How NoCode helped 4 non-tech founders buildd their dream projects quickly and affordably?!

NoCode tools can be life-changing for a non-tech founder. Here are 4 examples of how NoCode can help you buildd your dream startup without writing code!

5th January 2023
5 min read

There are 2 EXTREME ends of the product/feature buildd-ing scenario:

  1. A team of 200 Google engineers all working seriously on Gmail's compose button 😂 (see image below)nocode case study
  2. Or a common Joe with BIG startup ideas but NO coding skills, NO money and NO resources dreaming to buildd his product one day.

Now, no judgement on the first scenario. Google surely has the resources to keep changing its compose button and we as users will enjoy every revamp.

But the second scenario is a concern. We want more people to be able to buildd products from scratch without spending a fortune on developers. It would be life-changing for these "common Joes" and will encourage the birth of more awesome products.

So, what's the remedy to this predicament? Well, NoCode of course!

NoCode tools can be life-changing for a non-tech founder hoping to buildd a new product. Here are examples of how NoCode helped these 4 founders buildd their dream projects!

NoCode Guru ➝ Advisor for beginner NoCode makers

Katrien (Katt) Risen was a typical Product Hunt lurker since 2016. Seeing founders post about their products on Product Hunt, IndieHackers and Twitter, Katt always had the dream of creating her own product. But she never started because she couldn't code.

Then 5 years later, she stumbled upon NoCode. She immediately started using Softr to buildd some small solutions at work and now she was actually building things!

She decided to finally come out of the introvert lurker shadows and joined a NoCode boot camp. At the end of the boot camp, she had to work on a simple Minimal Viable Product (MVP).

Building NoCode Guru

During this same time, Katt kept coming across this returning question ➝ "Which NoCode tool should I use to buildd my project?"

So, she decided to buildd an MVP that directly solves this problem, which gave birth to NoCode Guru!

NoCode Guru is a simple chatbot that asks you a bunch of questions about your requirements. Once it understands your requirements, it suggests a NoCode tool.

nocode case study

Katt built NoCode Guru in just 2 months working only in the evening with a total spend of 40 Euros/month on her NoCode stack! Here's what her tech stack looked like:

  1. Yep.so ➝ She validated her idea using this super fast landing page builder
  2. Landbot ➝ She built the entire chatbot using Landbot. Landbot is a great solution if you want to have a chatbot connected with Airtable. This especially works well when you have a lot of data.
  3. Airtable ➝ Holds the database that feeds the data to Landbot.
  4. Softr ➝ Website was built on Softr. Using Softr's building blocks you can buildd landing pages very quickly that are tailored to your needs. Plus it allows features like app connections (Airtable), memberships, user logins, gated content, payment integration and more!

Katt very quickly received an offer to acquire NoCode Guru. So, she sold her first NoCode product valiantly coming out of her passive lurker phase. Now, she has built multiple products and runs a newsletter that covers NoCode stories that went from 0 to ACQUIRED!

Content Allies ➝ Buildd-ing workflows for a B2B Podcast Agency

Jake Jorgovan is a B2B Podcasting expert and founder of the B2B Podcast agency, Content Allies. He has produced podcasts for many huge companies like Meta, Siemens, Alibaba, General Dynamics, Stampli and more!

Content Allies started out as a generalist content marketing agency but given Jake's personal experience in the podcasting niche, the agency inevitably built a niche brand for itself.

nocode case study

Now, running an Agency is no easy task. To do bespoke agency work, you need a team that is super efficient and adaptable. Given evolving and changing needs of clients, a basic software flow can't achieve this.

So more than a centralized and independent software running the agency, Jake needed tools that could help him glue the business together into tight and streamlined workflows that would support the existing team.

They initially tried and failed to find a good tool but eventually, they came across Process Street and finally everything worked perfectly. At any point, Content Allies has more than 400+ episodes in its products. And, they manage all this with only a handful of project managers and the automated systems take care of the rest.

