Modern Makers #22
25/10/2020
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 : Essentialism by Greg McKeown
🦄 Low-code tool Retool is almost an unicorn
🧭 Create a dashboard for your start-up with Notion Metrics
🎓 Learn Bubble with Buildcamp
Enjoy!
📚 Book of the week
Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Author: Greg McKeown
Release date: April 2014
My key lessons / takeaways:The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better - there are so many activities and opportunities available that it becomes crucial to be able to select and retain only those that are vital and worthy of your time and attention. You need to be able to see the difference between the trivial and the essential. An Essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential
Don't neglect your sleep - to discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make. Your 8 hours of sleep per day is an investment that will allow you to operate at your highest level of contribution so you can achieve more, in less time
Learn to say NO - we are naturally afraid of upsetting or disappointing our friends, family or colleagues if we reject their requests. You can say no and regret it for a few minutes. Or you can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.. Also, if something isn’t a clear YES, then it’s a clear NO
If you don't prioritise your life, someone else will - without getting cynical, it is important to understand that everyone is trying to sell something (be it a point of view, an idea, an opinion) in exchange for your time. Not understanding this prevents you from making your own choices and deciding what deserves your attention and your time
The right thing the right way at the right time. What inspires you the most? What are you particularly good at? What does the outside world need most? Your time and energy should be allocated to the intersection of the answers to these three questions
Other content I've enjoyed this week :
How to Be Productive, According to Ancient Philosophy by Darius Foroux - a list of 7 tips to apply to be more productive. It’s always good to follow advices from Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Confucius
Robinhood's Bull Market - The Flywheel - an interesting analysis of the success of the Robinhood app
A playbook for founders by Shaan Puri - Entrepreneur Shaan Puri gives us a free PDF of his 12 favorite frameworks. Each takeaway comes with an illustration and examples. For those who prefer the audio version, this 30-minute episode of the My First Million podcast is for you
💰 Funding
Another big funding round this week and a new unicorn in the no-code/low-code world. Well, almost. This $50M funding round values Retool at $925M. The founders didn’t want to reach the famous billion of valorization which transforms your company into a unicorn in the eyes of the whole world.
“There is a tendency to glorify a billion-dollar valuation. We want to signal that to people that we are just getting started.” - David Hsu, Retool’s CEO
Retool is a low-code tool for developers that allows them to build internal tools faster via a drag & drop interface while letting them customize the code to achieve the desired end result. All this with considerable time savings: Retool announces that it can reduce production times by 40! Among the customers of the San Francisco-based company created in 2017: Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, Rakuten, FOX, Allbirds and Peloton. Retool targets both Startups and Enterprises with pricing ranging from free plans to individual accounts from $10 to $50 per month.
This Series B (as well as the $25M Series A in April 2019) was led by Sequoia Capital, along with some prestigious investors: Paul Graham (co-founder of the Y Combinator, which Retool joined in 2017) and the Collison brothers, founders of Stripe.
We can imagine that this money will mainly be used to improve the product while accelerating the international development of the company.
🧰 Product
Notion Metrics is a tool launched this week on Product Hunt. It makes it very easy to retrieve data from third-party tools and integrate them into Notion. For business owners, it allows you to create a dashboard within Notion displaying your start-up’s most important KPIs.
At the moment Notion Metrics is able to collect data from six services: Stripe, ConvertKit, MailChimp, Google Analytics, RescueTime and Plaid. Once one of these services is connected, Notion Metrics generates a URL that you can then integrate into Notion via an Embed block. So easy!
I think this product addresses a real need and the idea of having all your metrics updated in real time on a dashboard is very interesting. Notion Metrics does not access all the data and metrics for the services you want to connect and the data being stored on their end only concerns the last five days of activity.
A tool to follow, especially if new integrations become available in the coming weeks.
⚒ Tutorials
This week, I discovered Buildcamp, a platform created by Gregory John. After many months of testing and evaluating many no-code tools, it is now obvious to me that Bubble really offers something quite unique in this market. An extremely powerful and complete tool. So I wanted to beef up my Bubble skills and I was looking for a course that would allow me to better understand the fundamentals of Bubble and to acquire best practices when creating web applications. The Buildcamp platform (created with Bubble) includes video tutorials that allow you to :
create applications from A to Z
better understand certain aspects and features of Bubble
assimilate the fundamentals of Bubble
On top of that, Buildcamp is also a community of no-code makers who can exchange and communicate directly on the platform. Gregory is a good instructor, very clear and precise in his explanations and presentations of certain concepts that are not necessarily easy to understand. You can have a glimpse of the quality of his video tutorials on his Youtube channel.
As you may already know if you have already tried using Bubble, the design of your applications can be quite tricky. Unlike other Bubble instructors, Gregory does not neglect this aspect on these projects and wants to show that it is possible to create good visual websites with Bubble. What I also really appreciate is the pricing: a monthly $29 subscription that you can stop at any time. There are currently only two trainings / projects available (for a total of 15 hours of videos) but a third course to learn how to build an online booking platform will be available soon.
If you're starting from scratch with Bubble, I recommend that you first use the free tutorials available on Bubble and watch as many videos as possible on Youtube.
📦 In other news
SpreadSimple adds Paypal payments for your e-commerce projects
Adobe launches Adobe Stock: 70,000 free images, vectors, and videos that you can use for your projects
Several product updates from Softr, including the fact you can now send data back to Airtable
A new component allows to create horizontal lists on Adalo
Your Adalo apps can now have their own API
You can now create folders on Webflow to manage your photo and video files
Recordings of Webflow Virtual World Tour 2020 are now available
Substack finally allows you to add a custom domain to your newsletter
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,