undefined cover
undefined cover
Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong) cover
Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong) cover
The KeyHire Small Business Podcast

Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong)

Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong)

37min |02/04/2025|

109

Play
undefined cover
undefined cover
Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong) cover
Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong) cover
The KeyHire Small Business Podcast

Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong)

Unlocking Business Growth with No-Code Solutions (with Xan Hong)

37min |02/04/2025|

109

Play

Description

In this episode of The KeyHire Podcast, host Corey Harlock sits down with Xan Hong, Founder and Principal Consultant of Drive Phase Consulting, to explore how small businesses can leverage no-code software to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and build custom tools without the need for a developer.


Xan shares real-world insights on how no-code solutions empower business owners to take control of their processes, reduce costs, and scale smarter. Whether you're looking to automate workflows, manage data more effectively, or create custom apps tailored to your needs, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways.


Tune in to learn how no-code technology can be a game-changer for your business.


Learn more about Xan: https://www.drivephase.co


Check out our sponsor: https://bit.ly/CS-KeyHire

Be KeyHire's Next Success Story: https://bit.ly/KHSuccess


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    I hear a lot about software and the challenges that come along with software. Integrations, cost, user ability, all that fun stuff. I actually have a client right now who wants to implement a new software, but it's cost prohibitive for him at the start of the year and with all the crazy stuff going on with the economy. Today, we're going to talk about a concept I've never heard of before, and it's called no-code software. Welcome to the KeyHire Small Business Podcast, where we cover the issues that help owners scale their small business. I'm Corey Harlock, creator of KeyHire, and I'll be your host. Our guest today is San Hong. He is a consultant and owner of Drive Phase Consulting, where they transform ideas into reality with no-code solutions. A couple of interesting things about San. He's helped his clients save over a million dollars in app development. Uh, he first learned no code because, uh, uh, his daughter, uh, over the pandemic wanted to, uh, go to the ice cream truck and get some ice cream and she kept missing it. So he built an app to track the ice cream truck, which I think is good dad stuff and also pretty cool. And former athlete used to be a sprinter at university of Pennsylvania and he's a good golfer, 16 handicap. Matt, let's bring in Sam. Hey man, how you doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Good. How you doing Corey? Thanks for having me.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, no worries. 16 handicaps. So that means you shoot in the 85 to 90?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I would say like low 80s to high 80s in that range.

  • Speaker #0

    God, I hate guys like you.

  • Speaker #1

    I play with a lot of guys that are crushing me. So I hear you.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. I think the best round I ever shot was a 91 or a 92 and I blew my elbow out. And then I had kids and they got old and into sports and no time for golf.

  • Speaker #1

    I hear you. It's tough.

  • Speaker #0

    So you're sitting in Delaware, you said?

  • Speaker #1

    That's correct, yep.

  • Speaker #0

    How's the weather up there? Cold?

  • Speaker #1

    It was 60 for a hot minute, and we're back down to 30s, so a little bit all over the place, so hard to dress for, but not bad.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, 77 and sunny here in South Texas.

  • Speaker #1

    You're such a jerk.

  • Speaker #0

    I know, sorry, man. I'll be right back. So the format of this podcast, you know, this is such a cool concept, and I remember when we first connected on this, I was... um it was it was really interesting because i'd never heard of it myself and i'm sure there are people out there who have but this concept of no code uh software development um so we always like to start with a definition you know what is no code solutions

  • Speaker #1

    or software development yeah great question um so I refer to it. And by the way, you're not the only one that hasn't heard of it. I'm always shocked because I'm in the world. So I expect everyone to realize it, you know, know what it is. And there's so many that it sounds like such a cool,

  • Speaker #0

    simple thing. Right. Like, why don't we all know about this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no. So so basically the way to think about it is it's visual programming. So, you know, it first started with websites. And I heard you kind of talking on that earlier. So so that drag and drop concept for websites. Right. You know. with WordPress and Wix and things like that, where you could drag elements on, you know, kind of what you see is what you get. But no code app development is taking that a step further, where you're actually using kind of prebuilt workflows to build the engine behind that, that front end, right. And so you can now kind of create workflows to automate processes in the back end. And so I tell people all the time, if you look at a basic business application, they're all kind of doing the same. thing in a nutshell i mean there's certainly ones that are more complicated but in a nutshell you're creating data you're reading data you're updating data you're doing calculations you're displaying data kind of in a unique way and so you can take these pre-poll elements and and build pretty complex apps without writing a line of code and really again the most important thing to take away from it is um that in general you know we can build an app probably five to ten times faster than traditional code. Now, AI code is a little bit different, but five to ten times faster than traditional code, which adds up to, you know, most of your cost in an app development is developer time. Right. So so that that directly correlates to cost savings.

  • Speaker #0

    OK, so I have two questions around this. Number one, is AI a part of this no code development? Are they interlinked or are they separate?

  • Speaker #1

    They are separate, but merging. Right? So AI generated code. So generated code is you put prompts in and AI actually generates code to write an app. No code. The interface is not a prompt. but you're actually using visual drag and drop elements to build the workflows, build the elements, build the app. Now, what you're seeing is a lot of no-code apps are incorporating AI. So now you've really got kind of the merging of two really disruptive technologies where now we can build apps even better. Now, what I will tell people is, at the end of the day, AI generated code still generates code. So if you're a non-technical person, If you don't know code, it then becomes very difficult for you to maintain that app. Versus if it's built in no code, a non-technical person can learn that platform and then maintain that. So I really like the combination of AI and no code because you kind of get the best of both worlds. You get the speed, but then you also have a non-technical person that can still kind of maintain and iterate on that app.

  • Speaker #0

    That's cool. So I guess if you build it through AI and it's actually giving you code and you get a glitch. you need to have some savvy to be able to go in there and figure that out. Where with no code, it's limited or you pull that out and drag a new one in and it should self-correct. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    exactly. It's just a little bit easier for those that are non-technical. So generally speaking, if you have a coding background, you'd probably love AI code. If you don't have a coding background, kind of the no code still is a benefit. And with a lot of the platforms, they're incorporating AI into their platform. So you're really getting the best of both worlds in a lot of cases.

  • Speaker #0

    Attention business owners, are you tired of wasting valuable time hiring for associate level positions only to have them not work out or show up? Let me introduce you to CareerSpring. CareerSpring connects first generation and low-income college students with employers like you for those crucial early career roles. Many of these graduates had to balance a full-time job and a full-time course load to achieve their college dreams. They understand the value of hard work and overcoming obstacles. And here's the best part. CareerSpring is free for employers. Yes, you heard that right. As a nonprofit organization, CareerSpring offers their services at no cost to you, making it easy to find and hire these incredible future leaders. They work with students all across the United States, from trade programs to Ivy League schools and everything. in between. If you're ready to make a real difference and connect first generation potential with future opportunities, click the link in the show notes below and learn how you can transform your business and support these exceptional students. This episode is brought to you by Key Hire Solutions, where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business. Are you struggling to find the right talent for your business? As a small business owner, your time is precious, and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business. guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today. Okay, now you're really going to learn how non-techie I am. So you refer to it as an app. And I know in our previous conversation, we talked about building software. Are they the same thing? Is this an app that holds the software that sits on your computer? Or how? And just so people are wondering, like, I don't need an app for my business, but I need a CRM or I need a way to track my logistics or something.

  • Speaker #1

    um are we talking about two different things can it do both of those i just kind of trying to understand the um yeah yeah so when i say app i'm referring to an application i think uh to your point i think when most when i say app a lot of people not coming from a technical background associate that with a mobile app so yeah like the thing on my phone right yeah exactly exactly when i say an app i'm referring to either a web application that could be like a a sas type product that you log into on the internet like a cloud-based cloud-based solution okay yeah exactly and or via mobile app as well and with a lot of no-code platforms you're building in the same way like you know this is changing there's some platforms where we don't have to do this but to build a mobile app in a lot of no-code platforms we're building a web-first, web-based application. What we do is then we put a wrapper around it that allows us to submit it to the app stores. And so it gives the feel of a native mobile app. But we're literally building a web app that we're putting a wrapper around. So, but yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    So if I were to build a no code, I'll just use CRM for easy kind of thing, easy example. And I got you to build that. You would build a cloud-based solution. That would be my CRM. That would be the application that I would get on my computer. I would sign into it and it would be hosted in one of the many server farms all over the country. And it wouldn't be hard data on my computer.

  • Speaker #1

    It would be most likely cloud-based, correct.

  • Speaker #0

    Got it. Okay. I'm glad we clarified that because I'm like app software. Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    No, you're not the only one. Yeah, I have to kind of watch myself.

