Episode 9 with Justin Jackson (Co-Founder of Transistor)

Hello everybody. I'm KP, your host of the Building Public Podcast. Excited today to have one of my favorite indie hackers, bootstrappers, someone who is— the favorite catchphrase I have is an internet stuntman. For a long time, I was a follower and a subscriber of his newsletter. And, you know, he's the co-founder of transistor.fm. And, you know, if you are anywhere in the circles that I'm part of, IndieHackers or Twitter, he's no stranger to you. So welcome to the podcast, Justin Jackson.

Yeah. Yeah. It's great to be here,

Justin. I wanted to kind of understand where, um, your head is in terms of like, first of all, Transistor. I know you're doing one other new project, MegaMakers. How much of these things occupy your headspace? And tell us about what you're most excited about in the next 6 months.

Yeah, uh, so the new project is called Meeps, actually, and Mega Maker is the community I've been running since 2013. Uh, so it's kind of always been there. And, uh, yeah, we can talk about community and how all that works later. Um, I would say these days I'm pretty calm. I'm pretty laid back. Transistor gave me a lot of space and margin in my life, which I'm super thankful for. After— I think I've been doing full-time indie hacking since 2016, and there was definitely some difficult years in there. And to have a product like Transistor That's providing just a ton of margin, like financial margin, margin for my time, margin for my energy, emotional margin. There's just lots of buffer there. So I've never felt more calm. Adding this, this new project in investing, I'm working with Joshua Anderton and really acting as a mentor, investor, collaborator with him. You know, that's definitely taken— because now I'm doing that outside of my work hours. That's— Added a little bit more weight maybe to my, to my life, but it's also been really gratifying to have something else to work on and think about and to kind of inspire me. So yeah, I think overall I would say I'm pretty calm, doing well, really excited about Transistor, still excited about running a company that is small, that is calm, and is profitable. And I think companies like Transistor are kind of like a whole new category of startups.

Right.

We don't want to grow super fast. We ideally would like our team to be 5 people, and we're okay with the way things are running now. Like, it's— we're not in a hurry to get anywhere else. We're not in a hurry to growth hack our way somewhere, you know, bigger team or whatever. It doesn't— we're really comfortable where we are and still want to build great features, still want to attract new customers, but not trying to, you know, we don't want to be, you know, making things so hot in the kitchen that we set the house on fire. Right now, it's just like, let's just chill.

Play too much. Playing with gasoline, playing with danger.

Yeah.

So I want to actually comment on that. And for the folks who are probably listening to this and may have missed some of the tweets that Justin and I had and what led to this conversation, just objectively zooming out, I was actually running this podcast, for the listeners, you may know this, on Anchor, which is part of Spotify. And it was doing fairly well. I didn't have any qualms with it because, again, it goes back to the thesis of like, oh yeah, Spotify does everything, so why not? Let's just, you know, it's mental hurdle, easy, just go in. However, it sucked the way— there's a couple of things that it sucked at. One of them being, it just felt that there were— it was designed by committee. It didn't, it didn't have these basic shit that you would want an episode page to have. And it's all like, I don't know if anybody has used this before. So I'm like trying to visually describe this. All of your podcast episodes are stacked over one over the other. And if you click on any one of them, you would expect a page would open up and that there would be a, as a podcast player, either on the top or the bottom, so people can listen. However, it's all stacked like a giant array. And if you click on any one of them, it just blows up a little bit and the rest are still there. It's very mind-numbing UX. Clearly, it was done as an afterthought. And I had a feeling that Spotify being the behemoth that it is, I'm a big fan of the company. I'm not knocking on it, but I think they're just not dedicating enough resources in terms of making this a fun and joyful experience for up-and-coming podcasters like me. And then the flip side, I shared about this, some of this angst on Twitter. On the flip side, I was like, what is my alternative here? Let me, let me see what else. So somebody recommended, I think it's Arvid, Arvid Kahl. Somebody recommended this thing, Kip, you gotta check it, look into Transistor. And for me, I didn't care about $15, $20 a month or whatever. For me, that's not the problem. The problem is, can I import all of this port over easily? Which was done in 5 minutes. Yeah. And then can I have the feature request of the, you know, having pages with players on top, which was again part of Transistor. Yeah. Yeah. But the cherry on top to me, and that leads to why we are here, was Justin went out of his way and cleaned up my, uh, my Transistor site's, uh, I think template or whatever. And, and he DM'd me and go, he goes, KP, can I help you set this up? Because it is a bit ugly. And I was like, first of all, he cares. He notices what his new customers are doing with his site. Second of all, who is this guy? I never would get a ping from anybody from Spotify or Anchor. And I was like, yeah, sure. Why not? And so within a couple hours, this new site, linpublicpodcast.com, it's rerouting to this Transistor site, was created. And I felt for the first time that I actually saw in in practice what I've been— a lot of us have been thinking about in theory, which is here's why indie works. Here's why indie can win in a market where there are behemoths in there.

