting to me to to talk to these team leaders and CEOs and CTOs because so many teams are struggling with the exact same things.

Interesting.

And even like a team of 20 is having the same challenges that a team of 500 is having right now.

Dude, this is what I love about customer research and customer development and taking those calls. It feels like you get this secret insight into a problem that nobody else has. And so you're just sitting on that knowledge right now. You gotta figure out what to do with it. But

I have one of the insights that I'm and and and this even came up on the call because the package that I'm putting together for teams who who want to, like, have, like, a a private consultation is it's a private workshop. Like, I'll I'll put on a private workshop for your team plus, like, an async well, there would be, a coaching session for the leadership team. You get a private workshop and then an async one or two week window where anyone on your team, after they've watched the workshop, they can submit a question to pick my brain about about it. And the workshop is largely built around, like, implementing AgentOS with your team and some other best practices. Right?

it goes over. Timer.

Yes. Oh, okay. All right. All right. You can cut me off.

Oh man, that was amazing.

Yeah. Anyway, there's like, just real quick to finish that thought, there's like 5% of team members who are, like, the power users.

Mhmm.

So it's like if if I could help train them on how to disseminate to the rest of their team Yeah. Yeah. The the workflows. That's an interesting pattern.

That seems like a great opportunity. That's awesome. You've got another fifteen minute segment coming up for Agent OS, so we we can come back to it.

Yeah. That's that's actually more of a smaller thing, but but more about competition in general. We'll we'll get into that. But I I wanna ask you because I I did listen to your episode on Build Your SaaS podcast with John. It was great to hear I don't know John personally, but it was great to hear him back on the mic Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I I definitely expressed in that there was some things that him and I had been talking about privately that the big one was, I think, exploring a few kind of things we've noticed over the past few years. And one is just, you know, I had that conversation with Jason Cohen and, you know, how to get what you want, his framework for how to get what you want. And he said, you know, you've been doing this eight years almost. And this is usually the time where people founders need a break.

What I was curious about listening to you guys was and I heard I heard all of that those same thoughts from you on on that episode. I was a little bit unclear on where John sits with all that. Are you guys kind of in the same place mentally with with that sort of like, been at this a while? What are we building towards? Where is this going?

I think his is different. And the cadence with John and I is usually I am kind of the pokey spear that gets the conversation going. And usually, I'll say, here's what's been on my mind. But then I know it's gonna take him a while to process it, think about it, and then kind of talk about what he thinks. So I think I mean, he just moved.

But this is That's the interesting question. Right? Because I it you know, I've I've always been, in the last couple of years, working out of this sense of urgency. When I just talked about a minute ago about all the different competing priorities, I don't wanna be working on all those things. Like I do in general, but I don't wanna have to work on them at the same time.

you know? Yeah.

So, yeah, that is an interesting question. I guess it comes down to like how much, I feel like a sabbatical is good no a good idea no matter what

you end up doing. I think that's what Jason was saying. And these questions are not easy questions to answer. I think the important thing is that I was feeling something and that some sort of I'm not happy. And not in the sense of like, I'm really dissatisfied or I'm, you know, it's nothing like but just feeling like, like, I'm feeling maybe happy is not even the right word, but I'm just like, I'm feeling something.

Yeah. Does. So just on the sabbatical idea, I think not only will would it result in like space to go explore new ideas or just see where you're at personally, but it's also a chance to test and for you to learn, like, let's see what happens with my business when I'm not there. Yeah. Like, what what does it mean for Transistor to run without Justin in the office, in the quote unquote remote office for weeks on end?

Yeah.

Knowing that like, that you could take a sabbatical anytime, or you could push down to part time effort if you wanted to at periods, or you could take trips whenever. That that could be just like an interesting byproduct of like like the sabbatical itself could be great. But but the the the realization of what what do you actually have in transistor that it can run without you, like, that could be pretty big as well.

Yeah. And so that is true because Jason talked about that too. And at the same time, he said, it's true that you could actually you could probably take a break for a year. But he said there would be a lot of stuff that wouldn't happen in that year that where you would notice it, maybe not in that first year, but you would notice it in year two or year three or year four. So there's this both and, which is in one sense, yeah, we got a team of six people.

