How to copy this venture-backed startup & bootstrap it to $1M+ ARR... with no-code tools

Welcome to issue #5 of No-Code Startup Ideas!

This week’s idea: A Remote Operations Platform.

Hey everybody! I'm sharing a full version of the newsletter here for your reading (& building) pleasure. Happy launching!

Read on to find out why this is such a massive opportunity, how to build it with zero code, and how to get your first 10 customers.

What is this post about?

After bootstrapping my first company to $20K+ per month using no-code tools, I started having way too many no-code startup ideas to ever pursue myself.

So each week, I send out a deeply researched business plan for a validated, profitable startup that you can start with no coding and very little money.

My goal: To help you start a bootstrapped business that pays $10K+ per month and lets you live the life you want.

The methodology

For each idea, we go through:

• The opportunity
• JTBD (Jobs to be done)
• Why now
• Companies that have proven the market
• The niche
• Pricing and revenue projections
• How to build the no-code MVP step-by-step
• Startup costs and time to profitability
• Tactics to get the first 10 customers
  Let’s go!

The Opportunity: Remote Team Operations 🏝🧑‍💻

If 2020 was the year of remote work, 2021 is the year we collectively refuse to ever, ever, ever go back to the office.

Number of full-time remote workers in the US
2000: 1.6 million
2003: 1.8 million
2006: 2.3 million
2009: 3.0 million
2012: 3.4 million
2015: 4.0 million
2018: 5.2 million
2021: 39.0 million
Chris Herd on Twitter

The numbers are in: Only 2% of people actually want to go back to the office post-pandemic.

What this means is that every. single. company is grappling with how to turn their “it’s a pandemic let’s work from home” mayhem into a sustainable remote work strategy. And yeah, it’s hard.

Bigger companies struggle more. When you have 30 new employees starting every month all over the globe, how do you ensure they have all the equipment they need? How do you make sure it’s set up correctly, and that it’s secure? How do you make sure you’re not spending shitloads of money buying and shipping stuff around?

Those are the problems a Remote Team Operations platform can solve. Take Firstbase, founded by Twitter celeb Chris Herd, which just raised $15m+ for their remote team provisioning-as-a-service platform.

With the right niche, some solid no-code tools, a lot of sales hustle, and some elbow grease, you can start a similar company to help companies smoothly transition their teams to being fully remote.

Let’s get into it!

JTBD (Jobs To Be Done)

There are many, but here are a few of the jobs that companies need to do when it comes to remote work operations:

• Deliver job-critical items to employees, including laptops, keyboards, computer mice, office chairs, desk lamps, headphones, microphones, webcams, the list goes on.
• Make sure those laptops are secure, with the right software downloaded onto them so the employees can use them
• If a laptop has an issue, figure out how to get IT support to fix it. Ideally they can fix it remotely, but they might need to lay hands on the computer in person in order to fix it.
• Ensure laptops, etc. are being shipped in a cost effective way
• Ensure employees are working in a safe, healthy environment
  And probably more. But even these are some hairy problems to solve, and right now they’re being handled by internal operations, IT, and HR folks who would 100% rather get back to their normal jobs.

Why now

Many companies are cutting their office space by 50-70%. That’s a huge chunk of budget that has been freed up, a healthy portion of which will go to remote operations if needed.

Of course, companies don’t want it to go to operations. They want to parlay it into competitive advantage – and spend as little on operations as possible.

That’s where a remote operations platform comes in: to streamline operations, reduce costs by increasing efficiencies, and take the complexity of all these items off the company’s balance sheet.

Companies that have proven the market

Firstbase is the newest player, having raised $15m this year, but they’re certainly not the only one. We can assume from this funding that they have some serious revenue at least on the horizon.

Deel is a newer one in global operations – it just raised $156m for its global employment, legal, and payroll ops platform. It is trying to disrupt the old player ShieldGEO which has commanded the space for years (with pretty bad customer ratings).

