New day started with negative covid tests!
What customers do when your product isn’t simple enough.
I've been playing around with AI.
My goal has been to find real-world, practical uses for it today. We published our findings for sales and marketing teams on the KickoffLabs blog. Check it out!
2023-01-11
In-progress view of what I'm working on today.
The more colorful shot is the new UI. Trying to get people onboarding @kickofflabs with types closer to what they may be thinking when they want to grow their audience.
Thoughts?
Lucy, part cat, lays on top of the couch when I work there. The look on her face is judgement. Judgement for the UI I’m in the middle of for @kickofflabs
Is authentication with 3rd party apps a “microservice” that was accidentally unplugged or did Elon decide to actually kill off apps?
No Code First Impressions with Bubble.io for SAAS
Last week I spent a day or so seeing how far I could get with building a SAAS app with a popular no-code tool named Bubble.IO. Here’s my first impressions as someone who’s a developer that owns a traditionally coded SAAS app.
My goal was to build an app to help automate some content tasks with a sprinkle of AI. The MVP… give it a blog post, get a series of tweets back, get those tweets posted to social.
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OMG there are full SAAS app templates that include the most of the fundental plug-ins and data models for auth, Stripe, and exposing APIs.
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Just add your API key for stripe and you could be selling your hello world app as a subscription service in under sn hour. Amazing.
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It even supports some back end workflows to send basic user emails like verification. Cool.
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I know I want to use the OpenAI API and I already have a dev account there. So I searched the bubble plug-in market place and found a couple of options the community has already built.
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The plug-in marketplace is pretty well stocked. Not as big as pulling gems or node packages, but the basics are all covered and most trending things like AI tools.
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The plug-in I downloaded didn’t support the latest API parameters and I couldn’t open up the code to add it. I guess that would have been cheating. But it would have saved a bunch of time.
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Thankfully Bubble supports a custom API call builder with a no code form. So I built my own OpenAI api calls.
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Debugging the official Bubble API calls is limited at best. I kept seeing errors and you can’t just open the network tab in Chrome or get easy errors back from the API you are calling. Took way to long to fix this issue with trial and error.
The developer for the first plug-in i tried to use got back to me. Considering it was a free plug-in I was impressed. He added support for the newer parameters. Maybe I shouldn’t have built my own calls. :)
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Now I could really try building out the UI. I found it mostly combersome.
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It supports global styles, colors, and UI elements that can be edited and reused. That’s the good part.
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Building new UI I assumed would be as easy as something like webflow or another website building tool. It’s not. Layouts are hard to follow and most changes get made in a UI pop up that’s not quick.
Managed to build a quick form for entering a blog post URL and some content to summarize time to wire up the UI to the API call I added.
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Click on a button and it was obvious where to add actions. You chain auto completed inputs and outputs together with some simple operations in a visual way. It works, but the UI for building complex statements like “take this string and split it at the “,” and generate a “list” of responses to be used in the repeating UI is very small. I would love to see a dedicated logic screen where you could do it more like scratch or other UI programming tools.
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Lost a lot of time watching videos trying to figure out why my results UI wasn’t populating. The “debugger” goes step by step… but it stops just short of really giving you enough insight as to why something isn’t working.
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Ok. So yellow workflow text means it’s bad and blue means it’s good. Basically I had a type problem. The UI was expecting one format and my result set was in another. Something that would be more obvious in a regular coded app.
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The debugger does let you inspect the data being passed around. Just not how what the response was from the UI. The yellow text was a warning I missed.
Got the first part of my MVP working!
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It’s not worth it if you can’t deploy so I upgraded in order to publish a live app. Totally worth $29 in hosting a month.
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Connecting my domain https://contentspark.ai easy and it was live very quickly.
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Invited a friend to signup and it worked! Not bad for a days work especially considering the learning curve of a new tool.
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Got feedback the mobile UI sucked in this template. Tried it out. They were right. It doesn’t flow well.
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Back to the cumbersome UI tools I had to admit this would be way faster for me to build in pure HTML and Tailwind or Bootstrap CSS.
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Made some improvements… but it’s too janky for my taste.
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Hit a limitation with my app. Couldn’t find a good way to get people authenticated with Twitter so I could post on their behalf as a job behind the scenes. I still don’t know how to write my own plug-ins to get around this. But at that point I’d be writing code.
Bonus: Super easy to drop in the KickoffLabs contest box on the home page to create a waitlist. :)
At this point my time was up for first impressions.
