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’ll be highlighting a member from our community and sharing their story, background and previous projects through our Member Spotlight blog post series.

This week we are chatting to Jakub Kliszczak from Wrocław, Poland

Jakub is the Founder of TwoxFootball

Hey Jakub, 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?

Sure, so my background is as a Marketing Specialist. I previously worked on the Channels team. I went from in-house and made the jump to working as a freelance contractor at the end of 2020. Recently I have been working with Ali Abdaal and I’m also a maker and a content creator too. I love travelling, exploring how the world works and understanding how people work too through the psychology of marketing! I have a fascination with digging deep into underlying principles that, although they are invisible, they still rule our lives.

My core interests centre around writing, physics, maths, marketing. Oh and football too!

I’ve been interested in no-code and no-code tools for about two years now. For me, no-code was another step in the pursuit of productivity and getting things done. Through the use of such tools as Carrd or Zapier I could get more done in less time.

No-code is a fantastic complementary skill-set for marketers, writers and content creators to learn. It’s a great way to look at no-code as an extension of other productivity tools, helping you to achieve your goals as efficiently as possible. 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?

I have a website at jakubkliszczak.com which is built on Carrd. I also like to write content over on my Substack called Brain Dump. It started as an experiment where I wrote daily articles for 30 days. I ended up writing over 17,000 words in a month. I found that writing more consistently really helped to improve my thinking. The thinking process helps bring your ideas to life and so do no-code tools. 

My main no-code project is TwoxFootball. It is a brief twice weekly newsletter containing all you need to know about football. It was started because I realised that 80% of football news is really poor, meaning lengthy articles can easily be summed up in a sentence or two.

I wanted to make it easy for football fans to stay on top of the news with no effort and to be a solution for the overblown, clickbait titles that football news is known for. So, the idea was to create TwoxFootball, distilling news down to only the good stuff. Curating the top 20% of quality information, that was my differentiator. 

To build it I used Carrd, Notion, Mailchimp, and Figma. I built it as part of the Makerpad T30 challenge. I posted daily updates and it turned into almost micro-blogging the process within the community for me, which helped me to stay accountable and on track with what I had planned. It was a long ride and an awesome experience. 

So tell us more about your main project. How did the build process go, what did you learn and what stage is it currently at?

So TwoxFootball is my latest and most current project. It was built and launched in 2020 and was put on hold due to my other responsibilities, my day job and uni life. 

Still, I do have plans for it and I really would like to develop it more in the future and make it a regular source of football news built with no-code tools. It wouldn’t be just me on my own but with other writers helping too.  That being said, I've managed to get a couple of hundred subscribers on the list and when the newsletter is live it is published twice-a-week.

The Makerpad T30 challenge was the inspiration to build TwoxFootball. The whole challenge was a blast. There were so many amazing projects submitted. Victory in winning the challenge was not really the end goal. It pushed me to start to work on an idea that I've been sitting on for a while.

I'd like to say a big ‘thank you’ to the whole Makerpad team, the community, as well as everyone else who participated in the challenge. Especially those who, shared feedback, gave criticism and words of encouragement. I really enjoyed the whole process and once I saw the whole project come together it was just a great feeling.

The amazing training sessions with people like Dru Riley from Trends.vc were very helpful and insightful.

When it came time to design a marketing plan I decided to use Noah Kagan's quant-based approach, meaning that I set a specific numeric goal, for example 1000 subscribers within a certain time period. I then break it down into several different acquisition channels and then proceed with the plan.

It resulted in me launching a project that has over 200+ subscribers, that I'll be working on in the future and I will do my best to keep it progressing as and when I can. 

One of the great things about starting a newsletter is the feedback I get. People were sending the newsletter onto their friends and it's just awesome to see someone that enjoys reading what you wrote. 

At the beginning of a new no-code project everyone says that it shouldn't be about the money. Yet even with just a little sneak peek into what running a self-held venture is like I can see that I'm getting so much satisfaction from a simple email or comment saying that someone thought that the last issue was awesome. Feedback is the most energy-effective fuel a maker can get.

It really is motivational to get positive feedback and to make improvements on a project for actual users and customers! It’s so good to build that base of core readers to help you to progress!  Thinking more of the future, what are you looking forward to seeing happen in the no-code space in the years to come? 

What I hope and think will happen is that more complex solutions will start to be turned into no-code tools. Things that aren’t possible to create right now will be packaged into efficient templates and made available to reproduce and customise simply. 

Right now, no-code solutions do still have a learning curve. Although they are simpler than learning to code, the learning curve still exists. New no-code solutions should adapt to that and become more intuitive for people to pick up even quicker than before. So they can be used by even the most non-technical people to solve their personal productivity issues. They need to build upon people’s existing knowledge. 

It’s certainly going to be an interesting process to see what things become possible soon! Do you have a favourite no-code tool? And what's the next no-code tool you're thinking of trying out?

I really can't mention only one. I love both Notion and Carrd and I have used them for lots of my own sites. 

In the future I’d really like to explore Circle more. Along with other no-code tools that help you to build your personal audience and connect with your own community. That seems like a lot of fun.

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

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