Upgrade - 13: #AskUpgrade

Episode Date: December 8, 2014

This week Jason and Myke discuss the varying ways that you can support yourself financially when undertaking a creative endeavour and why it's important to consider their positive and negative effects.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 13 this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by boom 2 from global delight a system-wide volume booster and equalizer for the Mac, PDFPen Scan Plus from Smile, the app on mobile for scanning and OCR and mail route, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. My name is Mike Curley and I am joined by your host and mine, Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How's it going? Very well, Mr. Jason Snell.

How are you? I am doing fine, Mr. Mike Hurley. How are things in the Snell Zone this week? They are a little damp because we've had a lot of rain. Well, by your standards, we've probably had very little rain. You've had a Wednesday afternoon's amount of rain. There have been days where we didn't get rain, which is unlike, I think, England. So, yeah, but we know we've had a lot of rain, which is good, and the hills are turning green

and not the sort of brown, sun-blasted hellscape that's described by John Syracuse when he visited my house once. It's greening up. Yeah, so it's good. We're getting ready for the holidays. We got the Christmas lights on the house and we have a Christmas tree and we're frantically shopping for things

and all the usual things that make December the most stressful time of the year. Does it snow where you live, Jason? No. Not at all never never ever um i think there have been two times since we've lived in in this county where snow was visible briefly as it was falling and then was no longer snow again. But generally, because we're by the ocean, the temperature stays pretty warm. And anytime you have a storm that comes in, the storm insulates the air and keeps it from getting too cold.

So we can be cold, we can be below freezing, or we can be rainy, but it's very rare that it's cold enough to cause snow because when it's that cold, it usually doesn't rain. But where I grew up, we used to get snow a few times a year up in the mountains. But down here by the bay, there's no snow. It doesn't happen. We don't get a lot. Every couple of years, I think, in recent times, there's been enough snowfall to make a disruption.

But that doesn't take a lot of snowfall here because we're not prepared for it. So if you have just a moderate amount of snow, it kind of shuts England and the UK just down, just shuts us down. That's what rain does in California. It rains in California. It's like, oh, no, it's raining.

No, we don't know what to do. Sure, Scotland is probably just used to it. It just rolls down the hills. It's no problem. But, yeah, it shuts England down anyway. Anyhow, we have some follow-up, I believe. What is our follow-up this week, Mr. Snell? Oh, is there follow-up on this show?

I think so. I think it's an important part of this show. I need to snap out of my reverie about snow and weather and get to – that was our weather vertical, Mike. I was hoping you'd say that. We're putting that in the weather vertical. Follow-up. Listener Michael wrote in and said, Your discussions the last two weeks about striking out on your own and your hopes for the future of your new businesses struck a chord with me.

And this is what he said that I thought was really interesting. I learned, as I explored different opportunities, I learned about many businesses that exist to help small firms like yours. I encourage you to look to other small businesses for the services that you need, but for which you can't afford to pay full-time staff. My point is you can become a good-sized business without hiring full-time

personal staff. So this was that question we got last week about what if you become a big business? And listener Michael's point is that you don't necessarily have to become, that's not the only path to suddenly have five employees in an office somewhere because there are lots of other people who are doing what we're doing and they would love our business to help their business too, which I thought was a nice point. And he says, Mike, I'm assuming the small business professional market is robust in the UK as well. He's in Chicago, so he says we're unlikely to be a client for him.

Sorry, but there are people all over. I thought that was an interesting point, the idea that a lot of times you have different small businesses that specialize in different things and they work together. And that's good. And you don't have to just kind of – so Relay doesn't have to become a giant 20-person operation if you don't want it to be. I don't want it to be. I would love an assistant. Yeah. Oh, sure.

And that's harder to outsource. Although I think I know somebody who's got an outsourced assistant that's like part of an assistant. This isn't the name of it, but it's like myassistant.com kind of thing. I know people that have used these sorts of services and I don't trust them. I feel like you would just be spending most of your time trying to explain to somebody what you need. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know whether this is a whether whether. Well, let's be face. Let's face it. I'm talking about Lex Friedman here. I because I occasionally will email him and suddenly I'll get a CC and it'll be like, oh, take care.

Can you schedule something with Jason here? And I think his I think his assistant is is like in Texas or somewhere, just like literally random location. And I don't know whether she works for their company or works as a contractor or what the deal is. But I agree that having somebody who knows the business and is going to be preferable if you can get to the point where that's feasible. I like how you said, let's face it, like everybody assumed you were talking about Lex. That's how I chose to throw Lex under that particular bus. Gigs up, you got me, it's Lex. It's Lex, of course.

It's always Lex. It's always, that's the answer to everything. It's always Lex. I don't think I want an assistant sitting here right next to me. Like, I think I like the idea of having, because most of the stuff that i do i don't need somebody here no but you know just somebody to like for example there's this thing that i need to do with some old audio files i need to check some making sure

that one is the correct version basically and it could and it could be like 100 audio files i need to go through and i would love to be able to give that to somebody to do. Oh, and by the way, listeners, I'm not asking for volunteers. It's perfectly fine. I will one day hire someone, but right now I can just get on with it and deal with it because I know that there are people that would very gladly offer help because they enjoy what we do because we get that sort of stuff.

But I already thank you for your thought, but it's fine. I need to hire somebody. And right now, I don't want to, I can't really afford to do that. Next piece of follow-up. All right, good follow-up. Listener Eugene wrote in,

and you may have missed this because Eugene's name was printed in Cyrillic. And so I think my email client was like, I think this is probably spam, but it's not spam. It's listener Eugene. I think all the things you're saying on the show and all the people in the podcast field are really supportive and encouraging newcomers. However, I think it's worth mentioning or talking about how the podcast should be distributed if you're new in the field. This comes from real questions of my own. I'd love to do a show myself, but who might want to listen to the ramble of a 19-year-old without any guests? All independent podcasts are made by people well-known in their field, and most of the people don't have such a background and such a number of followers. What can a young novice podcaster do to find an audience? What would you do if you started from scratch? I suppose that Mike can answer this question because he started doing this on his own way back when. So, Mike, what's the advice for somebody who's just getting started in podcasting? Do you have to be

famous doing something else before you can be a podcaster? Definitely not. But find a friend, either a friend in real life or a friend that you've made on the internet and do the show with them, because it really helps to be able to talk to somebody. And yes, you probably can't get guests on the show if you're just starting out, but you shouldn't have guests on the show if you're just starting out but you shouldn't have guests on your show if you're just starting out in my opinion um that's why i think it's difficult for people who want to do interview shows because you need to build your skills especially if you've never sat down in front of the microphone before and you're maybe best waiting until you've had a bit of practice

before you start bringing guests onto your show. Because, I mean, obviously one of the great reasons about having a guest on your show is it brings more people to your show. But if you've not yet gotten to a point where you are comfortable with what you're doing, then you may be doing a disservice for your show because it can't be as good as it could be if you did it in two months' time, for example. So find a friend and do the show with them so you can share the work

and you can share in the success that you'll have later on. And also because it is way easier to talk to somebody than to talk on your own. So yes, anybody can do it. You just need to, I would say, to find somebody to do the show with, start doing it with them. And as you get better, then invite guests.

