- Published on
Episode 13 of Morning Maker Show: Running on coffee & spilling the beans
- Authors
- Name
- Morning Maker Show
Summary
In this lively episode, Dan and Sandra tackle the complexities of being solo entrepreneurs. From time zone struggles to coffee-fueled discussions, they explore exciting indie projects one by one. Discover the Morning Maker Show's take on B2B success, unconventional outreach methods, and the surprising world of in-browser Mario Kart. Plus, gain insights on taking breaks, building communities, and Startup Stage. Sip your coffee and dive into the best of indie making. Let's go!
Join the conversation & see the tweets/posts we read! Stop by our space 💬
Transcript
Dan: Good morning, Sandra.
Good morning, Dan. How are you this morning?
Sandra: Well, I'm trying, I don't know, I feel like we are running a freaking marathon, and people are giving us water, and we are missing the water, but we are still running, and we are thirsty, you know.
Dan: So, you had to get some coffee, otherwise we couldn't do the show.
That's what happened,
Sandra: right? Yes, very, very much true. And the reason for that is because of this event that is happening called time zone. So you are living in one time zone. I'm living in another time zone. With me, it's 7 a. m. With you, it's like 9 a. m., which is not fair. No,
Dan: it's Is it 9 a. m.? Um, yeah, let's see.
Uh, but it's the morning maker show, Sandra. It's not the afternoon maker show.
Sandra: I know, but the morning maker show from Finland is nine.
Dan: Yeah. Okay. Well, you'll be back in Finland soon. I hope. Cause, cause I can't take this anymore. Ocean and swimming pool.
Sandra: Yeah. It's too beautiful to be true. I wrote yesterday, someone that, um, I would consider moving here, but it's, it's, I'm scared of being too happy all this, all the time.
It's not, it's just not the
Dan: vibe. Yeah. Yeah. It's too positive. I agree. Come back. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's, let's do what, what we do best. Let's see what people have made during the weekend using the build in public hashtag. See what updates they have. The good and the bad. Yes. Let's do that. I take the one by Alex because it's a very simple name and I'll keep the hard ones for you.
Unbelievable. Alex says, Project Mario Kart 3. js. Are you ready to challenge your friends in an online web based multiplayer Mario Kart like today's features, improved visuals, improved handling, drifting, and mouse steering, and a bunch of other things. Hey, I could maybe procrastinate, it's Monday, do some Mario.
It looks pretty cool. It looks pretty cool.
Sandra: Cool. I didn't know. You're seeing more and more games. Yeah. You know, in the Morning Maker show,
Dan: this is really interesting. Yeah, that's like one of the OG indie communities, the indie gaming, right? Yeah, yeah. I didn't know you could do this in the browser though, it looks, it looks, I mean, it's pretty smooth, 3D.
Yeah, it looks really nice. Yeah, oh my god, this post got, this post got 400 likes, so I think he's maybe onto something. Nice job, Alex.
Sandra: Let's not move to indie games, please.
Dan: Yet. No, I think that's the problem with checking out an indie product. You can spend half an hour, but checking out an indie game could be your week.
It's very dangerous. You are very bright. Yeah. All right. There is no link, just, just, uh, by the way. Okay. Do you want to take the next one? No, I mean, I gave up on the links. Okay.
The next one by Charlie, do you want to take it?
Sandra: Yes. Um, Charlie,
I've heard everyone struggling to find a really good independent products on Product Hunt and made it famous to begin with. So I put together a free Chrome extension that focuses on the little folks. My way of giving back to the hashtag build community, hashtag build in public community.
Um, so Charlie is saying, I've heard everyone struggling to find a really good, okay, yes, there are a few products. So he's giving us Chrome extension.
Dan: No link.
Sandra: I can, Dan. I
Dan: quit. We're not doing this anymore. I'm just quitting on this one. Okay, if you open it, it's in the first, it's in the first comment. So find the best tools on Product Hunt, filter for solo founders bootstrapped and open source projects.