I feel like if you if you think about, like, the world where you are committed to transistor, like your role in transistor, even if that means, like, you you'll you'll do a sabbatical every year or you'll Mhmm. You'll ease off on your actual work hours, but still you're in your seat, you're in your role as, I don't know if you guys do titles or whatever, but like you're very involved. It's not like you're gonna step away and hire a CEO or anything like that, right? I mean, could be an option at some point, but I'm just saying, let's live in the world for a second where it's like you are still doing what you're doing for several more years. Yeah.

Yeah. I think I think that could be motivating for us because that's the other tricky part about this is that not only do I individually have to figure out what I want and what's motivating for me, I then have to John also has to do that as well. That alone is a lot to ask. Then him and I have to reconcile that together, and then both be committed to helping the other person get what they want. Then we have to take it to the team, and we have to figure out what is going to motivate each individual on the team to continue to do their best work.

Yeah. I I do know, like, people who are cofounders and and run, like, well established SaaS companies for for many years. And I've seen them go through these similar cycles. And I've seen a few different I have seen the sabbatical playbook happen, which has had very good results. But also, at one point in the history of of this one SaaS company I'm thinking of, it's like they did they did decide to do a second product.

Right? How did that work out? Because I'm always curious

I mean, about doubled and tripled their revenue. Okay. Because normally what

you hear is the second product doesn't do as well as the first product.

No. It was like an obvious it was like their customers are telling them like, all right, you solved this one problem. Now we want you to solve this second problem.

Oh, nice.

And and their revenues has that that was their what what I was gonna say was like, if you decide that growth, like a like a significant trajectory change in growth is the thing that you wanna go for.

Mhmm.

Like, yeah, you could push on maybe new some some new marketing and branding ideas

Mhmm.

That might result in some growth. But I feel like for a well established product like yours and the and the industry that you're in, probably the biggest impact is like figuring out what the most obvious adjacent product to sell to your existing audience is. Mhmm. And then it's it's almost like you're back to startup mode. And and, yeah, like it like, you're in it, your team's gonna be in it.

I think a lot of it was this realization that most of the greenfield opportunity in podcasting, I think, has been captured. I think I think we entered the market at a good time when there was lots of market to gobble up, and we grew really fast. And then we kind of hit the natural constraints of the market. And now we're just growing along with the rest of the market. And there's some things we could do here and there, but they're iterative.

Yeah. I can see

that. We could. There's there's still things we could do. But when I look at the levers we could pull, it's like, yeah, we could pull this lever and get into the ad market. But, man, that would be that would be a big deal. Right?

So feel like a lot of these big product changes for transistor almost cross the line into, like, these are separate products.

That's the other feeling I'm getting is I've

Because, like, even even if, like, technically, you could connect it to to your existing transistor product, I see that's a departure on the on the core job to be done.

Yeah.

You know, like your customers today are coming to transistor because they wanna host their podcast. Yep. Yep. It they it's not a given that every one of them also cares about advertising or even the video thing I was thinking like that could maybe be thought of as like a separate product. Like, it could benefit your existing customers, but presenting it, positioning it as a separate product, can start to market it as like, if you have a video problem, you know, like, come here for that.

Yeah. I really like that. I yeah. I oh, five, four, three.

We need like an alarm or or even like a warning too. Yeah. Like

a Yeah. Yeah.

Like a two minute warning. Warning. Warning.

Wrap it up. What yeah. Let's talk about let's switch. Let's talk about what you were thinking about competition. I I I was kinda eager to talk about that.

Yeah. So, like, not not necessarily like my competition. There's I guess that you might consider some. But, like, it's more like this what to think of competitors in general. I've talked about this before on various podcasts, but I just tend to not care what what competitors are doing. And also, like, I also try to avoid even looking at them a lot of the time, even if I know them personally.

Why is that?

Because I because I get pulled into those, like, I would say, unhealthy thoughts. Like, oh, what are they doing? Or or are they copying me? Or am I going to be accused of copying them? Or are we competing for the same customers? And am I better than them? Are they better than me? And I don't really care about all that. Like, I only care about what my customers want and my ability to serve them something that's valuable. And also my personal taste on things.

