Andrew: hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner and I didn’t do this interview for months because I probably walked into this business that we’re about to find out about with the same. I underestimated it the way that I imagine if you’re listening to me, you, you might underestimate it. Tara Reed is the founder of apps without code.
She teaches people how to create apps as the name says without coding. And then more than that, how to actually build a business model, how to get customers, the whole business that’s built on software. That’s not involving code. I had two issues with that. They kept me from having run number one. I said, if it’s no code, people can fix and figure it out. I said, maybe you can’t, maybe there’s not a real, huge business to be built without code, but whatever there is, you know, you could just figure it out. And then the second part was, I said, it’s a nice little business. It’s not at the level that I’m looking for. For, for Mixergy interviews. I was wrong on both counts.
I was wrong on both counts because Tara, I went to, to create this app that I had in mind on air table. I wanted all the highlights that I got out of my Kindle books to be put into a clean database that I could tag up and have photos of the cover art from the book. Like you’re not, this is basic like ABC stuff. And I don’t have to code anything. I don’t have to wait for a developer to have something that’s ideal. And I know people are gonna tell me about read wise. I wonder my make my own version of Revit. It was a process. It wasn’t tough, but it was a process of learning how to think like this. And I have to be honest, you’re you’re nodding right?
Tara: Yeah, no, I think like the process of thinking like an engineer is the piece that is the gap that not everybody has.
Andrew: With also understanding that there are limitations to this platform that I’m working with and super powers that I hadn’t thought of because I don’t walk into air table, which is essentially a spreadsheet slash database. I don’t expect that it’s going to have these superpowers. Right.
Tara: And then ways you can get creative and find a workarounds for things and intended way. Like there’s all sorts of different kinds of thinking that, right.
Andrew: So that helped me understand it. And then I said, okay, nice. You have a nice little business. I underestimated it. I think, based on the homepage, because you just say sign up for free and I’ll teach you for free. I knew there was a backend. I didn’t realize the backend was generating as much as it does. Can you, can you say the revenue up front?
Tara: Yeah, we have a $5 million annual run rate. It’s I guess 34% profit margin.
Andrew: It’s phenomenal.
Tara: Yeah, it’s a good business. It’s fun too. We love it.
Andrew: And you’ve got an incredible reputation. I can’t tell you how many people have said I should have you on. And I kept saying, thank you. You’re a nice person, but, um, I don’t think it’s a good fit. And I appreciate that people like Laura Roeder was just an 80 Payoneer right. Just put Andrew, wake the hell up.
And I’m glad that I did wake up. Let’s talk. Before we get into this, let’s talk about the first businesses that you build. You raised how much money for it.
Tara: Probably like $300,000. Some of that was from 500 startups accelerator and then the rest from angel investors. So my first company was called and it was my original intention was to help people, young professionals, artwork for their homes. Okay. And so something I was personally exploring if I am really honest with myself too, there were lots of motivations for starting that business, including.
I was a working in corporate tech at the time I was working at Microsoft and I was like, I couldn’t wait to have more just creativity and decision making ability and the products I was working on the windows team. And so working, going from windows team to working on my own at the beginning side project was like a great win for me.
And so that company, that lots of things for me, I’m including me this other creative outlet. But also, um, helping me explore my own art collecting that I was doing at the time and going through this process that I went through of being like, I’m going to figure out a way to deliver this and to scale it up no matter what, so whatever skills I got, I’m gonna use them and figure out a way to make this work.
And that’s really how building without code sort of came about in building that first company.
Andrew: And, and the vision was Andrew needs to get art for his wall. God knows. Every, every time people see me, they see there’s no print here. I promise you, Olivia has put a lot of art in our house. Um, but I should be able to go to an app and pick out the stuff that I want, but goodness exist. Didn’t the sites already.
There, there are sites that do this. What was you going to be your
Tara: Yeah. So specifically what I wanted to do and what we did, wasn’t there a ton of affordable artwork sites that are out there, right? And so we wanted to pull all of the artwork from those sites and tag them all and build like this art matchmaking system where it learned about your art tastes and then show you art recommendations based on your taste.
And that is what we built this art recommendation. Aren’t recommending sort of algorithm. And I kept pushing the limits of how much of this I could do before I had to hire a developer. And every time I would hit a wall, I’d be like, okay, let me just see if I can just do a little bit more myself.
Andrew: So, why did you want to go to no code? You’re somebody who worked at Microsoft. You worked at Google, you’ve got access to developers. Why did you say I’m not going to use code to create the first version?
Tara: So I definitely had access to developers. I don’t think I trusted my ability to articulate exactly what I wanted to them in a way that would not give me like, Hey, why are results? And I see this all the time. With entrepreneurs that I work with now. Right? Like they were like, I set aside $40,000. I hired a developer.
What I got back was not at all what I intended and there’s like a lost in translation there. Um, so I was concerned about that, but also like, I was more concerned about getting the product out, which I think is maybe different than a lot of. First time founders, where they’re like very focused on getting the product beautiful and right.
I was less interested in that. Like I was like, we gotta go, we gotta get this in front of customers. And so anything I
Andrew: It’s me. You want to do it
Tara: yes, true. At the beginning. It was just me.
Andrew: you. Okay. I noticed this a lot of times with entrepreneurs, they say we a lot, which is a nice thing, right? Versus the arrogant people who are just like, , there’s a team of people behind them who are doing all the work. It’s just, I want to be clear. You are an independent person, had an idea.
You decided you were going to code this up without code so you can run off and get it started. And the apps that you use were, what, what did you use to build this?
Tara: Okay. So it was a progression. The very first MVP I built this was before all the no-code tools are out there, by the way, I should say so. So this was 20. 14 2015, there was maybe like one or two good no-code tools out that were just starting. And I didn’t know about them yet. So the first version of the product I built was with the survey.
I use survey gizmo. And so, you know how surveys have show, hide logic? Like, if you say what’s your favorite color it’ll show and you say, purple it’ll show the purple followup question. She will say like, why didn’t you like purple and hide the blue question? So I use that two people told me what kind of art they like.
So it was like, they like black and white. They like photography and they had a budget. A thousand dollars and below. And I would like pass that on information in the parameter, in the URL parameter. And then it would show the artwork that matched their tastes and hide the artwork that didn’t. So everybody got an email with their individual link and they could go through almost like Tinder style and take the pieces that they liked.
Um, and we would learn about and save the information about what they liked or didn’t like, and people would message me and be like, Oh my gosh, I love your app. And little did they know? I paid $35 a month for my survey gets most subscription and did it that way. But that first version of the product made us our first $35,000 in revenue.
Andrew: With that survey logic emails, because you are making money off of affiliates.
