Alright.

So I got things wired up and working in WTF NO CODE DROP #10 so I can pull in as much news content about a specific city as possible, once a day. This means you could send a daily email and include as many of the relevant links as you want.

You can also dial all of that up or down depending on what you want to achieve.

The thing I’ve discovered about local newsletters is that it’s largely a volume game. By that, I mean you have to cast a wide net and pull together as much content as possible, summarize it, classify it, score it, and then publish it.

Optional: Bopin’ It.

At this point, an important assumption is that the Airtable base being used to harvest content is open to multiple sources. You don’t have to keep it to just the content being pulled in from Inoreader. In fact, it probably makes sense to anticipate a world where you let people submit content via a form on your website and have it land in this same Airtable database.

For now, let's assume that content from anywhere on the internet can land in your Airtable base and that you want to summarize it for your subscribers.

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

I’ve been mulling over a new project lately.

On one hand, I don’t need to start something new. Client work has picked up a bit since I lamented how slow things were and I’ve been enjoying a little more Webflow work than usual.

Despite that, I’ve been drawn to local newsletters.

The premise seems simple enough: you challenge your incumbents – often old school, stuffy publication outlets – by introducing a straightforward news digest with a list of curated links to content readily available on the web. Grow your audience to a significant size and begin monetizing.

Easy as 1-2-3.

I might pursue this completely and I might not; I haven’t decided yet. But, I do want to know whether it’s possible to wire this up.

THE NEED

As I think through what I’d need to harvest content, I want to ensure a few things:

• I need it to pull from news and other sources automatically

• I can quickly add something I find via web and mobile

• I need to determine relevance since I’ll be drinking from a firehose at first

Now that I type that out, I’m pretty sure we’ve got a series of WTF NO CODE DROPS on our hands. Yup, this is at least a two-parter.

So that’s that– I need to establish reliable source of news so I can harvest a ton about the local community, weed out the low-quality content, pull things together in a format that makes it easy to scan, and publish the newsletter at with the right frequency.

Easy, right?

Easy.

Let’s take a look.

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

THE NEED

I actually never had newsletter on Substack, so I don’t need to migrate an existing subscriber list away from Substack. But there is something else that grabbed my attention…

Substack’s effort to compete with a fledgling Twitter platform with it’s Notes, Chat, and Threads features signals a willingness to invest in tech outside of it’s core focus of newsletter hosting. While there’s an argument that this investment could be better suited a little content moderation, it’s too late for that.

Leaving a walled-off platform

With the realization that we’ve got yet another social network on our hands, I figured I’d find a way to move subscribers from the closed Substack ecosystem to my preferred ESP – beehiiv.

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

If you’ve ever worked in a Scrum team, you’ll know that there can be a lot of repetition to the (otherwise important) rituals you participate in. Some may view things as being dogmatic, but I definitely believe there is a some real value in establishing a healthy rhythm as a team.

One thing you find yourself doing quite a bit (everyday, really) is reporting in on the previous day’s work, today’s work, and whether you’ve been blocked by something.

That’s right, we’re talking about those daily stand-ups.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can do your stand-ups differently, especially if you’re working remotely and reporting in on Slack.

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

THE NEED

The best example to showcase is another banger called Podcast Delivery Reviews. In my case, I engage my newsletter audience to let me know what they think of the podcast I recommend them every week.

I want them do at least one of two things:

1. give the recommended podcast a 5-star rating

2. leave a review about the podcast

This is all done using an Airtable form that’s generated for each of the specific podcasts or records I have in my database.

Check it out and give it a try yourself!

The form is accessed via the Cast Your Vote button and, once clicked, you’re taken to an Airtable with prefilled and hidden fields that include information about the podcast you’ve just chosen to rate. Dropping that gallery onto a landing page by using an HTML embed means you can have something pretty official-looking while using little more than Airtable and some well-placed formulas. Let’s dive in.

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

I hint at this above but once you have the fundamental piece in place – specifically the right formula to generate a unique form for each of the items you want reviewed then it’s a matter of wrapping that in the correct context and ushering people through a two-step process.

My favourite part of it all is that is soooo simple it almost can’t be extended upon too much. One thing you can do pretty easily is setup an Airtable automation to fire off a Slack alert whenever a form is submitted so you can maintain visibility into what people are saying–

Let’s pull it all together.

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

Every year, 1 in 3 people set out to accomplish a New Year’s resolution.¹

Of those people, only 9% see their resolution through.²

That’s a 3% success rate.

WTF is up with that?

Now, what if these people also ran their own businesses? What if the approach they took in setting New Year’s resolutions and failing at them carried over to the way they ran their business or worked with freelance experts?

Is that last question too leading?

Maybe, but those are just a few of the many thoughts I had as I settled in to the beginning of March revelling at all the opportunities that seemed to present themselves over the course of the first few weeks of 2024. 

I had prospects referred to me from friends. I had my listing and obscure directories pay off with cold(ish) emails landing in my inbox. Forum posts from sizeable companies looking for solutions seemed to come across my desk every other week. 

I felt like the work I did in the past 18 months, putting up digital billboards on the information super highway,  was really paying off.

Then, everything took a turn. 

One client suddenly came down with this rare condition where they never replied to the right email in the thread of about a dozen or so emails. Let’s assume that was a technical problem with whatever email client they were using. Regardless, after three attempts to try to lock down a date so we could gauge if there was a fit, I moved the project over to the close lost column. 

Then, there was the project dependent on a city government’s budget approval. It was at risk with each of the last 3 near-US government shutdowns but the straw that broke the camel’s back was a lack of funding for non-critical projects. I guess a sweet project all about maps will have to wait. It’s a shame – I was really looking forward to using Felt.

Next up, I had someone nearly fall out of their chair when confronted with the age old adage of it takes money to make money. More specifically, he was shocked to learn what my starting rates are, mostly because he’s been under-valuing his time for years.

So, what’s a freelancer to do?

With two other clients postponing work till mid March, I found myself with some time on my hands. These are both pretty big opportunities and I am eager to get the ball rolling and though about doing some pre-work to really get things moving, but I slowed myself down on that front pretty quickly. 

Sure, it would be helpful to get a head start  on things and really lay the groundwork for when, or rather, if things pick up again in a few weeks. But none of that would be paid work, and there’s no guarantee that they’d come back to me in March completely ready to start work. 

Instead of searching high and low for something new, I figured it’d be best to do the following:

1. Where possible, encourage my prospects to gather and share documentation and resources so I can gain as much context as possible. This would be passive, low effort work, and I’d set the expectation that nothing tangible would come from this early fact-finding mission.

2. Look for opportunities to improve and optimize recently wrapped projects. There were some things in my gallery ordering system that deserved some new attention. In a couple of instances, things needed re-factoring but all of this was valuable.

3. Write more and groom a backlog of ideas and content. Since I committed to sharing 50 different tactical components with WTF NO CODE DROPS, to make sure I’d have enough lined up so that I could occasionally take a week off from writing. 

Each of these were underpinned by the need to stay sharp. I needed to stay warmed up while I was on the bench waiting to see some game action.

