How I Built a Million-Dollar Company Using My Personal Brand | 081

80% of all businesses fail. What are the characteristics of the people that succeed? One thing you can see is that the people who succeed have just been—

My guest today is Justin Jackson, co-founder of transistor.fm, a podcast hosting platform that now hosts over 30,000 podcasts and is generating millions in revenue per year. But before that, he was a prolific creator.

If you have a personal brand, use your personal brand If you have a newsletter list on your own, if you have a following on a social network, like, use every advantage. You need every advantage. We were one of the first people that were able to distribute podcasts to Spotify. How did that happen? We were doing a podcast. An engineer at Spotify was listening, DM'd us, saved us so much time and money. A lot of creators should be thinking about that, especially if they want to start a software business.

How do you make the most of it? What are the things to do that make a big difference?

Every person I've interviewed that has gone on to do something exceptional, when they talk about the pivotal moments of their journey where they really leveled up, it was always because of— As creators and as founders of independent businesses, this is the way that we hold the tension between us and the big platforms because it gives us power.

So, Justin, you have this idea that I've heard you talk about of how business is like surfing. And I want you to get into that because it touches on these ideas of market selection and timing and like being in the game for a long time that I think are really important.

Yeah. It's kind of like, um, for anyone to, like, starting a company is a lot of work, takes a lot of energy. You're making a bet that might not pay off. And so I, I keep thinking about how can you increase your chances? Some people think you can't increase your chances at all. You just got to keep throwing spaghetti up against the wall and then—

Like it's pure luck or something.

It's pure luck or whatever. And so yeah, if we talk about luck surface area or whatever, what are some ways that you can increase the chances of a success? And I think it's kind of like surfing. So a surfer who catches a good wave has showed up at that beach every day. They've learned to watch the water. They've learned what time to get up, what time to get there. They've built relationships with all the other surfers. And when the good wave comes, they're ready for it. And they know that it's worth, worth it to expend all that energy to paddle out.

Right.

And paddling is a lot of work, right? You expend a lot of energy. And, and that's what everybody, you know, who wants to start a business wants to surf a good wave. And then the wave is like the market. That's what carries you and your product, and however big and strong the wave is, that's how long of a trajectory you could have.

Right?

And so there's all of this in this metaphor that I love. It's like putting in the work to show up every day, be in these waters, be kind of soaking in an industry or a category. That's one element. And then learning to recognize what is a good opportunity? What does that look like? What is the size and shape of the wave? And then having enough fundamentals to be able to paddle out, having the fitness to do that, compete against all the other surfers, right? And then actually ride this thing. And then realizing once you're on the wave, some of it's going to be your skill, some of it's going to be whatever product you've created, maybe that's the board, a lot of it is out of our hands. A lot of it's the market and the market, the momentum and energy of the market is like a wave. That's what carries you. And I think the mistake a lot of people make is they're trying to create their own wave or they're surfing waves that are far too small. And so once you learn this, it's like, okay, what is kind of the right-sized wave for me? What's kind of the right size and shape and everything? And Once you can do that, I think you can increase your chances of having a good business.

So yeah, there's so many things in there that make a difference because it addresses the topic of luck.

Yeah.

Right. And there is, there's so much of that. And so we'll say like, oh, she just got lucky. Mm-hmm. But you're like, well, okay, right place at the right time matters.

Yeah.

The person standing on the beach going, I don't know, the waves look a little iffy today.

Yeah.

Didn't have the opportunity to get lucky.

Yeah. And then there's another person there, which is like the bro who shows up one day and is trying to take advantage of that surf spot or whatever. And they're just going to take advantage.

The whole rest of the market's kind of like, yeah, exactly. You don't know what the lineup is. You don't know any of that.

And this is the part that, because there's this other thing people always talk about is the failure rate of like 80% of all businesses fail. Or sometimes I'll talk about something, I'll say, "Here's an example of how you can increase your chances." And people will say, "Well, who'd that work for?" And I'll say, "Well, it worked for Nathan and it worked for me and it worked for my friend Adam Wathan." And they'll say, "Yeah, but that's like—" You're the outliers. You're outliers. And my whole point with entrepreneurship is you want to look at the outliers. Survivorship bias in entrepreneurship is what you want. You want to look at the survivors. Because it's unlike anything else because anybody can start a business. There's only going to be a few that succeed. So if that's true, then what are the characteristics of the people that succeed? And one thing you can see is that the people who succeed have just been showing up at a surf spot forever. So you were a creator, you were using other email newsletter platforms, you were talking to other creators, you saw the struggles that people were having, and then you saw an opportunity and you had, you know, built up all of the connections and everything else to like actually do that, right? And it's the same, you know, almost every success I've ever seen is like that. It's all people who have put in the work, who've showed up at the surf spot every every day who maybe surfed a few smaller waves at first and then built themselves up to the wave that they caught and tried tons of waves that didn't work out. But we also have— we don't have unlimited— we only have so much energy. We only have so many resources. And if that's true and you don't want to be in this massive group that is starting a business but not creating a better life and you want to be in this group that did it and succeeded. Yeah, I think these are the kinds of things you want to be thinking about. Like what markets, what categories, what opportunities am I uniquely kind of prepared for? And I might have a unique advantage in it. And I think if, like with Transistor, if I hadn't been in podcasting for all those years and if I had, like I was in, every podcasting forum. I was in Google+ Circles for podcasting. I bet a bunch of people listening are like, don't even know what that is. Don't even know that.

We don't even need to explain it because it's not relevant anymore, but like it existed.

But being in the water, kind of like sitting on my board waiting for the opportunities, and I'm in different spots, like there's other places I could have gone, but I could see the wave of opportunity with podcasting coming. I could see Every week the New York Times is publishing a new editorial on podcasting. I can see Serial going up. I can listen to my friends like you and other people that are like, "Well, I'm starting a show. I'm starting a show. Oh, I have a show. I have 3 shows." I'm like, "Man, there is something building here that is unlike the previous 5 years of podcasting." And you only kind of get that if you're in the water on the shore kind of waiting for the right opportunity to come.

Yeah, because you're watching this build over time. I was talking to my friend Ben Greenfield, who's in the fitness space, and someone was like, Ben, you've been podcasting for a while, right? And he goes, yeah, 17 years. And he has legitimately been podcasting continually for 17 years when you had to hand edit your XML file to get all this in there. And like, I remember, you know, 10, 15 years ago, people saying like, oh, podcasting is saturated or whatever else. But if you're really watching it and paying attention, you're like, wait a second. It's, yeah, it's double how big it was a year ago or 2 years ago, but like still super, super tiny. And then you see that, you know, these inflection points. And I think that, you know, Serial and some of these others like really ramping up is a big moment.

And I think to think about markets, the size of a market matters. The size of a wave matters when you're surfing it. And so podcasting as an opportunity, I don't think enough creators and business people think about the size of the opportunity because no matter what, you're just going to be shaving a percentage point off that market. So I think at one point I tried to estimate ConvertKit's market share. I'm so curious about this stuff. Like what percentage of the market, you know? It depends on how you define the market. It depends how you define the market. I'll say this is like a total money being spent in this market. So how much of that are we gonna get? Mm-hmm. And I don't know, like, do you think kits is 3%?