However, in this day and age, with there being so many podcasts, having guests, having high profile guests don't necessarily mean that your show is going to become an overnight success. But just keep plugging away and working on it. And I assure you that an audience will build. So was Terry Lucy your find a friend he was he was he's my one of my best friends in real life went to school together

and we started doing a show together and then as time went on i then started finding online friends people that i've met by twitter or via other networks and in little groups and then started doing the shows that way and that's how the rest of my shows have been born is through people that I've met over the internet which is something me and Casey talk about on Analog this week actually is that sort of like how Twitter becomes like you get into these groups you know like you find a group of people that love X so for example there are people that i know like there's this little group of people who are big fans of relay shows and they talk and we talk and they talk together and it's fun you know and there's like a community that's built around people that enjoy the stuff

that we do which is awesome um i was in that for five by five back in the day you know uh and it's nice to see those groups build up and then it's nice to see people that are in those groups and that kind of stuff they start doing their own work together it's it's cool i'm listening i was just listening over the weekend to an episode of uh of joe steel's podcast with uh with dan stern the focused and uh well and joe was on the incomparable this weekend which was uh which was fun long time listener-time caller kind of thing. And that struck me because those guys are visual effects professionals and they're talking about movies. And yet almost every reference they make, there's a reference to tech podcasts.

And at some point, I think in the Ghostbusters episode, Joe actually says something that leads me to believe that he literally believes that they are like the footnote to the tech podcast. That they assume their entire audience listens to Roderick on the Line and Upgrade and The Incomparable and ATP and the talk show. And I thought that was really funny cause they're not, it's not a tech podcast, but they're, it's like a, they definitely view themselves as living at least mostly inside this, like inside the existing subculture. Even though their podcast isn't about that. I thought that was an interesting way of doing it.

So I love those guys. Defocused. Although it's amusing to hear somebody who hasn't, who didn't live through the eight to hear somebody who didn't live through the 80s, people who didn't live through the 80s, talk about movies from the 80s. Every time they make a comment, I feel like John Syracuse, actually. I want to say, that was real. It was really like that.

They're like, oh, this is a very 80s sort of movie thing. No, no, that's a really 80s thing. It was really like that. That's a real thing. People did aerobics. That was a thing. It's not just a movie trope. Not just. That's where the trope comes from. Listener Ryan

has some follow-up for us that I thought was really interesting. We asked about how to take listener requests because we did our lightning round that was very, very slow lightning last week. And he said, I work at an ad agency doing social media work, and I found the Twitter hashtag to Google Sheet, if this, then that recipe, useful for aggravating, yes,

and aggregating everything coming into a designated hashtag into a shareable spreadsheet. And he shared a link to a recipe, which is not his recipe, but it's an if this then that dot com recipe for hashtag. And his suggestion is hashtag ask upgrade. I actually turned this on. So so if you want to tweet your questions to hashtag ask upgrade and you can mention me and Mike, too. But that will actually stick them all in a Google spreadsheet that I will share with Mike and we will look at and then I can't guarantee we will

actually answer your questions but uh that's a really cool idea so thank you listener Ryan that's actually an awesome way to do follow-up as well yeah I mean throughout the week people can be sending their their questions to uh just any time any time you have a question like what shall I have for breakfast hashtag ask upgrade right I hope it works I I don't you know it hasn't created it yet but I'm hoping it will work interesting I like that that's really cool actually that's uh we should I should have been on the lookout for a social media professional from the get-go. They could have helped me.

So thank you, Ryan. If you need to hire an ad agency to do some social media work, I recommend Listener Ryan. Listener Ryan Incorporated. Yeah, LLC. Shall we take a break to thank our first friend for this week's episode? I feel a need for some friend thanking right now, yes. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Boom 2 from Global Delight. Boom 2 is a pro audio app for the Mac that offers a system-wide volume booster,

advanced equalizer control with presets, amazing audio effects, and so much more. This app was built from scratch and is designed for Yosemite. Boom 2 is tailored to calibrate itself to your Mac as no two Macs are the same and once you get used to using Boom 2 it becomes something you cannot live without. Personally I remember Boom 2 saving me from going mad when I was using an 11-inch MacBook Air. I couldn't watch movies or TV shows on it, Netflix was just horrific as it was just too quiet. I just couldn't hear anything. But then I found Boom and it's totally saved the day.

And now Boom 2 is here and it's louder, clearer, and better than ever before. With personalized and customized sound to suit any occasion, it also gives your Mac the power to fine-tune and control every single element of audio. Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, and iTunes, every other service out there is going to sound a whole lot better, and it's localized to German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and five other languages as well. The first version of Boom, Boom version 1,

was awarded the Macworld Best of Show in 2011. The Global Delight team is a small team that operates from a small town in southern India. And my illustrious co-host, Mr. Jason Snell, was the man that actually went to their booth to hand over this coveted badge. And the Global Delight guys were very excited to tell me this story. And I think it's so awesome. Jason, do you remember doing this? You know, you were setting that up. It was really going to sound like I traveled to a town, a small town in the south of India to seek out new Mac applications. And what I found will surprise you. But I do remember, I actually remember when we had, so every year we would

have the best of show like debate where all the editors would bring the stuff that they'd seen. And it's not a scientific process like something like, even like the Eddie Awards was a little bit more like we had tested everything and then we would argue about what we thought the best was. Best of Show was even more hazy. It was like, is this cool? Is this cool enough? And you'd end up with these long, weird arguments between various editors. And I remember that one, especially we were in a room somewhere at the convention hall having that conversation. And I remember somebody actually brought out their laptop with a beta, I think, of Boom installed on it

and said, listen to this. Basically like, you know, demoed it for us right there. And so, and that convinced the crowd. And so, yeah, then I had the job that year of walking around and sort of giving everybody their little trophies or ribbons or whatever it was that we were handing out. So I remember that well. You can now try Boom 2 for free for seven days

by going to bit.ly slash upgradeboom, which I quite like that. Bit.ly slash upgradeboom, and we'll put the link to that in the show notes, of course. And when you decide to buy, get 20% off by using the coupon code upgrade this offer is valid throughout december thank you so much to global delight and boom 2 for sponsoring this week's episode of upgrade good friends good friends indeed in a small town when i visited them in their small town

is very small south of india i know i've never been to india but they came and visited us in san francisco it's not the same thing at all what are friends for indeed do we have any more follow-up today we do we we have a couple more um i'm gonna i'm gonna say listener tebow it could be tebow i don't know i'm like once again this is the third time i'm going to say this a little uh john syracusian and failing to uh i'm tried but probably failed anyway listener t-bow says follow-up regarding marvel unlimited another reason why there's a six-month delay he said i thought this might be tied to a deal with comiXology maybe comiXology and amazon are getting a cut from sales uh and they'd want to prevent Marvel from offering the same catalog. Now, I think this is a good thought, but I don't think it's accurate.

I actually think that Marvel could control this and do whatever they wanted. I don't think that there's an exclusive window that Comixology and Amazon have. I could be wrong, but I think not. I think the way this is working is that they, like with Netflix, there's a primary market and a secondary market, and the primary market is people who spend a lot of money on brand new comics, and they don't want to lose that market and have all their hardest core fans sign up for a $70 subscription service because they would lose money on the deal because those people buy a lot of comics, service because they would lose money on the deal because those people buy a lot of comics more than 70 a year worth of comics by a long shot uh from marvel so i think i think it's not that i

think it's that that's more of the symptom which is amazon comiXology and marvel are very happy to have people paying the full price for those issues they in fact you can see it that new issues cost maybe four dollars and then after three months or so, they get cut to like $2. And then eventually they end up on Marvel Unlimited as well. So they can, because they're digital, they can now cut the price as they get older

because they realize that the number one moneymaker for them in terms of profit margin is the people who are going to buy it the first week or two that it's out for full price. So that's my theory. I believe it's Thibaut. Thibaut. It's French. Thibaut.

