As I have been working on building Transmits, I started reading Rob Walling’s (@robwalling) book, Start Small, Stay Small. I was originally reading his latest book, The SaaS Playbook, but like he suggests in there, if your business is not at a certain monthly recurring revenue (MRR) you might be better off going back and reading his first book, so I did.

While reading it I realized I was breaking the cardinal sin numero uno, no marketing, nor testing the market to see if people would actually pay for what I am building. Granted, this is definitely a scratch my own itch project, and I know I will be using it regardless if I am able to get others to pay for it. But, at the same time, I am definitely investing a good amount of time trying to make what I am building really nice, both for myself and to wow some potential future users into being paying customers.

Thinking about what I could do to start building some initial marketing efforts I realized that the quickest thing I could do was repurpose the Transmits-specific episodes from this podcast, and re-package them into a Transmits-only podcast that I could start publishing, and include on the transmits.io site.

Reasons why making a Transmits-only podcast makes sense, now and into the future:

• SEO: By publishing the episodes and including those within a /podcast area of the marketing site, I am hoping that both the show notes and podcast transcriptions will feed the Google/search engine machines and start to get Transmits ranking for a few key terms
• Backlinks + SEO: Since I will be publishing the podcast, I hoping that the feeds and episodes will help to build up a good amount of backlinks to the site, driving more traffic and helping boost key word rankings
• Connection: There’s really no better way to understand what someone is trying to do than to listen to them. I am an avid podcast listener and am definitely more motivated to support people that I am listening to, than those who I have no direct connection with (even though that connection is mostly a one-way from my podcast app to my ears, but it still a remarkably personal one, even being one-way).
• Build Listeners + Subscribers: From the start of thinking about Transmits, I have always envisioned the product having a podcast where I would bring people on to discuss tools for thought, or podcasting, or whatever else might be interesting to discuss that could be tied back to either the underlying tech or goal for the platform, so why not start to get that wheel spinning and try to pick-up a few early subscribers along the way.
• Flywheels: Since I am already podcasting about Transmits, why not repurpose that content and effort and apply it to kickstart and support future efforts
• And, finally, it just sounded fun and was a good excuse to tinker on some site stuff!

With all that said, and without further ado, I am happy to say that the Transmits: The Podcast is live! Check it out, subscribe, and all that jazz. I have re-packaged some previous episodes from this podcast, and will probably do the same with this episode. And, from this point forward, I am going to have to come up with a nice way to introduce the episode without necessarily having to record a custom intro per pod, or maybe I’ll just drop the intros and get right to the meat, to keep it easy.

If you want to get early access to start playing around, please join the mailing list here: https://www.transmits.io

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

After recording the last episode via Transmits, I mentioned that I needed to test recording on playback on mobile, specifically Mobile Safari (since I am an iPhone user), and Chrome on Android. My goal for Transmits is that I can launch the initial version as a progressive web app (PWA), so it’s crucial for it to work when added to the home screen on either iOS or Android devices.

Well, in classic fashion, once I went to test the app on mobile devices, it totally failed in Mobile Safari, and regular Safari for that matter. It turns out that Safari only supports saving files via the FileSystemSyncAccessHandle, which only works within the context of a Web Worker. So, I rolled up my sleeves and started refactoring the app to include a web worker–surprisingly the first one I have written!–and wire up the file saving to use it. Low and behold, this week’s episode was recorded on my iPhone, via Transmits running as a PWA!

Next up, I am working on a spike to get speech to text working for transcription running locally via a Web Assembly (WASM) wrapped version of OpenAI’s Whisper model. Once that is working, then will come defining the data models and start working on building out the cloud sync support. Not gonna lie, I am getting pretty stoked on this app so far, and I hope you will too!

If you want to get early access to start playing around, please join the mailing list here: https://www.transmits.io

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

A milestone has been reached! This is the first episode to be recorded in Transmits!! Obviously, these are early days (the official second recording made in the app was this episode), but recordings are being captured via the web app and stored locally via the File System API in the OPFS (Origin private file system).

The goal is to get this early version of Transmits out so people can start playing with it and capturing their Audio Journals* (*the positioning I am playing with for this initial version of the app. What do you think!?)

