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,.
Today's the day
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Remember that summer project that Ferdinand and I have been working on? Today's the day we officially launch it on Product Hunt. Please help us out! Your votes and comments are appreciated! 🙏 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/swagfan Here's the backstory: I met Ferdinand at a local Hack Night while he was getting his CompSci degree. I was impressed with his numerous solo projects (including a project where he cloned my voice). Once he graduated, I offered to hire him over the summer/fall and give him his first "tech job." The project we decided to work on together is Swag Fan! Over at Transistor.fm, we've had great success using swag as a marketing and promotion channel. We send our customers, fans, and influencers hats, t-shirts, and stickers. In turn, they promote us organically on social media and when they go to events (by wearing our gear!). We've always used Printful for printing and shipping these items, but having people choose their items, tell me their size, and give me their address was awkward (and typically took place over DMs). Swag Fan is the "merch giveaway" app I've always wanted. You can use it to connect to Printful, generate branded giveaway links, determine how many items you want to give away, track redemptions, and view all the contacts who have redeemed free swag. Once a swag link is out of items, you can collect names and email addresses for future giveaways! This is Ferdinand's first full-fledged SaaS project, and he's eager to see how people respond. (We've had a Senior Laravel developer review his work.) We've priced Swag Fan at $99/year for early access users. It essentially gives you an automated giveaway engine. Cheers, PS: please support our Product Hunt launch today! 🙌
This newsletter is brought to you by: Ferdinand is looking for his first full-time tech job! I enjoyed working with him on this project; he's highly skilled and, with the right leadership, could become an excellent Senior Engineer in the future. |
Justin Jackson's SaaS marketing experiments
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,.
I didn't expect the last newsletter to generate so much debate! It ended up getting posted to Hacker News. Aaron and Ian talked about it on Mostly Technical, and many other folks responded in comments and emails. Some folks felt the tone was too pessimistic/defeatist. Others felt like I was discouraging older founders from starting companies. (I also had quite a few folks who responded and resonated with the spirit of the post). I recorded a response to all this feedback here: A few...
I recently listened to three podcast episodes, all with bootstrapped founders over the age of 40: Paul Jarvis has retired from Fathom Analytics Matt Wensing steps down from Summit, takes job with Customer.io Brian Casel and Jordan Gal talk about building SaaS at this stage of life It's interesting to see how differently this stage of life is compared to our 20s and 30s. (I'm 44). An Evolving Definition of Success: "I've been at Summit for 5 years. My last company took 15 years, and I didn't...
Every day in Transistor's #marketing channel in Slack, we track our new trial signups: Like most SaaS companies, our growth relies on new people finding us every day. Whenever I see these numbers, I ask myself: "Where are these signups coming from?" There's this idea in marketing that we'll be able to find a magical channel that brings in thousands of customers. But, when I look at where these signups come from, there's never one dominant source. Here's what we saw in August: Search (40%):...