🥷 The freelance designer's toolkit + 🪄 Creating Webflow Magic

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📚 On the blog

🥷 How a designer built an all-in-one freelancer toolkit on Bubble

This is the story of Sylvain Naessens, a freelance product designer who used his own experience and no-code knowledge to build a solution that helps other designers get more done in less time. 🙌

"I discovered the world of product design while launching my first startup, and less than one year ago I started to learn no-code.

I began first with Airtable, then Webflow, and finally Bubble.

As a freelancer, you’re often bombarded with tedious tasks that keep you from focusing on what you love to do — like invoicing, income and project tracking, rate setting, etc.

I built a toolkit for myself to help solve this issue. Then a few months ago, I decided to share it with other freelance designers to help them become more productive and grow their business."

Introducing Ninja Designer

"I called this toolkit Ninja Designer, an all-in-one toolkit for freelance designers. It's a niche I knew pretty well!

Ninja Designer provides a single place where you can find all the tools you need for your freelance design business. From invoicing, to project management, rate calculator and more.

It's the first no-code SaaS I've ever built.

At the moment, 150+ beta testers are using Ninja Designer. I plan to release more features in the next months, like a job board and an image search engine."

Building with Bubble

"I used Bubble to build Ninja Designer. I chose Bubble because I think it's the best no-code tool to launch SaaS products.

I'm not gonna lie to you, Bubble has a learning curve, and it's the reason why communities such as Makerpad or the Bubble Forum are very helpful.

Here's the approach that I used to build Ninja Designer:

• I listed all the core features I needed: login, signup, invoicing, to do lists and more
• I used Makerpad's tutorials such as Airbnb and Instagram clones to better understand Bubble and its logic
• I went through all the available tutorials on Bubble blog that were relevant to the features that I needed to develop for my app. For example this tutorial to build a Quickbooks clone

Challenge 1: getting the architecture right

"When you build a SaaS app, you build what we call a single page app: one sidebar menu, one header, one content area.

With Bubble you can build this type of app in two ways: one single page app architecture or a multi-page app that fakes a single page navigation.

I chose the single page architecture for performance and UX benefits. But in Bubble, with a single page app you put all your designs and workflows in one page and at the end it can be a REAL MESS.

You often end up spending hours to understand how your app is organized.

If I had to do it again, I would definitely choose the multi-page architecture, so each core feature will have its own page with its own designs and workflows."

Challenge 2: marketing

"Marketing takes time and a lot of effort! I'm not full-time on Ninja Designer, so I have to focus on just a few channels. Slack has been my best acquisition channel so far.

Here’s what I’ve found: to get your first users you must have a simple acquisition strategy. What are your quick wins? Where can you quickly get access to your target? I didn’t have time to do detailed SEO which is why I put content marketing aside and focused on Slack.

I used the “small ask” trick. Instead of being spammy I just asked if freelance designers on Slack could complete a quick survey in order to understand their pains.

In the survey I asked them if they wanted to sign up for the beta for free. And guess what? I got more than 150 signups!"

​Read the full story.

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📚 More from the blog

👨‍💻 How an engineer turned his interests into no-code projects on Bubble

When you’re thinking of a no-code product idea, a good place to start is with your passions or hobbies. That way you’ll have an extra dose of motivation and interest in building it out. When we found Paul Beresuita, we were immediately impressed with how much of his interests had turned into fantastic no-code projects and tools.

​Read the full story.

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📺 Tutorials

✍️ Tool-path: Launch a publication with Ghost

Ghost enables creators to publish, share, and grow a business around their content. First, we will set up a newsletter digest using a Ghost template. Then, we'll explore editing, publishing, and enabling paid member-only content. This tool-path was built by our Creator in Residence, Tessa.

​View this tool-path.

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Setting up Webflow for Magic.link

Learn how to use Magic to set up a password-protected blog site in Webflow. View this tutorial.

How to integrate Magic.link with Webflow

The second part of our Magic.link tutorial. View this tutorial.

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🧑‍🏫 Courses

Enrollment for No-Code Fundamentals cohort 5 is still open, but only for another couple weeks. Early-bird pricing ends January 11th, so if you want to join our best-selling cohort and save yourself $400, now's your chance!

​Find all details, FAQs, pricing and more here.

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🚀 Community Projects

​UX/UI Tips for Non-Designers, by Rebecca Reich.

"Our Head of Product Design is hosting a quick webinar on UX/UI tips specifically for those of us who are not designers by trade. This is our first in the series and we hope to have more soon. See you there!"

​Recommendation for implementing double-sided referral program? e.g. Get £50 for referring a friend, your friend gets £50 too, by Yee Hung.

"Looking for recommendations on how to implement this. The simple way is to pay someone like GrowSurf or Rewardful, but is it worth trying to DIY this using no-code tools i.e. linking Stripe with Zapier and the member database to? Any advice appreciated!"​
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​Internal Tool Product Management for Dummies, by Luke Walker.

"When 2021 was slated as "The Year of No-Code", I sat in anticipation to see what would actually manifest. One year later, the verdict is in: no-code is BIG and it's here to stay."

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💼 Jobs

​Growth Engineer – Nomad Cooks

​Content Editor – Scribe

​Hiring across Engineering, Product Design, & Data – Stacker

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🐦 Tweet of the Week

Ben Tossell @bentossell Send me your best no-code tik-toks and we'll hire you @makerpad twitter.com/clokehead/stat… Andy Cloke @clokehead There is a MASSIVE opportunity for someone to do Airtable/ no-code TikTok videos. Look at the difference between the results for ‘Airtable’ vs ‘Excel’. I wish I could dance. pic.twitter.com/U42hoMpPoC January 6th 2022 2 Retweets 19 Likes

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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 ✌️