Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, you're listening to Open Threads. I'm Brian Casel got another conversation today with my friend, Justin Jackson. And you know what? Justin stood me up. He missed our calendar appointment for this conversation. I can't believe it. And that actually kicked off our conversation for what we're talking about today, which is.

First of all, why he missed our calendar appointment, but more importantly, how do we manage our, uh, day to day time and energy and focus and planning these tasks and what we're working on. So we got into it and in Justin's case, he's running Transistor FM. We got to hear you know what it's like for him working with a small team, a small growing team over there and how to keep things flowing, how to keep the relationships healthy with your teammates, but also with yourself and your work.

And [00:01:00] so I really enjoyed this conversation here. Enjoy.

I've been so anti standing meeting in all of my work, like. Audience Ops, like all my companies, I've never had a standing weekly meeting with anyone.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. Well, it's very helpful for John and I, because we know for our co founder relationship, we need to talk on the phone at least once a week, but we've been bad.

Like we have this standing meeting that's still in our calendar every Wednesday morning. It's called John and Justin call 10 30 AM every Wednesday. We haven't done that in ages, but once we hired Helen, We started doing these weekly meetings where she runs the whole meeting. She's our customer success person.

And she just goes, here are all the things I've noticed in support this week. Here's some things you should be thinking about. And she's the one [00:02:00] pushing both John.

Brian Casel: That's what I've heard from friends. Have your team run the meet. Cause when I think as the founder and I've always been a solo founder, I've had partners on projects, like co hosts on podcasts and stuff like that.

And like, I used to think of like. If I have a weekly meeting with a team member, then that's a weekly project for me to do, like prepare for what's the agenda, run it, host it. But really it's just like, I just need to show up to hear what they have to say to me so that they get. FaceTime with me and the team.

Justin Jackson: Yes. It's a forcing function in a lot of ways because now we're a team of four. Cause we hired Jason, we hired Helen in April of 2019 and then sorry, 2021. And then Jason in August of 2021. And. Um, we don't do any other, like I could go weeks without speaking face to face with them if we don't have that weekly meeting and maybe I don't notice it as much, but I've definitely noticed it with John.

If we don't [00:03:00] get FaceTime, it's not good for our relationship. It's something that we need to have. So one on one or in this small meeting. We really need that face time. And I think Jason and Helen are actually similar to John, like they really enjoy being able to see each other and having, you know, time to, and today, Jason and John are on vacation.

So it's just Helen and I, but it's just the standing thing. Every week, that was helpful for me.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And it's like a small community, small family. You're part of this thing. You're committed to it. For me, it's like async and what I'm doing with ZipMessage and everything. Like a lot of that was born out of just my style of being, if there doesn't need a meeting, we don't need to have a meeting for better or worse.

And I think that in my previous business, it was so much more about just a repeatable production line. We're not building anything. Whereas a SaaS. You're building something new every single month, whether it's a new feature or a new marketing or new, whatever in that business. I did some meetings in the very early days and every week it was like, all right, well, what's new client work, [00:04:00] same stuff every week.

Okay. I don't need to be here, but I could see with a small SaaS team. And now it's basically just me and a couple of developers, but they're in India and we communicate mostly over GitHub issues and Slack and a little bit in ZipMessage. And when I work with marketers, like on content stuff or podcast stuff, it's really all ZipMessage.

It's like, here's the thing I worked on. What do you think? Let me get your feedback. We go back and forth.

Justin Jackson: Yeah, I find ZipMessage really good for like our team. I think there's just this other level of with John and I as co founders, I realized pretty early on, like there needs to be recurring emotional connection and it's worth investing in that.

And then once Helen and Jason came on, like the pandemic was tough. It wore us out in a way that we didn't realize. And then as soon as we hired Jason and Helen, and we had these weekly team meetings, all four of us were kind of like, this is nice. We just get to see each other. We get to talk a little bit, joke around a little [00:05:00] bit.

Then Helen takes us through her weekly update. And then at the end, John and Jason can share a little bit about what they're working on. And it's also time for us to talk about things that bug us, like Justin, the pricing page still doesn't have this. Like, can you do that? And it's like, Oh yeah, yeah. Okay.

I'll do it right away. But for other folks that I don't talk to as much, especially. People that want to book, like book meetings with me, whether it's just a customer or someone in my audience. So they want me to like book a call with them. Usually I just say, well, let's just do it over ZipMessage. So I'll record a video and then you can reply to it.

