Wondering if you can build your business idea using no-code tools? Here’s the story of someone who did! Todd Schmidt and his team built a business to help people through their journey of homeownership, using Webflow, Bubble, and a few other handy tools.

Here’s his story!

Hi, I’m Todd Schmidt! I love spending time with my family, thankfully, most of them live near us in Atlanta. I also enjoy learning and spend my free time learning new coding languages or reading books!

I'm the CTO and co-founder at The Home Dispatch, where we help reduce the stress of homeownership. I've been at tech companies working in operations, marketing, and engineering teams for a long time. But I have recently fallen in love with the speed of no-code tools.

Using no-code tools to speed up development

The Home Dispatch app was created to help homeowners reduce the stress of homeownership. Owning a home is hard, especially for first-time homeowners. You spend a ton of money, have limited experience, and are all of a sudden expected to manage this investment with very little help.

We've found this is often overwhelming. The Home Dispatch is there to help. At The Home Dispatch, our mission is to empower homeowners and reduce the stress of owning a home by making it easier to discover products, find pros, and manage projects.

We offer 1:1 support for all of your home needs, and bring all of your projects into one spot to help you take that first step to find vendors and products. Inevitably, most homeowners will also have to do work on their home. Hopefully, this is a renovation they’ve always wanted, but sometimes, things break, and people need help now.

Whatever the reason for doing work on your home, our platform offers multiple mediums to talk to your dedicated concierge. Your expert will help you understand everything that needs to be done, design choices, vendors, budgeting, and payment.

No-code tools speed up our noncompetitive tech stack development components, allowing our engineering resources to focus on AI to help power our concierge experience.

Why we care about homeownership

Incredibly, each of our co-founders has a personal connection to this problem. Amirah, our CEO, had a house fire and experienced the pain and burden of rebuilding after a tragic event. Jaime, our CMO, is working on her second full-house renovation and has learned how fragmented the industry is and the massive opportunity to help users.

I had water damage on our main floor while my wife was 8 months pregnant and took an entire week off to just coordinate all the vendors to fix our floors. We all came out of these experiences wanting help. And, the more we talk to homeowners, the more we find out we are not alone.

The current offerings in the market are great if you can take hours out of your day to do your own research on vendors, ask community forums, call and vet vendors. However, for most homeowners, that's just not reasonable.

We want to meet homeowners where they are in the process and help take the mental load and stress of doing work on your home.

How we built The Home Dispatch

We have stitched together many tools to help us build our app. Webflow powers our homepage and landing pages. The speed for SEO and the integrated CMS allows us to quickly spin up landing pages to test marketing messages and add to our blog.

Our main app is powered by Bubble. We've found Bubble to be the most flexible and robust solution that allows us to move lightning fast through iterations while scaling with us for the first few years.

We use Segment for our customer data platform, Google Analytics to understand website traffic, Hotjar to better understand users, Intercom for chat, Front for centralized inbox, Klaviyo for marketing emails, Sendgrid/Twilio for transactional emails and SMS, Calendly for scheduling video calls.

It sounds like a lot, but the best part is that the setup for these tools is so fast, and the maintenance is easy! It wasn’t always easy though – for example, we were testing out a chat service with a CORS error with Bubble. Unfortunately, with no code, one of the downfalls is that we couldn't fix this error as it was a setting with a third party. Fortunately, we were flexible and found a provider that worked and fit our use cases.

My advice to anyone building a business using no-code tools

Be wary of feature creep with your MVP. The goal is to get feedback from customers. If the feature is necessary for feedback, great. To optimize an experience, it can probably wait until after you have customers.

And lastly, always be shipping. One of the great things about no-code is the speed of development. Let your users feel this benefit by constantly shipping new features.

Thanks for sharing your story with us, Todd! You can follow his journey on Twitter here.