Jon Buda

Before quitting their others jobs to focus on Transistor full time, Jon and Justin considered taking on venture funding to grow, but ultimately decided against it.

Now that the company is making good revenue, they would consider hiring a support person to offload some of the day-to-day stress, but ironically, hiring someone else would create stress of its own.

Customer feedback drives some of the feature priority, and some are driven by the industry and where it is going overall.

However, they do not put too much attention on feedback because a small loud minority might be able to force a huge backlog of ideas that don't add a lot of value.

Instead, they carefully sort through all the ideas, and evaluate how those fit into their overall road map. Then, the team spends about six weeks working on each large feature, building and refining it along the way.

When starting to build Transistor.fm, Jon already knew what he needed to create in order to host a podcast - an RSS feed, a website, and few other things. He sketched it on paper, generated a rails app, and dove right in, sketching directly in code as he went along.

While in college, Jon created an open-source music player, which later got him a consulting gig, an untimely turned into his first startup experience. This was also his very first project in freshly released Ruby on Rails.

Initially Jon wanted to build the product completely on his own, but realizing he was a great coder but not a marketer, partnering with Justin would bring a lot of value to the table, and turn his side project into a real business.

Interested in podcasting and working at Cards Against Humanity, Jon wanted to create a better experience for his coworkers, so he convinced them to sign up for his software before anything had even been built. Once he had the users, Jon built the tools.

Jon Buda describes Transistor.fm as a podcast hosting and analytics platform. A show needs a place to store audio, an RSS feed with the show and episode details, listener numbers, and distribution to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other apps. Transistor is the subscription product that does that. It can also build a website for the podcast and supply embeddable players if you want to keep your own site. Buda says the aim is to make publishing easy once the episode is recorded. He had helped build an earlier podcast platform that came apart for him around 2015, then stayed around shows while working at Cards Against Humanity in Chicago.

On Build Your SaaS, Justin Jackson tells Jon Buda that leading a company comes down to two jobs: thinking, and making decisions. Execution is the work Jackson likes, but he says co-founders are not graded on it. The example in front of them is Spots, the product they were weighing alongside Transistor.fm. Chasing it would hurt in the short term, because he wanted to ship fast and Spots still had a lot to prove, including whether they even wanted to be in advertising. His instinct was to keep things easy and deal with it later. He says you almost always have to force yourself to do the opposite.

On Build Your SaaS, Justin Jackson reads a Twitter thread from Stephanie Hurlburt, @sehurlburt, and tells Jon Buda why he follows her. She is an entrepreneur, and she is the founder of Binomial, which makes image and texture compression for VR, games, and similar work. Jackson says she is not really in the SaaS business. She sells annual licenses. What he values is her writing on marketing, on sales, and on being a software person, including a thread on how programmers can improve a wardrobe with a few simple changes, for men and for women. He points listeners to her thread on hard selling.

On Build Your SaaS, Justin Jackson tells Jon Buda that a bigger audience usually means tapping people who already have a bigger audience than you do. Their method that week was to pick three tweets and use them as the whole conversation, then see if the authors shared the episode. The first tweet was from Justin Kan, after he sold Twitch and started Atrium. Kan wrote that he had thought a lot about how B2B compares with B2C, and that he now preferred B2B. Jackson says Kan has done both, which is why the thread is worth using. Show notes were promised at saas.transistor.fm.