Works at RealMic Software. Also friends of the show. Listener Michael also had some follow-up for us. He did. Which is interesting. I saw this. I'm surprised this is in here. I thought this was a very interesting follow-up for us he did interesting i saw this i'm surprised this is in here i thought this is very interesting follow-up to send in uh michael is a very open uh individual i don't know if he expected this to be follow-up right on the show but here we are he put it on he put it on

twitter if he had sent this in a personal email to us i might have felt a little different but he did put it on twitter and included it to both of us so it's very definitely about the show and he says listener michael he says i'm not sure how it happened but um we had an ahoy telephone moment during our special in quotes special cuddle time this weekend so he says so so yes during some private time, Listener Michael and his partner seem to have accidentally triggered a Hoi telephone on his partner's phone. Not his. He said, I have that turned off. I have a Hoi telephone turned off on my phone. But I believe it was on her phone.

And they had a special. So Siri got to be a part of that relationship apparently that is what i like to hear siri's bringing people together with a hoi telephone oh breaking them up another reason to turn off that feature, is what I'm saying. Yes. Or, before you have special cuddle time, unplug your phone. It's one of those. All right. Oh, dear. Should we go to a topic, Mike? Please.

I would very much like to go to a topic. What would you like to discuss today? I would like to discuss at least merchandise merchandising I've been over the last year or so selling t-shirts for various incomparable things

I put an incomparable mug up on Zazzle last night because everybody wanted a mug and i didn't want to make and ship uh heavy mugs and worry about them breaking so i just did a design and put it up there and i'm letting zazzle uh zazzle zazzle spazzle mazzel basil i don't know them zazzle what a great name i don't know what it means anyway zazzle with the three z's uh it's up there and then relay fm has merchandise too that you opened a relay fm shop where there's a

a t-shirt with a big r on it which i've worn a couple of times um indicating that i'm a registered trademark and uh stickers as well yep my stuff actually arrived today finally. Oh, good. Shipping is a fun, fun thing. We should talk about that actually. Because there's interesting points in the merchandise. Because what we've done, what we've decided to do, we decided that we would like to go the route of owning and operating the store ourselves as opposed to using someone like Cotton Bureau or Teespring or Zazzle.

Don't know Zazzle t-shirts. They're not good. They fade after like one wash. Oh, really? I don't recommend it. Yeah, that's not good. I got those for the space shuttle launch. I made a couple t-shirts, one-off t-shirts, which they do, which was great. And they were great for the event.

And then I put them in the laundry and they were like half faded away after that. But they were good for one shot. You use them quite a lot. Oh, yeah. Zazzle, I would like a t-shirt or a mug or a hat. Well, no. So, I don't, the t-shirts, I don't do. The hats turned out pretty well.

And then the mugs, I, you know, I've been, I've had a macalope mug that I made on Zazzle for, like, three years now. And it's still great. Which is why I did the incomparable mug on Zazzle. It's the same thing. That's, like, heavy. But this is what you were saying is, there's a lot that goes into this. You've got, if you were making t-shirts,

who's going to make the t-shirts and then how are you going to distribute the t-shirts? Do you make a batch? Do you anticipate what the sizes are? Do you get a lot of these things like Teespring and Cotton Bureau? They, they take the orders up front and that's so that they know exactly how many to make and they make that many and then they're done.

If you don't do that um you risk selling out or being left with stuff that's extra and then somebody's got to fulfill they call it fulfillment i hope it's a fulfilling job because technically that's the industry they're in is fulfillment they've got to put them in boxes and mail them out to people so there are lots of different choices you have to make when when it comes to to merchandising yeah so we decided, so basically the hope is that we could try and make some money out of this, like as another way to help support the network. And we figured the best way to make the most money in theory is to manage the entire thing ourselves. And also we would like to, we'd like to do some different stuff, some interesting things,

and we'd like to have a permanent store. And we found the only way to really have a permanent store that we could control in the way we wanted was to set up our own. So that's what we did. So RelayFM's store, we own an operator. And luckily, Brad Dowdy from The Pen Addict, he has a company called Knock where he makes and sells with his friend and co-business partner, Jeff. They sell pen cases.

And they ship. Of course they do. They do indeed. They pack and ship all this stuff out of Atlanta. So they are operating the fulfillment of our products for us. So Brad is helping with the T-shirt printing. They're being printed in a local place in Atlanta. And he was on sort of on the ground to check all those out and make sure the proofs were okay. Then we kind of guessed the amounts that we wanted to order

because we had no idea of knowing. So we kind of took some guesses. We ordered a bunch in. The T-shirts sold pretty well. The stickers, they were selling a lot better. And then we used a sticker printer for that. And then we had the sticker printer send the stickers to the shipping house. However, we discovered after having all the stickers sent out that they are in varying quality. Unfortunately, some are blurry, some are not. We are actually getting them all replaced.

So if you have been trying to buy a sticker and haven't been able to because we took them off the store because we didn't want to continue getting orders, those stickers should be arriving as we record on the 8th of December 2014. The refreshed stickers arrived today. So we hope that they look good and then we'll be able to ship out all of the orders that have been made and then put them back on the store. So these are like the perils of doing it. The thing is we are making more money per order than I have done in previous stuff like this. Sure. than I have done in previous stuff like this.

Sure. But we're also just kind of, you know, we're trying to deal with the balancing of when do we actually start making some money? Because there's not an awful lot of money in it. And in theory, the money will get better in the future. But that means we need to keep coming up with new and interesting things that people actually want to buy. Because the RelayFM t-shirts, the logo t-shirts,

which we'll probably keep in stock forever, at some point everybody's going to have one that wants one. Right. There'll be an army of people wandering around WWDC with the black t-shirt with the white R on it. I hope so.

It's more of a sort of slate blue. Okay. It's the same color as the background. It's very dark. It is very dark. You're right, it is more of a slate blue, isn't it? Yeah. Alright, you win that one. So, Oswald, by the way, if I do ever see anybody

in the world wearing one of these t-shirts, you get a free hug if you want it. It's yours if you want it. You don't have to take it. I'm not going to jump on it. $100 value value i may jump on you uh but i'll try not to oh my uh just don't activate ahoy telephone attack hug and you know there's like so that you know we want to try out some other things we will do show t-shirts um but they will all be limited you know right we'll buy x amount of show t-shirts and when they're gone they're gone but i think it's about just this is a lot this is actually kind of a running theme of the way that me and steven have have set up relay we kind of want to control as much of it as possible

um it would have been so much easier for us to just set up teespring we did it we did it with the prompt we had to we had a teespring i've done a couple of Teesprings for, I think I did one for the Pen Addict and I did one for 70 Decibels T-shirts. And I've always been very happy with them, actually. They're very responsive. I found the quality to be very good. But I and Stephen, there we go. That's that.

I and Stephen wanted to be able to control ourselves and there's just like this is a running theme of the things that we're doing is trying to do it on our own. I mean obviously it causes a lot more work but I think that we're happier with the end product actually in theory.

Well so I think this is interesting because I'm going to you may well be right but I'm going to say I wonder if you're insisting on controlling everything, including things that it may not be worth controlling. Maybe not. I did it. I think there are levels here and you guys are going to this extreme. Well, you're not packing and shipping them yourself. You've got somebody to do that, but you want to keep the store open and you did order a larger amount of merchandise, which is tricky because the more you order, the cheaper per item, but the more stock you have and then you have to um you have to sell out of it or at least get close enough that you are in the profit your profits come at the end after

you've sort of you know you sold enough shirts to pay for the run and then the remaining shirts you sell are in the profits um merchandise can be really successful the the nonprofit that I work for, National Novel Writing Month, that I'm on the board, they make a pretty good amount of money from their merch sales every year, where they've got a new t-shirt every year and a new set of merch, and their event is once a year. And that speaks to something, which is there's the ongoing sale versus the kind of stunt sale. And the advantage of doing that stunt sale, like daring fireball t-shirts or when we've done incomparable t-shirts, is there's a time frame. You need to order by a certain date or you can't get that. And in terms of buying psychology, a lot of times that's a real motivator.

