I recently received a package from Amazon. This isn’t totally out of the ordinary. We have a prime subscription and order quite a lot from the online retailer.
I didn’t recall ordering anything recently though. I logged into my account and checked, and there wasn’t an open order.
I opened the package and saw what was delivered …
I definitely would have remembered ordering this …
There was no message in the package so I was stumped, where did this awesome drone come from?
Later that day I received a slack message from a friend, asking if I’d received a package that day. Off course I put 2 & 2 together and got to pretty quickly to 5.
I have yet to meet Eric Willis, something that needs to be fixed, but I’ve known him for a couple of years now and consider him a good friend.
He posted Interviewed to Product Hunt (my first project on Product Hunt), and that random act has led to some amazing things.
Shortly after Interviewed was launched, Eric launched a website called Maker Success which collected blog posts about successful product launches on Product Hunt.
Unfortunately the website had some performance issues and was having trouble handling the traffic from Product Hunt. Since Eric isn’t a developer, I offered to lend a hand.
In true hacker fashion, rather than fixing the issues with the CMS that Eric had selected, I decided instead to just rebuild the website from scratch, and the following day we relaunched Maker Success.
Maker Success
When Eric started his next project: Maker Hunt, a slack community for Product Hunt makers, I was thrilled to be involved.
In helping to build the Maker Hunt community with Eric and many other volunteers, I got the opportunity to know people that I would not even have even met let alone worked with.
Since I’d had the chance to get to know Ben Tossell before we talked about his idea for a website listing marketing resources, I was happy to help him. It didn’t really matter what the idea was to me: he was passionate about it, and I wanted to help.
A few weeks later that led to the launch of Marketing Stack. The website was very well received, joining the 1000 vote club on Product Hunt. Product Hunt was so impressed in-fact that Ben now works as a Community Manager there!
By this time I’d become hooked on Product Hunt, and launched a number of other projects there. I’d set myself the target of being the #1 Maker. I even purchased a t-shirt from Maker Tees a project by Daniel Kempe, but I wouldn’t wear it until I made it to number 1.
It didn’t take long for me to get to the top of the maker leaderboard, and I’m still there!
Getting to know Daniel thru his projects and the Maker Hunt community, led me to be involved with Quuu. Daniel had a great idea for helping people keep their social media timelines full of awesome, relevant content. Unfortunately he didn’t know anyone who could help him turn his idea into a functioning project, so of course I volunteered to help.
After a couple of weeks of hacking we had the MVP for Quuu ready to go, and go it did. Quuu has become a very popular social media marketing tool, and a solid business.
This was just the start of a journey that I could write an entire book about. I’ve done more projects with Ben and Daniel, not to mention: Jonny Nastor, Dylan Feltus, Bhavesh Patel, Seth Louey and many others.
In doing all these projects I’ve never expected anything in return, I just enjoy working with great people and turning their ideas into reality.
There might not be a direct return for taking part in these projects, but the karma roundabout spins quickly.
Being selected as 2016 Product Hunt maker of the year is an intangible, invaluable reward, even if it did come with a Golden Kitty. Once the weather improves, I’m going to enjoy flying my drone and find a real roundabout I take a spin on.
Thanks again Eric for the gift, and I look forward to doing more projects with friends old and new.
