Need an app built? Here's how you can do it yourself. w/ Tara Reed

several mistakes. I can tell you what I've learned from them. The biggest mistake I made and that I have to really work on every day despite the learnings, is this assumption that I can't do what's needed. Like me, I don't have the ability to do what needs to scale my company because I didn't have this fancier experience or I didn't do this fancy thing. The reality is when you're building something that's really innovative, there is no right way to do it. There's only a way to think

and feel about it, which is unbelievable. So persistent passion and what I found like I would hire these high polluted people from these fancy companies and bring them in and they'd be basic as hell, and I'd be like, why are you so basic? I don't get it, Like I don't have a degree in this and I'm about to google my way to being significantly better than you. It's because no, and it's because like they you know, and even Richard Branson will say this stuff. It's like, yo,

hire for culture, not not for skill set. A smart person can learn almost anything, or you can have a consultant and ask them questions. But when you bring on the team and they think they have the skill set but they don't have the culture. When things change, when you have to deal with certain scenarios, it can be tough for them. And so we at one point, we're almost twenty five, and we're right now down to six team because I just know that there were a lot

of basic people eating up my burnery. I'm with Lucas, Mrs Black Tech, Dream Money. I'm gonna answer you to She just some of the biggest names, some of the brightest minds and brilliant ideas. If you're black in building or simply using tech to secure your bag, this podcast is for you. Terror Read is founder a apps without code, you know, online learning platform which teaches anyone how they can build and launch an app to any of the big platforms like Apple's App Store and Google Play. However

without writing a line of code. She's a big evangelist of the idea that technology has advanced to such a place where building an app is the easy part. However, I asked her about being that is so easy? Are there still any real excuses to be used for an entrepreneur to not have their app idea done? Oh? Well, I mean they're all kinds of excuses for people not doing stuff and launching their ideas that they have. So yes,

there are excuses. There's always an excuse. But in terms of technology and like I can't do it, it's it's possible now. Yeah, So much has changed over the past really like five years about what is possible to build. And I've gotten to really see and and largely usher in this whole new wave of people building things and building their ideas, their app ideas without having to have a computer science degree or pay twenty dollars to hire

a developer to build it for them. Like people can really build their products themselves now without code and using after that code techniques. Yeah, I mean you said, so much has changed over the past couple of years. What has changed that allows somebody who does not have a technical background didn't start coding at two and a half years old, that's right. What happened so before it used to be that if you had an idea for an app or an online business. And really, by the way,

an app is just something that you log into. So if it has a user name and a password that you can log into, it's an app. Even if it's on your computer, it's an app. So sometimes we think about apps is just the thing that's in the app store that you download, but we use apps all day every day. If you log into it it I can't even keep track of all my passwords. Sometimes if you log into it, it's an app, right. So so if you had an idea for something that someone would log into,

you would have had a couple options. Before you have had to hire someone to build it for you, and usually pricing for that starts at twenty k and up. Or you would have to find someone to be your tech business partner. And there's nothing wrong with that, but you want to get someone that you trust and not

rush that process. And not everybody has network so that they know a bunch of developers and coders to make an app for you, or you would have to learn to code um which again nothing wrong with it, It just takes a few years for most people to get to a proficiency level. And technology moves so fast that you spending two years just to learn a new skill before you start. Like that idea is gone. And so

you used to have those options. And what changed is that the platforms, the software available to let people build apps changed. Before you used to need to know a coding language to do it, and now all you can build apps in English. So the way that works is you design the app by drag, drop, point, click, you

like like you're making a power point presentation. You put what you want on the page, and then you tell the app what to do in English, so like it literally says if the user clicks the button, then log them in. And it says that in English is opposed to you having to learn a whole another language to tell the app what to do. So you write these logic statements, and the logic statements tell the app what

to do, and that's what's changed. So there's so many people who I would imagine come to you and say, hey, I hear you saying all this stuff. That sounds good, but you know, I still have a problem opening the PDF, right, and so like like what kind of person is best suited to be building an app without code? And what kind of person should still just leave it to somebody else? You know the question? Great question. Okay, So there's some basic just tech skills competency that it helps to have.

