Name a challenge you're working on and I'll suggest a workflow & tools to help
I used to work at Product Hunt and saw over 80K+ products launch... I've tried out sooooo many tools and continue to do so. People ask me all the time for advice on what tools they need to look at to do X, or replicate Y feature.
So as a little Friday challenge, I'll see if I can help you with yours! Make it quite specific to get the most out of it.
Make it 1-2 sentences max.
E.g.
"Set up viral competitions for my users"
"Automated emails after payments"
"Add likes to my website without code"
p.s. all my solutions are without code
We at draftss.com - an unlimited graphic design service on subscription model are looking forward to create a social sharing chain where people tweeting about our product get rewarded with a free package upto $349
Use an applet like this https://ifttt.com/applets/P45PCZKW-save-tweets-featuring-specific-content-to-a-spreadsheet from ifttt to save the tweets to a google sheet and follow up either manually or automatically using ifttt/zapier :)
Build a website with one search bar and two filters that pulls in available flights. I assume using an API that pulls in flights is required, but I'm unsure.
Edit: right now I'm thinking Webflow for the website itself, but I don't know how I would go about pulling in the flight data (airline APIs?)
Edit II: Never mind, I think I'm slowly figuring it out. Found an airlines API (https://partners.skyscanner.net/affiliates/travel-apis/) and Webflow documentation on how to incorporate APIs (https://developers.webflow.com/#http-verbs).
ha LOVE how you answered you're own question before I managed to get to it!
I would've done the same setup to be honest. If you build this, I'd love to get you be an instructor on newco.app :)
Add chat to a website. Think slack on one of your pages
Notable examples:
https://chat.stackoverflow.com
https://gitter.im
Ok so how about something like this: https://www.chatbro.com/en/ - embed using telegram as the main chat client?
Even replain.cc also uses telegram. Great UI. :)
try https://www.customerly.io
I'm curious about this too!
A library or a service to implement some gamification features (badges, achievements, etc) ?
Depends. Is it already connected to a site with log in? Or start from scratch?
Discourse is good for badges and community
https://karmabot.chat/ for Slack groups
Something like https://emojicom.io/ to embed emoji feedback
You can manually use airtable/coda to do some aspects of achievements too
I am a PM at http://500friends.com/ and this is a very common use case to help customers build gamification experiences, achievement tracking etc. Typical applications include retail, gaming, sports etc. We have a fully functional API as well.
A content restrict solution like https://www.uscreen.tv/ but for articles, text..
Thanks for doing this🕊
hmmm not sure what a 'content restrict solution' is?
If you mean 'pay to be a member and access articles/text' then I suggest https://www.podia.com/
Places to post content that can help build an audience as it allows engagement and back-links (E.g. medium)
hmmm if I'm understanding correctly you want a blog with engagement?
https://ghost.org/
Can build a custom one in webflow.com
Let me know if thats not what you're after
I was looking more for places that you can ghost blog that can help build an audience. Like creating an Article on Indie Hackers.
However ghost looks like a helpful platform that I will definitely look into.
Sorry for the confusion.
A few others: http://telegra.ph/
https://caramel.la/
https://write.as/
Hi @bentossell
I have a budgeting app that scans card transactions for grocery expenses.
I'd like to automatically determine the brand logo of a vendor I shopped at.
Could you please look into this api; https://clearbit.com/logo
Not sure if this helps.
It comes very very close. I think I can make it work! Thank you so much!
Glad it helped. :) Keep shining.
Hi Ben, I like the challenge! I'm developing www.Welcome.AI a professional network for AI companies and people. What do you think is a good tool to help with growth to attract developers, data scientists and business professionals?
I'd like to add a email signup form before users can access a pdf file
You can check www.sumo.com
3rd party IPhone keyboard for suggesting rhymes. For spoken word or poetry.
Not sure how to build a keyboard without code! sorry :(
Ok converters of ECG to an output for users
An alternative for typeform payment form with stripe ( we don't have stripe in my country)
Airtable form with link to paypal?
Use carrd.co and insert pay with paypal button (its part of their templates)
Somewhere where I can upload an image with a custom name which setups a unique route which can access that image
What do you mean by a unique route?
