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Episode 17 of Morning Maker Show: Adventures in Launchland
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- Morning Maker Show
Summary
In this special episode, Dan and Sandra dissect their weekend, trying to piece together the madness that ensued. They dive into the chaos as they showcase new apps, critique design mock-ups, and ponder the enigma of missing links.
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Transcript
Dan: Good morning, Sandra. Good
Sandra: morning, Dan.
Dan: How are you this morning?
Sandra: I don't know how to explain to this. I have so much energy. I'm very happy. I'm super excited. I'm trying to kind of summarize what, what the hell did we do this
Dan: weekend? It feels like weeks and weeks have passed, but I think it's just two days.
Sandra: You are so right. Last night I wrote a tweet kind of like explaining to people what happened, but also explaining to myself what the heck happened. It started early Friday. That's what I know. Everything after that is totally unclear for me at this point.
Dan: It's just a blur. Yeah, it's just a blur. How did you, how did you sleep on Friday?
I, I fell
Sandra: asleep like a baby.
Dan: I actually don't remember how I fell asleep. I just crashed somewhere. I think maybe on the couch. Then I transitioned to the bed later. I was, it was so good. And you know how it is when you, when you have the launch and you have so much love and support and so on, you, it's, it's very addictive, you know, like you.
Sandra: Super, super addictive. And. You know, it was ups and downs on Friday, especially during the morning, but somehow we managed to get the feature. Then from there, it was just like this brilliant thing.
Dan: Um, Even before, right. I, I think everyone, I was telling this earlier, everyone wrote these heartwarming messages.
And even before we were on Product Hunt, even before we were featured, we got so many heartwarming messages. I'm just blown away. Thank you so much everyone for. For actually making us happy first, and then for making this show possible, it's, it's just the most incredible feeling. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Sandra: Yeah, for sure.
Dan: Now we have a lot of things to go through, but before that, there is our, you know, our bread and butter, the, the, the meat of the show, meeting new people, seeing their apps, seeing their updates. Are you ready? Thank you. Absolutely.
Sandra: My favorite part of the show. Let's get, let's get to it. Let's go.
Yes. David Stanek.
Another fun little UI this time with my favorite dog breed. My, the idea was to create a dog shelter app that helps dogs to find new homes. Oh my
Dan: God. It's very cool. Let's see if I open. Do you think there will be a link inside? Of course
Sandra: not. Of course not. You realize that no one is putting
Dan: the link.
But I think in fairness, this is an idea and it's not, maybe it's not an app yet. Maybe it doesn't have a name. I, can I just believe that?
Sandra: Don't even check. Let's just stick to that. Let's, let's think that that's just an idea without the link.
Dan: You know, what's very cool. And I would like to ask David if, if we can get in touch or if he's going to listen to the show.
How did he do this mock up? Because so for everyone that that's maybe not seeing our screen, uh, it's a 3d mock up where. There's a pan on the phone and it's everything's animated and it looks actually super, super clean and tidy. I wonder what software you use for that. You see,
Sandra: we discover one product, but there is three more in one.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. If you dive deep into it. I also want to mention, you know. Um, I think last week we transitioned to a UI design show without knowing because of Alex.
Sandra: And I think many people liked the show very much and maybe we can, um, you know, invite more and more people to kind of read, read the updates with us.
Yeah,
Dan: we should do that. And we should also invite our members from Discord. Oh, for sure. It's absolutely great. Like the people that joined have. Just mind blowing stories, I kind of read and I felt, hey, maybe they should do the show because they're a lot more interesting than I am, like, um, I don't have the story,
Sandra: but that's a great idea.
I think that we can ask our members. If they want to jump in and have us at some point, yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Hi, Charlie and Shivam, two incredible stories, by the way. Good morning. Good morning. Okay. Next one by Oren Aksakal.
I need to stop trying hard to sell my products and start promoting the outcomes they bring.
Completely agree. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So talk about how you help people more than, you know, just buy this thing and why should I buy that thing? Yeah. Is this, is this just my thing, Sandra?
Sandra: I need to stop trying hard to sell my products and start promoting the outcomes they bring. I mean.
Yeah, like it's always about the value that we are bringing to the people, either it's time or usually money, you know, what are we saving to them? Um, I've learned this, that sometimes in the community, we do often focus more on like the tech side and the journey itself and et cetera, and very little on the product, um, and the value of the product.
So I fully agree with, um, Oxen, Oren.
