This Week in Startups - E1148: Apps Without Code Founder & CEO Tara Reed teaches aspiring entrepreneurs how to bootstrap startups to profitability

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Check out Apps Without Code: https://www.appswithoutcode.com FOLLOW Tara: https://twitter.com/TaraReed_ FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Get $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn. com slash twist and Roman. Erectile dysfunction used to be tough to talk about, but now there's Roman. Go to get Roman.com slash twist and get $15 off your first order of ED treatment, a free online visit, and free two-day shipping. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakanis. And if you are sitting there wondering, if you could be a founder,

If you can be an entrepreneur, you can. You need to have a small number of things in order to make this work. You need to be a developer. Nope, not anymore. You don't need to be a developer anymore. You used to need to be a developer. Now we have something called no code. And we have people building no code startups.

What is a no code startup? It's in the name. You don't have to write code. There are a bunch of platforms now where you can build an MVP, minimum viable product in the lean startup mode with tools like bubble, or Slack or Notion plus Airtable plus a CRM system like Zendesst, etc. And there's little pieces of glue called APIs. And you can use tools like Zapier, which makes you happier.

And you can connect all these disparate, disparate tools to make things happen. And this little revolution going on, the no code revolution, is going on in parallel to the indie hackers movement. and to the bootstrapping movement and people who are working on a global basis, working from home to build companies. And some of these are lifestyle businesses. Some of these are extraordinary lifestyle businesses that take people from making a salary to making generational wealth.

Let's call it what it is, millions of dollars a year. And we recently had Cortland Island on the podcast. If you didn't listen to that episode, it was episode 1,143. Yes, we've done over 1,000 episodes. boy, am I tired? No, I'm not. I love doing this. I do it three times a week, and I've been doing so for a decade, and I love doing it. It's a privilege to be here with you. And when we had Cortland Allen from Indy Hackers on, he talked about all the different examples of people who were making a living, just building their own little startups. And then he mentioned one that I thought was really

interesting. It was called Apps Without Code.com. Apps Without Code. And I said, wow, this is a great idea, teaching people how to build no-code startups. I've been looking for something like that so that I could tell people, go here if you're looking to learn about a no-code startup. So we reached out to the founder, Tara Reid, and she's going to join us today to tell our audience what she's building, how she got it to $5 million in revenue, what she learned from her last startup and working at Microsoft and Forsewear in the past, and how you too can become CEO of your own bootstrap company. Welcome to this week in startups, Tara Reid. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Cortland blew you up on the episode as like an example. You must have had a bunch of DMs and text and emails come in when that happened. Yeah, and he sent me a heads up too. And he said, I mentioned you on the podcast. So yes. So you've been in the tech industry for looks like almost, I guess, your whole career, 10 years or so. Yeah. Yeah.

And you worked at Google as a business analyst, acquisition marketing at 4Square. to be a product marketing manager at Microsoft before starting a startup called Collecto. Yeah, that's right, Collector. Yeah, that's right. And then you went on to build apps without code. So it looks to me just looking at your resume that you came into the industry and, you know, like a, I wouldn't say an entry-level position, but a, you know, a starter position, business analyst. I don't know what that does at Google offers, but I think it's like you dial for offers.

Is that right? Yeah, it was more so that I was doing a lot of forecasting for where we should be doing offers. Essentially, Google had tried to buy Groupon. The deal didn't go through. And so they were like, we're going to build our own. And so it was a Groupon competitor and was forecasting where we should be building deals and building all sorts of dashboards. It's actually where I started a lot of the seeds were planted for me for a lot of the no-code stuff I would do later. No-code didn't exist at the time.

But I was doing a lot of modeling and creating these dashboards in Excel. which turned out to be really helpful skill sets just in the logic, the if this, then that, that you have to know how to do for no code. Yeah, that kind of scripting, light, you know... Right. Scripting and being good at Excel, man, you could become a real business asset for any startup.

There's like one person who has mastered Excel in every startup and they just can do things a hundred times faster than everybody else. Yeah, kind of that nerd. Yeah. You're that nerd. but it does give you the ability to kind of understand this no-code space. So tell us why you're so excited about no-code and what the implication is for entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

Yeah. So I've been doing no-code since 2014 when I started my first startup. This was before we were calling it no-code. It didn't have a name back then really. Maybe we're calling it visual programming back then. To me, no-code is so exciting because... it opens up the doors, not just for people who are like the traditional makers, right, the traditional people who are going to be hacking.

I think it's exciting for them too. But to me, it's exciting for people to see people who have industry expertise in a totally different industry, right? They know about education. They know about health care. They know about manufacturing. And they see a really clear gap in the market that Silicon Valley is probably not excited about filling or doesn't know how to fill.

And they're able to then create their own tech-enabled. companies to fill those gaps in non-sexy industries. To me, that's the most exciting part about no code. Yeah. And when we say it's accessible to a larger group of people, what is the skill set that's required to build a company without code? What is the basic table stakes? Because we know for a developer, computer science, maybe math, logic, this ability to focus and basically learn new languages is the prerequisite feels like low single digits of humans elect to do that. And based on people I've talked to, people believe, you know, 10 or 20 percent of people have the aptitude, I don't know if I believe this or not, to become, you know, proficient coders,

just like certain people have the aptitude to be really good at design or something or music. Yeah. So if you buy into that, which not everybody does, what do you think this sort of table stakes is, what do you need to come to the table with or what's helpful if you already know? Or can anybody do it? You have a high school education and you know how to use email. Are you qualified? Yeah. For the most part, anyone can do it.

I would say that you have to have a relative level of comfortability with technology. So like if email is really hard, for example, then like no code app building is going to be hard, right? But I think that also having some sort of proximity to logic is the thing that makes it easier or harder for people. So, for example, and it doesn't have to be like computer programming logic. It could be that you have a job as a project manager or you have, like, we find a lot of people in health care where doctors are really good at this. or you have some sort of job where it's a logical oriented role, right? That is really, like, translates really well. And that's a lot of roles.