Webflow allows you to add an image upload component :) and use airtable for backend
Hey I mean where the route is the something like the image name, and if that name exists then append 123 type thing. So direct access to that image.
Will check that out..
Didn't find any questions about what I'm about to ask so would appreciate the help :)
A service/tool for gamification and a progressbar for students where the teacher fills in after each lesson how it went and students can follow their progress. (Not Discourse)
Automated emails after payments (I use FastSpring)
Zapier is your friend here :)
Hey Ben, thanks for doing this. What can we use to trigger emails based on custom events that take place on our website? We don't wish to use something like Intercom want to be able to do this with minimum changes to our existing systems. (PS. I see you are a Zapier pro so would love for you to check out Integromat!)
Drip.com, drift.com - all good solutions. Zapier can be used but may get messy quickly!
Thanks Ben!
Oh wow, a lot of comments, so I'm not mad if you don't see this anymore.
I'm looking for a way to pay my users, instead of them paying me. They'll have to do an exercise and if they complete it, they can request x$
Hmmm why don;t you set up an automatic email to fire when they complete the exercise (by clicking a button) - use Zapier for this.
For the payment, maybe add a field for phone number then use paypal to process paying via phone number each day.
I like this question as I'd like to figure out a better solution here!
I don't think you can create payment via the API with PayPal, can you? (You need to process $50k+/month to enable the Payouts API. Would love to discuss this more if you are interested. Either here or my DMs on Twitter are open.
be careful with KYC, paying out money can lead to money laundrying.
How?
Make an ordered beta waiting list where you can advance in the queue by sharing on social media
viral-loops.com :)
also Queue (queueat.com).
Disclosure: I am an advisor and shareholder.
I'm looking for a 2 way platform/system for middle manning briefs/jobs with creatives/freelancers, etc... The catch is that there will be an entire front as if it's an agency. What I mean by that is we help somewhat in the workflow process for the brief creator but the work is truly done by the freelancer.
Thats quite straight forward, use forms like typeform, database like google sheets/airtable, automatic notifications using Zapier for sending briefs to certain types of freelancers.
I'll be doing a tutorial on this soon!
ben, I am looking for a tool to download all attachment in my outlook mail server. Office365. Not the new ones. Already existing. I am using outlook and 0365 Mac and or Windows
hmm Vijay, sorry but I'm not sure on a solution here! I'm also bad a microsoft/windows stuff :(
A tool to automatically follow up prospects by email, with customizable actions workflow (depending on email opened or not, inner link clicked...) thanks :)
So automatic emails can easily be done with zapier but I think what you're looking for is more in the realm of drip.com, drift or intercom
What’s the best tool to do visualizations with company logos e.g. put them on map or create a logo-landscape such as https://goo.gl/images/WJNcDw
For context: did the G Sheets <> Webflow CMS hack via ZAP from one of your tutorials, so I have them stored on GDrive, GSheets and WF CMS
Ok so what you should do here is create a bunch of div blocks and in each div block you add a collection list. Connect them to show the logos and add a filter on each div block to only show the type you want.
Here's a quick video to show collection item and filtering https://cl.ly/113j3b460142
DM me on Twitter if it doesnt make sense and I'll walk you through it
Perhaps a tool in which I can input a challenge that I'm working on, and it'll suggest a workflow and tools to help. ;)
haha well if someone wants to add all of these into a CMS/Airtable, we could easily make public and searchable. Easily turn that into a site too ;)
A tool to help find guest bloggers/freelancers with topic specific expertise (e.g. influencer marketing) to help me create blog posts for that topic
https://assmb.ly/
https://www.publicfast.com/
https://www.scripted.com/
upwork
I'm looking for a way to build a web platform that users can post live messages on, upvote/ downvote, then allow select messages to disappear within a set time? without needing to code
theres a few that I've found like bubble.is but not sure if they have functionality I need
hmmm discourse and flarum, rank it wp and others could do this but not sure about the select messages to disappear within a set time.
bubble would give you this ability I'd guess!
I'll check 'em out. I appreciate the reply man thanks!
Hey Ben,
Thanks for this offer! I'd love to build a data visualization that's beautiful, elegant, and customizable.
