004 — The Start of the Pod
Show Notes
This is a crossover episode that was originally posted on, All Play, where I share the initial idea of starting to publish this podcast and some goals for it. Enjoy.
As I have been working on building Transmits, I started reading Rob Walling’s (@robwalling) book, Start Small, Stay Small. I was originally reading his latest book, The SaaS Playbook, but like he suggests in there, if your business is not at a certain monthly recurring revenue (MRR) you might be better off going back and reading his first book, so I did.
While reading it I realized I was breaking the cardinal sin numero uno, no marketing, nor testing the market to see if people would actually pay for what I am building. Granted, this is definitely a scratch my own itch project, and I know I will be using it regardless if I am able to get others to pay for it. But, at the same time, I am definitely investing a good amount of time trying to make what I am building really nice, both for myself and to wow some potential future users into being paying customers.
Thinking about what I could do to start building some initial marketing efforts I realized that the quickest thing I could do was repurpose the Transmits-specific episodes from this podcast, and re-package them into a Transmits-only podcast that I could start publishing, and include on the transmits.io site.
Reasons why making a Transmits-only podcast makes sense, now and into the future:
- SEO: By publishing the episodes and including those within a /podcast area of the marketing site, I am hoping that both the show notes and podcast transcriptions will feed the Google/search engine machines and start to get Transmits ranking for a few key terms
- Backlinks + SEO: Since I will be publishing the podcast, I hoping that the feeds and episodes will help to build up a good amount of backlinks to the site, driving more traffic and helping boost key word rankings
- Connection: There’s really no better way to understand what someone is trying to do than to listen to them. I am an avid podcast listener and am definitely more motivated to support people that I am listening to, than those who I have no direct connection with (even though that connection is mostly a one-way from my podcast app to my ears, but it still a remarkably personal one, even being one-way).
- Build Listeners + Subscribers: From the start of thinking about Transmits, I have always envisioned the product having a podcast where I would bring people on to discuss tools for thought, or podcasting, or whatever else might be interesting to discuss that could be tied back to either the underlying tech or goal for the platform, so why not start to get that wheel spinning and try to pick-up a few early subscribers along the way.
- Flywheels: Since I am already podcasting about Transmits, why not repurpose that content and effort and apply it to kickstart and support future efforts
- And, finally, it just sounded fun and was a good excuse to tinker on some site stuff!
With all that said, and without further ado, I am happy to say that the Transmits: The Podcast is live! Check it out, subscribe, and all that jazz. I have re-packaged some previous episodes from this podcast, and will probably do the same with this episode. And, from this point forward, I am going to have to come up with a nice way to introduce the episode without necessarily having to record a custom intro per pod, or maybe I’ll just drop the intros and get right to the meat, to keep it easy.
If you want to get early access to start playing around, please join the mailing list here: https://www.transmits.io
To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.
Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics
Transcript
00:00 - 00:15
Hey. How's it going? This is Ryan Hefner. Welcome to Transmits. So this is gonna be this is kinda like the origin episode of when I decided to even start making this specific podcast, the Transmits podcast.
00:16 - 00:56
I realized I was, you know, doing these episodes for the All Play podcast that were Transmit specific. Figured, why not repurpose that effort and those episodes? Make this podcast have it be totally specific to Transmits publishers to the actual transmits dot iosight, maybe help the SEO, maybe get some backlinks, maybe start building up some subs subscribers to the podcast. So this is the episode where I basically had that idea. And this is also gonna be the last episode where I'm gonna do any of these kinda, like, custom bumpers leading into the episode.
00:56 - 01:16
So without further ado, that episode, and I look forward to recording some more non buffered episodes and getting in that on this podcast as well as on All Play. So enjoy. Hey. How's it going? This is Ryan Heffner, and this is the All Play podcast.
01:17 - 01:51
So I've been reading, a book by Rob Walling called, Start Small, Stay Small. It's the first book that he wrote. And, actually, I was reading his his most recent book, The SaaS Playbook, and realized that, obviously, where I'm at company wise, the SaaS playbook is probably a little bit beyond where I'm where I'm currently at as far as my company goes. And so even in that book, he recommends that if you want to, you can go back and read, Start Small, Stay Small. And, so that's what I did.
01:52 - 02:48
I just wanted to see, like, what kind of, you know, what kind of information I could kinda gleam out of that book to apply to what I'm working on within transmits. And even though the book is a little dated in some of the examples and, references to, you know, things that you would work on and how you'd maybe go about, marketing those or or, you know, building up awareness of of those things. The book is really good to get you to think about marketing. And so while I was reading it, and I was sorry started to think about, like, what's, like, some of the earliest marketing things that I could actually do to help Transmit's, you know, get a little leg up early on and be more successful, hopefully, by the time that I'm ready to really open it up and get people in. So with that, I was thinking, oh, well, I'm making this podcast.
02:49 - 03:37
And, you know, some of these episodes will be solely about transmits, but I'm also gonna be sprinkling in some other stuff, like, got some stuff with, some open source packages I'm gonna be talking about here shortly, and then also just some general thoughts on habits versus rituals and some other stuff. So with that said, the one thing I think that I probably could end up doing is taking the transmits only episodes from from all play. And who knows? Maybe even some of these things just only live in this other space that I'll get to you shortly. What if I take these episodes and then publish and package them or package and publish them under a transmits only podcast?
