The Bootstrapped Founder

While working on my latest software project, Podline,

I've been thinking a lot about how

I plan to onboard customers and deliver the service offered

by my SaaS business.

And that's what I want to share with you today.

Podline is effectively an integration

that people can add to their existing podcast hosting

platforms.

If they have a podcast and want to communicate

with their audience, adding a Podline voice messaging

embed or link to the website, that's the way to do it.

And it's the only way to do it.

And in a way, that's quite the ask,

because Podline is not like basic podcast hosting

or an analytics tool with automatic integration.

Instead, users have to add Podline

to their platform themselves intentionally

and with a little bit of effort.

It's easy, just an iframe embed or a link.

But I still need to educate my customers on how to use it.

So to improve the customer experience,

the whole onboarding experience, really,

of setting up Podline for their podcasts,

I've been considering a wide glove service approach.

And this idea comes from Paul Graham's essay

on doing things that don't scale, which is an essay that I

highly recommend, even though it's kind of more aimed

at the VC funded founder.

You just do things knowing that you're not

going to be profitable because you have

some kind of financial backing.

But it still works for bootstrappers,

because in the end, in the beginning,

we don't have anybody as a customer anyway.

So we might just as well put in the effort

to lend a couple that may not be immediately profitable,

but they guide the way.

And that's kind of the point of wide glove as a service

approach.

You really get it.

But I'm going already into something

I wanted to talk about later.

So let's just think about the idea of wide glove service

being something that involves helping people

by just taking over the task that they would normally

have to do themselves, using your product in the early stages

of your business.

Because I work in the podcast industry,

I know what it takes to build and set up a podcast.

And it's not just about the technical aspect,

like the mic or the room audio treatment

or even the content creation aspects,

like writing a script or actually recording the whole thing.

You also need to establish a business ecosystem

around the podcast itself.

This includes having a place where

people can go to learn more about your podcast

or look into older episodes and subscribe

if they enjoyed it in the first place.

You need a website.

You need a place for people to go.

You need a domain.

And you need to bundle it up all into something

you can mention on your show, like the fact

that you could just go to tbf.fm, the WhatsApp founder.fm,

and you would go to the podcast landing page for this podcast.

That's important to have, because tbf.fm

is easy to say and easy for people to type.

And it needs to exist for anybody

who wants to know about the show to learn more.

And many podcast hosting services,

like Transistor or Anchor or all the other competitors,

offer this option just to set up a website.

And I've had experience running two podcasts before,

so I know how these things work, how you set it up.

And I just realized just how crucial this is,

because it's vital for me to understand

what my customers expect from a podcast

landing page and any potential integrations

to be able to render a white glove service.

I need to know what it looks like.

And then it kind of dawned on me,

if you've never experienced white glove service before,

how can you provide it?

This seems to be a common problem in the customer service

industry I recently learned.

Many customer service hires just don't

know what this kind of service looks like,

because they've never experienced it before.

And many founders don't know about that either.

And I thought, just in preparation

for today's episode, this is a thought worth exploring.

Some founders, they just see a problem.

They create a software solution, like an MVP

with all the fancy graphs and dashboards,

but they just don't understand how

this fits into their users workflow or the larger

context of their work.

They see the technical implementation,

but they don't see the contextual needs

of their customers, their prospective customers.

And this kind of white glove service

works best, or even just at all, when you understand

the full job to be done.

For a podcast host, that job is to create a space

where people can chat, find out more,

and engage with the podcast.

That's the job to be done.

The goal isn't just to set up a voicemail system on a website

or integrate Podline into your HTML, in my case.

That's a part of it.

But it's to build stronger bonds with the community

and make it easy for people to reach out.

And that is a reframing that, if you

are so deep in the trenches of building a software product,

you might lose.

You might lose this kind of bigger goal

that people might have in using a product.

And to offer early onboarding services

and create just great experiences

for initial customers, you need to understand more than just

the steps to integrate your product.

You need to step away from the technical.

You also need to help them contextualize it

within their existing job.

It's becoming like a processual thing.

You need to understand the process

and how it's being described, what the words are,

so you can explain it to your customers how and where

this fits.

Onboarding in SaaS should be tailored

to more than just the SaaS.

Often, using software products, which

are software products of all kinds, is mostly--

you start with onboarding.

You have this onboarding screen, and it

shows you, click here for this, click here for that.

Then something pops up.

Enter this now and try to play around with it.

The onboarding flow is kind of an in-product thing.

But that's just learning about the product itself.

It doesn't say anything about the context.

It needs to go beyond that.

Instead of walking people just through features

in 10 steps, focus on integrating the product

into their existing workflows.

I know this is hard, and it's easily said and done

in a way that is very unique and specific to each product.

But that's kind of where the white glove service approach

comes in.