Here's their tech stack:

  1. Process Street ➝ Systems and Project Management
  2. Airtable ➝ They organize all their data into this database
  3. GSuite ➝ They use this for file organization and management
  4. Zapier ➝ They use this to automate processes to connect Process Street to their other core systems

With just the addition of Process Street, Content Allies was able to let go of a $ 5,000-per-month operations manager and instead utilize a software system that did the same work for much less.

And, as an additional cherry on top, their output scaled 5 times while cutting costs!

WXLLSPACE ➝ The World's Mural Art Marketplace

During his 10 years working in real estate development, Jordan Giha always dreamt of building an online business. And, interestingly, he had a very unique niche in mind!

He wanted to buildd a platform for mural artists and help them easily connect with real estate developers to earn paid gigs. He had earlier realised that the creative marketplace for murals had a lot of friction. So, the goal was to remove the friction and find these mural artists a wall to paint!

nocode case study

Now, Jordan knew he didn't have the skill set to code this entire platform. And as a solo founder, cash was scarce and his time was a super valuable asset.

Also, there was a lot of work to be done on the business front that was independent of the product. And, given Jordan's expertise in real estate, he wanted to focus on the business part. So, he decided to save time & money and use NoCode tools instead.

It took some time and a lot of digging into instruction manuals to decide what tools to use. Here's the tech stack of WXLLSPACE:

  1. Webflow ➝ They built the website using this site builder
  2. Zapier ➝ This connects every other tool via simple automated workflows
  3. Airtable ➝ Everything was funnelled through Airtable which was their main database

Very soon he got his Beta off the ground which landed him 500 sign-ups and his first paying customer! Their first client later earned them their first $35K in revenue which was a major win for a startup that's a couple of months old!

Even today WXLLSPACE's 45% operational load is handled by NoCode tools which costs them a meagre $500 per month keeping the monthly overhead super low!

NoCodify ➝ Helps others learn NoCode

Now, there are a lot of platforms that are built on NoCode. But, here's a platform that's built on NoCode and teaches you NoCode!

NoCodify is an online platform that provides courses to learn different NoCode tools, so you can design and buildd apps from scratch using NoCode.

nocode case study

When Tal Botnar set out to buildd NoCodify, he knew he had to buildd it using NoCode as well because

  1. The software developer cost for outsourcing the product came up to $30K.
  2. NoCode would drastically reduce the time-to-market. So, it would be much faster to produce the MVP if it's built on NoCode tools.
  3. NoCode would allow for quick iterations. So, Tal himself can go ahead and make changes to the platform easily.

They built the product in just a couple of months on a $250/month NoCode tech stack. Here are the tools they used:

  1. Bubble ➝ 90-95% of their product is built on Bubble.
  2. Vimeo ➝ They needed to create, edit and manage videos, so they chose Vimeo for that purpose.
  3. Zapier ➝ All workflows and automation are in Zapier.
  4. Sendgrid ➝ For sending marketing and transactional emails.
  5. Calendly ➝ To schedule 1-on-1 tutorial sessions for users.

Today, NoCodify has reached 4500+ members, hundreds of hours of 1-on-1 sessions, 100+ in-depth courses and hundreds of hours of video content. The company is also profitable and all thanks to its low-tech stack & maintenance cost, it produces high margins.

Here are some interesting lessons Tal shares about building products:

  1. Buildd something that is useful and that you would use yourself. If you need to use it, chances are others will as well.
  2. Buildd and ship quickly — Customers don’t care if there are minor bugs in your product, they care that you address them quickly and come out with new (valuable) features.
  3. Be customer-centric — Provide exceptional value to your customers and they will be your biggest supporters and marketers. One happy customer is worth ten “ok” customers.
  4. Keep it simple — Don’t try to buildd an incredibly complex MVP. Buildd what’s truly valuable to your customers and go from there.
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How Fevicol became a monopoly, and dominates the adhesives industry

Pidilite, Fevicol's parent company, was founded in 1959 by Balvantray Kalyanji Parekh. Its STAR product Fevicol is extremely popular in India, with a whopping ~70% market share!

