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Episode 18 of Morning Maker Show: Launching on Product Hunt during the show with Greg
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- Morning Maker Show
Summary
Join Greg, Sandra, and Dan on a ride of unexpected triumphs as they navigate the treacherous waters of launching an app on Product Hunt. This hilarious journey proves that even the best-laid plans can go awry. With humor, humility, and a healthy dose of sarcasm, Greg and the team tackle each challenge head-on, reminding us all that sometimes, it's the journey that's truly worth celebrating.
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Transcript
Dan: Are you saying this is not as good as a morning show or CNN? What are you saying, Greg? I think it's better.
Sandra: Nice!
Dan: And is that subjectively or objectively? Because you're kind of in the show. No,
Greg: it's more that I've been told to be nice, otherwise I will never be re invited
Dan: good morning, Sandra. Good morning, Dan. And good morning, Greg. Good morning. How are you this morning?
Greg: I'm very fine. I wasn't sure if you were asking Sandra, but I'm, I'm very, very fine.
You know, I read something yesterday. I think it was a tweet. Actually, I retweeted it, but it's an old tweet by Nicolas Taleb. wrote the, the black Swan and skin in the game and so on. And the tweet was saying that even though he's been making his own schedule for the past two decades and being self employed, he still feels like Friday's the best day of the week and that he dreads the Sunday evening.
And he says it's because we leave surrounded by other people. So it doesn't matter if you are self employed. You will still, uh, your life will synchronize with the people around you while dreading to go back to work on Monday. So, so it's Friday. I feel good.
Dan: On that positive note. Uh, yeah, I, I feel it too.
I think some weeks though, some weeks that are quite intense. I don't. I don't see a difference. So, you know, any day is a day where you work or you don't, but typically I do feel the difference. Sandra, do you feel the difference between, you know, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening, or is it just another day of work?
Sandra: Um, I thought you were talking about Fridays because I'm very excited about Fridays, probably for the different reasons. But, um, I love my Fridays because Or like preparing for the weekend. It doesn't matter anymore. Do I have to work or I don't have to work? It's just the feeling of like not having the pressure and then going into another pressure.
But I'm just lying to myself during the weekend.
Greg: Yeah, I can understand that as well. I'm looking forward to every Saturday. I have like a bit of routine. We have a long breakfast with the family and then usually I write a little for the blog and uh, and then I go for a long run. So I'm looking forward to that as well on Friday evening, which is probably why I feel so good tonight.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Sandra: yeah. But today we have something special happening. First of all, we are starting the show 30 minutes earlier. Um, who's going to explain that because I'm very mad, actually, for some reasons.
Dan: You're mad because we're starting early or? No,
Sandra: I'm, I'm mad for a different reasons. I just found out some things as well.
Dan: Please tell us. Please tell us. So,
Sandra: yes. Today's a special show, I guess, because we are preparing, um, Greg for product hunt. But imagine, imagine who is the hunter?
Dan: Who could that be?
Sandra: Well, not me. Not me, Greg. Uh, maybe we should put Greg on here and maybe Greg should tell us what was his decision making process of who's going to be the hunter.
Dan: Can I interrupt and do some math? So you're saying you're not the hunter. Greg's obviously not the hunter.
Greg: Though, why are you saying that? It's obvious because I think we are three hunters in the room because I've been a hunter. For a very long time on the platform.
Sandra: You see, I would never, never say something like that, Greg.
Dan: Do we need to create a poll and let people choose the hunter? I think we
Sandra: should.
Greg: I can tell you the, maybe the, the thoughts that were into selecting Dan as the hunter for, for this project. Oh, I'm the hunter.
Dan: Yeah. Didn't you know? Amazing. Thanks for letting me know.
Greg: So the, the background story is that the app that we're going to talk about, I actually, Decided to build it a little bit because of that, because I had it on my mind that I wanted to learn how to build an iOS app.
I've never done it before. I tried to learn Objective C and UIKit in the past, but I've never really, you know, I never put the effort to continue and go to the point of shipping. So I thought, okay, this time I'm going to learn Swift and SwiftUI. And I was really, you know, decided to, to, to take a course or read a book or something.
And Dan told me, Oh, you know what, maybe you should just build the app and you'll learn as you build it. And of course, what has changed since the past, since the previous time where I tried to learn how to build an iOS app. Is that we, we have ChatGPT now, and it was very interesting to learn by doing while being assisted by ChatGPT.
So, so that is really the reason why this app came to be. Uh, if he hadn't said that, I would have probably, I would have done, I would have probably taken a course and stopped after lesson number three or something. I did thinking that it makes no sense to do Hello World and calculators and stupid projects.
Dan: Can I just say, If this gets featured and wins number one, I take full credit. Then Greg made
Greg: it. You know, that's, that's also another thing. I think, uh, I told you I have in the beginning, I had no intention to, to hunt. This app, because I built it really for myself and it ended up being used by some of my friends and some people that I don't know.
I recently checked and saw that there were actually comments on the app store from people that I don't know. So I was a little bit surprised. And by the way, I don't check the, I don't check the downloads or anything on the developer on Apple developer website because I'm too lazy to log in and I could not care less.
So I have no idea how good this app has been doing. Uh, . So I, I had no intention to to, to hunt it really. And, and I think Daniel, you were the one who, who pushed for that as well, you said? I think it's a good idea to put it there. And then I think I dropped the ball for a couple of months, uh, not doing it because I had all the projects and other things that felt more urgent.
But now there is something happening. The app that we're about to, to put on Product Hunt, it's an app that helps people who are Christians. And want to build some sort of ascetic practices. And next week, it's the beginning of Lent. Next week it's Ash Wednesday, so that's the beginning of Lent. Lent is a period of spiritual practices.
So it felt like it would be relevant to put it on Product Hunt, uh,
Dan: before Lent. It's now or never, basically, right? Because Almost,
Greg: yes. Okay, there
Dan: could be next year as well. No pressure. Yeah.
