I'm the co-founder of Transistor.fm (podcast hosting and analytics). I write about SaaS marketing, bootstrapping startups, pursuing a good life, building calm companies, business ethics, and creating a better society,.
Nathan had to jump through these hoops
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First, thanks to everyone for the incredible response to my Calm Companies essay. It's my most shared essay of the year, and I saw it appear in multiple email newsletters and briefly on the Hacker News homepage! This week I want to try to distill some advice I've been giving to aspirational founders.
Iterating towards successMy friend Nathan Barry is one of the youngest successful entrepreneurs I know: he founded ConvertKit, which now has $40 million in annual revenue. Recently, they were valued at $200 million. Nathan is turning 34 this year. Nathan started as a freelance web designer at 17. By 21, he was releasing apps on the App Store (making $2k / month). At age 22, he wrote his first design book, which earned him $26,679 in 24 hours. For Nathan, each project he launched was an iteration on his path to achieving success with ConvertKit. Success almost always occurs after a series of jumps. Accumulated experience is the foundation of successYour ability to launch a successful business depends on the accumulation of experiences, connections, skills, resources, experiments you've run, and insights you've gathered. Today, ConvertKit's mission is to "help creators earn a living online." Nathan and his team design and build the product with intuitions about what creators want and need. How did they develop those intuitions? Nathan developed his intuitions through his time being a creator. His experience writing and launching multiple apps, books, and courses from 2011-2013 informs his work today. As an indie entrepreneur, you want to maximize every advantage you have. Most good markets are competitive, so you can't just show up with a "good product;" you need an edge. Your competitive advantage should be that you understand the customer (and what they want) better than anyone else.
Can you still iterate to a successful business if you're older?A Harvard Business study found that "the average age of a successful startup founder is 45." This is roughly true for me now: Transistor (the startup I founded with Jon Buda) is doing well, and I'm turning 44 this year. However, success doesn’t operate on a clock—you can’t simply hit 45 and expect to launch a thriving startup. The groundwork for success all happens well in advance. The age you are when you start a business is less important than the number of iterations you have amassed along your journey. Your goal (at any age) should be to weave interesting threads into your life continuously, forging meaningful connections and launching your projects. How did this work in my life?On Twitter, someone asked: "How did you do [all this] with Transistor?" I was 38 when I co-founded Transistor. Before that, I had spent six years:
At MicroConf in 2018, I spoke about how all these iterations led to Transistor. This talk was given before we had officially launched! (At the time, we had 39 paying early-access users.) In retrospect, my intuitions at that time turned out to be prescient: I had watched the podcasting market for a long time, and 2018 ended up being the perfect time to enter the industry. In terms of podcast hosting, people were ready for something fresh. Success isn't guaranteed, regardless of age, but if there’s a path to it, it’s through continuous iteration. Cheers, PS: if you liked this newsletter, please share it with a friend! This newsletter is brought to you by: ⚡ MegaMaker ⚡ |
Justin Jackson's SaaS marketing experiments
In 2024, I'm sharing marketing and growth tips for SaaS founders
I'm the co-founder of Transistor.fm (podcast hosting and analytics). I write about SaaS marketing, bootstrapping startups, pursuing a good life, building calm companies, business ethics, and creating a better society,.
A lot of people don't know this about me, but in the early 2000s, I owned a snowboard shop in Alberta called the Real Deal. It almost bankrupted me. I just published a video where I tell the whole story: It describes how I emerged from that failure and was (eventually) able to bootstrap a successful SaaS company. It took a few steps to get there! If you're on your own indie SaaS journey and want a sense of what my path looked like, I think you'll dig it this video. (It also has a bunch of my...
The problem with marketing metrics is that most of them are meaningless: How much traffic did we get last month? How many TikTok views? How many clicks did we get from our FB ads? How many YouTube views? What was our email's open rate? Founders spend thousands of dollars on marketing activities that produce clicks, traffic, views, and opens – 99% of which don't matter. In marketing, the only question that matters is, "Which of our efforts are bringing in revenue?" Matt Paulson, founder of...
It's been hard to watch the recent layoffs in the tech industry. Seeing so many good people being let go has been heartbreaking. Getting laid off doesn’t just rattle your career; it shakes the very foundation of your life. I've seen friends lose their jobs and go into an existential tailspin. It's not uncommon for them to blame themselves and to feel immense guilt and shame. The experience is especially hard on parents whose families depend on them for income. You can read this newsletter on...