So it's a It's an extension that adds some more filters and some more tags to all of the products. I think it's a pretty good idea because it's true, not all of the good products, especially from Tuesday to Thursday when it's very competitive, not all of them make it. To the top, whatever. So you might miss some, some good ones.
Sandra: Yeah, I need to try this extension, actually. I want to see
Dan: how it works. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to try it too. So, nice work, Charlie.
Sandra: Yeah. It's going to give me daily updates, which means that I can, um. Keep up with my streak.
Dan: How many days do you have?
Sandra: I am right now on 340
Dan: something. So you, for almost one year, every single day, you've logged into product hunt and did something
Sandra: there.
Yes, yes. And I have to tell you, it's extremely stressful during the weekend. I get these small heart attacks when I remember, Oh my God, did I go and go to the product hunt? And then I realized you did like 30 minutes ago. Um, so yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Oh, well, um, I lost my streak, so I think I'm at day two. You know, I, I'll just live through your success.
Is that okay?
Sandra: Yes, and no, you really need to, um, you know, step up that thing. We can't, we can't complain to Prada content and have one day's break, okay?
Dan: Yeah, I agree. Alright, um, we have an interesting update in the comments by, by Charlie. Um, Hot of the Press. This is like a You know, he's, he's hacking the system.
I like it. It's good. He, he went straight into the comments and hijacked the updates. I can read it.
He says, I got a little carried away with shipping this weekend, building in public here on X and, and, or somewhere else, list yourself in the building public network directory. Oh, interesting. The wait list is open link is in my bio.
Ah, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, at least he says where the link is.
Sandra: Yeah, he's navigating us.
Dan: So, buildinpublic. network. Discover creators who are sharing their journey with the world. Oh, this is cool. You know how this came to be? Or what I've seen? It's, people are afraid that X is gonna shut down one day. Then how will you find the people that you used to talk to then, you know?
Uh, so this sort of site has a nice way to have a list of the building public people that you used to interact with every day. So it's like, uh, Thank
Sandra: you Charlie for sharing the link. I think it's time to sign
Dan: up. I think we should all sign up for this. Well, it's a wait list now. I'll put my email there.
Okay. Very cool, Charlie. Thanks for hijacking the updates. Want to take the next one,
Sandra: Sandra? Yes. Vladimir Kosenko.
- 30 and it's still dark. Slept for an hour and a half. But I'm already working on the next project for hashtag building public while the child hasn't woken up yet. If you want to achieve something, you'll have to try hard.
Dan: What a hero.
Sandra: Well, people that do this and also have family and kids are on another
Dan: level. Yeah, complete respect. Well, we were complaining just because we had to wake up and get our coffee, but not.
Sandra: Well, yesterday night I got mad because, um, a group of a group of family and friends. I'm, I'm here working, stayed like at.
It. What? I went sleep at 11. They stay at like 1:00 PM I 1:00 AM. And I was like, you are so loud, so loud. I need my sleep. .
Dan: Yeah. So you reached that phase where you're the angry lady. Unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you have a responsibility now, Sandra. You cannot just, you know?
Sandra: Yes, I know. You ask. 700 people that heard the show.
Do you know what, how much that, that big of the
Dan: pressure is? Yeah, it's huge pressure. And I would one day like to meet all the 700 and shake their hands for joining the show. It's imagine how many people that is.
Sandra: I can't, I don't know. It's, it's Taylor Swift concert
Dan: almost. Yeah, it could be a Taylor Swift concert.
All right, uh, next one by Borja Soller, did I, is that something you can pronounce better than I can?
Sandra: Borja Soller, Borja? But Solar is
Dan: still tricky. But he's not Balkanese.
Sandra: Not, oh, I'm scared to say no, and then Borja finds me,
Dan: like Alright, he says, Would you like to create videos with just the text input? How much would you pay for it?