Yes. Yeah. This is, this is Jason Cohen of WP Engine. This is something he imparted to me, which was people think that bigger companies have more resources. And so they're just better at everything. They're better at product. They're better at customer service. They're better at whatever. marketing. I think it's bullshit.

Yeah.

I think indie hackers, small bootstrapped companies can win because we care more. So Jason Cohen says like the best customer support you'll get is, you know, a small bootstrap company where the, the owners and the employees really care and they show up and they, they are actively invested in this idea of customers having a good experience. And if there's a gap in the product, which there always is,

right,

you know, maybe the UX of this isn't so good. In terms of our podcast websites, it's a new— we're going to be building a new version of that, but it's not built yet. So what's going to fill the gap? It's customer service. It's customer success. It's somebody showing up and saying, I care enough about this to help you set this up in a way that, you know, makes the experience better.

I also want to ask this. This is how much of this is a function, is a result of almost like running a calm company, you know, where you're not driven to death about the ARR and the KPIs of like, you know, doubly active, you know, weekly active users or daily active users. Just not, you know, it's not about growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. So you can take a breather and you can actually say, you know what? Let me look around and say, who can I serve today? Who among my customers need my help? How can I help?

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. As long as the threshold that you've reached in terms of MRR is there,

right?

Like if, if Transistor was only making $5,000 a month, that would apply pressure on me. I have this post called, I think it's just justinjackson.ca/margin. And one of the insights I have there is If your boss is a real jerk, and they're always stressed, and they're always downloading their stress onto you as an underling, there's something not right in their business model. Either they're not getting enough sales, they're not getting enough leads, there's not enough cash flow. So a lot of the calm in Transistor comes from our cash flow. We were able to, you know, for a long time grow 20-30% month over month. And that got us to a threshold that we're at now. And now we're growing, you know, sometimes 3 to 5% per month slower, but the threshold is there. You know, we're sitting on top of a very healthy cash flow. And so I can, like today, I didn't even get to the office till 10:30. I can wake up late. I can hang out at home. I can, you know, check in with my kids in the summer. I can walk downtown to my office here. I can get a coffee. I can talk to the people in the office here, this coworking office I share, and then I can get to work. And I've just got time and energy and space for all of it. So the, it's the underlying fundamentals that give you the calm.

Right.

And probably values as well. Like I just, and John is not as much like this, but I'm just like, from the beginning, When we were building Transistor, I would spend, you know, hours helping people set up their podcast and helping them set up their website and giving them tips and then, uh, you know, analyzing their audio for them and giving them microphone tips. I just get pumped up about that stuff. Uh, and—

I wonder, um, Justin, I wonder if there's something about this spirit of service that you've learned or you've witnessed at the receiving end and you, you, you've, you get that kind of thrill and you want to pass it, pass it on. Who are some people who were some people in, you know, if you back and reflect, um, people or companies that stood out in, in the way that it's sort of service and, you know, um, helping customers, helping people involved in the community?

Yeah, uh, I mean, there's so many. As a customer, I always appreciated WP Engine and their customer service. Like, you can ask somebody on live chat, you know, for help, and they almost always have somebody available. It's really, really helpful when you're on the receiving end of that. My friend Spencer, who's the founder of Podia. Yeah. He's the one that really impressed on me the, the benefits of live chat. For a long time, I thought, ah, live chat, that's, that's too much work, especially for a small company. But he said, in terms of getting real-time feedback, in terms of really helping people out right away, it's been very good for Podia, and we were able to start that early with Transistor. And then once you're used to it, it's just kind of like, okay, you know, like we're in this. And we don't always get back to people right away. I think our average is 45 minutes. Um, but often I'm able to catch folks right away, or Helen, our customer success person, is able to catch people right away. And it's just a great feeling when you can respond to people immediately.