I do find that there are some sort of career professions that people have had where they aren't doing logic in that same kind of way. Maybe you're an artist, right? And it's a different kind of thing you have to turn on in your brain because you still have to think like an engineer. You still have to think if this happens, then this happens. and if this doesn't happen, then this should happen. And thinking that through, thinking like an engineer is actually the biggest challenge of no code for people who have never done it before.

Got it. And you created an offering for people. It's, I believe, $1,900 for the course. Yeah. What is the online course? What do people get out of it? Who takes it? Yeah, that's right.

So I launched this course and apps without code as a company as a whole on accident. So I launched it because I was building my first company and I had done a TEDx talk on my personal process, building apps without code and building the first version of my first company, which is Collecto. We built this system that matches people to artwork based on their taste. And so we were using, right, at the very, very first version of this, this is before a lot of the existing no-code platforms were out there. The very first version, I took a survey. I think we used survey gizmo. and we loaded it up with artwork and we had like show hide logic. So if you had a, if you liked photography, then it would show the photography and hide everything

else. Or if you liked photography and liked black and white photography and had a budget of $1,000 and below, it would show that and hide everything else, right? And so that was the MVP, the very first version. And I had done a TEDx talk on how I had put together the product. By that time, we had taken that MVP, we made 30. $35,000 in revenue with that MVP, took it to 500 startups, got an investment from 500 startups and went through the accelerator program. And so we had by that time moved on to more

complex no-code tools. We weren't still hacking together a survey, but we're still doing it with no code. And so I did this TED talk on how I had done it. And all of a sudden I had just a ton of emails of people asking me, hey, can you teach me how to do the same thing? I have an idea too. I have no idea how to build it. I don't have $20,000 to hire a developer. I don't really trust myself to communicate what I need to the developer and for them to really understand it and us to have an efficient working process. I don't have a technical co-founder. Don't really like trust someone yet to be a 50-50 partner with me. Like, what do I do?

Right? I was getting a lot of those emails. And I at first was kind of irritated because I was like, I'm trying to run my own company. I don't have time to do this. But I decided I was going to help five people. And so I helped five people. I like randomly decided it was going to. to be $900 and helped them get their apps launched. And then I opened it up again and there

were 70 people. And I was like, oh, wow, I think this might be its own thing. This is the whole business. And so fast forward to now, you know, we're running an online school teaching people how to build their own apps. All right. When we get back from this break, I want to understand how the course has developed. And maybe you can give us some examples of people who've graduated what they learned and then what they put into practice and what the outcomes were because ultimately if you're running a school and an online course, the outcomes are what matter when we get back with Tara Reid from apps without code on this week of service.

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just say thanks Squarespace. Thanks at Squarespace for supporting at TWA startup. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in startups. Our guest is Tara Reid. She is on the Twitter, T-A-R-A-R-E-D. I think underscore at the end. Yeah, underscore at the end. Some other Tara Reid got it.

There's an actress named Tara Reid. There is an actress. I thought she would be totally irrelevant by now, but she keeps surfacing. She's a train wreck, right? That's like basically she's known as being a complete disaster. So My mother didn't know it's not her fault. In an alternate universe, you've got all of your stuff together. You've built a $5 million business, I believe, without any investment? Or did you take investment for action?

No, we've not taken any investment. So you own 100% of the business. I do. You have thousands of people taking the course a year. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. How many weeks is the course? What do people learn in the course?

Yeah, so it's an eight-week program. and we are learning two categories of things. So the first is, of course, at building how you actually build this product. But the other half of what we're learning is around marketing and talking to customers and getting your first sales and also validation for what you're going to build. And so we have to do half and half really of both. The no code piece is actually not the hardest piece. The actual building of a business around it is actually go figure the hardest piece, right?

It's a surprise for, I think, a lot of people that are thinking, oh, I just will build something and they'll come. We know that it doesn't work that way. And so we're doing a lot of teaching of business fundamentals, too. So you ask sort of about structure. The way that the program works is you go through like freshman, sophomore, junior, senior stages. We go from that way. And so you have live classes with instructor. We have live classes on Zoom.

And then there's homework for you to do in between that you do self-paced. So you go back and forth. between those two different styles. And is it full-time? Is it at night? Is it work while you can? How do you think about that? Because a lot of people who want to do this,

they probably are aspirational. They may have a job right now. Maybe they've got kids or a mortgage payment. Who's coming into this? Is it a bunch of millennials? Or is it, you know, Gen Xers who are, you know, 35 or 55 years old and looking to maybe not be a wage slave anymore

and get out of the corporate grind and be their own boss? Who applies to this and then is it 9 to 5 or is it on your own schedule? Some millennials, but actually mainly Gen Xers. I think usually people, when they hear apps without code, they think it's going to be like all millennials building the next Uber or trying to build something like that. It's actually not. So it's mainly people who have subject matter expertise in a particular industry, right?

As I mentioned before, maybe they've been in education, they've been in healthcare, they've been in manufacturing and they see a really clear gap that they want to fill. So they've had careers and they are looking to switch out and to work, either have a side hustle that brings in good income so they can make a decision on if they want to continue their job or they're completely fed up with, you know, working for the man and they're ready to do something else. Right. Yeah. And so what are the, did you mention if they're going full time? Like do you do live courses or is it watching videos? Yeah.

So what because of that, because most people are in. a nine to five job. It is not a full-time program. So all of our classes are on evenings or on weekends. You can choose the time slots that you want. And I really built this around my own journey because when I launched my first company, I was working full-time at Microsoft. And so I didn't have the luxury being able to leave everything I was doing first and go full-time on entrepreneurship. I just didn't even have the cash to do that. And so the majority of our students also were in that same position. So they're working as well as launching their company. For those folks, make sure you watch our discussion about IP assignment.

