🤝 Crowd-funding knowledge with no-code + 🤩 Special workshop on startups!

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🚀 Highlight of The Week

💡 Using no-code to crowd fund a knowledge-sharing platform

Sari Azout is a seed-stage investor, design-thinker, product strategist, and storyteller.

Born and raised in Colombia and educated in Rhode Island, she's on a mission to bring more humanity and creativity to technology and business.

She spends her days investing and building consumer technology companies for the sake of making human life better, not for the sake of technology.

Sari also writes a newsletter about humanizing tech, building the future, personal growth, and raising children.

A need for knowledge

"Two years ago, I started documenting the things that inspired me about startups and tech. I organized them in an Airtable database that now has notes from over 2,000 content entries with over 4,000 tagged startups," says Sari.

"This ongoing practice opened my eyes to the fact that good quality, one-off writing needs funding.

Unbelievable amounts of wisdom remain unshared. 100 billion people have lived, but only a small fraction have published their ideas and insights.

We need a new model for funding ghost knowledge — the kind that exists within expert and maker communities but is not written or documented.

This is why I launched Ghost Knowledge, a 1-week crowdfunding experiment to get the people who don’t write enough to share their knowledge."

Introducing Ghost Knowledge: a one-week, crowdfunding project to fund writing

"The problem we saw is that there is no funding model for writers that don't want to publish on a regular basis.

This results in most of the media we consume coming from full-time journalists, content marketers, SEO experts — and not from makers, operators, and builders.

There’s an underserved market for practical, specific business knowledge; the sort of secret intellectual capital few people have access to.

This is how Ghost Knowledge works:

• You suggest ideas for essays you'd want to read from authors that don't normally publish
• You pledge $$ to support the suggestions you like
• We collect payment and coordinate with authors to make the magic happen ✨
• Also, if you requested the essay you get 10% of the proceeds of the crowdfund."

And the tech stack?

"Every part of Ghost Knowledge was built with no-code tools in under 10 days.

The site lives in Webflow with three Airtable embeds:

• An Airtable view to display all requests
• An Airtable form to place a request
• An Airtable form to pledge your support to an existing request

Aside from this setup, we leveraged Airtable automations to send communications about requests to pledgors and requesters."

520 upvotes on Product Hunt and $11k in pledges

"As an experiment, I think it was a success! In one week alone, we generated over $11,000 in pledges, of which $6,000 represent successful crowdfund proceeds that will be distributed to writers.

We also had over 500 emails added to the waiting list.

We’ll likely run a second season of Ghost Knowledge in the future now that we have the infrastructure in place."

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Read Sari's full story here.

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📚 More on the blog

💼 30 no-code businesses you could launch in 1 month

Many of us agree that there's a lot you can do with no-code. But how many types of online business can you actually build and run without code? 5? 10? 100? We spun up this list of 30 businesses you could have running within 1 month, all using purely no-code tools.

​Read the full post.

👋 How an agency automated and simplified their client onboarding process

We love highlighting and celebrating people that are doing awesome things with no-code. This is why we were super excited when we came across Nick Abraham’s work. He’s mapped out a super slick process to help agencies automate and simplify their client onboarding.

​Read the full post.

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📺 New tutorials

👕 Tool-Path: Create a print-on-demand store with Printful & Webflow

The 4 tutorials in this tool-path show you how to start an online store with Webflow. You'll use Printful to set up a print-on-demand store, then integrate it using an ecommerce template in Webflow.

Printful allows you to create various products with your unique branding and designs and ship them when a user orders from your online store. By setting up an on demand store, you can sell merchandise without having to deal with inventory costs of storing unsold goods.

​View the full tool-path.

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📆 Events

✨ How to Build and Sell a Startup — A special, one-off workshop will be happening this coming Wednesday 18 August with Makerpad's founder Ben Tossell, Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia and MicroAcquire's Andrew Gazdecki.

The workshop is free to attend. Don't forget to share with anyone you think would be interested (they don't need to be Makerpad member).

​Register now.

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🧑‍🎓 Courses

🧱 No-Code Fundamentals Cohort 3 | 13 Sept 2021 | 5 weeks

Looking to fast-track your no-code knowledge and skills surrounded by other creators, builders and entrepreneurs? Come join the third cohort of our hugely popular foundational no-code course.

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.

Pricing is $680 until August 23rd; $850 thereafter.

​Full details and enrollment info.

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💼 Jobs

​No-code Practice Expert – Netguru

Joining Netguru as a No-code Practice Expert means:

• Having an impact and shaping the future of the no-code/low-code area in Netguru.
• Leading a growing no-code/low-code department.
• Playing a significant role in reaching the strategic goals of the leading Product Design team in the region.

​Product Designer – Minimum Studio

As a Product Designer, you'll be working on 3 areas of the business: Creative problem solving, Fast UX Design, and Standardising solutions for our UI kit.

​No-Code Developer – AdYogi

We are looking for an Enthusiastic no-code developer based out of India to join our Product Team. The role will involve you in developing, designing and overseeing the product development of a Marketing Automation platform. You will be working closely with the core team to build this product into a Leader in the Marketing Automation space used by 1000s of e-commerce companies around the world.

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🚀 Community Projects

🏆 User Groups, Improved Airtable Setup, New Blocks, and More, by Narek of Softr.

"Hey Everyone, Softr has lots of news and updates this month, which I'd like to share with you: 🥈 #2 Product of the Month on Product Hunt 😊 And we couldn't have been more excited to have Ryan Hoover use Softr to build one of his projects."

🏆 Certificate Maker with GSlide, Gsheets and Gmail, by Sanskar Tiwari.

"Hello everyone, I made Certificate Maker called certifysimple.app
↳ Create/Edit Template in Google Slide
↳ Get Student Data from Google Sheets to Personalise
↳ And Send Certificates with Gmail.
Here is quick video on how it works."​
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🚀 How Justin Welsh Launched A Paid Online Community and Made $40k in 48 Hours, by Geoff of Outseta.

"Hey all! One of our customers and a phenomenal no-coder, Justin Welsh, recently launched a paid Discord community that he manages with Outseta. In short, this is probably the most impressive setup I've seen yet for monetizing a paid online community with memberships—Justin uses a pretty sophisticated application process and an impressive series of automations. Most impressive of all, he set all this up on his own without a lick of code."

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🗣️ Want to share your content with our followers? Contribute to Makerpad

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 — tell your story through Makerpad and make our audience, your audience.

Post in our forum, get your story published on our blog, or publish your work regularly through a newsletter series.

​Learn more.

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Cheers,
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️