Entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to no-code platforms to build profitable startups without extensive technical knowledge. These tools have democratized app development, allowing founders to quickly bring their ideas to market.
In this post, we’ll explore three no-code startups that have achieved remarkable success, each generating over $1M in revenue. Their stories demonstrate the power of no-code solutions and may inspire aspiring entrepreneurs to pursue their own ventures.
In This Article:
Comet by Charles Thomas
The first startup I wanna talk about is Comet, It was started by Charles Thomas. Charles built a marketplace for data and tech talent to be able to get hired remotely for their work.
So basically an awesome place that where you could find tech or data freelancers, you could hire them to do a job within your company. And the benefits for the freelancers is that they would get business through this platform. Now, Charles didn’t really have technical skills when he kicked this off.
And so back in the day in 2017, he discovered a platform that at the time was a no code tool that today is very developed, but at the time really wasn’t that developed, called Bubble.IO, and it allowed you to essentially program without having to write coding language. And so Thomas leveraged this platform to be able to build his tech stack, to be able to build a first version of his marketplace. Now, one of the cool tricks that Charles did early on was that he highly vetted every single freelancer that he allowed to list on the platform.
And so he ended up being very differentiated from other platforms, mainstream platforms like Upwork and that gave him kind of a competitive edge early on. And his company also was able to structure a team for you if you were looking for a larger team that required several members.
So in 2017, he was able to build this without coding at all as a non technical founder. And he launched it and did over 300 projects for more than 150 different companies. And because he’d seen so much awesome success early on, he was able to raise $2M from investors in Europe.
One of these was called OTM Ventures, and the other one was called Kima. Now, Thomas was not only able to build the platform, but he was also able to scale his platform to more than $800K in monthly recurring revenue. Built fully on bubble.
After seeing so much traction behind his startup idea in 2018, he was approached and raised an additional round of funding for $12.8M from other venture capital firms from all over the world.
Now, back when Charles started this off, the no code space was nowhere near to where it is today. And so today, there’s way more flexibility. It’s much easier to go out there and scale a startup from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so Charles was one of the people who paved the way.
Teal by David Fano
The second no code startup I want to feature here is called Teal.
David Fano, the founder and CEO at the time, was trying to find a great way for people to be able to find jobs. And after several iterations, he found out that the process of going about finding a job was what was really difficult over even just finding a specific position online. And so he built teal, a platform that helps to navigate, organize your search, track different jobs, and also provides a content library with tips and tricks on how to improve your resume to be able to fit a specific position.
Now, he’s very open about the fact that the early days was a lot of pivoting, trying to figure out what the customer wanted. They walked into this with some assumptions about what customers wanted, but over time, realized that the product that they had first delivered didn’t necessarily fill the problem or wasn’t really a solution to the problem. And through kind of micro pivoting and figuring out really exactly what it was that they needed to build for this customer, they were able to come to product market fit.
Now, recently, Teal actually raised $5M from investors, more specifically Flybridge Capital. And they’ve really focused around this idea of career direction. Now, we all know that a lot of people are trying to change jobs these days, or they’re leaving jobs they’re not necessarily happy in.
So there’s obviously a growing market in this area. His platform was built in Bubble. He also used a good amount of Zapier to be able to communicate information or transfer information from one place to another.
He used software like Typeform to be able to make very nice and pretty forms. He built a CRM system with HubSpot and was able to connect through the API connector that bubble has. He used this tool, Zapier that I’m talking about to be able to manage and automate workflows.
He also used Airtable for additional database management, and they built their amazing website, leveraging Webflow, which is one of the most beautiful website builders. And when he was asked about no code and the importance that it played within his company and the development of it, he basically said that mockups are great, but unfortunately they’re very limited. Right? You really need to make sure that someone is willing to take an action that’s gonna prove that there’s really demand behind your startup.
And so being able to actually build these things out without any technical skills, that’s incredibly powerful thing. The other awesome benefit that he talks about leveraging no code, was that he was able to get his small team of only twelve people. He got everyone to participate in building out the product and building out the right thing, because suddenly he could give the power of technical skills through no code technologies to his entire team, allowing a more collaborative experience, and of course through that, a way better outcome.
Scribly By Dani Bell
Like most people trying to build startups, Dani had a big roadblock, which was that she didn’t know how to code. Now at this point she was trying to freelance, and after a couple months of freelancing as a copywriter, she realized that a lot of her time was being consumed and she wasn’t really able to take on the increasing demand that she was getting for her product. And that’s the point at which she decided to build Scribly.
Now, Scribly is a content marketing platform, but essentially it was a way for her to be able to productize her services. So instead of selling her time for money as a freelancer, she was trying to find ways to automate that. And so she created a SaaS platform or software as a service platform that would be able to take a weight off of her shoulders and be able to deliver amazing results to her clients.
The first thing she did was jump into Webflow, and she was able to build a website as well as a client management system for customers to be able to order directly from her. She was able to leverage Airtable as a database, to be able to centralize the details of every single job. And then she used some Zapier to be able to connect some of these different things, to be able to send information from one place to the other, and also to automate certain systems.
Now, in total, she says that it took her eight weeks to build and that it cost $200 only to get this thing off the ground. And she quite rapidly was able to convert seven of her paying customers, freelance customers, into the model that she had built out with Scribly. So that was very, from the beginning, quite obvious that she was gonna see success to some degree.
But over the next twelve months, she was able to scale this platform up to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And when she was interviewed about no code, to talk about the power of no code, here’s a direct quote. I can’t overstate how excited I am that all of these things used to be closed off and now they are becoming democratized. And she is super excited about how quickly and inexpensively you can build leveraging these tools. Now, an important thing to know is that no code does not mean no work. And you can really only leverage the power of no code if you’re using these tools within the context of a bigger goal.
🛠Tools for Creating Startups Without CodingðŸ›
- Make: From tasks and workflows to apps and systems, build and automate anything in one powerful visual platform.
- TypeForm: Templates for quizzes, research, feedback, lead generation, and more. Personalized flows and seamless integrations with world-class user experience.
- ShipFast: Build your start up in days, not weeks.
- Versoly: The fastest way to build your pixel perfect website.
- Gravity Write": Create blogs, ad copies, emails, social media posts, images, and more in seconds.
- Bouncer: Increase your email marketing ROI. Land smoothly in your recipient’s inboxes.
Conclusion
And as you’ve seen from some of these examples, you can make a considerable amount of money, you can raise a considerable amount of capital, and you can do it way more cost effectively. That allows you to pivot as your company realizes what the market realities are. And that’s really what we’re encouraging when we’re building startups, it’s going to be to go out there to experiment, to build things, to test them in the market.
If they work, we’re going to find ways to be able to do those better. But in the end of the day, your ability to be able to put the solution to a problem that someone’s having in their hands and for those people to get an outcome that’s desirable and they’re willing to pay for, is the number one thing you should focus on. The tools and the techniques, those are secondary to you really being able to give the value to the end customer.
Hope that was useful.