Greg: Let's do it. Yeah, the app can be used throughout the year. But Lent is definitely, uh, the period where this idea, the idea of the app was built, uh, emerged.
So that's a good idea probably to ship it, to ship it now.
Dan: I'm ready to do it. So since I found out I'm the hunter, I kind of have a hunch, but now it's for sure. I'm the hunter. I'm going to submit the app. And while I do that, I'm sharing my screen. You can, you know, you can comment on what I do, but you can also talk a little bit about the app and we can get into.
How you built it, how you designed it, what your experience was learning a language with chat GPT and learning a relatively new language too, because that's a particularly interesting experience, if not frustrating. So how does that sound? Yeah, it
Greg: sounds very good. Maybe, maybe I should say something for people who don't know me is that I've actually been building stuff for a long time.
So I think that's, that's worth mentioning because I was not, it was not my first project. I've been building web apps for a very long time. When I was a kid, I was making some sort of programming. I learned with BASIC, like a lot of people my age. And so I was not completely a noob when it comes to, when it comes to building apps.
I think it's relevant, it's relevant to say because The app was built in a month and a half. Originally I gave myself a very often, very often I do that.
I do something that I call deadline driven projects. So I give myself a deadline, which is more or less like some sort of time budget, and then the building of the app needs to fit in the time budget. Well, surprise, surprise. I almost never respect that.
Sandra: I just wanted to ask you. I
Greg: almost never respected completely, but it forces me to make drastic decisions when it comes to features and polishing of the design and all these kinds of things.
It forces me to have a bias for action. So, so yeah, so I decided to build this up in a month and it took a month and a half, something like that. And. If I didn't have any prior experience in programming, it would have been impossible. This was in July. So I would say as well, the chat GPT has improved quite a lot.
Like we saw GPT 4, which is much better than it was actually, it's worthless now for the past two weeks, but it's, it's been really better before that. And I think that if I didn't have any experience regarding, you know, software architecture and stuff like that, ChatGPT would have probably led me into a dead end.
I'm going to give you an example. The first time you launch the app, you create, you have to create your journey, which is like the challenge that you take with yourself of like. Um, committing to some, uh, practices. So I asked GPT to help me to build this onboarding flow, but somehow it didn't understand that it was an onboarding flow, even though I mentioned it, and it made it like the core part of the app.
So I had to re architecture the project later on, because I saw that, of course, that's what it was thinking about the project, if you allow me to speak like that. So having the prior experience was required. It was a very frustrating experience. I spent a lot of time copy pasting code into into ChatGPT.
I used some software, some software to help me with the diff, making the diff to try to see if also like ChatGPT was not changing some of the code that I was passing it, passing it on, passing it on. So I had to build like some sort of, um, workarounds like this to be able to, to build the app with the, But it turned out okay.
Like, I mean, it, it worked. And as I said, it took a month and a half, something like that. Uh, regarding the design, you were asking the question and this is a question that I get quite often. People ask me how I learned to design and I don't consider myself a great designer, but, but I've always admired people who can design.
And I remember this is a story I share from time to time. I have no education. I have no formal education, uh, neither in programming nor in designing. And look at me being on the morning maker show. I mean, so, you know, I remember I think it was in 2013, I sent an email to a designer that I really like, her name is Mary and she was working for Instagram at the time.
And I emailed her, you know, like out of the blue, I sent her an email and I said, Hey, I love your design and I know nothing, but I would like to learn. How did you learn? And you know, I thought she would never reply to me, but she actually sent me like a super encouraging email and giving me tips on how to learn, which I don't really exactly remember.
I probably didn't follow them, but somehow having this person that I admired answering me, it gave me like the encouragement and the confidence. To start learning and I started like just copying other people's design at the time we didn't have Sketch or Figma at the time. Uh, I was using something called OmniGraffle, which is still, it's still around, but it was not really made for prototyping and designing interfaces.
And I just, like, copy interfaces, try to learn, like, what colors, uh, go together. And that's pretty much how I learned. And today it's, it's still, um, a little bit surreal to see so many people praising my design because I, I don't call myself a designer, you know. So, um, so that's, that's the, that's the background.
Dan: Greg, can I interrupt? You, you do have And I for for good looking, not only interfaces, but a knife for detail, at least, and I think your designs are very much your way. So you don't look at the trends at, you know, the latest linear purple, dark shadow, whatever, whatever is popular these days, but you do it in the way you imagine.
And you're very careful with the detail. So I I really love your designs, and people should check your other apps too, they're all great, but right now I want to tell you that you got me in trouble, because you didn't keep the description length to what I sent you, and I had to, I had to take out some stuff.
No problem, I'm the hunter, I have the power. Now I'm, I'm on product hunt, I'm selecting the topics, I found one of the topics, which is meditation, is that
Greg: correct? Yeah, I think meditation is a good one. I think it was in the health
Dan: category. Yeah, but then you, you suggested med activity tracking and I don't have, I have productivity, which is not really it.
And then I found
Greg: it in the categories though at the top. So
Dan: I cannot find that. So for tracking, I have under productivity, I have time tracking.
Greg: That's not really accurate. I would say, um, give me another keyword. Can you show me again in the, um, maybe in the health, did you have the health category? Okay. Okay.
Dan: What are you looking for for some tracking of sorts?
Greg: You know, I went to the website just to check the categories. That's how I selected them. Let's see if
Dan: we have met.
Greg: Yeah. No, I was just about to say in categories. What did I see? Did I, did I, maybe I, I, I pulled the GPT and completely hallucinated.
Dan: We have, so we have health and we have, well, we have psychedelics as well, but I don't think that's it.
Greg: Oh, actually you know what? In health and fitness you have activity tracking. That's that's probably the one that I meant and I I I wrote Tracking but I meant activity tracking.