Overall going from Zero to MVP is insanely fast with a tool like this. If you can’t code it’s a great foot in the door and levels the playing field a lot for the early stages of a basic app. I could be getting way more real feedback on Content Spark already that would be making the full app much better.
If you do code you are going to be frustrated. It’s like learning a new language and a platform all at once. Not starting from scratch mind you.. but going from one to another. There are several times you’ll wish you could get under the covers to make it easier or do just a little more than what’s possible.
So Snaggit, from Techsmith, has gotten crazy slow in the latest releases for just capturing and marking up a quick screenshot. What do you all use now on a Mac?
2023-01-13
This sums up one of the large reasons I've been working to extract myself from the larger social network companies.
Avoid design by “what if…” questions.
It’s easy to get sucked into the trap of thinking things like “but what if they also need sorting and filtering in this list?”
Reality is if you don’t know there will be that many items you shouldn’t add extra complications.
2023-01-14
Thanks for the replies to my query about screenshot tools yesterday. Bought ScreenShot X, and it's a HUGE improvement in performance. 10/10 - Recommended!
Wow. Even the weather app knows. RIP
Going off grid for social networking
This year I took more steps towards going "Off-Grid" for social networking.
What I've done
- I set up a new blog on https://blog.joshledgard.com using Micro.Blog. This is now the source of my online self.
- I deleted (or tried to... Facebook is making this hard) most of my content on Facebook after downloading all my images and videos. I still need an account there for managing some business stuff & to stay in touch with some friends.
- I'll no longer be posting personal content on Facebook or Instagram. I had already slowed my posting dramatically a few years ago.
- I've already had an iCloud photo-sharing solution for family members.
- Setup a Mastadon account mstdn.social/@joshledg...
- Started posting to my blog that does cross-post to Twitter & Mastadon.
## Why? I've always had mixed feelings about "Big Social" owning the content I posted there. Yes, they make it easy for people to follow you, but the trade-off is that you don't really own or control your content. They choose how and when to display it in the feed, monetize it, and train AI models that we don't get to really benefit from. It's always made me hesitant to trust them.
Here are a couple of small examples...
I would cross-post this feed to Facebook... but Facebook silently killed off posting from outside apps for individuals. Not for businesses. There is no technical reason for it other than to ensure the eyeballs are ALWAYS trained on the app.
This week Twitter seems to have decided to kill off 3rd party clients for posting OR reading to the network. They also want to lock you in.
They want you locked into their feed, their algorithm, and their monetization strategy and hope that the easy distribution to friends makes it worth it to you. But they choose what to amplify or hide behind the scenes.
Also this. There's a lot more but this is a recent list.
It just feels icky.
I pay to own the content now
Micro.Blog is an excellent mix of allowing micro-content, full posts like this one, photos, and even a video podcast if I wanted... all from the same feed. It's a good catch-all solution with a small ecosystem of apps and a way to back up my content automatically.
There's even a way for some family and friends, who want, to subscribe to email updates once/week where they can skim highlights. I think my dad subscribes. :) There's even an RSS feed if you are so inclined.
I feel free
I can post any type of content I'd like.
I don't worry about public or private. Private content is for family shares, friends, and text messaging, and I just know if I post here, it's open to anyone.
I'm already getting more engagement with a much more limited follower count on Mastadon.
I view Twitter and Mastadon feeds as my comment reply feed. I've been through hosting comments before, and I just don't need to moderate or see them on my own site.
I'll still browse other social networks to stay up to date and comment where appropriate.
I can't say off-grid living is for everyone, and that's OK. Big social networks will come and go but we'll all still be here and it's nice to have a quiet little corner of the internet to myself.
I see lots of writers that are fearful of AI and spread FUD with terrible arguements.
This is a good podcast episode that goes at one real fear… that we’ll start losing uniqueness.
Two Writers Wonder If They’ll Be Replaced By AI - Crooked Media
2023-01-15
Unpopular take: It would be good for #Mastadon to have a better discovery experience for "The Fediverse". The results from Twitter can be trash, but they help new users find their people.
People and discovery are harder, and more manual on Mastadon today. It's a barrier
2023-01-15
The feeling outside in Seattle today is “dark”.
I've hit the copy/paste/test stage of a big feature update for KickoffLabs, and my current vibe is
People tell me Ben, just make-up junk, And turn it in, But I never was alright with turning in, A bunch of shit
2023-01-16
What I want from big social media companies when it comes to “the feed”.
A big reset button that drops any training it had on me.
Switching to Mastadon is like that. I started from zero and have a more pleasant feed.
Oh. And don’t shove all of Elons shitposts on me. :)
2023-01-16
