- Published on
Episode 33 of Morning Maker Show: Easter eggs.
- Authors
- Name
- Morning Maker Show
Summary
In this episode, Dan and Sandra analyze updates from makers at various stages, from those celebrating impressive revenue milestones to those just starting out. Along the way, they share insights on overcoming shipping fears, the power of feedback, and the potential of open source in building and marketing products.
Join the conversation & see the tweets/posts we read! Stop by our space 💬
Transcript
Dan: Good morning, Sandra.
Sandra: Good morning, Dan. I wanted, you know, I wanted to make sure that you are ready for the show and give you for a few seconds, you know, to
Dan: Yeah, I was born ready. I was born ready.
Transitioning to Professional Video Production
Sandra: We're doing video. I'm
Dan: seeing you in the video. Yes,
Sandra: we are. We are moving now.
We are becoming a full on professionals. We got our small mics and it was time for the next step. And the next step is of course, um, filming and making the videos. And showing people the craziness behind the scene.
Dan: It's very cute, this small mic. I'm not over it yet. It's so cute. It's so cute. Yeah.
Easter Celebrations and Office Work Preferences
Dan: But happy Easter.
How did you celebrate or do you celebrate what's going on?
Sandra: So I, I don't celebrate this one to be precise, but I do celebrate Easter. But, um, it's a holiday in Helsinki. Or Finland today, and it was on Friday. So I'm just enjoying Easter in Finland.
Dan: Got it. Got it. So the city is empty. Everything's closed and you have it for yourself pretty much.
Sandra: Absolutely. The whole office building is empty. There's no one here. It's lovely.
Dan: Fantastic. Fantastic. Um, and why did you go to the office? If you could, you know, not do anything today and just stay and relax.
Sandra: No, I have to work, but, um, I don't know. I mean, I have things to do, but, um, I like coming to office.
Is that weird? I, I, I tend to come to office.
Dan: I like it some days I like, you know what I like? I like the option to do something different. So if I was. Coming to the office every day, then I would say I like working from home, because then you always like what you can't do, you know, of course, of
Sandra: course, having an option is the best thing then, or a choice.
And then you can be like, oh, I love coming to office. Yeah, exactly.
Dan: But, yeah, some days, some days. You just feel like, I don't know if you, if you feel this, but you're, you, you have some tasks to do and it's quicker if you don't go to the office. I have this, this like pressure and I think, well, I'm going to spend, you know, half an hour at least, but you need to get dressed as well.
And then all of that time you could have worked, then you just jump on the computer. You know what I mean?
Sandra: I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. Um, It's, it's, it's, it's a real thing. It happens to me as well. Um, but I have this, I live like 10 minutes from the office, so I don't have quite a good an excuse not to make it.
Dan: So you live at the office, work at the office. Got it. Okay.
Sandra: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, but, uh, this weekend I spend actually at my parents place. I tend to do that as well a lot.
Dan: Yeah, got it.
Introducing Special Guests and Diving into the Build in Public Feed
Dan: All right, well, good morning everyone joining us. I see we have the honor and pleasure to have Ilyas and Dima today.
Sandra: Oh, hello guys.
Dan: This is, uh, you know, I'm a little bit nervous, I must admit, because of these two, I mean, they're basically superstars at this point. Uh, thank you for joining us. I opened the build in public feed and it's going to be a crazy show.
Sandra: So we are ready. What, what actually Dan is trying to say. if he says to me that he opened the feed, it's a sign that I need to show now on the camera that Dan opened the building public hashtag.
Dan: Now we're at the level of professionalism, where you don't need to explain, you just take the cue. Okay, but okay, so in the video feed, which people will get, On YouTube.
Sandra: Yes. Yes. And
Dan: the video feed, people will also see that we don't prepare shit. And that's one thing. And then they also see how we go through the feed and how we pick the updates and all of that.
Analyzing Updates from the Indie Hacking Community
Dan: So without further ado, do you want to read the first one, Sandra? Um,
Sandra: Absolutely. Sebastian Roll.
Another great month came to an end. Total revenue is down again, but it's still an incredibly high number that I didn't expect. Here are numbers for my app business in March. 20, 000 in revenue, minus 23%. I don't know, should I read these?
Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sandra: In the 6, 995 MRRs and 8, 000 502 subscribers. I meant, do I need to read this in brackets? Because this is already very high numbers.
