Makers Weekly

Remote work is here to stay. Justin and his team are pioneers in the space building tools to help teams do their best remote work.

Authpack ( https://authpack.io/ ) is a turnkey user login and payment system for web projects. Jack and I have a great chat about developer enablement and why keeping it simple is a feature :) *Stack* Frontend = React, TypeScript, Emotion. Backend = TypeScript, GraphQL, Custom build. Client side is open source: https://github.com/jackrobertscott/authpack-client *Apps and tools he uses religiously:* Notion, VS Code, Adobe XD, Webflow, Sentry. Pretty excited to see how Webflow pushes the no-code movement forward! *Social* Twitter: @jacrobsco ( https://twitter.com/jacrobsco ) & @authpack ( https://twitter.com/authpack )

TruePublic ( https://truepublic.com/ ) allows users to anonymously share opinions --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and see what others think based on their gender, age, race, location, and political leaning. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Tools:* Mixpanel, Shift, Any.do, Calm App, Slack, Streak CRM, Discord Chat, Google Hangouts, Trello. ** *Social* * twitter.com/TruePublicApp ( https://twitter.com/TruePublicApp ) * https://www.facebook.com/TruePublicApp *Tech Stack* * React JS for Web * PostgreSQL * MongoDB * Redis * ElasticSearch * RabbitMQ * Kafka * Spring Boot, Spring Data, JPA, Hibernate, Jersey *Dev Ops and Infrastructure* * Jenkins * Nexus * Gradle * Docker, Docker Swarm * NewRelic * ELK Stack * AWS

I love this episode and product, you will to! Greg and I talk about how right place, right time, right product can really help your app get early exposure. He got a shoutout from Suhail ( https://twitter.com/Suhail ) 's (founder of Mixpanel and Mighty) "Shipping Friday" tweets (earlier this summer, Suhail would feature a Maker who recently shipped product). From that point on, Punkt ( https://punktapp.me/ ) was off to the races. Punkt has also been featured in the AppStore. *Product Description* Punkt is a private and secure one-sentence journaling app for iOS. One sentence a day helps you to learn more about yourself. The app makes it easy to reflect on emotions, weaknesses and driving factors in your life. It’s the perfect app to form a journaling habit and become a tiny bit happier in your life. The app is based on a simple but joyful design and focuses on your privacy. No login, no ads, no tracking frameworks or whatsoever are included in the app. It’s all about you and your stories. *Tech stack* Designs were made in Sketch. Development done in Xcode. Data is stored on the device and in private iCloud container. *Tools* RevenueCat has to be mentioned here. It makes it super easy to integrate subscriptions or IAP in your app. Other than that no tracking tools, crash reporting frameworks or whatsoever. No one but the user should have access to the data / content of the app. *Social media handles* Personal: @iPGregor (Twitter), gregor.pichler (Instagram) App: @punktapp With terabytes of ❤️ - Dan

We talk about how to handle employee engagement in a remote world. *Topics include:* Employee feedback & engagement platform for remote teams *Tools used:* Slack app is Python, Serverless - AWS Lambda, Webflow for marketing site *Technologies:* Hyper terminal + VS Code deeply integration for code. Love notion for documentation. iA writer for writing blog posts. Slack for communication. Figma for design.

In this episode I sit down with Dr. Zack Abbott, founder of ZBiotics, the world’s first ever genetically engineered probiotic (first user case: curing hangovers). They're a Y-Combinator company and have raised capital from from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley to support their cutting edge science and mission. This episode was recorded a few months ago at their SF headquarters before their product was in market. They have since launched and are really making a splash. I tried the product pre-launch and saw noticeable results (although I didn’t push the limits of the use case, cheers

A super techy jam with Aparna Dhinakaran, Founder of Monitor ML. We talk about everything machine learning, artificial intelligence and bias that machines inherit from their makers, humans!Monitor ML tracks the performance of models throughout their lifecycle and connects them to business metrics. They support model tracking, metric logging/analysis/alerting and production event logging. You choose the framework, they monitor the machine learning model.

CALA is the world's first fashion house technology that makes it easy to design, produce, and deliver fully-custom apparel. Ryan brings a ton of premium design expertise as the first principal designer at one of Silicon Valley's most adored startups, Superhuman.CALA offers design assistance, material sourcing, and sampling. With powerful features like in-app notifications, task management, and real-time commenting — so you can maximize productivity in the studio or on the go. Whether you're looking to screen print tees or embroider evening wear, CALA offers you the couture approach of the best fashion houses with the manufacturing capability and speed of the largest mass-market players.Tech Stack: TypeScript, node.js, React, and PostgreSQLTooling:Notion: Internal process documentation and personal notes/ideationTypeform: PMF/NPS survey results and internal product feedbackAirtable: Tracking feedback and customer profilesWebflow: Marketing/landing pagesFigma: All things digital designLinear: Issue tracking and prioritization**Are.na:** Sourcing inspiration and moodboard creationYou can find Ryan below: https://www.instagram.com/nexpure/https://twitter.com/RBTRYNhttps://ryanw.co/With terabytes of ❤️- Dan

