I'm Andrew, I'm from the UK, and about 5 years ago I discovered and quickly fell in love with Zapier and its potential for all things #nocode.
Like most people I found it when I started Googling ""how to automate X"". With a computer science diploma - yet no coding skills - and a small lead generation business that wasn't making enough money to pay anyone other than me, I needed some backup with the whole 'work smart, not hard' mantra.
Fast forward two years and there was barely any day-to-day left to do at my company. I needed new challenges and started building and fixing zaps for other people's businesses. The demand was huge, full time freelancing came next, and soon an agency was born - www.luhhu.com. I now get to spend my days helping all sorts of interesting businesses automate complex workflows without code.
"The no-code movement has me fascinated. It's given people from so many backgrounds the chance to think up and build businesses in a very low-risk and flexible way"
As well as not being able to code, I'm also limited in my design abilities. I know what good looks like on a website, but I don't know how to replicate it.
Thank goodness, then, that tools like Bubble, Landen, Glide and Table2Site have come along, as it's given me the chance to scratch my inventor itch launching full-blown projects.
Beta Zaps (http://betazaps.luhhu.com) was my first endeavour. Lots of apps build Zapier integrations, but for whatever reason never get them published in Zapier's directory. Using Table2Site - a near tool that instantly turns any Airtable into a CMS-driven website - I set about to create something people could use to easily find these zaps. It runs neatly on across two Airtable tabs. The first is where I add a few bits of data - invite link, description, Twitter avatar etc - in a quick and easy way. Then, as soon as I tick the last column, a zap gets triggered, does some formatting, adds some HTML to the fields before copying everything to a second tab which the site is powered from.
The site gets 5-10 visits per day, has had praise from Zapier staff, and is attracting people wanting to list their apps. I don't intend for it to make money directly, but it's a great promo tool for my agency.
Get Self Employed (https://getselfemployed.com) is my first 'real' attempt at a no-code service. I live in Hungary and I know from experience that registering self-employed is hard. There is paperwork, there are poorly-advertised requirements and more than a few patience-testing quirks in the process. Once done, however, it's the easiest and most cost-effective way for freelancers to work.
As an expat that doesn't speak the language, you'll need a local expert. I found one, but it took a while. I thought - what if I build a good website, with a well-written overview of the process and link people up with said expert? What if I do that in a few countries?
I built the front-end on Landen, which is a dream to use. In 30 minutes I had the basics built and then it just took another hour or so of tweaking to get finished. On the backend, leads get passed into an Airtable and trigger a zap. This zap then sends a Gmail to the customer, with the expert CCed in, inviting them to contact each other. The expert meanwhile gets another email with all the customer's details.
It's a barebones start, but In a week since launch, with $50 spent on Adwords we've had about 30 visits per day and 6 inquiries (3 of which were spammy sadly - we're going to need some automated filtering). With each successful lead generating us $20 in a commission fee from the expert, I see real potential for this business, so long as we ween ourselves off Adwords and get natural search traffic. Plans for a newsletter (an exciting chance to play with Revue) and a blog should help with this.
The no-code movement has me fascinated. It's given people from so many backgrounds the chance to think up and build businesses in a very low-risk and flexible way. I expect a wave of innovation over the next 5-10 years as demand drives the development of new tools - and new tools allow for even more complex products.
On the bleeding edge of the no-code movement, the community is informative and encouraging to newcomers, but I'd say there is a whole segment of people who already run SMEs build on more traditional infrastructure that have no awareness of what tools like Zapier can do for them.
When my consulting hat is on, I spend most of my days helping business make small, incremental, yet financially-impactful improvements to their businesses using nocode tools - and I'd like to help educate other businesses about what is possible.
You'll find my most active on Twitter @AndrewJDavison where you'll find me freely dispensing advice on Zapier and chatting about nocode stuff. Feel free to ask questions