Tara: Well we’re yeah, we’re making money. So what we would do is we would sell the artwork and then it’s very common for artwork prices to get negotiated. So we would go to the seller or to the artist and say, Hey, we have a buyer right now. Can we do a 20% or 30% discount on the piece? And so we would take that margin and sell it to the person for the retail price.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. Wow. What, what type of pricing we’re talking about
Tara: Oh, so we focused on our $3,000 and below. So anywhere between like 303,000, what a sweet
Andrew: and they’re still negotiation at that price point. Wow. Okay. I wish that everyone could see this. You’re you’re a great guest and that I could see in your face immediately, what you feel like EV.
Tara: Yeah. Yeah, no, there is. And this is all the stuff that I was learning at the time about artwork, about buying artwork. And the challenge is that at a higher price point of artwork, you get an art advisor. And the art advisor knows all this stuff, but art advisers work kind of like real estate agents. So they take a commission.
And so there’s no excitement for them to do a commission on your like $200 artwork. That commission is not worthwhile to them. And so I wanted to take that experience that folks had at the $20,000 artwork price point and see if we can use technology to create it for everybody else.
Andrew: Okay. Everyone focuses on how you create things without code. Let’s spend a minute and ask you, how do you create customers? If we’re talking about 3000 and under that’s a good number of customers, how did you find them?
Tara: Okay. I’m trying to remember back to when I started this. So the first thing that I did, and I also want to give a nod to, because as I was launching this, I had help. I had. Uh, coaching through this, I went through a program called orbital, uh, from a gentleman named Gary chow. He had just left union square ventures and had rented out Kickstarter’s old office in New York park.
And I was actually living in Seattle at the time. Yeah. So I had applied to his program and I got a scholarship to do his program, but, and the program was how to launch your side project. And this is interesting too, because I learned a lot about teaching entrepreneurship there too, but, and which has been helpful in my career now, but I was living in Seattle and I was like, okay, great.
I got into this program, but how the heck am I going to do this? And I ended up getting my airline credit card so that I could afford it. They give you money miles and I would go on Sunday and fly to New York during the night, have my class on Monday, work for work remotely on Monday, and then fly back to be in the office.
But again at Microsoft on Tuesday. So I was doing that for a summer to take this training program, to learn about how you build a side project and how you get customers for side projects and things like that. So the first thing I was doing to get customers was I went on LinkedIn and I found people who had art, museums, art, collecting, things like that in their special interest of their bio.
And I like cold messaged people. Um, yeah, that was like the first thing that I did, I went on forums and posted and were posting at people. I, I, um, sent it to a bunch of colleagues and friends, which was probably the scariest part. In fact, my first customer was someone I went to middle school with and, or high school with.
And my second customer was someone that we didn’t work on the same team, but also worked at Microsoft. And then after that, they were strangers.
Andrew: You know what? I’m so glad that you mentioned how hard it is. I feel like every time I ask people, it wasn’t a tough to go back to, to friends and ask them to colleagues and ask them. They always say, well, you have to do what you have to do for your starting a business. Yeah. But there’s some hesitation there that we have to get past.
And many of us don’t get passed at a time. All right. So you did that. You said that there are a couple of variables of versions of it. Did you, you, at that point raised money or did you change to the next version of the software?
Tara: Yeah. So at that point, we at the $35,000 revenue point, I had recorded my interview video for 500 startups and I wrote, and then I had got invited to come in for the final round interview. I remember the. Interview where things are going great. We were talking about the company, they were impressed with the revenue thus far.
And then we got to the point of the conversation where they asked about the tech and who your CTO was. If you have a CTO and how you built the tech. And I remember like getting nervous at that question. And I just like told them, I was like, Hey, here’s what I’ve done. As far, I built this without any code I use existing off the shelf tools, like a survey show, hide logic.
And that’s how we built the product thus far. And I think we can build upon it, but that’s, and then I quickly pivot it to, and that’s why we’ve made it first $35,000. So I made sure to like end it with that right. With the win. And I remember it was a two, one, one. Three on one interview. So it was me and three people, two partners, and one, I think associate at 500 startups.
And I remember them looking at each other and nodding their heads. Like this person is going to get this thing figured out, no matter what, like we can help her with the rest, but she’s going to figure he’s going to be scrappy enough to figure it out was I think the tone of the conversation after that, I think it worked to my advantage.
Andrew: Were you planning on hiring developers at tap at some point? Or were you going to stick with no code?
Tara: I hadn’t really thought it through. It was more so like, let me take it as far as I can and if I need help, I’ll get help. But every time I surprised myself with how much further I could take it. I got more and more belief in no code.
Andrew: Really as a website or an app. Do you, did you think you, I saw the app on, uh, on, uh, Eric Reese’s site. Were you thinking you were gonna build an app with no code?
Tara: I was thinking about it being a web app. I didn’t think it was important for it to be a mobile app at the time, just because I think a lot of times people want the first thing they think of is like a native iOS app. But unless someone’s using your product with a lot of frequency, it’s not that important for it to be a native app, in my opinion.
So I wanted a web app. I wanted people to be able to log in, but there were all these tools and I was doing it. I had one. And
Andrew: What’s a tool for logging in.
Tara: Oh, so right when we moved to fiber to start ups, we started using, there were a couple of other portal tools that we had used. So we had played around with some like customer login, portals.
There’s one, it doesn’t exist anymore. That was specifically for art companies. Um, but we ended up moving to bubble at that time and bump.
Andrew: Yeah, what is it?
Tara: Yeah. So bubble was my first experience in, I don’t want to say was my first experience with no code tools. Cause I’d say Zapier probably was my first experience. When we built that survey hack together, Zapier was piecing it together.
Um, but bubble was the first platform I use that housed everything in one place. Right. And so the way that bubble works is you drag drop. PointClick you design the page, how you want the app interface, how you want it’s mainly for web apps, um, like you would design a PowerPoint presentation and then you logically tell the app what to do in English.
So like if the user clicks the button, then log them in. Or if the user clicks the button and the password doesn’t match the password on file, then show the popups saying the password’s wrong. Right? And you can get as complex with this as you want. But as long as you understand, if this, then that sentences, you can tell the app what to do.
And so that is how we started building more sophisticated versions of this using bubble.
Andrew: I want to know what you built with double. Let me just take a fast forward to the future for a moment at apps without code. Do you teach people how to use bubbles specifically or let them learn what I wish people could see the reaction? What, what do you do you know where I’m going with that?
Tara: Okay. So it has changed over the years. So one of the things that’s been just generally interesting about teaching apps without code this early, right? We’ve been teaching apps without code for four years now, and it’s still a baby in terms of its progression. And so when we first launched the school, we taught bubble.
We then changed that to teach five they’ve different software tools, depending on what type of app you were looking to build. And now we teach one tool, which is glide. Let me maybe like walk through that and why helpful. So cut bubble first. Cause it was like the thing that was out there. Um, there weren’t a lot of other options, but bubble, I would say is on the sophisticated side in terms of capability for a no-code builder.
Um, you have to understand if you’ve set up your own database and you have to then understand how databases work and how they’re structured. And like there’s a lot to learn there. If you don’t know. Um, and so because of that, we then shifted to a different type of no-code tool. This is a type of code tool.
