☕ Good Morning!
Community is booming! Li Jin points out, the landscape of software tools for building online communities is exploding. And because this is such a broad space, there will not only be one set of tools to manage one. To give us a better overview, Mac Reddin from Commsor provides us with brilliant in-depth research on the “Growing Ecosystem of Community Tools”. He has mapped out the key players in this evolving and growing landscape and provides us with an Airtable containing over 130 tools across 11 different categories. 45% of these tools are less than three years old! The post also lists a number of investors who are interested in this space. Read more.
Source: Nick Youngson, CC BY-SA 3.0, Alpha Stock Images
😺 Product Hunt Recap
June 21, 2020
🥇 Bye: Email at its worst, by Thinko.
🥈 Mighty Health: Mighty Health is a personal health coach.
🥉 Logaster: Create a business name in a few clicks!
June 20, 2020
🥇 Kukla kit: Huge pack of 3D elements accessible directly from Figma.
🥈 Copy Arrow: An organized set of arrows for your copying pleasure.
🥉 Carpe: Create an alias for your bank details.
June 19, 2020
🥇 Perpetua Project: Curated events for investors, operators & founders.
🥈 Trivia for Slack: Fun team-building with 1000s of quizzes right inside Slack.
🥉 PayID: Create an alias for your bank details.
🚀 Maker News
Email Open Rates
Useful post by Andrea Bosoni on Indie Hackers on how he achieved an email open rate of 60% during the past few months. His learnings include consistency in delivery, reply requests from readers so Gmail places newsletter in the primary folder, removal of inactive subscribers after three months and a compelling preview text. Although the goal is to grow the subscriber list, quality over quantity is critical. Learn more.
Bootstapped SaaS Founders
Nathan Latka is about to publish the July edition of Latka. It contains a list of the 400 most promising bootstrapped founders and features Makers such as Ryan Kulp, Justin Jackson, Design Pickle and Smartlook. Today, 22nd June is the last day to order this issue for $29. You can also register and view the full SaaS database at getlatka.com.
Fathom Analytics vs Netlify
Bryce Wray provides us with his comparison of two Google Analytics alternatives that respect your privacy: Netlify and Fathom Analytics. Both are not free, but that’s because they don’t use your user’s data as Google does. For Bryce, Fathom ticks more boxes and is currently the best option to understand what your website is doing while protecting both your visitors and you. Learn more.
What Makes an Indie Business
Lolita Taub summarises the key characteristics which indie.vc say best describes an indie company/founder. They should leverage existing technologies, target niches with big adjacencies, be on-trend but out of favour, be in overlooked geographies, and be led by underrepresented founders. Read more. Read more.
Effective Emails
To get a response from a busy person by email, your email needs to be effective. Tobias van Schneider explains in his post what works and what doesn’t. His 10 tips include saying what you want, not sending NDAs and not using bullshit office jargon. The principle is that a little effort into your email, will encourage your reader to do the same. Read more.
🖥️ NoCode & Automate
NoCode Tools Extra
Want to find out what other NoCode tools are available besides Webflow, Bubble or Zapier? I found this great newsletter by Choco Chu from March, where he lists nine further platforms to keep an eye on and that look like game-changers. After reading this and looking at the different tools, it only confirms to me how this space will continue to boom in the coming years. Read more.
Follow Up
@edmundamoye, @ModernAfflatus, @MichaelJNovotny and @nocodelife launched TheFollowUp on Product Hunt on Saturday. The platform recognises businesses taking a stand against racial injustice and hopes to inspire more companies to take part and do the same. Moreover, it also wants to ensure these companies are held accountable to the promises they are making. Learn more.
MySQL → Google Sheets
It can be tedious to analyse data in a MySQL database. Seekwell has provided a tutorial on how to get your data from MySQL into Google Sheets. Learn more.
💰 Funding
Pre-Seed Funding
This is an insightful thread by Tyler Tringas on pre-seed VC funding. Generally, there are very few funds and deals in this space and few founders succeed in raising funds from professional investors. Therefore entrepreneurs shouldn’t waste their time or energy on this. Instead, they should do a “family & friends” round or otherwise bootstrap. Basically, pre-seed is here for a “small class of founders that have such an accumulation of unfair advantages that it’s just obvious they will generate some amount of traction on an idea and be able to raise a seed round. Read more.
💭 Afterthought
To finish the day, Darshan Gajara provides us with some insight from James Clear around the cycle of improvement. Once something becomes a habit, “the “effortful becomes automatic.” Take care of each other and see you tomorrow!
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