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Episode 6 of Morning Maker Show: Time Zones, Indie Games, and SEO Adventures
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- Morning Maker Show
Summary
Join Dan and Sandra in this hilarious episode as they tackle the challenges of time zones, explore an indie game developer's journey, discuss the complexities of SOC 2 certification, and dive into the world of SEO adventures. Plus, a special shoutout to Prasanna for offering to review and give feedback on products in the community!
Join the conversation & see the tweets/posts we read! Stop by our space 💬
Transcript
Dan: Good morning, Sandra.
Sandra: Good morning, Dan. How are you this lovely
Dan: morning? I am fine, thank you. It is 7:30 PM in my time zone, so this is the weirdest thing to say. Can I propose something, if you don't mind? Please. Can we have just one single time zone? I don't mind if I have to sleep during the day and wake up in the night as long as we have one time zone and we all agree on it.
Sandra: I think that's the only solution for our problem
Dan: I mean, I've scheduled maybe hundreds of meetings and I can't get this right. It's just impossible. I give up. I cannot do time zones. It's true. And it's not even hard math. I can't do it. I don't know. Bear in
Sandra: mind, um, that there is a one hour difference between you and me.
Dan: Yeah. It's not even, you know, you're not in Australia or anything.
It should be simple. It should be simple. I can see
Sandra: Denmark from
Dan: here. This is unbelievable. Yeah. Anyway, good to have you this fine morning. If you're in Australia, it's four in the morning. Good morning. Um, if you're not, good evening. Thank you for joining us. I see a few friendly faces. Welcome everyone, happy to have you here and we will begin reading some of the updates.
Sandra, if you don't mind.
Sandra: Absolutely. Wait, I'm becoming a little bit blind. Okay, after working... Remember,
Dan: sorry to interrupt. You need to pronounce the full name. Remember that's the rule.
Sandra: Well, this will be a pleasure because this seems like a Finnish person. Hello, you see, um, is saying after work on my AI assisted assisted free 2.5D point and click adventure game for a year. I'm releasing a demo for PC and OS. This demo shows how AI tools help a solo dev make a game and what it could be. I have the whole process in my blog.
Dan: What do you think about this?
Sandra: I have no idea what you see is talking about.
Dan: I think it sounds like a game that was either made with AI or uses AI for the gameplay.
Yes, but I think, so there's a video here and it's kind of, it's kind of 3d, it looks really advanced. I mean, cool graphics. Yeah. It looks really, really cool. And it kind of seems like, yeah, maybe the interactions are AI generated. I mean, first of all. Very cool that we found someone doing an indie game. I think this is like a huge, huge area.
And to be honest, I don't have that many people close to me that do, do games, but I'm, I'm a big fan of this kind of stuff. That's for sure. Do you have some people that you talk to?
Sandra: No, but I would consider myself one of them. Um, in my times of developing process I did a game as well.
Dan: Oh, really? Yeah, what game was that?
Sandra: It was a horror, um, horror maze game and I, during the developing process, it was all cool, but then when we were testing the game, I was afraid of the game itself. So, um, it was a very interesting thing.
Dan: Man, this is awesome. It kind of, like, if, if this is the same as The AI tools did for development and design and copy, even if you, if you get the same for games, this could be huge if you get, uh, so you see here, did I say that correctly?
Juicy? Yeah. Yeah. Not juicy. Yeah. Good. That would be a good name, huh? Juicy. Okay. So if, if this is what it is, you know, like a similar. It's tool set, but for games and said, this could be huge. Um, uh, makes me want to do a game as well. Maybe not a maze horror game, but
Sandra: not a maze horror game. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. So great to read that.
All right. Let's, uh, let's jump to the next one. By Igor, uh, I don't believe this is his name, but Igor Momentum, that's like a clever way to plug his his product and name. He says, okay, you launched the wait list. Now what? And you Momentum has the built in knowledge base. So founders can learn how to build and grow startups.
