What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
There's been an explosion in the number of people who are using the internet to build
cool stuff and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I talked to the founders of these businesses and learned about the
latest ideas, trends, and opportunities they're using to get ahead, so the rest of us can
do the same.
If you've been enjoying the show, do me a quick favor and leave a rating on Apple Podcasts.
It helps other people find the show, and it also helps me stay motivated to keep doing
interviews.
Today, I'm talking to Tara Reed, the founder of Apps Without Code.
Tara is, in many ways, supporting the burgeoning no-code movement from behind the scenes.
She's teaching thousands of students every single year how to build their own apps, websites,
and profitable internet businesses without learning how to become software engineers
and write code themselves.
And by the way, she's making millions of dollars a year while she does it.
Tara Reed, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on.
You've got a ton of interesting tweets that I've been reading through.
And in one of them, you said that you're struggling with the question, how big do I want my company
to be?
First of all, what is your company and how big is it already?
And second, you know, you just tweeted this a few days ago, how are you working through
this?
Yeah, okay.
So I run a company called Apps Without Code.
We've been around for four years now.
We're a $5 million a year company.
What our company does is we teach people how to build their own apps.
So we're an online school.
You should go out and build their own apps, but not just the app, but the business around
it too.
And I was tweeting this because I was feeling like I needed to reset.
I feel like every level you get to, you sort of have to reset the conversation about like,
where are we going?
What's the goal?
What does success look like?
So I was revisiting that question, I think like over the weekend.
And I was just curious about how other people are thinking about this.
It almost felt like in my own title, I was the only one, although I'm sure that's not
the case.
Right?
Wondering like, how big do I want this to be?
Because everyone's advice is like, just make it as big as possible.
Just like go as hard as you can.
And then you'll figure out how big you want it to be.
But I just don't feel like that's very intentional.
No, I saw that reply to your tweet.
Everyone was just like, as big as possible, why would you choose any other answer?
And it's like, that's not a well considered answer, answer at all.
The replies were and I was just like, I don't know that I accept that answer.
What does that say about your followers?
Oh, no, it probably means that I'm like, even way too immersed in the like VC track world,
I guess I you know, it's funny because I don't view myself as being in that space actually
had to intentionally said this is my second company, but my first company we went through
500 Starbs Accelerator and sort of went down that path of raising capital.
And I decided that that was not the kind of company that I wanted to run.
I wanted to at least start with bootstrapping my company so that I had optionality right
now after that code is fully bootstrapped.
I wanted to run a different kind of company.
So I had to like physically remove myself from as many of the like social circles I
was in of that narrative, which is there's only one way to build a good company, you've
got to build it as big as possible and get VC funding and all of that.
And yet your followers didn't abandon you, they stuck with you and they're still pushing
that narrative.
It's worth considering though, because obviously there's some benefits to building a bigger
company.
I mean, you're sort of two factors that you considered in your tweet war.
Number one, how big of a nest egg do you want to leave for your kids?
And then number two, like what level of peace versus challenge do you want to have in your
life?
And it's obviously like way more challenging to build a huge company, just the expectations
that are put on to you, the amount of work you have to do, it's harder to walk away from.
So there's a balance there.
It's exponentially more stressful.
And I think like if I look at, okay, if I look at the different milestones we've hit,
I can map what my lifestyle was like to those milestones.
So if I back up, the most recent sort of milestone we were at that I remember having a different
lifestyle at was maybe at like 100K, 150K a month, like going backwards.
And at that milestone, I was working three days a week.
And I was traveling, I was taking like four months a year, doing a month long trip, four
months a year to a different city and country and just working from there.
And it was wonderful.
And then we had this transition from the 150K to like the 400K that we're in now.
And that happened pretty fast.
And I'm definitely not working three days a week anymore.
I'm definitely working full time.
I'm still really enjoying my job.
I still get to craft what being CEO means, instead of like take it out of a book, I still
get to craft what my role looks like.
I'm still able to like have fun and dabble in new innovative projects.
But I think that there will be a point where like a lot of the things that I like about
my lifestyle and the lifestyle that comes with the company that I've built will change.
And so I'm wondering, this is what I'm thinking about, right?
Like what point does that come at?
I don't know.
I don't have the answers to this, Tara.
I've never grown a company to $400,000 a month in revenue like you have.
But I do remember hitting some of the earlier milestones with Indie Hackers.
Getting to profitability, getting acquired by Stripe, and realizing that pretty much
all the stuff that I can do to make myself like enjoy life, I could have done before
any of those milestones.
It's completely, at least for me, it was like completely disconnected.
And so I tried some stuff.
I've tried keeping a gratitude journal, which in theory, I understand why that's helpful.
And I think it made me a better person while I was doing that.
But I don't think it made me a happier person.
Like I was never really looking forward to writing down like three things I was grateful
for every day.
I've tried other things too.
Like recently, I went on a road trip.
And I haven't decided yet if I'm still in the middle of the road trip or if it's over.
But I remember just being excited every time I went to a new place just to eat the best
meal I possibly could in that place.
And I would figure out what it was going to be and what I was going to get.
And I would just look forward to it all day long.
And now I kind of do the same thing with work.
Like I figure out, what am I really looking forward to every single day to working on?
Let me put that at the end.
Like, I'm going to talk to Tara today.
It's going to be fun.
We're going to discuss like all these tweets that she's made.
And the whole day, I'm just looking forward to like this good thing rather than some bad
thing.
And so I think that's kind of what my ideal is in terms of like work-life balance and
being happy is always having stuff to look forward to, and then really having fun doing
that thing once I get to it.
But that's also very much a characteristic of an entrepreneur to be like living in the
future, excited about what's coming in the future.
I think that's a good thing to have though, because that's how you move forward.
So for me, I feel like I'm starting to enter this gray zone where there are not as many
examples of people talking about their like at a revenue level where I don't hear as many
people talking about like their lifestyle as CEO.
I think there are some great examples.
The buffer team is really good at talking about this.
Laura from Edgar, Edgar is really good at talking about this.
There are a handful of companies that where the CEO shares about how they want to keep
balance and think about all those things, but there are not a ton of examples.
And so the things that I'm thinking about, as you mentioned in the tweet, right, like
I want to be able to have some assets that I leave to my kids makes for me particularly
it's like a woman, it's a person of color that lets them have some sort of sizable social
economic shift.
And to me, that's like a driving factor.
So I actually had a conversation about this with someone who was on my team, but it was
sort of just like, what do I need to get to, what do we need to get to to get there.
And then to me, keep pushing and like just build even more past that doesn't feel all
that exciting.
Right.
At that point, I want to chill on beach.
Where that line is, is what I'm looking for.
And I don't know what size company that is, but that is the marker of where that is.
Yeah, there's probably not that many people talking about this.