Dan: Oh, like that. Yeah. I think we, these numbers are so beautiful. We should read them. We should like take our time. Ah, so it's, it's so amazing. Sebastian, you remember, I think one of, one of the first shows.
We, and we can see the chart here, right? We started around end of November, beginning of December was officially, I think, beginning of December. Right. And his app was just starting to pick up very well. And I remember we picked up his updates and then pretty much followed the journey on the show. Yeah, and it's so it's like he is the sort of the beacon of the morning maker show that we, we kind of follow his journey and it's, you know, he's setting an example, these numbers are absolutely incredible.
He's doing a great job, and I'm really happy for Sebastian.
Sandra: Good job, Sebastian. Good job. Congratulations.
Dan: I wanted that. I want to just jump on a call with, with Sebastian and, you know, just say, hi, like we should do more of this. We should, you know, we, we see a person around, we like what they do. We like their, their progress.
And I really love that he's still using build in public. Cause I think a lot of people stop using it after a while, after they get a certain number of followers or revenue or whatever, they don't use it because it kind of feels lame, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.
Sandra: I know what you mean. Um, and I, I think we should just continue using hashtag built in public.
It doesn't matter. Yeah,
Dan: yeah, exactly. So I love that Sebastian is still using it. Like, I don't know if it's every single update, but most updates, he's, he's still using it, putting it in there. It's, it's beautiful. So, yeah. Go follow Sebastian. All right.
Navigating the Challenges of Indie Hacking and Learning from Mistakes
Dan: Next one by Gabriel, which is the exact opposite of this.
If it's true.
After three months of indie hacking, I quit, this is too hard and not worth it. You have to know software, marketing, SEO, editing, pricing, so much. Stuff. It's not possible. It's not for everybody. I suggest just to stick to your 9 to 5 and do regular people stuff.
Sandra: Don't read comments. Don't read comments.
Dan: Not good.
Sandra: Now I want you to absorb this tweet and think outside of our bubble and our work.
April Fool's Day Shenanigans and Earthquake Pranks
Sandra: What is today Dan?
Dan: Oh my God. There is an
Sandra: earthquake in Finland
Dan: right now.
Sandra: Oh my God. Yes. First April, Dan.
Dan: Oh, good morning.
Sandra: It's April fool's day.
Dan: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. It wasn't a good one. It wasn't a good one.
Sandra: At least I think imagine if Gabriel actually is quitting. Then we need to stop him. What's happening?
Dan: Um Yeah, I mean he's not clarifying
Sandra: He's not clarifying. I mean I read the comments of this update and it's not saying
Dan: Okay, it's
Sandra: first april, but he
Dan: didn't let's prepare Let's prepare two answers.
Yeah. One if he's actually quitting, and one if it's approval, right? Yeah. I do, I do the one if he's quitting. Uh, Gabriel, I'm sorry to hear, but Don't, don't quit altogether. I mean, there's different ways to do this. If, if this is really true, maybe another approach is to slowly build while you do nine to five and to do things that you enjoy, I mean, you don't need to do things that feel like more work, you can find the thing that you enjoy and do that.
And then whatever that thing is in software marketing and so on, find that. And do it. And now you do the April Fool's version.
Sandra: Oh, this was good one, Gabriel. Really good job. You really tricked Dan into thinking that you're quitting. And I also, I also checked the, I checked this tweet and I was like, I need to trick Dan as well.
And how I'm going to do that. So the earthquake was one of the possibilities. And the second one was, Dan, I have a very, uh, big announcement for you. Unfortunately, I will not be moving with the morning.
Dan: I don't believe that for a second. You need to do better,
Sandra: but yeah,
Dan: no, but the earthquake, I was like, We're in the north. There's nothing happening here. There's no earthquake. There's nothing. It's like so cold. I think. Yeah. Okay. A meteor struck Norway a million years ago. That was the most thing that happened.
Do people still talk about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is actually fun fact. There is a park in Norway where they say, Oh, yeah, 1, 000, 000 years ago, there was a meter here and you go. And then you ask, but like, where's the crater? And it's like, Oh, yeah, it's like the whole valley. Like, wait, there's no hole. No, no, no.
Like, it was 1, 000, 000 years ago. There's no hole anymore. So, okay. Um, cool. I, I, I just want to, okay, let's, let's go past Norway. It's a beautiful country, by the way. Lots of money, lots of money,
Sandra: lots of oil, lots of oil, great country.
