The 💯 Digest

The 💯 Digest: UI Auto-Generation Tool, How Perplexity Grew, Product Idea, 20% OFF This Tool & More!

Author

Max Haining
April 14, 2024

“My tech startup failed because our founding team were all non-technical” - Max, founder of the 100 School

Welcome to the 💯 Digest: a weekly newsletter that helps you solve problems that matter with tech - through stories, handpicked links, and one mystery opportunity (read till the end 👀). Brought to you by the 100 School team (#100daysofnocode / #100daysofai)

This week’s 💯 Digest includes…

  • 🛠 Tool tour: Find the tools of the week

  • 👏 Be 100: Reverse engineering one of the best creator’s success & more!

  • 📚 Watch/read/listen: Learn how to auto-generate UI designs & more!

  • 🗻 Board meeting: Partnership idea & more!

  • 🤫 Weekly advent calendar: One mystery opportunity!

Tool tour 🛠

We’re always on the look out for epic tools. Here are the best ones we found from the last week…

Be 💯 just like…

Whether it's automating daily nuisances or developing groundbreaking apps, we want to spotlight non-techies leveraging tech to 💯…

Read. Watch. Listen. To... 📖

Sure, we’re all about helping you learn tech skills but if we dig a little deeper, it’s really about a committment to showing up and hitting 💯% of your potential with the tools at your disposable. Some gems to help you get there…

Join our board meeting 🏂

If you want to see under the hood and shape what’s next for the 100 school, this is your stop.

👀 First some context…

It’s Max here 👋. If you didn’t know, I run 💯 School. Growing up my tech skills were pretty bad. That’s until I started asking the “dumb” questions I was always too scared to ask - and ever since, I’ve been turning the answers into free challenges for anyone to learn tech skills (in less scary, more fun ways). Hence #100daysofnocode & #100daysofai.

I’m also a solo-founder. And get told a lot…”Max! You should get some extra help calling the shots”.

That’s where you come in.

We started as a Twitter hashtag. No curriculum, team or mission. Just me in lockdown trying to learn a new skill. Community was the only thing that kept me going. And I want to continue building this thing with you, the community - because without it, well…it wouldn’t be a thing; only an idea.

That’s why I’m going to use this little corner of the digest to share lessons and updates/questions with you every week. Like a board meeting but way more casual 😅. Thankyou 🙏

💯 WIN

The 100 club grows 🥳!!

Seeing folks complete their 100 day journey that started all the way back on Jan 1st has truly made my week! Whilst hitting the 💯 is cool, that’s not what excites me. It’s the skills, confidence and opportunities that students unlock on the journey to 100…which makes it special. Big kudos to everyone basking in their 💯 glow this week…you deserve it!

The frustrating (and exciting) thing for me is that we’re only just scratching the surface for the impact we know we can have. Ultimately, completing our daily lessons for 100 days is just the input. So I always come back to the question: how can we help students 10x the outcomes they are able to unlock from following the exact same inputs?

That’s why a big focus for us this quarter will be around bridging the gap between the skills we teach and the opportunities our learners have to put them to work. We’ve already begun partnering with organisations to scope live “problems” that our students can help solve. If you work for or run an organisation that would also like to collab on this, just reply to this email 😊!

📕 LESSON

Branding is deeply personal (and subjective). If only there was (👀 request for product incoming…)

We’re currently in the process of transitioning from 100DaysOfNoCode / 100DaysOfAI to the 100 School. Apart from the name, it’s a brandless brand created in Canva. Essentially a placeholder before we create a visual identity around it.

Therein lies the issue. I know what I want the brand to look and feel like, but communicating this with clarity is hard. Working with an agency has been a great forcing function to build deeper clarity, yet there was still a big gap between my level of clarity and the extent to which I could actually share that vision.

To bridge the gap, I did a deep dive of brands, websites and specific aesthetic styles that I liked, breaking down exactly why I liked them. But, this took A WHILE 😅

Which brings me to my request for product. As Dru says, “we find new problems by solving problems” and in this case, I believe there could be a less painful way to quickly pool brands, websites and styles together that align most closely to what you’re trying to communicate. Is this a tool that you can prompt with text and images and outputs an easily shareable / editable “moodboard” for your brand vision? Or something else? I’m sharing this mainly for fun but also in case it strikes a chord with anyone else!

Your weekly advent calendar 🎁

Every week we share a little mystery opportunity that we think you’ll like - it can be everything from a tool discount, merch drop, event, freelance gig, new project or challenge we’re launching - we try to keep you on your toes. A weekly advent calendar but just not in December. Drum roll please 🥁….

  • Browse.ai is a web automation platform that enables users to extract and monitor data from any website without needing to code. Use the code 100DaysOfAI at checkout to get a 20% discount on any plan for 3 months.

Until next time (drop me a reply if you have any Q’s 😊),

Max 👋

P.s Want to sponsor the next digest? Find out more here