Modern Makers #48 - How to Automate Your Finances
💵 Manage your personal finances 💰 A $8M Series A for Adalo
Welcome to issue #48 of Modern Makers
This week in the agenda:👇
💵 Some tips for managing personal finances - 5 lessons from Ramit Sethi's book
💰 Adalo raised $8M
📄 Google takes inspiration from Coda and Notion to improve Workspace
🆕 Several new features on Softr
Enjoy.
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Welcome to the new makers who have joined us this week.
This week I tried Bloggi, a tool that allows you to create a blog in a few minutes. With the PRO plan available at $9 per month (or $80 per year) you can use your own domain name, customize the design (colors, fonts, page layout). And also use the API. I love the minimalist interface that allows you to focus on writing content. This remains the essential point for a blogging platform.
🚨 No newsletter next Sunday. I'll see you on Sunday the 6th of June for the next edition of Modern Makers.
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👤 Who are the Modern Makers?
What I love the most about this newsletter is to be able to meet makers from all over the world. In the last few days, I had the opportunity to exchange with :
🇮🇳 Vin (@TheVinamra on Twitter), a designer based in India. His favorite tools: Webflow, Bubble, Figma and Notion. Feel free to contact him if you have any projects he could help you with.
🇺🇸 Kyleigh (@bagelsangranola) created Harold, a tool that tracks our daily habits. Kyleigh was part of the first class of On Deck's no-code program. She used several tools to create Harold, including Airtable, Autocode, Stripe and Typeform.
🇺🇸 Charles (@charleswpich), the founder of Rubix. Rubix is the easiest way for an e-commerce brand to measure its performance. Rubix streamlines data from your most important sources - Shopify, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and more - into prebuilt dashboards and reports for instant analytics. You get all the power of a full analytics stack without the cost, code or complexity.
I would like to thank them very much for the time they gave me. And for the valuable feedback on this newsletter.
If you would like to organize a video chat with me, I invite you to book something on Calendly.
📚 Book of the week
I Will Teach You To Be Rich: No guilt, no excuses - just a 6-week programme that works
Author: Ramit Sethi
Release date: 2009
Personal finance and investment are two subjects I had never really explored until last year. Rather than making excuses and lamenting the gains I've missed out on because of my inaction, I finally spent some time learning more about it after the first lockdown. Reading a book like this many years ago would have had a huge impact on my life. The vast majority of people will never take the time to learn the basics of how to make their money work for them. For me, money has become a tool, a means to freedom. The freedom to do what you want. Here are 5 points to remember:
PS: I am not a financial expert (far from it). Do your own research and be aware of the risks.
🤝 Negotiate - You can negotiate everything. Your rent, the rate of your mortgage, your salary, your home or car's price. If you don't ask, you don't get. In some cases, you are in a strong position. Your current bank does not want to lose you as a customer. The same goes for your Internet service provider. In your conversations with these organizations, do not hesitate to mention the competitors who can offer cheaper alternatives. It's a buyer's market
🤖 Automate - Once your salary lands on your bank account, several things should happen. A percentage of your salary should be redirected to a savings account. Another percentage should be transferred to an investment account. Automate also the payment of certain bills and recurring payments (your rent, for example). If you use a credit card, set up an automatic monthly payment to ensure you never pay late penalties. Automating your money will be the single most profitable system you ever build. In just a few hours you will have set up an automated system that will make your money work for you.
🔢 Diversify - When it comes to investing, diversification is key. A diversified portfolio limits your risk. Try to have a little bit of everything in your portfolio: stocks, bonds, real estate. cryptocurrencies, art, cash... Diversification should also happen within these different types of investments. For example, a stock portfolio consisting solely of Amazon and Google shares is not a diversified portfolio. Diversification means different industries, companies, geography... ETFs are the best way to diversify.
😎 Enjoy your guilt-free money - Once you have set up and automated your system, make sure you have an amount dedicated to your personal pleasures. An amount to spend each month, guilt-free. Personally, most of my investments of this type are dedicated to my personal development: books, training, digital tool subscriptions... and travel once the restrictions will be lifted.
📖 Share your knowledge with others - Knowing some of these basic principles puts you in a position to share your knowledge with others. And have a real impact on the future of the people you care about. Be aware, however, that conversations about money can be complicated and make some people uncomfortable. So don't push it and don't judge people on how they manage and spend their money. I am now trying to get my family and friends to learn about these topics and spend a few hours on them. The best possible return on investment.
“Yes, the best time to start investing was ten years ago. The second best time is today”
“The single most important factor to getting rich is getting started, not being the smartest person in the room”
Three other content that caught my attention this week:
🤑 On wanting - Newsletter - Letters From Home & Away - An article that echoes The Great Online Game I was talking about last week. And which made me want to read Friday Night Lights. We’re all in control of how much we play the game. We do not need to be champions.
🤓 Fierce Nerds - Article - Paul Graham - A new article in which Paul describes a certain type of nerd, the fierce nerd. These people will often be ultra-competitive, confident, intelligent, and impatient. This type of personality is an advantage according to Paul for success in the business world. There has never been a better time to be a nerd
₿ Bitcoin Is Civilization - Newsletter - Balaji S. Srinivasan - It's been a crazy week for crypto-currencies with a very significant drop in the Bitcoin price. This pro-Bitcoin article lists 10 reasons why crypto-currencies may save Western civilization. Here is also the other content in this series, this time with a case against Bitcoin.
🌎 What’s new in the world of no-code
Adalo, the no-code mobile app creation tool, announced an $8M round of funding this week. The Series A round was led by Tiger Global. A fund that has invested in companies such as Facebook, Zynga, Peloton, Square and Coinbase. A decent track record! Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier and Ben Tossell (founder of Makerpad) also participated. Since its creation in 2019, Adalo has raised a total of $9.7M.
The startup currently has around twenty employees and plans to reach sixty employees within 12-18 months. Adalo will use this money to add new features, improve the performance and launch the Adalo Academy - a place to help more people to learn how to build mobile apps.
All the details on this Series A are available on Adalo’s website.
Google revealed an important update to Workspace. It is now possible to embed other documents within a document. To start a video chat directly from a document. Or to assign tasks to colleagues by tagging them using the @. A timeline view will also be available soon in Google Sheets.
Google is thus attacking Coda and Notion, while still competing head-on with its historical rival Microsoft. These new features within Workspace won’t surprise Notion and Coda users (it always feels a bit weird to switch between Google Docs and Notion, like time traveling). These changes will nevertheless bring real added value to the hundreds of millions of users of the Google suite.
Discover Smart Canvas by Google in video
A few new features on Softr, the tool that makes it easy to create websites and web applications from an Airtable database.
Linked Lists: it is now possible to display data from several linked Airtable tables on the same page. For example: display all the opportunities a salesperson is working on or all the restaurants in a city
When a person fills out a questionnaire on your site, you can display a message of your choice or redirect to a specific page
A Checkbox field and a Date & Time field are now available for your forms
More details on these new features on Softr’s website
📦 And also…
One week after the API launch, Notion is available on Integromat
Notion is also available on n8n, the open-source automation tool
Readwise now captures images of tweets and threads you bookmark
Some keyboard shortcuts to know to boost your productivity
Will Google give a second life to RSS?
Webflow gives us a checklist to make our sites accessible to everyone
Discover the new version of Stacker in video
The tool stack used by Janel to build a 5-figure info product
As always, if you're enjoying Modern Makers, I would love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I do my best to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it.
I also invite you to contact me if you have questions or need help with no-code tools. Feel free to use the button below for those of you who want to organize a call to get to know each other better.
Have a great week and keep learning.
Martin,