Makers.dev

Even if you don't have ADHD, learning about your brain and how it works will pay dividends for your entire life. We chat with Jesse J. Anderson about his journey with ADHD, what symptoms to look for if you think you might have it, and some processes and systems you can try to get a handle on it. If you want to hear more, check out Jesse on twitter! https://twitter.com/jessejanderson 00:00 Intro 00...

Competition isn't bad, it's good! If you target a narrow market and tell your story, then people will buy your product just for that. This week, Christian figures out who to hire first and Chris preps for his CS masters to start. 00:00 Intro 03:13 Podcasts are cool 04:13 Next week: ADHD chat 06:28 Prepping for a CS masters 10:30 Teaching as you learn 16:38 Future Christian tells past Christian who...

Chris has big news about the next few years. Christian thinks about how and who to hire. Also, we talk about ADHD again: how to handle it, and what it means. 00:00 Intro 00:29 Meal prep 03:29 Solving AI problems 08:38 MS CS 10:40 Why get a college degree? 15:28 What makes someone a student? 17:10 Work in Progress update 19:56 Having more capacity to do work 25:48 Live streaming as accountability f...

Chris's Kaggle competition wrapped up and he finished in 5th! Christian goes on a hunt to figure out what is wrong with his parents house, and contemplates what the future of life and business is once an AI is better than humans at most things. 00:00 Intro 02:29 Chris finally bought a computer 12:39 GPT-3 and the future of AI 21:52 Home diagnosis 33:11 How do you curate when there's too much infor...

Burnout is sneaky. Chris and Christian talk about what makes work meaningful, and how to find that work. Christian talks about onboarding and how many info products get the checkout flow all wrong. Also, Christian is building a tiny house and is super excited about it. 00:00 Intro 01:29 Burnout 09:22 AI Update 11:10 What makes work exciting? 16:44 Work in progress 18:51 Deep learning machine 21:09...

How much would you spend to increase your MRR by $1000? Christian thinks he has been thinking about customer acquisition all wrong, and could be spending a lot more to get customers. 00:00 Intro 00:26 Kaggle contest update 06:34 Christian had A WEEK 13:53 Making a super simple info product 21:48 How much is $1000 MRR worth? 26:57 LTV = ARPU / Churn 31:09 Acquiring a small saas or info product Time...

Chris talks about overfitting to the public leaderboard (on Kaggle and in life), and Christian tries to figure out a direction for two different projects: a hierarchical book reader (or writer?), and his timetracking app: should he go more B2B, or be more like Scott's Cheap Flights or Nomad List? 00:00 Intro 02:48 Overfitting to the public leaderboard 06:48 Different approaches to life, business a...

Christian is out this week so Chris is joined by Matt Swanson (https://twitter.com/_swanson​). We talk about making decisions about features and user roles in his software consulting role, how he grew a twitter audience to 4,000 and what he learned, and "Boring Rails", his latest project, where he talks about writing software using the tride-and-true "boring" rails stack.

Both of us refocus on the businesses we had when we started makers.dev, and we become each other's boss again.   00:00 Intro   01:38 Taking breaks is good for work   03:52 Chris's update - AI plus WIP   09:25 Specific marketing next steps   21:39 A tool for finding "watering holes"   23:54 Make specific next steps and cultivate long term habits   31:12 Chris might buy a computer   34:12 The most e...

Chris dives deeper into data science and complains that crypto currency miners are buying all the graphics cards. Christian talks about how to decide what to work on, plus has 6 new business ideas to think about. 00:00 Intro 01:11 Chris's projects 03:43 When to buy vs rent (graphics cards and more) 12:34 Trying to rise in a Kaggle competition 16:44 MeetingPlace - what to do next, committing to act...

Chris enters a Kaggle competition to expand his data science skills, and Christian tries to figure out what to work on and how to prioritize time. We also talk about personality and learning traits, and how we get things done. 00:00 Intro 01:23 Data science update 02:37 Kaggle indoor positioning competition 11:51 How Chris dives into learning a new topic 14:18 Balancing short term vs long term 17:...

Chris talks about learning more AI and ML, and how learning that is helping as he teaches others. Christian is about to get a new 3D printer, and talks about how it's so cool that we can just download and print real things - we're living in the future. 00:00 Intro 02:15 Doing things under your own name vs a new domain name 07:18 Learning new things makes you a better educator 09:27 Consuming the c...

"Christian just do your emails" 00:00 Plumbing problems 01:31 When do you outsource vs. do it yourself? 13:18 Chris's AI research 17:38 Overview of Machine Learning 22:24 PyTorch vs. TensorFlow 26:02 Python, Javascript, and Ruby 29:41 Slogging through email 33:34 Email systems 40:43 Bookmark bankruptcy 41:44 Zettelkasten Google Search browser plugin HOT TAKE 44:34 Just do your emails Christian Tim...

