Episode 1
· 01:02:02
Alright. Welcome to the first episode of the panel where smart founders discuss the realities of building better products and a better life. I'm one of your co hosts, Justin Jackson. I'm the co founder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel. I'm the founder of instrumental products and also, Clarity Flow.
Justin Jackson:We just finished recording with our 2 panelists.
Colleen Schnettler:I'm Colleen Schnettler, and I am the founder of a SaaS called Hello Query, and I also just launched a marketing coaching business for founders called SaaS Marketing Gym.
Tyler King:Hi. I'm Tyler. I am the cofounder and CEO of Less Annoying CRM.
Brian Casel:So this first episode, we decided it the timing works out. It's January 2025. We decided to, to talk about some predictions. And, I I thought I thought having Tyler and Colleen on as our first guests were were really great. I mean, Tyler, I've I've known for a couple of years.
Brian Casel:Tyler's business, less annoying CRM, is one of those just like slow, steady, sort of boring bootstrap SaaS companies. That's that's been a long term slow success story, you know? Yeah. And, yeah. O always good to hear from him.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. We had a nice mix of personalities and viewpoints. And Colleen, a lot of folks will remember her from Software Social podcast. Yep. She, she actually drops an announcement at the end of this episode that I'll give you a
Brian Casel:little breaking news.
Justin Jackson:A little breaking news. Her and, Lianna Patch.
Brian Casel:Yep. They're doing, a thing called SaaS Marketing Gym, which is really interesting.
Justin Jackson:And then she also has her own SaaS product called Hello Query.
Brian Casel:Hello Query. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:People always make fun of how I say query. Query. Okay. Yeah. Oh.
Justin Jackson:Hello?
Brian Casel:You know? Canadians say a lot of things kinda weird. So
Justin Jackson:This is a big people can blame it on Canadians, but I think I just pronounce things poorly.
Brian Casel:People when I was younger, people gave me a lot of shit over over coming from New York and saying saying words like forest and, like,
Justin Jackson:Oh, interesting...
Brian Casel:you know.
Justin Jackson:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:I I must say this is like the predictions episode, and I think in the first half, especially the first segment, it it gets a little dark.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know? With, where things are headed with AI and SaaS as an opportunity. I think we I think we recovered as the episode went on.
Justin Jackson:But Yeah. Yep. Yeah. We rounded out a bit, but that's good. This is the whole point is that we could really dig into things so someone could make a prediction, and then someone else could say, well, wait.
Justin Jackson:Hold on. What do you mean by that? Like, let's let's go a couple layers deeper. And as we kind of teased everything out, it, I think this nice kind of picture emerged. I think there's just tons of actually actionable stuff in here.
Brian Casel:I gotta say that's what I'm probably most excited about. The fact that we will have this rotating panel is because I I always like to pick out little nuggets from different people that I find interesting, and and I just use it as, like, inspiration for me to go figure something out in my world.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Well, let's let's get into it. Let's hear the conversation.
Justin Jackson:Let's start with SaaS, bootstrapping, our industry...
Justin Jackson:Colleen, I heard you've got a take. What's one of your predictions for bootstrapping in general in 2025?
Colleen Schnettler:I think in 2025, SaaS is going to get harder. Okay.
Tyler King:It's just what we all wanna hear.
Colleen Schnettler:Sorry, guys. This is just....
Justin Jackson:Now do you mean, starting a new SaaS is gonna get harder? Running an existing SaaS is gonna get harder? What's what what do you think?
Colleen Schnettler:I think it's gonna get harder to start a new SaaS. I'm not sure about running an existing one, but we are seeing attention spans getting shorter. We are seeing AI cannibalizing search, and discovery is a huge problem now. We are seeing everyone spinning up these I call them crappy little apps, but everyone's throwing out these crappy little apps as fast as they can, and so it's just you can't get people's attention the way you used to be able to a couple years ago.
Justin Jackson:Interesting. Tyler, you got a response to that when you were nodding your head.
Tyler King:Yeah. I mean, I think we're supposed to be debating, but I totally agree, especially with the crappy little app thing. So, like, my experience here is, like, I'm running less knowing CRM, which is a 15 year old business with, like, major legacy code. And then on the side, I help my friend Rick's start up, called LegUp Health, which is it's not even a tech company, but it just has, like, this little simple web app. AI for me has been hugely valuable for that simple little web app that doesn't need to be all that sophisticated.
Tyler King:And I don't wanna say it's not helpful, but it's way less helpful for the legacy code. So I kind of a classic bootstrapper advice is figure out what VC companies can't do and do that. And I think you could kinda take that same angle and say, well, figure out what AI driven new startups can do and do what they can't, and that's legacy. So I I kind of feel like I agree. It's the market's just gonna get flooded with the easy stuff, but it's not that much easier to do the hard stuff.
Tyler King:So that's probably where the opportunity is, I think.
Justin Jackson:Interesting. And, Brian, I I know you've been talking and thinking about this too.
Brian Casel:I I I mean, I I hate to make this like boring radio here, but like, I am definitely gonna piggyback on the same theme. I just wrote up my, like a blog post thinking through these predictions, and one of the headlines is the bootstrap sass is past its prime. I'm not saying bootstrapping a SaaS is dead. I'm not saying that you can't, build a great business as as a SaaS in 2025. Obviously, there there are still great businesses going and you can still start something up.
Brian Casel:I'm just saying that I think as an opportunity to start a new business, if you're gonna choose SaaS as your business model, the 2010 to 2020, that was probably like the golden era of bootstrapping and starting up a new SaaS business. And since then, even before AI came into the picture, SaaS has been getting harder and harder every year. Like Colleen was saying, the the competition, the competition sort of comes from all angles at this point. A big one of course is just the big players. It's harder, like the big players were always there in every category, but it is harder than ever now to convince customers to choose your your small SaaS in a marketplace where the big tools are, frankly just so good.
Brian Casel:Like, they they need a really good reason to choose the small guy over the over the big one. And that's harder and harder than than, like you were saying, like, all all the all the crappy little software start, like then it's even competitive with the small niche tools. So, the advice has always been like, well, just niche down and do a vertical SaaS that, that the big players won't even touch because it's way too niched, way too vertical. Even that's more competitive than ever. This theme is sort of informing all of my predictions for this year.
Brian Casel:Customers are more savvy and they have a much higher bar in terms of what they're willing to put up with in the software tools that they buy and use in their businesses. So, look, every every SaaS tool that that we use or that any customer uses, there's always gonna be some paper cuts that you don't like. Maybe 70, 80% of it solves your problem and 20% of it is like, I wish it didn't work that way or I wish it had this missing feature but they're probably not gonna build your missing feature because it doesn't serve the rest of that SaaS's customers. It used to be, well, like maybe for larger companies, the the calculus was do we build our own solution internally or do we buy any product on the market? And the answer used to be easy like, well, building is way too expensive, hiring some firm to build it, build us some custom software does not make sense to do anymore.
