🚪How Nick grew his accountability app to $540 revenue in 4 weeks

The No-Code Success Story of Nick and Compete NG

Jun 15, 2024

Hello there,

Welcome to 96 new subscribers. Big news: I finally made the switch from nocode-exits.com to nocodeexits.com. Farewell dash!

This week I talked to Nick Gaul, read about:

💥 Losing 30 pounds with a shared spreadsheet
⭐️ Turning the spreadsheet into a mobile accountability app
✨ The scalable tech stack
💰 Getting the first users

Enjoy and happy building.

PS: missed the last interview? Read here how Jules raised $10 Million with No-Code

🎈 5 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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Learn the skills that took others from idea to exit. Check out NoCode University's crash course and learn how to build apps without code.

🔥 No-Code Founder Interview

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

Hello! What's your background?

My name is Nick. I am 33 years old and have lived in the Philadelphia, PA area my entire life. For the last decade, I have been working as a Corporate Relations Manager within a health institution.

I graduated college in 2014 and minored in Information Technology (I barely passed). I knew how extremely hard and nearly impossible coding is. However, with the emergence of AI, I decided to dive into app building.

It didn’t take me long to learn about FlutterFlow. It was the turning point in gaining the confidence that I might actually be able to pull this off. So, I signed up for FlutterFlow and spent a few weeks exploring demo applications and watching YouTube videos. After coming across the videos of Ambitious Labs, I also discovered the opportunity to join a FlutterFlow accelerator program.

Thanks to that program, my app is now a reality! There are so many unknowns when starting this type of challenge. The accelerator program organizes what you need to do at each stage with videos and assignments. This was incredibly helpful, especially after spending three weeks trying to teach myself and getting absolutely nowhere.

How did you come up with your idea?

Throughout my teenage years and adult life, I struggled with wanting to get fit but never actually achieving it. I lacked the short term motivation needed to build any momentum. Finally, fed up with my lack of progress, I decided to focus on short-term goals, hoping the results would follow. So I created a shared spreadsheet with a weekly exercise minutes goal. Knowing I needed some added accountability, I involved my 60 year old dad who wasn’t living a healthy lifestyle. We agreed that if one of us didn’t meet our goal, we would owe the other money. Over 3 and a half years later, we only had to pay each other once and we both lost 30-40 pounds.

Compete NG (Android and Apple), is this spreadsheet idea I have been using for 3+ years. But now streamlined into a fun and rewarding platform that allows users to link up with a friend, create their own minutes goal, and work towards that goal while using their partner for added incentive and motivation to stay on track.

Which No-Code platforms did you use?

FlutterFlow is certainly the reason I was able to build this native mobile app. Being able to design my project without using code has been a game changer.

I chose Firebase backend management because it integrates seamlessly with Flutterflow.

Learning Buildship was challenging, but now I use it along with Sendgrid to automatically send users a "Your Trial Is Ending Soon" email two days before their free trial expires. Additionally, I use Buildship to receive notifications whenever someone signs up for my app, which has been awesome.

I also used AI to help write functions and to search for step-by-step instructions for certain implementations.

What went into building the first version?

It took me 5 months to get to version 1 during night and weekends, On average, I spent 10 hours a week in FlutterFlow. Since I was building my first app and coming from virtually no background in this field, I had so much to learn. I know that if I were to build another app, I could cut that time in half or more. The app went live in the app store on May 5, 2024.

How have you attracted users and grown your product?

With just 4 weeks in, there are 30 users and a revenue of $540. Marketing has for now been focused on my social media channels and joining online motivational groups on Facebook.

Next focus is to double down on marketing. Some things on the agenda are joining a networking conference with health professionals and meet some fitness trainers.

What's your advice for people just getting started?

No matter what your background is, with no-code, you can certainly build an app.
As long as you:

have patience
are open-minded
and are eager to transform your idea into reality

My advice would be to just get to a starting point, and then start searching online (mainly on YouTube). There are many no-coders out there who have instructional videos on every single stage of implementation. The tools are all there; it's really such a fortunate time for people like me, who have virtually no experience, to do things that in prior years seemed impossible.

Thanks for sharing your story Nick! Rooting for you!

🍿 Katt builds in public

My actions, fails and wins on the road to ramen profitability with no-code

I haven’t done a lot of SEO for No-Code Exits. Now I finally started.

I set up search console
I submitted my sitemap
I looked for no-code related keywords with low competition and some search volume
I created a page around the keyword
I optimized the H1, Description, Meta Title, Meta Description for the keyword
I adapted the content (very easy by just setting up different filter in Softr and Airtable)
I linked the pages in the footer so Google knows it exists

Here is an example, let’s see if it might bring in some traffic :)