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Marc Köhlbrugge
Marc Köhlbrugge
PRO
PRO
@marc
Maker of WIP. Building various other projects as well. Writing book about domain names.
Currently, for each todo you post on the site, we include the UTC datetime that it was posted. We format it as a "relative date" so it says something like "2 hours ago" or "3 weeks ago", etc.
Some people have asked for an option to see the "absolute date" (e.g. 23:02 on 16 November 2023".
Also...
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When you join an accelerator like Y Combinator you not only getting funding and mentorship, but I believe they also offer various services like legal advice, setting up payroll, etc. Their goal is let you focus on your core business, and they take care of all the secondary stuff.
VC firms do the...
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I wanted to let you know about some changes to WIP membership that will help us maintain the quality of our community and ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform.
Starting today, we will be moving to a paid membership model for all new members. Existing members will be grandfathered ...
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There's a new WIP feature I've been contemplating. Would love your feedback!
The idea is to pick a topic each month and we all work on todos related to that topic. For example, one month the topic might be "SEO". At the start of the month we share our SEO-related goals, throughout the month we s...
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TRENDING
What are you reading?
What books and/or long-form articles are you reading? What do you like and dislike about them?
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TRENDING
What I Worked On Last Week
Hey everyone,
I wanted to share some updates on what I've been working on recently. It's been a mix of bug fixes, design improvements, and some exciting new features across a few different projects. Here’s a breakdown:
WIP
🛠 Bug Fixes:
• Fixed a bug where clicking on an avatar would download...
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TRENDING
What would you ask WIP AI?
If WIP had an AI chatbot that knew about your projects and completed todos. What are some of the questions you'd ask?
I'm wondering if it would be useful. Want to collect a list of use cases first. Some ideas I thought of:
• Ask it what to work on next
• Let me specify my goals and ask if I'm ac...
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TRENDING
"Invert, always invert." Join this challenge to gain new insights on how to achieve your WIP goal :)
I recently finished reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, which is a collection of Charlie Munger's talks.
One of his most well known phrases is "Invert, always invert." which is a technique to come up with non-obvious insights when working on a goal.
For example, if you goal is to decrease churn, y...
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I'm in the process of simplifying WIP. The reason is that over time the codebase and UX gets more complicated as we add more features. It's important to sometimes also REMOVE features to keep things lean and progress on-going.
Pending todos (i.e. todos that aren't completed) have been part of WI...
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TRENDING
Which topics for hangout?
We’re going to try something new. Have a specific topic for some of our weekly hangouts.
Which topics would you like to discuss?
We might try and invite an expert to answer your questions.
Thanks @ben for the suggestion!
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A central place to discuss your ideas for WIP.
• Have a feature request, bug, or feedback? Add a comment!
• Each top-level comment should discuss only ONE idea. Add multiple top-level comments as needed
• Upvote a suggestion by using the ❤️ button
• Reply to a suggestion to discuss or add more de...
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TRENDING
About WIP's recent downtime
Just wanted to give you all a quick explanation on WIP being down today and earlier this week.
I've been in process of switching many of my smaller apps from Render to Digital Ocean, deployed through Kamal. While I'm still a big fan of Render and I think it's great for hosting profitable sites, ...
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PRO members gets access to various deals including many discounts to SaaS services.
What services would you like to see included?
I'll try and reach out to them to see if they can offer a nice discount for us. Also, you can add a discount for your own project.
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When a customer of your business requests their account data to be deleted, how do you handle it?
You could just delete everything outright, but you risk losing all usage evidence if they end up filing a chargeback later.
I'm thinking of building a well secured, self-service "delete my account"...
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What are some of the best Black Friday deals you've seen?
Please share the name of the product, the link, and the discount.
Feel free to also promote your own black friday deal, but do disclose it's your own product.
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WIP currently shows you their daily tasks and occasional milestones.
What other things would you like to see?
I'll list some ideas below, but I'd love to get your suggestions too!
• Revenue / MRR for each project
• Other metrics like user growth, engagement, etc
• Weekly/monthly recap of their ...
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I notice a growing concern in the maker community (not WIP specifically, but in general) of people's work being blatantly ripped off. It makes people hesistant building in the open, sharing the revenue numbers, etc.
So I had a crazy idea inspired by Twitter's new view counts.
What if you could ...
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Curious to hear what new habits other members you all are building?
Some sub-questions:
• What made you want to build this particular habit?
• How is it going? Harder/easier than possible? Anything surprising?
• What benefits (and drawbacks) have you experienced so far?
