A 2.5 million revenue startup built with no-code

Katt here 👋

In No-Code Exits I share every week a success story of a non-technical founder.

The issue of this week is the story of Chad Sakonchick.

You will learn about:

• ✨ Why he switched from custom code to No-Code
• 🎯 How he outperforms huge competitors
• 🧰 His full No-Code tool stack
• 🥸 How to get rid of SaaS subscription costs

Parents' house

Chad Sakonchick began his entrepreneurial journey in his 20s. He hired his first dev from RentaCoder (now freelancer.com) and worked on his project while living at home with his parents.

During the day, he installed and maintained septic systems for his dad's friend's business. At night, he would communicate with his overseas developer, often working from his bedroom of his parents' home​​.

It didn’t stop with 1 venture, in the following years he started:

• A company that allowed users to create websites.
• An app designed for food truck owners.
• A platform for event spaces.

He spent tens of thousands of dollars on devs and had to chase people down to convince them to use his apps. There were 2 major learnings from these ventures: coding requires a lot of time and you shouldn’t waste time on what you think people need.

There must be a better way to do this

The spark for Better Legal came when Chad was helping a friend, an attorney. His friend was losing business to online companies offering cheaper do-it-yourself legal services to start a business.

Every state has its own process for starting a business or changing information of a business. Chad helped his attorney friend to automate his operations. They reduced the time spent on forming a new business from 3 hours to less than 10 minutes. This efficiency allowed the attorney to charge 75% less per new business formation while making more money per minute.

Chad built the prototype in one week. They spent $900 on Google Ads and $600 was made back within hours. This initial success led to them founding BetterLegal.

Custom code triumph

The first version of Better Legal was built using a combination of various (No-Code) tools like Asana, Zapier and Formstack. The customer filled in a questionnaire with simple vocabulary (no legal lingo). This was sent to Asana where a task with a 40-page legal document was created. The problem with this setup, was that if the customers wanted any changes, the team had to edit the changes in the huge doc.

Chad started looking for a solution where they could store the data in a system and output the legal document when it was ready. They switched to Salesforce to solve that. But also Salesforce had it’s limitations and was very expensive.

They wanted to provide their customers with a self-service dashboard to manage their account information and make changes to documents. To achieve this Chad took the plunge. He hired freelancers to develop a new application from scratch with custom code in 6 months.

This setup sustained BetterLegal for five years but it was not easy:

• With each new feature, dev costs increased
• Everything took long and was often delayed
• Once you rely on developer as a non-technical founder, you are fully at their mercy
• It was costly ($8,000-$10,000 per month) just for basic stuff

Return to no-code

In 2022 the companies operational costs were too high and the board instructed to cut all developments costs to the bare minimum. Better Legal was stuck in a difficult situation.

Everything changed when Chad joined a 30-day build challenge and tried Bubble for the first time. A light bulb went off in his head, Bubble could be the answer to his dev problems. He went through the Bubble interactive lessons, a 10-hour Bubble Crash Course and got to work with some other devs.

In 90 days he rebuilt Better Legal with No-Code:

• Bubble as the underlying platform the complete system is built upon
• Productivity Sweet for a set of templates and processes that sit on top of Bubble that make building lightning fast
• The Masonry to develop lowcode components that host Stripe and create reusable code blocks that work between Bubble, Zapier and Make.
• Zapier as the beating heart of the system that runs over 100k automations per month
• Make to run higher volume automations for a reasonable price
• Twilio for communication system
• Lob to handle address verification, snail mailed filings and checks to partners
• Asana for follow-up requests from customers

Bye subscriptions

To get costs down and efficiency up, Chad also started building internal tools in Bubble to replace the third party apps they were paying subscriptions for.

The first one was Asana, which was costing them $350 per month. Chad bought a Bubble task manager template and customized it to the needs of the team. It made sense as all the data lived in Bubble and now everything was in one place.

And more recently, in November, he replaced Twilio Flex (contact center web app) with a custom-built Bubble solution connected to the Twilio API. This saves them money ($600 per month), time (no constant redeployments or sunsetting of features anymore) and results in a tight integration between communication and the client data.

The agents can now do everything in one interface which connects to all the client data, tasks and the billing system. For example: they can now build features like live-matching the call number to an existing contact, pull up their info and Stripe data and add AI functionality to make the agents job easier and offer a better service.

Battling with giants

The legal tech space is competitive. There are a lot of huge competitors like the 20-year old ($3 Billion) LegalZoom.

Chad believes that No-Code is their huge competitive advantage. Thanks to the smart use of technology they don’t need that many employees. And less employees means:

• Less mouth to feed
• Lower overhead costs
• No working in silo’s
• More flexible processes

That in combination with the speed of No-Code means they can offer a better product and service to their customer at a lower price.

Money talks

Chad shares that in the first 6 years MRR grew slowly due to a limited budget for development. It’s when they had the capacity to design their own form in Bubble that their MRR skyrocketed with +58%. Suddenly they had full control of every element of their product and this resulted in much higher attach rates.

Recently Better Legal crossed $1 million ARR and $2.5 million in revenue. And they keep shipping. This week they released a contract analysis tool powered by AI to help you understand the contracts you sign. Check it out here.

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