Product of the 

week

Product of the week #25

So I know we’ve looked at AI tools for 2 weeks in a row now 😬 which is why we’ll do just one more and then we’re taking a break and moving on to a different category, promise!

The AI space is just fascinating rn and I think testing all of these tools helps me stay away from building my own AI tool (but never say never 👀)

Anywaays..😅

Meet cleanup.pictures ✏️

Website link: cleanup.pictures

Cleanup.pictures is a very easy to use tool that makes getting rid of unwanted stuff in a photo, way to easy!

How? Well this is the whole process: upload your photo -> use the brush to mark the thing /things that needs removed -> blink -> your clean photo is now ready 🤯

You also have a cool “on/off” switch which lets you see the before & after and that’s pretty much it!

Making things simple is very hard. So long may tools that do one thing really really well, live and may photoshop & the likes rest in peace 🪦 as AI is slowly taking over all of these tasks and making the processes quicker & easier than ever.

And from where I stand, they are still just that. Tools. Quicker, cheaper, better tools but not close to putting any person out of a job just yet 😉

This week’s maker story comes from a no-code maker & writer focusing on other no-code acquisitions 👀

Also, she is helping me test a different type of AMA that will hopefully create less friction & encourage more people to get answers to their questions 🤩
(TLDR; visit this link for the AMA: indiehackers.com/post/ama-with-katt-risen-the-brilliant-mind-behind-no-code-exits-f1e7dfcdd2)

Here’s the link to Katt’s No-Code Exits newsletter: nocode-exits.com

And here’s the story behind it:

“Once upon a time…on a sunny summer day in Leuven, Belgium….  I noticed that every tweet about my recent acquisition (of a small side project made with No-Code) went bonkers.

So I followed the pull. In 30 minutes  I created a Substack, went for the first best name that popped in my head and chose an icon from a stock website as logo.  I announced it on Twitter and 12 hours later I had around 250 subscribers. I quickly published my own story and left on holiday for 2 weeks.  When I returned, I had 610 subscribers. Newsletter Market Fit: Check. Now (3 months later) I’m at 2000+ subscribers and have around 800 USD of ad revenue per month. 

For my readers, I always feel a bit guilty when I display ads. So I really go the extra mile and try to think outside the box to have ads that add value for my readers (It has been a success because in an audience survey there was someone who only reads the newsletter for the ads ;-)). And this also results in good results for the advertiser and some long-term partnerships with some. So it’s really a win-win.

If I look back now on my journey I would never have thought one thing would lead to another:

1. Made small No-Code Side Project
2. No-Code Side Project got Acquired
3. Stared No-Code Exits because of all the questions I received about it
4. It also got an acquisition offer for No-Code Exits (but I said no)
5. And now I’m making an mvp to validate an idea also in the No-Code / acquisition space.

So conclusion: don’t wait for this huge idea. Start launching some side projects, learn by doing and listen to your audience/users/readers/… Who knows what I will be doing in 12 months 🙂“

Check out Katt’s tools stack ↓

Link: ctrlalt.cc/profile/katt

And just in case you’ve missed it, you can go ask Katt any questions you might have, here.

Product of the week #24

With everything AI nowadays and so many cool projects popping up every minute, I feel like it would almost be unfair to switch up the topic – so we’ll be sticking with AI for one more week 😃

Meet PromptHero, your text-to-image AI sidekick 🦸‍♀️

Website link: prompthero.com

If you had a play around with any text-to-image AI tools, you probably know by now that talking to AI is pretty much an art in itself! PromptHero, created by @rameerez, makes this easier with a collection of text-to-image prompts that will solve your AI blank canvas syndrome & help you generate your own beautiful images in no time.

You can start by searching the collection for a keyword or filter it by category or AI model and boom – an endless amount of images generated by other people will be displayed. Pick one that tickles your fancy, open it up and unveil it’s secrets! 👀 Now adjust this prompt to your needs, add it to your favourite AI tool and voila, you’ve now generated an equaly impressive image yourself 🖼.

Here’s an exmple of one that I’ve tried ⬇

The 1st image is from PromptHero. I’ve then used the same prompt to generate the 2nd image myself, then changed up a couple things (like Megan Fox ➡ Elon Musk) to get the 3rd image 🤩. Pretty impressive result!

And if you want to take it one step further, you can easily get lost down some rabbit holes by clicking parts of these prompts and pretty much reverse enginner the human to AI chat. You’ll quickly start learning what bits influence the image generation and in what way. It’s a lot of fun! So if you also love playing around with these new AI tools too, definitelly give PromptHero a go 😉

And this week’s maker story comes from 2 makers who want to help developers in their entrepreneurial journey!

