Breaking out of an accounting career by building a portfolio of no-code products and services

Kieran Ball tried and failed to learn how to code. Then, he struggled to find a technical cofounder. And these failures led him right to no code.

He doubled down, building several no-code SaaS products, a newsletter on the topic, and a no-code SaaS boilerplate called Bullet Launch.

Now, no code makes him $5k+ per month, plus what he brings in from no-code freelancing.

Here's Kieran on how he did it. 👇

A lackluster employee

I don’t think I knew what an entrepreneur was until I was in my 20s. No one I knew was doing it. So I followed the path laid out for me and ended up as an accountant.

I wasn’t the best employee. I didn’t like having a boss. I didn't like the lack of autonomy. I didn't like living according to someone else's schedule. I didn’t like working on small tasks that meant nothing in a 70,000 person company. And I didn’t like being pigeon holed into doing just one type of specialized work.

Another big factor is ownership. Earning a salary was convenient and easy, but I knew the bulk of the value I was creating was going to the company and, ultimately, its shareholders. That’s the way the system works. If you’re not worth significantly more to the company than it’s paying you, then it wouldn’t be employing you.

Dipping a toe into indie hacking

In 2008, I read The 4-Hour Workweek and got hooked on the idea of selling digital products online.

I remember seeing an app called IDoneThis which just emailed your team members and asked them what they’d done that day and then collated their replies. Simple apps like that seemed so achievable, so I tried learning to code using Codecademy and other tutorials. But for some reason, my laptop’s dev environment would just stop working all the time. I never gave up, but I never reached a point where I could ship an app either.

I tried finding a tech cofounder but, ultimately, my ideas were terrible — mainly social networks — and I knew nothing about marketing. Thankfully, I never had the conviction to invest a lot of time or money in any of my ideas, as they would all have failed.

Doubling down on no code

I think the whole concept of no code SaaS products is overlooked by folks who only care about the tech stack and don’t look at the business fundamentals underneath it.

In 2019, I came across a no-code app builder called GlideApps on Product Hunt and it blew my mind. No code was what I needed. I launched a couple of MVPs but quickly hit Glide’s limitations.

Then, I found Bubble.io and was instantly hooked. It was so much more flexible and powerful than any other tools I’d found. I was reasonably technical at this point, so I had a decent understanding of how apps worked, and Bubble just made sense to me.

I started out building the simplest functional page, and then just started working on a SaaS project, learning as I was going. Bubble has an amazing community and forum so the answers to any problems I hit upon were readily available.

Within a couple of months, I’d built my first full SaaS product, a video testimonial tool before they were trendy.

The product failed. I didn't market it and my initial users just didn’t use it. I assumed video testimonials just weren’t going to be a thing and moved on. Turns out I was wrong, as a year later, Damon Chen launched Testimonials.to and made a killing.

Becoming a no-code freelancer

I kept building SaaS projects and then abandoning them because I was too much in the "builder" mindset and not at all thinking like a founder. But with every build, I learned new skills, so I soon quit my job and became a freelancer for one of the biggest Bubble agencies.

This required me to learn their way of building and, for the first time, have my apps reviewed by professionals. This was a brilliant experience as I learned a lot of best practices and grew in confidence. In fact, my current boilerplate project uses a lot of the best practices that I learned there.

Anyway, I was so excited about building with Bubble that I started recording tutorials and courses to teach others how to do it. A significant proportion of my income started coming from that instead of freelancing, so that freed up time for more SaaS projects.

One SaaS became a small success. It’s called Yep.so — a lightning fast landing page builder for validating ideas. I grew it to $700 MRR, but growth stagnated and I ended up selling it for $25k. It’s recently been sold again, which is pretty cool.

A no-code boilerplate

Currently my main product is a SaaS boilerplate called Bullet Launch. It helps no-coders and visual developers — i.e. people who have technical skills but don’t know how to code — to launch their SaaS projects much faster. It comes with a huge amount of detailed documentation and videos so it’s kind of a course and a boilerplate in one.

This idea was brewing for a long time, as I continually found myself wasting time building the same basics into every SaaS project. Then, late in 2023, Bubble introduced a new feature which made it possible to detach reusable elements, which finally made it possible to build your own functional UI components to reuse across an app.

I was also aware boilerplates were becoming increasingly trendy and, of course, I couldn’t help but notice Mark Louvion’s success with Ship Fast.