  • Speaker #0

    Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    So,

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, the... the tagline was, you know, get custom software for 10% of the cost. And you said it's, you know, 10% of the time to build, to use code to build software versus no code. So let's kind of now maybe, like I said, I have a client out there who's talking about doing a conversion to one of these big players out there to, he's got a warehouse and logistics business. And he's like, man, I'd love to do it, but it's just so freaking expensive. So what are some of the. mistakes. And I guess we can frame this in a few ways because there are a lot of big players out there that own certain spaces, right? Like Salesforce or ADP, right? These guys own these spaces and maybe it doesn't make sense to build custom software to do what they do because they do it really well. So what are the mistakes around building custom software applications for your business? Do people miscast them? Do they think of it incorrectly or are there any? I mean, maybe I'm going down the wrong road, Sam, but tell me what mistakes have you seen business owners make when they come to you and say, OK, we want to either A, I can't afford to do software or B, here's what we want to do with our software. And you're like,

  • Speaker #1

    let's rethink that. So first off, I'll tell you, this is when clients come to us, believe it or not, the first thing I'll do is, hey, let's just make sure there's not an existing solution that meets your needs. you know, as much as I would like to generate income, I always try to do the best for the client. And existing solutions are always going to be more cost effective. That being said, where if there is an existing solution, what I also tell people is you don't want to change your processes to meet the tool. You want your tool to kind of match your processes, right? And so what typically happens is if there is an existing tool, they'll come to me like, well, it just doesn't fit what we're doing. And so that's where custom software. kind of doesn't make sense, right? So then kind of, you know, going down the path of where you're going as far as, okay, what are the common mistakes I see is the first one we see is the first, you know, there's a term we use in software development, MVP, which is minimal viable product, right? And so that's kind of what we define that as is the minimal amount of features that you can do to accomplish your goal. And in developing software, One of the biggest mistakes I see is in that first version, trying to do too much with it, right? Inevitably, whether it's no code or code, your first version is going to have bugs in it. You're going to have, you know, there's just too many things you're trying to do. And so when you try and do too many things with that first version, I feel like it's almost trying to fight too many battles on too many sides, right? And so we try and prioritize, like, what's the most important thing you're trying to do first? Let's build that version, nail that, and then incrementally add the other features that you want once we nail that. Where we've seen the best results is when we've done that. Where we've seen kind of clusters is when we've tried to build just this Cadillac right off the bat. And it's just trying to debug all those things. And everyone gets frustrated. Users get frustrated. Clients get frustrated. And so we've learned to really try and simplify. So a lot of times when I meet with clients and they're like, hey, I want this, I want this, I want this. I try and back them down like, hey, let's start with this, get that nailed down. And then adding on, you know, incrementally once we built that initial product becomes a lot easier than trying to build all the pieces at once. Does that make sense?

  • Speaker #0

    So let me let me. So I'm a visual thinker. So let me tell you what I was thinking while you were talking. It's like doing a reno and you have a. $200,000 budget and while they're in there they're like well we found this and we found that and you're like yeah fix that fix that fix that and then your budget you end up spending 400k right yeah they try to kind of once you get in there and you're working the brain trust starts having well what if we got to do this and got it to do this and then they over complicate the the original one and then i guess what i heard you say was build it like you know you build your business you you do your main software and then add bolt-ons right you're going to go now the next module we want to add to this let's have it do this so you're kind of playing in it and then thinking okay well the next logical now that we're in it because i i have a feeling a lot of people have all these great ideas and then when it's built it it doesn't flow or the things they need aren't there when they need them so if you start with a basic version and you're like you know what if we had this come in at this part of the process that would be really helpful so then we build that module and bolt it on no a thousand percent and as you're talking through that i'll actually mention kind of the one of the other mistakes that we see and candidly we learned ourselves was

  • Speaker #1

    we have learned over the years and it's exactly for one of the reasons that you just mentioned is we used to kind of jump right into building the app What we've learned is we always now, especially if it's a bigger app, sometimes if it's a small app, we can get away with not doing it. But it's rare is we'll start with what we call wireframes first. So if you're not familiar with wireframes, it's basically kind of all the major screens in your app. We graphically design them first. Yeah. Usually the tool that we use is Figma. So we'll design them through. Sometimes we'll do what's called a clickable prototype where it's almost like, you know, you can click to the next screen and it actually, you know, kind of. Right. You can kind of. uh experience what that what that experience would be but what we've seen is when we don't do that there's a lot of people just like you that are visual and so they come and say here's what i want and then we start designing it and they're like oh well no we actually really want this right and so so we just screw ourselves and screw them because you know even though it's no code it's much more flexible it still is

  • Speaker #0

    adding cost if we're changing directions multiple times throughout the process of course yeah and yeah and that wireframe's like a 2d version of what they're going to get right it's like not the living breathing version it's just the the 2d version but doing that process we've seen over and over again it forces the client to make decisions that they hadn't thought of right yeah i think it's the way to go i mean even even in my business you know uh my assistant and our the designer we use i'll give them an idea and they'll say well how do you want to look i'm like i don't know i need you to come up with the concept and then i'll be able to pull it apart and kind of move things around but if you're asking me i can see it in my brain but if you tell me to explain it to your write it down on piece of paper just it's gone you know so and you're better at this stuff than i am so you start and then i'll jump in and kind of collaborate exactly exactly so yeah no that that's kind of another big lesson that we lesson that we've learned so what are what are maybe another is there any other mistakes that we're missing i mean is is there a wrong application for software where people want to try to automate things that just generally you can't or i remember years ago i wanted to do software and a friend of mine who's also a business consultant he said you know the worst investment you can make for your business is developing software i think ah yeah so

  • Speaker #1

    What I will say, and I guess it's really more of a startup type of concept than anything, is like people that come to us and they have this idea for the next billion dollar startup. Right. And they come to us and they want to just, you know, they're usually the ones I want to design the Cadillac. And again, you know, what I'll tell them is you want to validate that what you're building is tackling a problem that's big enough that someone will pay for a solution. And I tell people, you don't validate that by asking, will you pay for this? You validate by making them pay something, whether it's like kind of early access or kind of, you know, sometimes I even tell people I started as a consulting service and kind of learn the problem by dealing with the customers, understanding what their true pain points are. And then what I've even seen and what we've done ourselves in a startup that I was in is in that consulting service, we built an internal tool. where we use the internal tool to deliver that service more efficiently. And then we transition that into like an external SaaS type solution, you know, and we were kind of our own first beta tester. So it's a little bit of a different mistake, but one that we have seen a lot. And again, I tell people if I don't think they've truly validated it, I'll tell them to go validate it before we go and build something. Because again, I mean, as much as we like to generate revenue, I don't like to generate revenue when someone walks away kind of frustrated. Sure. And so I want to make sure they're building something that is going to be successful for them as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    I can't imagine you get very many people that come to you and thinking they have the next billion dollar startup idea.

  • Speaker #1

    No, we do. And more importantly, they usually want us to work for free. And they'll give you a percentage of that billion dollar.

  • Speaker #0

    VC alive and well, you know, you can get in on the ground floor, son.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    Cool. All right. Well, let's move into maybe some pieces of advice. And one thing I do want to talk about, I don't want to not talk about. is the cost aspect of this, because you said it takes about 10% of the time of regular coding. So maybe walk us through, well, let's bunch it all together. So what pieces of advice would you give someone? And we've touched on some of that stuff already, but, and then maybe when we're done that, we can talk about the process, what it looks like and how it's, how you save the time and where you save the time.

  • Speaker #1

    Sure. Sure. So where do you want my start? Sorry.

  • Speaker #0

    let's start with advice the top three to five pieces of advice if someone's listening is thinking man i i've had this problem and i've been thinking about getting some software made and this sounds like the right idea for me you know what what what should they be doing to get this yeah so i

  • Speaker #1

    would say the more they come to us or whether it's us or or if you want to build yourself you know what i would say is the more you can define what we call the user journey journey So one of the most important things we can do before we get started is define, A, what type of users are going to use the app, right? Is it going to be a consumer? Is it going to be a salesperson? In one case we're working on right now is an estimator. Is there going to be an admin user? So number one, you want to define, OK, what types of users are going to use it? And then as much as possible, kind of storyboard out what do you want each of those user types to do? from the time they log in to the time they log out right and we can typically help a client through that but the more that someone can come to us with that information kind of fleshed out as much as possible then i think the smoother the process will be so i think that's a really important one um because and then then it comes down to thinking through okay do i want this to be a web-based app or do i want a mobile app right or you know will this be used primarily and and this is a different decision because you could have a web-based app that's primarily on mobile it doesn't necessarily need to be a mobile app so is this going to be primarily used on mobile tablet or desktop right because those things will affect maybe what no code platform we use right so the more you can kind of figure out those things out um you know it just makes our job a little bit easier it allows us to kind of guide you down the right you know path a little bit better very cool

