Behind the Product releases Season 2 - Netflix style 🚀
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Behind the Product releases Season 2 - Netflix style 🚀
#20 2022 | Sparkmate
In entrepreneurship, you can feel exhausted and burned out for months, have road blocks you’ve never anticipated, or just feel like nothing is working. This is where it helps to talk to other entrepreneurs, to listen and learn from their journeys and be reminded that you, too, can get past anything in front of you - you’ll just have to adapt and be creative about it!
The truth is we usually see the successes of all of these companies, products or entrepreneurs but never the real blood, sweat and tears it had taken to get there. This is what Morgan wanted to learn more about, and share with everyone his conversations with amazing entrepreneurs who’ve all made incredible impact and had their fair share of failures and learning curves.
So if you’d also like to listen to their journeys, we have more about the podcast below and the links to tune in. Hopefully, it will inspire you too!
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark reads:
Behind the Product Podcast releases Season 2 - Netflix style 🚀
Animate designs in minutes with Jitter 🎞
Look out the windows of people from all over world 🪟
Recyclable, 3D printed wind turbine blades 🌬
Giving the Spark in Home Kong 🇭🇰
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESBehind the Product Podcast releases Season 2 - Netflix style 🚀
“You don’t need to talk to 1,000 entrepreneurs, you just need 10 outstanding ones”
This season, Morgan is releasing 10 #masterclass episodes with 10 different entrepreneurs on how (and why) they started, launched, failed and persevered in making their solutions a reality - as well as evolving and scaling them! Here’s an overview of each:
#1: ⚙️ Bre Pettis wanted to make building accessible for all, so he did with Bantam Tools and MakerBot which sold to Stratys for US$400M
#2: 🙋 Guillaume Moubeche started lemlist to fill gaps other tools couldn't, and got US$10M ARR in 3 years
#3: 🎨 Chloé Martinot found roadblocks that kept her interior design company from scaling, so she built Mesetys to help any design company scale
#4: 💬 Antoine GORET aimed to connect companies and their clients better, so they evolved Crisp from Live Chat to an all-in-1 messaging tool
#5: 🧠 Adam Menges made machine learning easy with Lobe, and got acquired by Microsoft 2 years later
#6: 📆 Bruno Vegreville thought our calendars needed to fit the #FutureofWork, so he created Hera with distributed and remote teams first in mind
#7: 👨🏻💻 Hoyin Cheung knew remote interactions could be made better, so he made Remo to make remote interactions immersive and meaningful again
#8: 🛡 David Balland wanted to make cryptocurrency accessible, then wanted to bring the best security solution with Ledger's hardware smart wallets
#9: 🍷 Nathalie TAQUET knew tracking everything we consume is tricky, so she's supporting food and wine producers with eBottli using Internet of Things and blockchain technologies.
#10: 💥 Sylvain Mansotte struggled to open up when spotting $20M in fraud, so he created Whispli to empower everyone else who sees them.
All episodes are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and any of your favorite channels! Listen in, and let Morgan know what you think or suggest the next guest you want to hear from!
🤸 FUN PRODUCT WE LOVEAnimate designs in minutes with Jitter 🎞
To make graphic design easy and accessible, Canva was developed. To make video editing easy and accessible, Veed.io was made. Now to make motion design easy and accessible, Jitter was built!
Features:
Browser-based. So you don’t have to worry about downloading any software and taking up 7GB of your storage per video.
Easy-to-use interface. With a live preview of your animation, clear view of the “motion timeline”, and straightforward tools.
Tons of templates. From showcasing a “tweet” and phone notifications to phone galleries and loaders, you can start with templates to mix and match with.
Text animations. Animate letters, words and lines easily.
Animation presets. Add rich animations in 1 click to start with and customize.
Fully customizable. Tweak your designs however you’d like.
Animated components. So you can animate once, and reuse it anywhere (Awesome feature coming soon!)
Video & GIF export. Export videos up to 60 fps or as GIFs.
Figma import. Want to bring your prototype or designs on Figma to life? They’ve got a Figma plugin!
Who it’s for: Anyone who wants to use animations and motion design to better present, showcase or engage.
Price: Starts FREE with unlimited projects and 720p with 30 fps. If you need videos or gifs in 1080p with 60 fps, their plans are at US$18/month OR $12/month for yearly plans.
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTLook out the windows of people from all over world 🪟
Look Out My Window was developed by AR Team based in Kyiv, Ukraine. With people being stuck in their homes and just looking out their windows, they were inspired to bring the world to us - through other people’s windows. With their app, you can point your camera to an empty wall and an AR window will appear, showing you scenes from places you’ve chosen. So whether you’re curious to see how it looks to live by the docks of Georgia, Vancouver, or the mountains of Fieschertal, Switzerland, check it out!
What other experiences do you think should be made virtual too?
(Currently only available on Google Play store. Sorry 🍎 fans)
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYRecyclable, 3D printed wind turbine blades 🌬
Today, most wind turbines have a familiar clamshell design: x2 fiberglass blade skins bonded together with adhesive, with 1 or 2 several stiffening components inside to hold its form (shear webs). This process has been optimized and reiterated over the past 25 years, but it has changed very little!
A team of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US have been using recyclable thermoplastics and 3D printing to create the next generation of wind turbines, making it more sustainable, efficient and affordable. Maybe you could already try printing and building your own, like this mini one made for hikers!
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATEGiving the Spark in Home Kong 🇭🇰
After 5 months of COVID restrictions, we’ve finally been able to re-start our Give the Spark events! 🎉 We invited Kevin Pereira, MD of Blu Artificial Intelligence (he helps companies implement AI to their products and businesses!) to speak about AI.
As soon as Kevin finished explaining his background and a few of his experiences, questions started to fire - from the differences of machine learning and AI, “supervised vs unsupervised” learning and how different industries like Manufacturing use AI today, to who gets the blame when i.e. a self-driving car malfunctions and how to best utilize the power of AI + humans.
We’ll have to (proudly) say, it seemed everyone had a great time and were very engaged - the event overran for 30 minutes without anyone realizing! We love these #AskMeAnything sessions, because instead of it being a “talk”, it’s a discussion, and anyone can get the answers they came for by just asking!
More events coming soon! What topic should our next Give the Spark event be about / do you know an awesome speaker we should invite?
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!