Morning Maker Show Pilot - Indie Making Rises from the Ashes!

In this episode, Indie Making Rises from the Ashes!

Summary

Join Dan and Sandra in this hilarious pilot episode as they attempt to revive indie making from its 'dead' status. Get ready for laughs, insights, and a touch of chaos in the indie making universe!

Transcript

Good morning!

So, Sandra, you're on mute in the space. Oh, sorry. That's not supposed to happen when you are in space. Let's try again. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first news reporting. We are really excited about reading to you what's happening.

What are we reading, Sandra? Can you, can you tell me? So, yeah, so we are going through building public hashtag. And we want to remind everyone that there are amazing people out there building amazing things. So we're just going to go through the hashtag and read it. So the whole idea is, people were saying that indie making or indie hacking, it's dead, you know, it's gone.

It's dead. It's never coming back, and we don't want that. We basically took this challenge, as the nice people that we are, to revive indie making. And we thought the best way to do that is to go In the building public hashtag and read the awesome stories and highlight, you know, the, the amazing wins and, and, and losses.

So let's see how that goes. This is the pilot. If, if people like it, if people enjoy this, it's going to be very, very relaxed. And then if people like it, maybe we're going to do more of these things. And maybe this way people are going to post more on building public and then, you know, they get featured in this.

Can we call it a show Sandra is it a show or what is it? Yeah, it's a show, but we don't have a hashtag. What's our hashtag for the show?

Have you thought of that? Of course not. Of course. I can totally read. Okay. So for episode one, you know what we do, we go back and we create a hashtag. Yeah, this is the show called building public status. Is that our, our name? We'll figure that out. I really want news reporting and, you know, like this big red titles and I need like more than.

So like the, the CNN of building public, is that the goal? I mean, yeah. Yeah. If we do some. Okay. Well, we need some breaking news then. Yes. Yeah. Good. All right. So I think, so surprise you're going to be the first one to, to read something from the building public feed as one thing I want to mention, like one of the ideas of this show, which we have established as a show is to have a keyword.

And when you find that keyword, so let's say the keyword is MRR. Okay. When you find that keyword in the building public feed, you take a shot. The problem is, it's now eight in the morning and we have Kind of stuff to do afterwards, so I don't think we're going to be doing the shot. But that could be like evening show, you know, the late night version of this show I fully agree.

And I is on the, is on the other side of the planet and they can take a shot if we can. Oh, yeah, we could all take a shot that are listening. You see? So we're working with the concept. Okay. Alcohol might be involved at some point. All right. So Sandra. Yeah. We're ready to go. Will you read the first wonderful update on Build in Public by none other than Olive?

Yeah, so Olive said, I stumbled on this Stealed Airtable update last night. Site sheets can be opened from the calendar in one click now. Inline editing still enabled. All my beta testers were super confused by the previous model. A huge quality of life change. Amazing work. So, you know, you know, Olive, I think she's actually super awesome.

She She's been doing these daily updates for so many days now, like I can't I can't even count it. She basically reports the progress and she's been building a lot of awesome stuff. I really like her style and she's been super active in the, in the community as well. Which one should be to the chat here or not?

Yeah to the chat, I guess so everyone can see oh, yeah, we could share We could share all this all this profile. Maybe yeah, so really cool. I I'm rooting for her She's making Awesome stuff. And she's building, I think she's building no code for the most part, which is also very cool. And, and yeah, Airtable is, is kind of like that, but like the stuff she managed to do with, with no code is, is amazing.

So great great job, uh, Olive. So I'm going to figure out how to share stuff in the meantime, but then Sandra, will you? Will you take the next update by Sebastian? Oh, Sebastian is a very interesting person. I like following Sebastian. Sebastian said, join the movement to get even more feedback. Had to write native code for this though.

Yeah, so we know Sebastian, he's he's doing iOS apps. Sebastian, I mean my, are you, you're speaking German very well, Sandra. Aren't you? Will you dare pronounce his second last name? No, I don't speak German. But I can try. I'm joking. Sebastian Roll, I mean. Perfect. Yeah, nicely done. So I hope we didn't butcher your name, Sebastian.

He, yeah, he's making iOS apps. I'm a big fan. He has the one that I'm even using is called Habit Kit. And I think it's I think it's in, in Flutter if I'm not mistaken. But yeah, so now he wrote something in, in native code. He maybe took a leap of faith to. To do some, some iOS stuff were very well done very well done.