Justin Jackson:This is an interesting take. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It used it used to be like easy to just say like, alright, we'll just go buy some SaaS even if we have to buy the enterprise version. It's still better than like high like hiring someone to build custom software. That math has changed. You can you can use AI to build the perfect tool for yourself now. And so, we're not only competing, we as like bootstrap SaaS people, we're we're not only competing against all the other competitors, we're competing against the option of anyone just spinning up their own solution.
Justin Jackson:Here's here's my thought. I I hear a lot of podcasts talking about AI and people feeling like, you know, developers feeling like AI is gonna make their job maybe redundant, bootstrappers thinking this is gonna make the the landscape way more competitive. I'm still not convinced because there's so much more that goes into building a product even on the engineering side. A semi technical marketing jackass like myself should be able to use AI to build a product. And I've got enough tech know how that I can see sometimes where AI is giving me advice.
Justin Jackson:That's not good. And may, oh, you need to understand how, you know, servers work and how the command line works. And there's a, there's a bunch of other glue, even on the engineering side that it seems AI is missing. Well, maybe just react to that part first from an end you all 3 of you are engineers. That part there still doesn't seem to be sure.
Justin Jackson:Like my, my kids could probably build a SaaS app using chat GBT, but could they really?
Brian Casel:I don't disagree with you today. I just think that the the trajectory that we're on is it's just gonna get easier and easier for people to not not necessarily build more competitors, but just build their own personal solution or their own tools, you know? Yeah. Like, it doesn't have to be a SaaS that that's out in the market. It just it just has to be my personal metrics dashboard that I just use for myself instead of buying a metrics dashboard tool, you know.
Tyler King:Got it.
Brian Casel:You know? And and that that's not gonna be the case for everything, but I I do think that that is the trajectory that like, that's just another new factor that's that's making it even harder for the for the for the SaaS business, you know. Add add in all the rest of the competitive stuff, you know.
Colleen Schnettler:I think as engineers, we're going to be putting the pieces together more because the AI is very good at these individual things, but it's not very good at the system level thinking is what I've seen so far, and I'm a heavy user of all the things.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Which one do you use the most right now?
Colleen Schnettler:Well, I purchased Devon. Don't buy it. Not worth it.
Tyler King:Okay. I
Justin Jackson:don't even know what
Brian Casel:that one is.
Colleen Schnettler:It's a really expensive one. It's $500 a month. Oh. And it's yeah. It actually Tyler, have you have you heard of it or tried it?
Tyler King:But it's the one that had that demo that was completely fabricated, apparently. Right?
Brian Casel:Oh, I remember that one now.
Justin Jackson:The one. Okay.
Colleen Schnettler:So as a solo dev over here, like, the promise was very high. But devin is one where you actually set up a virtual machine, and it connects into your GitHub. And so it will open the pull request for you.
Justin Jackson:Oh, interesting.
Colleen Schnettler:It's a disaster. I mean Shocked. Right? So bad. So I actually use cursor composer the most.
Colleen Schnettler:Okay. But I still think there's I mean, it's just not that good. I think Brian's point is is valid. It's gonna get a lot better, but we're gonna be but but let's take your example, your perfect example. You're technical enough.
Colleen Schnettler:If you used Cursor Pro or whatever your AI tool of choice is, you could put something together. And then you just hire someone super cheap to kind of put the finishing touches on. So I still think the barrier entry is much low it's much lower now for someone who is kind of curious about tech to ship something.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Okay. I'm, I'll respond to that in a sec. I'm interested to get Tyler's take too. What do you what do you what's your take on this?
Tyler King:I have 3 reactions, but I'll try to go quick. Number 1, Colleen, what you just said made me hear, no code is really more in danger than SAS. Like, something you might have done with no code to prove out a concept and prototype it.
Brian Casel:I buy that.
Tyler King:Just just code it now. But okay. And then I also wanna reference something Brian said and something Colleen said. Number 1, AI is obviously this huge shift. But it's not just in how to build a product.
Tyler King:It's how to get your product discovered. And AI is certainly making it harder to market, I think, especially because AI is trained on old data. So it keeps recommending SAS from back in the day, which is great because we're old. And then Brian said even without AI, the SaaS gold rush ended in 2020. It's it's not just AI.
Tyler King:It when when I started less knowing CRM, we had a couple years of catch up before we were at our competitors. If you start a CRM now, you've got 15 years to catch up to us, and we're behind HubSpot in them. It maybe you can find some really, really obscure SaaS product, but I just don't think there's enough oxygen in the room for there to be for for there to be room for an for a bunch of new competitors to come in and and get enough money the way we could back in the day.
Colleen Schnettler:Wait. So can I just clarify, Tyler? You're saying you don't think people should be starting a SaaS in 2025?
Tyler King:I have a specific suggestion of what I would do. I'm not saying don't start a startup. I when I say SaaS, I mean, like, a project management tool, a Calendly alternative. Like, I I think all the oxygen's been sucked out of those markets, personally. I should
Brian Casel:just say, like, for this episode, for predictions, and I and maybe a general theme from from my box on on this, podcast is I'm not gonna suggest what anyone else should do. I I don't know what It's harder.
Tyler King:How about that? It's harder than
Brian Casel:what Everything is harder, but, like, everyone has different strengths, and you, listener, should do whatever your gut is telling you to do. I I can only speak to, like, what I'm seeing here at my desk in in my business, and that's gonna be, like, my my angle and things, I think. You know?
Justin Jackson:Well, I love telling people what they should do,
Brian Casel:so I'll
Justin Jackson:do that.
Colleen Schnettler:You too, Dustin.
Justin Jackson:I'm with you. Okay. There's so much I wanna dig into here because I think Colleen and Tyler brought up this interesting the the big question is, should you start Assas in 2025? Did the gold rush end in 2020? So, Tyler, what is your advice then for what people should do then?
Tyler King:So this is not proven yet, but the the little side thing I'm working on has been a really interesting glimpse into a non SaaS business, and that is it's basically a health insurance agency. The product is service, and I'm not saying, like, all new businesses need to be this exact model, but the technology is just that leg up. Sorry. The company's called leg up. I didn't didn't mean to do that.
Tyler King:Like, okay. You've got a 1000000 health insurance agents. They all do the same thing, but one of them has custom code behind it. You can just do a little bit better. And I think this is actually really similar to what Brian's saying about companies doing it internally.
Tyler King:Like, you can the the customer of the product could be the business that you work at, but the actual business is some something else that's not just selling software to other businesses.
Brian Casel:Again, I'm speaking to about my own business because I literally, all the revenue right now in instrumental products is us building SaaS apps for clients. And and I'm saying that my own business is, like, at a threat, like, to to the point where, like, I'm gonna be spending 2025, like, pivoting to a different angle on this because I don't think that what we're doing to make money is really sustainable as as a business.
Justin Jackson:When you say it's a threat, is this a threat you're seeing right now? Like, you're seeing leads that would normally convert to customers saying, no. We're just gonna build this ourselves, or is this just you feel like it's in the it's in the air?