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WIP's streaks are always a decisive topic. Some people claim it's what finally made them a productive maker while others dislike the unhealthy incentive to work every single day.
For the people that do like streaks, it can be very demotivating when they eventually lose them and have to start fro...
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I'm considering creating weekly reports that will show you a high-level overview of what you worked on that week, based on your WIP todos.
The goal is to give you an overview of your progress, while also giving you something to share with your audience (blog, Twitter followers, etc) to update th...
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When you're in the zone you might forget to log your work. So what if you could connect your GitHub account, and at the end of the day you'd receive an email with all your commits. And based on that you can write the todos you completed that day. (e.g. just by replying to the email)
Two question...
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There are a lot of talented people in our community, but it isn't always easy to find them.
What if we allowed you to add your skills to your profile?
Then later we can add filters, so then when you have an SEO question you can quickly find all members who are experts at that. We can also start...
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MILESTONE
WIP is now invite-only (and free*)
When I first started WIP about four years ago I never thought it would turn into what it is today. It was a just a Telegram chatgroup, free for anyone to join.
Pretty soon though, some very kind people (many still active members today!) asked if they could donate some $$$ to WIP in the hope to i...
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Transaction emails like password resets, etc are generally handled by just having a template as part your code base and sending that through something like Sendgrid.
But how do you deal with with one-off broadcasts like announcing a new product feature?
Do you integrate it in your code base som...
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I've been toying with three related ideas for WIP to grow the community and get more (relevant) people onboard:
Idea 1: Free
Currently, anyone considering to join WIP will need to commit to paying $20 per month. This is great in the sense that we don't get any spam, and the majority of new memb...
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When I initially added the #hashtag feature to WIP the idea was to group all your product's todos together in one place.
That's still what most people use them for. However, more and more people have started using them for other creative usecases like #life (non-work related todos), tracking the...
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I've added Tailwind CSS and ViewComponent to the WIP codebase.
What started out two weeks ago as a "quick experiment" soon turned into a long rabbit hole of refactoring large parts of the codebase. With each change, affecting something else in the codebase, requiring another change and so forth....
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We're back doing the weekly voice chats on Telegram!
If you haven't attended one, it's basically a big group call with a bunch of WIP members. is our host faciliating a structured discussion, but ultimately the goal is to have a conversation as a group.
Sometimes we pick a topic, and other tim...
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As you might know we started doing weekly WIP voice calls with the community. Each Friday we pick a topic and discuss it for an hour.
We'd like to know which topics you'd be interested in?
Some examples of previous topics:
• Sales for founders
• Dealing with the ups and downs of bootstrapping a...
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I recently learned about generative art on the blockchain from Kevin Rose's new podcast.
It's still in its early stages and it can be implemented many different ways. But one site I've been looking at is Art Blocks.
The way it works is that first an artist writes an algorithm. It's typically ju...
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MILESTONE
Passed $10,000 in monthly revenue
Startup Jobs has been growing a lot lately. It now generates over $10,000 in monthly revenue. If growth continues like this, I estimate we'll hit $15,000 within a couple months.
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MILESTONE
🔎 You can now search through WIP
Today, Jankees added search functionality to WIP. You can search through all todos, products, and makers.
Click the "More" button in the sidebar navigation and then "Search".
Search is really nice to quickly find your own stuff, but it's also a great way to find other makers that might be able ...
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MILESTONE
One million job applications 🤩
Startup Jobs has crossed 1,000,000 job applications. That means a million people applied for one job, one person applied for a million jobs, or hopefully something somewhere in between that 😅
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Magic links have become a popular authentication method. People enter their email address and receive a one-time link to sign in. No need for passwords anymore.
It's not without its problems though. So I'm curious what some of the best practices are. I'd especially like to hear from people who'v...
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MILESTONE
Revamped Milestones
Three years ago we added the "Product Updates" feature which would let you share important milestones, announce new product features, etc. Basically anything where a short todo wouldn't do it justice.
It was a bit hard to find though and I think the naming was a bit confusing.
So today we've gi...
Share your personal goals for the new year.
• What are you hoping to achieve?
• How do you plan to get there?
• And how can the WIP community help you?
Share your business goals in this thread:
https://wip.co/questions/what-are-your-business-goals-for-2021
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Share your business goals for the new year.
• What are you hoping to achieve?
• How do you plan to get there?
• And how can the WIP community help you?
Share your personal goals in this thread:
https://wip.co/questions/what-are-your-personal-goals-for-2021
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TRENDING
Hello, my name is Marc Köhlbrugge
What are you working on these days?