I hear, I don’t hear people talking about as often. This is like, there are no code tools that are for one thing specifically, for example, shared tribe is a tool that is for creating marketplaces, like Airbnb style marketplaces. That’s what it does. And it does it well, and almost everything is done for you already.
If you’re trying to build a marketplace or a mighty networks, unless you create your own social network app, right? Like everything is pretty much already done for you. If you’re trying to create a social network app. So I call these like, like use case specific or vertical specific, no code tools. We moved to those.
And had people, you know, decide what kind of app they’re building and choose the right tool accordingly. Um, and then we moved to glide as a third iteration. There’s been three versions, um, because it was a nice middle ground. There was a less to learn from a bubble perspective. Glide lets you take a spreadsheet and turn it into an app.
Andrew: Google is it just a Google spreadsheet that they turn into apps they’re just, and then on their website, it’s glide apps.com. People can see that they could create a copy of Instagram, a copy of a simple CRM, et cetera.
Tara: Yep, exactly. So we now teach glide primarily it’s the main tool and we found that that’s been the best sweet spot of ease of use to teach for people who aren’t thinking like developers and or who haven’t already been a developer. And for people who want some flexibility in what the product can do.
Andrew: But bubble bubble, lets you do more in a more unstructured way. Glide lets you do less, but it’s easier to get started and it has more structure around it. That’s the
Tara: Yes. Exactly.
Andrew: Um, okay. I’m with you. I should say, by the way, bubble was a sponsor. People can go and use them at bubble.is/mixergy. And even when I interviewed the founder of bubble, I said, I’m very skeptical.
I don’t know that this makes sense. Anyway, if you use bubble.is/mixer, they’ll give you a 40% discount, I think three months of their software. Um, okay. Going back then to you, you finally were you, you talked to 500 startups. They invested where they put 20,000.
Tara: No. It was a hundred thousand.
Andrew: A hundred. Okay. They put in a hundred what’d you do with a hundred thousand.
Tara: Yeah, mainly it was like work team working on new versions, marketing, those sorts of things, um, and grew our user base and continue to build in that company. And at the time I was blogging. So I was blogging about my journey building the collect those app. And I had a series on my blog called building without code, and I got a ton of people who are really interested in the building without code series.
I then got asked to do a TEDx talk. I was living in Detroit at the time. I got an S to do a TEDx talk on building apps without code and the combination of the blog and the TEDx talk. I had so many people emailing me like, Hey Tara, I have an idea for an app too. Can you teach me how to do it? Like you did.
I had so many emails and I was getting kind of frustrated because I was like, no, I’m trying to run my own company. I do not have time for this. So I decided that, like I was getting so many emails, I’m going to help five people. I’m going to pick five people, help them. Uh, I sent out an email. I immediately sold out a four.
I pick up a random number by the way. I was like, it’s going to cost $900 and I’m going to take eight weeks and I’m gonna teach you how to build your app at a time with
Andrew: why, if you’re, once you take money, you really committing to your time, you’re really committing to, to them. Why would you do that for, for less than $5,000 when you’ve got a hundred thousand raised in this whole credibility on the line now?
Tara: Good question. It’s like a nice in between of like, no, I am not the kind of founder who could do it for free. Like that wasn’t an option. I just like didn’t have those kinds of resources. Um, and also I had enough imposter syndrome not to charge way more. That’s the honest answer.
Andrew: You needed the money at that point,
Tara: No, I didn’t need the money.
It was more so like, I’m going to put this out there. I need to charge something because otherwise people will take it for granted. So like, let me make up a number and put it on the site. It wasn’t super thought out and strategic.
Andrew: what happened with those people?
Tara: So those four people, I sold up four seats immediately just from like I had maybe a hundred, couple hundred subscribers on my blog kind of thing.
So four seats immediately. Um, I helped those people. They launched their apps and then I opened it up again and I had, I increased the price. Um, there were two different options. One was 2001 was 3000 and I had 70 people and I was like, Oh wait, I think this might be a business.
Andrew: How far did you get when you were using bubble for Cleco collected?
Tara: Pretty far. So we built an algorithm that matched people to artwork, and it’s no longer what we run now or what Selecto runs. Now. I don’t really operate collector now. Um, but we built an algorithm to match people to artwork based on their taste, that it was a very simple version in the survey, but we’ve got a more sophisticated version in the.
Absolutely more or less product.
Andrew: What I read was that it was human beings behind the scenes making the matches. It was.
Tara: It started that way.
Andrew: And it was even on the bubble days. It was, it was human beings now.
Tara: Bubble days. It had moved out of human beings with a, too many customers. So when we day one, it was human beings. And the way I found human beings on day one was I went on LinkedIn and I typed in art advisor and I found a handful of art advisers. And I went to coffee with a couple of them and liked one of them.
And I was like, Hey, do you want to be our chief art advisor? So she was picking the artwork and as she was picking the artwork, she was like, we were making this database. Artwork sites that she was pulling from. So then when we got to the bubble version, what bub, what we were doing with the other couple of external tools too, was scraping the artwork sites for the artwork, putting them into bubbles database, and then having them be tagged based on like what kind of artwork they were.
And then showing recommendations is based on someone’s taste profile.
Andrew: I didn’t know. Bubble could do that. Bubble could scrape.
Tara: Yeah. I use a third party tool to scrape and then put it into bubble. But again, a no-code tool,
Andrew: Auto automated or you, it was all automated. It would just scrape on its own. Send it into bubbles database. Bubbles database would use it and got it.
Tara: Yep. And show the recommendations. We did like a weekly scrape or had like a VA hit the button to hit, to run the weekly scrape.
Andrew: All right. You know, the other issue that I wonder about is. If you’re with bubble, you eventually need to hire another person to help you out manage it. How easy is it to hand it off to somebody else?
Tara: Uh, pretty easy. There’s still the element of like someone just like, if you hand off your code, there’s the elements of someone like understanding what you did there. Right? So there’s still some of that, but we eventually, like, I hired someone to be our bubble developer on our team and he managed it from there.
So after a while I was not the no-code builder, my biz, my. I have more of a marketing and business background. So I went to go focus just on that, but he then maintained it and redesigned it and, and maintain that base.
Andrew: Okay, you discovered then I have a business and then we’re going to get Tim moment about the transition away from collect. Go to this new business. First. I should tell people about my, my first sponsor. Is a company called HostGator. One of the beauties are of your, if your story is you are just blogging, what you are learning and seeing who it attracted.
I assumed that you had thousands of people. I don’t mean like hundreds of thousands, but I assumed you’d at least have 5,000 people on your email list or on your blog subscriber list. It didn’t, you’re talking about hundreds of people who just saw what you were talking about, saw your worldview, who signed up.
If anyone out there is listening to me and they see this as a model for them, take your passion. Here’s the way to do it. Take your passion, put it on a website. Just. Write it out. See who it attracts, see what happens in the world. And if it leads somewhere great, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t cost you. And I was going to say cost you anything, but I guess to be a hundred percent accurate, it costs you a few bucks.