But he's number one.
It's just not something people want to broadcast publicly, like, here's how I'm spending my
millions of dollars.
Even if it was, there just aren't that many people running a profitable SaaS business
to the level that you've grown yours to.
So yeah, it sounds like you just need some rich friends to talk about this in private.
It's definitely a private conversation.
But I think that you hear about it from folks who are on the VC track.
But at that point, you've got you set yourself up such that you've raised money and you've
got the pressure from an investor to get it to an exit so that they can have their money
out.
So what does that look like?
Particularly like I think it's a conversation, interesting conversation for the indie hackers
community is what that looks like when you bootstrapped, because it's actually a totally
different game.
I mean, I've lived on a beach, though, I've tried this, I mean, I've actually gone to
a beach and tried just living there.
And I just get super antsy.
It's too fun for me to have something to work on some sort of like long term project.
And there's this idea of the deferred life plan, where you work really hard for five
or six years, and you take a break for five or six years or something or the rest of your
life.
And that's just too much time on and then too much time off for me.
I'm more of a natural cadence, like work really hard for a few weeks, and then give myself
a break.
And I'm trying to get to the point where I can just like work really hard for a few hours,
and then break the rest of the day.
I think that's the that's the holy grail for my sort of natural on off cadence.
For me, it's more like seasons of time.
So it's like, that's why the going away for a month thing works well, because I'm still
working, but I'm usually doing a different kind of work.
I'm doing more introspective thinking, planning, next steps.
And then when I come back home, I'm usually in like go mode.
And I actually like, I am very conscious of how I trend back and forth between those two
different modes.
And I try really hard actually to be in flow with that so that I'm not trying to like crank
out a project when I'm not supposed to be in that mode.
I'm supposed to be like, I call it like incubation mode.
But usually what it looks like is like me almost like being I go more introspective,
I like want to spend less time with people.
I am less motivated to just like be doing a bunch of projects.
And I always hate when I'm in that when that transition comes because I'm like, Oh, I was
just working on a project.
I want to finish that.
And I'm learning to lean into those trends.
Yeah.
Let's talk about how you got here, how you got to this point where you've been so successful
and you're running this $5 million a year business.
What's the story behind apps without code?
Yeah, okay.
So apps without code really got created somewhat on accident.
So I was running another startup before this, it was called collecto.
I was working at Microsoft at the time.
So my background is working in tech or did Google then Foursquare and then Microsoft.
And while I was at Microsoft, I had this idea.
So I wanted to help people find affordable artwork for their homes.
And we ended up building this algorithm that matches people to artwork based on their taste.
The very first version of that though, I've cobbled together with some no code tools actually
was always a no code product.
And so I had started blogging about my experience building apps without code, how I had built
collecto without code and then I ended up doing a test.
When was this?
This is like before no code took off?
2014.
I was as well before no code was a thing.
2014.
Yeah.
So no code was not a thing.
People were like, huh?
You're doing what?
In fact, I think bubble was around, but it was certainly was not as popular, all kind
of come back and tell you about like what tools I was using.
But long story short, I did a TEDx talk on building apps without code and I just got
a huge influx from my blog and the TEDx talk of people emailing me saying, Hey, I really
love what you're doing.
Can you teach me how to build my own app too?
And I was kind of frustrated at first because I was like, I, I'm trying to run my own company
and I have time for this.
And I decided though, because I kept getting the emails to just help five people.
So it helps five people launch their app, they got it out into the wild, got their first
customers and then I opened it up again and there were 70 people who had signed up.
I think the first time I did it, I like randomly made up a price of $900 the second time I
like, wow, 70 people and I was like, Oh wait, I think this is a whole business.
And at the time I was feeling kind of icky about where I was with my first company.
So we were doing, we had like a 360 K run rates.
We were making some money and we'd raised some capital, but I realized that I had chosen
the wrong kind of business model and the wrong kind of business path for what I wanted my
life as the CEO would be like.
And so there was this other opportunity for almost a chance for me to like redo with everything
that I had learned of the first company.
And so after maybe a few, maybe six months, I ended up working full time on apps without
code and fast forward here, that's where that company came from.
So you make it sound like it was easy, but I'm pretty sure if you've got a company and
you've got momentum and you've been working on it for years and you've got revenue.
And in your case, you even had investors that just saying, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop
this and work on a brand new idea I have, uh, it doesn't sound like an easy decision
to make.
Yes.
Yes.
So I definitely dragged it on longer than I need it to.
Mainly it was about me just saying, declaring, this is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to do this other thing.
I needed some time, but muster up the courage to just be confident in that.
The investors that I had were super, super nice and were super entrepreneur friendly.
I actually was really intentional about not raising a bunch of capital from a bunch of
investors that I didn't know or didn't feel like we're going to be entrepreneur friendly,
which I think helped a lot.
It was a good decision in this scenario.
So ultimately I was able to like send them an email, let them know what was happening
and then I gave them an opportunity to invest in this new business, which they were not
interested in.
Um, and they're like, it's not our business model, not our thing.
And so a bad thing for you or a bad thing for you that they didn't invest.
Great.
You're like, you can invest, but like, I really hope you don't.
I think at the time I wasn't quite in a place of like, I really hope you don't.
It was like, Oh, this is generating some of its own money.
I don't think it was maybe to like a year later when I really was able to look back
on how I felt when I was at the accelerator, when I was at 500 startups, like how I felt
about that experience, which I felt like I went into the accelerator knowing that I didn't
want to build the kind of business, which is like scale at all costs, build it all costs.
I didn't want to build that kind of business.
However, everything around me felt like it was leaving it moving in that direction.
Like the momentum was moving there.
And I kind of just sort of got drifted away in that to be completely frank.
I don't think I saw that until like a year later, I could look back and be like, Oh,
that's what happened.
And so I kind of was just like moving with the momentum as opposed to actually being
intentional about what I actually wanted.
The other thing you said was that you had five or 10 people who basically got in contact
and were like, Hey, Tara, can you teach us how to build, you know, the way that you're
building companies, we want to do this too.
And you charge them $900 a piece, so you're instantly just making thousands of dollars
just teaching people and you didn't like you didn't sign up to be a teacher, this sort
of just happened to you.
What was that process like?
Do you remember like what you were teaching them?
Do you have like a lesson plan?
Did it work?
Okay, the first time I really didn't have a full out syllabus or lesson plan that I
was talking to people about I built it as I went.
So what happened was I went on I had a few blog subscribers, maybe like 100 150 people
who were subscribed to my blog at that time.
So I sent them an email and said, Hey, I'm doing this, I'm going to help five people.
And I offered people a phone call to talk about it.
So I talked on the phone with maybe 2015 people and talked about what they needed and what
they're working on.
