The Makerpad No-Code Accelerator Course. What I learned, what I built and where to next.

This is my first post on Indie Hackers and is a quick summary of the Makerpad No-Code Accelerator Course I have just completed.

The course was asynchronous, so there was no contact time besides weekly office hours to discuss any problems we may have. This worked fine because there was an active Slack group dedicated to the course where you could receive prompt feedback from the Makerpad team or other participants.

The course was broken into four modules, loosely designed to be completed each week over four weeks. This wasn’t mandatory and you could take as long as you like. For me, sticking to a module per week kept me accountable and productive.

Each module had four assignments of which you chose three to complete.

For the assignments I built websites, apps, databases and automations.

I used Carrd, Squarespace and Softr for the websites and integrated Stripe into a product landing page purely for the exercise.

I used Airtable and Google Sheets for the databases.

I automated actions in Zapier and in Airtable using the built in automatons.
I built my apps using Adalo and Glide. I also signed up for, and plan to use Draftbit for future projects.

I also went off piste a little and played with simplescraper, parsehub and parabola. This was for some web scraping I’d like to do for a couple of projects I have planned.

Some of the assignments I completed were just for the exercise, and others I used to build functional components of actual projects I’m working on.
I hadn’t planned to have a personal website but it was an early assignment, and I am glad it was as it gives me a place to write about my journey. You can have a look at https://flyinghacker.co

We were encouraged to build in public and to use Twitter to share our progress. This was new to me but I gave it a crack! You can see the modest stats for both my blog and Twitter profile in the image attached to this post.

Now I’m at the end of the course, I feel much more comfortable with the No-Code space. I know the tools that are available, how they can be stacked and the terminology associated with building websites and apps.

The program gave me the motivation to push though any difficulties and to piece together my ideas into something functional much more quickly than I would have if I had been chipping away alone.

I have about a dozen projects I would like to build and am confident I can get a good portion of them shipped now using the skills I have learned on the No-Code Accelerator.

I plan to ship my first project in time for the Zapier No-Code competition that closes on the 13th of April. I will be doing this around work and family commitments but it should still give me about three weeks to get something out. It’s tight but is a good milestone for me.

I will continue to post daily updates of my progress on Twitter and weekly in more detail on my blog.

I would highly recommend the Makerpad No-Code Accelerator course to anyone wanting to give their No-Code skills a boost or to launch a business.

You can check out the course at https://makerpad.co

Note
Ben isn’t paying me to write this! I found a lot of value in the course and wanted to share what I gained from it. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

Rich 😎