If I see that people would like it, I'm going to create it. So, he Has a one minute long video of Napoleon where there are pictures moving and then essentially the text, um, the transcript probably that he put as an input. It's an interesting concept. It's not exactly a video, it's more like a animated, okay, maybe slideshow is, is short selling this, but an advanced type of slideshow, I'd say.
What do you think?
Sandra: I mean, it's interesting. I vibe with all of these things that's gonna help me not to work that hard.
Dan: Yeah, I could see this being useful for the podcast where you put the transcript and you get some, some things out. Cause that's what I'm essentially doing just a lot more manually. So it works for that.
It doesn't work for your product. I don't know if you put your copy from the homepage that I don't expect to get much out of it, but I don't think that's the point.
Sandra: Yeah. I'm interesting to try. I actually went on his profile. It seems like he went through it. He's building it.
Dan: Oh yeah. He got enough traction to build it.
Sandra: Yeah. I'm building an app in 48 hours to create TikTok videos like one below. Yeah. TikTok would be perfect for this. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he found his niche because, um, this historical videos and if you have created them, I mean, I like
Dan: it. Yeah, great. Um, Sandra, I have a question for you. Oh, no. I promise it's not bad.
Did you sign up for startup stage?
Sandra: I have
Dan: not. All right. Then you're, you're going to do it live. So for people that don't know, Startup Stage is the sponsor for this show. And we promised to try their product. So sponsorships here are us actually honestly checking out a product and telling our opinion of it.
And just sharing it with, with you and hopefully this is going to be a good one. I'm quite
Sandra: excited. Yeah. I wanted to say that StartupStage is the first sponsor. It's not, um, friends and family. I mean, it is friends and family, but in the sense that they actually pay.
Dan: Yeah. It's, it's yeah. Friends and family that pay.
That's very, very well put Sandra. All right. Tell us what you're doing.
Sandra: Okay. I'm signing up to startup stage right now. It's a classic signup process. And I continue with my Google, I guess.
Dan: But you're just doing the Google sign. I I'm split between these. I think I usually put my email and password because I'm a little bit of a privacy.
I mean, okay. I'm not a privacy nerd, but I like to hide the email. While I can, no matter the website, so, you know, you have this thing in iCloud where you can create email addresses, and then I put that, so, never mind. How did it go?
Sandra: Um, it was really smooth and fast. I signed up, signed up successful. That's why I love Google signups then, by the way.
Um, Yeah. And right, as your startup deserves a stage, startup stage is a place to showcase your startup and compete for features across our platform. Submit your company. Was it the same for you?
Dan: Yeah. So let's, let's talk about what it is. So I think even though this is probably not the best way to put it, startup stage is something similar to product hunt, except they do one week launches.
So you submit your product, then for one week, people can upvote. Um, the products selected for that week and then the top three products, they get a special treatment. So in product hunt, you get a nice trophy, but here you get a blog post for your startup and then you get featured in the newsletter and then you also get shared across their socials.
And hopefully get a few backlinks, too, as part of it.
Sandra: Yeah, but somehow I'm trying to upvote products of the week and it's not working for me. Were you able to
Dan: upvote? Yeah, so I'll tell you a secret. I signed up before the show because I couldn't wait. Because it looked very interesting to me. So I just wanted to try, like, I want to do it in the show, but I didn't, I didn't jinx your experience.
I hope. And then when I upvoted, it wasn't clear for me as well. So there is a UX issue. I think that when you press upvote, it turns orange, which means you've upvoted, but the text doesn't change. It still says upvote.
Sandra: Yeah. And one more thing that I've noticed is that maybe I'm just so used to product hunt.
I'm used to seeing the product itself, but here is more focused to upvote. Like, share your own company or submit your own company or project or whatever, where I'm searching for, wait, wait a minute, I want to see all the
Dan: products. Yeah, so that's a big difference is, I've noticed too, that you talk more about the company behind and maybe how you've built it, um, the type of funding as well, so essentially more about the back, backstage, and also a little bit about the product, but the focus is not on the product necessarily.
That's true.
Sandra: Interesting.