Brian Casel:Yes to both. I I I have seen because, like, what we do is we build, like, MVP apps for clients. Yeah. So so I'm not, like, consulting with large companies and just working on their big software stack. Like, literally, we take an idea from nothing to here's something that you can offer to your first customers.
Brian Casel:And and we, you know, we do that. We we have 3 of them in active development right now with clients, and it's it's going well. But and it and to your point, Justin, like, it it does make sense, especially if you have the experience or resources to know, like, how much needs to go into a real SaaS product. That's that's why our clients do work with us currently. But, yeah, I do see other clients out there and people in my network or in my leads pipeline who, like, could could and are easily just whipping up their first MVP using Cursor instead of hiring a shop like mine for tens of 1,000 of dollars.
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin Jackson:See, here's here's my my pushback on that is it doesn't feel like AI is ever and maybe, I guess, not eventually, it could, but it seems a long ways away before an AI is going to be able to replace a John Buddha or a Brian Castle for building a product with good design and well thought through, screens and just that that whole crafting of the experience. So, if I was hiring like, if I'm hiring you in particular, I'm like, I want the Brian Kasel, like, thing. Like, I want the whole crafting of the app that's especially if I think I can't remember who said it, Tyler, but if there's gonna be more of or Colleen, there it might be more of these cheap little apps out there with terrible user experience, bad design, you know, and, and those little bits of a product where, you know, if, if those little connections aren't working, if they're just tied together with duct tape, they're not quite great. That's the experience. That's what makes a product, even if it's an MVP, worth using or trying.
Justin Jackson:I feel like you're gonna be more in demand now.
Brian Casel:Well, it's interesting you said, like, I guess the thing that I'm really excited about and the direction that I'm I I don't know if you call this a pivot or or whatever, but, like, I think the the the workflow of building with AI is is not to write a prompt and have the AI spit back a finished product to me. It's working with the AI, like collaborating with the AI, knowing how to do that well. And then maybe, yeah, like, working with, like, a human consultant or someone with design and product skills to help shape the direction. But the actual production and legwork of putting the pieces together is you, the owner, plus the AI. And so, essentially, the direction that I think that I'm taking going forward, this is not an an action quite yet, but where where my head is at is, like, instead of us completely building the full stack from top to bottom for money, it should be us working with you to help you build your your own vision with AI with our assistance community support tools.
Tyler King:Interesting. I wanna ask Colleen. You've you've got the newest SaaS here. Right? Like, because the thing that seems so hard to me, it's it's not the building.
Tyler King:It was never the building. That was never the hard part. It's getting anyone to notice you. Now you're do you have a lot of competitors? What's the experience been like going from 0 to 1?
Colleen Schnettler:It's been pretty tough. I do have a lot of lot of competitors. And, you know, I'm doing this coaching for SaaS founders, and I have people at all different levels. So I have a couple people that are pretty early, a couple people that are pretty advanced. But I think what we're seeing no.
Colleen Schnettler:I know what we're seeing is people are inundated with all the things right now. Right? Getting someone's attention And this, you know, could segue into, like, what are the future channels that are gonna work. Mhmm. Getting someone's attention is so hard.
Colleen Schnettler:Getting someone to talk to you, it's not like, you know, we all consume, or at least I consume all of Jason Cohen's content. And he's got that really famous article from, like, 15 years ago about how he found the first 50 people to interview for his WordPress hosting site. That doesn't work anymore because people don't care about startups anymore. They're hearing about them every day. So, really, it's just getting attention.
Colleen Schnettler:Like, distribution I think someone just said this, but, it's, you know, it's not just the code. Right? The code is whatever. It's the distribution that everyone is fighting for, and it's so hard. And coming up against these, you know, these VC backed companies that can just throw money at the problem, it's just you just have to get really creative.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:I feel like that is a great segue into the into the marketing growth section. I mean, Justin, I wanna hear your your take, and and I I think it's another one of these things that I'm just gonna be like, yeah. What what he said.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I I mean, one one prediction I have is I think companies are gonna invest less in social media marketing. So Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all of those things. I think, I think when you might have normally had like someone on staff to do social media marketing, A I think a lot of people are tired of social media. It's just like checked out and I think it's just been harder to get, attention on some of those platforms.
Justin Jackson:A lot more competitive. Now that's not to say I do think there's still gonna be people like, those personalities that will get attention on those platforms and that can be a great channel, but in general, I think we're gonna see a pullback from social media marketing and companies are gonna be putting all of those dollars that would go normally go in the social bucket into YouTube. I think YouTube is the platform that almost every company I talk to wants to, do better on, just
Colleen Schnettler:where all the eyeballs are
Justin Jackson:in our own like day to day like I come home from work like I listen to podcasts on while I walk home from work but as soon as I get home I sit on the couch and I open up YouTube and I'm watching YouTube stuff. And we've got all of the thing we got, you know, all of the streaming platforms, but we used YouTube the most. So that's one prediction. What's your guys' response to that?
Brian Casel:Tyler, I feel like you you and I have had this conversation multiple times. Like, is is marketing bullshit? Like
Tyler King:It never works. Marketing never works ever. Well, I'm curious, Justin, just to make sure I understand. Like, there's one thing is I'm a YouTuber, and I I'm gonna use YouTube to get an audience. And the other is, like, I'm a marketer, and I wanna buy ads on YouTube.
Tyler King:Which of those are you more talking about?
Justin Jackson:I think both. It's I think people are going to be creating more branded content. I think people are going to be there's gonna be more companies where there's, a personality that fronts the brand and they are on YouTube. I think transistor would fall into that bucket. I've been very much the face of the brand and it's been, it's been good for us.
Justin Jackson:It has worked.
Brian Casel:And I feel like that's a tack that's, like, tactically really difficult for a company to, like, invest in unless unless, like especially unless, like, one of their founders is a Justin Jackson who can go on. You like, there are people that you can hire to, like, do video content strategy, but I feel like it's never quite as effective as if it's one of the founders on the camera. You know?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I I mean, there's people that I mean, Aaron Francis did it as an employee, and I think he also can do it as a founder. I I think there's I I mean, a lot of there's gonna be a lot of competition because I I do think a lot of people are like, forget this social media thing. Like, it's just a headache. Like, I just want, I I want off of it, you know?
Justin Jackson:But YouTube just feels like this safe space. It's where all the eyeballs are. It's they have all of these great tools. Like you can promote a video and, you know, get a bunch of views on it. You can promote a video and get a bunch of followers.
Brian Casel:I do completely agree that YouTube is if if you're gonna choose a platform to invest in and if if you if you lump YouTube in with all the social platforms, it's sort of its own thing really, but, like, I I really think that YouTube is the the one and only that has, like, the best opportunity for exposure to, like, a wide audio like, of new audience of new people. Right? Mhmm. Like, podcasts are fantastic, but they're but you're not gonna use a podcast to, like, gain exposures exposure to a lot of new people. Whereas YouTube and the algorithm, like, what what really excites me about it and why I I am investing in YouTube this year is, it it really comes down to, like, your own creativity.
