Makers.dev

We talk to Brian Casel about launching ZipMessage and growing a SaaS business (vs a productize service). We talk to him about his previous business successes, how he got started programming, and how he's thinking about growing ZipMessage. 00:00 Intro 01:08 Brian's backstory 05:35 Scaling by hiring more people 09:40 ZipMessage 12:22 Audience Ops 13:14 Move towards software businesses 18:14 Christia...

The exciting finale of "Dude, Where's my Car???"; plus we talk about crypto: is it gambling? or is there a way to make money with it? 00:00 Intro 00:25 The Matrix Resurrections 03:49 VR Movies 08:29 AcornChat next steps 12:38 Work time vs vacation time 13:45 AI competitions 24:04 Crypto Trading Compeition 30:03 Efficient vs inefficient markets 32:01 Why you can't make money trading crypto 34:16 Ma...

SaaS is complicated... Christian has FileInbox go down and has to figure out what that means. Chris works on his final lab and runs into issues. Also: what would you do if your car got stolen? 00:00 Intro 00:46 SuperTuxKart AI 13:05 Acorn Chat 17:47 FileInbox was Down! 21:06 SaaS is... complicated 28:25 Programming languages for SaaS 32:49 Dude Where's my Car? 43:28 How to deal with a car thief? 4...

Chris finished his final lab using MPI (used in supercomputers). Christian tries to get his car back, and then we both ask: do you have to be kind of a terrible person to be a billionaire?   00:00 Intro   01:47 MPI to solve the n-body problem   12:40 Dude where's my car?   17:02 Spending money to make money is hard   21:25 Road trip in a Tesla   30:11 The relaxed pace of Barbados   33:54 Steve Job...

Chris builds an AI to play virtual go kart icy hockey. Christian wants to track his mood and talk to customers. 00:00 Intro 01:29 SuperTuxKart AI Control 13:51 Kittens idle game 20:06 Kaggle Superpermutations 27:22 Youtube good? Youtube bad? 34:50 The formula for retention 36:45 Christian's projects 41:10 Mood tracking 46:40 Theranos 51:23 Deploy Empathy 54:47 Talking to customers Timestamps creat...

This was supposed to be an interview with Michele Hansen, co-founder of Geocodio and author of "Deploy Empathy", but due to interview issues that part was lost :(. Instead, Chris and Christian talk about the book and do a customer interview exercise from it - which worked way better than either of us thought it was! 00:00 Intro 01:24 Don't just ask what people want 05:10 You have to be bad before...

Chris has been learning Rust and has thoughts about strongly typed languages. Christian has been building "Treebooks" - a new way to read ebooks - and is wondering how to get customers and authors onto this new format. Also and update about Christian's passive income experiment of renting out his card 00:00 Intro 01:36 Chris's update 03:21 What has Chris's GPU been doing? 06:53 Does GPU mining of...

Chris is learning Rust for his next lab. Christian has been renting out his old car to someone who uses it to drive for Uber, and it makes us think about wealth inequality. Also: what actually is the metaverse? 00:00 Intro 01:33 Rust 05:28 Process for learning a new language 09:37 Worrying about memory size and resources 14:43 Custom designed silicon chips 19:34 Low level vs high level programming...

Chris gets a list of all 160 million registered .com domain names and tries to figure out what to do with them. Christian has been looking into Solidity programming and has some hot take ideas. 00:00 Intro 02:39 All the .com domain names 08:31 Using AI to generate new domain names 16:31 Twitter algorithm 17:39 What type of work do you want to be doing? 26:41 Motivation 28:28 Solidity programming 3...

What makes a tweet thread either go viral or go to zero? Christian talks about his recent tweet thread that didn't get any likes, and Chris talks about some of the ways he's used tweet threads in the past. Also: is twitter really the best medium for what we want to share anyway? 00:00 Intro 00:27 Diminishing returns and catching little bugs 05:43 The Go programming language 10:09 Deleting youtube...

We both took a road trip and was able to do some thinking about what he should focus on. We talk about if you should or shouldn't worry about competitors, and some good ways to focus. Then we delete twitter and youtube from our phones in an effort to regain some wasted time. 00:00 Intro 00:38 Deep thinking on a road trip 04:07 Losing interest once you have the end in sight 07:28 Worrying about com...

Christian goes through a list of 20 potential marketing channels and we think about ways to make those work for Fileinbox. We also try to figure out what to focus on and how to frame the work we're doing as "experiments": with a hypothesis, success and failure criteria, and a completion timeframe. 00:00 Intro 03:25 Talking to people as an experiment 13:12 How to figure out what to focus on 15:34 P...

