profile

Initiator Creator Newsletter

Initiator Creator - Issue 141

Published 13 days ago • 4 min read

Initiator Creator - Issue #141 - ( Read in browser )

By Saurabh Y. // 5 May 2024

Presented by DesignThingy

This Week's Notes:
Airtable View is the New Standard

To be honest, before Airtable came along, working with spreadsheets was dull, pale, and uninspiring. They were just rows and columns of boring data. But Airtable shook things up by making tabular data interactive, easy to use, and visually appealing.

Airtable's emergence has transformed the relational database scenery, setting a new industry standard on how the table needs to work and be viewed. It's the new go-to for managing tabular data.

Its style become a new industry standard which is why you can find at least one tool for every type of database whose sole purpose is to make your relational database look like Airtable.

For example,

  • Plato for relational databases
  • NocoDB for Postgres and MySQL
  • Teable for Postgres and it is open-source also

and there are many more. Literally, I'm seeing one new tool every few weeks.

But now it is not just about the look anymore. Along Airtable, many tools like Quicktable, Budibase, Seatable, Baserow, etc are taking it further by making no-code platforms to simplify the process of creating internal tools and MVPs.

Did you like it?

Entrepreneur

How Perplexity Builds Product - Lenny's newsletter

Johnny Ho, co-founder and head of product, explains how he organizes his teams like slime mold, uses AI to build their AI company.

How to Price an Early Stage B2B Software Product - Focused chaos

Talk to customers, but don't ask what they'd pay. Keep it simple and understand how they buy.

Don't give your investors common stock - Substack

Keep it simple and separate – preferred stock for money, common stock for effort.

The Science Of Project Estimates - DPM

Everything you need to know about project estimates: the pros and cons of each estimation technique, what to know before creating an estimate

Startup Canvas: Product Strategy and a Business Model for a New Product - Product Compass

Key questions to ask. A recommended approach. An editable template of the Startup Canvas to download.


Marketer

Guide to Product Marketing for startups - Medium

A primer on Product Marketing, including best practices and insider perspectives from Amy Saper's time at Stripe, Twitter and Uber

How Content Creators Build Brand Culture - Amsive

Content creators have become brand architects, building and shaping a company’s identity. Their ability to showcase products in an authentic and engaging way resonates with audiences to foster trust and encourage brand loyalty.  

Why Big Companies Make Bad Content - Ahref

It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.

7 fails of roadmap-making - Leah's ProducTea

The most common potholes to avoid when creating long-term plans.

Developer

Why reading whitepapers takes your career to the next level - High growth engineer

"As a tech lead at Google, one of the highest-impact activities for my growth has been reading cutting-edge academic computer science papers." - Micah Learns

Why SQLite Uses Bytecode - Sqlite

Bytecode provides a clear separation between front-end parsing and analysis and back-end evaluation of an SQL statement. When problems arise, the developers can examine the bytecode to quickly determine if the source of the trouble is either the front-end analysis or the back-end data storage section of the product.

YouTube.js: A wrapper around YouTube's internal API — reverse engineering InnerTube - Github

This library manages all low-level communication with InnerTube, providing a simple and efficient way to interact with YouTube programmatically.

PySheets - Spreadsheet UI for Python - PySheets

Load data and use AI to generate Python code to perform data exploration

Popover API is Here - FrontEnd Masters

The Popover API has support across browsers now, and apparently the new way to say that is “landed in Baseline”


Designer

The project that shifted my perspective as a designer - Pinterest

"the complexity of the business-facing side of the product can truly drive creativity and innovation — and it helped me grow as a product designer." - Frances Lee

Making Product Value Obvious - Lukew

The most valuable contribution product designers can make to software is making the core value of a product clear to the people using it.

Affinity Diagramming: Collaboratively Sort UX Findings & Design Ideas - NN/g

Use affinity diagramming to cluster and organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.

Variables in Figma - Design Good Practices

Beautiful UI components for React, lovingly crafted with the Wedges Design System, Radix UI, and Tailwind CSS.

Adobe's Project Neo - Adobe

Supercharge 2D designs with 3D magic.


Interesting Read

7 Questions That Changed My Life - Sahil Bloom

The greatest discoveries in life come not from finding the right answers, but from asking the right questions.

Why We Buy: The Role of Comparison in Our Spending Choices - Becoming Minimalist

We often end up purchasing things we don’t need and chasing things that don’t satisfy. All because we are trying to keep up with our assumptions about how well life must be going for everyone else.

Schopenhauer’s Strategy Against Clickbait - Fs

Not all writing is worth reading. Just because someone can put words on a page doesn’t mean they are worth reading or add value.


Community Submissions

If you like to share a project or article with the rest of the readers then please DM me at @ICforpreneurs or hit reply

Building a Rocket Engine from Scratch - abl

"How I learned to stop worrying and love the burn." - Ryan Kuhn

Sponsored by DesignThingy

We Develop Websites and MVP Products

A Remote Team Transforming User Experiences Through Code. DesignThingy develops pixel-perfect, responsive, semantic, standards-compliant websites and MVP web apps.


Outro

🙏Thank you for reading Initiator Creator issue #141

Forward to a Peer and let them know where they can subscribe Initiator Creator.

Want to get featured? Submit an article for us to include or hit reply.

Anything else? Hit reply to send us feedback, review or say hello.

Initiator Creator Newsletter

Handpicked articles, and resources sent once a week to Product People of all kinds - Product Leads, Product Managers, CEOs, Makers, and Entrepreneurs.

Read more from Initiator Creator Newsletter

Initiator Creator - Issue #140 - ( Read in browser ) By Saurabh Y. // 28 April 2024 Presented by DesignThingy This Week's Notes:Directionless bull All our efforts get wasted when we get stuck in the cycle of directionless efforts to get better outcomes. A directionless effort is a bigger blunder than a wrong-direction approach. After all, you can’t say which direction is good or bad without reaching the outcomes, but changing your direction frequently will take you nowhere. You will be lost...

20 days ago • 4 min read

Initiator Creator - Issue #139 - ( Read in browser ) By Saurabh Y. // 21 April 2024 Presented by DesignThingy This Week's Notes: Ever-increasing Paradigm of Microsites The traditional concept of microsites is elegantly straightforward: build highly specialized small websites to target niche audiences for lead generation, sales, and brand visibility. Mainly utilized by companies, particularly for marketing (esp. engineering as marketing). These microsites are usually free tools, tailored to...

27 days ago • 4 min read

Initiator Creator - Issue #138 By Saurabh Y. // 17 March 2024 Presented by DesignThingy This Week's Notes: Phase II Starts Here This week's issue came 22 weeks after the last issue, a lot of things have changed. The purpose of the Initiator Creator was not clear from the start. Some of you know about and tested the tools that we created last year but we dropped all of them without releasing them for you all because of the poor market fit. After taking a long break and spending my time...

2 months ago • 5 min read
Share this post