How I made $22k in 6 weeks with no outreach and a site built on Bubble

Hey all,

I’m JT and I run the nocodefounders.com community. In case you’re not familiar, NCF is a Slack community of founders who are building businesses without code. I started the community just over a year ago to scratch my own itch of being able to connect with people like myself - non-technical founders who are building internet businesses. After launching, it very quickly grew to a small community of engaged founders who were in the same position as me and looking for a support network. I focused heavily on engagement rather than growth and didn’t pursue monetisation at all in the first few months. I then built a website for the community which was pretty much just a blog with and then interviewed founders from the Slack and posted the interviews there as a way to grow the community organically.

After a few months, I started to look at the different monetisation options. Initially my plan had been to grow the audience to 1000 members and then charge any further members a monthly fee to be part of the community. As the community got close to the 1000 mark though, it felt wrong to restrict the growth by adding a payment wall and I didn’t want to prevent people from being part of what was happening, so I scrapped that idea.

I then looked at the B2B side by partnering with no-code companies and felt that could be a good approach so I started setting up calls with no-code platforms that were already part of the Slack and picking their brains to find out what their biggest challenges were and how they felt No Code Founders could help them achieve their goals. This allowed me to narrow down the areas that the NCF community could drive real value for these partners and I was then able to structure those benefits into packages to offer to platforms that were interested in partnering. I then reached out to a few companies and offered the service and managed to sell a few of those at the end of 2019. I gathered feedback from them and tweaked the offering as I went.

I wasn’t happy with the lack of connection between the Slack and the website so I started to explore how I could improve this and the best way to do this to drive value for our partners and members. After a lot of research, I decided the best way to do this was to build out my own platform that could showcase all aspects of the no-code movement, from the tools to the startups and everything in-between. At the end of 2019, I had challenged myself to build 5 startups using Bubble.io and had built projects like a blogging platform and a no-code tool directory. I was able to take the functionality from those projects and add it directly into the new site which speeded things up a lot and gave me some nice SEO juice by directing those domains over to the new site. Even with those shortcuts though, it was still a mega build and took about 8 weeks of pretty solid work to get finished.

Ok, next up was the beta launch. So, there was a lot of value in the new site which seemed potentially too valuable to offer as a free service to users, so I decided to trial a freemium model by allowing anybody to create an account and add content free of charge, but then restricted some of the more advanced features such as being able to filter startups by various parameters. I decided to go with a lifetime model of £99 rather than monthly/yearly payments initially as it felt like a fairer model to offer to existing community members. I then started sending out beta invites in small batches to existing NCF members and started a waitlist that users could join on the site. I released a small number each day and fixed bugs as they were reported. I found that around 5% of the invites were converting to a lifetime membership. By the end of the beta, around 700 people had joined the waitlist and they also got the invites. All in all, we had around 70 people pay for the lifetime membership which brought in $9k. I also created a partner-with-us page for the new site which included key details about our partnership options and the benefits of partnering with us. This page seemed to get quite a lot of traffic, despite only being in the footer menu. I got an influx of requests from tools who were looking to partner with us and I set up calls with any that felt like a good fit for the audience. The conversion rate for partners was extremely high, maybe around 80% and this brought in another $13k. I didn’t do any outreach for any of these sales for either partnerships or memberships. The focus all along has been to provide value and that continues to be the focus. Now that we’re out of beta, I plan to be a bit more intentional with outreach whilst maintaining our mission of delivering value to the no-code community as a whole.

For anybody looking to replicate something similar, I think the starting point is to develop the community first. This is even true for non-community products such as SaaS tools where if you can build a community around the product, you can develop your product around their needs and actively test the product in a live market. Then, when you come to launch your product, you will already have a loyal fanbase of evangelists see to spread the word, as well as your first paying customers.

The other key takeaway is the importance of listening to your audience. I wouldn’t have got to this point without setting up countless calls with platforms in the space and community members to help me understand their needs and then developing the No Code Founders platform around the feedback I received from them. I also used Twitter polls for lots of quick decisions - not the most thorough way of gathering feedback but an easy way to help users shape the future of the community.

If you have any questions, let me know below or feel free drop me a DM on Twitter ✌️