no i i don't agree um and i don't really know where you're getting this impression from like okay so for sure there are bad no code apps out there but if you build a no code app well if you know what you're doing then For sure it can scale. Hello and welcome back to IndieBytes, the podcast where I bring you stories of fellow indie hackers in 15 minutes or less. I'm your host, James McKimben.
In this episode, I'm joined by Kieran Ball, who is the founder of NoCodeLife, a selection of case studies of those making successful businesses using NoCode. Kieran also has courses on how to become a NoCode SaaS founder, specifically using the Bubble platform.
I wanted to get Kieran on the pod to discuss and challenge him on the no-code movement and if you can actually create a scalable product using the tools available or if no-code serves a slightly different purpose. Now, if you enjoyed my back and forth with Kieran about no-code, there is an extended version
of the chat available on the IndieBytes membership for just $60 a year. Head to IndieBytes.com membership. And before we get into it, I'd like to thank my sponsor, Email Octopus. Now, Email Octopus are the email platform focused on affordability and ease of use.
very generous free plan and without some of those bloated features so you can focus on shipping and growing your audience which regular listeners know is essential for growth in the early days so to get started with an email platform that just gets out the way You can contact up to 2,500 subscribers for free. Head to emailoptimus.com and hit the link in the show notes. Let's get into this chat with Kieran. Kieran, welcome to the pod. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.
So let's get into who Kieran is. I put here, you worked in finance and you're a spreadsheet bro. Is that right? I started out my career in finance using a lot of spreadsheets, very, very corporate, and I didn't like the banking aspect. My favourite thing about it was using spreadsheets, which sounds really nerdy, I know, but I think there's a lot of people out there who like spreadsheets.
And the thing I liked about spreadsheets would be sitting down and trying to make a new spreadsheet that did cool stuff and had inputs and outputs and it was basically like a simple app and i always dreamed of being able to turn a spreadsheet into an app so that was kind of like the the beginnings of my interest in no code you have tried and failed to learn code i know a lot of people who have tried and failed to code so what was your story
yeah i mean i spent probably a decade on and off trying to learn to code doing like code academy doing javascript and stuff like that and the thing that i always found the most difficult like the actual coding part i quite liked like simple javascript in code academy
was good but the thing i didn't like was often it just feels like you're trying to get your environment set up on your laptop and you're copying and pasting commands from stack overflow into your like terminal and i was thinking i don't understand what any
these things are doing i could paste the wrong thing and totally wipe my entire computer like i have no idea but i found that stuff really really difficult i think it's different now because you've got stuff like replit which takes care of all those different things the servers and environment and you just do the code so i think maybe if i learned now it would be a different story i've kind of had a similar experience and
it sort of leads us nicely into no code i'm grateful that there are no code tools available that mean not only can i create the media content that i do that is more in my skill set and doesn't require needing how to code but you can now create sas apps and various other things when did you discover it and get into it and where does it sort of fit into the timeline of you dabbling with code working in startups so in 2015 i co-founded a
a tech startup with a coder and i was the non-technical one and we eventually had a team of like 15 developers and so i'd spent many years like working alongside these guys and then I was still like playing around in my spare time with side projects and then in 2019 I think I saw a tweet
or something on product hunt and i i discovered first i discovered glide apps which their promises turn a spreadsheet into an app and and naturally i was like oh my god this is what i've been looking for so i started using that and making little apps and then i quickly found bubble and i just logged in and dragged some stuff onto the page and added some buttons and then added a workflow and i was like oh my god this is exactly what i want within two months of discovering it i had built a full
sass app with payments and like pretty cool functionality it was like a video testimonials tool when i missed you i was asking for some of your thoughts on no code and what you've done and you said you've built and launched multiple sas products albeit with minimal success and i'm guessing a lot of these sas products have been using no code and here's where i think the problem
is a lot of the time that it's really hard to launch something and make it successful with no code because it always feels kind of hacky do you think your minimal success with a lot of these sas products Due to it being no code or the position, the product, the market. Because if you follow what Damon's done with Testimonial and now Senja, that would suggest that it's not the market or the idea of the positioning.
