What it takes to launch a SaaS

This podcast is hosted by transistor dot f m. Alright, folks. I have a great bonus episode for you this week. Tom and Robert had me on the framework podcast. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. You're listening to framework where we dig into the research, planning, and building that goes into bringing products to market. I'm Rob Hayes. And I'm Tom Creighton. And today, we're talking with Justin Jackson, who is the cofounder of the podcasting, hosting, and analytics platform, Transistor, and host of the Build Your SaaS podcast. We'll discuss building tools for creator communities like podcasters and doing it as an independent, non venture backed SaaS business. We wanted to talk with Justin for a couple of reasons. Justin is one of the most recognizable faces in the independent creator community on Twitter, and he manages to do more than just register a domain for every project idea he has, like some of the hosts of this podcast. He actually builds them and helps other indie creators do the same. And as podcasters ourselves, we're excited by the idea of focusing on this community of creators to provide tools to create better content and lower the barrier to entry. Justin, can you give us a short intro to yourself and what Transistor is all about for those people who aren't familiar with it? Yeah. I mean, that was a really nice intro you just did. I don't know if I could I don't know if I could, you know, live up to that. Yeah. I've been doing, kind of business stuff my whole life, but went independent from consulting in 2016. And then early two thousand eighteen, John Buda and I teamed up to work on Transistor, which is podcast hosting and analytics. So every podcast you've ever pushed play on in Apple Podcasts or Overcast or whatever is hosted somewhere. And, that's the part that we do. Awesome. And so when you guys got going on this in 2018, can you give us a sense of what the software landscape looked like for podcasting back then? I I I'm imagine it's evolved a ton in the last two years. But, how much tooling was in that space when you got going? And and where was it focused in the the workflow of a podcaster? Yeah. So I've been podcasting since 2012. And, I met John at this festival in Portland called XOXO in 2014. And at the time, John was working on another platform called Simplecast. And so he I was self hosting my show at the time. I had, like, WordPress and a bunch of plugins and, Amazon, you know, AWS. I I was kind of self hosting it, and I thought thought it would save me money. And it ended up just actually costing me more money. And once you added up WordPress hosting and AWS and all the plugins I needed to make it work. And so John said, hey. …