It's, oh, I want to buy that now because i want that shirt and i can't just say well i'll get it eventually because it'll be gone but it has the direct benefit to the to the um economics of the project by only you're only making as many uh as there's demand for and uh and then within that you can go two different ways where cotton cotton bureau is basically um the people who did Pixel Workers, United Pixel Workers, and a screen printer in Pittsburgh. And they work together now to do Cotton Bureau. And that's end to end. Like literally you send them a design and if they like it, they will put it up.

And then there's a crowdfunding kind of model for two weeks. And then they print the shirt. And they take a lot of money for it. But they do everything. they print the shirt and they take a lot of money for it but they do everything other than you do the design but even then they they will sometimes help with the design and they want to make sure that it fits with what they're trying to do on the on the their site what john gruber does with daring fireball i believe is he's got a screen printer that he's worked with and that other people have worked with that he likes and And the screen printer will do the shirts,

but John is still taking orders up front. He uses the order taking to determine how many shirts he has the screen printer order. And then I believe the screen printer will do the fulfillment, will ship those out. So what John Gruber is doing is he's doing the part of taking orders himself and then passing that on to the screen printer. So there are lots of different ways you can do this.

And it sort of becomes how much time do you want to spend and how much a lot of control over it but on another level I really didn't want to spend my time worrying about shipping out t-shirts or mugs or anything like that and so for me I was willing to pay somebody to do that and I ended up using cotton bureau because I'd bought some pixel workers shirts and they as a proof of concept they were really high quality so I knew I was to get something that wasn't like that zazzle shirt that faded after after one wash so i appreciate that it what we are doing um it requires more work and and at the moment it's requiring an amount of work but in

theory if it goes the way we would like it to go, a lot of the printing and fulfillment stuff will be handled by and estimated by the guys at Knock. Right. And me and Stephen just send them a check, right? And then we split the profits at the end of it. But if it turns out that this doesn't work, then that's fine. But it's an experiment that we wanted to try.

And we haven't lost any money on it. And it's tied in with the brand promise of Relay, right? Which is let's do this stuff ourselves. Right. I mean, in some ways, that's part of what Relay represents. And so to have you guys set up your store and I will admit, I think it's really cool that you've got a store that's open all the time and things may come in and out of stock, but it's open all the time. There's something cool about that because if you want an incomparable Zeppelin shirt today, you can't get it. You just can't get it. We're not selling them. We sold some last year and we sold some earlier this year and right now they're not for sale. And we may have gotten more orders in the meantime, but I also look at Cotton Bureau site where they have a request, a reprint, and there are a bunch of people who've requested a reprint on that already because they just missed

it. And now it's too late. So I like the idea that it's just sort of always available. The problem is just the behind the scenes stuff of the fact is you can't do a run of one t-shirt. So if somebody wants a men's XXL and you're out of men's xxls your only choices are to go back and print 20 of them or say sorry out of stock maybe maybe later but i like the idea that your store is always there it that was kind of where the the original um the original feeling to do this came from was we liked the idea of having a permanent store that had some stuff in it. You know, it's like stickers and T-shirts of some description will always be there. Maybe if we try some other little things in the future.

We'd love to do mugs, but we can't. We can't do mugs. The fulfillment is too complex and expensive. That's why the incomparable mug that never existed now exists and it exists on Zazzle. Like I was saying, they're heavy, they're breakable. Just, no. Don't do it.

There are potentially some other things we could do as well as t-shirts. Because we will always do t-shirts because t-shirts are fun. And also, I like having t-shirts i mean because we will always do t-shirts because t-shirts are fun and also i like having t-shirts for the for my shows and and my stuff however uh i know that everybody has a million t-shirts so we are thinking of ways and stickers stickers is a good one because stickers are a good one because they're very they're cheap you know you can get a whole pack for i think it's like eight or $9 or something like that.

And you can buy just a single sticker of your favorite show for $2. I mean, that's fun. And you can be like me and cover your laptop in stickers. Should we take a quick break? Because I know that you wanted to talk about... We'll jump off of this and talk about something a little bit beyond merch. But yes, we should hear from a friend first, I think. This week's episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by Smile Software and PDF Pen Scan Plus.

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awesome, for supporting this episode and for making PDFPen Scan Plus, which is something that my accountant is very happy exists. Thanks, Smile. You know, yeah, it's that's good stuff. And from friends, scanning in things, you can scan in real world items.

You can scan in crazy stuff and then you've got it forever good indeed so funding funding this is what we want to talk about right now right we yes we're going to put the fun in funding now well no i just we're talking about merchandise and and and that brings up a larger issue, which I think is getting money from – look, we are – as we've talked about in previous shows, we are people who are trying to find a way to do what we want to do for a living. But part of that is the for a living part, that you can do what you want to do, but then also how are you going to eat? And there are different approaches here, which I think is interesting. It used to be that the approaches were, you know, the mainstream media approaches where people paid you for your content and then you also put ads in

it. These days, there are lots of different gradations, right? So somebody like John Gruber has site sponsors and podcast sponsors and we've got podcast sponsors and that's how we make money from this show is the, is, is that our good friends give us money in exchange for us talking about our good friends. Um, but there are other approaches, right? Uh, Tom Merritt, uh, who used to be at Twit now has his own daily tech news show. He's using Patreon and he's bringing in $13,000 a month. He's basically got thousands of fans who are paying him.

I think it's maybe roughly 5,000 fans paying him about, you know, a little bit less than $3 a month on average. I'm one of those people. I actually don't even listen to his show every day, but I love Tom, and I think he's amazing, and he deserves this. Oh, yeah. He is just the best.

He's such a pro. Oh, he's great. And he has 4,590 patrons currently paying him $13,149.72 per month. He's fantastic. I've interviewed him a bunch of times. I think I've had him on Inquisitive. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So this is

to me one of the real Patreon success stories where he's got fans. He's got fans, 4,500 of which are able to donate, again, $3 a month. It's not a lot. And that allows him to do the show. And then the show is free.

You're not getting anything by donating other than to fund more things for him to do. But that's okay. That's the point of it. And that's a great success story. Then there's somebody like Ben Thompson who does Stratechery. And he posts a couple of interesting think pieces every couple of weeks, I think, on Stratechery.com. And then he has a daily newsletter that's full of links and other thoughts that he has. And it's a really good newsletter. I subscribe to that.

And that's $10 a month or $100 a year. And so for that, you're getting something. You're spending something to support him, but also to get this newsletter that he writes. And he puts a lot of effort. I would say probably 70% of the effort we see on Stratechery is in the newsletter. And then the other 30% is in the pieces on the site. Maybe he would define it differently. But the point is, it's a lot. And there are other people out here doing this. I actually had a phone call a few weeks ago with Sean Blank about this because he's got members on SeanBlank.net. He'll be very upset with you, by the way. Why? Blank. It's Blank? Yeah, like Mont Blanc.

Really? Yeah. I apologize to Sean and to listener Thibaut. I don't do French. Sean Blank. Mont Blanc. Of course you say he's pronounced like a pen mike of course you would say that it's easy way to remember shane shane blank is his name okay shane blank and if you go to shane blank dot in biz dot plumbing you will see so so sean montblanc pen

uh has a membership too. And I talked to Sean about it. I only used his first name because I hate names, Mike. I was walking with my wife yesterday and we were talking about names and how I just never use names. I try not to use people's names ever, Mike. Except on shows maybe, Mike. I'm the same because I'm terrible at remembering names. I'm great at remembering faces, horrible at remembering names.

Yeah, hey you. Good to see you. I fall back to being very British. Oh, hello, sir. Oh, hello, mate. And it works. People just, they like to hear that, especially Americans.

It doesn't work so well in this country, but Americans like to hear it. They let it go. Ahoy, telephone. Ahoy, buddy. Yeah. Hey, pal. Hey, Skipper.

