Modern Makers #24
08/11/2020
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:
📚 Company of One by Paul Jarvis
📱 A successful launch on Product Hunt for V.One
📦 A lot of new features for Glide
🤔 How to use the IF function on Notion
Enjoy!
📚 Book of the week
Company of One - Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business
Author: Paul Jarvis
Release date: January 2019
My key lessons / takeaways: What is a Company of One - a business that questions growth. A business that wants to grow smaller and smarter and become more efficient and more resilient. A business that deliberately sets a limit to its growth, not for lack of ambition but for the sake of personal fulfilment. After all, do we really have to want to become the new Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Or build a unicorn? Do we necessarily want to raise funds and have to manage the expectations of investors who want a return on their investment? By creating a company of one, you can build your business around your lifestyle, optimizing for both profit and your personal happiness. The criteria of success of your company can therefore be something more personal than a simple growth KPI: the quality of the product or service you offer or the happiness of your employees and customers for example. Build your business around your life, not the other way around
Stop trying to follow your passion - an irresponsible business advice according to Paul Jarvis. What if passion is the side effect of mastery? It is highly likely that focusing on a particular area or skill, practicing that skill every day will make you fall in love with your work, which may then become one of your passions. If it brings you autonomy, a sense of recognition (from your colleagues and/or clients for example) and the feeling of making the world a better place, your work will probably become your passion. Passion doesn’t create success, it usually comes after success
Start small - when starting a company of one, you need to focus on the smallest version of your idea in order to get it out as quickly as possible: your Minimal Viable Product (MVP). The automation of your business can wait, as can growth. Your first priority must be to find a way to get your product tested as quickly and cheaply as possible (no-code tools are perfect for that) and get feedback from your first users or customers so you can iterate. From the start, it is also imperative to focus on the profitability of your company. Unlike other startups, you can't afford to have a loss-making business that needs to use its growth to attract investors
Give your business a personality - Your expertise or skills can be replicated or available to others. However, your personality is unique. As Naval Ravikant says "No one can compete with you on being you". If your business does not have a personality, your audience the market will assign it one for you. Be unique and don't try to simply copy what others do
Focus on your existing customers - as a company of one, your priority is not to find as many new customers as possible to grow your business. Leave that to your competitors, who will likely focus on growth at all costs, and therefore on acquiring new customers rather than retaining their existing ones. The cost of acquiring a new customer is estimated at 5 times the cost of retaining an existing customer. Turn your audience into customers and your customers into ambassadors for your service or product. As a company of one, taking care of your customers should be one of your main advantage compared to your larger competitors with higher growth ambitions. Therefore, treat your customers as human beings first and foremost and not just as a line of revenue. In case of mistakes or problems (your mistakes as well as those of your partners or employees), assume your responsibilities and sincerely apologize. Turn these problems and complaints into opportunities by ensuring that they are dealt fairly, quickly and empathetically
Some other content that caught my attention this week:
The hyper freelance mode by Ben Issenmann - freelancers need to diversify their activity. When they’re only working as consultant, they are exchanging time for money. If they’re not working, they’re not getting paid. The hyper freelance mode is a combination of Consulting + Education + Product
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - Harvard Business Review - an article that echoes the book Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less that I told you about two weeks ago in this newsletter. Being very demanding and selective with the multiple opportunities available to us becomes essential. We need to focus on opportunities that are at the intersection of our talents, our passions and what the world needs. Eliminate the non-essential. Do less but better
Oh Snap! 👻 by Packy McCormick - an interesting analysis of Snapchat, a company that was a bit on the bottom of the wave in recent years and which made a real comeback in 2020 (its valuation doubled this year). This article convinced me to invest in Snapchat for the next few years
🧰 Product
V.One finally launched on Product Hunt this week. And it was a very successful launch as this mobile app builder finished Product of the Day last Tuesday and generated more than 1,600 upvotes!
V.One allows you to easily create mobile apps via a Drag & Drop interface and publish your application to the Apple Store & Google Play in just a few clicks. Integrations with Airtable, Webflow, Zapier, Shopify, Canva and Woo Commerce are already available.
At the moment it seems that it is only possible to try it with a paid account (the Startup plan will cost you $8 per month and a Growth plan is at $90 per month). If you don't want to pay and access the Free plan, you will have to join their waiting list but you might need to be patient. I have been on that list since last July and I still haven't received my invitation. In all cases, we will keep a close eye on V.One and see if it can become a major tool in the no-code space.
Glide has a lot of new features and announcements this week, including:
Protect a column in your Google Sheet or in the Glide editor: the data in this column will never be accessible by your users
Anonymized emails: with this option enabled, Glide randomly generates a fake email address in your database each time someone creates an account on your app
the Preview As mode now allows you to search and filter your user base by email or by name
Data Editor: rebuilt from scratch, now 5X faster when scrolling and interacting, you can now change the size of the columns and add new rows of data
an image generator to avoid having items without image in your application
for PRO apps: increase of the size of uploaded files up to 1 GB and Tablet/Desktop mode can now be enabled by default
Have a look at this video to see all these updates
But the most important announcement is the launch of the Actions feature that allows you to create custom actions within your application. Glide has also announced that a webinar will be held on Thursday, November 12th. CEO David Seigel will have the opportunity to show us in details this new Actions feature. Spots are limited so make sure to reserve your seat.
⚒ Tutorials
Notion published this week on its Youtube channel a new episode of its Notion at Work series. This episode hosted by William Nutt (the creator of the excellent Notion VIP, I’m using their icon pack for my Workspace Notion) is dedicated to the IF Function. A key function that allows you to set up a conditional statement, whether on Notion, Airtable or even Excel and Google Sheet. I hadn't done too much digging into the use of formulas within Notion so it was time I looked into it. I was able to use Notion’s Code block for the first time and it’s absolutely perfect for writing code or functions.
This 20-minute tutorial offers a good introduction that will allow you to :
automatically update the % of progress of a project as you complete the tasks related to this project - this is done by using the Relation and Rollup properties in Notion
recreate the Eisenhower matrix and automatically assign a status to the items in your to-do list according to two criteria: the importance and the urgency of the task. Ex: if it is urgent and important, it is time to take care of this action. If the task is urgent but not important, it is better to delegate it
The IF function for the Eisenhower matrix
📦 In other news
Substack keeps on adding new features: you can now add image captions and alt text
9 essential elements of a modern website design according to Webflow
Want to work at Adalo? The startup is looking for a Community Experience & Success Specialist and a Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Here are the 10 most popular no-code tutorials on Makerpad (and some of them are available for free)
A great tutorial to learn how to build a recipe sharing app on Bubble
Landen (a tool to create landing pages) has a new name: welcome to Umso
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,