From Idea in a Bar to Product with JJJ

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And now on with the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, I’m here with John James Jacoby or Jay Trip as he’s known in many circles or probably a bunch of other names. And we’re going to be talking about his new plugin, Publishizer today. John, how are you?

Jay Trip: Oh, I’m awesome. Thank you for having me. This is great. I appreciate it. How are you?

Joe Casabona: I’m great. Thank you very much for being on the show. We basically, I messaged John this morning and I said, “Hey, would you like to come on my show sometime?” And he said, “How’s today work?” So it all happened very quickly, which is nice because I’m trying to get a bunch of shows lined up before, you know, before my daughter is born in March, so.

Jay Trip: Oh, wow! That’s coming. That’s going to come up before you know it.

Joe Casabona: I can’t even believe it. At the time of this recording, we are like in the third trimester. I can’t believe we’re there already, so.

Jay Trip: Right. And that’s for me, if you don’t catch me on the day, I have a hard time pre-planning. Like on my way to WordCamp US, I didn’t book the hotel until I was in the car on the drive there.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jay Trip: Like, there’s not going to be a lack of hotels to sleep in. So why plan six months in advance if you don’t really have to? So when you were like, “Hey, do you want to be on?” I was like, “Sure. How are we, I’ve got time today. So let’s see if we can make it work.” So I appreciate you, you know, having the time and even making it happen. It’s awesome.

Joe Casabona: Oh, absolutely. And well, speaking of WordCamp US, this is, why don’t you give us like the, well, first of all, a little bit about who you are, and then how you came up with the idea for this plugin, which I think happened at WordCamp US, is that right?

Jay Trip: It did happen at WordCamp US. So I spend the majority of my time maintaining BuddyPress and bbPress and trying to lead some of the vision for both of those projects and helping out across wordpress.org, whenever I can, largely label myself for the past few years as an independent WordPress consultant.

For 2017, I’m going to try something a little bit different, which we can talk about later. But the idea for Publishizer came from WordCamp US, which is in Philadelphia this year, which was the first week in December. And hanging out with a very fun group of Germans. And so they were at the dinner table on Sunday after Contributor Day, talking about German words and phrases and the way you say things and how things work. And as those conversations generally tend to do, they steered toward swear words and words that sound weird and, you know, make the funny American say things and a German artist Schwartzenegger style way. And then that turned into the word ‘shizer’, the, you know, and so that was funny and then that became like a running joke for dinner. And so credit where it’s due,  the two of the guys were from multilingual press. One of them was Felix Arntz [inaudible 05:09.00] a lot of multi-site, a bunch of like really awesome, like contributors we’re hanging out at dinner. Jeff Dolan from Automatic,  a friend of mine for a long time, and Mike Lauren is there at the other end of the table. There are a lot of people there, there must’ve been 15 of us at the table.

So we took an Uber back to and what has been sort of a relatively lukewarm topic for Twitter and for bloggers with WordPress has been turning into a tweetstorm. Well, the response is usually you should go get a blog. If you have this much to say on Twitter, you should go post this on your blog instead. And so that got me thinking about how, and at the deep bar thoughts, after several, several stouts where the thoughts come up of like, well, maybe Twitter is actually the best place for this dialogue to happen because we turn comments off on our blogs and we don’t want to moderate the commentary on our own blogs. And so we can push our content to the place where people are. But if it’s just a link to your blog post, engagement isn’t always as high as if you draw the attention of an actual tweetstorm. I mean, the reality is that even though it’s terrible etiquette, it does tend to convert into a dialogue. And so rather than blog and then push it to your Twitter, which is, seems like, has been done a million times, why not take your blog post and split it up into parts and then just push them to Twitter directly and keep it backed up on your blog. That way you don’t have to archive the tweets from the other side. You can just write from your WordPress and let the code figure it out. And so we all were kind of like, “That’s really a good idea, and we can do this, and we could do that.” And you know, all of us at the bar, 15 of us drinking and laughing and thinking, it was really funny. And so then I was like, “I think I have the perfect name for this plugin actually.” And so as silence falls over the crowd, I said “Publishizer” And then, you know, there was a lot of laughter and everyone thought it was funny.

So I just, that was clearly the name that it had to be. And part of it was because when I worked at Automatic, I worked on Publicize for Jetpack. And so I had the, I’ve worked with the third-party APIs, I helped build part of Publicize. And so Publishizer gets to be the relevant side project to that. So it was,it was good. 

