Hi, I’m Lachlan Kirkwood. I’m a Digital Marketing Specialist based in Brisbane, Australia. My background has seen me work across a myriad of tech startups and digital agencies, utilising data-driven insights to help drive conversion objectives.

Working in the tech industry, I’ve always been in envy of both designers and developers who have dedicated communities to showcase their work.

Whether it be GitHub, Product Hunt, Dribbble, or Behance - these platforms are used to showcase the real work these professionals create.

As a digital marketer, I always found that our industry was missing a community-based platform dedicated to our profession.

Although social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter serve as a way of communicating with the industry, no one platform allows us to showcase real examples of our projects.

These professional communities are a great way to source inspiration and connect with other like-minded professionals. They also serve as a portfolio for sourcing new work opportunities.

I built ClickThrough as a solution to my own problem. ClickThrough is a community-based platform to showcase and discover beautiful digital marketing work.

It’s a place where digital marketers can share learnings, find inspiration, build relationships, grow their personal brand, and source new opportunities.

"The no-code movement is empowering makers of all backgrounds by removing traditional barriers to entry. As a non-technical founder, I previously didn’t think it was possible to actively build a product of my own."

I initially started ClickThrough as a Facebook group to first build a community. Once the community scaled, I decided to leverage Bubble and build a full platform. As a member of existing no-code communities, I’d heard how powerful Bubble was at building dynamic products. I found that its feature set was also the most equipped for building a social platform with user accounts.

At this time, I’d just left my full-time job and started freelancing. This gave additional time to focus on building the core product. Having no prior experience with Bubble, it took just over 10 weeks to develop a product that could deliver value to an initial cohort of users.

I was continually blown away with Bubbles feature set. With access to only basic videos tutorials and Bubbles community forum, I was able to build unique features specific to my platform - these include:

• ‍User profiles
• A newsfeed with custom search parameters
• Comments & likes
• Event notifications
• Weekly leaderboard for user profiles based on activity
• Individual user profile rankings
• Invite-only registration workflow
• I’ve also used MailChimp as a CRM to store and continually engage users. As an invite-only community, it also plays a key role in the onboarding automation sequence.

At the beginning of September, I started slowly sharing the platform with my network. Since then, I’ve hosted over 2k unique sessions on the platform and have seen 70 users register successfully through the invite-only process.

My current challenge is now driving engagement with these users - converting them from consumers to active creators.

The no-code movement is empowering makers of all backgrounds by removing traditional barriers to entry. As a non-technical founder, I previously didn’t think it was possible to actively build a product of my own.

No-code tools have allowed me to quickly ship and iterate on products that can deliver some form of value to end-users.

Although it’s easier than ever to build something, I also believe that it’s now harder than ever to scale a product. With access to so many new products, users have a myriad of solutions to solve their problems.

Working with no-code tools - particularly Bubble - the only restriction I’ve encountered has been the responsiveness of my product across devices. My core product certainly isn’t the most responsive experience on mobile. I do believe that this is a function that will only improve over time.

"No-code tools have allowed me to quickly ship and iterate on products that can deliver some form of value to end-users."

If you’re a passionate digital marketer, you can learn more about ClickThrough at https://clickthrough.marketing

You can also follow my journey across my personal blog - lachlankirkwood.com, or get in touch with me on twitter - @lachlankirkwood. I always love hearing from digital marketers and makers about the projects they’re working on.