Hey Makers! 👋

Welcome to the Digest 003 of the newsletter. Alex, our featured maker, is creating a valuable platform for the community, sort of like Hacker News, but for podcasts. 🏆

If you haven’t heard of Hacker News it is a social news website focusing on technology and startups. Most of the posts that make it to the front page are community-driven, hence it is important to curate your post such that it’s tailored to your audience.

According to RJMetrics the number of submissions made to HN each week has held steady. Participation rate is around 20-30% where users who participate more than 6 months tend to remain active for longer, despite the growth in HN users.

Looking at the best HN posts some subject matters appear to remain constant, e.g. programming, while others fall into and out of current trends. The median score for a HN front page story is 140, however posts that score >4K can be considered as viral.

As Alex said the biggest value of the platform is from the community. But you cannot have a community if you don’t have content, and you cannot have content if you don’t have a community. ⭐️

What I’ve Been Reading 📖

• ⭐️ How to Start Your Research with Attractive Mind Maps and Clever Business Models: You have an idea. How do you write it down? How do you know if it’s workable?
• Lessons Learned Building A Golden Kitty Award-Winning Product: In the summer of 2020, I built One Word Domain out of a personal need - I was trying to come up with a decent, catchy one-word domain for my latest side project.
• My first month of self-employment: In November 2020 I decided to take a huge personal step. I quit my beloved job and started my journey in becoming an independent freelancer.
• Why I left a six figure salary at GitHub to go solo: Last week I left GitHub. I stepped away from job security (whatever that means nowadays), exceptional colleagues, and the thrill of ..
• Turn Hacker News into an RSS feed: You’re an engineer who looks at Hacker News 2-5 times a day. HN is a good way to fill the gaps in time.

Maker Focus 🏆

Featuring one or more makers per digest. Want to be featured as a maker? Fill in this form. ✍️

Alex Paval

Alex is skilled in team and people management, C, C++, C#, Python, HTML, CSS, SQL, Automotive SPICE, ISO 26262. ⚡ Besides tech stuff, he is also passionate about people, travel (by motorcycle), and photography. 📷

He is currently learning web development, growth hacking, freelancing, bootstrapping businesses and personal development. 📚

Product Focus 📦

⭐️ Podots

The community to find great podcasts recommended by people just like you.

Podots is a platform that enables people to share quality podcasts.

Archivy

Self-hosted knowledge repository

Archivy is a self-hosted knowledge repository that allows you to safely preserve useful content that contributes to your own personal, searchable and extensible wiki.

LibreTranslate

Free and Open Source Machine Translation API.

Free and Open Source Machine Translation API, entirely self-hosted, built on top of Argos Translate. Unlike other APIs, it doesn’t rely on proprietary providers such as Google or Azure to perform translations.

Education 📚 & Resources 🧩

• Python Pandas For Your Grandpa: Wanna learn Pandas?. I consolidated everything I learned into 43 videos spanning roughly 3 hours of content.
• Remarkbox: Remarkbox is a free hosted comment system that works on your web pages.
• QuikPub: Write, Publish and Share in Seconds without Sign-up and it’s FREE.
• Design Resources for Developers: Curated list of design and UI resources from stock photos, web templates, CSS frameworks, UI libraries, tools and much more.

An Interview with Alex of Podots

Hey Alex! Let’s start out with your background. 📝

I am a tech geek from Romania. A programmer by heart currently leading a team of 5 software engineers at Hella. I always have a side project of some sorts, and lately I’m having the online sorts.

What is the purpose of your blog, and what resources do you use to get your ideas, if any? 🧩

Here I usually write my weekly thoughts from my journey in this maker’s world. It could be anything from personal
experiences to what I actually learned.

I use pexels for pictures, artstationhq for artwork and Canva for creating the blog’s cover photo.

What is an opinion you have that most people don’t agree with? ✒️

A couple of months ago, when quarantine started, I got fat and depressed.

I totally changed my lifestyle since then, and now, people don’t understand the fact that eating within a schedule is actually good for you.

Most people think I’m starving myself because I’m only eating at certain hours. I don’t.

Why was Podots started and is there a roadmap? 🎯

The idea behind this product is straightforward and not even original. It’s supposed to be a Hacker News clone, but for podcasts. That’s what we’ve built so far.

The focus right now is to get more people to use it, since that is the only way we can make the platform valuable.

This product doesn’t have any roadmap. The sole purpose of this product was to test the market if there is actually a need for a podcast exploration platform.

I could say that the only real roadmap so far, is that we are planning to have a product hunt launch sometimes this month.

What is the most challenging problem that’s been solved in Podots, so far? 🚧

Building a platform like this has the following limitation. The biggest value of the platform is from the community. You cannot have a community if you don’t have content. You cannot have content if you don’t have a community.

So, as you can see, it’s incredibly important to get people to use it. The feedback from the people can then be used to make the product better.

Until then, we are posting our favorite podcasts on the platform, so people that do come to the platform have some exploring to do.

What is one product that you can’t live without that you think others should know about? 💡

Carrd.co

If I gave you $1 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it? 🚀

I would create the biggest network of open-air coworking spaces in Romania. This would leverage both the remote working mega-trend and the people’s desire to travel after the pandemic ends.

Tourism through coworking spaces is something that I’m really into right now.

Thank you Alex.

If you want to read more about Alex’s story: How I Met My Co-Founder and Started Podots.com

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