  • Speaker #0

    think through those through think those through the better it will be so i always i never want to kind of bury the lead and i always try to think about what questions people would have out there and i just realized we haven't really outlined what you could use this for okay what as a business owner what are some of the applications i could have you build something for me to do or what are you seeing commonly or or what what efficiencies are you able to build into businesses with this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. So it's run the gamut. So I'll try and kind of group them into themes as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    Sorry. I kind of surprised you.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no, no, no. You're good. So one is kind of, you mentioned it, like a CRM type of app, where, but more so the CRM, it's the automation workflows behind it, right? So Yeah. A lot of business applications are some sort of variation of a CRM. And for those that are also customer relationship management system, where you're storing all your customer lead information and you're, you're kind of driving workflows and automations off of that. Right. So we have one right now we're working on where I can't give all the, all the details, but it's, it's basically the CRM tool combined with an estimation tool in the consultant. cool all right so they're combining it into one where they can create the lead and then assign the estimation process that estimator can go then there's a mobile app component where they can kind of do what they need to to uh to take the measurements to to do uh that sounds like a chunky piece of software like that's that's not as that's that's pretty yeah it is a piece of software and that's one where it's almost kind of hard you know i know but break break one of the first pieces of advice i gave but it's almost kind of hard to to break so we are starting as simple as possible but we're you know the the estimation piece is the the chunkier piece of that but we do have a simple crm to begin with so so that's kind of one example of one um so another one is kind of a customer facing piece uh you know there's some e-commerce brands where we kind of simplified the buying process through an e you know through a custom mobile app right okay and so that's been another one that we've done i'm trying to think of some other ones obviously ai has been a big one recently. I just built one for myself. So I was actually trying to learn a new no-code platform. And in my head, if I'm going to take the time to do that, I'm going to build something that could be useful. So I built a social listening app that I use for my own lead generation. So basically, I put in keywords and I have different integrations that I've done where based on the keywords I put into my system, it'll go and get... mentions on right now, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn that have those keywords in it. It pulls it into a dashboard and then I kind of filter through it. I have AI kind of evaluate, is this kind of a high intent for my business or not? And then I actually have an AI component that will respond to that post. And it's been actually a pretty valuable tool for me to go and generate leads because basically we're targeting people on social media that are looking for the services that we provide. So that took up a lot of integrations that we had to set up. But, you know, that's just another example of something we were able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    So let me get this straight. You built an app that will go on social media platforms and find people talking about, I need to build a website or I'm looking to build an app. Does anyone have any ideas? It'll prioritize those in terms of it'll score them, lead score them for you. Yeah. yeah and then it will generate a response from you saying hey we can help you with that yeah basically yes yeah yeah so just to give you a sense i built that in less than a month like

  • Speaker #1

    that you know how many people spend hours a day scrolling through and commenting yeah yeah yeah yeah so so it so it takes me now it takes me about like 30 minutes in the morning i'm able to get through 10 keywords that way so yeah so so that's just kind of another that's like i said that's something i just finished on myself so it just made me think of that but but really i hope i'm just trying to give kind of a broad range of the types of things yeah that's wild though that's super cool that you you yeah it's really and like i said the the food truck tracking app was another one where we were able to uh that actually got licensed uh by a food truck association which was my eight-year-old daughter's idea um but you know basically

  • Speaker #0

    food trucks could share the location there was a consumer app to download so that they could always see where those food trucks were it sent them push notifications when they were within a certain radius of their current location this episode is brought to you by key hire solutions where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business are you struggling to find the right talent for your business as a small business owner your time is precious and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business, guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today.

  • Speaker #1

    So again, no code, no code. So it's... There's very little we haven't been able to build. I'm sure we'll encounter it, but so far there's been few that we haven't been able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    Very cool, man.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, that's crazy. So, San, if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, I want to learn more about this or I've had this idea and I want to bounce it off San and see what he thinks. Oh, no, hold on. Before we get to that, the cost savings. Let's talk about that. So, obviously, it's a quick and dirty process compared to typing code. Now, AI is helping with the coding and things, but you claim it's 10% of the cost of traditional. So, how does that work out for you?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, so I can give you kind of real life examples. So that number, you know, our tagline is we've saved our clients over a million dollars in that development cost. So for this full disclosure, those are in the cases where clients have come to us and given us their other estimates that they got prior to coming. Right. So those are numbers where that's coming from. So to give you a couple of hard examples of this, and these are bigger apps, so hopefully I won't. I'll give you a couple of different ranges of maybe smaller apps versus bigger apps. But we've had. two to three in the last few months where they came to us where their existing estimates were in the neighborhood of 400 to 900,000 and it was going to take 12 months or more to build for us it was going to be in the neighborhood of 25 to 50,000 and we probably could build them in two to three months wow so and in the case of the one that was a half a million it was a small company competing against bigger companies right so they were using this technology to kind of disrupt their industry the reality is i think you kind of mentioned a similar case with your friend is that project didn't doesn't happen at a half a million dollars right we ended up doing for about 40k um and so that was a comfortable number for him and so again it really democratizes access to this custom technology and again we've got a few more that are in that 400 to 900 000 range where again we're in that 25

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, for a small business owner, if they have this idea of getting software, no wonder they say like it's prohibitive because $500,000 out of the jeans of a small business doing $10, $12, $15, $20 million a year. Yeah. That could be the entire year's revenue, right? Exactly. You got to wait for a year to get it. And so, you know, $25,000, $30,000, $40,000 is a much more reasonable number. You get it faster.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly. And, you know, we've done smaller apps, you know, candidly, we're moving away from these smaller apps because they end up being a lot of headache, you know, for very little margin. But, you know, on the smaller end, we've done as small as 5K. But I would say probably right now our average is, you know, 15 to 25K, you know, as a range. And they're pretty robust apps. You know, it's not like you're getting. you know, something very simple. I mean, you're, you know, what I will tell you is this is a lot of the functionality we are leveraging what's known as an API or application program interface. So these are third party solutions that do a very specific thing that we're able to integrate with, use that to do that complicated calculation or scrape that data or do things like that. pull that into our app that that kind of third party API is doing the heavy lifting. We're leveraging that to kind of add that functionality to our app. And so that's really that's really key. I think people think, oh, we got to program all of it. No, we're smart about it. We're leveraging people that have built these external products to to do a lot of heavy lifting. And then we're kind of aggregating all that functionality into one. And so that really allows us to to to build these robust apps without having to kind of, you know. to take you know a year to do and i and it doesn't sound like you're you lose any functionality on them at all they're they're just as good and as effective as the 500 000 coded software correct yeah the one thing i will say just kind of for full disclosure now i think the no code tools are getting better at this but we have seen some of the tools where as you scale up to you know more and more users you do see a little bit of lagging in performance but a lot of times it's because you're on a shared server and they do have kind of you know kind of uh dedicated instances where you could pay up for it but yeah but you know that's one thing i do kind of share with people is you know uh no code can and like i said there are some solutions that um that are you know addressing this but but performance can be an issue with no code but again I tell people you've saved so much money that even at a later date, you did have to kind of add coded components to it. It's still worth it. But there's a lot of companies that are, you know, three, four years in and are fine with it. So, you know, I just say that to be.

  • Speaker #0

    transparent about it but um but yeah i mean that that's one thing that we have seen in some cases but but generally speaking no code can handle a lot of what they need to i got to assume it's evolving because it was probably meant to be cost affordable for smaller operations but now people are like oh this works and now like bigger companies are doing it so they

  • Speaker #1

    kind of have to play catch up because it wasn't built for that kind of volume right that's exactly right and that's where you are starting to see like more enterprise level uh no code tool so well but yeah that's just kind of one thing i just

  • Speaker #0

    tell people to just make it aware and and we walk them through kind of how to address that super cool all right so now man if people want to get in touch with you we're going to put matt to work here uh how can how can they reach out if they want to learn more about what you do or talk about some software yeah

  • Speaker #1

    absolutely so the best thing is uh our website our website is uh drivephase.co so it's d-r-i-v-e-p-h-a-s-e dot co um And the easiest thing to do is on there, there's a link on whether it's about 50 links on there to schedule a free consultation. And, you know, that is what it is. I mean, we don't do a hard sell. We just basically walk through, OK, what are you trying to do? A, can this be done in no code? And then, you know, if they want to kind of move towards a more full on estimate, then we that typically takes another session where we start that scope of progress, which can be pretty, pretty intense. But. but yeah that's really the best way to do it like i said you know we do these free consultations and we had some other other places to reach out matt what do you got your youtube station youtube at drive phase co instagram they're

  • Speaker #0

    all pretty much the same handles facebook yeah it's consistent throughout yeah there you go there you are on linkedin cool hey man thanks so much this has been super cool i learned a ton from it and i appreciate you taking the time to come and chat with us

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, thanks for having me, Corey. It was a pleasure.

  • Speaker #0

    All right. We'll talk soon. There you go. San Hong. That was a very cool and interesting conversation. I'd like to thank you for tuning into the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. If you got value out of the episode today and you want to keep up to date on our new content, make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, leave a comment, even let us know if there's topics you'd like us to discuss on the show for you. If you prefer to listen to your podcast, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform by searching the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Corey Harlock. And until next time, stop grinding, start growing.

Description

In this episode of The KeyHire Podcast, host Corey Harlock sits down with Xan Hong, Founder and Principal Consultant of Drive Phase Consulting, to explore how small businesses can leverage no-code software to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and build custom tools without the need for a developer.


Xan shares real-world insights on how no-code solutions empower business owners to take control of their processes, reduce costs, and scale smarter. Whether you're looking to automate workflows, manage data more effectively, or create custom apps tailored to your needs, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways.


Tune in to learn how no-code technology can be a game-changer for your business.


