How a no-code fintech startup raised $2 million

Hello,
Katt here 👋
In No-Code Exits I share every week a success story of a non-technical founder.

The no-code startup I researched this week for No-Code Exits has a sad ending as they are no longer in business. Still, I found the story of their early days so inspiring that I still wanted to share it.

Read about:

From homeless to CTO
Turning life around with Bubble
Building a prototype in 1 week without writing a line of code
Helping customers save $35 Million

Rockbottom

Nate Washington moved to Atlanta in 2009 to attend university in Georgia. He was struggling financially and had to work hard to pay for tuition. His efforts were not enough and in 2014 he couldn’t afford to go back to school. He lost his bed on campus and had to sleep in his car for periods of time.

One night, chilling not so comfortably on the backseat of his car, Nate was browsing the internet and stumbled upon no-code web app builder Bubble. On that moment Nate decided to focus on coding and building software while working two jobs at restaurants. He dove in headfirst and was able to launch his first app after a few weeks. His first ideas (a long distance car-sharing service and a dating app) weren’t a big succes. But his third idea was. After a while, Nate started to share his Bubble learnings with others offering coaching and courses.

Step by step Christian was turning his life around. He started going to startup network events and that is where he met Christian Zimmerman. Another aspiring entrepreneur who was dreaming of building a fintech app. Christian knew everything about finance but couldn’t code. He shared his idea with Nate: an app that uses your spare-change from everyday transactions and automatically applies it towards your credit-card debt and student debt. The idea resonated with Nate because he himself had still giant student debt to cover.

Prototype time

From the moment Nate arrived at home he started building the app in Bubble. It was just an experiment and he was not even sure if it was technically possible. One week later he finished a functional prototype and showed it to Christian. Christian was stunned and offered Nate to be the CTO of Qoins.

They launched Qoins in 2016. During the day they were working their regular jobs and in the evening they focused on growing Qoins. Their first customers were students from their network and it kept growing:

A year and a half later they raised their first round of $750k. Investors were impressed with how fast they could release new features.
In 2020 Nate received a $100k Google Startups award.
In 2021 they raised their second round $1.5m from investors.

Bubble allowed them to test their initial concept and iterate quickly. It scaled with them better than they originally imagined. As Qoins has grown, they continued to use Bubble throughout major parts of the business. They could do things faster and without a larger team of developers. Later, some parts transitioned to being built on code (native mobile app for example), Bubble continued to serve as the backbone of the business.

Sadly, during my research I found that the story doesn’t end well. Qoins has stopped operations in June 2023 due to bank migration problems resulting in a lawsuit from their original bank SouthState.

Create something tangible.

Still, it is inspiring to see how Nate and Christian were able to grow their app made with No-Code to over 10,000+ paying customers and paid off more than $35 million of debt for its customers.

Let’s finish with a smart recommendation from Nate. You hear all these success stories of products made with Bubble but that doesn’t mean that learning Bubble for months should be your first step:

I don’t always agree with the approach to start off with Bubble right out of the gate. It depends on what your goals, skill level and budget are. My recommendation is to understand what the value is you are trying to create. What is the easiest way to validate that value? It may not even be with a product made with no-code. It just has to be something tangible that you can create so that you can evaluate and measure a real response, see a user take a real action and/or pay money for a product.

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