So this video today is
for anyone just getting into no code, I'm
going to be telling you how I created the unicorn
without knowing how to code and hopefully rope
you into starting your own no code
business with the tools that I'm going to
be talking about. So without further
ado, let's get into it. Hey, welcome back
to the channel. If you knew him at
times and on this. I how people who cannot code
build online businesses with no code tools. Now, if this is your
first time here, then this is going to be
the perfect video for you, because in this video, I'm going
to give you an overview of what my code is about. And we should get started. If you want to
explore it further. Now, before we get
into it, if you are thinking about setting up
an online business or a side hustle, but you are stuck
because you can't code and you don't have access
to the type of funding that you're going to need
in order to hire developers, then quickly subscribe
to the channel and make a whole bunch of these
videos that will hopefully help you get your business
on the way using these tools. What about the do? Let's just dive straight
into the first point, which is going over
what noko tools are, how it's absolutely changing
the game for people wanting to set up online businesses
and how I set up the unicorn factory, which is New Zealand's
largest freelancer marketplace, without having a
clue how to code. So no laws are RTOS
or software that was developed to help
people who don't come from a coding background
to visually build websites, automate workflows,
build databases and basically do a whole bunch of things
that you would otherwise require developers. For now, when have
graduated from University about six years ago. I wanted to go out and
start my own startup, but one of the biggest barriers
that I had, and this is also a barrier that a lot of
other non coders have, is that unless you have
access to a lot of funding or you can code
yourself, you really don't have a lot of
other opportunities to really get your
startup off the ground. So some of the books
that I got when I was trying to find ways to
get my platform up and running was to basically get
to the point where I could prove to investors
that I had enough traction. And I could do that by building
a list of potential customers, even making pre-sales. And as soon as I
was at the point where I really had a
good business case, I could just go and raise
money from those business, hire developers, and
then get those developers to build that platform for me. Now, in theory, that sounds like
a pretty straightforward plan by anyone who has gone through
that experience of trying to raise money before will know
that is actually not that easy at all, especially in New
Zealand where I'm from. They're just not that
many opportunities. And people who are actually out
there investing in early stage businesses are
definitely some, but just not that many relative to
the amount of people starting businesses in New Zealand. And so oftentimes you find
yourself in a situation where over time, you just
don't see the kind of results that you want. And that oftentimes leads
to your startup idea dying. So another industry that
had a very similar problem to what we have in the
software space is commerce. So oftentimes, if you
want to start a store, you would have to buy
all of the inventory. You would have to
pay for your lease. You would have to have staff
who would be available. And then, again, required
a huge cash outlay. And wasn't really
possible for anyone who didn't have that
cash lying around or who didn't have access to the
type of people who could invest in that type of business. The game in the
place change, though, when Shopify came along and
really democratized people sitting up online stores. So even though the
barrier to entry didn't completely come
down because you still needed to know a little bit
about setting up online stores, it really made a
lot more accessible for people who didn't
have that type of cash to basically jump
online, set up a store. And really dive into, you
know, selling different types of products online. Now, no stores have done
the exact same thing for the software space. So after a few failed attempts
at setting up a startup with some friends, I decided to
jump into the freelancing world to make a little bit of money. And I helped the businesses
with their Facebook advertising and a whole bunch of
other marketing campaigns. So what are the key
things I had to learn when I started helping
businesses with their Facebook advertising in their
marketing campaigns was to learn how to
build landing pages that would allow me to drive
traffic to that website. Now I tried to learn how
to code multiple times and never really stuck. I also tried to have a little
look at how Wordpress works, and that also had quite
a high learning curve. But luckily, one
day I discovered a tool called web flow, which
completely changed my life. Now we've learnt is a website
building tools similar to Shopify or squarespace, with
the main difference being that instead of randomly dragging
and dropping together different elements on a canvas, you're
actually visually writing code. And one of the things that
completely sold it to me was that after I was done
building out my sites inside of wipro, I could
actually export the code and hand it over to
developers, and then they could build on top of what I
had visually COVID for them. Now, someone who had been
trying to learn how to code. So that I could contribute to
