🔥 Idea to acquisition in 11 months + 🤑 The Reddit idea that made $10m revenue

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📚 Posts

🔥 How a college student built, scaled and sold a startup using no-code tools

It’s the indie maker’s dream: to launch a startup, build a great product, and get acquired within just months of launch.

That’s exactly what Kenan Saleh did.

In 2018, from his college halls and with the help of a friend, Kenan launched Halo Cars — an advertising startup selling rideshare ad space to brands. Just 11 months later, he was approached by Lyft to begin talks about acquiring the young company.

"Hey, I’m Kenan Saleh.

Halo Cars began as — and still continues to be — a way for ride-hailing drivers to make extra money through digital advertising. We fit a screen on top of their cars which displays ads as they drive around. Brands pay us to run the ads and manage the campaigns.

I sold Halo Cars to Lyft in 2019. After the acquisition, Halo Cars became what is known as Lyft Media today. We’re Lyft’s advertising division, and I am GM.

Operating an ad network on no-code tools

I used no-code a lot when I first launched Halo Cars.

Since the acquisition, we’ve become much more advanced in the tools we use and how we use them. But we still rely on no-code tools for certain elements of Lyft Media.

Like our hardware ops, for example.

Our business is operationally intensive because we have a lot of hardware (the advertising screens that go on the cars) to deploy, manage, maintain and repair. This is where no-code tools help us the most.

Our core no-code stack is a combination of Retool for our internal dashboards, Zapier for our automations, and Airtable for our CRMs and some forms.

Automating busywork and connecting apps with Zapier

Without a doubt, Zapier enables our small, 6-person team to do the work of a 20-person team.

Here are a few examples of how we use it to speed up our business operations.

Automating repetitive tasks:

If we ever find ourselves doing something more than a couple of times a day (or even a couple of times a week), that’s a signal for us that we need to try and automate that task.

We use Zapier to create “When X happens automatically do Y” automations, such as:

• Send templated email with inputs
• Send Slack update of KPIs every morning at 9am
• Update CRM, trackers, and a database of changes made

Connecting tools together:

As the company has scaled, we’ve added more and more software tools to our stack, and we need those tools to talk to each other and keep in sync. Examples of use cases include:

• Put Typeform responses into Airtable
• Propagate change in Airtable to database
• Trigger workflow from Retool button

Automating driver onboarding:

In the early days, we relied heavily on Zapier to help us onboard new drivers.

Drivers would fill out a Typeform to apply, and Zapier would pull that data into our Airtable base. Then Zapier would send the driver a ‘thank you for applying’ text message using Twilio as well as an internal notification to us using Gmail.

We also used Zapier to automate sending documents like contracts and other driver information.

We had a ‘Status’ column in our database, and every time we changed the status of a driver, it would trigger a Zap and action the next step of the driver onboarding workflow.

We had thousands of drivers applying, and there’s no way we could have manually handled them all. By doing some of the busywork for us, Zapier helped us appear much bigger than we were as a company, and helped us scale much faster than we could have ever done without using automation.

Knowing when to code or no-code

Sometimes founders can struggle with knowing when to choose custom code over a no-code solution, or knowing when it’s time to stop using a no-code tool they have needed up until now.

My advice here would be to code your unique value proposition, if you have the resources and budget available. This is what will differentiate you from your competition and give you the most leverage.

Take our business: we are an advertising business at our core. Our value prop is our advertising platform software. We own it entirely, and we can keep building on it to make it serve our clients’ needs exactly as required."

​Read the full post.

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🐦 Tweet of the Week

Neel Parekh @NeelBParekh I started a business that has generated almost $10M in revenue. And I got the idea from Reddit. But only a few people know the power of Reddit to fuel entrepreneurship. Here are 9 under-the-radar subreddits that will help you build a million dollar business: Thread 🧵👇 August 18th 2022 856 Retweets 5,644 Likes

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Cheers!
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️