Modern Makers #21
18/10/2020
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 automate your work.
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Hi makers,
This week in the agenda:
📚 The book of the week: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
🤖 Integromat just got acquired!
🛠️ Some product updates for Loom and Tally
💰 A $2M Seed Round for Memberstack
Enjoy!
📚 Book of the week
Outliers: The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Release date: June 2009
My key lessons / takeaways:The main point that Malcolm develops in his book: too often, exceptional achievements are attributed to the combination of innate talent + work. In reality, these people are said to be the beneficiaries of hidden benefits, cultural legacies and extra ordinary opportunities that have been granted to them and that have pushed them to work hard and become talented in a specific field
10,000 hours, the key number. This would be the amount of hours needed to become truly talented in a particular field (music, coding, cooking etc). Perseverance, permanent investment and patience are therefore your best allies
No one succeeds alone. All the examples in this book demonstrate this. From Canadian NHL players to Bill Gates, New York lawyers to the Beatles .... all are products of their environment. Their nationality, their year of birth, their parent's education, the people they have met ... the role of luck and chance is invaluable. All these outliers had access to incredible opportunities. On the other hand, they had the presence of mind and the will to make the most of these opportunities
Rather than getting excited about Bill Gates' incredible success, we should focus on creating a world where the greatest number of people can benefit from incredible opportunities. For example, it has been shown that long three-month summer vacations in the United States or France have a negative impact on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Every year, the gap becomes greater with children from more privileged backgrounds who benefit from a summer and an environment rich in learning opportunities and personal development
Three elements play a major role in your happiness at work: autonomy, the complexity of the work and a connection between effort and reward
Outliers had long been on my reading list and I’m glad I finally took the time to read it. The point of view developed in this book is interesting, deserves to be discussed, and the examples and stories mentioned in the book are very diverse. I really liked the structure of the book: each chapter begins with a description of one or more successful people. After that, the author tries to identify the reasons behind this success story and therefore offers an analysis from a different angle/point of view.
Other content I've enjoyed this week :
₿ The Investment Case For Bitcoin by Anthony Pompliano - in this newsletter, Anthony explains why he strongly recommends allocating a portion of your investments (1-10%) in Bitcoin. Anthony predicts a very significant increase in the value of Bitcoin over the next 15 months - to the end of 2021. This is the result of 3 main factors: increasing demand, limited supply due to the very nature of Bitcoin (only 900 Bitcoins are produced on a daily basis and 21 million Bitcoins will be created in total) and the fact that a large part of Bitcoin owners keep them in their portfolio (60% of the Bitcoins in circulation have not changed owners in the last 12 months). Personally, I will continue to buy Bitcoins over the next few months and this article just conforts me in my decision
🎙️ Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy (#473) by Tim Ferriss - Naval is back on The Tim Ferriss Show for a two-hours long interview. A pure joy to listen to. Once again, I highly recommend reading The Almanach of Naval Ravikant (and the book is available for free!)
💰 Acquisition & Funding
This week's big news was undoubtedly the announcement on Wednesday of the acquisition of Integromat by Celonis, a German tech company specialized in process analysis and optimization. A company valued at 2.5 billion dollars and which counts Vodafone, Uber, Siemens, L'Oréal and Cisco among its customers. The "Automation" brick was therefore the missing link in its solution, and Celonis' management decided to acquire Integromat, the Czech company that is competing head-on with Zapier in the automation market.
A partnership that makes sense. The amount of the operation was not communicated but the CEO of Celonis announced a figure of more than 100 million dollars:
"It was a three-digit amount of over $100 million. We can't disclose the exact price, but we're just giving this range," - TechCrunch
The post published on Integromat's website states that Integromat will still be available as a standalone product, from now on under the name "Integromat by Celonis" (a name that nobody will use of course 😃).
It is always difficult to know what to think when acquisitions of this type take place. What will be the impact on Integromat? The optimistic version will say that this acquisition will help Integromat to accelerate its growth, develop new features and expand its catalog of applications (the launch of Integromat 2.0 is still planned for Q1 2021). The more pessimistic version hopes that this acquisition will not ruin what Integromat's teams have built over the last few years or negatively impact the pricing and customer experience.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you think it is a good news or a bad news for Integromat’s users?
Memberstack announced this week a $2M Seed tour led by Gradient Ventures, a Google fund specialized in artificial intelligence. Other investors include entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson (if you don't know him yet, I invite you to follow him on Twitter and listen to several episodes of podcasts where he is invited).
Memberstack is a no-code tool that makes it very easy to set up a subscription system on your site. The equivalent of a Stripe but for subscription management. The tool is particularly popular with Webflow users. Eighteen months after its launch, Memberstack has more than 1,000 paying customers, more than 600,000 subscribers on sites using its technology and has generated more than $8M in revenue for its customers.
🧰 Product
Several changes at Loom, the video messaging tool that's on the rise. If you haven't had a chance to test Loom yet, I highly recommend you give it a try!
A new look and a new logo
The workspaces teams are now available for all users.
A new Starter plan completely free of charge and which allows you to have up to 25 employees in your workspace. The only constraint: a limit of 5 minutes per video. Once again, this plan is 100% free, so it's hard to complain!
Screenshots are now available on Loom, allowing you to easily capture your screen
Loom continues to review its pricing and has merged the Business and Pro plans to keep only Loom Business, available at $10 per month.
Loom maintains its commitment started this year with Covid and continues to offer its Loom for Education plan free of charge 👏
I told you about Tally in my newsletter two weeks ago. This new form builder tool has made a lot of talk about him with his block building approach (similar to Notion or Coda) and especially a very generous free plan. This week Tally launched Tally Pro, its paid offer which has five major differences with the free plan:
Team collaboration with unlimited users
Workspaces
No Tally commission on payments generated from your forms (in the free version, Tally charges a 5% commission). On the other hand, Stripe's commission (the technological brick used for the payments) is still present.
The possibility to remove the Tally branding on forms
Unlimited storage and no size limit for uploaded files within forms
The functionality to connect your own domain name will also be available soon. The price of this Pro plan: $24 per month or $240 per year.
📦 In other news
Medium, the company of Evan Williams, has a new look and a new logo
Adalo adds 3 new data modules for its Analytics section
Glide’s Data Editor is now 5 times faster
For those who plan to switch from Notion to Coda, here is a very complete guide that explains how to best use the new Notion Importer from Coda
The 100DaysOfNoCode community launches a challenge with Adalo
Webflow has launched its Digital Dollar Store, an e-commerce site that sells digital products for $1. All the profits will be donated to charity
Webflow already allows you to optimize the display of your websites on iPhone 12
Nocode is a tool that allows to turn a Google Doc into a website
That’s all for this week. If you like the content, don't hesitate to share it with your friends or colleagues.
I also invite you to send me your feedback on this content by leaving a comment below.
Have a great week,
Martin,