Exploring Norway's Success and Migration Trends
Sandra: There is actually a fun fact. Again, there's a lot of Finnish people, uh, migrating to Norway, especially the nurses.
Really? Yep. Yep. The pay here is quite bad for nurses. So they are moving to Norway.
Dan: Oh yeah, that's true. And in the north of Norway, they have a shortage of that. So there are also people from Denmark going, but not only nurses, doctors as well, because they're kind of, they're kind of needing any, any people and they have.
Oil money, so, but it's not, okay, it's not fair, right to, there is oil money too, but it's actually, if you, if you look into their money, cause I'm, I'm obsessed with it, they had a very clever government and it's not just the oil, it's also their hydro energy and the way they approached it and basically they didn't own it.
And they got a lot of external investment, but they made an agreement that after like many, many years, I think 30 or 50 years, they will own whatever infrastructure everyone built and extracted from their country. So it was like a long term plan, a bit like indie hacking.
Sandra: It's actually funny that you mentioned that.
I see Charlie is in, uh, listening as well. And I was actually watching some, um, Vida or something where they were comparing the oil and those infrastructure that you're talking about to Australia and how Australia didn't manage. It's quite privatized, you say it like that, compared to Denmark. On a Denmark, sorry, Norway,
Dan: Norway.
Sandra: Yeah. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. It used to be like that, but now, now it's not, now it's the government and the government is doing a good job, which is, you cannot say about many governments. Yeah. So fun facts for Easter Monday. All right. You want to take the next one? It's, it's, it's a quick one, but I actually have some, some stuff to say.
Okay. Go, go.
Diving into Web Development and Overcoming Shipping Fears
Sandra: Uh, so, so everyone recently I just made this admin dashboard project using only HTML and CSS idea taken from the Odin project website. Now I'll be moving to JavaScript while still be doing some small projects for my initial practice.
Dan: Yeah. So this is very cool. I think I'm so disconnected from, from this part.
Like it's I'm into building mode that I forgot. Someone asked me the other day, can you recommend some sort of course or something to, to learn how to code the web development? And I just realized I'm so disconnected. I don't know. What's what are the option? What's popular? Are the people do it? Is it, is it.
Is it just chat GPT? I guess it's a, it's a good part of it, at least. Um, and then someone else said, um, well, I, I learned it, but I'm too afraid to ship because I'm, I'm scared of security. As well. And I thought that's fascinating. And it reminds me that a lot of people, like not to say anything about this person, we all have this fear.
The first time we ship something, you know, what if this doesn't work? What if we mess up customer data? What if we leak the emails and so on? Right. And. I can't remember how I got over it. You know, like what advice can you give? How do you, how are you not scared about that? Like we do a lot of, a lot of things where things can go, or there's a million things that can go wrong, right?
You can just crash the entire app and then no one can use it. Customers yell at you that we're paying, which happens sometimes, of course,
Sandra: many times. I mean, if we would live in a fear, we wouldn't be able to push anything. I think you just have to overcome that, do whatever you can or in your ability to make the same decisions.
But in the same time, you need to push as well. And if it crashes and it crashed like multiple times, even with us, you learn the lesson, you apologize, you do everything you can for the next time not to happen. And then it's going to happen again. Something's going to happen again. And then you learn a lesson again.
And it's just this process of learning lessons and you growing as a person and writing a great apologies. That's how do
Dan: you call this? Is it, uh, ask for forgiveness and don't ask for permission mentality.
Sandra: Something like that, yes, something like that.
Dan: Yeah, but it's true. You kind of have to accept that things will go wrong.
And of course there's like a part where you do need, you know, one thing is to be sloppy, like to do it just because you were sloppy. And another thing is not to fear that things will go wrong because they will ultimately. You need to still check your stuff, still make sure, you know, things are kind of all right.
But when you don't have the experience, you don't even know what to check.
Sandra: Yeah. Yeah. I,
Dan: I think the best way to start small,
Sandra: start small. Yeah, exactly.
Dan: Exactly. The best way to overcome it is to ship something that is small. I mean, whatever you're gonna ship first is not gonna be big. Right? Yeah. That, that's also the other problem that you think, oh my God, there's gonna be thousands and thousands of people and no, it's really gonna have a handful of, of users, if you're lucky.
And the best way to learn and overcome this is to. Ship one, two, three, five of these, and then see, okay, nothing did go wrong. Things are actually working and maybe when they do go wrong, that's when you learn. And hopefully it's not such a big mistake, but even if it is, as you say, you apologize, learn, learn what not to do the next time.
