We are fortunate to have a vibrant community of thousands of members from all different places across the globe. We come together to talk about tools, tech, no-code and new ways to make creating and building even more productive than before.
At Makerpad we love sharing our member’s journeys through learning no-code, using new skills in their workplaces, building projects and even launching businesses.
Each week we highlight a member from our community and share their story, background and previous projects through our Member Spotlight blog post series.
This week we are chatting to Adam Wiseman from Toronto, Canada.
Hey Adam, great to have you be part of the Members' Spotlight. Can you give us some details on your background. What first got you interested in no-code?
I was using no-code apps long before the category was clearly defined. My background is in post production, which I had been working in for 15 years prior.
Even though I worked on some decent-sized projects, there wasn't always a budget to hire help and manage the workload to meet the tight deadlines. I had rudimentary coding knowledge, but not enough to solve some of the niche problems I was facing. However, I was resourceful enough to know that I could likely cobble together a few apps to alleviate the monotonous aspects of the job.
My stack at the time was:
Hazel (a more advanced version of Automator) and Renamer (a batch renaming program).
Used in tandem, these tools saved me hundreds of hours of work, and in turn allowed me to focus on parts of the job I actually enjoyed.
It was after this experience that I realized I enjoyed solving workflow issues more than just working in post production.
It sounds like you caught the automation bug early! Can you take us through a no-code project you have built in the past and what tools did you use for it?
I leveraged some of the tools I listed above as well as a few others, and repackaged them into a service for low/mid-sized TV productions. Once I expanded beyond post production, I pivoted to build workflows for businesses to deal with more monotonous aspects of their jobs.
Airtable, Google sheets and Integromat have been the foundation for many of these solutions.
Zapier is obviously a main player in the automation space. However for me, the leverage that Integromat gives you in its free plan worked better for the businesses I was assisting.
It's great that you were able to take your experience and pivot into providing no-code-based solutions as a service. So let's bring things up to the current day, what are you currently working on and what stage is it at?
I’m currently building my first big project called Photography Management Studio.
As a photographer I noticed that managing a photo session was a fragmented experience, so I decided to build a more encompassing solution.
I initially started building this as a really intricate Notion template. However, it quickly became apparent that Notion was too sluggish to properly handle what I was building, so I switched to Bubble.
If you're either a professional or amateur photographer that wants to fluently manage all aspects of a photoshoot, you can read more about its capabilities and get on the waiting list for Photography Management Studio here.
That's awesome — good luck with launching it! Thinking more of the future, what are you looking forward to seeing happen in the no-code space in the years to come?
Right now, a lot of no-code is web based, but there are still many potential use cases for offline and/or local jobs. I’d like to see more no-code solutions address offline modes, since not everybody has the advantage of a stable internet connection.
That aside, I'm looking forward to seeing more no-code tools that address decentralized web3 protocols. There have been some huge strides in this area, and I think no-code solutions will only accelerate that.
Do you have a favourite no-code tool? And what's the next no-code tool you're thinking of trying out?
While I love and use all the well known ones regularly (Airtable, Zapier, Notion) I think my favorite no-code tool as of late is Descript. I don’t think it’s usually associated with the no-code movement, but as someone who used to edit things the old way, I know the leverage it gives you in being able to work on something in a fraction of the time. The fact that they made it an enjoyable experience is also one of its strengths.
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