It means stepping back from your product

and looking at people's tasks and goals,

and then projecting your product and all its parts

into those tasks and goals.

And in every industry, this looks different.

So I can't really give you a tip here.

But what I would do is, if you don't

know the specific job to be done that your product serves,

you need to ask and figure out why your product fits

in this bigger picture.

You need to talk to people.

And again, I guess one of the things

that we lose if we're so technical,

and we love building, building, building, as indie hackers,

where we love the code, we love the setup, the DevOps,

the backend, the automations.

But very often, we do not really get

to see the specifics of the process in which we help people.

So you can't just really expect people to do this work for you.

You need to do it for them, really.

And there might already be a solution in place

for their needs, very likely.

Because if they have a well-defined job to be done--

and by well-defined, I don't mean that they

see it as a job to be done.

I think this framework is something

that not everybody understands.

But they certainly understand that they have a task

that they need to accomplish.

And if that task is well outlined,

then there is a solution often in place.

Most of the time, it's just doing it manually,

which is the part where SAS comes in.

And it automates it away.

But there could also be another software tool,

or this amalgamation of different software tools.

The little node here, an Excel sheet there.

Maybe there's a database with some really, really basic

wrapper around it that somebody in the company

built five years ago.

All these things exist.

And the existence of these things

means that you have something that is already there, that

already takes data and already produces data.

And you have to understand what you're replacing

in terms of a tool or who you're replacing

in terms of the person that might be doing it manually.

So figure out who they report to and what tools they use.

That's one of the first steps that I would do.

Figure out what the people that depend on them

expect from them.

And on the other side, I guess on the input side,

what the data is that they depend

on to do their job to be done.

Learn about any automations that they have for their input

and output data, what comes in for their job

and what needs to be produced during their job.

And figure out what is handed off to them

and what they will hand off to somebody else

with a different task.

Maybe if you really want to get it,

understand the jobs to be done for these people that

are doing the input for your business

and the output after people use your product as well.

Understanding these things is pretty crucial to really get

where the workflow is that you're in.

And if you get these things right,

your early customers will build massive trust with you

that can jumpstart further growth just from word of mouth

because you really knew what you were talking about.

That's the idea.

You want to be so deeply versed in the issues

that these people have that they see you as one of them.

And you talk so much more easily in a beneficial way

about the people that think like you, that act like you,

that use the same vocabulary you do,

that really understand your process just like you do,

that even may have the same motivation

to work in this field as you do.

And if that happens, your early initial customers

that you help more than maybe your later more

automated customers, the low touch customers

you hope to get in your SaaS in the future, these early people,

they will become evangelists for you as the person doing it

and the business that you're building.

So White Glove Service is all about knowing

these little details and really truly understanding them

and then guiding your customers through this experience

in a way that leaves them just wowed.

That's what you want.

All right.

That is onboarding.

Let me share a quick built-in public update

that is both Podline related very strongly, I guess,

and goes beyond it.

Because I've been working on something

over the last couple of weeks, and I'm very

excited to talk about this.

I shared a couple of things on Twitter about this already,

but it's really a marketing effort for Podline

because I said that I needed to find podcasts that already are

established.

That's one of the ideas behind Podline

is if you have an audience already,

it's so much more useful to have a voicemail system instead

of way still fighting for your initial couple listeners.

It is unlikely that you get a lot of them

to communicate with you because most people just

don't really want to chat.

So the bigger the audience, the more likely

it is that voicemails make sense.

And the more established a podcast is,

the stronger the community.

And the stronger a community, the more likely

is that in the community, people will communicate

with each other and want to communicate with the hosts.

Again, assumptions, but pretty strongly proven

because the more I see older podcasts,

the stronger their connection with their communities

just from listening to these shows.

I listen to a couple of podcasts that are like 10, 15 years old,

which is kind of crazy if you think about it.

They are in four figures terms of episodes.

And the community involvement in these shows,

mostly around literature, I guess,

or science fiction or fantasy and stuff, it's pretty strong.

People don't lose this kind of hobby.

So there is a very strong community there.

So what I want is something that helps me find these things

outside of my own sphere of knowing.

I know a lot of podcasts, but I certainly

don't know all of them.

And I wanted to build a tool that automates that for me

because I'm a software engineer and I will build automations

if I can.

That's really what it is for my marketing.

A kind of lead generator for podcasts

that exist out there that are active and have a community.

And they talk to their community in a certain way,

and they talk about certain things on their show.

So in having built a podcast tool with Podline

that kind of transcribes and summarizes voice memos, which

is just a couple of minutes worth of audio,

I kind of have the expertise at this point

to build something that can transcribe and summarize

a full podcast episode, right?

Because it's just a slightly longer voice memo

where somebody talks about a certain topic

and mentions certain words.