But, how did Pidilite hit it out of the park with Fevicol? Well, it's pretty simple. You see, in 1950, carpenters used fat-based glue which was inconvenient, clumsy and required heating before using it.

Now, generally, in the adhesive market, ~60% of the revenue comes from the industrial segment, while ~40% comes from the consumer segment.

Fevicol, on the contrary, makes ~80% of its revenue from consumers, while ~20% from industrial sales.

So, Pidilite packaged ready to use, Fevicol adhesive into smaller containers and sold them directly to consumers and carpenters to target a wider market.

If we do some quick math, we can figure out how much Fevicol makes from households and consumers.

Households:
- Total households = 25 crore
Suppose 80% of households use about 5 small tubes of Fevicol, so total revenue generated = 80% x 25 Cr x 20 x 5 = INR 2000 crores

Carpenters:
Total carpenters = ~10 lakh
Suppose 50% of them use Fevicol, total number of carpenters using Fevicol = 500,00
If each carpenter uses ~200 kg of Fevicol in a year, then we get = INR 40,000
Total revenue generated = 40,000 x 500,000 = ~INR 2000 crores

Totally, Fevicol makes INR 4000 crores from households and carpenters! Now, Fevicol does a lot to keep these carpenters loyal to the product. Plus, you can't deny the fact that it solves a real pain point for consumers (remember the green bottle gum?).

So, Fevicol's monopoly is 100% intact and it'll be tough for competitors to beat "Fevicol ka mazboot jod"!

$69B: Microsoft makes all-time largest tech acquisition!

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Microsoft's been gobbling tech companies & startups: LinkedIn: $26B | Nuance: $20B | Skype: $9B | GitHub: $7.5B

But they paid more than all 4 combined for Activision!

What does Activision Blizzard even do?
Owns famous games across platforms:
- Candy Crush: 2.7 billion downloads in 2017!
- Call of Duty
- World of Warcraft, etc

But, last year, Activision was sued for having a toxic workplace culture.
CEO Bobby Kotick, had not taken action despite knowing of these happenings.
Employees protested on social media, and 200+ employees even staged a walkout in November.

Now, back in November, Microsoft condemned Activision's culture. But, after the backlash, Microsoft had an easy target in Activision. But, why is Microsoft so eager to buy this gaming company? Well, there are many reasons!

A) Microsoft will now be the 3RD BIGGEST video game company.

Only 2 more to beat:
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- Play Station maker, Sony

B) The Metaverse has 2 bets — 1) revolutionising gaming and, 2) virtual office

Microsoft already sees Minecraft & Halo as part of the Metaverse concept.

Now, the horizon is broader: huge game communities can create their own Metaverses.

C) No more paying app store fees to Apple & Google!

Microsoft's gaming empire becomes so big that gamers come to it directly.

D) Microsoft has 0 mobile gaming presence. Candy Crush by itself makes their position strong.

This $70B deal has the potential to shake up the entire gaming industry!

How to buildd a SaaS survey product on a $38 NoCode stack in just a few months?

What exactly is Serenifits?

Serenifits is a non-intrusive way to gather and structure an employee's anonymous feedback into data.

Here's how it works:
- Every 2 weeks employees take a Heartbeat survey
- The tool aggregates the data from the survey
- It then presents a department-wise overview

Problem ⇒ Building the product takes a long time & costs a lot
Solution ⇒ The team used NoCode tools to create the product from scratch

Final survey tool dashboard could:
a) automatically send surveys
b) collect and analyze the survey data
c) visualize the data

NoCode Tech Stack
1. Validation ➝ SurveyMonkey ➝ $100
2. Development ➝ Bubble ➝ $16/month
3. Bubble Plugins ➝ $10/month

4. Email ➝ Gmail business account ➝ $12/month
5. Domain ➝ $20/year

So, their one-time cost was $120 and their recurring cost was ~$38/month!