And I love that you can reply to videos and ZipMessage. And I'll tell people that, like I'll say to a customer, like, okay, here, I've just answered your question. Um, which they fricking love, by the way, like when you record a video just for a customer, it's like next level and they know they can reply.

They rarely do. Right. So I invite them to,

Brian Casel: That's the biggest thing I hear. It's [00:06:00] like the biggest problem that I,

Justin Jackson: I don't think it's a problem all the time. I think they can, I don't think it's a usability thing.

Brian Casel: Right. That's the thing. So I didn't intend for this to be a ZipMessage, but yeah, like that's a big thing in my mind space at the moment.

It's cause I hear it a lot from customers. I create and send videos. I don't get a lot of replies back and this gets to like use cases and I'm trying to dig in on which are the most valuable use cases from a marketing and positioning standpoint. Because it's the ones where they're like customer support or audience, where they're sending a ZipMessage out, they might want a response back, but they don't always get one or like sales prospecting where there's not a lot of investment.

on both sides of the conversation. But if it's a remote team member, employee relationship, manager relationship, or a client and an agency relationship, both ends, or like a coach and their coaching mentee or whatever, there's a lot of investment on both ends in replying back and having a long conversation.

So it's all these [00:07:00] different use cases and I'm trying to figure out what to emphasize.

Justin Jackson: Yeah, I think it's just nice having the option. A recurring problem For our customers is stuff like DNS. So we have this tiny little feature, tiny, tiny, tiny little feature that allows you to connect a custom domain that you've registered to your transistor podcast website.

And that one little field causes us so much support because DNS is a fucking. Menace.

Brian Casel: I just upgraded my transistor account today. Oh, nice. And I was just looking at that, the domain thing. I got to get that connected. So Justin, I need some customer support on my domain.

Justin Jackson: And ZipMessage is really clutch for this because there's so many different providers and I've walked through one GoDaddy video that we referenced, but people are like, well, I use whatever.

And I'm like, okay, well. I can create a video for you that shows you, and then they can reply with a video or a screenshot of what they're seeing. And it just makes it so much help.

Brian Casel: Message [00:08:00] templates now. So they're canned responses, but video. So you can have a video for GoDaddy, a video for, what's cool is you could just insert them into any conversation that you're already in.

Justin Jackson: Oh yeah. I see this in any message. Yeah. So this is like exactly what I need is to, you need to build up a library of all the different DNS providers, but there's some sticky issues like that, that It's just so helpful to have the back and forth. And honestly, like it's worth it for us to still have it because it's a cool feature and people want to connect their custom domain to their podcast website.

And the difference between transistor and a competitor is customer support. Like we have a live chat widget and from the beginning, this is something I learned from Spencer at Podia was a big believer in live chat from the beginning. And I was like, what are you doing, man? That's so much effort.

Brian Casel: I hate it when me as a customer, like forces me to use live chat.

Because first of all, it's never live. You know, that the agent is running 10 different chats and they're going to take 10 minutes to reply to [00:09:00] every question I ask. So now I got to like, sit there and wait. Sometimes they say it's live chat and they're literally just not even there at all. It's like, just give me an email address.

I need async. I'm all about async. I'm not going to sit here.

Justin Jackson: But live chat. For us, even when we can't get to him right away, there's something about it that when it works, it's so magical and I'm feeling like I want to double down on it because it's such a differentiator between us and I feel like it would be a huge benefit.

Brian Casel: Maybe you already do this. To double down on it and be great at it. Yes. Like have a real person read it. It's super hard to actually do that at scale, but to actually have a real person.

Justin Jackson: We don't use bots. We have no chat bots. And the reason we hired Helen was that I would go to sleep at 11 o'clock and I'd be answering.

It's on my phone. So it would just like pop up on my phone and I'd be answering support up until 11 o'clock PM. But then I'd go to sleep and then tickets in Europe would build up. So we hired Helen and she [00:10:00] just like covers. It's a pretty wide day. Like it gets busier for her in the evening because that's when our North American customers are going to be online.

And so she has structured her day. So she still gets pinged and she'll answer right away, but we try to respond as soon as we can. And every once in a while there'll be someone that doesn't get a response for 20 minutes, but I still think it's worth doing even when a few people fall through the cracks.

And yeah, I think even to get better at it is worth it.