And then if it was a good fit, we signed up or they signed up on the phone or they said,
Okay, great, I'm going to sign up tomorrow kind of thing.
So so that's how that first round went.
The second time I opened it up, I was more intentional about studying the process of
how people get customers for online training programs.
So we did a webinar instead of me getting on the phone with everyone, which is good
because there are way more people the second time I wouldn't have been able to do phone
calls with everyone.
But the first time it was like send the email out, offered phone calls to talk to people.
And then people were on board, signed up.
I think the internet is giving people the opportunity to do a lot more like one to one
coaching.
Like last year, for example, I just randomly decided I wanted to get into chess because
my buddy Vincent, like we played a match and I won and we played nine more matches and
he beat me every single one.
And I'm like, this is bullshit.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna get a coach and I'm gonna start winning.
And it was like a magical experience to have this like actual coach who would sit down
with me one on one and like teach me based on exactly what I needed to learn.
But also, I think in general, like people underrate education, like even taking a class
for like what you're doing, what pretty much every other school in existence does where
it's like this one to many, whether it's a webinar, whether it's an ebook or something,
just like talking to people and telling them what you know is super valuable.
And when it comes to like what you're doing in particular, you're helping people like
make money.
You're not saying like, I'm going to teach you some like arcane knowledge, like I'm going
to give you like an art history degree and then like, good luck.
And the economy with that, you're like, hey, if you want to learn how to make an app, not
just any app, but an app that's going to help you start like a real business, here's what
you need to know.
And it makes sense to me that people will like pay hundreds or thousands of dollars
to do that, even if it's a webinar setting, even if it's not one on one, even if it's
not even in person, but it's online.
So I think the business model and the whole problem you're solving behind it is super
smart.
Yeah, I think that's fun.
Like for me, there are a handful of things that I have figured out work and don't work
about this process.
And I think that those are the things that people have that really help them.
For example, like one of them are around the ways that you can charge people to use your
app.
Most people come to app to that code thinking about just the typical way, which is like
there's an app in the app store that you download and maybe make somewhere between 99 cents
and $5 per download.
And yes, you can do that.
But if you are bootstrapping, you need a lot of 99 cents or $5 to pay your bills super
hard.
It's super hard, like unless you are an expert marketer getting that many people as quickly
as you need them because you have to pay your bills for getting that many people as quickly
as you need them.
It's really difficult.
And so one of the other ways that a lot of the folks in apps that could bootcamp charge
for their apps is they find ways to white label them, meaning that they find a company
or an organization who wants to have their own version of an app.
Like an example of this might be, let's say that you have an app that's going to help
people with mindfulness and it's going to help them stay mentally clear and organized.
You could go and give it to individuals, but it's going to be hard to get individuals to
give you more than somewhere between 99 cents and $5 for that app.
However, you can find a company and organization who would want their own version like therapists
who have a whole career around helping people with this process.
And if you take that app and you take your logo off and put their logo on, make a copy
of it, take their logo on it, then you can license it to them and white label it to them
and charge them a much higher fee that they can use for all of their clients.
So that's an example of one of the shifts, which is like, I found that these things were
working for me.
And when I share them with students, they're a program, they're a coaching, they're a curriculum.
It's really helpful for them to get from A to Z way faster than if they were just figuring
out on their own.
This is what people need.
Because I say this ad nauseam on the podcast, I'm like, yeah, charge more, sell to businesses
that have money.
And then I talk to people, pre-pandemic times, I would go to lots of meetups and people would
be like, oh, I love the podcast.
It's so cool.
I listened to 100 episodes.
I'm like, what are you building?
What are you charging?
I've got like a 99 cent app.
And I'm going to sell.
I'm like, no.
Did you really listen to the podcast?
It's just not going to work.
But maybe what people need is a hands-on method of you actually working with them and listening
to their ideas.
Do people come to you with ideas?
Or are you giving your students ideas once they join?
People mainly come, they enter the boot camp with ideas.
So we have like a free training program that we do.
And for the free training program, a lot of people don't have ideas yet.
But we talk about like the formula to come up with an idea that you already know something
about.
So you're not starting from scratch.
So usually we'll stem ideas for people from what they do for work and like a problem around
what they do for work or something that they do for a hobby and a problem around that.
That way they already have, they're already subject matter experts in the topic.
We're not learning about a whole new thing all over again.
And to me, the coolest app ideas are the ones that are around a job that you've had before
that's not sexy, where there's a problem or there's something that's not efficient happening
at work that you can make a lot smoother, right?
Like we have folks who are in education and healthcare and manufacturing and they see
all these really clear gaps that like Silicon Valley is just not rushing to fill because
it's not sexy.
But they're able to go and like get these large contracts to license their apps and
it makes a big difference in getting their business growing.
Like closing a 10K deal feels really different than getting your first 99 cent download.
So these are like non-tech people, which makes sense because they're joining a school for
learning to build an app without coding.
And if they were tech people, presumably they would build apps with code.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't always love the word like non-tech people because I do think that in
its current state, no code requires you to have a little bit of tech savvy, meaning like
if you, if opening up Zoom is really hard, then like no code app building will also be.
So there are some tech savviness elements that are, that are required or that are helpful.
However, like, no, these are not people who are software developers who've ever built
an app before.
Exactly.
They often have some sort of business sense from a role that they've had in the past,
but that's it.
So how much are you charging today?
You started off charging like that initial batch, like 900 bucks.
What does it cost if I wanted to go through your program today?
Yeah.
So the program is 1900 right now.
Wow.
And so a couple thousand bucks, you're doing $5 million in revenue and people are just
taking this like once, right?
Yeah.
So you get lifetime access, so people will take it once and then they'll like have a
first company going and maybe want to like come back again and work on another project.
So people continue to circle back through.
And you're getting multiple thousands of students at this rate.
That's amazing.
Let's talk about how you've grown this thing.
Because a lot of people want to sell online courses and webinars and books and all sorts
of stuff, but not very many people are good at getting thousands of people to pay a couple
thousand dollars.
That's, that's insane.
Yeah.
What are the, what are the stages of growth for you?
Like how did this work?
Yeah.
So the first stage of growth for me was, well, the first stage of growth you heard me talk
about was like, I was on the phone talking to people.
So that was the very first for the first round.
But after that it was partnerships.
So I would reach out to other people who had audiences who I thought would be interested
in this.
When I first started, I think I did a partnership with a friend of mine who runs an organization
called I'm Black and Tech, a friend of mine also, Danielle Leslie, who had her own audience
of people who were like learning and building things online.
So like things that were like tangentially connected, right?
There was a Instagram account that we went on, so Black Girl Nerds that we posted on.
So it was just like friends, people that I, that were in my network that had audiences
of people who I thought would be interested.
And we would do like a social media takeover on their site and tell people that like, if
you're interested in this, we're doing a free workshop coming up, you should come.