Dan: Yeah, unfortunately, I don't even see it.
All right No, I just have a meditation. I think we should maybe come up with one extra Topic though if you can if you can think of something because so the thing with product hunters besides the product of the day badge you can also get and it's not like a word, but you can get a top three product of meditation or of health, or, you know, you get an extra badge if you, if you select the right topics.
So,
Greg: let's see. Can you
Sandra: quickly open health news? I want to check
Dan: what's there. That's the topic. There's no
Greg: I was about to say, you could put, you could put just health, maybe. Yeah. That sounds like a, that sounds like a good idea. And maybe you could put, I was about to say quantified self, maybe it's a bit stretching, but I want to say something, I want to say thank you because you said something very nice and one of my favorite compliments.
Which is that you said that I was very detail oriented. And I have to say something that maybe is a bit unexpected. It somehow doesn't have anything to do with me learning to design. But one of the, my many careers was actually as a project director. And I was very lucky to work for someone. He was my N plus one.
And he was, uh, he learned to be a project manager at, uh, Ernst Young. And he was an excellent project manager. And he taught me to be rigorous. In the way I was doing work and pay attention to details That was the thing like, you know, it was like almost like a motto for him He was telling me pay attention to details pay attention to details the reason he was saying that is because when you drive a very complicated project You need to make sure From the beginning to the end that there are no details that are slipping the crack through the cracks Because these details could be for example in the purchase order.
You can forget something very important. It's going to have like a very big impact on the cost of the project. And throughout the project, it can involve responsibilities of, uh, of some of the parties. So he always told me to have like really to pay attention to details. And I think that I carried that training that he gave me.
I carried it over to design. And the other thing as well, I would say for design is my wife. I'm extremely lucky to be with someone who is an excellent designer. That's not a job. That's not a trade. But she's excellent. Like she, she, she paints, uh, she can do illustrations and so on, which means that whenever I design something, she's involved.
You can be sure that she's having a look. If you see something that is off, she's going to tell me. So this is, those are my, my cheat codes. Basically. I'm very lucky to, to, to have been mentored by the best and to live with the best.
Sandra: Yeah, you're really lucky one, but you said that you started the building in July.
And then, um, you know, like, how did you manage to put all this together, especially when it comes to the design itself? It would be interesting to kind of like, um, understand it more. So for
Greg: the design, I don't always follow the exact same workflow. But in this case, I knew that I had to understand how the app would look because I had so little experience in SwiftUI that I thought if I, I can't wing it.
If I'm building a web app, usually I have quite a lot of experience designing stuff for the web, so I can wing it. I don't need to go through Figma and whatnot. But when I was building this iOS app, I knew that I needed to do it the right way. And I also saw another opportunity, which was to Grow my audience on X, uh, by actually sharing the whole design process, because I know people like looking at this.
I like looking at other people designing. So this is what I did. I started by, uh, creating low resolution mockups. So there are many tools that you can use back in the days. I was using something called balsamic. It still exists. But I don't use that anymore. I use Excalidraw, which is open source. You can use it for free.
I use it inside Obsidian, but it's just my personal preference. And then I take Excalidraw and I just basically draw shapes. So I'm not going to design like an actual phone. I just, I make a rectangle portrait format. And then I stopped designing in it and next to the, so I designed in Excalibur, I designed all the screens of the app.
I think, I think it's eight or nine screens. And then next to the, next to the drawings, I simply wrote, I could share it if you're, if your audience is interested, I can share it after, but I actually wrote down what the app is. So I said, I, I wrote down like a few questions, you know, like, who is this app for?
What does it work when the person opens the app? And I wrote just like, just a couple of lines, maybe 20 lines, 30 lines, just to have, make sure that I have a clear understanding of what I was, uh, what I was building.
Dan: Please, please share it, Greg, in the comments. I don't know if you can do it now, live. I'll do it after.
We are highly We're highly trained professionals, so we can do multiple things. I'm very,
Greg: I'm very monotask. So, so this is what I did. I started with Excalidraw, and then while I was recording, while I was designing in Excalidraw, I was actually also recording my screen. And that allowed me to create like a time lapse.
The time lapse of the design that I was creating in Excalibur and then regularly I would, I would post on Twitter on X just to show the design, show how I was creating this, uh, this happen. And people really resonated with that. I think in 2023, I grew like from. 900 followers I think to over 2000 and I attribute that a lot to building this app that we are hunting today
Dan: And and directly
Greg: of course That goes without saying of course since we've already established that this app will not be there without you
Dan: Greg, I'd love to take the credit, but it was all you, uh, but listen, you've been telling us all these wonderful things and I took full advantage of the, of the story.
I was listening. I promise I'm at the last screen. When do we launch this? Well, what's the date? Is it tomorrow morning? Well, you
Greg: guys are the experts. And right now I'm looking at Sandra and I'm like. What are we doing? I think tomorrow is good.
Sandra: Me, because I'm not a hunter, but, uh, Um, yeah, like tomorrow, tomorrow, like I really like Sundays. I don't know if you were planning the whole week that it's going to be Saturday, but I do enjoy like the product launches on Sunday. So, you know, Saturday or Sunday, whatever makes you more ready. Um, or your hunter actually, what is your hand hunter plans this weekend?
Dan: Um, To launch the app. Does the hunter have responsibility over the launch? Well, of course. Okay, then I'm, then I'm ready. And let's do it tomorrow morning. I'm a tiny, tiny bit afraid. I don't know how, so there's no transparency in product content. And I don't know how this works in practice. If it's too short notice to get featured.
But we've also seen, you know, Uh, Philips launch yesterday for the. SEO kickstarter. He reached out one and a half weeks before and everything was set up still didn't get featured. So there must just be. Certain randomness to it. So maybe we should just do do tomorrow and you know, it's In the theme of this it's in god's
Greg: hand You know as for me Honestly, I don't have like a big.