There’s also Remote.com, which raised $30m for its Employer-of-Record service. Essentially, they let you hire people full-time in different countries.

Deel’s valuation ($1.25 billion) shows investors believe not only that is this a massive market, but that it’s growing very fast. Every company will have to have a remote policy if they don’t want top talent to quit.

Just heard of a co that was for sure going back to the office… only to do a 180 and become remote-first.

Why? Some employees were going to quit if they had to go back https://t.co/pWQTl98v6o

• Daniel C. Liem on Twitter

The niche

You’re not going to be the Employer of Record for your clients, yet. Let’s focus just on providing the physical goods employees need: Desks, chairs, computers, etc.

This is a rare opportunity where I will encourage you to focus on somewhat larger companies. Why? The simple answer is that they are the ones with the problem. There’s just more to manage. There’s more budget. And there’s more appetite to find a simplifying solution.

So who do you target? You’ll focus on people with these general job titles:

• CEO / COO
• HR Operations
• IT Operations
• Finance
  Each one will have their own focus for why this stuff should be automated through a third party (you).
• C-suite cares about operational efficiencies and saving money.
• HR cares about giving employees a safe, healthy work environment.
• IT cares that their equipment makes it there OK, and that repairs and fixes can be made quickly.
• Finance cares about simplifying the balance sheet by consolidating all these operational costs into one monthly subscription (paid to you).
  What kind of company should you target? They must have the following characteristics:
• Employees are knowledge workers, i.e. they work at a desk, behind a computer. From customer support to engineering.
• They have 30+ employees.
• You know someone there and could get an intro.

Pricing and revenue

When there’s no pricing on the pricing page, you know what that means…
It means the price is high. How high?

Remote.com charges $599 per month per employee on their annual plan, and $699 if you pay month-to-month. That’s for Employer-of-Record services, including full payroll, admin, HR operations, the works.

You will be providing just a subset of these services, so I suspect you can charge somewhere between $99 - $299 per month. Let’s split the difference and say $199/mo. Here’s what your revenue looks like:

• 10 customers = $1,990/mo and $23,880/year
• 50 customers = $9,950/mo and $119,400/year
• 200 customers = $38,900/mo and $477,600/year
• 1,000 customers = $199,900/mo and $2,388,000/year
  As a no-code bootstrapper with some serious hustle, it is possible to hit $1m ARR within the first 2 years.

Building the no-code MVP: Overview

Unlike many other opportunities, much of your no-code work will be on the backend – to manage operations for this sprawling service.

Then you will want to display the status of different elements in close to real-time for your clients on a dashboard.

So here’s the general overview of what you’ll build:

• Website + billing
• Dashboard for clients
• System to provision employees & manage operations
• Logic connecting the operations system to update the client dashboard

For the website and billing, go with a tried-and-true combo: Webflow ($12/mo) for the website and Outseta ($29/mo) for billing and customer relationships.

For the dashboard you can use Bubble ($29/mo), and for the logic you can use Zapier (free, then $29.99/mo) or Integromat (free, then $9/mo) combined with something like Airtable ($20/mo). We’ll dig into the details of how this should work below.

Startup costs and time to profitability

Your initial stack will cost you $90/mo at first, plus a domain name at let’s say $12 for the year. So if you’re charging $199/mo, you only need one customer to break even.

It may not be easy to land that first customer. You’ll want your website and service to be on point, and then you’ll have to go through a full sales process – which can be daunting if it’s your first time selling.

However, let’s say it takes you 1 month to build the website and initial service architecture, and 1 month after that to land your first paying customer, who pays you in month 3.

With this plan, your time to profitability is 4 months.

Keep reading the full issue here 👉

Learn how to get the first 10 customers, how to build the MVP in detail, plus 3 bonus ideas!

Thanks for reading, and happy launching! Let me know what you think in the comments below 👇

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