The 5 lessons I've learned while creating (and selling) my No-code project

Just about a year I launched as a solo-founder on Twitter my project: Nocodehackers. 1 year later I've helped more than 700 people to learn #nocode in spanish and made over 15.000€ in revenue, which led me to sell my side-project to minimum.run. All without code.

And I've manage to learned a few things that I would like to share with you from my personal experience, hoping it can help somebody!

Validate always and build quick

One of the major takeaways of the project was building something quick rather than perfect that was just "good enough" to launch it to the market.

Over a weekend I developed an MVP of my project, sticking together Airtable, Webflow, Thinkific (for the e-learning platform) and I had an online academy. It was not perfect but it made the day.

I made a quick one-day course on how to use the basics of Airtable and decided to see if it was interesting for my friends and social media followers.

To my surprise it really had more impact that what I was hoping and that made me realise that there was something interesting here.

Afterwards it was (and still is) a question of building what people want and creating small artifacts in order to validate if there's interest. In my case, selling courses there's no better way to validate your ideas than defining a course curriculum and doing a pre-sell.

If that goes well, I developed the course, if not I've just saved me an enormous quantity of precious time.

The crucial step was earning 1$ online:

I'm used to test and validate ideas through side projects, but until the last year, **nobody actually paid for something that I've created. **Making the decision of actually put a value on my knowledge was a very though decision and I was really scared.

I really didn't know if anyone would buy one of my courses, at the low-price of just 5€. At that point is not about the price, it's about just taking that step and actually putting value for what you know.

Now in hindsight it's obvious, but when you're in that process it sure is scary. It's a mindset change but there's no turning back from that point on. You know that somebody can pay you for what you've build. That's amazing.

Listen to your users, but not always what your users tells you is the truth.

This is a overused cliché but actually it is **more difficult to apply than what it seems at the beginning. **

I've spend a lot of time talking to my users, doing interviews, being with them in online events, talking through twitter, forums, communities, and you always learn an incredible amount of things that you could actually can do.

And it's easy to be overwhelmed as a solo-founder with all the request that they would like to see on your project - like more videos - but then someone tells you that they hate videos and only read the transcription.

So I've tried to balance the petitions of changes and new content while also creating my vision of the project. And not always what people tell you the want is what they actually really want.

Sometimes they just tell you the positive, or give you feedback without actually having the time to dedicate. A thing that obsesses me is the people that buy a course, they never start it, but when you ask them they will tell you that they are very happy.

You have to try to dig deeper on the actual reason for what they're buying your course. ¿What are they hoping to achieve?¿Why did the buy your product?

Share, share and then share again

One of the things that really helped me in growing the project was **starting a newsletter **where I would tell people how the project was going, and some no-code news.

Sharing what I was doing really helped me establish a connection with an audience of makers and people that in some way felt like they belong to the project and wanted to see it growth.

Also I always try to offer the community a part of what they're giving me doing things like events, livestreaming or hosting a podcast (anchor.fm/nocodehackers) that helped me to know some of the most interesting people building things in the ecosystem.

Sharing everything along the way was one of the most pleasant and rewarding thing. Every mail that I receive after a newsletter makes my day and it's amazing hearing stories of the people that every week read what you're thinking.

Enjoy the process

The main takeaway is that I've learned to reach a point where I really **enjoyed the process of building the project ** and it was not work in a traditional sense. Actually building something that people wanted is a really amazing experience.

But it is really easy to fall prey of over-working and dedicating too much hours into the project at the cost of your mental health. And that should never be the case.

Yeah, sure, sometimes you have to dedicate extra hours every day - at the end I have a full-time job and this was my side-project. But it cannot be the norm. I've learned to work "smarter" and not just harder, because you are alone. And you have to do it all by yourself. From creating invoices, to think about the marketing, strategy, talk with people...

All of that can have a real toll on your life and it is necessary to balance it with exercise, rest and having fun while you're doing it.

¿And what comes next?

Now, I've joined forces with minimum.run to grow the project because i was not having that balance in my life and needed help.
Selling the project was not an easy decision but now I feel like I have the tools, the team and the time to continue exploring on my dream and making more people in the world that can build things without code.

¡Hope it is helpful to anyone reading!

Keep you posted