How we scaled a no-code agency from $50k to +$500k in revenue in 1 year!

Hey folks, I just want to share with you how we were able to build a no-code service company combining design, product maker, and growth skills and scale it to +$500k. This is the Minimum.run story so far.

TL;DR 😴

1. Understanding our Customer Needs
2. Internationalization
3. Standardization
4. The team
5. No-code Toolkit
6. Marginal Gains
7. Customers
8. Community
9. CSAT

1 / Understanding our customer needs 🧠

Every day we learn how to use new tools and automations to add value to our customers.

We work with different types of customers: startups, scale-ups, venture builders, and corporate. They have different needs and it is our responsibility to understand their pains better than them to provide the right design and technologies.

Learn from every deal to improve conversions and results in the next project.

2 / Internationalization 🌎

Expanding to international markets helps us to continue growing not only in the number of projects but also increasing our margins. This requires a more qualified team and being able to work with different cultures, time zones, and languages.

In 2021, 20% of our customers were international and our main focus in 2022 will be the U.S. market.

3 / Standardization (Specialization of services) 🔑

The main key to grow and scale.

We started the business doing almost everything: landing pages, MVPs, product websites, automations, mobile apps, e-commerce, and any service that our customers were requiring.

Once we found out our product-market fit, we focused our efforts mainly on Product Marketing sites.

This helped us to standardize our offer and grow the team efficiently.

Standardization is allowing us to identify what tasks and roles are required to continue growing our services.

4 / Our team the key to our success 🤝

In the beginning, I just started working with my partners and one collaborator. But in order to scale we had to create the right structure and process based on the needs of our main customers and business model.

In our case, we were hiring based on projects needs until we found our Market Fit. Currently, the main part of the team are product designers and builders.

We are already 15 full-time profiles and 4 freelancers 🙌🏻

5 / Find the right no-code toolkit for your services 🤔

There are hundreds of nocode tools out there, we started trying many of them: Webflow, Softr, WordPress, Bubble, Shopify, BravoStudio, Landbot, Memberstack among many others.

After working with more than 20 product-marketing customers, we found common patterns on their pains (dependency of technology teams, speed, and flexibility).

This helped us to identify the best NoCode toolkit to help them satisfy their needs:

• Webflow
• Hubspot
• Arengu/Typeform
• Airtable
• Mailchimp/Sengrid
• GA/GTM
• Segment
• Amplitude/Mixpanel
• Hotjar
• Slack
• Integromat/Zapier (in case we need to add some additional automations)

6 / Marginal Gains (Always continuous learning) ⭐

We continue to build new MVPs, not for profitability but because we want to be NoCode and LowCode innovators and keep learning from different tools building products.

We rethink our tools based on what we find works best on each situation and how tools evolve aligned with our customers needs.

This also allows us to find gaps in the nocode industry and potentially build our own technology.

7 / Work with great customers 💥

In our portfolio we already have 3 startups incubated in Y Combinator (one of the best accelerators in the world led by Paul Graham).

This helps us to create a good reputation and be aspirational not only nationally but also at a global scale. At the same time, we learn from them about how to innovate in specific industries.

8 / The power of community, referrals, and recommendations 🤘

This year we added NoCodeHackers to the http://Minimum.Run family. With a strong focus on building Nocode community in Spanish. We are training the future Nocode Product Makers and we want to help them to be more efficient at their work.

Recommendations and community is our main sales engine, if you offer quality, customers will not only come back to you but they will also recommend your services to other industry peers. Everything is connected nowadays and your reputation is crucial.

9 / Measuring customers and team satisfaction 🪐

Every week we schedule a weekly meeting where we discuss the team's challenges across different projects and see what areas we can continue improving. This year we also added our customer satisfaction feedback review (https://www.minimum.run/project-feedback) so we can have our customer point of view.

Looking forward to 2022, our goal is to continue growing, finding, and training the best talent, and helping entrepreneurs and innovators (our customers) to build, experiment, and validate faster. And communicate better their value proposition and automating manual processes using the best NoCode technologies.

To the moon! 🚀

This post has been written by Jorge Lana, CEO at Minimum.run

We are writing a Handbook with our processes, so you can create your own agency, hope it will be ready in 2 weeks.

You can find more info about us on our website :)