Justin Jackson runs a company that serves 34,000 podcasts - and he built it with one co-founder, $10,000, and no investors.
The conventional startup story runs like this: raise money, move fast, break things, exit. Justin Jackson's story runs the other way. He started a snowboard shop in rural Alberta, went $80,000 into debt when it failed, spent years managing a non-profit, stumbled into software, and eventually built a bootstrapped podcast hosting platform that's never had a down month in six years of operation.
That platform is Transistor.fm. It's not the biggest podcast host. It's probably not the one you've heard of if you're new to podcasting. But it's the one that co-founder Jon Buda and Jackson built from $33 in first-month revenue to $375,000 in monthly recurring revenue - without a single outside dollar, without firing anyone, without sacrificing a Sunday afternoon to a board update.
Jackson lives in Vernon, British Columbia, a city of about 40,000 people in the Okanagan wine country. He snowboards at Silverstar. He plays piano. He's been going to more live jazz shows than any year of his life. He has four children and a wife named Lorinda he's been with since 2001. He left Twitter/X in 2025 and says he feels great about it.
He is, by his own description, someone who almost never made it. There was a stretch in 2016 and 2017 where he was working five hours per week, savings depleted, therapy newly started. The thing that got him through was not hustle or grit - it was a specific, contrarian argument: that the market you choose matters more than how hard you work.
He proved the argument by choosing podcast hosting in 2018, when the space was crowded but not yet locked down, and RSS was still open, and the question of whether independent creators could run sustainable podcasting businesses was genuinely unsettled. Eight years later, Transistor hosts the Vegas Golden Knights' podcast, VH1's content, and roughly 34,000 other shows. It's the 13th largest podcast platform in the world, run by a team of seven people who work regular hours and take weekends off.
Jackson writes about all of this publicly - the revenue numbers, the product decisions, the hard months and the easy ones. The "Build Your SaaS" podcast he and Buda have recorded since 2018 is an unedited documentary of what it actually looks like to start a software company from nothing and keep it running. There's no narrative cleanup. There are arguments, doubts, and months where nothing works. There are also stretches of quiet growth that look, in retrospect, like what compounding actually feels like in real time.
The indie hacker movement has plenty of founders who made their money and then wrote a newsletter about it. Jackson is something rarer: someone who was building in public before building in public had a name, who documented the $33 month alongside the $375K month, and who has spent a decade arguing - loudly, with data - that the VC consensus about what makes a company worth building is simply wrong.