Ep. 44: Jeremy Blalock from Adalo talks about growing and retargeting your start-up from your community feedback

TLDR;Some Good Quotes

• I think that being in a competitive space, it made sense to us to just give away the product for free to use it at a basic level. But you can't actually. Publish a native mobile app and you can't publish it on a custom domain for web unless you pay.

• So one thing is it does feel very natural for designers to use our product because it is based on sketch, essentially. But at the end of the day, it's people who are a little bit more on the PowerPoint and Excel world who seem to be excelling at it versus people who are just purely visual designers.

• If you're building a real startup, you're going to be paying thousands of dollars a month for something, regardless of what you're doing. But when you're just starting out, I think that it's important to have something cheap enough that people see as cheap, and see as attractive, and see as like within their range of affordability. But without kind of realizing that it's going to eventually be a lot more.

• We feel like our product itself matters and the quality of the way that you build the apps, the interface, all that stuff. But I think that really, you have to build some kind of flywheel that will actually generate more value as more people are there. And I think that the things that we'll do over time are just building that ecosystem and that community. And so having really trying to get more and more people involved in building knowledge around the tool, that will really build value longterm.

• I was doing a lot of customized stuff just to get these very small number of customer accounts to be successful and to be published. And I feel like at that point it was a big internal struggle of, you know, how do I actually get my time back so I can build the real horror platform and actually get this thing to be successful?

• I kind of also wished that I just did some sort of launch earlier. I know that the product wasn't polished, I know that it wasn't perfect or nearly as good as it is now, but I feel like getting that early feedback would have been good because now a lot of what people are doing, doesn't really require things that we didn't have then. It's just that we didn't get the necessary, like kind of lift-off until later on. And I think that the whole no-code movement has helped out a ton. So I can't really, it's hard to say what would have happened at that point.

• The majority of our users really just come from word of mouth and referrals from other people are using the platform and kind of organic sources like that. So, we've really kind of tried to put as much effort as we can into building our communities, both on slide, head on the forum and, you know, really building a big Twitter following.

Summary

Jeremy Blalock, co-founder and CEO from Adalo, joins Jeremy in a conversation about the turnarounds and creatives process to launch the company and the importance of having a strength no-code community to strengthen the bonds with customers and succeed in the field.