📱 Teaching Adalo to Syrian refugees + 👍 How to upvote in Softr!

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📚 On the blog

📱 How a former tech founder enabled Syrian refugees to build no-code apps

"Hi, I’m Barrett Nash! I'm a Canadian triplet who has been living mostly out of Africa since 2007.

I’ve always been a big believer in technology's ability to empower people and it seemed to me like Africa, with its exploding population, would be a logical place to focus my energy."

The startup idea: Creating safer rides in Rwanda

"Where I was living in Rwanda, they use motorcycle taxis to get around. They seem fun, but motorcycle accidents account for 80 percent of Rwanda’s road accidents.

My Kenyan friend and I had this idea for a safer Uber for African motorcycle taxis. The goal was to make transport safer and more accessible.

Literally out of the blue, we had the investor group called SOSV reach out to us, wanting to transform our pitch deck into a real company."

The launch of SafeMotos

"We called our company SafeMotos: A Safe Uber For African Motorcycle Taxis. We were based in Kigali, Rwanda in 2015 and expanded into Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019 (under the name CanGo). It was quite a ride.

We were the first mover in both markets, and managed to make every mistake imaginable in Rwanda.

Fortunately, we learned from those and did a much better rollout in Kinshasa. We went from launch to 5000+ trips per day in just 3 months!

We were ranked by Fast Company magazine as Africa’s 7th most innovative company, and became a leader in the African startup ecosystem. We were covered by National Geographic, The Guardian, and got some pretty incredible recognition."

From startup to no-code

"But then came more challenges and we decided to close shop while there was enough money in the bank to pay our employees severance—a rarity in Africa startup land.

I still had (and continue to have) this deep faith in how technology can be a force for good in the world. I had all these ideas of the tech I wanted to build, but I was not technical!

Thankfully, my former co-founder and current best friend, who is one of Africa's best devs, shared Adalo with me.

I really fell in love with the platform immediately and decided to spend my time during quarantine learning Adalo instead of playing Zelda on Switch.

I had never seriously considered I could make beautiful tech. Yet here I was, myself, on Adalo building apps that I thought I'd need 500K in the bank to be able to recruit a tech team just to reach an MVP."

Teaching Adalo to Syrian refugee students in Lebanon

"Inspired by the possibilities and opportunities to create amazing products without coding, I took to teaching!

A friend invited me to teach Adalo to some Syrian refugee students in Lebanon that she was working with as a part of Global Education Movement.

To my great pleasure, the committed students learned amazingly well. Today, several of my students are better than me at Adalo.

I put a team together with my students in Lebanon and we've launched a small startup, InfiniteUp, which is building rapid MVPs to deploy in the African market."

"I am now certain that no-code/low-code is crucial in me achieving my personal goal of helping technology unlock human potential at scale. With no-code, and platforms like Adalo, I really believe anyone can become a talented app builder.

The transition that we’re on the brink of is an extremely important one: anyone can create technology, instead of just consuming it."

​Read the full story.

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📚 More from the blog

🍄 Building a community of psychedelic professionals using no-code

No-code tools have been especially helpful in building communities. You can automate emails, sales funnel processes, and subscriptions via simple integrations, and there are great examples to follow. Here’s one: Mitchell Wilson built a community of psychedelic enthusiasts and professionals on Webflow, Circle, ConvertKit, and a few other awesome no-code tools. What’s more, he got it funded too!

​Read the full story.

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📺 Tutorials

👍 How to add upvoting in Softr

Learn how to enable upvoting functionality on list collections in Softr. All you need is a Softr account and an Airtable base to create an upvoting system for your users.

​View this tutorial.

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🧑‍🏫 Courses

Enrollment for No-Code Fundamentals cohort 5 is now OPEN 👏👏. Onboarding week kicks off January 17th 2022. Early birds get $400 off!

>> Get your seat <<

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🤩 eBook: A Quick Guide to Launching a Business with No-Code NEW

We're super excited to announce the release of our second eBook — a step-by-step guide to help you build the technical structure for any online business, without the need for code.

​Get your copy for free here!​

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🚀 Community Projects

​Integrating Stripe with your No-Code App, by Jamie Kane.

"This is part 2 of a video tutorial series I have made while experimenting with Stripe and how to best use it in a no-code way and integrate it with your no-code app."​
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​Calling all digital nomads!, by Héctor Reyes.

"Over the last 15 months of exploring as a DN, I struggled with how stressful planning my next stop was. I created a template using Coda for digital nomads to centralize their inspirations, itineraries, expenses, and more in one place. I'm launching today -->"

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💼 Jobs

​Develop Google Sheets Scripts + Generate PDFs – Closer

​Senior Product Manager – Mason

​Nocode Video Instructors – RecreateApp

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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 ✌️