And what I wanted to build was a tool that effectively--

and this is kind of the delusion of grandeur that I had here--

scans all the podcasts everywhere,

transcribes every single podcast that

has been released out there immediately as much as I can,

and then searches those transcripts for certain phrases,

for mentions of competitor products,

or for phrases like send us a voicemail,

or leave a message here, or that kind of stuff,

where I could figure out, are there

podcasts out there that already have

the need to communicate with their audience?

And if that's the case, well, where are they?

Who is talking?

Where are they located?

What's their website?

And in podcasts, there are lots of repositories out there,

Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Every podcast has an image, a podcast thumbnail,

or something like this.

And that thumbnail has a color scheme.

So I can just pull that thumbnail

if I know that the podcast talks about topics that I care about

and automatically create a potline theme,

and then automatically create a potline for these things

and just mail it to them.

That's the idea, right?

The idea for this lead generator is

to find podcasts that talk about things that I care about,

then automatically give me all the data

that I can quickly build something for them.

The freemium version of potline is just very easily used.

I sent them an invite link.

They claim their podcast, and boom,

they immediately have their voice memo.

Everything is set up already.

That's the idea.

So I built this tool.

And in building this, I was surprised by how much

I can do on my own computer.

So I don't know how deep I should

dive into the technology of transcription right now.

But transcription used to be around for ages.

And I guess tools like Descript have been around

for many years.

Otter.ai is one of the tools that most recently came out

that I've been using a lot.

There are a lot of podcasts or just voice transcript tools.

I think Zoom has a lot of tools that just transcribe

as you speak in a meeting.

It's really cool.

And the technology that lies underneath this

used to be a bit more arcane.

I didn't really understand what it was.

Until a couple of years ago, OpenAI

released Whisper, which is their pre-trained model.

It trained on millions of hours of people talking

and having that transcribed.

And it exists in multiple different formats.

There's a small, there's a medium, there's a tiny,

and there's a large version of this, each of which

runs with a particular kind of speed.

And it's an LLM, kind of, like an AI model

that you can run on your own computer if you have a GPU.

And there is a version that runs on your CPU

that is kind of also sped up in a certain way.

That's pretty fast.

On my Mac, I have a Mac Studio M1, I think an M1 Max.

So that's kind of the next to last generation

of Apple hardware, right?

M3 is around the corner, M3 Ultra is around the corner.

So this is going to be even crazier.

So this is pretty much not the most recent Mac,

but a fairly recent Mac.

I installed Whisper.cpp, which is the CPU-bound Whisper

inference model.

So you can use your own computer to run this Whisper model,

the AI, and give it an audio file and gives you a transcript.

The benefit of Whisper.cpp is if you compile it in a way

that you use the, what is it called,

Core ML or something, like the Apple's own machine learning

architecture.

There are chips in this, like the neural engine

or whatever they call it, chips that are effectively

GPUs, machine learning chips.

If you compile it, plus with the software that is around it

and all that kind of stuff, in a way that

uses all these optimizations, you can-- and listen to this,

because it's crazy--

transcribe a 60-minute audio file.

60 minutes, right?

60 minutes, that's 3,660 seconds in 40 seconds.

That is bizarre, because there used

to be a time where even just real-time audio transcription

transcribing one minute of audio in one minute of computer time

was hard.

And now you get an hour in under a minute.

And once I figured this out and I ran my tests

and it actually did this thing-- and depending on which model

you choose, you get either a very good transcription that

takes a bit longer, or you get a 80% good enough transcription

where a couple words may be off, but you get it

done in half the time.

So you can optimize for that depending on what you need is.

I thought, if I can do an hour in a minute,

that means I can do 60 podcasts an hour.

And that means that I can do over 1,400 podcasts in a day.

And that blew my mind, because as much

as I know that there are a lot of podcasts out there being

released, I knew that it can't be that many.

At least, I thought it couldn't.

So I checked it out.

I looked into the stats.

And there's a website called, I think, podcastindex.org,

which has a wonderful API that provides you

with trending podcasts, the most recent trending podcasts

that a lot of people download, the most recently published

episodes of podcasts that you can download.

It has an API that kind of oversees

the whole podcasting field.

They also have a stats endpoint.

And they give you the number of podcasts

that are being released over the last three days, that

have been released over the last three, the last six,

the last 90 and 30, and all that kind of stuff.

And think over the last three days,

30,000 podcasts have pushed an episode.

That is a lot of podcasts.

But you have to think about the fact that on my one computer,

I could do 1.5 thousand per day.

So if you have 30,000 in three days, that's

an average 10,000 in a day.

Half of them aren't even English.

So that's 5,000, 6,000 maybe in English in a day.