Sebastian, should I take the next one, Sandra? I, I didn't figure out how to post the profiles. We need to figure that out for the next show. Actually, I can post it from here, but you can read the next one and I'll make sure to post, or you just put it in the comments, maybe. Yeah. Cause you know, there's a way to pin stuff.

So that's what I was looking for. And I can never find that. Like pinning comments in the space. Yeah, we're just learning. So Justin Harwood I like Justin. He, he didn't start that long ago, but time flies, time flies. I know the first day he started, I remember it because he reached out. He was learning to code.

And he reached out for advice, and I don't know if I did a good job, but I gave him some advice, and then, you know, fast forward, now he's, he's building things, he, he probably is a master of code now so he's on building public day, I don't even remember, I'm really the, getting the, Hang of the flutter flow platform.

So there you go. He's he's he's doing some Then he has the questions. What's the go to font size for designing mobile web apps? And do you have a go to padding left and right? So, like, One of the things that happens a lot in building public is, you know, people getting feedback asking for feedback. I think this is awesome. Especially people that maybe don't have that many hours and then sitting with Figma or design this is kind of cool.

I think, I don't know the answer to this, Justin but if someone's someone's good with, with design, I definitely pitch in. We have our good friend, Alex. Yeah. He's probably not here. She is extremely good with, with design. I'm sure she'd have some yeah, something to say. All right. I keep the drama for you, Sandra.

There's like a really drama drama update on building public coming next. Do you want to, you want to read it? Yes.

If, oh no, it's very problematic when we need to read the names and I'm not quite sure about the names. So I can't hear you, Sandra. Oh, what can you hear me? It might be something with my space. I'll just rejoin. One second. Yes.

Alrighty, so Good job, Dan. Apparently, if the space breaks, and you leave the space, then you end the space. So, the problem is, I couldn't hear anything, and I thought, well, I'll, I'll just rejoin, like any other thing. And, obviously, that ended the entire space, and completed the episode. So, good job, Dan.

That's why it's a pilot, because I'm I'm learning. So, Sandra, I was off at the drama tweet. You want to take it over?

Oh, wait, you are, you are not a speaker yet. You might need to accept that you're a speaker and then speak. There you go. So I was speaking this whole time. I read the half of the post, you know But the good part about that is that you rehearsed it once so now it's gonna be really awesome Yeah, true true.

Please. Don't please don't stop space. Just don't cancel it Okay. Oh, you're gonna make fun of me for this one for a while, huh? A little bit. So Nifango, he's saying avoid building public if your target audience is not there. Otherwise, you'll attract copycats when your project makes money. For every idea, think if your X marketing outweighs the copycats you attract.

Regret sharing our baby AI on X, but I won't make the same mistake again. Yes, because everyone are just waiting for To copy ideas, you know, and it's going to be crazy and successful. I fully agree with you, Farhan. I'm thinking of leaving and being in silence. You said this, Sandra, and I'm thinking I'm going to copy Clue.

Is that okay? Yeah, please. Can you please do it? Please, someone can, like, make it better. Do something. Figure out the problem. Figure out the problem because I can't. Yeah, so. Yeah, we're being mean, but I think that's generally the thing that comes up in building public and it's, I always have the same thing to, to say, and then it's, you know, ideas, they're, they're cheap.

And then the copycats, they don't tend to last long, they pop up, but they don't have your platform. They don't have your, um, your, your polish in the product. They don't have your vision. Right. So it's. It's not really, it's not really something, I think you should take it as a compliment, if anything, that you have actually, you arrived on something that people think it's so good that they could copy it, and, but you're ahead of everybody and Ethan has a bit of a, a bit of an audience himself, right I think whatever copycats he has are not gonna help.

Not gonna do much damage and and then there's a lot of people in the world. Maybe there's space for two things, you know Maybe there's space for both. It's not it's not like you you don't have customers anymore when someone copies you There's there should be enough for everyone. I think what do you think Sandra?

Um I, I mean, I'm, I, I do understand where is he coming from. There, there is always a fear that someone will take something that you spend time and effort in building and then, you know, there is also a fear that they will gonna manage to maybe market it better and faster and et cetera. So I kind of do understand that, but I still think it's not equal to what you can achieve if you are kind of building in public.