Here's a reference that's in the ballpark, even though it's an oldie but a goodie: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/project/flight-patterns/
Check out https://flourish.studio/
http://apps.baapps.com/preview/index.html
and a collection of tools http://dataviz.tools/
Thanks @bentossell! I look forward to diving in to these.
trying to find a name for a video and photo sharing app. Similar to snapchat, and Gobi.
Read http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
use https://www.launchaco.com/name
No-code solution for giving access to locked subscriber-only content (such as Stripe subscriber). For example, if we click the typeform to subscribe to Newco.app, how do you then provide access to subscriber-only content?
The no code solutions from your new site, old blog posts, etc. and others on the web never seem to explain this. Thanks!
All I used is password protected pages for webflow!
You can use podia.com for a membership site OR a new tutorial coming soon is how to build a membership site with Webflow + Plasso :)
Something capable of turning O365 calendar items into Xero time entries. I'm on macOS, so can't use traditional Outlook add-ins.
After a couple of days searching (looked at Streamtime, Temponia, and a dozen other services), I'm now tempted to build it myself -- but surely someone else must have done it already...
https://zapier.com/ and connect o365 with Xero. Should be pretty straight forward :)
Nope. I discovered the Xero API for Projects is recent and still in beta, so no connector (zapier, flow etc) implements it yet.
I ended up writing my own script that parses ICS calendars locally (to bypass tedious authentication requirements from Microsoft, which are really just ways to make you use their stack and pay for Azure...) and uses the beta API to push them up to Xero.
Ben - I want a cheap / free platform on which to place a user guide or manual for our SaaS product (opiniator). NOT interactive videos - rather a simple replacement to PDFs BUT has access control. Right now we just sent a long pdf out to new customers. There must be a better way to get us out of the dark ages.
Thanks
Matt
Hey you should try userguiding.com
Great idea - I will check it out
I love https://www.gitbook.com/ - stripe-style docs. Does that work?
Yes - seems outstanding. Thanks
I love it
I want to make an ecommerce website with no backend, but with custom front end (Vue.js, HTML, CSS). Or alternatively, something that really simplifies backend so that someone with basic knowledge of node.js/express and mongoDB could use it comfortably.
I use https://snipcart.com/ and have nothing but good things to say. Storefront is a custom vue app, with backend all handled by them.
Oooo a code question, now im stuck :)
Airtable could be useful here?
Not sure why this was downvoted. Airtable could be useful here.
I mean, I'd probably drop in something like Shopify checkout instead, but Airtable is a definite possibility (combined with Zapier/stripe/typeform for example).
Different people, different tastes! But appreciate that Louis - I want to get into Shopify solutions a lot more.
I'm diving in head-first with my new SaaS product, PostPerk.com (also works code free)
So I'd basically use the airtable for item/picture/price of the items but use Stripe for my payment button?
yeah I'd say so!
Webflow have announced an ecommerce platform too so check that out
The tricky part is stock management and fiddly stuff like returns/discounts etc. I'd go for a dedicated ecommerce backend - there are so many good ones out there that it's really a waste of time to create your own (code or no code).
Yeah not sure why you got downvoted, thanks for the suggestion. Here, have an upvote.
So many helpful answers, thanks everyone for your help!
Check out https://plasso.com/flexkit
prismic.io could be helpful
Working on a software that provides comprehensive data for ecommerce sellers who list products across multiple online marketplaces like Amazon, Ebay, and Walmart.
Again I'd just suggest a big database with Airtable and lots of different factors. This is a tricky one, sorry I cant be more helpful here!
Something here may lead you in the right direction: https://gorgias.io/ecommerce-stack
I'd like to set up a kind of fictitious venmo for my users where I can seed everyone with $1000 of fake money that they can form a tiny economy with. Also, the money should eventually disappear at a decay rate that I can set.
Hmmm interesting... maybe use cryptocurrency? https://www.onhexel.com/ lets you create tokens, distribute, mint and lots more!
I wonder why is @bentossell commented downvoted? www.onhexel.com looks like the right thing for what @BarryS asked.
I checked it out -- it's interesting but ultimately it doesn't do quite what I want, and on a certain level is a bit overkill.
I think at this point, making low-stakes funny money is still at the "roll your own solution" stage.
