🤯 $1.3m revenue with no-code tools! + 💸 New Causal tool-path

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📚 On the blog

🚀 How a tech executive crossed $1.3M in revenue with no-code businesses

Justin Welsh is a former tech executive turned entrepreneur. He coaches SaaS founders and sales leaders to accelerate recurring revenue toward $50M+ and has worked extensively with no-code tools to build businesses.

He tweeted recently how his one-person business had made a lofty $1.3m in revenue in just 810 days. He runs his business online, and doesn't use a lick of code.

Justin Welsh @JustinSaaS Last week my little one-person business crossed $1.3M in revenue. It took 810 days, I ran zero paid ads and operate at a ~98% margin. Here are the 14 steps of my strange journey: Hope it's helpful to someone. [🧵 thread] October 26th 2021 677 Retweets 5,611 Likes

Of course we were curious to find out more. Here’s how he did it!

"Hi, my name is Justin Welsh and over the last decade, I've helped build two $50M+ ARR companies, teams of 150+ people, and raise over $300M in venture capital. Then, in 2019, I completely burned out.

So, I walked away from my executive job at a fast growing startup in Los Angeles to work for myself. My goal was to completely redesign my life with more intention.

Over the last 2 years, I've built a number of one-person businesses."

Running an advisory business on Carrd and Airtable

"All of my businesses are built using no-code tools.

My advisory business, JW Advisory, leverages a Carrd template. I knew I wanted a simple, clean, user-friendly website solution, and Carrd is my go-to.

I use Airtable as a lightweight CRM to manage my pipeline and paid customer base. An Airtable form embedded on my Carrd site collects inquiries.

I love this because the form pipes the information directly into Airtable, where I use automation to move prospects from one stage to the next.

I've set up distinct stages that are each tied to Airtable automations. So, when I qualify a prospect, an email is automatically sent to the prospect including my Calendly link to book a call."

Selling a digital course with Gumroad and Teachable

"My digital products also all run on no-code solutions.

I build all of my product landing pages using Carrd with Gumroad widgets to sell the products on those landing pages.

Once someone purchases my course, for example, I then use Zapier to send them into the course in Teachable.

Because I've sold over $100k on Gumroad, I pay a minimal 3% which is great. Once inside of Teachable, users are prompted at the 50% mark and the conclusion of the course to leave a testimonial.

Rather than boring text testimonials, I've embedded the testimonial.to widget to inside of the Teachable course, allowing students to instantly record a video testimonial."

Running a private community using Slack and Outseta

"I use a ton of no-code for my private community, called Audience and Income. I use Carrd for the website and Outseta for nearly everything else.

Here's how it works: I built a form in Outseta which is connected to the website. This allows people to apply for the community, keeping standards high. Once they apply, they are stored as an applicant inside of the Outseta CRM.

Using Outseta's segmentation and email automation tools, I can review the applications, accept or reject the applicant, and based on those actions, emails are instantly sent to the applicant sharing our decision.

Once the user pays (again using a Gumroad widget), the Outseta email automation does two things: sends them an email with an invite to our Lu.ma community (where we have a member directory, host events, and have our resources folder) and invites them to our private Slack."

Justin's advice for creators

"The two biggest mistake I see creators making are:

1. Focusing on tools over product:

People spend too much time trying to find the perfect tools for their job before validating whether people actually want what they are creating. No-code tools make it so easy to validate an idea in 1 day. I'd recommend spending as little time and money on the first version of what you build, and instead focus on validating the idea with your audience.

2. Procrastinating:

I see too many creators not getting started. They want to read one more blog, listen to one more podcast, ask one more question or try one more tool. The answers you are looking for are all found when you get started."

​Read the full story.

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📚 More from the blog

☕ How a Zapier partnership manager built a coffee subscription business with Softr

No-code is constantly evolving, with newer tools, better features, and slicker automations making their way into the marketplace. Even if you’re working in no-code, there are still opportunities to learn and grow—that’s how we met Briana! She works at Zapier, and signed up for the No-Code Fundamentals course. Here’s her story!

​Read the full story.

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📺 Tutorials

💸 Tool-Path: Build a financial model with Causal

This tool-path will walk you through how to use Causal to build a financial model for a business to help forecast revenue, projects, and churn. Throughout these lessons, we will be building an interactive model for a SaaS company, but this tool-path can be applied to any subscription based business.

​View this tool-path.

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🧑‍🏫 Courses

Cohort 4 of No-Code Fundamentals kicked off last week and our students have been busy building and flexing their new no-code skills. Check it out! 👇

Makerpad @makerpad The Makerpad No-Code Fundamentals course has launched. Meet some of our members and what they will accomplish in the course 👇 November 4th 2021 14 Retweets 52 Likes

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Makerpad @makerpad This week in #MPNC4 we are building one-page websites. Here's what our students are going to build 👇 November 9th 2021 1 Retweets 12 Likes

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🚀 Community Projects

​Productized Service Directory with No-Code, by Jameson Campbell.

"Hi all! I've been really into the "Productized Service" business model lately. In short, Productized Services are standardized services sold like products, with clearly defined parameters and pricing. When you outline precisely what a customer will get and at what price, you can market and sell this “product” many times. So for inspiration, I created "Productize Shack". A collection of awesome productized services on the market."

​Modemagic 2.0 - PH Launch, by Sri Nikitha Thummanapalli.

"Hello folks! 👋 Show some support to Mason! 😀 After months of heads-down hustling, we'll be launching ModeMagic 2.0 by Mason on Product Hunt this Thursday aka 11th November. This is going to sound like a big favor, but it's my first time launching big on PH, so equal parts excited and nervous. 😊."​
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​Wanderers Book Club, by Patrick Finnigan.

"After hanging out in the Wanderers NFT discord, I noticed that the community kept recommending books to each other. So I knew I had to build something for them, I put together a Carrd site with Airtable embeds and sent off a tweet last night!! We now have 9 books submitted and this took about 10 minutes in total to setup."

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💁 Makerpad Advisor Spotlight

Makerpad Advisors are a select group of ambassadors that act as the voice of our students and community members. They are no-code advocates, are driven by supporting others, and are motivated to extend their knowledge in ways that drive impact.

This week we're shining the spotlight on Taylor Bozarth.

​Read Taylor's community intro post here.

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✨ Partners

​Outseta: Interested in building a membership site? The options can be overwhelming. Read more >

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💼 Jobs

​Product Manager (Founding Team) – Opsmate

​Product Owner- No Code App Builders – ServiceNow

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😍 Want to see your own story featured in this newsletter?

We're looking for more stories from our own community and beyond—tales of success (and failure) you've had using no-code tools. Whether you're building a business, forging a community, writing a newsletter, running a non-profit, or anything in between, we want to share it

​Read more.

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Cheers!
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️