And move on.
Sandra: Yeah, exactly.
Dan: All right. I'm ready for, for another update. I like how you, you move things. You, you control things, Sandra. You move videos. It's great. Will you, do you want to take the next one?
Feedback on Formify Flow's Marketing Strategy
Sandra: I vibe with this. I love it. Um, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. J. J. Okay.
Um, exciting news. Trill to announce the upcoming launch of Formify Flow.
Formify Flow? Formify Flow? Um, ramped landing page design. Our platform is leveling up with new solo and team plans. And guess what? The team plan paid version is already in the works. Hashtag building public hashtag.
Sandra: Where is the link Dan?
Dan: There is an ad to, oh, so there is a company account and there is a link in the, in the, in the bio for me, five flow.
com and they say forms for everyone because who needs limits anyway. Whether you're a novice or a pro, enjoy the perfect blend of user friendly simplicity and advanced form customization without breaking the bank. So I have some feedback on that, uh, but I read, so in the, in the update, where is, where is the update?
I'm moving. He's in the bio of the company. It is create unlimited, beautiful notion forms that are customizable based on your brand. And that's exactly what I wanted to say. This. Copy is better than what's on the website because I read this on the website and I'm thinking what forms for, for where, and is it, is it the product for me?
So I think this copy is a lot better because it tells me, it could also tell me why it's a good idea for me to use it, but already knowing that it's for Notion and it's customizable based on my brand is actually, you know, okay. I want that, uh, rather than, This, whether you're a novice or a pro enjoy the perfect blend, uh, this doesn't tell me much.
So I would probably, I'd probably have to read the features or, you know, I would say, oh, that's not for me and close the site. What do you think?
Sandra: I fully agree with you. I want to know what does actually mean like notion forms.
Notion database integration.
Dan: Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So today I learned Notion has a database.
Sandra: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So then that's it. Then you, you probably designed the form and then it goes into that database and then you're good to go.
Sandra: That's pretty cool. You see, that's a great copy. You are so right.
Dan: Yeah.
Oh, and I would even move this stuff a bit up, like the explanation. But yeah, anyway, it needs a little bit of work on the landing page. It looks good. I have to say that it looks good. I think overall the copy is not bad, but you just need to iterate a bit on it. And I would like to try it, but you're, you're like the notion superstar.
Who am I kidding? I didn't even know how, how to open a step by step tutorial in Notion. I was like, well, can you click on this?
Sandra: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, but that was a great feedback for me as well, because I was like, oh, wait a minute. Maybe people actually will not know that they need to open this. Thing and then there's extra information.
Dan: Yeah. Do you want to give context on this?
Sandra: Oh, yeah. So I sent yesterday, um, that to my, my guide for Dan to review it. Um, and then he actually, like, he was brilliant as always. And it's great.
Unlocking the Power of Feedback in Creative Projects
Sandra: Just from another planet. Um, and he gave me actually a great feedback on, on, um, notion guide on TakoTreba guides.
And one of the things that he said that, um, so I made this very nice layout or I thought it's a very nice layout, but then, then, um, didn't see that you can actually open all of the pages. And then go into depth of each task and why we are doing it. And that was kind of like mind blowing, because in my head, it was so simple and like obvious, but that's also the issue.
That's like a pure example of how we can like F the things up. Just having our minds and our vision of how the things should look like and not align with that with most of the people. And then, so whatever you're working on, send to people, send to multiple people, get that feedback because it's, it's really important.
The Art of Timing Feedback for Maximum Impact
Dan: Yeah, I think there's two things. So one, I know you've been working a long time, so then I kind of thought, okay, it's enough for something to be shaped. So you can send it to people. Sometimes it's not good to send it too early. Also, I think, again, I'm going to mention Greg Gilbert. He, he has this theory that you will ask for feedback.
Once you believe in that piece of content or app or whatever, enough to, to be able to say, this is useful, or this is not useful because a lot of the feedback you can get into this defensive position where you think. You know, this is not helping me. And if you do it too early, you might be discouraged and you just drop the thing.
I mean, it's not the case for you because you're going to do the guide anyway. But just to say in general, you have to maybe wait a little bit before you ask for the feedback, but you do. Need to ask for it.
