🚪 How Chad built a No-Code startup with 2.5 million revenue
The No-Code Success Story of Chad Sakonchick and Better Legal
Hello my dearest readers,
On to the absolutely impressive (million dollar!) case-study of this week. For this issue I spent hours digging in articles, podcast interviews and tweets to bring you the story of Chad Sakonchick.
You will learn about:
✨ Why he switched from custom code to No-Code
🎯 How he outperforms huge competitors
🧰 His full No-Code tool stack
🥸 How to get rid of SaaS subscription costs
Enjoy it but first, a spotlight on a very cool sponsor:
✨ Spotlight
Toddle is a new visual development platform to create amazing and powerful UI’s.
I tried it out and here are my findings:
Perfect for: stunning interactive web apps with dynamic content
Design: No limitations
Scaling: No need to worry about that. You can scale to to eternity as you can use any database.
API: You can connect to any application with a REST API or Webhook
Support: Active Discord community, engaged and passionate team, growing YouTube channel with tutorials
Learning curve: Steep, ideally you have an HTM and CSS background
You will feel at home: When you are used to working in Webflow or modern programming frameworks like React
This excites me: You can export your interactive Toddle components and embed them on any static website (see video)
I built: a pretty web app for sprints.so members. It has a Pomodoro timer, reminder messages that pop up on certain dates and alternating inspiring quotes. The freedom to create anything you want, in a design you want felt amazing. But honestly, it was not easy to me. The YouTube videos were helpful and I got some great assistance from the team. It will take time and practice to get comfortable for 200%. But hey, every tool has a learning curve, and this one is worth it.Â
🎈 6 Cool Finds
Flow is a minimalist pomodoro timer that blocks distracting websites during a focus session. I started using it this week and I love it.
Zeroqode’s Full OpenAI ChatGPT-4 plugin saves you time by integrating OpenAI functions to Bubble. It offers text analysis, language processing and image generation.
Steal Club ‘steals’ the tactics and playbooks that the top creators use to grow and monetize their audience.
20% off for No Code MBA. Learn no-code by building real-world apps similar to ChatGPT, Reddit, and Airbnb. Use code EXITS20 at checkout.
Atlas Icons is a free library of good-looking consistent SVG icons.
100 Days of No-Code is the perfect way to start the new year and learn No-Code for free.
*This section is a mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Parents house
Chad Sakonchick began his entrepreneurial journey in his 20s. He hired his first dev from RentaCoder (now freelancer.com) and worked on his project while living at home with his parents.
During the day, he installed and maintained septic systems for his dad's friend's business. At night, he would communicate with his overseas developer, often working from his bedroom of his parents' home​​.
It didn’t stop with 1 venture, in the following years he started:
A company that allowed users to create websites.
An app designed for food truck owners.
A platform for event spaces.
He spent tens of thousands of dollars on devs and had to chase people down to convince them to use his apps. There were 2 major learnings from these ventures: coding requires a lot of time and you shouldn’t waste time on what you think people need.
There must be a better way to do this
The spark for Better Legal came when Chad was helping a friend, an attorney. His friend was losing business to online companies offering cheaper do-it-yourself legal services to start a business.
Every state has its own process for starting a business or changing information of a business. Chad helped his attorney friend to automate his operations. They reduced the time spent on forming a new business from 3 hours to less than 10 minutes. This efficiency allowed the attorney to charge 75% less per new business formation while making more money per minute.
Chad built the prototype in one week. They spent $900 on Google Ads and $600 was made back within hours. This initial success led to them founding BetterLegal.
Custom code triumph
The first version of Better Legal was built using a combination of various (No-Code) tools like Asana, Zapier and Formstack. The customer filled in a questionnaire with simple vocabulary (no legal lingo). This was sent to Asana where a task with a 40-page legal document was created. The problem with this setup, was that if the customers wanted any changes, the team had to edit the changes in the huge doc.
Chad started looking for a solution where they could store the data in a system and output the legal document when it was ready. They switched to Salesforce to solve that. But also Salesforce had it’s limitations and was very expensive.
They wanted to provide their customers with a self-service dashboard to manage their account information and make changes to documents. To achieve this Chad took the plunge. He hired freelancers to develop a new application from scratch with custom code in 6 months.
This setup sustained BetterLegal for five years but it was not easy:
With each new feature, dev costs increased
Everything took long and was often delayed
Once you rely on developer as a non-technical founder, you are fully at their mercy
It was costly ($8,000-$10,000 per month) just for basic stuff
Return to No-Code
In 2022 the companies operational costs were too high and the board instructed to cut all developments costs to the bare minimum. Better Legal was stuck in a difficult situation.
Everything changed when Chad joined a 30-day build challenge and tried Bubble for the first time. A light bulb went off in his head, Bubble could be the answer to his dev problems. He went through the Bubble interactive lessons, a 10-hour Bubble Crash Course and got to work with some other devs.
In 90 days he rebuilt Better Legal with:
Bubble as the underlying platform the complete system is built upon
Productivity Sweet for a set of templates and processes that sit on top of Bubble that make building lightning fast
The Masonry to develop lowcode components that host Stripe and create reusable code blocks that work between Bubble, Zapier and Make.
Zapier as the beating heart of the system that runs over 100k automations per month
Make to run higher volume automations for a reasonable price
Twilio for communication system
Lob to handle address verification, snail mailed filings and checks
to partners
Asana for follow-up requests from customers
Bye subscriptions
To get costs down and efficiency up, Chad also started building internal tools in Bubble to replace the third party apps they were paying subscriptions for.
The first one was Asana, which was costing them $350 per month. Chad bought a Bubble task manager template and customized it to the needs of the team. It made sense as all the data lived in Bubble and now everything was in one place.
And more recently, in November, he replaced Twilio Flex (contact center web app) with a custom-built Bubble solution connected to the Twilio API. This saves them money ($600 per month), time (no constant redeployments or sunsetting of features anymore) and results in a tight integration between communication and the client data.
The agents can now do everything in one interface which connects to all the client data, tasks and the billing system. For example: they can now build features like live-matching the call number to an existing contact, pull up their info and Stripe data and add AI functionality to make the agents job easier and offer a better service.
Battling with giants
The legal tech space is competitive. There are a lot of huge competitors like the 20-year old ($3 Billion) LegalZoom.
Chad believes that No-Code is their huge competitive advantage. Thanks to the smart use of technology they don’t need that many employees. And less employees means:
Less mouth to feed
Lower overhead costs
No working in silo’s
More flexible processes
That in combination with the speed of No-Code means they can offer a better product and service to their customer at a lower price.
Money talks
Chad shares that in the first 6 years MRR grew slowly due to a limited budget for development. It’s when they had the capacity to design their own form in Bubble that their MRR skyrocketed with +58%. Suddenly they had full control of every element of their product and this resulted in much higher attach rates.
Recently Better Legal crossed $1 million ARR and $2.5 million in revenue. And they keep shipping. This week they released a contract analysis tool powered by AI to help you understand the contracts you sign. Check it out here.
That was it for this week. Go and follow Chad on Twitter, he is very transparent about his entrepreneurial journey and shares a lot of amazing insights.
I just wanted to take a moment to wish you all a beautiful Christmas with some well-deserved time off surrounded by family, friends and lots of delicious food.
Thank you for reading No-Code Exits in 2023 and let’s crush our No-Code dreams together in 2024.
🙌 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
Find product ideas that bring you customers on auto-pilot
Kickstart your no-code journey with these no-code courses
Learn which no-code tool is the best for your idea
Browse through the full library of no-code success stories
Sponsor this newsletter to get in front of 10,000+ subscribers