Well, so one thing that I, uh, talk about, if, if you go email marketing as a whole. Yeah. Because a lot of markets are winner take all or winner take most. Yeah. Where someone has 80%. Yeah. And the next 10 companies fight over the remaining 20%. Yeah. And then there's even a long tail behind that. Uh, something that I told the team is Mailchimp's revenue at the time of sale was right about $1 billion ARR. They're the biggest. There's other players, uh, I think now Klaviyo sits, you know, in the e-com space, it's around $400 or $500 million. Yeah. Campaign Monitor is like $250 million. Yeah. Um, And there's a lot down from there. Yeah. But I tell the team like, we're $45 million in revenue, which wild success. Yeah. I was trying to get to like $20K in ARR so that I could, you know, like me and a developer and we could, you know, all that. So I'm thrilled. But the thing to point out to the team is we are not 45% of Mailchimp's revenue. Yeah. We are 4.5%. Yes. And you're like, so market size, That's quite large.

I think I estimated you might be around 3.5% or something like that.

Of email market share? Yeah.

Yeah, we're under 2%. And this is why— Now creators versus— Yeah, but this is why I think this is so important is that you have, when you're thinking about a market, so here's Nathan, here's Justin, how much of this market could I in my wildest dreams even think about getting? Well, it's likely when you start, and it's likely even if you build an incredible business the way you have, that you're only going to get some percentage of the market. And so the total size of the market does matter to a certain extent. If it's really, really tiny, then you're going to have to get a bigger percentage of that to build a meaningful business. And so the podcast hosting market, I think, is maybe 150 million total. The whole podcast market is like everything advertising, you know, you got big players like Spotify and Apple Podcasts and everyone. The total podcasting market, maybe outside of YouTube, is I think $5 billion globally.

Including all the sponsorships and ad spend.

Everything, everything. That includes like, uh, people making money on Patreon and everything. That's tiny.

And then, and then you're saying you're playing within podcast hosting, which is $150 million. Yeah.

So that's going to create an upper bound. So still, I had a sense of this when we got in. I had a sense like, okay, is this big enough to build a meaningful business? And for Jon and I, we're like, yeah, if we can get this thing to a million or 2 million or 3 million in revenue, that would be incredible. And that would put us in the top 10 of podcast hosting platforms. And we've been able to achieve a lot of that. But you have to— this is— you want to be thinking about this now as you're evaluating waves of opportunity. How big is that wave? How hard is it? How competitive is that wave? There are some markets that are not that big and are ultra-competitive.

And you're like, I run into that where I look at someone, I'm like, you are working so insanely hard for not that big of an opportunity. And if you were to go play somewhere else.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of like Main Street businesses are like this. It's like you're really If you open a clothing store, I had a snowboard shop in my early 20s. It's like, who am I competing against? Well, I'm competing against the other snowboard shops in my area, but then I'm also competing against every Burton selling direct to consumers and everything. So we had to work incredibly hard, way harder than I'm working now.

For way less results. For way less results.

And The amount of sophistication and everything. So I think not enough people think about the size and the shape and the dynamics of the opportunity before they jump in the water. Right.

Do I even want to surf this beach?

Do I even want to be here?

Yeah. Right. There was, uh, not to go too far on the surfing analogy, but like, uh, there was a time that I was surfing in Mexico. I am not a good surfer, but This particular break had, you know, as the surf instructor's telling you, like, hey, at the end, one, don't ride it all the way into the shore. Yeah. And two, when you fall, like fall like flat on your back and try to spread out. And you're like, why? And they're like, well, there's a bunch of coral and you really don't want to like land on it or step on it. And you're like, and I, I don't want to surf here. Like take me back to San Diego or something where there's like crazy long flat beaches and, you know, all of that. And I just think that there's markets where you're like, just don't get in there. Don't play that game. Either because it's not a good fit for you, or there's just places that are going to be much easier to play. But you can only know that by trying it and getting in.

If you're hanging out.

If you're hanging out there. Another area that I want to go to is this idea of SaaS and personal brands. I have had, I guess, different times. Like my personal brand has played a different role in Kit's marketing and all of that over time. Right. Very early on, you know, I had my personal brand. I had courses, you know, was doing all that very similar to you.

Yeah.

And then, you know, I'd say that was like 90% of the attention. And then ConvertKit at the time was 10%. It sort of changed. Then there was a middle period where I, like, ConvertKit's brand was way bigger than my brand. And I actually, like, went much more behind the scenes. Yeah, you pulled back a bit. And elevated other people within the company and all of that. Now we have all those other people making content and doing all this amazing stuff. But I've made a very deliberate effort the last 18 months to build my personal brand because I believe in that so much. Yeah. You and I come from similar, like, bootstrap software circles where— I mean, it's a big point of debate. Yeah. Like, personal brand or not.

A lot of people say it doesn't matter. And I remember kind of believing them. And I've revised my opinion on it. Like, folks like Tyler Tringas would call me out on it. I would say— I would kind of parrot what everyone else was saying. Like, I'd be like, well, personal brand doesn't matter in software. And then Tyler would be like, I don't know. Like, I think it matters. Yeah. And the more I've paid attention, the more I realize, I think in my case, it's mattered a lot. So every customer that signs up for Transistor gets a welcome email from me saying, you know, what brought you here? Why did you sign up? How did you hear about us? And so I get this drip of responses every day, which over time kind of brings me this aggregate data. Right.

It's qualitative data at scale. That's right.

The interesting thing is about 15 to 20% of the people who reply say, Justin, I've been signed up for your newsletter for 10 years, like your personal newsletter. Justin, I remember you interviewing this person on this podcast. "Justin, I remember reading a blog post you wrote 5 years ago." And it could be like, "I've been watching your journey for a long time. We're sitting in a meeting with my boss. My boss says we need to start a podcast, and I put up my hand and say, 'I've got the place for you to go.'" And then he signed up for Transistor. By the way, this also helped us in so many ways. We were one of the first people that were able to distribute Podcast to Spotify. How did that happen? We were doing a podcast and an engineer at Spotify was listening, DM'd us and said, again, I've been following Justin's journey forever on your podcast. I can get you the inside path to be able to have access to a new API or submission process or whatever. This happened, we were trying to figure out bandwidth costs, talked about it publicly. There's a person at a CDN that said, well, there's this kind of backdoor you can go through and I can help you. Like saved us so much time and money. So it's had a huge impact on Transistor, my personal brand. Again, surfing waves is hard, business is hard, and you need to stack every advantage you have. If you have rich parents, use their money. Do that. If you have a personal brand, Use your personal brand. If you have a newsletter list on your own, if you have a following on a social network, use this. Use every advantage. You need every advantage because most people who start a business don't win. So if you want to build a meaningful business, you've got to do everything you can. And I think for people like me, this is where you have to qualify it, for people like me and maybe people like you, brand, personal brand and your personal following and writing a newsletter, a personal newsletter for whatever it is now, 15, 20 years, writing a blog for whatever it is, 15, 20 years actually matters because you're stacking all of these advantages, all of this surface area of luck that makes it more likely that people are going to remember you, interact with you, all this stuff. And so yeah, I think a lot of creators should be thinking about that, especially if they want to start a software business.

