Notion adds Backlinks, Glide has a new pricing

Modern Makers - 06/09/2020

Sep 06, 2020

Modern Makers is a weekly newsletter where I share with you a selection of the best available content about no-code and productivity tools. I hope this content will help you grow your business, launch your project or succeed in your career.

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Hi makers,

This week in the agenda:

💰 Anima wants to improve collaboration between designers & developers

🔙 Backlinks are now available on Notion

🏷️ Glide introduced its new pricing

Enjoy!

You are currently reading the 14th edition of Modern Makers, a project that I officially launched just over 3 months ago in its English version (I also have a French edition that I started a couple of weeks before). First of all, I’m delighted to see that the number of subscribers is growing every week, and so I thank you for that. Your feedback is also extremely motivating and useful to help me improve the content I create for you and to try to give you a lot of value in a structured email allowing you to navigate between the different sections that interest you the most.

So far I have managed to keep up with the initial promise: a new edition sent every Sunday.

However, it is sometimes difficult to find enough material for certain sections of the newsletter. For example, I don’t discover interesting enough no-code projects on a weekly basis. And our favourite tools don't necessarily have every week a new feature that deserves our full attention.

In order to ensure that I can provide you with enough content in each edition of the newsletter, I have then decided to launch a new Readings section 📚 where I will share some of the content that has caught my attention as well as my current reading on my Kindle. This new section will of course remain mainly on the themes that are dear to me and in line with the editorial policy of this newsletter: Business / Entrepreneurship / Tech / Productivity / Personal development ...

Don't worry then, all the other usual sections are of course kept and I will continue to summarise the news around the no-code tools.

Don't hesitate to send me your feedback by leaving a comment or by replying to this email.

📚 Readings

I’m currently reading To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy.

Lawrence was hired as CFO by Steve Jobs in 1994 to help him develop Pixar and take it to an IPO. In just under 300 pages, Lawrence takes us through the history of the Pixar studio starting in 1994, one year before the release of Toy Story, the first animated feature film in computer generated images, a true technological exploit achieved by a team of barely 100 people.

Everything about this incredible success story is fascinating: the process leading up to Pixar's IPO in 1995, the intense negotiations with Disney as well as Lawrence's relationship with the charismatic and demanding Steve Jobs. A true human adventure made possible thanks to the prodigious talent of Pixar's teams.

I highly recommend this extremely inspiring book.

Among the contents that I also particularly enjoyed this week :

Stripe: The Internet's Most Undervalued Company by Packy McCormick
A Playbook for Fundraising by Lenny Rachitsky
How the Head of Growth at Superhuman Does His Email by Dan Shipper
The Rise of Gymshark: Winning CPG Through Loops and Mimetic Theory by Gonz Sanchez and Pauline Guého

💰 Funding

Israeli startup Anima announced a $2.5M Seed Round, two years after its incubation within the 2018 season of Y Combinator.

Anima wants to improve collaboration between designers and developers. "Design to Code, Automated" as announced on its website. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Walmart, HP or Starbucks are already using its solution.

A success probably due to the fact that Anima allows these two groups of users (designers & developers) to continue working with their favorite tools and frameworks and therefore does not disrupt their existing workflows. Anima comes in the form of a plugin available for the three most popular design tools: Figma, Adobe XD and Sketch. Within these tools, Anima will allow the creation of advanced prototypes and the export of the code. The exported code can then be shared with the developers, who then take over and will be able to use a solid base, saving them a lot of time in the process. On top of that, it also allows to directly turn designs into websites hosted by Anima, like this one for example. The startup currently has 15 employees spread between Tel Aviv and New York.

For the anecdote, Anima's CTO is the creator of Yo, a mobile application that was a great success when it was released in 2014 with a very original approach: the only thing you could do on it was to send a “Yo” message to your friends.

🧰 Product

Bubble just keeps announcing new plugins launches for its platform. After Figma and Airtable, it is indeed Slack's turn to appear on Bubble's marketplace this week. With this integration, it is now possible to use the Slack API within your Bubble apps. This integration can for example allow you to create your own Slack bot via Bubble or to send Slack notifications to the users of your Bubble app.

Bubble's No-Code Slack Integration

Backlinks are now available on Notion. Notion allows you to insert in a page a link to another Notion page. From now on, the destination pages of these links will display a list of the links of the other Notion pages that have linked to these pages.

An example below: my page dedicated to Airtable includes a link to my No-code tools page. As a result, this page now also displays a link allowing me to access in one click to the Airtable page.

By default, backlinks are not visible (Notion only displays the number of links pointing to this page). You just have to click to display the complete list of links.

Learn more about Notion's backlinks

Glide has updated its pricing plans. Here are some of the important changes:

The "Free" plan becomes the "Personal" plan: it is still possible to create an application for free but it must remain for personal use only
Introduction of Glide Basic: a $9 per month option that allows you to add more features to your application and have up to 5,000 lines in your Google Sheet database
Increase in the price of the "Pro” plan: this plan is now available for $24 per month as part of an annual subscription, a pretty significant increase of 26%

Glide has also reviewed the pricing of its private applications (apps where you can have members logging in with an email and password). Until now, the pricing of these applications was not based on the amount of members. This is no longer the case now, with a monthly pricing of $0.75 per member for Private Basic applications and $1.5 for Private Pro applications. A minimum of 20 accounts being required for the Pro applications, the pricing effectively starts at $30 per month.

Full details are available on Glide’s website

What do you think of this new pricing?

📅 Events

Bubble announced the launch of Immerse, its no-code accelerator to support projects developed by Black & Afro-Latinx founders. This free incubator will host projects for 10 weeks to allow founders to create their MVP and present them during a demo day. Several speakers and investors will also be present in order to raise awareness among project creators about the issues related to fundraising.

The first batch of Immerse will welcome 10 participants and will start on October 14th.

Apply to Bubble Immerse