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GO DEEPER

It may very well be worth all our while to treat freelancing like a craft and hone that craft whenever you get the chance. When you’re out of work, look at what you do and pinpoint where you don’t have reliable systems in place. It’s worth thinking about how you might be able to systematize some of your own operations as though one of your clients are asking you to take on work.

A good rule of thumb is if you find yourself repeating a workflow more than 3 times, it’s time you streamline it. If you have standard documents you share with your clients, consider making templates out of them. Do you DM someone once a week for an update? Setup an automation that does that for you. Are you the one sending the update? Think about how you can gather inputs that are fleshed out with the help of ChatGPT.

And, I’d be remiss to let this opportunity go by: if you or someone you know is looking to invest in automating their marketing or operations, hit me up!

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

Twitter tweet

This is… a lot. It’s worth reading through the whole thing. Trust me.

What Erik pulls together in this 14-paragraph tweet isn’t unique to the no code world. The race to the bottom is facilitated by access and accelerated by grifters. 

🌶🌶🌶
(out of 5 🌶)

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

Like I mention above, things can get advanced depending on the front-end solution you’re using. If you go fully custom, then you can do some pretty cool stuff like incentivized referral targets and automated referral emails for your users.

But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.

Let’s just pull it all together.

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

When it all comes together, one of the first things you’ll notice is that things boil down to the IPO model, which means you have something systematized on your hands.

With any system, you’ll need to understand your data checkpoints and throughputs to understand your opportunities to scale. The most crucial checkpoint for this system is your inputs and in it’s simplest form we’re talking about words.

Lucky for us, words are on webpages and words can also be extracted from images using OCR/text recognition. This means you can do some pretty neat stuff like pull in webpages and images using Airtable’s Web Clipper (more details in WTF NO CODE #3), expand on the processing capabilities and curate ever more types of data.

If you’re up for it, you can even go hard in the paint with a little AI, but for now let’s keep it simple so we can get the dunk.

Let’s pull it all together.

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

As a reminder…

The edges of what you need should be taking shape. At a tangible level, you’ll want to create an Airtable base with two tables – in our case, one named Harvested Content and the other named Publishing Queue.

Once everything is up and running, the effort you put into creating your social media content will start to resemble what you might already be doing with long-form writing; like in a newsletter or blog post. What you put out there will be far more premeditated and, as a bonus, you’ll start to recognize aspects you can automate even further.

The first thing you’ll want to establish is your publishing cadence. I’ve built things that publish multiple times a day. You may only want to publish once a week. You can change this down the road but to get things started, let’s assume you’ll be publishing content twice per day, every few days.

THE EXTENDED VERSION

Social media is exhausting.

I know that the position I hold here isn’t unique. You might even share a similar view. The truth is, I have social media to thank for a few things:

1. something like 96% of the people reading this were connected with what I’m doing because of Twitter

2. I worked at a social media company for 8 years, starting in 2012

3. a good chunk of my community has been forged thanks to either #1 or #2

That sorta makes it a necessary evil then.

I guess the moral of the story is that there is a beneficial utility to it all, but many things can be true at once and that utility can lose its value as new effects take hold.

I believe that deliberate and intentional connections will continue to be facilitated by social media platforms. These platforms will evolve and adapt based on what they believe is right and true. (What’s right and true will also continue to evolve, so watch out.) You’ve probably heard about how you’re merely renting an audience on social. I believe that to be pretty damn accurate and a core motivation in building building WTF NO CODE.

Put differently, my newsletters and my freelance business are the destination. Social media content ends up being the mile markers, directional signs, and billboards scattered along the way to the destination.

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

The edges of what you need should be taking shape. At a tangible level, you’ll want to create an Airtable base with two tables – in our case, one named Harvested Content and the other named Publishing Queue.

Once everything is up and running, the effort you put into creating your social media content will start to resemble what you might already be doing with long-form writing; like in a newsletter or blog post. What you put out there will be far more premeditated and, as a bonus, you’ll start to recognize aspects you can automate even further.

The first thing you’ll want to establish is your publishing cadence. I’ve built things that publish multiple times a day. You may only want to publish once a week. You can change this down the road but to get things started, let’s assume you’ll be publishing content twice per day, every few days.

THE EXTENDED VERSION

THE NEED

THE STACK

THE RESULT

So a big takeaway here is that you’ve got usable data the moment your users submit your form and especially if you require them to submit their email address.

Quick aside: In the case of Podcast Delivery, I’m also capturing a URL which includes a unique ID.

This gives me two individual data points I can use to augment the information I’ve already collected from my user. I also make a point to capture the source/channel I’m acquiring all this data from so I can handle each channel differently. In my case, I change the messaging I use in my replies depending on the channel they come through. I won’t go into detail about querying APIs with those unique IDs but if you want to learn more just email me.

Clearbit offers two useful APIs to level up your user data. The first lets you find company logos based on the email address you send their way. This is pretty straightforward in the grand scheme of things and I’m will to be you can update some of your existing automations with this functionality in an afternoon.

The second API does all that logo jazz and more. If available, you get access to 100+ different attributes based on the person and the company. This instantly gives you better context about who you’re dealing with and signals where you may want to put your time and focus as you engage with your users.

The best part? Clearbit is free.99 with 500 renewable monthly credits. (Late last year HubSpot acquired Clearbit, so you may need a free Hubspot account to access Clearbit’s API).

THE EXTENDED VERSION

THE NEED

A good chunk of Podcast Delivery’s social presence stems from user-generated content or UGC. This is a decent way to generate engagement from some of your biggest advocates but you never really want to open things up without some sort of control or approval process in place.

I’ve had this for a few years now and it’s certainly evolved over time. What started as a simple form embed on a janky Squarespace website has since gone on to integrate with my CRM (HubSpot) and my ESP (Beehiiv) along with Airtable playing an important part too.

There’s no sense in building something this robust out of the gate, so the right move here is to start simple and that’s exactly what we’re about to do.

THE STACK

THE RESULT

THE EXTENDED VERSION

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

WTF No Code started because I wanted to peel back the curtain of my freelance business, the projects that I took on, and the clients that took a chance on me. That ended up looking like long form pieces published once every 6 weeks or so. Developing that habit required a lot of focus and pattern-building that ultimately ended up being disrupted whenever I wanted to take a breather. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love getting into the weeds with an in-depth show-and-tell; but a lot goes into that – more than I can afford to give as I take on bigger and bigger projects.

Another thing that led to a bunch of headwinds was my stubborn vow to avoid AI content. Creating an AI-focused newsletter in 2023 was a fool’s errand. There were far too many of them covering the same stories, all while newsletters and AI experienced new milestones in their hype cycles.

I subscribed to dozens of AI newsletters at the start of 2023 and ultimately whittled it that down to 3 AI newsletters I trust. Take a look –

The Best AI Newsletters for No Code | WTF No Code

If you use no code tools to build, these are the best AI newsletters to be subscribed to.

www.wtfnocode.com/c/best-ai-newsletters-for-no-code

That vow to avoid serving you wholesale AI content doesn’t end. The last thing I’ll do is shift away from the no code domain after all I’ve been able to learn while exploring and operating within it.