For example, like your if answering your email is hard, you should outsource it. Somebody else can do it for you. You have other zones of genius, right, And that's just like real talk, like there are other people who can do it for you. I still think you should have someone else build it without code, particularly you're just starting. You can have someone else build it without code for you because that way it gets done in a fraction

of the time and the fraction of the cost. You still want that, um, but you may hire someone else to do it for you. Um. There's also some just like general logic skills it helps to have. So I just gave an example earlier, whereas like if the user clicks the button, then log them in the concept of if this then that there are some professions where even if you've never built an app, like because you do this kind of thing at work, people pick it up

so fast. So like, for example, um, if you use Excel at all, like it'll be a breeze and easy. You do lots of logic and Excel right. If you are you have part of your job is to give people detailed instructions, you'll be good at it. Um people who have people have like logical a lot of critical thinking in their work. There's some roles where like there's a little bit of a larger gap. For example, like when I talk to people who are artists right where

it's all full free form creativity. The computer is not smart enough to understand your free form creativity ideas. So you're gonna have to give it like step by step instructions which you can totally learn. But like people who for example, are struggling with the email and getting your email open outsource that use your Zonner genius for something else. So I wonder, like, is there a certain type of app that I can build without code? Because I wonder if if I wanted to make the next TikTok, could

I do that without learning how to code? Versus if I was trying to make you know, a spreadsheet versus you know, kind of kind of, I would imagine there's probably some limitations or no, you can tell me no, there are limitations. So it's probably easier for me to tell you what you can't do then to tell you what you can do, because most stuff you can do now.

And I'll preface this by saying that every time people ask me a question about what you can't do without code, like the next month, someone comes out with the software that allows you to do this, So it does change. Um. For example, I used to say that, like augmented reality not really possible yet without code, Like I'm sure someone's

working on it, but not yet possible, but it's now possible. Actually, Facebook has a tool called spark a R which allows you to build augmented reality apps without codes, So like that's no longer true. So I say that to say that, like if someone launches something this this space is developing quickly, so like people will launch stuff, um, the things that are still hard to do without code. Emoji apps, you know those apps were like you create your own emojis

and they embed into your keyboard. Still hard to do without code, um. Virtual reality so not into the reality. Augmented reality is where like let's say you hold up your phone and it puts like we see this a lot and like snapchatter chick or TikTok or filters. Right, that's a that's an augmented reality. You still see some the normal thing through the camera, but you put a hat on top of the person's head or you you augment what's actually happening in reality. UM, so that now

is actually possible. Virtual reality is where like you have like a headset, for example, and you change the whole world. Your whole world is now you're in a different land. Right. So virtual reality still I haven't seen a lot of really good tools for no code with virtual reality, augmented reality yet virtual reality now, UM what else? Um, there are some limitations in like UM and this kind of

depends on the tool in UM. Cryptocurrency thus far without code and really plugging into cryptocurrency platforms and doing cryptocurrency deals and transactions and letting people pay in cryptocurrency, that still is not amazingly smooth without code. But those those are the biggest areas that I see people stuck with.

And there used to be other areas, and then someone came out with a tool, so like things you can do UM and actually we have like a couple common structures that we find most people's app ideas fall into UM and these are all totally possible. So most of the time UM many app ideas will give you the categories, so they will an app that recommends things right, think like Tender for example, where it's giving you recommendations based

on something. An app that gives you like a community, so think like Facebook, think TikTok, think Instagram like a community based app really good for building without code. UM A marketplace app where people are like buying and selling things from each other, think like Airbnb people can buy and sell. Also a UM I would call it like a service tracking app, so think like Uber where you like book a thing and you can track the progress,

or even like Domino's pizza tracker. Like those are like examples of those sorts of tracking service tracking UM I think like also UM tracking of a like numbers or metrics, so think like Fitbit or even like Salesforce where you're tracking the progress or process of a transaction, a sale of your health whatever that might be. What am I forgetting here missing those are really common ones. There's a

couple more that we often have people fall into. But like those are things you totally can do, and I

would count consider those things like easy to do without code. Now, yeah, at what point do you think it will we will get to the place where we don't feel like we have to tell our kids and our young people go learn to code because no code has gotten so sophisticated where you don't have to go get the engineering situation is are we still like a decade out, two decades or we a couple of years out or would that always be that you still know that we should be

doing that period, Like there is a movement where it's like everybody go learn to code. Like I recognize that, particularly for folks of color, we're like, oh, look that's where the money job is. Everybody should go learn to code. I don't know if that's the right narrative. Um, in the same way that I don't know it's the right narrative that like when we say everybody should be a doctor, right,

that's that's where the money is. I think when we do that, particularly as people of color, we end up being like behind the curve because by the time the generation whoever is giving that recommendation realizes that that's where the money is. That next generation, like the money is moved to a different kind of place. So, UM, while I don't think it's a bad thing to be a developer, to be clear, UM, I think we really want to teach people how to be in our people, particularly how