Me and (mostly him) made this new intro feature over the last few days. The goal is to help new members introduce themselves to our community and make them feel welcome. It's aimed at new members, but I figured I'd test it out to see if it actually works in ...
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I'm planning to ask new members a series of questions to help them introduce theirselves to the community. The idea is to share these little interviews in our weekly newsletter, on the website, and in the Telegram chat (when the member joins the chat).
Below is what I have so far, but I'd love t...
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If you've been following my recent todos for Tweet Photo, you might have noticed something was up. Well, here it is: Tweet Photo has been acquired by CreatorKit.
A few weeks ago Kevin Natanzon (@kevntz) reached out to me asking if I'd be interested in selling the service. He's the CEO of Creator...
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David Rusenko, founder of Weebly (sold for $365M to Square), talks about prioritization in his Startup School talk How to find Product-Market Fit.
Specifically he says: optimize for learning. Ask yourself:
“"What is our biggest unknown that would rewrite our priority list?"”
So as a thought ex...
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Share a photo 👍
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MILESTONE
You can now log your todos via email ✨
If you enable the daily digest email, you will receive a daily email summarizing that day's activity. It shows you all the pending todos you added, and the todos you completed.
Starting today, you can reply to this email to log more todos.
Every line is considered a separate todo. Todos are pre...
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TRENDING
What are you reading?
What books and/or long-form articles are you reading? What do you like and dislike about them?
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If you have any feedback for me, post it here. Of course you can also share it in the chat or email me personally.
People occasionally ask me what the best place is to share their ideas, so I figured I'd create a post for it. 😁
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What do you struggle with the most, and when do you wish you had a cofounder? Do you find that having a network helps?
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MILESTONE
📊 Calculating activation rates
As previously discussed I'm looking to make my product designed more data-informed. One metric I'm especially interested in is WIP's activation rate. That is: what percentage of new users actually become active community members?
It's pretty hard to grow a community if new members leave right af...
In the previous post I explained I want to take a more data-driven approach when it comes to product development. But which metrics should I look at?
Ultimately the goal of a business is to generate a profit. Setting aside costs, we can just focus on revenue for now. In case of WIP, that's our m...
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When it comes to product development and deciding what to work on next, I have never really followed a specific methodology. I just fixed the bugs that seemed the most annoying, and built the features I thought people wanted.
That kinda works, but I'm always wondering: is this really the thing I...
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I regularly come across talented and influential makers I'd love to have on WIP. These people could have disproportionate positive impact on the community.
I'm reluctant inviting them though, as it feels disingenuous saying I love their work but then asking them to pay $20/mo for a membership.
...
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TRENDING
Trying out @mentions
Feel free to try out @mentions here. Please be kind and don't unnecessarily spam people. Just ask them a question or share a compliment.
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MILESTONE
👨👩👧👦 Collaborate with your team mates
Starting today you can invite your team mates to WIP and collaborate on your products!
Here's how to get started:
1. Visit your product page
2. Click the edit button
3. Enter your teammate's username in the additional makers field
4. Your teammate will receive an email asking for confirmation
5....
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You can now easily paste in images from your clipboard right into the compose window.
On macOS you can hit cmd+shift+4, and then hold ctrl when you select an area of your screen. This will copy the contents of that screenshot into you clipboard.
You can then invoke WIP Menubar and simply hit cm...
MILESTONE
⏰⚡️ Streaks now support time zones!
⏰⚡️ Streaks now support time zones! Set your time zone by sending your GPS location to @wipbot (we don't store your location). Your streak will then be calculated based on your own time zone. Make sure to complete at least one todo before midnight, local time.
⛔️ This feature is in BETA. Use at ...
I just release v1.2.1!
You can down press down arrow in the compose window to see all your recent pending todos. It's a quick way to see what to work on next.
If you already have the app installed it should automatically update after restarting. If you have the Mac App Store version you might ne...
New in v1.1.1:
• A new /help command for quick access to https://wip.chat/help
• The compose window now automatically hides itself when it loses focus, similar to macoS Spotlight
If you already have the app installed it should automatically update after restarting. If you have the Mac App Store...
MILESTONE
Introducing the Affiliate Program
Starting today our customers can earn money by referring their friends.
How it works
1. After someone joins as an affiliate, they get a personal link to share with friends, etc
2. When someone clicks the link, we set a 30-day cookie
3. If that person signs up within those 30 days, we consider t...
MILESTONE
Introducing Keyboard Shortcuts ✨
Too lazy to click? No worries. You can now use Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts to navigate across WIP!