I know boilerplates have become a bit of an indie hacker cliché. But in the no-code world, they're actually quite rare and there's a real need for them. I've seen some amazing products built with Bullet Launch, usually in an interesting and underserved niche where few traditional developers exist. Here's a good example - a brand consultant who built a SaaS to solve a problem for his existing clients.

Bullet Launch is a one-time purchase rather than a recurring revenue product. I originally charged $199, but I put it up to $249 a few months ago.

It's built with Bubble with built-in integrations for Open AI, Postmark and Loops for emails, and Stripe and Lemonsqueezy for subscriptions.

I launched it on the 8th of March this year. Since launch, it’s made $3.3k/mo on average, after Bubble marketplace fees. 

I also have a few other projects:

• Create With: An AI + no code podcast, newsletter, and conference. It's still pretty new so all revenue goes right back into the company.

•  The NoCode Solopreneur: A newsletter with 4.5k subscribers where I write about building businesses with no-code tools. This is the top of my funnel, so it isn't monetized.

• Course sales: This brings in about $2k/mo on autopilot.

• Freelancing: The rest of my income comes from freelancing, I do about 10 hours a week.

• And I'm working on a couple of SaaS projects, but nothing worth showing yet.

Distribution is everything

When people say “distribution is everything”, don’t ignore them and carry on building. It really is the most important thing. It is also much harder than you think and requires real time and dedication to learn. If you want to build that successful SaaS, focus on growing your marketing skills.

My marketing has been primarily on X and through my email newsletter, with a small amount on LinkedIn. Since 2019, I’ve built up 30k followers on X who know me for posting about no code, indie hacking, and SaaS. On LinkedIn, I have 1.3k followers. My newsletter has 4.5k subscribers.

A no-code SaaS boilerplate fits well with my existing content and makes it easy for me to weave it into my narrative. This makes a big difference to me as I don’t enjoy trying to contrive ways to promote products.

Social media marketing

I just post updates about new features I’ve built into it, screenshots of parts I’m particularly proud of, or anecdotes about what people are building with it.

I try to post about it at least once per day on Twitter. I do worry people will get sick of hearing about it, but realistically, only a small number of people see each post so they aren't being bombarded.

Recently I set up a Twitter profile for Bullet Launch so I can tag @usebulletlaunch instead of including the URL in posts, as URLs decrease reach.

I’ve noticed that the posts about software that do the best tend to have beautiful screenshots attached, so I try to attach nice images when I can get them. People also respond well to short videos. I use this amazing indie app called Screen Studio for my videos.

Here are a couple of examples

https://x.com/nocodelife/status/1800157154696966354

https://x.com/nocodelife/status/1801256182738309324

I’ve cross-posted a few of these to LinkedIn too, and they usually do seem to lead to a sale.

Newsletter marketing

I also added a footer to my newsletter which I borrowed from Justin Welsh’s newsletter.

It says “When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help you…” and lists the boilerplate and my Bubble course. Generally, I find I get at least one or more sales per newsletter I send.

Optimize for the long game

My favorite indie hacking quote is from Courtland Allen. It goes something like this: “Everyone has a successful company in them, the only variable is whether they can keep going long enough to find it”.

Since you don’t know when it will come, my advice is to optimize your process for the long game. It’s the difference between joining the gym for a few months versus a complete healthy lifestyle change.

I’ve seen a lot of people come and go in the community. They get excited, launch a load of things, then get disillusioned and eventually go back to a normal job. I plan to keep trying and failing until I succeed.

Start by thinking “What do I need to put in place to keep this up for at least the next 10 years?”

This may mean staying in a day job you don’t love, or reducing living expenses and working part time.

It will also mean finding ways to consistently test and shut down ideas with minimal expenditure of time, effort, and emotional energy.

And, ultimately, it means you have to make the journey enjoyable for yourself.

I had an interesting exchange with Ben Tossell, the no-code OG who sold Makerpad and founded Bens Bites. He pointed out that time isn’t actually the main factor of success — it’s the number of attempts.

If you’re someone who spends a year on each attempt, finding success will probably take you much longer than someone who spends a month. This is why no-code (and boilerplates) make so much sense.

What's next

So that's how I approach it — long-term thinking. My number one goal for the past 10 years is to launch and grow a successful indie SaaS product. If I could build a SaaS to $50k MRR, I would consider that goal achieved.

Apart from that, I just want to spend more time with my family, take nice holidays, and enjoy life.

You can follow along on X and my newsletter, or check out Bullet Launch and createwith.com.