Um, I don't have big expectations This is for me. This is a bonus. I'm not really expecting anything much from the from the launch So there is very low pressure on you. I like launching during the weekend because I think this is not a mainstream app. So even if it gets featured it's not gonna It's probably not going to get 3000 likes.
I would be really surprised. Oh, you
Dan: never know.
Greg: You never know. I don't I don't really. I don't really think so. So I like I like the idea of tomorrow. If you prefer another day, that's fine by me.
Dan: We do it tomorrow. I get the courage to press this big red button. If anyone has questions for Greg, we still have a few minutes.
Before we so at half past which is in three minutes. We're gonna resume the the actual show We're gonna read updates and and all those nice things. We have a couple more minutes with greg So if you have questions just put them in the comments. Should I press the button?
Sandra: Press the button.
Dan: I press the button and We did it! Congratulations, Marc!
Greg: No, no, we can say that when it's done.
Dan: We can say that when you're number one product of the day. Well, I think Can I tell you Can I tell you a secret? Please. This is the first time I hunted something. No!
Greg: No! Well, I didn't really do it by the playbook, because yesterday I was openly criticizing Product Hunt on Twitter. The day before the launch.
So that was maybe not the best, uh, the best idea. So
Dan: you looked at the playbook, went through page three and four, and then decided to burn it.
Greg: Correct. Do you want me to say something just to wrap up the design story? Yes, please. So I went from the, I started with Excalibur to make the low resolution frameworks, sorry, mockups.
And then I actually moved to Figma. And I'm more like a sketch person. So it was the first project that I was using Figma for. And, and I used, I actually used the export in Figma, you know, you can export code from Figma and that was also like a tremendously useful. To build the app because I didn't have to figure out like all the details of how to place elements and so on Uh, so that was very very useful.
So I just wanted to wrap to wrap this story So I went from idea Excalidraw, Figma and then and then I moved to the the actual code Yeah,
Dan: please link all these you probably have wrote tweets about them Is, you know, people might, uh, listen after the show and it's going to be very cool. We're also going to put them on the website and transcript.
I have one comment from, from Philipp, which we have mentioned. He says that, that's the spirit, Greg. I spent too much time preparing the launch. I think you're doing it a hundred percent right.
Greg: Oh, good. And hi Philippe. And hi mom. It's my mom's birthday, so.
Dan: Happy birthday!
Would your mom believe that you've made it to the Morning Maker show, Greg?
Greg: Um, I haven't told her yet, but I will tell her when I call her tonight to wish her happy birthday.
Sandra: Um, and tell her, don't tell, like, forget about Maker, just say Morning Show.
Greg: Oh yeah. Then she's gonna think it was on TV and so on.
Yeah, yeah,
Dan: yeah. Are you saying this is not as good as a morning show or CNN? What are you saying, Greg? I think it's better.
Sandra: Nice!
Dan: And is that subjectively or objectively? Because you're kind of in the show. No,
Greg: it's more that I've been told to be nice, otherwise I will never be re invited.
Sandra: Yeah, you were very risky when you came and decided to choose Dan as a hunter, you know, it was all risky.
Dan: You know, Sandra has an iron fist, and I think, I think you kind of got in trouble there because, you know, we all expected she's the Hunter, to be honest. Not Philipp, though.
No, so do you wanna, before we get into the show, Sandra, do you wanna tell us what happened with that?
Sandra: Um, how Philip and I broke the Internet and product hunt and got really mad and wrote the newsletter of our own product hunting is still mad. Two days after, um, I have no idea how that happened. I think Philip had an excellent communication with product hunt.
Everything was supposed to happen. To be good and ready. Um, I have a very nice profile on product hunt as well. So this was extremely surprising for me. We had a similar situation in the morning maker show when we were launching the product. Um, but somehow after like me writing multiple messages and emails, they approved it.
I did the same thing for, for Philly, but they didn't, um, they didn't give us. A real, real reason why that happened. And that's actually why I'm mad , like, because you don't actually know what's the reason why the, the product wasn't featured. It was just some kind of bluntly answer. Please read these guidelines and when then you, when you read the guidelines, I mean, he had multiple conversation with them and in this conversation they could, could have mentioned something about it.
They didn't. Um, so I, I mean, I, I. Talk with Philippe. I think the launch itself went really well when we look at that bigger picture, but it would be very nice if he managed to get featured because other people outside of the community would be able to see the product and kind of have benefits from the product.
Um, but yeah, still
Dan: mad, you know, what's the. Silver lining. I mean, I'm, I'm kind of, to put it lightly, pissed off, and I get it that not everyone can be featured and it's competitive and there are hundreds of products, but there were also products that were, I don't know how to say it, a little bit less effort than what Philippe did, and I know he worked for months on this thing, so maybe it wasn't the right fit or whatever.
But, the community has supported him even more, and you know, he posted updates on that. And I think at the end of the day, he created a lot of buzz about his product. He made a bunch of sales. I'm not sure if more or less than if he was featured on Product Hunt. You know, I tweeted this morning. That ProductHunt has a pretty bad conversion rate anyway, and when you launch on ProductHunt, I think a big chunk of the sales come from the Twitter buzz and not from ProductHunt itself, which is fine, I mean it's, it's, you know, that's the circle, um, but he got the buzz, so maybe at the end of the day it wasn't too bad, and plus he got hundreds of upvotes.
Without being featured which is completely crazy. I we I think we've got hundreds of upvotes While being featured, right? Yeah.
Sandra: Yeah, he had more than 200 upvotes, which is amazing for not being featured on Product
Dan: Hunt. Actually, we didn't explain what even feature means. I think a lot of people don't know exactly what that is.
When you launch on Product Hunt, you can launch and be somewhere in their directory, so, you know, kind of hidden, or featured, which is, you're on the front page. And for the first four hours, Even if you're featured, you don't get any ranking. That's, that's kind of newer. Not, not that new anymore, but more or less recent.
