Modern Makers #28 - The importance of your atomic habits
💵 Salesforce just acquired Slack 🎬 How to build a website with Dorik
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,
Hope you’re all doing well! Welcome to the new makers who have joined us since last Sunday!
How was your week? On my end, I spent some time to finally create a new logo for this newsletter (it was about time!). Here is the new visual identity of Modern Makers. I used Figma, a tool that has now become my go-to tool when it comes to visual assets creation. The two colours used are : #ffa502 & #2f3542 and the font is Bungee. I hope you'll like this new look!
I was also able to start working on a project I had in mind for some time. It's a platform that would allow to discover key quotes from books, with an upvoting system (similar to what you can find on Product Hunt for example). Users can view the most popular quotes, vote for the ones that inspire them the most and submit their favorite ones. For this project, I decided to use Softr as this tool has a Product Hunt template and offers an Airtable integration. In just a few hours I managed to create a first draft of this project with a functional website, allowing you to view quotes, vote and add content. The customization options are quite advanced and Softr has many pre-built blocks, making the website creation extremely fast and intuitive. I also want to thank Mariam and Artur, Softr’s funders, for their amazing support to help me on this project 👏
The next steps are:
Find a way to automate a newsletter that would send one inspiring quote on a daily basis (let me know if you have a tool that I should use for that, it needs to be available on Zapier)
Add a lot of quotes on the Airtable base
Finalize the development of the platform and publish a first version
When it comes to the monetization of such a project, it could include an affiliation system with links redirecting users to Amazon if they wish to buy one of the books showcased on the platform.
Would you be using a service like this? I’m keen to get your feedback on this project!
This week in the agenda:👇
📚 One book: Atomic Habits by James Clear
💰 Salesforce acquired Slack for almost $28B
🎬 How to launch your next website with Dorik
Enjoy!
📚 Book of the week
Atomic Habits - Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
Author : James Clear
Release date: October 2018
One of the very first books I read this year during the first lockdown in March. I bought the paper version since I did not have a Kindle at that time. The digital book was available this week on Amazon UK for £0.99 so I took the opportunity to go back to this book to share with you my 5 key learnings. James also has a weekly newsletter (The 3-2-1 Newsletter) that I highly recommend.
Five key lessons / takeaways: Don't focus on your goals, focus on your systems - goals have many problems. First of all, winners and losers share the same common goal (winning a competition, get a job, losing weight...). The difference between success and failure is not the goals but the systems used to achieve those goals. Objectives are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. So focus on your system rather than on the goals. And fall in love with the process. Goals should only be there to give you a direction to follow, a North Star if you prefer. On top of that, achieving a goal is only a temporary change. "The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game." What happens once you accomplish a marathon? (your goal). Do you stop running or are you going to keep this habit and stay healthy? Keep playing the game!
Time is your best ally, be patient - keeping a new habit is very difficult because the effects and benefits take time to become visible. You will inevitably go through a plateau phase where you will feel that your efforts are not paying off. Likewise, the impact of your negative habits is not immediately visible. Eating a burger and fries doesn't suddenly put you overweight. Your habits only have an effect when they are repeated over time. "Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat." Don't neglect the impact of these small daily habits that will ultimately have a significant impact. Everything compounds!
Adopting new habits requires a change of identity - instead of focusing on one goal or one outcome, think instead about what kind of person you want to become. What type of person is currently achieving your desired goals and what does that person do on a daily basis? Then become that person. For example, instead of setting a goal of writing a book, become a writer. What does a writer do? He or she probably writes every day. So get into the habit of writing a little bit every day. Every time you do this, you reinforce this change in identity and belief through your habits and actions. "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become”. Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it yourself with small wins!
Optimize your environment - our will has natural limits. No matter how much you want to take care of your body and your health, you probably won't last long if you spend your days with a tray of cookies in front of you. Optimize your environment to make good habits easy and bad habits hard. An example would be leaving your fruit out in plain sight and accessible in your kitchen and putting your higher calorie snacks deep in the cupboard. Or leave a book by your bedside table and unplug your television after each use (although, just between us, who's still watching TV these days?)
Don't feel guilty if you’re feeling lazy - probably one of the tips that helped me the most this year. With the lockdown, I've created a habit for myself to get some exercise after work once every other day. Before that, I tended to feel guilty when I was too lazy or procrastinating. Now, if I decide to skip a gym session, I don't have that guilt feeling anymore. On the other hand, I make sure that the next session will take place. Since March I think I have skipped two consecutive gym sessions only two or three times. So the most important thing is not to have an agenda set in stone, but to make sure you don't break the rhythm and the momentum - "Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately."