And from there [inaudible 07:31.58] had helped out with,  just some thoughts about,  some design stuff. And so we have some issues on GitHub and so for me, it was a funny project. And I haven’t, I mean, for lack of a better way to put it, I think it’s pretty rare that there’s like a project that is almost just fun. Again, it’s always like this solves a problem or I built this little thing to do this thing. But like the branding and the idea and the inception of all of us sitting around and like having fun and kind of vibing off this, like a really silly, terrible implementation of like a way to tear your blog apart and then deliver it in the worst, least most efficient way, was funny. And so it was something that was creatively nice to work on in. And because everyone else that was there was employed by somebody or works for an agency or a company or somebody else, there really wasn’t going to be another person that was going to have the time or the ability to work on it in a way that it would stay unaffiliated. So I was like, “Okay, I’m going. I hope everyone’s cool with me running with it, but credit where it’s due, this is like all of our ideas.” And so sitting at the table about Publishiza, publishizer.com and then kind of started taking some notes. And then other people crashed the party and then we kind of dropped it from there and it went away. So that’s the story of working…

Joe Casabona: Man, that’s, I mean, that’s awesome for like, for several reasons. First of all, you’re absolutely right about engagement, right? I mean, how many times have you posted something on, I don’t know if you’re on Facebook but how many times have you posted something on Facebook? I have comments open on my blog but engagement is way higher on Facebook. That’s just the medium people are comfortable with. And most of the time people are only reading the headline anyway. So not to throw my friends under the bus, but I mean, most people do. So…

Jay Trip: But that’s common. That’s common. Even the people that share links, right? Like that’s a proven fact. There are people that share stuff a lot of the time and they’re just resharing without ever reading what it is that they’re sharing. 

Joe Casabona: Right, right. Yep. More or, you know, I’m guilty of like re-tweeting and then reading the story. And, you know, and it’s too late by then. But, so I mean, this is such a fun and funny idea. And so the timespan, right? So WordCamp US happened the first weekend in December. This recording is happening kind of the third week or fourth week, maybe. I guess the third week in December. So from inception to launch was a very short timeframe.

Jay Trip: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So, you know, usually I ask, did you do research? Do you talk to people? It sounds like you talk to people, but, you know, did you do like any initial research to see if something like this existed or anything like that?

Jay Trip: So, I mean, preliminary, right? Like the bare minimum of research went into like, is this a space where someone is already trying to solve this problem? And then the answers seem to be like very quickly ‘No’, like there’s a lot of plugins to connect your accounts and identities together. And a lot of them for sharing your stuff and making sure that you’ve got all the metadata tie everything together nicely. But I think the idea of spamming your Twitter feed with all of your pieces is just such a terrible idea that no one even bothered with trying to do it at all.

And so believe it or not, I actually waited almost a full week and a half before I even wrote any code for it at all because it didn’t seem that conceptually difficult to do anymore. Twitter apps are easy to deploy and where believers who work at Automatic, who I worked on Jetpack with when I was there, open-sourced a library that is a WordPress plugin that’s called ‘Keyring’. And it is one of the coolest, most underutilized things like pieces of software that does exactly what you need for it to do that nobody would implement or use because it literally handles all of the connectivity between your WordPress and any third-party service that has a tokenized with one or two API endpoint. So it comes baked into it, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and Cora and all these things that just come with it. And all you have to do is just write on top of it and monitor your responses and do some of the icky stuff. But that’s all the implementation details. So it was like, “Okay, well, all that I need to do is kind of imagine how I’m going to tie this into a WordPress interface and how do I make this as easy and unobtrusive as possible.” 

And then I had a plugin that it’s still relatively popular. I think it’s got 50,000 installs called a Post Type Switcher. And so it seemed logical to take a similar interface approach to add a little drop down to the same area of the publishment meta box where you would decide whether or not you want to take this blog post and push it to Twitter through Publishizer. 