Or we would do an affiliate partnership with the people who had email lists and say, hey,
we'll give you a person, like a referral fee for the people that you refer us, send people
to our webinar and then for people who sign up at the end of the webinar, like we'll give
you a referral piece of that.
So that's how that started.
Then maybe years later, a year or so later, maybe two years later, actually, we started
running a lot more advertising, paid social advertising, and that made a really big difference
in growth.
So we still do both.
We do affiliates and paid advertising.
Those are the two biggest ways that we're growing.
I love this approach because it's kind of a, it's like the perfect sort of start off
by doing things that don't scale and then increasingly scale more and more and more
and more.
And a lot of people have trouble like finding their first customers, but those are usually
the easiest customers you'll ever find because it's just like one or two people and you can
brute force it.
Like you can do what you did, talk to people on the phone.
People love talking on the phone.
Like they love like telling you the problems.
It's so easy to do.
I have a buddy who's been thinking about starting a company and he's been like building the
site on Webflow and just like sort of wringing his hands for months.
I'm like, hey, just get on the phone and talk to some customers.
And he told me last weekend, like he's selling to some of these like outdoor sort of exploration,
like kind of the companies that take you like on a guided tour up a mountain type company.
And he's like, yeah, I called this guy and honestly he felt bad because he was talking
so much and he was like, well, do you have anything to say?
And the guy just wanted to talk his head off and it's like so easy to talk to people.
But I love that you started that way.
You learn a ton when you're talking to people and then you just progressively but like slowly
scaled up.
So instead of like talking to customers one at a time, you're like, well, why don't I talk
to somebody who can talk to their audience for me and I can reach hundreds of people.
So you started talking to people like influencers with big Twitter accounts and IG followings
and email lists.
And then you're like the highest level of scales like you're just paying for ads, you're
doing affiliate stuff.
And so it's like you follow the perfect playbook really for like how to grow and increase your
growth over time.
But start off super personal one on one.
Yeah, it's funny because there's two things interesting here.
One I just reached out actually yesterday because we have our students in boot camp.
They'll share their wins throughout the week.
So I reached out to a handful of students who recently closed their first sales and
I asked them, hey, just curious about how the sale went.
Did you build the product first and then close the sale or did you close the sale first and
then build the product?
I just curious how like what the order of events were for you.
And in this last outreach batch that I did, almost everyone closed the sale first.
And then they had like started working on the app, but it wasn't finished and then finished
afterwards.
And I feel like so important because I thought of this when you were mentioning your friend
who was talking to people and what they did that worked for them is they got customers
on board and then they allowed the customers to almost like be part of the process of finishing
it.
So the customers got to get their input included into the finished version.
And all they had to say was, hey, I'd like to get you signed up so that you can be part
of this first launch.
And we can make sure that the things that you want to have in the app are included in
the app.
And people were like, oh yeah, sure.
That sounds fine.
Super smart.
It's a way better way of doing like product research and like feature design than just
like guessing on your own what people are going to want.
And it's like way more exciting and motivating, I think, too, when you actually have people
who are like potentially excited customers on the other line.
Like you're not just in a room by yourself coding or non-coding or no coding.
You're you're actually like building something in collaboration with people who are going
to pay you money.
And like, if that doesn't feel exciting for a founder, I don't know what else does.
That's right.
And all of them were like, yeah, once they were on board, it was super easy to finish
the app just because like you really have that momentum behind you then to just finish
it up.
But this is the thing to be easier that way.
But it is harder that it is scarier that way.
And the reason it's scarier is because you have to put yourself out there is like, here's
my idea and you have to put yourself out there for rejection before you feel like you're
ready.
And that is, to me, like the thing of early stage entrepreneurship, that is the thing
that stops most people is that they're waiting to feel like it's ready.
And I've been in entrepreneur for six years now, like it never that time doesn't ever
come where you feel like it really is fully, fully everything's perfect and wonderful and
there's nothing left to improve, like it just doesn't come.
So that's the thing that I think stops most people.
And it goes back to what you were saying about, you know, people who are like, I listen to
the podcast all the time, but it's not done certain critical things or missed certain
critical things because they're scary stuff that's part of this journey.
And most of entrepreneurship is fear management and getting out of your own way.
So I was looking at your syllabus for your bootcamp really, it's like eight weeks long.
Even the way that you've like structured your syllabus is directly in line with this.
The latter half is when you finally get to stuff like prototyping, and app building,
and all that other stuff.
And the very beginning of it is like, no, you need to think about pricing, you need
to think about your business model, email marketing, sales tactics.
It's all like super sales heavy upfront.
First, yeah, which always feels reversed for most people until they get through it.
And they're like, Oh, I see why we did that now.
That makes sense.
And that's how you kind of did it yourself.
You started with sales, started with talking to people, you started with moving to influencers.
And it's almost like you followed your own playbook, basically, where you're doing all
this stuff.
How did you get these influencers on your side?
When you go to somebody, you say, like, you don't want to take over your Instagram account,
we want you to tweet this out or send us an emailing list, were you just paying them?
Or are they doing you a favor?
I paid them.
So either we had an affiliate agreement for most of the influencers, it wasn't like a
referral affiliate agreement, it was like, we'll just pay you.
When I first did this, I'm trying to think of like how much I paid it ranged depending
on how big their accounts were, but it ranged from like $150 for like a takeover for the
day of like, we'll just post a bunch of stuff of content, and I would go live and like show
me building a piece of app so people can see what it meant to build an app without code.
That was like the low end.
And on the high end, I think the first time maybe we did like a $2,000 or $3,000 takeover
from like one that had a lot large audience.
So that was like the range of pricing they were paying.
But most of it was closer to that lower end, like $150, $300, something like that.
And that wasn't that expensive for you because you were charging your own customers like
$1,000 to $2,000 a head.
So if you're bringing in like $1,000 every time you get a customer, paying 150 bucks
to take over somebody's Instagram account for a day, it's peanuts.
It's like absolutely nothing.
You can easily justify that expense because you're going to make so much more back.
I saw this when I was selling ads for indie hackers, and all of my best customers were
the ones who were charging their customers a ton of money.
So they do an ad in our newsletter or a podcast.
And I'd be like, Oh, I'm sorry.
Like, you know, your ad only got like 35 clicks that I thought I was going to get like 100.
And they'd be like, No, we made we made thousands of dollars, actually.
So like, we're going to do another ad.
And all the people who, who were charging very little, they were the worst advertisers,
like they would be sweating every single click, they needed more all the time was very hard
for them to find profit.
So it's just one more reason to charge a lot more money per customer for what you're doing.
Yeah, and I by the way, I wasn't spending that $150, $300 for the influencers.
I wasn't doing that until I had already done the first round of five people at $900.
