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 journey 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 Amit Sarda from Pune, India.

Amit is a Freelance Business Consultant at AmitSarda.xyz.

Hey Amit, great to have you be part of the Member's Spotlight. Can you give us some background on how you got into no-code? How long have you been using no-code tools and what got you first interested?

Thanks to my business analytics and consulting background, I have been using spreadsheets for a long time. When Glide first came to the scene in Feb 2019, it immediately piqued my interest because it was based on something I was really good at — Google Sheets. I am also a Computer Science engineer but I had never published any apps 11 years after graduating. Glide changed that immediately and significantly!‍

‍In the last 2 years, I have published more than 250 apps, for myself, for my friends and family, for my clients. In fact, I have even published more than 30 apps to Glide's template store. In the last 5 years, I have worked with over 100 businesses and business founders and owners to address the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. This rich experience gave me ideas for the Glide Apps templates that I have published. It has also helped me become a Glide Apps Certified Expert by allowing me to demonstrate my skills using these diverse applications.

I wasn't even aware of the term no-code at that time, but looking back, I have been active in the no-code space for the last 5 years in some capacity wherein I was combining applications and tools like Zapier and Airtable for my client work. My experience with these tools helped me be really efficient when thinking of solutions for clients.

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Wow! That’s a real focus on a specific tool and using it to solve a huge range of different problems. So can you take us through some of the no-code projects you have built in the past and what tools you used for them?

Most of my work in the no-code space is using Glide Apps.

I have published templates for:

• Day-to-day chores like expense tracking, habit tracking and tracking workouts.
• Fun and trivia like quizzes, birthday celebrations, language translation and journaling.
• Business applications like CRM and quotation tools, online courses, employee training, order and inventory management.
• Niche use cases like art gallery auctions, digital restaurant menus, stock portfolio management apps. ‍

Also, I am a no-code developer, and my clients and their users are the end-users of these no-code platforms. For clients, I have built Glide apps for a variety of use cases including a social exchange platform, lead generation calculators, user generated content (UGC) apps with reviews like Yelp, sales tools like quotation and CRM. Also rewards-based educational apps for children.

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When the pandemic started in March 2020, with my expertise in Glide, I helped a team collate resources in a single place using a Glide App. During the same time, I helped somebody who was passionate about books, build an app to help bookstores around the world. In April 2021, I published a couple of apps to aggregate verified leads for resources across India. One was a national-level resource, while the other was an app that anybody could copy to lead the efforts locally should they have a team of volunteers to aggregate resources in their own area. Since then, a number of such apps, developed with Glide, have come up to help people in India.

Using Glide as your primary no-code tool hasn’t really restricted the types of projects you work on. They seem to span a range of industries, which hopefully makes them interesting projects to work on. So let's bring things up to the current day, what are you currently working on and what stage is it at?

At this current time, I don't feel strongly about one particular problem. Overall I like developing creative solutions using no-code platforms. This intersection puts me in a very unique position — helping people bring their ideas to reality with my no-code expertise. While I have a couple of personal pet projects that I want to work on, my bigger focus is on helping my clients make the most of these no-code platforms. 

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Besides, I am always thinking of new templates to publish to the Glide Apps template store!

Having said that, I plan to build out platforms for pet adoption, artists and their art, job referrals and candidate recommendations plus a marketplace for no-code templates across all no-code platforms. If anybody wants to join hands in building these ideas, you should get in contact with me! 

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That seems like a nice balance between working for clients and also having your own personal projects to be creative on too.  Thinking more of the future, what are you looking forward to seeing happen in the no-code space in the years to come? 

There are a number of no-code platforms coming up these days and it is becoming harder to shortlist a platform to build your idea, which can hold you back from getting started.

While no-code allows you to build fast and fail faster, it is also a wasted effort and a little demoralizing to have to test out multiple platforms. This is where one of my own projects hopes to help: helping people to select their no-code platform by evaluating the same idea built using different no-code platforms. This is also where working with no-code experts helps.

I have a rather unpopular opinion. It is great that founders can develop their own apps using no-code, however I strongly believe that they should leverage the expertise of an expert more, to build their ideas even faster still.

‍Their time can be spent on other important aspects of their idea, like validation, distribution, monetization, marketing. I see no-code as a faster way to build things, which is already a 10x improvement over the other alternatives in the market (traditional code), but the hard part is still acquiring customers. Think of any new technology or application frameworks in the last couple of decades, they helped build products faster than their predecessors and I don't think no-code is any different. Again, I know this is unpopular but there will always be a learning curve to building complex solutions with no-code tools and experts can help with that. 

In summary, I hope founders leverage the power of no-code by still working with developers who have honed their craft, so they don’t always have to spend time developing their ideas by themselves. And this needs to happen today, not in the future!

No-code is a great solution not just for the building phase but for long term continuous maintenance too. A founder can have their idea built quickly by working with an expert and still use their own skills to expand on that initial build in future by learning just some of the features the tool has.

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Do you have a favourite no-code tool? And what's the next no-code tool you're thinking of trying out?

Glide Apps, hands down! These days I am experimenting with Softr, and hoping to learn more about Retool and Bildr!

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Thanks so much for sharing your story with us Amit. We look forward to following your journey.

Keep an eye open for our next Member Spotlight blog post coming soon!