🚪How Sam went from curation to acquisition
The No-Code Exit Story of Sam Dickie and nocode.tech
Hi, Katt here.
Next week I’m climbing mountains in Austria. Talk to you again in 2 weeks. 👋
On to this week’s interview, Sam Dickie breaks down in 4 minutes and 2 seconds:
🧲 Validating the idea before building
🔥 Building in public and listening to your users
💰 Making money with a directory
🏄♀️ Getting his first users
🚪 Finding a serious buyer in the same country
Enjoy it and happy building
🎈 5 Cool Finds
Million Labs helps you to unearth the potential of your ideas. Validate your app concept swiftly with our smart no-code landing page before any major investment.
BetterLegal reached $10 Million in revenue, it’s built entirely on Bubble.
Small Bets is the most active entrepreneurship community I’m part of with every month new valuable guest lectures. Worth every penny.
Insanely Cool Tools helps you discover the best tools and resources to build, launch and grow your startup. Join 20,000 startup founders for free.
SiteGPT helps you to minimize your customer support so you have more time to build and do marketing (hooray!).
*This section is a mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Sam, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m Sam Dickie. I'm a product manager by day for early-stage tech startups and at night and weekends I create digital products, run small experiments, write, consult and run a newsletter.
I got into No-Code before it was a phrase. Back at university in 2012, I wanted to create a news aggregation site for environmental news in Glasgow where I was studying environmental science. This lead me to creating my first website using a bunch of No-Code tools. The site grew into a social enterprise and as it grew I added more and more functionality with a bunch of rudimentary No-Code tools at the time.
Once I grasped the tools I created a few ads and began running 1-2-1 tuition showing others how to create websites with No-Code. I managed to get a few clients and continued to provide tuition during my time at university.
Creating websites at this time without code felt like a superpower. There was a tickle of new products coming to market and Weebly at the time was releasing big improvements most months.
Tell us about your product that you made?
I remember being on Product Hunt one day and noticing the success of Startup Stash. Startup Stash simply provided a categorised list of tools and services for startups with a brief description and link. I loved the simplicity of the site. It got me thinking what if I created a similar directory site specifically collating all the available No-Code tools : nocode.tech
The initial site consisted of a landing page with a bunch of categories like website builders, logo generators, web app builders, mobile app builders and plugins. When you clicked through you could see a list of tools with my personal summary of each and a link. Later the site included content, tutorials, members perks such as discounts, newsletter and a community.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
Privy for the email capture
Zapier for the bridge between email capture and welcome email triggering
Mailchimp for email
Slack for the community channel
What went into building the initial version?
I didn't want to simply build the site for no one to find any value in it. So I knocked up a super basic landing page with email capture and began posting it on various sites. In a few days I had a couple of hundred signups. I posted it on:
Indie Hackers
Reddit
LinkedIn
Twitter
BetaList
Next
BetaPage
Specific FB groups, and communities
After I had a reasonable amount of email subscribers, I used my list to test some of my early mockups and wireframes for the website. The feedback was incredibly constructive and allowed me to make some changes and before deciding whether to pursue building the site. This whole process only took a few weeks and helped me validate my idea before spending the time and energy building the website, dramatically reducing the possibility of it flopping due to lack of customer validation.
Armed with this validation I then began building in public and keeping the subscribers up to date with my progress as I built out the site, sharing screenshots and getting feedback.
What's your business model?
Affiliate links on the site
Ad placements on the newsletter
Products could pay more to be placed at the top of the list for their category
Revenue grew with traffic due to the advertising model. More traffic = more eyes which in turn meant I could charge more. Additionally, the referrals the sites got continued to increase which meant they would eventually contact me to place ads.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
The Product Hunt launch was by far the biggest bump in traffic to the site. Ryan Hoover (founder of PH) also included a link to the site in a blog post he wrote about No-Code tools which generated a lot of traffic and signups. Asides from that it was word of mouth, doing talks at events, social media, backlinks from other sites and posts.
Can you tell us more about the acquisition?
I considered selling initially do the lack of time I had to continue supporting and improving the platform. It was growing week over week but my full-time job was requiring a lot of my time. At this point I was going through a pretty serious career pivot, moving from Town Planning to my first role as a product manager for a startup studio in London. I had a lot to learn and I didn't want the platform to crash and burn given the amount of time I had put into it and also the opportunity for it to continue to thrive.
I researched a bunch of platforms that sold digital businesses and started listing the site. I ended up getting about 7 responses using a newsletter at the time called opportunity overload, however, half of those notes of interest didn't respond. The rest asked a bunch more questions and put in an offer which was way too low.
A couple of weeks later I got an email from someone mentioning they were interested in acquiring the site and wanted to jump on a call to discuss it. Turns out he was also Scottish which came to both our surprise. We chatted through some of his questions and after a few days he put in a good offer and we moved forward. From putting the listing live to selling to site it consisted of about 6-7 weeks.
Why did the buyer decide to buy it?
They saw the huge potential of the no-code space and knew how to scale the platform and grow the revenue model.
What's your advice for people just getting started?
Pick something to build that you are passionate about. I've created products in the past that I thought could make money but ultimately I didn't enjoy trying to grow them and inevitably they died.
Stay curious and don't be afraid to try other tools. I was a hardcore Weebly user but eventually grew out of it due to its constraints. I was hesitant to try Webflow as it looked incredibly complex to use but after spending a few weeks building with it I got my head around it and now love the product.
Where can we learn more about your projects?
Follow me on Twitter to see what I’m working on.
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