There are a lot of different possibilities when it comes to using no-code tools to launch a business. Many successful businesses run entirely on a no-code tech stack, some employ no-code tools just for specific workflows or components of their business model – it all depends on your needs, resources, and constraints.

Here’s the story of a maker who built a one-stop platform that streamlines the selling, delivering, marketing, and analytics of digital products.

Hi! My name is Jelani Abdus-Salaam. I'm the founder of Cartfuel. We help businesses sell more through conversion optimized payment forms.

Before building Cartfuel I worked at ClickFunnels. It was there that I learned about sales funnels, optimization and direct sales marketing. After that, I started working with high-profile gurus like Dan Lok. I love experimenting with different marketing techniques and building cool things.

For fun, I love going to the beach. I live in San Diego so the beach is like my second home.

The idea behind Cartfuel

Cartfuel was created when I realized there was a need for an easy way to accept payments on websites.

Most people build their websites on something like WordPress or Webflow. But often you'll find those people sending their customers off their website to another domain to make a sale – especially when they want to start selling quickly.

When they direct their traffic to a third-party site, it reduces their conversion rate significantly. Cartfuel helps solve that issue. You can sell your products on your website with ease. No-coding required!

Our users are able to create digital products like ebooks, courses, coaching, etc. and embed the Cartfuel payment form on their website. Or if they don't have a website they can use Cartfuel hosted pages to make their sales.

Validating my idea with Webflow

I started building Cartfuel after I took a course by Sam Parr called Ideation Bootcamp. In this course we discussed ways to validate your ideas.

One thing they said was to go onto forums and see if there were people asking about your idea. So I went to the Webflow community forum and posted about my idea.

I made a quick landing page on Webflow to get beta users. To my surprise I got 50 signups from that post in the community forum!

Building Cartfuel with code + no-code

I'm a non-technical founder. I had to hire devs from Upwork. The frontend is using Vue.js and our backend is using Laravel. However, to validate our idea we used Webflow for our landing page, Zapier and ActiveCampaign.

I think the hardest thing about building a SaaS is nailing your ideal customer profile and then providing enough value to those customers so they don't churn. I'm still overcoming this challenge, but what’s working for me is constantly talking to our customers.

The biggest lesson for me is: don't build something for everyone. Pick a niche. Get really specific and build for that one customer type.

If you don't do this, especially when starting out, it becomes 10x harder to find your ideal customers and your messaging and value proposition will suffer.

Thanks for sharing your story with us, Jelani! You can follow his journey on Twitter here.