03:38 - 04:21
I think some of my thoughts around doing this is kinda like a little bit, you know, through there's there's multiple reasons why I'm thinking about doing this, essentially. I think, 1, if I could get basically start publishing these to the transmits. Io site and just having general pages with what I'm talking about and the description and the transcription and stuff. It's a really easy way for me to just start getting content up on the site and, obviously, generating a bunch of backlinks from all the places where the podcast is distributed and hopefully just start building up my Google ranking or transmits. Io.
04:23 - 05:12
So why not repurpose what I'm already doing? You know, it's relevant, for people who do visit transvest.io just to they can get a transvest trans actually, I didn't realize how hard it is to say this word sometimes, and I just don't know if it's because I'm a mumbler or not, but transmits.io. Relevant for people who are visiting that site. Obviously, still early in the journey, but I also do think that it can build a foundation for things that I would ultimately love to do on a podcast specifically for Transmit. It's essentially talk to people who are either in the the journaling space or in the podcasting space or just general technology on on what we're going you know, what it's built on and ways of making it better.
05:13 - 06:00
So I think it does provide a little bit more opportunities to, obviously, repurpose the solo content, but also opens it up for having some different conversations about audio, audio hosting, podcasting, journaling, kinda tools for thought. You know, all the other different things that kinda fall under this umbrella of essentially getting your ideas out there, documenting them, being able to reflect on them, and ultimately having a space where you can reflect and potentially share them. So those are all the high level things that, you know, I'm thinking about with transmits. And, so yeah. So that's what I'm working on right now.
06:01 - 06:50
It's not live yet. I'm doing some tweaks to get the site set up to basically be ready for those. I'm probably also gonna go back to the last two episodes and throw a little intro on those two episodes to just explain where they're coming from and the fact that they're a part of this show. I'm not a 100% sure how I'm gonna do the intros for these kind of dual purpose shows, whether I'm gonna reference transmits or all play or just jump in and start talking about stuff, and then I can figure out how I wanna enter them, depending on the podcast, you know, that's that's relevant for, which feed it's going in. But that's kinda where my head's at.
06:51 - 07:26
I don't know. I don't know if this is just a floundering moment, and I'm wasting time doing this, and it's not gonna present anything. But I do know that I should be probably investing if people are even interested in what I'm building. Of if people are even interested in what I'm building because that's one of the things I'm realizing that I didn't really do yet, with transmits. It's definitely more of a scratch your own itch kind of thing.
07:27 - 08:07
Even if people aren't totally, you know, jazzed up for it or stoked on it, I'm probably still just gonna build it from my own personal tool because that's just what I do. But I would like to at least take the steps to set it up for success if that's possible. And by just ignoring it and not doing it, I'm just gonna fall back on keep building, keep building, keep building, and not do the effort. Take the, you know, take the level of or make the investment into seeing where it can go. So this is a really quick one.
08:08 - 08:28
This may also end up on the Transmits podcast. We'll see. But, yeah, that's just where I'm thinking about doing some stuff. And so there will be a Transmits podcast, and you'll be able to find that at transmits.iopodcast. You can follow Transmits on Twitter at transmits.
08:29 - 09:23
Io. The, you know, episodes will be posted there. I might actually even enable the auto posting, to Twitter on that podcast just as an easy way to as episodes come up to start filling up the Twitter feed with some episodes as they go out via Transistor, and we'll see where it goes. But hopefully, it does end up providing, a good base of content for, Google to chew on. And, also, I think it'll just force me to maybe go back into the the existing kinda landing page and really think about the messaging and how I want to position transmits to, explain kinda what I think or hope it'll be.
09:23 - 10:21
It's kind of in there. It's like, I think under the hood, the thing that I want most is just like an easy way to share audio that's outside of the context of it being part of a podcast or the idea that it has to be part of a feed, like just one off audio clips. I like I love that idea of just recording something, posting, you know, posting it up, getting a link, sharing it with a friend, getting their feedback on it, whatever. I think it's really the real goal of of transmits. I think I started thinking about the whole audio journaling just because I also wanted, a very, like, quick and easy way to basically record these episodes where I could just literally use the one app to both record and publish and be done with it.
10:23 - 10:57
So I am a little bit torn between, like, the recording and the just general utility of a place where I can just throw an audio file and get a link back, and people can preview it via, you know, a player page. So, I mean, I also talking about this, I suppose I could totally just do that with unpublished episodes on Transistor, but it just doesn't seem like the the place for that. So yeah. So that's it. I'm almost at the 10 minute mark.
10:57 - 11:13
That's what I'm thinking. Transmits podcast. Gonna be going, hopefully, live by the end of this weekend. It's Friday afternoon. And, I'll be including links to that in future episodes.
11:14 - 11:31
And you can also, if you want to, subscribe and maybe help out with those numbers. But, until then, I'm Ryan Hefner. This is the All Play podcast. You can find me online at ryanheffner.com. Follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner.
11:32 - 11:44
You can find the show at, online at allplay.fm, and follow on Twitter @allplayfm. Alright. Have a great one. Later.