to be good problem solvers. UM. The concept of thinking like an engineer, that part is useful regardless of what you do. And when I say thinking like an engineer, I really mean in this scenario, like there there is a sequence of events that need to happen, and there's a logic behind those sequence of events. And if you want to go be a lawyer and use that um knowledge, if you want to go be a developer and use that knowledge, if you want to go be an artist

and use that knowledge, that's still relevant. So I'm not a huge backer of like this whole everybody should code movement in the first place. UM. I think that the distinction, though, to directly answer your question, is depending on if you're trying to get a job in tech or you're trying to do entrepreneurship in tech. All right, So if you're trying to get a job, you still need to learn to code. There are not enough companies yet who are

hiring no code developers. They're more and more. So if you go on like upwork, for example, you see all these job postings for no code developers. Now, um, but most big companies are looking for you to code, all right,

So if that's the goal, go learn to code. If your goal is entrepreneurship, and particularly if you're not technical already, like you're not technical, you're interested in entrepreneurship, it may not make sense to go spend years learning a new skill set when you probably ultimately in the company that you build will be doing something else, like you might be the CEO and at some point not coding at all.

And in that scenario, your goal is to get as quickly to paying customers as possible, and so whatever way you can do that, usually no code will get you there much faster, if that makes more sense. So if it's about job, definitely still have to go learn to code. I think we're five maybe ten years out plus from that changing. Um, just because of how no code has gotten popularized, and I think how we're talking about it.

I don't think that the no Code community and space has done a great job talking about what no Code is such that it's gotten the adoption that it deserves. Yeah, and you know what's so interesting to me is you

didn't it into this wanting to be an entrepreneur. You didn't see yourself as an entrepreneur, you know, growing up, and now you're running this big business, this online platform, teaching people how to do this, and a lot of folks who will be building these apps that you're that you're evangelizing don't see themselves as people who build apps.

So how do you how do you think about, you know, reframing um your own mental process to be able to be successful, because if I'm just trying to run my small grocery store, now I'm building this app, you know, there's other things that go into that, you know, to find success versus just let me throw this up on app store real quick and move on. Yes. Absolutely, I always tell people that they should build a business that happens to have an app, not an app that happens

to have a business. The business comes first, right, and the app is just a tool that delivers it to people. In fact, a lot of the times it's not even useful to market. If you have an app idea, it's not even useful to market it as an app because in people's head or as just an app quote unquote, because in people's heads when people hear app, they think free cents, two dollars, ten dollars, some low price point, um.

But if they hear something else, right, other energy, to hear education, to hear services, all these other things experiences we think are expensive. App we think it's cheap. So even if you're building an app, you may not even want to position it that way. And that's where your point about other skill sets comes in, because if all you're good at is building the app, you're gonna have some trouble because you won't make much money from it

and really won't have a thriving business itself sustaining. What you really want to be thinking about is what business you build around this thing. And for me, I had

started to my background isn't working in tech. I worked at Google, four squared, Microsoft before becoming a full time entrepreneur, but I was working on the business and marketing side, so I was not developing any apps, um, And I was not planning to be an entrepreneur like you're saying, I my plan originally was to climb the corporate ladder.

The only reason, the only reason that I built an app was because I was working at the time at Microsoft and I felt like there was a lot of bureaucracy in my job and I wanted like another creative outlet, that something I had control of more as opposed to sort of like the politics playing that I was feeling frustrated with at work. That's why I built my first app. I wanted like another creative outlet, and I didn't have those words at the time, and I can look back

and say, oh, that's what it was. I was just looking for like something that I could like create and build. I'd like to make things um But really I think at the time, I just felt like I like to solve hard problems. There was something about the challenge of putting something out there into the world that I made that feels cool and exciting and like, let me go check that out. That's probably closer to the words that I had at the time. And so I think that