the actual product development lifecycle, discovering
a tool like workflow and seeing how I
could contribute to the build of
an app or product was absolutely game changing. And from that moment,
I really just started to dive deep into
how we play works. So one of the main
reasons why we play was built in
the first place was to empower designers
who would otherwise have to hand over their
designs to developers to actually just build
the websites themselves. So at the time, the most
common use cases of workflow was basically to build my. Adding sites or to
develop really nice looking animated pages that
were developed directly by the designers,
but the deeper. I dive into, the more
I started to realize that you could actually do. So much more for than just
building marketing sites because you were actually
following the traditional rules of normalcy season Javascript,
which are the coding languages that I use to build the
front end of websites. And as soon as I start to
dive into it further and see how you can use the web flow
seems to basically build template pages. I discovered that there
was an opportunity for me to start working on an idea
that I always kind of want to work on, which was
the unicorn factory. So the idea for
the unicorn factory was pretty straightforward
at the time. Most of the work
that I was getting, I was getting from working in a
coworking space in Wellington, and a lot of the work would
be referred to me from people who were actually in the space. And I kind of realized
that there will probably be an opportunity to help
people who are also freelancing but did not work from
coworking spaces, connect with local businesses
who might needed their help. So at the time, it seemed like
a very straightforward project to me. It was just simply building
a very simple directory in which I could definitely
do with the skills that I had already
acquired at the time. And then all I needed to do
is just find a few people who were freelancing and were
keen to be on the website, and then just start promoting
it to some of the businesses and the coworking space. So it took me about two days
to build the very first version of the unicorn factory. I also went out. And I roped in a
bunch of friends for joining the
site because I only have two real freelancers at the
time who want to join the site. And I thought it would be a bit
strange to launch a directory with two people in it. So luckily, a few of
my friends volunteered to be on there,
even though they had full time jobs and no real
interest and being freelancers. But, you know, you've
got to start somehow now in order to spread the word
about what I was doing. I basically told people
in the coworking space. What I was working
on was really how it was just getting
the first few official clients to use the site. And then I also posted
it in a Facebook group that then also really
started help build awareness with other freelancers who
started signing up to the site then. So at the time, I didn't
have grandiose ambitions for the factory. For me, it was just a fun
little side project to do. People were getting
work for the site and also it was a fun
little project to work on. But over time, more
and more freelancers started signing up more and more
businesses that are joining. And it started getting a bit
tedious managing all of that, especially considering that
I was doing it all for free. So the most tedious thing about
managing the unicorn factory at the time was that I had
to do everything manually, meaning that if, for example,
a freelancer want to sign up, I had to manually go through
the process of setting up their profile on web flow. If a client wanted to
reach out to a freelance, I had to manually forward
on all of the information about the client's
project to the freelancer, and it just started to add up
as the platform started to grow. Luckily, I discovered
the next tool called zapu, which was
another absolute game changer because it
allowed me to take all of these manual
processes and automate them. Now, what zapu does is it allows
you to connect a bunch of apps to each other to basically
automate the workflows that send different informations
between those different tools. Now, again, the advantage of
zeca is that it is designed for people who cannot code
to basically replicate the workflows that would
otherwise have to be set up by a back in developer. So the first workflow that I
set up for the unicorn factory was the lead generation
workflow that I have a video about on this channel
where I automatically forwarded on all
of the information that a client would submit on
a freelancer's profile page to that freelancer by email. So as soon as I had
set up that workflow, I discovered the
endless possibilities of using zapater
pretty much automate all of these different
things that I was otherwise doing manually, not just also
using zappia for the unicorn factory, also using
it for absolutely everything, my
freelancing business, even in my personal life. And the greatest
thing about saphir was that it really
allowed me to now scale up the amount of
people that I could have on the unicorn of actually
the amount of clients that I could refer
to freelancers. And that is when things
really started to kick off for the uniform factory. One thing that I started
to discover pretty early on as it started
to grow was that I needed to find a more
effective way to organize all of the information that
I had about from freelancer's different clients and all