Embracing Built in Public for Continuous Improvement
Dan: And I think that's why built in public is so beautiful is because you, you do get a lot of opportunities to ask for feedback on, you know, small things, big things on copy on, on design on, you know, you, you cannot get feedback on.
The overall product itself, although people might, might give you that, but you know, you can test out things and it's a great thing to use.
Sandra: Yeah, for sure. And I fully agree with you or, or Dan or Greg's theory, because, um, you know, when you are working on something, it's super important also to work on it in full mode, get something.
Working like yesterday when, when I sent you the guide, you gave me, like, I sent you and then you, you gave me a feedback and your feedback kind of like got me into this whole picture or like gave me an idea of what the whole picture of this guide should be for the people. You know what I mean? So, so there was certain things that.
You mentioned that were so obvious that there should be there, but I totally miss them, you know,
Dan: just to say it was small things in my mind because the overall guide was great, but these small things could be what, you know, tie it in together sometimes, especially if you, when you sit with something, and I think it applies a lot to a design, but when you sit with anything, um, You, you don't realize what's missing anymore because it's, it's so clear to you and you also start to dislike it if you sit too much and having someone else look at it and put, put in the missing pieces could get you out of that state and get you excited about it.
I don't know if I got too excited about it. I'm excited. Yes,
Sandra: you did. Yes, you did.
Dan: So I can't wait for the guide to be out.
Navigating the Challenges of Newsletter Engagement
Dan: But speaking about writing, we sent out the first, or I should say you, sent out the first newsletter for Hunted.Space. And It actually went very well in my opinion, and it's the first time we send a newsletter and someone in our morning maker show discord have said, Oh, I just started on a wait list, I believe, and a lot of the emails go into spam.
So then I, I actually thought, wait a second, hunted. It doesn't have any reputation at all. We, we didn't use this, uh, this email address before. So probably a lot of the, the newsletter additions went into spam. So we, we, first of all, I've always wanted to try one of these warmup services. I think Charlie, he recommended one.
Hi, Charlie. Um, and besides that, I log into EmailOctopus 6.5% click through rate. 6. Is this huge or what?
Sandra: It's quite good. It's
Dan: not bad. It's it's kind of cool. I mean, that just means that just means people are not opening and closing this. Cause what you click your, your. You're going through the content, right?
So that's actually, is there some sort of clever email, something that could, could tell you how engaged people are? No, I don't think you can do that. Like how much time do people spend reading an email?
Sandra: I mean, that would be, this is amazing feedback for EmailOctopus as well. if, if we would have a possibility to kind of like check where people click or where people stopped when reading the newsletter, where did we lose them?
Dan: Yeah. I don't know if that's possible, you know? 'cause you can do a PostHog style. Um, yeah. How do you call it? Like, uh, timeline. So you can, you kind of see the flow of a user, like, okay, read this, click on this, click on that. But I don't think there's a lot of privacy concerns, right? Like email is a lot more private than I don't think you can do that technically.
Um, at any rate, I think the, the Hunted.Space newsletter went very well. The second one probably going to, to reach more people's inbox, but I'm going to try this email warmup service for sure. And see if it does anything.
Sandra: I don't know if you remember, but we had the same issue with Moonmaker Show at the beginning as well, when we started writing the newsletters.
And now when you look at the opening rate, it's much higher. So it means that. Yeah. Yeah. So if I go
Dan: to email Octup to see like morning maker show has consistently over 60 percent open rate and hunted has 42 percent and the hunted newsletter that you sent was very good. So it was one of those that. It was how, how to choose the best day to, to launch on product hunt.
And it's one of those that if you see in your inbox, you're going to open it. It, it was very good. All right. Enough about that. Uh, thank you. EmailOctopus for, for this awesome, awesome service. I've moved all this stuff to EmailOctopus. That's it. I'm not using anything else. Yeah. That's my favorite.
Exploring iOS Development and Core Location API
Dan: Next update by Mario.
For my next project, I need to learn Apple's core location API, so I made this simple app. Next, I want to, the app to notify the user if He was, if, if something has arrived, there's a typo there. Is it possible to do it without a backend server? So the app gets the user location and then calculates a destination distance.
And essentially it works with coordinates and so on. Looks pretty cool. Um, speaking about learning. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, on, on iOS, I think iOS is an interesting platform to, to learn. I wouldn't do it as the first thing. I actually don't know how would I approach iOS? Like I'm, as I said, I'm completely disconnected, but when I learned iOS development many years ago.