Learn more about Xan: https://www.drivephase.co


Check out our sponsor: https://bit.ly/CS-KeyHire

Be KeyHire's Next Success Story: https://bit.ly/KHSuccess


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    I hear a lot about software and the challenges that come along with software. Integrations, cost, user ability, all that fun stuff. I actually have a client right now who wants to implement a new software, but it's cost prohibitive for him at the start of the year and with all the crazy stuff going on with the economy. Today, we're going to talk about a concept I've never heard of before, and it's called no-code software. Welcome to the KeyHire Small Business Podcast, where we cover the issues that help owners scale their small business. I'm Corey Harlock, creator of KeyHire, and I'll be your host. Our guest today is San Hong. He is a consultant and owner of Drive Phase Consulting, where they transform ideas into reality with no-code solutions. A couple of interesting things about San. He's helped his clients save over a million dollars in app development. Uh, he first learned no code because, uh, uh, his daughter, uh, over the pandemic wanted to, uh, go to the ice cream truck and get some ice cream and she kept missing it. So he built an app to track the ice cream truck, which I think is good dad stuff and also pretty cool. And former athlete used to be a sprinter at university of Pennsylvania and he's a good golfer, 16 handicap. Matt, let's bring in Sam. Hey man, how you doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Good. How you doing Corey? Thanks for having me.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, no worries. 16 handicaps. So that means you shoot in the 85 to 90?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I would say like low 80s to high 80s in that range.

  • Speaker #0

    God, I hate guys like you.

  • Speaker #1

    I play with a lot of guys that are crushing me. So I hear you.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. I think the best round I ever shot was a 91 or a 92 and I blew my elbow out. And then I had kids and they got old and into sports and no time for golf.

  • Speaker #1

    I hear you. It's tough.

  • Speaker #0

    So you're sitting in Delaware, you said?

  • Speaker #1

    That's correct, yep.

  • Speaker #0

    How's the weather up there? Cold?

  • Speaker #1

    It was 60 for a hot minute, and we're back down to 30s, so a little bit all over the place, so hard to dress for, but not bad.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, 77 and sunny here in South Texas.

  • Speaker #1

    You're such a jerk.

  • Speaker #0

    I know, sorry, man. I'll be right back. So the format of this podcast, you know, this is such a cool concept, and I remember when we first connected on this, I was... um it was it was really interesting because i'd never heard of it myself and i'm sure there are people out there who have but this concept of no code uh software development um so we always like to start with a definition you know what is no code solutions

  • Speaker #1

    or software development yeah great question um so I refer to it. And by the way, you're not the only one that hasn't heard of it. I'm always shocked because I'm in the world. So I expect everyone to realize it, you know, know what it is. And there's so many that it sounds like such a cool,

  • Speaker #0

    simple thing. Right. Like, why don't we all know about this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no. So so basically the way to think about it is it's visual programming. So, you know, it first started with websites. And I heard you kind of talking on that earlier. So so that drag and drop concept for websites. Right. You know. with WordPress and Wix and things like that, where you could drag elements on, you know, kind of what you see is what you get. But no code app development is taking that a step further, where you're actually using kind of prebuilt workflows to build the engine behind that, that front end, right. And so you can now kind of create workflows to automate processes in the back end. And so I tell people all the time, if you look at a basic business application, they're all kind of doing the same. thing in a nutshell i mean there's certainly ones that are more complicated but in a nutshell you're creating data you're reading data you're updating data you're doing calculations you're displaying data kind of in a unique way and so you can take these pre-poll elements and and build pretty complex apps without writing a line of code and really again the most important thing to take away from it is um that in general you know we can build an app probably five to ten times faster than traditional code. Now, AI code is a little bit different, but five to ten times faster than traditional code, which adds up to, you know, most of your cost in an app development is developer time. Right. So so that that directly correlates to cost savings.

  • Speaker #0

    OK, so I have two questions around this. Number one, is AI a part of this no code development? Are they interlinked or are they separate?

  • Speaker #1

    They are separate, but merging. Right? So AI generated code. So generated code is you put prompts in and AI actually generates code to write an app. No code. The interface is not a prompt. but you're actually using visual drag and drop elements to build the workflows, build the elements, build the app. Now, what you're seeing is a lot of no-code apps are incorporating AI. So now you've really got kind of the merging of two really disruptive technologies where now we can build apps even better. Now, what I will tell people is, at the end of the day, AI generated code still generates code. So if you're a non-technical person, If you don't know code, it then becomes very difficult for you to maintain that app. Versus if it's built in no code, a non-technical person can learn that platform and then maintain that. So I really like the combination of AI and no code because you kind of get the best of both worlds. You get the speed, but then you also have a non-technical person that can still kind of maintain and iterate on that app.

  • Speaker #0

    That's cool. So I guess if you build it through AI and it's actually giving you code and you get a glitch. you need to have some savvy to be able to go in there and figure that out. Where with no code, it's limited or you pull that out and drag a new one in and it should self-correct. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    exactly. It's just a little bit easier for those that are non-technical. So generally speaking, if you have a coding background, you'd probably love AI code. If you don't have a coding background, kind of the no code still is a benefit. And with a lot of the platforms, they're incorporating AI into their platform. So you're really getting the best of both worlds in a lot of cases.

  • Speaker #0

    Attention business owners, are you tired of wasting valuable time hiring for associate level positions only to have them not work out or show up? Let me introduce you to CareerSpring. CareerSpring connects first generation and low-income college students with employers like you for those crucial early career roles. Many of these graduates had to balance a full-time job and a full-time course load to achieve their college dreams. They understand the value of hard work and overcoming obstacles. And here's the best part. CareerSpring is free for employers. Yes, you heard that right. As a nonprofit organization, CareerSpring offers their services at no cost to you, making it easy to find and hire these incredible future leaders. They work with students all across the United States, from trade programs to Ivy League schools and everything. in between. If you're ready to make a real difference and connect first generation potential with future opportunities, click the link in the show notes below and learn how you can transform your business and support these exceptional students. This episode is brought to you by Key Hire Solutions, where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business. Are you struggling to find the right talent for your business? As a small business owner, your time is precious, and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business. guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today. Okay, now you're really going to learn how non-techie I am. So you refer to it as an app. And I know in our previous conversation, we talked about building software. Are they the same thing? Is this an app that holds the software that sits on your computer? Or how? And just so people are wondering, like, I don't need an app for my business, but I need a CRM or I need a way to track my logistics or something.

  • Speaker #1

    um are we talking about two different things can it do both of those i just kind of trying to understand the um yeah yeah so when i say app i'm referring to an application i think uh to your point i think when most when i say app a lot of people not coming from a technical background associate that with a mobile app so yeah like the thing on my phone right yeah exactly exactly when i say an app i'm referring to either a web application that could be like a a sas type product that you log into on the internet like a cloud-based cloud-based solution okay yeah exactly and or via mobile app as well and with a lot of no-code platforms you're building in the same way like you know this is changing there's some platforms where we don't have to do this but to build a mobile app in a lot of no-code platforms we're building a web-first, web-based application. What we do is then we put a wrapper around it that allows us to submit it to the app stores. And so it gives the feel of a native mobile app. But we're literally building a web app that we're putting a wrapper around. So, but yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    So if I were to build a no code, I'll just use CRM for easy kind of thing, easy example. And I got you to build that. You would build a cloud-based solution. That would be my CRM. That would be the application that I would get on my computer. I would sign into it and it would be hosted in one of the many server farms all over the country. And it wouldn't be hard data on my computer.

  • Speaker #1

    It would be most likely cloud-based, correct.

  • Speaker #0

    Got it. Okay. I'm glad we clarified that because I'm like app software. Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    No, you're not the only one. Yeah, I have to kind of watch myself.

  • Speaker #0

    Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    So,

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, the... the tagline was, you know, get custom software for 10% of the cost. And you said it's, you know, 10% of the time to build, to use code to build software versus no code. So let's kind of now maybe, like I said, I have a client out there who's talking about doing a conversion to one of these big players out there to, he's got a warehouse and logistics business. And he's like, man, I'd love to do it, but it's just so freaking expensive. So what are some of the. mistakes. And I guess we can frame this in a few ways because there are a lot of big players out there that own certain spaces, right? Like Salesforce or ADP, right? These guys own these spaces and maybe it doesn't make sense to build custom software to do what they do because they do it really well. So what are the mistakes around building custom software applications for your business? Do people miscast them? Do they think of it incorrectly or are there any? I mean, maybe I'm going down the wrong road, Sam, but tell me what mistakes have you seen business owners make when they come to you and say, OK, we want to either A, I can't afford to do software or B, here's what we want to do with our software. And you're like,

  • Speaker #1

    let's rethink that. So first off, I'll tell you, this is when clients come to us, believe it or not, the first thing I'll do is, hey, let's just make sure there's not an existing solution that meets your needs. you know, as much as I would like to generate income, I always try to do the best for the client. And existing solutions are always going to be more cost effective. That being said, where if there is an existing solution, what I also tell people is you don't want to change your processes to meet the tool. You want your tool to kind of match your processes, right? And so what typically happens is if there is an existing tool, they'll come to me like, well, it just doesn't fit what we're doing. And so that's where custom software. kind of doesn't make sense, right? So then kind of, you know, going down the path of where you're going as far as, okay, what are the common mistakes I see is the first one we see is the first, you know, there's a term we use in software development, MVP, which is minimal viable product, right? And so that's kind of what we define that as is the minimal amount of features that you can do to accomplish your goal. And in developing software, One of the biggest mistakes I see is in that first version, trying to do too much with it, right? Inevitably, whether it's no code or code, your first version is going to have bugs in it. You're going to have, you know, there's just too many things you're trying to do. And so when you try and do too many things with that first version, I feel like it's almost trying to fight too many battles on too many sides, right? And so we try and prioritize, like, what's the most important thing you're trying to do first? Let's build that version, nail that, and then incrementally add the other features that you want once we nail that. Where we've seen the best results is when we've done that. Where we've seen kind of clusters is when we've tried to build just this Cadillac right off the bat. And it's just trying to debug all those things. And everyone gets frustrated. Users get frustrated. Clients get frustrated. And so we've learned to really try and simplify. So a lot of times when I meet with clients and they're like, hey, I want this, I want this, I want this. I try and back them down like, hey, let's start with this, get that nailed down. And then adding on, you know, incrementally once we built that initial product becomes a lot easier than trying to build all the pieces at once. Does that make sense?