Brian Casel:And and, like, it's like the best creative stuff that serves the right people wins, and YouTube's algorithm is actually really, really good at just serving the your stuff to the right people. And that's how they you you'll get exposure to to more people. It's it's hard. Like, it's not it's not an easy thing to to win at, but it but, like, the mechanics are there. Like, YouTube will serve you up to to more new people than, like, Twitter will or, you know, x, whatever.
Justin Jackson:What about you, Colleen? Are you seeing anything in the SaaS marketing gym? Like, people trying it and
Colleen Schnettler:I have some opinions. So first, I think both you and Brian have very, prosumer businesses. Yep. So you you I could totally see YouTube working for you guys, and I'm that's why I'm super curious to hear what Tyler has to say because I think for more traditional b to b SaaS businesses, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place to be.
Colleen Schnettler:All of the people I'm working with have had really good success with LinkedIn, and it seems like a terrible cesspool of AI generated trash.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Colleen Schnettler:But once you get in there, because it is a terrible cesspool of AI generated trash, if you don't do that, it's really easy to stand out. When you do like, we do a lot of cold outreach, and people, like, have gotten customers from that cold outreach on LinkedIn. And this is more, like I said, more pure b to b, not really, like, beta prosumer. So and, Tyler, I assume your business is more like that. So I'd be curious to hear what you think, but, yeah, I'm LinkedIn for 2025 b to b.
Colleen Schnettler:Okay.
Brian Casel:I'm always wondering, like, who are these people on LinkedIn who are like
Colleen Schnettler:They're me, Brian.
Brian Casel:Actually writing their LinkedIn messages, you know?
Tyler King:Yeah. I I definitely don't think we're prosumer, but, like, on the spectrum of, like, enterprise to we're small business, which is maybe to the right of prosumer, but to the left of enterprise. But all I think all 3 of you are taking like, you all are more influencer y than I am. Like, you all have audiences. I've given up on that.
Tyler King:I'm not I'm not interesting enough. No one wants to follow that. But, especially, the key thing is the people I sell to are not the people you all sell to. Yeah.
Brian Casel:For the record, I I am a fan of Tyler's podcast. You should listen to it.
Tyler King:Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's terrible, but give it a shot.
Justin Jackson:You might wanna work on your pitch there, Tyler.
Tyler King:You'll get a full refund if you don't like it. But, like, the people I sell to are, you know, insurance agents and small manufacturing companies. They both don't care what I have to say about startups because they don't care about startups or tech or business. And b, they don't care about CRMs. No one's like this is a mistake I've made over and over and over again throughout my career is like, oh, let's start a CRM newsletter or whatever.
Tyler King:And, like, who in their right mind would follow that? Whether it's on YouTube or LinkedIn or wherever. I'm looking at this from the angle of I wanna sponsor people on these platforms.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm. I don't
Tyler King:want a YouTube ad. No one's watching a YouTube ad and then buying a CRM from that. LinkedIn seems more believable. I've tried it, never gotten into work, but I could see it working. But, like, the Google AdWords is what's missing.
Tyler King:I want something like that.
Brian Casel:I think the sponsoring things on YouTube seems to work better if you hire the influencer directly, you know, and and you have them, like, talk about your product in the middle of their video. Not not a YouTube served
Tyler King:ad, but It's still such like a brand impression thing versus, like, a performance marketing. Someone's gonna convert after they see your ad.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. What is working for you, Tyler, in terms of marketing and growth? Like, where where are you getting your customers right now?
Tyler King:Yeah. No, nothing works. Marketing's bullshit. This is the I've talked with Brian a bunch about this. Like, the the dilemma is nothing we ever do seems to work.
Tyler King:And this is actually if I can turn this into one of my predictions. Nothing we ever do works, and yet our business as a whole is working. Okay. And so one of my predictions here is I think that there's all these people who are better at, like, leveraging tricks who are like, oh, I found this weird, oh, the algorithm rewards this. And for, like, 6 months, I'm gonna get a lot out of it.
Tyler King:And before they shut it down, I've never gotten anything like that. I think it's harder and harder to do that. Because there's so much AI slop in there and just competition in general. I think the patient, I don't know how you go from 0 to 1. But once you have some customers, just serve them well, get word-of-mouth, make your product better, offer really good customer service.
Tyler King:And then the thing I'm trying, I can't say this has worked, but I'm trying to figure out how to build viral loop features into my product. CRM is naturally not at all a viral product, but we're building, like a little form tool right now, maybe appointment scheduling one day. I'm hoping that that can turn my current customers into more customers. That's my bet right now.
Justin Jackson:Okay. So but, when you get a customer and you ask them how they found you, what what do they say most of the time?
Tyler King:Most of the time, something like, oh, I don't know. I heard about you.
Justin Jackson:Okay.
Tyler King:We've we've done the thing where when they sign up
Brian Casel:Happy customers tell other customers. Right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I mean, word-of-mouth is one channel, but there's gotta be something else in that mix. I
Tyler King:Yeah. Because we're getting, like, a 1,000 free trial sign ups a month. So it's not like no one's coming to us. We can probably attribute maybe 20, 30% of that to, like, an a specific ad click or something like that. We do advertise.
Tyler King:The ROI is terrible. We if that were our only growth, we would be out of business. But, yeah, there's, like, 70% of it that's kind of unattributed, and it's something between word-of-mouth. But buying a CRM is a really long journey. Mhmm.
Tyler King:So most people are like, oh, I've just known about you for years. I don't remember the first time I heard about you. It's that type of thing.
Brian Casel:I really do think that in the case of less annoying CRM, it's I I I just I can't help but think that it's as simple as the brand name.
Tyler King:I mean We do get people like that. I was looking through a list of a 100 CRMs that used to that.
Brian Casel:Especially in the in the CRM space where where there are, like, a 1000 CRMs to choose from, you're you're not going to remember the name of 99% of them except for maybe HubSpot and, oh, that weird one called less annoying CRM.
Tyler King:You know? Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like, the like, that that's something when you're looking at a long list of CRMs, like, it's gonna stand out.
Tyler King:We do hear that.
Brian Casel:I I guess my my one prediction in the in the marketing thing, and this is, again, to sort of piggyback on on why I think YouTube works, but in general, like, one of my little headlines here is, like, human content is king.
Colleen Schnettler:Mhmm. That's what I was thinking. Yes. All 3 all 4 of us. That was basically, I think, the the center touchpoint.
Brian Casel:People are craving the the the human connection, but the human driven, like, realness. And and you could you're already seeing it. Right? That's why YouTubers do really well is because your people are connecting with them on video and and they're growing, but you're seeing other things. In Google, most of us have have started to, like, abandon using Google to, like, find the things that we're that we need to find.
Brian Casel:But I still go to Google and the and the one and the click the the links that I do click on in Google are are Reddit. Mhmm. Mhmm. And why why do I go to Reddit? Because I that's where the humans are.