No, I think it's 100% the founder. And yeah, it's not at all at all. I don't agree that no code apps are hacky. I'm sure there are lots of ugly ones out there. But yeah, I think my lack of success with my different SaaS products...
projects is 100% because I'm not very good at marketing. That first video testimonials all you know i probably tweeted about it five times i maybe had like a hundred followers i spoke to a couple of friends and said do you want to use this and they kind of said yes and then they kind of didn't use it and then i just gave up and i was like okay this isn't going to work and
Yeah, at that point, I just discovered Bubbles. So I was like, okay, I've got 10 other ideas I can make. So I just totally just dropped it. What about those that have been successful building no code or apps with no code? I think... We see less of them because no code is still a relatively new technology. But yeah, there's definitely a few that are doing really well. So like this one guy, David Bressler, he was on paternity leave and he wanted to try doing a side project and he just...
discovered bubble so he built this thing called excel formula bot it took him like six weeks from discovering bubble to to building this thing and then it went viral on reddit and from what i've heard recently is he has like 60 000 monthly active users and like 700 000 users in total so
Like he's definitely scaling. He went full time on it after I think six months. And there's, yeah, there's loads of other stories like that. There's like swap stack, which was recently acquired. It's like a newsletter sponsorship market marketplace. They were at 25 K MRR when they got acquired.
it took them maybe a year or two to get there and then there's ones that are doing like yeah way bigger scale but you just don't hear about them or they're like they're a bit shy about revealing their numbers and stuff like that yeah i mean i feel like they're almost the outlier examples and even then they're still not massive compared to what you would expect for something that is scaling beyond the point where i feel you can fix things and build new
features that customers want without like really pushing the no code tools to their limit do you think that like do you think that maybe No-code tools are best for building MVPs and like getting to a certain scale and then you might have to rebuild the app in code to... make it more robust no i i don't agree um and i don't really know where you're getting this impression from like okay so for sure there are bad no code apps out there and i think one of the things about no code is that anyone
or almost anyone can do it. It's like way more accessible. So you get people who have absolutely zero design skills, have never looked at a technical product or looked at how it's developed and they try and build an app and they find that they can build an app.
but they built it badly. And then people, they show it to people and people are like, okay, yeah, no code looks terrible and the app's like really crap. But if you build a no code app well, if you know what you're doing, then for sure it can scale.
I mean, if you think of like Salesforce, right? Salesforce is like the original no-code app. You can build custom apps in Salesforce and it's used by... giant companies all over the world but if you like i was i've been watching videos recently on how to build apps and salesforce and it's it's not that different from bubble you can do a lot of the same things but you just have this terrible ui that you're like restricted to whereas
bubble is the same principle build whatever app you want but you just have so much more flexibility Yeah, I think that's a fair point. And you asked where I get the impression from about it being more hacky and better for an MVP. It can't be scalable. Purely my own personal experience and examples that I've seen of apps built in no code. I've always felt that whenever I try to build something,
always like restricted to the confines of whatever tool I'm using and often if I try and change one thing I need to pair it together with something in the back end with Zapier and it just feels more hacky because I don't know what I'm doing and maybe that's the thing
whereas because i don't know what i'm doing with code i wouldn't know where to start but with no code it looks more attainable because it's more visual you can see that you drag these things here to connect this and make an app but actually i'm not doing the required effort to learn how you can use a tool better in terms of your own stuff no code life and your courses Where did it start for you telling stories of others, building stuff with no code and also your courses? So, yeah, I mean...
I'm trying to build a flywheel where I get people interested in no code. And a lot of people have the same kind of concerns or preconceptions that you do that... you know, you're very limited on what you can build. There's not much of an ecosystem around it. And so I wanted to tell the success stories of people who have successfully changed careers. So like I know tons of people who have gone from other jobs to becoming a full
time no code builder and then obviously when people say oh actually this does sound good then i'm like okay well i have i have courses teaching you exactly how to do all this stuff how's all that going in terms of the core sales and growing all that it's going okay i find courses take so long to make and then yeah it's all about marketing right and as i said i'm not very good at marketing i'm slowly getting better at it i think you're being harsh to yourself as well kieran
on not being good at marketing because you have grown an audience for yourself 25 000 twist followers that's not an easy feat you're in a niche and you're focused on that niche so everyone that comes to you knows that you're going to be talking about no code and learning from from you about that so what parts of your marketing do you feel you need to improve on
I mean, yeah, I guess I am harsh on myself because, yeah, I'm in, you know, the same Twitter bubble that you probably are where I see the success stories and everyone going crazy and tweets going viral. It's a mindset thing, really. Like, I still... put off marketing as much as possible like you really need to focus on it like I find marketing to be like
it's too wishy-washy you don't see the results straight away like if you if you build a new feature for your app you can play with it immediately and you can show it to people straight away but if you do marketing you might have to wait a month or two months to see results and even then you don't know if it was the
stuff you did or if it was just something random that's happened and i yeah i know there are ways to like attribute things and and be a lot more methodical about it but yeah that's that's not really me so i still find it quite of a kind of just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if anything works. You say it's not really you, which I get, but it's kind of necessary, right? So...
