From No-Code lockdown project to acquired, in 4 months.

A new interview for No-Code Exits went out.
Read the full interview below.

Hello James, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Since I was a teenager, I have been working on projects. I've built a lot of apps over the years. I've run companies that have been VC backed, but I also bootstrapped. I joined other startups and worked for some bigger companies like Experia and Brand Watch. So I have a long background in starting new things.

What No-Code product did you built?

I got the idea for this app at the beginning of the COVID lockdown, just when everyone was kind of being stuck at home. Me, my friends and some colleagues wanted to play some quizzes over Zoom. So I built this app that let people create these online quizzes and play them as a big group real time through Zoom.

I started building it because I wanted to use it with my friends. One day I decided to open it up for others, and suddenly it started getting loads of signups. So at that point I decided to add paid plans onto it.

The app let you set up questions, answers, and it had a library of like free quiz questions as well. You could send out the link to play the game to everyone in your office and play it all together on Zoom. It would work out the scores and everything like that for you.

Which No-Code tools did you use?

I built it on Bubble. I've been building in Bubble since 2017. I've just been hacking around building apps that I found useful. I probably built 4 or 5 apps through Bubble before I started building this idea.

The first version was built over one weekend as a fun little project and I improved and added new features from there. It was running on cheapest plan of Bubble for around $29 a month. And it had thousands and thousands of users. Around 50.000 people were playing it at one point.

How did you launch and grow your product?
First it was me and my friends.

Then I started talking about it on social media and got some retweets. This resulted in about a hundred people singing up in the first week.

From the moment I put the paid plan (around 10$ per month for extra features) into the app, I started to experiment with Google Ads. It turned that it was a cost-effective way of acquiring users onto it. There was not a lot of competition, so it costed me only a few dollars per user.

After another month, the app was breaking even and just nudging over into being profitable. Given the whole thing ran on Bubble & Sendgrid there wasn't a huge cost base, with operating costs under $100/month to keep it all running.

By July, I had around 1,500 users with around 13k questions answered through the app which was awesome. Users had also made around 100 custom quiz templates with their own games.

I started to get signups from big companies (and even governments!) with staff using the app to play team quizzes in the office, which was a bit of a sign of a future direction the app could go in.

Something that really helped, was that the app had a virol loop built into it. One person sets up the quiz » share it with all the players » Players share it again with their friends and family for another quiz.

Why and how did you sell it?
I decided to sell the app because I don't really have any background in gaming, and it wasn't something I wanted to do long term. So I thought the app would be better off if it was run by someone who was 100% dedicated to it.

I listed it on Microacquire which was in its early days. And I got hundreds of inquiries that I had to sift through. 2 people reached out to me through Twitter and that got the conversation going a bit quicker. From there, the acquisition process was fairly straight forward. We negotiated the price and scheduled a series of calls about handing over.

For the handover, we went through the Bubble application from top to bottom:

• Explaining how the whole app worked
• Handing over all the different accounts that were linked to it (Postmark for email, Facebook integration, …)
• All these other bits and pieces
• And then the new buyer took it off and decided to pivot it towards the education market.

Can you share some stats from the time you listed it for sale?

• 15K questions answered
• 1200 users
• Profitable
• From idea to acquisition in 4 months

Why did the buyer want to acquire your project?
They wanted to acquire it because they had seen an opportunity in helping kids get ready for exams. So they wanted to pivot the app from being like a workplace quiz to an educational app.

What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to get started with No-Code?
I want to share that it's really possible to build and scale a business with No-Code.

I'm now running a Shopify app on Bubble. It's a survey app, and it's collecting like an unbelievable amount of responses. It's running 1.3 million bubble workflows a month now without a problem.

The most important is to get started building things.

Start off building simple apps just for yourself, just to learn how the technology works, and later on as you build more and more you evolve to more complex things.

What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to sell their No-Code project?

• Keep Bubble as organized and structured as possible
• Use backend flows as much as possible
• Put all of our workflows into folders
• Use the notes feature in Bubble to explain what workflows are doing
• Make public documentation for your app
• This all helps when you come to sell it, and it results in a smoother handover.
• Every week we share an inspiring interview with a No-Code Maker that sold their product or business. Subscribe here to receive it in your mailbox.

Every week we share an inspiring interview with a No-Code Maker that sold their product or business. Subscribe here to receive it in your mailbox.