How I validated a NoCode Course platform over a weekend

👋🏻 Hi!
I'm Alex, founder of Nocodehackers, and I'm going to tell you how this project was born and how I validated the idea in a Weekend.
¡Hoping to be of value to someone!

I love creating digital products, and I've teaching Design Thinking for a while but not with my own project, so I decided that was time for putting on practice all that knowledge that I've acquired over the years.

First, I focused on the problem, and for that I had to create an hypothesis about who my user was. I've been exploring the #nocode world for almost a year, so I decided that it had to exist more people interested in this world.

With that I mind, I did my personas to try to recap all the info that I've recollected in my own experience with the #nocode world and using it in my workplace.
My customer persona is "Juan", a 30 years designer that loves technology and works in a small agency. He loves trying new things and is always developing new ways of doing things with less work. He has heard about the nocode movement and tried a couple of apps, but never dedicated time to learn.

While I was doing the research, I saw that although the community in english is vast and grown, in spanish it is not fully developed. So with that in mind and having always wanted to develop a online course platform, I settled in the #nocode courses in spanish.

But to develop the courses, it would consume a lot of time and maybe I'm wrong and nobody wants them. ¡I had so many things that I wanted to teach! So I decided that I would do a Free intro course on the tool that I'm most proficient: Airtable.

A course that would take me not more than a morning to plan and build. And that's what I did the Friday morning. I've created a short intro course to Airtable, showcasing the basic funcionalities with a real life example.

Now, I had to plan how to validate my hypothesis:
"There's people interested in learning NoCode in spanish, and the would pay for it".

And if anything I've learned is that to validate a idea, you should spend as less time and money as possible. So that's why I did it for free.

I did a Landing page in Webflow (https://nocodehackers.es), and chose Thinkific as my course platform, since it allowed me to have up to 3 free courses and handled all the user info.

I spent the majority of the Friday and Saturday to develop the M.V.P., in total no more than 8 hours. And then I decided to test with my (small) Twitter audience if they would like the project.

For a while nobody signed up. But steadily, some people started joining and praising on the quality of the course. In total, 17 people registered that day.
🙌 ¡ Yay !

But then, it was only a free course.
And people love free stuff. But, ¿will they pay for it?

So that's why, amongst the people that did the course, I emailed every single one of them , and offered them a more advanced course on Airtable, treating more complex things like blocks, formulas and integratios.

But of course, the course wasn't ready, so I offered them a deal. If they bought the course right now, they will get the content for only. 5$, from a 29$ that will be the final result of the course.

Of those 17, 5 of them bought the course, and I decided that I would focus myself on building that course.

2 months later, I have more than 130 students, and grossed <1k $ on the courses, so I'm pretty happy of the results and having spent 40€ in building the project (in total up to today).

Now i continue creating things in my project: https://nocodehackers.es and I write about No-code news in my newsletter: https://nocodehackers.substack.com

¡Thanks for reading! Hope it helps to anyone trying to validate their next idea.