Well, I think there's probably two camps of people who have a personal brand who end up in software. Either they go big on the creator side first and then they're saying, I have a huge amount of attention. How do I direct that to something that will build me more equity or enterprise value? And then there's the other side of I'm getting into software or this other side of it. Yeah. And maybe I need to build a personal brand. You and I have been in software for longer than we've been creators. Yeah. Right. Working in the industry in some way. And then we built those skill sets, uh, alongside it. Yeah. But I, I, I think that everyone, everyone thinking about software should have an audience in some way. Even if it's the basics of writing a monthly investor update that's actually not to investors, it's to your like friends and advisors. Yeah. Or it's this idea of a minimum viable brand where you get like 2 or 3 podcast episodes. You've got like— it just helps everything that you're doing. When people say, I got this cold email from this guy Justin, I don't know what he's about, but I Googled him and then his stuff is cool. Yeah. And yeah, I'll take the call.

Sure. Yes. Yeah, that makes— it makes a huge difference. With everything. Like you have so many problems to solve. It's like, again, vendors and how are we going to navigate this thing? You know, you need partners, you need friends, you need all these things. I will say, I think for creators that are thinking about getting into software, I know some people haven't had a good experience with co-founders. I've had a very good experience with my co-founder, John. He is I've described it as we're like Voltron. We come together and the sum is better than the parts. I couldn't have done it without him, and I don't think he could have done it without me. So he is an incredible builder. He's an incredible software engineer, full-stack engineer, great at building product, but had never started a podcast before. Had started a podcast hosting platform before. So I mean, again, if we're talking about leveraging every advantage you have, well, if you have someone else who also has their own stack of advantages, if you can imagine this high watermark and it's like, "Well, I got us to here, but then with John's stuff stacked on top, we got here," it just makes it so much more likely that you're going to succeed. And it's more difficult we are very different people. And so the navigating that is tricky, right? My favorite story about that is we're at a conference. My favorite thing at a conference is to be holding court with a circle of people. I've watched you do it many times. I just love that. And I'm watching John's there and he's just slowly kind of like, I can see his battery going down. You can tell he's ready to sneak off. And he's kind of like, hey, can we go? I'm like, I mean, I'm having a good time. Sure. You know, if it's time for bed, let's go. So we went back to the Airbnb and then as soon as we got back to the Airbnb, he wanted to make some tea and like have a talk, just him and I. And I realized like actually one-on-one interactions are very draining for me.

You're like, no, I need an audience. I need—

So these dynamics are tricky to navigate, but man, I love him. Like I couldn't have done it without him.

What would you think about selecting a co-founder? Like we're speaking to a creator who's saying, hey, I have this software idea. It's a good fit for my audience.

Yeah. I think this is another case where you got to be in the water on the beach. I, I heard, I met John in 2014. So 4 years before we did Transistor together and hung out with him every year. I would be going to Craft and Commerce. I would be going to events, meeting people. Go to some programming events, go to a Laracon or a RailsWorld or something and build relationships over years. And then when you're ready, when you're like, "You know what? I've got this insight that nobody else has. I've realized in my category, my type of person, my market," There's this opportunity. Who am I going to pair up with? Oh, I remember this person over here. And then you can pitch them on it.

And then you're not also trying to pitch a partnership with the first developer that you've met, which statistically is going to be a terrible idea. That's right. Yeah. And then you're going to end up in the story of like, yeah, I had this technical co-founder. They didn't work out well at all. And it's like, You never had a technical co-founder. You had an engineer that had no business working in a startup. They should have been at a media company.

This dynamic falls prey to the same math that we described before, which is a lot of people say, well, so many of co-founder relationships break up or whatever. Of course, it's not that hard to start a partnership. People can do that. It's easy. You say, you want to partner on this thing? So the denominator is going to be very large number. And if you want to be one of the people that make it, you just got to increase your chances. And I think that's building a good relationship with a bunch of people and then approaching people one-on-one saying, "Hey, I got this idea." I mean, John didn't want to do it with me originally. I had to convince him. It was like he thought about it. He'd been burned by a partner before. And so Um, but the reason he could trust me is because we'd spent so much time together.

I think the other thing is a trap that creators can fall into is thinking like, oh, the product is easy and I'm going and I have huge amounts of distribution. And so really I'm bringing like 90% to this. Yeah. And, uh, you know, you just build the thing. Yeah. Because they're used to a sales cycle maybe from a course or an ebook or something else. That can be an impulse buy. Yeah, but like moving my entire email list to Kit or, you know, like, let me get off of whatever podcast platform I'm using and move to Transistor. Yeah. Like there's a lot more to it than that. And so it's not like, I don't know, I sent an email to my list and then thousands of people signed up and we're on from there. It's like you have to, as a creator, you have to expect you are going to promote this thing like crazy for years. Yeah. To get traction before it starts to compound. This is another thing, like industry advice.

They're like, never do a 50 50 partnership, and maybe legally that's a— it is a bad idea. John and I were 50/50. I was just like, I could not see a world where we had— we just needed equal incentives. It's like, I've got 50% of this thing, you've got 50% of this thing. And John was the first partner that I connected with where I felt like I was running the way I normally run, and he was right there beside me. Yeah. And I think it was partly because of our relationship. I think it's partly because we are uniquely talented in very different ways. And I think it's because of our, our incentives were 50/50. And again, maybe I'm sure there's stories on either side, but I at least want to be one example of, I think, a 50/50 that's worked out really well. There's downsides.

There's times where it's like we're struggling, but I think 50/50 with a couple of advisors or mentors who you both really respect. Yeah. And so you're basically like, hey, we know we're going to get into— Yeah. A big dispute. Yeah. First, you should do the premortem. Yeah. You should write out, all right, we're going to get into a 50/50 partnership. Yeah. Here's all the way this fails. Oh, we actually have the same skill set in these categories. Like, we don't complement each other. Yeah. Or, you know, our personalities are going to clash. Okay. You know, so you list out the pre-mortem, which is all the things that could happen. Yeah. And then from there you go into, okay, if or when this comes up, how would we address it? Yeah. And then this becomes a document that you can have.

We still have ours. Yeah. Yeah. With a bunch of hard questions. Yeah.

Well, is there an example of one that you had to wrestle with?

It's like one question was, can either of us fire the other person and why would that happen? We just went through a big thing over the summers. Like, what if either one of us dies, right? John doesn't have kids. I have kids. I have like, I had this anxiety about who's going to take care of my family. And so we had to have this like honest conversation about like, John, I just want to know that if I pass away, that someone's going to take care of my kids. And so, yeah, those are some of the big ones that you talk about. It's, it can get serious. It's like it is. It's not like a marriage, but it has it's that level of commitment.

