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,.
What are you doing now?
Thanks to everyone who replied to last week's newsletter. I got more responses than I expected! Seems like lots of folks are excited about this year's direction.
As mentioned last week, my 2024 theme for the newsletter is SaaS marketing experiments.
My first step is to learn more about you and what you're doing for marketing now.
I made a quick 5-minute survey for you here:
| Fill out the survey |
The form is anonymous unless you'd like me to follow up (in which case you can leave your email).
This information will help me figure out my direction with the newsletter.
If you have friends who are in SaaS, feel free to share the link with them as well: https://forms.gle/rLgHSQ8URv4wrmhr6
You can also share it on Twitter here.
Cheers,
Justin Jackson
@mijustin
PS: I was interviewed by the co-founder of LemonSqueezy (JR Farr) and indie hacker James McKinven. They asked me some strong questions: "Will YouTube kill podcasting?" "What's the point of building a startup?" "Are you thinking big enough with Transistor?"
I highly recommend you give it a listen.
Or, watch it on YouTube.
This newsletter is brought to you by:
🎙️ Transistor
2024 is a great year to start a podcast
⚡ MegaMaker ⚡
My private community for bootstrappers
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...
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. View this newsletter online Iterating towards success My friend Nathan Barry is one of the youngest successful entrepreneurs I know: he founded ConvertKit, which now has $40 million in annual...