The following keyboard shortcuts are currently supported:
• Type gp to go to your pending todos
• Type gd to go to your done todos
• Type gh to go to the homepage
• Type gq to go to the questions...
While GUIs are great, bash scripting can provide a powerful way to automate common workflows. What are your favorites?
Please link to a source / gist where relevant.
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I find Contentful too expensive.
[This post was originally posted by another member, but they deleted their account and I didn't want the replies to be wasted.]
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I don't mean for each individual app and how they access them, but rather if and how you manage all of them in one place.
Do you use a password manager like 1Password to keep track of them?
Many API keys you could just retrieve from the associated site when you need them. But some of them only...
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Just curious to see what creative domains people have come up with. Domain hacks, etc.
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Right now I have a handful of customers on the $29/mo plan. I feel like there's more potential though, but it's a tricky product to market.
Any suggestions on how I can grow revenue without substantial investments in the product itself?
I'm considering adding a cheaper plan ($7/mo) with a lower...
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One of my #faces customers asked for it and I currently don't have one.
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Please include description, link, price, and discount.
Related, but different thread: https://wip.chat/questions/share-what-you-are-looking-for-during-black-friday-cyber-monday-2019
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e.g. through delegation, buying the premium version, etc
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Whenever I see a clever design technique I might want to draw inspiration from in the future I like to somehow bookmark it.
However, every app I've tried has failed me. In the past I've tried LittleSnapper (dead), Ember (dead), and most recently Pixave (unreliable).
I'm leaning towards just usi...
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Right now hashtags are unique per user (e.g. I can only have one product with the #betalist hashtag), but they are NOT unique across users (e.g. multiple people could have a product with a #betalist hashtag).
Right now this works okay, but has a few limitations:• We cannot use the hashtag as a s...
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I launched Caption Cat a few weeks ago as an experiment.
Since then I've been posting new photos daily, but the number of user-contributed captions and upvotes is declining. There's still a core of users contributing almost daily, but it's less fun if there's too few people left to see it.
I'm ...
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I really like the concept and little code snippets, but the foobar examples can be a bit abstract and hard to grasp. Simplified real-world examples might clarify the code.
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Do you use the same set of API keys across different products? (seems insecure)
Or do you use the IAM Management Console to create separate users for each app? How do you configure your groups/roles/users/policies?
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Assuming you have multiple email addresses (for example for each product you manage) and you forward them all to the same email address.
How do you set up the forwarding?
The reason I'm asking is I'm using Linode to manage my DNS, but they don't support email forwarding. I could run my own emai...
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When people or crawlers request a page that doesn't exist on your site they will get a 404 Not Found error. I'm wondering if I should keep track of these.
Pros:
- Let's you monitor potential issues with the site that will otherwise go unnoticed
- You can follow up with any blogs/etc that might i...
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nvAlt is a text editor which does something very clever. It lets you search your notes, but if it doesn't find anything your search query becomes the title of a new note.
I figured this might work well for posting questions on WIP as well. We all know we should search before asking a question (o...
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“Purchasing power parity (PPP) is an economic theory that compares different countries' currencies through a "basket of goods" approach. According to this concept, two currencies are in equilibrium or at par when a basket of goods (taking into account the exchange rate) is priced the same in bot...
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Any website should be able to show the images (GET), but files should only be uploadable from https://wip.chat.
Here's what I'm thinking:
https://gist.github.com/marckohlbrugge/b493e74ca764f99ea3f94bd6e112d4ac
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Right now the URL of this question has just the ID: https://wip.chat/questions/639
I think it would be good to add more descriptive slugs. Both for SEO purposes, but also to give people a better indication of what the question is about when shared on platforms where there's no preview.
I'm cons...
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See https://wip.chat/weekly for what it would contain.
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Assuming you have an existing codebase and are running into problems due to using the wrong approach. Maybe your product significantly changed since initially building it.
How do you decide whether to refactor, or completely rewrite?
I don't have a specific codebase in mind, so if you answer is...
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MILESTONE
📅 Monthly Report – April 2018
Now that we have Product Updates on WIP, I figured I'd share a monthly report. Here it goes…
Metrics
Numbers are a little down compared to March. This was to be expected as we launched last month leading to a lot of new members and increased activity. Overall though, the numbers look really go...
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I'm guessing hardly anyone does, in which case I might start experimenting with some other designs.
For example I think we can we show more recent questions, recent Product Updates, and the newest members.
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MILESTONE
🔔 You can now follow products
With over 1,000 products on WIP it can be hard to stay up-to-date on your favorite ones. So starting today you can follow products.