Yeah. Now, one of these things that I've seen go wrong a few times in a 50/50 partnership is the face of the company. Yeah. Because it gets into— it's partially playing to strengths. Yeah. But then ego comes into play. Yeah. There's a project that I invested in. I won't say what. Someone could probably figure it out based on some of this.

You want me to start guessing?

Yeah, exactly. I've only made like 11 investments total, so 2 co-founders. Yeah. Equal partners. And then they had a handful of outside investors. Yeah. And it went well. They had some strong personalities, so there's some clashes, but that was all expected. Yeah. But then one of them became the face of it in a huge way. Yeah. Like national, international press coverage, all of that. Oh, wow. And watching— like, that was amazing for the business. Yeah. Exactly what we were hoping for. All of this stuff, the content creation stepped up, all of this stuff. Yeah. And the other co-founder, like, became very jealous. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it caused— so, like, that was the point. It eventually broke up for other reasons. Yeah. And myself and a few other people and, and the co-founder that stayed ended up buying out the other, the other co-founder. But you could— if I could point back to, like, where did this go wrong?

I mean, I had this conversation with John. I was like, I'm just out there. Doing my thing. And people will think that it's entirely your company. People think it's entirely my company. I mean, I always try to bring him up because I want to— he's—

when John and I built this, when—

yeah, he's crucial for the company. But I said, man, does this bug you that I'm kind of the face of the brand? And he's like, no, dude. He's like, I don't want to do any of this, you know? Like, and it's the same. Like, we go to a conference or whatever, and I'm— it's that same dynamics there. I'm happy to just be out in the fray and just in my element and he's happy to go back to his room and have a nap or go for a jog or whatever. So I think it's a good discussion to have. That might be one of those questions you ask is like, what if one of us becomes more famous or becomes the face of the brand? How would that make you feel? And it might also have to do with, I don't know if age plays into this. I would've been fine if Jon was the face of the brand. I could've also chilled out as well. So we started Transistor, I was 38 and John was 37. So, you know, the average age of our company now, we have 6 people, is like 42 or something like that. We're an old company.

I've noticed the average age, it can like gradually creep up as I've—

Oh, I'd love to talk about that actually. I think that's one of our challenges. I want to bring in more young people. I did this project over the summer where I hired a junior developer that was just looking for a job. And just to build a personal project for me, so with my own money, hugely inspiring. I got so much energy. This kid named Ferdinand in his 20s, and it's just so different than working with people in their 40s and their late 30s. It's like nothing wrong with older people either, but there's something about that young energy that maybe a lot of bootstrap companies are missing. It's like, this is it. We need to get some young— and people are criticizing Apple for this right now. I don't know if you saw Gruber's post. They're saying the board is all in their 60s, the executive team is all in 50s and 60s. Is this why Apple keeps fumbling the ball now? Like with their AI initiatives, all of that. You need some young— and their perspective is so interesting. I wrote this blog post about how I'm getting older and my brain just isn't what it used to be. I don't have the same raw firepower as I used to. People got really upset about it. Sometimes I think I talk about things and I don't realize that it's going to upset people. Like someone's going to take it very personally.

Yeah.

This is one of my favorite things about having a Kit newsletter now that I'm not depending on for new product launches. I can just write what I want to. But seeing this younger person work, and I think this is something creators can do, anybody, it's just their perspective and their energy and their capacity is just so much greater. And it was so fun and inspiring to be working alongside them and just be kind of channeling this energy.

And to go back to the surfing analogy, you're right there in the water and they're like, "Oh, this wave," and you're like, "Not that wave, that one." That's right.

That's right. That's right. And maybe it's a wave I couldn't get to by myself, but it's like, this guy's got energy. Just go, man. Uh, so I, yeah, I think that's really fun. I think more people should be doing that.

I think something that we, uh, a pro and a con of how we do it at Kit is, I mean, we used to hire lots of, uh, you know, young, inexperienced people like myself, because that was who we can afford, who we could recruit and network, all of that. Now we, we hire very experienced, very smart people who are, you know, well into their careers, which pays super well and all of that. Which has huge advantages. People, week 1, they're like, okay, so here's how we're going to change all of this. And you're like, yes, the best I've ever seen.

You need both. I think it needs to be balanced. And if you're too far one way, it doesn't work. If you're too far the other way, it doesn't work. But that— there's also just something about people not knowing and asking questions. There's so many times where he was like, Well, why don't we do it this way? And I have some rote answer in my brain about like, oh, well, this is why we do this. But there's a few times I was like, actually, let's just do it your way. I just want to see how that turns out. Let's question these old assumptions we've had, you know? And yeah, so I'm thinking about that, like, how can we bring in more young people? Yeah. Hire more junior people. I think that's pretty important for a business.

One thing I'm trying to figure out Yeah. Is how this relates to AI. Oh, yeah. Because something that I'm noticing is I think the AI is going to— if a career is a ladder. Yeah. And there's a bunch of different ladders to climb.

I've heard you got a post about this.

Uh, yeah, it's something I'm thinking about a lot, but if AI takes out all of the bottom rungs of the ladders. Yeah. Right? Because it's not replacing the incredible interior designer who is world-class at what they do. Yeah. But if you're like, how do I style this room? And you take a photo and upload it to ChatGPT, it'll be like, there you go. And you're like, that's pretty good. Yeah. Um, and so I think in programming, in design, in— oh man, in all of these categories. And I'm trying to figure out, like, short-term, maybe that's great because productivity increases or all of that, but long-term, like, What if only, like, world-class people who are the complete outliers are able to, like, jump the 4 missing rungs of the ladder and actually get up this career? And in 10 years, do we actually have any?

Yeah, I mean, I think about this all the time. I have 4 kids, 15, 17, 19, and 22. Okay. And so if they're watching or any young people are watching, This is what I would say is the rules are still the same, which is when you get hired to do something, so you're starting your career, your job is to solve the boss's problems. And even in that example you just gave, so you can take the picture, it can suggest a bunch of stuff. Who's going to source that stuff? Who's going to find where you can get it? Who's going to get it shipped? Who's going to get it set up? Who's going to solve all of the problems that crop up? In the real world. And that is where I think a young person with a bunch of energy who's hungry can really excel is just show up and you don't really know yet. You're not experienced enough yet to really know what to do. Just watch the boss and then say, "I can do that." So it's like your boss takes a picture and it's like, "Man, "how am I going to get all these plants?" I'll do it. Just pull up your old Honda Civic hatchback or whatever and— Get it done. Deliver the result. Deliver the result. And this is the— I mean, right now, if someone showed up at my house today and said, "Do you need your dishwasher fixed?" I would say, "Yes. Come on in. I will pay you whatever." Right? There's not that many people doing work. And if you show your ability to do that, and you can pitch people on this that you don't even work for, just other creators that you respect, anybody. Go to a conference and wait by the shipping door and watch your favorite creator coming in to set up their booth or whatever. Hey, can I help you move this stuff in? Just show up and solve their problems in a tangible way. I think that's going to be a big opportunity. I am worried about it though. I think there is some concern in terms of— the problem about talking about AI right now is people always assume that I'm talking about forever. So I'll say something like I'm about to say, and people are like, well, just give it time. Sure. I think in the next few years, I still don't think AI can build a good software product. End to end. There are so many decisions you got to make along the way and just prompting into a thing and getting an output, you're going to realize really quickly that there are a bunch of connection points. There are a bunch of things you need to do to join these together, both in code and more importantly in user experience. And then even like there's a whole DevOps side to this that people don't think about. I think if you're a DevOps company or service company, you're going to have a really good business. Because people are going to be getting all of these dependency errors and like, who's going to keep doing all that stuff?