Brian Casel:I I I know I know I'm gonna get an opinion from people instead of somebody who, like, SEO optimized the hell out of some article that's a bunch of fluff and and not helpful, you know, or or an ad, you know.
Justin Jackson:And, ironically, a lot of the AI LLMs are using Reddit as source material.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So Of course. There we go.
Justin Jackson:Like, Transistor, we invested a ton in Reddit, just because it was felt real and that's where people were hanging out, but it had this ancillary benefit of now the LLMs are recommending these products that came up in Mhmm. Reddit posts Yeah. 2 years ago.
Tyler King:Are we all getting recommended by do we hear from customers that say Chatchi PT told me about you?
Justin Jackson:Yes. I've seen a few
Brian Casel:for, like, clarity, though.
Justin Jackson:Pushback. I I think it's it's still not the majority.
Tyler King:Oh, no. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:For like organic search for us is still, way more we're getting way more customers from regular organic search on Google than chat gbt, you know, all these they're showing up, but it's still not it's maybe 10, 15% right now.
Tyler King:The reason I ask is have you noticed what ChatGPT sites when they recommend SaaS products? Because it it is Reddit or it's like the fit business top 10 CRMs. It's not like, they're not doing like an algorithm type thing like Google is and trying to figure out what the best CRM is.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. It's, I'm seeing Reddit posts and posts from affiliates, honestly.
Tyler King:Oh, interesting.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. So, we, we just happened to get lucky in this sense. We invested in affiliates and in Reddit and in content, and it ended up that that's where a lot of these LLMs are, getting their stuff from right now.
Brian Casel:And and like like anything else, I feel like especially in the in the marketing category, it's like what works for one business is gonna be completely different for the next and the next and the next. That's that's always gonna be true.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I I also just wanna tag, like, podcasts in general. Like, it's it's not a great way to to for that discoverability and, like, exposure to wide audiences, but it's it's in some ways, like, the ultimate human, content. You know? Like people are really, really loyal to their top five favorite podcasts, and they and they don't miss an episode. And they know, like, everything about those hosts.
Brian Casel:And they they literally give them, like, an hour of their time every week. I mean, that's that's kind of a crazy level of attention that podcasts can demand. I mean, I'm not gonna venture too far into politics here, but the 2024 election, a lot of peep you you could you could make the argument that, like, podcasts were, like, the most important media in that election. You know?
Justin Jackson:I mean, I think on this topic, you know, maybe I'll I'll present the other side, which is I I think there's gonna be tons of opportunity because this whole AI wave is gonna produce tons of really shitty apps. Mhmm. Tons of really shitty customer experiences. And I wanna drill down into 1, which is AI customer support. I hate it.
Justin Jackson:I I've never ever had a good interaction with an AI chatbot. Yep. There's an app that we all know, we all use it for, newsletters. They don't have They have an AI bot, and I'm like, This is the most annoying thing ever. And Transistors invested like, we have a team of 6 people.
Justin Jackson:2 of those full time people are real customer success people who answer live chat and email all day. I am doubling down on that. I we just hired some someone else full time. So now we have 2 people doing it. This is the most important thing.
Justin Jackson:It's I think it's always been the most important feature of SaaS. Adi Pinar has this great old talk that he gave way back in the day where he said, the most important part of SaaS as a service is the service.
Brian Casel:I couldn't agree more with that. That's yeah.
Justin Jackson:There are there are gonna be so many opportunities like this where people are trying to do the cheap, efficient, automated thing, and what wins is real human beings that actually care.
Colleen Schnettler:I I agree, Asterisk. 22 points I wanna make to this is, first of all, I love the AI chatbot on Canva. Okay. It's awesome. K?
Colleen Schnettler:And that's because I signed up to Canva. I wanted results immediately, and I didn't wanna read the docs. And so all it did was do a good job of parsing the docs for me and telling me what I needed to know. And then I pay for this other service, which is a $100 a month, and they have a real live human, but the human doesn't know any of the answers. Mhmm.
Colleen Schnettler:So, you know, so this whole customer support thing is tough because if you're hiring a call center in the Philippines and you know, or wherever Yeah. And that person is not even though they're a real human, if they don't know about your product and they just you know, it it doesn't do you any good. So I think it's hard to find that balance there.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I it's gonna this is like the whole thing is, like, what are the advantages that small companies have? And in the beginning, it's the founder cares more than anybody else. So at the beginning of Transistor, from the moment I woke up, which was sometimes 5 in the morning till the moment I went to bed, which was sometimes midnight, I'm just answering support tickets all day. I'm doing things that don't scale and that paid off.
Justin Jackson:People told their friends and then eventually we were able to invest in hiring Helen, who's amazing, and she could give that same level of service. She backed off some things. I was doing some things that were too much, but she's able to give this very high level of service. And I think this is the thing about building a business is if you're gonna be small, you've gotta get every advantage that a big company I often joke, like, what's the people will say, what's the difference between, you know, starting our podcast on Spotify for creators? And I said, well, Daniel Ek isn't answering your live chat request right now.
Justin Jackson:You know? That's the that's the difference, and that's where you can kinda stand out.
Brian Casel:I'm gonna totally agree with you and maybe disagree at the same time. I this I wanna I wanna stay optimistic about what I was saying earlier when I said, that bootstrap SaaS is is past its prime because I I do think that the flip side to that is exactly what you're saying. In 2024, I hired a customer success person for my SaaS Clarityflow. She's awesome, and she still does it today. And that that's been my biggest investment in that business.
Brian Casel:And I I literally cut the other marketing channels that that we were doing to only focus on her serving the customers and personally onboarding the customers. And and and that's been, that's that's been great. And and you're totally right that that is the difference between us and the big competitors. I mean, we've all experienced this. Like, I like you said, the the AI chatbots that are completely useless, but also even, like, the human support at the large companies.
Brian Casel:You know, if I send in a a feature request to a to a big name, big big SaaS tool, like, I almost never do it because I know that, like, whatever I send in, they're gonna come back to me with their canned response. Like, thanks. We'll add it to our list and for considering in the future road map, which I know, like, no, you're not. Like, I
Justin Jackson:don't know.
Brian Casel:There's no way my email just went into, but
Colleen Schnettler:it's not.
Brian Casel:You know? But, like, yeah, we as a small SaaS, we get the request and we can literally build their request in in a couple weeks, you know. That alone does not grow a SaaS business.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:We we grew. It was a positive year, but it's not a raging success. And and just offering great, like, highly competitive support is not enough to overcome all the headwinds in in a in a small SaaS business. You know?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. It's, necessary, but not sufficient. I wanna get to Tyler's take in a second, but I just also wanna call out the listener right now. I wanna hear in the comments on YouTube or wherever else, whether you've had a good experience with AI chat support. I wanna hear people's, people's responses because maybe there are more cases like Canva.
Justin Jackson:I I gotta try that one out where the experience is good.