In this episode, we speak with Jonathan Parisot (calling in from Paris

In this episode, we speak with Justin Mitchell, founder of SoFriendly who recently launched his new award-winning product, YAC (yelling across cubicles). YAC won Product Hunt's Maker Festival in 2018 as a weekend side project, he then received overwhelming amounts of demand for YAC and needed to act fast!Justin reveals tons of useful insights including:

In this episode, we jam with Laura Simpson to discuss her newly launched product, Side Door. Laura and her co-founder, Dan Mangan (Juno award-winning, world-touring singer-songwriter from Vancouver) launched Side Door to empower and build local communities around live performances.We cover a medley of topics including:

Sam had basically excepted that he would be a starving documentary filmmaker. While in his tent in Tanzania on a shoot, he starting tinkering with programming to solve a problem his friend was having. They needed a way to manage time tracking for hourly workers easily. This side project turned into SINC, a rapidly growing startup that helps thousands of companies understand and manage the variable wage costs associated with having large populations of highly-skilled hourly employees.Technologies and topics covered in this episode:When is your MVP actually ready?Hybrid mobile technologies -> React and React NativeFirebase and AppEngine - lightweight and turnkey infrastructure as a serviceAppStore Optimization (ASO)How to think about customer acquisition for your mobile app

In this episode, I sit down with Darren Chait, Founder/COO of Hugo, at their San Francisco headquarters. Hugo is a connected meeting notes platform that integrates with all your favorite tools. Darren started Hugo to solve the problem of creating a more open and collaborative team culture. We discuss product analytics, pricing strategies, the importance of storytelling and much more! A few highlights and callouts from the episode

Welcome to episode NINE! On this episode I spend some quality time with the ultimate goofball, Dennis Roady!We talk about his journey to creating multiple content streams that reach MILLIONS of fans. To name a few checkout: How to Prank it UpPrank Your FriendsDennis Roady GamesPrankKits.comIn this episode we geek out on:- 

In this episode, I sat down with Cody Candee at the beautiful HERE Collective (that's us in the pic above with his co-founder). We have a detailed conversation about how he tested and launched Bounce, the next generation of bag and luggage storage. Cody have us the scoop on the following: rapid prototypingtesting demand for your productassumption testingworking through operational challengesand much moreExtra ExtraRapid Prototyping - this is a method of testing interfaces and customer experiences before you invest the time into building them. Click this link to learn the different types of prototyping and other best practices.Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) (17:50) & Churn (19:35) - Having a deep understanding of how much it costs to acquire new customers is critical to building your financial model. Another important piece is understanding how you retain users, or lose them (churn). Knowing your retention curves can help you understand the lifetime value of each customer, at which point you'll know exactly how much you can pay to acquire each new customer profitably. Bill Gurley wrote an excellent article that provides the key terms and math behind calculating your customer LTV. Notable MentionsAdwords (4:50) - Cody used Google Adwords to test demand for his product by running ads before the product was live. By running ads he could understand search volumes and click-through-rates.Google X (6:10) - Google's entity that focuses on "moonshot" ideas. Solving the world's hardest problems.NYC Citi Bikes (6:50) - NYC's urban bike program.Facebook Messenger Chat Bot (9:15) - you can build programs to interact with users through FB's messenger appStripe (9:35) - credit card processor for internet productsElixir (10:50) - modern programming languageReact (10:55) - modern Javascript framework for developing web interfaces. See ReactNative for mobileLean Startup (12:22) - a product development methodology (and book) that focuses on rapid prototyping and constant product iteration to capture learnings cheap, fast, and often.Google Analytics (13:30) - analytics platform that gives you visibility into how people find and interact with your websiteMixpanel (13:45) - product analytics toolSegment (13:45) - help you get the most utility out of your customer data

In this episode I sit down with one of Phoenix’s fastest growing comedians and producer of the city’s hottest comedy shows, Michael Turner. We talk about how he got This Week Sucks Tonight off the ground and scaled into one of the best comedy rooms in Phoenix, and has since taken the show on tour.We also discuss:How speaking at his best friend’s funeral was a fundamental moment in identifying his purpose in life, comedy

