This is a crossover series from both Adalo, a mobile app platform for builders, and Lloyd, a career advisor for young professionals. We hope this series provides examples and encouragement to today’s builders about how no-code can impact, influence, and uplift your career trajectory.
The mobile app market is growing exponentially. A Gartner survey predicted that the market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than IT organizations' capacity to deliver them… and this was conducted five years ago. What we’re seeing at present is demand at an even larger scale.
The global app development market has an expected growth rate of 497.09 billion during 2020-2024. The impact of the pandemic is significant in this massive growth of the mobile app development industry. To keep pace, rapid prototyping, no-code & low-code tools, and constant upskilling are enabling people without technical skills to build software. This highly adaptable new set of software developers are creating solutions that would otherwise not have been viable from a resource perspective, and they’re powering the creator economy in innovative ways.
Here’s the story of two such entrepreneurs that are using no-code to build creative software solutions.
Meet Jason Dupree, Founder of Strong by Bodyweight and No-code Entrepreneur
I grew up in Plano, TX, and after graduating from SFASU with a degree in Kinesiology, I moved to Austin, TX to become a personal trainer, and I've been here since 2014. For fun I like to sing, hike, and play video games, and I have 2 cats.
Most of my career I was a 1-on-1 personal trainer. For a few years I was also a manager at a small fitness company where I was basically in charge of technology and operations. I discovered my love and talent for automation and no-code there.
Now, I'm focusing on adding online training to my 1-on-1 training, and have started Strong by Bodyweight, to help people build an athletic body without the need for a gym. I wanted to make an app, but couldn't afford the developers. So I googled how to make my own app, and stumbled upon no-code software. I've built 2 apps for Strong by Bodyweight.
One is the user app, where you can follow programs and track progress. My clients can also receive their custom programs and coaching in this app. The other is the coaching app or the backend, that helps me manage my business using a shared database.
Building a Fitness Coaching App on Adalo
I came into Adalo knowing how to use a database (thanks Airtable!), so I had a quick learning curve. The challenging part was taking the vision I had and translating it into a no-code app. Some things are easy, and some things take some creative workarounds. For example, scheduling and tracking workouts turned out to be more complicated than they sound, and I've come up with a pretty unique solution for both.
One of the biggest things I learned is that just because you can't do things a certain way, doesn't mean it can't be done in another way. Adalo is relatively young, so there's definitely some features that, when added, will make it even better, but there's still usually a way to get things done in the meantime.
Just being able to drop other training apps and use my own in my business has been great. It's cheaper, and I have 100% control. It's a little more work, but my clients get the experience I want them to get.
If You’re Thinking of a No-Code Business Idea
Just start building! It costs nothing to get started. You'll go through learning curves and many iterations of your app, but in the end, it's worth it to have something you made that will save you time and make you more money.
Adalo allowed me to do what I thought would never be possible: create my own app! I remember looking at the cost of building an app a few years ago - $20,000 for what I wanted. Now I've built it for next to nothing.
Meet Patrick, No-Code App Maker and Founder of Showroom
Hi I'm Patrick!! I build + automate websites with no-code tools, I've worked for multiple startups and have just recently started my own business called Showroom.
I graduated from Miami of Ohio and went directly to work for a startup in LA that helped bartenders & servers find gig work for weddings, happy hours, birthdays etc. Once the pandemic hit, that business dried up quickly, but what I took from it was how powerful Airtable and Zapier are!
When I was working at that startup, we hired a no-code consultant/Zapier wizard to help automate our scheduling process we had inside Airtable. I started using no-code tools in April of 2021 and worked on a bunch of projects since then:
- Showroom: The Trusted Marketplace of Independent Jewelry Collections
- OpenFee: An Opensea Webflow Cloneable
- NFTsentiment: An Art Board made by the Robotos NFT community
- InverseGallowayIndex: A platform to protect investors from cold takes
- All my other projects can be found on https://patrickfinnigan.xyz/
My Experience Building Out No-Code Projects
Since I had to learn no-code tools to start, the first 3 months of building Showroom were focused on setting up a functional marketplace rather than going and marketing to our customers.
Now that I'm comfortable with no-code tools (especially Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier), I'm confident I can go out and talk to new/existing customers without the website or automations breaking.
I built out inversegallowayindex.com after sending out a tweet with the landing page and I received over 70 email sign-ups! I had to give the people what they wanted so I connected a Carrd site with an Airtable base to show all the data. The OpenSea Webflow cloneable I built has also received some great attention. For something that I built out over two nights, I wasn't expecting that many people to like/use it.
If you’re looking for ways to get started with your no-code work, I recommend that you start by watching Youtube/Makerpad tutorials and build in public on Twitter. You don't need to know CSS or HTML, just start building today!!
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We hope this article sheds light on how no-code is democratizing creativity and providing new and exciting career growth opportunities for today’s makers. If you'd like to chat with a career advisor to plan out your next steps, give Lloyd a try for free for 14 days.