Unique feature idea for Learning and Management System (LMS) or online course like Udemy. How about a wrapper of instructor - Learner social networking feature or WebRTC? Thanks
podia.com for sure!
pluralsight or teachable are other options too.
Hey thank you for doing this.
We are finishing up with development of an eCommerce SaaS perfect for small B2B companies. How do I get my hands on a list of B2B Wholesale/Distributor companies and how do I meaningfully approach them to get across the benefits of our solution without giving off the pushy sales guy vibe?
Hi @darkrussian,
Here's another resource that may be useful: https://www.worldwidebrands.com/
(Hope you don't mind, @bentossell)
Manual, cold outreach but do your research into each potential lead before reaching out. make your pitch unique to their needs.
Upwork you can pay for people to do this research.
https://slik.ai/ is a good option too.
Set up different referral programs for pre-launch & post-launch
Automated emails after payments, signups etc. + is there any website where you can see copy from other startups?
Viral-loops.com
Use Zapier to connect Stripe and Gmail (send email after payment). If user signups get added to a google sheet or similar then you can use zapier to send automatic emails too.
https://www.goodemailcopy.com/ and https://reallygoodemails.com/ - for email copy :)
Marketing approaches when revenue per customer is only single dollars per customer annually?
Focus on referral marketing.
Organic marketing isn't very scalable. Paid is, but if you're LTV is low then you can't afford much in terms of marketing.
Email is cheap
Manual outreach is cheap
Referrals are cheap
(cheap but can be time-intensive)
thanks!
another payment system apart from stripe that works globally
Paypal?
Plasso?
Amazon Payments?
Braintree?
Thanks
I use paddle.com for one of my app.
Facebook Messenger CRM / Prospecting Tool
Very impressed with your previous reply, what about this one^
For my day job, I use Facebook and LinkedIn for prospecting. It's a nightmare keeping track of who to follow up etc
Primarily it would need to automate responses and, as a bonus, connect with something like trello to provide a visual guide of the pipeline.
For any CRM/Prospecting tool I always recommend Airtable or Coda.io
I'm not quite sure of how this works (and dont understand the process ha).
but Zapier you can connect with Facebook and link to Coda/Airtable, so you may be able to do this. (can also link to trello)
launching a platform to sell "Well researched pre-made landing pages for marketers"
Easy. Just need webflow or carrd.co + stripe for payments, set up Zapier to ping an email to the purchaser with the link to download?
Or user chooses, pays and then you manually do the set up for them with a new account. Pass off the details and they change them.
Thanks Ben, You made simple :) Will let you know the result shortly.
I just started Paperclip (https://pprclp.co) We're a team of 5 and having problems with client development. We do have retainer agreements with startups. How do we grow our client list?
do things that don't scale - reach out to people manually.
Build side projects as a marketing tactic
Best product to manage several daily (weeks to months long) email campaigns? Any ideas other than Mailchimp?
Zoho
Mailjet
Sendgrid
Campaign monitor
Not necessarily a feature request but tools/steps needed to do better "problem validation" would help me a lot.
Doing a tutorial on that soon - how to do customer development.
Recommend googling hiten shah and read/listen to his stuff on validation.
Everything from types of questions to do, to the set up and everything in between
that would be fantastic. Keep me posted on when it goes live. Hiten is a legend yes!
So far I’ve had success in creating different types of nocode apps with Bubble and Dropsource. Where I’ve come up short has been browser extensions. Not sure if there is a nocode tool to do this yet but it would be $$$ if soneone created it. “Dropsource for browser extensions”
Me too! Please someone make this.
Oh man I'm totally with you, I want that! I don't have an answer to that I'm afraid - I have tried myself before.
Btw - would you consider being an instructor on newco.app? We're looking for Bubble and Dropsource makers :)
Unfortunately, I’m spread pretty thin at the moment between family, day job, personal projects, and consulting/client projects. I know building lessons and screencasting can take up a lot of time. However, let me know if there are other ways I can help support your community, I’m happy to get involved.
No problem!
The screencasts are anything from 3 mins - 15 mins (maximum).
DM me on Twitter if you fancy it anyway!
How to find brand or companies to sponsor my newsletter?
Manually search for them and cold-email.
