#118 – The Magic of Choosing a Great Market with Justin Jackson of Transistor

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2019

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Justin Jackson (@mijustin) has spent a lifetime as an entrepreneur, working on products, hosting podcasts, running communities, creating courses, and more. But it wasn't until he created his newest business, Transistor, that he fully realized the power that comes from choosing the right market as a founder. Justin joined me on the podcast to talk about the advantages of solving a straightforward problem, the importance of finding the truth in the early days, and why it might be worth it to wait for the right idea for the right market.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/118-justin-jackson-of-transistor

Transcript

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0:00.0	Justin Jackson, welcome to the Indie Hacker's podcast. Hey, Cortland. It's good to be here, man. It's good to have you. You are the founder of Transistor, where you provide podcast hosting and analytics. And I've got to say you guys are really killing it this year. You launched the public in August of last year, 2018. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. About a year ago, you hit $10,000 a month in revenue in April of this year, just three months
0:25.3	after that. You doubled to $20,000 a month in revenue. That was July. We're recording
0:30.0	this, what is it, August. And you're already tracking past something like $30,000 a month
0:34.8	in revenue, which is amazing. So first of all, congratulations.
0:38.6	It's been super fun to watch all this go down.
0:41.1	Yeah, yeah, thanks.
0:42.6	It's been really a ride.
0:45.6	I don't know how else to say it.
0:46.8	When we launched, I thought it would take us about five years to get to this point.
0:53.3	And to have it happen faster has been, you know, really gratifying.
0:59.5	This is just you and your co-founder, John, right? Just two people, no employees.
1:04.4	That's right. Yeah. Just John Buddha and myself. And I believe you're entirely self-funded.
1:09.9	So no angel investors, no venture
1:12.0	capitalists, just what you're putting into the business. That's right. Although,
1:16.9	we can talk about this later. There was a stretch where I was really feeling the cash crunch
1:24.5	personally. And I was looking at investment because it was almost overwhelming,
1:33.1	you know, but we managed to make it through that. And now we're in a pretty good spot.
1:39.7	Yeah, I'm making it sound like it's all sunshine and rainbows here. There's definitely a
1:43.3	tough stretch before you launched where it was looking like a little like deer in the headlights, what's going
1:47.4	to happen? What about your expenses? How much does it cost you to run a business like transistor?
1:52.9	Yeah, I mean, we're aiming for gross margins of 80% or higher. We, I mean, one big expense that people wouldn't see on our top line revenue is we have affiliates,
2:07.9	and some of those affiliates bring us quite a bit of business,
	...

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