Makers Mansion, new tools for frontend dev, and how to make money in a recession
Raz Tirboaca 
Choose your tomorrow but start today
It was 2003 when I built my 1st online product - a music store to sell my beats - right after I figured out that I’m not going to be a great music producer, I was average at best. And it was while designing and coding this website when I discovered that I can actually be great at it!
See, I always knew I’m a maker, I just needed to find my craft. That’s why today, 19 years later, I’m putting together MakersMansion.ai, a community for tech makers.
Makers Weekly is the first brick into the wall, a weekly newsletter that I publish every Thursday morning touching topics like tools, team culture, market and anything that’s relevant to build better online products and services.
Consider subscribing if you’re a designer, developer, product manager, marketeer, writer or startup founder. Let’s dive in, makers!
TOOLS
🎨 Github launches Primer Prism, a tool for creating and maintaining cohesive, consistent, and accessible color palettes. Not ready for prime time yet, while definitely the best tools I’ve tried for playing with scale.
🧑💻 Safari adds support for size queries in Container Queries, Container Query Units and Subgrid in the latest release which means they’re coming soon to the other browsers. Big win for frontend devs as we will do more with less code, big win for users as the performance will get a boost.
🥁 Do you struggle with feature adoption? Check out this case study on how to increase feature adoption the right way with a Google Maps example
TEAM
🏠 New Microsoft Study of 60,000 Employees finds that remote work threatens long-term innovation. In other words, short-term productivity goes up, long-term creativity goes down.
I find the overall debate way too extreme for my taste, with folks being either in the 100% remote camp or the opposite. What concerns me the most is when I see small companies do whatever big companies decided to do, somehow similar to how blindly they implement work processes just because that’s how Google/Spotify/etc does it.
Why not just do what’s best for your size? 🤷♂️
Anyways, is clear that we brainstorm better face-to-face!
MARKET
🎙 Insightful podcast from Christopher Lochhead on how to make money in a recession and what’s the difference between category vs brand. He then describes 5 steps to create demand for your product, service or platform.
📊 SaaS isn’t dead, it hasn’t even gone to bed! While the SaaS market may look like it’s in a bad shape, the data shared by Brad van Leeuwen indicate the otherwise. If you’re working in SaaS, keep executing!
🗓 Steve Blank will have a fireside chat with Alum Maria Rotilu on Wed, 22 Jun. Book your spot here
He is credited with launching the lean start-up movement and his ”Customer Development Process” approach is in clear opposition with Steve Jobs ”vision” for product design. Jobs famously said: “It is hard to design by focus groups because most of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
🙃 Bonus for FUN Bloomberg asked some top executives to tell us which innovations will make a difference in the next 30 years. OK!
Thanks for reading and would love to hear your thoughts. See you again next Thursday!