Is Uber a platform or a marketplace?

Lots of projects going on at the moment, but of course there’s always room for more.

Topics for this week:

• The Wave Marketplace

• Live Subscribers

• Carousel Images

• Course Creation

• Another Leaderboard

The Wave Marketplace

With Wave finally live on Android and iOS, monetization is the next priority.

I’ve been deep in the Stripe APIs this week making sure I have all the pieces.

The first 2 big wins where they had documentation for the tools I was using.

As always, there’s a client side and a server side.

Once I figured out the right approach I was happily greeted with a very clear, React Native friendly approach.

Stripe has already provided an npm package with most of what’s needed to get Stripe pages showing in the app which is the first big win.

That makes the app side much easier if Stripe provides some boilerplate to get started in React Native.

Then on the server side of things, I’ve been running Go microservices in AWS so I was planning to stick with that infrastructure.

Luckily one scroll down the page, Stripe provided the server side code example, complete with an option for Go.

Big win number 2.

Someone would have had a community package to integrate Stripe and Go, but I’d rather use an official package if possible.

You would think this isn’t something to celebrate.

React Native and Go are pretty popular these days but you never know.

Very pleased Wave’s tech stack will play nicely with Stripe, and that they have all the steps documented in one convenient page.

It took a minute to find it though.

I’m pretty sure I’ve described parts of the Wave business model as a marketplace, but I had to really think about it before going with that choice with Stripe.

Stripe asked if I was setting up a Platform or a Marketplace.

I’d like to build a Platform, but right now Wave would be a Marketplace.

Users can purchase Cover to get into a Venue, so Wave takes a cut of the purchase, but the rest of the purchase goes to the Venue.

This is, effectively, a Marketplace.

Wave matches buyers with sellers.

Which means apps like Uber and DoorDash are technically marketplaces.

If anything, this reveals my software perspective bias that I tend to think of everything as a platform, but technically Wave isn’t a platform until it provides services for other applications.

So until Wave starts offering services to venues to integrate into their systems, I’ll be building the Wave Marketplace.

Live Subscribers

The phrase, “a watched pot never boils” comes to mind as I keep an eye on YouTube progress.

Only 21 subscribers left to 1000 as of this writing.

I finished a video last night and took vidIq’s advice that my viewers are most active from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM so I scheduled the video to publish at 8:30 AM this morning instead of 9:00 PM last night to see if I could get the almighty algorithm to help me out.

3 subs this morning, which is not bad at all!

And wild to see 128 new subscribers in the last 28 days all from 1 video per week.

Definitely not pulling in subscribers from live streams.

With 33 live streams in the last 28 days, a minimum of 55 minutes each, I have received 1 subscriber.

In the same time, 107 subscribers have come from videos, both new and old.

45 subscribers have come from really just 1 video I uploaded in the last 4 weeks.

So all that to say, streaming is not for getting subscribers on YouTube.

Uploading videos is.

And even with that, 3 out of the 4 videos I uploaded have brought in 1 subscriber.

But it’s better than 1 in 33 like live streams.

So the point is keep uploading.

Not every video will be a winner, sometimes it will.

And some will continue to bring in new subscribers.

Amazing how consistency can make a difference.

And the live streams will become valuable later…

Carousel Images

So I may be catering to the YouTube algorithm a little hard, because n8n nano banana is currently my biggest source of traffic right now, but there’s good reason for it.

The name is weird and catchy so that helps.

I think Google got lucky with that one.

But the model itself is really powerful.

I’m prioritizing quick and convenient over flashy and impressive, but I’m thinking there will be a bigger, fancier workflow in the near future.

This video shows an even quicker way to use Nano Banana with n8n through Openrouter instead of using the Google API directly which requires setting up a Client in the Google Cloud console and all that.

Openrouter makes it much easier by signing up, added a payment method, and it’s good to use.

But as I was creating the thumbnail for this video, I found myself using the workflow a few times to edit the image I ended up using.

A few tweaks could create a nice system that could generate a whole series of nicely formatted images to use on social media or wherever.

And do so without having to open Canva or Photoshop.

Just send in the template image and get a bunch of variations back.

I picture the system but it’s a little hard to describe.

More to come on this and maybe a website for it…

Course Creation

I still like live streaming, despite it not bringing in the subscribers.

And we’ve been on a roll lately.

One of my subscribers emailed me about creating an n8n workflow that could generate course content.

The user answers questions like what’s the topic, who’s it for, what language, and what platform the course would live on like Udemy.

After that, AI could do some research on the topic and spit out a series of short lectures to listen to about that topic.

I think it could be really useful if done correctly.

Here’s a post from just the other day:

Tutoring and teaching is one of the main uses for GPT and it’s great on it’s own.

But it’s not going to generate a lecture on it’s own.

Even if you asked it, it would take a while to prompt your way into a series of lecture videos.

But that’s what we’re trying to build on stream.

Something that can create 3 minute lectures videos including slides and an AI voice over.

So far I’ve got a system that generates the lecture slides from Google Sheet data, and turns those slides into images that can be used in the lecture video.

Next up is using AI to fill out the Google Sheet with the lecture content.

Then need to do some Text to Speech to create the audio content, and all the pieces should be there to produce 3 minute lectures on whatever topic a user wants.

As with every project, it’s been trickier than expected but progress has been good.

Looking forward to sharing the entire system soon, but I’ve live streamed almost all progress, so it’s pretty easy to catch up if you’re curious.

Most recent stream here:

Another Leaderboard

LMArena is clearly one of my favorite websites with how often I both check and reference it, but it’s missing something.

API price.

Admittedly I haven’t done a ton of research, but I feel like there should be an easy site like the LMArena board that lists the API prices of all these models in one place.

Seems like the numbers are buried in each company’s documentation pages, but it’d be great to compare them all quickly on one screen.

Artificial Analysis comes to mind with really thorough breakdowns.

These are great, but they’re very information dense, and trust me, I enjoy information density.

I still find myself wanting a clean, sortable list of prices for quick reference, similar to what LMArena shows.

I don’t have enough projects going on right now, but that may be high on the list for the next build-in-public project.

Plus you know, it should only take a day to vibe code, right?

And that’s it for this week. The Wave app is becoming a marketplace, and plenty more to be done with AI.

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Let me know what else I missed! I’d love to hear your feedback at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected].

Thanks for reading!