And so I had some interface already built and it was easy to say, “Okay, well, we can kind of bolt these things together in this way.” and then it was like putting a little bit of flair on it. So the one thing that came up at the bar, which is well, probably it will probably change as people start to take this a little more seriously, or as it becomes a tool that people actually decide that they want to use, instead of it just being something that’s kind of funny and goofy is a, I didn’t want there to be a hashtag for Publishizer. I didn’t want it to include like too much spammy stuff. I wanted it to be your blog posts split apart and that was it. And so the way that like a hashtag became a thing happened very organically. So I thought, well, maybe we just insert some kind of control character into the tweet. Like if it’s a poo emoji or a storm cloud or something that says like, this is, this thing happening. And people will think it’s funny cause they don’t know what it is and people will recognize it once they do know what it is. And so, since tweetstorms are perceived as negative things, then the poop storm together, a character is sort of a natural fit. And so in the Publishizer, when you decide that you’re going to take your blog posts and split it apart and push it to Twitter, it changes the publish button into the poo emoji in the store cloud and so it kind of says like, “Hey, you’re about to really bother some people on Twitter with what it is that you’re about to say.” And then the V one of what it is now is really as simple as it could possibly be. You hit publish, you hit the poo store button and then I trim out all of the links and images and anything that might be HTML. We strip tags, everything. 

PHP conveniently has a function called a ‘board rep’ and so that lets me break a paragraph of text up into a text by word with a minimum number of characters. And so it’s exactly what it is that we would need for this to do. And so I word wrap it to 119, which was kind of a guess. It gives some room for the control characters in the emoji, plus a hyphen, and then the ellipsis at the end, and give or take if there’s like a screw-up, and then make the emoji filterable. And there’s a filter If you want to add a link to your blog post at the end. Now, things that like developers could turn on and off if they care. But there’s no settings interface yet. There’s nothing to it. It’s literally just pushing out a tweet, sleep for two seconds, push out another part, sleep for two seconds until all the tweets are done. And that’s it. And that’s all there is. So it was literally the simplest way to get this out the door. 

And I think because Dave Weiner and a few others have been trying to like solve this like distribution publication problem of like, I have this blog or I have these things to say and Twitter or Facebook or the engaging places, but there are other people that are kind of a hot, hot-ish topic. And so it seemed really cool at the bar and then it seemed even funnier in reality. And so, yeah, so then, there are some issues on GitHub on ways that we might extend it or enhance it or turn it into something else. And so, yeah. That’s where it’s at. 

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. And I mean, that’s fantastic. I just love that. Like you came up with something and then like, you know, essentially a week of coding, “later you have the minimum viable product”. And it answers, I think there could probably be, you know, and this would take longer than, you know, the next 15 minutes or whatever we have. But you know, there’s a bigger conversation around, like what I mean controlling where you publish, owning your content and stuff like that. I know the WordPress community has just like a very weird vendetta against the medium. I’ve said this before. Maybe this will be my first poo storm, you know, on my blog. It’s just, it’s very weird because it’s like, well, the medium does this and we can’t do everything WordPress does. And I’m like, “I don’t really think they’re the same.” But you know, one of the big questions is, you know, do you really own your content on medium and Twitter and Facebook? So this is very cool. You can tweet a bunch from your blog posts, which you thought, which also seems like an easier interface, especially if you’re like trying to like links like I don’t know, Tweet Part. Tweet Part has like, or you can reply to yourself or a topic. And I don’t really know what the topic thing is. 

Jay Trip: Yeah, I figured it out, but I don’t know that. I don’t know that it’s a thing that makes sense for like a Tweetstorm idea. I think that maybe Twitter’s like the native answer to try and to solve that problem. But I think that the idea of like the very organic implementation of replying to yourself and threading that thing is familiar enough where anyone that understands that, that’s what you have to do in Twitter is going to do that because it just, it feels the most natural. At first, I didn’t know because when I reply to myself on Twitter, I almost always do the original tweet. I don’t reply to the reply of the reply to the reply, but that’s the way that you’re actually supposed to thread them. So I’d hide, you know, that was the first bug in Publishizer, was that I was grabbing the idea of the first tweet and not hooking into the subsequent tweets of every response. So the threading for a few days was wrong. But, you know, for the several people who noticed or cared, it didn’t really seem like a big deal.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So, that’s cool too. So it doesn’t just send out tweets, rapid-fire. It threads them for you. 

Jay Trip: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: So cool.