  • Speaker #0

    So let me let me. So I'm a visual thinker. So let me tell you what I was thinking while you were talking. It's like doing a reno and you have a. $200,000 budget and while they're in there they're like well we found this and we found that and you're like yeah fix that fix that fix that and then your budget you end up spending 400k right yeah they try to kind of once you get in there and you're working the brain trust starts having well what if we got to do this and got it to do this and then they over complicate the the original one and then i guess what i heard you say was build it like you know you build your business you you do your main software and then add bolt-ons right you're going to go now the next module we want to add to this let's have it do this so you're kind of playing in it and then thinking okay well the next logical now that we're in it because i i have a feeling a lot of people have all these great ideas and then when it's built it it doesn't flow or the things they need aren't there when they need them so if you start with a basic version and you're like you know what if we had this come in at this part of the process that would be really helpful so then we build that module and bolt it on no a thousand percent and as you're talking through that i'll actually mention kind of the one of the other mistakes that we see and candidly we learned ourselves was

  • Speaker #1

    we have learned over the years and it's exactly for one of the reasons that you just mentioned is we used to kind of jump right into building the app What we've learned is we always now, especially if it's a bigger app, sometimes if it's a small app, we can get away with not doing it. But it's rare is we'll start with what we call wireframes first. So if you're not familiar with wireframes, it's basically kind of all the major screens in your app. We graphically design them first. Yeah. Usually the tool that we use is Figma. So we'll design them through. Sometimes we'll do what's called a clickable prototype where it's almost like, you know, you can click to the next screen and it actually, you know, kind of. Right. You can kind of. uh experience what that what that experience would be but what we've seen is when we don't do that there's a lot of people just like you that are visual and so they come and say here's what i want and then we start designing it and they're like oh well no we actually really want this right and so so we just screw ourselves and screw them because you know even though it's no code it's much more flexible it still is

  • Speaker #0

    adding cost if we're changing directions multiple times throughout the process of course yeah and yeah and that wireframe's like a 2d version of what they're going to get right it's like not the living breathing version it's just the the 2d version but doing that process we've seen over and over again it forces the client to make decisions that they hadn't thought of right yeah i think it's the way to go i mean even even in my business you know uh my assistant and our the designer we use i'll give them an idea and they'll say well how do you want to look i'm like i don't know i need you to come up with the concept and then i'll be able to pull it apart and kind of move things around but if you're asking me i can see it in my brain but if you tell me to explain it to your write it down on piece of paper just it's gone you know so and you're better at this stuff than i am so you start and then i'll jump in and kind of collaborate exactly exactly so yeah no that that's kind of another big lesson that we lesson that we've learned so what are what are maybe another is there any other mistakes that we're missing i mean is is there a wrong application for software where people want to try to automate things that just generally you can't or i remember years ago i wanted to do software and a friend of mine who's also a business consultant he said you know the worst investment you can make for your business is developing software i think ah yeah so

  • Speaker #1

    What I will say, and I guess it's really more of a startup type of concept than anything, is like people that come to us and they have this idea for the next billion dollar startup. Right. And they come to us and they want to just, you know, they're usually the ones I want to design the Cadillac. And again, you know, what I'll tell them is you want to validate that what you're building is tackling a problem that's big enough that someone will pay for a solution. And I tell people, you don't validate that by asking, will you pay for this? You validate by making them pay something, whether it's like kind of early access or kind of, you know, sometimes I even tell people I started as a consulting service and kind of learn the problem by dealing with the customers, understanding what their true pain points are. And then what I've even seen and what we've done ourselves in a startup that I was in is in that consulting service, we built an internal tool. where we use the internal tool to deliver that service more efficiently. And then we transition that into like an external SaaS type solution, you know, and we were kind of our own first beta tester. So it's a little bit of a different mistake, but one that we have seen a lot. And again, I tell people if I don't think they've truly validated it, I'll tell them to go validate it before we go and build something. Because again, I mean, as much as we like to generate revenue, I don't like to generate revenue when someone walks away kind of frustrated. Sure. And so I want to make sure they're building something that is going to be successful for them as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    I can't imagine you get very many people that come to you and thinking they have the next billion dollar startup idea.

  • Speaker #1

    No, we do. And more importantly, they usually want us to work for free. And they'll give you a percentage of that billion dollar.

  • Speaker #0

    VC alive and well, you know, you can get in on the ground floor, son.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    Cool. All right. Well, let's move into maybe some pieces of advice. And one thing I do want to talk about, I don't want to not talk about. is the cost aspect of this, because you said it takes about 10% of the time of regular coding. So maybe walk us through, well, let's bunch it all together. So what pieces of advice would you give someone? And we've touched on some of that stuff already, but, and then maybe when we're done that, we can talk about the process, what it looks like and how it's, how you save the time and where you save the time.

  • Speaker #1

    Sure. Sure. So where do you want my start? Sorry.

  • Speaker #0

    let's start with advice the top three to five pieces of advice if someone's listening is thinking man i i've had this problem and i've been thinking about getting some software made and this sounds like the right idea for me you know what what what should they be doing to get this yeah so i

  • Speaker #1

    would say the more they come to us or whether it's us or or if you want to build yourself you know what i would say is the more you can define what we call the user journey journey So one of the most important things we can do before we get started is define, A, what type of users are going to use the app, right? Is it going to be a consumer? Is it going to be a salesperson? In one case we're working on right now is an estimator. Is there going to be an admin user? So number one, you want to define, OK, what types of users are going to use it? And then as much as possible, kind of storyboard out what do you want each of those user types to do? from the time they log in to the time they log out right and we can typically help a client through that but the more that someone can come to us with that information kind of fleshed out as much as possible then i think the smoother the process will be so i think that's a really important one um because and then then it comes down to thinking through okay do i want this to be a web-based app or do i want a mobile app right or you know will this be used primarily and and this is a different decision because you could have a web-based app that's primarily on mobile it doesn't necessarily need to be a mobile app so is this going to be primarily used on mobile tablet or desktop right because those things will affect maybe what no code platform we use right so the more you can kind of figure out those things out um you know it just makes our job a little bit easier it allows us to kind of guide you down the right you know path a little bit better very cool

  • Speaker #0

    think through those through think those through the better it will be so i always i never want to kind of bury the lead and i always try to think about what questions people would have out there and i just realized we haven't really outlined what you could use this for okay what as a business owner what are some of the applications i could have you build something for me to do or what are you seeing commonly or or what what efficiencies are you able to build into businesses with this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. So it's run the gamut. So I'll try and kind of group them into themes as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    Sorry. I kind of surprised you.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no, no, no. You're good. So one is kind of, you mentioned it, like a CRM type of app, where, but more so the CRM, it's the automation workflows behind it, right? So Yeah. A lot of business applications are some sort of variation of a CRM. And for those that are also customer relationship management system, where you're storing all your customer lead information and you're, you're kind of driving workflows and automations off of that. Right. So we have one right now we're working on where I can't give all the, all the details, but it's, it's basically the CRM tool combined with an estimation tool in the consultant. cool all right so they're combining it into one where they can create the lead and then assign the estimation process that estimator can go then there's a mobile app component where they can kind of do what they need to to uh to take the measurements to to do uh that sounds like a chunky piece of software like that's that's not as that's that's pretty yeah it is a piece of software and that's one where it's almost kind of hard you know i know but break break one of the first pieces of advice i gave but it's almost kind of hard to to break so we are starting as simple as possible but we're you know the the estimation piece is the the chunkier piece of that but we do have a simple crm to begin with so so that's kind of one example of one um so another one is kind of a customer facing piece uh you know there's some e-commerce brands where we kind of simplified the buying process through an e you know through a custom mobile app right okay and so that's been another one that we've done i'm trying to think of some other ones obviously ai has been a big one recently. I just built one for myself. So I was actually trying to learn a new no-code platform. And in my head, if I'm going to take the time to do that, I'm going to build something that could be useful. So I built a social listening app that I use for my own lead generation. So basically, I put in keywords and I have different integrations that I've done where based on the keywords I put into my system, it'll go and get... mentions on right now, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn that have those keywords in it. It pulls it into a dashboard and then I kind of filter through it. I have AI kind of evaluate, is this kind of a high intent for my business or not? And then I actually have an AI component that will respond to that post. And it's been actually a pretty valuable tool for me to go and generate leads because basically we're targeting people on social media that are looking for the services that we provide. So that took up a lot of integrations that we had to set up. But, you know, that's just another example of something we were able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    So let me get this straight. You built an app that will go on social media platforms and find people talking about, I need to build a website or I'm looking to build an app. Does anyone have any ideas? It'll prioritize those in terms of it'll score them, lead score them for you. Yeah. yeah and then it will generate a response from you saying hey we can help you with that yeah basically yes yeah yeah so just to give you a sense i built that in less than a month like