Users can contribute to knowledge base by sharing the useful resources too. Um, I think I. Kind of get what this is. So do you know what momentum is? Well,
Sandra: it's been a year now that I have been trying to understand what Momentum is and I still have a trouble of understanding it.
Dan: I have some questions myself.
Sandra: But yeah, I, I, I spoke with Igor, I think it was in April and he demoed me the Momentum at that point. Um, I don't know if they have changed something in the meantime. Yeah,
Dan: it's, it's, uh, I mean, at its core, it's, it's a landing page builder. But very efficient one, plus a way to give updates on what you're building.
So those are like a combination of a feed plus the landing page itself. And then the landing page could have a newsletter or a wait list or some place to put an email. So as I understand it, he's saying, well, they've expanded this. And after you put your, your email, now you also have. A knowledge base, which I believe is a feature in momentum somewhere,
Sandra: but not much.
For your own, probably product,
Dan: then. I believe so. Yeah. So it's a knowledge base for your own product. So while you're building it, I guess the idea is that you already start writing tutorials for it or some sort of examples or, which might be a pretty clever investment because you already. Get some keywords in, maybe you get a little bit of traffic because now you have some more interesting content.
Sandra: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm, I'm struggling now with Clue to kind of build the whole help center and the knowledge base, I guess. And so, yeah, there is definitely value.
Dan: Are you using any tool for that?
Sandra: Unfortunately not. I was planning to build it on Webflow itself. Yeah. You had one version on Notion and I don't think it's enough and I, I want to have it all on the website, but I don't know.
Dan: Yeah. Does, uh, does it have some sort of plugin or it's kind of, you have to figure out how to do it? You have to figure it out. How to do it. Okay. Sounds like it's going to be a uphill battle, right? Yeah, long process. We also didn't have such a good time building the landing page or how was it?
Sandra: It was disgusting.
I hate it. I mean, I don't know how else to explain it. I went through this process of building the landing page and rebuilding it and adding it and it's never enough. Um, so, and I did it with Webflow and I've, I've really liked the idea of building and shipping something very fast and then just testing it out.
Dan: So, yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a trap with these that you start fast and you get something up, but then when you want to customize it and make your, your own, you kind of hit all the limitations and you have to see how to work around them. Is that how you. Absolutely.
Sandra: That's a good problem to have for me. It was more that I was stuck in something that wasn't even out properly.
Dan: Yeah, I see. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But maybe momentum is something you could look at who knows the knowledge base.
Sandra: Yeah, but I'm bigger, um, admired. Of [Shipixen](https://shipixen.com.
Dan: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to plug it, but of course Shipixen is the absolute best way to do a knowledge base. Uh, no, it's very good.
I had a lot of fun, but of course that's, that's, you know, you don't have a CMS, you have to write it yourself, but I had a ton of fun doing that. So definitely another option. So maybe both of these could be sponsors of our show. Who knows speaking about sponsors. Um, you have some updates regarding the special edition of the newsletter, right?
That's the Christmas newsletter. Yeah,
Sandra: so I'm very proud of the next newsletter. Of course, it's going to be funny and very educational, but because holidays are coming, so I wanted to have that. Period in the newsletter. So we managed to get really cool products for a very nice discounts. Um, some of them are free as well.
So I'm super excited for the next newsletter. And we also
Dan: have, you mean like completely, entirely free. I like that. Yeah. I should sign up for the newsletter too. You have not signed up. I'm joking, of course, I've signed up. Of course, yeah. I was ready to go to that. Yeah, no, I've done it a few times. It's just so good, yeah.
So, sorry. Oh my God. Next one. Next one, by Evo, you want to take it?
Sandra: Yes. Maps. Oops. Um, I want to write more next year other than the usual building public stuff. Been thinking about clone. cloning popular applications and sharing my process on, um, deciding what would be in the MVP. What would be left out and then actually build it and share the code?
