No-code
Dec 2023
Plastics Recycling Platform
In 2022 I was hired as a freelancer at Golden Circle to make a custom CRM. The CRM was to be used to track plastics shipments en-route to a receiver, who recycles (parts of) the plastic. Golden Circles original request was for me to expand their existing platform, which had been built with PHP. However, there were a lot of issues with the way it had been designed. Progress on the project had grinded to a halt for about three months due to difficulty adding a admin functionality (an admin user type, with special permissions).
Given the state of the code, I proposed re-creating and re-designing the platform. The reason for this was that in addition to progress being painfully slow, the existing platform could only track shipments, but it needed to do a lot more. Because of the constraints on time and capital, I researched whether the platform could be built with a no-code tool. After some research, I decided to go for Bubble, which is capable of building full-stack software and has a rich plugin ecosystem.
After deciding on Bubble for the project, I started hosting workshops with the founders. The planning process was rudimentary at best, but I tried to use some concepts I had learned in UX class in school, such as creating user-stories and wireframes. Doing this on a real project posed a steep learning curve. Looking back, I would have spent more time on being more systematic in the planning phase.
The project ended up being completed and Golden Circle was subsequently acquired by Retura, a large competitor. At the time there were dozens of companies onboarded on the platform from countries such as Netherlands, UK and Poland. Below are some of the features in the final product:
- User authentication (forgotten password, temporary password, change of password etc.).
- User administration (activation/deactivation, profile editing).
- User onboarding (terms of service, setting up profile, filling in details).
- Six different user models (collector, transporter, receiver, customs agent, admin, superadmin).
- Bidding system on shipments for transporters. Highest bid gets to transport the shipment. Also admin management of bidding.
- Granular permissions based on user type (permissions for who can view/create/edit shipments, bids, users etc.).
- Creation, editing and deleting of shipments (complex data model involving around 30 fields, such as origin country, bids, price, accepted bid etc.).
- User invite system for admins as well as users (each company invites and manages own users).
- Accounting functionality (for materials and sub-materials accounting, revenue per transportation).
- Email notifications (notifications for invites of new users, as well as updates on progression through supply chain).
- Automatic document generation/filling based on details about the shipment (required documents for border crossing etc.).
- Multilingual support (translated to English for international users).
These are not all of the features that were implemented, but the list above hints at the scope of the project. In this case, no-code was an excellent choice and I suspect there are many more use cases for no-code such as this one. Specifically: Bespoke internal tools that need to track or automate some processes at a company. While it may not make sense to hire a team of developers in most of these cases, a no-code agency (or even an in-house technical person) could possibly do it for a fraction of the time and price.
SEO-Subscription Service Landing Page
After getting interested in SEO, I created a no-code landing page with Bubble for a content creation subscription service with Bubble. It took maybe a day to create it. It was integrated with Stripe for monthly subscription payments, live on a custom domain and could receive emails through the contact form.
After creating it, I cold-emailed perhaps a dozen businesses asking if they would like a free content sample (an article or two). I used this as a lead magnet, and it worked well! I received interest for the samples from three businesses. One of these was VG Nisje (widely read in Norway) to use on-demand content creation to supplement full-time employees. However, upon starting to write the samples, I discovered that content creation was incredibly boring to me, and left it at that.