Dan: Yeah. So I think just to, to put my thoughts, we're gonna, we're gonna continue this. We're going to submit products in the next few weeks, I think. It was straightforward, um, but nothing special, which is to say for a signup, that's okay. I don't want things that are too complicated things.
I want it to work, but it could use a little bit more personality. So the signup email was kind of dry. I could, I could do a little bit of branding there. I like when you have, uh, some sort of messaging in the, in the email that, you know, makes you feel. It makes you feel like you joined something special, you know?
Sandra: Yeah, and my big suggestion to start up stage would be also on the landing page to change focus, or maybe, I don't know, but I would love when I land on the startup stage to already see the products because the landing page and forgetting what the focus is, and I think if people would see it would be much easier to understand immediately that this is about the product and or companies or people building these products behind, you know what I mean?
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, great point. The homepage should be showcasing the product. Very well, you can sign up at startupstage.app, try it out as well. Submit your products too.
I'm going to do that at some point this week. Exciting to, to see this develop and hopefully they'll take our feedback and make this a better platform.
Sandra: Yeah, for sure. For the first thing that I think my advice would be for the beginning is to change the landing page focus from like explaining what they are trying to do to just showing what they are
Dan: trying to do.
Yeah, that's such a good advice. Yeah. I was thinking. Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have compared it to Product Hunt, but it's still interesting to, as you say, show how you're different if it's, if it's not Product Hunt and it's not immediately clear. Like I, I, I digged a little bit into it and I, I see how it is different because we talked about it.
It's, it's more focusing on the company and it's a bit of a different concept and the voting takes longer, but just having the products on the front page would, would help a lot.
Sandra: I think so, too. I think so, too. And they can put place the products as whatever. They don't have to place the order of like how product and does it.
They can just put the articles they have of the companies that are already signed up and showcase them. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get back to back to the updates. I can take the next one by Nikos.
He's saying. I'd like to introduce to you all RNS or Remote Storage Network. It's a simple open source CLI operated personal cloud storage solution that can be ran anywhere.
You can check it out at this GitHub link. Includes the link. Nice job. Ah. And. That. And, and, and, there isn't. A lot more documentation wise, how to run it. Um, the, the code is there so you can look at that. Unfortunately, there isn't a get started or something like that. Maybe it's going to come soon. So personal cloud storage is like Dropbox, but you run it yourself.
Would you like such a thing, Sandra?
Sandra: Um, as long as I can connect it to Klu.
Dan: That's what I'm getting. Can you add, you cannot add random apps to Klu, right? Like that, right? Well, you know what I'm afraid? How do you share things with this? Because that's the, the big, the big part about cloud storage and Google Drive and whatever people are using today, you can easily share this with someone, you have the permissions and so on.
Sandra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the interesting product we haven't seen.
Dan: Yeah, I have, I haven't seen a lot of open source stuff lately and, uh, in build in public, I think there are a few people that do it. Uh, it's hard to mix the two strategies because. You, you, obviously, you're bootstrapped, so you, you wanna make money and then maybe open source is not the best way to do that unless you, you have a really, really big project and sponsorships or what do you think, do you think we're not seeing that just because people don't know the value or because it's not a good business strategy?
I
Sandra: mean, it's hard. I, I, I think many people ask me also like open sourcing, like Klu and things like that. It's also hard from our side as well to do so because it does require a lot of time.
Dan: Did you consider an open sourcing Klu?
Sandra: Yeah, I mean, we did consider it, but it's just like not the right timing.
It's, it's complicated. You know. It's not, not at this moment,
Dan: I guess. Yeah. Um, one good example of that is, Dmytro Krasun. Um, yeah, yeah. So his, I guess, first product called Damn Good Tools, it was an open source product, which he, so you can get. Absolutely everything in the in the product or he hosted it himself and then you could pay I think it was a one time lifetime deal kind of thing and get access to all the tools online so you don't have to bother with um, you know setting up things and he he sold it and I think he actually got a pretty good deal out of it and it wasn't like It was an okay business model.
