46: The Importance of Trust with Your Audience with Justin Jackson

Today’s episode features guest Justin Jackson, who is building a new podcasting startup called, Transistor.fm, and runs MegaMaker training and books for SaaS and indie software companies. He’s discovering that it’s a lot of work to build something.

Derrick and Ben know how he feels. For Derrick, it’s been a fun week in the land of Level. He’s been working on his new landing page and landing new sign-ups for the pre-launch list. Ben has pre-sold $700 worth of Tuple accounts and raised $500 worth of verbal “Yeses.” Contact Ben if you want to be a part of Tuple. They share their ups and downs, fears and triumphs!

Today’s Topics Include:

• Should I learn more programming? More design? Acquire skills to connect the two
• It’s easier to build something after building relationships; a personal approach makes you stand out
• Can connection with core audience become a scalable competitive advantage?
• Ways to tell your story and generate followers before you have product info available
• Get your product into the hands of potential users
• Propensity that you know all the answers, but bury your ego and ask for help
• Deciding how much to charge, pricing structure
• You can get people to sign up and get them to pay for it, but can you get them to use it and keep using it?
• Invest in something that offers a virtuous cycle of revenue back to your company
• Demonstrate value of existing content; making money and conversions from specific campaigns and activities
• Fears and feelings when people are not using a product
• Hire customer support people to reach out to customers and generate revenue
• Trend is automated software companies, but the most successful companies emphasize a human service component
• Pair programming always bubbles to the surface

Links and resources:

Derrick Reimer Website
Derrick Reimer on Twitter
Ben Orenstein Website
Ben Orenstein on Twitter
Justin Jackson
Justin Jackson on Twitter
Level
Build Your Saas podcast
Transistor.fm
MicroConf
Jason Fried
Seth Godin
RightMessage
How We’ve Taken FOMO 20k to 80k by Justin Mares