🛍️ Start an online store with Webflow + 💰 Bootstrapping your way to $1m

This newsletter takes 6 minutes and 24 seconds to read.​
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⚡ Tech Ladies' Caro Griffin: Bootstrapping your way to a $1m member community

With the recent announcement of our new course, Launch a member-based business in 3 weeks — no code required, we’re casting a spotlight on some incredible businesses that have already done what our course aims to teach and inspire in others.

That is, to be able to get an idea for member-driven business off the ground quickly, build a community to support it, and do it all using no-code tools.

We hope to show how with the right idea and tools, *anyone* can build a successful business.

We caught up with Caro Griffin, VP of OPs at Tech Ladies, a bootstrapped, member-driven community making in excess of $1m/year in revenue and doing exciting things for the tech and community spaces.

A business built for community

“Tech Ladies is a community of women working in all aspects of tech all over the world, who are supporting each other through growing their careers. We really exist to facilitate those connections, and also help connect our tech ladies with opportunities and to help our hiring partners connect with tech ladies.

Structurally we have two main parts of the business. One is a free membership community — it's free to join, you get access to our secret job board, our weekly newsletter, a public Facebook group.

The other is our revenue arm, and there are two main sources of revenue. The first is our hiring services, which includes our job board and our candidate database amongst other things; the other is our paid membership community, called Founding Membership.

Across all platforms, our community has 100,000 members and around 1,200 of those are founding members.

Providing community value and keeping it relevant

Tech Ladies provides a lot of resources for our members to take advantage of, including speed-networking events, professional development opportunities, webinars, and weekly career coaching.

One of the most valuable resources for members is one-on-one coffee pairings, which is entirely facilitated using a tool called Orbiit. Using a tool like this is particularly ideal when you’re managing a large community and you want to offer them a premium experience.

Using no-code tools

We actually use a lot of no-code tools at Tech Ladies! Specifically for the community aspect of the business.

The particularly great thing about no-code tools is that you can whip up features and services for your customers quickly and effectively depending on their needs and what they’re asking you for.

We use tools like Mighty Networks, MailChimp, Zapier, Help Scout, Airtable, Eventbrite and Add Event.

I also built a candidate database to help hiring partners easily make contact with our tech ladies. I built it in just 1 week using Webflow, Airtable, Zapier and Active Campaign.

We were able to ship it quickly and easily and it's actually quadrupled our revenue!"

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Read Caro's full interview here.

Want to build a successful community business like Tech Ladies? Learn how with this new course: Launch your own member-driven community business in just 3 weeks, without code.

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🛠️ New tool-path

🛍️ How to start an online store with Webflow

The 7 tutorials in this tool-path will walk you through setting up an online store from a Webflow template so you can begin selling physical products, digital goods or services, without code! Using these tutorials, you can fully design the end-to-end customer experience for your Webflow store.

​View this tool-path​

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📺 New tutorials

🛒 How to integrate Shopify products into Webflow​

📱 How to use an Apple AirTag to trigger automations​

⬇️ Adding a dropdown menu to a form in Adalo​

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📚 On the blog

📩 Email marketing software: top tools and how they can help you

Marketing tools have come a long, long way since email was first invented. In this post, we take a look at some of the top email marketing software tools being used in 2021, and dive in to how tools like these can help you achieve great things with your sales and marketing.

​Read this​

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🧑‍🎓 Courses

🎉 Launch a membership-based business in 3 weeks — no code needed

In an exciting turn of events this week, Tyler Tringas of Calm Company Fund will now be joining Demo Day of this course. Why is this exciting? Because Calm Fund are *actively* looking for member-driven startups to invest in.

Tyler will join Demo Day to see if projects built during the course have good investment potential. 👀

If you have an idea for a member-driven business and you want to get it funded (who doesn't?!), then this course could make that all happen. 🚀

​Learn more​

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🧱 No-code fundamentals: Cohort 3

If you're looking to fast-track your no-code knowledge and skills surrounded by other creators, builders and entrepreneurs, this is the course for you. You'll build 5 projects in 5 weeks, including an app, a marketplace, a directory site and more. You'll also leave with a clear understanding of the no-code tools landscape so you can choose and use the right tools with confidence. Cohort starts on September 13.

​Learn more — Registration now OPEN​

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💼 Jobs​
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​Product Marketing Manager – WeWeb

Are you looking for an exciting experience at the intersection of Marketing, Product and Sales? You want to help craft a differentiated product story in the fast-growing no-code space? This is a great position for an ambitious candidate ready to play a key role in the growth of a world-leading no-code software. Now is the time to seize the opportunity!

​Head of Sales – WeWeb

WeWeb has been ranked one of the most promising startups by Y Combinator in 2020, is recommended by premium clients and is backed by top-tier investors. This job is to build WeWeb’s sales strategy from scratch by finding the right acquisition channels in close collaboration with our CEO and the growth team.

​Software Engineer II – Airboxr

We’re on a mission to create the best last-mile data analysis platform the world has ever soon. As a part of the core engineering team at Airboxr, you’ll be working on sophisticated data pipelines and backend infrastructure to execute this mission. This is a full-stack role though, so expect some UX/UI work interspersed with systems design and implementation.

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🚀 Community Projects

📄 Top Airtable Experts You Should be Following, by Narek of Softr.

"Hey Everyone, the Airtable community is among the most dynamic and fast-growing communities in the no-code space, and there are many members producing and sharing educational content, tips, or news on Airtable or just offering related services. We have selected the top (in our opinion) experts in the field who are worth following"​
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📊 Custom & Automated SEO Tracker using Stackby + Ahrefs, by Rachit of Stackby.

"Build your custom & automated SEO tracker using Stackby and column API connector with Ahrefs. You can automatically track backlinks, keyword positions of your URLs and your competitors' URL in real-time."

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🗣️ Contribute to Makerpad and connect with a new, captive audience

Building in public has proven to take startups and fledgling projects far.

When you share your story with the world — the ups, the downs, the small wins and the struggles — you bring people along on your journey and allow them to invest in you. When you're ready to sell, these people become your best customers.

Our community is brimming with budding entrepreneurs, makers, creators, artists, designers and citizen developers, all with a thirst for knowledge and keen to learn from people like you.

Whether you're building a new tool, website, SaaS platform or digital product, growing an online community, writing a newsletter, or selling your services — or anything in between — get your story out there and promote it to the world.

​Learn more.

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🏗️ Build Club

Build Club is a weekly meet-up where members can share what they are building, get feedback, ask questions and get help from each other. Join Build Club.

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Cheers!
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️