Right.

Probably my first tech job, I came relatively late to tech, 28 years old, 2008, after working in the nonprofit sector for a long time. My boss, Greg Oldring, my first day on the job, got me to start answering phones. We had a phone line that people could call, and we would answer phones all day for this email newsletter software. I was grumpy about it at first, but I quickly realized That, uh, customer support, customer success is so much of the business. People talk about you when you're able to take them from screaming angry to, I love, I love this company. I love, I love what you guys are doing. And, you know, I get a lot of, uh, it's gratifying. It's just

nice

to be able to do that for people.

I mean, and as you probably have, you know, hundreds of examples yourself, but do you see how so much about how we shop and so much about what we buy, I think, is irrational decisions? making, right? As humans, we're not perfect. We're not robots. We're not— as much as people, you know, um, and all these marketing principles and frameworks like to lock us into ICP and all these things, we're really not. Uh, we're square pegs in all that stuff, right? We're always breaking rules. And I often— I've learned that, you know, when you surprise somebody, catch somebody in, in, in sort of in, uh, industries, especially in industries that have very low NPS, Right.

Yes.

Um, and you catch somebody and just offer humanity. You didn't do anything, but maybe that person needed to know that there's some sense of, you know, uh, humanness around to go around. Yeah. You would turn him into a— him or her into a lifelong fan. And there's no rational logic behind this. This becomes a story that they will tell their friends. They'll bring other friends and they become your allies.

Yeah, this is why the underlying structure of the business matters.

Hmm.

If you are ultimately beholden to shareholders, that's going to dictate everything you do. And so to say, why don't we really empower our whole team to care for people, to meet them where they're at, to really go the extra mile, and not just as a, as a PR exercise, but to do it because it's the right thing to do.

Right.

And it brings people joy and it makes their lives better.

Yeah.

That doesn't work because shareholders just want returns. And that means you're going to have to look at numbers and you're gonna have to look at KPIs. And the same is true for a lot of venture-backed startups. All they care about is growth. That's the metric that matters. So you can't grow if, you know, you're focused on these kinds of things. It slows everything down. But for a team of 4, 5, 6, even up to 10 people, with, you know, millions in annual recurring revenue, you have the underlying financial margin to pay people well, to give them lots of space to do their job without having to work 10, 12, 15 hours a day. And they can actually— they have space in their day to go, oh, wow, like, this person's audio quality really isn't that good. I should just record them a quick video to show them how they can improve it. Now, of course, we're not going to be able to do that for every customer that shows up, but we, we're able to do it for a lot of customers. And, uh, there's something about that that is just, again, incredibly gratifying. Uh, it's the right thing to do, and the business model works because there's enough revenue there per employee or per partner that it all works, right? Right. The important thing is that you're building all of this on top of a market where there's enough momentum that it will carry you as an indie hacker, um, and give you this margin, give you this revenue, essentially, uh, profit margin that can seep into all parts of the business. Right.

So this is a great segue to my second question, um, around momentum. And I know you've written a lot about this topic, um, in one way or the other. whether it was about demand, market pull. I think I've, if I'm not wrong, I probably heard about this phrase and actually really spent time thinking about it after reading one of your newsletter articles on the market pull side of it. So I wanted to take this moment and sort of get your, what is the latest iteration of that thinking? Where do you stand on how would you define momentum? Why is it important? And the same thing with Uh, market pull. How should indie hackers look at this in 2021 before they start a project?

I mean, I keep using these metaphors of surfing, of rafting down a river. And, uh, so water, there's energy in water. If you've ever gone rafting, if you've ever canoed, if you ever kayaked, you know, the energy that pulls your boat forward on a river is the water. It's all in the water. And there's other things about that metaphor that I like, which is if you have been kayaking for 20 years and I have been kayaking for 5 minutes and we both get to the same body of water and we both put our kayaks into the river, you're going to kick my ass. You know things intuitively about that water, about how that water works, about how rock formations and how you can— maneuver around them. You just know water, you know momentum in the water, you understand all of that. And I think sometimes when I give this advice, like, you need to look for momentum, people just think, well, I'm just going to go— I'm just going to go to any category that seems hot right now, and I'm going to— that's what I'm going to go after. And that's not what I mean. There's more nuance to it than that. It's about stacking experiences. It's stacking skills, stacking knowledge, stock stacking, uh, connections in a given category and, uh, in a category that has momentum.

