Ship it and Sip it

Hire global talent or get left behind | Ep89 with Paul Xue

Last week Paul mentioned on X that he wanted share his thoughts & findings after a few months of researching the state of global hiring.

We're happy to play host to this conversation and share Paul's ideas with you!

Here's what we got into:

🤑 The reasons having a global team make sense for your startup.

🛠️ How to build a remote, async workflow that won't slow your team down no matter where they are.

🚫 What kind of mistakes or blockers still exist for founders who try to go global.

🤝 How to connect with employees or employers who are a good fit for the company and culture (without spamming AI generated resumes)

And that's just the start — Paul cares deeply about building a sense of community no matter how physically separated a team is. Hope you enjoy the show 🍻

Follow Paul on X and check out his amazing guide to building a successful agency!

Beyond merely budgeting or money tracking, Investrio puts education and money mentorship in the center of the equation to help young folks figure out how to get out of debt and build a better financial future.

Here's what we got into in the show:

🤝 How Laura and Joyce met and objectively decided to team up as co-founders

💪 What they brought to the team in experience and skillset

🫶 How they used their community and VC experience to shape the product idea and guide the build

🫣 What speed-bumps they hit along the way as they built the MVP

And of course what's coming soon and their vision for success with Investrio.io

Definitely check out their site if you're looking for a better personal fintech product and follow Joyce and Laura on Linkedin for more insights from their founder journey.

PS: they share fabulous money management tips on Instagram as well 😎

"To get my mission of accessibility out there is not a problem of having the right tool, or developers needing to find the right tool — but rather teaching them all the benefits of accessibility."

This week’s guest Charlie Morris is on a mission to help startups, indie makers, and even BigCos make their websites and products more accessible for everyone.

Since joining the #BuildInPublic community on X late last year, he’s launched several indie-oriented products, an agency focused on accessibility and heaps more.

All on top of his regular 9-5 and also co-founding a mushroom farm with his partner last year 🍄

Here’s what we uncover in this show:

* Charlie’s motivation to grow awareness around accessibility and to do all this in public.

* The details of what it means to have ‘good’ accessibility, how to test it and why it’s a constant improvement journey.

* What major sites or products we can look at as great examples to learn from.

* How the mushroom farm inspired Charlie to start his indie maker journey.

And a lot more. Here are Charlie’s products that you should definitely check out:

* A11yAudit.ing — Run a free test on your site and get your accessibility score + tips to improve each factor.

* Indie Filter — Free Chrome extension to find indie tools on Product Hunt.

* Colour Easy — Generate fabulous colour palettes for your site or brand.

* QRuickly — Make lovely QR codes in a snap.

Find us on your favorite podcast player HERE

Back with a fresh site, Hai and the Wudpecker team are here to extract all the important bits from your meetings both online and in-person — so you can focus on the meeting itself.

Today we have look at the website, break down the messaging and dig through some of the free resources they share.

Honestly, I couldn’t find much not to like about the site, copy or value proposition. I’ll try to make a few more roasty roasts next time.Anyway, follow Hai on X for more info about the relaunch and check out Wudpecker’s site if you have meetings to remember!

From the outside, concerts look like a party on the road every night. But the truth is each tour is run like a business and the tools to organize every stop were not quite fit for the purpose.

That meant inefficiency, money wasted and in the worst cases, unhappy fans & artists.

Ternwheel's here to turn that around and Ashanti brings the skills, support and network to make it happen.

We got into:

• His start in the music industry and landing in San Francisco to chase his idea for Ternwheel

• How live shows are coming back and why they're the main revenue driver for artists.

• The long road from ideas to a launched SaaS and what bumps were on the way.

• Fundraising, the launch and Ashanti's vision of success in the near future.

We're proud our team has helped bring the best v1 of Ternwheel to life and can't wait to see what we can build it into going forward with Ashanti. The show has just begun 🤘

You all know the pain — you google a recipe and find a bunch of long-winded SEO optimized foodie blog articles that may have a decent recipe buried somewhere under all the keywords and ads.It sucks, but that's what it takes to stay up top on google.