Don't use your work computer. Don't work, do it during work. And then you're going to have to get it after, do it on your weekends. And then at some point tell your boss you're working on a side hustle so that they don't fire you or try to claim it's theirs, right? I mean, it can happen. That's absolutely right. We have to have this discussion too. You do have that discussion.

Yeah, and go look at the contract to see what you signed. most people are unclear on if they've signed something that says that they can't work on anything externally. They don't really know what they signed. Yeah. And they don't, yeah, because these things are so complicated. They're 20 pages long. There are tons of details.

And a lot of things are open for discussion. Like, is this competitive? Well, if you work at Microsoft and you made this art project, somebody might say, oh, you know, we're doing something like that art project at Bing in the image search. Like, how would you even know in a giant company if there is something competitive? If you don't even know, so you've got to basically protect yourself and, you know, be honest with your boss is my best advice. Yeah, that's right.

So how many people work at Apps Without Code now? And what's the big vision here? Because, you know, getting to $5 million in revenue is something we see one out of, you know, 25 or maybe one out of 15 of our investments get to, you know, that hurdle. Yeah. And here you are. You've done it without investment. How are you thinking about this business?

Do you see a path for it to get to 50 million? or 500 million in revenue? Or do you think this is, you know, a business that's best if it's, you know, sort of more bespoke and, you know, at the $10 to $20 million level and you just sweep all that cash every year? Yeah. So I have a, it's funny because my answer is changed over the years. If you would have asked me this a couple years ago, I wouldn't have even said $5 million.

So as we progress, my vision for it grows as well. I see this as a $50 million year company. And I specifically think that there's a couple things that we've done well that will get it there. If we continue to do, we'll get it there. The first one is around community, right? Like, you know, you were talking to Cortland a couple episodes ago, right? Like, community-based businesses are making huge differences now in that you've got your tribe. For us, we've really got and done a really good job creating and cultivating a tribe.

and it turned out that the tribe was not the hashtag no code Twitter audience. Right. The hashtag no code Twitter audience already has, I call them like tech adjacent. They're already like sort of in the tech space or they know someone in the tech space. They're fascinated by the concept of no code. Yes. But they're already fans of tech. They're in the industry.

You've got a group of people who are outside the industry who are looking to build businesses. And they want to get in. And they want to get in to the tech. And so. How do you manifest those, that community? Do you do something like a Slack instance or something? How are you manifest in your world? Discord or something? So in, for our students, we have a really awesome Facebook group for all of our students. It's really exciting and lively. But I think some of it is our strategic use of faces of the brand. When we started, it was just me. And I think that there was something that was important about me putting myself out there because what it did was, it, I

if people are listening on the podcast, like, I am a black woman with dreadlocks, right? And so I think people, I got so many at the beginning emails of people saying, like, I've never even seen someone who, I don't know any women who are building apps, definitely not that are non-technical building apps. I don't know any people of color who are doing this. And so that actually really started helping us create a tribe of people who, we call them underdogs. The funny thing about underdogs is like everybody considers himself an underdogs. I consider myself an underdog for a long time and then somebody was like, hey, you're a white male who was born in Brooklyn.

Like, you're starting on second base. I was like, feels like I'm starting in the dugout. I feel like I'm in the parking lot. Your struggle is not exactly the same as everybody else's. But that's okay, right? Because everybody's got a different variance of what their exact struggle was. But I think that there are some commonalities

around what underdogs experience. Not everybody feels like an underdog. There are some people who don't feel like they're an underdog. But there's some people who don't feel like they're an underdog. But, you know, there's some commonalities, right? And I think that one of them is around mindset and doing the mindset work of realizing that things are possible for you. And we frankly, we have to do a lot of mindset work in our programs because we have a lot of people, myself included, right? Like,

there's stuff you inherit from your parents even about what you can and can't do, from your grandparents that you can and can't do. And so we know that we have to address that for our students because you have not been a developer in this industry for years and years. You're not coming in with the confidence of just like, let me pitch my startup. And it's great even though I'm still working on it. There's so much imposter syndrome. And so I think because from a brand perspective, we speak to that. It's mainly via video that we speak to that.

I think that it creates an awesome tribe of people who are tech outsiders, which then just grows the pie of who's able to do this. It's such a really interesting point that you bring up because, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the knowledge of how to build businesses has never been more available at free to no cost. I mean, you're charging 1900 for this. Let's be honest, this information is available out there free. You've made a course and you've made a community, but this information on how to build businesses in 2020 is everywhere. And just 20 years ago, it was locked.

up and nobody knew what a term sheet was. Nobody knew how to incorporate. Nobody knew how to raise money. Nobody knew how hiring best practices. And now there's a million books on it. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about motivation. And you talked about this. And so you brought it up. So now it's on the table. I want to talk about why do so many people feel like they can't do it when we both agree that it's never been more open. And we still have a problem with diversity in the space, even though the space feels for, you know, that all the information is out there waiting for people just to grab it and to take this opportunity when we get back on this week and serves with Tara Reid.

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But that's for your first job posting. $50. It's on me. It's on LinkedIn. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Welcome back. We have Tara Reid on the program.

No, not that one. we've got the one apps without code.com. Someday, I'm sure Tara Reid will do a startup and we'll have her on to the other Terry. Oh, no, don't say that.

And then people will do a search. Tara Reid, this is it start a house. It'll be like, Tara Reid's crazy app and then actually apps without code. We get a lot of celebrities, like, especially like the B and C level former celebrities who get like attached

to something like a cryptocurrency and then they email us and like, hey, this like washed up celebrity who is like doing a cryptocurrency, Would you like to have this person on? I'm like, are you crazy? Like, no, we don't want to have that person on the podcast. We're here to talk about real stuff.

