Can you tell me a little bit about your background and general work experience?I’m an economist by trade, did my master’s in economics and then became an economic consultant after I graduated. I had no real programming experience, but I hated consulting and a friend asked me to come work at his start-up. I was doing a bit of everything for a while, then landed in a product manager role. The team has grown from 4-30.

Did you have a prior background with coding or design?After working at the company for a while I decided to go build up my coding skills, so I went todo a bootcamp. Afterwards, I started trying to build up a portfolio of work.The thing is; I wasn’t that great at it! My wife needed a new website, and I wasn’t really able to build that with code, even after investing real time into it, so I started looking at other options and that’s how I came across the no-code space.

What started your journey into no-code?

Once I found the tools in the no-code space, I was able to build something really great for my wife and that lead to a number of other people (friends and so on)reaching out and asking us to build similar sites for them. What’s been amazing is that, we now do quite a lot of work to help service local, small businesses in a really affordable and accessible way. We work with local Austin small businesses to give them the kinds of tools and web options they want, without a huge cost and complexity of engaging with developers.

In no-code the audience is so diverse. There are a lot of people that have wanted to build things for their specific needs, that are figuring out how to do that with no-code.

“At work, it’s really helped me, and my product team find ways to be far less reliant on our engineering team to build some internal tools. That means as a product team we can focus purely on the customer roadmap.”

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What have you found most surprising about the no-code community so far?How quickly it’s growing. The advancements in the tools, the communities, what’s being built and how diverse and global it is.

What tools or platforms are you using for your no-code projects?

Webflow, Zapier, Integromat, Parabola, and Airtable – Next up I’m going try Bildr for a webapp idea I have in mind.

What are you working on at the moment?

Our focus is really on helping and working with local businesses via https://www.twindeavor.com/. Within that we are soon launching a podcast called “LOCAL” (https://www.localpodcast.show/) which is focused on the stories of local companies. Austin (and many places) are growing, and we want to make sure we support what’s small and local within that growth.

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