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⚡ From struggles to light

🌱 My journey with Threado started in late 2020. I was the first employee. We were building the MVP and by the side hustling for growth and scale. I was definitely excited about the 0 to 1 journey, knowing that it was gonna take tremendous effort to get there.

We wanted to build the brand and be in a habit of shipping out something every Friday - that was the norm. This meant shipping out resources, blogs, mini products, landing pages, etc. along with setting up multiple processes for growth and operations. We started small - started with our blog, newsletter and social media content.

📈 From day 0, we were big on NoCode advocacy. I started my NoCode journey with Notion. It became our internal wiki, later we also started creating JDs and posting hiring requirements through Notion’s public pages. Notion was the go-to tool for just about anything - project plans, team Kanban boards, content pages, PRDs, etc. Around the same time, we explored Webflow for building our website. Creating a content hub on Webflow had its own learning curve. I couldn’t execute without help in setting up the design layout blocks.

While the product was getting ready, we wanted to help give Community Builders an unfair advantage by creating resources that would help them get better at what they do. While the smaller content pieces helped, it was not enough.

We had to scale rapidly and create a larger impact to make the pipeline significant. The resources had to be packaged and distributed better than the present - to make it easier to consume, delightful and impactful. That’s when we decided to build Community OS - an actionable workbook with community resources built completely on Notion. Curating the resources was pretty manual. We didn’t use scrapers or Airtable or any discovery tools. It took about a month to build it. We collaborated with Michael Novotny, founder of Side Project Stack. With his expertise on NoCode, he transformed the playbook from being just a Notion guide to an impactful product. We launched it on Product Hunt and we ended up being #1. 💪

The launch helped us get almost 3000+ subscribers! This was THE overwhelming moment for me personally when I realised the potential of NoCode - from the ease of execution and automation of day-to-day tasks to building a standalone powerful product. Enter: 100daysofnocode!

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🔥 The NoCode Boom at Threado

The rise of SaaS and automation is going to steer growth and adoption for NoCode tools in a big way! By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools, predicts Gartner. NoCode tools are helping individuals push limits on building and shipping things single-handedly, taking away the dependencies on coding.

At Threado, we definitely needed to do many more things the NoCode way - for speed of execution, upping team’s productivity and increasing the frequency at which we ship out resources. I had my eyes on the #100daysofNoCode hashtag that is so popular on Twitter! Never really understood though how it would help me with my NoCode journey.

I wanted to commit to an intense learning journey to be able to pick up and start executing right away. I guess I was lucky enough to notice Max Haining talk about his upcoming Bootcamp on NoCode. Had no second thoughts, registered right away!

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💯 All about 100DaysofNoCode

Max started the 100DaysofNoCode community, as a Twitter challenge where people community to building in public and spend at least 30 minutes for 100 days, learning and building with NoCode. People found their calling with this challenge. Many committed to deeper learning with the community and building their MVPs with NoCode. 497 solo entrepreneurs have built and launched their ideas through 100DaysofNoCode!

Soon Max launched a 30-day Bootcamp for limited seats. The idea was to follow a sprint model to learn, build and ship your MVP in these 30 days! I had heard great outcomes from the first cohort, which made me definitely want to be a part of the next one! These 30 days promise to deliver the most transformative NoCode journey you would witness as compared to similar courses out there.

And rightly so! Two days back I just demo-ed the first-ever product that I built! From never having thought of being able to build something individually, to shipping out the MVP to the team and my peers was a proud moment!

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Tonight will be the wrap-up for the Bootcamp! It’s given me so much value which I definitely had to document through this blog.

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Keep reading. 👇

🎢 The curves that matter

🙏 Onboarding for the Bootcamp

The Bootcamp kicks off in style! 😎 The first session of the Bootcamp is all about understanding what we’ll be going through for the next 30 days, forming peer groups for co-building and a few mini-networking sessions to get to know your peers. Max, Harold, Conrad, Aditi and the team definitely know how to run a litt icebreaker session!

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📝 The Structure

The Bootcamp requires you to commit to 2-3 1.5 hour sessions a week. Each session is about a new tool or process you would need to learn to start building your MVP.