Dan: Yeah. 100 percent agree. I mean, one of my, my problems is not, so he's still, he's still, uh, trying to, to sell. So it's not like he is doing marketing. I think I got it wrong, but it's just the approach or his messaging that that's maybe something he would like to change.
But for me it was more, I'm, I'm building, you know, and I'm building something cool and people are just going to figure out it's cool. not actually talk about it, which is not what he does, but that's what, what I did when I started. And of course no one thought about it. You need to talk about it for people to find it.
Sandra: Yeah. Marketing is a miracle job.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. If only we had a course on marketing. Okay. You want to take the next one? Um,
Sandra: Rymel is building, Rymel is building in public. He has his, he's really good in this. It's in his name. Okay.
Building public is slowly finding its footing. And thanks to the community, I would like to find more like minded people.
Are you a maker, solo dev, indie hacker? With the startup and etc. Um, I'm only someone who is extremely active on Twitter and building public and I think he's also super active in morning maker show. And he showed us like his account analytics and it looks pretty good. Everything is green.
Dan: You know, mine is completely red, so I should learn something from Primal.
There is a lesson here to learn. Do you check these stats of your stuff? Yeah, absolutely. Look at this. I'm showing Sandra my screen. Everything is red. There's not one that's green. Oh my
Sandra: God, Dan, you need to work, work more.
Dan: Yeah. That's actually don't know why, because I've been active ish. Maybe it was just a
Sandra: and I'm not going to even apologize.
His numbers are huge. By the way, we are talking like hundreds of thousands. So when he goes red, it means like he's still in hundreds of thousands.
Unbelievable. 300.000 impressions. Come on, Dan.
Dan: Yeah, actually, I got, I got paid by Twitter yesterday and then the number is going up and I actually don't know how it works at all. But I don't think it's related to impressions or, or so on. It's maybe related to the quality of the stuff. I actually, I have no idea, but now it's, it's up at, uh, 50 something dollars.
I don't know where I can see. Yeah. 58. And. It's so crazy to, I will never understand this concept. Like you, you do this thing that you would do anyway for free and they pay you for tweeting, I don't get, I don't get that. It's, it's, I don't know where this money comes from. Do you, do you know what I mean? If it works, don't
Sandra: question it.
Dan: Don't question it. Yeah. So I think it's something every two weeks you get paid. I haven't tracked, I should maybe make a, do you know how to make charts and stuff? Okay, we talk after the show. Wanna take the next one by Harry? Harry.
Sandra: um, you don't find sass ideas. You find problems worth solving. What do we think about that?
Dan: I think that's completely right. The hard part here is how do you find the problems we're solving? And I have a pretty good idea and that is you need to genuinely be embedded in a community, whatever. So if, if you're solving problems for, you know, microwave people, they're really into microwaves. You need to be in the microwave discord and a microwave Reddit and really care about those microwaves and see people complain about.
You know, the things that don't work with their microwaves. That's how you find the problem.
Sandra: Exactly. And, you know, or being aware of the things surrounding you. I remember when I was working with one company, they have a freaking printer. And I know we all have problems with printers and it's annoying, but this printer was so freaking annoying.
I would come to that and it wouldn't work. It wouldn't connect. And it was this big, fancy printer. And I went deep into printers. And I wanted to fix printer industry. And then I, I was like, this is hardware, not my, not my love. There's no sass in that. So, but I,
Dan: I solved that problem years ago. Oh yeah. I found a printer that actually connects to, to the wifi.
And then I can, I can find that everywhere. I don't know why, but the best part about it is it's wireless and it has a battery in it. So. You don't have to have like this huge, and it's quite small as well. I'm going to have to find it if someone wants it. It's actually a good printer and it, it does work, does do the job and you don't have to plug it in anywhere.
I mean, you need to charge it every now and then, sure, but. There's such a, someone probably did this, they went on the printer subreddit or, or some corporate, corporate, whatever team, they all went in the, in the subreddit. And so, so what, what are the problems? Well, we cannot connect to wifi. It's very, okay, let's fix that.
And then we don't want this huge thing being plugged in and taking half of our desk all the time. Yeah. Okay. Let's make it wireless. And there you go. And now they got a fan and I'm gonna make them sell a few copies of this printer after the show, I think. Oh my god, share the link please. I will. I think it's HP, but I'm not sure.
Sandra: Okay, Jacob.
Dan: Jacob Eland.
Draw to code on Vision Pro, building a functional unit converter. Vision Pro is a thing now. It is.
Sandra: And it is
Dan: very confusing to me. I saw, did you see any reviews? Yeah, I
Sandra: think I watched yesterday one. Um, I don't know. It looks kind of like freaky
Dan: freaky. I don't understand if it's a completely new thing or it's an improved version of.
