A Medium Fightback 🤔

Jun 4, 2020

☕ 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.

2PM @2PMinc

News: In an effort to compete against the onslaught of @substack, @Medium launched a newsletter function.

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!

Phillip Smith @phillipadsmith

Using @Medium's new "Newsletter" tool to grow your audience seems like a terrible idea to me:

🚀 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.

Channing Allen @ChanningAllen

Online communities: historically difficult to monetize. Most target penny-pinching consumers. But consumers are becoming more entrepreneurial! More are thinking & spending like businesses. Add the loneliness of lockdown? New golden age for communities 👇 indiehackers.com/post/community…

Community: the new business model for indie hackersThe new business model of charging for paid communities is sweeping through the world of indie hackers. DCoolican on Twitter: “2010: Build an audience,...indiehackers.com

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.

Minaal @minaal

Tune in now to hear our interview w/ @hamishmckenzie , cofounder of Substack and champion of ambitious writers everywhere!

Show Notes: Hamish McKenzie – The Future Of PublishingListen: This interview will air on Wednesday 03 June at 8am, 4pm, and midnight (Pacific US time), on the radio player at the bottom right of your screen. At 8am June 04 Pacific, the on-demand audio will become available …members.minaal.com

🏗️ 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.

Sam Parr ⚪️ @theSamParr

This is amazing. I didn't make it...it's notes from @ShaanVP and I podcast (shaan did most of the talking)

Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It’s the all-in-one workspace for you and your teamnotion.so

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.

Temirlan ⚡ @optemization

producthunt.com/posts/palabra auto emails with nocode tools is gonna a breeze with this📨

Palabra - No-code friendly workspace for your automated emails | Product Hunt☄️ Automate emails from your app to your users easily. ✉️ Create sequences of emails using our templates. 📕 Use some of our pre-written emails to get started quickly.producthunt.com

🖥️ 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.

Corey Haines 💡 @coreyhainesco

Delayed releasing the latest @SwipeFilesco teardown due to recent events but just going to ship it now for anyone who might find it useful. Check out the latest teardown of a new productized service called Shepherd 👇 swipefiles.co/latest/file

Shepherd’s Landing PageShepherd’s landing page uses straightforward copywriting to shine light on its productized service. Shepherd is a new agency that finds top overseas talent for your company. It’s one of the best productized service landing pages exemplifying how to address objections, create desire, and position cle…swipefiles.co

💭 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!