Jay Trip: And so that’s part of the problem actually, it was the hardest engineering part of it. Aside from maybe figuring out how to break the text apart in a way that would always fit on Twitter is, and this is actually where the next UX enhancement should come, that when you hit publish, it’s a blocking process. PHP is just looping through your code, through your blog posts, and waiting for a few seconds so that Twitter doesn’t throttle you.  So if you have a long blog post that’s going to get broken up into 30 parts and it waits for two seconds for each part, you’re at the risk of timing out over a minute while it sits there and pushes all these tweets out. So the obvious next thing to do would be to have some sort of interstitial or a modal that is an Ajax process that can give some feedback to the user to show that, you know, tweet number 22 out of 30 is on its way out and we got a response back and here’s the next one. And here’s the next one that would give you the option to even cancel the Tweetstorm if you have like post-storm remorse where you’re like, “This is terrible and I want to stop this and go back and delete them.” You know, there’s an opportunity there to improve the experience of this. But I think for a V1 to get it in the hands of people to start playing with the idea, was a lot of fun.

And so I’ve seen people like uses it now, like just organically in the wild. And it’s like, “Oh my gosh! It’s alive. We’re not playing with this idea.” And so I always get excited when I see like a BuddyPress site or a bbPress site in the wild. I don’t really get as excited when it’s WordPress. I mean, I try to contribute a lot to WordPress, but WordPress is everywhere so I’m not, I do the like, “Hey, you’re using WordPress. That’s cool.” But when it’s like a BuddyPress or bbPress install, or someone’s using some other weird plugins, it’s like “Oh, you’re like using this one little niche thing is really exciting.” It’s really exciting for me. It makes it all feel more fun and makes it that helps you remember, like why it’s like supposed to be fun.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. And so it’s cool you have a V1, you’re thinking about enhancements. What do you think about for, I mean, we’ve talked a ton about like how you built it and kind of the engineering side of it, but, you know, is this something that you think will remain a side project, or do you see, like, do you see a way to make money… 

Jay Trip: on it? I guess…

Joe Casabona: which is like a very, not open-source kind of question to ask, but I mean, it’s, you know?

Jay Trip: So if there is a way, if there is a way to monetize it, if there are a few obvious ways, I don’t know that any of those ways are ways that I, that like fit my experience or comfort level with how stuff works. And so if it happens, I would need help from someone who has a better vision for what that looks like and I’m open to that idea. But one of the jokes, one of the running jokes was that,  if there was a Saas version of this, we would have ‘shiza’ as a service. And so that was like, “Oh my gosh! We absolutely have to do that.” And I think the obvious way is to have like publishizer.com be the place where this plugin just quickly connects. And then we maintain or monitor the connection between somebody’s WordPress and their Twitter account or whatever account that may be around in the future. 

And then the value of the product comes from the data that we have in those connections and being able to see the communication that’s going on there. And so the value isn’t in the like pay 99 cents a month to have access to this thing. And it isn’t in the buy this tool for a one-time purchase or a yearly license. Like, I don’t know that this idea fits any of those models. And honestly, aside from the like 15 times that I’ve talked to folks like Pippin Williamson about like how all this stuff works, I still don’t understand like how to monetize products like that. I’m happy that people do understand it, but I just, it blows my mind that that’s really is that successful. 

So I think, the money comes from the data comes from seeing who’s using it and what they’re publishing and funneling it through a place, which is a little big brother, creepy-ish, kinda. And so it doesn’t match my comfort level but I understand the need for it. And if you want to keep it going, and if it’s providing a valuable service, then people hopefully get something out of it. So the one thing with Jetpack and Publicize was that connecting your WordPress to all these third-party services to distribute your content was just really hard to do. And it still is kind of if you’re going to maintain and monitor all those connections. And so that’s where Publicize and Jetpack really came in and like, made that awesome and easy for everybody. And so I think the thing that is cool about the idea of trying to make this a service is that it switches it from making the connections easy to then being like the connection is a solved problem. But now let’s make the distribution of this content like really honed in on solving one specific problem. And so that’s cool. But once you build that, or once it’s built into Publishizer makes it instantly easy for anyone to duplicate or for them to pour into Jetpack or anything else if it becomes a thing that’s actually a useful tool. So even building it or trying to do it independently means that at a certain scale, the best-case scenario is to just get totally walked over by something that has like a billion times more market share than my one little idea.

So I think, honestly, I think it stays a little bit of a side project. Like I think it stays fun and kind of playful until really someone approaches or says like, “I am the person who’s willing to try” and like, turn this into an actual thing that can help you, or help other people. And hosting is cheap, but just sits there and does nothing. And so it’s fine. but I don’t know. I mean, it’s a, who knows what the future holds, I guess.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s really cool. And so it’s, you know, this is just another one of your many contributions to the open-source community. And I know something that you kind of hinted at the beginning of the show that I’d really like to kind of, we can close out the show this way is you know, you’re, you’re trying something different for 2017 or you kind of already launched it, but this is a post WordCamp US going into 2017 sort of way to contribute, but also support yourself, is that right? 