That's what I say here to British people. So anyway, Sean's got a, Sean, what's his name, has a, he's got a membership too. And his membership has, I think he does a podcast, a short podcast. Yeah, he does. A daily members-only podcast called Sean Today. That's his main thing that he gives. And he has like a pledge drive, like a membership drive

every year. He does like giveaways and stuff. And I know like Sean is an interesting one to me because he was doing this. He's been doing this for a while. There weren't a lot of people that were doing memberships when Sean did his. And he kind of looked

to John Gruber for inspiration. And then Sean of people that were doing memberships when sean did his and and he kind of looked to john gruber for inspiration um and then sean set up his own and it kind of it started off a lot of people trying to do uh sort of i am an independent writer please support me type stuff and and sean has done very well and and continues to do very well i believe it's his main source of income even though he does own like a thousand websites. I believe that the membership is Sean's thing mainly, and he continues to be very successful from it, which is a great success story. But he also takes sponsorship as well. It's like, it's another avenue of income for Sean. Right. And you put it together. And this is, I think this is interesting. This is not that different from, I think, the struggle that app developers face in terms of deciding how am I going to, you know, can I

charge for this app? Can I do in-app purchases? Is there a subscription model here? I mean, this is finding the right way to get people to pay for things is a challenge. And then what I found, and I think Sean has found this, I think Ben Thompson has found this, and it's obvious that Tom Merritt has found this, is there are people who like what you do and want to support you. And there are different ways to approach that. Tom Merritt, like I said, I don't think the people who give him $3 a month on Patreon are getting access to any special content. They're just getting the good feeling of supporting this guy who's going to make great stuff that they listen to or watch every day. For somebody like Ben or Sean, you're getting something out of it.

Now, you may or may not actually listen to every podcast or read every newsletter, but there is a feeling like it's an exchange where I'm giving you money because I like you, but also I get something out of it, whether I take advantage of it or not. And there's some psychology there. And it's just, it's fascinating to see these different approaches. And I mean, the reason that I talked to Sean and didn't use his last name a couple of weeks ago is that I'm absolutely thinking about this. This is one of those things that I'm thinking when I'm trying to come up with a way to, like I said, make a living doing things that I

love. And I've heard from people since I left Macworld saying, how can I support you? I'm not an advertiser. I don't have a product, but I'd like to support you. And right now my answer is, well, you can't. I have no way to do that. But tell people about the site. But I'm definitely thinking about this for me or for Six Colors or something like that. Could I do a membership? What would I offer? Would people want to give some money to me on a regular basis to support what I do? In addition to the sponsorships, would that be the difference? It's entirely possible that that could be the difference between me making it or not with something like Six Colors. It is knowing some of these other examples out there. And Tom is in the stratosphere, I would say. But you can see he's in the stratosphere with 4,500 people. So, you know, it doesn't take that thousand true, that Kevin Kelly thousand true fans thing.

There's truth to that. Like a small group of people paying a small amount of money to somebody to do something that they, that they, you know, to keep doing what they like that person doing can make the difference between success or failure. And that's fascinating. Now I haven't done anything about it yet other than think about it, but it's definitely something that I've thought about. I don't know, you know, I don't want to do a tip jar, right? That, that I don't, and I don't know if you've thought about this for Relay, if you want to do anything other than, you know, sponsorship and some merchandise things. I know people feel like when they buy a t-shirt, they're supporting you, but you know, the amount of money you get at,

like you said, out of a t-shirt is not particularly great. So yes, I have thought about it yeah yes to which okay i i asked you like 90 questions there well in the form of statements so yeah it is actually yes to all of them basically so i get the same thing we get the same thing i would love to support you what do you have a patreon i get that question a couple of times a week at the moment. For a while, I was thinking about it. But then after having some conversations and then also thinking about it some more, I love Patreon. I think it's amazing. But for some reason, I don't think it's right that we're there. Relay is maybe different to say you.

Well, right. I think that's an aspect of this too is people versus product. Because I thought about doing a membership for Incomparable too, but that would be a different thing. And that would be, that's much more complicated because there's different podcasts and different people who would be involved and the money would need to go to different places.

And I'm not, you know, that would be a different kind of thing not necessarily better or worse but a very different thing than i'm supporting jason doing and six colors being the most obvious place where it's you know it's sort of my thing and i have some other people writing there occasionally but it's really my thing and relay is many things right so so it's a little harder to pin down i want to support mike versus i want to support relay and because i am relay right that's this is where all of my creative endeavors go i don't want to have a patreon for me right right it doesn't feel right i don't have a patreon for relay because relay is a company that sells ads as well as a company that creates podcasts. Right.

And there's just something in that to me which is peculiar. Like that I am an entity as in the business, right? The business has these two parts of it. So I don't really want to have a Patreon for that. There's just something about it. So then I thought, could we have a direct membership? Again, we do it ourselves. It's another thing I'm thinking, would we want to do it ourselves?

Maybe. That one is a maybe, I think. But I just don't know what I would give, and I feel like it would have to be something really good, and I don't know what it is yet. I have an idea for a thing that I'm working on, which is not membership related, but there could be something that falls out of that, which we could offer to people. And maybe, I don't even know if we would

want to call it a membership. We might call it something completely different, but it could be a way for people to give us money for a certain thing, right? Like you're buying something regularly from us, which is digital. And I feel like whether it's a direct transaction of money for a certain thing or it's money for access to a thing, I like that. I mean, I mentioned Sean's podcast, right, and Ben Thompson's newsletter. And I think there's some truth to that, that you may not actually read the newsletter. You may not actually subscribe to that podcast but you i still think psychologically uh you're getting something for your money and that i like that i like that as a person giving money and as a person receiving money i think that is a better kind of transaction than patreon although i like the idea of I just, it makes me a little uncomfortable because it is, it is surely

I like you. And instead of being like, I like you, so I'm buying your product or subscribing to your, your product. And for me, that, that second one feels better to me. It feels more tangible, even if you don't use the product, right? You just want to support the person. You don't have to use the product. Nobody's going to make to support the person. You don't have to use the product. Nobody's going to make you read the newsletter. But there is something there. You are getting something. And when it comes time a year down the road to renew, you have a reason for renewing beyond support, which is access to this thing that has maybe some value to you.

I don't know. It's tricky. But I do believe that if I were going to do something like this, I would want to have something as a benefit and not just do Patreon. Patreon, it's really cool. We've talked about it for Incomparable. We've talked about doing it for like our radio dramas, although we've talked about doing Kickstarter for that too,

which is also another thing that's out there uh the difference there is the kickstarter there starts to be this um implication that you're going to get everybody's going to get goodies and that you're using the the cash specifically to fund the project whereas with patreon it's more about support it's about these are people making a cool thing and i want to support them and uh that's the to me that feels like a difference from Kickstarter, where it's literally like, why am I giving you this money to make this thing? So the money better be in the thing, which is not always how it works. So I don't know. It's fascinating that there's so many different options here, but I feel totally paralyzed about it. I'm only now at the point

where I'm starting to really think maybe I will do something like this, but it's just been, there are so many different approaches and asking people for money, you know, that, that also is a, it's a big step, but at the same time, it's very hard when you're out on your own and people are saying, I really like the stuff that you've done. And I like the stuff you're doing now, but I'm never going to be able to do anything beyond buy a t-shirt. And I have too many t-shirts to just turn them away and say, well, you know, I mean, this is what Lex Friedman does when we talk about podcast advertising is, you know, he says he's told me a few times that, you know, you can do a Kickstarter or you can do something like that. But it's very difficult to get that to work instead of advertising. But you could do both. get that that to work instead of advertising but you could do both and that you know there i i don't think there's anything wrong with that if the advertising is uh is reasonable