It wasn't a bad idea, or that's my opinion of it anyway. And obviously someone else thought the same because they bought it.
Sandra: Yeah, yeah. Also, I love
Dan: them good tools. Yeah, I'm still using them. Yeah. So
Sandra: good. And there's so, so much value from it. Like I've seen the products like I have right now, I have a product in mind that I know that managed to raise money and make money and sell blah, blah, blah.
And the meter has it. And I'm going to message you like, Hey, we can make this happen more and more and
Dan: more. It's just great. Just unfortunately. I don't know if the new owner has kept it open source, you know, it might have been changed. Yeah. So, yeah, interesting topic. I think open source could be a very, very good marketing tool.
If you do free tool marketing, you could also do. open source free to marketing rights to say if the tool is free anyway, then why do you care? You might as well give the code as well. And then for the right type of tool that could actually amplify it quite a bit. So not for the product itself, but tools around it.
I think that's something to explore.
Sandra: Definitely. Definitely.
Dan: Okay. Do you want to take the next one?
Sandra: Pratham.
I'm considering creating a community for indie hackers with less than 20 people. I already have five people who are interested. The purpose would be to support each other's product and launches for mutual growth.
Comment below or DM if you are interested. Let's have a chat. Are
Dan: you gonna comment below?
Sandra: Well, I'm part of multiple groups. I think I've shared also Google, like a Google sheet of multiple groups that you can be part of it. I'm also someone who is like very active in one group and then super inactive in every single one of them.
And people keep kicking me out because I'm inactive. So I'm scared of joining any other community From the ones I
Dan: already have. Yeah, someone was asking us yesterday if we're part of some sort of group or whatever. The reality is if, if you're in this for a while, these things happen naturally and all of a sudden you're part of 10 different so called communities, which are, they're very nice and you actually get closer to people with them.
So it's definitely a good idea, but it's also very hard to stay up to date with all of them. Like these tend to have a lot of messages. So especially when they're split, so some are in Discord, some are on X, some on Telegram. Then it becomes very difficult to keep up with all of them. But it's a good idea to do it with people that you're close to, I think.
Sandra: Oh, absolutely. For sure. It's just, um, sometimes if you're part of many of them, it can get overwhelmed. So focusing on the ones that are important for you and then trying to keep up with everything else.
Dan: Yeah, I agree. Okay. This is, this is also, I want you to take the next one. This is good for you.
Sandra: This is good for me.
Um, in need, Inid,
what are What are everyone's outreach methods on here for B2B SaaS?
Dan: I got to open up the comments because Um,
Sandra: I'll tell you a little secret now and then we are talking about B2B and um, when, when, when, when I started on Klu, I knew that the product itself is quite complicated and complex and no one's gonna like, um, You're going to be to be is like very hard for early stage products and, um, like when we are, if we are talking about cool, it's quite complex product, you know, there is security and issue things and et cetera.
Um, so my strategy was to find the companies I want to place glue in, then find the people in departments I want to see clue in. And then try to connect with them and that wasn't LinkedIn.
Dan: So how, how well did that work? It works very well.
Sandra: Oh, really? It worked very well. Yes. It was, it's something called like a bottom to up.
People put these, these, these lovely words and define these things. Um, but at the beginning we had like issue where the people would bring the products to, um, you know, their managers and then they would discover, Oh, I can't actually connect with them. Like my company account to Clue and et cetera. So there was like, and then we entered to the stage where we had to, like, kind of discover how to communicate with these admins, like Slack admins that are protecting Slack and et cetera, you know, like, so you're entering the new phase where you have to kind of discover how to deal with different problems, which is a good problem
Dan: to have.
Yeah. So are these, they're still with you? They become long term. Wow. That's awesome. That's
Sandra: awesome. People that's kind of like, um, moved us into idea of like going with Klu into enterprises.
Dan: Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I guess there are a lot of other good suggestions under this, this post as well. But I kind of, I kind of take yours as the best one because you've convinced me.