Brian Casel:See, this is awesome. Like, co hosting a podcast with a real marketer. This is this is good.
Justin Jackson:Alright. Tyler, what's your what's your take on all of this?
Tyler King:So customer service has been our whole thing the whole time. I think we have 18 people right now and 8 of them are customer service and we pay them very, very well. It's huge investment for us. And I agree with you, Justin, but I'm not sure the trend is moving, making it more of an advantage. And here's what I mean.
Tyler King:Most companies have been using chatbots since before the LLM wave, and they were even worse.
Colleen Schnettler:Mhmm.
Tyler King:I don't think I think the bar was so low that customer service from other companies can't get worse. Real human customer service is still much, much better, but the gap has narrowed a little. And so the conversation we're having internally right now is how do we make this even more of an advantage? And, like, for example, we're trying to figure out I don't wanna say force, but, like, highly encourage people on the phone to get to get on the phone with us. Because the more we're chatting with them, even if it's a real person behind it, it still feels a lot more like a chatbot.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I wanna I wanna like that's something we're trying too. We just made this simple change, which is I send every new customer an automated email saying, hey, it's Justin. You know, how did you find us? What brought you here today?
Justin Jackson:We get great responses to that. But then in the PS, we say, hey, Michael is on our customer success team. He would love to book a call with you. Here's his SavvyCal link, and he's been doing these Zoom calls, Best thing ever. Best thing ever.
Justin Jackson:We're getting people right when they sign up. Not everybody does it. You know, he can't, but there's enough people that do it. He gets this steady stream of people. When he gets overwhelmed, we just remove it from the footer for a while.
Justin Jackson:I think this is such a great strategy to get on the phone with people. And if the lifetime value of a customer, is, you know, in the 1,000 of dollars, that's a pretty good investment. You just have a little phone call with them, they'll they will remember that forever, and you get all this great customer research as well. Well, I've got Actually, I've got one saucy take that we could remove or not remove, but let's just get your take on this. Okay.
Justin Jackson:So one saucy prediction. I'm thinking I might short Tesla stock in 2025. Here's my thinking. I think the valuation of that company has always been attached to Elon, and, I think LiveItNow is attached to the fact that he's kind of, cozy with the incoming government. I don't think that's gonna last.
Justin Jackson:And so I'm wondering if we should all short Tesla stock in 2025 because I think he I think he's gonna that that, buddy relationship, that buddy comedy is going to turn into a tragedy in 2025. Short Tesla stock. What do you guys think?
Colleen Schnettler:So we just bought a Tesla, and we love it.
Justin Jackson:I
Colleen Schnettler:So that's all I have to say about that.
Justin Jackson:I'm also a Tesla I'm also a Tesla owner. I'm obsessed.
Brian Casel:Me too.
Tyler King:I got a Nissan LEAF last week.
Justin Jackson:Oh, it's a tough. Here we go. Here we go.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we have we have the model y. We've had it for, like, 2 2 or 3 years and really like it as a car, but I I do agree with first of all, it's just I don't I don't really buy individual stocks. I just do the boring index fund thing. See, I I have a hard time believing that it's necessarily like like the Elon thing or the politics thing.
Brian Casel:Like, that noise is always gonna be there, and it's whatever. It is what it is. Yeah. But I think that the reason why I would probably agree that that Tesla isn't a great investment is that or, like, I I like our Tesla. The the again, the competition, like, there there are so many other great electrics coming on on the market now that there's there's just a lot of really good options.
Brian Casel:So, So, like like, from a product standpoint, there's not it's not as exciting as it used to be, is the thing.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the their sales have been disappointing in 2024. Like, I think they sold a 150,000 Cybertrucks or something like that, like, way less than they they thought they would.
Justin Jackson:They're not selling as many vehicles.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, I'm on the I'm on the waiting list for the for the next Rivian thing that's coming out in in 2026. Oh. That that seems more exciting to me from a product standpoint. Yeah.
Brian Casel:And, like, that like, I the excitement around Tesla as a product seems like a ship has sailed a little bit.
Justin Jackson:They're still the best at software. Like, that that software experience in the Tesla is I don't know. Very good.
Brian Casel:I don't But I don't love it.
Tyler King:I wanna push back, though. None of this matters. None None of this matters. The price of Tesla stock has nothing to do with how good the product is or how good the software is or whether people buy it or if they have any revenue. It's a meme stock.
Tyler King:It's a meme stock. It's like arguing what should the value of Bitcoin be. Like Yes. Whatever some idiot's gonna pay for it. Sorry.
Tyler King:No offense if you buy Bitcoin. But, like, it's completely detached from reality, and I I hope you're right, Justin, but shorting it strikes me as pretty risky given how random it is.
Justin Jackson:Okay. That's what I was looking for. Sorry. Where Sorry.
Tyler King:It came in guns
Justin Jackson:blazing. Where's our fire emoji? Yeah. Alright. That's great.
Justin Jackson:I don't know.
Brian Casel:I I do see a lot of these cyber trucks driving around Connecticut or around here. It's it's it's crazy that people
Colleen Schnettler:There's a ton.
Brian Casel:Buy them here. Like, they're I'm seeing more and more of them around here.
Tyler King:But the numb the numbers are super bad. I'm sure
Brian Casel:they are. Yeah. Yeah. But but my kids love calling them out whenever they see 1. You know?
Justin Jackson:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Okay.
Justin Jackson:Well, let's, let's end here. I think because we did a 2025 episode, it'd be good to just do a little round table about what everybody's individual plans are for 2025. So, Colleen, let's start with you. What what's kind of the goal? What's the plan for 2025?
Justin Jackson:I know you got SaaS marketing, Jim. What are you working on this year?
Colleen Schnettler:Yeah. So I have 2 things. Well, actually side note for your listeners, I'm trying to sell my micro SaaS Simplifile upload. Makes $25100 a month. DM me if you wanna buy it
Justin Jackson:because I'm
Brian Casel:Woah. Alright.
Colleen Schnettler:Done with it. So, I hope to get rid of that. That's been a project I started as a fun side project and have just ignored while I've worked on other things. You know, did makes a little bit of money, so that's nice.
Justin Jackson:25100, like, not most tasks don't even make it to that. Right? I know people who have been working on apps for longer that have way less MR than that. So
Brian Casel:I mean, is this is this, like, breaking news a little bit on on episode 1? Like
Colleen Schnettler:Yes. I literally have not told anyone until right this okay. So it's funny. This is breaking news because I haven't told anyone this except you guys right here. You're the first to hear of this.
Brian Casel:I just think it's awesome that you even, you know, pitched it. Like, usually, we hear about someone selling their their SaaS, like, after it happens. Like, I I've had to be, like, tight lipped about this, and now it's done. But, like, you're just like, it's it's here if anyone wants it. So
Tyler King:We should've done doing it.
Justin Jackson:We should've done this as a live stream and done an auction. Right.
Colleen Schnettler:That would be amazing.
