I have building using nocode tools (see http://mobius.xyz  ) and so according to the laws of #nocode, I have to drop a thread about it. that's just how it is. so here it goes:

I am a long time in tech (15 years) but always front of house in sales + management (although funnily enough I worked for a pioneering nocode company with @keithahern and @tomjadams ) and sitting in Melbourne under complete lockdown, it seemed like the perfect chance to build

and launch something. being a big fan of the @tylertringas micro-saas approach, I was keen to go down this path and from following @briannekimmel here I had heard of this amazing tool called @webflow ...

here's me learning webflow

[side note: One of the amazing things i have loved about nocode is the community - and imagine my surprise when I ended up doing a 30 day challenge with @makerpad and two of the judges were.... @tylertringas and @briannekimmel . amazing!]

my brother in law is a radiologist and he had been kicking around an idea for a patient tracking platform for post procedure recovery. I take it a look and it seems like it has legs - but how to test it? enter the @bramk @nocodemvp course. tick. (it's awesome. do it)

where to learn about all the different nocode tools, choices to make, how to find a solution? Over i go to @makerpad where @tomosman , @AmieDelisa and @bentossell help me find my community and it's genuinely been incredible, although the 30 challenge nearly broke me!

in the beginning their was airtable. it wasn't pretty, it wasn't well structured, but it held all the data we would need from clients to run.

so now I have a back end and a basic website.

I installed google analytics and google marketing platform - i even ran a campaign and spent $30. i have no idea why.

shout out to my friends in ecuador!

money not well spent:

We then needed to use this dummy info in airtable to send SMS, so off to @ClickSendSMS we go. BIG SHOUTOUT to the clicksend support team who have been absolutely amazing, really top shelf, super responsive, super helpful.

so I figured out that I could send SMS - yay! but then how to automate it? @zapier , of course. Patients reply, which is available in Clicksend - yay! so how do we get that from Clicksend into airtable? Zaps again. and so the zap library begins to expand...

**LESSON**: if you use emojis in a message, it becomes a Unicode message which means you only get half the character count. emojis also count as 2 Unicode characters. so this means my original 7 SMS were actually counting (and being charged as) 49 SMS messages per patient.

which ruined the entire unit economics of the business . so less emojis it is. rewrite the script and we are away. and testing.

matching the incoming responses to the original record in airtable was hard. and not for the reasons I was expecting. you want to know the reason it was so hard? mobile number formatting.

goddamn it America, adopt the goddamn metric system already and accept that

there are non-US formatted phone numbers in the world when launching a global business (looking at you here @airtable ).
now we have a website, can message patients and they can respond and we can store these in a database. this is starting to feel a little bit like a product!

hhhmm, better find a way that clients can pay us for this product. special shout out also to the amazing @outseta team and @geoffroberts in particular who have helped me enormously, especially since I am still on the free tier! they have provide so much hands on support

that I actually feel bad about it!
now clients can log into a client portal and see only their data, which is actually just an embedded view (or two embedded views to be specific) from @airtable but it works goddamn it!

**so let's recap shall we?**

I now have a website that allows clients to read about what we do, get excited, they can choose a plan, pay us money (yay!) and get access to the product (GIPT).

Once they have registered, they can add patients who will then get polled by SMS on

their pain levels following their procedure 6 times over the following month. they respond and this is all recorded and tabulated automagically.

meanwhile the client can log into their portal and see their own unique set of patients and their responses.

AH-FREAKIN-MAZING.

this no-code thing just continues to blow me away. for someone like me to build this (with a shit ton of help from makerpad community, support at multiple vendors, my goddamn legend of a wife @GeorgiaGorigas ) in a few short months is nothing short of an honest to god miracle.

so we have been running with live users for a few months and hope to have actual clients starting (paid) trials this month! It's been an incredibly fun journey so far and I have learnt an extraordinary amount.

here. we. go.

I hope you will come along for the journey.

ps 2 observations from my time working with nocode (apart from the fact that it's mindblowing!).

1. it's an incredible game changer for people like me who can't code but have an idea for a business, the biggest leap in the democratisation of online business building in

a long time. I've been able to build a fully functional web app with automated messaging, client portal, reporting
& more that will scale to >$25k/month.
2. the impact of automation on efficiency at big orgs is going to be on a level not seen since excel dropped in the 70s