Well, especially the creator who's like, uh, AI is making software development so much easier there. And I'm the biggest advocate for prototyping stuff with AI. Yeah, do it. I'm doing it all the time and I love it. But then if the creator has distribution and so they're like, so I got this thing working, we got 10 beta users that went well. So then I sent it to my an email list of 100,000 people and it all fell apart. Any DevOps person is going to go, well, yeah.

Yeah. We got to prepare for that. And, but like that whole side of things has not been built up yet. I think the encouraging thing for creators, this is a Tyler King quote. He does Less Annoying CRM. He says the building was never the hardest part. The hardest part was distribution. So I think you've talked about this for a long time and It's correct. Distribution is the hardest problem. And in an AI world where everybody's churning out these crappy little apps, it's going to be even more important. Who can actually connect with a customer and do it in a way that maintains the trust that's been built up, do it in a way that delivers on the promise? Creators know about this. They know if I deliver something, that isn't up to snuff, I'm going to get a bunch of refund requests or whatever. So creators are in great opportunity. I have a great— are really well positioned in this AI world because they've got distribution. That's the hardest part. And yeah, on the building side, it's again, I think it's going to be hard on junior developers. But if I was a junior developer, what I'm not seeing is I'm seeing a lot of kids who go to comp sci and get their degree. What I'm not seeing is them going, I'll do whatever it takes. You need someone on the customer success team. That's how I started. I started customer success, right? And I think that's the, like, just start wherever you can start and you're just solving problems.

That's all you're doing. Since we're talking about distribution, let's go back to being the face of the company and like, let's get practical. Yeah. What does it look like? Let's say we've got, uh, two founders. Yeah. One's, uh, maybe much more on the business side, one's much more on the product and engineering side. Yeah. And either you've gotten just, maybe we've gotten to $20K MRR. Yeah. And distribution has worked in some way. We've got growth, we're growing, you know, I don't know, a few thousand dollars of net new MRR a month. Yeah. And we hear this of like, there should be a face to the company. Yeah. What, what do you think goes into that where both deciding how you should do that, how you breathe personality into it?

I mean, naturally, For us, it just happened organically because I was just that person.

Yeah. So it was pretty clear who it would be, but like this, even the steps to take.

Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, if you're building a software product, I think the face of the company should be answering customer support for the first little bit. I think that's one of the best ways. You just get so connected to real people. And if you're talking about being the face of the company, people remember the customer success people that help them. And so it was instantly like, "Oh, Justin helped me out with this." And that was my joke at first. People would be like, "What's the difference between hosting with you or hosting with Spotify?" I said, "Well, Daniel Ek isn't answering your customer support requests right now. I am." And so I think that's one thing. I just, for us, it's just looked like the things I'm naturally excited about doing. I like making videos, and so I'm making YouTube videos. I like writing email newsletters, so I'm doing that. I like writing blog posts, so I'm doing that. I like giving talks, so I'm doing that. So we just kind of built it on top of what we're already doing. And I think that's, if you're the face of the company, I think that's kind of what you're doing. You're just getting out all the time. And I'm starting conversations in our industry all the time. So I'll get curious and I'll be like, how big is our industry? I think all the estimates are incorrect. They're all over the place. Nobody's publishing their numbers. I'm going to start an open-source project where I estimate the size of the industry, and then I'm going to talk about it. And all of a sudden, I'm in the news a bunch. It's Justin Jackson from Transistor is doing this thing.

It's kind of like the meme that you can just do things. You can just do things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's Aaron Francis. That's like, you can just do things. And the face of the company is kind of doing that. They're just in an authentic way. I think you're following a curiosity.

You didn't say, you know, it would be a good marketing strategy for us. Yeah, it'd be a great marketing strategy if we were the ones to figure out what is the size of the podcast industry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, but instead you went the other way and you said, I'm curious about this. I want to know. I think these are all wrong. Yeah. And so you can even just put out a question.

That's like my biggest pet peeve about anybody. Most podcasts with CEOs are boring. It's like you're just talking in corporate speak. You're not a real person. I've always wanted to be authentic. I want to reveal as much as I can. I mean, there's a lot that people don't see, but the 20% that I can share authentically in a real way, I'm going to share that stuff. If I think— I mean, it gets me in trouble too, but the benefit of it is when I'm being authentic, people recognize it, I think, I hope. And then when they're making decisions, they'll say, "I feel like I can trust this company. I think they've been real." And then that culture just permeates through the organization. So Helen and Michael are our two customer success people, We answer live chat all day. This is something I got from you guys, from Spencer at Podia. This is something that I just saw work and they are just as excited about serving people in a real way. Michael said, "Would it be okay if in your welcome email, if you just said you can book a Zoom call with Michael?" I said, "Dude, we get hundreds of signups in a month. You might I want to do it. And so any price plan that signs up can book a call with Michael, and he's half British, half Australian. He's got this great— he's just a ray of sunshine. I'm at this conference in Chicago, Podcast Movement. 3 or 4 people walk up to me, say, I had a call with Michael. It was incredible. It totally changed my day. He was so helpful. They are never going to forget that. And being the face of the company is kind of like that. You're investing in things that don't scale, It doesn't always have to be you have to have a massive YouTube channel. It could just be showing up and then also having other people show up. And people don't forget that. They're like, man, he actually took the time to care. I'll still respond to welcome emails. I'll go and check out their show. Hey, I just listened to it. I love this part. Hey, maybe think about this. Again, Daniel Ek's not doing that. It's just something you can do when you're smaller. And then they recognize like, wow, this guy's like the face of the company, but he's also helping me out. There's a practical side to it. Yeah.

And then that increases the perceived value of that person being the one to help.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll finish that off by saying, you know, if you're the face of the company and you're trying to be the brand and you're trying to talk, so part of it is just like, okay, did I get, you know, do more people know about Transistor? That's one thing. But there's this long tail of just treating people well. That pays dividends that aren't— don't show up in your analytics. So like you really cared for this one person and you were even like, I don't even care if you sign up for my product, like I'm just going to help you out. That pays dividends for decades. And I've seen it now because we've been around long enough that we can see these people come back. You know, I think it's underrated as a strategy, just like caring for people one-on-one. Care for people when you're doing a big talk too, but it's that authentic, genuine, I actually care about you as a person, as a creator, and I'm going to help you accomplish what you're trying to do. People don't forget about it. They talk about it, they tell their friends, and that's always the best marketing. I like it.