VR headsets that we have. Did you understand? I think so.
Sandra: But like I read, this is so funny. I think I read a funny tweet. What's the Cameron, what's the name of that director who made the Titanic? He's the last name is Cameron. David,
Dan: David Cameron. Yeah.
Sandra: Um, he said it's the best thing ever and I fully trust him.
Dan: Um,
Sandra: my first 3d movie I went to cinema and watched was avatar. Yeah. And it, the only reason why I watched the second version of Avatar is because of that and they said they have new technology in the movie. I didn't actually notice it, but he said it's brilliant, so I trust
Dan: him. Was Avatar sponsored by Apple?
Like the official? Probably.
Sandra: Probably someone signed some
Dan: documents in the meantime. Why would David Cameron be so excited about an Apple product?
Sandra: Someone signed a few documents.
Dan: Anyway, it looks very cool. I don't think the first generation is for most people, though. It's kind of an opportunity, but because of the costs, it's not really the same as the iPhone right now.
Not that many people are going to pay for it. Uh, secondary device and then if you make apps for it, I mean, there's an opportunity to be first and there's a lot of apps missing, but realistically you either make a very expensive app and then you can, you can actually get something back. Or you need a lot of time before, you know, millions of people actually have it.
You can, you can scale up your sales. If you make a 5 app, I think it's going to be difficult to, to even cover the cost of your headset, you know.
Sandra: It's 3, 500 euros. My God.
Dan: But it's a lot of hype around it, and you see, Jacob's clip, which is actually very cool by the way, you know, got hundreds of likes and thousands of, of impressions, so.
Actually, I would like to try to, to make something, but I'm not sure just for, for the fun of it, but I'm not sure I will ever cover the cost. So like a hobby, the problem is I have too many things that I want to do at the same time. Do you have the same feeling?
Sandra: Yeah. And I feel, I'm scared of hype, you know, because it's usually it's hype, hype, hype, and then it kind of slows down and it's too big investment.
Yeah. Jump on it. So I'll, I'll enjoy reading about it in Morning Maker Show, but I don't think I will jump
Dan: on it. Yeah. I agree. I'm going to wait it out a bit. I think that's the, that's the reasonable decision. Okay. The next one by. Wyatt, do you want to read?
Sandra: Wyatt Feaster. Feaster. Okay, people, I'm so sorry.
In recent conversations with marketers, I've learned that they often share ideas with their clients, but it isn't the most seamless experience. I'm adding boards to emailemu. com to bridge the gap. Here is a prototype. Emailemu.
Dan: com Discover emails and strategies from top brands.
Sandra: Like this website, but how did I land on this website?
I think it was from Tik Tok or something. Yeah, I had no idea. It's building community. That's
Dan: amazing. Oh, you found it's like a huge, like I look at it and I think, Oh yeah, this must be like a, you know, a million dollar something company, but maybe it is, but also in the community. Hey,
Sandra: I found this. This is so
Dan: cool.
So I wonder. Have you, you haven't tried it, I guess, right? You've just No, I haven't tried
Sandra: it, but I did, I saw some campaigns from top brands and how they are
Dan: doing it. So is this essentially someone collecting all the purchase of a big company?
Sandra: Yeah. Collecting the emails from the big companies and then placing it in one place.
It's actually pretty cool to see.
Dan: That's a clever idea. Very clever
Sandra: idea. Yeah, I think I found it on TikTok or Instagram, real something like that. And I was like, Ooh, I need to check this out.
Dan: And I'm, I'm really impressed by this. It's probably if you mix this and you know, what would be cool to also. Put their website copy and their, you know, how, how does that like, even as a case study to see the very successful ones, like let's take post hoc, right. And see, okay, how did their landing page start?
When did they introduce the, the, the mascot and you know, how, how they actually got to. Yeah,
Sandra: this is very cool example of something I didn't, I'm now proud that it's in a community.
Dan: Next one by Romain De Wulf.
He says, no more excuses. Let's build in public harder. And then the good part about this is he has a red t shirt that says building in public. I want this t shirt. I think by the number of comments, many people want this t shirt too.
Sandra: Oh, I need a t shirt and socks.
Dan: Yeah, the red one is good.
I hear from the previous show we had that the red anything sells very well. Like Nick and Alex sold very well with their red website. So that's the new trend in 2024.
Sandra: My trend is whatever Nick and Alex do, just repeat.