Some other content that caught my attention this week:
🇯🇵 This Japanese Shop Is 1,020 Years Old. It Knows a Bit About Surviving Crises - The New York Times - Japan has 33,000 companies that are more than 100 years old, or 40% of the world total! This article from the New York Times lists some of the reasons that explain this incredible fact and that have allowed these Japanese companies to go through many crises and major events during the last centuries. An article particularly relevant in the current context marked by the destruction of millions of companies in 2020
🦄 Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company by Sahil Lavingia - the founder of Gumroad (a platform to sell digital products) writes about his entrepreneurial journey with Gumroad since its creation in 2011. From a successful start to the dismissal of 75% of his employees a few years later. Sahil also realized that his initial goal (to create a unicorn) was a very bad choice. He finally accepted it and is now focused on a new goal: to keep improving his product and create value for content creators
🏠 Airbnb: The Disaster Artist - The Generalist - Airbnb's IPO is imminent! The famous platform created by Brian Chesky in 2008 had a very special year in 2020. For those who are considering investing in the company, this report will provide you with all the information you need to make your decision. For my part, as with all recent IPOs, I will wait a few quarters before deciding to invest
💰 Acquisition
It's impossible not to talk about the most important business news of the week: Salesforce's acquisition of Slack. The world's leading CRM company has decided to buy the collaborative messaging tool for $27.7 billion 🤯
With this acquisition of Slack and its 12 million users in 2020, Salesforce is now a key player in the enterprise collaboration space along Google and Microsoft. Microsoft, whose collaborative messaging tool Teams has slowed Slack's growth for the past three years (it’s never easy to fight when your competitor offers a relatively similar product for free) and which in 2020 has more than 75 million users.
“This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world” - Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO
The officialization of the deal took place last Tuesday evening, just after the closing of the financial markets. Following this announcement, Salesforce stock declined, despite better-than-expected results for the last quarter. I took the opportunity to finally invest in this company that had been in my sights for some time. If you were a Slack stockholder, you will receive $26.79 and 0.0776 of a Salesforce share.
Finally, two fun facts:
The company initially launched in 2009 by Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson and Sergei Mourachov offered an online role-playing game (MMORPG) called Glitch. It was not a success but the messaging system used in the game was the foundation of what officially became Slack in 2014. What a successful pivot!
Even crazier: Stewart Butterfield had already created an online multiplayer game in the early 2000s. That game also failed, but the company pivoted and launched Flickr, the photo-sharing site, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005
⚒ Tutorials
Dorik is a no-code tool that allows the creation and hosting of websites through a visual interface. Dorik organized a webinar to show us how to recreate from scratch this template with Dorik. A really interesting tool, halfway between Webflow and Carrd/Landen. Dorik offers many pre-built components and customization options allowing to quickly create a website. The multi-page feature was launched recently and gives a whole new dimension to Dorik and allows to use this tool for more projects in the future.
During this webinar, we can see how Dorik makes it easy to create responsive versions for mobile and tablet devices. Like Webflow, Dorik allows you to create unique designs for mobile devices without affecting the desktop version. A real plus for me!
You will also learn how to create animations on your website (at 1h28 in the video).
🧰 Product
A few new features this week again on Notion, including the launch of a Confluence importer. This feature allows to import in Notion in just a few clicks all the content stored in Confluence. Those interested in switching from Confluence to Notion can read this guide.
Notion also announced that its Mac application already has an update making it compatible with Apple's new Macbook M1.
For Notion fans, an advent calendar has been created by some of Notion's ambassadors. A surprise and a Notion resource (a template to duplicate, icons for your pages) are waiting for you there every day until December 24th.
📦 In other news
The replay of 100 Days of No Code’s second Demo Day is now available
Lacey Kesler joins Adalo as Head of Education
Interested in learning how to use Parabola? This how-to guide is for you
Honeycode from Amazon is now available on Zapier
Discover all the new features available on Stacker (a tool to create a front-end for Airtable)
This formula allows you to extract domain names from a list of emails on Airtable
That’s all for this week. If you like the content of this newsletter, please share it with your friends, colleagues or communities, it's what helps me the most.
I also invite you to contact me if you have questions or need help with no-code tools or if you want to have a virtual coffee with me ☕
Have a great week, and keep building!
Martin,