Transistor.fm

Jackson and Buda each put $5k in via Stripe Atlas and built the MVP nights and weekends — Rails API, Postgres, AWS hosting. They committed to an August 1 launch publicly so Podnews would hold them accountable.

Launch day on Product Hunt brought ~46 paying customers and about $1,400 MRR — enough validation, not enough salary.

They forecast five years to full-time income; compounding marketing + product work got them to ~$20k MRR in about a year. Jackson’s “$30k” post breaks down salaries: ~50% of revenue to founder pay, predictable MRR beat SV vanity metrics.

Mixergy and indie podcasts document the open Baremetrics dashboard from $0 upward — transparency as distribution, not just virtue signaling.

Ship It! #61 with Jon Buda describes infra upgrades — Rails 7, Ruby 3, Elastic Beanstalk platform bumps — done as a batch because they finally had breathing room after shipping podcast websites.

Transistor’s anniversary posts emphasize margin: emotional, financial, and operational. Still Rails on AWS, still bootstrapped, still saying no to complexity that makes founders hate their calendar.