Mm-hmm.

And momentum simply means there are customers in motion already looking for solutions, already buying solutions, and you're just coming along and you're putting your boat in, into that existing momentum. And your success is going to depend on what skills, experience, et cetera, you bring to bear on that particular river, on that particular category. So yes, the first, the baseline mistake you can make as an indie hacker is to, you know, put your, your kayak into water that has no momentum. The river's not moving.

Still water. Yeah.

Yeah. Still water. But, um, and we've seen this, like every kind of success we see today was built on prior momentum. So Slack is, is chat for businesses. But before Slack was Yammer and HipChat, before Yammer and HipChat was Campfire, before Campfire was ICQ. It's building— it built off the momentum that came before it.

Right.

And this is especially important for indie hackers and bootstrappers, because we do not have the, the financial resources to pioneer new categories. We're almost always going to be observing existing demand, existing momentum, and going, ah, you know what? I have an opportunity here because I've been in this industry for 10 years, because I'm an incredible product person, or I'm an incredible marketer, and I know these channels that work in this category, because I've got a network of people I can reach out to that can help create, you know, momentum or awareness or can help me navigate these waters. So it's, it, we're almost always going to be on a river that already has momentum, on a river where there's already competitors, and finding a way to carve out a piece of the pie for ourselves. Right. And, but there's more nuance than just finding a hot market or a hot category or a competitive market. That's not what I'm saying. That's a misunderstanding,

right?

The founder matters a lot. And if, if you show up and somebody else shows up and they have more experience, they have more capital, they have more connections, they understand the channels better than you. Yeah, they're going to win. This is, this is, yeah, this is just how it works. Right. So.

Right. So I love the piece around learning. I mean, learning to assess if this is a— if there's 2 extremes. One, it's still water, which means there's no momentum. Mm-hmm. And you can objectively tell that you are exerting too much force and you are trying to like, you know, create some sense of motion here. There's no real energy in motion. Now that's one. The other end, way on the other end of the spectrum is like, So much momentum, super hot category, quote unquote, like creator economy today, right? Like super hot. Everybody's doing something in creator economy and then almost unable to discern like, is this coming from the water or is this coming from everybody splashing things?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it.

I think it's somewhere in the middle is what you're trying to, you know, if I'm not wrong, if I'm hearing it right, you're saying it's somewhere in the middle where there's enough water and enough momentum to carry you forward without you coming to a full stop, but at the same time, it's not coming from other people's, you know, splashes that'll also die out soon.

Yeah, it's ultimately the— ultimately, you're looking for evidence that other people are searching for products like this and buying products like this. It's why I think most indie hackers, when they're evaluating product ideas, should be on Google And using SEO tools more than anything else. What are people searching for on Google and finding and buying? What are people— what terms are people using to search for those things? How do they find those things? The advantage of being in the podcast hosting market is that people just search for best podcast hosting. People search for Anchor alternatives,

right?

People search for, you know, how do I start a podcast? So there's folks in motion who, um, and I know from, you know, looking at Libsyn and other competitors, you know, Libsyn has, I don't know, 80,000 paying customers or something like that. So there's 80,000 people out there that somehow found Libsyn, somehow took out their credit card, and somehow paid. That's enough evidence in this particular market that it's worth going after. But I mean, a good example is Derek Reimer and Level. He found— so he was trying to create a Slack competitor, and he wrote this manifesto. It really resonated. It's exactly like a lot of people splashing in the water. He published this post, and everyone's excited about it. Yes, this is it. Slack is a distraction. Slack is bad for developers. Slack is bad for your attention. And it just seemed like he was onto something. But it's— that's not the evidence you're looking for. What you're looking for is, is evidence that there are actually people seeking an answer to that problem. They're actually seeking a solution. And when he started asking the people on his waiting list, hey, uh, what have you already done to solve this problem? And people were like, well, nothing. Well, have you ever searched the Slack App Store for a solution to this? No. Have you ever gone to Google and searched for a solution to this? No. Okay. So he hit a chord inside of people emotionally, but that feeling that people were feeling was not strong enough that it actually compelled them to do anything about it.