  • Speaker #1

    that you know how many people spend hours a day scrolling through and commenting yeah yeah yeah yeah so so it so it takes me now it takes me about like 30 minutes in the morning i'm able to get through 10 keywords that way so yeah so so that's just kind of another that's like i said that's something i just finished on myself so it just made me think of that but but really i hope i'm just trying to give kind of a broad range of the types of things yeah that's wild though that's super cool that you you yeah it's really and like i said the the food truck tracking app was another one where we were able to uh that actually got licensed uh by a food truck association which was my eight-year-old daughter's idea um but you know basically

  • Speaker #0

    food trucks could share the location there was a consumer app to download so that they could always see where those food trucks were it sent them push notifications when they were within a certain radius of their current location this episode is brought to you by key hire solutions where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business are you struggling to find the right talent for your business as a small business owner your time is precious and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business, guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today.

  • Speaker #1

    So again, no code, no code. So it's... There's very little we haven't been able to build. I'm sure we'll encounter it, but so far there's been few that we haven't been able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    Very cool, man.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, that's crazy. So, San, if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, I want to learn more about this or I've had this idea and I want to bounce it off San and see what he thinks. Oh, no, hold on. Before we get to that, the cost savings. Let's talk about that. So, obviously, it's a quick and dirty process compared to typing code. Now, AI is helping with the coding and things, but you claim it's 10% of the cost of traditional. So, how does that work out for you?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, so I can give you kind of real life examples. So that number, you know, our tagline is we've saved our clients over a million dollars in that development cost. So for this full disclosure, those are in the cases where clients have come to us and given us their other estimates that they got prior to coming. Right. So those are numbers where that's coming from. So to give you a couple of hard examples of this, and these are bigger apps, so hopefully I won't. I'll give you a couple of different ranges of maybe smaller apps versus bigger apps. But we've had. two to three in the last few months where they came to us where their existing estimates were in the neighborhood of 400 to 900,000 and it was going to take 12 months or more to build for us it was going to be in the neighborhood of 25 to 50,000 and we probably could build them in two to three months wow so and in the case of the one that was a half a million it was a small company competing against bigger companies right so they were using this technology to kind of disrupt their industry the reality is i think you kind of mentioned a similar case with your friend is that project didn't doesn't happen at a half a million dollars right we ended up doing for about 40k um and so that was a comfortable number for him and so again it really democratizes access to this custom technology and again we've got a few more that are in that 400 to 900 000 range where again we're in that 25

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, for a small business owner, if they have this idea of getting software, no wonder they say like it's prohibitive because $500,000 out of the jeans of a small business doing $10, $12, $15, $20 million a year. Yeah. That could be the entire year's revenue, right? Exactly. You got to wait for a year to get it. And so, you know, $25,000, $30,000, $40,000 is a much more reasonable number. You get it faster.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly. And, you know, we've done smaller apps, you know, candidly, we're moving away from these smaller apps because they end up being a lot of headache, you know, for very little margin. But, you know, on the smaller end, we've done as small as 5K. But I would say probably right now our average is, you know, 15 to 25K, you know, as a range. And they're pretty robust apps. You know, it's not like you're getting. you know, something very simple. I mean, you're, you know, what I will tell you is this is a lot of the functionality we are leveraging what's known as an API or application program interface. So these are third party solutions that do a very specific thing that we're able to integrate with, use that to do that complicated calculation or scrape that data or do things like that. pull that into our app that that kind of third party API is doing the heavy lifting. We're leveraging that to kind of add that functionality to our app. And so that's really that's really key. I think people think, oh, we got to program all of it. No, we're smart about it. We're leveraging people that have built these external products to to do a lot of heavy lifting. And then we're kind of aggregating all that functionality into one. And so that really allows us to to to build these robust apps without having to kind of, you know. to take you know a year to do and i and it doesn't sound like you're you lose any functionality on them at all they're they're just as good and as effective as the 500 000 coded software correct yeah the one thing i will say just kind of for full disclosure now i think the no code tools are getting better at this but we have seen some of the tools where as you scale up to you know more and more users you do see a little bit of lagging in performance but a lot of times it's because you're on a shared server and they do have kind of you know kind of uh dedicated instances where you could pay up for it but yeah but you know that's one thing i do kind of share with people is you know uh no code can and like i said there are some solutions that um that are you know addressing this but but performance can be an issue with no code but again I tell people you've saved so much money that even at a later date, you did have to kind of add coded components to it. It's still worth it. But there's a lot of companies that are, you know, three, four years in and are fine with it. So, you know, I just say that to be.

  • Speaker #0

    transparent about it but um but yeah i mean that that's one thing that we have seen in some cases but but generally speaking no code can handle a lot of what they need to i got to assume it's evolving because it was probably meant to be cost affordable for smaller operations but now people are like oh this works and now like bigger companies are doing it so they

  • Speaker #1

    kind of have to play catch up because it wasn't built for that kind of volume right that's exactly right and that's where you are starting to see like more enterprise level uh no code tool so well but yeah that's just kind of one thing i just

  • Speaker #0

    tell people to just make it aware and and we walk them through kind of how to address that super cool all right so now man if people want to get in touch with you we're going to put matt to work here uh how can how can they reach out if they want to learn more about what you do or talk about some software yeah

  • Speaker #1

    absolutely so the best thing is uh our website our website is uh drivephase.co so it's d-r-i-v-e-p-h-a-s-e dot co um And the easiest thing to do is on there, there's a link on whether it's about 50 links on there to schedule a free consultation. And, you know, that is what it is. I mean, we don't do a hard sell. We just basically walk through, OK, what are you trying to do? A, can this be done in no code? And then, you know, if they want to kind of move towards a more full on estimate, then we that typically takes another session where we start that scope of progress, which can be pretty, pretty intense. But. but yeah that's really the best way to do it like i said you know we do these free consultations and we had some other other places to reach out matt what do you got your youtube station youtube at drive phase co instagram they're

  • Speaker #0

    all pretty much the same handles facebook yeah it's consistent throughout yeah there you go there you are on linkedin cool hey man thanks so much this has been super cool i learned a ton from it and i appreciate you taking the time to come and chat with us

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, thanks for having me, Corey. It was a pleasure.

  • Speaker #0

    All right. We'll talk soon. There you go. San Hong. That was a very cool and interesting conversation. I'd like to thank you for tuning into the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. If you got value out of the episode today and you want to keep up to date on our new content, make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, leave a comment, even let us know if there's topics you'd like us to discuss on the show for you. If you prefer to listen to your podcast, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform by searching the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Corey Harlock. And until next time, stop grinding, start growing.

Share

Embed

You may also like

Description

In this episode of The KeyHire Podcast, host Corey Harlock sits down with Xan Hong, Founder and Principal Consultant of Drive Phase Consulting, to explore how small businesses can leverage no-code software to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and build custom tools without the need for a developer.


Xan shares real-world insights on how no-code solutions empower business owners to take control of their processes, reduce costs, and scale smarter. Whether you're looking to automate workflows, manage data more effectively, or create custom apps tailored to your needs, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways.


Tune in to learn how no-code technology can be a game-changer for your business.


Learn more about Xan: https://www.drivephase.co


Check out our sponsor: https://bit.ly/CS-KeyHire

Be KeyHire's Next Success Story: https://bit.ly/KHSuccess


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    I hear a lot about software and the challenges that come along with software. Integrations, cost, user ability, all that fun stuff. I actually have a client right now who wants to implement a new software, but it's cost prohibitive for him at the start of the year and with all the crazy stuff going on with the economy. Today, we're going to talk about a concept I've never heard of before, and it's called no-code software. Welcome to the KeyHire Small Business Podcast, where we cover the issues that help owners scale their small business. I'm Corey Harlock, creator of KeyHire, and I'll be your host. Our guest today is San Hong. He is a consultant and owner of Drive Phase Consulting, where they transform ideas into reality with no-code solutions. A couple of interesting things about San. He's helped his clients save over a million dollars in app development. Uh, he first learned no code because, uh, uh, his daughter, uh, over the pandemic wanted to, uh, go to the ice cream truck and get some ice cream and she kept missing it. So he built an app to track the ice cream truck, which I think is good dad stuff and also pretty cool. And former athlete used to be a sprinter at university of Pennsylvania and he's a good golfer, 16 handicap. Matt, let's bring in Sam. Hey man, how you doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Good. How you doing Corey? Thanks for having me.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, no worries. 16 handicaps. So that means you shoot in the 85 to 90?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I would say like low 80s to high 80s in that range.