In this episode we hang with Philip Thomas, he shares an inspiring story about how his first failed startup gave him the learnings needed to launch Moonlight, which is bootstrapped and rapidly growing.We discuss many interesting topics with Philip including:when to quit working on an idea, and move onthe importance of getting to know your early users how to validate your idea with data before building anythingways to start a software business and get revenue, before writing codethe importance of experimenting with different pricing modelsand much more!Extra Extra - go deeper on topics from this episodePricing and rake strategies for marketplaces - Bill Gurley, legendary VC @ Benchmark, published this excellent piece on how to approach pricing as a marketplace. My last startup was a marketplace, I would reference this often when modeling different pricing strategies. It's very tricky to keep your rake low to reduce supply-side friction, while also maintaining favorable unit economics to acquire both the supply and demand sides of your marketplace. Bill knows marketplaces very well given years of experience in the space, he was really early in cos like eBay, Uber, and others. Great book about Bill and the founding of Benchmark, eBoys.Remote work is the new LaCroix in 2019 - let that one sink in... companies are becoming more and more comfortable hiring remote workers. This is what allows for products like Moonlight to thrive. Here's a list of 900+ Startups that are hiring remotely.Notable MentionsStripe (1:40) - credit card processor for internet productsOpenDNS (2:20) - where Philip started engineering, they provide consumers with safer, faster, and more reliable internet in their homes. (acquired by Cisco in 2015)Y-Combinator (2:50) - the most prestigious startup incubator in the worldSquarespace (7:40) - modern no-code website builderTypeform (7:45) - the future of web forms and surveysZappier (9:25) - allows you to connect and automate work-flows between popular internet apps (awesome tool)Calendly (10:25) - a tool for scheduling meetings to your G-Cal, I use this regularly to avoid back/forth email schedulingPaid Labs (11:28) - invoicing tool, acquired by Auction MobilityStripe Invoicing (11:30) - Stripe has an awesome suite of tools for end-to-end payment management. For invoicing specifically, hit the link and scroll down to the "Modern invoice made easy" sectionPayable.com (11:40) - nifty tool for paying contractors, it manages all of the tax paperwork (W-9's and 1099's)Dogfooding concept (12:12) - it's a concept that refers to teams that use their own products to do business. There have been multiple references to this concept from major cos like Microsoft and Amazon. Hit the link for more details and referencesStripe Connect(13:00) - this is Stripe's tool for managing the flow of cash for marketplaces. It makes it easy for platforms to take payments and manage pass-through funds to vendors on a marketplace. (think Uber and drivers... you pay Uber, then Uber pays drivers and takes a cut)Lean Startup (14:08) - a product development methodology (and book) that focuses on rapid prototyping and constant product iteration with the goal to capture learnings cheap, fast, and oftenHigh Growth Handbook (19:35) - a book written by legendary angel investor and executive, Elad Gil about the common challenges the best high-growth companies have encountered and overcame to be successfulProduct Hunt (25:40) - a daily list of new products around the webShow HN (25:42) - a way to share something you've made with the hacker news communityIndie VC & Permissionless Entrepreneurship (27:00) - Indie VC is a venture capital firm that has spearheaded a new type of deal structure for startups. Instead of giving up huge chunks of equity in exchange for an investment, you can pay returns with your companies revenueIt's with tons of love ❤️ that I ask you... if you find this interesting at all and want to support this project, please pass this along to a few friends by forwarding this email or text them a link to the podcast. Thank you and enjoy!

In this episode, we kick it with Owen Williams, most recognized for his previous work as an editor at The Next Web and maker of the well-regarded technology newsletter re:Charged. From his broad experience as a journalist and software engineer, we’re going to discuss his latest product launch, Write Together.We cover a broad range of topics including:the evolution of content creationwhy it's important to write every dayPHP frameworkshis super nifty Slack hackand much moreLean more about Makers Weekly and what we're working on here.Notable MentionsVanmoof (2:45) - awesome futuristic smart bikesProduct Hunt (3:19) - a daily list of new products around the webRyan Hoover (11:47) - founder of Product HuntMedium (6:25) - a modern, social blogging platformGithub streaks (8:10) - a visual indicator of the frequency a developer commits code to a projectLean Startup (12:30) - a product development methodology (and book) that focuses on rapid prototyping and constant product iteration with the goal to capture learnings cheap, fast, and often.React (14:35) - a modern Javascript framework for developing web interfaces. See ReactNative for mobileLaravel and their billing framework, Cashier (14:50)Getstream (15:39) - out of the box social networking features, like news feeds and timelines.Stripe (16:10) - credit card processor for internet productsSegment (16:11) - data analytics platformChart Mogul (16:17) - out of the box operations portal for SaaS businessesBear Metrics (16:27) - similar to Chart Mogul but a bit more robust and more expensiveGoogle's Startup Program (16:43) - free cloud hosting!!Sentry (17:15) - Error tracking, Owen integrates with Slack for alertsSlack (17:16) - Owen routes all of his alerts into a Slack via their API, check out all slack integrationsMailChimp (23:00) - email distribution and marketing platformGoogle Reader (23:16) - RIPExtra ExtraHow do you become a better writer? Well, you need to write. This is the premise of the Write Together product. Here's a great article (and interesting story) about how consistent writing can provide meaningful benefits over time; it has over 20k claps on Medium. I specifically enjoyed the sections called "Be Prolific" and "Learn to Recognize Patterns."Network effects (23:16) - in the product development world, this is a term that refers to features that incrementally get better (or provide greater value) the more they're used. If you're working on a product, this is a must-know concept. Here's the perfect resource to learn all about network effects (check out the slide deck at the bottom).It's with tons of love that I ask you... if you find this interesting at all and want to support this project, please pass this along to a few friends. Thank you and enjoy!

Dan shares the "why" of Makers Weekly and what to expect in future episodes.To learn more about what we're about --> https://makersweekly.io/

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