Yep.

Agent OS is an open source thing, but it's a product that is aimed at spec driven development. Yeah. It's a tool. And I've been talking about spectrum development for many months now. There are multiple There's a few other frameworks that are similar in concept or at least trying to target the idea of spec driven development

Mhmm.

In in AI. And there's a new one that just dropped this week from GitHub.

Okay.

What's it called? So that one I think it's called SpecKit. SpecKit. And they they put someone on this, like, basically full time to be, like, the the the and he's doing YouTube videos and everything, which are which are blowing up on you know, because they're they're doing this, like, spec driven framework tool, open source, and it's it's interesting. Mhmm.

Yeah.

But I don't care. I don't wanna see it. I don't wanna even have an opinion on what someone else is doing.

Interesting. Like I I'm I am John, I think, is more sensitive to this than I am. And other people on the team actually have asked me even to stop. Because sometimes I'm that guy in our Slack saying, oh, these guys are doing this and this. And they've asked me to stop because it affects them emotionally.

So I'll tell you. I am interested in because I ask this a lot. When I'm on a call with a customer, I do always ask, what are the alternatives that you're looking at right now?

On

that call the other day with the team, they're gonna hire me talk to their team of 500. I was like, okay, so you guys are expressing to me all these pain points that you have, and I'm getting a good understanding of them. And I have some ideas on how I can help. But I'm curious, like, what have you done? What are you doing?

me

because they think that that's what I wanna hear. Yeah. In fact, I probably actually wanna hear what did work for you. But at end the of the day, it's like, you're on this call with me, so there must've been something that fell short over there. Yeah. Right? So I'm always very interested to hear about my competitors from my customers. I want my customers to tell me like, what do you see? Yeah. That's much more interesting to me.

Yeah. I I mean, I think this is why having customer conversations is so helpful. That email I send to every new customer, you know, what's going on in your world that brought you here today? Often, people tell me other options that they considered. And I always follow it up and say, why did you choose us? Like, what was it? And sometimes it is vibes. They're like, I just liked your guys' vibes better. Yep. And that might have been how they got treated in onboarding call.

And sometimes it's like a speed thing. It's like it's like, well, you're the one that I found today, and I wanted to get this done today. So you know?

Yeah. Or you're the one that ChatGPT recommended. Or you're the one I mean, that one's happening a lot.

And or

you're the one that Google recommended. So, yeah, I think those conversations are so helpful.

The other point I wanted to make about competition is that even if they do exactly what my product does, and even if we share a lot of the same customers, and maybe they switch between us pretty frequently, or they consider us both all the time, I don't even think of it like a competition. Or at least I try not to. There's always the human element, like when I look at them and I might be jealous of this or that or, you know

Yeah.

But at the end of the day, when I step back and I'm like, what do I actually think? Like, I I think a more healthy approach, and I have to remind myself to do this, is like, we should both exist. There's a reason we both exist. We're gonna continue to exist. They're gonna do great. I'm gonna I'm doing my thing over here. Yeah. I like, I think the thing that triggered this for me was that I had a YouTube comment. Okay. You know? What what do you think about this this spec this this

That's how we should start every segment is what actually triggered this segment? Gonna I'm add that

into And my usually it's gonna be like, YouTube comment triggered Yeah, yeah. So, but it was like, hey, this hot new thing just launched, and they seem to be making lots of updates really quickly. And if you don't catch it had the tone of like, if you don't respond to feedback and release as frequently as they are, as this big company is doing over there, then you're going to miss out or they're going to win in this. And my first response was, well, he was also asking about like, how are you different or how are you better or worse? And my first answer was, look, whichever one works for your workflow is the one you should choose.

The podcast industry is interesting in that we hang out together. So, you know, we're all at the conference and we're hanging out together. We're spending time. We connect well with each other. I would consider many of my competitors my friends.

How do you react when a competitor does something awesome? Like, something that you like, if it's any if if you're looking at a product that's not in your industry and they do something awesome, you look at it and like, oh, that's really well done.

Yeah.

They well designed. They executed that branding thing in a really good way. What happens when when it's one of your competitors?