So it made you know, about 5k to already start with, and then I started paying for some marketing
after that.
But that but to your point, making being able to make 5k from just a handful of customers
is what makes it easier.
And I think sometimes we have to do this is something we talk about in the boot camp program
to is sometimes you have to most people can't see how someone would ever want to pay more
money for what they're building.
Like they're like, I don't see how I could charge more than 99 cents, I'm building a
dating app.
And people think dating apps equal 99 cents, so I can't charge anything else, for example.
And one of the things that I often talk with folks about is this concept of the wrapping
paper method.
So sometimes you have to find something that your customers value.
And like find it and it's not going to be an app.
Because unfortunately, we think that apps are free or 99 cents, like when people think
about apps, that's what they think about.
So you might have to find something else and position it differently to be able to charge
more.
An example of this, someone who does this really well, like Stitch Fix, and those sorts
of sites that will like send you a package of clothes boxes.
All the box businesses, right?
Like if you look at their websites, their websites usually say something like, get your
own personal stylus.
Smart.
It's more of that and less around like, have an algorithm choose the outfit that you're
going to wear and send it to you.
Because one sounds expensive and the other one sounds really cheap.
So like some of the marketing positioning that if you can find, ask yourself, what is
the thing that people think, but the alternative to my software or my idea that costs money
and position it is that you instantly get it to be in a different price range in people's
minds.
So like an example of that, if I use the example I had before on the dating app, right, like
people think that dating apps are cheap, but they think that having a like a dating coach
or they think having a matchmaker is not right.
And so you might decide that you want to position it as that.
And also another way to like be able to charge more is to add some more human interaction
into your product experience, because just where we are that people are craving that.
So instead of just having an app where people can log in and like see a bunch of matches
and just like swipe or see a bunch of people and choose who they want as their date, you
maybe have events where there is like every Wednesday you can click and puts everybody
in zoom, and you do the like break rooms feature and do speed dating, right, because it feels
like a more rich experience, you would pay way more to go to a speed dating events like
a ticket to a speed dating event than you would for a 99 cent app.
And so sometimes you just have to like wrap what you're doing in something that your customers
see as more valuable in order to charge more, because positioning is just an app, it's hard
to work.
We're not an expensive dating app, we're an affordable matchmaking service.
And our peloton, we're not a rip off piece of exercise equipment, we are your own affordable
personal trainer and luxury gym, you know, and then suddenly, when people think of it
like that, they are willing to spend much more, I think that's brilliant.
And it ties directly into like, again, your curriculum, where you start off like chapter
one, week number one, business model planning, what are you what is your business model?
Are you going to make money?
How much are you going to charge?
And that comes before everything else.
Because the way that you talk about your company and you do your marketing, and even the way
you build your product should flow from what your business model is going to be and how
you can actually charge you know, enough to sustain what you're doing.
Yep, that's exactly right.
Because what you build might be totally different.
Very cool.
I think it's funny too, because your own advice to students is basically like you should
sell to other businesses, right?
Do this white label thing so you can sell your app to like an entire college or an entire
company rather than to like the individual teachers and employees.
But your business itself is very B to C, your customers are individual consumers, and they're
paying out of pocket, but the way you position yourself, it's not like they're paying for
yet another webinar or just a course or an ebook.
It's like you are a business school.
And they are basically entrepreneurs or businesses themselves who are paying for this training
to make more money themselves.
And so then you can charge prices that are commensurate with that value that you're delivering.
And I think that the advice is not just to sell to businesses, it's more so to sell to
people who have a willingness to pay.
It is like a no broke customers or no willing to pay customers.
Yeah, I'm like so many people are struggling with their business because they're trying
to market their product to grow customers.
And even if and that's fine, it just doesn't make for a very good business is the reality.
And even if you want to do good with your business, like you want to build something
that helps homeless folks, right?
It might be easier for you then to go and find a nonprofit that has a whole huge budget
for helping homeless populations, but they can't figure out how to do some sort of digital
accessibility and white label what you're doing to them, right?
So that they can give to their whole community and audience.
It's not always businesses though, businesses are easy, because businesses already know
that they have to have expenses and spend on something.
So it's easier to do that with businesses, but not all the folks that I work with go
after businesses, you can go after consumers too, but the consumers have to be niche and
have a willingness to pay.
Like if we use the dating app example that we were talking about before, you can build
the dating app.
But if you build it for everyone, and it's like the dating app for everyone, it's really
hard to charge premium prices.
If you go really niche and you go for like, I'm making this up, like high earning professionals,
people who are like lawyers, doctors, et cetera, and you narrow down who it's for, and you're
going after people who do have a willingness to pay, then you can go after consumers because
you can just charge more to that consumer base.
So either you have to go niche and after an audience who's willing to pay and is already
paying for something related or go after businesses, but not the like all customers, even though
they might not have any willingness to pay.
That's the part that doesn't work.
And in your case, you went after these customers who had a proven interest in what you're doing
because they were following these Instagram accounts.
What did you say to your potential customers once you got in front of them?
Okay.
So most of, a lot of the messaging hasn't really changed, it's actually mainly showing
people something they just don't know is possible.
And this is not something that I uniquely can do, right?
Like all of us have something that we know something about, and it is a useful way to
market either a course or a product, like any kind of thing is by doing some teaching.
So I really like the main way that I was talking to people and getting them sort of into the
apps.code world was teaching them stuff for free, right?
Like sharing things that I'd learned and I would go live at the beginning days, I would
go live on Instagram a lot and just like share, here's what I'm working on today.
I was doing all of the building at the time, so I'm doing a lot of building of my own software.
And so here's what I'm working on.
Let me just like stop for five minutes and show you what I did the last hour and I'll
come back in a couple more hours and show you more of what I did.
Here's how it works.
So I was just doing that, right?
I was just sharing that and sharing how the process works.
And I think that was really helpful for people because I was so willing to share stuff openly
that they're like, I'd like to do more of this in your more formal program.
It's a common theme when I talk to people who have education businesses is sort of the
two mantras are like, you want to build an audience and you want to build trust.
And trust makes a lot of sense because people like if they're going to shell out a lot of
money for you to teach them something, like they want some proof that you know what you're
talking about.
And this is going to be valuable.
No one wants to pay two grand to like learn at the feet of someone who has no idea what's
going on.
And so it makes a lot of sense that you're actually putting out these videos and you're
like demonstrating what can be built.
But then I think the audience side of things is probably repeated more often than the trust
side of things.
But it doesn't seem like that was a huge part of your story.
Like it doesn't sound like what you were doing was cultivating your own email list and like
having a bunch of fans of Tara who like followed you over the ages.
Were you doing that?
Or do you think that that's overrated and just by building trust even in the short term,
you get the same effects as building a huge audience?
No, I think building audience and email list is important.