I think the idea of audio journals is interesting, and it also seems like some other builders in the bootstrapping/indie maker space–both Peter Suhm [Tweet] (Reform and Out of Beta Podcast) and Brian Casel [Tweet] (Clarity Flow and Bootstrapped Web Podcast)–have started sharing audio/video updates similar to this podcast.

If you want to get early access to start playing around, please join the mailing list here: https://www.transmits.io

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

I have finally settled on the project that I will be documenting on this podcast. I would like to introduce you to, Transmits. transmits.io is domain I have been sitting on for the past 4 years. When I had originally registered it I was working on a React Native prototype of an app that I was exploring, which was essentially an iOS Voice Memos app that was going to be platform agnostic. That prototype still lives on my machine, but work and life got in the way from taking it any further than a very rough example of getting some basic audio recording capturing and reviewing within the app.

Since then, I have worked on a bunch of different stuff, both for clients and personally, but this idea of a simple app that lets you quickly record some audio and easily share it with friends—or beyond—has remained constant over that time. Although, the one thing that has changed is my thoughts on what makes the most sense for how to build the app.

Over the last 4 years a lot of advancements have been made in the browser space to better support progressive web apps, things like local SQLite instances running in the browser, push notifications on Mobile Safari, and generally more packages and tools that make it easier to build a good PWA experiences that can truly rival native apps. So, with that said, this version of Transmits is going to be built with 100% progressive web app support from the beginning.

At this point, I already have basic PWA support for the app. You can turn off wifi and cellular and browse all the pages you had originally viewed while being online. And, I have some basic recording support setup via the Web Audio/MediaStream Recording API’s. Both the marketing site and app are built in React/NextJS, and I am going to explore building the API with NestJS (since this is a stack pairing that I have been wanting to explore).

Next on my list to tackle includes:

• Get local file saving setup via the File System API
• Setup local-first data handling (probably using electric-sql, or something similar)
• Audio filters to apply to recordings in real-time via Web Audio API
• Real-time transcription support via local automatic speech recognition (ASR) model
• Integrations to make it easy to take recordings captured via Transmits and distribute them (looking at you, transistor.fm!)
• Some other odds and ends to make the app feel more native, like Push Notifications and what not

I was definitely debating which project to really commit to, and this one ticked all the boxes of the type of app and technologies that I wanted to dig into more. Not to mention, if it turns out how I think it will, I will probably be able to drop my Adobe Audition setup and record all of my podcast episodes via this app, with a simple flow for distributing them to Transistor, Substack, Medium, and beyond.

I hope this project seems interesting to you, and I look forward to sharing my learnings from building it along the way.

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

Welcome to, Transmits!

Hi, I’m Ryan Hefner (@ryanhefner), and I am in the process of building, Transmits, an audio journaling and distribution app focused on letting you quickly capture and refine your ideas, and easily share them with the world—or not.

In this podcast, I’ll be documenting the building of Transmits, and what it takes to build a modern SaaS application in 2024. I’ll be diving into the technical challenges and tradeoffs made while building the app, exploring the marketing and messaging approaches as I try to position the product properly to support current and future features while trying to find the right early customers and opportunities to set the product up for success, and dig into all the other things that go into taking an idea and turning it into reality—and a company—that can generate either enough money, or notoriety, to help build the foundation to a sustainable life that provides the freedom to work on what I want, when I want.

In addition to documenting life in Transmits, I’ll also be reaching out to friends in the industry—and beyond—to hear about what things they are working on, and share stories and tips that you might find helpful depending on where you are at on your path.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey, and I look forward to sharing the stories—both good and bad—along the way.

In the meantime, sign up for the mailing list to get notified when early access opens up–along with other updates and goodies–on the site, https://www.transmits.io, and follow along on Twitter, @transmitsio, where I plan on hosting some broadcasts of discussions/interviews and live working sessions.

And, if you like this podcast, you might like the other podcast, All Play, where some of these episodes may be cross-posted from, along with other general thoughts and updates on things I am working on beyond Transmits. And follow along on twitter, @allplayfm.