the different inquiries that would come in, which is when
I discovered the third tool, which is your table. So your table is a
database that is probably quite similar to Google
Sheets and a lot of ways, with the main exception,
that it is really, really good for managing
large amounts of data. So, for example, if
you're using Google Sheet and you start
adding a lot of rows and the other things can get
pretty messy pretty fast, but it was just kind of set
up to be nice and visual. It doesn't require you
to know how to code. And it's really good to
integrate with tools like zepa that will then allow you to
send that data that sits inside of it table to flow. So with those free tools, I
was able to grow the factory to the point where we
have now got over 550 freelancers on the site. We also have worked with
over 3,000 businesses in New Zealand, and it's
evolved now into being one of the largest freelancing
marketplaces in New Zealand. I have also expanded the
unicorn factory into Canada and started the very
early days of it. But I'm basically. Going for the exact same
process that I went through in New Zealand, in Canada. So for me, building
the European factory, I wasn't really openly
talking to people about how I was building it. I kind of what I was like
a weird little niche thing that not a lot of
people cared about. Also, I had my forums that I
participate in, for example, the website forum there
also a few little niche YouTube channels
that had started that would talk about things
like zappy or a table. But the game. Absolutely changed
for me when I was invited to speak at the
noko conference in San Francisco in November 2019. So, you know, the conference
was put on by WIPO and they basically invited me
to come over to San Francisco and tell people how I
built the factory where we play table and zappia. And so I worked up a
little presentation, flew over to San Francisco
and did the talk. So the Nokia conference was
fantastic for multiple reasons. But probably the most
exciting part about it was that I got to meet
a whole bunch of people who were using the
same tools that I was to build their own
little online businesses. They had all start off the
exact same reason that I have, which is they just
didn't know how to code and they wanted to get their
business idea off the ground. The more time. I spent talking to
them, the more I realized that this problem
was not a problem that developed overnight. Not knowing how to
code and not been able to get your own online
business up and running is something that is
incredibly frustrating. And I think that these tools
here have now become a solution to that problem. That is why I decided that I
wanted to share a bit about how I built the European
factory with the wider community of people who are not
able to attend the conference. So I whipped up
the presentation. And I put it online. But ever since I put
that presentation online, a whole bunch of people
reached out to me, telling me that they had an
online business off the back of watching their presentation. And that is absolutely
fantastic because that was the main reason why I
wanted to share it with people. Now, I decided in
about October last year that I wanted to go a bit
further with the type of help that I want to give people. So I started this
YouTube channel here where I make a whole bunch
of tutorials on how you can build certain types of things. I showed people behind the
scenes of the conversation show me how I use
different types of tools to automate certain
workflows to really help people take their business
ideas to the next level. So I make a range of tutorials. Some are quite advanced. Some are for people
just getting into it. And so what I want
to do now is tell you where you should get
started, depending on where you are in your noko journey. So if this is the
first time that you've heard about no code, you don't
know what we're followers, you don't really know what's
there appears and you've just kind of stumbled
into this video, then I recommend
actually watching my how to build a marketplace
without co tutorial, which is on my website. It's 45 minutes and will give
you a high level overview of how I built the factory,
the different tools that I use, the different workflows
that I set up. And I will give you
a really good idea of how the different
tools work together and where you can get started. Now, if you have already
been doing your research into no code, you have an idea
for all the different tools do, but you're not quite sure
where to get started. Then I recommend checking
out my playlist on my YouTube channel called Start here,
where I basically show you an intro to wind flow zepa. I also show you how
it's possible to build certain types of platforms
like YouTube or fiverr, and that will
really help me make that first step into building
your online platform. If, on the other hand, you've
already made your start and you've already got the basic
version of your marketplace up and running, and you're
looking for new ways to take things to
the next level, then check out my
prototype oriels playlists where I
show you how I set up certain things in
the unicorn factory. I also dive deeper
into different tools that are out there
that allow you to solve some very specific use cases. And that will really
allow you to take things to the next level. Now, before you go out there,
I want to also quickly tell you what you should expect
in terms of how long it should take you