All you have to do is go to hostgator.com/mixergy, and they will even charge you. Less than they’re already low price. We’re talking about just a few bucks a month to get your site up and running and to see what happens, um, with your ideas. There’s nothing like putting ideas out there and seeing people gravitate towards it.
You know what I see as really interesting these days, Tara is, um, The pod. We’ve got our kids in a school pod. I am noticing now we were at a playground yesterday. The mom who showed me the kid had a skateboard. She said, once she turned 40, she decided to get a, get a skateboard. She said, my kid has a skateboard.
I started talking to her. She said she has got her kindergartner in a pod. You know, it’s just. Kindergartner and two other kids. I think it’s a parent who’s leading the pot. Anyway, this whole revolution, somebody should just write it up so that my kids pod can learn from her kids. Pod could learn from somebody else’s pod.
Just write up what you’re learning, put it on a site and then see where it goes. I could see this going into so many different places, this whole pot idea, Already people are hitting me up saying, how do I find a teacher to lead the pod while I love to say this is the site that I did learn how to run our pod, go there.
They’ve got a job site. Anyway, whatever idea you have, if you go to hostgator.com/mixergy, don’t overthink it. Just put it out there, just like an artist might sketch and see if it’s something that they’re passionate about. You should do the same thing. hostgator.com/mixergy. All right. You feel any guilt?
You just take in money from 500 startups for this business that you talking about. You did talk about that and it’s you’re on mute. There you go.
Tara: Yeah, I did feel guilt. Um, I felt guilt and actually also it was like a mix of some guilt and some fear failure. It was like, wait a minute. Like this other company is doing well. And like from a revenue perspective and from a profit margins perspective looked really different. Right? So with, with collector, our profit margins were somewhere in that like, 20 30% gross profit margins run that 20, 30% because we were taking a cut of the artwork, um, with running the class, like I had to pay for my zoom subscription.
And, and like, we, uh, I don’t even know where I think I, at the time I had built my own online learning platform in bubble so that I had like gamified. So like there were, so I had my bubble cost, so it was really low. And so the, the. The margins were different and it was bringing in a different kind of money.
So there was guilt. And then there was also a little bit of like, Oh, did I fail here? This other company has different kinds of potential. It’s more of like a scaled up business. Or at the time I thought that it was a more scalable business. Um, and. Am I am I, did I fail with that? So I think that there was some of that for awhile and it dragged on for a long time until I eventually got over it.
Um, and I had wonderful investor, so ultimately, like I sent them an email and I was like, here are my revenue numbers from my side project, which is what it was at the time. I just want to let you know that I’m going to shift over my focus. And like, I hope that that’s okay. Like, I just want to let you know, thank you so much.
It was a very gracious email and they were like, go do it. Great job. Those are great side project numbers. Wonderful. So they
Andrew: would be so hurt. Like you just took my money to go commit everything into this. I thought you were going to go all out. Do you feel like you could have made it work if you had stuck with it?
Tara: maybe when it wouldn’t have been what I wanted. And here’s why I always felt icky about the. VC funded, build a business and scale it up really fast route. In fact, like I ha I wasn’t clear enough on it to say no to money at the time I got clear on it, but my experience even going out to mountain view for 500 starts like it was not good.
I did not enjoy it. It was not fun. I remember like the, some of the first of all, just solo founder. So there’s less so now, but at the time, like it was like, we don’t like solo solo founders who don’t invest in solo founders. There’s a big stigma around solo founders. And we, I remember there were three other solo founders who were all women CIT or actually four, one, three women, one guy sitting at the solo founder table.
Um, and. There was already that like feeling of like unwanted newness that I felt from Silicon Valley, even though I was in it from like, I’d worked before I’d worked at Microsoft. And before that I was at Foursquare before that I was at Google. And so I had been working in tech, but not as a startup. Um, and then also, like I was a woman and there were all of those like investor meetings where you were like, are you trying to make this a date?
Or is it like,
Andrew: Did that really come across? Are you trying to make it a date was a thing?
Tara: Yes.
Andrew: Did you ever feel like someone really was trying to make it a date?
Tara: Oh, yeah. That’s why I’m saying that. Yes. And then, like, we had like a secret Twitter, my girlfriends who were also founders at the time with like a secret Twitter where we got to like, vent about it. Uh, and then like also I’m a person of color. And so like, I’m a black woman. And so I think that there’s all sorts of pattern matching, right?
Like what happens in that space early stage is you offer then how do I say this? People we’re investing in like what they wish they were in college or shortly thereafter.
Andrew: Really,
Tara: Yeah. To some extent, like that was my experience. And so, although I think that there are people who found it interesting we’re in a different climate now.
Right? Um, it just, wasn’t a super welcoming. Say that again.
Andrew: I don’t see that much has changed. I think it’s an interesting thing to, to notice that they’re trying to invest in the person they wish they were in college. I, I, I want to like start to put that. That thought with the faces, that people who I’m thinking, I don’t see, I don’t see it, but it’s possible.
And I want to be aware of that. What I do definitely see is what you mentioned earlier. Pattern matching the sense of, I want another him. I miss this guy. I want him again. I want another crack at that.
Tara: yeah.
Andrew: And so this guy was a little bit flaky. Well, here’s another, person’s a little bit flaky, but I didn’t notice it before that they were cool.
And now I see it there that I get. I, I do see that a lot.
Tara: Yeah. Yeah. So I think for lots of reasons, I, it, I didn’t feel super welcome. And the way that I am is I am not. Interested in spending lots of time, kind to make myself feel welcome in spaces where I don’t, I’m just like, I’m going to do my own thing. It is that there is a contrarion, um, theme. I like for sure.
Otherwise I wouldn’t be building out to that code for example. Right. Um, but it was like, I’m just gonna do my own thing. So I was very interested in. Having a, at the time, a lifestyle business, I, I, those, I don’t like those words. Um, but I wanted to be able to grow at the pace that I wanted to, and like growing as fast as possible at all costs, wasn’t really that exciting to me like that.
Wasn’t, you’re saying to me, and I don’t think I had the words or the confidence to fully own that at the time, but that post, um, 500 startups, I was really clear on that.
Andrew: I wonder also how much is I want to have a software company that does this thing that feel and has backing from 500 startups that feels validating. That feels like you’ve got somebody saying you’re real. You’re real person. You’re real thing. Versus I’m an info marketer. I sell information feels, uh, not as, not as cool, not as meaningful, almost like you’re living on the edges of this thing that really exists in the world.
Tara: I think now I’m for sure. Info marketer. I don’t think that before I knew what an info marketer was, I’m talking about sort of maybe my shift from collectible. Just, just thinking about my time at and thinking about how I’m more of what I wanted just with collective, right? Like the kind of business that works really well as a, and that transition to apps without code the kind of business that works really well.