  • Speaker #0

    God, I hate guys like you.

  • Speaker #1

    I play with a lot of guys that are crushing me. So I hear you.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. I think the best round I ever shot was a 91 or a 92 and I blew my elbow out. And then I had kids and they got old and into sports and no time for golf.

  • Speaker #1

    I hear you. It's tough.

  • Speaker #0

    So you're sitting in Delaware, you said?

  • Speaker #1

    That's correct, yep.

  • Speaker #0

    How's the weather up there? Cold?

  • Speaker #1

    It was 60 for a hot minute, and we're back down to 30s, so a little bit all over the place, so hard to dress for, but not bad.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, 77 and sunny here in South Texas.

  • Speaker #1

    You're such a jerk.

  • Speaker #0

    I know, sorry, man. I'll be right back. So the format of this podcast, you know, this is such a cool concept, and I remember when we first connected on this, I was... um it was it was really interesting because i'd never heard of it myself and i'm sure there are people out there who have but this concept of no code uh software development um so we always like to start with a definition you know what is no code solutions

  • Speaker #1

    or software development yeah great question um so I refer to it. And by the way, you're not the only one that hasn't heard of it. I'm always shocked because I'm in the world. So I expect everyone to realize it, you know, know what it is. And there's so many that it sounds like such a cool,

  • Speaker #0

    simple thing. Right. Like, why don't we all know about this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no. So so basically the way to think about it is it's visual programming. So, you know, it first started with websites. And I heard you kind of talking on that earlier. So so that drag and drop concept for websites. Right. You know. with WordPress and Wix and things like that, where you could drag elements on, you know, kind of what you see is what you get. But no code app development is taking that a step further, where you're actually using kind of prebuilt workflows to build the engine behind that, that front end, right. And so you can now kind of create workflows to automate processes in the back end. And so I tell people all the time, if you look at a basic business application, they're all kind of doing the same. thing in a nutshell i mean there's certainly ones that are more complicated but in a nutshell you're creating data you're reading data you're updating data you're doing calculations you're displaying data kind of in a unique way and so you can take these pre-poll elements and and build pretty complex apps without writing a line of code and really again the most important thing to take away from it is um that in general you know we can build an app probably five to ten times faster than traditional code. Now, AI code is a little bit different, but five to ten times faster than traditional code, which adds up to, you know, most of your cost in an app development is developer time. Right. So so that that directly correlates to cost savings.

  • Speaker #0

    OK, so I have two questions around this. Number one, is AI a part of this no code development? Are they interlinked or are they separate?

  • Speaker #1

    They are separate, but merging. Right? So AI generated code. So generated code is you put prompts in and AI actually generates code to write an app. No code. The interface is not a prompt. but you're actually using visual drag and drop elements to build the workflows, build the elements, build the app. Now, what you're seeing is a lot of no-code apps are incorporating AI. So now you've really got kind of the merging of two really disruptive technologies where now we can build apps even better. Now, what I will tell people is, at the end of the day, AI generated code still generates code. So if you're a non-technical person, If you don't know code, it then becomes very difficult for you to maintain that app. Versus if it's built in no code, a non-technical person can learn that platform and then maintain that. So I really like the combination of AI and no code because you kind of get the best of both worlds. You get the speed, but then you also have a non-technical person that can still kind of maintain and iterate on that app.

  • Speaker #0

    That's cool. So I guess if you build it through AI and it's actually giving you code and you get a glitch. you need to have some savvy to be able to go in there and figure that out. Where with no code, it's limited or you pull that out and drag a new one in and it should self-correct. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    exactly. It's just a little bit easier for those that are non-technical. So generally speaking, if you have a coding background, you'd probably love AI code. If you don't have a coding background, kind of the no code still is a benefit. And with a lot of the platforms, they're incorporating AI into their platform. So you're really getting the best of both worlds in a lot of cases.

  • Speaker #0

    Attention business owners, are you tired of wasting valuable time hiring for associate level positions only to have them not work out or show up? Let me introduce you to CareerSpring. CareerSpring connects first generation and low-income college students with employers like you for those crucial early career roles. Many of these graduates had to balance a full-time job and a full-time course load to achieve their college dreams. They understand the value of hard work and overcoming obstacles. And here's the best part. CareerSpring is free for employers. Yes, you heard that right. As a nonprofit organization, CareerSpring offers their services at no cost to you, making it easy to find and hire these incredible future leaders. They work with students all across the United States, from trade programs to Ivy League schools and everything. in between. If you're ready to make a real difference and connect first generation potential with future opportunities, click the link in the show notes below and learn how you can transform your business and support these exceptional students. This episode is brought to you by Key Hire Solutions, where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business. Are you struggling to find the right talent for your business? As a small business owner, your time is precious, and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business. guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today. Okay, now you're really going to learn how non-techie I am. So you refer to it as an app. And I know in our previous conversation, we talked about building software. Are they the same thing? Is this an app that holds the software that sits on your computer? Or how? And just so people are wondering, like, I don't need an app for my business, but I need a CRM or I need a way to track my logistics or something.

  • Speaker #1

    um are we talking about two different things can it do both of those i just kind of trying to understand the um yeah yeah so when i say app i'm referring to an application i think uh to your point i think when most when i say app a lot of people not coming from a technical background associate that with a mobile app so yeah like the thing on my phone right yeah exactly exactly when i say an app i'm referring to either a web application that could be like a a sas type product that you log into on the internet like a cloud-based cloud-based solution okay yeah exactly and or via mobile app as well and with a lot of no-code platforms you're building in the same way like you know this is changing there's some platforms where we don't have to do this but to build a mobile app in a lot of no-code platforms we're building a web-first, web-based application. What we do is then we put a wrapper around it that allows us to submit it to the app stores. And so it gives the feel of a native mobile app. But we're literally building a web app that we're putting a wrapper around. So, but yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    So if I were to build a no code, I'll just use CRM for easy kind of thing, easy example. And I got you to build that. You would build a cloud-based solution. That would be my CRM. That would be the application that I would get on my computer. I would sign into it and it would be hosted in one of the many server farms all over the country. And it wouldn't be hard data on my computer.

  • Speaker #1

    It would be most likely cloud-based, correct.

  • Speaker #0

    Got it. Okay. I'm glad we clarified that because I'm like app software. Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    No, you're not the only one. Yeah, I have to kind of watch myself.

  • Speaker #0

    Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    So,

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, the... the tagline was, you know, get custom software for 10% of the cost. And you said it's, you know, 10% of the time to build, to use code to build software versus no code. So let's kind of now maybe, like I said, I have a client out there who's talking about doing a conversion to one of these big players out there to, he's got a warehouse and logistics business. And he's like, man, I'd love to do it, but it's just so freaking expensive. So what are some of the. mistakes. And I guess we can frame this in a few ways because there are a lot of big players out there that own certain spaces, right? Like Salesforce or ADP, right? These guys own these spaces and maybe it doesn't make sense to build custom software to do what they do because they do it really well. So what are the mistakes around building custom software applications for your business? Do people miscast them? Do they think of it incorrectly or are there any? I mean, maybe I'm going down the wrong road, Sam, but tell me what mistakes have you seen business owners make when they come to you and say, OK, we want to either A, I can't afford to do software or B, here's what we want to do with our software. And you're like,

  • Speaker #1

    let's rethink that. So first off, I'll tell you, this is when clients come to us, believe it or not, the first thing I'll do is, hey, let's just make sure there's not an existing solution that meets your needs. you know, as much as I would like to generate income, I always try to do the best for the client. And existing solutions are always going to be more cost effective. That being said, where if there is an existing solution, what I also tell people is you don't want to change your processes to meet the tool. You want your tool to kind of match your processes, right? And so what typically happens is if there is an existing tool, they'll come to me like, well, it just doesn't fit what we're doing. And so that's where custom software. kind of doesn't make sense, right? So then kind of, you know, going down the path of where you're going as far as, okay, what are the common mistakes I see is the first one we see is the first, you know, there's a term we use in software development, MVP, which is minimal viable product, right? And so that's kind of what we define that as is the minimal amount of features that you can do to accomplish your goal. And in developing software, One of the biggest mistakes I see is in that first version, trying to do too much with it, right? Inevitably, whether it's no code or code, your first version is going to have bugs in it. You're going to have, you know, there's just too many things you're trying to do. And so when you try and do too many things with that first version, I feel like it's almost trying to fight too many battles on too many sides, right? And so we try and prioritize, like, what's the most important thing you're trying to do first? Let's build that version, nail that, and then incrementally add the other features that you want once we nail that. Where we've seen the best results is when we've done that. Where we've seen kind of clusters is when we've tried to build just this Cadillac right off the bat. And it's just trying to debug all those things. And everyone gets frustrated. Users get frustrated. Clients get frustrated. And so we've learned to really try and simplify. So a lot of times when I meet with clients and they're like, hey, I want this, I want this, I want this. I try and back them down like, hey, let's start with this, get that nailed down. And then adding on, you know, incrementally once we built that initial product becomes a lot easier than trying to build all the pieces at once. Does that make sense?

