My first episode

20 years ago, I was running a small snowboard shop in my hometown that nearly left me bankrupt. Today, I'm the cofounder of a bootstrapped profitable SaaS company that does podcast hosting called transistor.fm. And I thought in this video, I would just give you a brief history on how I got here. And I think we need to start in the early 19 eighties when my family got its first computer this Commodore Vic 20. Both my parents were teachers.

We had computers kind of my whole life. We've gradually upgraded to a Tandy 1000 and then other PCs. I got really into computers, to the point where it kind of consumed my whole identity. That's me in grade 9. And then when it came time to go to college, I decided to go for business.

That was the other thing I've always been interested in is business. In high school, I ran, a few different businesses. 1 was an event business where we ran raves and other events. And initially, my goal was to go get my business degree and then be a entrepreneur. And in fact, while I was in college, I started my first real business media head productions where I did web design, web hosting and video production.

And I really loved running my own business. But once I graduated from college, I ended up going and working for a snowboard manufacturing company. There was two reasons for this. 1, the economy was not super great at the time. It was right after the dotcom crash.

There was really no tech work available, and I'd always been into snowboarding and wanted to see the business side of how that work. Ended up starting my own snowboard shop after that. That did not end well. Ended up in quite a bit of debt. Realized that retail is probably one of the hardest businesses you can start.

And then I went and worked for a non profit until I was about 28 years old. And at that point, I got my first job in the software industry. Worked for a company called My Mailout, which was an email newsletter company that competed with Mailchimp. And I basically started right at the bottom doing customer support, answering phones, answering emails, and worked my way up to product manager there. And, just had an incredible learning experience at that company.

Another important note from this time is in 2012, I started a podcast called Product People. It was an interview show where we interviewed people like Jason Fried, Patio 11, Jason Cohen. And this will become important for the future. You'll see in a second. Around 2014, I switched to another startup called Sprintly that did project management.

Based on my experience at Sprintly and at my mail out, I wrote a book in 2015 called Marketing for Developers. And it was that book that allowed me to launch myself as an independent entrepreneur again. And I did that from 2016 to 2018. Just worked as an independent entrepreneur releasing different digital products, books and courses, doing some consulting, trying different SaaS ideas along the way. And then in 2017, at the end of 2017, I was talking with my friend, John Buda.

And he was saying he was thinking about building a podcast hosting tool that they would use at his work, Cards Against Humanity, for a podcast they were launching. And John and I had met in 2014. We had worked together on a few different projects, and I've been watching the podcast category for a long time. I started listening in the 2000s, started my own podcast in 2,012. And I just watched podcasting kind of emerge into the public consciousness.

And I could feel that this was a crucial time for podcasting. In terms of public awareness, more people than ever knew what a podcast was. They were listening to Serial. There were some hits out there. And also there hadn't been a new podcast hosting provider in a while.

And so I pitched John on the idea of us building Transistor together. And in early 2018, we signed a partnership contract, started working on Transistor together. After all of that, we decided to add some more features and then open up early access. And we did that in the last 2 months. This is what our early access invites look like.

And we're right now, we have about 56 early access customers. And so that's how we validated Transistor so far. We officially launched August 1, 2018. And by the next year, August 2019, John and I were both working full time at Transistor. Today, Transistor has nearly 30,000 podcasts on the platform.

We have 6 people on the team. We are doing 1,000,000 of dollars in recurring revenue. We are a calm company. We have lots of margin built in to the company. We think the company is there to serve the team, to make our lives better, and that the product is there to serve customers, to make their lives better.

I'm passionate about all of these topics, bootstrapping, marketing, calm companies, building products people want, jobs to be done. And I'm going to be talking about that here on this channel. Often we'll be focusing on marketing because I think that's for a lot of people the hard part about building a product. But my goal and my passion, something I've been willing to do and not get paid for it, is to share my experiences, to share the wisdom I've garnered from other people, other founders that I know, and to help other people build independent, profitable, calm companies. And I know a lot of you have that dream as well.

So if you're interested in that, subscribe to the channel. And I wanna hear your questions, your comments, the things you might not agree with that I'm talking about. I wanna create a respectful conversation around how can we encourage more people to build profitable, calm companies. So that's it. If that interests you, you can get started by leaving a comment below and introducing yourself and telling me why you're here.

What are you interested in hearing about? Thanks.