To be a fully bootstrapped business. It doesn’t need, anyone is one that has high profit margins and where there are higher, you don’t, you don’t need a ton of scale in order to get started. Right. Collect on needed a lot of scale for us to get started. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to run a business with tunnels, the customers to talk to and tons of like, I wasn’t sure that I wanted that.
Andrew: So the business is still up and running now. Um, I think the site looks great. Who’s running this thing.
Tara: Yeah, the site is running and we like, sort of have it up. I run it as a side project, but we don’t, it’s a flipped, I ran it as a side project, but we don’t, it doesn’t generate revenue. Now
Andrew: It, no revenue at
Tara: revenue. Yeah, we turned off. I’ll
Andrew: that you guys have on there.
Tara: say that again.
Andrew: It’s just claps that you have on there.
Tara: Yeah. So now there’s like the ability to, uh, for people to post their own artwork that they find online from some of these sites and people like.
And so it’s more of like an appreciation of artwork platform and you can click on the link to go purchase it yourself, but it is not, we’re not taking a cut of the revenue. It’s not a revenue generating thing
Andrew: Okay. And what’s it built on now?
Tara: Bye bye.
Andrew: Um, alright, so you finally said, all right, I think I’ve got something here. I’m going to teach this. The second program. What did you change in the second batch?
Tara: Yeah. So the second is pretty similar to the first batch. We were still teaching bubble. Um, I had just learned how to do it with a little bit more scale. Um, so the first and second batch were pretty similar with some minor tweaks and what I, but I think I noticed a couple things. I, first of all, I noticed that.
That I had a pretty remarkable niche audience that really liked what I was doing. And they were peop entrepreneurs who considered themselves like underdogs. It was like people of color women and people who were older than the typical tech founder.
Andrew: even say outsiders from what I’ve seen. So then that brings me to Laura rotor introduced me to you. What’s your connection to you?
Tara: Oh, um, Laura has been super helpful in my business.
We’ve talked on the phone a couple of times and we share advice
Andrew: Just as an advisor, a friend type of thing. She’s not in the program or anything. Okay. Laura Roeder is the founder of meet Edgar, the social media sharing app. Okay. So you notice something about who they are. They still could afford a thousand dollars, even though they’re on the outside underdog part of the world.
Tara: Yeah.
Andrew: They signed up because of your blog and your TEDx.
Tara: so at that time for the second group of entrepreneurs that I worked with, what I did was I found other people who had email lists and communities, and I did affiliate partnerships with them. Well, I said, Hey, I’ll give you a percentage of folks. if you like, send this email out to your audience, Lang the know that I’m doing a free workshop.
And finally, the free workshop was really helpful because first of all, people have no idea. The, a lot of people have no idea what I’m talking about. When I say you can build an app without code, I still have to like, show them a visual or some examples. Or goal through the different tools that are out there and the options for them to see it.
And then we also have to talk, a lot of people don’t know anything about making money online and specifically they think about app equals 99 cents or cheap, right? Like they think that when they think about apps and so we have to talk a lot about different business models, particularly we talk a lot about white labeling, which is what a good majority of my students end up doing.
They white label their apps to companies, to other companies. Yes.
Andrew: What’s a, what’s an example of something they create and then white label out.
Tara: Okay. I have a alumni program. His name is Josh and he’s a music teacher in Virginia. So he goes to schools or used to go to schools to teach after school music programs, but he can only go to so many schools. So he built an app. For students to learn music, you work in teams, it’s kind of gamified. The teacher gives grades for that music program and then allows schools, particularly if their arts budgets get cut, to be able to teach these music classes.
And so he licensed it to schools. He has 23 schools that in Virginia that are licensing his app, his app is built on bubble. He’s one of my earlier students and he charges varying price points, but starting at like $5,000 and up. A year.
Andrew: To license it.
Tara: Yep.
Andrew: Alright. My second sponsor was going to be top towel. I think still is phenomenal, but you know what I’m gonna do? Bubble was a sponsor. They’re not paying, they have not coming back, but why don’t we just do an ad for bubble? What, what would you say if you had to talk, they’re not paying for this, but I need to do an ad.
What would you say to somebody who wants to know what bubble is and why they should go to bubble and sign up?
Tara: Yeah. So bubble is a tool that lets you build a web app. So an app that’s on like a computer that you can log into, save information about people without any code. And so you log in, you’re able to set up your database, however you want. That’s where you save information about people and things. Um, and then drag drop point click and design your page.
And it is a, one of the really incredible no-code tools that are out there.
Andrew: Computer or phone, right. Obviously.
Tara: Web app or mobile web app. Right. So it’ll still look really nice on your phone. There are third party tools you can use to wrap it and turn it into a app that you download in the app store, but just mobile alone is web app.
Andrew: a whole fricking ecosystem around bubble now.
Tara: whole ecosystem.
Andrew: It’s unbelievable. Um, the other, the first time I had the founder on, I had the same skepticism as I, as I had around you. And then he said, Andrew, you’re not paying attention. Here’s what it is. And I remember him even explicitly going up against, was it the mayor of New York when he was Michael Bloomberg telling people that you should all code?
And he said, I don’t think everyone should code. I know that. I know everyone’s saying, go learn to code. I don’t think everyone should learn to code it. We should make it easier for people to create.
Tara: No, absolutely. And I think this is a clear. Testament of like, when I see the students that I work with who are 80%, um, of those, like we can call them underrepresented tech outsiders, 80% of those folks are the students that I work with. And they have some sort of subject matter knowledge in something they know a lot about nursing.
They know a lot about healthcare. They know a lot about manufacturing. I have a. Oh, you’re on mute.
Andrew: It’s like the person that you just brought up earlier. Right?
Tara: they know something about something from a job that they’ve had from a career they’ve had. And they particularly an unsexy industry that Tech’s not that excited about where they look around and they go, Ooh, the tools that are being used here, they’re kind of clunky and kind of ugly.
I think I can do something better and they go use their network of people that they knew already, or, you know, open up a whole new network. We can talk about. We talk about both and say, Hey, here’s a platform. It costs this amount for the white label. It you’ll get your brand on it. And here’s the annual contract.
Andrew: All right. I’ll I should say to close out the bubble sponsorship, you can go try it for free. Get to use it for free right now and get a 40% discount for the first three months. If you decide that you want to continue on and be a paid customer, all you have to do is go to bubble.is/mixergy. Bubble.is/mc that’s bub, B L e.is/mixergy.
So I’m assuming for the affiliate programs you’re doing, like it’s usually roughly 50% share. Right.
Tara: At the time 30% Allie, I don’t think I knew I didn’t. There’s a whole like info marketing course marketing world that I was not really aware of. I had a friend, Danielle, Leslie, who. Taught me about this. And I had met her at the lean startup conference. She was in the audience. We talked afterwards and became best friends and she, I hired her to help me create a class, of course, for collector.
