How to build online marketplaces with Webflow, Airtable, & Zapier

hey my name is connor i'm the founder of the unicorn factory and in today's presentation i'm going to show you how to build your own online marketplace without code so there are three key things that i want to talk about in today's session first of all i'm going to show you a few examples of noco marketplaces created by people who had previously done nothing in terms of building platforms then i'm going to take you behind the scenes of the unicorn factory and i am going to show you the types of tools that i use to run my platform and then finally i'm going to show you how you can get started as a complete beginner now if you have any questions along the way just drop them into the chat and i'll get to them at the end of the presentation so let's start off with some examples of online marketplaces and the first one is my own one the unicorn factory so the unicorn factory is a freelancer marketplace that i created to make it easier for businesses in new zealand to find and hire local designers marketers and developers at the time that i created the unicorn factory i was actually freelancing myself and this was just a very great way for me to practice my workflow skills but also to find more freelance clients since starting the unicorn factory we've had over 600 freelancers in new zealand we've worked with over 3 000 different clients and we have recently expanded into canada next we have chive so chives is a directory that allows new zealanders to find local charities so chai for started by stephen and ellis who both come from the social entrepreneurship space and they wanted to make it easier for smaller charities to be discovered now a big problem with charities in new zealand and probably everywhere else in the world is that oftentimes the charities with the bigger marketing budgets find it easier to find new donors chives solves that problem by leveling the playing field and allowing charities to list their profiles on their website so that then new zealanders can find charities and causes that they can support next we have reviews now reviews is an online marketplace that makes it easier for people in lusaka zambia to find and hire service providers that can help them with all sorts of different jobs examples of service providers on the site are people who can help you with carpentry help you with your ip needs and a whole bunch of other things reviews was started by michelle who wanted to make sure that people who were looking for local service providers could find the most reliable ones ever since starting reviews michelle has collected over 1200 customer sign ups from people who want to hire service providers from her website so these are just three examples of marketplaces that were created with no code tools but there are a whole bunch more and one of the main reasons why we've seen so many new marketplaces and online platforms being built with no code marketplaces is because the barrier to getting started has gone down significantly now there are a few things that are really really awesome about noco tools first thing is now it's a lot easier to support people at a local level because the cost of running a platform like this is significantly lower than when you had to build a marketplace with developers in the past this means that lower cost and cheaper cost to maintain the site means that you can actually work with people on a local level because previously if you had to build a marketplace you had to have a big enough market to justify the cost of hiring developers now another thing that people really love about noco tools is the complete autonomy that you have over your site now a big frustration that i hear people having with developers is that oftentimes there's a lot of back and forth just to build features but with noco tools you can just take care of it yourself meaning that if you want to add a new feature or fix a bug on your website instead of having to rely on other people you can just jump in there yourself and fix it and then finally and this is the part that i'm most excited about you don't need to know how to code and you don't need to learn how to code to get started with these tools these tools are designed for marketing people designers but also developers who want to quickly spin up websites without having to go through the process of setting up servers and a whole bunch of other things like that so because noco tools have become so popular over the last few years there have been a whole bunch of different tools that have been launched that will allow you to build online marketplaces like the unicorn factory now to make it a lot easier for you to digest i want to show you the different tools that i use on the unicorn factory plus i'm going to show you the first three tools that i started off with that allowed me to get the first version of the unicorn factory up and running so the first tool that i started off with was webflow now we've closed the tool that i used to build the entire website so the cool thing about webflow is that you can just simply drag and drop together different elements on a web page it's very easy and intuitive to use and one of the key features that makes building marketplaces super easy is the webflow cms now the webflow cms is a database that allows you to dynamically store information for things like profile pages locations portfolio items that you can then map two pages inside of your webflow pages and that will then allow you to automatically create things like profile pages and that makes the whole process of creating a marketplace really easy another thing that really worked wonders for me when working with webflow is seo now a lot of our customers in new zealand find the unicorn factory through google searches and that is thanks to how webflow allows you to build websites with best practices so after having used webflow for a while i started to realize that it was quite difficult for me to keep track of all of the information and data that was flowing between all of the different freelancers and clients