I remember the concepts were very, how do you say they were, they needed more computer science knowledge than web development, where it could just slap some stuff together in a form that works, if you know what I mean. So Mario is talking about the core location API. That's probably like a pretty complex thing that you need to read.
There's some documentation, go for some examples and kind of see, okay. I have this data and then how do I store it? Do I need the database? But at any rate, um, it's cool that the learning has something that you can use, that there is an app at the end of this. And I would probably recommend Mario to skip as many.
Of these backend, whatever tasks and use something like Firebase that kind of has a package with all of this authentication database and so on and kind of postpone learning that as well because learning iOS, it's hard enough in itself, in my opinion. With all the different APIs and UI controls and you do Firebase, you don't have to think about the backend that much.
And then at some point, if, if you do need it, you can always start learning about it, but then at that point, you already have an app that's working. Maybe some users too.
Sandra: Yeah, that's a great advice.
Dan: Next one by Arthur.
The Journey of Building in Public and MVP Strategies
Sandra: I just wanted to add, it's lovely to see when we are going through this, uh, building public hashtag.
It's lovely to see the difference of stages people are in. Like we started with, um, the first one with the big, um, you know, revenue numbers and subscribers and et cetera. And now we are going through a person who is just starting out. So just using a hashtag building public gives you ability to just.
Scan and learn so much, but
MVP is close to ready. Um, page widget for basic controls done, element highlighting done, data extraction done, export done. I'll probably make exporting a pro version. We'll ship this week. Hashtag build in public.
Dan: You know what I think this is, but I'm not entirely sure. In the previous show, we came across something called the visual web scraper.
I think this is it. And we're basically getting, uh, an update on it without knowing, but there is no, there is just a wait list, unfortunately. Uh, and then there's this video that, uh, that people will be able to, to see in the, in the comments. Um, it's, it's, it's very cool. It got me into this MVP discussion.
Uh, what did you do Sandra? Tell us you got in trouble with MVPs
Sandra: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I am so in trouble. So, um last weekend I had to write a newsletter And the whole newsletter team was about MVPs and what MVPs mean in 2024 Um, and you know, i'm i'm I consider myself, uh, in the person, but I found myself in reality in a startup world.
And it's quite funny for me to see the difference different way of approaching these mvps Um, and I think the indie hackers do so much better job than startup people And then I was just mad, you know me when I go into my crazy craziness mood Um, and then I found this event happening in nordics quite big startup Startup event and they had like a speaker open forms or whatever.
And I applied and then I got an email that I was shortlisted. So I might be on a stage talking about why indie, indie hackers are so much better in building MVPs than startup people.
Dan: Unbelievable.
Sandra: Then you know what's funny? Life is really funny. I, I, like, I find this So interesting. Um, when I was writing that newsletter, and I don't know if you remember, and I hope you do, and I expect from you to follow every single tweet I make.
Dan: I do. I do. Yeah.
Sandra: Okay. But so you remember that that weekend I was sitting in the office. And I was putting my cream on the face and I tweeted about it. And I said that, um, I need to put this cream on my face because when I accept these awards or when I go to the stage and do TED talk and et cetera, I want my face to be hydrated.
One week later, here we are.
Dan: So it was a prophecy. Uh, I don't, I, I don't even, let's not, let's not get into this. So you're going to represent, you're going to represent the entire indie community on a stage, possibly.
Sandra: The future of indie making is in my hands.
Dan: Okay. So if, if people want product placements in this talk, we reach out on your, in your DMS with the product and the pitch, I guess, is it like a TED talk or do we know, like how, how big, what's the scale?
Well, it's a big event. It's a big
Sandra: event.
Dan: Look,
Sandra: it's a big event and there's a stage.
Dan: Unbelievable. Can we do something to make this happen? Is it, how, when do you know and how, how do you get picked for this?
Sandra: Well, I'm not quite sure do I want to, I'm just joking. No, I'm ready. So, um, yeah, so I'm shortlisted, which means now it's the process where people can vote for, for People, they want to listen.
And it's so funny because other speakers have this very long subjects. They're going to speak. And most of them, I don't even understand. It's like very like long and too many letters and words to care. And mine is like something like your MVP is shit or something like that.
Dan: Okay. So, okay. Your, your talk would be, you go on the stage, you say your MVP is shit.
