Welcome to Makers Festival WFH Edition 🎉

Aaron O'Leary
37 replies
Hi everyone 👋 Aaron from Product Hunt here. With the proliferation of work from home mandates over the past few weeks, we thought it would be a great time to host a global, WFH festival that focuses on relief efforts (in any form) for the COVID-19 pandemic. We've seen a bunch of great products build to help with the crisis, now we want to see what you can build. It can be anything from products around self-care, at-home entertainment, ways to combat the spread of misinformation or products for healthcare workers on the frontlines 💪 The discussions are your space to get support, collab with other makers or simply just strike up a conversation. We can't wait to see what you build. Registrations are now open here until the 2nd of April 🎉

Replies

Andy Dent
@aaronoleary when it says "created within" the festival, does it need to be *entirely* created within that time period? Or can it be something relevant you have been working on for a while but yet to launch on PH? I'm frantically adding features to Touchgram to get a more usable release out to help people communicate better whilst locked down. ("for a while" = at least a year since my wife's patience was utterly exhausted)
Aaron O'Leary
@musingmurmurs You should now be able to submit your project :)
Aaron O'Leary
@andydentperth1 It can be both, aslong as you are still looking working on the product from before :)
Elizabeth Ferrao
@aaronoleary I'm getting a "Registrations for the Makers Festival have ended!" message when I try to submit a project. Just me?
Aaron O'Leary
@musingmurmurs Hey that would happen if you did not register in time before the submission period. We closed registrations on Wednesday however I will get you in now :)
Alexander Haque
@aaronoleary just realized we didn't register. Is it possible to get us in?
Anna Grigoryan
Hey, i'm really happy to see this initiative. I was actually working on something for this matter. I was developing a platform for content creators and advertisers to connect, with a lot of features including shout-outs between the community members so people could help each other out to grow. Now I'm launching the product with only shout-out feature build with Airtable. Submit your project and get help from other people here. https://www.hackeranalysis.co/ I'm new to no-code community so this is my first try, I'll improve the website as it goes.
Andre
Awesome, I'm in.
Aaron O'Leary
@andrefuchs Woooo! Any idea of what to build? :D
Abadesi
I'm so excited for this! One thing I've been struggling with is consuming the news and social media during the pandemic. Hope to see some products that help with mental health and self care in these tough times. 🧘‍♀️
Anthony Dike 🌻🐝
@abadesi same man same. Had to completely dump IG. And I’m consuming Twitter in heavy moderation. Need mental quiet during these times tbh
Abadesi
@antdke yeah I've been trying - and failing - to stick to screen time limits on my devices. Definitely using Flux way more and trying to do non work things that don't need a screen like drawing or reading a book. Hard though!
Anthony Dike 🌻🐝
@abadesi yeah, any effort in the right direction is good any good books you’re reading rn? If you’re into math, I found a good explainer book called “Bayesian Statistics: The Fun Way”. It’s good stuff so far. It’s making all the math stuff I used to hate less scary lol
Helen Huang
@abadesi ahhh hopefully what we made will help a little bit with that: https://love-in-pandemics.netlif... 🥰
Anthony Dike 🌻🐝
Just registered 🥳 I’m excited
Tomi Gelo
Great timing as I'm also working on a WFH-themed product myself!
John Fennessy
Idea being shared on Twitter for a marketplace to match two needs: 1. Your favourite restaurant needs you to buy a voucher to keep them going until it’s all over. 2. Your favourite health / frontline worker deserves something to look forward to when it’s all over. Solution, create a marketplace that accepts donations being paid by anyone to support local restaurants and purchase meals, which can be distributed to front-line workers (nurses, doctors, retailers staying open )
David Braun
Great idea, as I’m currently also working on a covid19 relief initiative. But @aaronoleary, why is the timeframe so long? Do you expect the situation to continue for many months to come, if voting is only on April 28th?
David Braun
@aaronoleary is it allowed to post the project on PH before the end of the program or will that disqualify it? Will it be posted then automatically as part of the makers festival?
Aaron O'Leary
@david_braun1 No that's not it, we just want to give makers a good timeframe to build :)
Camille Franceschi
@aaronoleary It's the first time I do a maker festival what does "submission" means? We submit our product on PH on the usual way?
Aaron O'Leary