Looking ahead, you will occasionally catch a reference to using ChatGPT’s API. I use it pretty regularly and it has proven itself to be user-friendly and an effective utility in performing a number of tasks that I simply wouldn’t consider 12 months ago.

Simply put, it’s another tool in my tool belt and when using it makes sense, I’ll use it and do my best to explain why its useful.

Here’s an example of that utility.

GO DEEPER

🌶 Spicy Takes

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

GO DEEPER

The fit was there and it was clear to both me and the client pretty early on. We were connected a couple of weeks before I was set to board my flight so before taking off for my vacation I moved things along to as far as I could while setting expectations as accurately as possible. The client knew my timelines they shared theirs so we could find the right overlap. We talked budget and project scope, understanding that the best approach would be to iterate through different phases. We locked in tooling and what a migration from Google sheets to Airtable would look like, how we could codify workflows around the platform, and what we’d want out of a user interface (spoiler alert: it was going to be Glide and Airtable’s Interfaces).

The client had spent years building out their business operations and it was all very piecemeal. Google sheets that could be accessed by dozens of people were being used as templates that were copied for each of their customers. There were competing sources of truth and their customers were being asked to do a ton of data entry.

This usually means there’s an opportunity to really surprise my client as I build a solution that saves them from doing hours of tedious, manual work and eliminates the toil and glut of administrative overhead. This time, it meant I’d get caught up in the minutiae of having the client tell me how I should be working. In this case, nothing really warned me about this possibility. As you can imagine, this dynamic certainly led to a challenging conversation when I reset expectations with my client so we knew what lanes I’d be occupying in our collaboration. I also had to flag a few examples where goalposts were being moved and the very aggressive timelines we agreed to were at risk.

There isn’t really anything remarkable or groundbreaking to share with you here. The challenges I faced aren’t terribly unique – clients will put their best foot forward just as much as I would as a freelancer. The important part throughout those initial conversations is the gain alignment on the problem so that you can prototype and develop a solution that fits the client’s needs. This particular project was built using a stack intentionally similar to what I used to build an ordering system, so much of what I learned there was streamlined and repurposed for this project.

All of this did me well since I was able to bring in revenue, forecast what the rest of this year would look like, and build something meaningful. This also helped me justify not creating that content and engaging much online. I let this new project take me out of it and I didn’t have that voice in the back of my head to encourage me to think about things in the context of learning and sharing – an otherwise perfect mental sticky note I leverage for WTF NO CODE.

So, as you probably guessed, I overcame that creator’s block and wrapped up that project. As I got back into the groove of it all and thumbed through my mental Rolodex (or Time Capsule backup, depending on how old you are), I realized there were a few lessons I learned while I was out of it

1. Don’t half ass taking a break.
   I intended to unplug completely but instead I kept things ambiguous. I figured I’d purge my inbox while enjoying my morning coffee like I was “reading the morning paper” and it was the year 1996. That only drew me into other browser tabs and unfinished things on my to-do list. It’s not so much that I did work while I was away, it was more that the work was so accessible that it stayed top of mind more often than not.
   

2. Always get paid upfront.
   There’s always a little bit of excitement/anxiety as you discuss commercial terms with your clients. Once you agree to terms, that feeling shifts “to I wonder how quickly they’ll pay their invoice?”. When you’re on vacation and likely to spend some money, make sure it’s money you have and not money you might get once your client pays that invoice.
   

3. Creative debt grows faster than you expect.
   This is something I struggle with and I’m certain I’m not alone. Ideas flow faster than my fingers can type and that means I need a system to capture, groom, and prioritize my work. On top of that, everyone seems to be joining in on the content creation rat race thanks to what can be done with a little bit of automation sprinkled in with some AI. The only solution I’ve got in mind to keep things from growing out of control is to ruthlessly archive ideas that don’t resonate and come back to them on a rainy day. What’s your approach?
   

4. Less is more.
   That’s really it. By definition, you can only ever have one priority. It’s impossible to add more waking hours to your day without sacrificing sleep, which only has terribly compounding effects on focus and productivity.

All in all, this project was a solid way to close out the year. It also forced me to think through what I’m doing with WTF NO CODE and how to best deliver value to you on a regular basis.

If you have any ideas, please share them in a reply. I’ll have more to share about that later on this month 👍

🌶 Spicy Takes

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

Ready for the second half of this WTF NO CODE two-parter?

If you haven’t already read through part one of this deep dive into one of my client’s business and the project that brought things into the 21st century, you absolutely should.

It’s cool if you don’t but it’ll help if you do.

Let’s get back to this.

Part Two

After conducting in-person research and setting the stage for a wholesale upgrade to the way the Ken Hoehn Gallery operates, what do you think would be next?

Would it be laying the foundation and running some tests?

Maybe it was more in-depth conversations and requirements gathering?

No. It was neither of those.

The next thing I did was cringe at every 👏 manual 👏 aspect 👏 of how things were run – and there were plenty of them to go around.

I could have probably done a better job at hiding my shock when things were revealed to be painstakingly tedious and manual. Things were usually tied to physical paper or a spreadsheet that was cobbled together over the span of many years.

Now, don't get me wrong, there’s a certain charm in doing things the old-fashioned way. I’m someone who still grinds their morning coffee by hand, but this charming anachronism was a prime candidate for a no code overhaul.

Every time I uncovered more manual work being done by Ken and his team, I would actually end up with another picture-perfect opportunity to improve how things were done and deliver unequivocal value to my client.

Not long after that crash course in how things were done, I stepped outside for a coffee (one probably made without a hand grinder 😅 ) and got to appreciate the view from Canmore’s main drag.

Twitter tweet

Our early morning starts had us entering the gallery from the back parking lot so when I stepped out the front door for the first time I got to see just how impressive the surrounding mountains were.

My busy, cascading thoughts were calmed and it wasn’t before long that started to see a plan take shape.

So what did I end up doing?

Like all good Airtable bases, I had to lock in a structure that could scale. All the research and discovery I had done to date suggested the CUSTOMER > ORDER > LINE ITEM setup was here to stay but what would those LINE ITEMS be based on? How would I go about presenting all the different options that a print could include?

These were just a couple of the dozens of questions that came to mind as I started to form well-rounded ideas that’d ultimately inform strategic decisions, business rules, and the various checkpoints I’d need to establish with my client so we could make and measure progress.

Strategic Decisions

One of the first things I mentioned I’d get up and running for this platform was events and notifications. I often rely on notifications being sent to a private Slack channel where I can passively monitor the ongoings of anything I build.

With reliable alerts flowing through the platform, I’d learn how it was being used and easily make tweaks or changes to how everything was processed, all the while focusing on an building an ordering system, not an inventory system.

Everyone was on the same page early on in the conversation.

A traditional inventory system didn’t really jive with how the business operated. In particular, we wanted to avoid the scenario where the gallery held onto multiples of prints that didn’t sell. Instead, we’d follow a just in time model and let customers essentially be the inputs into the manufacturing process. We’d also let some orders be made for the purposes of maintaining stock in the gallery so the “greatest hits” were always on hand and ready to be sold.

