Tara Reed left a job at a big tech company to launch her own apps, websites and startups. But believe it or not, she wasn’t techie.
When we think about the type of people who build apps, we think about Zuck back in his college dorm room coding what would become Facebook.
Or Larry Page and Sergey Brin who built Google in their garage, also by writing code.
What if you have a great app idea but you can hardly figure out how to right-click on your MacBook Pro?
Read on for Apps Without Code reviews.
Today, tech prowess doesn’t matter.
You don’t need to grow up playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading programming books to be able to create applications, websites, or even algorithms.
Ask Tara how she knows. She built several apps without writing a single line of code.
She literally sat down and Googled “without code.” Found a slew of resources. Some were tools she had already heard of that were based in logic.
Surveys, for example. Where you can show and hide different information based on who the user was. Just like you’d do in an app.
See also: spreadsheets. These allowed for additional logic. If this, then that. You can actually power the back-end of your app just by connecting different Google Sheets.
See also: email marketing tools. If this, send that.
Don’t forget Zapier to tie it all together.
One of the biggest things Tara’s learned while building without code is how to leverage these existing software tools in unintended ways.
May sound a little clunky but if you think about the apps you can’t live without, their earliest versions would’ve been similar. As in, ugly. Unrefined. Limited in what they could do.
Your app prototype should be treated like a rough draft. Just get something down. Edit later.
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you’ve launched too late, as Reid Hoffman famously said.
So here’s your goal, according to Tara:
Build something fast, get it in front of your users, see how they respond, iterate accordingly.
Most apps today are not being built by engineers but by doctors, teachers, farmers, executives, stay-at-home moms, high school dropouts.
Instead of using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, or Perl, they’re pointing and clicking, dragging and dropping.
Their apps are going from “dude, you know what would be cool” to something that’s usable, in a matter of days not years.
Tara has mentored hundreds of other non-technical entrepreneurs since founding Apps Without Code a few years back.
Pretty much all of ’em felt handicapped by not knowing how to write code. But Tara shook the windows and rattled the walls of that belief. She proved it could actually be a super power.
See, when you nerd-out on code, it’s easy to forget to come up for air and focus on your customers. You end up creating fancy tech that nobody wants.
Whereas non-coders are all about function. They’re asking people: Would you use this? How can I make it better? What if we did this or that? Right?
And with that approach, whether you’re making an app for a local bakery, or a website to sell print on demand products, or building an algorithm to help people find art like Tara did with her first app, you can be successful.
All ya gotta do is find the right resources and start building.
That’s how they do it in Detroit, where Tara’s from. They build. They roll up their sleeves and get to work.
Damn. She slid a hot iron back and forth over that pitch, removing every wrinkle before handing it over on a hanger.
So what’s Tara selling?
Apps Without Code Bootcamp is an eight-week course with templates, guides, a community, and your own startup coach, that costs $1,710.
Or you can upgrade to 1-on-1 coaching and they’ll build your app for you, for $4,810.