@camille_franceschi1 Hey Camille, submissions mean you submit here producthunt.com/makers-festival/wfh, there will be a form there if you registered during the window :)
Aaron O'Leary
@camille_franceschi1 Aweeeeeesome cannot wait to see what you build!
Camille Franceschi
@aaronoleary Thanks I saw it after the registration period :)
Geert Jan Sloos
I'm in! will the posts be featured on the homepage during the Voting Opens?
Aaron O'Leary
@payrequest They will be featured on a dedicated separate voting page, but you can for sure post to the main website after the festival!
David Hersey
This is so timely! My non-profit (https://leapforward.us) is building a global tool to visualize the needs of individuals, families, communities, states and cities arising from COVID and the massive shift in life and work that it brings. We are open-sourcing the software and crowd-sourcing the data. The goal is to bring attention to the gaps and overlaps (tons of online yoga classes, but no emotional support for families for example) and inspire us to work together to help each other. There's no profit model; this is 100% service-focused. I am new to PH and this is my first Maker evernt ... can someone suggest the best place to find other makers who want to help with this? Stack is React.js with lightweight Ruby API backend. Prototyping with Airtable for data collection. Thanks!
Aaron O'Leary
@david_hersey Hey David! You could totally make a new discussion here asking if anyone wants to team up. The more the merrier!
Iranthi Gomes
Hi @aaronoleary, Submitted on the 2nd of April and very excited! :) My co-founder and I came up with an idea for at-home entertainment. We are using our current business's solution to create it, which is a chatbot builder platform, to create a space for storytellers and artists to create interactive stories. Where readers can read stories and play games by making decisions to determine their journey. Basically modern text based adventures. I have a quick question. We started working on the project last week and putting all extra time to bring it together. When I submitted the project it wasn't fully working. Hope it doesn't matter because voting wont be open till the 20th April?
Andy Dent
@aaronoleary @iranthi_gomes I'm a big fan of choose-your-own-adventure and that's one of the ways I describe Touchgram to people - they can build up a multi-page message which goes to different pages depending on the gesture or area they touch. I've not pushed this hard in public yet because of a couple more features I want to add to make writing them easier. Touchgram pages currently just have one big picture as a background. Coming soon is an update to make it easy to compose pages *within* Touchgram including adding overlay text and long-form formatted text as a scrolling section. That way people won't need to put all their pages into the camera roll. Have you considered importing from existing tools for interactive fiction, such as Ink, Twine or Texture? See - https://steemit.com/programming/... - https://emshort.blog/how-to-play... as a great starting point
Iranthi Gomes
@andydentperth1 Hi Andy, apologies about the late reply. I gave Touchgram a go and it was fun! I had a bit of trouble figuring it out initially but then I went through this https://medium.com/touchgram/bir.... It would be great if you could add a simple tutorial in the beginning. Would there be a way to get it on to WhatsApp as well? Yes, it would be great to import story content but that would be down the line once we start a building a community. We decided to call it Netstory. You can give it a look here https://netstory.io/ :) You can add images and videos for your interactive story for the moment and we'll soon be adding audio as well for sounds and voice artists. Would love to know what you think :)
Andy Dent
@iranthi_gomes thanks for your advice on Touchgram. Now that the v1.2 push for Makers Festival is over (it's live on the App Store) I'll be putting up videos and better walkthroughs. In particular, v1.2 added the big feature of being able to open sounds from other apps in Touchgram and copy sounds from macOS (formerly via iTunes sharing). Those are quite complicated things for people who aren't used to sharing documents between apps so need a walkthrough. I *love* the aesthetic of Netstory - that opening background mixes a relaxing feel from watercolor with warmth from the glowing lanterns. Already got severely distracted following a couple of stories. Does using the chatbot make it easier to deliver?
Iranthi Gomes
@andydentperth1 Yeah a walkthrough is going to be very helpful. Will check the new version :) Glad to hear you enjoyed it! :) Looking forward to adding more stories. Yeah using the chatbot solution helped with all the main functionalities, we just had to remove parts that didn't apply and added a few more on top to make it more suitable.
Aaron O'Leary
@iranthi_gomes No no it's all good, don't worry at all, awesome idea by the way! :D