there just feels like i i agree with what you're saying but it feels like to me the difference is uh it's you it's just jason i don't know this feels like that there's something there which is uh it feels better than than the like a big company yeah a company certainly certainly that's true um in the chat room brian hamilton says um you know uh i would pay a few bucks a month to see six colors without ads but this is this is the thing and this is actually a path we tried to go down this with macworld insider the. First off, the ads on six colors are a little text block, a single text block at the top that doesn't change for a week, and a single post once a week. So there's not a lot of ad clutter there. But this is the challenge, is

if you take your best audience and you sell them a product essentially that blocks the ads, then what you're doing is you're trading, you're adding value by having people give you money and removing value from the people seeing the ads. And essentially, I've come to believe the math doesn't really work when you do that. You kind of need to do both, and it needs to be supplemental. And I think removing ads as the product that you're selling is not necessarily that much of a strong point. Plus, people who want to remove the ads can remove them anyway, or you can ignore them. But that's sort of what Lex's point was, is if you're trading one for another, it's a lot harder to make the math work. Yeah, it's like anything that we ever did, we're not going to get rid of ads and we're not going to talk about that. I know that something that Dan Benjamin talks about with his Patreon, you know, they talk about reducing ads, which is, I mean, I could say it's a very perplexing thing to

me because he's in that business. So it's one of the reasons that we wouldn't want to do it. I believe in the advertising model for podcasts, and I will show that in selling our advertising. That's an important thing to both of me and Stephen, is that we don't dilute that. I appreciate Dan saying, if I get enough money on Patreon, maybe we don't have ads in our podcast but really that's that sounds to me like saying like a like a professional sports franchise saying if you fund uh you know if you fund upgrades to our stadium um you know maybe ticket prices

will go down then they're not going to go down they're going to go up because you're going to get the money from over there and you're going to get the money from over here. And that's just going to, that's sort of how it works. That's not, you're not, it seems unlikely that it would happen any other way. So yeah, I, I, if nothing else, um, I think what this points out is it's, it's complicated and these things are, at least for us, I can't speak for everybody else, are things that we think about a lot and think about the ramifications of. And it's not something you do on a lark. I appreciate that you guys, like me, are really wary about the idea of asking your audience for money. And if you're going to do it,

you want to do it right. And if you can't do it right, you don't want to do it. And that's definitely where I am now. And people like Tom Merritt and Ben Thompson and Sean Blanc are, that's how you pronounce that, are inspirations in that way, that they have done it and they've gone out there and asked for support from their audience and gotten it and that's that is really inspirational but it's you know when money is involved especially you don't want to screw that up but not just because like oh no i might lose money but like i don't want to cause a rift between the people who like what i do and me over me mishandling the you you know, whatever it is where money is involved. You know, money can change relationships.

I would hate to sour my relationship with the people who like what I do because I asked for money in some, you know, inappropriate way or did something wrong where it was a mess. I don't want to do that. Do you know what part of the problem is with removing the ads for money? You actually lose the people that are probably most likely to click or listen

or connect to your ads. Yes, that's exactly what they said when we tried to do Macworld Insider was it's very hard for the sales people to go out and say, we're giving you this great audience the most tied in of which won't see your ads that's that's tough that's a tough one and that is a true thing like

i find that the people that that support our sponsors there are a portion of people that support our sponsors to support us and that is like the best thing that anybody can do. Because, I mean, I believe that Relay can make more money from advertising than it can from direct. Yeah. I think in most cases, that's just the truth, is that the advertising money has much more upside than the direct sponsorship money. The direct sponsorship money is more constant.

It's from the people who really care about you. It's going to be there for you in the lean times, but it's never going to be with very few exceptions. I would say even Tom Merritt, somebody like Tom Merritt, who's a success story for Patreon, he can monetize his podcast better with ads on his podcast than the money he's making from Patreon.

And he can choose to do that or not do that. But with an audience the size that he probably has, I would be surprised if that isn't a product that could generate way more than $13,000 a month, right? And that's the trick. So yeah, it's weird. We all just want to make great stuff. Bottom line is we all just want to make great stuff and be able to do that for a living. That's really what it is. And then it's just a matter of the math of how do you do it? How do you make something? I've seen so many businesses that get so deep down into advertising and it's crappy advertising and they make bad decisions and the product suffers. And I'm, you know, I saw it happen at my, at my previous employer and I've seen it happen elsewhere in the media. Um, I, I, I actually don't like the idea of entirely relying

on advertising to support yourself because, uh, once you're that down in it, it's very hard to, it gets very hard to say no. And you end up compromising so much of what you're doing. Not, not like saying things that aren't true but like putting junk all over your pages and sending out emails that are full of sponsor messages because you need nobody wants it but you need to send it and i i just i would really like to not go down that route because that i've been there and uh audience support is one way that you avoid going down that route and diversifying. And it gets you through the tough times when you might, you know, you might accept that really crappy ad and lets you say, no, I'm not going to do that. That's not what my audience

wants. I have one more last little point that I've been thinking about with this sort of stuff. And I've been having some conversations about this recently. You know, that people say quite, quite a bit, not too frequently, but you hear it, your advertisers influence your content. Like this is something that you hear people make the claim or ask, do they? I wonder if listener support or direct support would actually make a bigger change

or influence to your content than advertisers. Like, for example, if you had a podcast that you liked to be for an hour, but you had a bunch of your listeners that liked the show to be 30 minutes and the ones that like it to be 30 minutes are the ones that pay but the people that don't pay like it to be an hour where are you going to go with that right and well if all your funding is from the from the listeners who who pay you might you might very much want to do that or you might provide them with two versions of the show uh there are lots of different ways to go, but you're right that, that,

that you've got different customers then in a way, except in some ways that's pure, right? Because you really, we really do make these shows for the audience and not for the advertisers. We had an interesting email thread, you and I, with a gentleman who congratulated us on being independent and then said, but you know, you're not really independent because you just do what your advertisers want you to do. It's like, well, no, that's not really how it works.

And his response was something like, yes, that's really how it works. I was like, no, no, that's not how it works. You have to make the show or the website or whatever for the people who are reading it. And then the advertisers love that you've got such great people reading your stuff or listening to your stuff, and they want to reach those people too. But that's not the same as saying, if you build a product for an advertiser,

nobody will want to see it. Trust me. I've done the holiday gift guide with like 40 articles about whatever that's labeled holiday gift guide because we sold it. Brought to you by Amazon or something. Nobody wants it. But you have to make it because it got sold. And that's not good.

That's not good content. The good stuff is the stuff that you make for the real people out there. And so, yes, if the real people were giving you money and so your entire model was your audience gives you the money and all you need to do is make them happy, then it's doubly you serving your audience. But you should already be serving. It's anyway, right? Yeah, of course. I mean, and that's what I'm saying. It's not why I'm saying that I don't listen to people and do what people would like us to do because ultimately we need the listeners to be here.

But I think that there's an interesting, like I wonder, I just wonder what is a bigger potential effect, sponsor money or crowdfunding money? Because I would feel more personally attached to the individual who's giving us their money that they earned than the sponsor that we work with. There is just a greater human personal attachment in that instance. Our sponsors are great, and I love working with them,

but many of them are really large companies. And the person that I'm dealing with is awesome, but they're spending a marketing budget. So it's a little bit more detached. It's a business transaction, It's a little bit more detached. It's a business transaction. But the crowdfunding thing is a direct kind of exchange between two people.

