🚪How Ab helps no-code apps scale to millions

The No-Code Success Story of Ab Advany & CoAlias

Mar 08, 2024

Hello there,

Katt here. Thank you for your support for our Product Hunt launch of Build The Keyword last week. We made it to #1. ❤️

This week I talked to million dollar sales expert Ab Advany, read about:

👑 The competitive advantage of No-Code
💥 From validated plugin to profitable business
🥷 Reducing customers that churn
💰 The power of usage based pricing

Enjoy and happy building.

PS: missed last week’s interview? Read here how Alim built a mobile appp with Flutterflow (and said no to an acquisition offer)

🎈 6 Cool Finds

A mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I discovered. You can get featured in this section by sharing this newsletter with 8 friends.

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🔥 No-Code Founder Interview

Learn every week from a real world no-code success story

Hello Ab

Ab Advany is a self-taught software engineer that sold $6 million in software licences in the last 10 years. He started coding at the age of 6. After finishing his business studies, he sold his first startup at the age of 30 and got into SaaS sales.

Ab had an idea for a SaaS, he was working on it with a programmer but it took way too long. It was frustrating and he needed to launch fast. Ab discovered Bubble and was hooked from the start.

After scaling one of his SaaS to $5+ million in revenue thanks to Bubble and CoAlias, Ab discovered that selling SaaS is becoming easier and easier thanks to no-code. He discovered he could beat existing solutions that where created with code because:

faster interactions possible: go from idea to releasing new features within the same day.
offer more for less: because you can build features in days, instead of months. This means a lower cost so a more competitive price.
easily create mock features for enterprise customers that request custom features. This helped in closing huge deals (Read more about it here).

So now, Ab his stack of choice is always Bubble because the speed of development is so fast. Even when something isn't possible he tries to use things like plugins to extend Bubble its functionality. Next to that Ab likes to use Posthog to analyze user behavior and Customerly for customer support.

Let’s fix that

A few years ago Ab was building a SaaS for the Dutch government. He built the SaaS in Bubble. At a certain stage, he discovered that if he branded each account of the customer with their own domain, he could charge 10x more. But because Bubble didn’t allow it, it inspired him that he could create a solution himself.

So Ab got to work. The first version was a quick plugin. Although he primarily built it for himself, he decided to add it also to the Bubble plugin store. After a while, more and more people started using it, asking for support and more features. It was some sort of validation and it gave Ab the idea to turn this into a real product with more professional features and a better interface. Ab rebranded and remade it to what it is today: CoAlias. It allows you to add multiple domains to a no-code app.

It is especially useful for:

SaaS to attract bigger customers on no-code apps with unique client domains.
Global Corporations to add country-specific domains to no-code sites and operate worldwide.
SEO to combine multiple no-code services like Webflow, Framer and Bubble under one domain for SEO purposes.

Profitable but complex

CoAlias offers a free plan but if you want to remove the branding and unlimited users you need to upgrade. The plan is usage-based so the more traffic you have, the more you pay. Usage-based pricing aligns with the interest of your users. Pricing is one of the best growth levers to grow a business. Especially if it aligns with the users success. Ab recommends it’s best to keep the pricing low when a customer just starts. And to increase the costs when they benefit more from your services.

CoAlias is a profitable business. But it is a very complex business to maintain. Users demand 100% uptime and fast respond times.

At this moment there are:

1000 apps using CoAlias
50,391 domains connected
25 billion requests served

The customers mainly come in through word-of-mouth. It are mainly agencies and no-code devs. By not focussing on the lower end of the market anymore, Ab was able to reduce churn. Users that only wanted to pay $10 per month where churning all the time and also requested a lot of support. Ab his advice is focussing on users that want to pay at least $30 per month. Those users are serious about business and scaling…

Thanks for sharing all your wisdom Ab. Give him a follow on Twitter and checkout some of the interesting CoAlias case-studies.

🍿 Katt builds in public

My actions, fails and wins on growing this no-code business to ramen profitability

There is only 1 reason why my plan of action for last month failed and a shiny new idea lured me away from my focus. My plan was too big. I had this idea in my head to create the biggest library of no-code playbooks of the ‘world’. But I had no clue how a playbook would look, how to package it, price it and sell it. So this month I will focus on a tiny first step: finishing one playbook. The rest will follow later. Smaller steps are better than no steps.