Right.

And there's lots of problems like this that people complain about.

Yeah.

That people feel strongly about, that people are excited about, and maybe creator economy is that. You know, people are really excited about the creator economy, but that doesn't mean that there's actually momentum in that market. Real people waking up, turning on their computer, searching, you know, how can I create a paid Discord channel?

Right.

And is there enough there that people will search for that, will find a solution, and then will pay for a solution? That's, that's the evidence you're looking for. And so—

I just, I have to say one thing here, which is you touched on something super interesting. It almost terrifies me anytime I go and do a special Google search or something that I wouldn't have done 6 months ago. It terrifies me watching myself do it. And I'll tell you why, because it tells me that people do shit like this. They don't write surveys. They don't answer things. They don't— if you call me on a customer discovery call, I would never tell you what I'm doing right now. I would do it privately. So when Anchor was pissing me off, I literally was searching for Anchor alternatives. Now, 3 months ago, if you asked the KP who just started Building Public Podcast, no idea. I would not, I would not be interested in Transistor. Why would I need Transistor? I'm happy with, you know, I don't even know what I need. I don't even know what I need. My problem, right? So have you heard about this framework of, um, was it, I don't know who actually, uh, brought, published this, but, uh, it's, it's been doing rounds around problem aware, solution aware. And I think, um, if I'm not wrong, I think alternative aware or something, but, but basically qualifying your audience into these categories. And yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's, there's all sorts of, uh, frameworks, like there's the business model canvas. There's that one there. Uh, I've actually, I'm sure they're helpful for some people. I've just never found them helpful for Me, because for me, it's much more, um, qualitative. It's like me sitting in the water and feeling the energy that's going on there. Uh, it's like feeling what's going on in this market. What can I see? What proof can I see that people are searching for this? And, um, in some ways it simplifies it because I can just go and go, okay, let So like with Meeps, Meeps is— the idea is we want to make it the best way to build a membership site, to create an online community, to build an online membership directory. And so we're exploring what's in the space, and I can just like kind of sit in the water, and the longer you sit in the water, the more you see. Mm. Um, all of a sudden it's like, whoa, I didn't realize That there's communities for people who build communities. I also didn't realize that this has become such a trend for companies, like companies are hiring directors of community to start communities for their company. Wow, that's interesting. I thought it was all just, you know, people building Substacks and people building Discord chats and Slack chats and, and, you know, creator economy type people. Right. There's actually a huge part of this market that's corporate people, people who are getting hired to run community for, you know, a company. And so that's the momentum. And then it's just hanging out, you know, just, you know, this one Slack I'm in, there's a channel called Tools and Resources. And it's just people all day asking for opinions on tools, telling other folks what tools they're buying and using. And that's the evidence. And then you can dig in even a bit more, like DM somebody and say, hey, I'm just curious, like you just bought Luma. What were you using before that? And why did you decide to switch? And what led you down that path? And what did you search? What, you know, what other things did you evaluate? Now that's different than reaching out to somebody that was not in motion. Um, right. So you can do surveys, you can do questions, you can do interviews, but it needs to follow action. Right.

Right.

So when somebody cancels their Transistor account, I write them a personal email saying, hey, what didn't work for you? Like, you've just taken an action. Let me know what, what was going on there.

Right.

Uh, when someone just signs up for Transistor, the first email I send them is, what's going on in your life that brought you here today?

Yeah.

And people have all sorts of answers that don't fit nicely into different boxes, but I can, I can start to get a picture For the job to be done, what job are they hiring Transistor to do in their life? And it could be I was just pissed off at Simplecast and I decided to switch. It could be I my boss told me I needed to start a podcast and I'm friends with somebody who uses Transistor, so that's how I found it. It could be you know I'm I just got fired from my job and I'm gonna try to make money from my podcast. You know there's all sorts of reasons and. I just let all that kind of come. I take all that in and I just let it simmer and I kind of start to get a sense for what's going on, um, and get a sense for what motivates people to cut, to switch. Uh, and it's one reason I, I mean, I love Anchor because Anchor gives us a lot of business. There's so many people that follow the same pattern as you, which is they sign up for Anchor to get started, then they get some momentum. And then eventually they want to upgrade to something else.

Right.

