Build Your SaaS

We're hoping to launch Transistor officially in July 2018.

And that means we need to figure out a pricing strategy. What types of tiers and plans should we offer?

SaaS pricing examples:

• Hootsuite
• WPEngine
• Sumo
• StatusPage

Patrick Campbell, from Price Intelligently, says there are three aspects of a pricing strategy:

1. Positioning: who are the right customers for your product? How will you target and attract them?
2. Packaging: what features are included in each tier? What value does each type of customer want from your product?
3. Pricing: putting a price on your tiers that reflects the value your customer receives.

Where did we get stuck? Jon and I started by looking at who had signed up for early access to Transistor:

• Hobbyists – podcasting for fun, two people talking, no advertising.
• Prosumers – side-project podcasting, may have a bit of income, want to go pro.
• Solopreneurs – solo founders building smaller tech products. 
• Small tech teams – teams of 3-10 people building larger software products.
• Bigger brands / enterprise companies.

This list brought up a question: how do we define our target customer? Is "podcast hosting and analytics for professionals" too broad?

Here's our homework for this week: we're going to let this simmer, we're going to talk to smart people about pricing, and we're going to come back to this next week.

Question of the week:

Tweet to @jon and @mijustin and let us know: how should we price our SaaS?

Show notes

• Jason Fried - Ass pricing
• Patrick Campbell - Price Intelligently 
• Jason Cohen - WPengine tiered pricing
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter
• Jon Buda is back on Twitter: @jonbuda
• Justin Jackson on Twitter here: @mijustin

★ Please review us in iTunes – T-shirt contest!  Leave a review you’ll be entered to win a limited edition Transistor t-shirt!

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

How transparent of a startup do we want to be?

There's an app called Buffer that really kickstarted the "radical transparency" movement with startups. Over time, they've revealed almost everything: how much their employees make, their company's revenue metrics, their internal emails, and their hiring process.

But is this something that we want for Transistor.fm? Listen to the episode to hear what we decided. ;)

Show notes

• Buffer Transparency
• Article: How radical transparency kills stress
• Article: How to Build a Transparent Company the Buffer Way
• Buffer: Why are we transparent?
• Right Message goes public with revenue
• Whisper network
• Spencer Fry on public roadmaps
• Baremetrics Open Startups
• Indie Hackers – transparency numbers
• Video: Our new analytics feature
• SnapShooter on Indie Hackers
• Announcement: We did it. We’re sharing our revenue on Indie Hackers!
• Marco Arment: “podcasters have enough data”
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter
• Jon Buda is back on Twitter: @jonbuda
• Justin Jackson on Twitter here: @mijustin

T-shirt contest!  Leave a review you’ll be entered to win a limited edition Transistor t-shirt!
★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Play this episode | Download MP3

Jon is busy launching our new podcast analytics feature, so this episode features Justin's talk from MicroConf 2018 in Las Vegas.

In this episode, you'll hear Justin's step-by-step approach for:

1. Identifying who you are, and what you want
2. Choosing a market
3. Discovering what they want
4. Shipping a (small) initial solution

Show notes

• Justin Jackson's 2018 MicroConf talk - video and notes
• Download the slides
• James Clear's list of core values
• MicroConf Growth
• MicroConf Starter
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter
• Jon Buda is back on Twitter: @jonbuda
• Justin Jackson on Twitter here: @mijustin

T-shirt contest!  Leave a review you’ll be entered to win a limited edition Transistor t-shirt!
★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Show notes

• MicroConf Growth
• MicroConf Starter
• MicroConf talk notes
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

T-shirt contest!  Leave a review you’ll be entered to win a limited edition Transistor t-shirt!
★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

What’s been happening?

• New iTunes review from Shane Smith in Australia: "Keep up the great work. Love hearing the behind-the-scenes part of setting up your SaaS."
• T-shirt contest!  Leave a review you’ll be entered to win a limited edition Transistor t-shirt!
• New features inside Transistor:
  • Embeddable players
  • Shareable links
  • Direct MP3 download URL
  • File uploader
• We've closed early access. Official launch coming soon!
• Marketing website is almost done
• We're working on a secret new thing - stay tuned to hear more.