Sounds interesting, question mark. Been thinking about cloning popular applications? I
Dan: mean, no, but it's cloning in a good way. Yeah. It's not in a copycat way. Okay. Let's imagine it's, it's a positive type of cloning.
Sandra: Okay.
Dan: And then sharing the process, and I assume it's not the cloning process per se, but it's actually the building process. That's pretty. Although I'm sure you will find, if someone makes a course on cloning and copying, I think you'll be very popular.
For sure.
Sandra: Let's make Slack.
Dan: Yeah. Would you, would you read this, uh, this kind of stuff, seeing how people, you know, if someone were to clone Klu and let's imagine no one did, but if someone ever did that, would you want to read about it or would
Sandra: you not? Yes. I mean, if it works at the end and it works really good, I want to know.
Tell me what you did.
Dan: For sure. Yeah. I, I, I have mixed feelings. But because they'll, they'll probably do a part of it, right? It's not going to be the whole thing. And I also think, well. I spent so much building this and then someone did it in a week or something, but it would still be a very interesting read, in my opinion.
Sandra: It's got that slap in the face as well.
Dan: Sandra, I want to ask a question. No, don't. What is SOC 2? Is this, so, okay, last Christmas I got A pair of socks under the tree. There was two of them. What is SOC 2 then? Can you please explain?
Sandra: Yeah, so it's so tricky. So when we started building Klu, we knew that we're going to stumble off multiple problems, especially if we're going to go and hunt enterprise companies.
There is Security, you know, many security compliances that you have to go through and etc. And SOC2 is something that is kind of a well formed in the, in the, um, I wanted to say community. We use community word too much. But, um, but. Going into enterprise levels, especially if you are third party tool, um, and we've been working on it for like the past seven months.
It's very long process, usually quite boring, exhausting and et cetera. And today we got the news that we got talked to. So, um, 2024. Hello enterprises. I'm coming for you.
Dan: So is this something that. Certain companies need to, to get, or is it's, it's for B2B especially, or anyone should, should get
Sandra: it's, it's something that is kind of required if you want to go for the enterprise level, because you are dealing with their data.
And, you know, so you need to have SOC2 certificate. Because that showcase that we have like a security processes and that we are protecting data and etc in order for them to kind of accept the product.
Dan: Yeah, got it. Yeah, got it. Well, congratulations and getting this today. I learned.
Sandra: Thank you. It's, it's been, it's been stressing me for too long and just knowing that, that, that we are gone and it's all good.
It's, it's really good. It's a very Christmas gift thing.
Dan: That I'm, I'm happy. I'm happy that you're happy. All right. Should I take the next one by Lera? Yeah. So damn it. Lera Momentum again. I have a feeling this is also not her real name. And in fact, I know that's the product. plug, but you see, uh, it works.
Put your product in your name. She says next week's plans. Next week is Christmas, Lera, by the way. Uh, Clipwing micro tool release, a promo video generator. Ooh, and a YouTube transcript generator. So move. Clipwing from Webflow to Momentum page, finally. Oh, this is exactly what we talked about. Uh, you can make this stuff up.
Um, all right. So Clipwing, I actually, I actually wanted to use Clipwing for our show. It's, it's an app to cut your videos with AI and make short clips out of it. And I wanted to do this for audio clips as well. It doesn't support audio yet though, but it might come. And it seems like the strategy is that they will make micro tools, maybe free tools that will attract people for the main product.
Sandra: Yeah. I mean, we already talked about, um, having micro tools, free, free tools, and then. This space was downloaded via
Dan: spacesdown. com. Visit to download
Sandra: your spaces today. Attracting for the real sale thing. Um, I'm quite inspired by Lera, by the way. I really, really like Lera. It's great to follow her. They kind of disappear for some time, Igor and Lera, but they come back and then disappear.
Um, but I think she's doing a really good job. Um, with the product.
Dan: Yeah. Agree. I love her communication and marketing and style in general. It's, it's so different from everyone else's. It's, it's just great. So looking forward to using the tools, but. Also Christmas, don't forget the next one.
