🚪How Art sold a pre-revenue directory
The No-Code Exit Story of Art West and SaaSRefs
Hello there,
Katt here again. It’s been a while!
More about that in my build in public update at the end of the email.
For the story of this week I talked to Art, read about:
💥 Building a trending SaaS platform
⭐️ The impressive no-code stack
💰 Getting acquired pre-revenue
Enjoy and happy building.
PS: missed the last interview? Read about the power combo of influencer + no-coder.
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🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
Hello! What's your background?
My name is Art West. I'm a NoCode developer and the founder of NoCodeDevs.
My background was traditionally in project management, which is actually what led me into No-Code. Being a non technical person, I wanted to build internal apps and tooling to help me do my job. And because I didn't know how to code, it eventually led me down to the road of no-code. Tools like Zapier made it possible to string together functional internal apps for my job.
How did you get your idea?
The product is called SaaSRefs. The idea for the product really came from the frustration of finding new SAAS tools. I often visit Product Hunt to discover new tools. But that’s not necessarily a great representation of what good products are.
I really wanted to know how many people are using a certain product and it’s popularity over time. There's nothing that gave me the bigger picture. With tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush you can look at the historical data but there is nothing that compared products and showed trends all in the same place.
SaaSRefs is essentially a tool database that shows the trending products in all kind of different categories. There's a lot of different ways to filter and search and slice the data.
Which no-code tools did you use?
I had a pretty interesting stack here.
I used Webflow for the frontend.
Airtable for the backend.
Zapier to make API calls from the SEMrush API.
Whalesync to sink the data between Airtable and Webflow and it's a two way sync, which is really nice.
JetBoost, which is a front end tool for Webflow to allow filtering and sorting of the data.
What went into building the initial version?
The validation was sort of scratching my own itch. It took me around 40 days to build but you know, it was an hour here or there. So in total it was a 20 to 30 hour project.
Version 1 was very rudimentary. It had a big list of all the products along with their web traffic. And then I started to improve it step by step.
As this is a brand new product, the business model hadn't yet been defined, but ultimately the way to monetize this is to have paid or featured listings or advertisements on the site.
How did the acquisition happen?
I didn’t build this with the intention of selling it. We wanted to keep adding features and grow this into a product. But we were contacted by somebody who had an interest. We ultimately put it on tiny acquisitions (now called Little Exits) where we made a deal with somebody different.
The buyer, a marketer, liked the idea of the project and had built similar sites on other platforms. He really wanted to take what we had built and continue to market it and build some revenue streams for the product.
So it was a really good fit. It was really nice to be able to hand this off to somebody who's non technical and have them be able to update and maintain this product.
Any last advice?
My advice is just to get your product out there. It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't really know if you have any sort of product market fit unless you put it out there in the world and get feedback from your users.
And you can't improve your app unless you get feedback from the people who are using it. So ship fast, especially with no code. It's really easy to crank out a lot of ideas. Don't be afraid of failing because most of them will fail, but you're looking for that one that doesn't.
Thanks for sharing your story Art. Check out NoCodeDevs here.
🍿 Katt builds in public
My actions, fails and wins on growing this no-code newsletter
Here I am again. Remember in my last update that I was not sure what was next?
Well, I took a month to focus and grow Build The Keyword.
I talked to customers (this article helped me a lot)
I created our email welcome sequence (this blog helped me a lot)
I worked on a marketing strategy (this helped me a lot + the book Obviously Awesome)
I tried out lots of different marketing tactics
I learned about pricing (the podcast from Rob Walling helped me a lot)
I started a Build The Keyword newsletter to show our product in action
We worked on a big new feature (Lee building, me testing)
…
A lots of things are still in progress (including a huge release today 👀).
But Lee and I decided that in the beginning of May we will evaluate and see what’s next.
What is our goal? Do we keep building and growing this? Do we sell? Do we try to automate as much as possible to let it run on auto-pilot?
We will see…
Of course, you can still expect this newsletter. But my goal of diversifying my revenue for No-Code Exits is on hold for a while. So maybe I will turn this into a build in public update of all my projects?
PS: pretty cool that this newsletter JUST KEEPS GROWING!
🙌 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
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