In all, these orders – whether meant to stock the gallery or to be delivered to customers’ homes – all needed to be worked on by a roster of highly specialized experts and everyone involved need full view into whatever was relevant to them. The aluminium cutter needed to know the dimensions of the print, the printer needed to know what file needed printing, and the framer needed to know what frame to use.

Oh, we also agreed that anything related to collecting payment at the gallery would remain out of scope and uncoupled from the ordering system.. for now!

These guiding strategic decisions made it possible to refine scope and actually focus on the things that mattered. Focus can be a real asset when you’re working on an expansive project and also makes the conversation simple when your client asks to do one small thing here or a quick thing there.

If you’ve agreed on the project’s scope and organized the work into intuitive slices or chunks, you can point to that need to keep focused while also building a backlog of items you can work on after you’ve wrapped up the current project. Then all of a sudden you’ve got yourself a returning client.

Business Rules

There were a number of business rules considered and implemented throughout the project, so much so that there are too many to list. Instead, here are five critical business rules put in place to make sure the platform could operate at scale.

1. a sales team member can assign multiple LINE ITEMS to an ORDER

2. the sales team couldn’t modify an ORDER once it was submitted to the print team

3. once submitted, an ORDER could be progressed through its checkpoints by the print team

4. all open/draft ORDERS will be archived after at midnight local time

5. all CUSTOMERS will be archived after 1 year of inactivity

Project Checkpoints

One of the guiding principles for any project I work on is to keep the client informed of any material changes to their workflow or the platform they rely on. Sometimes, their input is needed and that conversation takes the shape of a consultation for feedback or opinion.

All of these early conversations solidified my understanding of the current way of operating and how that’d influence the project’s requirements. There were a handful of things that were non-negotiable, but thankfully Ken and his team were open to new, more efficient ways of getting their work done.

With that in mind, we were able to collaboratively put this systems and workflow flow chart together.

The Ken Hoehn Gallery Systems at Work

These images can get hard to see in full detail so if you’d like a larger copy, email me at wtf@sogrady.com 😄 

With a predictable flow of data in place, things started falling in place. I began to really understand the edge cases and nuance that might show up and the priority of the different pieces we needed to get up and running.

This would feed into the backlog of features and you can actually see it all for yourself here:

Next came the part where I built the actual Airtable base.

I took the early prototype and firmed up a number of concepts that needed to be production ready. This included putting some of those business rules into action and really battle-testing the relationship that needed to exist between ORDERS and LINE ITEMS. While we didn’t want to create an inventory system, our platform needed to have some concept of what any given print could be.

This meant I’d have to maintain a list of all the prints that Ken was selling – both online and in the gallery – while also establishing a solid dictionary for some of the more peripheral details like the prints’ dimensions, materials, and how they’d end up affixed to customers’ walls.

That day’s forecast had a high chance of 🤯 

Thankfully, I’d always have a bird’s eye view into what I was building. If you didn’t already know this, Airtable has this awesome extension that gives you an overview of your base’s schema.

Here’s what this one looked like:

The structure of the Airtable database that powers the ordering platform for the Ken Hoehn Gallery

These images can get hard to see in full detail so if you’d like a larger copy, email me at wtf@sogrady.com 😄

What I setup would allow for a number of things to occur:

1. a CUSTOMER could be assigned any number of ORDERS

2. an ORDER could be populated with LINE ITEMS that were created with the help of the previously established data from a number of other tables, namely
   - PRINTS
   - COMMON SIZES or UNCOMMON SIZES
   - MATERIALS
   - HANG SYSTEMS

3. an ORDER’s status could be updated as ORDERS progressed through various stages
   - Draft → Submitted
   - Submitted → Working
   - Working → Ready for Delivery
   - Ready for Delivery → Delivered

It definitely doesn’t do it justice to say “THAT’S IT!” but the core concepts of this ordering platform were dead simple and I knew I’d want to keep the raw Airtable base open and unburdened by hardened rules and restrictions.

That’s what Glide was for… 😎 

GO DEEPER

Earlier I briefly touched on a distinction between keeping your client informed and consulting with them for their input. If you’re interested in folding this sort of approach into your own work, check out this breakdown of the responsibility matrix –

This sort of thing could very easily make the project joyless, so don’t get overly pedantic with this or any other framework, especially with your clients. Not once did I bring this up with Ken in these explicit terms. This is simply a great way to think through things as you embody a number of different functional roles for your client.

Also, there were a number of things that weren’t core to the function of the platform but ultimately provided some incredible additional value. There’s enough substance to this that I could very well put together a Part Three to this series and create no code’s first trilogy that’d obviously rival the likes of The Godfather or Christopher Nolan’s Batman films or the Back to the Future trilogy.

🆗 SIMPLE $%!#

My latest project update or feature release. That's it. That's the $%!#.

THE NEED

A front-end UI for the behemoth of a platform that I built all on Airtable.

THE STACK

• Airtable

• Make

• Glide

THE RESULT

A Glide-based UI that worked seamlessly with the structure of the database that powered all of the sales team’s workflows at the gallery AND an Airtable Interface UI that the print team’s workflows at the print facility!

Customers

Orders

Help Desk

Changelog

The Print Facility’s Dashboard

THE EXTENDED VERSION

There were recent additions to the core of the platform that allowed for things like a changelog to alert the team to new features and a way to manage email communications. These pieces made the platform feel incredible cohesive and matched the high bar set by my client’s own way of operating.

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

Twitter tweet

That’s about as much energy as I’m willing to put into this and as much as I want to maintain the sanctity of my 🌶 scale, this Boring SaaS Guy gets a…

🤡 
(out of 5 🌶)

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

In this WTF NO CODE two-parter, we'll explore one of my recent freelance projects involving my client’s wildlife photography and gallery business, his clear-minded objective to bring his print production in-house, and the need to have a cohesive platform to power his business’ operations.

The cool part?

This project was wholly unique as it involved lots of in-person collaboration and travel; something I thought I left behind when I leaned into working for myself and from home.

Let’s get into it.

Part One

One crucial aspect that remains at the forefront of my mind as I operate my freelance service business is that it is imperative I understand my clients and their unique requirements.

To build the perfect collection of no code workflows isn’t enough. I couldn’t just rely on a shallow understanding of what powered my client’s business and as Ken Hoehn and I got to know each other over a series of emails, the insistence that I travel from Vancouver to Calgary and Canmore to discuss details in-person started to make sense.

I truly never anticipated having the opportunity to travel for work again. Sure, I’d love to travel anywhere with access to the internet and work, but travelling for work seemed like a thing of the past. After years of working from home, it wasn’t only a habit, it was a full-on lifestyle choice to work from a tiny home office and benefit from as many of the flexibilities that come with that sort of arrangement.

Despite that strong preference to use Loom videos and Google Docs to keep effective async communication going, I was intrigued by the idea of heading to Alberta for a few days to wrap my head around how things were run at the Ken Hoehn Gallery. After some negotiating (read: forthright conversation – something I’d recommend you establish with your clients early), I committed to diving head-first into the world of Ken’s business. Even before I boarded a plane, I started thinking about how I could align myself with all the important parts of the business processes.