I think if it's I mean, sometimes I'm, like, worried about it. I'm like, oh, man. We gotta think about that. Sometimes I'm like, oh, let's wait and see. Let's see how this you know? And now I've been in it long enough, I know that not not all of these big pushes produce any sort of meaningful results on the end. So you can have a big cool feature that gets tons of press. And we've had those features, got tons of press. People loved it. Did it change our monthly sign ups that month?

Yep. So yeah.

I I I It's cool. Yeah. It's I mean,

I think that, like, it's it's interesting that the competitive spirit, like where it comes from. For me, it's always been self, like like competing with myself, trying to trying to get better. Yeah. Trying to trying to beat my personal best at whatever it is.

Yeah.

You know? Whether it's revenue, whether it's product, whether it's like, you know, my craft.

Yeah. I I get motivated even by, like, silly things. Like, how often are we in the press? How often are we getting mentioned online? You know, the things like that are motivating to me to feel like it's really motivating when someone says, I tried this other competitor. They were no good. Somebody recommended transistor. I've been using you for a month, and you're way better. I love that stuff. That's fuel for me.

It it does burn me when I especially when I see churn and cancellation reasons. Mhmm. When they cite that, like, yeah, we we had to cancel because we're going to this competitor. Mhmm. Because we we like we like the way that they handle your feature better than you do. And and that like, there's there's no there's no way around it. Like, that's gonna burn, you know, to for me, it is.

I think it burns, Yeah. It burns people differently. Again, I think that I think it does burn John more than it burns me. For me, I'm more emotionally distant from that. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Like, people really seem to want that. I'm also always interested. Like, I wonder if they're gonna come back. Maybe they'll come back.

If if they cancel because they do something that we don't, I I'm I'm cool because it's like, yeah, I I get it. Yeah. I would cancel too because we don't do that. But when it's something that we do and it's like a core feature, they just like their version better. Yeah. That's like, ugh. Alright. That stings.

Yeah. That was exactly 15.

Oh, alright. Nice.

Do we wanna talk about hiring Or do is there something else you wanna

I I sort of talked about it already with the video editor. Unless you have any thoughts.

But I think I think I'm good.

I think we got a good one here.

Anything else we should chat about? Or we did we do it?

I think we did it. Another marathon. Hour forty three.

Well, it was an hour and forty three. But

I don't know how much was recorded.

We did have we started recording early. So we'll see how long the actual show was. But I I kinda like this segments thing. So

I do too. I wanna, like, prepare for next time.

Yeah. Yeah. Next time, I gotta make this collaborative.

But yeah. This is I expect you to vibe code it by tonight.

I mean, what what what the limitations of vibe coding are just so clear on this.

Like I know. I well, like, I've played with the v zeros and a couple others. And as as someone who builds stuff, you know, with my hands Yeah. That that that those tools are very frustrating to me.

You know? It's like even till the last build, the colors on this were all wrong. And I was like, what what are you doing? And to get something, like, fixed, it even if you highlight, like, listen, there needs to be more contrast on this title.

Like, I'm all for building with AI in the code base itself, like in Cloud Code or Cursor. Yeah. But typing into a box and expecting an app to come out. Yeah. I I don't buy it.

The other there was some cool things about it, though, because I I I do find this step that's helpful is the having to describe to it what you want. And I think like this first part just forcing me to articulate like, okay, build an app that I had to articulate it in succinct a way I could, while kind of spelling out what this thing is. And then as I'm interacting with it again, I have to kind of describe these interactions in a way that a machine would understand. It largely

It has been interesting. One real again, this is an insight that I picked up from the sales call with the team. It's something that I've had on multiple sales calls with large teams. Because I'm really asking a lot of questions about like, what does your workflow look like? How are you using AI so far with your team? I've been surprised to to hear about more serious software companies using these tools, vZero, Replit, and Lovable.

Mhmm.

Because I always associated these with the indie hacker who's vibe coding, who doesn't know how to code anything, and they're gonna put together this AI slop and ship whatever from out of v zero. Right? But it turns out that these tools are being used on larger teams in Yes. The early prototyping So whatever they're creating in vZero is nowhere near what they end up building and shipping to customers. But it's the product managers, the designers, the idea people that are going into vZero to whip up something so that they can go have a meeting about it with somebody in their department.