Sandra: Yes. Andreas, I finished all my remaining tasks and I have planned for any stone.
io this year. The last update for 2023 just went live and I feel so. Overall, I shipped 27 small and big updates across the year. Hashtag building public. Oh my God. I feel you. I feel you. When I finished this talk too today, I was like, okay, I'm done.
Dan: But can I just point out? What any stone is, because this is like, this looks super scripted and we're like trying to make it look like it's not so any stone is, of course, a knowledge base software that I believe would be a competitor to momentum and a great fit for your use case.
Sandra: Bear in mind, Igor is listening to us, Igor,
Dan: we are not Hi Igor, yeah, I mean, you know, it's obviously, it's obviously, yeah, well, I can't comment on this. Uh, we're, we're being objective here, uh, so yeah, a lot of shipping and, and, and uh, pretty much Andreas here says the year is done, the year is done, and looking forward to the next year.
Is your year done?
Sandra: Well, tomorrow, I will pretend tomorrow that it's done. Tomorrow, I'm flying, I'm taking a day off, um, but starting Monday, it's the same, same all
Dan: over again. Yeah, you know, I'd actually love, at some point, to do this and say, I'm kind of I'm kind of taking some time off, but I feel like I can these days because I'm, I'm always in work mode.
That's probably good and bad.
Sandra: I mean, I, I try to tell myself as long as you enjoy this and as long as that is kind of like the first thing you want to do, you just do it. I mean, try to have a healthy life balance. I fully agree. But don't restrict yourself. Oh my God. I sound so bad. Work people, just
Dan: work.
Just, just work. Uh, Sandra, have you prepared our sponsor for today?
Sandra: Of course I prepared our sponsors for today. Let me choose. I have 10 of them. The biggest sponsor of today, and I'm super excited about this sponsor is Screenshot One. Turn websites into screenshots via API.
Dan: Did you learn this by heart?
Sandra: It's so good. It's great sponsors to have. And I highly recommend you to try it out because you can turn a website. Into screenshots, imagine
Dan: that this is, this is amazing. Um, I've, I've tried this out. It actually is pretty cool. You know what it can do? So I was, I got kicked this, you know, what's the problem with this?
That you could do, you know, go with developer mode. You could do a script that you get it out. By the way, he's not actually sponsoring. I hope you figured it out. We don't have a sponsor yet.
Sandra: We're just, figure it out when you said, um, actually I tried it
Dan: out.
Yeah. So the cool thing about it that I had to try it to understand is that it could. bypass cookie, you know, those privacy things and accept them for you and all sorts of models and stuff. And it's actually super challenging to, to script all of those. Like, you know, if you want to do it for, let's say you have an app that shows a preview of landing pages for some reason, or a directory or whatever, you basically have an unlimited amount of use cases where people do, or it's cookies or, you know, Put your email here in a pop up to sign up and so on.
And it could bypass all of those and take the actual screenshot. So that's pretty cool. Isn't it Sandra?
Sandra: It is. That's why, um, it's our sponsor. We don't take any, any
Dan: products. Obviously, it's, it's highly, yeah, yeah, highly rated. Yeah. Okay. Will you, will you read this very quick one here?
Sandra: Yes. Phil is saying first sale.
Yay. Hashtag building public.
Dan: Always a, always a good one to see a first, uh, first sale. Congrats Phil. Very good. Yeah. What is this for? Let's go in the comments. So.
Sandra: And I love the pricing. 47 euros. Yes. We put our product for cheap. I'm
Dan: going to change that. Yeah. You should increase your pricing. So the product I believe is called SEO audit.
What is it?
Sandra: Get a free AI powered SEO audit.
Dan: I have an itch to try this thing out. So automated keyword research, blog posts and autopilot, CTR optimization suggestions, internal linking recommendations, and much more. And SEO is like super hot. Have you done any SEO recently? Yes, I'm very proud of it. Yeah.