to get comfortable with all the different tools
and to get to the point where you can set up your own
online business with no tools. Now, as soon as you dive
into the narco world, you are going to stumble
into tutorials where people are going to basically tell
you how they built something like Airbnb within five minutes. But I want to set the
expectation straight from the outset that a
lot of these people who build these things as
fast as they're actually have a lot of experience
in using all the tools. And you will definitely
not be in a position where you'll be able to spend
something up as fast as that. Now in order for you to
get comfortable with flow and you just go
through the process of learning it all yourself. I'll probably say sticking to
it for a solid three months will put you into a position
where you can probably build the entire front end
of your online business. Now, I would focus my energy on
workflow at the very beginning because that is
definitely the tool that has the biggest learning curve. But it also is the tool
that will have the biggest impact on you actually getting
your platform up and running. And WIPO also has a fantastic
resource called WIPO university, where they
have a bunch of tutorials for free, where you can
learn how to rebuild certain types of websites. Now, if you are looking
for a great project to get started with,
I would recommend trying to set up a landing
page for your startup idea. We can then go ahead
and connect forms to it. And basically practice
setting up some workflows with zappia and er table. As soon as you've got
the hang of wipro, then I would just focus on
learning the basics of zapu. And honestly, zappy is not
that difficult to learn. They have a very nice,
simple to use user interface. So even if you don't
know how APIs work, it will still be easy
to kind of connect them all to each other and a. I've got some tutorials on
this channel that will really help you get your first
steps set up here, table is a pretty
easy to learn tool. Again, it's all about
how to structure your databases properly. So as soon as you
learn how WIPO works. And you learn how
the process works, then setting up your
database inside of a table will also be pretty
straightforward because you'll know exactly
what fields you need to set up. All I'd say if
you're going to go through the process of
learning this all yourself, give yourself four
to five months. And you will honestly
change your life. Knowing how we approach
your table in zappia works, you'll be in a position
where you will understand how they all work
together, and you'll be able to solve some
really unique use cases. And you'll be able to basically
build an online platform that will allow you to
make money on the side or allow you to get your actual
business idea up and running. Now, if you don't have
this kind of time, and you need to get something
up and running ASAP, then I also have some coaching
programs on my website that you can check out. First of all, if you
just want to learn the basics a lot faster, I am
about to launch a course where I show you how to set up
your own landing page, connect it to hear
table and zappia, and I'll basically give
you a bunch of homework that will basically
get you to the point where you can launch a pre
launch site for your start up in a few weeks. If, on the other
hand, you want to dive straight into
building a marketplace or an online directory
with no code tools like we've got a table
in zapu, then I also have a program called
the MBE program, which is a little bit of a
hybrid of an online course. And one on one coaching
where I basically help you get your
online business set up. So the Indian
program is definitely more for people who are
more serious about using noko tools to set up their start
up to bobi basic version of it. And to get it to market
where they can then either go ahead and raise
money or even just get it to the point where
it's generating enough revenue that you can
hire people to help you with it. So if that is you, then
jump on over to the website. I'll leave a link to both
the courses and the coaching program in the
description below, and I'll be happy to help
you out with that, too. All right. I'm going to wrap it up here. I just wanted to finish off
by saying that no hotels have absolutely changed my life. When I think back as to where
I was before I discovered these tools, it was
just so hard for me as an ideas person to
really get my business up and running without
hiring people who could help me build it. Now, I am pretty confident
that if you are in a position right now where you want
to get your own business up and running, but the biggest
barrier to getting started is not being able
to code and not being able to afford to hire
developers to build it for you, then this is going
to be for you. So I've been lucky enough to
meet some amazing founders who don't come from a technical
background, who have managed to build the online marketplaces
or the online directories with these tools. And they are now solving
really key issues that they have in
their community. And if you want
to be someone who solves issues in your
community, then this might just be the path
to make it happen. There way, thank you very
much for sticking around. I really appreciate you
watching the whole video. Again, if you have
any questions, let me know in the
comments down below. Other than that, I hope you're
pumped about this soul as I am. So I'll see you back
here for the next.
