Have you ever checked out a landing page for a new product, seen a collection of endorsement logos of wildly successful companies, and felt a tiny bit skeptical?

Using customer logos on your product landing pages is a smart marketing tactic. Just like using testimonials, reviews, and UGC as social proof, company endorsement elevates your product and heightens its trustworthiness. If the likes of Salesforce, Uber, Hubspot and Zoom use a product, who would we be to question its quality?

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But just because the logos are there, how can we know for sure these companies really use those app or products? What if it isn't actually legit? It would be foul play for sure, but it's perfectly possible.

An indie maker from Ukraine realized this dilemma and decided to do something about it! Here’s his story.

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My name is Arsen Kolyba. I'm a product designer and indie maker from Ukraine. I'm currently working on OLX – the biggest marketplace in Ukraine. In my free time I enjoy hacking together side projects by myself.

As a designer, even though I code a little bit, I rely on no-code tools to be able to deliver most of my projects from start to finish.

Being an indie maker opened a lot of doors for me: I've learned how to write proper copy, SEO, product launches and so much more.

Creating companies.tools

companies.tools was created to solve the problem of seemingly random client logos on product, app and tool landing pages. Without some form of verification, you never can really know if these clients endorse and use the products.

That's where companies.tools comes into play. It's a community where each published product gets its own page. The product's team provides an app stack they actually use, and this stack is listed on their respective page on our site.

That's what our main product is: an embed widget that displays client logos, but only the ones that have verified they use a particular product themselves.

Not only does this make client endorsement verifiable, our widget also comes with a lot of added benefits like being dynamic (showing different logos on page refresh), not having to constantly update the list, and not having to find high quality and accurate logos or keep up with re-brands.

companies.tools is currently in closed beta. We've just sent our first batch of invites this week for the teams that signed up for the waitlist here.

Building companies.tools (mostly) without code

This one time I was browsing Product Hunt and I opened the landing page for some product. The quality of the product was questionable and it seemed like it just launched, and yet they had logos of well-known corporations listed as clients. I couldn't see how it was possible.

That's when I thought of the idea for companies.tools.

I used Figma and Notion for initial design and documentation. And then I implemented everything in Webflow with a bit of custom code and used Zapier to automate waitlist signups and invite form submits.

A huge thing for me is analytics. I need to have clear visibility of how people are using the product and Mixpanel is great for that. It’s very flexible.

I'm also using Sender for email marketing and Ahrefs for search engine optimization.

The hardest thing to wrap my head around was the embed widget. I didn't figure it was possible to do in Webflow at the start but after some thinking and googling how most embeds worked, I managed to overcome initial limitations.

Building when it's not feasible with no-code tools

If you think something's impossible with no code tools, my advice is to just think some more. Most likely you can do pretty much anything your mind can come up with.

I've had multiple roadblocks, thinking, “This is it, I won't be able to implement that.” But every time I came up with a solution without code, and it was very rewarding!

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Thanks for sharing your story with us, Arsen! You can follow companies.tools on Twitter.