Justin Jackson

When more people are building software, what's the value of software?

It's only been a month since the podcast industry descended on London for the 2026 Podcast Show.

Since 2018, my business partner Jon and I have built our company remotely.

Last week, I was walking to a coffee shop on Bloor Street in Toronto, listening to the Mostly Technical podcast.

Most business advice is necessary but not sufficient on its own to achieve success.

It's bizarre for me to think about being 13 years old and how sandboxed technology was back then.

Hope you're finding some calm in the midst of the storm.

The first time I sat down and used Claude Code's Opus 4.5 to build software, I couldn't believe how good it was.

On a winter's day in 2018, I was helping a grandmother figure out what to do with an RSS feed someone had sent her.

The first month of 2026 has been a blur.

Reflecting on an entire year's worth of events can feel daunting!

I gave a talk about my experience as a founder with my son's high school Entrepreneurship class.

Aaron Francis wrote about this in his newsletter, and I can’t stop thinking about it: “Maybe, working hard doesn’t lead to burnout, but the lack of hope leads to burnout.

There's a strange relationship between the effort you put into something and the outcome you get out of it.

You spent $100k on ads in 2025.

So much of what made culture great between the '60s and '90s was that you had to work for it.

"Never tell me the odds." – Han Solo, Star Wars.

This is a draft post I'm working on.

AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code have completely consumed the tech industry's attention.

I'll be honest: I've been skeptical of AI development tools.

I keep thinking about Michael Osborne's quote: "Podcasting is where I go to get away from the internet.”

tl;dr – The podcast industry has long relied on the open nature of RSS to sustain a wide variety of small businesses.

I've been thinking a lot about the modes of life in which I feel like I have tons of creative energy.

In the pursuit of "making podcasts more discoverable," the podcast industry has welcomed YouTube with open arms.

Chris Sacca recently claimed, "We are super fucked... almost all coding is fucking useless" because AI can now build apps on demand.

The decisions we make have a profound effect on our lives.

There’s a lot of “don’t build a SaaS (too hard)” narrative right now.

I keep hearing people worry that AI will take over software development, product development, writing, video production, and other areas.

When I start to write my year-in-review post, the first thing I do is go back in Google Photos to January 1st.

I recently listened to three podcast episodes, all with bootstrapped founders over the age of 40: Paul Jarvis has retired from Fathom Analytics Matt Wensing steps down from Summit, takes job with Customer.io Brian Casel and Jordan Gal talk about building…

Since joining Bluesky, I keep finding cool apps and projects built on the AT Protocol.

Every day in Transistor's #marketing channel in Slack, we track our new trial signups: Like most SaaS companies, our growth relies on new people finding us every day.

tl;dr – It's November 22, 2024, and I've decided to delete all my Twitter posts, lock down my account, and leave the platform.

Here's a story about how Laravel/Rails might fix the "pipeline problem:" by hiring new grads to build the awesome tools we've always wanted.

My story: "I must build a B2B SaaS" When Jon and I started Transistor, a podcast-hosting platform, we followed the common bootstrapper wisdom: "Don't build a B2C product; build for B2B.

Here's a SaaS marketing strategy for converting and activating new customers.

In 1999 I met pro skater Chad Muska at Slam City Jam in Vancouver.

If you want to create a podcast in 2024, you need to choose the right topic, get the right equipment, get podcast hosting, and submit it to Apple Podcasts and Spotify the right way.

The problem with marketing metrics is that most of them are meaningless: How much traffic did we get last month?

My friend Nathan Barry is one of the youngest successful entrepreneurs I know: he founded ConvertKit, which now has $40 million in annual revenue.

It's been hard to watch the recent layoffs in the tech industry.

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It's time for another SaaS marketing tip.

A local company here in Vernon asked if I could go for coffee.

I've decided that in 2024, the main theme of my writing will be marketing and growth tips for SaaS founders.

Happy 2024!

"Marketing an indie software company today is way harder than 5-10 years ago."

Someone just sent me five duplicated, poorly targeted emails in a row: Writing "I trust this email finds you well" in multiple cold emails and then aggressively asking me to book a call is the worst way to earn my trust.

The normal advice for people building SaaS companies is "Don't build software for consumers (B2C); build it for businesses (B2B)."

Here are some ideas on things you can do (now) that will create opportunities for yourself in the future: Podcast Give a talk Write a blog Go to meetups Take a course Learn new skills Get a remote job Join a community Grow your network Promote your work Go