Dan: Wow. Yeah. Oh, it was so cool with Alex. I'm still working on editing that episode. It's, it's kind of, it's one hour. We usually do shorter ones, but they keep getting longer and longer. Have you noticed?
Sandra: Yeah, I did. I did. I did. I think maybe more people, more people sharing it, or we talk too much so we don't go, um, into too many posts.
But yeah. Oh, one thing I want to say about, um, Roman's post. Okay, Dan already scrolled off, but I kind of stumbled on, um, many people saying that, um, build in public, you shouldn't kind of focus in building public because there's no target audience there for you, you can't sell to indie makers and etc.
And I just want to say that not many people are just, um, doing this or building their projects in public because they want to sell to makers or indie makers. They just want to have the support system we all need. So yeah, that's, that's it. That kind of bothered me when I read it a few times and I was like, Hey, I'm not doing this because I want to sell things or like, you know, it's nice.
It's nice. It's nice always to see that you get the support from the community, but there is much more. In building public,
Dan: you know, I'm not excited at all about that approach, you know, all, all business. I mean, sure. A lot of us want to eventually be on our own and make money, but this is, this is like your, your family.
You don't want to, you know, make money off your parents, right. And sell them things. Um, sure. It might happen because. I think mostly because they want to be supportive and I also bought so many things from, from people in the community also because they're very cool. And, and I want to try them out, but sometimes just to support as well, even though I know I'm not gonna, you know, use that so often, but it's, it's still.
It's still nice to do that sometimes, speaking about Alex, she, she did this, um, last week, I think after the show, she just wrote, you know, give me some of your products and I will buy them if you, um, you know, if you have a one time fee or something like that. And I also like that because just getting a few of those sales in a, in a dark week or dark day, when you think, okay, this is not going anywhere, just keeps you going.
And as, as you say, that's your support system. You're not gonna, you're not gonna, you know, make a living out of it. Exactly. So, that's my, that's my approach with this is, I also don't expect anything back, like my expectations from the community, although it's been incredible, are to give and not expect anything back, to be honest.
I really do not expect. It does happen. So it's, it's a strange way to think about it. It happens and I absolutely love it when it does, but I don't really expect people to do this in return. If I do it, you know, if I buy their products, I really don't expect them to buy mine. You know what I mean? Yeah,
Sandra: yeah.
And that's healthy way of thinking about it as well, because then you are stuck in the mindset of, you know, I'm just going to do this because I have expectations that they will do the same and it's not going to lead you anywhere. As you said, no one is going to get rich from just, you know, placing their products in building public.
There's much more work to it. But yes.
Dan: All right. I'll take the next one by Kai Bedford.
He's saying, time to get the landing page for invoices. supply ready for variant 1. 0 launch. Variant 1. 0 version? Maybe Kai, um, he's British, yes. I've probably I've probably missed that in, in version could be variant if you're British.
So very cool. What's everyone working on today? So, okay. He's, he's doing invoices dot supply. It's a powerful invoicing tool powered by Framer. So you can manage your clients and you can do that directly from the Framer canvas. Have you used Framer? Yes. I think this, this is very cool. So if you're, let's say you're a freelancer or let's take, we've been talking about this a lot, the design freelancer, wouldn't this be a pretty awesome feature?
Because you're probably spending a lot of time on, in Framer anyway.
Sandra: For sure. For sure. And Framer is getting bigger and bigger. I see more and more people working on it.
Dan: Yeah. I think they definitely nailed this. The sites that come out of Framer are pretty, let's say, contemporary, like they feel, they feel very good.
If you know what I mean? Smooth. Yeah. Smooth. Yeah. I don't know what the word is, but you can, I can also say when I see some of these websites, there's some elements where I can see, okay, this was probably made in Framer, but it looks good. And I, and I think they've nailed this. Coolness aspect, perhaps, of it, right?
Sandra: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It feels like, you know, we were stuck in WordPress and then Webflow came out and it was like, Oh, this is so much better. And now the framer came out and I'm like, Oh, this is so much smoother, you know?
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. So very cool. I've used it a little bit in the past and I think it has changed a lot since I used it last.
Um, but it's, you know, it's different types of skills cause I really like. Working with the code, and probably, I'm not exactly in the target group that they have, but there's like a massive, massive target group that, that they're aiming for. I essentially all, um, all entrepreneurs, like smaller businesses that you can be from, you know, physical shops to, yeah.
It's, it's a huge market that they have. And the, the competition is crazy there. What's really surprising is how they made it in the market and now have a name.