So in that spirit of real stuff, yeah. Listen, you know, we don't see diversity at the levels we want to. It's gotten a lot better, I will say, you know, just anecdotally from running an accelerator over the last four or five years, the number of applicants who are women, who are women of color, has skyrocketed. So I feel great about that. I don't know if I'm supposed to feel great about it or if I'm supposed to be, you know, super woke and like upset and social justice where that.

It's not where it needs to be. But I've seen massive change. Have you seen massive change in the industry? And then do people of color, do women feel welcome in tech yet? And do they feel like they can do this? Or do they feel like, you know, they're not wanted and we'd rather you guys not be here, you know, in terms of, you know, when you have real conversations with black women, you know, when, let's say, white venture capitalists aren't in the room.

Yeah. Yeah. What's the real talk? I think that the real talk is around creating your own playbook. I think that a lot of my friends and also my students who are people of color view the traditional route of startups, the route of like, you've got to go to an accelerator, then you've got to raise VC, that that route, there's two options. either they are, they feel unwelcome there.

So the conversation is either how do I fit myself into that? Or I think the conversation more so with my peers is how do we create our own playbook. So for me, I had an experience with my first company where we went through an accelerator program and had the experience of raising from some investors. We didn't raise a lot. We raised like $300,000. And that was mainly because I was so uninterested in that game. with investors. It's funny too now because the more I say no to like I don't I'm going to hold off. I don't really know what we have yet in this new company with investors the more they're interested, right? So it kind of works that way. But the, I definitely felt somewhat unwelcome and or a little bit uncomfortable. I think that that was due to a lot of things, right? Some of it was like my own just imposter syndromes or some of it I created and some of it was just based on me react. to my experience in a space, right?

Who's around me? And so for me, that just meant that I was like, let me not be obsessed with that in a place where I don't. Like, let me just create my own thing. Let me create my own setup where I have a business model that doesn't have to have venture, where I don't have to be aligned to the tech industry. And I actually found that that did a lot of good for my business.

There was a period of a couple years where I really, when I first started Apps for that Code and my first company, collecto. I was very involved in the tech scene of doing a lot of speaking engagements and podcasts and all of that. I pulled back for two years on that a lot because I just wanted to go heads down and work on my P&L and growing the business and helping my students. And I wanted to align myself with other almost like tech outlier groups, the online course communities, the e-commerce community, just these other non-VC-backed tech communities because they were doing things differently. They were thinking about how do we grow our businesses without having to have investors.

How do we have diverse communities? And so for me, finding my own niche communities was made a big difference. Very interesting. And if I unpack it a little bit, when you go into the machine, the venture industrial complex as a black woman, there's two things going on, if I'm reading correctly into your description of it. And this was a couple of years ago, but it's still super valid. and maybe it's changed a bit. But you yourself are saying, hey, I'm different than everybody here.

I feel different. And that's in your head. And then I'm guessing people are treating you different because you're the only black woman in the room or one of two black people in the room. And it creates and people are uncomfortable to talk about race. But when people are a very small number of people, a minority of the people in the room in the lowercase minority sense of the word, not the societal sense of the word, but just the, you're, there's not as many of you there.

And maybe there's a ton of Indian people. Maybe there's a ton of Asian people. And all of a sudden you feel out of place and it gets in your head a little bit of like, hey, am I, am I supposed to be here or not? Yeah. And it's, it's incumbent on the people who are running these programs to really get that diversity going without it feeling like, oh, there's, there's one token black woman in the class, right?

Yeah. And what you're describing is, hey, this is a whole other group of people who are the majority of the people in the room and they're focused on this. it's your own tribe. And it feels, it feels, to me, like it feels better to you to be in this group as opposed to that group and trying to force yourself to kind of play the game on the rules of the venture industrial complex. I'm like, correct? Yeah, that's right. I think in general, one of the themes in my career has been to to zig when they zag. So if I'm not, and it took me a while to get to the level of confidence to be comfortable doing this. But my sort of general

philosophy has just been, if I'm feeling not welcome or uncomfortable, like, I'll just go somewhere else and do my thing somewhere else. I know a lot of people don't feel confident just saying that. For me, that's sort of just comfortable my own entrepreneurial skin that, like, I'm going to I'm going to crush it regardless. And if I need to, like, create my own communities and sub-communities to do that, like, I'll do it. So that's just sort of my personal approach. I don't spend that much time thinking about it, though. Because it's also, it's like, it's energy draining to be immersed in like, am I welcome? Do they want me?

Like, I, it is counterproductive for me as an entrepreneur to be all immersed in that. Yeah. It's interesting when you, when you're a white male, I'm just thinking about my experience in the industry. Yeah, yeah. Coming into it, I always felt welcome. I always felt like people were rooting for me, wanted me to be a thing. I'm a social butterfly, whatever.

I'm a good hang. But, you know, I think my experience was completely the opposite. Like, it was like, you're supposed to be here. By all means, like table of two, table of ten. We're ready for you. Yes. You know, and I didn't go to MIT like Cortland or other folks or Stanford, like my friends, like Sacks or whatever.

Like, but even without that, I felt welcome. And it really is interesting to think about some number of your cycles on your process or having to go to maintain. you know, this, whether it's imposter syndrome or am I being, am I just like the token person in this room and they needed to have one black founders or they just pick me and like, or how do people perceive me? All of this is like overhead, right? It's cognitive overhead.

