🔥 The No-Code Accelerator + 👀 New Super & Airtable tutorials!

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📚 On the blog

🤔 How a self-taught engineer built a Notion-powered knowledge base tool

Today we're talking to Dominik Sobe, a maker whose self-taught coding skills helped him build a Notion-powered knowledge base tool for other no-coders.

"I’m an information systems grad student and a self-taught software engineer.

I fell in love with the concept of bootstrapping and indiehacking. I’m currently bootstrapping multiple side-projects with a focus lately on no-code.

My goal is to become ramen profitable by the end of my degree this September, so I can start focusing full-time on growing my projects."

Spotting a gap in the market

"I’m particularly interested in trying to make software more accessible and easy to use.

The project I’m currently focusing on is called HelpKit — a no-code tool that turns Notion pages into a professional knowledge base.

There are already a few knowledge base softwares out there to help you improve your customer support.

And while most of them are certainly doing a good job, are they actually making use of the best content management system in the world?

I have been using Notion for a few years now. It's an amazing tool for storing and organizing all of my company's knowledge and documentation.

I wanted to be able to expose everything to my customers. Sure, I could just publish our Notion page on their own but that might have come across as unprofessional. The Notion URL, distracting links pointing to Notion and the lack of customizability are just a few disadvantages.

I didn't want to leave Notion. But I also wanted it to feel similar to tools such as Intercom or Zendesk.

Since I couldn't find the right solution, I built HelpKit."

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Knowledge bases are here to stay

"Unless you have built a flawless product (congratulations 🤩), your customers will always have questions.

I learned the hard way that they want to get immediate help when they need it most.

A knowledge base can provide all the information that your customers need in one place. It can range from FAQs about your product/service, common issues and their solutions, videos with tutorials on how to do things and more.

So whenever I shipped a new product, I had to either tediously build my own help center or use a dedicated software.

Believe me when I say, I have tried every knowledge base software on the market. None of them resonated with me."

Testing product-market fit with no-code tools

"HelpKit’s been built with custom code in Nuxt and Node. But the pre-launch website was using a couple of no-code tools in order to find out if there was a product-market fit.

I used Gumroad for early payments, Typeform for gathering feedback and Zapier for handling some logic that made it easy to follow up potential customers."

Dominik's advice for other makers

"As almost every Indiehacker knows, building a product is only half part of the game. The other, arguably more important part is marketing.

Getting initial traction is tough and there is no magic formula for it. What helped me the most is building in public on Twitter. Constantly sharing my progress on HelpKit gained initial interest and slowly the Notion community picked it up and started sharing it as well.

This helped me a lot getting to the point right now. There’s still a lot of room to grow, so I’m excited for what the future holds."

​Read the full story.

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📚 More from the blog

📲 How a team of Adalo experts built a business selling app components

No-code has made room for innovation and interesting business ideas – here’s one that we love! Meet CompLab, a marketplace for Adalo components.

​Read the full story.

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📺 Tutorials

👉 How to use the website builder in Super

The Builder from Super.so is a new drag and drop website builder for Notion. This tutorial will walk you through how to use the Builder to create beautiful layouts and Super.so to customize the site. View this tutorial.

👉 Set up conditional logic for Airtable automations

This tutorial is an overview of how to set up a basic automation and conditional action automation. View this tutorial.

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🧑‍🏫 Courses

ICYMI, we've launched a new course! The No-Code Accelerator is an async, 4-week course teaching no-code basics. Ideal for busy people. Perfect for anyone needing a quick route into no-code. Kicks off February 14th.

​Learn more.

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🚀 Community Projects

​🗃️ Asynchronous Communities Directory, by Bastien.

"Hello Makers 👋 To practice on Softr I built this application which is a directory of asynchronous communities. https://async.softr.app/ So here it is, you can add your community if you want to be listed in this directory. The advantage is that you can be found thanks to the filter system."

​Coda vs Notion, by Matthew Busel.

"With an assist from our favorite Notion expert Tem (optemization.com) (🙌), I wrote up a deep-dive comparison of Coda vs. Notion. Hope it's useful for anyone that hasn't had a chance to use both."

​Hello everybody!, by Kamil.

"I'm Kamil, a Senior Full Stack Developer currently working for Mitsubishi in Japan. I've joined MakerPad a few days ago, so this is a bit late welcome post ;). Currently, I'm working on remote job board https://remoteindex.co, where you can find a dozen of new JavaScript, Go and WordPress jobs. Please follow my posts for my journey updates."

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💼 Jobs

​Cloud Infrastructure Engineer – Bryter

​Marketplace builder – Wisdom

​Growth Engineer – Stacked Collective

​Bubble Engineer – EcoMap Technologies

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🐦 Tweet of the Week

Ben Tossell @bentossell We're testing a new cohort format, perfect for busy people - Build your next business idea 💡 Using a brand new curriculum @makerpad 4 weeks, 4 modules, all async. 🎉 Live kick-off 📝 Project assignments 👥 Support & accountability 💻 Showcase makerpad.co/cohort-courses… The No-Code Accelerator Course A 4-week, async cohort-based program to bring you up to speed on no-code basics, and get you buildin... makerpad.co January 27th 2022 8 Retweets 27 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 ✌️