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 Tomas Laurinavicius from Lithuania.

Tomas is an entrepreneur, designer, content marketer, and lifestyle blogger.

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

I’m from Lithuania, however I have spent the last 6 years living a nomadic lifestyle and traveling to over 50 countries. Right now, I’m in the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the mid-Atlantic.

For as long as I remember I was building stuff. When I was little, I would tear apart electronic toys (cars mostly) and try to build little boats or airplanes using these parts, wood, scotch tape, plasticine, cables, and batteries.

One day my mom told me she was getting a cellphone with a color display. I was so excited imagining all the things you could do with it that I couldn't sleep that night. It was 2002 or 2003, the phone was Nokia 3510i and it was the first time I connected to WAP (mobile Internet) via GPRS.

Not long after that I started learning WML together with my curious friend Edgaras. WML is a kind of simplified HTML for mobile Internet. Using PC in the school's library I learned more about PHP and discovered WordPress around 2005-2006.

It was very early days for WordPress but I was already fascinated by the idea that I can build a blog and extend its functionalities with plugins without having a full understanding of code. Since then, I was building blogs, online marketplaces, landing pages while learning as much as I can about digital marketing, design, SEO, and business.

In late 2019, I noticed that no-code tools were getting more and more attention and I was very curious to learn more. I started playing with Airtable, Zapier, Webflow, and not long after discovered the Makerpad community!

It sounds like you’ve had an entrepreneurial background from a young age! It’s great to see how you adopt new technologies as you go! 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?

My ongoing project that is slowly turning into a business is a platform connecting writers with companies. Right now, it's a typical job board where you can browse open writing positions if you're a writer, and you can post a writing job if you're a company.

I started Content Writing Jobs by following Ben Tossell's tutorial on building a job board with Webflow and felt there was a market gap and lack of job boards serving specifically writers. After a while, I invited my previously mentioned school-friend Egdaras to join as a co-founder and we polished it for the launch in May 2020 on Product Hunt. Content Writing Jobs - Product Hunt 

Our stack as of today includes: Airtable, Webflow, Integromat, MailerLite, Memberstack, Stripe, Google Workspace + HTML/CSS to Image API, Fathom Analytics, Cloudflare, Notion.

I wrote a more in-depth tutorial documenting my process on Webflow's blog here: How to create a job board 

It’s exciting to hear that Makerpad helped you to get started building the Content Writing Jobs job board. So let's bring things up to the current day, what are the main things you are currently working on and what stage are they at?

I'm still working as a Content Marketing Consultant, helping ecommerce, SaaS, marketing, and tech companies of all sizes grow organic traffic by producing long-form content.

The rest of my time free from client work is spent on developing Content Writing Jobs and trying to make it into a profitable and sustainable business.

Since the launch last year, we have had a total of 109.4K unique visitors, 373.5K site views, 4,300+ newsletter subscribers with a 43% open rate, $270 MRR, 33K followers on LinkedIn. We also rank number #1 for "content writing jobs" on Google.

At this stage, we're trying to figure out what our ideal users are and how we can serve them better than anyone else. We're running little experiments, introducing new features while getting most of the growth organically – ranking for long-tail keywords and getting generous organic reach on our automated LinkedIn posts.

Finally, I write on my lifestyle design blog. I'm fascinated by the 80/20 principle and try to apply it to lifestyle design experimenting with technology and mental tools to live a better life. I write about the things that I find interesting like cybersecurity, freelancing, habits, and my favorite books. I also send Life Designed, a curated lifestyle newsletter to over 5,000 creators, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.‍

It’s interesting to see how you are incrementally improving your job board and thinking of how it can grow and reach more writers.  Thinking of the future, what are you looking forward to seeing happen in the no-code space in the years to come? 

Right now, you need to understand many tools and technologies and learn a lot of skills to make any no-code project into a profitable business. I hope we'll see more all-in-one business solutions for solopreneurs and maybe even support from the governments with lower taxes for the micro-companies.

You do have to be willing to do all aspects of a business when you get started with no-code. It’s important to know how all of your tools all fit together! Do you have a favourite no-code tool? And what's the next no-code tool you're thinking of trying out?

Oh, there are too many. I spend too much time browsing Betalist, Product Hunt, and Hacker News. There are so many exciting projects to try out and a new one comes out every single day. The FOMO is real here. I'm quite fascinated with the API economy and programmatic SEO so I'd like to learn more about working with APIs and integrating them into my workflows to reduce tedious work. Integromat seems like an exciting platform right now.

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

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