A software engineer that switched to no-code (and almost got acquired)

Hello, Katt here 👋
In No-Code Exits I share every week a success story of a non-technical founder. This week I talked with Alim, who went from software engineer to no-code entrepreneur.

Read about:

👑 Working for startups as a mobile developer
💥 Discovering the advantages of Flutterflow
🥷 3 top tips on app store optimization
💰 Saying no to a $15k acquisition offer
🔥 Starting ambitiouslabs.io

The Start

Alim has been working as a software engineer for startups for over 10 years and created 2 mobile apps with millions of users. You can say that he knows a thing or 2 about mobile app entrepreneurship. To create prototypes he always used tools like Figma, Zapier and Webflow to test new ideas. While he liked these no-code tools for certain usecases, he never saw it as a solution to build real apps because of the limitations.

Debunking myths

Two years ago, Alim discovered Flutterflow, a tool to build mobile apps without code. He was blown away. There were no longer limits.

• He could build apps in a fraction of the time
• He could focus on the business side in stead of writing code all week
• No more debugging one line of code for days
• He was excited to build mobile apps again

“I used to be turned off. I had great ideas but knew it was gonna cost me months of time to build it or thousands of dollars dev time. With Flutterflow I wanted to build apps again…”

Team no sleep

When GPT-3 was released, Alim was lying awake in bed thinking about shiny new ideas (classic!). As a true mobile dev, he was wondering if there were already any good GPT-3 mobile apps in the app store. He started searching. There were only a couple apps and they were not that good. He got out of bed again around midnight and started building.

He focused on solving a personal pain point. He was trying to be active on social media to build his personal brand. But he struggled to post content consistently and to find fresh content ideas. So he decided to build an iOS app to help content creators with that. 3 days later the app was ready and published to the app store in 1 click. Virally, an AI social media coach was born.

Don’t fear competition

There were already some big players like Copy Ai and Jasper AI doing something similar. But Alim sees competitors as something positive.

• Competitors with paying users means there is already some validation.
• The big players can do top of the funnel education.
• There is always enough space to differentiate your product or be the best for a specific niche.

Not pretty

That initial version that Alim launched in 3 days... it was not a pretty sight. That doesn’t matter. The first downloads started to trickle in. Alim saw that as a positive sign and kept improving and adding more advanced features. His startup experience paid off because he knows all the strategies to get discoverd in the app store and monetize your app. After 2 weeks he had his first paying users. Without any marketing, he could grow his app to a steady income of around $1000 monthly revenue. All by focussing on app store optimization.

Here are his 3 top tips:

• Always optimize your keyword phrases for verbs.
  People buy outcomes and they look for products to achieve those results: go viral faster, make money fantasy sports, watch romance stories, save tiktok videos.

• Spend disproportionately more time doing keyword research than anything else. Use a tool like Appfigures to identify niches/keywords that have a lot of money flowing through them. Adjust your keywords every month and keep track of the performance.

• Don't just look at the USA market. Optimize your keywords for other Tier 1 countries like Australia, UK, Eastern Europe, Spain, etc. Take the time to create price parities, even though its tedious. Virally ranked 50th for social media in the Netherlands. Because Alim optimized the pricing for Europe, it converted well.

Almost acquired

A few months ago Alim decided it was time to move on. He wanted to sell Virally to show the students of his academy and accelerator Ambitious Labs that they too can build a small, niche app and sell it. He listed Virally for sale on acquire.com. He was close to closing a deal for $15,000 when doubt started to creep in. “Wasn’t the price too low? Shouldn’t he try to grow it? Are we in an AI boom?”

He backed out of the deal. 15 months of revenue was not enough to justify the sale given how easy the growth potential is. He is now making plans to 3x Virally by:

• Rolling out Android
• Adding voice assistant features
• Adding a 21 day viral challenge to increase retention and guarantee success

Do you want to read more No-Code Success stories? Browse here for free through 50+ interviews with No-Code Founders.