004 — The Start of the Pod

Transmits

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
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