Justin Jackson:Hey. Kinda hear 25, 25, 25. We just get it going. Alright. So selling simple is it simple upload?
Colleen Schnettler:Simple file upload.
Justin Jackson:Simple file upload. Upload.
Colleen Schnettler:Like, great names when you're talking about less annoying CRM. It's got great SEO because people, like, just type that in. What do how do I do simple file uploads?
Tyler King:So
Colleen Schnettler:I'm, like, number 1. Great SEO for that one.
Justin Jackson:Okay. So selling that. And what else are you working on for 2025?
Colleen Schnettler:So I've got another SaaS called Hello Query, which is a reporting tool, and that's that's very touch and go right now. That's, trying to figure that out. Don't have product market fit with that one. And then I started SaaS Marketing Gym, which is kind of a coaching thing and kind of a community thing, and that has been a blast. So I feel like my one goal for 2025 I had to pick would be figure out how to take SaaS Marketing Gym and grow it into something bigger than what it is.
Colleen Schnettler:Because what it is right now is it's, I work with the brilliant Liana Patch, who's a great copywriter. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:We're definitely gonna have her on the panel at some point.
Colleen Schnettler:Oh, she'll be I was just saying she's hilarious, so that'll be fun. And, what it is right now is founders come to us, and we build them a marketing plan, and then we have daily office hours, 4 days a week, where they can come and execute on the plan that we built them. Because what I see, especially now with all these AI tools, what we're seeing the most is it's just people are overwhelmed by choice. Like, for example, you need a social media scheduler. You could spend a week just trying to figure out which of the 5,000 social media schedulers you should use.
Colleen Schnettler:Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:Like,
Colleen Schnettler:that's a huge waste of time. Just pick 1. So we kind of remove those barriers of tools and marketing and what to do. It's just like you just have to execute, and people fall down in the execution stage because it's they're overwhelmed by choice.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm so interested in what you're doing there. I I mean, I DM ed you about it, but I've been, excited about what what you and Liana have launched with with SaaS Marketing Gym. Right? I feel like I could, like, do a whole other podcast with with questions to pick your brain about it. But I I like, what's interesting to me is that it it's you're doing it daily, like, every, like, multiple days.
Colleen Schnettler:Except Thursday. Yeah. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. So, like, how do you find it as a business for you to to run? Like, do do you enjoy doing it? Does it does it drain your energy?
Colleen Schnettler:No. I love it. You don't really have to prep for it. And much like Justin, my favorite thing to do is tell other people what to do. Just, so we have a blast.
Justin Jackson:Product market fit. Right?
Colleen Schnettler:So I love it, and Liana is you know, she's so great with copywriting, which has what has been fun is I've gotten so much better just, like, through osmosis. Mhmm. But, like, I have this funny story where I'm trying to get Hello query into the Heroku add on marketplace, and the Heroku rep is, like, ignoring me. I've emailed this guy, like, 5 times. So I start hanging out with Liana, and I just sent him this email that's like, what do I have to do to get out of Heroku jail?
Colleen Schnettler:And he responded right away, and he was like, what's Heroku jail? And I was like,
Brian Casel:oh, this
Colleen Schnettler:is how you get people's attention. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:That's brilliant. So it's
Colleen Schnettler:just it's been fun.
Justin Jackson:That is brilliant.
Tyler King:I love that.
Justin Jackson:Cool. Tyler, what about you? What's on the docket for 2025?
Tyler King:My general, the the the way I am in life is I'm really excited about very boring stuff. So the the short answer is just like
Justin Jackson:Again, you gotta work on your slogans, Tyler.
Tyler King:I am excited. Yeah. Like, we we've been in business for a long time, and I just wanna keep doing it. In particular, like, again, I just think that there's so much competition and so much just mess and low quality stuff out there that I just want to be a higher quality product. Like, growth is my focus.
Tyler King:We're more or less plateaued. Now we're plateaued at a point that's fine. We're making money. Like, it's not a urgent problem, but it's fun to grow. Mhmm.
Tyler King:So I wanna grow, but the way I wanna do that is by making the product better, which everyone says doesn't work, and it's never worked for me. But maybe this time, it'll work.
Colleen Schnettler:After 15 years, this is gonna be it. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:This is it. This is the killer features coming.
Tyler King:I'm happy to get more specific, but, yeah. I'm as a founder, I'm like, we have marketing going. It's not that we're not doing marketing. It's just like that's a machine that's that's going. I am really focusing all my energy on product this year.
Justin Jackson:Awesome. And and you have 18 people right now?
Tyler King:Yeah. Something like that.
Justin Jackson:And are you hiring in 2025? Or what's the what's the story on the people front?
Tyler King:Yeah. Basically, no. We're pretty plateaued. We're we're in an interesting spot where if we were to hire, everyone on the team agrees we'd wanna hire a developer. But I'm kind of the main product manager, I guess, and we have a kind of designer or contractor.
Tyler King:But the dev team has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, which is a lovely problem to have. We're shipping stuff faster than ever. I think we're working on higher impact stuff. All great. For the first time in my career, I'm really appreciating how important product and project management is.
Tyler King:I'm having a lot of trouble keeping up. Like, just this morning, we were writing stuff out on a whiteboard, and I was like, I have to design 3 major features in the 2 weeks because everyone's about to finish everything they're working on. So I don't wanna hire because I don't wanna replace myself. This is the job I wanna do. Mhmm.
Tyler King:But also hiring another dev puts even more pressure on me and probably lowers the quality of the design and stuff like that.
Justin Jackson:I'd love to have you come back at one point and, I think another great thing for us to discuss is, how long can we do this, Tyler?
Tyler King:Oh, forever. I'm just trying to distract myself until I die.
Brian Casel:That's gonna this is one of the things with the panel podcast, which is gonna be great. It's gonna be a lot of return rotating guests coming soon back through and and do an update. So I
Tyler King:would love to talk about that. I've got so many thoughts.
Colleen Schnettler:And when you guys do that, you should bring on, like, 2 people who have already sold their businesses and do, like, a little compare and contrast.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Colleen Schnettler:Would that be fun? It'd be like, when do you sell? When do you keep going? Yep.
Justin Jackson:That's right.
Colleen Schnettler:I'm super curious about that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Justin, what what do you have coming up in in your world in 2025?
Justin Jackson:I mean, we've got some exciting stuff we're working on. And I did this big, research report on, like, I just wanted to know how big the podcast industry was. And so using Claude as my research assistant, I went through just tons and tons of source material, like financial statements from big public companies, and I tried to estimate the best I could how big the podcasting industry is. And, one of the reasons I did that is because I thought a lot of the public numbers were bullshit. Just like no no sources given, just, what's is it Statista or you you know, you look up research and you see those charts and it's just like, we're just, you know, put your hand up in the wind and try to guess.