Sandra: Mm, yeah. Yeah. And the pricing is not that bad as well. It's not. I checked it last. I mean, checked it. I paid last night. Um, it's five euros for like entrepreneurs and solo makers for landing pages and et cetera, a year.
And then monthly. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. That's cheap.
Sandra: That's cheap. And you can put your own domain and all of these things. And then it's. 10 euros, I think. So if you pay on monthly basis, so it costs like 60 euros per year. Yeah. Something like that.
Dan: Yeah. I think that's a pretty good deal. Like you can't, I think not, not even back in the day, if you get like, what would be, you could get a WordPress on a shared hosting, but I think you still pay.
Yeah, maybe, maybe you find a really cheap one that it's a good price. It's a good price. Like if you, if you do a, for a commercial purpose and you put it on yourself, for example, that's 20 a month. Right. So we're, we're talking a huge difference here. So very cool. That might be one of the reasons that, yeah, they're very competitive.
Flexible
Sandra: platforms for others to build on top of it. Yeah. And you know. Okay, Framer is not our sponsors, but talking about the sponsors
Dan: today. Sponsors for today, startupstage.app. I submitted my, my app on startup stage. It's super interesting. Uh, last week we talked about competing. Unfortunately, they had too many apps submitted, which is crazy.
And your submission didn't make it with mine. And I really wanted to compete with you.
Sandra: So, yes, guys, this week Dan and I are competing actually against each other on startup stage. I, I submitted the, um, hunted space and you submit it.
Dan: I, it's a secret. I'm not going to tell you. Hey. Because we're competing.
No, I'm not going to tell you. And I'm not going to tell you my strategy either. Okay.
Sandra: Anyway, I'm not going to share my strategy with Dan, but. It's going to be a fun week, I guess.
Dan: It's going to be fun. And you know, what's the problem now is that I've launched something every week since pretty much the beginning of January, and I cannot keep doing this for the end of the year, I will burn out for sure.
Uh, so I think this is going to be the last one and then I'm going to take a break from launching. Okay. But wait, I'm out.
Sandra: If you launch and start up stage, it's not the same, you
Dan: know. It's like, Oh my God. Is the whole week now? It's the whole week.
Sandra: So it's not only 24 hours. You have like a
Dan: lot of days. Okay.
So your strategy is to market through the entire week. Okay. I'm getting it now. I'm not here to play. You're not messing around. Okay. Should we take one more and then we get to marketing on Startup Stage because I don't want to lose. For
Sandra: sure. Um, Chris Wakefield.
I set out this year to make exactly one app per month.
You see, people are doing and launching. Last month I released my wallpaper app, which is, as of today, has started to make money. Here, here is a preview of the app I'm releasing for February. Everyone has a breath, breathing app released, right? Here is my no link. Open the, open.
Dan: No link. Uh, link in, no, uh, there is a gif of, uh, gif, gif, right? I just upset half of the people. I have no idea how to find this link. Oh my. I'm sorry.
It's, is it, uh, this one, a send app? This is a fitness app. Please, Chris, include the link if, no, it's, it's unbelievable. Include the link at least below the post. If, uh, if not, I would recommend putting it in the, in the main post also. It's a crazy concept. I know. For sure.
Sandra: For sure. For sure. I can't, I can't, I feel embarrassed that, you know, anytime I have to call out people on the links, but it's actually becoming quite
Dan: fun.
Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, our show now is being link police and telling people put the damn link in the posts because we cannot talk about it on the show. Uh, okay. But I want to say just congratulations to, to Chris. It's amazing if you started to make money on it. Huge congrats. This is great.
Sandra: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And put the link.
Dan: Put, put the link. And I think that is a perfect way to end the show. We've learned something today and that is. You have a way bigger chance to get featured on the show and people to sign up for your app if you put the link. It's, yeah, it's simple. That's it. Speaking about links, morningmakershow.com is a wonderful link. Click on it, look at it, then click on the newsletter. Put your email, click on submit. It's great. Listen to our previous episodes on Spotify and Apple podcasts. This is not rehearsed. I thought you liked it. It's it's every
Sandra: time it's getting better and better than you really, you're really nailing this
Dan: one.
Thank you so much everyone for tuning into the show. We will catch you again on Friday. Yes. Thank you so much for all the support. We're so grateful for you listening to us and, you know, being, being next to us in this whole launching thing and this whole journey, figuring out what we're doing together.
It's just lovely. Thank you.
Sandra: Thank you everyone. And see you on Friday and have a lovely week, I guess.
Dan: Have a lovely week, everyone. Bye.
Sandra: Bye.
