My First Million: #19 - Drone Light Shows, No Code Movement & Plugin Empires

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

A million-dollar brainstorm.

We're back.

Episode three.

It's been fun so far.

Like we had a guy, the guy who texted us about the TRT thing.

I got to call him back.

Yeah.

We got to call that guy.

So the guy who reached out to us.

Jason.

Jason.

Yes.

We talked about the TRT businesses.

He has owned apparently a few, sold it for what he said with seven figures.

He's interested in expanding, I'm not going to start that, but somehow he got both of

our numbers.

I don't know how.

I thought he was a friend of yours when he texted us.

I thought he was a friend of yours.

He texted us like he had known us forever.

Well played, Jason.

So he somehow got both of our numbers and was like, Hey guys, you're talking about this

TRT thing.

Trust me.

I know way more about this than you do.

I started a TRT business, brick and mortar, sold it for seven figures.

I can help you guys do this thing you guys are doing.

I'm going to do it and you guys can sort of be involved in some way.

And I was like, wow, that's cool.

Like this is luck coming to us.

Yeah.

Love that.

You're right.

Well, let's create more luck and when we left off last week, I had brought up the idea

of Zapier.

Are you familiar with that?

I am familiar with it.

But if you need to give the basics, Wade, the guy, his name is Wade, he's a young guy.

I don't know him, but I've chatted with him on Twitter.

So the story is, is that he was, went to college at University of Missouri.

They raised a million dollars in funding from YC or something like that and they're fully

distributed.

I've got a friend who works there, so no office.

And what they've done is they've built a really easy system to allows you to connect

to programs through via API.

So for us, we run our whole business off of this.

So like if there's a new entry form onto Google Sheets, it will tell Slack you have a new entry

form and you could do that with probably a thousand different apps that they have already

uploaded.

It's like plumbing or piping between all your different programs.

Yeah.

I think that this is the very early stages of that.

And this whole idea of connecting different apps through a way that does not involve coding.

It's this whole thing right now that I've heard people refer as the no code movement.

Have you heard no code?

I've heard of this a lot lately.

I think this is, this is trending.

Yes.

And it is going to get much bigger.

So first of all, Zapier, they've built this company now.

I've heard, they're speaking at Hustle Console, we'll learn, but I've heard that it's a 50

or 60 million recurring business.

They've only raised a million dollars in funding.

So like on the really high end, this company could be worth half a billion dollars on the

lower end, maybe like a few hundred million dollars.

So very valuable.

And so why, why is this growing so fast?

And it's, I think it's because of this whole no code thing.

And I'm incredibly fascinated by companies in that space.

So another one's a Webflow.

Webflow has been around for six years.

They actually started right before I started Hustle Console, I talked to Brian right before

he launched it.

I thought it was not going to be a big thing.

It is going to be a big thing.

And then there's a handful of other things.

Have you seen any other no code ones?

Yeah, there's a couple of good ones.

So Webflow and Xavier are the two sort of most successful ones now.

I have one on my phone.

People are trying to do this where can you make a mobile app without coding, right?

Yeah.

And I don't think this is not going to be a bad, I believe this is going to be a thing.

So much so that a friend of mine, his name is Andrew Wilkinson.

He owns this agency called MetaLab, which is, I think they're like 200 person agency.

They create user interfaces like Slack or they created that for Slack.

He is opening up an agency only around no code.

So the goal is how do we hire just like designers and marketers and have them actually build

a stuff.

No code experts.

No code experts.

Right.

That's amazing.

So if I was trying to make money right now, I would, I would create an entire community

around this.

So I had a guy reach out at the last one said, Hey, I heard you guys mentioned no code.

By the way, I've created the largest directory of no code tools and reviews and here, check

this out.

I think it's called codelist and he sent me an invite and was like, you know, let me

know what you think.

Was it awesome?

And I was like, look, here's three things I would do with this if I was you, right?

Like, I don't think you need a director of everything.

I think you need to be able to say here, you're trying to do X. Here's the best no

code tool.