I did not think of myself as an entrepreneur. I don't think it's that important that when you start you think of yourself as a hotshot entrepreneur. Um. But I do think it's important that you think about how you're going to make money with the business, and is this an idea that people are willing to pay for? And why is this idea a good use of my unfair advantage. When I say unfair advantage, I mean something that you

already know something about. I often see entrepreneurs launch something and they're like, no, absolutely nothing about the industry that they're launching the app in or a launching the business. And it's not a bad thing to do. It just means you're not leveraging your unfair advantage, which is something you already know something about. So those are all the like business skills and things that surround the app that many people who are non technical they already sort of

have as their common sense and are refining even more. Um, those are the things that really make a big difference. At least for me, has made a really big difference in my business success. The app building piece has been just an extra thing that has enabled me to have

reach and be able to enter tech in a different way. Yeah, and let's go in there, because I wanted to ask you this is how do I know, Like, what is that process that you teach people on to say, how to determine if this is a viable app idea in the first place, Because so many people will come to you be like I got an idea. What's the process you go through to to walk them through and say, let's find out if this is actually an idea versus just something you and your mom said it was fantastic. Yeah,

that's right, that's right. Okay. So there's two parts to the process. The first is just coming up with the idea in the first place, and then the second is exactly what you're mentioning, which is going to test it and validate it to make sure this is something that

will make the kind of business that you want. So the first step I usually encourage people like call it a smart idea formula, but to walk through a series of three questions for themselves to come up with an app idea that leverages their unfair advantage in the first place. So the first question to ask yourself is an easy one. It's like what do I do for work? You could also do the same process with what you do as

a hobby, So like, what's my hobby? Because starting there allows us to build something around something you already know something about. You know more about it than I do, right, And so we start there. Then the second question is what is one thing that is hard or time consuming about what you do for work or what you do

for a hobby. We all have parts of our jobs that were like, oh, I gotta do this part again, it's just kind of like annoying, I've got to do this right, or even things that your boss is complaining about that you just repetitive prophecies, or things that are hard or time consuming. Even if you're a full time parent, right figuring out what your kids are going to be

doing for that day is harder time consuming. And so the third question to ask yourself then is if you built an app to alleviate that stress of the thing that's harder time consuming, what could the app do and to start brainstorming there, that's the place to sort of focus your brain storm around around what you do for work or hobby, something you know something about and what's harder, time consuming and what you could build there. That's the

place to start. Another way to think about that, like if I hired an assistant to help me with my job what would I have them do? Because the chances are whatever you would have them do, that's the thing that you should build something around, so that points you in the right direction. That's the first step. So let let's talk about So let's say I have an app. Now, yeah, how do I get people to download? Because it's one thing to have the app, the whole other thing to

get people to actually quick download. Yes, absolutely, absolutely, So I think that there are a couple of different really good ways to get word out about your app. One of the things that we do actually in our boot camp program is we've teach people different ways to find folks and communities of people on social media. So that could be like faithbook groups that could be on LinkedIn.

People are all over the place, self identifying themselves on Twitter, different things that they're posting about, and so we show a lot of our students how to get those first customers by reaching out in some of those places. But you want to find where the hubs of your customers are with means that you first have to get really

specific about who the heck they are. So if you're like, oh, my app is for everyone, it's like that's one of the number one rookie things that I hear people say, like, oh, it's for everybody. You really want to be specific, because when you're specific, you can go find those groups of people. I guarantee you there's a Facebook group for that. I guarantee you there's a meetup dot com group for that. I guarantee you there's a bunch of people posting on

Twitter about that. And so those are some really good places to find people. You should not assume that if you put your app in the app store, people will find you. That used to be the case when like apps were first coming out an app store, just because you were in the app store, you'd be discovered. Now you're likely going to be at the very bottom of the list, and so you should assume that you're doing all of your own marketing and footwork and outreach to

get people to you. In fact, I actually usually encourage the students that I work with, like, let's not even worry about the app store for a minute. It's not really going to help us. Let's launch a web app so that someone can use it on any device, so you can use it on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, if you have, on whatever device, because we're gonna have to give them

the link to it anyway. Um, how do you get non technical people to specifically think about like utilizing existing tech versus building their own thing, because there's so many people like you, Like, there's things like if you're trying to automate the process, you don't always have to build that.

You can use something like zappi are or you know, like, how do you get them to think about, Okay, look, if you're not really trying to build a situation off of this and there's tech availance, let's probably figure out to leverage tech that's already out here. Yeah. No, I mean the foundation of everything that I do is leveraging

tech that's already out there. And I can give you actually a story about this because my first app idea, UM, I was working at Microsoft at the time, I had just moved into a new apartment and I was thinking about art in my home. And so my very first startup was called Collecto, and I built an algorithm, Ultimate lead, to match people to artwork based on their taste. But when I first was starting, I was like, Okay, I have a very few resources and very little budget to

get this going. So what existing tools can I use to make this happen. And what I ended up doing is I used a tool called survey GisMo, the surveying tool, and surveys have this I U I used survey GisMo in an unintended way, so this is not how you're supposed to use survey GisMo, but it got me what I needed. So surveys have like show hide logic. So an example of this is like it'll ask you to

survey and I'll say what's your favorite color? And it's multiple choice, and you say purple, and then it'll ask you a follow up question. The next question is referencing your answer, so it'll say, great, what do you Why do you like purple? And what it's doing is it's showing you the purple question and it's the purple follow up question and it's hiding the blue follow up question. That's what it's doing. It's showing and hiding the right thing.