Nathan Barry sees this with ConvertKit as well. At first, he was worried about Substack because Substack has a pretty generous free plan. But now Substack is like the number one referrer to ConvertKit. He loves Substack now. Tons of people get started.

Right.

Yeah, it's the ramp. And so, you know, we're fine to allow these multinational corporations to and big funded startups to just, you know, they can, they can be the top of the funnel for us. We're, we're fine with that.

They also, uh, in one way sort of grow the market, um, and they sort of build awareness, you know, about this particular, um, content creation too. So kind of, you know, good, good, good overall. So I, I want to switch gears here and then get to building public, right? And, and, um, I actually spent some time on your Twitter I used a bunch of phrases to figure out, like, if you have tweeted about build in public, and I've noticed I've uncovered a specific tweet that I want to read out here. It's January 2018, and that is the only time you actually mentioned the full phrase build in public. And I'll tell you what you tweeted. You said, yes, period. It's scary to build in public, but the worst thing that could happen is you could fail in public. This is January 2018. So you were an OG. Nobody was talking about— I don't think anybody were talking about build in public that way back then. So I want to ask you to double-click on that and then say, what was your experience? You've built so much about your life, your career on Twitter, Justin, you know, and in— I, maybe you, whether you called it building public or not, but what was your sort of reflection as you look back and say, whoa, I'm glad that I, you know, sort of decided to go on this path, but I'm curious, like why you did it. First of all, why you decided to be active on Twitter and, you know, build this community. And second, where do you now see building in public, which is this movement, you know, that's again, it's kind of a hot trend, go to or take us to?

Yeah, build in public, to me, is just one tool. It's one way of building momentum, of building awareness, of connecting with people who can help you, of motivating yourself. So there's a lot of kind of benefits from it. And I think, and also in terms of legacy, I think there's lots about it that are great because we're limited by our imagination of what's possible. So I grew up in this little farming town in Alberta, It was like when I was growing up, it was like 6,000 people. And, you know, my imagination— and I was always into computers, but in, you know, '95, when I'm 15, my imagination for what was possible with computers was really limited. There was a computer repair store locally. I knew that there was like Michael Dell and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but that seemed way like My imagination could not cover what, how I get from Stony Plain, Alberta to the CEO of Apple. And it wasn't until I started reading other people's blog posts, kind of revealing how they were building their business and how much revenue they were making and why digital businesses work as opposed to other types of businesses I was aware of. Um, it wasn't until I started reading that stuff that I had my eyes opened and then my imagination could kind of reach that level. Oh, that's possible. So I think it has legacy benefits as well. There's downsides to it too. There's risks to it as well. And it's going to be nuanced, like build in public covers a lot. It's an umbrella that covers a lot of ground. But I think for a lot of indie hackers especially, it's one of our advantages when compared to you know, a bigger company. A bigger company just has to hold so much to their chest. They can't reveal everything.

Mm-hmm.

And we can be like, well, why not? Why don't we share the story? Why don't we share the journey? People are interested in other people's journeys. And starting from $0 and saying, hey, it's me and John Buddha, we're in our late 30s, We're kind of chewed up from the tech industry. We're tired. We're going to try to do this. This might be our last thing. Like, here we go, $0. And we're going to— our first goal is to get to $10K. And then really, what will make this a reasonable business for us is us getting to $50K. And I mean, if we could get above $50K, that would be amazing. And then just sharing every week, here's what's happening, here's what we're doing, here's what's going on. Is, uh, an incredible way to build allies, to build people who are on your side, to be able to have cheerleaders who are on the journey with you, who will mention Transistor to their boss in a Monday morning meeting, who will reach out in DMs and say, hey, I work for Spotify and I know you're having trouble with them, but maybe I can help, uh, who will, uh, you know, uh, who are willing to give us all sorts of free advice and help. because they're with us. Right. They, they feel like they're a part of it. And, uh, if you can cultivate that kind of, uh, community, if you can cultivate that kind of, uh, you know, invite other people to join you on the journey, I think it's incredible and, uh, has lots and lots of advantages specifically for indie hackers because I don't care about Coca-Cola's Build in Public. Like, I don't really care, um, because, you know, it's just gonna be corporate, it's gonna be sanitized. But I care a lot about Joshua Anderton's Build in Public.

Mm-hmm.