By following a product you will get notified of their Product Updates. You also get a handy list of all the products you follow.
For all the different domains you have, how do you manage email for those? Both receiving and sending.
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Today I'm introducing the beta of Product Updates, a better way to share your most important product changes, milestones, and other changes.
Todos are a great way to share incremental updates on your product. Whether it's a bug fix or small feature. However, some changes deserve more attention t...
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I'm not looking to learn swift actually haha. I have a few domain names I want to sell. I figured companies selling expensive resources tend to have more budget 😄
One of the domains is learnswift(.)com 👀
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I'm planning to spin off BetaList Jobs into its own website. I'm looking for a new name with an available or for-sale domain name.
Requirements:• Memorable name. One or two words.
• .com or .co should be available
• Cannot use .jobs extension (they are restricted)
• Budget is low $x,xxx dependin...
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Curious to hear how it works as I badly need to fix my posture. I guess it stretches chest muscles?
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I think it could be useful for us to roast each others product. Provide critical feedback. Then as a maker you can go through each point and figure out a fix or how to prevent those possible problems.
I’ll start with WIP.
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I notice quite a few 'request for feedback' type questions popping up in the chat and on the site. I am wondering if it makes sense to formalise them and possibly introduce additional functionality.
Some examples people request feedback on:• Product ideas
• Revenue models / pricing
• Design crit...
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TRENDING
What if rather than losing your streak count during an off-day, it drops by 1 (or more) ? #wip
Right now the Shipping Streaks incentives people to ship every day. Shipping often is a good habit, but doing so for weeks in a row without rest is unhealthy.
Some people log non-work activities, but that feels like a hack and leads to spammy todos.
Maybe we can redesign the streak. It should s...
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Losing your hard earned streak can be very demotivating. I've seen quite a few makers that completely stop shipping when they lose their streak. 😯
One idea that has come up is to let makers pay to fix a broken streak. So if you accidentally skipped a day you could pay a fee to 'fill in' that day...
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I can imagine you have an endless supply of ideas for new features to build, existing functionality to improve, or bugs to fix. How do you decide what to work on next?
I often reuse the same code across multiple Rails apps. From simple service objects to stylesheets. I’m wondering what an easy way would be to share those across different apps?
I guess I could put them into ruby gems, but that seems convoluted? Having to build/manage the gem. Imagine I just wan...
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There are many talented maker in the community and WIP's todo list is ever-growing.
I'm looking at a few different options to help speed up development. One of them is making the code (semi) open source so community members can contribute code.
At least initially I would still be the one decidi...
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Jumping into the group chat can be a bit intimidating for new people. There are a lot of discussions going-on, inside jokes, most people already seem to know each other.
I try to personally welcome each new member and guide them through using WIP, but it's getting harder as WIP grows. I'm wonder...
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TRENDING
How has WIP helped you as a maker?
I realize this is a very loaded and self-serving question, but I’m looking to collect a few testimonials for the WIP landing page haha.
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I'm losing track of DM's in Telegram. I'm curious to hear if any of you have any suggestions?
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We've been discussing adding a /milestone feature to track important milestones in your product. For example when you get your first customer, or reach $1,000 MRR.
I'd like to get a better sense of what everybody would like to track (if anything). If there's enough overlap, we could potentially ...
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If enough people are open to this I'll add this feature to WIP. It would make it possible to see how much revenue each product is generating.
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I'd like to build out the WIP maker profiles a bit and figured it would be nice to have a collection of Q&A's for each member.
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Me and @nadine_bejou were discussing the idea of having a way to set and track your goals on WIP.
Before we dive into the feature though, I'd like to get a better sense of how all of you are setting goals (if any?), what kind of goals, how you measure them, whether you set a deadline, etc.
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Whats your experience with that / opinion about it?
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Curious to hear how you decide which todo's to work on next, and whether (manually) sorting your todo's would make sense?
If you're working on multiple products, would you like to mix the sorting across products (harder to implement for me) or have it scoped per product? (relatively easy to impl...
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When you finally launch your product on #wip that's something we should celebrate and share with the community.
What should it look like? Where does your launch appear on the site, and what information should it include?
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Ideas for sticker designs are welcome, but also any other crazy ideas you might have. 😁 #wip
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A few weeks ago @dr33tje reached out to me. He mentioned he really likes our community and how it supports (upcoming) makers to ship and so his company Nedap likes to support that.
So they are contributing €2500 (about $3000) to WIP. @dr33tje told me I could use it however I see fit. But we talk...
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I personally think it's pretty great, but I'm biased.
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