So yeah, I wouldn't be scared of that. I wouldn't be scared of copycats or things like that. Also, also, also, we had like few times even this year where we obviously not notice the products that have been copied from other maker. And I think we. All clearly, like you, you go wild and crazy when you figure something like that, then you talk about it and you write tweets about it.

So there is also support system in that. Yeah, it's it's not nice when it happens. Yeah, like, like, we need to have empathy because no one wants that. But. It's not the end of the world, either. No, no, no, no, not for sure. Yeah. So good. You handled the drama very well. I know. I'm such a good reporter. Yeah. You know, I mean, we, we should already close down because I said half an hour, but I'm having too much fun.

Maybe we take, how many more do we take? You need to be at Slush. Yeah. What's Slush? Slush is a very big tech conference in Helsinki. And it's happening today. It was, it started actually yesterday and it's happening today. So I'm quite excited about it. A lot of drunk people talking about money. So, yeah.

So drunk people with money to give. That's not, they only talk about the money. Not, oh, only no one has money. . Okay. They all want money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And everyone are changing the world, so it's very freaky . Oh. So there's no one there that comes and says, you know, my product is just average. Like everyone, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Well, okay. Let's take a couple more. We take one each and then, and then we close the pilot and then hopefully someone will give us feedback if this is like a good good, whatever format at all. So I can take the next one. The next one is, is, is like a hot, hot thing. So our friend Danny Postma, one of the, you know, the prolific indie makers.

where I don't know if he's indie anymore at this point, but he used to be anyway. He has launched animated version of it's not, it's not like his product headshot pro can do avatars, but he launched a sort of like a side product to it where someone's saying Benny cocked that you can create an animated talking avatar with your headshot pro avatar.

And then his. Free avatar generator was launched on product hunt recently, I believe it's a hundred percent free. Don't know how he pulled that off, but it's probably when you do, when you do these, I mean, you're at the marketing goddess, basically, Sandra, why would you do one of these three products like this?

Because that obviously costs some money, like you need to pay open AI for the product that he's actually marketing. I mean, I had a hunch, but I'm not as good as you are, but it's actually quite good. I've seen that a few times, people doing it and yeah, have you tried it? Have you tried to make a free? No, no, no, no, I didn't.

I don't know how or where it would fit with Clue though. Yeah. I haven't think about, I haven't thought about it. Yeah, it's a great way to kind of like, but I've seen others pushing next to their product, a free version of something that is kind of, or can be combined with the main product. Yeah, yeah, I mean, of course, it needs to tie into the product somehow, and not all products have have that opportunity, but it's good.

You know what I saw. I think it was Dan and Sveta, they do, they do this a lot and they do it to get leads basically, and then they convert them later because they're very good with email marketing, for example. And you also get like when you have a free something, that means you get a lot of people linking to it because, you know, everyone likes free stuff and you get high in Google search as well.

So if you tie in a free product into your main one, you might actually get some, some clicks from search organically into the main product because now you're, you're kind of you're kind of ranking high for for a word, so pretty cool stuff. Yeah. All right. Also in my mind, I thought about them immediately.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've been perfecting this, this form. Yeah. I was about to make a joke about Dan, but I'll keep it for the next show. So Sandra. Last build in public update from Manoj. I probably butchered this heavily. Will you, will you read it? Okay. But Manoj is excited to announce that X has been acquired.

Hey! Hey! Congratulations! This is really, I mean, this is my first acquisition when I, When I'm on the selling side, new owner has exciting things planned for X Actions and I'll also be contributing to that for a little while. More details coming soon. Hey, this is, this deserves some kind of sound. Yeah, can you do celebration sounds?

You know.

Yeah, amazing. Amazing. So that's one of the, one of the awesome things that could happen in this space is, you know, you, you build a product, it maybe has some sort of MRR that makes it makes it valuable. Then one of the possible outcomes is you get acquired and that's, that's very good because it gives you some runway.

And perhaps, you know, a lot of, a lot of people are trying out different things and seeing what works. And when we get acquired, you you tend to focus on, on another thing. And then you have a little bit of. Peace of mind. 'cause, 'cause you have the, the, the runway for a while. And I actually saw, I dunno if you noticed the same, but a lot of the people that get acquired, their next thing that comes out is actually pretty good.