I think like regardless of what you're selling, having an email list and an audience is really
critical.
I think that there's a lot that the software world can even learn about from like the online
education world about how to do that.
So yeah, so I was list building.
I really wasn't doing a lot of like, hey, join my newsletter kind of stuff.
But I was doing, I was sort of directing everybody to this free workshop and webinar I was doing
and I would do it every week.
So at the time I was doing it every Wednesday, I would go live and like do a whole hour and
a half class of sharing stuff that I learned and at the end of it, I would explain how
the bootcamp program works and folks who were interested were able to sign up.
So that was a way of list building because it was around my webinar.
But I wasn't because people were signing up with like name and email for the webinar.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So you're building an email list, but you're also doing this thing where you're putting
yourself front and center.
And I think it's what's cool about that is just like looking at people who have built
these massive audiences on YouTube, who build audiences on Twitter, who build podcast followings.
What I've seen is people who put like their face and like their voice, like video and
audio just like people have a deeper affinity for you if they actually hear you talk, especially
if you can respond like a live webinar like it's like, Oh, I know Tara after like an hour
of just like talking to you, whereas like it might take me six months of tweeting before
someone feels like they're actually comfortable with me.
So I love the fact that you paired the list building with an extra webinar, even though
that's more effort.
And like you're doing these things that don't scale like it's way more effective and way
faster I think.
Yeah, like I think one of the things that was actually unintentionally really helpful
in our business is that people got to see an example of someone who looked like them,
right?
There were a lot of women and a lot of people of color in our community, particularly early
on.
And that was something that like they hadn't seen an example of like, Oh, there's someone
who looks like me building apps.
That was really exciting for a lot of our early customers.
And that kind of came down to like three different areas.
It was like someone who is not a software developer, they had been seeing watching videos
of people who were software developers trying to explain it to them.
And they were like, I didn't get it.
And so the way that I explained it as someone who's not a developer was really helpful.
So that was one seeing a woman explain it or seeing a person of color, it was like one
of those three that really resonated with them.
And so it was really just like me being myself, but it really took putting myself out there
a lot for that to work.
I still don't think that people love following logos.
So I want to read through some of your tweets because you've tweeted a bunch of interesting
stuff.
You're very transparent.
Like, for example, let's talk about like some of these, these, I love your tweets.
I wish more people were this transparent.
You've got like a whole class of tweets that I think are like normalizing, taking it easy
as a founder.
So one of them literally just says, I did nothing today.
The other one, another one says, I took the week off.
Can't wait to get back to it on Monday.
I think that's a good sign.
You've got like probably like once a month, once every few weeks, you've got a tweet that's
just like, I'm chilling.
You know, you've got one that says, today was so fun.
I love my job.
I've created it.
What do you got going on?
It allows you to take so many breaks and enjoy your job as much as you do as a founder.
Yeah.
Oh, that's a good question.
Okay.
So I will preface this by saying it took me a while to get here.
Like year one did not look like that at all.
It was like me glued to my computer working all the time.
And it was a lot of stress.
Like I particularly remember when we first started running paid ads that that was just
like the worst experience for me because it was like feeling like I was gambling in a
way.
And like, have we lost the money?
Is the money still there?
Do we want to make it back?
Like that felt so scary and it was giving me so much anxiety that I had to get really
intentional about lifestyle design.
I remember I took a trip with my family.
We went to like on a, my mom was on cruises.
I went on a cruise with my mom.
And I, the reason that I agree to go on these cruise trips is because there's no wifi, there's
no good wifi.
And if you want good wifi, it's like outrageously expensive and like doesn't really work.
So it like forced me to turn off.
So I remember I was on a trip like that with my mom and it was like the first vacation
I had taken in.
Like, Oh, I couldn't even remember.
This is probably like two years into running after that code.
And I had, I was rereading for our work week and it was a re-reminder that like you can
set this up the way you want to.
And I came back to work and I took, started taking, I was already taking Fridays off.
I think I tried to challenge myself to take Fridays off like one day a week.
And when I got back from that trip, I decided to add another day.
So to take Mondays off too, and to intentionally use Monday to go be a tourist in my own city.
And I just wanted to see if like the whole company would fall apart.
So like going away for the week and it didn't, going away for the week was really helpful
because like whenever you back up way as a founder, even I think at the time I had maybe
like four other people who were working with me.
So we weren't a big team.
But going away for the week and seeing that nothing burned down was like, all right, okay
without me.
And then that gave me the courage to like, but it was a challenge for myself to like
add another day of the week.
And everything was fine.
In fact, I was actually better at my job.
Like the more rest I took, the more, I used to really have a lot of problems seeing like
vision setting.
Like I'm really good at the like eight month out, six month out view.
But like the long term vision setting was hard for me.
And I got better and better at it, the more time I took away from like, I'm in the computer
doing and building and doing all the things and just away.
Now that being said, I think about the company all the time, all the time I'm thinking about
it.
So even if I'm not like, actively working or I take the week off, like I'm still thinking
about it.
However, it's so useful for me now to like move away.
And that was the progression of how that happened.
There's this term in psychology called the Zygarnik effect.
I had to get on my brother's case because he wouldn't stop shut.
He wouldn't shut up about it.
He told me about it every single day.
But basically it's this effect that occurs when there's some activity you're working
on that's been interrupted.
And the result of the effect is that your brain just like more readily remembers it.
So any sort of thing that you're working on that gets interrupted that you don't finish
any unfinished task, it's always going to be front and center in your brain.
And if you're running a company, you probably have 1000 unfinished tasks, plans, grand
plans, people you want to hire, like things you want to build, it's just always going
to be front and center.
And there's just no way around that really because that's what your brain does.
That's right.
That's right.
That's it.
So I just to close that out, like it has been work to be in a place where I'm okay not working
on the company, actively every single second, that has been a thing I've had to work out
and exercise and get strong at.
It didn't just like come easily.
It was been it's been like several years of work.
And even now, like literally the other week, I had to remind myself because I was feeling
really stressed.
And I had to remind myself like this is supposed to be fun.
Like literally, you are creating this thing, you're creating the thing you asked for, you're
getting everything you asked for, in terms of like the intellectual challenge, like all
those things you got is supposed to be fun.
And literally, I just got to choose to feel that it was fun as opposed to feel that with
stress.
And that was a good reminder.
So I still have to work at it in order to be able to be like, all right, I'm gonna go
take a nap now or whatever I tweeted.
It's so nuts.
Like is it as a founder, you have the freedom to choose what you're going to do.
But even then you can still get into the same like mindset where like it's not fun.
I'm a big like journey over the destination guy.
And it's a huge cliche, right?
Everyone's heard this a million times.
But like the way I see it, a cliche is usually something on the border between like something
that's really good advice, but also advice that like no one ever follows.