Use crunchbase/angellist if startups
Pay someone at upwork $1 per lead to scour the internet
scraping youtube playlists with urls, titles and description
Use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd then export to Google Sheets and https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ to crawl the videos.
OR
USE 'https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOURPLAYLISTIDHERE' to generate an RSS for a YT playlist and use that.
thank you Ben :)
the second solution seems to limit the feed to 15 videos but the extension has helped a lot.
Hi Ben
Great work!
I want to test demand for a platform that will allow transport contractors to find backloads / return journeys to avoid wasted journeys.
My initial thoughts are a hacker news style site but ideally with a hero to explain to first time users.
A simple one-page feed style site with infinite scroll would be perfect.
I don't want to dive into any code at this stage so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Does an upvote style site make sense for this kind of site?
Seems that a daily submission site is all it needs. In that case you could tweak a site like I made goatjobs.com
So use webflow for the front-end style, then connect typeform for submissions and airtable as the database, submissions automatically then post to webflow CMS and show on the site..
I did a tutorial for this but it's only for paid members: https://www.newco.app/projects/job-board-with-webflow-zapier-typeform-stripe-google-sheets
Or check out http://rankitwp.com/ for Wordpress.
Discourse (with the extra voting capability) or https://flarum.org/
Sorry I forgot to mention upvoting wasn't needed.
Goatjobs looks awesome, exactly what I need!
How long is the tutorial & did it take you long to build newco?
The reason I ask, I already have Discourse live on my domain (one-click install with Digital Ocean) but I need to tweak some of the code.
So the quickest route wins tbh!
Thanks for your feedback.
3 videos for the job board = less than 2 hours. ( 1 hour was the first tutorial for the styling of it)
newCo didn't take me long to build. Couple days maybe.
Curated list of best resources (experts, books, websites, videos, podcasts) with ability for upvoting.
Curated resources tutorial: https://www.newco.app/members/how-to-build-a-curated-resources-website
With regards to upvotes, you could do this https://cl.ly/42332W2a022M which I'm releasing as a tutorial soon. But its essentially just embedding a like button from: https://likebtn.com/ on each item.
OR use coda.io/airtable for documents with ratings.
Upvoting sites like PH/IH:
http://rankitwp.com/ for Wordpress.
Discourse (with the extra voting capability) or https://flarum.org/
OR
Public Trello board, add the voting power up.
The wordpress theme Chipmunk is also really good - https://chipmunktheme.com/. I've used it for an art print release website - http://artery.xyz/.
yeah chipmunk is good! Forgot they had upvotes too!
Chipmunk is the most promising suggestion so far. Thanks!
Thanks! That looks really cool.
Thanks! Will that tutorial be for members?
Yeah, I’m envisioning kind of a Product Hunt for good resources and recent content in health focusing on longevity, biohacking, etc.
Mega interested in that!!
Try Telescope[1], it gives you a PH clone
http://www.telescopeapp.org
Thanks! I can't code, but it's sweet you're interested.
yeah this works if you can code
Yeah, I can't code. I'm from the health industry so just beginning to figure this stuff out. That video tutorial is great.
Yeah that tutorial will be for members.
Ok cool sounds good!
This comment was deleted 3 months ago.
This comment was deleted 3 months ago.
I made a template exactly for this on Bubble not too long ago. Completely customizable without code... https://bubble.is/template/content-curation-1526833157543x492121042797461500
Hey I like it. I don't see upvoting/liking feature?
That’s the beauty of bubble.is you can completely build and customize without code
There’s also this if you don’t mind putting it on someone else’s domain... stashes.io
Thanks! That has a nice look, but I do think I'm leaning toward my own domain.
Hi Ben, just had an idea and shared it with the community a couple of days ago! As suggested I'm going to work on the landing page and validate the idea before starting to work on it! Non-techie here so a workflow would be very helpful!
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-first-time-indie-looking-for-feedback-5cf7c529c9
Please do share your views as well!
That's one way to hack a quick ask for a longer paragraph! But I'll answer anyway ;)
Why do you need to do all these integrations? Just set up an Airtable, people view it and decide to gift based on the links shared to wishlists?
alternatively, you pair people in your database together.
This comment was deleted 3 months ago.
I'm not sure I understand what this app does...