Okay, so we talked about building a brand as a creator and how you need to stack every advantage, every possible advantage you can get. A personal brand is a huge advantage. And so if you have that, how do you make the most of it? What are the things to do that make a big difference? Because I think I see people on one hand, they build their brand and they kind of use it. And then there's people who say, "Oh, I'm going to breathe my brand all the way through everything that we're doing." Interesting.

Okay, well, let me think through this. I mean, I try to make everything personal. So when we send out email newsletters from John and Justin, I'm writing most of the blog posts for Transistor still. We get the majority of our business through content, so blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, and almost like 90% of that content is coming from me personally. And I can do that right now. And I think, yeah, so a lot of it is just like You actually got to make stuff. You actually got to keep creating stuff and putting stuff out there. It's kind of like if you see someone disappear from a social network for a while, it's like, what happened to— I haven't heard from that person in forever. It's like you got to keep showing up. You got to keep publishing stuff. So I think continually publishing is one way.

So many listeners of the show are going to say, okay, I have the audience. Yeah. What do I do with it? You know, I think the thing that I would do is I would talk about the journey of building the company as much as the marketing or sales of why you should buy it, and maybe more. I think that'd be an easy trap to fall into of saying, like, as an example, let's say that you had a very popular course on podcast hosting, or sorry, on creating a hit podcast. And everyone looked to you as the person for how do we create a hit podcast? And so you're like, oh, I'm going to then create the podcast hosting platform that I can sell. Yeah. I think most people in that position, they're so used to being perceived as the expert on the pedestal at the top of the mountain, whatever, that they're going to be like, here's why Transistor's the best. Yeah. Here's all of this. And I think what's actually more effective marketing is to say, here's what we learned building Transistor. Yes. Here's the problem I was trying to solve. And here, here's the, which this is all the stuff that you do. Yeah. I just think that someone who hasn't grown up through this world is going to approach it as the expert rather than the person on the journey. They're sharing the journey is what I think. Yeah.

Yeah. Because that's being authentic is kind of what resonates. So when we were building Transistor, you know, I've been on the web forever since, like, I was there when the web was born in '93, but I started live streaming. Um, I decided to build the Transistor marketing site by myself. Just from scratch. And I would show up on these live streams. And even though I've been on the web forever, I'm a fairly decent web developer. I was just honest about my limitations, what I wasn't good at, what I was struggling with. And I would just show up almost every day. I just hit stream and, "Hey, everybody, today," I'm trying to figure out Tailwind CSS. Like, I don't know how to do this. And then I was able to bring on my friends, like Adam Wathan. Right. And, but I'm still fully leaning into, I'm trying not to be too much, like pretend to be someone I'm not. So Adam is like watching me, like I have no keyboard shortcuts. I'm like dragging my mouse up and like clicking.

You see him like start twitching and he's like.

We just shared it all. He was just like, Oh my gosh.

He's like, if I could get you to do one thing, it'd be like, just please never use the mouse for this one.

That's right. I also brought on, because I was building this all in Laravel, and so I brought Taylor Otwell, the founder, on, and I just remember him just having this huge sigh. He's just like, oh man, this is going to be rough just watching Justin use the mouse. But it was all authentic, and it was me saying, I don't know how to do this. I'm going to ask the people that do. I'm going to be open to the audience. Hey, if you've got suggestions on how I'm doing this. I would take people through our whole onboarding process like, okay, everybody, today I'm going to pretend I'm a brand new user and I'm going to do everything. I'm going to sign up for an account. I'm going to use my credit card, everything. And I want you folks in the comments to just tell me what you see. And when you let yourself be open like that, it's actually a huge relief. I think a lot of people hold it tight like, no, I got to Make everything seem like it's okay and like I know what I'm doing. And when you can kind of let that go and just be like, I'm just going to be honest and open to whatever comes here. It's like, if you have an idea, if you have a critique, let me know. If you see something that I'm not seeing, let me know. But I think that's one way that people could do that in a way that's authentic. And again, what's the other alternative? You could be one of these boring CEOs that has a podcast that no one listens to because no one wants to hear that stuff. They want to hear real human beings. If you want to hear a fake human being, you can use that Google LLM to make a fake podcast. And if you listen to those, it's just so— It's just a gimmick. It's just nothing. What resonates with people? As soon as— I've shared this before, you being honest about going to therapy had a huge impact on me and was the reason that I ended up going to therapy. So you shared that— That's awesome. Once in an interview, that vulnerability has stuck in my head forever, and it's what I remember, right? Like, you've probably taught me dozens of things. I've probably seen lots of your talks. I've bought your books on design. I don't remember any of that. I remember these vulnerable moments where Nathan was real, and I think we can do that as creators, as founders. That's what resonates. That's like the most powerful marketing. If you're going to be the face of the brand, that's what's powerful is that you just show up as a human being. I'm not trying to pretend to be anything. I mean, a little bit. There's a version of me. You're playing, like, yeah, there's that. I'm—

everything's a little larger than life on the internet. Yeah.

But it's a better version of myself, but I'm still trying to show up in an authentic way in the midst of that.

I'm thinking about your example of coding the, you know, building the marketing site live. Yeah. Two things stood out to me on it. One is the personal brand that you've built over the last more than a decade. Yeah. I'm realizing you've been a Kik customer since September 2013. Yeah.

So started blogging in 2008 probably, but I had an email newsletter before that.

So yeah. Yeah. So you've been, been around for a long time. Yeah. But that has allowed you to build these relationships with all these people because you're talking about I'm building on these platforms and you casually mentioned, and so I had on the founders of, you know, Tailwind and Laravel. It's everything, right? And you're like, oh yeah, because they're just friends of mine. Of course. It's everything.

How do you build those relationships? You just got to go get in the water.

You got to go to all the events you're at.

Go to Craft and Commerce. Go to these. I met these people. I met Adam. He was just reading my blog and he just DM'd me. And same with Taylor Otwell, same with all of the people I know. And this is actually, I've been interviewing people. I met you through my podcast. Every person I've interviewed that has gone on to do something exceptional, when they talk about the pivotal moments of their journey where they really leveled up, it was always because of a person. So you've told the story about Hiten Shah a lot. That interaction created this moment, this pivotal moment that allowed you to go to the next level with your company.

Yeah, it was Hiten telling me to either shut down the business or double down on it. And that changes the trajectory of everything.