We talk about MicroConf Local Austin and MicroConf Europe: Do we need to be focusing on just one thing? We also come up with a framework for doing small experiments with post mortems as a way to push us forward. 00:00 Intro 01:23 MicroConf in 2021 vs before 04:54 Isolation as an Indie Dev 06:17 MicroConf Takeaways 08:45 Focus as a bootstrapper 16:33 Results oriented post mortems 21:39 MeetingPlace...

Christian has an idea for a financial visualization app and we talk about how to market it. Chris has been doing C++ recently, and has just started GPU programming. 00:00 Intro 00:16 What to do with GPT-3? 05:08 C++ 07:41 Programming video games 09:38 CUDA GPU programming 13:23 AI loss functions 14:20 How Chris learns new things 15:34 Reading an ebook like a tree 24:43 Releasing an audiobook as a...

A short episode this week: Christian is in Europe! He just got access to GPT-3 so he's really itching to play with that. Chris does his first big project for his masters, and is going to Austin in a few weeks. 00:00 Intro 00:51 Christian got access to GPT-3 09:43 C++ threads 15:45 Microconf Local Timestamps created with https://clips.marketing by @cgenco

Chris explores how a non-fiction writing buddy app might work. Christian ponders if freemium is a good fit for his app or not and talks about progress on his time tracking app. 00:00 Intro 00:25 We made attaboy.ai 01:51 Offline vs online AI 06:41 Deploying web apps with Vercel and Netlify 08:24 Non-fiction writing tools 23:20 Chris starts his masters 24:05 AI generated narratives 31:38 Is freemium...

Christian gives up on a project and Chris convinces him that it's actually a big win. Chris is about to finish his summer work and start his masters. Also: How much is a SaaS worth? Is $100k too much to pay for a SaaS that only makes $600 per month? 00:00 Intro 01:10 attaboy.ai 04:58 Chris finishes summer work 11:47 0-shot learning 14:18 The logistics of an online masters program 21:28 Wacky AI ex...

Who wants to take bets about when Tesla Bot will be ready? Chris is finishing up his summer consulting project and getting ready to start his CS Masters program. Christian spent 0 hours on fileinbox last week, and instead created a mini web app to show people's "life timelines"... was that time well spent? 00:00 Intro 06:25 Using AI for a large variety of problems 12:54 Tesla bot 18:05 Is Elon Mus...

How do you feel about NFTs? Chris has finished his GPS competition and is now using his fancy GPU to generate AI art. Christian got clips.marketing past his internal goal line! Now he has to figure out the next steps. We also talk about a potential business idea for sharing family photos 00:00 Intro 00:14 Kids back in school 05:35 Chris got 5th place in the GPS competition 10:03 Learning new thing...

How do you decide what to work on every day when there's no one really telling you what to do? Christian thinks about ways to keep himself on track, and Chris talks about what motivates him to do Kaggle competitions (hint: it's not money). 00:00 Intro 00:58 GPS competition update 06:29 Olympics data scraping 08:41 Chris's summer work with Hidden Door 12:38 How to choose a day/time for different ti...

Christian gets back from New York with an unwelcome update, but is plowing ahead by taking care of himself first. Chris has a new contract for the summer - his first AI position! Then we talk about how great SaaS is compared to other assets. 00:00 The Lost Episode 01:51 Health is important - take care of it! 08:22 The most effective productivity hack 10:15 GPS competition update 17:51 Chris's new...

Learning AI is like learning to program all over again. Christian tries to plan what an AI based text-bot business would look like. Chris talks about an AI coding assistant (we recorded this before GitHub copilot was released :0 ), and we both marvel as self driving cars. 00:00 Intro 03:46 GPS data competition basics 08:04 Time is hard 11:56 GPS data formats 14:45 The AI Hammer 16:43 Christian exp...

Chris gets stuck on his kaggle competition and when trying to figure out how to move forward, started researching how to buy a farm :). Christian asks about how AI works and also talks about how he got ffmpeg working in the cloud. 00:00 Intro 02:20 The ability to take time off 03:48 Pushing forward when you feel stuck 09:46 Exciting work - buying land 16:37 Self driving cars 25:29 How AI works 40:...

Christian gets advice about how to focus to make more money... but is that what he wants? We also talk about how to start and maintain programming projects as a solo dev. 00:00 Intro 03:47 Chris's next week 05:20 Learning math for a masters - making a product from it? 10:52 Short form content plays better in today's world 13:56 What kind of assistant aligns with Christian's business goals? 19:34 F...

If you could just spend money to save time - would you do it? Where is that line? Christian explores a personal assistant and Chris finally gets his new computer. 00:00 Intro 00:04 New computer 03:03 Camping and shiny toys 07:12 Freeze dryer 16:13 Exposing yourself to different ideas 17:43 Selling the core thing vs selling an experience 21:07 The value to the customer 25:07 Chris update 27:54 Appl...