App created for the common good.

The Wellbeing Directive

Portrait of the maker

Paul Harrison

Maker

Maker
Starter Stack
hours to build

Open source your no-code product to grow your audience for your SaaS product

What is it:

App created for the common good.

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: Opensource your glide app as a great way to market what you do. I think this is a great strategy by Paul to provide a way for schools to use. Schools are cash strapped, open source software allows them to benefit.

Side project marketing is a term that I have learned that I believe no-code is underutilized for. Because you can create applications very quickly using a tool like Glide. You can create unique value to your product by offering an app or a no-code service for free.

The way I would use this strategy is like Paul, create an app for free and provide it for a niche area. Have this free app or service sit adjacent to other services that you provide and use this as a lead generator. You stand a better chance at rising above the noise and getting noticed because it is not a traditional marketing tactic.

2. No-code tool feature: Glide apps horizontal scroll. This was a neat feature that I had not discovered before and did not know that Glide had the capability to do. Which is a horizontal scroll bar that allows for clickable content that opens up into a new page. I think that this feature is a must if you are using a Glide app, because if you have content that you want to display images, having a vertical scroll will be tiresome for the user to find what they are looking for.

3. Product Strategy: Value creation vs value capture - What do you want the user to do? Paul does a great job of clearly outlining that immediately at the top of the landing page. By giving a purpose to the user of what they can do which is join the community to get even more content.

I don't think this can be overstated how important it is to nail down what will your product do and what will your product ask for in return.

Many times when I meet with Makers, I analyze the v1 products and notice that this is not clearly stated. It's often confusing and the offer is jumbled and not clear.

The reason why this happens is we often try to do too much. As we begin to create our product our lack of experience and insecurity creates a bias in us that we have to add one more feature otherwise the user is not going to find my product helpful.

My recommendation is to take the exact opposite approach. Your risk as a side project no-code Maker is lack of time, lack of skills developing and need to build an audience. To reduce the risk of all three of those simultaneously is to segmentize your product and break it into smaller bite size products or single feature apps that are faster to produce, launch quickly to get feedback, can build upon or move on. And while you do this you will be attracting more people to your brand that you are building and will be mitigating the risk of building one massive thing that takes a lot of time. Because you are making a bunch of small bets over time that you will eventually hit on one or they will compound over time so that the sum of all of them is greater than the whole.

Through this way you can achieve breakout success.

Then once you have segmentized your product, you can clearly see what is the value creation and the value capture for each product? Now your work will have more clarity, more conversion and increase chance of success because your product is clear and it adds value.

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