I built CtrlAlt.CC to make it easier for you to find helpful tools for startup tasks & now I'm bringing one cool product to your inbox, every so often.
Let's have a look at an indie tool that I liked trying out this week 👀
Product of the week #5
I found this product through twitter recently & added it to CC but haven't had a good chance to make an account & deep dive into it, until the maker @JustinQuda sent me a DM about some interesting guests that he's got this week on his platform.
Was super intrigued but before going into more details; having worked on a few marketplaces myself, I really appreciate the hustle they take to get moving (one side always seems to have more than the other) & so really appreciate the work Justin is doing here!
In a world that loves podcasts, twitter spaces & clubhouse (a long, long time ago), audio seems like it's making its way back into our lives (or has it never left 🤔)
I personally find it hard to have podcasts on when working, but do like the occasional listen & made some time for a few episodes of @stephsmithio & @calvin_rosser's one. So you can imagine I was quite excited to hear that because of Justin's work I now have the chance to ask them a question directly through Quda!
I was also slightly nervous. I am one of those people that every time I hear my own voice on a recording I think it doesn't sound how I thought it sounded in my head - so the medium was for sure not my first choice. However I had no doubt Justin already thought about all these things & it turns out he definitely did!
The onboarding was super quick & smooth and the instructions made me feel at ease about the scary part of audio recording. You can basically re-record your question as many times as you want & you can even upload your own mp3 file if you prefer - which I did after recording myself about 5 times 😅
Super smooth experience all around - now just waiting, curiously for an answer from them whilst listening to other little nuggets from other great minds in this space! (P.S. In case you are dying to know, my question was around money as a goal vs a means to an end in the creator economy 👀)
Will definitely be following Justin's journey with Quda as it has a lot of potential!
Quda is now featured on CCunder this shiny new tag ✨ ⬇️ (more updates on the early adopters space to come 👀)
Also if you want your product featured in one of the next emails or wanna share some thoughts on early adopters stuff give me a shout 😊
Daniela _______ Founder & Maker
Email #4
Hello, Daniela here 👋
I built CtrlAlt.CC to make it easier for you to find helpful tools for startup tasks & now I'm bringing one cool product to your inbox, every so often.
Been a while (finally took some time off away from tech ☀️) but I am back now, fully recharged 🔋 and ready to dive straight in!
Product of the week #4
This product is at the very beginning of its journey and looking super exciting!
As it happens with a lot of other tools that end up doing great, this started as a side project meant to help with another goal. In this case, my friend @panphora started it in a bid to get a job! I know. Not the most usual route (and not one that I would take myself), but there are endless ways to get where you wanna go & you just gotta find your own.
This is not David's first rodeo though - he's made quite a few products in the past & lately did 31 projects in 31 days, back in January.
As the name implies, Polite Pop will be a widget that you can add to your blog (and probably website in general), which will help you capture newsletter signups in a less disrupting & more polite way.
It will wait until the reader has been on the page for a while and read enough of it before a non invasive and very friendly mascot asks them if they would like to see a pop-up where they can sign up. Giving readers this choice can be very powerful!
Also really love the idea of creating something that makes tiny ripples, which could lead to larger metaphorical waves. When testing the Polite Pop demo that's exactly the impression that I got. It feels like a solution for making the internet (or at least a part of it) shout a bit less at you. Quite an accomplishment!
Besides being a cool product this is also a great segway into some news!
As many people seem interested in the early adopter stage of products & the rewards that you can get as an "early bird", I am now working on bringing some focus to these products on the platform.
In the meantime, until I figure out the best way for this to work (your inputs are super welcome!), I've made it a bit easier for you to keep up to date with the latest tools that have been added to CC 😊
Also if you want your product featured in one of the next emails or wanna share some thoughts on early adopters stuff give me a shout 😊
Daniela _______ Founder & Maker
Email #3
Hello, Daniela here 👋
I built CtrlAlt.CC to make it easier for you to find helpful tools for startup tasks & now I'm bringing one cool product to your inbox, every so often.
Did this a couple weeks in a row, then skipped one and here we are again!
Product of the week #3
This is the 1st request for a featured product everybody!! 🙀 Quite exciting!
I have been using this tool a few months back and then stopped my subscription as I felt it was starting to kill more of my time than it was saving. BUT as I lately found out on a chat with it's maker @michalmazurek_ , I was actually using the tool all wrong 🤦♀️ (makes you wonder how many times this actually happens without such happy endings)
We chatted marketing, twitter, reddit, ahrefs, longtail SEO & how this tool initially started as a side project to help with marketing his main product and it's now a healthy product that helps a lot of users every day.
