Justin and Jon are joined by Jason Fried to talk about: The philosophy behind their new book Shape Up . Does Basecamp's approach to 6-week cycles differ for smaller teams? "Long projects destroy morale. When things don't ship, you get frustrated." – Jason Fried Why projects ship late (it's human nature). Why work is like a hill. How they make product decisions at Basecamp. How do you know what you should work on next? Why they don't believe in backlogs. "That feeling of 'there's nothing to do, b...
Aug 06, 2019•51 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast Big week. Justin was in New York and Jon found an office! Justin lost his voice. Jon doesn't work from home or coffee shops anymore. Jon found an office: "It’s inexpensive, but quiet, with nice people in a nice area. Inexpensive enough to where I won’t feel bad if I do want to work elsewhere once in a while." Justin's Spotify visit (very interesting). Laracon conference on Times Square (Justin was the MC and gave a talk) Met with a few customers: Jess & Jmac – The BaseCode Podcast Conor – Th...
Jul 30, 2019•51 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast Justin and Jon are starting to feel that stress. We start with an unscripted bit. Our backlog and todo list are still stressing us out. We want to improve the app, but we get stuck fixing bugs. Justin is going to be at Laracon, NYC . Should we fly less? ★ Thanks to our sponsors: ProfitWell gives you free subscription metrics for your SaaS. Just plug in your billing system (Stripe, Zuora, Braintree, Chargebee, Recurly are all supported) and get free access to your MRR, churn, cohorts. Sign up for...
Jul 23, 2019•44 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Justin and Jon dive into the growing backlog of features, bugs and tasks, and talk about how they might better manage it as a two-person team. A big new milestone is reached! Jon had a bit of anxiety over the growing backlog in Clubhouse New ideas were being thrown into an unscheduled list, but weren't yet actionable. Some ideas can be left alone for awhile and revisited to see if they're still worthwhile. Ben Orenstein wants to delete your entire backlog. 6 week cycles like Basecamp does might ...
Jul 16, 2019•46 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Now, Justin and Jon share are both focused full-time on Transistor. This week they discuss: Emotionally processing what it's like leaving a full-time job. What was it like working at the Cards Against Humanity office? What's it like now? Contextual zones: “I noticed that when I entered the library, I was already thinking about reading and writing.” - Kunal Shandilya. Why you need local and online community. What happens if one of us goes hiking in the woods, and there's an accident? ★ Thanks to ...
Jul 09, 2019•54 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Jon had some personal news for Justin this week. This week they discuss: What does this mean for the product? What does this mean for us as a team? ★ Thanks to our sponsors: ProfitWell gives you free subscription metrics for your SaaS. Just plug in your billing system (Stripe, Zuora, Braintree, Chargebee, Recurly are all supported) and get free access to your MRR, churn, cohorts. Sign up for free at profitwell.com . Redash is is a BI tool for people who love SQL. Connect your database, query, vi...
Jul 02, 2019•49 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Jon is away, so Justin is tackling these questions: "When you were early on and desperate, were you tempted to take investor money?" "How do you position yourself in a crowded market? What's your marketing plan look like?" "How do you prioritize feature development? Are new features coming from customer feedback, intuition, or some combination of both?" "Are you planning on experimenting with paid acquisition channels?" "How can I get a job at Transistor.fm ?" ★ Thanks to our sponsors: ProfitWel...
Jun 25, 2019•44 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Jon and Justin talk about new developments with Transistor : We've taken over $100,000 in funding (from our customers!) We harken back to July of 2018 (right before our official launch), when Justin was stressed about money. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: ProfitWell gives you free subscription metrics for your SaaS. Just plug in your billing system (Stripe, Zuora, Braintree, Chargebee, Recurly are all supported) and get free access to your MRR, churn, cohorts. Sign up for free at profitwel...
Jun 18, 2019•48 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast More honest updates from Jon and Justin on what it's like to be building Transistor.fm : People can't believe that we're using this in production. Why SaaS feels better than other businesses we've been involved with. "Kubernetes sounds like a Russian swat squad." There's a temptation to over-engineer things; but there's only two of us working on Transistor! The enterprise sales process seems like it's too much for our small bootstrapped company. Looking back, we were wrong about who are customer...
Jun 11, 2019•47 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast Jon and Justin share some honest updates about as they continue to build their SaaS (Transistor.fm): Justin swears in this episode. We're half way through 2019!?! Jon is wondering if donuts are big in Canada. Official Transistor start dates: May 2017: actual incorporation date January 2018: Jon and Justin sign partnership documents August 2018: official launch "Some days I feel like I've been doing Justin thinks business is a lot like fishing. "Transistor's launch has felt different than other p...