Is it not as like essential to learn those things that aren't really you? Or is it a case of outsourcing those to someone else if you can afford it? Yeah, I've thought about outsourcing, but I really, I really want to get... good at it because i really think that it is the kind of thing that it's kind of like a game and if you get into it and figure it out then i can see it becoming fun if you if you can actually say okay
if I do these things, I know that revenue will come, then I can imagine that will be fun. And yeah, I have like, I have had some success with, with marketing. So like my most successful product to date.
it was a landing page builder called yep.so which i launched like coming up to a couple of years ago and i did get quite serious about marketing that but then when it comes to like i don't know more highbrow marketing like seo and stuff like that and paid ads i'm just i'm so nervous of it there's like
like so much analytics and things you have to do. Where do you go in the future for you, Kieran, in terms of do you... put effort into yep.so or do you put more effort into your courses and no code side of the business so yep has actually just been acquired so i'm not going to be working as it yeah i haven't announced it i haven't announced it yet
But yeah, it's just been acquired, which was like a difficult decision. But yeah, I hadn't really touched it for a year, right? And it was making $700 MRR. And I was probably spending... two hours a month on it so for seven hundred dollars that was like a good return and i was just happy to let it tick over like it was it's got like a kind of inbuilt
growth mechanism whereby people are creating their pages and sharing them and then when someone looks at their page they see like the the yet badge and stuff so it keeps getting new users without me doing anything at all so It was a good, good product from that respect. But yeah, I've just, just sold that. So yeah, I'm gonna, I've got a few more SAS things I'm working on. I've got like probably six or seven projects that I'm working on. This scares me.
Kieran, like, first of all, you had a product that was getting users without you doing anything. Imagine if... Now, I don't want you to now regret your decision, but imagine if you had... Put the time into marketing, growing it. If it was getting users without anything, and you say you've got six or seven SaaS ideas on a go, it's going to be so hard to make any of those work because you've got your no-code stuff as well.
why is it you've got all of this going on yeah it's partly for bad reasons partly because i just i get new ideas or people approach me with with projects they want to work on and i'm like yeah this would be great but on the other hand Like because I'm making courses and I'm, I am building an audience around no code. Like it is in my interest to be constantly learning new skills and trying new things. And so a lot of what I do is like, I'm, I'm playing around with open AI.
time they release a new thing i'm learning about it making tutorials about it and then maybe i end up making a product so i've just built this ai interview bot which i'm gonna you know i'm gonna try and market it to recruitment agencies and stuff so they can get candidates to like practice their interview skills with like an ai bot that has the job description and and
yesterday i actually told it to pretend it was you doing an indie bites podcast and like these opinions about no code and then i we did like a mock interview Like, so I could prepare, like, how do I answer the sound? And then, like, at the end, it gives you feedback. So I just love building stuff like this. It's crazy what you can do, especially with AI now.
get the same multiple as a traditional sas so you're on 700 mrr which is about eight grand a year typical sas multiples two three times so around 25 20 25k is that about right yeah that's exactly right You listen to the pod, so you know I end on three recommendations. A book, a podcast, an indie hacker. what have you got for me the one book i picked up recently is the sass playbook by rob walling in terms of podcasts i only really honestly listen to your podcasts and obviously i love arvid karl
And, yeah, indie hacker. There's someone called Hazel Lim. I don't know if you're aware of her. And I just think she's putting out the best content. of anyone at the moment like a lot of the formerly good tweeters were now like just too successful and she is just like scrappy and she's experimenting in public with like ai and no codes definitely kieran thank you so much for coming on the pod
Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of IndieBytes. Don't forget you can get access to the full conversation on the IndieBytes membership by hitting the link in the show notes. And I thank you again to my sponsor, EmanOctopus, for making the show happen. That's all from me. See you next week.