🚪How Milly went from validation to acquisition with No-Code
The No-Code Exit story of Milly and Shout About
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Welcome 141 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.
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The interview this week is with solopreneur and indie maker Milly. I remember when I started following her on Twitter a few months ago. I was so impressed by her No-Code projects. And after this interview even more. I love her approach of:
Solving a problem in an industry you are familiar with
Validating the idea with a presale
Promoting by building in public on Twitter
Building and launching a first minimum viable product
Selling when you still have momentum
I hope you will learn as much of this interview as I did. 👇
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🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Milly, tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Milly Barker-DeStefano. I'm originally from England, but now live in Connecticut, USA.
Before starting my own digital venture studio (birkwood.co), I had a successful and rewarding career as an international lawyer and legal academic, focusing initially on international humanitarian law and later switching to global business.
Throughout my time as a lawyer, I constantly felt the pull of entrepreneurship and wanted to work by myself, set my own schedule, and prioritize health and happiness over the demands of the legal profession.
No-Code is what really facilitated this shift in my career. I can't code (yet - I'm learning Python now, though!) and so I was looking for solutions to build my own apps and websites without code. I've been a WordPress user for years and slowly got more exposed to No-Code through trialing products like Softr, Bubble, Webflow, Zapier, and countless other builders and tools.
Which product did you build?
In April 2022, I got the idea for a media relations and analytics platform. I had been in the position of needing to reach out to journalists, influencers, writers, etc. to get businesses more publicity, and hated how it was such a long, tedious, manual process.
Any long, tedious, manual process is a great candidate for a new SaaS product.
So that's exactly what I did: I set out to build a SaaS platform that would make it easier for founders to get publicity for their projects. I started building this in Bubble, but realized I needed some help. So, I partnered with someone (my good friend Harry, who I met on Twitter) and we got to work.
Within a few weeks, we had a functioning MVP where you could search for journalists that matched your interests or industry (entrepreneurship, the environment, transport, AI, animals, whatever) and send them email pitches about what you were up to directly from the platform. We also integrated some email analytics so you could find out how many journalists opened your email, clicked on your links, responded to you, etc.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
Bubble, for the application itself
Algolia, to speed up searching the database of media contacts
Postmark, to send emails to your selected media contacts
Apollo, to pull contact information for each media contact
Stripe, for payments
Notion, to organize ourselves asynchronously
How did you launch and grow your product?
I launched the product for pre-sales on Twitter way before we had a functioning MVP. Truth be told, I didn't want to proceed with the product build without pre-sale commitments (which for us, meant submitting your card details and agreeing to be charged once the product launched). I needed that validation because I knew this was a good idea, but it was never a passion project. I didn't have the passion and the industry interest to see this through all the tough times, so I needed to find the motivation in the financial side instead.
I tapped into the #nocode and #buildinpublic hashtags to share what I was doing. I don't have exact figures, but I'd say 90% of my tweets about the project were related to the build, sharing what I was learning, asking for advice on tooling, etc. and only 10% were actually directly selling the benefits of the product and asking for sign-ups. I didn't want to be pushy - I just wanted people to sign up if they saw value.
The only thing I did outside of Twitter was tell two or three close business contacts about it (two of them signed up in support - thanks!) and posted one article to IndieHackers, which later got featured by their editors on the home page. That drove some traffic, but not as much as you'd think.
We managed to get over $1,000 MRR in pre-sale commitments before we launched, which was fantastic considering I only promoted the platform through tweets and an automated DM to new followers.
On launch day, I did the same: I tweeted about what I was doing and how it was going. We got several more sign-ups because of that.
Can you share some stats from the time you listed it for sale?
At the time of listing, the platform had 20 pre-sale customers committed to $59 p/m each, of which 17 eventually became 'real' customers due to three payment cards being declined. That took our MRR to $1,003. With $138 per month in expenses, that meant we were doing $865 a month in 'profit' (I use quotes around that because that doesn't take into account our time, of course. Note, though, we were only working on this a few hours a week.)
I think the website was getting around 100 visitors a month from my Twitter efforts at that time. Not a lot, but enough to get those critical first few customers. We converted really well once we got people on the site.
Why and how did you sell it?
We were only one month into running the platform when I asked Harry if he would be OK if we sold the project. I'd had some health things going on for several months, and to compound things, I broke my leg (really, really badly) and needed reconstructive surgery, which meant I was going to be laid up on the couch for a couple of months and would be in rehab for months thereafter. Even sitting at my desk was impossible because of the blood flow to my leg - honestly, it was agony.
Harry, of course, was as supportive as he always is. We agreed we would try to sell the platform while it had some momentum and early customers from our pre-sale efforts. We chose to advertise on TinyAcquisitions and Microacquire. I also posted about the sale on Twitter.
After some back and forth on pricing/valuations, we decided to list for $10,000 to reflect the value of the development work on the platform, the high profit margin (it only cost $138 per month to run this thing), and the existing customer value (we did have just over $1k MRR, but that dropped when we announced the sale). We also priced it to encourage a quick sale, because I was reduced to working just a few minutes a day from my phone post-surgery.
In the end, we had a lot of interested buyers, which sparked a little bidding war. In the end, we sold the platform for an even $15,000 and took away another couple of thousand in subscription revenue. Harry and I split the project evenly, so we both walked away with about $8,000 each after we paid ourselves back for expenses.
Why did the buyer want to acquire your project?
Multiple reasons, but mainly because of their interest in the media/PR industry, desire to acquire a project that had paying customers/initial product-market fit, and the fact that we used no-code.
No-Code meant they could carry on the project without being so worried about development.
The person who bought our project isn't a developer, but felt confident being able to manage the project with Bubble.
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to get started with No-Code?
Just get started. Try everything. Trial every tool. And ask a lot of questions. Someone in the #nocode community on Twitter will have the answer!
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to sell their No-Code project?
Don't be too emotional about it. Bad buyers will pick your project apart and complain about ridiculous things to try to lower the price. Good buyers, however, will see the value and make you a straightforward offer. Go for the latter every time, even if the actual sale amount is slightly lower than what you want.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
I post about what I'm building on Twitter, so that's probably the best place to find me.
And check out my new project 👀 Hey Lexi, a copy and content productized service.
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