We are fortunate to have a vibrant community of hundreds 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 & 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 Büşra Coskuner from Zurich, Switzerland.

Büşra is a Product Management Consultant and Mentorat The Mentoring Club.

Hey Büşra, 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?

I'm originally from Berlin, Germany, but I have been living in Zurich, Switzerland for 5 years now. I started to go deeper into no-code about a year ago. I was chasing a startup idea back then. I had validated the problem, the value proposition, and even had a first idea of what the solution would look like. Then I found out that I would need investment to make it and get it fully built. I thought I had to go the VC route, which I didn't want to. I started to look for other options on how to build the first version myself. I took the red pill and started to go down the rabbit hole of no-code.

It’s great to see people considering no-code as an alternative option to needing funding. So much of an early idea can be built by the founder. So can you take us through some of no-code projects have you built in the past and what tools did you use for them?

The first app I built was a takeaway and delivery app for restaurants built in Glide called Tadar. This was when the pandemic first started. I wanted to have my list of restaurants that would offer take-away or delivery. This became obsolete after a short while as most businesses caught up to the demand for takeaway and almost all restaurants started to offer this, so the app wasn’t needed as much. I followed the Glide intro videos on Makerpad on how to build this, and I was so happy that I had built my first no-code product!

Then I went deeper into Bubble and built some mini-apps which included a goal setting and standup app for solo makers to continue my stand-up habits after becoming a solopreneur and an inspiration page app for product managers: 

Then I became pregnant with a little girl. I'm into Women in Business and gender equality topics due to life situations that I've been through, both at work and at home. I wanted to make sure that my baby girl knows that she can do anything and become anything she wants, so that I've used Pory to build a web app that displays a collection of powerful women who've had an impact in their countries or in the world against all odds, it’s called the Female Leaders app.

It would be great if the community could continue to add more examples of powerful women to the collection to show our daughters that the sky's the limit for them! I built the same website with Softr just to compare them and decided to stick to Pory for this one.

I decided to use Softr for my next project instead and used it to build MakerProfile. It was built to show the no-code products I was working on. The plan was to continue this project and perhaps build out voting functionality and let people vote on the product ideas that I have. That would be the next step. 

It seems that you have tested lots of different tools each time you have started a project, to help grow your no-code skills. So let's bring things up to the current day, what are you currently working on and what stage is it at?

Currently, I'm in the process of building a matcha tea online shop with SpreadSimple and Carrd for the frontend, and running the inventory and order & customer management in Airtable. I'll setup automations with Integromat and will probably use Stripe for payment. I'll start selling the matcha in Switzerland, and then need to figure out how to sell to the EU. It's a process, VAT and regulations nightmare! This shop is called HARU Matcha 

The web shop is under construction at the moment. I've turned off the add to cart button for now while I'm testing the order function and getting the payment processor connected. The page content and pictures are a work in progress too.  

The next step is trying to figure out how Google Analytics tracks the page. There are 3 places where I can add the tracking code so now I'm experimenting to see what each one does and how best to do it. Lots of no-code is experimenting and learning along the way. I’ll be looking to speak with people in the community who can help me out with the best way to set up my analytics. ‍

Having the mindset to find things out as you go is key to no-code. You’ll never know everything before you start and you’ll likely get help from the community along the way too.  Thinking more of the future, what are you looking forward to seeing happen in the no-code space in the years to come? 

Being in Europe, there are many data protection regulations we need to follow. I wish to see more European no-code builders of all kinds that store all the data on European servers. I wish that big players like Bubble and Webflow offer the option to store data on European servers instead of US servers to an affordable price point or even better already included in their normal offering. And I wish there were better no-code GDPR services so that I can simply add them to my pages. Following these regulations makes being a no-coder more difficult. 

Plus, I'm a product consultant and coach, and I hope to see the product management community embracing the no-code options even more, and that managers now see that there's no excuse anymore to not run discovery, research and experiments. Moving away from the "it takes too much time" mindset and really understanding how much value can be created with the help of no-code tools.

Seeing no-code tools become more frequently used in companies will create a whole new wave of no-coders. Do you have a favourite no-code tool? And what's the next no-code tool you're thinking of trying out?

Oh that's a really difficult question. I have a favorite currently, but next on my list to try is definitely using Bubble more to build a micro-SaaS, and eventually to build the original idea that I was chasing when I started my no-code journey. 

Thanks so much for sharing your story with us Büşra. We look forward to hearing more about your journey soon! 

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