Yeah. That's not being focused on your business. Yeah. That's right. That's right. I think it's mainly the imposter syndrome piece, though. Yeah. Because this is something that I spend a lot of time on with my students who in some way often

have imposter syndrome just by being underdogs, even if they are not women or they're not people of color, they are trying to do a coding thing with no code, right? So they already feel like underdogs. That's already like its own little, you know, oh, we can dismiss that. It's not real coders, right? They didn't go to MIT or they're not like Stanford people. They're not coders. They're not computer science background. They're doing no code. But the truth is, no code means you're so much more efficient. You can be nimble with no code. You can be fast. You can test more. And I don't know if you've read the new Netflix book, the no rules rules. It will resonate with you because they talk about people just being able to make bets. And obviously a large number of those bets are going to fail,

but you know, you focus on the winners and you sunset the losers. If you're doing no code, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're going to be able to move faster and test more things without burning through tons of money, then you don't need to be on the venture industrial complex treadmill where you need another $3 million to test another 10 things for $300,000 each and none of them work or two of them work. You can test things for $3,000 each, right? Yeah, the we need to raise $3 million conversation is not the one that I'm having of my students.

If we're talking about raising, we're talking about 100K max of what people are looking for. And usually, actually did a workshop with people of my audience. yesterday and I asked them like if you guys are thinking about getting money how much are you thinking about and the not the answers were like 20,000 dollars, 10,000 dollars, 30,000, right? And so if that's, but that's what they actually need, right? And so because of that, then we often start talking about other ways of getting funding that are not VC because it just doesn't even make sense if that's how much money you need to even go that route. Like let's talk about other options. Let's talk about

crowdfunding. Let's talk about other things. Yeah, friends and family around. If you, if you've got friends You've got an aunt or an uncle or a brother who can put in 10K or you get past that or even, you know, I use credit cards for my first one. When we get back from this quick break, want to talk about people who've graduated. And if you have any signs of success, we've been, I've teased us twice now. We haven't gotten to it. Yeah, okay. There's so much other good stuff to talk about. But I want to know what some of the outcomes have been.

It's early days. But I wonder if you've had any really interesting businesses come out of apps without code. And you can check out apps without code at apps. Apps without code.com. There you go. All right. We'll be right back with Terry Reid. It is super awkward and embarrassing to talk about erectile dysfunction ED. We usually just brush it off or maybe we blame ourselves. But Roman is here to get the advice you want and help you with your needs, with no shame. With Roman, you can get a free online evaluation and ongoing care for ED from the comfort and privacy of your own home.

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Welcome back to this week in startups. Our guest is Tara Reid. T-A-R-E-D underscore on the Twitter. I don't know if she's active on the Twitter. active on the Twitter? I am. And what do you think of Twitter in relation to the tech industry and

like as a tool as a place to converse about stuff? I've gotten into it. Yeah. I personally like Twitter, but it is... 20,000 followers and you're only following 67. You've got a strong Twitter game. Thank you.

I try not to follow that many people so I can not be distracted by... Oh my God, I'm of the 67. Look at that. You are. Yeah. There you go.

I like Twitter. I often encourage my students to go get on Twitter because they're usually not because it's a good place to go be next to the people who are in tech and tech adjacent. That's where they are. Is sort of how I explain it to them. But I think that I only go to Twitter when I'm trying to be in that world. And then when I want other perspectives, I get off of Twitter. You do get a better, yes, perspective off of Twitter. And so let's talk about graduates and people who've, you know, success stories, etc.

How do people define success coming out of the program? Is it that they've built their own side hustle, that they built a full-blown business, a project, or maybe they got a better job because these skills obviously work inside of enterprises as well, right? If you were the, you know, micro-entrepreneur who can make microsites and, you know, pop-up little projects, you're very valuable in a company, right? I mean, we all have like one or two people in our companies who can do that who can set up a square space site and put up a Zen desk and, you know. That's exactly right.

Yeah. So there are two things that we're looking at for success. One is that you got a completed product, an app built and launched. And then two is that you're generating some revenue from it. And so those are the two main things that we're looking at. Although we actually were just talking about this inside a team. We have 18 people on our team now. we were just talking about, we have a Slack channel of student wins, and we do see student wins in there that are like, actually, I ended up getting a promotion at work because I showed all these new skill sets. And I came up with, I proposed an idea to my team that a product we can build to automate something in house. And they were so impressed that I got a promotion. So we are seeing that. I'm wondering if we should track that in a more robust way about the promotions too. That was not an intended focus, though. Really, the intention.

focus was around entrepreneurship and launching your own business. So examples of things that people are building, because this is my favorite part of it, are usually people are building ideas in non-sexy industries. I'll give you some examples. I have an alum who had a ton of experience in manufacturing in the Midwest, and he told me, I didn't know this, but the assembly lines in Chicago, Detroit, they're still tracking everything with pen paper and a clipboard. Like, yep, that's done. Check. Yep, that's done. But everybody's got a phone in their pocket.

And he's like, this is so dumb. So he built an app for manufacturing companies to track their process of what's completed, what's not, so that headquarters can see when the process is moving a little bit too slowly, when a machines may be about to break down because of time lags. So they can see that real time. So like a checklist kind of app. It's more or less like a simple. Yeah.

Yeah, a checklist with analytics to be able to see. And then people can sort of log their each individual parts of the process. right and this is probably done on paper before or an email or some unstructured data he probably built it in two weeks yeah they're doing it on paper now they're doing it on paper so so he his first customer was Coca-Cola who licensed this what right so my one of the things of the directions that I often will direct my students into is the concept of white labeling because for many of them going after like a consumer business means that they need a lot of customers they have to be really good marketers and it

means that there's a long lag of time between starting and having enough money to pay your bills. I always say, like, you need a lot of 99 cents to pay your bills if you want to do the math. You are welcome to do it. Yes. So instead... And it winds up being 70 cents after you give Apple their cut. Right, right. So we have a no 99 cent app rule, right?