Brian Casel: Why don't we stick with this as like the first main topic, which is day to day workflows and schedules and like work lifestyles. This was actually just on my mind this week. I've been trying to get better. Like you were saying, planning out personal tasks, what I'm working on, what I'm prioritizing, but that at some point here, I do want to shift into podcast.

Okay, sure. As a thing. So, my thing I tweeted like two weeks ago was like, I feel like you were just saying I really relate to that where it's like every day is like a whim. What's giving me energy today? There's a feature I want to work [00:11:00] on or somebody asked for this thing and I'm going to spend half a day on it.

And I get pulled in a lot of directions, a lot of like self inflicted like, Oh, I think I'm going to work on that. Maybe I could ship this by Friday. Now I'm spending the whole week doing that. But was that really what I needed to do for my business? Was that the most important thing that will actually move the needle or other priorities?

Like, I know I got to be exercising more in my life. I know I want to have more free time to hang out with my kids. Am I actually being intentional to prioritize these things and put them into my schedule? And I've never been one of those. Like, I'm organized when it comes to like systems and stuff for my Team and my business, but for me personally, I don't schedule my calendar with my tasks or anything like that.

I'm not a crazy, like Asana or Notion or ClickUp person. I just need a simple, like most of it's just gut instincts. So now I'm trying to do more, like I'm using things for Mac. Like is my to do list. I'm going to try to knock through it, but I'm curious, like what it looks like for you, because I know you're the marketing slash product guy.

You're not like John, where you're in the code all day. I am in the code a [00:12:00] lot. Both building myself and a lot of directing my developers and reviewing their code and what they did and then going back and finalizing a feature like that sucks up a lot of my time. So I'm curious with you, like, are you doing multiple projects in a day or do you commit to like 1 project in a full day or what is that?

Justin Jackson: Yeah, it's pretty loose. I mean, for me, this is really the benefit of finding John, honestly, all those years of doing stuff on my own. And I could force myself to be organized. And there was a time where every block of my calendar was scheduled. And I probably needed that for a time, at least for now, who knows if this will be the way it is forever.

The way I like working. I just have this rhythm. So. The rhythm of my day starts after the kids have gone to school, I put on my jacket, get my shoes on and walk down to the office and that's 30 minutes. And that's where I listen to podcasts. That's a 30 minute walk, even in the [00:13:00] winter. Even in the winter.

Yeah. Just walk downtown to my office. I can ride my bike in the summer, but I like having the time, that 25, 30 minute walk. And it means I'm getting an hour of physical activity every day, which is. Also important. And I just like that rhythm. So then I come downtown. That's really cool. Cause you also have that separation.

Brian Casel: Yeah. I miss that. I had an office a few years ago, five minutes away from my home. And then when we moved this house, I got this home office. So. Now my kids and then my kitchen is right behind me. My kids are playing in the room over there. So like when I finished my day, it's like literally five steps and I'm in.

Justin Jackson: Oh yeah, yeah. I tried that too. It just doesn't work for me, especially because.

Brian Casel: And I'm not disciplined enough to like stop working an hour before and have.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. The unwinding time. And I can get pretty manic at work. Like if I really get into something, it's like I've gone down into a black hole. And then I emerge when.

I look [00:14:00] at my phone. I see my wife's texted me 10 times and it's six o'clock. That can be a day. And so unwinding from that takes about 30 minutes. And so I like walking to work today. I listened to you and Jordan on my walk to work because it like fires me up. I like hearing what other founders are thinking about and doing.

And like, it's my brain starts working on like, what might I do today? Then could be something that I listened to that inspires me to start working on that thing. And that's part of the rhythm is. And these days I just show up at work, I check our customer support, check slack and all that stuff. And then I just start pushing a rock up a hill and.

That could be working on the marketing site, that could be recording a video, that could be doing whatever.

Brian Casel: That's actually what I'm curious about, like, what do your rocks look like? Again, like, you're like the marketing side of the business, right? And how long does each project last? Are these like, what's a typical thing?

Justin Jackson: Yesterday I was like throughout the day, I [00:15:00] was just like hopping from one thing to the next. A lot of days I am just like hopping around. It's just like, Oh, I could do this. I'd do this like a little, and none of it's planned. It's like, I'm going to write some tweets and then I'm going to go over here and update the transistor blog and this knowledge base needs to be updated.

And, Oh, I'm going to jump on a call with this person. It's very in the moment.