And I don't know. I haven't really got a fully fleshed out thought with this one. But it's just something that I've been pondering when thinking about this stuff. Is there a potential bigger... Or at least would I feel different about the content? I think I would. I think I would feel different if people were paying me directly for it. Well, I think the most – the biggest difference would be – we were talking about the thousand true fans approach, right? So you've got a podcast that's being listened to by 20,000 people,

but a thousand of them are your true fans. And this is the difference, right? Your sponsors are very happy to reach 20,000 people. So if you're getting money from sponsors, the 20,000 people, that is your target audience. But if you're giving the show away for free, but a thousand people are funding it, then shouldn't a thousand people be your target audience if that's all you're doing? I think this is why it ends up being that a little bit of

both is probably a good idea because you're making something that's got broad appeal, but only a small percentage of the people are going to love it enough to want to give you money for it. And so you have to do a little bit of both. But it's funny that we're living in a world where all these things are possible. Like I said, that just makes it that much more difficult to figure out what you actually want to do. So we've spoken quite a bit about making money. Yes. Let's take a sponsor break. I think it's the right time. Jason, would you like to tell me all about MailRoute? I am speaking to you about MailRoute because they are a friend and because you are my friends. This is the perfect time or the least perfect time to do a sponsor read, isn't it?

I use MailRoute. I've been using MailRoute for more than a year now. And MailRoute is a system that lets you get rid of spam and viruses and bounced emails. So they don't even come to your inbox. And you don't have to buy any hardware or invest in any software that runs on your own systems. It happens in the cloud, they would say now, I suppose, at MailRoute servers. So MailRoute, the way it works is basically you point your mail inbound at MailRoute, and then it comes to your mail server after that. And MailRoute, the way it works is basically you point your mail inbound at MailRoute and then it comes to your mail server after that. And MailRoute does this thorough kind of washing of your email and pulls the spam out.

I've been very satisfied. They send me a little email every day that says, here's what spam we trapped. And 99 times out of 100, I would say, it's all spam. And I get a good laugh at some of the subject lines. I would say it's all spam. And I get a good laugh at some of the subject lines. It's like, I found your ATM card. And, you know, things in broken English about how I've got an incredible value waiting for me if I will just give them my credit card.

Oh, you got my email. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Mail route took care of it for me. It's a shame. So it really does a very good job. And so I'm getting a lot less spam. It's got a lot of settings that you can configure to make it work the way you want, how often you want to get the digest saying what got filtered out. If you're a regular person like me who's just an individual or I've got a Google Apps installation, so I've got like four users on my domain.

And that was very easy to set up. It all routes through MailR route and then comes to us and that's great if you're a uh an email administrator an it pro something like that they've got all the all the tools uh for you they've got an api they support ldap active directory tls outbound relay and mike's favorite feature mail bagging love a mail a mailbag. It's the best. Everything you'd want for people handling your mail. So if you're an admin for your organization and you are tired of dealing with spam, MailRoute could be great for you. And if you're a regular person, you can potentially use MailRoute as well for your mail. So here's what you need to do to take advantage of our very special offer and remove spam from your life for good.

Go to MailRoute.net slash upgrade. You'll get a free trial and 10% off for the lifetime of your account. Not 10% off the first month or the first year, but forever if you go to MailRoute.net slash upgrade. but forever if you go to mail route.net slash upgrade. And thank you so much to mail route for helping put food on the tables here at my house and at Mike's house. Thank you, Mel. And a good friend,

a good friend. Indeed. What else is on the, uh, is on the agenda for today's episodes. So in the story arc of today, I want to move next. So we talked about merch and then we talked about money and I want to move next now so we talked about merch and then

we talked about money and I want to talk about success and failure and and um we we we will probably need to go on and on about this at some point in the future but um listener Mike sent a link to a post I'd actually already seen but I hadn't really thought of it as a topic until listener Mike sent it in which um uh Anil Dash did a post on the ThinkUp blog at thinkup.com about how ThinkUp is doing as a business. And it's a really good, honest post about how Anil is doing this startup with Gina Trapani. It's like social media analytics. I paid for a year of think up.

It's actually really kind of cool. It sends you an email every day saying like finding interesting nuggets about how people have interacted with you in social media. Uh, but it's going okay. They're happy with the product, but it's been problematic to market it. Um, and they are building basically a, uh, what he says is a, solid business, not a venture capital scale business. So it looks like they laid some people off, but they still have other people working on it. And it's not dying.

It's just not growing as fast as they had hoped. And this resonated with me because John Gruber in his talk at XOXO this year said this too. with me because John Gruber in his talk at XOXO this year said this too. And it was something that as I was just going out on my own, I filed away and I keep thinking about it too, which is there's success and there's failure and there's this muddy middle. And forgive me, because I think I've talked about this a little bit before, but Anil's post really brought it home, which is, you know, we all view things through the lens of did it work or did it not work? Was that business a success or a failure? Mike, when you quit your job and went out on your own, did you win or did you lose?

Right? When I left Macworld and decided to go out on my own, did I win or did I lose? And what Gruber said at XOXO, and that's the resonance with Anil's post, is the problem is that it's not a binary answer, usually. You usually aren't a crashing failure or a runaway success. A lot of the truth is in the middle, and it's the it's going okay kind of thing, right? It's not great. It's not terrible. It's okay.

And it's much harder to make a decision about do i want to keep doing this is this going to work can i can i make this work if it's in the middle because you can you can say forget about it and except i mean glenn fleishman was talking about this for the magazine it was the same thing the magazine is wrapping up this month and he's shutting down production of it. But for a year, he had been caught in the middle of, I don't want to shut it down because there's money coming in, but there's not a lot of money coming in. So it's not a success. It's not a failure. What do I do? And I think the ThinkUp post just brings it home again that there's a whole lot of gray.

And that is where most businesses operate operate, especially I think most small businesses and most independent people like us. I really recommend a Neal's Post just because you get that glimpse into they're not a runaway success, nor are they a failure. What happens when you're in the middle? How do you do course corrections? How do you figure out how to make it work? When do you start doing what you and I were talking about, which is are there other revenue streams? Is there some other thing to do? And it's way too early in my journey to know whether I'm in success or failure mode here.

I would say that I'm not in failure mode yet, but I would say I'm also not yet in success mode. I'm kind of in the middle, and I didn't expect to be. But in six months, if I'm at the point where I need to make a decision about am I going to do this or am I going to write this off, it would really be nice if I had clarity. But I need to steel myself for the fact that it's not going to be clear, because it probably won't. Chances are it won't be, because that's not how most of this stuff won't chances are it won't be because that's not how most of this stuff uh ends up i spoke i i promise this is not purposeful because there's like another link to inquisitive in the show notes it's like four now i spoke to gina trapani about this last week um and there seems to be this the interesting like the idea of where where are you comfortable with your company being

and like and it kind of ties into how we were talking about that team aspect like earlier in the show today last week like i'm happy with us making a decent amount of money and being okay like i say this to people quite a lot like i have no i don't want necessarily it's, it's not on my list of goals for Relay to make me a very wealthy man. That is not what I do this for. I just want to earn a comfortable living and be a podcaster forever. That's all I want this to do. So that kind of middle, we are surviving, we're doing good, we're paying people, we're making money, it's fine. I'm happy with that.

I don't need this to be this American life for me to be happy. I'm happy where we are now, and I hope that we just scale at that level. That's great for me. That's all I really need and want this thing to do. And then I would, you know, that's great for me. That's all I really need and want this thing to do. Yeah, I, another part of this, I think that goes into Anil's post is that, you know, they got investors and investors tend to want that venture capital scale growth. And that comes back to, you know, why are you, why are you doing this? Neither of us, I think, is in this to create some explosive growth that is going to make us all rich, rich, rich. I think we're all trying to explore doing this and making a living with it. And that's just a different approach. I read all these stories

about Gimlet Media and the Startup Podcast and all that. And I thought, well, that would have been the other way to go, right? For Relay or for me or whatever to say, I'm going to find some investors. They're going to give me a few million bucks and I'm going to get marketing and I'm going to hire talent and I'm going to hire producers and we're going to make a big podcast thing. And that's great as long as it works and you have the explosive growth that's going to be needed to make that investment worthwhile. And, you know, neither, neither of us, uh, is doing that with the,

with what we're doing. We are doing the, uh, sustainable, slow and steady. Um, I want to, I want to make something that's successful. Um, but I'm not in this to create that giant thing. And that's okay. I'm not saying that the big startup podcast thing is a bad idea. It's just a very different way to approach it. We thought about it. Is this something that we would want to do? And we decided we didn't want to do it.