Stop building it. Thank you so much. Sign up for Clue. Have a nice day, everybody. No,
Sandra: no. Um, listen to us. Uh, listen to amazing things that we talk about on morningmakershow. com. Or we could make a presentation of, of best MVPs in indie community and present that to startup people to show them exactly where they fail.
Dan: Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Great story. Um, um, I'm cheering for you because I want to plug Shipixen and talk. I don't, I'm like typically selfish then. All right. Let's take one more update each and, and then we, we, we go Easter again, I suppose.
Sandra: Yes.
Dan: Deal?
Sandra: Deal. So I start. Okay. I mean, I know we should be professional at this point and know which one.
But Jorge Perez just dropped also writer you go to tool for boosting your reddit audience easy effective and ready for your feedback what do you love what needs work this is interesting reddit
Dan: build and expand your reddit audience Boost your sales, expand your reach, forge new connections. I'm ready to get started.
Oh, no, but you know, the, the writing, I understand analytics and so on, but how do you know where you don't get help with the actual subreddits where you need to be in the community, right? That's kind of, you still have to figure that part out, which for me is the most Difficult part. And you still need to be active in a subreddit, I suppose.
Otherwise, people will hate you.
Sandra: Yeah, but how the tool works in once you are in Reddit, that's, that's what I want to know.
Dan: Maybe it's not about subreddits. At all, maybe it's just, so I see on the left, there are a lot of popular posts. Maybe it's able to pick up posts from multiple subreddits, just, just based on your topic and then on the right, you can reply to those posts.
Maybe it's like that.
Sandra: Yeah, I think so. You can choose the topics that you find interesting and then see the popular posts there, and if it can kind of, Oh, it also generates the content.
Dan: Yeah, but yeah, I was talking to eager about this and there is still some words that, you know, when you see those words, you know, this is not written by a human is some sort of GPT or whatnot.
You know what I mean?
Sandra: I know what I mean.
Dan: Maybe it's not in the first sentence, but in the second, you're like already. Was there a human writing this thing? So I'm not sure we're there with those yet. And it's also a little bit there. There was a lot of discussion on LinkedIn automations where someone posted an update and pretty much every single reply was the same thing.
Written by, it was clearly a similar prompt put in chat GPT by different users. And the answer came out very similar as well. It was like, can we please stop this madness? I mean, what, what's, what's the point? It was just noise. So maybe this is better. Maybe this is better. I don't know. I mean,
Sandra: if it, if it's able to scan the most popular post and get, then give you some kind of suggestion, what you should focus on.
That could be a thing.
Dan: It's already good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm willing to try it out.
Sandra: Yeah.
Dan: It's a good channel, right? It's a good channel. All right. Last update. And then we go.
The Potential of Open Source in Building and Marketing Products
Sandra: Yes.
Dan: D D D hang or something like that. He says, I find this Google indexing script easy to index pages on Google and huge scales in the tool.
io. Thanks to Charles for sharing this. I'm sharing this to help in the hopes that it help you too. So it is, uh, a tool by, uh, it's, it's, it's. Go Ning, you learn, right? He, he, he was on the show before I came across this tool. It's essentially, you know, there's a lot of these apps that help you index your, your articles faster.
This is basically a free script version of that. And it does the exact same thing because there's just one thing to do. That's to use the Google search index API to submit your pages. And it probably falls under the same limitations. I think there's 200 a day that you can, uh, that you can do max, which is still quite good.
Um, not everyone needs this. I think not everyone needs this.
Sandra: I just want to say one thing and it's super interesting. Um, so this is where. The targeting audience, the market, the, all of this thing that we sometimes talk about goes in to the story because now we are like kind of part of first stage of building and we can see a lot of them like popping up.
And when you told me it's like an open source, so anyone can pretty much do it. I find it brilliant because you can build whatever you want, but where and how you're gonna push it is so important. Someone could take this and just take it to all the, I don't know, stores that he has in his environment that want to rank on Google and sell that to them.
You know what I mean?
Dan: Yes.
Sandra: Like it's not exciting, but it could be.
Dan: Yes. It's actually. Yeah, it's actually a good point. And I love that he's linking to TagParrot, which is, which is like the original paid version of this. That doesn't need any, you know, fiddling with open source and taking this in your own hands, essentially.
Um, open source is still pretty cool way to market. Um, I, I think there's quite a few people in the community that do this where they have. Either an open source core or, or most of the product and then the hosted version of it that you pay for. And I think the good part about that is you get a lot of contributions from the community, especially if that product is, is, you know, as you say, if, if you're a target group is somewhat technical, if you do an open source product for a no code tool, right.