And then after four hours, you compete in the ranking. If you're not featured, you're not part of that. And you don't get organic upvotes, so to say. People don't see your app. And on, on top of that, you don't get ranked at all, no matter how many upvotes you have. You, you're basically not participating in the launch, even though you, you are on product hunt somewhere.
People have the link.
Sandra: Yeah, so the only way for people to reach your product is through the link itself, which is kind of issue if you have a limited group of people that can, um, see the product or get the link themselves.
Dan: Without further ado, I think it's time for, for the regular show. Before I do that, this is so crazy to say, but since last week, we have added four sponsors, and I would like to personally thank you.
Every and single one of the sponsors, PostHog, LemonSqueezy, Inline Help, Bake Design Studio, Startup Stage, and Magic Space SEO. You are brilliant, and you keep this show running. Thank you so much for sponsoring the show. Each of them, we will use the product. We already use most of the products, but we will get into depth and we will tell you about them.
Maybe some of them are interesting for you to try as well. And each show you're gonna discover something about them. I'm really excited about them.
Sandra: Yeah, it's been a wild week for sure. On Monday we started something and I don't think we expected, um, also this amount of people and love and sponsors, but yeah,
Dan: pretty cool.
Pretty cool. Another thing that I Would like to thank you and it's I think just as big is all the members that I have now subscribed and are also keeping the show running you are incredible you're very Inspiring the stories the intros that we got on our discord are just amazing. I've mentioned last time.
I just feel Like, my story is not that interesting anymore after seeing what other people did. It's just fantastic. So I'll actually, I'll do a shout out. Can I do a shout out, Sandra?
Sandra: Absolutely, I was waiting for this
Dan: moment. I'll do a shout out to each of the members. Aaron, Alfred, Alex, Bruno, Charlie, Dima, Greg, hi Greg, Illy, Lewis, Jason, Joao, Lera, Matthias, Philipp, Salem, and Shivam, and Last but not least, Serhii.
Thank you so much for joining and for being on our Discord and inspiring us. You're awesome.
Sandra: That was very nice, Dan.
Dan: We can, uh, we can try again next week, but you say the names. It was very hard to memorize all these names for me. Well,
Sandra: I was hoping we're gonna share it, but you went all in.
Dan: I was ready.
Yeah, I memorized them all day. I hope I didn't miss anyone. Okay, let's do, let's do the show. Are we ready? We're gonna, we're gonna keep it going with Greg. Greg, do you want to read the first update? Yeah,
Greg: absolutely. And you know, this is one that, uh, I'm hoping it will be good luck for him. So, Miguel Lorenzo.
Super exciting news building public community, finally finished the MVP of Siesta.
Great name, by the way. Landing page and is now live up and running. Please be kind and roast it as heck. The app is being sent to the App Store review at the moment, hoping it will be approved soon. And that's why I'm saying good luck, because I've been through the process of being approved at the App Store.
It can take a bit of, uh, it can create a bit of frustration, but I know you will get there.
Dan: So, SiestaApp. Absolutely fantastic name. I have to agree. Yeah. You liked Sandra? I loved it. Enhance your well being, better sleep, sharper focus, with customized sounds.
Sandra: Oh no, now I have to try
Dan: it. I was, I'm curious.
Okay, I'm, I'm going into a worm hole or into a hole altogether, worm or not. I'm going to dig it.
Sandra: Dan, I'm sorry to interrupt you. There is a link in this tweet.
Dan: Fantastic. You know, this is, I think, the first time in weeks seeing tweet. Yeah. Great job, Miguel. So, I actually want to ask both of you. Let's ask you first, Sandra.
Do you fall asleep just like that? You close your eyes? Or do you put some sounds or a show or, you know, Netflix or whatever?
Sandra: I have this weird habit of going into YouTube and watching really weird documentaries. I don't want to say on the show what's the deal, but, and then I just randomly fall asleep while watching it and then in the middle of the night I see these, hear these sounds and then I'm like, whoa, I need to turn this off.
But I have no problem when it comes to that, except this little thing is an issue.
Greg: As for me, I have two kids, a four year old and. A one year old. I haven't slept in four years, so I don't remember exactly. Ha ha
Dan: ha ha ha!
Greg: Joke aside, it's been, actually, it's one of my superpowers. I can just fall asleep anywhere, anytime.
I close my eyes, and I'm asleep in basically a minute. Which can be very frustrating for people around me, because I can be in the middle of a sentence and just
Dan: Can you be in the middle of a show and just take a snooze just, I'm sure it could, that would be, we, we've, we've broken some records already. Uh, so first product actually submitted during the show.
I think it's a bit of a tradition now that Sandra finds out there's a new launch. I, I've done this three times already this year. This is the fourth basically, but she kind of knew this one. Uh, but we've never had someone sleeping on the show. So great. Hell,
Greg: there is a first time for everything. And it's a morning
Sandra: show.
Dan: Yeah, well, morning if, again, if you're in, um, Australia, I think, but for us, it's, it's more or less evening, I believe.
Greg: I don't know anymore.
Dan: It's also four years since you've last checked.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, kids are a blessing, but not to your sleep.
Dan: Love it. Okey dokey. Sandra. You are a move on to the next.
Yes,
Sandra: I have almost. I have this drop down for for switching between projects. It's feels off thinking of just showing all projects and clicking on them, expanding to show the links. What do you think
Dan: so? We're back to being a design show after we have Alex, this kind of a,
Sandra: this kind of She frosted us. We were not prepared
Dan: for that.
Yeah. Um, I think it looks good. I think it looks good. So it's, it's a traditional drop down. First two options are projects. The third is create a new project. I am kind of used to that. I would, I would have a search as well. I'm not sure if he expects people to create many projects, but this should be like an autocomplete where you can also search while selecting.