At the time I created this thing called art collecting school, and it was like mainly a marketing. For collector, but she taught me about this whole world of people who are teaching things online and this whole course industry. Um, and I felt various ways about the course industry. It almost like collides directly with course industry culture and tech culture.
Very much butt heads in there. Um, Views on marketing, right. And the tone with which it’s okay to market. And, and sometimes online course space feels sleazy and it’s marketing. And sometimes the tech space feels like they’re not even trying with their marketing. Um, and
Andrew: right. Right. One feels like they’re too aggressive. And the other feels like they’re too passive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tara: Yeah. And it was important for me to go meet people who were in the other side, who were in the online course space, because there was a big difference in the culture and that in the tech world that I was previously in, it was like, go raise money, go raise money. And in the online course space, it was like generate revenue for your business and get profitable.
You don’t even have a real business unless you’re profitable.
Andrew: Right. And I also feel like in the education space, there’s not much thought about the future. It’s get the money while you’re here. The only sense of future is you’re going to have a big conference with a lot of people paying you, but that’s it. And then once they hit that, they say, well, what do I go from here?
Tara: And often we’ll like quit and sort of stop there. Like that stopped a lot of businesses
Andrew: it does. Right, right. They get burned out. And if they’re lucky they get to sell it. Like, I think Eben pagan sold his business. If they’re not lucky, they let it just languish and it’s collect some money over the years. And that’s, that’s all there is.
Tara: Yeah. So I’m super interested in this, like mixing between the two, like I’m, I’m, I’m thinking from both sides and this experience in both industries. So the way that my works, for example, often like online course businesses are very hesitant. To build a team it’s like just about the face and the brand of, of who’s teaching.
And we think really differently about that. Um, often online courses, won’t be thinking a lot about like how you track success, metrics of students. Uh, we think a lot about that. So, so those are sorts of things that like, we sort of take a combination of both approaches and pull them together.
Andrew: Okay, you got students in order to get them to buy in and understand it. You have to show them what it could do. Did you start coding up in front of them using screenshare? Did you build stuff and show them what’s the visual? You showed them to get them to see the promise land of a real web app built with no code.
Tara: Yeah, I showed them a bunch of examples. So I still do this. I do a workshop every week where I show a bunch of examples and then also we’ll show the tools. I think when I first started doing the workshop, I would do this thing or I would take five minutes. And build a piece of an app in front of people.
And it was like this whole wow moment where people really got it and saw what they could do. Um, and then I also show a sort of gifts and examples of all the different tools out there. Cause people don’t know that there’s so many, right. Like I show the ones that are cool for gaming. I show the like ones that are cool for creating those, those niche specific use case kinds of tools for creating.
Your own Tinder style app, but there’s all sorts of things. So I show them that. And then we talk about generating revenue and I think those two things together, get people to see that there is options there for them.
Andrew: When you show them how to get revenue, what do you teach? What’s the process.
Tara: yeah. So we teach a couple of things. Um, you’re talking about in the free workshop that I do or in
Andrew: In both. Do you, I’m assuming that you’ve got some methodology that you’re passing on? What is it?
Tara: White labeling.
Andrew: So the idea is
Tara: We talk a lot about white labeling, which just people aren’t thinking about. That’s something only thing we’re thinking about. That’s the first thing though, like the option to white label, because what that does is it allows you to build a tech business that doesn’t have to raise money and the.
The majority. And that is what the majority of my customers are looking for. They’re looking for, maybe they want to receive may later on, but they’re looking for the optionality not to have to. So it allows you to, instead of scraping for 99 cents at a time for each customer, or for $10, the time do have large contracts that you then get to say, actually, this job that I have, I’m done, I’m going to go work on this full time.
Andrew: Because I see it. It’s white labeling so that you sell to one person who then sells to multiple people and you have one big sale instead of lots of small sales. That’s the difference?
Tara: Yeah. Or you have like five to 10 big sales and that gets you your distribution, right. But there are larger contracts that then pay your bills and allow you to make different decisions about where you want to go next with your life and your business.
Andrew: Okay. And then how do they find the thing that they create that will then have enough of a demand for white labeling?
Tara: you mean? Like how do they come up with their idea?
Andrew: How do they come up with it? Yeah.
Tara: Yeah. So, so this is one of the things we do in the free workshop, and I’m happy to share a link with folks, but there’s three things we cover in that free workshop. The first one is how to come up with an idea. Um, that’s going to be a strong idea.
The second one is how to build it without any tech people. And the third one is how to make money from it. So the first thing we talk about in that workshop is how to think through the things that you already know something about. Right. So it could be like, I have an entrepreneur program who he likes centered it around his hobby of liking to play basketball.
And the challenge of like knowing which basketball courts are going to be available and which ones are free, and then decided that he was going to build a platform around that and license it to, um, companies in gyms, including the Y YMCA who partnered in piloted with him around having people be able to book and advance their courts in their rooms.
Andrew: Eric Reese created the lean startup conference that you spoke at, right. I think one of the things that he advises is that you talk to customers early, that you sell to them. Ideally, do you, do you do that too?
Tara: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re talking like the way that our bootcamp program works as we go back and forth between business stuff and app building. So we’ll do a little business, which includes at the early stage talking to customers, and then we do a little bit of app building and then we go and we actually get confirmed.
Here’s the price point? Are you in. So we can, we sort of presale the app and then we do some more app building to get that done. So we go back and forth. So that it’s a holistic view.
Andrew: Okay. Let’s then talk about the possible, well, actually a little bit more about where you got your customers. I went and I use the same tools that I use for everyone else. Like similar web, I put your domain in your domain is apps without code, training.com.
Tara: Oh, it’s actually@code.com and after that code, training.com.
Andrew: So I guess I put in apps without code training.com. I saw that you hardly had any traffic to the site. Maybe I should try apps without code.com and see where’s the traffic coming from. What’s your reward? Where people coming in,
Tara: We run ads,
Andrew: what type of ads are you doing
Tara: Facebook and Instagram
Andrew: that lead to a landing page that I guess
Tara: to the landing page. That leads specifically to our free class landing
Andrew: the eight week, I think free class.
Tara: No, the free class is just like a few hours. So I think it’s on. If you go do this is for the same length that anybody else can go to. It’s just workshop.app to that code.com. We send all of my traffic there to our free class.
Andrew: What are you using? What’s the no-code landing page solution that you’ve got for that.
Tara: I think that’s built on lead pages.
Andrew: Okay. All right. And so they come in from there, they sign up. Got it. Um, I was going to ask even more, but that seems like the model, right? It’s that straightforward? You’re buying ads. Who’s buying the ads. Are you, do you have an agency that does it, are you doing yourself now?
Tara: Yeah, we have an agency that we work with and then we work really closely with them. So we do a couple, we do a couple of different ways to market. We do affiliate partnerships and we do ads for those in the biggest ways that we’re finding folks and folks who have app ideas, they come to the free workshop.
And at the end of the free workshop, if they’re interested, they learn about our eight week training program.
Andrew: And what do you do in the free workshop? Do you help them build their first app or just show them what’s possible?
