Creating a no-code app to help with social justice

What is it:

We are committed to positive change by recognizing companies taking action against racial injustice - and holding them accountable.

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: No-code colab - Initial vision created by Edmund Amoye and I collaborated with Ash @ModernAfflatus and Kieran Ball. The advantage of no-code is speed to market. This stack proves that you can go from idea to market in a matter of days. What I like about this stack is how effective it is in adding value and capturing value. Further, what's different about this project is that 4 Makers collaborated asynchronously within the tools. You could not easily accomplish this with a coded application. This is a unique advantage no-code allows because the tools enable sharing and live collaboration at the same time.

The way we structured this is the following:
1. Brainstormed problems and opportunities that we saw
2. Ideated around how might be best to solve this and score effort with potential impact
3. Didn't go out and build it, but created a landing page with basic value prop and value capture - email
4. Launch on twitter and product hunt to gauge interest and feedback from users to see what the reaction is

The lesson for me here is how we as a team were able to collaborate around something and the tools we used allowed for any of us to fill in an contribute. Normally the assignments in a group are for skills that are very different. Project manager, product manager, marketer, designer, developer. With no-code there is a convergence of doing all of these. When you make and launch with no-code you are learning how to be a generalist or jack of all trades. Then once you hook into something with some traction you can seek outside help from professional or experts on skills that you do not have.

But in regards to this project it allowed us to all contribute by being able to all do any part of this project. We essentially all could fill any gaps needed for the project and that is why were were able to ship so fast < 1 week. Because there was no deep technical need, and because many of the tools like Carrd come with great design, we were able to create a good enough V1 and ship it.

2. Product Strategy: Making things is about experimenting. This project went from idea to launch in < 1 week. I am not a fan of the maker porn present about launching in one day. What the point I am trying to make is that the normal constraints that you have when making and launching something begin to disappear. Because you can now generally do all things needed to make something without needed a deep expert knowledge skill set.

What I hope no-code can do overall is create a belief that anyone can make something. Because creating is something that we all have the ability to do and all should experience. And if no-code can democratize creating digitally, then the next obstacle getting in the way is fear of failure, rejection and making something that nobody cares about.

We as a community need to embrace experimenting. I wouldn't say embrace failure, but experimenting and creating side projects so that we can learn from it.

Recently, I was talking with another Maker, Sharath and he mentioned a saying from Naval: "Before you become a founder you need to be a Maker."

This is so true because being a Maker at its essence teaches you so much about adding value and capturing value.

3. No-code tool feature: Airtable forms - Now that the project is live, I would have changed how we implemented the Airtable form. Because the form is linked from the main page the load time is really long. A better way to implement this is by creating a separate page anchored from the Carrd landing page and then embed the Airtable form within it.