Yeah. You're, you're, yeah, your strategy sounds, but it sounds. Also time consuming to do it your way, wasn't it?
Sandra: Yeah, it is. It is, but it depends, like, I think this way is, um, much better in the sense of building relationship and these people actually kind of building the product that you want to in direction you want to go.
Dan: You focus on quality over quantity in this case. Yeah. Yeah. And especially in the early stages, you want people to be very close. So this approach could, you know, create long term relationships as you have and. Actually move the product in, uh, in the better direction that that you maybe magenta would.
Sandra: Yeah.
Yeah. I, but I also want to, I also want to test this 1000 call the emails don't get me
Dan: wrong. Yeah, but now you're at a different stage. Now, pretty sure you have a pretty good idea on what you need to do. It's not figuring out what the product is anymore. Now you're finding new strategies to acquire. All right, let's take the last one.
I think it's a good note to end on, um, Osman,
He's saying it is perfectly okay to take rest and start fresh on Monday. Remember, don't stop at all. Slow steps are better than not at all. What do you think about this? Um,
Sandra: I fully agree with Osman.
Dan: I think you should not feel bad if you need to rest sometimes. I had that exactly this week and I recognized it relatively early and then I said I'm just gonna take the day off and tomorrow is gonna be two times better because I'll be rested and don't feel guilty about not building that day.
Sandra: For sure.
I mean, like, what you can achieve if you feel guilty, the whole, I mean, not guilty, but like, if you don't feel like yourself and just going back and forward, you're not going to achieve much, probably.
Dan: No. And the reality is one day doesn't matter. You, as, as he says, we're slightly different. Words. It's about the long run.
So in a period of three years that you keep building things or more than one day really doesn't make a difference. One week doesn't make a difference either, to be
Sandra: honest, of course, but there is a guilty moment. I have done and it's worse than. not feeling like working.
Dan: Yeah. I also have to battle it. It comes towards the end of the day for me where you think, okay, um, I'm rested now, but I could have done some work because towards the end of the day, you feel better.
And then you figure I could, I could have done something, but
Sandra: yeah. And I mean, in that moment, it's nice to open the computer and do anything, you
Dan: know. Yeah. That's the good part is that you, you decide you're, you're your own boss and you can say, yeah, I'll do a little bit of something. But overall, I think if you feel tired one day, or if you feel that's just not the day for you, take, take the day off.
That's going to be, that's going to be the best choice you could do for yourself.
Sandra: I agree with you, I agree with you, and I don't want Morning Maker Show to end, because I just took my coffee, I could take one more then, if you are up for it.
Dan: We can keep drinking coffee, yeah. Unfortunately, Sandra, we will have to end it, because It is Monday and we did have one day for us.
That was yesterday and now it's back to work for everyone, but we have all of these wonderful people in the, in the audience. Thank you for joining and listening to our. To our opinions here and finding out the awesome new products from so many people every single show I am surprised again. I keep thinking about this Mario Kart thing, though.
That's what That's what stuck.
Sandra: Morning show stars that he left
Dan: us. Yeah I I did listen to the rest of the stuff, but that just put a mark on me just because I couldn't I couldn't imagine you can even do that in the browser. So I'm definitely gonna try that game after we finish the show.
Sandra: Can
Dan: the Mario Kart game be our sponsor as well?
That, that's the question.
Sandra: Yeah, that's, that's the best part of doing these sponsorships, you know, like enjoying the product itself and using them and testing them. And, you know, it's the whole different
Dan: concept. Yeah, I had fun with Startup Stage and I'm really excited to submit my, my product and see how that goes and see.
I wonder what's the waiting time. Will it just pop up next week? We'll find out. You'll find out. Yeah. In the next show. Thank you so much, everyone. Remember to sign up for the newsletter at morningmakershow.com if you haven't, and you can see past episodes and also listen to us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Sandra: Yes. You are really good in this ending the show.
Dan: I practice.
Sandra: Well, thank you guys and see you for next show on Friday.
Dan: Bye.