Yeah. And then we talk about the concept of white labeling. There are other ways that other students do it. But a lot of them will white label their products and go get a handful of customers. who are paying anywhere from $5,000, maybe something even down to $3,000 all the way up to like $20,000 plus a year for access to it. And if you just made something and started something

and you already have industry expertise, so you have people maybe on your LinkedIn that you can contact to start, you know, some deals, to get some first customers. And it took you a couple weeks, maybe four weeks to build this, five weeks to build this because you're doing it for the first time. and you then spent a couple more weeks actually starting to land the customers, and you land a couple $5,000 deals, a couple $20,000 deals. That's huge.

Yeah, you're in business. You can keep working on it. You've got signs of life, right? You have signs of life. The brilliance of this is, you know, when you have this service revenue, you still own the code base, you still have that optionality of making a consumer business. So if the checklist product, you know, at Coca-Cola winds up, you know, becoming the next to-doist or whatever, you know, workflow program. You know, you still have that option, right? Yeah, that's right. And you have all those learnings too.

Yes, that data from the customers as well. Yeah, that's that great. Another example of that would be like I have another alumni who he's a music teacher. And so he travels to middle schools and high schools to do after school music lessons. And he could only be in so many places at once. So he built a platform where you can like, drag and drop elements of songs. You can compose songs together.

There's like assignments who sort of gamified it, almost like a video game for students. Teachers can go in and give grades. And what it does is it allows schools who maybe have had their arts budgets cut or they can't have like a whole music program to then still teach music from like a regular teacher who doesn't necessarily have that skill set.

And he has 23 schools in Virginia that are white labeling this from him. Amazing. Wow. So you must be, thinking about how this goes 10x from here. And is that an advanced course or a subscription fee to be part of the community, you know, of 50 bucks a month to be part of the community, you make 600 bucks a person. I think this membership communities are a big deal. How are you thinking about scaling this? Because people obviously, I teach a course, Angel University, which is only 100 bucks to charity for

accredited investors, but we don't do that to make money, but we have 300 people take it a month. and they all want to do something down the road. They want to keep it going. Yeah. Nope, we're done. I did an hour of Q&A. Four hours. We're done.

You have to go home now. And they're like, no, I want to hang out. I'm like, yeah, you can, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. You got to go. Yeah, for years, I've been saying that same thing, right? We've had one flagship program and I had to intentionally be focused. So I was like, sorry, I don't have anything else. In 2021, I think you're going to see a lot of expansion.

of offerings that we have. And I'm thinking a little bit differently more about this concept of a, I'm still playing around the wording, but this concept of like a school for generational wealth, right? And I personally think that entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship and investing,

right, are the ways that you get to creating some sort of generational wealth, right? That's all about equity. Yeah, it is very unlikely that you will do it with a job, I guess, That's the way I'll say it. It is literally impossible to do the job.

Because, I mean, it's capped, right? I mean, unless you have some kind of profit sharing, like at a venture firm where you get some equity in it, like, if you don't have equity, you don't have equity. That's just basically. That's right. That's right. But that's really a rolling of the dice. So for me, I look at the fact that traditional universities are going to teach you about

mainly how to get a job and work for someone else. And where do you go to learn about entrepreneurship and investing, right? I do think that traditional universities are like starting to step up their game on teaching some of those other things, but that's not why most people are going there. Yeah. I mean, people who are going there are just been totally, I think people, you're a millennial, I take it? I am, yes. I mean, your generation seems to have been absolutely hoodwinked into thinking that spending $100,000 or $200,000 on a degree will work out. And it almost never does.

And I understand why a lot of people in your generation are like, we need to move to socialism. And Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are super compelling to millennials because, well, if I got screwed out of $100,000 or $200,000 and been told, this liberal arts degree or whatever you got in social science is going to get you a job that could potentially pay back a $200,000 mortgage, basically. I mean, it's crazy, right? I mean, there's just a total disconnect between what they're selling.

and what you're going to get out of it. Whereas when your program, it's super direct and it's $1900. Right. That's right. So in general, I'm thinking about the school for generational wealth where we're not just, like, if you think about a traditional university where there's departments, right, the tech entrepreneurship or app entrepreneurship is just a department, but it is not the whole school, right?

You also, if you want to create some sort of wealth that you can pass on to the next generation want to be thinking about real estate, you want to be thinking about stock investment, You want to be thinking about other forms of entrepreneurship that you then sort of piece together. You want to be thinking about like insurance planning and all sorts of things like that. And so there's no place, particularly if I look at my peers, right, there's no place where we go to long that. There's no school. And so I'm thinking about the school. This is a bigger idea than your first idea.

It's such a great idea. I mean, just doing a class on wealth accumulation and being proud of that, you know, it's like you're this really weird. phenomenon, which is, you know, your generation is like wealth is bad. And you're sitting here saying, no, wealth is what we need to focus on. Wealth is, you know, the way for us to advance society. I mean, if you have the wealth and the means to invest and to build the world you want to see, money equals power. It's just that's it. That's it. And it's very uncomfortable for people to understand this, but money equals power, period. Yeah. And get the money. Secure. the bag. This is what I always tell people. If you want to change the world, get the money.

Because once you have money, people look at you different. Look at you with the $5 million revenue. I'm looking at this like, I've got to be in business with Tara. How do I get on the cap table here? All right, I got to invite her on the podcast. I got to connect with her on the podcast. Then I got to slide into her DMs on Twitter because she follows me on 67 people and say, hey, you know, it's a great podcast. How are you thinking about funding this company? Because I'm looking at it going, going to 10 X-Ex this from here. I honestly do. I think you're going to have a $50 million business in five or ten years. And I get like the little tingley feel like, whoa, $5 million in revenue.

That could 10x if she had a little bit of money to make to a $3 million. And have you seen when that $5 million numbers out there and you let that number out there, obviously, people have treated you completely different than the last startup, right? Investors, et cetera. Yes and no, right? I think I got way, because what I was doing in my first startup was like it was like sexier. Right. So it was, yeah, and it was like more novel.