With an interactive demo.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting tool in that. Like, never really thought of these in that context. There's gonna be the audience that uses it to actually try to ship a small app in a weekend. But I think in the professional context, it's like a prototyping tool.

Yeah. Yeah. And I I found it hugely helpful to to it's so hard to describe to people what you want. And I've done it with TLDraw. I've done it with wireframing. I've done it by kind of quickly coding up a series of HTML screens. I've done it by, you know, building the best MVP and Rails I could. But this it was just so fast, and the feedback loop is so quick. It's like, no, I don't want that. I want this.

Right.

A way of figuring this out.

I'm really curious to see how far you get with this thing. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we'll see what we'll see if I I think if I was actually gonna build it for real, you know, I would I would probably say, okay, let's make this see, the interesting thing for you in this is that as after I built this, I was like, ugh, you know what I really want now? Is for Brian to help me get set up in the existing transistor code base with some sort of plot or whatever, and then help me get a a j like, if this was a tool on a subdomain, but I wanted to use our UI and our way of building a Rails app and all that stuff, help me train the AI to do that so that I can start building a product in the transistor way with AI that's going to be It'll just be a tool that's on the footer of our website. Right? I

think that that is getting a lot easier and better now when you already have a reference point. Are now actually tool like, Cloud Code itself is very good at you can just give it an image, it a screenshot of of your interface, and it'll pick up details pretty well. And then there are this gets a little bit into the weeds. There's like a tool called Playwright, actually lets lets your agent it's like an MCP that you could use with Cloud Code and Cursor and all these, which which basically allows your agent to fire up a a browser

Oh, okay.

And click and test test things on its own.

This is a Microsoft thing.

Yeah. It's a Microsoft project that it's so it it basically gives you the ability to to type into Clog code and say, open this in a browser and check it at mobile screen sizes and click on this navigation and make sure the flow all works. Like, it can you'll you'll see it actually do that in the browser.

Interesting.

But also but just just even giving it screenshots, you can say, like, make it look like this or use the same color scheme or style guide as as what we're using. That's pretty good. What I'm interested in and still haven't felt good about the options now is the design phase. So if I'm working on a totally greenfield, like totally new product, I have not found a solid design, an AI driven design tool that's that I feel better than just me going into Figma and creating something. Now, I don't don't do that process very often.

But

when I do want to mock something up from scratch for a totally new brand, totally new look and feel, v zero and Replit and Lovable are supposed to be able to do this. Mhmm. And maybe they're better at it now. And there's other tools that are like it, but I I'm just never happy with like verbally describing something and and the output that it gets out. And, like, I still wanna go in there and tweak things, make it pixel perfect.

Yeah. I think you can upload

Like, Figma's built in AI is not very great, you know, not very useful right now. So that's that's the side of the stack that I think is still behind.

I noticed in v zero, there's an add from Figma option or upload from Figma.

That assumes that your design team has already created a a mock up in Figma.

Yeah.

Yeah. So but it's like the creation of the mock up. How do we get there with AI?

There's also this design mode in v zero. I I need to check this out.

Cool.

Well

Yeah, man.

That's another panel.

Another segment. We got we got we got a bonus segment.

We got

a bonus. On vibe coding.

And by the way, I I didn't think anybody was gonna show up in the live chat. I got the announcement out late. Heck, we had so many people show up. We had Ryan Heffner, Casper, Daniel Roberts, Emmett, Zach Gilbert.

The regulars.

Adam. A new Adam I haven't seen before.

Yeah. It's cool to see some some new and familiar faces popping in here. It's awesome to see you guys.

Yeah. Thanks so much. Ben Daily. Simon Bennett.

There's Yeah.

There's a name. There's a name I haven't heard in a while. Well, I've heard it. But he's I think he's been building something new, I think. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for showing up.

I wanna hear about it.

Yeah. Well, maybe have to have him on the program. Alright. See you all.

Thank you, folks.

Talk to later.

Alright. Bye. Later.