A weekly digest of the best solo maker tools — I keep track of the most exciting tools to help you build and grow your own products.

Contents

👾 WIP — Favorite community for makers shipping together.

👾 HARO — Get killer backlinks on the right publications!

👾 Descript — Easy video and audio-editing tool.

👾 Tally Forms — Your go-to Notion-like form builder.

🤖 Chatbotly.co — Your custom GPT-powered chatbot!

🍭 Introducing Maker Stories, a sneak peek into one maker building their own product. This week, we’ll meet Lena, Maker of Chatbotly.co.

👾 Useful tools

Interesting tools are recommended or widely used by other makers. Here is my top pick this week.

WIP — Favorite community for solo makers shipping together.

What we like: I love this community for several reasons. First, it works with telegram so, you can just message /done and add your task. Second, you can support each other, every new project is showcased to all the members. And finally, it’s gamified, if you don't log a task every day, you lose your streak. Great way to make progress! If you want in, I have ONE invite left. Hit reply if you’re interested :).

Descript — Easy video and audio-editing tool.

What we like: If you're doing video or audio content, Descript is useful to easily cut out words in the transcript, which will auto edit the video too! No time wasted, editing and cutting out time stamps every time you say "uhm". Besides, Descript has a creator pricing!

HARO — Get killer backlinks on the right publications!

What we like: Haro is a site where bloggers and journalists post questions and use the answers in their content. If you want your site on big or niche media, that's one way to go. You can sign in as a source, and then you will receive 3 emails/day (what I did was create a specific tab on Gmail just for them). You can search for your main keywords, and see which ones you can reply to as an “expert”. If one is relevant, write a one-paragraph answer, and make sure to be specific, give context, and actually add value. This article gives great advice.

Tally Forms — Your go-to Notion-like form builder.

What we like: Forms to create, embed, and collect payments through a notion-like form. The real mega plus: 99% of Tally’s features are free. If you need Tally Pro, they even offer discounted rates for bootstrappers here. Makers Marie & Filip are simply the best!

🤖 Tools to try

New tools were recently launched, and are worth a try for solo makers. Here’s my top pick this week.

Chatbotly.co — Your custom GPT-powered chatbot.

What we like: Load these FAQs, detailed support docs you wrote, and all your key data points into your Chatbot, specify how it talks to users, and test it away. In 10 minutes, your chatbot can help your visitors/users learn more about your product. What I love about it, is that it logs all the user’s questions, it's a gold mine to learn from them and improve positioning. Learn more about why Lena built Chatbotly, below!

🍭 Maker Stories

Let’s meet Lena, maker of Chatbotly.co, your custom GPT-powered chatbot.

Why did you build Chatbotly?

I’ve been developing chatbots for the last 6 years. Since GPT became popular, more clients started to come to me with similar requests, asking for a GPT-powered chatbot that runs on their own data.

I decided to simplify the processes for myself and for my clients. I collected all the knowledge accumulated over the past 6 years as a chatbot developer, into an easy-to-use no-code platform allowing people without any knowledge to create trustworthy AI assistants.

There are many chatbot builders that already exist.

The problem is that they either require chatbot development & conversation design knowledge to build something that actually works or, they are too simplistic. They don’t account for different nuances important when creating user-friendly chatbots.