Zubair & Noman’s product: saaswisdom.com

“Hello there, we are Zubair and Noman trying to build SaaS Wisdom. A cohort-based community of software developers who are working on their side projects

While running a Dev agency for several years, I got to work with many software developers. One thing I noticed is that developers are good at programming. They develop the skills required to build a full-scale SaaS Application as they grow in their career. Like everyone else, they have startup ideas, and they also have the skills to build the products. But I have seen, developers in general are not well versed in business, marketing, and growth aspects of a startup

We wanted to address this pain point and help developers become entrepreneurs. SaaS Wisdom is a Cohort Based Course (CBC) specifically designed for software developers. This course gives them a step-by-step roadmap of how to build, launch and grow their side projects. It’s a 30 days Cohort, where a developer learns through live sessions, peer reviews, assignments, collabs, and more. We want developers to feel at home, so this course is beginner friendly. It is being designed by industry experts focusing on explaining business concepts and marketing frameworks in simple language. We will also try to ensure that we are answering the queries of all the students and conducting 1v1 sessions.

Creation of a valuable course content, creation of cohort plan, building a pool of candidates, building the community, engaging with the community etc are the real challenges that we came across in the process. We have just opened our early beta and the applications for the first batch. This batch is completely Free for our students, where we are going to shortlist the candidates from the applications received.

All the applications get the Lifetime access to our Communities on Slack & Discord.“

Check out Zubair’s tools stack ↓ 

Link: ctrlalt.cc/profile/zubair

Product of the week #23

So I’m still experimenting with video and not yet sure what direction this is gonna go, but excited to play around with some cool tools in the process and see if I can get something to click!

A few issues ago we’ve looked at a video editor that allows you to do all the basics really easily. Well this time we are gonna dive a bit deeper and look at advanced editing, with a sprinkle of AI magic ✨

Meet Runway, where video + AI = 💜

Website link: runwayml.com

Warning, this product is a rabbit hole! 🐇 🕳  (the good type). There are a lot of things happening in AI right now and Runway have it covered on all fronts – video, audio, image & text.

To start with, you can try out a few “standard” things, like generating an original image from a prompt, transcribing a video or making your audio input sound cleaner. Or you can dive a bit deeper and I think this is where the real fun begins 👀

I uploaded a test video and straight away the UI of the editor is very intuitive (always a sign we’re off to a good start). It has all the advanced video editing that big names like Adobe provide, but it looks clean and like if I click on something it will do what I expect it to, without having read an encyclopedia sized instructions manual beforehand.

But besides allowing you to add filters, animations, stitch multiple videos together, add new audio, layer images, text & shapes across your original input, you can also do stuff that I, for one, haven’t seen anywhere else yet. Like mask a moving element and remove everything else in the background creating a greenscreen effect, meaning you can add your own sci-fi video background and almost produce a new Star Wars directly from your browser!

Or you can do the opposite and mask an element that you’d like removed from your video instead! Remember that Starbucks coffee cup in that Game of Thrones episode? Well with this tool it would’ve been like it never existed, without any frame needing to be re-shot. Sorcery, magic, money saving, all of the above 🤯

So if you are looking to do some advanced video editing, or if you’ve just got some spare time and wanna see what all the AI hype is about, then take a leap and jump down this rabbit hole! You’ll not regret it 😉

And this week’s maker story comes from Siddhant, a maker who’s helping other makers build their SaaS faster!

Siddhant’s product: geniepy.com

“Hey 👋🏼 I’m Siddhant and I’m the maker behind GeniePy.

GeniePy is a boilerplate for building SaaS products that lets you set up a new, fully functional SaaS in just a few minutes. Why did I build GeniePy? There is a short story and there is a long story. 🙃 The short story is I got tired of having to write the same code in a different context over and over again.

The long story is that I like to build things and I have a lot of ideas in my backlog, some of which are SaaS products. As you probably know, every SaaS has a baseline set of features that includes basic things like user management (eg. ability for users to be able to register, login, logout, reset their passwords, etc.), and some not so basic but essential features like payments, file uploads, transactional emails, etc. And on top of that, there are enhancements like an SEO optimized blog, pushing updates to the user in real-time, easy and standardized deployments, error tracking and monitoring, so on and so forth.

If you’re building a SaaS, none of these features have anything to do with your core offering. But you need to build them anyway because they form the foundation of almost every SaaS on the planet, including yours. And building these features in a robust manner can easily take 4-6 months of focused development work. This is exactly what made me build GeniePy. The minute someone buys GeniePy, they have a fully functional SaaS application running on their machine, which they can start adjusting with their own business logic. This lets them build their product quicker and get to market quicker, in turn giving them a clear advantage over their competitors.

My goal with GeniePy is to make it easy to build SaaS applications, especially for software developers who prefer to use the Python programming language 🐍. And I’ll continue extending GeniePy to be one of the most featureful and robust boilerplates that you can use to kick-start your own SaaS.

Thanks for checking it out, and if you have any feedback or feature requests, you can find me on Twitter at @siddhantgoel or send me an email at me@geniepy.com!“

Go ask Siddhant any questions you might have ↓ 👀

Link: ctrlalt.cc/profile/siddhantgoel