Thanks to Ethan Chlebowski we now have a better option — CookWell.com

Directories and info-products are having a bit of a moment, and I think Cook Well is a fabulous example that other founders and creators can learn from.

Here's why:

• You land on the page and the recipes are right there, product-led in a way.

• The v1 is hella comprehensive, definitely not an MVP but a full, organized resource.

• You learn while using the product.

So enjoy this fresh roast of CookWell and check out the product next time you need inspiration in the kitchen.

Zeng’s got so many AI projects going on it was hard to decide where to focus without this turning into a 4-hour chat (which would be lovely).

But we managed to scratch the surface and, in my opinion, this is almost all one can do in terms of AI right now. The pace of change is furious, tools pop up and disappear too fast to fixate long on ‘the state of things’ now.

‘Cause tomorrow it’s gonna be different, and we both hope, better.

Here’s what we uncovered:

🐾 Zeng’s memories from the early days of AI art — being trolled and learning tricks to prompt beauty.

🔎 How she curates tools to share with her PicAisso community

⚒️ What tools creators and founders can use to quickly generate useful brand assets for their new product ideas

🫤 The dark side of AI — what we shouldn’t make!

While you enjoy the show, I highly recommend you check out some of Zeng’s own tools, products and content:

• Picaisso is both an amazing art prompt maker and her newsletter.

• FemmeStock is a lovely service of feminine stock photos created by Zeng.

• Here’s a great collection of 100 banner images for social media and more.

That’s just a start, go check out her bio page to find lots more 💜

Flipner AI might be just the solution you're looking for. But can it deliver on that promise?

Find out where I see Flipner's potential and what the founder could improve ahead of the Product Hunt launch on Jan 25th.

Here are my main tips for Alex:

* Replace ‘texts’ as the cover-all outcome — specify what kinds of content Flipner will help folks create.

* Give a few clear before-after examples of how the AI writing assistant helps transform voice transcriptions. There’s a lot of potential here if it does well! Same goes for the style changes from AI, give us some convincing samples.

* Condense the 6 listed use-cases down to 3, add a concise header for each and shorten the description texts — people scan these sections so you have to hook ‘em with titles.

* Differentiate Flipner from other notes platforms. There are a lot and many of them have AI integrations already. If it’s the voice transcriptions, double-down on that.

Check out Flipner.com to sign up!

“You have to focus on small wins because maybe this week you get 100 impressions, next week you get 150 or a single post that finally gets two replies while the others received no feedback at all.

If you see these small wins, these small improvements every week, not every day probably, but every week — you see something.”

There are 3 reasons I’m stoked to have Alberto on the show:

* His depth of experience and background — anyone who goes as far as completing a PhD in Comp Sci and then decides to write blogs instead simply raises at least one eyebrow in curiosity. But that was (digital) ages ago, he’s been writing and creating on the web since the 00s and still brings joy and passion to it.

* The Medium.com experience — while I’ve had writers and marketers on before, Alberto’s the first who has focused on Medium for his long-form content. I wanted to know why and what he’s done to win a following there.

* His experiments — one of Alberto’s posts on X caught my eye when he described his test of posting long-form content directly on X for a month instead of Medium. He saw very little engagement on his long posts but got a lot from his reflection on the test. It’s always fun to chat with folks who are experimenting in public.

We got into all those topics and much more. If you enjoy Alberto’s perspective on writing online — go check out his free mini-course and Notion template aptly named The Unstoppable Creator.

But check it out and you'll see why I'm so stoked for CopyFrame.

Roast 'em Gently is a new show where I find upcoming PH launches and break down the product page according to the copy, the value prop and just the overall vibe.

And CopyFrame promises a ton of neat features that will make life SO MUCH easier for high-volume copywriters or any folks who launch a lot of new websites or landing pages.

Dive in and let us know what you think. Subscribe to CopyFrame's launch to see what it’s all about 🚀