🚀 $3m revenue on a $100/mo stack! + 👀 Get hired: New no-code jobs

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📚 On the blog

🚀 How Flexiple made $3 million with a no-code tech stack of $100/month

This story of building a successful business on using a few simple no-code tools is nothing short of inspiring.

"Hi, I'm Karthik Sridharan! I'm the co-founder and CEO of Flexiple.

We launched five years ago, but in the last year and a half, we've grown to 5x and have just hit $3 million in revenue."

From India's top business school to entrepreneurship

"I studied electrical engineering, and like many engineers in India, I ended up with a job in finance. I joined investment banking as an analyst in one of the ‘Big Four’ financial firms.
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But I just didn't feel like all the hours and all the effort had any impact at all.
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I decided to quit it and do an MBA, thinking it would give me the space to decide what I could do next.
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I got into the best business school in India, called IIM-Ahmedabad. In my first week, I was amazed at how the focus of the entire program was centered around interviews, CVs, internships – not running a business or entrepreneurship.
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I decided to bypass the entire placement program, got two batchmates on board, and set out towards an entrepreneurship journey!"

Connecting high-quality dev and design talent with the right clients

"Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr existed at that time, but they usually come with the assumption that you're low-quality or provide unreliable services.

We wanted to solve this problem by adding a layer of vetting to create a truly high-quality network called Flexiple."

"As far as industries go, we realized that the tech industry, in particular, had the biggest hiring gaps and needs. With the startup ecosystem booming, we believed a solution like ours would be really helpful.

We built Flexiple to be a freelancer network of specifically developers and designers. The nature of these two job profiles aligned with remote work, and tools made it easy for teams to work well asynchronously."

Getting the first $100,000 just on Google Sheets!

"For our business, we got the first $100,000 just by using Google Sheets! We had two sheets, one called ‘Companies’ and the other, ‘Freelancers’. We used to talk to people, note down their names and details, and then manually match companies to freelancers, send them emails, make invoices, and so on.
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We'd wanted make a very scalable product; but instead ended up with something very manual.

When these processes began getting too tedious, we decided to use no-code wherever we faced manual bottlenecks.
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We started with Airtable and Zapier, so we could collect data and move it into our CRM to trigger emails to our freelancers. This is where my no-code journey began!"

Connecting Airtable, Zapier, Integromat, and Memberstack

"Between these four tools, and multiple touch points, things were starting to break. That’s when I decided to move us to Bubble so that all of this could be under one roof.

Along with this, we also built a side-project called Scale. It's a free, open-source tool that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs access high-quality illustrations.

We have a few more no-code projects and the entire stack is very, very affordable. It still costs less than $100 a month and we're able to pull in a revenue of over $3 million."

My top lessons for other entrepreneurs

#1: Scalability shouldn’t always be the priority

"People often talk about the constraints of no-code and the issues with scalability. In my opinion, you just need to embrace it

Sometimes those constraints are a blessing in disguise, especially for companies in the early days of their launch.

When you have no constraints, you begin to focus on the wrong things and in the process, you lose sight of what you're actually trying to build.
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​#2: Think business model before tech

We made two products, spending about $5,000 each on them, and eventually had to junk them both. The main lesson I learned was that tech is not everything!

Always build a solution that;
(i) your customers want, and
(ii) works!
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Then use tech to scale that particular solution. Don't start the other way: building products that can scale then testing whether it actually solves the problem that you were initially trying to solve.
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​#3: Rome wasn’t built in a day! Start simple

You might use Uber or Airbnb and think ‘Okay, my first version of the product needs to be that good.’

It’s inspiring, but it's the wrong approach!

Those solutions have evolved over years to become that good. Take Flexiple for example — our first product was just on Google Sheets.

Once you’ve got an MVP in place, you should focus on marketing and distribution. Don't let that be an afterthought."

​Read the full story.

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📺 Tutorials

🧾 Tool-path: How to automate invoicing in Airtable

Four no-code tutorials teaching you how to automate invoicing in Airtable. Super useful if you manage clients and projects already in Airtable and want to streamline your invoicing process.

​View this tool-path.

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🚀 Community Projects

​Build dynamic filters, for FREE, by Elliott Zelinskas.

"On my last post, I shared that I had used Jetboost to add filters for a job board site I'm building at the moment. Then, I learned about Fin Sweet's attribute directory. This weekend I experimented building with Fin Sweet's attributes, and am super impressed. The responsiveness feels fast and clean, and it's FREE."

​Hi all, I am Shan!, by Shan S.

"I am a Marketer, new to the no-code community, and have recently started working with a no-code app SaaS company based in Germany https://www.openasapp.com (though I am based in Australia) So I am hoping I will discover and upskill myself in all things no-code!"

​Plug 'Gaps in Your Zaps' - Automate websites Zapier can't, by Yaseer.

"Hello everyone! I thought I would introduce our product, https://axiom.ai/, to the community, and share some of our learnings to get here"

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💼 Jobs

​Community Manager – Baserow

​Bubble Contractor – Anthroware LLC

​Bubble Developer – MyPocketCFO

​Junior No Code Coach – Coaching No Code Apps

​Growth Engineer – Stacked Collective

​Bubble Engineer – EcoMap Technologies

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🐦 Tweet of the Week

Softr @softr_io Excited to announce our $13.5M Series A round at @softr_io led by @mattturck at FirstMark Capital, and 35+ amazing angels, the world’s top minds in product, growth and community. 🎉🚀 We are building the world’s largest ecosystem for no-code apps. softr.io/blog/worlds-la… Softr raises $13.5M Series A We are excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13.5M Series A to create the world’s largest ecosyst... softr.io January 18th 2022 37 Retweets 273 Likes

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

If you have a great story to tell that you think the no-code community would be inspired to read, we'll publish it on our blog and feature it in this newsletter. Submit an outline here.

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Cheers!
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Ben & the Makerpad team ✌️