And so you can't have those moments unless you've set yourself up to have those collisions with other people. And so you can't do this by just being in your basement all the time. You can do it by having a podcast and interviewing people. That was like the first step. And then once you build relationships online, when people start inviting you to stuff, you got to show up. Chase Reeves, who's a mutual friend of ours, invited me forever. He said, "You've got to come." He'd gone to MicroConf before me. He'd gone to this XOXO Festival that ended up being really meaningful for me. And he kept saying, "You've got to come. You've got to come. You've got to come." And then I didn't have a lot of money at the time. I was working for the software company. I've got 4 kids. I didn't want to ask them to pay for it. But then that NMX trip came up. I don't know if you remember that, New Media Expo. Yes. And Chase DM'd me and he's like, "Dude, you got to come." I said, "I can't do it." He's like, "Well, what if we set up a cot in our room?" Him and Caleb were sharing a room. "What if we set up a cot? You can sleep on that." I'm like, "Okay, I can do it." So I flew to Vegas. That was like, I think I met you there for the first time. There are still connections I made there. How long ago is that? 10 years? I don't know how long. Yeah, probably 10 or 11. There's still connections I made there. Like, I became much better friends with Chase, with you. Like, we'd all had online relationships, but once you meet people in person, that's like another level. And then when you're doing a livestream and you're like, you know who I should call right now? I should call the president of the United States. That's like calling Adam Wavyn and saying, can you help me? You know, it's equivalent. And when people say, how do you know all these people? It's like, well, when I met Adam, nobody knew who he was either. We were just all, you know, starting out at the same time.

And now he leads Tailwind, which is the most popular web framework. And yeah, you ask an LLM to write any frontend code for you. That's right. It will reach for Tailwind.

That's right. And one of the most incredible independent businesses. I think the other thing that helped me, that helped me level up was being around folks like you. I was really following you. That was like Nathan launched the course and I was like, okay, I'm going to try launching a course. And then Nathan switched to SaaS. And I remember thinking like, Nathan, why are you giving up this great course business? Right. Yeah.

I made $250,000 in a year off of courses. And then I didn't make $250,000 a year in a single year again for a long time.

But again, it shows the power of friendship. And because that had a big impact on me was you saying, "Well, here's the reasons I've decided to start the software company," and they just happened to resonate with me too. And then I did it. And then it was funny, I was in a mastermind with Paul Jarvis, and then pretty soon Paul started Fathom. These relationships kind of often the people you hang out with will propel you. And it's another reason to get out of your house, out of your basement, like actually meet people. And this can be anything. My wife signed us up one time for a Ruby on Rails meetup in Vegas. Okay. Just a local meetup. And we just got some cheap tickets to Vegas and flew in because she wanted to learn Ruby on Rails. So I said I'd come too. And we met people there that still are pivotal people in the industry. It was just a local meetup. And they're like, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? And it was cheap. It was like, you know, maybe a couple hundred bucks to do the whole thing. But we set ourselves up for these collisions, right? Build relationships that, you know, have paid dividends for a long time.

Something else that you said as you were talking about the website building process that resonated was you being so vulnerable about what you were learning, so open about what you're learning in the process. And I don't think I do that with Kit to the same extent that I used to. Yeah, I don't think I've talked about publicly, like the, the 3 big initiatives that I'm trying to work on within the product, right? I'm trying to build out an app store and here's the hard things about it. I'm trying to build our creator network.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to improve onboarding and activation. Like, yeah, I could absolutely do the livestream. Yeah, dude. Walk through our onboarding flow and be like, all right.

You know what's good about that is people gossip and gossip is actually good in this case. Like, hey, I saw Nathan talk about the difficulties he's having with the app store. It's like kind of gossiping, right? Yeah. But there's this good part about it where it's like, I actually think sometimes gossip is healthy. There's a negative kind, but there's this other kind of gossip where just industry talk or people talking is like, hey, I hear Nathan's like trying to figure this out. You know, I think you achieve this a certain to a certain extent with the brand relaunch. Like, yeah, yeah, this is going to be tough for that. Yeah. Here's what we're going through. And people gossip like people are like, Is this going to work? Are they doing this the right way? All of that can be good. There's a negative side to it too, but all that can be good. And the people who are going to appreciate it are the creators and founders who are your target market. They're like, wow, okay, he showed us how he did that. I'm paying attention.

Well, I remember another mutual friend of ours, Ian Landsman, was like, dude, He posted a comment somewhere like, "Dude, when's the next episode of the rebrand coming out?" And I was like, "You pay attention to this too? This is amazing." And I've had so many people reach out who have thought about a rebrand or that sort of thing. And to be able to point back to the artifacts like, "Hey, we documented, here's everything we know about it." That's been a huge thing.

There's another type of creator. There's the type of creator that just tries to build the biggest audience. I think I'm, I would love to have a bigger audience, but I think I'm more in this category. And I think there's another category that's even narrower. And I think they're both, underrated, which is my first podcast was Product People. I don't think we ever got more than, I don't know, 2,000 or 3,000 downloads per episode. The right people were listening though. So when we're talking about building a network and building friendships, it was like, first of all, it enabled me, it opened up the door to meeting you and to meeting a bunch of other people. But then the people who were listening was Ethan Shaw and he would, message me with his own— Ruben Gammez, these people that have become advisors in my life. And I think it's underrated as a strategy. There's a type of creator that's just like, I want to build something great, and that might mean I need to have the biggest distribution channel possible that I build. But it could also be like, if I just reach these people, if Ian Landsman's listening, that has a value all of its own. And my email list I think has been 7,000 forever. And it's just kind of like, this is where I get to. I get to 7,000 people on my email list. I get to a certain amount of traffic every year. And now I'm in my 40s and I'm kind of just like, this is perfect. Is it still helping me? Is it helping me achieve my goals? Absolutely. Because I know sometimes I'll publish a newsletter and someone like you will reply or someone like Ian will reply or someone like Marie Poulin will reply. And as long as those people are still there and listening, I'm getting all the value I need. So if you're the kind of person who wants to build a big audience, that's great. If you can, that's great. But there's also this I've been having an email newsletter forever. I've got 7,000 people on there. It's fine. It's serving its purpose. And—

There's this idea that I want to write about more that I'm kind of developing of an audience versus a crowd. Yeah. Because an audience is what you're describing of the right people paying attention. Whereas a crowd is anyone. And I think an audience is the people who are in your corner in there. If you were to be mulling over something, they'd reply not with like a, well, good luck with that. But, you know, like a couple paragraphs of, here's more about it. Like the audience is rooting for you. The crowd is like, entertain me. If you crash and burn, that's fine. Cause I'll be entertained. If you succeed, that's fine too. You know? And so playing with this difference.

This is what worries me about centralized algorithmic platforms. YouTube's recommendation algorithm does not really care about the creator or helping the creator build an audience. They'll switch whoever is there, right? And I worry about that. I worry about— I think this is the advantage of— there's no surprise that every meaningful bootstrapped independent software business has been built on an open standard. So you're built on a bunch of open standards, SMTP, TCP/IP, HTTP, Transistor's built on RSS, XML, and also HTTP, TCP/IP. These are the forgotten heroes of innovation. The power of the whole internet. They power the whole internet. And think about how much actual how many dollars TCP/IP has created. And we're all talking about what's the new innovation. So I guess you should explain really quickly what TCP/IP is at high level. It's just like, this is how we communicate on the internet. It describes and enables bits to flow through the internet. And HTTP is another one. It powers the whole web, but then app stores use it. It's like It's— these are the channels that, you know, the modern web uses, but— and they're really old. Some of them date back to the '70s and even before that. And they've created so much value. And all you read about in the press is like, like Web3 and like AI. We can't get away from AI. Like, this is the new thing. It's creating all this value. SMTP. Look how much that value that's been created.

