A Medium Fightback 🤔
A Medium Fightback 🤔
☕ Good Morning!
Medium has announced that any publication on its platform will now be able to start a newsletter, allowing their creators to better reach and grow their audiences. As 2PM writes, most will see this as an effort to compete against Substack, although they are not offering a paid functionality. You can read the full announcement by Medium here.
The following tweet by Phillip Smith makes a good observation on the finer details, which for many creators will make this new service unappealing. Publication editors will not have access to their subscriber email addresses unless a user replies to a newsletter and one will have to own a Medium account to be able to subscribe. Moreover, Dan Rowden tweeted that newsletters subscribers will be held separate from publication followers. For me, apart from lacking a paid newsletter functionality, this currently sounds like you won’t be owning your audience, making Substack the much more appealing creator platform!
🚀 Maker News
Another insightful piece by Channing Allen on the growing trend of paid community sites being built by indie hackers. In contrast to five years ago, you no longer need personal magnetism or influence to build a community, go paid and generate income. The rise in both traditional community products such as Slack (used by Visualize Value) and Discord as well as newer platforms such as Circle (used by Makerpad) and MemberSpace are supporting this booming trend. As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, this is part of the growing “Passion Economy” which Li Jin calls the “enterprization of the consumers.” Entrepreneurs of every background are getting access to consumer-focused NoCode platforms, which allow them to express their creativity easily and quickly. One of the most fruitful outcomes seen by Channing is that the community discussions not only support the co-creation of products but are itself a “co-created product”. Read the full post here.
As mentioned above, the “passion economy” is exploding and Substack, a NoCode newsletter publishing app for independent creators, is one of the players enabling this trend. Hannah from Minaal has just spoken with its co-founder Hamish McKenzie discussing among other topics the origins of the company, moving away from ad-based to paid newsletters, common characteristics between successful writers as well as financial support Substack offers its writers. Learn more here, the podcast goes public today at 8 am PST.
🏗️ Build + Launch
In their recent podcast, Shaan Puri and Sam Parr discussed several new business models, how to break down frameworks and which methods founders use to source and develop startup ideas. By summarising these learnings and integrating other sources, Arix has built a detailed and structured Notion board which will be a helpful step-by-step guide for any Maker on topics such as unbundling, reverse engineering and idea generation strategies. Great work! You can listen to the podcast here and find + duplicate the Notion board here.
mrs. robot has just launched Palabra on Product Hunt. This app is a simple workspace that integrates with NoCode tools such as Airtable, Webflow, Bubble and Zapier to easily automate emails as well as create email sequences using templates. They also have pre-written emails to get you started quickly. Visit their website here.
🖥️ NoCode
The NoCode project Swipe Files, founded by Corey Haines, has just released its latest free teardown, this time on a new productised service named Sheperd. The company was founded by Marshall Haas, who also authored the homepage and which in Corey’s opinion “uses straightforward copywriting to proactively address objections, create desire, and clearly position themselves.” Like Swipe Files, the website is also built with the NoCode website builder Webflow. You can read the Twitter thread here or the teardown on Swipe Files here.
💭 Afterthought
Been reading a lot of James Clear lately, so I was exhilarated to find the following Twitter thread by Justin Mikolay, that once again “organises and distils” this writer’s ideas, quotes and wisdoms from his last 3,000 tweets. As a Maker, the first is still one of my favourites: “Start early, start small, start now”, as taking action is always the best strategy! Read the Twitter thread here or the newsletter for an easier format. Take care of each other and see you tomorrow!
You can also find me on Twitter if you’d like to follow my thoughts in real-time!