#2 Software agencies should not be afraid of the no-code revolution
Let's embrace the change
Yes, you👂🏻heard me right. No-code revolution and the DIY power it is giving to the thinkers, to your potentials clients is not a bad thing for your business in long term. I am also a product studio (Calypsu) owner and my very first value proposition on this is, you’ll get to work with much more mature clients.
Client who have already designed, developed and tested their ideas using no-code will have much more clarity about their products.
Clients who have done design and development on their own will be much more understanding about the 🦺effort it takes to build a product. This will save you a lot of time of trying to build an 🤝understanding with not so technically sound clients.
Clients with already ✅ vetted ideas will be much more open to spend good 💰💰💰money on their product as they will be confident about the 🎯success of their product.
My second value proposition is, this is like the WordPress revolution. As it happened more that de decade, WordPress made web development quite easy for everyone. This reduced effort for 🏢agencies and 💡thinkers who didn’t want to get their hands dirty turned to WordPress developers to get MVPs in basic cost. Similarly now you will get to save a lot of development 🕒 time (if you acquire no-code knowledge) while you will keep getting work from thinkers who don’t want to DIY.
Build your personal website in minutes using Notion and Popsy
Few days back I created a personal website sort of page on notion inspired from profile page of Nico, who runs an insightful newsletter around startups. After making this page I started looking for solutions using which I can 🎙host my notion page as a website and 🔗link it to my domain aanandmadhav.com, but there was no website which had a 🆓 tier where I can link a hosted website to a custom domain. I found one free solution but it was a too much of custom work using cloudflare workers and somehow didn’t work for me.
I recently participated in this 💯 days of no-code 🏁challenge by Max Haining who writes a beautiful no-code newsletter and is doing a lot for the no-code revolution and community. Though I haven’t posted anything hash-tagging #100DaysOfNoCode but I have been silently learning through all the tasks and tutorials that are being shared in this challenge (I know I need to work on my social skills and post about such things, I’ll work on it). During one of the challenges I came across Popsy. It is the exact solution I was 🔎looking for. Popsy slightly improves UI of your notion page while hosting it, it give you some extra options like converting links to buttons, table of content to menu, etc and it also lets you to link your domain with hosted notion page for free. Popsy definitely have a paid tier but it covers all the essentials of hosting a notion based website in free tier, which is 😍lovely.
Now I have aanandmadhav.com designed, developed and hosted in few minutes and at no cost. Here’s the workflow :
I have ✍🏻detailed down the whole process in this medium post. Follow the steps mentioned to 🧱build your website. Share results you achieved following the workflow in the comments and I will share it in the net edition.
I think Notion’s free version is good enough for personal use but if you want to use it at scale or to run your team then you can subscribe to their premium packages. I used Secret's website to avail free credits for notion. I have leveraged this website to save thousands of dollars on SAAS products. I have a small offer for you, You can use my link and this coupon “COUPON20” to avail some discount on Secret's premium membership. I totally recommend it 👍🏻 CLICK TO OPEN MY LINK ↗️
Tools I recently discovered
Vizion : A basic 😤problem that notion has is you need to share entire database even if you want to share just a small filtered view of it. Vision ✅solves this problem. Check their website, the tool is 100% free for now : VISIT VIZION WEBSITE ↗️
Windo : It’s a super easy 🛒e-commerce store builder. A very basic alternative to shopify with a free forever plan. It’s good to see that so many new tools a coming with very generous free tiers. This is important to encourage people who want to start up. Just to test the tool, I built a shop page to sell a book written by my father Arun Tiwari, and it took me minutes. The outcome is basic in looks but I am sure it can be customised further and will be enough to start something. Here’s the store I created CLICK TO VIEW ↗️ . In some future edition of the newsletter I will share some more easy to do methods to build beautiful methods to create your e-commerce store, for now CHECK WINDO ↗️
Notion Sites : Checkout this beautifully designed Notion page. This website is currently in making but I can already see some useful things on the website. The $2 templates look absolutely beautiful.
I hope you are 👍🏻liking my newsletter, please help me achieve the 🎯goal of “Empowering 💡💡thinkers to become 🦺doers“ by spreading a work about this newsletter.
Also help me decide following :
What all sections should I permanently include in this newsletter? For example a section of latest tools, a section of interesting reads in no-code, a section of features creators, product, tweet, tutorial, companies, etc.
Is it a good practice to link detailed tutorials as a separate blog post? Like I did in this newsletter, I wrote a separate blog post so that this newsletter does not become too long and boring. Tell me if it’s a good decision?
I am planning to start a new service where startups can subscribe to my design services on a monthly basis. There will be different tiers, each tier will have incremental set of design services, like website and social media post in basic tier and website, social media posts, showreel videos in advance tier. By subscribing client will have a design team at their disposal. Client won’t have to go to freelancers again and again and do all the negotiations every-time. Also we will do unlimited revisions. All a client needs to do is send us requirements, we will quickly discuss the requirements and deliver the design in standard working hours based on design type/requirements. Starting price of this subscription will be $4000 or INR 3,00,000 a month. What is your view on this? Will you subscribe to such service?