• The course is hosted on Coleap - a learning management platform. The entire course has detailed well-structured reading content and videos. For learning each tool there is also a detailed pre-workshop and a post-workshop read so that you’re prepped with the basics before the workshop.
• The 1.5-hour session is with a subject expert. The first 30-40 odd minutes would go into explaining what the tool can achieve.
• Following this is a 30-35 minutes of the co-building session on the tool in a breakout room - isn’t this a fabulous experience? 🤯 You are provided with a step-by-step guide to help you follow and build a mini-tool/product with the NoCode tool. The build is meant to cover features for advanced users as well - not just for beginners.
• During the co-building session, Max and the subject expert would drop in to take your questions. Well, most of the queries also get solved by peers.
• They also have mini-assignments throughout the course to help you get hands-on experience of using these tools before you pick them to build your MVP.

🤝 Co-building

Peer-to-peer learning is the best outcome of this community and the course! You find people in a similar journey ending up with transformative experiences. The team enables a peer learning group of 4. We used to meet up at 5:30 AM IST 😀 to discuss the progress on the MVP and solve each other’s challenges - Serendipity at its best!

While building my MVP I used to get stuck multiple times with multiple tools. I always had my peers back me - never let me give up midway! Huge shoutouts to Malvika, Ramu, Katt, Hakeem, Pedro, Nitesh, Jorge, Tom, Matt, Dom, Alex, Peter, Uli - guess I’m gonna just list down all of them! 😀

The team facilitates a “lounge” on the learning platform for you to drop in anytime - you’ll either find the team or your peers’ hangout here. This makes it easier to find motivation and help whenever needed.

👥 Stay for the Community

You can see the idea of “Community-led Growth” stand out at 100DaysofNoCode! The community is thoughtfully designed to be minimal, yet powerful - it is mostly self-engaging. And there is so much chatter - all so valuable!

100DaysofNoCode community on Slack is one the most engaged community you could witness. You begin your journey in the community by posting your introductions. The introductions have a detailed template too! - It’s all so well thought of!

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There are channels specifically meant to nurture the community like the “asks-and-offers” one where you hang out if you need help/can offer help and the “look-what-i-have-found” channel to let you share your finds with your peers!

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Of course, Max and Harold keep checking in your DMs frequently, to understand if you need help with your MVP. Being a part of the pumped community alone pushes you to definitely NOT give up!

⚒️ Tool Experts

Each workshop is hosted by a tool expert! You get access to them not only during the workshop but also in the community. They help you out with queries around the tools used throughout the Bootcamp! Besides the well-known NoCode tools you also get exposed to multiple supporting tools to help you achieve smaller wins. For example - we got our ideas validated by creating a Yep.so landing page for our MVP.

💰 Values driven from the Bootcamp

The entire Bootcamp had an immense learning curve - not just about NoCode, but learnt so much about community building as well! Here are some of my key takeaways 👇

• Commit to learning with a group, keeps you on your toes and helps you find motivation throughout the journey.
• Learn with the community - global CBCs are the best approach to learning. Being a part of a global community helps you widen the scope of solving the challenges faced by larger audiences.
• Always give, before the ask - there’s more value in both ways.
• There’s a NoCode productivity hack to almost every action at work - “automate something every day” is my new motto.
• “Progress before perfection”. Keep shipping ideas.

⏭️ Way Forward

The Bootcamp definitely helped in shaping my idea better and making me believe that it could definitely be the solution to the problem I wanted to address. I’m on to building and shipping V2 of the product already! 🚀

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming up soon! 👇

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🖼️ Threado’s NoCode Showcase:

Here are some of the tools we built at Threado with NoCode 👇. You can check them out here!

About Threado:

Threado is the command centre for your online community. Signup for the waitlist and check out our cool drops - Community OS, which ended up being the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, SamosaBot, which is a fun way of showing gratitude in your slack community, and Serendipity Bot, which connects you to new people in the community based on your interests!

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2022 comes with more community events than ever. Presenting Threado Community Hour - an hour-long panel discussion with some of the most successful SaaS community builders and networking sessions to help you learn the best engagement tactics, grow your network, and get answers to the questions that matter to you. The next one is on 10th March! Stay tuned for details! 🙂

And we’ve got more drops brewing for you - stay tuned!

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