Fundamental business processes like…

• how customers go about choosing their favourite prints to purchase,

• what materials would be needed to produce their print,

• how customers figured out what print size was most ideal for their space, and

• what important details the print facility team needed for every customer order so they knew how to progress prints through the different stages of a print’s production.

These were just a few ideas that I knew were integral to understanding how things were run IRL and “offline”. Once discovery kicked off with a tour of the print facility in Calgary, I had even more rapid-fire thoughts about how things were run and what we could do to improve them.

So, I began to wrap my head around the art of everything at hand. I was working with really smart people who were experts in what they did. Showing interest in what went into cutting the raw materials to size and shape meant I learned how the facility team worked to anticipate orders coming down the pipe. I was also able to observe the printing & pressing process which came with a better understanding of the different finishes available to customers.

8am at the print facility, Day 1

Along with the the different framing options that can be affixed to each print, I began to piece together that each ordered print would be put through a series of different checkpoints or stations. Those stations were typically hit in sequential order, but sometimes a print wouldn’t need framing, for instance. Knowing that volumes would only grow, it was important that we prevent bottlenecking wherever possible – we simply didn’t want to hold up the print production process if one print didn’t have what was needed for it to be packaged and ready for delivery.

Next stop was the Canmore gallery so I could be a fly on the wall, observing sales associates in their natural habitat much like Ken sought to capture photographic concepts as he observed animals in the backcountry of the natural world.

The Ken Hoehn Gallery in Canmore, Alberta

What quickly became clear to me was that the key to the entire business was the binder.

This binder had been in the picture for a while and the very analogue source of truth for all sales orders placed at the gallery. Regularly, my client would transpose the information captured in the one-page form into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet was then emailed to the appropriate print facility and from there someone manually determined the priority given to the order, what dimensions the aluminium sheets needed to be cut down to, what sort of printing finish was needed to properly produce the print and fulfill the order. Then it was sort of lost in the ether until everything was packaged and either ready for pick-up or delivery. Only then would a phone call or an email confirm that the customer would soon have their vibrant new addition courtesy of Ken Hoehn.

The front desk at the Ken Hoehn Gallery

I’m sure you can see how risky things could get with this binder if you wanted to increase order volumes and scale the business. When it dawned on me that every sale had been bound by this binder process, my jaw hit the floor. But, despite the riskiness of that binder, I knew it was going to be the basis of a workflow that I’d soon bring online for my client and his team.

At this point in the discovery phase, I felt it important to recollect the many thoughts and ideas I had formed about our project’s goals.

The fundamentals of the platform: Customers place orders, orders have line items.

My mission: to understand all the possible combinations of prints that could be ordered by customers at the Ken Hoehn Gallery and codify that optionality in an app and system that let the gallery sales team rely on their innate abilities to catch, sift through, and synthesize the deluge of information from potential art aficionados – all while ensuring each order made a graceful leap from gallery to production queue. No two orders were alike but there had to be a lowest common denominator and/or a high water mark to rely on. Once I wrapped my head around every possible workflow’s beginning and end, the no code vision began to crystallize in my mind, and a system’s architecture started to take shape.

Thankfully our trusty binder was filled with examples I could use to discern the relationship between the prints being ordered, how they’d appear on a given order, and who that order belonged to.

In other words, I’d have a static relationship between the customer, their order(s), and the line items that made up that order.

What lied beyond simply understanding the most optimal structure for all orders put through our potential platform?

How an order moved from the gallery to the end customer.

The order workflow

This factored in things like whether the final destination was the customer address or the gallery where the customer would pick up their order. It also account for some of the other details like internal orders meant to replenish the gallery’s on-hand inventory – something typical for Ken’s most popular prints.

On of Ken’s most popular prints: Bridge Creek School (circa 1961)

It goes without saying that Ken’s art is far more incredible than my flow chart art, but sense of everything coming together was just as exciting and as vivid.

For the next 36 hours, I had access to the entire business’ operations and used that to my advantage to quickly prototype an Airtable base that instilled some of the fundamentals of the ordering system and solidified the foundation of a new way to operate.

What came next, and a few build details, will be shared in part two.

GO DEEPER

Make sure you spend some time browsing Ken’s work on his website. He’s built a fascinating business around a true passion and has a wealth of experience that I was able to scratch the surface of.

The Ken Hoehn Gallery - Canmore Art Gallery Alberta

Canmore art gallery specializing in spectacular wilderness & nature photography prints. We carry amazing photographic images of everything natural & wild filled with mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, forests, prairies and other landscapes. These animals range from bears, birds, wolves, moose

kenhoehn.ca

This is also a great example of what projects might be out there. A number of longstanding businesses run the risk of becoming “legacy” and the best way to avoid that is to modernize the core operations of the business. Depending on what the business is all about, that can be a quick switch or a massive overhaul but if you take away one thing I hope it’s this: genuine and thoughtful explorations along with some invigorated curiosity can make one hell of a difference when you’re looking to make an impression with your clients.

🆗 SIMPLE $%!#

My latest project update or feature release. That's it. That's the $%!#.

THE NEED

One thing that took a bit of a backseat during this ordering platform project was that there would be a few different channels through which orders could be placed. The print facility would also handle orders for custom prints placed through a Shopify store so that meant the platform would need to capture and ingest Shopify’s Order payment webhooks.

The small problem here is that Shopify seems to be very generous when sending its webhooks which means I need to account for similar payloads in quick succession while upserting the relevant pieces of data.

THE STACK

• Airtable

• Make

• Shopify

THE RESULT

Since every webhook notification’s payload comes with an Order ID it was simple to merge the nearly duplicate data that came through to Airtable. Those webhook notifications would also include data about the order’s line items along with the custom image that’d be uploaded by the user.

All of that data ends up formatted in a way familiar to the team at the print facility; making for a fully unified workflow.

THE EXTENDED VERSION

The extended version of this is something to marvel at, at least as far as I’m concerned. I’ll have more to share about this project in the coming weeks in part two of this project showcase!

✌️

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

There was a time when Stripe was considered the gold standard for nearly everything it did.

API Docs?

Gold.

UX & UI?

Gold.

Supporting small businesses and finding new and incredible ways to make the lives of entrepreneurs easier?

Gold.

Twitter tweet

Nowadays?

Stripe seems to have fallen from grace.

Look, I’m all about creating new automations and incredible efficiency, especially when it comes to transactional emails being delivered in high volumes, but you can’t put something in place without the right safeguards and alerting, especially if you’re valued at over $50B.

The one thing that has to remain intact is the consideration for the human being – on both sides of the coin. This is especially the case with AI-driven shortcuts coming at us from all angles and companies being sold on solutions for problems that are of their own making.

I guess I’m advocating for everyone to slow the F#@! down. We’re all getting back so much time anyway.

Or, I guess we can all just put XYZ EXPERIENCE on our resumes and hustle even harder.

🚽 
(out of 5 🌶)

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

So here’s the big question I’ve been kicking around while working on a couple of projects that are becoming more expansive as things go – Do you show your client how the sausage is made?

Awful butchery-byproduct analogies aside, I’m trying to figure out when it’s appropriate to get into the intricate, often technical detail about the automated processes I’m putting into place.

