📈 Scaling ops for charities + 🚀 How to start a business online

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🚀 Story of The Week

💡 How a charity used no-code to scale their business operations

Joey Ceunen is the CTO of the charity Carefree, and a self-confessed no-code enthusiast.

Carefree is a UK-based, tech-first charity startup solving a unique problem. There are around 9 million people in the UK who provide unpaid care, saving the economy £132 billion each year.

But full-time carers very often have little opportunity to recover, relax, and look after themselves. That's where Carefree comes in.

Carefree provides free breaks to full-time unpaid carers by using unsold hotel rooms.

"It might sound relatively simple," says Joey, "but the process behind the work Carefree does is actually quite complex. There are lots of safeguarding issues, and lots of stakeholders including our network of carers, our network of donors, and our hospitality partners."

Using no-code to pivot operations

"When I joined the Carefree team as a product manager, the charity was struggling to build and maintain a digital platform from scratch.

Custom code was just not a realistic nor sustainable way to build what we needed. It was expensive and time-consuming. The tech was always breaking, and fixing it was constantly a bottleneck.

Our CEO decided that no-code was the way to go, and it was my responsibility to execute it.

We moved away from an architecture that was at least 90% custom code to one that was 90% no-code and only 10% custom.

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We actually use about 30 different no-code tools to manage different member spaces for stakeholders, and verification pathways for carers to access a platform to book a break. The tools are all integrated using Zapier and Integromat.

Here's a brief overview:

• We use Front for inbound and outbound communications and to manage referral pipelines
• Feedback management takes place on Herald
• Our cloud phone systems run on Cloud Talk
• We use Typeform a LOT!
• Beamer is a tool that provides updates and a newsfeed on our member spaces
• Pipedrive helps us manage pipeline
• Mailchimp for newsletters and ongoing communication
• We use Webflow for a frontend for our member spaces (carers, hospitality partners, community partners)
• Memberstack to manage these different member spaces
• Identity verification happens on SumSub
• Payments are processed through Stripe
• Knack is where our databases are maintained
• All this is held together using loads, and loads, of zaps

The economy of no-code supporting charities

"There's so much potential with no-code tools, especially within the charity/social sector. And since all charities are so underfunded, the impact no-code can have is immense!

That's what's already happening with Carefree, and it’s amazing.

We are planning on sending 6,000 carers on a break by the end of this year. And that just wouldn't have been possible without the economy of no-code tools.

The more I can share this potential with other charities and empower them to do the same, the better!"

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Read Joey's full story here.

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📚 More on the blog

🤹 Six skills you need to learn to start an online business

Without the ability to make, market, and sell, your business will likely fail. Unfortunately many budding entrepreneurs often lack at least one of these cornerstone skills. So what’s the antidote? Well there isn’t just one — there are six!

​Read the full post.

💼 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.

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📆 Events

✨ How to Build and Sell a Startup — This one-off workshop earlier this week saw our own Ben Tossell, Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia and MicroAcquire's Andrew Gazdecki discussing on what it takes to build and sell a startup.

​Catch the recording here.

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🧑‍🎓 Courses

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

Time is running out if you want to secure a spot on the upcoming cohort.

Take your idea and turn it into a tangible, profitable business. Build 5 projects in 5 weeks, including an app, a marketplace, a directory site and more. Understand the no-code tools landscape and the technicalities of automation, so you can choose and use the right tools with confidence, and build almost anything.

Pricing is $680 until August 23rd (tomorrow!); $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

🏆 How to design customizable charts in your low code app!, by Aakash Raghunathan.

"Watch and learn how to use the charts controls to build all sorts of interactive & flexible graphs on your no-code app! You can now build almost any graph you can imagine to cover all your use-cases like admin panels, 360 customer views, supply chain mapping & more!"

🏆 Newsletter subscription management with Netlify Forms + Airtable + Vero Newsletters, by Chris Hexton.

"Hi all 👋, I’m a founder at Vero. We’ve just released Vero Newsletters, a newsletter tool that enables you to connect to data stores like Airtable, Postgres (and others), query your data “in place” and send a newsletter. Most newsletter products, like Mailchimp, want to both store your customer data and send your newsletters. We’ve built something different."​
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🚀 Launching Startup PR Tracker - 350+ sites & communities to list your startup to improve visibility and SEO - for FREE!, by Harshala Chavan.

"Hey guys! This is my first hand at a side project made simply using Google Sheets and Buy Me a Coffee! Startup PR Tracker is a FREE Google Sheet that provides you: - curated access to 350+ directories, marketplaces, blogs, and communities where you can feature your website. - Track your Sign-Ups, Mentions, and Progress of listing - Checklist, case studies, hacks to refer - will keep updating."

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🗣️ Make our audience, your audience: 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 use our platform to tell your story.

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

​Tell your story.

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Cheers,
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️