So what I did was I used that technology, um that show and hide component the survey to fill in a bunch of art, pieces of art into the survey. So each survey question was like a piece of art and essentially, do you like this, yes or no? And if people said that they liked photography, I would show all the photography and hide everything else. Or if they liked paintings that were abstract expressionist with a budget of under five hundred dollars, I would show that and hide

everything else. So it was automatically doing the show and hide logic. And that was the very first version of the product. It was like not an actual app. It was like a survey that I built. People actually thought it was an app. People would respond to like, oh my gosh, it's your app is so cool. And that first version of the product that I built maybe my first thirty five thousand dollars in revenue, and it also got me a hundred thousand dollar investment from five hundred Startups,

just a top tech accelerator in Silicon Valley. Like I remember my interview for a five hundred startups where we got to the part where we were talking about the tech because at that point I still was using that survey tool to make my first money. We we moved on to more sophisticated no code tools after that, um, but I remember the part of the interview where they asked me, you have a technical found co founder, like who's developing this how's that part going? And I was like, Okay, Harry,

I've got to explain this. And I was kind of nervous about it because at the time, even more so than now, it was like, you have to have a tech co founder, you have to have a CTO, and that was the culture. And so I explained to them how I used a survey and how we'd use existing off the shelf tools, things that already existed to build the product. And then I quickly pivoted it too, and here's the revenue that we've made this far, and here's

all our excited customers, right. And I remember that the partners who were in the interview, they looked at each other and they nodded, because what was clear was it this person was going to figure this out no matter what. We can help her with the other stuff, but like, she's got grit and she's gonna use the tools that already are out there to figure it out. I think it actually works to my advantage. And that was the beginning of me looking at no code tools. I eventually

wanted to get more sophisticated and found other tools. At the time, I use a tool called Bubble to build the next version of the product um but that was how I started. I use existing tools that were already out there to get my first version built. It's particularly and I've asked almost everybody in the podcast this question

because it's it's so important to me. It's particularly in this moment um, this COVID you know, hopefully end of COVID moment, this you know, um social unrest moment where we're trying to figure out, you know, our new social discourse, a new way of dealing with each other. How important is this moment for black entrepreneurs who I'm looking for, you know, opportunities to scale their business and looking for

opportunities to do business better. How important is it that they don't miss out on the opportunity right now to be able to do their thing? Oh man, I mean, so, the reality is that during crisis and or recessions, that's when people society, individuals in society make their next level up.

Like that's the reality of how wealth gets generated. So people say that, like during a recession, you go from economy to first class, or you go from first class to a private jet, Like that's the opportunity, that's the window is usually during a recession because things in industries are all being shaken up, and so there's all this opportunity, right, and so yes, you will not meet the opportunity at every recession, in every crisis to make that jump, but

there are huge opportunities there, and so particularly for folks of color, for black folks, like, we need to make those jumps, right, We need to be thinking about those opportunities and making the most out of those time periods. Who I would say, even though we're sort of at the hopefully end of this period, we're still in it.

And this is not the time to be like, you know what, like I'm gonna play it safe, like I'm just really not going to launch that thing that I've been thinking of, Like this is the time for the risk. It feel and it feels the opposite. That's the tricky part about it. It feels like the time to be like, you know what, let me not take risks right now.

A lot's going crazy in the world. No, this is the time where actually people are making these seismic shifts in their own income, wealth class, and so this is the time, this is the moment right now for us to be like, you know what, I'm gonna take a staff at That Idea. Yeah. Black Tech Green Money is a production of Black and the Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast network in My Heart Media and it's produced by Morgan Dubon and Me with Lucas, with additional

production support by Love Beach, raveneer Boy. Special thank you to Michael Davids since the car savan Yon you know like the Wine. Yes that's his real name. Learn more about my guests and other tech disruptres that innovators at afrotech dot com. The video version of this episode would drop the Black Tech Green Money on YouTube next week, so tap in, enjoy your Black Tech Green Money, leave us a five star rating on iTunes. Go get your money. Peace of luck,