Does it work?
Sandra: That question actually. Um. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I, I started not, not even a full month ago. Um, you know, I started with just the keyword research and Philippe was a big influence in that. Um, I started with the keyword research and then I decided, okay, let's push blogs. Let's do, even with this help center, I'm putting all the keywords and et cetera.
And I mean, of course you don't see immediately the big spike, but, um, there was people coming. And I think the, the, I think the conversion was around seven point something percent. So I was quite happy and satisfied. And when I say conversion, I mean from people who landed to the page from the, the Google ping, um, to the first search.
Yeah. So,
Dan: so quite good. Yeah. How many articles did you write?
Sandra: 20 plus
Dan: help center. No, okay, that, that's a, I mean, in my mind, that's a pretty huge amount of content, but it's also easy for you to write, I believe.
Sandra: I mean, I was waiting for this moment. I didn't want to go to SEO because I, I don't, again, like long term strategies with, uh, with, uh, early stage products.
So I was waiting for a long time and the moment I decided to go to that route, I had a lot of to say, so.
Dan: Yeah, got it. Yeah, it's usually you probably had a lot of backlinks already. So yeah, that's the hard part, because even if you write this large amount, but no one linked to you, you don't have any domain of authority, then yeah, you're not going to get anything.
But probably you had a lot of big outlets and press and whatnot linking to you. Yeah,
Sandra: yeah, yeah, it was kind of already set up and Philippe was really, I, I, I, I mean, he was really, really a big help for me. And so if you guys, anyone wants to go into this space, I highly suggest to talk with Philippe. He's also
Dan: listening.
Philippe. Yeah. Yeah. He's back in the comment section. Hi Philippe. Yeah. I see. Nice work. All right. You want to take the next one too?
Sandra: Yes. Thanks. Josh. Andrew, Andrew, I've spent months researching on how the best design subscription web agencies set up their landing pages. If you're looking to release a new product, service, learn from some of the best links in the comments.
Hashtag building public.
Dan: It's a potentially a gold mine if, if you want to do that, man, it's so crazy. I see. One of these new design subscription web agencies popping up every other day now. Yeah.
Sandra: I think we kept mentioning them. Yeah. during every morning show at this point.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it seems I'm just opening the comments.
There's a lot of examples here. Honestly, I don't know a lot about it. I don't think I'm going to do something like this, but I had this thought and do you think you can ever do this for. other types of industries. So let's say a productized marketing agency where people pay a subscription to get marketing.
Do you think that could work? Yeah. Yeah. And why don't we see more of those, do you think?
Sandra: Maybe they are existing, but they are not just in the space that we are.
Dan: Hmm. Yeah, yeah. So they're maybe more in the medium sized business type of space, or? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But isn't that going to be contract work usually, you know, have a larger project that when you deliver it and it's done, is it, do you think it's common to have a subscription for, for example, marketing?
I don't know.
Sandra: My kind of like intuition is saying that it's always a good idea to have someone in your team or in, in, in house that is dealing with that. Yeah. And then outsourcing only. short terms, whatever strategy it is you have. So I'm very up for, I don't know, PR agencies or as you, I mean, some type of the agency that they are dealing with certain parts of the whole strategy, but then talking about outsourcing your marketing to the agency that's going to hardly.
Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Quite interesting. Do you ever see yourself doing that?
Sandra: I mean, During I during all of these product calls. I was kind of doing that because it was interesting for me to hear the, to hear other people and what they are solving and then figuring out like next to the product hunt, um, what are their strategies and how they see marketing.
So, um, it was interesting, but it's a very short. Period of time. It is usually one call or maybe two with few people. Um, but it is exciting. I could potentially see myself doing something like that. Having multiple products and kind of like going into their marketing. Yeah,
Dan: but yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Am I, do I need a new domain?