I care a lot about, you know, these, uh, Marie Poulin and her journey. I care about these people that, uh, you know, are sharing where they're at right now and what's happening. And it just makes me want to help them. Right.

So, I mean, I couldn't agree more. Um, take us to the early days of your career where— was there a version of Justin Jackson who wasn't that active on the internet in expressing himself on the internet? And if so, what flipped the switch and you realized, hang on, Uh, I want to be myself on the internet.

I mean, I think there's a version of this that's always been true for me. I like performing. I like— I've always liked writing. I've always liked public speaking. The idea of radio has always been interesting to me. Uh, video, you know, I was making videos with a VHS camcorder when I was 10 years old. So I think there's always a version of this that's existed for me. When I got my first tech job in 2008, my boss introduced me to 37signals and—

Yeah.

Their blog and that book they had written, Getting Real, it was just, I'd never seen anybody be that open about their business before and expressing themselves in that way. And I found that really inspiring. I found, you know, once I discovered podcasts and you kind of get this, you know, I used to listen to Dignation, which was Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Albrecht, yeah. And, you know, after 20, 30 episodes, you just feel like you know them.

Mm-hmm.

There's this, this kind of personal human connection you feel. And I think that was inspiring to me, that you could kind of get to know people in a human way on the internet. And yeah, I think I started blogging in 2008 and probably started on Twitter around then, maybe 2009, 2010. Probably started podcasting in 2012. So I just started doing this stuff. And part of it is I do like attention. So for people that are performers and like attention and like to express themselves, it's probably more natural. My partner, Jon Budda, he's not like that. He doesn't like it as much. So part of this is probably personality. I also found it, for me, processing not everything I'm going through personally, but processing personal stuff out loud has always been helpful for me. Mm-hmm. And the more I've been able to reveal, and again, appropriately, it just makes me feel better. Just feel like, okay, I don't have to hide that. You know, I don't have to hide the fact that I was really depressed in 2016 and '17, and I don't have to hide the fact that that product launch went bad. I don't have to hide the fact that I was insecure about, you know, these things. That's been cathartic for me to share that stuff. And there's a risk to this too. Right. I will probably do this until I get burned. And once I get burned, I'll probably not be super excited about it. So far, the internet has been very good to me, and connecting with people all over the world that I would have never met normally has been really good for me. And so I think all of those reasons kind of—

I think just to underscore what you said towards the end, the risks are super real, and there are, of course, downsides. And I think on average, Someone like you, uh, probably gets more DMs, which means more interruptions. Um, now we're not even talking about the quality of the DMs. Some could be really, someone's upset and they're on you. That's another whole different thing. But I think if you weigh in, you know, what I've noticed is, is the, uh, upside completely, you know, um, sort of tips the scale, uh, to, to the downside. And, and—

Yeah, to a certain extent.

Right.

Like, I've, I've, I've, I'm actually super happy with, like, I'm super happy that I only have whatever it is, 20,000 Twitter followers as opposed to 100,000. Because my friends who have 100,000 just seem to have more drama in their lives.

Right. Drama in the DMs, right?

Drama and just drama everywhere. It just creates more problems in the same way that I think When you scale a company, when you grow a company super fast and you get, you go from 5 people to 1,000 people, it just gets more complicated. And I'm interested in small, calm, profitable. That's what I'm interested in. And I don't, yeah. So, so there's thresholds all over the place. For me, once I got to 1,000 followers on Twitter, There was some clear benefits. Once I got 1,000 people on my newsletter, there's some clear benefits. Once I had 1,000 people listening to every episode of my podcast, there were some clear benefits to that. And then those benefits just kind of keep increasing gradually. But I think there is a peak that folks don't consider. You get, you get to a point where the, the advantages, the disadvantages start to outweigh It's like

diminishing returns from there.

Diminishing returns. Yeah.

So switching gears again to, since you mentioned newsletter and I have a prompt here to talk about your newsletter, it's probably one of the most prolific newsletters in the indie maker space. I've been reading it for a while. I wanna ask you as someone who's created, how many articles have you published? Do you have an assessment of how long have you been writing and how many articles have you published?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I've been writing since 2018, and I don't know, it's hundreds. I used to publish something new every week, and these days it's probably every month or two.

Right.

