Startup review: Toolmeup

Greetings,

I'm launching another weekly digest where I will try to make reviews for a startup idea that will find in Antler community, on Producthunt, or anywhere else.
Why do I do that? I will train my product vision and deeper dive into different scopes - you will get insights and new ideas for your product.

I will provide short summary to save your time. For those who want to dive deeper, I prepared these blocks: pros and cons, competitors and their insights, problems, improvements, where to find users, and monetization.

As the first target, I choose toolmeup.io - a list of no-code tools that I found on the top of the list of Antler's community (a great chance to become a founder). This is not a real product but it's interesting to understand how is it possible to grow it into a product and monetize it. Makerpad which was acquired by Zapier also started from a list of guides and no-code tools.

Summary:

Use of no-code growing rapidly and will proceed in the future. Not all people have enough time to dive into the no-code world but they want to fast and easily understand which tools will help them make the needed product.
Current sources don't provide enough information to make the right decision. The stack of tools should be selected based on all client needs - pricing, integrations, privacy, features, platform, and the number of users. Different services have their own pros and cons and even professionals are not always sure which tool will be most suitable in this case - tools adding features too fast.

Toolmeup needs to enrich the tools card with additional information that can be used to provide real personalized recommendations and save users money on consultations. Aggregation of additional related data will help to hold back users and try to invite them to the community.
The heated community can be converted to paid subscribers, or used for advertisement. In the future, you can have a chance to be acquired by another star of no-code tools.

Pros:

• You can choose a service that is already used to see which of the tools suits integration.
• Detailed reviews for some tools.
• Ability to submit a new tool.
• Slack community (if it is alive)

Cons:

• You can filter through categories but don't see it on the tool card. If I will choose a few categories I won't be able to understand what this tool is about.
  It will be great to have a tooltip about the difference in complexity. Right now it works more for evaluating users' current level of expertise and confidence.

Competitors - you can find a lot of lists published every week on ProductHunt (check my weekly digest with products from there):

• Nocodelist - agencies and stacks
• Makerpad - pioneer of no-code guides
• Zeef - deep categorization of tools
• Btw.so - rich details about tools
• Hellobonsai - an interesting service for freelancers
• Nocode.tech - great free courses

Insights from competitors:

• add blog articles - share success stories of using no-code tools, last updates, guides, or just show the best-selected articles from external resources (Make have a great blog, as some other services)
• add use cases - add an example of the real company that used this app, the whole stack used in this case, and a guide on how to create by yourself what they did
• add public rate and open comments - let people share experiences and choose the best tool (last seen a great example - 50hacks)
  enrich tool's card - add service screenshots, list of features, pricing, reviews from g2, last updates, and alternatives
• add additional lists - aggregate related information about no-code agencies, tool stack of companies, resources for education

My insights:

Aggregation of big amounts of different data related to tools will make it possible to create deeply detailed recommendations for the tools stack. User will need to pass a quiz where we will identify his needs - app or automation, mobile app or web app, what services uses now that should be integrated, country of users (GDRP rules and etc.), who is the user (internal or external, B2C or B2B), budget, database (visual or not) and many other things.

The result can be formed as a small technical task with a list of no-code tools where I will be able to see summary pricing, feature list, exchange tools with alternative ones, and see changes. Also, there can be links to agencies or experts who specialize in it or generated list of education resources based on chosen tools. Users should be able to add additional fields, provide needed information for the project (budget, deadlines, email, summary, notes), and download or share it. This will help the client to understand the preliminary scope of the project and save time on communications with developers if he will decide to hire someone instead do it himself.

Where find first users:

• no-code communities - Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Indiehackers, Facebook, Youtube (share some expertise, advice, or tip, comment on others' content, and provide a link to your channel)
• create your own community on social networks - provide value to subscribers, communicate with them, make free consultations helping to choose the right tools
• launch at ProductHunt - there are already tons of lists, it works
  collab with other small products or micro-influencers when you will have a bunch of users

Monetization:

• course - create your own course
• experts - invite experts with done courses and sell them traffic
• paywall - show most valued content only after payment
• referral link - use a referral link to services (use clean email for services where you can't withdraw bonuses to sell them in the future)
• discounts - collaborate with services and sell bundles of services discounts
  be acquired - some rapidly growing services are happy to get your community (Nocode.tech by Stacker, Makerpad by Zapier)