which is why i had to use a database tool in order to collect and manage all of that information and the tool that i used is airtable so airtable is the tool that i use to store all of the information about things that happen on the unicom factory for example if a freelancer applies to join the platform i send all of that information to airtable first before it gets sent to webflow if a client reaches out to a freelancer through their contact form all of that information again is sent to webflow before it is automatically forwarded on to the freelancer through gmail as good as webflow is as a website building tool when it comes to managing data and the flow of data between different platforms airtable was really in a league of its own besides being able to manage your data they also have a whole bunch of awesome inbuilt features like automations apps and scripts that really allow you to take your platform to the next step talking about automations that brings me to my final main tool that you should look into zapier so zapier is an automation tool that basically glues all of the different tools that you're going to be using on your marketplace together so for example if you want to send information from ear table to webflow for example for your profile pages then you can use a tool like zapier to send that data around another really great thing about zapier is that if you are brand new to using automation tools zapier is the easiest one to learn for beginners another great thing about zapier is that they have over 2 000 integrations meaning that whatever tools you're currently using to run your business on a day-to-day basis is very likely to have a zapier integration but it doesn't stop there over time your platform will grow and as your platform grows you'll start to have more needs to enhance your platform and with the rise of noco tools there are a whole bunch of options out there for you now so here's an overview of all of the tools that i am currently using to run the unicorn factory in new zealand and canada so there are a whole bunch of tools like member stack that will allow you to have user accounts on your website jetboost that allows you to do search and filtering of all of your different collection items for my in my case freelancers and so whatever needs you'll have there's very likely to be a tool out there that will allow you to do it without you having to write a line of code now when you're getting started you're likely going to have a cost of 50 to 80 per month to run your platform that is how much i had to pay for the first six months of me running the unicorn factory but then as your platform starts to grow and you start to add new tools obviously the cost for adding those tools increases as well so at the moment i am paying 580 a month to run the unicorn factory in new zealand and canada for all of the different tools that i'm using and that is still incredibly low compared to what it would cost me to hire developers to build the equivalent site for me in code the only other cost that i have running the unicorn factory is my monthly advertising expense of two to three thousand dollars which helps me find more clients for freelancers and it helps more freelancers sign up to the platform in short getting started in no code is quite a bit cheaper than hiring developers and the ongoing costs of running an online marketplace with noco tools is also significantly cheaper than if you have to have developers on hand to help you manage your site now for the part that i'm most excited about showing you how you can get started with your first no code marketplace now i have a simple formula for building an mvp or building the first few features with no code tools the first thing that you're going to start off with is building your site inside of webflow so of course if you want to start off by designing your site in a tool like sketch first then feel free to do that but you can just simply jump into webflow design your page and build it as soon as you have created your pages then it's time to set up all of the necessary databases that you need in order to dynamically populate information on the pages that you've created and then as soon as you have created your webflow cms and you've mapped up the fields in the cms to the pages that you've created it's time to set up all of the external databases so you're likely only going to have to start off with ear table but if you're using a tool like member stack to create user accounts and you want to dynamically store information in the member stack database then now is the time to do so as well finally once you've got webflow all set up and you've got all of your databases set up now it's time to glue all the tools together with zapier so zapier again is the tool that will allow you to control the flow of information meaning that if you want to send information from air table to web flow then zapier will do the trick for you now to show you how this works in practice i want to show you the first and most important workflow that you're going to have to set up if you create a lead generation marketplace so the workflow that i'm going to be going over today is the workflow when a client submits the contact form on one of my freelancers profile page now before you get into setting up all of the different workflows you're going to need to start off by creating the profile pages for your suppliers and in my case freelancers so the first thing that you want to do is you want to have a think about what information your client will need to see on those profile pages in order for them to reach out to one of your freelancers the first thing that you want to do is add information like the profile picture someone's first name and last name but a very important thing to keep in mind is that you also have to add a contact form at the bottom of this profile page now webflow is really great with pre-built components which means that you'll just be able to drag a contact form onto the page and it's pretty simple to set up so once your page is designed and built it's time to set up the cms