Case Study: How I launched a business in under 3 hours

From idea to live business using no-code tools

Hi everyone,

This week’s edition will be slightly different. Instead of the normal guide format, I’ll be sharing a personal story of how I launched a new business venture this week in under 3 hours and I’ll unpack some of the thinking and strategies behind the launch. Firstly, the business I launched is a service business called SimplSystems which is a productized service business which offers automation and process optimization services for existing businesses.

The problem

Over the past several months, I realized through my work at No Code Founders that the companies who can benefit most from no-code are large companies that don’t even know it exists. Think about companies in historic industries that haven’t changed much for decades. They typically have enterprise systems with hefty annual license fees that are possibly not cloud-connected and therefore can’t interact with other systems well. This means they not only have high costs, they probably have a lot of duplicated work and manual entry by staff as well as system maintenance which is costing them a massive amount of time.

With the current state of the global economy, businesses are even more eager to cut costs so it feels like there is definitely a big benefit for this type of business exist.

The idea

For these companies, there is a massive opportunity to optimize their systems using no-code tools, automation and AI. By utilizing these tools effectively, they could massively reduce their costs and probably their staffing too, just by a few simple changes to their systems.

Here’s an example. In one of my first jobs when I was only 20, one of my responsibilities was to track the availability of staff. I had to email them all every week and follow them up until I had a reply. They would all send me their availability in different formats. I then had to input that data into a spreadsheet and color-code it accordingly, then print out multiple copies and give them to the rest of the staff in the office. It took me 5 hours per week. There were 7 other members of staff who did the same thing with different staff groups. I quickly got tired of this and setup a Google Sheet with a Google form connected. I sent the form to the staff once a week and the responses came into the Google Sheet. I added conditional formatting to the Google sheet as well so that they would all color-code automatically. The google sheet was shared with my colleagues so they could access it online rather than rely on printouts. It took me 30 mins to setup and it brought my time on that task down from 5 hours to 5 minutes per week. I setup the same system for my other 7 colleagues, which then saved a total of 40 hours per week. That’s an entire member of staff’s weekly hours! All for 30 mins of effort and a Google Sheet!

My idea was to package this service as a no-code optimization and automation service which could help streamline workflows of these companies and reduce their costs. Sometimes it might be as simple as a Google Sheet, and other times it could be using more complex no-code and automation tools like Bubble or Zapier.

The challenge + the selling point

The biggest risk I could see with this business is that these companies don’t know that they need help and they can’t immediately see the benefit. They might not know what no-code is or might never have came across automation tools like Zapier. So as well as being a cold-sell, I would also need to educate them into why this is useful for them.

In cases like this, it’s always best to break the selling point down to the final benefit they will receive. Some people call this the “So what” method. Here’s how it works:

“The service I offer helps you optimize your systems”

”So what?”

”It simplifies your systems and makes them easier to use”

”So what?”

”It reduces your system costs and hiring needs?”

”So what?”

”It reduces your running costs”

And there we have it. The final selling point is that by optimizing their systems, they can save money. That’s a much easier sell, than saying “we can optimize your internal systems”. In other words, we’re selling the benefit, not the service.

The name + branding

Because there is a challenge in educating the customer, I wanted the name to help communicate this. I wanted a name that made it clear the service I can provide as in this case, that’s the most important thing. If I called it CutCosts, that wouldn’t give any indication as to what the service actually does. I decided to go with SimplSystems. I wasn’t too bothered about getting a perfect name and didn’t want to spend days thinking about it, as the main thing for me was to get the business out into the market and see how people respond to it. SimplSystems sums up nicely what the service offers. I registered SimplSystems.co

The pricing

The pricing I’m going with here is a subscription-based pricing. So companies can sign up and pay a fixed-fee every month and they get a certain number of hours of automation and development work. I don’t have a set price in mind for this yet as I need to get initial feedback from potential customers. My idea however, is that the price should reflect a monthly salary so that they can think of it as another salary, but the ongoing work makes their business ever more efficient.

I prefer the subscription model to one-off payments, as otherwise there is a constant need to find clients for one-off projects, whereas with a subscription model, I can have a solid busines with only 2 or 3 clients.

The tool

I now needed a website. Nothing fancy. Just a one-page site displaying the key info. I decided to use a no-code tool which I haven’t used before which is Umso (I’m not affiliated). I needed to build fast and I was aware it had some great features for speedy building so I tried it out. It took me around an hour to get a fully-fledged landing page ready with all the info I needed.

The structure of the page is as follows:

• Header

• Logos of places I’ve been featured for credibility

• Section about me for transparency

• How we work section

• Benefits

• Pricing

Initially I had the prices shown on the site, but have since removed them in case it’s a blocker. I can then get some feedback from initial calls and use that to determine the pricing.

The clients

I’ve just started reaching out to potential clients. I’m starting with industries like construction and waste as I think those groups have the most to gain. I’ll let you know how it goes next week.

The entire process of cementing the idea, coming up with the name/brand, then building and publishing the site only took 2-3 hours. The power of no-code continues to blow my mind. It’s still early stages for this business, but by launching it into the market, I can get some real world feedback quickly rather than having the idea swirling in my head for months. If you need help optimizing your processes, feel free to drop me an email.

If you have your own examples of launching a business quickly to test the idea, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.