Modern Makers #29 - what we can learn from Magellan
🏢 Webflow for Enterprise 🤖 Build workflows with n8n
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? You’re currently reading the latest edition of Modern Makers for this year. I will take advantage of the next few weeks to rest, read and think about what to do with this newsletter in 2021. If you haven't done so yet, I invite you to follow the Twitter account where I will continue to publish some no-code & productivity content. I'm also creating a form (using Tally, a great tool that I highly recommend) so that I can collect your feedback on the content of this newsletter as it will help me improve it for next year. Don't hesitate to contact me if you want to share your feedback with me or if you want to schedule a call to get to know each other!
See you in early January for a new edition of Modern Makers! Have a great holiday season and take good care of yourself and your loved ones.
This week in the agenda:👇
🌎 One book: Magellan by Stefan Zweig
🤖 Focus on n8n, a new workflow automation & creation tool
🏢 Webflow launches its Enterprise offer
🆕 Several new updates available on Softr
Enjoy!
📚 Book of the week
Magellan
Author: Stefan Zweig
Release date: 1938
Until I read this book, I knew almost nothing about Magellan. A name, a date, an accomplishment. That's pretty much all I knew. And that's very little, given the immense feat achieved in 1520 by the Portuguese, his 5 ships and 250 men. An incredible book that I invite you to read during the holidays, you won't regret it! A perfect gift idea for Christmas
Five key lessons / takeaways: Trust others, share your doubts and convictions with them - from the very beginning of his journey, Magellan distrusted the Spaniards (he had good reasons for this). As a result, he did not share any of his convictions or doubts with his captains, creating a hostile and unhealthy atmosphere during the journey. It was only after the passage to the Pacific Ocean was discovered that Magellan made the decision to finally ask his captains for their opinions and treat them as comrades. Don't make this mistake and make sure you earn the trust of your teams or colleagues from day one. Your employees need to feel involved and have your trust. The CEO is the head of the ship and is therefore in charge of reassuring all passengers on board
Stay humble, even if you are very successful - it is human nature to let go if you are successful or achieve one of your goals. This can cause us to let our guard down, become less focused, take too many risks or feel invincible. However, be careful not to relax too much or forget some of your core principles and rules. In Magellan's case, this mistake was fatal, even though he was known for being meticulous and attentive to every detail. Stay humble in case of success, accept the part of luck involved in this success and make sure you don't ruin everything because of your attitude
Be aware of the consequences of your actions and decisions - Think twice before betraying someone's trust, before taking advantage of someone or a situation. Magellan betrayed Portugal, his country, and in return he was never able to fully gain the trust of Spain. After all, it is easy to imagine someone who betrays his own country that he would be able to do the same with another country right? Misbehaving with a customer or one of your colleagues or employees will probably prevent you from fully gaining the trust of a future customer, colleague or employee
History only remembers the result, not the manner - in case of failure, the image and place given to Magellan in history would have been very different. During his journey, Magellan had to take radical and morally more than questionable decisions. But the outcome of his trip proved him right, so history decided not to focus on these “details”. "History doesn't care how something happens. It takes the side of the one who accomplishes it, who brings it to fruition."
The importance of our models - Henrique, the King of Portugal, prepared all the future successes of Portugal during his lifetime, fully aware that he would no longer be alive to see with his own eyes the result of his work. He knew how to give the Portuguese the pleasure of entrepreneurship. Success leading to success, each successful expedition creates vocations in a whole generation of young sailors, eager for adventure and thrills. "And where a new generation is firmly resolved to take action, the world is changing". Personally, reading this book made me want to follow the adventures and projects of an entrepreneur such as Elon Musk even more, and to be more interested in the conquest of space in particular
Some other content that caught my attention this week:
⌨️ The Code That Controls Your Money - Wealthsimple - a fascinating article about the Cobol programming language created in 1959. Our financial and administrative systems are largely based on this language. The problem: nowadays, hardly any young developer wants to learn Cobol. Many companies and administrations are therefore in a real status quo situation. If you are wondering why your traditional bank cannot innovate as quickly as you would like to, this article is for you!
⏳ Time Billionaire - The Pomp Letter - an interesting reflection that begins with a conversation between Graham Duncan and Tim Ferris. One million seconds equals 11 months. One billion seconds, on the other hand, is 31 years. We are then probably all Time Billionaire. Or even multi-billionaire for some. Only you can choose how you will spend your billions of seconds. Youth & Time are the ultimate assets. Not money!
🦸♂️ My First Million: #135 with Rahul Vohra - My First Million is one of my favorite business podcasts. I found this episode with Superhuman’s CEO (formerly founder of Rapportive, sold to LinkedIn in 2012) particularly enriching. Rahul talks about the importance of his morning meditation and also shares some business ideas he has in mind as well as some projects he has personally invested in. Also, let me know if you are a Superhuman user as I’m keen to understand what makes the $30 monthly fee worth it 🤔
⚒ Tutorials
n8n, a workflow automation and creation tool, has just officially launched its cloud-hosted version. Until now, n8n required to be installed on a computer in order to be used.
The catalog of available integrations is currently pretty limited, especially compared to what Integromat and Zapier can offer. Applications such as Airtable, Calendly, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Sheets, Stripe or Zoom are still available, which should be enough to start building some very cool workflows.
On top of that, the pricing is very attractive with a Starter plan available at 20€ per month. This plan allows you to have up to 20 active workflows and generate 5,000 workflow executions. You can therefore build a workflow that contains several steps, it will just count as one execution overall.
If you want to better understand how the tool works, I invite you to watch this 23 minutes tutorial that shows you how to create a workflow sending an SMS every morning at 8am with the weather forecast for the day. I also recommend this list of tutorials.
🧰 Product
This week, Webflow introduced Webflow Enterprise. In order to seduce this new category of customers, Webflow highlights two essential points for any IT department. Firstly, the security aspect with features such as Single Sign On or certifications such as SOC-2 (waiting for final report). The other crucial aspect is of course performance, the ability of the service to handle high traffic loads, and the reliability of the platform. Webflow offers Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that guarantee service availability 99.99% uptime. Support is also key with a dedicated account manager and Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). In order to best support companies wishing to build a website with Webflow, a list of partner agencies is available on Webflow’s website.
Webflow's content team has also published an excellent article listing 21 web design trends to follow for 2021. Some of the trends highlighted by Webflow include:
retro fonts
horizontal scrolling
custom cursors
the development of websites with audio
dark mode
Finally, if you need inspiration for your next website, Webflow shares with us its favorite websites from last November.
Softr, the tool that allows you to easily create a website or web-app using Airtable as a database, has several new updates for us. My favorite ones:
4 new templates (2 for web-apps and 2 for websites)
A new Listing Details block that allows you to display a carousel (ideal if the items in your database contain several images for example)
It is now possible to copy a block and add it on a new page
We can now choose among the different views of our Airtable table
A new Twitter block is now available, allowing to easily embed and display our favorite tweets
Softr has also launched its affiliate program, allowing you to earn up to 30% of the monthly payments made by people who sign up with Softr via your link.
📦 In other news
Airtable now allows you to leave a comment on an uploaded file (video or photo)
Typefully is a tool that helps you create threads on Twitter (thanks Pierre for the discovery)
Yes, it is possible to build an entire Amazon page with a no-code tool such as Carrd
Spline allows you to create 3D web experiences for your website
Want to add a Facebook pixel or Google Analytics tracking on Notion? Notionlytics is there for you
Superhuman's Lead Designer gives us some tips to design dark themes
Notion's API is coming soon, join the waiting list!
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,