By Ben Tossell

‍

When I started Makerpad I never thought it'd be where it is today. A little side project that turned into the hub for everything no-code (although I still dislike the term πŸ˜‰). I'm learning lots of things along the way, like; creating my own systems to get stuff done, finding exercise you like doing (tennis), you don't have to respond to all emails and DM's, it's ok to be a maker that has to do some 'manager' tasks.

I'm forever grateful to the growing community for all your support, our investors for enabling me to do this full-time and my team, for taking the leap with me, producing phenomenal content and being the reason Makerpad is what it is today.

This year I postponed getting married, got a puppy and had my fair share of up and down days. We've got to just keep going.

Here's some of what we accomplished:

  • Total Members: 4,943 (should hit 5k by 31st December)
  • +363% growth in members from 2019 β†’ 2020
  • 14,948 newsletter subscribers
  • 278 tutorials in total
  • 500+ projects launched by the community
  • Makerpad fund launched with investments such as; Supabase, Stacker and Causal
  • Community Program pilot

What to expect next year:

  • Build Club. 14 day cohorts of building projects, alongside others. First cohort kicks-off Jan 4th
  • Community improvement. We've got a couple of projects underway that we think will be super exciting for engaging the community in a new and meaningful way.
  • Content. We're planning more Tool-Paths so let us know any suggestions you have here
  • Some secret stuff 🀫

A few things we've learnt along the way

  • People like being guided. So we built educational content around business use-cases (e.g. How Morning Brew do sales) and Tool-paths (e.g. Build a membership community). This allows people to follow tutorials sequentially around a specific goal
  • Concise content. Videos need to be easy to consume and quick to inspire
  • Videos aren't just educational. They're often used as inspiration. Many people have watched a tutorial only to go off-piste almost immediately. This is what I used to do tooβ€”"this is how you can do X" becomes "Oh cool, I'm going to tweak that to the thing I want to do which is slightly different"
  • Challenges engage the community, but there are parameters to consider. 30-day challenges can work if they are broader or have big prizes and judges. Everyday challenges lose steam fairly quickly. This is why we're testing Build Club. 14-day rolling cohorts building projects alongside others

Below you'll find a collection of our top pieces of content from 2020; Tool Paths, Deep-Dives, Tutorials, Challenges, Workshops, Blog Posts and Podcasts.

We'll put together a 2020: Community in review shortly to show off some of the most amazing things our community has built - there's just so many!

‍

πŸ› οΈ Tool-Paths

Released in December our tool-paths have recently been launched and are available to everyone! They are sequences of step-by-step tutorial videos, tool-paths guide you through projects from start to finish.

The first 3 paths are:

πŸ‘” Automate a job board

πŸ›’ Build an e-commerce store from your phone

🎟️ Build a membership community

‍

🀿 Deep-Dives

Our Deep-Dives are an in-depth exploration into the processes of an interesting business, individual or organization. We then break down how you could re-create that process using the latest no-code tools.

🌊 Automating an Investment Fund's Form to Contract Process (Deep-Dive)

🐬 The Community Creator - How to run a low-cost membership community (Deep-Dive)

β›΅ Cottage Deep Dive: How to manage, track, and automate complex projects (Deep-Dive)

πŸ’§ No-code solutions let Stark focus on content creation (Deep-Dive)

πŸ‹ Makerpad builds Community Building no-code solutions for 1 Second Everyday (Deep-Dive)

🏊 Rebuilding Morning Brew's sales process with no-code solutions (Deep-Dive)

‍

πŸ“Ί Top 10 Tutorials

Makerpad has over 250 written & video tutorials, here are our most popular ones!

🐧 Cameo clone in Glide - video shout-out site (Tutorial)

🌲 Selling digital products with Gumroad with Notion & Super (Tutorial)

🧣 Airbnb clone with bubble (Tutorial)

🦌 How to build a basic membership site with Carrd (Tutorial)

πŸ•ŠοΈ Build a subscription platform like Patreon (Tutorial)

πŸ•―οΈ Creating a membership website on Webflow (Tutorial)

🧨 A Meetup clone built-in Adalo (Tutorial)

❄️ Job Board in Webflow (Tutorial)

⭐ Build an Airtable powered mobile app with Adalo (Tutorial)

🎁 Creating a marketplace app on Bubble (Tutorial)

‍

πŸ†Challenges

We regularly have challenges to test your no-code skills! Here are just a few of our Challenges that have taken place this year!

πŸ… Advent of No-Code (View Entries)

🏡️ Bubble Challenge (The Results)

πŸͺ™ Community Challenge (The Results)

πŸš€ T30 Challenge (The Results)

‍

πŸ“† Workshop Replays

Our weekly workshops with experts are recorded & the replays can be watched later! Here are some of our most recent workshops.

πŸ” Automation for Entrepreneurs

πŸ” Automate Content Marketing & Print-on-Demand Fulfilment

πŸ” Office Hours with Sahil Lavingia & Ben Tossell

πŸ” No-code AI: An Open Discussion

πŸ” Make Your Website Multi-lingual with Weglot

πŸ” How to Repurpose Content with Hani Mourra

‍

✍️ From the Blog

Our blog posts cover our partner announcements, podcast episodes and articles too! Here are some of our recent posts:

What Is No-Code?

Why Building A Membership Community Could Spark Growth For Your Business

‍

πŸŽ™οΈ Podcast

Our weekly podcast talks to founders and makers within the no-code community. Here are our top 5 most listened to episodes!

🎀 Episode #1: Vlad Magdalin - How Webflow is reinventing the website.

🎧 Episode #22 - Sahil Lavingia - Founder & CEO of Gumroad

🎢 Episode #21 - AJ - How Carrd is carving out it's own niche

πŸŽ™οΈ Episode #25 - Wade Foster – Zapier

πŸ“» Episode #14 - Tyler Tringas - Funding profitable companies from seed with Earnest Capital

Tags

What's your story? Β Tell us how you use no-code
Something wrong?