I think when I started in No Code, No Code was not cool. No code only got cool this year, right? And so I've had to just be like called crazy for a while in order to get here. And I think it's good. We sort of emerged as a healthy company, right? So I had to go a couple years, heads down of like, I'm not going to do the tech press stuff. I'm not going to do that stuff because I'm going to go work on my profit margin. Right. So that has been a big difference in how sort of I've had response. Because I think just people don't really know about what I'm doing. I've been pretty heads down. Yeah. See, anytime I hear, I always ask people like, who's doing interesting stuff. And when Cortland was like, oh, Tara, it's like a perfect example. I was like, okay. I just start doing my research a lot. I was like, okay, this is legit. I agree with you. People don't appreciate the online learning space, the no code space to the degree they should.

And I think it's just a bias, not a bias of gender or race in this case. It's a bias of the novelty like you're saying and the sexiness of technology. It's not AI. It's not machine learning. It's not VR, AR, VTOLs, whatever. It doesn't have an acronym that, you know, is super sexy. But I mean, I don't know if you saw Teachable. Yeah.

Dot com got sold, I believe. And then the founder was saying they sold like tens of millions of courses in a day. Yes. Yes. And Masterclass is crushing it. Have you thought about ISAs? I just had some people who are doing like an ISA platform, income sharing agreements on the podcast.

We have two companies we've invested in that are doing this. Yeah. Have you thought about ISS? I mean, at $1900, it doesn't seem necessary, but... I haven't thought about it a lot. That's my honest answer. I haven't thought about it a lot. I know what it is.

I'm familiar. I haven't thought about it as a model press. Do you have an idea for a $10,000 course? That's like six months. That would be more like a boot camp, like leave your job and go to it? Or do you think that's... I think that's the next piece for you. I think it's for a different audience.

So I think that what we've done is we've got this. I actually have been deep in this since it's December. I'm doing planning for 2021. I've got this map laid out now of what the offerings are and where we go. I do think that there is a vertical expansion like I was talking about before. Like no code, and apps of that code is just like the first department we happen to start with. But I also think that we mainly work with people who are beginning and just entering the tech space and are working on getting from like that the plain point of like zero to

10K a month. That's the sweet spot where we're focused now. But there's a lot that happens after 10K a month. I know. That there is total room for building programs on. And for me, one of the things I think is really interesting is like dipping into different industries and coming up with my own mix. So I see this happening really well in the online education space or people who have courses and they do huge businesses that are more so like these $10,000 programs, I've done them. But I don't think that it gets pulled in with some of the tech industry approach. I think there's a really nice marriage between the two where one industry is like we don't get any funding and we don't have to move fast and it's all centered around a person and a person's brand. And the other side is like,

you have to go fast. You have to scale up. You can use. You can use. use external capital. Like there's a nice in-between of that that to me is a sweet spot I like for apps of that code. See, I love that because what happens is when you're, and listen, I, there's few people who have invested in more high growth as an angel startups than I have that have extreme velocity like Robin Hood or Uber or Com. Like I've seen this movie. But what people didn't see about those movies were there was a year one or year two where they were, just rock solid businesses. Uber was a rock solid small business in the beginning that was massively profitable.

Nobody knows that because they weren't around to see Travis launch and Garrett and everybody of Ryan. They just launched the black cars in each city. The black cars were massively profitable. They were pouring out cash from their 25% take. And the drivers loved them back then. It was only when UberX happened. and they sort of built a mid-tier offering and then Uber pool that people were like,

oh, it's grinding people because there were lower margins and obviously you can't pay as much. But there was a real rock-solid business in just being Lincoln Town Cars on a global basis. They could have built that business. It would have been a $10 billion business. It wouldn't be $80 billion, but it would be $10 billion for sure. And the same thing with Com. You know, Com just has always been this dipshit guy, Professor G, Prof G or whatever his name is Galloway. from NYU, he's like,

calm is a terrible business. And it's like, you are a moron. Like they are been profitable since I invested in them. I was the first major investor. They've been profitable since day one throwing off, I can't say, but when I say they've thrown off more, I think they,

I can't say, but they have thrown off so much money, it is ridiculous. Like they have been massively profitable at times. And they've only chosen at times to invest. And they were the number one app of the year by Apple. Not like number one in hell. number one overall.

Like, this is one of the most rock solid businesses. So you're right. But we don't like talking about rock solid businesses. It's so weird. Everybody is to, and then they just, they get on Uber about like losing money or postmates. And it's like,

it's called an investment. Like if you're scaling across the globe, like if you're losing a 50 cents or a dollar every time you deliver food, like that's really not that big of a deal. You think if you raise the price 50 cents or a dollar. What I love about your group of people is, you know, your bootstrappers, like gritty folks,

because they haven't had resources. Yeah. When they do get resources, they know how to handle it. Yeah. They look at that money and they don't go, oh, how do I get new area on chairs? How do I upgrade everybody's computer? And how do I blow it? They just say, okay, I'm a steward of this capital.

This is a privilege to have it. I'm going to deploy it intelligently. I know how to get it. They're not going to waste the money, right? The frugality is so important. Which is a great thing I think about underdog entrepreneurs. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I built my first magazine, I was literally, put on my credit cards and like I watched every single bill. I signed every check and then became a $10 million a year business and they're like, you're still signing every check. You don't need to do that. And I was so scared about money for my entire career that up until this last company, I signed every check. I'm having to do a lot of work on my relationship with money. I have a really phenomenal hypnotherapist. She's wonderful. When I say hypnotherapy, like I, one time

when I was in high school, we had like an assembly and there was like a hypnosis who came and like they did a weird thing and made people bark like a dog. That's not what I'm talking about. No, you're talking about that. And so really what it is is like the first part of the session is therapy. And the second part, we do like a guided meditation to like clear a limiting belief. Like her job is to help me remove limiting beliefs. And she works with all the executives on my team actually as well to just like help us get out of our own way.