So my 1.5 thousand, so my 1,500 out of 6,000 on my one computer

means that I need like three more MacStudio computers

to be able to accurately and in almost sub-real time

transcribe every single podcast that is being released

as it goes out.

And that blew my mind.

Because I can literally figure out

which podcasts over the last two hours

have talked about a certain topic.

And that reminded me of something,

which is why I know it's part-line related, right?

Because this is being built as a marketing tool

to find podcasts that talk about the thing.

But I was like, hey, this is something

that probably other people might also be interested in.

So now I'm at a point where I'm really struggling.

Because I love part-line.

I love the idea of building community and voice messaging

with another podcast.

And in many ways, the tool itself, the part-line tool,

is technically feature complete.

Obviously, it's not completely bug free.

I'm still working on that kind of stuff.

But the voice messaging works, the back and forth,

the notifications work, the upload works,

the transcription works, the summarization work, all

of these things are in the bag.

So feature-wise, it's kind of at least feature parity

with the existing things in the world, the competing products.

I've built way more than most of the competitors' products

offer in terms of theming and in terms of customization

and that kind of stuff.

Also, transcription and summarization

are a thing that most of them do not support.

So that one is feature complete, which kind of allows

me to spend a lot of time on this new kind of podcast

scanning thing that I'm building.

And it's kind of tearing me apart

because I want to focus on marketing part-line.

But this tool itself is such an interesting marketing tool

that I might want to build this into a business.

So maybe just really, if you're listening right now

and you understand the potential of a tool that--

if I build it right, if I find a solution

to kind of scale this in a financially feasible way

as an indie hacker without having

to buy 10 more Mac Studio computers just

to be able to scan all the podcasts,

but put it in the cloud, pay for some GPU-based Amazon instance

or whatever, and run it there and reliably scan

every podcast everywhere, if I would do this,

what do you think?

Do you think this is too much of a deviation from the product

that I'm currently working on?

Do you think I should look into this more as a marketing tool,

kind of a Google alert for podcasts

where you can put your phrase or your brand's name in there

and it can report it back to you like minutes

after a podcast is released anywhere in the world

that you're not even aware of?

What do you think?

Is that a good idea or is it not?

Because I'm kind of struggling with--

I want to focus.

I don't want to dilute my focus.

The question is, what should I be focusing on?

So yeah, again, indie hacking is sometimes

such a hilarious thing.

You think things are not even possible, then you build them.

You know this is possible.

And then all of a sudden, this world of potential,

you'd be standing right in the middle of it.

You didn't expect to go there.

You didn't want to go for the trip.

You just wanted to build something cool.

And now you're wondering, should I do this instead?

Man, it's such a blast and such a struggle at all times.

Just wanted to share this.

I hope this is interesting.

If you want to let me know about this,

let's just use the same way as we always do.

Go to podline.fm/arvid, A-R-V-I-D,

and just tell me about it.

If you send me a message that is funny enough,

I'm going to put it on the show next week.

We can talk back and forth.

That'd be fun.

But yeah, that's where I'm at.

So I guess that's it for today.

I'm just going to briefly thank my sponsor, Aquia.com,

right now, because I regularly check the products

that are listed there, because it's just

Revel in the side of profitable businesses

and that are looking for new owners, pretty much.

And it's really always a surprise just how niche you can get

and still build something worth like five, six, seven,

or eight figures that other people would love to own.

I see a lot of products in the podcast space.

There's also dog magazines and e-commerce things.

There's everything there, which is really cool.

I just really get inspired just even to follow my own choices

by seeing how other people followed

their own ideas of what they wanted to build

and then built that and turned into something meaningful.

And the more people I talk to, the more

I see that they just all sell for different reasons.

Some are just done with that particular business.

Others want to refocus on something new, which

is kind of my problem right now.

And then there are some that just need a quick cash infusion,

turn what they have into money.

And that's kind of what unites them.

They all build something for themselves

and now want to turn it into financial stability.

That's the idea.

So if you're on track to getting to that point

or you're already there-- congratulations, I guess--

go check out acquire.com.

I think it's a perfect place to just check it out.

You don't need to make a choice, but checking it out

definitely is an idea.

Their team is super helpful.

They make sure you're getting a really good price

for your business, and they know what they're doing.

But talk about White Glove Service.

This is a team of people that have your best interest in mind

because the more you sell for, the better for the community

and further people that then later want to sell for.

Hey, if you're interested, go to try.acquire.com/arvid

and check it out.

It doesn't hurt to be prepared for that happy acquisition day.

And yeah, just see if it is for you and your project

at this point in time.

Thank you for listening to The Bootstrap Founder today.

That was a fun little conversation.

You can find me on Twitter @arvidcarl, A-R-V-A-D-K-A-H-L.

And you'll find my books and my Twitter course there too.

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It will make it interesting to them.

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I would just really, really enjoy it.

Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.