So yeah, there's quite a few. I've actually been going back into my archives lately and bringing back old posts and making them better. So the last one that really resonated was this One post that I'd written back in 2013, and I just reposted it.

Wow. So if you have to reflect on this journey, the 3-year journey of this newsletter, what was super easy about writing this newsletter and what was actually super hard, surprisingly hard about this newsletter?

I mean, writing is difficult. I think about maybe, I don't know, 15% of my writing is good. Even the stuff I publish, it's just writing really benefits from constant revisions, constant editing, constant input, but the input from the right people. It's so challenging to synthesize ideas into words. When you get it right, it's incredible, but it's very difficult to do well and to do well consistently. I think now the trend I'm seeing, which I think makes a lot of sense, is people posting these Axios-style newsletters or these 3 things types newsletters. I think that trend is probably going to increase because it really fits nicely with the medium. You know, people reading their inboxes and they just want to scan and they want to get something out of it. Right. And they— my favorite pieces to write are the longer pieces that I really think about and I really work the material over and over and over again until it's— it's never great, it's never perfect, but I can at least publish it and go, okay, this is something I've been thinking about that I wanted to articulate in a deeper way than a tweet. And then you have a record of it.

Hmm.

So I, I think as an art form, long-form newsletters, long-form essays, It's probably not as compelling or popular as it was, but it's still worth doing because there's nothing more difficult but more valuable than synthesizing challenging ideas into words. It's just that once it's there and it exists, it becomes like a pillar or an anchor that you can keep referring back to and referring other people to. So I find that part really helpful. If, but if I was just trying to grow a newsletter, I'd probably do an Axios-style newsletter.

Punchy, like a quick— yeah.

Yeah, my newsletter has gotten— I just, I, it was like up to 16,000. And I think I filtered out a bunch of people. I think it's about 6,000 or 7,000 people now. So I'm, again, I'm not concerned about the numbers as much as like the process and the The art of trying to write something long-form that matters, that's going to make a difference in somebody's life.

I love that. And I'm going to now jump to our last question. And as I'm noticing that we're over time, so thanks, thanks for staying on a little bit. This is a fun one. In your personal opinion, what's one thing indie hackers are over-indexing on lately? What's one thing that they're under-indexing on lately?

Depends who it is. Uh, I think we're still over-indexing on doing everything by yourself. Teaming up with somebody is a risk, but I wish I'd done it earlier.

Mm-hmm.

I tried it earlier too, and it didn't work out, but finding a great partner, somebody that is just talented in the things that you're not, is one of the best ways to step up what you're doing and actually get to that benchmark that you have set for yourself, whether it's a revenue milestone or whatever, um, teaming up with people, finding the right partner is the, one of the best things I've done lately. I could not have done Transistor without John. John could not have done it without me. We both feel that strongly. And it actually made me feel better about myself too, because for a long, especially when I was depressed, it was like, You know, I just feel like I'm shit, you know, like who, who would— I can't do anything right. And the skills that I had, I really kind of looked down on them. Like, who wants product marketing? Who wants, you know, nobody likes marketing. I didn't want to introduce myself at parties as a marketer. That just seemed lame. But being able to be my full self, which isn't just marketing, it's all sorts of things.

Right.

Bring that to the partnership. And for John to go, I could not do what you're doing. I just couldn't. And for me to look at John and go, man, you're good at building product. Like you are so good at it, has been incredible. Uh, and there's tons of stories like Walt Disney would not have built Disney without Roy Disney. And people don't— people forget about Roy, but Roy was crucial to the success. So I think More indie hackers should be teaming up, uh, with people they know who, whom they've built relationships with that they trust. And, uh, it's not easy. It doesn't happen overnight. You can't just like go out and search for it on Google, but it's worth cultivating those types of relationships.

Awesome. I love that. It was such a wholesome ending, uh, to, to this podcast episode. So, um, thank you so much once again, Justin, for being here and for spending your Friday afternoon. Uh, with me and, uh, excited for everything that you're doing in the community space. Uh, keep us posted on Meeps when it comes out to public beta. Would love to test it out. Would love to try it. And, you know, just like Transistor, the moment I loved it, I was like, I gotta share this with my audience. So, um, happy to be, uh, involved in any capacity. That said, thank you once again.

Yeah, thanks. And thanks for being a Transistor customer. We really appreciate it.

Excellent. Awesome. Sounds good.