That you might not get. That many back. So, of course, logic, uh, but there was quite a few examples of, of services that are more in the back end that get contributions from member and members in the community, but also have a lot of users that don't want to go through that setup or deal and hosting or deal and so on.
Um, and. I think it's a little bit harder to, to make money off of it initially, but it seems like once it becomes popular, it becomes a go to, uh, then once you've passed the initial hurdle, you can actually grow faster when it's open source. So I'm thinking the very big companies that we use every day, including PostHog or super base, right?
They are open source first and you can host them yourself, but they're also, um, Profitable businesses, as far as I know, uh, that have a lot of users paying users at the same time. It's a very cool model and I'm not sure if what's first, is it first that they were big and they had investment to, to pull this off or was it first that they did open source and then they got an investment because of that and they managed to get big.
Sandra: That's a very good question. That's a very good question because it changed. It changes totally the idea of how you should start with the open source. I would, I would take a look at it.
Dan: So something to think about, something to, to work on this week.
Reflecting on Easter and the Indie Maker Community
Dan: I mean, it's Easter, but for, for indie makers, it's, it's two more days that there's peace and quiet, so you can work on your things.
And And then it's also, you know, for, for people with, with kids, I think there's family time a bit more. I talked about, I don't know what I'm talking about really, but from what I hear, a lot of the people, that have kids also enjoyed this time because even though they, they spend it with family, for the most part, they have some moments to think and to maybe reflect on their project.
So it, it's a good time for everyone this week to either clear their minds or get some stuff done.
Sandra: You said it really well. You are really good host. It's a pleasure doing this with you, Dan.
Dan: I feel like we're just, there, there, there's some people listening to, but I feel it's just like us complimenting each other for the shows, you know?
Oh, this is so nice. You said that so well. Oh, Sandra, your, your Taco Trebo guides are incredible. Nice job. Oh, thank you, Dan. Also nice job with the hosting, Dan. Hunted.Space. Oh my God. I love it. Yeah. Oh, the newsletter. It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.
Sandra: Well, we have to do it. Like my mother doesn't do it. I don't know about yours.
So I expect it from you.
Dan: Someone needs to do it. Otherwise we'll quit within a week. Like Gabriel maybe quit or maybe April April fooled us. I don't know. Yeah. We need to reach out to Gabriel and find out what's happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate to be pranked, so I cannot believe you didn't
Sandra: know it's April Fool's Day.
Dan: I did know, and I actually wanted to prank you, but then I thought, no, I do like Sandra.
Like, why should I prank her? I, I, I could have pranked you like with the show and, you know, say, well, you have to do it by yourself and like, see how far I can push it.
Sandra: Oh, that would be so good.
Dan: Or say that, you know, uh, there's the board members from PostHog want to join the show to see how we do with the sponsorship and we need to do very well.
They just emailed me and, you know, be careful today.
Sandra: Imagine me doing this show, it would be Posthog. Yes. In this example, this is, oh my God, this is amazing opportunity to connect it with Posthog. That's why I'm happy. That's why I'm happy when we decided to start this sponsorship. We said like, no, no, no, don't send us anything, please. We do it
Dan: by our own rules.
Yeah. Yeah. All right, Sandra, it's time to close it off. Thank you everyone for tuning in. You're lovely. Have a nice week. Have a nice Easter. Have a nice time with the family. And of course, go to morningmakershow. com and check out the previous episodes, the juicy transcripts, the recordings on Spotify, the recordings on Apple podcasts and all the other bits.
Beautiful places where you can listen. Oh, you really liked this one. And don't forget Sandra is so excited. Oh my God. Yeah. She's going on Apple podcasts right now. I think don't forget about the morning maker show newsletter. It's awesome. It's always including summaries from the community. If you've missed shows and sometimes very deep, deep thoughts from Sandra and most of all, jokes and funny things.
And I love it for that. It's, it's the perfect mix of serious, funny, and practical information.
Sandra: Exactly. Perfectly sent then. And also, um, newsletter and I'm, I mean, I want to push this video out today so people can actually see us. I want to see the reactions.
Dan: Let's do it.
Sandra: Let's do that.
Dan: Let's do the video.
Have a nice week, everyone. Thank you for tuning in. Bye.
Sandra: See you. Bye.
