Growing to $3m revenue on a $100/month tech stack 🤑
This story of building a successful business on using a few simple no-code tools is nothing short of inspiring. 🚀
"Hi, I'm Karthik Sridharan! I'm the co-founder and CEO of Flexiple.
We launched five years ago, but in the last year and a half, we've grown to 5x and have just hit $3 million in revenue.
The idea for Flexiple came when myself and colleagues from my MBA wanted to connect high-quality dev and design talent with the right clients.
Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr existed at that time, but they're often associated with low-quality or unreliable services.
We wanted to solve this problem by adding a layer of vetting to create a truly high-quality network called Flexiple."
Getting the first $100,000 just on Google Sheets!
"For our business, we got the first $100,000 just by using Google Sheets!
We had two sheets: one called ‘Companies’ and the other, ‘Freelancers’. We used to talk to people, note down their names and details, and then manually match companies to freelancers, send them emails, make invoices, and so on.
We'd wanted make a very scalable product; but instead ended up with something very manual.
When these processes began getting too tedious, we decided to use no-code wherever we faced manual bottlenecks.
We started with Airtable and Zapier, so we could collect data and move it into our CRM to trigger emails to our freelancers. This is where my no-code journey began!"
Connecting Airtable, Zapier, Integromat, and Memberstack
"Between these four tools, and multiple touch points, things were starting to break. That’s when I decided to move us to Bubble so that all of this could be under one roof.
Along with this, we also built a side-project called Scale. It's a free, open-source tool that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs access high-quality illustrations.
We have a few more no-code projects and the entire stack is very, very affordable. It still costs less than $100 a month and we're able to pull in a revenue of over $3 million."
My top lessons for other entrepreneurs
1️⃣👉 Scalability shouldn’t always be the priority
"People often talk about the constraints of no-code and the issues with scalability. In my opinion, you just need to embrace it
Sometimes those constraints are a blessing in disguise, especially for companies in the early days of their launch.
When you have no constraints, you begin to focus on the wrong things and in the process, you lose sight of what you're actually trying to build.
2️⃣👉 Think business model before tech
We made two products, spending about $5,000 each on them, and eventually had to junk them both. The main lesson I learned was that tech is not everything!
Always build a solution that;
(i) your customers want, and
(ii) works!
Then use tech to scale that particular solution. Don't start the other way: building products that can scale then testing whether it actually solves the problem that you were initially trying to solve.
3️⃣👉 Rome wasn’t built in a day! Start simple
You might use Uber or Airbnb and think ‘Okay, my first version of the product needs to be that good.’
It’s inspiring, but it's the wrong approach!
Those solutions have evolved over years to become that good. Take Flexiple for example — our first product was just on Google Sheets.
Once you’ve got an MVP in place, you should focus on marketing and distribution. Don't let that be an afterthought."
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Cheers ✌️