Justin Jackson:The biggest part of the podcast industry is ads. That's, is with podcasting is, $5,000,000,000 a year industry, which is actually quite small, I think for all the press that podcasting gets 5,000,000,000 is like not that much. I, I think Facebook did 150,000,000,000 in revenue. So our entire industry is doing maybe 5,000,000,000 a year and 2 to 2 and a half of that is ads. So we have an ads feature, but we wanna make it better, more tracking, all these kinds of things that marketers and advertisers wants.
Justin Jackson:We're gonna add some of that stuff. And, probably not hiring. We just hired Michael full time last year, so I think we're gonna wait on that. And then there is this bigger existential question, which is podcasting on YouTube is a bigger thing. And the if you look at younger people, when they think about a podcast, they really think about it as something on YouTube and not Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:You know, not something you listen to Apple Podcasts on. And so the thinking about YouTube and how it's gonna affect audio podcasting is something I did a lot of I did a lot of thinking about that in 2024. Gonna do a lot of thinking about that in 2025. I think my theory, and we've already seen this, is that we're actually I think pod audio podcasting is itself won't grow a ton. Like, it'll have like maybe a 15, 20% growth this year as a as a whole category.
Justin Jackson:And, a lot of that will be off the coattails of YouTube. So people will start a show on YouTube. We're already seeing this, and then they get somebody saying, hey, I wanna listen to this on Spotify or Apple or Pocket Casts. And, they go, oh, how do you do that? And, they Google, how do I do that?
Justin Jackson:And then they eventually find us.
Brian Casel:I do think it's really interesting, the the relationship between YouTube and podcasting, and even my own behavior as a as a long time fan of of podcasts, like listening to a lot. There's like a few podcasts that I exclusively consume only through YouTube
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And usually in in their clips. Usually, the the playbook for, like, like, Conan O'Brien's podcast is one that, like, I I never listen to it on audio, but I'll watch a 12 minute clip of an interview on YouTube all the time.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna we're keeping an eye on it for sure. The the and yeah, it's a it's a threat, but also an opportunity.
Justin Jackson:One thing that has always been nice is I I remember talking to Nathan Barry about Substack and he was really worried about Substack coming in with free newsletters and, it's just turned into a great, top of funnel for Kit is having all these people that start on Substack and then they want, you know, the customer service, they want the features, they want whatever, and then they eventually, come down to Kit. So there's actually maybe an opportunity for everybody there. Is it like where are there big kind of free funnels out there where these well funded companies are, increasing the market? But you can go down funnel.
Brian Casel:It does seem I I I can't help but think that podcasts are really growing and and sort of like finally having a moment as like a as like a media like, it it literally feels to me that, like, podcasts as a media outlet are way more important than, like, television was.
Justin Jackson:It could be. I what we're waiting on is the IAB releases numbers every year about what's the value of podcast advertising. So last year, it was 2,000,000,000. And so we're gonna see if all these, like, all this political advertising that went into podcasting, if that increases it. December 2024 was one of our best months ever in terms of growth.
Brian Casel:It just seems like the reach for especially for for large audience people with large audiences on both YouTube and podcasts, really, really well known celebrities that you see on television have a fraction of the audience that, like, a Joe Rogan has or a mister Beast has, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they have, like, what, tens of millions of people tuning into them. Whereas, like, the highest rated television shows might have, like, a1000000?
Brian Casel:If if that, like
Justin Jackson:It's difficult to see how that will affect our business. I'm expecting optimistically that podcast paid podcast hosting as a category increases 15 to 20% this year, which is about on average what it's done for the past 15 years. It's one of the nice things about the category is it just grows 15 to 20% every year. But transistor had, increased the number of the number of shows on platform last year by 30 3%, I think.
Colleen Schnettler:Oh, wow.
Justin Jackson:So 33% increase in number of shows. So there's, there's some good growth there. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Very nice.
Justin Jackson:What about you, Brian? What are you working on 2025?
Brian Casel:You know, like I said at the beginning, I'm I'm really, rethinking the the direction for instrumental products. It one of the things that I'm very much looking at and interested in is sort of what Colleen is doing with, SaaS Marketing Gym. It's super raw. Like, the clay is being formed right now, but I'm thinking through a similar concept, not on the marketing side, but on the product side. Some sort of small cohort community workshop coaching support sort of model, to help you build your own tools, whether it's using AI or using Ruby on Rails, which is which is the stack that I choose.
Brian Casel:I I know Colleen builds with Rails as well. And, yeah, I I I don't know that it necessarily looks like a training course. I I'm thinking more of like a done with you support sort of model. And and I'm thinking through, like, what a funnel for for that could look like. Maybe, like, workshops, like, putting on mini workshops as, like, the top of funnel, and then that sort of leads into a cohort, into community, and then into a line of tools.
Brian Casel:You know, Rails components is gonna be the first one. I'm working on a Rails editor, like a block editor thing. And there will be just a a line of tools, a a community, some coaching done with you kind of stuff, all aimed at helping builders build.
Justin Jackson:That's a good tagline. Okay. Well, we did it. Like, this we had our first episode of the panel. Tyler and Colleen, you were amazing panelists and guests.
Justin Jackson:Thanks for being here.
Tyler King:Thanks for having us.
Brian Casel:Great job, and thanks for thanks for coming on short notice. And, man, episode 1. We did it. The panel. Yeah.
Tyler King:Right? I'm excited to listen to the the following ones. This is a cool idea for a show.
Justin Jackson:I do wanna say that we want to hear from folks, and so there's a few things coming that I think we can tease here. 1, Transistor's building a new feature where if you reply on Blue Sky, those become comments underneath the episode. So look for that. We're gonna have a Clarity Flow app where if you've been feeling this whole time, like, you wanna get in on this conversation, leave us an audio or video recording. That'll be at panelpodcast.com/respond.
Justin Jackson:You can also email us at panelpodcastshow@gmail.com and this will be on YouTube. You can you can leave a comment there as well.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm super excited about this, and, and I I think this panel format is is really interesting. It's gonna be awesome to, to do it and have some some fresh faces and then returning folks. So we definitely have have to have Colleen and Tyler back on at some point soon. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:And just so we have it, Colleen, where can people find you? What's one link you want people to go to right now?
Colleen Schnettler:Fastmarketingjim.com. Perfect. But you can also find me on on the Internet at leanyburger.
Justin Jackson:Leanyburger. Yes. Yes. Do you have leanyburger.com?
Colleen Schnettler:No, but I should.
Justin Jackson:I think you gotta register that right now.
Colleen Schnettler:Yes. Great idea. I think
Brian Casel:there's a fast casual food food chain business in in the works here.
Justin Jackson:And, Tyler, what's, one link you want people to go to right now?
Tyler King:If you'd like to listen to my mediocre podcast, it's startuptolast.com, hosted by Transistor.
Justin Jackson:Maybe your thing is you just have the worst Oh. You have the worst slogans.
Tyler King:I just nag myself over and over.
Justin Jackson:Awesome. And all of the links, will be in the show notes as well. Thanks, everybody. This is great.
Tyler King:Thank you. Thanks, guys.
Brian Casel:Later, folks.
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