Welcome 198 new subscribers👯♀️ to No-Code Exits. The newsletter that shares every week a story of how a No-Code Maker went from 0 to acquired.
How is your week going? Working on some cool No-Code Projects?
👀 Katt's Week
We crossed this weekend 2000 subscribers. Thank you everyone for all the sharing and the good vibes!
I love how with Substack, you can help each other grow with 1 click. Let me know if you have a newsletter on Substack.
I’m getting started on LinkedIn, all advice is welcome and let’s connect. 😁.
One of the outcomes of the audience survey I did here, was that you would like to read more in detail about No-Code tools I use with specific examples. So I’m trying something new. 👇 It is however time-consuming (but fun!), so would love to have your feedback if I should keep doing it or not.
🐹 Tool Experiment
I build something with a No-Code Tool and summarize my findings.
Name Softr
What Turn your Airtable data into a simple yet powerful web app
Best for web apps, client portals and internal tools
I built A job board with filters, search function, possibility to add paid job posts (Stripe integration), custom form to add a job post and price option page.
I liked The easy to use interface, building blocks so you don’t need to start from scratch, easy to add user accounts, gated content and powerful integrations (like Stripe), amazing customer support, great free plan with custom domain
📣 Cool Classifieds
Social proof adds instant credibility for your product. I try to add it on every landing page I make. My go-to tool for that is Famewall. Easy and looks great!
Pricewell is a No-Code solution to easily implement Stripe subscriptions on your website built with Webflow, Bubble, Wordpress etc.
The AI innovations are wild. I read the Bot Eat Brain newsletter to keep track of all the cool AI products that are launched every week.
🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Nithin & Karthik, tell us a little bit about yourself.
We're Nithin & Karthik, the makers behind Drotion. Prior to this, we were both working as digital marketers at our regular 9-5 job. We came across Notion one day, and after using it for a while, fell in love with the Notion community on Twitter. We noticed a lack of templates for marketers & creators at that time. So we started NotionChefs and started building marketing tools & templates for Notion.
Which product did you build?
The single biggest challenge we faced as Notion Creators was preparing for the launch. After we created a notion template, it used to take 1-2 weeks of time to create a landing page for it, host it and then test it before launching. And it was too much of a stressful process.
We wanted to make building landing pages easier for creators without any design or technical experience needed. And that's how we got the idea for Drotion. With Drotion, you can build a landing page for your products right inside your notion workspace. You just need to drag & drop the components you like and you will have your landing page ready in less than 10 minutes of time.
Which No-Code tools did you use to build the product?
It took 30 days for us to build Drotion. We used:
Notion: We used Notion blocks (Synced Block) for the builder. And the components (Hero sections, pricing sections etc) are designed using Notion callouts and text formatting features.
Apption: to add a Product Hunt Badge widget to Notion
Indify: to add Carousel and Buttons to Notion
Tally Forms: for forms
Fruition: for custom domain for your Notion pages
How did you launch and grow your product?
1) We built Drotion in public. While building in public on Twitter and Notion communities, we created a waitlist landing page and added to the posts.
2. Then, we built a few landing page templates as lead magnet for Drotion and gave them away for free on Gumroad.
3. After a few days, we opened pre-orders with an early bird discount for the waitlisted and landing page template buyers. We've got around 25 pre-orders from that.
4. After we finished building Drotion, we shipped it to those 25 customers and got reviews from them. Early reviews helped us build trust among visitors for Drotion.
5. Then, we launched Drotion on Product Hunt, where we ranked #2 Product of the Day and made around $2000 of sales from the launch.
6. After Product Hunt Launch, we created one more free landing page template and shared it in the communities. This brought us a few sales for Drotion.
7. At last, we launched Drotion on other marketplaces (Notion Plaza, Appsumo, Beta List) and communities.
Can you share some stats from the time you listed it for sale?
Paid users: 90
Revenue: $3134
Why and how did you sell it?
The main reason we decided to sell Drotion was because we had another product idea in mind. We were really excited about it, and we wanted to focus all our efforts on it. So even though Drotion was bringing in revenue every month, we wanted to pass it on to someone who had the time and resources needed to take care of it well & grow it further. It got acquired for 4 figures.
Why did the buyer want to acquire your project?
The buyer had a programming background with interest in Notion tools. He really liked what we were doing with Drotion and felt that he had the potential to add new features to Drotion and make it better.
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to get started with No-Code?
The easiest way to learn any No-Code tool is to start building with it. Once you start building something, you’ll figure out the tool much faster.
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to sell their No-Code project?
Have a proper documentation of your operational process & marketing activities
Document the future ideas & plans the buyer can carry out post acquisition to grow your product
Keep a list of all your numbers - sales, revenue, traffic & analytics.
Go through Microaquire blog to understand the acquisition process
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
We're right now building The Big Bang Launch Newsletter, where we interview creators behind top 3 product launches of Product Hunt on their launch strategies & secrets. You can subscribe here.
Thanks a lot for sharing your journey 🙏
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