Apple seems to be making no progress whatsoever on AI so it's unclear what role they would place in this new type of marketplace. Google/Gemini certainly seems to be lightyears ahead of them. Claude is also making demonstrable progress on creating a marketplace. ChatGPT not so much, their MCP servers are currently buried in the Connectors section of Settings menu.
I think what's so cool about this is because MCP is an open standard, anybody can incorporate an MCP client into their own software and give users the ability to mix and match MCP servers. There will undoubtedly be commercial winners in the end, but this time it could be a much wider marketplace than two incumbents.
A few months ago I launched SpiesInDC - https://spiesindc.com, a mail-based (as in the real mail) subscription service about Cold War history. Subscribers, ahem secret agents, receive packages every few weeks containing reproductions of famous documents, stanps from the USSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, coins, and other fun stuff. I keep refining the packages every week to make it better and it is so much fun.
Great, novel idea and great that you've been enjoying the process on your end. Is it possible to gift this? I couldn't tell from the Subscribe section where there's a shipping address field but no billing address information was needed. Sometimes the billing and shipping info have to be the same for payment to go through.
Yep it is possible to gift and in fact that is how most subscriptions come in. The latest round was because of Father’s Day. As for matching billing and shipping fields, not sure, everything has worked fine so far!
So the answer to this question is a funny one. I started using a Google spreadsheet to manage shipping dates and that quickly became a chore so like any good nerd would do I built a CRM which is now live if anyone wants to try it: https://6dollarcrm.com/
Wasn’t planning on announcing it here but what the hell.
If you don't mind answering, does this have any users besides you? I've got a few internal tools developed over the years that I don't have the bandwidth to turn into a proper SaaS (not much time for support, polish, new features, etc) but could potentially offer on an "as-is" basis for a token monthly sum but not sure if it would be worth the trouble.
Yep has several users, people I know personally have been beta testing it for a few months now. I haven't started marketing it yet because I have been dogfooding it since February in order to build exactly the CRM I personally want to use.
Also has > 800 automated feature tests, in app documentation, gone through security audits using tools like Zap, etc. I've built a lot of SaaS products over the years, and I'm building 6DollarCRM from the standpoint of having learned a lot of things the hard way. I'm currently working on data importers and browser extensions for easily adding new contacts.
I recently launched SpiesInDC, a Cold War history subscription service that delivers reproductions of historical documents and speeches, maps, photos, and even coins and stamps to your real mailbox. I have always loved reading about Cold War history, and I'm an avid stamp collector, so I combined the two together and people really seem to love it.
One of the most fun experiences I have ever had in a car was traveling from Tokyo to the Friday night Daikoku car meetup in a GT-R Skyline. It was legit like being in a scene from Fast and the Furious, multiple GT-Rs cruising through traffic, girlfriends hanging out the windows filming with phones. Fire shooting out of exhaust pipes, it was unforgettable.
NextJS + Tailwind CSS and the TailwindUI (apparently now Tailwind Plus) Spotlight template. Code managed on GitHub and auto-deployed to Netlify free tier.
No database, nothing to manage. Just write, commit, and push to deploy.
I've also written 1,000+ page books https://wjgilmore.com/books so if a book is defined by its length then I think I have that down pat. In any case, feel free to call it what you will, I'm happy with the information and experiences shared within this slim volume and think readers will find it useful too.
And as is typical of all my books I will continue updating and expanding it over time and always provide those updates for free.
I recently used NextJS by way of a TailwindUI.com template to relaunch my personal website https://wjgilmore.com. NextJS was actually pretty fun and surprisingly easy considering I never used it prior to this project. Hosted on Netlify free tier.
I've written 9 technical books, including 4 for a major publisher (Apress), and 5 independently (https://wjgilmore.com/). One of these books (Beginning PHP and MySQL) has incredibly reached its 20th year in print[1], and has been translated into a bunch of languages. Many years ago I also wound up editing ~70 or so books for Apress plus a few for Wiley. In summary I know this business pretty well, and still follow it closely despite not having participated in it for several years.
My advice is this: if you want to write a book, then write it. But if you do have this sick, twisted desire to spend countless hours writing and editing your work, telling yourself you are an idiot, not good enough, and a horrible writer, then at least do so with the thinking people are going to read it and as a result you will make money. Set yourself up for the possibility of success. How can you do this?
* Package the book in different ways (print, print + videos, print + videos + consultation). This has been extraordinarily successful for me personally.
* Use the amazing Leanpub.com to do the book production (turn your Markdown into PDF, epub, etc). Not an affiliate or whatever, just mentioning it because you will save untold hours of pain.
* If you want to work with a publisher (and in 2024 I don't suggest you do), then choose very, very wisely. There are two who I would even consider working with today, and even in those cases I would absolutely not cede the usual rights.
Hope this helps,
Jason
[1] As of this fifth edition my name is no longer on the book due to a disagreement with the publisher.
I would also recommend writers to keep their digital books up to date and current. The book should not be considered finished the day it is released.
Jeff Geerling gave his devops books away (free) on multiple occasions. I chose to pay for them as he kept working on and improving them well after release.
If more writers took this approach, the quality would increase.
Last August I built and launched EmailReputation API in about 12 hours both out of frustration due to spammers and bots signing up to things using syntactically valid but still bogus emails, and also as a test to see how much I could lean on AI coding tools to build something new as quickly as possible.
I think what's so cool about this is because MCP is an open standard, anybody can incorporate an MCP client into their own software and give users the ability to mix and match MCP servers. There will undoubtedly be commercial winners in the end, but this time it could be a much wider marketplace than two incumbents.