Brian Casel: you have this marketing approach that I tend to relate to, which is like, just keep the activity flowing. Keep it going. Yes. Just do a lot of stuff because I'm always so jealous of, but I've never operated this way of like super analytical. We're going to run 10 tests. We're going to measure every single thing.

Each one is going to last 24 days and then we're going to graph it out. And then we're going to know what our channel is. I wish it was that clear, but it's not.

Justin Jackson: That was like one of my favorite like interactions at MicroConf is I went out for beers with Lars Lofgren, who did marketing at Kissmetrics for a long time.

And, and we just had this amazing, like two hour conversation. And at the end, he's like, you know, Justin, we're both [00:16:00] in marketing, but we are both completely different in our approach. He's very analytical, very, like he wants to test everything. And I'm way more qualitative. If he's quantitative, I'm way more qualitative.

I like the feel of things. I like what gives me energy and what gives the product energy. I like this feeling of there's just stuff happening and I'm going to create part of that energy every day. And there's pros and cons to it. It is nice having people on the team now. For example, we did this test where I think YouTube SEO especially is going to be really important for us.

There's certain keywords like how to start a podcast that are really hard to get on regular Google search results. But in YouTube, it opens up this new opportunity. It's still competitive, but not as competitive as what's happening in the regular Google search engine. And there's some interplay between them where if you rank well on YouTube, it can [00:17:00] actually help your ranking in the regular search engine.

So we did this test, you know, I've recorded now three versions every year, how to start a podcast in 2022. So I finished recording it. And by the way, the trigger for recording video is haircut day. When I get a haircut, then I record a video. So it's like all like the rhythm of. Life. It's like, what's happening?

It's like, Oh, haircut. It's just like, okay, I know I'm going to record some video that day.

Brian Casel: Yeah. I mean, I've come to rightly or wrongly conclude that the search for the single channel that you want to double and triple down on is elusive or like not even possible. Like I think it's so much more, it's just going to be a lot of things that build on each other.

A lot of little. Activities. And then ultimately there will be a couple of things that bring the pop, like a big product hunt launch, or we talked about this last time. Every now and then you're going to run into something that brings a spike of traffic and customers. But in between that stuff, you just got to keep having whatever it is, like podcast appearances, [00:18:00] SEO, content wins, integration partnerships, like keep the activity flowing and this stuff will just build on each other.

And then eventually, of course, with SaaS, you have a customer base that starts to. Compound, yeah. On itself and recommend it and stuff.

Justin Jackson: It is iterative again, now that we have new team members, it was really helpful for me to realize there's just a bunch of stuff I'm not good at. So like Jason, this new developer we hired, he has experience running massive cost per click campaigns.

And John and I have always just been grumpy about that. Like, nah, it's always a waste of money. Like we've tried it a bunch of times. And he's like pushing us to say that video, Justin recorded how to start a podcast is really good. How can we get it in front of more people? And Justin worked all of his magic and he got it up to a thousand views, but how can we amplify that?

And he's like, we should do some paid YouTube. And John's not into it, but he convinces us. We're like, okay, let's do it. So I set up a campaign, 50 a day for four days or [00:19:00] something. And he's like, no, if we're going to do this, it needs to be 500 a day for five days. Cause he says investing higher is better than having these a bunch of really low days.

So we did 500 bucks a day for four or five days. So it cost us like two grand. But that whole experiment was fascinating because the video went from a thousand views, 2000 to learn a lot. The video went from a thousand views to 38,000 views. And I always like wonder, 'cause like one of the ways I'm trying to optimize this thing is I go to YouTube and incognito mode and I type in how to start a podcast in 2022.

And some of these videos I'm like, they have so many views, how did they get there? And. I'm realizing that a lot of these people are paying for views, like there's one from B& H photo that has 1. 3 million views. It's like, how did they do that? It's like order of magnitudes larger than.

Brian Casel: And something like B& H must be paying [00:20:00] for that kind of traffic across so many different tasks.

For those who don't know, they're like an electronics chain of electronic stores. Um, and like podcasting microphones are just one of hundreds of different products that they sell. It's not like they're a podcasting company. But if they're investing in that many views on just that YouTube channel or just that YouTube video, think about what they must be spending on for like stereo equipment or whatever, GPS, whatever else they sell.

Like they're probably doing that across so many different.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. And it's interesting to see you like pull a lever and then the leverage it gives you. So we went from a thousand views to 31, 000 and then we stopped paying for ads. But since we stopped paying for ads, we've gotten another 7, 000 views. So there's something additive about these things.