It's a social listening tool that makes it super easy to keep an eye on conversations that you can join across.. pretty much the internet.
It basically helps you do marketing in a non-salesy way by building trust on the platforms that your audience uses, which will in turn help with getting more customers.
Pretty simple recipe, but as opposed to other social listening tools (that are mostly targeted at big companies) it gives you access to everything you'll need without the extra unnecessary complexity. And to make things even handier you can set it up so that it brings stuff directly to your inbox / slack!
How I was using Syften wrong (& how you should use it instead)
On our chat when Michal was showing me how he uses Syften, he mentioned something super interesting. He said "I monitor answers not questions" - which (the 1st part) is exactly what I was doing.
I basically set up a few filters for twitter that would bring matches for generic terms like "SaaS" to my inbox - you can imagine how many matches I would get & how I would spend quite a long time to go through them & see which ones I could engage with, if any. It got to the point that it was taking so long, that I built a tool to fix it 😅 (but more on that some other time)
So looking at it from this new pov, Syften has so much newfound value that I reactivated my subscription the day after and been finding that it's now bringing through actually relevant stuff 🎉
Now bc I found this chat so helpful (& bc outside of building CtrlAlt.CC I do UX design for a living) I made a quick mockup for Syften's landing page, to help the site visitors visualise what Michal described to me. Keep an eye on it for updates! (But this is a sample, with Michal's permission):
Also you can find Syften featured on the CtrlAlt.CC dashboard when you login next!
Also if you want your product featured in one of the next emails give me a shout 😊
Daniela _______ Founder & Maker
Email #2
Hello, Daniela here 👋
I built CtrlAlt.CC to make it easier for you to find helpful tools for startup tasks & now I'm bringing one cool product to your inbox, every so often.
Let's dive straight in!
Product of the week #2
I recently gotten rid of my Adobe subscription as I always hated how clunky their software is & nowadays there are so many makers creating amazing alternatives that I would far rather spend this money on!
An indie project made by @sasha_codesthat in a nutshell, allowed me (a super noob at video editing) to make this slick video here, in about half a day 🙀
It doesn't make just videos though. Its main purpose is to allow you to display your designs in beautiful mockups, either static or animated ones. But tbf, when it comes to motion, there aren't that many other tools that allow you to animate mockups so easily and that make them look so good!
What it does super well:
As opposed to super complex software with 💩 UX that requires a course to navigate, Device Frames makes moving things and recording them super straightforward. You basically set an initial state & a final state and then the thing just moves from A to B in the way that you picked. And that's it. You got a video!
Editing the lighting, devices & environment to suit your designs, is super straightforward as well and everything is done in a browser tab.
Indie making is not for the faint hearted and can say that Sasha completely nailed it with this product!
Also if you want your product featured in one of the next emails give me a shout 😊
Daniela _______ Founder & Maker @ CtrlAlt.CC
Email #1
Heyy😊
Daniela here 👋 it's been a while so here's a brief refresher to why I am emailing you:
I built CtrlAlt.CC to make finding helpful products (that sometimes fly under the radar) easier. You are part of it (legend! 🙌) & I am trying out a thing to see if I can make finding stuff even easier for you - this time by bringing 1 cool product directly to your inbox 💌 every so often.
Don't worry I'll still keep all emails to a minimum bc no one likes an inbox full of stuff they don't have time to read. But let me know if you like this and I'll keep on doing it!
Here we go, product of the week #1
I was kinda struggling with were to start & how I should pick between all the cool af products that I've been testing & using.
But I like getting rid of the blank page block quickly, so I decided that the last product that I've tested and loved is probably a good place to start. It's also a banger 🤩 & still fresh in my mind, so here we go!
An indie project made by @clarabellum that let's you generate noisy gradients to use in your designs 🤩
I gave it a go making stuff here . It's super straightforward to use and lets you set up your colours, pick noise + chaos levels, generate random variations until you find one (or more) that you are happy with & then download the outcome as jpeg.
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Hello 👋
I’m Daniela - I made this website & write the emails that you'll get when signing up 😊
We live in an amazing time where a lot of creative people are making a lot of cool things! The sad part is that sometimes these things get lost in the noise of the internet & noone finds them anymore / ever.
So I made CtrlAlt.CC as a place dedicated to helping you find cool tools, that sometimes fly under the radar but will make your life easier 🧘♀️
Wanna see what tools I've been enjoying using lately?
