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The No-Code Exit Story of Nazz and Venture Basecamp
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On Tuesday, I had some fun with making a quick No-Code solution to solve my own problem. If now Elon Musk breaks Twitter, our social proof is safely stored. 😅 You can read it in this thread.
No-Code Bootcamp Cohort 4 is in full swing. After 2 weeks of learning, the participants now started to build their idea. We kicked this off with a No-Code Clinic where 12 No-Code Experts were present to answer any question and help them get started. This was so valuable, I wish I could also pick their brains every time I started a new project.
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🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Nazz, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hi. I am Najmuzzaman "Nazz" Mohammad. I was born in a very small mining town of India in a worker class family. I am an engineer and MBA by education. I had my own startup that I ran with my hostel room friends which failed grandly with lots of learning but left me jobless.
I did everything from going door-to-door trying to sell a point-of-sale app to restaurants to coding the early software of an award-winning robot until I found a Product Management job at a startup, and ever since I have been enjoying the life of a Product Manager.
I stumbled upon No-Code in engineering college as where I had a bunch of startup ideas I wanted to test but didn't have the patience or time of coding each one of them. Since then, No-Code has helped me not just test startup ideas but:
build my own startup
build prototypes to explain specs to engineering teams
build internal tools for companies
earn freelance money on the side to pay back my student loans.
Which product did you build?
Capria Ventures (a network of impact funds around the world) found through research that most of the graduating entrepreneurs of the incubators were uninvestable.
They set up a non-profit subsidiary called VentureBasecamp to solve this problem and I was the first hire meant to lead the product development. I worked with the co-founders to come up with a solution which was a digital investability evaluation and learning product.
Being a non-profit on grant money, we wanted to keep the product development lean. I built the whole product myself and launched the beta in about 6 months. We got mentioned by the UN as a best practice example of solving investability, won a tender to support the Indian government's incubators and within 2 years, got acquired by the Wadhwani Foundation to support their entrepreneurship programs.
Which No-Code tools did you use to build the product?
Bubble: Core product
Typeform + Zapier for the investability evaluation
Bridge LMS for the courses
Auth0 for the authentication system
How did you launch and grow your product?
We were very aware that we were building in a market where the customers (incubators) and consumers (entrepreneurs) were different.
So, we launched the exclusive beta by inviting applications for incubators to be a part of a multi-day "Incubator Investability Workshop" where the top Capria investors shared their learning on how to run a successful incubation program.
The incubators loved our approach and wanted to introduce our "investability for entrepreneurs" program to their cohorts. We also made sure that the incubators felt that they were the early shapers of the program, which helped us get these incubators not just as early adopters but as co-creators who gave us regular feedback to improve the product. Our program also had a component of live workshops run by the incubators, and our team ran some of these workshops ourselves to understand the customer problem and our solution's effectiveness better.
Can you share some stats from the time you listed it for sale?
Our revenue was through government grants and software licensing fees that the incubators paid us. We started off with a $1 mil grant from DFID UK (now UKAID) and Shell Foundation. We were working with about 10 incubators in our beta with yearly cohorts of an average of 20-30 incubates before we got acquired.
Why and how did you sell it?
Even though we were very successful, it was a challenge to scale the program quick, given the non-profit nature of our market, where our incubators also relied mostly on grants. Initially, Wadhwani Foundation approached us as they needed a product to support their new grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the 101 new incubators the Indian government had announced. However, they made an offer to acquire as they realized that the product could support their other entrepreneurship education programs present across Indian universities and SME support programs. We felt this was a great opportunity to plug into their existing network to distribute the program.
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to get started with No-Code?
The first version of your product will probably be completely unrecognizable from the version that gets you to Product-Market fit.
Don't worry about the “scalability” of the No-Code tool you choose. Start with any tool you feel comfortable with or find easy to use.
Hack your way around limitations until it becomes unmanageable.
If you are worried about redoing all the work, ask successful companies how many times they had to rewrite their whole codebase to tackle product limitations.
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to sell their No-Code project?
If you are confused about whom to sell your project to, don't think about who could buy your project. Instead, think about the customers who would come back kicking and screaming if they couldn't use your product anymore. This is your "tribe".
Talk to them to see if they would want to acquire your project and give it the direction they want. If your tribe can't afford it, they will be eager to help you find rightful new owners so that their experience doesn't deteriorate.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
Check out my personal website here.
Thanks a lot for this amazing advice Najmuzzaman!
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"The first version of your product will probably be completely unrecognizable from the version that gets you to Product-Market fit. "
I like this one :)