SMTP is what—

that's what powers email. Still to this day. The reason I think creators should care is if you are using YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or whatever, I think you've been saying this forever, you got to have an open standard. Counterpart to it. Counterpart. Email newsletter, podcast, website, blog, RSS. These are the things. That are your bedrock. So sure, attract people from over there, but this is going to get harder, I think, if we're talking about making predictions. If you watch TikTok, people might follow one or two people, but most of it is just like, entertain me, entertain me. Whatever face comes in front of me that can entertain me, that's it. And the idea of someone actually following you and then actually maybe going to your newsletter and then maybe buying a product from you, it's getting harder and harder over there. This stuff over here, it's never going to give you the same distribution in terms of being able to attract new people, but it's so important. And I want people to know about it, even to have these keywords in their heads, like open standards, open source, the open web. This is our refuge as creators and as founders of independent businesses. This is, uh, the way that we hold the tension between us and the big platforms because it gives us power. So you take away my YouTube channel, well, I've still got my RSS feed. Mm-hmm. And yeah, my RSS feed is, has less followers or subscribers, but these are the real ones. You know, if I, if I keep publishing on here, they're going to keep supporting what I'm doing. Whereas if this goes away, there's just another person that's ready to fill your spot. You need both. We've always done, creators have always done arbitrage with the bigger platforms. Like that's the tension of our world, but like give some credit to the real champions, which is these old crusty Web standards and— They power everything. That they power everything. MailChimp, that big exit that they had, it's because of open standards. Facebook would've not been possible without PHP, without Linux, without all of these things that have been built for free that we can take advantage of. And any creator that's publishing anything on the internet is using them every day because the centralized platforms use them as well. And I mean, you've been saying this too, but I just want to reiterate, yes, go out there. I'm on YouTube too. I'm bringing them to my podcast RSS feed. I'm on YouTube too. I'm getting them to sign up for my email newsletter. I'm getting them to follow my blog. And these are the real ones that are going to keep following my work no matter what happens to the platform.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. The last thing that I want to talk about a little bit is the mindset shifts. That you've had over the years? Yeah. We've talked about a few of them already, but as you've been, you know, a content creator and then building, you know, a multimillion dollar SaaS company and all of that and watching this for a long time, are there any other mindset shifts that have come into play that you think are important to share?

One interesting one is like my job at Transistor is to show up every day and just push the rock a little bit further down the path. And so I think people think, especially with marketing and growth, there's just going to be one thing you do. And sometimes that happens, like you push a snowball down a hill and it builds momentum and stuff. I've been talking a lot about if we can compare pushing a snowball down a hill and it slowly building momentum over time and building up more and more impact versus a slot machine. And I think with marketing, I often treated things like a slot machine, like, okay, Facebook ads, here we go. And it's disappointing. The things that have been truly impactful are these things where I'm just pushing the snowball one day at a time, and then eventually it builds momentum and it rolls down the hill, and then I got to push another snowball. That's kind of the work, and I'm happy to do it. Every day, just show up and go, what meaningful push forward could I do? But it's small, it's incremental. If you look at transistors, where we get our customers in Slack every day, we're basically, our goal is to get 20 signups a day. And on average, we'll convert about 75 to 80% of those to paid. So we have this, we know what the funnel is, right? But that, you think about 20 people a day. I try to imagine just who are those people? It's just like 20 people at home taking out their wallet, taking out their credit card, typing it in for a 14-day free trial. That's, wow, there's people doing that. Where are they coming from? It's like I did an AMA on Reddit 5 years ago that still brings people in. I convinced this partner to put us in their blog post. That still brings people in. It's like 2 or 3 people coming from each one of these channels every day. And that was just me waking up going, okay, what meaningful progress could I make today?

It reminds me of Amy Hoy's blog from years ago, Stacking the Bricks.

Yeah, you're just putting one step at a time.

Then you build whatever massive thing that you're trying to build, but it's just one brick at a time.

Another thing I've been thinking about a lot is just getting older. So I'm turning 45 this year, which in the software startup world is ancient, and seeing both the challenges and the value of being older. I think there's a lot of people, creators or people thinking about starting something new that are in their 40s, their 50s, and their 60s, I think if you stack your advantages in the right way, there's a big opportunity for you, but you can't do it the same way that someone who's in their 20s and 30s would. Just acknowledging our differences has been interesting to me. I just don't have the same gas in the tank that I did when I was in my 20s and 30s. So to acknowledge, I think Founders especially don't like to acknowledge, like, maybe we're human, maybe things are changing, you know? Even like the things I get anxious about, like, you know, I don't know, like how much longer are people going to want to see my face on video is just a practical thing, you know? And but to acknowledge it and be like, okay, but what advantages have I gained as someone who's in their 40s and will be in my 50s. And then it might mean partnering up with someone again who's like super young and has more gas in the tank. But I'm being way more honest about like who I am, what my limitations are. I still want to be pushed too, but it's also on the, on the other side of it, it's okay to say, okay, I'm not in my 20s anymore. I can't play that. Last night I'm at this conference. I went to 3 parties. I shouldn't have done that. I'm just too old for it. You know, I was like yelling at people. I couldn't hear anything. I should have just gone home and gone to bed, you know? And yeah, I think acknowledging that has been, has been good for me.

Well, I think it's, yeah, that thoughtfulness, the intentionality, and then the like transparency and vulnerability that you've built the business with all the way along. Yeah. Has allowed you to build relationships that have made a huge impact. Yeah. Consistent for a long time. You have this reputation that you know, I think it allows you to, whenever you're saying, hey, I'm launching this thing or I have this question, people wanna come alongside you. Uh, it's part of the reason that despite, or, uh, in addition to great software that I've been a customer of Transistor for, uh, a long time, almost since we launched.

Yeah. You're right in there.

Uh, Kit runs all of our podcasts on Transistor. Anyone listening should go and do the same. Yeah. Uh, if someone has a, a podcast on another platform, Do you have some, some pointers?

You can migrate it really easy. Uh, Michael will even do a Zoom call with you and help you onboard.

You get that like ray of sunshine in your life.

That ray of sunshine. It's actually really easy. Again, these open standards, you can like migrate your podcast, redirect your old feed. All the apps pick it up. It's actually way easier than people think. And it's portable. It's like an email list is portable. RSS feed is portable. Uh, unlike these other platforms, right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's important. Well, where should people go if they want to listen to you on a podcast, check out any content that you're creating?

I have a new podcast with our friend Brian Castle. We do a podcast called The Panel where we invite one or two people on and we have kind of a panel discussion about building a business, being a founder, all that kind of stuff. So I'm really excited about that. I'm still blogging and sending my newsletter from justinjackson.ca.

Sounds good. Thanks so much for coming on.

This is awesome. Thanks for having me.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.