Expanding on that idea – Should I invite my clients behind-the-scenes if they fall on the low end of technical maturity curve?

With the world’s AI-driven increase in pace, freelancers need to be on their A-game when it comes to understanding their clients' tech-savviness. Many will say “I want” without following up on the reasoning so its your job to understand why something has come up in a conversation you’re having with your client.

A one-size-fits-all approach just won't cut it anymore. I try my damnedest to put myself in my clients’ shoes so I can strike that perfect balance between giving enough info but not overwhelming or, worse, boring your clients to tears.

It all comes down to meeting your clients where they are and the best framework I’ve used to pinpoint where they’re at is really straightforward: listen and ask “why?” a hundred times.

Okay, that may not be a framework as much as it is a facet of a curious thinker’s day-to-day, but there’s no better way to make sense of how your client views their problem something that needs to be explicitly defined if you’re ever going to find a solution worth your client’s hard-earned money.

A REAL WORLD TAKE

So, once you land a client that needs a little hand-holding when it comes to understanding your product or solution, it’s really no big deal. Give 'em simple, easy-to-digest info in a format that caters to their style of learning and you’re upping the chance that you’ll get them excited without making their heads spin. On the other hand, if you've got those super tech-savvy clients who eat specs for breakfast — they'll appreciate more in-depth details.

One of the best ways I’ve been able to bridge the gap is with ScreenStudio. You can record your screen and make an incredibly slick how-to video for a finished product or workflow and spell everything out that would otherwise be lost between the lines. If you do have to get a little more in-depth with things, Scribe might be the way to go. Lately, I’ve been uploading those super-slick videos to Loom which is a handy way to quickly gather contextual feedback from your client.

A RECAP

As you figure out how to really nail your own client communication, remember to first figure out what kind of clients you're working with based on their tech maturity level. Then, tailor your message to suit their style. And, most importantly, don't just call it a day after one interaction. Get feedback, keep an eye on how your strategies are working, and make adjustments as needed. That's how you keep things fresh, my friend.

Remember, understanding the tech maturity levels of your clients is an absolute must, especially for those in the technology, freelancing, and no-code development world. Just keep things flexible and always be open to learning from others — you'll be slaying the communication game and building killer professional relationships in no time.

The magical point of equilibrium between your clients’ maturity levels and how detailed you need to get.

It’ll eventually lead to understanding the point of equilibrium that exists between your clients’ maturity levels and how detailed and in-depth you have to get when discussing what you’ve built.

GO DEEPER

Here are a few frameworks and resources I’ve come across as a product manager and as a freelance that can help you better understand your clients:

Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users.

www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping

Empathy mapping is a great UX exercise borrowed from companies with budgets large enough to fund customer research and comes as advertised – you will better understand your client once you unpack what they say, think, do, and feel.

Client Onboarding for Small Businesses

Learn everything you need to know about client onboarding, including the steps, tools, and systems you need

www.honeybook.com/blog/client-onboarding

Client onboarding doesn’t mean you need to move mountains but blog post runs the gamut of what freelances can do to make their clients feel welcomed, appreciated, and most importantly heard.

Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework

What is Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework? Learn more about Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework and other product management terminology in our resources library.

www.productplan.com/glossary/jobs-to-be-done-framework

As a freelancer, I really like how the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework helps me focus on my clients' core needs and motivations, which makes communication smoother and brings us on the same page.

🆗 SIMPLE $%!#

My latest project update or feature release. That's it. That's the $%!#.

THE NEED

A simple way to summarize complex data that’s actually useful

THE STACK

• Airtable

• Make

• OpenAI’s Speech to Text API

• OpenAI’s Chat Completion API

THE RESULT

An incredibly powerful automation that captures my poorly formatted and often messy ramblings, creates something structured and actually useful, and goes the extra mile to apply tags that become super useful the more I use this.

Twitter tweet

THE EXTENDED VERSION

I’m hoping to compile the individual, highly specialized variants of what you see here into a single Shortcuts app that prompt me to select the type of output I want – outline for a blogpost or article, a summarized first draft for newsletters, or a top-10 list of ideas.

Those are the ideas I’ve got for it right now, what do you see this evolving into? Hit reply and let me know your thoughts!

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

Twitter tweet

Call me old fashioned, Keith, but I am not branding myself with anything that is due for a rebrand in the next half-decade.

🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶
(out of 5 🌶)

❓ WTF No Code

SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME

I found Kirby Fergusson’s Everything Is A Remix video series nearly a decade ago. It stood out in a crowd of amateurish videos produced by independent creators at a time where people didn’t really think to mimic the threadboi bullshit they see en masse and on line. At every turn. Made by people with no overt shame or any shreds of humility.

Pretty ironic considering that there are clearcut templates or playbooks you can use to produce content “that works” depending on the channel you operate in. TikTok playbooks can help get you noticed so long as you rip the right audio. The niches within niches of Twitter are dangerous while Instagram’s are shallow.

There’s not a whole lot of original content out there and that stretches from the freelancer seeking their next gig (👋– hi! Why not say hi back and book some time to chat!) or an established recording artist lifting a beat without paying credit where credit is due.

The point is– Fergusson’s video series, now complete, is worth your time. He’s revised and remixed his own work enough so you’re getting a distilled and generally calculated message out of it all.

That message?

I never thought I’d be quoting Twain in a technology newsletter.

This is particularly true in the world of no code, where many of the tools, techniques and tactics are built on existing concepts, ideas, or even vibes. We’re out here reaping the rewards of an abstraction of what was once handcrafted, pure C-O-D-E code.

That, my friend, is a remix.

The communal feeling that leaves you with the warm and fuzzies after you make use of that Webflow clonable in your latest project.

That’s a remix.

That X?

Remix.

BAD REMIX

If there’s a space to embrace the art of remixing others’ content, it’s the no code space, at least in my opinion. Innate to the whole ecosystem is this idea of comparison – “Can this be done remixed in code?”, “What tool should I do remix this with? Zapier? Make? n8n?”, “Can I recreate remix this Fortune100 company’s website in Webflow just for the hell of it??”.

Let’s get one thing clear. I’m not out here advocating for you to rip off Linear like all the wannabe techboi threadbros who mispronounce the word niche while they practice make believe keynotes speeches in the mirror.

When you borrow something remember to credit and even celebrate those who you borrow from. If you don’t know how to go about doing that, take a page out of Aron Korenblit’s and Webflow’s book and roll some literal credits or something.

That was a remix ☝️

All of this is laid out here for you to contrast things with what come next. The thing that has me on this kick is pretty much one of the more egregious things you can find online today, especially Twitter. Or in a LinkedIn carousel of Twitter screenshots. Or in a Instagram post of a TikTok. You get the point.

It’s laziness.

Here’s a clear-cut struggle with finding original ideas.

Twitter tweet

Here’s a shocking attempt to lazily lift a consumerist tactic originally created to boost retail sales.

Twitter tweet

Finally, here is someone else calling it as they see it.

Twitter tweet

Click through the RTs and replies for that 👆️ tweet. So worth it.