Sandra: Yeah, I agree. Search is super important and we know the reasons for it. Um, in any case, but I would love to hear Greg's opinion because he, he has a good eye.
Greg: I'm gonna be the typical designer philosopher, and I'm not gonna give an answer, but I'm actually gonna, now I'm gonna say something which is, um, you always have to keep in mind who you're designing for.
So if you're designing for a very techy audience, for example, I would say it almost doesn't matter the way you organize, like the labels and stuff like that. Uh, in that case, I, I only see the image quite small, so I'm not going to give any actionable feedback besides the fact that it looks quite small.
I'm getting older. I turned 40 last month. I like big buttons. I like big fonts. I like when it's very clear what I'm clicking on. So that would be my comment. It's like, always think about who you're designing for. If you're designing for an older, older audience, make sure to have like big enough text. And if you're designing for people that are, let's say older, And more in B2C, B2B, sorry, B2C, then make sure that like the interface has very few clickable things, stuff like that.
So that's the feedback I could give.
Dan: Fantastic. I think you and Alex, you could do a, you could do a design show. Fantastic duo. Sandra and I, you know, we're, we're more into. Just encouraging people and, you know, trying out products. Marketing, too, I guess. That's Sandra's thing, though.
Sandra: Oh, but no, it's now everyone's thing.
It's not my thing. The links in tweets, please, you know, the product hunt, the testing the product, sharing it out there. It's everyone's thing
Dan: now. And judging by the messages I've sent this week, which is basically copy and marketing screenshots asking for your feedback, I think we're all doing marketing now.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
Sandra: the whole community definitely transitioned into a new space.
Dan: Yeah. Okie dokie. I want to talk about one of our sponsors, InlineHelp. I've tried it and it blew my mind. Let me tell you what it is. It's a product that you point at your knowledge base. It crawls up your pages. It has like a little crawler, just like Google, goes through your pages, indexes them, and then gets you a widget.
And with that widget, what you can do is say, explain me this thing, and you could do it on any element of the UI, and it's gonna use that knowledge base, plus AI, and tell you what that is. It is freaking crazy, I've tried it in the wrong place, I've tried it on, just for fun, on a couple apps, but I'm gonna put this on Shipixen and on the documentation site.
And I think I'm gonna have it in the app permanently. And the cool thing about that is that you realize when you don't get a good answer, you realize what documentation you're missing in your app.
Sandra: Exactly. That's what we talked about with the maker of the product. He actually told us that he got a lot of feedback from the customers saying that they have improved their knowledge base because of the questions being asked by
Dan: people.
Yeah, exactly. So It's, it's, it's a very fascinating approach to, to knowledge bases. I'm, I'm really looking forward to having this in a few apps. I, I have to, to say for some of the apps it's going to be a bit pricey, so I think Crontap, I don't make that much revenue on it to, to be able to afford it.
But Shipixen I could, right? So, just check that out. I think you could get a free trial though. I think it is worth it for a lot of people if, if you get, you know, rid of One of your two support people with this which could be possible is it's a no brainer, right? So they're also launching on product next week, but we'll talk about that more later for now I'm gonna move on to the next update by none other than
João which is also a member of the show, hello, he's saying.
My second episode of Building with João is just released.
I'm sharing my weekly building public updates in a mini podcast audio episode. How about that?
Sandra: Yeah. And actually I listened to it this morning, um, the episode right now. Um, I enjoyed it very much.
Dan: So what's inside? Can you tell us? Yeah. Yep. Yep. Um, well,
Sandra: it was interesting to hear, or at least for me, it's always interesting to hear how people decide to do something like this because it's not easy.
I think we have discussed it wasn't even like, okay, it's very natural for us because we have communicated before, but there is a partner kind of thing, situation happening. So whenever I don't have something to say, there's you to jump in. I got
Dan: your back.
Sandra: Yeah. You got my back. But then when you are doing something like this alone, it's quite scary.
So it was interesting to hear his, his perspective on it.
Dan: Yeah. So Talking to yourself is, is actually quite intimidating, even though, and then hearing yourself and thinking, you know, when I do that, I said last week that I'm actually an introvert and doing this entire show has been such a journey for me and, you know, I overcame so many of my fears and so on, but doing it It's a challenge.
When, when there's no one to give you feedback, no one's to, as you say, to back you up, you think it's crap. Basically, you're thinking, oh, who's going to listen to this, right? So I'm, I really appreciate what, uh, what Drow has made. He's saying that, you know, he's Worked on some features for one of his products, Trailer Wave, and then he talks about a couple of them, at least, editing videos and how the app works.
I love the idea. Maybe this is going to be a trend. Do you think this is going to be a trend? I hope
Sandra: so. I hope so because I love these type of things because it's so easy for me to or I do enjoy like While i'm working to listen to something especially if i'm designing something it gets really boring out there and lonely So just listening, um maker's journey and just sharing the raw and honest Um, it's quite nice.
Greg: I
Dan: I completely agree. Greg. You've done something like this in the past, but with video, is that, is that true?
How did that
Greg: work? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Especially during, uh, during when I was building Ascent. I made six, seven videos, maybe something like this, which were just like me on the side of the screen walking people through the progress that I was making in building the app. It was, some of them got really popular.
And some of them a bit less, but it was still a good exercise because that's, that's an art that you have to learn, you know, like, uh, being on camera and explaining your product or showing your product. And I've actually reused this skill. Quite a lot, like I'm working on a new product now and for example I made like a small video that I shipped to a bunch of people to get feedback So so it's always a good idea to you know to sharpen the the axe By by doing this kind of things learning new skills so that you can use them later.
Dan: Yeah completely agree awesome stuff So make sure to check out trailerwave.com turn product pages into promo videos Sounds awesome Thank you, João, I hope one of them is correct. Thank you so much for, for doing this. It's, it takes a lot of courage to do it and I think it's an awesome, uh, awesome initiative.