And so it needs to be repeated ad nauseam and like that's why it's a cliche.
Like I've heard this journey over the destination thing a million times, but I still have to
check in with myself regularly and be like, am I enjoying the journey?
Like what can I do to make myself enjoy it?
So it's cool to hear like you're, you are in the same boat.
It's not just me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's talk about like the later stages of your growth with apps without code.
Because you know, you talked about how you went through these different stages of like
talking to people, then influencers, then advertising.
Did you see like the numbers of students that were coming into your program start to blow
up at some point?
Yeah, there's been blow up moments or what felt that way, like pivotal moments.
There've been like two recent big pivotal moments in the last like two years.
So in January 2019, that was a big pivotal moment.
And the pivot was, I'll tell you what the pivot was and how it came about, but the pivot
was us getting to a hundred K a month that previously felt like, Oh my gosh, that's going
to be, that's so much, I can't even imagine hitting that revenue number consistently.
But that happened in January of 2019.
And the way that it happened was I noticed I was being like, it gets down to like personal
work a lot of the times, like places I'm in the way, and I really just need to like move
out of the way to let the company grow.
So I noticed that I was doing that, that in the, this is true in the course business.
And because I come from tech, sometimes I'm like, there are things that I'm just like,
I don't necessarily know to do them or know this whole industry.
So for example, in the course business and online education business, it is very common
for people to get coaches as a CEO to sort of help you and share what they've learned
and what they're doing.
Right?
Instead of you taking a course, once you're at a certain level, it's like you do a lot
of coaching.
And I had a lot of friends around me who are paying lots of money to work with coaches
to help them grow their business.
And I thought it was like so crazy that they were spending this much money to hire a coach
to help them as a CEO.
But then their business would skyrocket.
But I still was being really resistant to doing that.
And I was like, no, I'm just like, I'm not doing it.
So there were like business groups, like masterminds that folks are joining and also coaches who
are getting it.
I was super resistant to it.
And then after a while, like late 2018, I pushed myself to be like, just try it.
Stop it.
Just try it.
And so I did and I got lots of little small insights of like, oh, if you show the testimonial
example here, instead of here, it's going to make a big difference.
Or like, oh, somebody gave me really good feedback on my webinar.
And it was like, you're kind of being too smart.
Like you're kind of assuming that people know more than they know.
If you back up a little bit, and at the beginning of the webinar, give people a quick lesson
on how to come up with an idea.
They're not even sure if their idea is good enough, help them understand that their idea
is good enough.
And then teachers like these little tiny micro tweaks of things that made really big differences.
And that showed up in January of 2019 in a huge way.
And that was like a big skyrocket.
And it was a good lesson for me to get the heck out of the way of my own stuff.
And then more recently, similar where it's always related, I can always look back at
it and find the correlation to me being in the way of the growth of the company.
And I'm willing as a founder to be open minded to the possibilities that it is me in the
way.
But more recently, this year, we had a huge growth spurt.
A lot of that was COVID and people being home and people being like, wait a minute, I probably
need to be thinking about other sources of income and income streams.
But we actually missed the first round of that happening and that sort of happening
in the economy and in the world because I was set on like, okay, we've got to be thrifty.
And I'm going to take over running ads for a while.
And I'm definitely not as good as like our ads manager now and the agency that we work
with now.
But I was like, okay, we're going to do this.
And actually, it's funny, because most of my getting in the ways, as I'm saying this
out loud, are like unwillingness to pay money to grow, like in the company, spending money
to make money.
So that was happening in a big block.
And once I let go of that, it was just like a huge skyrocket.
That was a combination of timing and me getting out of the way, but like still the same story.
I was listening to a podcast with Austin already recently, he's the founder of Lambda school,
the teaching people to code.
And he was on the indie hackers actually way back when like two or three years ago when
Lambda school was super small, he was just getting started.
Since then he's raised like $120 million or something crazy.
And he said he was getting like three or 400 new students enrolled every month, which is
a crazy amount.
But looking at your story, you're doing at least half of that in your bootstraps.
So kudos to you.
But he's under insane amount of pressure.
I mean, the host asked him, what are the chances that you live up to the hype that you achieve
this grand vision that you set out for?
And I think he said it was like 50%.
And then he said he's optimistic, and most people would probably give it a lower chance.
And that's just a ton of pressure.
But here you are.
And all of your pressure is kind of in your hands.
If you want to invest more into your business and grow faster, you can.
And if you want to just chill out for a bit, that's totally in your power to nobody's gonna
push you.
So some of it, it's like a mix of, I think to be a good bootstrapper, you have to have
a pace and a balance of like putting your foot on the gas and like letting go, putting
your foot on the gas and letting go.
And the reason you have to do that is because when you have a big growth spurt, you can
then go and like hire more people.
But as a bootstrapper, you can only hire for what you have the revenue to hire for.
And so you can follow that trend, but you also need to like not be if you have a little
bit of a growth spurt, you got your first customer, you got something going, you can't
just keep hiring or keep spending, because it's not likely that your growth trajectory
will like keep doing that most people's growth trajectory is have like some, a lot of wiggliness
in them.
And so you have to move with that.
So I do think that I've gotten really good at that.
So like back and forth, and I've now gotten good at communicating it to my team.
Like we're in a growth season right now, it is why you're seeing us talking about hiring.
It's probably why in our one on ones, we'll talk about what do you need on your team.
I anticipate that like, in a few months, we will no longer be in that phase.
So if we're not talking about hiring a bunch of people, don't be shocked.
It doesn't mean that something is wrong.
It just means that we're like ebbing and flowing with the growth.
And as soon as we have our next wave of growth, we'll all come back and we'll say have that
conversation and get like communicating that to my team has been helpful.
But that's the ebb and flow that I have to manage.
You're smart visual growth season versus sort of sustaining season.
And if you're like a funded company, you're always in growth season.
You're always like trying to grow, raising more money, pushing on the gas.
And if you stop growing like your dad, you're screwed.
Whereas if you're a bootstrapper, you stop growing, you just like stop hiring, and you
stop spending more money and you catch up as revenue, you catch up and then fund the
next growth season, if you even want there to be a next growth season.
Yeah, yeah.
I think about it as like expansion mode and incubation mode.
For me, at least, it's hard to get to the next expansion mode unless I've like allowed
it could be myself, the company, the team to like rest, like for us, it might be like,
oh, we just had like a whole new growth level of number of students were taking on.
Let's take some time to like really get it right at that size.
And at that stage, there's new stuff that comes up.
And then like it's taught then we're well rested to do the next like growth stage.
So there's this thing you've been kind of talking about on Twitter that I've also experienced
myself, which is branding versus building, right?
How much did you be spending thinking about like building like the foundations of your
company and making it a good business?