We didn't even go far into it. It was just an idea at the start. Do we want to do this? Do we want to look it. We didn't even go far into, like, it was just an idea at the start, you know, do we want to do this? Do we want to look at investment? And it was for us, at least, this very quickly became a, no, I don't, we don't want to go down that route. Simply because, you know, the idea of doing it on our own, it doesn't lend to that. So we decided that we wouldn't do it. You know, it just wasn't something that we were willing to try out. And we just didn't pursue that route. And I don't begrudge people from doing that. I think that there are definite merits. But we were in a very lucky position that we were able to start this company from savings accounts um and and

that was perfectly fine you know as i'm sure you started six colors in the same way from from a savings account that you had probably and uh went with it from there yeah oh yeah it's um it's very much that thought well plus i I'm decompressing from whatever, 17 years at this corporate media job, where the other part of it is, do I want to immediately come out of that and then enter in a situation where I am doing something where I have an investor or owner or something who's going to have me make those decisions based not necessarily on making the best product, but on doing what we need to do to grow and generate large revenue growth. And boy, was I not willing to have those conversations when I was exiting my old job. So under other circumstances, would I talk to somebody about creating a media company and with investors and all of that. Sure, I might under other circumstances do that because I have skills in working, creating different products and working with big staffs and stuff like that.

But boy, not now. I need more time. I need a lot more time before I would even consider something like that. So do we have anything on our list today? I know i have something that i wanted to talk to you about very quick yeah well let's do your let's do your topic and then we'll we'll forward promote the topic for next week so this is a very just a very short thing um i for the first time today held an iPad Air 2. And I'm interested by it. It was surprising how thin it actually is.

It's not that I'd avoided it. I just assumed that I wouldn't be interested in it because the big iPads are not really the iPads that I buy. Or at least I thought that I was interested in because I find sometimes the big iPad to be kind of comical in its own way, because it feels like a weird iOS. It's like this huge thing and, you know, etc. Anyway, and I know that you have yours. Are you still using the ipad air 2 as your ipad no i'm i'm back to my uh ipad mini 2 okay that i that i've been using for the last year okay uh i still have the ipad it's a review unit

so i i think i have to get it back to them next month but i it's it's it's around and i will use it occasionally for you know checking something on that that device. But mostly it's back to the one that I have been using all along, the Mini 2. I do every time I get another Safari tab reload or switch to an app and it has to reload, I'm reminded of how much nicer the iPad Air 2 is. Not just because of the speed of the processor, but because of the RAM. not just because of the speed of the processor but because of the RAM so what would you consider going to iPad Air 2 or do you think you're

going to stay with the mini if I was looking for a brand new iPad right now today if I didn't have that mini mini 2 so it's a Retina, it's essentially

last year's model, same as this year's model of Mini, I would seriously consider the Air 2, only because it is so much faster, having that extra RAM is a big deal and it's so light and thin that even though it's got that huge screen um it doesn't feel it doesn't feel enormous um and since i read comics on an ipad having the bigger screen to read the comics is great. That said, I do so much work responding to emails and tweets and things like that. So much active typing and stuff on the mini in landscape orientation. And I can thumb type really well on that device. And I can't on the Air 2. It's too big. I can't type like that. So I would have to find a new typing strategy, move it into portrait. I don't know what I would do, but I can thumb type really well on the Mini. So it would be a lot to give up. But that extra RAM,

especially, it's just huge. So I don't know. It would be a toss-up. Even now, it would be a toss-up. I think i said in my little six colors holiday gift guide that the ipad i recommend right now is the ipad mini 2 because it's a really great deal for what it is and the and the ipad mini 3 is not a very good deal but the air 2 is a beautiful thing so i don't know i don't. I'd say it's a toss up. But I'm going to accept that I'm a weirdo who likes that little iPad mini and that most people, I mean, you've got a 6 Plus, so geez, you don't need an iPad mini. just want something for a slightly bigger screen but those things are very very uh far and few between um yeah so i was wondering do i need an ipad in my life and i was hoping that you would just flat out tell me no not to get it well but that but you haven't done that which is fine i don't want you to change your uh i think i i don't know i i think given what you do for a living, that it's less, just the podcast stuff.

I have this dream of being able to take only my iPad with me on a trip or something and leave the Mac at home. But podcasting makes that just not, it's not possible. Just the recording and editing and podcasting, some of it is difficult and some of it's impossible. Just the recording and editing and podcasting. Some of it is difficult and some of it's impossible. And, you know, I think you've got your laptop and you've got your Mac mini and you've got your iPhone 6 Plus. And I don't know. I mean, where I use my iPad is on the couch and in the kitchen and in bed. It's like in the house and I'm not actively like writing something.

That's what I use. That's my auxiliary computing device. That's what I do Twitter on and check email on. It's almost entirely that on the iPad Mini. And it's great for that. A bit of real-time

follow-up. Yes. The new stickers look good. Oh, good. I just received pictures right now. And I have opened all the hashtag AskUpgrade tweets at Google Doc, and there are indeed three tweets in it. Wow. And Kyle Seth Gray says, what's the best burrito?

Okay. And my favorite burrito is a barbecue chicken burrito that I get at my local burrito. Burriteria? I don't know. That's the one that I like. That's my favorite. It's great. Yeah. Barbecue chicken and beans and like a barbecue saucy kind of sauce and some grilled onions.

And it's really good. That's my best burrito. So see, right from the spreadsheet. Look at that. Perfect. And listener Murder of Crows on Twitter asks, does this thing work? Hashtag ask upgrade. Yes.

We can confirm it does. Yep. So we would like to tease next week's topic. Yes. We can confirm it does. Yep. So we would like to tease next week's topic. Yes. Holidays. Did you know that it's the holidays, Mike? I'd heard the rumors. Thanksgiving is over.

As you know, you're finally out of the haze of Thanksgiving. All those leftovers, all that turkey. Woo. It is the holidays. Finally out of the haze of Thanksgiving. All those leftovers, all that turkey. Woo! It is the holidays. It is the end of the year. Celebrating the fact the earth goes around the sun. It's like another loop completed. Happy New Year.

I think something that we should probably talk about this month is about the holidays and about what all goes into that along with like bests and favorites of the year and gift ideas and other things like that so if people have feedback or thoughts about best of the year and holidays and gifts and things like that maybe they should send those along because we'll talk about that next week and then um presumably the week after too because we've got december on one level it feels like it goes on forever on another level I feel like completely stressed out about how little time I've got between

between now and when we're leaving because we're going to visit my mom in Arizona and so I've only got two weeks and then we're on the road and I'm hoping still to do an episode of upgrade where I just call you from out in the middle of the desert. Just like in the car driving through the desert and there's no one around but like a tumbleweed and a coyote.

And we do a show. I would like that very much. We'll see. Maybe. I would like that very much indeed. If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode, you want to take your web browser and point it towards relay.fm slash upgrade slash 13. 13. 13. Lucky number 13.

There's a lovely list of links in there. If you'd like to find me on the internet, I'm at imike, I-M-Y-K-E, and I am a podcaster at relay.fm. Mr. Jason Snell writes the fantastic six colors, and he is at jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. We'll be back next time. Don't forget hashtag hashtag AskUpgrade. And I hope that you've enjoyed this episode.

Yes, as do I. And we'll be back. Say goodbye, Jason. Farewell.