I hope you do these podcasts every week. Yeah, me too. Sandra, take the next one, please.
Sandra: Oh, then Bartos, Bartos.
Yeah. Working on the, working on a new request feature for fruit minder app in the next version, you will be able to create reminders to help you with eating your daily fruits. I need this. I don't remember last time I ate any
Dan: fruit because you're in Finland.
Sorry.
Sandra: Yeah. Maybe potato and potatoes as
Greg: fruits. But were you, weren't you drinking a smoothie like a few seconds ago? Mm hmm. Your favorite
Sandra: smoothie. Comes in this can, usually. Yeah,
Greg: yeah. The smoothie with the two
Sandra: bulls. They promise you that you can fly.
Dan: For the ones listening in, I just took a screenshot of what they're talking about.
I, I really like this, uh, this app. There is no link, so we cannot learn more about it. I'm sorry.
Sandra: Yeah, Greg, I don't know if you have been listening to previous episodes, but since the beginning of the year, very little people are actually putting the links in their posts. And then they usually try to put it in the comments, but most of them don't even put in the comments.
So Dan and I spend a lot of time.
Greg: You know, maybe, maybe that's a good time to debunk some ideas regarding the algorithm because I was a little bit scared to put links as well. But now I started to link my blog posts quite regularly and some of them, it gets through like quite a lot of traction. So I don't, I don't know if they've made any change, but I don't feel like it's as penalized as it used to be.
So, and you know, you know, if you get like, even if you get less rich, if the people that actually Seeing your screenshots have a quick way to go to your app. Exactly. That's probably better than a lot of people who see it and, you know, they're not going to bother to try to click on your profile, find if your app has like a Twitter account and then find the link, you know, like so.
Exactly.
Sandra: This is what we talked about it actually, um, many times. It doesn't matter at any some point that the reach is so high when there is no link and then people have to do multiple steps in order to kind of find it. But, um, I think it's the time for the sponsors. Then this is becoming really interesting for me.
Next show, you only do sponsors. There's no any other update except the
Dan: sponsors. What do you think? Um, we, we just, you know what? I don't mind it because every single sponsor that we have I actually think is a great freaking product. And I either use them. Already or use them before being a sponsor. That's kind of how we did it for for a lot of them We we were a big fan of the product and said hey, you're not a sponsor and they said yes So I don't mind it at all.
I think they're awesome product that I can talk about them for four days. Let's go Well,
Sandra: I guess you can start with a very famous expression when life gives you lemons
Dan: you make what? Revenue and MRR charts? Nice
Sandra: job, Dan! You nailed this one! So ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how this happened, but uh, Lemon Squeezy decided to sponsor their morning maker show Um, I mean we already kind of all of us use use them and make lemonades Um quite often so we are super proud and excited to have them backing up backing us up
Greg: I have to say something, you know, I I recently built a new app and I integrated a payment processor into it.
We'll call it Orange Soup or something like this. And before using this other payment processor, I actually emailed Lemon Squeezy to get some information. They didn't have the feature that I needed yet. But I have to say that they replied to me super fast. I was really surprised to get an answer that fast.
The answer was like high quality. And the tone was perfectly right. That's the kind of tone I'm expecting when I, when I'm contacting a customer support. I want to say that like my impression about the lemon squeezy is very, very good. And I haven't been paid to say
Dan: that. Yeah. I was about to say, have they paid you for that?
Cause it's better than what we said. Exactly. When life gives you lemons.
Greg: No, no, I haven't used them, but, uh, but you know, you can. Usually you can say a lot, uh, just by contacting the customer support. I
Dan: agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've also, I mean, I I've been using it for, you know, since I started this, it's actually the only payment provider that I've used.
So, you know, think, think last year and I never had any issues. So that's, that's good. I, not to say that it's perfect. I hear some people. Every now and then say, well, I had to wait two days, so that can still, that can still happen. But personally, it was, it was very good for me. I submitted bugs as well, maybe three, maybe four by now.
And they all got fixed in maximum 48 hours, which is, I think it's a, it's not. You know automated generated message. You actually get a reply for a person that says I'm looking at this bug. I've never encountered that. I hope they can keep that up as they scale. And I've even asked for a feature once.
Okay, you see, um, I can't stop talking about this. I asked for a feature. I wanted to do some tracking on the checkout page. They didn't forward the, the source, so Google cannot really figure out the referral. And I said, Hey, could you, could you forward this to the checkout page? And someone replied to me in the morning, said, Oh, that's a good idea.
And then I kid you not, four hours later said it should be working now. And I could use the feature. That. That just blew my mind. It's, you know, not even some of the indie makers could, could do this. And this is kind of a, it's, it's a sizable company by now, I believe.
Greg: I want to say just something as well.
If your audience wants to try the experience of like the end user, uh, using Lemon Squeezy, they can go to morningmakershow.com. There is a button called, uh, get your house key or something like this. And when you press it, you can get the experience of using Lemon Squeezy as an end user.
Dan: Can I, can I just say something, Sandra?
Let's have Greg on every single show. Do I read my mind? I was already ready to offer him a seat. You have the permanent seat, Greg. I, I am not joking. We have not rehearsed one bit of everything. We never do. We just go through the updates. None of this was planned. I'm gonna listen to this recording and have a lot of fun, I think.
For sure. This was too good. All right, we have time for one more exciting update. This is, okay, Sandra, you know what? This is, this is an easy one, so you can have it. So, so people see you, you pronounce the names right.
Sandra: Tyler A. Young, building in public. It's in his name, so we should all know.
Um, always a good day when you hit the Hacker News front page, hashtag building public.
Dan: Yes! Is it? Is it though? Is it a good day?
Sandra: Yes.
Dan: No. No. Uh, should I, I think we need to dig a little bit and see what actually happened here.
Sandra: Oh, I read the comments.