Jun 04, 2019•50 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast Jon and Justin share some honest updates about as they continue to build their SaaS (Transistor.fm): Jon asks: "how do you prioritize with limited resources?" "Working on something for an hour only isn’t really feasible. it takes about 20 minutes just to back into it." Justin is thinking about " the myth of the niche market " This latest revenue update has Jon and Justin scared. 😱 ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq is giving a shout out to their ADMIN team members. They are the unsung heroes of...
May 28, 2019•46 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Happy Two-Four ya hosers! After a Canadian long weekend, Jon and Justin convene to talk about: Justin thinks non-alcoholic drinks are going to be huge. Jon just shipped an update that puts RSS feeds on a CDN. We're still struggling to "find the time" to work on big features. Building things slowly vs BEING IN A RUSH! ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq : You can meet the support team at balsamiq.com/support - they're awesome people. Clubhouse.io : Clubhouse is the first project management platfor...
May 21, 2019•37 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast Jon and Justin are wrestling with thoughts about growth: "Our current rate of growth is nice: it feels sustainable." – Justin "It feels less sustainable for me, because I'm working a full-time job." – Jon We’re able to keep up with demand, and enjoy the process. There are all these stories about folks whose companies are growing like crazy. They’re just always adding more people, more process, more stress. Do we want that? Peldi tells this story about starting Balsamiq. He said his launch was li...
May 14, 2019•44 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Jon and Justin are back from Portland and wrestling with ideas, bots, and CMSes: Justin's spouse wants to know why we wouldn't sell for $5 million (and each get $2.5 million) Jon found some bot traffic that we need to eliminate from our analytics, and it's giving him a Postgres headache. Justin is trying a bunch of different CMS options: Vapid, Statamic in an effort to get off WordPress. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq : They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-d...
May 07, 2019•50 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Jon and Justin do a founder retreat in Portland with Darby Frey and Shay Howe ( Lead Honestly ). We hashed out some ideas for: How do you start building a really big feature? What does version 1 of our "dynamic content" feature look like? Setting up Mixpanel: creating event triggers, funnels, and onboarding. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq : They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-designers. Get in the zone, and I feel creative right away. Try out their free tri...
Apr 30, 2019•38 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast If you're struggling with pricing your app, listen to this episode! Ben Orenstein, Jordan Gal, Patrick Campbell, and I discussed whether "charge more" is always the right answer. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq : They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-designers. Get in the zone, and I feel creative right away. Try out their free trial: balsamiq.com Clubhouse.io : Clubhouse is the first project management platform for software development that brings everyone to...
Apr 23, 2019•1 hr•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Jon is away so Justin called up Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. In this episode we covered: How Laravel become the most popular backend framework on GitHub. Surprise! Taylor wasn't really into computers before he created Laravel. What was Taylor's motivation? Why did he create this, even though there were other alternatives? What's Laravel's secret? Why did it succeed? How is Laravel a business? How does it earn revenue? "Before Laravel, there were a lot of programmers that were burnt out...
Apr 16, 2019•58 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Jon's away! Today I talked to Spencer Fry, from Podia about: How do you find a good startup idea? What are the worst types of companies to start? Should you raise money or bootstrap? Why the target market for your product matters. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq : They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-designers. Get in the zone, and I feel creative right away. Try out their free trial: balsamiq.com Clubhouse.io : Clubhouse is the first project management platf...
Apr 09, 2019•47 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Recorded on April fools day! Here's what we covered: If you're bootstrapping, when should you get a salary? An update on the worst day ever. (We're fine now) A SPECIAL SURPRISE "It feels like there is this convergence in podcasting and I don’t know what to do about it." Anxiety and insecurity about "missing out on better opportunities." ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq : They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-designers. Get in the zone, and I feel creative right...
Apr 02, 2019•46 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast On Sunday, we had a service outage. Jon and Justin talk about what happened: TLS / SSL day of horror Sunday morning Justin started getting messages from a few Android users that they couldn’t download episodes. Then, the afternoon hits, and we started getting a flood of tweets, DMs, text messages, and support requests. We talk about how we fixed it, and what we'd like to change for next time. Also: how we're earning 29% of our SaaS revenue. (A channel we didn't expect) ★ Thanks to our sponsors: ...