Main topic: organizing your time

• This will be interesting because we’re coming at it from two different perspectives:
  • Jon works full-time
  • Justin runs his own business
• What’s hard about it?
  • Jon: I’m other people’s boss. Running the tech team at CAH/Blackbox. So people are depending on me. Blackbox is also a startup that requires a good deal of product decisions day to day. Both are exciting so it’s hard to juggle sometimes!
  • Justin: I’m my own boss. I tell myself what to do. The hardest part right now is Transistor isn’t making money, but it’s the funnest thing to work on.
• How do you overcome those obstacles?
  • Jon: Two separate Pivotal Trackers and Apple Reminders lists. if I can think of something for Transistor during work I just throw in the list for later. I have to smart about not doing Transistor during the work day and letting my team down. Transistor is mostly relegated to after hours and weekends. 
  • Justin: notepad, I split it into two sections: “MegaMaker” and “Transistor.” I have a Trello for MegaMaker that tracks what my contractors are doing.
• What does your ideal day look like?
  • Jon: ideally I’m only working on Transistor  in reality, wake up a bit early and see if I missed anything overnight for Transistor. errors, support emails, etc. Go do the fulltime thing. take a break after work to work out or make dinner and then work on Transistor at night a couple of times of week. Ideally I deploy at least something to Transistor everyday.
  • Justin: I’ve realized I really get energy from interacting with people. I recently did this “Strengths finder” test and activities like doing sales, doing demos, interacting with customers, writing, making videos and podcasts, hacking on ideas, building prototypes… these all play to my strengths.
• Tips for listeners:
  • Define the end result first:“what does your ideal day look like” is a really important question. 
  • Distinguish between big milestones and daily tasks.
  • Have a way of organizing tasks. Try a bunch!
  • Contextual zones. Have a different place to work on your side-hustle.

Show notes

• Good place for startup swag: printful.com
• Strengths Finder Test
• New feature: see our new shareable options
• Dropzone
• Quest Quest - a live D&D podcast
• CBC Radio Contextual Zones
• A Soft Murmur - audio contextual zones
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Recent news

• We're an official Spotify partner. You'll be able to find us in Spotify soon!
• Build Your SaaS was #1 on Product Hunt!
  • 1,773 downloads that day. Our previous record was 443 downloads in a day. ;)
• Searching for Casey Neistat.
• How do people find out about Transistor?
  • Thanks Joe Workman for referring us a new customer! Check out his show: Weaver Radio.
• New shareable / embeddable share links coming soon!

Main topic: money

• Should your startup get funding?
• Quotes:
  • Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer: “Easy to sell away your ownership and control without realizing what it will mean. The industry seems to normalize and make people feel like it's a given that they can't grow with their company.”
  • John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost: “This is so important. I had the exact same experience in a startup accelerator. All these wealthy smart people telling me that there was no way to succeed without taking capital. They are VERY good at convincing people of that”
  • “Growing fast and health are nearly mutually exclusive”
• Pros to funding: it’d be nice to move faster.
• Cons to funding: you lose control, your forced to move faster than you might like (or need to).

Show notes:

• Transistor’s new shareable links for social media
• Product Hunt: Build Your SaaS
• Searching for Casey Neistat tweet
• Interesting funding model: Indie VC
• Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer
• John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost
• Thanks to Andrew C and Bullet Train for being our first sponsor!
• Kayako for customer support
• Flywheel
• Adam Clark designing our marketing website
• Zoho
• Xero
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

What’s been happening?

• Is the Macbook Pro 2013 the best computer ever made?
  • Jon's review of the new Macbook Pro: the screen, the keyboard, the thinness are great. He doesn't like the touchbar, and it crashed a lot initially.
• Thanks to Bill for the Spotify introduction!
• We tried out Amazon Transcribe and it was hilarious

Main topic: Partner communication, making decisions

We got a question on Twitter from Dennis Martinez:

Jon and Justin have different decision making styles:

• Justin is "quick start." He likes to make decisions quickly, and have a fast momentum.
• Jon is more thoughtful and detail-oriented.