Jay Trip: That’s right. So the idea is depending on who the audience is and who I’m trying to talk with this about. The direction that I approach the status has been, it has been different for a couple of different audiences, but I think the…some people will look at my idea and consider it like version two of my Indiegogo campaign from a few years ago. But I think the problem that I’ve identified since being independent and working and contributing on WordPress for the past two years is that there’s a lot of  the ramp-up period for individuals or companies, small companies, big companies to get involved in the WordPress community. Or uncore, or design, or accessibility, or translations, or the websites or anything else takes time now. There is enough going on that it isn’t as easy to get involved. I mean, it’s never been easier to get involved, but it’s the period of time for you to decide like where you fit and what you’re going to be able to do and how much time you’re gonna be able to spend. And is this going to be a good return on my time and I’m not going to get in the way? A lot of it is just like, It’s like jumping into a moving car when there are 50 moving cars between every division and a fraction of WordPress core. Plus there are 14 years now of history of core track tickets. And why was this decision made and how far back does this go? And I’ve been around for a long time now. And so I can kind of remember and see a lot of this stuff. Plus, I think I understand it pretty well, what like Automatic as a company, what Matt’s sort of vision might be a little bit and what a big company like Automatic, what they might look or feel or think about some of these things are going on in the community. 

And I don’t want to speak for anybody. But I think that I can share like relatively closely with people who don’t have the time or can’t afford the time to ramp up to say, “Okay, well, I can help you. I can help you get ramped up.” Like this affects multi-site in this way because this is how it affects .org or .com or whatever else. Or this is the team and this is the person of what you want to do is help with the design or GPL law or whatever else that like I can help people navigate where they need to go up to and including patching security vulnerabilities. Or getting people in contact with people from other companies or organizations. So the idea loosely is to be like a WordPress community ambassador to be someone who’s not really affiliated with anybody but is speaking on behalf of you know, everyone that is trying to do good and the right thing to shepherd things along. And then try and report back on what it is that we’re able to do to push the ball forward. And so, the idea is to have industry sponsors so hosting companies or,  independent companies or individuals that would like to try and either improve WordPress for everyone in a specific way or, just need help trying to get their employees or volunteers ramped up for a fire for the future type of initiative. Or I can come in and help out for a week and say, this is the best way to do it. What are you into? What are your passions? What are your goals? And then I can guide them through that process to get them set up and be a liaison for them in the middle and be a resource to answer any questions that they might have. And so sort of experimental. It’s sort of trying to identify and solve a need, like at the same time. And so I think there’s some risk involved there, but at WordCamp US, the response was extremely positive. 

So several conversations and things in the works with a bunch of brand names and companies and people that everyone would recognize that seem to be pretty much behind the idea and supportive of it. So I’m kind of in the process of revising the pitch document and getting some feedback from everybody to make sure that the tone is right and that this makes sense and that it’s kind of covering all the bases.

And so what’s on my website now is sort of a living doc, it’s just on jjj.blog. There’s probably a post somewhere that somebody could find. It’s sort of, I’ve nicknamed at 100 forever since we’ve got this whole fight for the future thing but it could be named anything. It really doesn’t matter. It was just mostly me trying to be playful and come up with something that might work.

So that’s the idea. And hopefully, you know, the supporters or sponsors find enough value in it where this ends up being a sustainable position in the WordPress community for me or anybody else. I mean, it could, and I might not be the most effective person for this role, but I think that we’re at a size now, and there are enough people that are involved now were sometimes trying to do the right thing isn’t the right thing and you don’t know what until after you already do the wrong thing. And if I can, if I can help someone or be on task or on a queue or on a retainer or whatever is somebody wants to look at it as to be able to help someone as a, to filter something through or to run an idea past or to get somebody involved in something, then I’ve done that pretty successfully through BuddyPress, and bbPress, and WordCamp, and the summits, and everything.

And so part of this is just me deciding to, not necessarily take a step from development full-time, but to focus more on getting everyone in a comfortable, happy level headed kind of place. And ideally trying to shepherd some of the deeper technical support security scaling multi-site weird stuff that I’m already working on, at the same time.