It seems a little bit more, how to say it? Like more mature. 'cause they had, they had the time and focus to, to build it. Well I don't know if you think the same. That's my,

I mean, you know, you learn. Yeah, it's a bit scary though. I have, I've never sold something. I don't know. I was thinking they're my babies. I don't want to, you know, I don't want someone to take over like hunted space and do something. Right. Yeah, it depends. It really depends who is the person and what. What kind of plans he has for that?

I mean, it's different that rather than like bigger companies acquiring smaller startups and then killing them just because of the competition. That's, that's like problematic. But if someone has like a nice roadmap or a plan for your product for our product for hundreds based on say that then I, you know, if they can do much more than we can at the moment, it's also very nice to see that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you do want to acquire hunted space please let me know. I was about to say we forgot to sponsor Sandra. Will you tell everyone a word from our sponsor today?

Yes, of course, I will. Of course, I will. Today we are sponsored by very special people um, and we are extremely grateful for their, the money they have invested in this, in this, in this show, show, show. So, It's it's screenshot one, the sponsor, right? Oh, okay. Good. Yeah. As yeah. So just the word sponsor screenshot one it's a scalable and performant platform for rendering websites, HTML, or, or markdown in any image format, including PDF without cookie banners and ads.

So thank you so much for sponsoring screenshot on your, your money is very, very much appreciated. Keeps the show running. Thanks. Of course wants to be in the next, you know, in the next show at our sponsor, please, please contact me or Dan. Yeah, please do. All right. I want to do one more. This is like so fun.

I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to end it. Do you want to, you want to do one more? One more. One more. Yeah. Are you, are you late for Slush? Yes, but it's okay. I'm already late. Okay. Cause this is a good one. Yeah. I mean, good. Not, not good for Charlie, but okay. Do you want to take it or should I take it?

Yeah, you take it. You take it. Take this one. You will enjoy this one. No, I will enjoy it. Okay. So Charlie Coppinger, he's, he's Charlie, he's, he's a very cool guy. He does some videos sometimes. I like that. We don't have a lot of people doing videos in the space. He does crazy things all of a sudden, launches something in the middle of the night on Product Hunt, that happened.

Or does, I'm gonna lock myself for 48 hours and code x or y thing and stream it. That kind of stuff big fan. But he writes, a few weeks ago I ran out of runway. This is, you know, many people's worst nightmare. My medium sized bets hadn't been playing off. Running out of bus money was my low point. Oh, Charlie, sorry to hear that.

And then he says, well, I'm back on the bus. Hey, LEED UX Early Access sold out almost entirely in less than 24 hours. So actually, this is a success story because, you know, in the lowest of the points, he launched. Lit UX, and

Out of runway, but now with his last moment, didn't even have bus money, he says launched his lead UX product and early access is doing fantastic. And now he's kind of back in the game as it looks from this tweet you know, there are many ups and downs though. So, you know, can you relate to that? I think I'm, I'm like, this hits home for me that it's kind of the, I understand the fear.

Yeah, that's like, it was the same with clue in May. We were also like questioning everything and are we moving forward and what's happening? So I totally get that. And I, there is no better feeling than when you think you will have to, you know, go other way or find another way. And then something happens like in Charlie case, so it gives you this I dunno, some kind of validation that we are doing this for some goods, you know, like, yeah, man, Charlie's really funny.

So the next tweet, he says the, the, he got kicked out of the bus for tweeting from the back and then next photo. Oh, can we link this? Next photo is I think you should, everyone should just go and say hi to Charlie and like cheer him up. He's really cool. On the bike. It's sunny outside. Who's the real winner?

And then you can see the bike and the buses in front of him, kind of, uh, going away. Yeah, very cool. Very cool. Big fan, Charlie. So, Sandra, do we, do we go to Slush? Is this the pilot episode? It's a wrap. You're on the phone. She might be on the phone. So, we lost Sandra. I know she, she has to be something.

She has to be somewhere in 15 minutes and people are probably calling her and say, where the hell are you, Sandra? Sandra, you're back?

Okay, but I think it's time to end it here. So thank you so much for tuning in. If you have any feedback at all, uh, we'd love, we'd love to hear it and let us know if this was fun and if we should do it again sometime, if you liked it. We might do it again. Thank you so much for tuning in. Define sponsor.

And thanks ScreenshotOne again for sponsoring our show. Have a nice day everyone and a great weekend when you get to it. Bye. Yes. Thank you. Bye.

Brought to you by

Page UI

Let us introduce your product to the maker community.

Sponsor us