Brian Casel: Oh, what do you know? If you pay Google money, they'll send you more traffic.

Justin Jackson: I love that stuff. And that interplay between me and now the team works well with my style because they can mention something in Slack. [00:21:00] And I can be like, yeah, okay. That's my day today. Today I'm learning how to optimize this for cost per click traffic.

Brian Casel: All right. So that actually ties in with probably my last question on this topic, but it's the big one that really sparked this whole thing for me in the last two weeks of like trying to be more intentional about what I choose to work on each day. And is that contributing to the bigger picture plan?

And for me, that planning usually happens more on like a quarterly basis. But like in your example, this YouTube ads experiment, you spend 2, 000 on this one YouTube video. It explodes the views. That's awesome. The way that you explained it made it sound like on a whim. Oh, we might try this. There must be like a higher level thing going on.

Like how can we double or triple our top of funnel traffic to the transistor website this quarter? Yeah. Right. Are you trying to align the things that you choose to spend your time on and now your team's time on with what the big goal for the business is this quarter? Yeah.

Justin Jackson: So John and I at the end [00:22:00] of the year, we marked out cycles, like in the shape up process.

And I just did this in Google sheets. I just have like columns for cycle one, cycle two, cycle three, cycle four. And that gives us an idea generally. In a year, we have basically six cycles and then a half cycle in December.

Brian Casel: And are those product features? Are those marketing projects or both?

Justin Jackson: They're both.

So we have the dates. So like cycle, we're in cycle two right now, which is February 28th to April 8th. And then April 11th to April 22nd is going to be a cool down period. But that block from February 28th to April 22nd is like, that's the block. And so then we have context, like what else is happening during that time.

So microconf and Easter are both things we have listed there. And then prod You going? Sorry? Are you going? No, I'm not going this year, but we had it marked down just in case we decided to go. And then product focus. Is podcast websites, and then we have [00:23:00] a link to a shaping doc. That's where we really brainstorm over time ideas that we want to work on.

And this is a pretty loose plan still, but it just gives us an idea of like, these are the cycles of work we have available to us. And we have some ideas for each one. And so then we have a shaping doc that explains here's the problem. Here's our appetite for the problem. Here's the solution. And then we have a marketing focus underneath that.

And then I've got some things in there, like, okay, what am I going to be focusing on? In a strategic sense, but for me, it's still ends up being like, once those general rhythm for the year is set, then my actual day to day. is not super strategic. I feel, and I could be wrong, but I just feel like I know the things that when I'm investing in them consistently produce results in the longterm.

And so I, I really stay focused on a lot of that stuff. It's like very much like a James Clear philosophy, the habits that you get into every day, the little actions you [00:24:00] take are the votes for what your product is going to become and what your marketing's going to become. And so there's some strategy in there and.

There's definitely people on the team that are probably thinking more analytically than I am and are pushing me. To think that way or to think like, Hey, what are we going to do about promoting these new podcast websites? But it's very much in the moment. I'm just like, okay, I know I need to talk about this.

I know I need to, Oh, I better make a newsletter, but I'm not going to have a content calendar that says, okay, I got to have a newsletter done. I just know like roughly, like I want to have at least one newsletter every month. And I just get this feel for like, yeah, it's time for another one.

Brian Casel: Definitely relate to that.

I mean, I definitely came to this point recently where My schedule is more open than ever. It was open for a while, last few years, even working on audience ops. But there were a lot of sales calls in there that I had to do and random check ins and stuff like that. But now almost everything I do is async.

The [00:25:00] only calls I really ever have are podcast recordings these days. Like honestly. And so that left me with all this open space, because I think like doing this for a long period of time, like entrepreneurship, having this level of freedom, I've worked from home for 13 years, I've been self employed. So during that time, you start to just get better at the decision process of what to work on each day.

Looking back on the early years, you start to realize, all right, there was a lot of wasted time here, a lot of wasted time there. You know, which things really move the needle. So I am pretty aware of like what I'm working on. Like, is this important enough to actually be spending my time on it? But it's still an open question of like, am I being strategic enough?

Justin Jackson: Yeah. I think everyone's different in that way too. And who knows, like maybe if Lars Lofgren was in charge of marketing at Transistor, he'd be killing it.

Brian Casel: Yeah, exactly.