Mar 26, 2019•52 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Lots of interesting items this week: Justin got a personal message from an NFL player Jon moved everyone over to the new CDN Podcasting has a lot of confusing paradigms for users It took two days of transferring files (just under 1TB) Justin signed up for the Transistor as if he was a customer He live-streamed the whole thing (got tons of good input from live chat) Jon is wondering how we're going to handle hate speech on the platform ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Clubhouse.io : Clubhouse is the fir...
Mar 19, 2019•49 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Good stuff this week: Justin wants to know: when's the last time you changed your business' homepage? Jon does a deep dive into Apple's podcasting docs. Justin built a status (uptime) page for Transistor using Tailwind. Jon thinks there is enterprise demand for private podcasts. Justin chats about Startup Kung-Fu. They both chat about specialists vs generalists. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Clubhouse.io : Clubhouse is the first project management platform for software development that brings everyo...
Mar 12, 2019•46 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast Good stuff this week: Jon ran into Myke Hurley at the Cards Against Humanity office. Whether you should work from home or the office. Spotify analytics update in Transistor . How do you feel about "walled gardens?" Sometimes the best plan is to do nothing . Just wait and see what happens. Billing updates for delinquent customers Did someone try to phish us on-air? ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Balsamiq.cloud : They make a low-fidelity wireframing tool, specifically geared for non-designers. Get in t...
Mar 05, 2019•47 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Jon and Justin share their progress on: The bandwidth / CDN cost problem (and how it might affect our profitability). Marco Arment: "It would cost them probably thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth and CDN costs to host our show." We made a decision on whether we'll take investment now. (Hats off to Earnest Capital, TinySeed, and Indie.VC for offering such great options!) Should founders use their savings to fund their company? What about credit cards? When should we start hiring people? Wh...
Feb 26, 2019•45 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Jon and Justin are wrestling with some heavy startup founder topics: What should your SaaS company's gross margins be? How much is bandwidth going to cost us? How does it affect our margins? Example: [Account A] does 495,000 downloads in a month, average file size is 8 MB, that’s 3960 GB of bandwidth in a month. If bandwidth is $0.01 per GB, that’s $39.60 just for bandwidth for that one account. And that’s if we can get it that cheap. Otherwise, we’d pay $198 on AWS, or Azure. If we u...
Feb 19, 2019•49 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Dave Zohrob, the CEO of Chartable, chats with Justin about bootstrapping a startup in the podcast space. We cover: Why Jon and Justin started Transistor Navigating co-founder relationships How to stand out and build a podcast audience in 2019 Our thoughts on Anchor (this was recorded pre-acquisition) This is a re-broadcast of the Chartable Radio podcast . ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Alitu.com : Alitu removes all the tech headaches associated with producing your podcast. They take care of processin...
Feb 13, 2019•52 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode: Jon and Justin open up about the challenges of bootstrapping "on the side." How things have gotten harder (in some ways) now that we have customers. Jon is finding it hard to juggle his day job, and getting time to build the "big features." Justin flip-flips back and forth about investment. Would investors and advisors meddle too much? We also discuss the Spotify rumors: buying Gimlet for $200 - $230 million? Also, a theory about why Apple should have made Gimlet an offer. ★ Tha...
Feb 05, 2019•44 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Jon and Justin discuss the golden rule for growing your audience. This could mean: How to get more paying customers for your software product. How to get more followers on Twitter. How to get more podcast listeners. ★ Thanks to our sponsors: Alitu.com : Alitu removes all the tech headaches associated with producing your podcast. They take care of processing, editing & publishing your podcast. Go to Alitu.com and check out their video demo. Podcastinsights.com : If you want t...
Jan 29, 2019•43 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode Jon and Justin discuss talk about how you should think about your software product's competition. Why you shouldn’t focus on the competition It’s a distraction. The main point by many folks is: “when you focus too much on the competition, it means you’re not focusing enough on your customers.” It causes anxiety. “ Last summer, I stopped[reading industry news]. I had just reached the point at which I could feel an unhealthy level of toxicity piling up inside of me. I felt myself g...
Jan 22, 2019•45 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast We received some product marketing questions from Nirav Mehta: How to get the word out about your SaaS? Should you pursue partnerships? How can you get distribution for your software product? What marketing channels work best? Build anticipation before you launch One big opportunity many folks miss is building up anticipation before they launch. Examples: Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger shared design tips on Twitter and on their blog for 6 months before they released their book, Refactoring UI . D...
Jan 15, 2019•34 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast 
