How Ian Built a No-Code Solution for Webflow and Scaled to 200 Paid Users
The key is building a product people love, Ian explains how...
Hello 👋
I’m so excited to bring you this inspiring story this week from Ian who created Supersparks.
Read about:
🚀 From Product Manager to No-Code builder.
💥 Created Supersparks for Webflow community features.
🛠️ Built with Bubble, scaled with custom code.
📈 Grew to 200 paid users via marketing and subscriptions.
Enjoy and happy building!
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Hello! What's your background?
I'm a Product Manager and no-code builder based in Vancouver, Canada.
My journey into no-code began in 2020 after discovering Makerpad's Ben Tossell on the Indie Hackers podcast.
At the time, I was on the founding team of a venture-backed startup facing a resource challenge.
We needed to explore a new product without diverting our limited development team from our existing product with market fit. When I realized a coded MVP would take months to build, I turned to no-code as an alternative.
The results were eye-opening.
Using Webflow, Airtable, Memberstack, and Zapier, I built a functional MVP in just one week.
While that particular product didn't gain traction, the experience revealed two insights: how no-code tools represent a powerful evolution of lean startup methodology, enabling faster validation cycles; and how these tools democratize entrepreneurship by allowing non-technical founders to build digital products independently.
This sparked my passion for creating no-code solutions that empower others, eventually leading me to found Supersparks.
What did you make and how did you come up with the idea?
A couple years ago, I discovered programmatic SEO on Twitter and found someone making significant revenue with a directory site.
Seeing the opportunity, I built breweriesnearby.com using Webflow, Airtable, and Whalesync.
My vision went beyond a simple directory. I wanted to create a Letterboxd / Goodreads-style community where beer enthusiasts could review & rate breweries and connect with each other.
However, I couldn't find any tool that allowed custom design within the Webflow Designer instead of generic embedded widgets, integrated with membership tools like Memberstack to display user profiles alongside reviews, and wouldn't eat away at CMS items.
When I couldn't find a solution meeting these requirements, I got the idea for Supersparks to solve my own problem.
After building a landing page, sharing my idea on a few online communities, and speaking to a few waitlist sign ups, I discovered many other Webflow users faced the same challenge.
What problem does it solve?
Supersparks allows nocoders to build community sites with Webflow in minutes. Webflow doesn't natively support user-generated content or community features.
Current alternatives force website owners to either embed generic-looking widgets (like Disqus or Yotpo), redirect users to third-party platforms (like Skool, Slack, or Mighty Networks) with cookie-cutter designs, or spend weeks creating custom solutions with Make or Zapier that ultimately end up having major limitations.
Supersparks solves this by enabling custom-designed communities on Webflow sites in minutes. Website owners simply paste our components (or clone a template), add our script, and publish.
The key differentiator is that all community elements can be completely customized in the Webflow Designer to match your brand and user needs.
This solution is particularly valuable amid the growing trend of creators monetizing their audience through community features. Supersparks unlocks these monetization opportunities for Webflow sites, especially those already using membership tools with payment capabilities like Memberstack and Outseta.
Our tool specializes in enabling three types of community content:
Commenting: Perfect for blogs and content sites
Reviews & Ratings: Ideal for ecommerce, directories, and recipe blogs
Community Posting: Allows users to create new pages of content, enabling forums, social networks, job boards, and more.
Through our integrations with membership platforms like Memberstack and Outseta, when logged-in members post content, Supersparks automatically displays their profile details (avatar, name, profession, etc.) alongside their contributions.
Site owners can then moderate all user-generated content through an easy-to-use dashboard. Supersparks bridges the gap between Webflow's powerful design capabilities and the community features that modern websites need, without compromising on design control or functionality.
Can you walk us through how it works?
Which No-Code tools did you use to build and run it?
Our tool is a hybrid app with an interesting evolution. I built the first version's backend and web app entirely with Bubble, which allowed me to create an ambitious product without a massive upfront investment.
This was crucial for me as a bootstrapped solo founder. From the beginning, I collaborated with a talented freelance developer, Edilson Gudo, who has been instrumental in developing all the JavaScript that powers the community features / magic happening when our app loads on a Webflow site.
This collaborative approach saved me thousands of dollars and countless development hours. Our app is loaded millions of times monthly.
As a result, Bubble's recent pricing changes presented a challenge, since we would have been charged tens of thousands of dollars in Workload Units (WUs) with our initial setup. With early product-market fit becoming evident, we made the strategic decision to invest into rebuilding our backend entirely with custom code.
However, the web app portion of our tool (installation flows, settings management, content moderation dashboard) and several ad-hoc API calls remain built with Bubble.
The visual editor and API connector continue to be enormous time-savers for me as a solo founder when building new features and user workflows. The plan is to eventually to make the entire product custom coded once we hit certain MRR milestones.
But this hybrid approach gives us the best of both worlds, custom code for scalable performance and no-code for rapid iteration. It's a pragmatic example of leveraging no-code tools strategically while scaling a business and remaining lean / agile.
What was your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
Our business model is entirely subscription based.
Our tool is free on staging domains for Webflow but our tool will only work on a custom domain with a paid subscription.
This gives our users as long as they need to test our tool and to design before going live.
We also offer a free trial for using our tool on a custom domain. One of our biggest conversion drivers are the emails we send when the users' free trial is about to expire.
Different tiers of pricing are based on monthly usage (number of pageviews and content posted). One of our features (community posting) is also exclusive to a higher pricing tier.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
Our main channels:
Community marketing - sharing our solution on the Webflow forum and relevant subreddits, Facebook groups, and Linkedin groups
SEO - blog posts and landing pages for our product's different use cases
Youtube - tutorials for different our product's different use cases 4) Twitter - great for top of funnel awareness
Webflow's app marketplace
We are growing every month:
2k registered users
200 paid customers
2.5k visitors a month to our site
500 social media followers on Twitter
What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out or want to sell their business?
If I could go back in time to before when I started Supersparks, I would tell myself this:
Just build!
Avoid analysis paralysis about whether an idea is good or not. While some validation is useful (waitlists, community feedback, market /competitor / keyword research, etc), you'll often only know if people will pay something when they try a working product.
The beauty of no-code and AI tools is that if you miscalculate demand, you've only invested a small amount of time to build the MVP.
If you're overwhelmed by these tools, sometimes the best way to learn them is by doing.
Start with templates where possible. Don't bang your head against a wall for days if you get stuck. Don't hesitate to ask ChatGPT or communities like Reddit for help.
Sometimes, investing in a freelancer for specific challenges is the most cost-effective solution.
Adding new features can convert and retain customers, but they're pointless if people aren't aware of your product or can't figure out how to use it. Balance your feature development with making sure people can discover and successfully adopt your product.
Don't ignore marketing and smooth onboarding!
Don't fall into the trap of pricing low.
Market where your target customers are.
Thanks for sharing your story Ian!
You can find Ian on:
X - https://x.com/ian_ruta
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ianruta
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