I think so. I think you're missing a domain there. Yeah, just one more to the 27 that you already have. Yeah, so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna read a couple things from, uh, from the comments. So I have MC, um, I, I imagine the name is longer, but MC on Twitter anyway, says Dan isn't a robot. He's a real person.
Very much so. Um, it might seem like I am. Some days, but I am very real and I'm not AI and also all of my tweets are not AI. So there's that.
And then, João, he says, uh, time for the evening maker's tea. So I love João, when we did, when we did it in the actual morning, not in the evening, he said, it's time for our morning coffee. And so now he switched appropriately to tea. I love this. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sandra: Yeah, we need to maybe do more often, um, evening
Dan: shows.
Yeah, yeah We had this idea in the beginning that we do the show and then we we get a keyword And whenever we see that keyword in the building public feed, we take a shot of something. So that could be a different show that I really want to try. What about the New Year? Yeah, it could be the New Year's edition.
That's for sure. Okay, shall we take the final one, Sandra, if you will do the honors? Prasanna.
Sandra: Hey, hashtag building public folks. It's time to give back if your product wants initial feedback, review, testimonial, link your product in the comments. I'm planning to spend quality time and have a max budget of 50.
Happy to try it out and give my honest opinion. Wow.
Dan: This is actually crazy. Wow, well done. Put Klu. so, please. Ah, this is brilliant. I love this community. Right? Insane. I love this. And he, you know, the best part is not asking for anything. It's just, you know, I'm, I'm doing this, spending some time and that's it.
That's the end of it. Initial feedback,
Sandra: review, testimonials. Oh, that's really lovely. This is just such a
Dan: vibe. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna retweet this. It's so good. Uh, it's, it's, I don't have anything else to add, really. My, I'm, I'm blown away. What, why haven't we done this, Sandra? We're bad people. That's why.
Don't call
Sandra: us out like that.
Dan: Okay. I don't need it, okay? You know, this is an example. You know, people listening and everyone else, you know, This is an example for all of us, give something. And I always said that give and support people unconditionally and good things will happen. And you don't have to ask for anything back.
Good things will happen anyway. For sure.
Sandra: For sure. Uh, it's really nice. I mean, there are a lot of tweets that you can see, link your product down and blah, blah, blah. But this is actually someone giving time and effort to try to review, leave the testimony. I mean, This is what the community is about. And I think, um You know, we tend to overhype each other, but giving also an honest feedback and review is already something.
So this is really nice to see. Wait, there is a sound that I want to use.
Dan: Perfect. Perfect. You're, they're a real professional. I don't know what I'm doing here. Uh, good. Let's, let's wrap it up. I had a blast. I think maybe we should do an evening one. Maybe we should just do the, the second one in the evening. So Monday we do morning and then Friday we do evening.
Sandra: Yeah, I like, I like that idea and then we can drink as, I mean, we don't have to, but we can if there are keywords and if you are playing a game.
So
Dan: if it just happens, we don't, no one really encourages it, but the people joining us could also do it. Yes. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for joining everybody. Before we close, I actually have a little bit of announcement. So, our newsletter has reached 86 subscribers. And we thought for the hundred subscriber, just so we celebrate you a little bit, we're going to do something special.
Sandra, what are we doing for the hundred subscriber? Yeah.
Sandra: So we're going to take a product, review the product in special space. So we're going to create a space for this person and then review their product. Why am I repeating
Dan: myself? Hopefully positively, right? So, you know, I'm taking some inspiration from Prasanna here and, you know, maybe we do the initial feedback, the review and then a testimonial as well, right?
I mean, might as well go all the way. So go to morningmakershow.com slash newsletter, or just to morningmakershow.com if you're Fingers are too tired from typing and be sure to sign up for the newsletter. If you happen to be the 100th lucky person, then we'll get in touch and check your product out. Yay.
Yay. And thank you very much screenshot one for sponsoring us this show.
Sandra: Okay. Then see you next show,
Dan: I guess. See you next show! Bye! Bye! .