Tara: The free workshop is two hours. So we help them show them what’s possible. And the three things we go through or how to come up with an idea, how to build it without any code. And then also, how do you generate running money from it?
Andrew: All right then in that case, I think that’s pretty freaking straightforward. Let’s then talk about.
Tara: It’s really straightforward and it is not a super complicated to some. Um, but I think it’s important to show people and demonstrate a lot of value upfront. And so like the workshop is really fun for that reason. Cause like I share a lot of what I know.
Andrew: All right. So let’s suppose that I were to say to you, Tara, I know as a podcaster, it’s a pain in the neck to create a website that shows your podcast episodes. I would like to create a better one for myself to make it easy for people to search. Easy to play easy to find the each episode and whatever podcast app they want.
At this point, I feel like we’ve got 12 big podcast apps. And I imagine at some point it’s going to come down to pod, to the podcast app from Apple and Spotify, but you still want to link over to it. It seems to me, first of all, you’d recommend that I not create it because I can’t white label that I could only sell it to individuals.
Am I right about that?
Tara: You
Andrew: I can white label that. And who would I
Tara: You don’t think other bloggers would be interested in that
Andrew: But that’s me selling it to individuals, right. To individual
Tara: white labeling. It doesn’t have to be to businesses. You can white label to like smoke. That’s who, a small business, someone who’s a podcaster as a small business.
Andrew: then they would, but if it’s white labeling, I would sell to them and then they would sell it to their customers. Right. Isn’t that a whole, whole idea behind white
Tara: they don’t sell it to their customers. They usually, when you white label, they offer it to their customers for free. So they’ve paid for the platform. So for example, you would take your podcasting platform, which would be like a place where people can create their own page and you find three other podcasters who would love to have this Susie.
Okay. Great. Here’s how much it costs. It’s going to have your logo and be branded with your colors and you use it for your audience. So it’s not like a resale kind of thing it’s usually, or like another example would be like, I have an entrepreneur who is for alumni of our program. He built an app to help manufacturing companies become more efficient in their assembly lines and white labeled it.
That in that scenario is to accompany to Coca-Cola. Right there Coca-Cola is not reselling it. They’re just using it in house. So it’s about a white labeling when you give that tool to them and they use it in house. Is it in house
Andrew: I was sure you were wrong. And then I looked it up and you’re right. I thought white labeling was, I create something and then you get to put your label on it and resell it to others. It’s according to Wikipedia. Anyway, it’s not necessarily that it could also mean I create it. You just brand it and make it look as if you’ve created it yourself.
Tara: if you created it yourself? Yes.
Andrew: I create this type of thing on. I can and then sell the platform to other podcasters. Can I create my own search? Um, can I create, uh, an easy to use database to publish my, my podcast episodes?
Tara: Yeah. So you have the database of your own podcast app. So you create it for yourself if you’d like, and then you can see a list of all the podcasts episodes, organize it the way that you want. Happy. We’ll be able to click them. Comment on them like them, whatever it is that you want them to do to interact with them, have conversations about each one with each other and start I’m making stuff up, start zoom meetings, where they chat back and forth about what they would
Andrew: All that stuff completely could be done. No code.
Tara: absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. We could even take the podcast episodes that you have and have people when they come to the platform, fill out a little like profile that tells us what kinds of podcasts they like. And it recommends certain podcasts based on which ones they would most be interested in based on the topics they’re interested in.
Andrew: All right. I’m with you. Give me more examples of what’s been built. That was great. By the way, I went to try out glide and I got stuck at as soon as I went to glide, the first thing they asked for was for me to log in with Google, which I have no problem with and then says we want access to view. I want to make sure that I’m not giving them access to my whole Google drive.
One of my problems with Google drive is I give these these creators access to my drive. They get access to everything in my Google drive, and God knows every freaking thing is in my Google drive now, but it looks like it says view and manage Google drive files and folders that you have opened and created with this app.
I think I’m okay with that.
Tara: Yes. Yes. So meaning like, if you create a spreadsheet that has your database,
Andrew: if I created within their can they get access to it? I don’t want these guys who
Tara: you open it and yeah. So they’re going to just like pull up a list of, cause the next step they’re probably going to ask you which spreadsheet is the database that you want to use for this app? And so you’ve got to pull up a list of your Google drive data spreadsheets, and you click the one you want.
Andrew: I’m going to do that. And, uh, yeah, which makes sense, right. Because if I could just put it in a spreadsheet, every episode of my podcast, it’s there.
Tara: Yes, exactly. Like done.
Andrew: Give me more ideas. What else has been done with this? What else has been done with, uh, with no code? You can get me fired up here, Tara.
Tara: Okay. So I always get super excited about the scenarios, particularly with my students where like they. Are not the typical tech entrepreneur and don’t have the typical tech entrepreneurship skills, but are able to like turn something into something. Cool. So I have an alumni who is a veteran, who is like, life was actually pretty challenging prior to bootcamp.
And she just knows a lot though about veteran services. And when we started, she wanted to build an app directly for veterans. The challenge is that it’s hard to monetize that. With the community of veterans, right. Um, she wanted to get like, give them access to resources and things like that. And I also, by the way, like I also ended up working with a lot of folks and I think this is also like a demographic thing too, where like there’s often the interest in doing good and giving back and trying to figure out how to make that work with a business to, um, Anyway, she ended up, we sort of pivoted a little bit to have her be able to focus on maybe the veterans themselves are not the ones we should monetize from, but there are tons of veterans serving nonprofit whose job it is to get resources to their community and be able to track how well they’re using those resources and their ability to continue to get grant funding is dependent on their ability to track that.
So she white labels it now to veteran serving nonprofits who now have like all these actors yeah. To the resources that they promote and they can track and see which resources their community is using and not. So they’ve got like this tracking dashboard that they can then use to go raise more money.
Great. That’s a great example of like it’s white labeled, so it has their name and they use it in house. They don’t resell it, but they use it for their whole team in their employee team to be able to use that. That’s like one of one example
Andrew: You know what a lot of this stuff comes down to databases. A lot of the things we’re talking about really are just databases, make it easy to get the data in, make it easy to get the data out and enrich it any way that you want. Right.
Tara: Yes, absolutely. And I, and I think that the Butte that’s like the sweet spot of no code to me. Is not trying to build the most fancy app. It is building tools for industries where people aren’t like the tech, industry’s not spending a lot of time building the sexy thing. It’s the non-sexy industries that I think are where everyday people are able to go in because they know that problem to be able to come up with a solution for it.
Andrew: All right. Give me another one because you’re right. You’re right. Eat. Not only do they not know it they’re turned off by it completely. They, um, I think frankly, Talking to anything about kids. They’re so turned off by it because they don’t want to get contaminated by that part of the world. And for a long time, I’d give that didn’t even admit that I had kids.
Not that I hated it. I didn’t want to bring it up. All right. What else?