Dan: You know, it's good in some ways. I always say Advertising negative positive is just advertising. So if you get if you get those impressions, it doesn't matter how you got them I'm very afraid of hacker news.
I don't know about you. I'm
Greg: sorry. I'm lacking the context. So he got roasted in the
Dan: comments No, he's saying Always a good day when you hit the there's no link. Is there not just a screenshot? Yeah, Sandra Did you find it?
Sandra: There are three dots after that sentence. So it's kind of scary. It looks like he got roasted a
Dan: little bit Yeah, I think it's in an ironic way, but I'm yeah, you know if I had the link I could actually tell you
Greg: I've been on the hacker news of on the front page of a can use three weeks ago, actually Um, and it's, it's, yeah, I don't know if you can say, of course, but, um, it happens from time to time.
I think it was the second time for my blog, if I remember correctly. And I got like, it drove 16, 000 people, I think something crazy like that in like three days. And so that's still quite amazing to be featured on Hacker News. I think if you have. If you have a blog, you should definitely take your shots by, by submitting your blog, your blog posts to Hacker News.
And if you have a product that is even remotely technical, you should try to submit it. No guarantee it's insured, but you know, and by the way, I have to say something that I didn't know because I've been on Hacker News for a long time. Here's what happened. I submitted the link to one of my blog posts.
And by the way, I didn't think that this blog post was exceptional. I wrote it in like 10 minutes or 15 minutes. I told my wife. I don't want to break the streak That's why i'm posting it, but i'm not super happy with this blog post I know it sounds a little bit like the writer version of uh, but it was cute my delete letter So I submitted it to hacker news anyway, because i'm trying to do that Nothing happened and then on monday month that was on friday And then on Monday morning or Tuesday morning, I get up early and I have like 30 new subscribers to my blog, and I realized that the blog post was actually picked up by the editorial team three days later.
So take your shots. Like if you have a blog, put it on Hacker News, if you have, if you have. Uh, whenever you have new articles, if you have a technical product, put it on Hacker News. Even if you get a little bit roasted, you know, like, that's still a good thing to do.
Dan: Who would have thought that by the end of this show, it's not, it's not the listeners, it's not the guests, but it's me that gets inspired to take some action.
I will, maybe, maybe everyone is, but. Personally, I'm very, I'm moved by this, and I will try Hacker News, I'm terrified of it, but if you say we should do it, I will listen to you and I will do it. The only
Greg: reason you're terrified is because you're one of the people who are roasting others and you're afraid that it's going to be done onto
Dan: you like you did today.
Can I interrupt for a second? Sandra, I take it back, we should not have Greg on the show anymore.
Yeah, I was
Sandra: I was a hunter. I was like, what's happening here?
Dan: Fantastic. I think this is the end of the road. I would love to keep this going. I think, you know, having a guest is new to us. We had Alex before, that was an absolutely amazing show, and very funny to edit and put it on Spotify. If you want to listen to it, of course, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and actually all the other podcast players I saw, it's available everywhere.
And you can also go on morningmakershow.com and sign up for the newsletter, read past episodes, everything's there with transcripts and links and tweets and. all that you might want. And if you want to support the show, please consider becoming a member. We love all of you that tuned in and have been supporting the show, sponsors and members.
And we hope to see you again on Monday.
Sandra: Yes, this was really nice. You're getting better and better at this. Amazing Also, we have tomorrow exciting day. So tomorrow you're vibing on product hunt as well with greg So let's not forget about that as a hunter would say
Dan: Set your reminders Tomorrow we we take Greg to number one.
If you liked him on this show, I would say upvote this thing actually Scratch that. I would say support him because if you say upvote you get penalized, we don't, we're on, you know, we're getting good terms with Product Hunt now. No more burning, no more books.
Greg, do you want to say something? Yeah,
Greg: please. I was just about to ask if I could have like a closing thought. I really want to acknowledge you guys for the work that you're doing for the community. I mean, you're putting the work to do this show and to keep everybody informed. And also I think to allow people to get an extra outlet for the post that they make on X.
It's an amazing opportunity for people to get featured. Uh, by just using the hashtag, you make it so easy. You've been making it so that people don't have to pay to pay to be featured, which is also awesome. It might change in the future, but right now I think people should consider that it's like, it's free extra exposure.
So I really want to acknowledge you for that because I think that you're doing a public service for the community. And I think it's highly appreciated. You can, you can tell that there are a lot of people listening. Live. And that's for a good reason, because you guys are doing an awesome job. So
Sandra: thank you, Greg.
Oh, I forgive you for not being a hunter.
Greg: Then it worked. It worked. You sent me a message. You say, say something nice and she will forgive you.
Dan: Uh, fantastic. Fantastic. I know. I know the key to Sandra's heart. Yeah. This is so wonderful, Greg. Thank you. We, we do not prepare for the show, and we do not, you know, select updates, so we will, we will never have anything paid.
We just go through the feed. Pick, pick updates, talk about them, and it's always going to stay like that. It's not gonna change. Thank you so much for the kind words.
Greg: Do you allow me another, just one thing, I promise it will be short. Of course. I mentioned the story of Mary, who was kind enough to reply to my email when I was much younger, and I knew nothing about design, and she encouraged me, and I think a lot of, there are a lot of people who have been really, like, instrumental in where I am today, even though I'm a nobody, but you know what I mean.
And I always try to reciprocate so if you're being a nice person And you email me or you dm me to ask me questions. I'm always happy to help. So Yeah, that's just an invite an open invite to the community I know that The two other people that are leading this show, both Dan and Sandra, you're also guys always trying to help people.
So I just want to say that, um, I want to be that kind as well. So if people have like some questions and if it's not too big of an ask, I'll always do my best to try to help. Well,
Sandra: thank you, Greg, so much.
Dan: You're the best, Greg. Thank you so much. Have an awesome weekend, everyone. Bye. See
Sandra: you. Bye. See you tomorrow.