And she specializes in like relationship with like money and achievement. Right. Because for me, what I have learned is that like 90% of. entrepreneurship is like personal work and getting out of your own way. Period. What did you have to get out of your way? What was in your way? I'm curious.

Okay. So like a year and a half ago, I'll give some examples. I was in this place where I was just like obsessively checking my sales dashboard. Like I would like refresh it and refresh it because I had this like fear that like, oh, we're doing well. I'm going to mess it up. Ah, yes. I was waiting.

I was waiting for like the P&L to like instantly like it was going to instantly crumble or something. You were being hypervigilant, right? And you were so scared of the boat turning over because you built this beautiful boat. I don't want it to capsize or anything, right? Yeah, but it's also not that productive. No. It's not that productive or healthy. That doesn't help.

Refreshing it doesn't help. We're talking to a customer helps, building a new landing page helps. There were plenty of other things I could go do. There would help. Yeah, that's right. So like that's an example because, I think at the time I was in this mindset of like, I can't spend anything. And so I wasn't like investing in the business the way that I could have been.

I wasn't investing in like my own coaching and growth in the way that I could have been. And I had friends who were investing in their own growth as executives and in their business and in advertising. And I was watching them skyrocket. And meanwhile, I was like holding on to all the all the pennies, right? There wasn't even that much that, you know, but still like holding on to everything. And so that's an example of something that I had to work through. There's a lot of like personal work I have to do around like imposter syndrome. Like, okay, today they release the Forbes 30 under 30 list, which I was on.

And I had like to thank you. The reason that was a win for me though was because I have for the past five years had people that I have known who've been on the list and they email me each time. I emailed them and said, hey, what was the process? how did this go? And they tell me about it. And they go, oh, you want me to nominate you? And I literally, I looked back a couple, like a few weeks ago. I looked back at those emails.

And I just like, I ghosted. I just didn't even respond because I had so much imposter syndrome that I couldn't even take to like, yeah, please nominate me. Right. The reason this was a win for me this year is because I finally emailed back and said, yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. And now you put it behind you and realize it's meaningless.

It's totally meaningless. The only meaning was that I actually, you know, stood up and, decided that I was worth it. So to me, like those, that's the real work of the stuff that comes up for me in entrepreneurship. Yeah, I deserve it. Yeah, like that I deserve it. The I deserve it part is the part. Of course I'm 30 under 30.

And then you realize like they're doing 70 lists and having done those lists when I was a magazine editor, we would literally pick people for the list knowing that it would make people upset. So we're like, you know, it's like when people talk about who the, you know, who's on Mount Rushmore of Angel investing or who's on Mount Rushmore of like basketball. And you're like, yeah, I don't put LeBron up there.

I put Kobe and you know, they're like, oh, Michael Jordan, Kobe. And you have this, like, crazy debate and it's just to get ratings. Yeah. Just to get ratings and get inbound links and people tweet it. When you realize it's just part of the, you know, media, clickstream industrial complex, the other industrial complex, you're like, eh, you know, what does it matter? But it is nice that you let yourself have the win, right? Let yourself be celebrated.

Yeah, I think that's exactly what it is, right? Or let my, I think that there's a direct correlation between, let, let, you know, letting myself be nominated and letting myself see what I'm doing as a $50 million year company. I see it. That's so clear to me. Those are directly. They're the same. Same.

It was the same click. Same issue. It was the same click that like, oh, yeah. And this is the part around sort of like imposter syndrome around like, yes, I can do it that that I've to spend a lot of time with my students on. I'm doing, and I share like, I'm going through my own version of this. I'm just a couple steps ahead. But like, here's what you've got to get through.

because the challenge, now that the barriers are lowered, right, now that you can do it without code, the internet's here, you can just like very easily get out to customers. There's Twitter. There's like all these things. Now the barrier is low. It's really just you and you getting out of your own motivation, right? Like that is scary for people. Because once you say to people, listen, the opportunity is there, will you take it? Will you put the work in? Like, that is scary for society to confront because then it's like, oh, it really is about the individual. And you're an individual who is like actually reprogramming your operating. So you're like, oh, I have a limiter.

Oh, somebody put a speed limiter on my car. Like the Tesla you can put a speed limit. I had to put it on my car because I can't take it. And I can just remove it. And you're like, oh, I can change it. That's in the settings. Oh, fuck, man, I'm going to change it. I'm going to be able to let myself go to 50 million.

I can tell you, zero to five is a lot harder than five to 50. Yeah. Five to 50 is just scaling it up, infrastructure, you know, and planning like you're doing. You know, you've got product market fit. Now it's just a matter of planning. Listen, Tara, I could talk to you for hours. And we have. We've talked for over an hour.

It's great. It's really great to get to know you. I hope to continue the conversation. If you ever raise money, I think everybody's looking at this business going, this is going to be huge. So congratulations on that. You know how to reach me if you do.

Love to get the syndicate involved if you're doing around. And if you are an individual who wants to have generational wealth, who wants to have control of their destiny, who wants to rise above the unfair nature of our society, the imperfect nature of our society, all the things, self-limiting beliefs, etc.

You can do it. Just go to Apps WithoutCode.com and get started. What are you waiting for? It's $1,900 bucks. I mean, if you're like going out to dinner like once a month and having a couple of cocktails, it's the same amount of money.

So just like for one year, buckle down and don't go out for cocktails, one less time a month, which, and do it. Like, go get it. All right, listen, great to have you on the pod, everybody. Go check out apps without code. And follow Tara Reid underscore on the Twitter. All right, we'll talk to you soon.

See you next time. Bye bye.