Tara: Um, I have another alumni. His name is Marcus. He built a really cool app to help people find farms and farmer’s markets nearby. He went through this like, like becoming a farmer training, which I was like, what? I didn’t even know. That was a thing. Um, And he lets the farmers post in the app for free, but if they want to sell their produce directly on the app, then there’s a charge for that.
And so he’s got, and he went online. He found this database, but again, we’re talking about databases, this database to a bunch of farmers, but now they have this platform where they can sell digitally and it’s become super important to a post. COVID era where like, people are not at the farmer’s market as they were before, but they still are able to make their orders within a certain vicinity.
Who’s got a map and you can see the vicinity and like click in. So that’s another fun example.
Andrew: Oh, that’d be so interesting. Imagine a farmer’s markets. You got to change because of this. You know
Tara: Yeah, it’s the non-sexy stuff.
Andrew: yeah, yeah. I do feel like the world is changing in so many interesting ways, but it needs some support in order to make like I’m, I’m even imagining could farm stands be streets in San Francisco are now being turned into restaurants.
Could it, at some point be turned into farm stands. If I don’t want to go into a restaurant into a supermarket, I might, as I’m walking down Valencia street, be willing to pick up some groceries. If it’s from some local farms so much the better I get, I get fruits and vegetables having interesting.
Tara: Yeah. And I think like, oftentimes from the tech world, we think about like the criteria for an idea being good is, is this going to change the world? Right. And I think that it could, right, like all these ideas that I mentioned they could, but even if they didn’t and this ended up being an awesome six or seven figure business for that entrepreneur, like for me, and this is, we were talking a little bit earlier about like, Race and identity.
Like for me, helping folks who are tech ciders, who wouldn’t have had access to this otherwise, who are women who are people of color, who were, who don’t know how code and get to that sort of sustainability with their own entrepreneurship, like that’s enough. Change the world for me, enough people doing it, that you have a six or seven figure business.
Wonderful.
Andrew: I’m with you. I do feel like a lot of the suggestions you’ve, you’ve put out there. A lot of the businesses that you put out there, I felt like, Oh, they’re not. I have to be huge. I’m never going to interview them on Mixergy, but first of all, I realized I was wrong. I interviewed you here, right? Emmanuel from, from bubble.
I was wrong there. Right? So you don’t know how big it’s going to be. And second, even if it doesn’t become the next billion dollar business, the next unicorn. There are many million and multimillion dollar businesses out there that we’re not paying attention to because we’re trained for some reason to just focus on the unicorns, they call it the unicorn industrial company, anything you had in desktop complex, too.
You get that you get to knock easily with, by, uh, by saying it’s big. Um, All right. I’m with you. I think this makes a lot of sense. All right. For anyone who wants to go sign up? Um, we, we totally didn’t get to talk about race. We totally didn’t get to talk about, about faith. I just got so fascinated by this for anyone who wants to follow up with you.
Sorry.
Tara: Do you wanna talk about real quick? Are we at a time?
Andrew: Let’s do it. I a, the person who I pushed off, because I wanted to interview you is coming out in three minutes. It’s, uh, it’s this college student is working on a project. Um, but. Is that enough time for us to do justice? To what you said to me before we got started, you said to me, I think about race every, I think you said every day with my business.
Tara: Yeah. So I nodded on it. I nodded to it really briefly, right? Like I get to in my business and this is, this was unintentional first, right? It was just, I told you, I mentioned I started, I opened up bootcamp and there were a bunch of people. That looked like me who were interested and what happened was they had seen maybe that it was possible to get into tech, but that person didn’t look like them.
So they figured it wasn’t possible for them. Right. And so one of the amazing things that I get to do for people in tech, for people of color, for women, all those groups and the people who don’t code for people who are clear, all those things that I identify with is that like you get to see someone. Who you relate to doing it and you get to then see a community of other people.
And it’s not exclusively those people, but like, I think unintentionally, I get to, to help create economic mobility in those communities. So that’s why I was saying, I think about race and identity all the time, but my business.
Andrew: And you know what I, for years have had more requests from people to get guests on who look like the person who is sending a request. So the classic one is get more black entrepreneurs on. And I actually, the classic one is. Get more international entrepreneurs. And if it’s black and more black entrepreneurs from my part, the world, and I used to say, I’m trying, it’s not easy, but okay.
I definitely want to broaden it out, but I’d also say in the back of it, in my head, well, who cares? Just learn from everybody. I don’t learn from people who look like me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by a biography about someone who looked like me or came from me. And I still felt inspired by people like Ted Turner.
Um, and at the same time, I have to acknowledge that someone like us does something, it feels more attainable. If I saw that Michael Seiger did a 300 mile, I did look and say, well, I hate to say, I said, how old is he? And then I thought, well, does he have kids? And then I realized, all right, if someone’s older and has kids, it’s not just 22 year olds, you can do it.
And then I had to come back on Twitter and go, damn it. What’s your next run. Maybe I want to do that too. So I have to acknowledge that and I think you’re right.
Tara: Yeah. Mom made a comment to me. That was really surprising. Cause sometimes I feel that way too. Right. Like I feel like I can learn from anyone, but also there’s this subconscious element of that. And I had a conversation with my mom. Where she was like, I’m just so amazed. Cause you just told me the people that you look up to that you aspire to be like, and there were, I would, when I was your age, I never would have considered having someone I could aspire to be like who wasn’t black.
It just never would have crossed my mind that I could aspire to be like someone who wasn’t black.
Andrew: that’s what she’s saying. You’re saying you’re making enough progress that you could, but at the same time, there’s some of what you’re saying
Tara: But still, but still at least half of my list is black. So like, I think like there’s progression, but I guess my point is that is why it’s important.
Andrew: All right. I love that you cut me off the one time I cut you off a bunch of one. I always cut off my guests. I feel like that’s a job of a good host. You’ve got to keep things on a certain path, but also we could overdo it with the cutting off. Anyway, one time you did was when I was telling people how to go to your website, which is unusual.
Most people want me to shut up then. Get to that. All right. I will say, uh, anyone who’s interested can go to apps without code.com and if you have any doubt about how, um, incredible do it, I did just, I always take a lower rotors word. If she says, go pay attention. I just stopped everything. W I wasn’t even looking for you.
I was looking for a whole other topic. Laura said stop and pay attention. Dammit. She’s right, right. Oh, and I forgot about my sponsors. First sponsor is HostGator. If you need a website, go to hostgator.com/mix, would you just start talking about your passion? See where it goes. I think you’re going to be surprised.
And frankly, you have a hosting company now that you hate to switch over to HostGator. I go to hostgator.com/mixergy. And the second is a company that probably won’t even know that we’ve run this ad. It’s bubbled.is/mixergy. I’m sure they’ll see some new people trying out bubble because of this. Um, and I appreciate them for just.
Uh, actually I appreciate manual for being so patient with me when I said, yeah, I’m not sure. I said I listened. I like you. Let me walk you through by Tara so much by bye everyone.