Apparently makers.dev is now the #1 Entrepreneurship podcast in Albania 00:00 Intro 01:45 2^4 episodes and the #1 Albanian Entrepreneurship Podcast 04:00 Chris's GAN AI research 09:32 How hard is it to make a GAN? 14:56 Feeling like you should be working on something else 21:31 EMAIL 24:56 Building a book reader in public 28:47 Orders of magnitude of views vs. engagement 31:12 Letting projects inc...

Eight new ideas hot and fresh from a week of impromptu urban camping in Dallas, Texas. 00:00 SNOVID 02:39 Iceballs 03:43 Acorn Chat 04:44 Standard landing page vs. Long Form Copy 09:52 AB testing 14:55 SNOVID idea #HOTTAKES 16:30 Amazon mobile app for all Shopify stores idea 19:07 donotcall.dev API idea 22:13 ffmpeg as a service idea 27:47 transcriptions with a good API idea 32:43 Every YouTube ch...

Perfect is the enemy of good, show your work, and get more of yourself out there. 00:00 Keeping the monkey healthy 03:00 Crunched audio? 05:02 Building Acorn Chat in a week 13:15 Why have separate app. and www. subdomains? 18:44 Embedded customizable .ejs templates per customer 21:13 Perfect is the enemy of good 24:00 The next 48 hours for Acorn Chat 27:08 Clips.marketing goals were CRUSHED 31:29...

Virtual Reality, project prioritization, and smart but upset tummies 00:00 Intro 00:56 Syndicating makers.dev clips 03:35 Clips.marketing as a consultancy vs. SaaS 13:58 Avoidant attachment style 16:00 Virtual Reality and the Oculus Quest 2 19:21 Unity VR development 21:23 Chris's 17 projects from 2020 26:02 How do you prioritize what to work on next? 31:22 Optimizing for fun work is important 34:...

00:00 Christian and Chris are converging  00:40 Maker.dev interactions on twitter  01:47 Audio quality is bad and it's not the microphone's fault  04:56 Chris's talking head videos  08:46 Why is Facebook's moneymaker backend so bad?  15:01 What's the plan for clips.marketing?  20:52 Build your audience first (unless you can build really quickly and cheaply)  26:16 Manually onboard to make sure you...

Apparently "worse is better" is how you get Christian to buy things. 00:00 Intro 00:23 Seeing the zoo through a child's eyes 02:56 Kids are like startups 05:27 Stripe Checkout 13:53 Microphone upgrades 17:52 Camera upgrades 21:54 Aspirational purchases 22:31 How would you live differently with more money? 28:25 A programmable phone in search of a problem and audience 34:40 Next week's plans Timest...

It's usually better to just get something done and out there rather than obsess over every little detail. Christian also figures out a better way to handle customer support emails.

00:00 10 episodes! 00:34 Listener shoutouts 02:59 Pumping your voice into someone else's ears 05:38 Converting internet numbers to real numbers 06:40 "Slack is down, use async!" 08:04 Meeting Place, Async.dev, and WebRTC update 09:59 How does WebRTC work? 14:59 Twilio's TURN at $0.40/GB vs. $0.01/GB 16:09 Business WebRTC bandwidth costs 18:49 STUN servers 20:09 Anyone could build AT&T from the...

Alternate title: doing everything right and seeing what happens 00:00 Intro 00:34 CHRISTIAN'S CHRISTMAS IGLOO 04:02 Chris's soundproofed office 05:14 Chris's co-founder breakup 08:53 Why not swing for the fences instead of bootstrapping? 09:55 Optimizing for flexibility 11:06 How do kids change business priorities? 12:46 Consulting vs. full-time for Riverside 15:44 Chris's upcoming consulting info...

00:00 Hello! 00:31 How do you take vacations as a bootstrapper? 03:58 Brain dumping 04:51 How is work is more fun than skiing or ziplining? 07:44 Morning Pages from The Artist's Way 08:08 How do you balance vacations and family with work? 10:13 Needing meaningful work 10:50 YouTube to Transistor script for makers.dev 13:57 Dogfooding async.dev for makers.dev 15:53 Websocks in Rails 18:33 Doing art...

0:00 Drywall is like business 1:24 Just doing the work is more important than tips and hacks 6:00 Christian's robot video editor 11:34 The dream podcasting workflow 17:40 Automatic YouTube to Transistor.fm flow 19:20 Makers.dev vs. BusinessMan. Business work 22:58 MeetingPlace update 24:13 Dogfooding Async.dev instead of Slack 27:20 How do you decide what to work on next? 36:45 Setting immutable b...

0:00 Special Acoustic Caulk and manual laber 3:22 The Jigsaw Puzzle Theory of Business 6:10 Async.dev Slackbot update 9:00 Can you charge for an unfinished project? 10:44 Niching a Time Tracker Coaching Service 22:28 What's next for Async.dev and Meeting Place? 24:54 Talking to Sign Printers update 30:25 Clipping Microconf Recap 35:17 Effective Time Design 38:07 Automated video editing 45:44 Deleg...