If you don’t really care about creating original content then this next bit isn’t for you. But I’ll plead with you to read the next few points since you probably already know this to be true:

• creating your own content is time-consuming

• creating your own content requires specific skills and tools

• creating your own content doesn’t mean that content gets results

Whether you’re producing videos for a Youtube series or getting meticulous with your subjects in a photo shoot, it’s yours and it’s original. Self-produced content is also the most effective way of capturing your authentic voice and point of view and if you keep at it long enough, you’ll develop a habit and strong understanding of what it takes to create. Plus, you’re guaranteed to stay out of legal or ethical hot water.

All of this bends the long arc of your personal development and overall business toward success.

Be original and be inspired.

Don’t be lazy and copy other people.

GO DEEPER

How do you combat the trend of stealing people’s content? How do you avoid putting in all the effort to create your own? There’s no sure bet in the journey to produce valuable content but there are some tips and tricks I’ve uncovered along the way, all thanks to no code tools like Airtable and Make.

1. Make It Easy to Capture and Organize Your Source Material

2. Know When to Supplement and Augment What You’ve Captured

3. Push for Visually Captivating Content If It Makes Sense

4. Repurpose and Recycle Responsibly

5. Understand Your Performance Metrics in the Right Context

👉️ WTF #6 gets into this with some examples. Check it out.

WTF #6

Criticisms about the complicated side of No Code tech. Also, a healthy dose of my freelance projects, broken down into steps that make sense.

www.wtfnocode.com/p/wtf-6

🆗 SIMPLE $%!#

My latest project update or feature release. That's it. That's the $%!#.

THE NEED

A client I’m working with is interested in capturing the content they publish across social media so that it is stored in a cohesive archive and accessible to review and report on.

THE STACK

• Airtable

• Make

• whatever’s left of Twitter’s API

• Facebook’s Pages API

• Instagram Graph API

THE RESULT

A basic automation that does a daily scan for the last 20 items published across to each of the social networks involved. That scan pulls in any new content along with post performance stats. If that scan for 20 pulls in a post we’ve already captured, it refreshes those performance stats thanks to the upsert function..

THE EXTENDED VERSION

Need a transcription for the content you’ve already published? Enter OpenAI’s Whisper API endpoint.

Want to understand how well one of your campaigns did without lifting a finger? You need a summary report and digest.

We’ll also soon be shifting gears and this backfill automation will be accompanied by another automation focused on pulling in published content in (relative) realtime.

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

Twitter tweet

🌶🌶🌶🌶
(out of 5 🌶)

Shots fired Stanley, shots fired.

I can’t say I completely disagree, but what I can say is I’ve held two jobs early on in my career and they were both 💯 a lot cultier than Webflow.

What Stanley’s seeing is a community… right?

WTF No Code

We’re going to start things off with a reminder to check yourself before you absolutely wreck yourself and burn out. Running a freelance business doesn’t come easy and putting it all together takes a lot of effort and patience. It also requires a ton of discipline and self-awareness; something I lost sight of pretty quickly this year.

Arvid Kahl summarizes it well –

Twitter tweet

When wiser, more experienced people swear by whatever regiments work for them it’s not to convert you into following their lead, it’s because its worked for them. What Arvid does here is abstract all that specificity away to simple principles that hold true no matter your experience or domain.

In my case, I can tell you what didn’t work as 2023 settled in, and naturally, I whined about it on Twitter –

Twitter tweet

What I didn’t know then is that I was at the start of a eight-week ordeal that had me completely down for the count, struggling to maintain the professional commitments I had made. As everyone’s mindset was to start the year off on the right foot, I had succumb to compounding injuries and ailments that quite actually had me off both feet.

When it came to getting work done, I didn’t have a foot left to stand on.

So, while I was down for the count physically I couldn’t help but lose sight of the productivity, the efficacy, the tinkering that makes freelancing fun. Mentally, I was AWOL and suffering from a tunnel vision I hadn’t really experienced before. When you rely on an employer for your paycheque, certain things (read: insurance, teamwork) kick-in so you can take a step back and heal. That wasn’t going to happen for me and things started to compound to the point where I was in the hospital for four days; hooked up to an IV working to gain weight and not that next dollar.

The news worth sharing is that I was able to find answers and craft a plan with my doctors. I’m left astounded with how connected the human body is and grateful for the roster of medical professionals I’ve come to know in the last while.

But, with time it becomes much easier to reflect on WTF went down so here’s what I’ve been able to wrap my head around 55ish days into 2023 as I tried to continue maintaining relationships with my clients and work on what made sense while very, very sick.

When things take an unexpected turn, understand how you’re adapting

Tunnel vision is a reactionary adaptation that comes with some real benefits when it kicks in for the right reasons. I’m convinced we’ve spent so much time on the internet that we run the risk of being rewired to the extent that the same phenomenon hijacks our routine internet habits and quickly become detrimental.

How often are you looking up at the clock to realize it’s hours later than you expected and you need to eat something? Over the years, I know I had done this exact thing enough times for it to affect my health. It’s so simple and I can’t help but feel foolish in retrospect but I realize that I had poorly transitioned from working at in-person startups to working from home. My office is three feet away from the kitchen but I’d neglect to graze or eat when I was hungry. Guess I got too used to those fast-paced startups that justified financial line items for kombucha on tap, fresh fruit around most corners, and a respectable-enough breakfast bar.

Some clients get it, others DGAF

Maintaining boundaries with your clients is a must but there’s nothing uniform about where those boundaries get set from client to client. Some people are all business and that usually becomes clear pretty quickly. You’re not going to get much more than courtesy small talk from these types of clients and, if you absolutely must step away from the work they’re expecting you to do, they’ll never be able to properly frame the personal challenges you’re going through in the context of what they care about – their bottom line and the agreement to complete a project for them.

There’s nothing flawed with that, that’s just the rules of the road for this part of the journey.

When you’re sick, expect these folks will only accept a delay to your delivery timeframe or a gap in your availability if you’re clear on how it affects them. You can spare them the details of what’s affecting you, they’re not terribly interested in that sort of thing.

If you’re fortunate enough to have timelines to your return, you can share them but keep in mind that your health can change rapidly. What you want to avoid here is kicking the can down the road.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got the compassionate and involved client that likely blends work and life liberally. They’ll get it – something I’m incredibly grateful for after my last few weeks – but they may need some reinforcing when it comes time to getting back into the swing of things, especially if you’re dependent on them for input or information.

You’ll already know if you’re engaged with a client that fits the mould. They’ll likely be easy to get in touch with and overall communication will be smooth. You can probably offer up a bit of detail so they know how you’re being impacted by everything that’s going on in your life.

Regardless of the type of client you have, if you find yourself needing to take a step back you’ll want to ensure you “meet them where they’re at” when you share the news with your clients. At its core, this loose framework is inspired by some of the Product Management principles I’ve learned over the years – stakeholder management, clear communication & expectation-setting, and clearly understanding scope of work & its involved dependencies.

I’m grateful for having learned those skills and for the folks who have reached out to check in. We can all use a little bit of that every once in awhile so why not dish it a bit.

