🚪How Bas created a $10K productized service with No-Code
The No-Code Success story of Bas van Straaten and Webflow Cookies
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 59 new subscribers this week. 👯♀️
For this week’s No-Code Exit story I talked to No-Code Founder Bas van Straaten. He breaks down:
🔥 His career path from project manager to Webflow dev
🤖 Turning a much requested service by his freelance clients into a productized service
👀 The power of organic traffic and conversion optimization
🌿 The benefits of starting as a freelancer
Happy building!
PS: Did you miss last week’s interview? Read here how a newsletter acquisition market place built with No-Code was acquired by the French acquisition market leader.
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🔥 No-Code Maker Interview
Hello, what is your background?
I’m Bas, based in the Netherlands and currently in my 5th year as a No-code Freelancer.
My journey started as a project manager at an agency, overseeing the handover from design to development. Back then, everything happened in traditional way: different departments, custom code, … Like that I experienced the pains of the more ‘traditional’ way of coding: endless revision rounds, dreadful meetings and underwhelming results.
This all changed one day when I saw an ad for Webflow. I was hooked and decided to learn the software inside-out . I couldn’t convince the developers in the agency to switch to Webflow, so after 6 months of trying… I gave in and quit.
Now 5 years later, I’m 100% dedicating my time to delivering amazing Webflow sites and had the opportunity to work with great clients like Walmart, Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors.
Tell us about your product that you made?
The service I created was never meant to make any money. When the GDPR rules were announced in Europe, I increasingly received the request to make my clients’ websites GDPR compliant and set up a cookie banner.
There were many services out there to help, but most of them were either expensive or lacked styling control. Short story: it was always a hassle at the end of project.
Until 2 years ago, when Finsweet (a well-known Webflow agency) launched their own open source cookie integration for Webflow. With this solution, we could finally deliver GDPR-compliant websites with full control over the looks of cookie banners!
To help the community, I decided to design my own cookie banner and offer it as a free resource to the community.
People started to use it and this is how the story of what now known is as Webflow Cookies was born.
What went into building the initial version?
A few months after releasing the free resource, people started to ask me for help with the setup. I installed the cookie banner, set up their Google Tag Manager and send an invoice for the hours worked.
Only after the 20th order I realized this could be a great little productized service. A few weeks later, and I had build a website, write out all SOPs and trained a VA to handle the implementation.
Unlike my day-to-day job as a freelancer where I basically sell chunks of my time, this service was my first experience of a ‘real’ automated and outsourced business.
What were some other No-Code tools you used?
Now that the service runs on its own, the stack is a little bit more complex:
Webflow (for obvious reasons) for the front end.
Netlify for hosting the website for free.
Stripe payment links for collecting payments.
Mailerlite for automated customer communication.
Moneybird for book keeping and creating invoices.
Notion as internal project management software and SOP center.
Google Tag Manager and Analytics for insights and A/B testing.
Airtable as a CRM and for collecting customer reviews.
And make.com for tying all of the applications and data together.
What is your business model?
We charge a flat fee of 75$ to install the cookie banner and set up Google Tag Manager.
Customers give us access to their Webflow project and Google Tag manager, and we then:
Install the cookie banner to their Webflow project
Match the look-and-feel of the banner with their website.
Set up Google Tag Manager to make sure that all external services that use cookies (like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Facebook Pixel) are loaded in a GDPR-compliant way.
After completion, we send them instructions on how the client can make edits themselves, for when they decide to remove or add more tracking services in the future.
How have you attracted users and grown your revenue?
90% of our customers come through organic search, and the other 10% through referrals or returning customers. Apart from pouring $100 into Google Ads as an experiment, I have yet to put any (real) effort into outbound marketing .
The little effort I have put into the service in 2023, has been focussed on optimizing our internal SOPs and optimizing the website itself.
I recently added more social proof (customer logo’s and reviews), an exit intent popup and a priority support option, all which increased the overall conversion rate and revenue.
In the last 12 months this productized service made just under $11,000 – with a 90% profit margin. While it only contributes <5% to my annual revenue of all income stream together (freelance work + 2 other small services), it counts as some good pocket money given that it’s fully outsourced.
What's your advice for makers who are just starting out?
If you’re just starting out, and don’t have a clear idea yet for a service/product – consider going the freelance route first:
You get to learn new skills, people and software while getting paid for it.
In the short term – selling your time to clients gets you much more cash much faster than trying to build a product (in my experience).
As you spend time becoming an expert in a certain niche, you start to uncover problems and new opportunities – which you then can turn into products or services.
Flowremote and Webflow Cookies would have never existed if I hadn’t first dived into the Webflow niche!
Thank you for sharing your great story Bas. You can follow Bas on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Great idea with great implementation. Kudos to the founder!