Creating a no-code digital info product with Airtable

What is it:

Modern Day Jobs - 100 ways to make money online

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: Ideas - If you don't have an idea then what can you do? I really like this product because it can help you find ideas worth solving that people would pay money for.

Find work, understand customers pain points. Create solutions then productize those solutions. But even if you do that you still won't have the distribution set up to get your product out to people who are interested in buying it.

So then what do you do?

Recently I saw a tweet by a prominent VC who gave Twitter advice about if you do not have an idea join a company and learn to be an operator. For some folks this might be the smart option financially. But I cannot help but strongly disagree.

Reason is coming up with ideas is like a muscle. And like a muscle you can train it. Here is what I have observed and experienced to help find ideas worth pursuing. It's a framework that has worked for me:

1. If you don't have any ideas (good is subjective no idea is good until it becomes validated through making a thing that people actually use or pay money for) then that means you have not experienced pain points in a niche or market.

2. Time to get your hands dirty. A great way to do this is to aggregate information and collect it into a single resource.

3. What do you find interesting or what niche would you like to understand more so that you can be a better Maker? For example, I observed a behavior that I noticed on Twitter. People shared their tech stacks of how they made their products. So I took this behavior and started documenting it. I then created a list of about 25 stacks and that's how Side Project Stack started.

4. What unique insight did you gain from documenting this. What trends did you notice that you can distill down into a framework, product or tool that you can productize your knowledge?

5. For example I created Get Stackd. A former number 1 Product Hunt is based on the data points from all the stacks that I was collecting. It answered the question what are the best no-code tools to use for your idea?

This became a hit. I then became known for this one thing. There are other examples like Janel of BrainPint who created NewsletterOS. She subscribed to dozens of newsletters all of the best ones, then wrote about what she observed. She then productized that and sold a Notion product to capture all that value into one ordered system.

6. Then once you create a tool, book, course, template, etc, and you start sharing information freely you begin to gain an audience. Once you have an audience you can talk to people to better understand their pain points and create a product that helps them.

7. It's through this that you can find your idea. Only once you understand what is the pain point, and the value inflection point do you then have an idea to solve for it.

2. Product Strategy: Simple starter stack. What I love about this stack is that it doesn't need to be complex or difficult to give value. You can aggregate information and put together and give away freely to grow an audience and/or use as a way to generate sign up for your product.

Bram is an OG no-code Maker and launches many projects. Many of which do not make money directly. But because he has his value capture set up, an online course to make and launch with no-code. He is able to use the mini launching of no-code projects as a way to generate views and grow his audience. As his audience grows so does his distribution for his online course.

Because he is using a simple stack like this he is able to rapidly create something without spending time on building it. Thus giving him an advantage around gathering information, and shipping it.

Many have heard of 12 startups in 12 months by Pieter Levels. This is the idea, using projects launched in rapid succession around a central thesis or theme will generate a ton of good will, value for people who follow you and eventually a percentage of those will buy from you.

3. No-code tool feature: Airtable database and Airtable forms. Elaine and Bram uses Airtable forms to collect any submissions for places to earn money from modern day jobs. This feeds automatically into their Airtable base. From here you can either have it feed the database automatically or you can manually add it to make sure that it is verified content.

In a way this is a web app. In its simplest form, you can add a resource and have it appear dynamically in the list.

It may not be the prettiest presentation but this is the most effective way to ship something quickly. There are other tools that you can use if you'd like to make a cleaner presentation, like Pory.io or Softr.io who use Airtable as a backend to display content in the front end display of the website.