How Tamir Bootstrapped a $3,500 MRR SaaS Product from Scratch Using No-Code Shortcuts

How Tamir Leveraged No-Code Tools to Fix What Zendesk Overlooked 👀

Hello 👋

I’m so excited to bring you this inspiring story this week. I talked with Tamir who runs a Zendesk app agency.

Read about:

📚 Leveraging knowledge of Zendesk to identify untapped opportunities
🛠️ The tools that helped Tamir build a $3,500 MRR business
👀 How solving gaps in Zendesk’s offerings gave Tamir a significant edge
🗣️ How offering free integrations sparked word-of-mouth marketing

Enjoy and happy building!

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🔥 No-Code Founder Interview

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

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Hello! What's your background?

My name is Tamir Bashkin and I fell into No-Code by way of a happy accident. Back in college, I dropped out of a CS degree which taught me enough to be able to read code.

But I knew I didn’t want to become a developer. This led me to start a Zendesk implementation agency, where my superpower was creating No-Code integrations.

After working on 100+ Zendesk implementations, I saw room for creating automated SaaS products. I began to do this within the platform for some of my clients and other clients on the platform.

This is what initially got me curious about No-Code tools that I could use. My clients needed quick solutions that would take Zendesk several years to create, test, and eventually launch.

Everyone around me discouraged me, but I knew this was a niche that hardly anyone was serving at the time. 

Tell us about your product that you made?

Given my experience with Zendesk automation, I knew the Zendesk app marketplace well. I saw the marketplace as a fantastic way to learn more about customer pain points too.

One pain point that my clients were repeatedly asking help with was needing a quick and automated way to close tickets. Specifically, they struggled with tickets being reopened after an agent had already solved them. This occurred when a customer responded with a thank you message.

This led me to launch a new product called Thank You GPT.

Thank You GPT uses AI to identify thank you messages from customers and it automatically takes them out of the agent’s queue. It’s a small task, sure, but thousands of them? That's a lot of time and costs companies want to automate.

I was blown away. After adding a paywall, I sent an email out to my customers and said: “Pay if you like it or I’ll need to shut it down.” To my delight, I had 20 customers who paid on the spot. 

Which No-Code tools did you use to build and run it? 

I used the first version of Make.com, called Integromat - when it was still a niche product. This still serves as the backbone of the app, and all the logic runs through there.

I’ve also used akeyless.io as a vault to store customer API keys. This was required from the beginning since we have to access their Zendesk account.

Once the product started to pick up, I implemented segment.io for storing analytics data, metabase for dashboards, and Bubble.io as the UI of the app.

I’m using Microsoft Azure and OpenAI to power the AI portion of the app, since it’s more secure. This allows me to cover the AI expenses via the Microsoft startups accelerator benefits, which remove a big operational cost for me. I believe that by the time the credits expire, AI usage will be a commodity so the credits help me get to that point in time.

🛠️ No-Code Tools

1. Make - for the logic and automations

2. Akeyless - for API keys

3. Bubble - for UI of the app

4. Microsoft Azure - for AI

5. OpenAI - for AI

What went into building the initial product?

The first version was created in a few weeks and $700 investment. I worked with a Zendesk app developer to create the app based on the requirements of one of my implementation customers.

He was responsible for creating the app and the front-end and I was responsible for the back-end side. This meant that I processed the messages and solved the Zendesk tickets if it was a thank you message. 

We got published on the app marketplace within 3-4 weeks after we started developing the product. Overtime, it amassed ~500 customers that installed for free at that time.

That version used Regex to decide if a message is a thank you message or not. This meant that it was useful for some companies but it wasn’t solving a lot of tickets on the whole. Once we implemented AI, that changed and we were able to start charging for the usage.

What was your business model and how have you grown your revenue?

I have a lean MVP approach, and I am a huge proponent of bootstrapping. I started by charging $50 for the usage, and $250 for Enterprise companies that wanted me to sign an NDA.

We went from $0 to $1,000  in revenue by launching AI processing and putting a paywall on the product.

The second increase in revenue was when we built a UI that allowed companies to configure the product themselves. This mean they didn’t have to reach out to us and it resulted in less churn. Customers were able to see the results of the plugin in real time and have more control over it.

How have you attracted users and grown your product?

Currently, the majority of our customers come from organic discovery in the Zendesk apps marketplace. We’ve been experimenting with paid ads on Google that had some success, but we were struggling to track the results properly.

Can you share some stats?

💰 $3,500 MRR

~ 40 active customers.

~ 80 more customers in freemium

200 visits each month on the Zendesk marketplace page, out of which we’re getting 5-10 installs per month.

What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out or want to sell their business? 

I believe the most important thing when you start out is finding some form of validation. If you’re a No-Code founder that’s working on a CRM plugin, you can search the feature requests forums for ideas.

If you’re not working on top of an existing platform, looking at creating a “low-cost” version of a VC backed product can be a validation point in itself. 

The easiest mistake to make is to jump into building and creating too fast. First, you need to ensure you’ve got a customer who’s interested in your product.

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Thanks for sharing your story Tamir!

You can find more about him on LinkedIn

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