now the cms is going to be responsible for dynamically creating all of the different profile pages for your freelancers so the first thing that you want to do is you want to start off by thinking about what information on those profile pages has to be dynamic so an example of that can be someone's first name last name job title or profile picture so what you want to do is you want to create a field inside of the webflow cms collection for every dynamic value that you're going to have on those pages once you have set up all of those fields inside of the cms what you want to do is you want to add an example supplier to your cms and then map the information that you submitted to the profile page that you set up in the first step the final thing to do is to create a listing page so as soon as you start to add multiple freelancers to your website what you want to do is you want to make the process of navigating between the different profile pages as easy as possible and the way that you're going to do that is by adding a collection list to your listing page and then dynamically mapping the information that sits inside of the webflow cms to your preview cards now real important thing here is to make sure that you link those preview cards to the profile pages that you set up in the previous step next we need to jump into ear table and create a database that mirrors everything that we just worked on now as soon as you've got your profile table set up inside of ear table it's time to now also look into setting up a table for all of your different messages so what you want to do is you want to go and have a look at what fields you have added to your contact form and create a new table inside of ear table called messages and create a corresponding field for every single one of those fields that you have in your contact form so that means the email address of the client the phone number of the client and the message that they submitted that will allow you to send the information that they submit from webflow to ear table and that is what we're going to go over now so once webflow is set up an air table was set up now what you want to do is you want to glue it all together and the way that you're going to do that is with sapia now if you are brand new to setting up workflows there's a very important concept to understand and that is triggers and actions now triggers are the events that happen that start the workflow and actions are the individual steps that your automation tool takes after that event has been triggered so in this particular example we are going to trigger our workflow when a client submits the contact form then we are going to set up the first action step which is sending all of the information that they submitted in that contact form to airtable so you're going to have to start off with testing that trigger inside of zapier and what you will find is that zapier will give you all of the information that the client submitted that you can now map two fields in your first action step which is to create a new record in air table so simply take the information that you got from your first step and map them up to the corresponding ear table fields that you will see inside of zapier finally once you have sent all that information to ear table we want to move on to the next action step which is to automatically forward on all of the information that a client submitted to the freelancers by email so the way that we're going to do that is very similar to the previous step we are going to jump into zapier and create an action step where we send an email via gmail so all you need to do is connect your gmail account and then dynamically populate the fields with the information that you got in previous steps for example just dynamically populate the to field with the email address of the freelancer and make the sender the client that submitted the contact form then what you can do is you can also write an email that you can then populate with dynamic content that a client submitted in the contact form now for time purposes i'm keeping it pretty high level but at the end of this presentation i'm going to be sharing with you some resources that dive even deeper into this workflow so where should you get started right now so if you are brand new to all of the tools that i've talked about today then i highly recommend checking out webflow first because that is where you're going to need to get started now the best resource out there for learning webflow is webflow university so you'll find a whole bunch of tutorials that were designed from anyone just getting into web design to seasoned pros now the tutorials are hilarious and you can either go through individual tutorials or check out entire series on how to build things like portfolio websites as soon as you have dipped your feet into the webflow waters it will be time to check out how airtable and zapier works now i have a few resources on my website that you can check out that will show you first of all how you can set up the workflows that i talked about in today's presentation as well as a whole bunch of other ones that you can use to build additional workflows that will really allow you to take your marketplace to the next level finally if you enjoyed this presentation today and you want to stay in touch then say hi to me on twitter also again i just want to reiterate that i've got a lot of different resources that i add to my website that will allow you to get your own marketplace up and running so please be sure to check that out as well other than that thank you very much for stopping by today and i'll see you soon you

Channel: Webflow

Views: 12,963

Keywords: Building online marketplaces, Airtable, Zapier, Connor Finlayson, Unicorn Factory, local marketplace, freelance marketplace, how to build a marketplace, no code, no-code, NCC, no-code conf, no-code conference 2021, no-code conference, NCC 2021, Webflow, web design, build a website, visual development, no code revolution, low code, low code no code

Id: omZ4Dl5NLBA

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021