John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He’s early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John’s acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.
Featuring
Sponsors
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AssemblyAI – Turn voice data into summaries with AssemblyAI’s leading Speech AI models. Built by AI experts, their Speech AI models include accurate speech-to-text for voice data (such as calls, virtual meetings, and podcasts), speaker detection, sentiment analysis, chapter detection, PII redaction, and more.
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Notes & Links
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | This week on The Changelog | 01:27 |
| 2 | 01:27 | Sponsor: Sentry | 03:25 |
| 3 | 04:52 | The acquisition of a lifetime | 11:29 |
| 4 | 16:21 | Scaling words with friends | 03:59 |
| 5 | 20:20 | Saturation in the podcast space | 13:25 |
| 6 | 33:44 | Sponsor: Coder.com | 02:09 |
| 7 | 35:54 | Setting the valuation | 05:29 |
| 8 | 41:23 | Multiples are hard | 02:30 |
| 9 | 43:53 | Is this your biggest risk? | 05:25 |
| 10 | 49:18 | This could be the hub to your spokes | 04:28 |
| 11 | 53:46 | Enter Keenan Feldspar and the Keenan Vortex | 03:10 |
| 12 | 56:56 | Could this be bigger? | 01:08 |
| 13 | 58:04 | The right number of businesses | 05:42 |
| 14 | 1:03:46 | Tiny buy mode | 03:45 |
| 15 | 1:07:32 | Old and gray | 02:23 |
| 16 | 1:09:55 | Hypothesizing from a lily pad | 02:51 |
| 17 | 1:12:46 | Sponsor: AssemblyAI | 02:17 |
| 18 | 1:15:03 | Sponsor: Unblocked | 01:58 |
| 19 | 1:17:01 | Comfortable in a Rails world | 03:08 |
| 20 | 1:20:09 | Not a Rails world? | 02:00 |
| 21 | 1:22:08 | Predictability is key | 02:15 |
| 22 | 1:24:23 | What if you have no more money? | 05:38 |
| 23 | 1:30:01 | A pool of angels | 00:19 |
| 24 | 1:30:19 | What if it goes to ZERO? | 02:22 |
| 25 | 1:32:41 | We're "long" on podcasting | 01:53 |
| 26 | 1:34:35 | We're trying to be calculated | 01:14 |
| 27 | 1:35:49 | There's a BIG upside | 02:24 |
| 28 | 1:38:13 | Is it a Rails world? | 02:37 |
| 29 | 1:40:50 | Live podcasting at conferences | 02:00 |
| 30 | 1:42:50 | Just like Less Conf | 01:23 |
| 31 | 1:44:13 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 02:25 |