Ask for help

This is often trumpeted as the thing you do shamelessly but many know it’s not easy to do. Whether you’ve got ego and pride wrapped up into things or you just can’t find the right words, it might not be that simple.

From that health perspective, seeking help can be straightforward. There are a number of outlets that can support someone in need; from clinics to ERs. But, you’ll want to make sure you have a good support network of people who know you well enough to know you’re when you’re in need and so they can offer something specific and real when you ask them for a hand.

For better or worse, the network of specialized healthcare practitioners isn’t terribly dissimilar from the network of the technology professionals I’ve come to rely on in getting my freelance business off the ground. At least in foundation. Anecdote and data suggest that my best client are the ones sent my way through friends and connections in the network. I don’t know how the doctors tending to me recently found the one doctor I saw across town three years ago but they did because that synaptic-like connection had been made in the network.

So, with a little luck I’m hoping to rely those synaptic-like connections as I get back in to the swing of things. If you know someone looking to break ground on a new no code project I’m available to work. I’ll even pay out a finder’s fee for any referred client. Get in touch at hello@sogrady.com for more info. 

🆗 Simple $%!#

My latest project update or feature release. That's it. That's the $%!#.

The Need

A friend of mine who works as a nurse recommended I track my ankle pain and how it was progressing so I had something I could refer to when discussing things with the doctors I’d end up seeing.

Naturally, I turned to Airtable.

The Stack

• Airtable

• iOS Reminders

The Result (ELI5)

A simple and effective way to track where my pain was at over time. The epitome of no code, I took the URL for this Airtable form and dropped it into my phone’s reminders app at equally-spaced intervals and it did exactly what I needed.

Step 1: Capture your data

Step 2: Do something with your data

The Extended Version

There is no extended version. I don’t ever want to revisit this Airtable base again 🙈

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

Which is it, people? Is no code an onramp to learning a new coding language? Is no code a new language? Whatever it is, if someone utters the phrase “high code” at me I might just need a new pain tracker.

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

Then we’ve got this SaaS-hole gunning for engagement through enragement.

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(out of 5 🌶)

WTF No Code

Welcome to the 27 new subscribers who have joined since the start of the year! I'm truly grateful to have you along for the ride and can't wait to hear what you think about WTF No Code and the little bits of commentary I publish. My goal is to spark thought and help flatten the access to information needed to help you build consciously.

Now, let's get to it –

I hate-read this Twitter thread:

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It's not that I hadn't been filled with any Christmas spirit.

It's not that I'm not a Doc Williams fan.

It's just that it all felt so... cheap..?

So... unoriginal?

So derivative!?

Yeah. It was derivative. Actually, very truly derivative. Because it was pieced together after analyzing hundreds of thousands of thoughtboi Twitter threads we're so lucky to have out there in the wild!

At least there isn't a Youtube thumbnail for it.

But, with as little as a few dozen keystrokes, Doc probably chuckled as he mused about the internet caving in on itself. Classic.

Mitch Hedberg had a great joke about limiting the number of times you could honk your car's horn. Three honks and you're done until the 1st of the next month. I'd love for something like this to exist for Chat GPT3. We'd end up with prompts that are much more thoughtful and outcomes that have a little more substance.

But, that's not likely to happen so while we face a deluge of content generated by anyone with a keyboard and we – the lowly consumers of content – are forced to rely on pattern recognition; which most humans suck at.

So while the overlap of no code and AI continues to grow, I'll be doing my best to train myself to recognize the patterns created by GPT3’s outputs and improve my media literacy skills.

If you’re questioning what has me categorizing an emerging technology (or more accurately, a fully emerged technology on a crash course with humanity’s collective id) as a facet of media, I ask what about this whole thing isn’t related to the media?

From mid-December on, there has been a flurry of new AI-powered apps that purport to:

• make it effortless to up your ranking on the Internet's media market

• make it effortless to generate content that can be used as media in the market

• make cursory detail a thing of the past so you can focus your time on creating or consuming – you guessed it – more media

And no code tools make it all the more easy to throw things together. An idea can become a first-to-strike business in the span of a week.

So with how ubiquitous this AI stuff is bound to get, it really can’t hurt to improve your media literacy skills. I fully expect AI to be Trojan horsing around thanks to the help of no code tools that make it easier to go from idea to fully-functional product.

I also expect people to continue chasing some of that everlasting relevance. The next Tweet thread or blog post you come across is increasingly likely to have been put through the AI rinse cycle a few times in the hopes that it catches your attention.

I make a point to keep that to a minimum, so what you're getting from me here is artisanal, hand-crafted content put together with intention and with conscious thought. This way, I get to say things like "I vow to avoid writing about AI in the next edition of WTF No Code" and mean it.

I mean it.

🆗 Simple $%!#

My latest project update or feature release. That's it. That's the $%!#.

The Need

Multiple Instagram posts scheduled to be published daily.

The Stack

• Airtable

• Make

• OpenAI

• Placid

The Result (ELI5)

I adapted my existing social media scheduling stack so that it supports Instagram alongside Twitter and let the regular workflow run as-is:

1. harvest content (in this case podcasts on Apple Podcasts or Spotify)

2. approve select content and assign it a scheduled date

3. pull in images and AI-generated summaries to fit within character counts, etc.

4. create custom images via Placid and stage for publishing in Airtable

5. daily Make scenario checks specific view in Airtable at set intervals, publishes eligible content

Instagram's API is somewhat restrictive in that it won't let you outright schedule posts so that's why I'm using Airtable to stage content for publishing.

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The Extended Version

With Twitter and Instagram posts crossed of the list, my impulsive thoughts take me to video content and getting things setup for stories and reels, and hey – maybe even TikTok.

Got ideas on how to pull that off? Let me know in a reply to this email!

🌶 Spicy Takes

This gets your attention today but won't mean much in a few months.

There's a revolving door to this narrative but like any revolution, this trend isn't going to take us backwards.

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This chart shows that since the start of the pandemic, a staggering number of people have filed a business application in the US and that number seems to have normalized at nearly twice the historic rate. Whether that leads to functionally operating business is another thing but there's a signal to be synthesized nonetheless.

Slowly but surely, people will find that returns of employer-based work are diminishing and hard-lined policies around things like remote work are ultimately a deal-breaker.

I'm not sure what horse is the right one to bet on, but there does seem to be some pressure on major cities to adapt to a new normal. Here's a good and albeit slightly alarmist read on how things are shaping up in the US.

Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities

To survive the work-from-home revolution, cities must let developers convert office buildings into deeply weird apartments.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/remote-work-is-poised-to-devastate-americas-cities.html

Who knows? Maybe this megalomaniac was onto something with WeWorkLive.

🌶🌶🌶(out of 5)

🎲 Dicey Makes

Every one deserves some criticism. I'll share some unsolicited feedback in a sentence or two and I'll try to keep it constructive.

On the docket today is @NOScode which we'll file under Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should.

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Twitter's API offers powerful search functionality but that can easily be exploited to spam people. Even if it comes across as being informative, it's still spam.

Bots and Elon's bullshit aside, there's not a whole lot to be gained when you do this, so for the love of all things natural and wondrous, don't.