02 Updates from Tiny Factories 📋🎨

William Felker
tiny factories
Published in
3 min readOct 20, 2019

Tiny Factories is a tribe of indie makers helping each other to ship products. We are working toward a future where folks can be creatively independent by becoming — what we call — an indiepreneur.

Every two weeks (or so), we send out an update about our project progress. If you’d like to receive this in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

🎨 Will: Hi, we have officially completed our first tiny camp! For the entire September, we were working as an in-person team to learn and build together. In the end, we launched two projects and are in the middle of working on finding a partner for the third.

Overall the camp went super well, we learned a lot about how to set better criteria for evaluating and scoping projects at the start and re-evaluating at the end. Some of the next goals going forward are around remote collaboration and monetization.

We all lived in this small bedroom for a month and didn’t kill each other — kudos to us! ;)

😇 Tiny Gathering ♪(┌|o^▽^o|┘)♪

It’s almost that time, the next tiny gathering will be set for Sunday, Oct 27th. This time we plan to play board games with new and old friends! If you are in the bay area, come hang!

🚀 Product Launches from us

1. arena2slides

We enjoy using are.na for collecting research and inspiration for our projects. One of the first tools we worked on was a presentation tool that lets you turn any are.na collection (similar to a Pinterest board) into a presentation. You can make your own presentation here.

2. Animal Text

Sometimes we all need a little pick me up. Animal text sends you a cute illustration of an animal at a random point in the future. If you want to get a cute illustration sign up here.

3. Sneak peek at donation.land

We are developing a new tool that collects donation in a visual way! You may be able to virtually plant trees to help the Amazon forest with this donation platform soon! We are currently reaching out the organizations to collaborate and test this. If you have any organizations that you think might be interested, please email us at: hello@tinyfactories.space

4. Sneak peek at our poster project

Lastly, we have started exploring generative design this week by making a poster generator. For now, we’ve created pretty strict rules that ensure each generated poster looks pretty good. Next, we are looking into relaxing the rules leading to more variety at the cost of varied quality.

📹 Where are the vlogs?!

We weren’t able to keep our promise on this :(

Weiwei and Will felt like they were drowning in projects last month and so they haven’t gotten to it yet. But they said:”If you still don’t see videos from us by the end of October, you all get to tickle us when you see us in person!😅”

That’s it for now, if you have any feedback, tips, or questions feel free to contact us at hello@tinyfactores.space or DM us. Until next time keep making and be kind to each other!

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William Felker
tiny factories

I work with organizations to research the humans at the center of their products and services.