Building a No-Code Startup Studio

Read Dee’s latest blog on building a no-code startup studio. Learn about the struggles and successes with building tools and recruiting a development team.

Morning guys, Time and Date

I’m going to give myself 20 minutes to put this together about my plans to start a ‘No-Code’ startup studio. I’ll begin to walking you through the journey that led me here - I want to build SaaS tools and have been frustrated with finding developers, working with developers - the development times required, delays and general challenges that come with development. It’s been a journey of over a decade and it’s probably fair to say I don’t have one completely working tool. So most recently - I started to understand that there are companies building SaaS tools successfully using ‘No-Code’ or ‘Low-Code’ setups. This is where there’s a vastly reduced development requirement and a much wider pool of potential people that can build such apps, Now imagine a developer coming into the world of ‘no-code’ and seeing how much quicker tools can be developed. On my side I’m looking to build something of a startup-factory - I want to build and launch tools on a monthly basis following something of a systematic process for growth and see where it takes me. As a company, the Pearl Lemon Group’s core areas of expertise are in marketing and sales. Rapidly we’re moving into other areas as I’m working to build up dedicated teams for each side of the business. In this instance here’s what’s happened so far:

I’ve put adverts out on Upwork, Internshala, asked my team, posted in several Facebook groups
I’ve had multiple applications come in, have had a couple interviews, and hired my first developer
The goal is to ultimately invest up to $10,000 in development teams to get several no-code apps and also to build a productive working relationship with a team/teams
Then I will explore a partnership on a revenue share model and/or pay per app

There are some other elements I want to happen in parallel. I’ll appoint a couple of people on my team to be involved in the project so they can learn and we can get some internal knowledge. [convertful id="197358"] In parallel I’ll hire an intern to work exclusively on this so perhaps over time I can determine whether this is something we can take entirely in-house. In the same breath we ARE building Pearl Lemon Web as a company - so in theory in 1 year from now - we can have an internal team dedicated to this Nonetheless - I believe with dedicated time and effort there’s no reason why this won’t work. It’ll just require consistent effort and writing about it brings it to life quickly. Already from the brief conversations, I’ve had with a couple of developers I’ve learned the following:

Some developers present themselves as ‘no-code’ developers when they’re ultimately building static websites (like Wordpress websites) which isn’t what I want at all
It seems that the most popular platform for what I want is Bubble.io - so that’s what I’m recruiting for

My first hire is a Ukrainian developer based here in London who believes she can build the lead-gen tool I’ve requested within 30 hours at $18 per hour. I am (in my mind) budgeting for 60 hours to get what I want and another 20 hours to get the improvements I want. It may be the case that it ends up totally not working at all…. But this is why I’m hiring 3 teams at the same more - I’ll make those hires over the next few days. I’m quite excited about this approach because where our expertise as a company lie is in growing websites and so if we have a great product we can make a dedicated commitment to it. Let’s see how this journey goes!