And how much did you be like tweeting and talking about what you're doing and getting
people excited about what you're doing?
And I think you've fallen much more on the building side of things like keep your head
down, build your company like I didn't even know what apps without code was until pretty
recently.
I just didn't see you on Twitter.
I didn't see you like you weren't like around but like you're crushing it.
And there are people like I know who are like sharing every dollar they make on Twitter.
And they like they're everywhere but like their business isn't like a 10th as successful
as yours is.
Yeah, when I started, I was doing lots of like, be public be out there is getting invited
to lots of conferences doing lots of podcasts.
That was like my first two years of apps that code and definitely first four years of entrepreneurship.
But then I started feeling icky about it because it was like, I'm doing all these podcasts
and like all these magazines are writing things about me.
But like my numbers are just okay.
And certainly the profit margin is not wonderful.
And I read Mike Metallowitz profit first at the time and I said, Okay, we're going to
get focused on this.
We haven't read that really good if you're bootstrapping, which is really around like
prior, it's a specific formula for prioritizing profit, and what that meant at the time, we
were probably like a four person team.
And so what that meant was we didn't have the resources to say yes to every speaking
engagement to do a bunch of social media posting, instead, we were going to focus on like conversions
and revenue and profit margin.
And of course, like serving the customers that come in through those things.
And that was going to take up I decided about two years ago, that was gonna like take up
all of our time, we were going to turn away from some of that stuff.
There was a strategic decision, there were pros and cons, the pro is like now we have
the resources to like hire brand folks and like do way more, which is why you're hearing
more from us now.
And we have like a sturdy, stable business with really great profit margins and all those
things that work really well.
The downside is that like there were a good two years where we were just quiet.
And a lot of the like no code movement happened in the last year of those two years.
And I think that we could have done maybe a better job being vocal about it.
But I still wouldn't change the way that we did, because I do think you kind of have to
like pick one to prioritize.
And I like how we prioritize and selected me out there some companies that have taken
advantage of this sort of no code wave webflow was like branded itself as the no code company
and they have the no code conference in San Francisco, and then maker pad and all these
other big players.
And like, I imagine some part of you have to feel a little bit like we were there first.
We were thinking about this first.
Yeah, it's a great example.
I do sometimes feel that way.
For example, I think in 2016, we did apps without code live conference, it was super
exciting.
And we had a bunch of folks on there, I don't know if we Webflow team was there, but like
Wade Foster from Zapier, and like the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark was there, we
have a really cool conference.
And he was talking about how he built Craigslist and just like no technical skills.
And I think that there are of course, like there if we had that continued pressing on
that, even though it didn't feel as big as it was is now that we would have had more
loudness in the space, but definitely not necessarily more stable of a business in the
space.
So I still, to my point earlier, like, I think I'm glad that we did it in that order.
It reflected my values, but I did have to check in and be like, okay, we need to switch
gears here.
Yeah, I think it almost always makes sense to do the profit first thing unless you have
very specific reasons why like branding is crucial to your strategy, which if you have
those reasons, you will know.
But if you don't, and you're trying to choose, it seems like profit versus the way to go.
Yeah.
Another thing that I'm very curious about is just the health of the no code movement,
there's a lot like being said about it.
It's a lot of marketing dollars being poured into it from companies with like a vested
interest.
But you're actually on the ground, like helping people build no code businesses and charging
the money to, you know, help accelerate their ideas into real companies.
Is it working?
Are people building successful no code businesses?
And if so, like, what could listeners take away from what you've learned works for your
students?
So yes, it's working.
And I also have critiques of the no code movement.
My biggest critique lies with the software platforms.
I think that one of the trends that you'll see is that the software platforms launch
with the intention of being for everyone.
And then for the app, not for everyone, but for the average user for the average person
who wants to build an app.
But because of like business pressure, or for a lot of reasons, will gravitate towards
a more and more technical customer.
And I do think that there's a fine line between no code, and really just like a whole nother
coding language you have to learn, right?
It's not it's a new coding language.
And so what I see is a lot of the tools shifting in that direction, the primary pull, I think
is that because enterprises will pay a lot for the platform or businesses will pay a
lot and they've got more technical capability and so they'll slowly move in that direction.
I'd love to see more focus on how to help someone in a product who doesn't know how
to think like an engineer already.
And I do think that that's a gap that we have to do lots of teaching over to fill that I
think that if we want to see lots of movement in the no code movement, we're going to have
to collectively fill that gap of how to think like an engineer.
I think designing products that make you not have to already know that as a prerequisite.
And I would love if folks want to reach out to me about this, I'd love to talk to folks
about this in more detail, but it is specifically around a I think that the gap to fill is almost
like a question and answer based interface.
So right now, the types of products, no code products that are out there are like, here's
a scribbling screen, drag what you want on there.
But like, what if you don't know what a great profile even looks like your great login screen
doesn't even look like what are you supposed to do?
And so really, like if you if you look at what my team does, it's actually like a series
of questions, like, okay, well, which of these multiple choices, the main thing that you
want your app to do is the closest to it.
Okay, now based on that question, what do you need?
Do you need this?
Or do you not need this?
Okay, great.
Let me explain what this is, like that kind of question based interface to build as opposed
to just freeform drag and drop, I would love to see that.
And so folks are working on that or want to work on that, like, I'd love to send people
your way and help you with that, because I would love to see more.
I love that idea, in particular, because people often think that, oh, there are already tools
and apps that do a particular thing, therefore, there's no room for me.
But there are a lot of industries where actually there could be lots of competitors and companies
that have different approaches to things and different user interfaces and different beliefs.
And like website builders or no code tools are a perfect example where like, we have
not heard the last word on no code tools.
And there are lots of people strong in patents, like you, who have lots of students or customers
who like want a particular interface, etc.
So I hope someone actually goes and goes on and builds this.
Yeah.
All right, Tara.
Well, it's been amazing having you on.
I always ask sort of a traditional question at the end of the show.
Based on the entirety of your journey, you're talking to, you know, someone who's thinking
about becoming an indie hacker, what do you think they can take away from your story?
The thing that comes to mind is this conversation you and I were having around selling before
you build or launching before everything's done.
That I think is the biggest thing that's been helpful for me.
And it allows me to do stuff that feels scary and that feels like you're not quite ready
to do that yet.
I'm working on a project now around like acquiring some small fast businesses.
I've never done it before.
It's totally new.
But like, I'm going to start doing it before I'm ready and I'm publicly talking about it
before I'm ready.
Like that, I think, is a principle is a great takeaway from my story and what we talked
about today.
Sell before you build.
Don't be afraid to talk in public.
Tara Reid, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about apps.code and everything
else you're working on?
Yeah.
So apps.code.com or on social media at apps without code.
And then I am at on social media at Tara Reid underscore our EED underscore.
All right.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
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