🚪How Alex started, grew and sold a No-Code Education platform
The No-Code Exit story of Alex Bernardo and NoCodeHackers
Hi, Katt here.
I had a little barbecue competition with friends this weekend. The big winner was Sticky Fingers Cauliflower. Google it, it’s so good! So far this useless update. I’m clearly hungry.
Learn in this week’s interview in 4 minutes and 01 seconds how:
🚩 Alex started creating online courses during the pandemic
🧲 He earned 12K in 9 months with his courses
🚪 His business was acquired by a leading No-Code agency
🏄♀️ They are now working together and keep growing
🥨 You say ‘without code’ in Spanish
Before we begin, a big thank you to this week’s sponsor
tonik is a seasoned design studio, working with early-stage startups, helping them in their 0 → 1 journey with designing, building and launching their MVPs.
They’re big believers in leveraging no-code tech as a capital-efficient way to build products.
Some of the viable ventures they launched with no-code are Micasa, Caktus and Pickle.
If you have a project in mind, you can find their availability here or reach them via hello@tonik.com.
🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Alex, what is your background?
My name is Alex Bernardo, and I'm a mechanical engineer. I worked in the open innovation department of a big bank in Spain (ABANCA) for 4 years. I helped them to validate their ideas and leading the intrapreneurship program.
Part of my responsibilities were to manage the website in Elementor and Wordpress. In one of my side-projects I discovered Airtable and my love for that tool started to grow. I used it to create CRMs and internal tools to help me do my job better.
During the pandemic I discovered Webflow and Zapier and started creating more advanced tools by myself, deep diving into Webflow because it gave me the power to create any design that I wanted.
Tell us about your product that you made?
When the pandemic hit, I suddenly had a lot of free time. I decided to try to launch an Airtable Course. I saw that no one actually knew Airtable in Spain and there wasn't any great content in Spanish about these tools. To solve this I created a course to help people learn the basics of Airtable. I named it NoCodeHackers.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
Webflow for the landing page
Thinkific for the learning platform in the beginning because it was free. We could embed the checkout on our landing page for a seamless experience.
Later we switched our learning platform to Podia because we could also set-up a community and Thinkific became very expensive if you wanted to scale.
Zapier and Mailerlite to automate emails
Airtable as CRM
Tally for forms
Landbot for chatbots
What went into building the initial version?
I created a logo in Canva, a landing page in Webflow and a course in Thinkific in around 2 days. I launched it on my Twitter (around 300 followers) and it had some traction, so I decided to keep pushing.
I launched several more (paid) courses of tools like Webflow, Airtable, Coda, … It grew to 1,000 students in 9 months. I worked on it for one hour per day and it generated a revenue of around 12,000€.
At that moment, I made a job switch. I started working at the leader no-code agency (minimum.run) in Spain. 3 months later, we decided to join forces and build something bigger.
Tell us about the acquisition?
Minimum wanted to explore the education aspect of No-Code. I already had a great presence in Spain and a community.
So in May 2021 I sold a share of my business. They acquired 75% of the company and I got 4% of equity in Minimum (worth around 100-120K). They supported all the expenses until we reached profitability like offices, administration and hiring staff.
The negotiation was in the span of maybe 2-3 weeks. I had another offer but decided to go this way for the synergies between the two companies and the amazing team.
How does the saga continue?
We kept growing by selling courses. When we had 8, we decided to create Nocodehackers PRO, a suscription to access all the courses at 174€ a year. We managed to reach 2,000€ MRR with this model. But soon we concluded that it was difficult to sell a subscription. Nobody was actually using the subscription to see all the courses. Then we pivoted to selling Cohort based courses between 350€ - 1,300€.
In our second year we grew to 30,000€, next year to over 110,000€ and this year we aim to reach 250,000€-300,000€.
We're now a team of 5 people with clients like BBVA, Decathlon and Santalucía. We've helped more than 6,000 students, in more than 11,000 courses and we are aiming to teach the next generation of No-Code Specialists in Spain.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
We mainly create a lot of content. We have a newsletter with over 3,600 suscribers, a YouTube Channel with over 5,200 subscribers and a Twitter account with over 9,000 followers. We also created a Discord community with over 3,000 members.
Our main focus is to create free content (courses mainly) and webinars to teach people the basics and then upsell them a paid course through email marketing. All of our growth efforts has been organic, with 0 ads.
What's your advice for makers who are just starting out?
Just launch it. You never know when a single Tweet can change your whole life.
Where can we go to learn more about you?
You can follow me on Twitter. And of course check out No-Code Hackers.
🙌 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
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Thanks Katt.