The artisan app movement
Home Cooked Apps | Build your own Where’s Waldo | First 100 Customers | Instant Physical Product Design + loads more…
🆕 Guest Post
This month’s issue is a little different. I have my good friend Troy Gasnier taking over this issue with a guest post while I take a month off to spend time with my family and our new bundle of joy who arrived on the 31st of December named Casper.
Troy was the first person I reached out to and thankfully he agreed to write this month’s edition. He’s a passionate maker who I enjoy jamming with every month over Zoom and I think you will love his fresh take below. See you next month.
Over to my boy Troy!
First of all, cheers to Sam for putting this newsletter together every month!
Sam and I first met after I used his ‘book a call’ link after using one of his Super.so Notion templates, and we’ve kept in touch via Zoom (+ 1 Scotland visit) almost every month since.
Quick about me: Originally from Arkansas in the US. I had a dozen failed ventures, errr learnings, and then one successful exit in the retail tech/agency space. My fiance and I moved to Lisbon last year, and I’ve been working on Epiphany (the world’s fastest way to capture tasks and ideas with voice) for the last 6 months. If you have an assistant or team member you regularly delegate to or are just a self-professed productivity enthusiast, I hope you’ll check it out here. (iOS only at the moment)
OK, now for the goods. Hope you enjoy it!
🔥 Top post last month: Multi-layered calendars
📓 Articles
Home Cooked Apps
Not every meal is served in a restaurant. Why does every app have to be launched and scaled?
After Taptalk, an app Robin Sloan and his family used for communicating shut down, Robin decided to build one for themselves. And BoopSnoop was born!
DAUs: 4
Churn: 0%
KPIs to hit: none
Sounds pretty great!
Personally, I think more things like this should exist. Just because the internet scales doesn’t mean everything made on the internet has to. We will call it the artisan app movement.
How I spent a year building an App and failed
This story takes us into the mind of Chris, an aspiring entrepreneur with an idea and the skills to build.
The idea, as he says, was TaskRabbit + GoFundMe.
The problem is, he didn’t actually know anyone who wanted it and couldn’t find them.
Everyone writes about success, but we can learn more sometimes from hearing about when things don’t go to plan.
🎁 Bonus content: Another shutdown story here from an app/service I absolutely loved while living in San Francisco in 2015.
🔗 Hyperlinks
Create your own Where’s Waldo
@0xFramer first posted some pretty epic AI-generated Where’s Waldo scenes and then published the ‘how to’ after so many people requested the prompts.
Personally, I find this fascinating. As a boy, I had all the Where’s Waldo books and there’s something so nostalgic about seeing one of these types of scenes. Sure, he had to manually place his own Waldo, and these productions aren’t quite ready for print. Isn't it cool!
My nephews sure would love to find themselves and their dog in a book💡
🎁 Bonus content: If you were like “WTF is Waldo”, you’re probably not the only one, check this out to learn more. And for the Brits, yes, Wally was the original 😉
First 100 Customers
Shaan and Sam basically trade war stories for how they acquired their first 100 customers for a number of their ventures.
It’s a good reminder that getting those first customers A. is really really hard, and B. requires doing things that don’t scale.
🎁 Bonus content: Do things that don’t scale.
Slick website
This might be the coolest company website ever.
I really enjoy leaning into the dual meaning of ‘runway’ without being overly tacky.
Design: I’m not a designer, but sometimes the aesthetic just leaves you in awe.
UX: Even the first scrolling experience takes you through the curved aeroplane window.
Copywriting: “First Class Amenities” instead of “Benefits”. Nailed it.
📱 Products
Getleo.ai | Idea to Physical Product
Wow! If you’ve ever casually tried your hand at CAD “computer-aided drawing”, you know it’s not for the faint of heart.
But what if you could skip that altogether and go right to 3D printing or manufacturing? The CAD production tool isn’t quite ready for release, but you can play with the product image generation tool now. Very cool to see the inputs of ‘random thingamagig’ being put to a proper product prompt.
I sent this to a buddy of mine who does CAD for a living. His response “There goes my job”. My response, “Naw… will 2x demand”. I guess we’ll see!
Snipd| Save Podcast Clips
Ever been listening to a podcast and thought “That’s interesting, I want to remember that”?
Snipd makes it ridiculously easy to save podcast segments with a tap of your AirPods.
I’ve been using Snipd now for over a year and absolutely love it.
GPTs | The next app goldrush
In 2008 the Apple App Store launched, yet most never thought it would be as big as it became. It started with very humble beginnings with just 500 apps. Today it has over 1.2 million and generates almost 100 billion in revenue for Apple.
That being said, it’s becoming increasingly harder to get a popular app on the store due to its saturation and we have been waiting decades for the next app store ecosystem and it’s potentially finally arrived. Open AI have just launched their GPT store and it’s being said it’s the next app gold rush. What makes this even more exciting is you don’t need to know how to code to create a GPT. Check out some of the best examples of GPTs for some inspiration.
Beta Directory | Discover the latest tech products
This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:
Poolside: No-code AI software development tool.
Chronicle: The Notion for Presentations
Spendoso: SaaS to manage all of your SaaS.
🐽 Other links to consume
🔮 Flashback
This month I’ll leave you a Microsoft media icon - Winapp. It was first released in 1997 and quickly became the default media player for Windows users due to it’s customizability compared to that of the default media player and being one of the first programs to allow MP3 files to be clicked and dragged from a file-sharing network. Winapp rod the file-sharing trend when it was common to download audio files from sites such as Pirate Bay, Napster, Limewire etc. It was also an extension of your personality, with an extensive custom skin marketplace allowing you to select from thousands of user-created skins. Check out this Winamp skin museum.
Winamp was originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. At its peak in 2001 Winamp had 60m users and is still being developed to this day despite changing hands numerous more times after being sold to AOL.
That’s it for this month!
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
🚀 Advertise on this newsletter to get in front of 8,000+ monthly readers
💬 Need some advice on building products. Grab some time with me.
🧪 Want to learn how to validate your product idea, check out Validation Co.
If you liked this and fancy some free goodies consider referring someone to the newsletter and get rewarded for doing so.
Until next the next issue,
Sam Troy | @troygasnier 👨💻