Having this balance is important!

How we communicate:

• Daily communication: Slack
• Weekly call: Skype
• How we make decisions: consensus.

Takeaways

• This is the benefit of doing a small project before you launch something bigger.
  • Example: where are we going for lunch? (XOXO), what source control are we going to use? (small project we did before Transistor)
• Partner with someone who is trustworthy, autonomous.
• Make sure there's enough overlap in your timezone.
• Ensure your co-founder has enough time to dedicate to the project.

Show notes:

• Justin's mic: ATR2100 USB
• Kyle Fox doesn't like the new Macbook Pro
• Spotify's podcast program
• Amazon Transcribe
• Indie Hackers
• Justin's article on Walt and Roy Disney
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Jon and Justin discuss "Why did we choose podcasting? And why now?" Picking the right idea, the right market, and having the right timing is crucial.

Current trends we've noticed:

• Dungeons and Dragons is getting popular again. Maybe because of Stranger Things?
• Podcasting, and branded podcasts, continue to grow in popularity. Increasingly, I'm hearing folks talk about the Tim Ferriss podcast in coffee shops. Instead of asking "What are you reading?" folks are asking "What podcasts are you listening to?"

Qualitative evidence almost always comes before quantitative evidence.

Show notes:

• Thanks to Greg at Mtek Digital for the studio space!
• Photo of Justin at Mtek studio
• World Waterpark at West Edmonton Mall
• Photo of waterpark
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

This episode is sponsored by Bullet Train. If you’re building a SaaS in Ruby on Rails stop what you’re doing right now, and visit BulletTrain.co.

You asked us:

In this episode, Jon goes into the nerd stuff. What programming language, frameworks, and infrastructure we're using to build our SaaS.

What we recommend:

• Programming language: use what you know!
• Make sure you can connect to the community (both local and on the web)
• Hosting: use Heroku if you don’t have DevOps experience, AWS is great if you know how to configure it
• Database: MySQL is fine, we use Postgres (good community + features)
• Design framework: Semantic UI, or Bootstrap
• Repos: GitHub
• Most important: Get something running as quickly as you can (and into the hands of customers!).

Show notes:

• Sponsor: BulletTrain.co
• Paul Graham's "Do things that don't scale"
• Nate Kontny’s take on “should you use Rails?”
• Stripe Atlas
• DHH on Rails 5.2
• Justin’s video tutorial
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

News

• We’ve opened up early access! We’ve been inviting people by email.
• We currently have 15 shows on our platform. In four months, we’ve served 2,335,033 downloads!
• So far: great feedback and feature requests.
• We have a bunch of folks in our trial funnel. We’ll start seeing whether people convert to paying accounts on April 6.
• XOXO is back!

Top fears when you're building a SaaS

• Can our servers handle the load? (So far, so good: over 2 million downloads)
• Will the user experience be good?
• Are we building the right tools?
• Uptime. There's this added layer of stress, because you don't want to let users down.
• Lack of time to build an app on the side.
• Or, working too much and burning out!

How to get over your fears

• Don't focus on your competition; focus on your customers!
• Listen to your customers. Get on the phone with them. Read their emails. Do live chat.
• Get paying customers as soon as you can. Listen to their feedback.
• Your ego is the enemy. You're putting your product out into the world so people get value from it.
• Put things in context: sure, this might not work out. But that's not the worst thing that could happen.

How to get over your fears?

Send us a tweet (@transistorfm), or email us: [email protected]. We'd love your audio clips as well!

Links

• 2018.XOXOfest.com
• Blog post: Why I'm building a SaaS in 2018
• Blog post: SaaS is ripe for disruption
• Adii Pienaar on customer support
• A checklist for product validation
• Book: Ego is the enemy
• Transistor.fm
• Transistor.fm on Instagram
• Transistor.fm on Twitter

★ Please review us in iTunes ★

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!