And here's a course on how to use that no code tool and just be like curating the best

no code tools and then training people on how to use them.

Kind of like, I want to use that as a segue into something similar, but I have one no

code tool.

Yeah.

We should know.

I want to hear what you have to say.

Retool is the name of the no code tool.

Have you heard of this?

No.

I think, you know, I saw the founder of Stripe tweet about this.

He's like, this is awesome.

And I saw it.

And I was like, this is actually amazing.

So what these guys did was every company has like internal dashboards.

So you create some periscope data.

So everybody creates them and not just about data, but like you create some like admin interface.

It's like, oh, I need to be able to, you know, for you guys, you might need to be able to

go in and change something in the email for tomorrow or go in and give the advertiser

some permission or something like that.

But most software companies have some admin panels, admin dashboards that you need to

do dashboard, not for data, but for doing things like running your business.

And so what Retool did was they were like, look, developers, like smart developers hate

building these things.

And typically people do a poor job of building them because there's like, oh, this is internal

anyways.

It's just like task work.

It's just task work.

You kind of need it to run your business.

And the UX always sucks because the designers never touch it because it's not facing customers.

And it'll break.

And you're like, oh, I'm working on this huge project.

I know, but come on.

I need to do my job.

And everyone's admin tool.

It's like, oh, it's all this like internal knowledge is like jerry rigged, right?

It's like, oh, you need to click that button twice for a torque.

It's like, what?

How would I know that?

Yeah, it's broken.

We haven't gotten around to fixing it.

So what Retool did was they made internal admin dashboards as a service for any company

and they are taking off.

And so we use them, yeah, we use them with our eSports platform because sometimes we

needed to go in and manually update the scores of the tournaments if our scoring system was

wrong and we needed to be able to go look up if someone was cheating or not.

And so we use them for our dashboard.

So you still need to be a developer, but it makes the developer's job like way easier.

And you also don't need to be like a deep full stack developer.

You could be like, you know, very, very sort of a light engineer and use Retool and set

it up for your company.

So are these guys, how big is the company?

So they went through what Combinator recently, I don't know how big they are in terms of

revenue or people, but I do know that, you know, for the first six months, eight months,

they were kind of floundering.

It wasn't really working.

And then all of a sudden it started taking off.

This past year has just been like, they're in that mode where you're just trying to keep

up with growth.

And like 30 people, 10 people, I haven't, I haven't met them.

I haven't, I don't know how many people in the company, probably something like 15 to

20.

So let me tell you what I would do right now.

Yeah.

This, I am all in on this.

Okay.

I think this is going to be huge.

The first thing that I would do, which would be hard, but worth it is you start one of

these companies like all around no code that, that is not going to happen overnight.

You're going to have to get a team together, maybe raise money.

You're going to have to get people together to build this 100%.

I would pick a niche and go after this.

But the second thing, which is, oh, and by the way, those things can be huge.

So you do know Tableau?

Yep.

So I mean, these are multi a hundred million dollar a year companies publicly traded some

of them at billions of dollars evaluation.

This guy's the limit for anyone in this space.

The second thing that I would do, and this is a more labor intensive, but you could crush

it right off the bat is I would create a business that goes into companies like the hustle or

Twitch and charges 10 to $30,000 for a two or three day seminar and says on the promise

of this, Hey, had a growth marketing or marketing or Hey, head of this department, I'm going

to make it so your team can move two times faster by teaching them just how to make their

own stuff.

You're not going to need any depth time.

Right.

Would that interest you?

Of course.

Of course.

Let me come in and teach your team how to use this suite of tools, and they'll never

have to ask a dev for help again that I would do that.

I would pay my company, which is a small company, I would pay someone three to $5,000 to come

and do that.

Right.

So trend here is the no code movement, the availability of all these no code tools.

What you're saying is a couple of companies to keep an eye on web flow, Zapier retool.

And then now you're saying new opportunity.

You can actually like serve that industry either through workshops, through building

a no code company, connecting a bunch of different tools, building a directory, whatever it may

be.

So what are you at now to make the call like?

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.