Joe Casabona: Well that, I mean, that sounds great. And it sounds like it’s, you know, a win-win for both parties involved. You know, if I have a company and I want to contribute to WordPress, but I don’t want to pay one of my employees to do it full time or even, you know, 20% of their week or something like that, I can keep them on billable work while you know, maybe you contribute or you show one of us how to contribute or…So that sounds fantastic. I’ll link your blog post in the show notes so if anybody listening wants to go read that they totally can. And, well, we’re at the end of the show here and I always like to ask my guests one final question and that is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jay Trip: Oh, goodness! Trade secrets. So I have one, but I don’t know that it’s a big secret and I don’t know that I would be breaking any rules or any hearts by sharing it. But it’s, one of the first conversations that I had with Matt when we met in 2007 or eight, was around the idea of using BuddyPress and the blogs component to be what is essentially now like Jetpacks interface for switching between sites. And so that’s part of the reason kind of why the BuddyPress blogs component is sort of hollow is because all of the direction and work and stuff went into Jetpack and the site switcher and the connection to .com instead of the original thought would have been to have those connections happen on wordpress.org or through Gravatar or some other like the middle place. Cause this was back when DIAspora, that old-like distributed social network platform was kind of a thing. And people were talking about how to break out of the silos of communication. 

And so my answer to Matt when we were sitting down and talking about it was, that is, that you can’t. You really truly can’t distribute that type of thing. You do have to, you always end up with a hub, a middle ground where people connect stuff too. And if you’re going to have a lot of separate WordPress or BuddyPress silos,  then you have to connect them together somewhere. And it depends on if it’s the business side for .com or if it’s the spiritual side for .org. and this up to and includes BuddyPress may still even have some code in the group’s component where we had whitelisted WP hyphen as like a namespace for blogging groups to be able to like exist inside of BuddyPress as the interface for connecting sites together for tablet, blogging buddies. And, I don’t know if we took that out or not, but I don’t know that it’s a big secret, but I don’t know that it’s a thing that we have talked about, or, you know, it goes back so far and then everything went in a different direction. 

And wordpress.org infrastructure wasn’t really designed to scale for all that type of connectivity and .com was. So, you know, it was, it made more sense to invest company dollars into solving a problem at that scale. So it’s possible, right? Like with Matt being Matt, and I know we’re almost out of time, so I don’t want to be too long. But, imagine that, you know, Matt is, as an individual has been, he’s invented a lot. He’s given a lot, he’s a very generous person. And so for all of the love or hate that someone in his position may receive on any given day, it is a hundred percent possible that it 10 years from now when WordPress multi-site doesn’t need to be really a thing and .com doesn’t really need to be a thing because all of these separate WordPress’s are kind of fabric together with Jetpack and connecting them all separately that the way that people interact with multiple WordPress sites and logging in and switching between them and writing blog posts from one to the other could be a completely different experience that we’ve talked about and can kind of imagine. But that is not the way that WordPress is sort of set up or the way that people use it today. So it could be really, really interesting. I think it’ll be pretty fascinating and fun. 

Joe Casabona: Awesome.

Jay Trip: That’s my, that’s my trade secret.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That’s really cool. And it kind of puts a bow on the conversation that we’ve been having really nicely about, you know, some unified platform for publishing and how things connect.

So Jay Trip, thank you very, very much for joining me today.

Jay Trip: You’re welcome. Anytime. Happy to do it. Thanks for inviting me. It was just always a pleasure.

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. I want to tell you about a new book I wrote with my good friend, Matt Medeiros of Matt Report, called the Podcast Starter Kit. It’s a QA-style book that tells you exactly what you need to get up and running with your own podcast. 

I’ve had lots of fun over the last several months with How I Built It and I want to share what I’ve learned with anybody looking to start their own podcast.

In the book, Matt and I try our hand at answering 23 questions that you need to ask yourself before you get up and running. We also include several resources, our favorite equipment, and a checklist at the end. Head over to the podcastbook.com to check it out. It’s only $24 and it’ll save you hours of time researching the right tools, where to upload your podcast, how to run a good interview and a lot more. That’s the podcastbook.com.

Thanks so much for listening, and thanks to our great guests and fantastic sponsors. If you liked the show, please rate it and subscribe on iTunes in Google Play or whatever your podcast app choices. If you have any questions, be sure to reach out at streamlined.fm.

And finally, until next week, get out there and build something.