  • Speaker #0

    So let me let me. So I'm a visual thinker. So let me tell you what I was thinking while you were talking. It's like doing a reno and you have a. $200,000 budget and while they're in there they're like well we found this and we found that and you're like yeah fix that fix that fix that and then your budget you end up spending 400k right yeah they try to kind of once you get in there and you're working the brain trust starts having well what if we got to do this and got it to do this and then they over complicate the the original one and then i guess what i heard you say was build it like you know you build your business you you do your main software and then add bolt-ons right you're going to go now the next module we want to add to this let's have it do this so you're kind of playing in it and then thinking okay well the next logical now that we're in it because i i have a feeling a lot of people have all these great ideas and then when it's built it it doesn't flow or the things they need aren't there when they need them so if you start with a basic version and you're like you know what if we had this come in at this part of the process that would be really helpful so then we build that module and bolt it on no a thousand percent and as you're talking through that i'll actually mention kind of the one of the other mistakes that we see and candidly we learned ourselves was

  • Speaker #1

    we have learned over the years and it's exactly for one of the reasons that you just mentioned is we used to kind of jump right into building the app What we've learned is we always now, especially if it's a bigger app, sometimes if it's a small app, we can get away with not doing it. But it's rare is we'll start with what we call wireframes first. So if you're not familiar with wireframes, it's basically kind of all the major screens in your app. We graphically design them first. Yeah. Usually the tool that we use is Figma. So we'll design them through. Sometimes we'll do what's called a clickable prototype where it's almost like, you know, you can click to the next screen and it actually, you know, kind of. Right. You can kind of. uh experience what that what that experience would be but what we've seen is when we don't do that there's a lot of people just like you that are visual and so they come and say here's what i want and then we start designing it and they're like oh well no we actually really want this right and so so we just screw ourselves and screw them because you know even though it's no code it's much more flexible it still is

  • Speaker #0

    adding cost if we're changing directions multiple times throughout the process of course yeah and yeah and that wireframe's like a 2d version of what they're going to get right it's like not the living breathing version it's just the the 2d version but doing that process we've seen over and over again it forces the client to make decisions that they hadn't thought of right yeah i think it's the way to go i mean even even in my business you know uh my assistant and our the designer we use i'll give them an idea and they'll say well how do you want to look i'm like i don't know i need you to come up with the concept and then i'll be able to pull it apart and kind of move things around but if you're asking me i can see it in my brain but if you tell me to explain it to your write it down on piece of paper just it's gone you know so and you're better at this stuff than i am so you start and then i'll jump in and kind of collaborate exactly exactly so yeah no that that's kind of another big lesson that we lesson that we've learned so what are what are maybe another is there any other mistakes that we're missing i mean is is there a wrong application for software where people want to try to automate things that just generally you can't or i remember years ago i wanted to do software and a friend of mine who's also a business consultant he said you know the worst investment you can make for your business is developing software i think ah yeah so

  • Speaker #1

    What I will say, and I guess it's really more of a startup type of concept than anything, is like people that come to us and they have this idea for the next billion dollar startup. Right. And they come to us and they want to just, you know, they're usually the ones I want to design the Cadillac. And again, you know, what I'll tell them is you want to validate that what you're building is tackling a problem that's big enough that someone will pay for a solution. And I tell people, you don't validate that by asking, will you pay for this? You validate by making them pay something, whether it's like kind of early access or kind of, you know, sometimes I even tell people I started as a consulting service and kind of learn the problem by dealing with the customers, understanding what their true pain points are. And then what I've even seen and what we've done ourselves in a startup that I was in is in that consulting service, we built an internal tool. where we use the internal tool to deliver that service more efficiently. And then we transition that into like an external SaaS type solution, you know, and we were kind of our own first beta tester. So it's a little bit of a different mistake, but one that we have seen a lot. And again, I tell people if I don't think they've truly validated it, I'll tell them to go validate it before we go and build something. Because again, I mean, as much as we like to generate revenue, I don't like to generate revenue when someone walks away kind of frustrated. Sure. And so I want to make sure they're building something that is going to be successful for them as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    I can't imagine you get very many people that come to you and thinking they have the next billion dollar startup idea.

  • Speaker #1

    No, we do. And more importantly, they usually want us to work for free. And they'll give you a percentage of that billion dollar.

  • Speaker #0

    VC alive and well, you know, you can get in on the ground floor, son.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    Cool. All right. Well, let's move into maybe some pieces of advice. And one thing I do want to talk about, I don't want to not talk about. is the cost aspect of this, because you said it takes about 10% of the time of regular coding. So maybe walk us through, well, let's bunch it all together. So what pieces of advice would you give someone? And we've touched on some of that stuff already, but, and then maybe when we're done that, we can talk about the process, what it looks like and how it's, how you save the time and where you save the time.

  • Speaker #1

    Sure. Sure. So where do you want my start? Sorry.

  • Speaker #0

    let's start with advice the top three to five pieces of advice if someone's listening is thinking man i i've had this problem and i've been thinking about getting some software made and this sounds like the right idea for me you know what what what should they be doing to get this yeah so i

  • Speaker #1

    would say the more they come to us or whether it's us or or if you want to build yourself you know what i would say is the more you can define what we call the user journey journey So one of the most important things we can do before we get started is define, A, what type of users are going to use the app, right? Is it going to be a consumer? Is it going to be a salesperson? In one case we're working on right now is an estimator. Is there going to be an admin user? So number one, you want to define, OK, what types of users are going to use it? And then as much as possible, kind of storyboard out what do you want each of those user types to do? from the time they log in to the time they log out right and we can typically help a client through that but the more that someone can come to us with that information kind of fleshed out as much as possible then i think the smoother the process will be so i think that's a really important one um because and then then it comes down to thinking through okay do i want this to be a web-based app or do i want a mobile app right or you know will this be used primarily and and this is a different decision because you could have a web-based app that's primarily on mobile it doesn't necessarily need to be a mobile app so is this going to be primarily used on mobile tablet or desktop right because those things will affect maybe what no code platform we use right so the more you can kind of figure out those things out um you know it just makes our job a little bit easier it allows us to kind of guide you down the right you know path a little bit better very cool

  • Speaker #0

    think through those through think those through the better it will be so i always i never want to kind of bury the lead and i always try to think about what questions people would have out there and i just realized we haven't really outlined what you could use this for okay what as a business owner what are some of the applications i could have you build something for me to do or what are you seeing commonly or or what what efficiencies are you able to build into businesses with this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. So it's run the gamut. So I'll try and kind of group them into themes as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    Sorry. I kind of surprised you.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no, no, no. You're good. So one is kind of, you mentioned it, like a CRM type of app, where, but more so the CRM, it's the automation workflows behind it, right? So Yeah. A lot of business applications are some sort of variation of a CRM. And for those that are also customer relationship management system, where you're storing all your customer lead information and you're, you're kind of driving workflows and automations off of that. Right. So we have one right now we're working on where I can't give all the, all the details, but it's, it's basically the CRM tool combined with an estimation tool in the consultant. cool all right so they're combining it into one where they can create the lead and then assign the estimation process that estimator can go then there's a mobile app component where they can kind of do what they need to to uh to take the measurements to to do uh that sounds like a chunky piece of software like that's that's not as that's that's pretty yeah it is a piece of software and that's one where it's almost kind of hard you know i know but break break one of the first pieces of advice i gave but it's almost kind of hard to to break so we are starting as simple as possible but we're you know the the estimation piece is the the chunkier piece of that but we do have a simple crm to begin with so so that's kind of one example of one um so another one is kind of a customer facing piece uh you know there's some e-commerce brands where we kind of simplified the buying process through an e you know through a custom mobile app right okay and so that's been another one that we've done i'm trying to think of some other ones obviously ai has been a big one recently. I just built one for myself. So I was actually trying to learn a new no-code platform. And in my head, if I'm going to take the time to do that, I'm going to build something that could be useful. So I built a social listening app that I use for my own lead generation. So basically, I put in keywords and I have different integrations that I've done where based on the keywords I put into my system, it'll go and get... mentions on right now, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn that have those keywords in it. It pulls it into a dashboard and then I kind of filter through it. I have AI kind of evaluate, is this kind of a high intent for my business or not? And then I actually have an AI component that will respond to that post. And it's been actually a pretty valuable tool for me to go and generate leads because basically we're targeting people on social media that are looking for the services that we provide. So that took up a lot of integrations that we had to set up. But, you know, that's just another example of something we were able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    So let me get this straight. You built an app that will go on social media platforms and find people talking about, I need to build a website or I'm looking to build an app. Does anyone have any ideas? It'll prioritize those in terms of it'll score them, lead score them for you. Yeah. yeah and then it will generate a response from you saying hey we can help you with that yeah basically yes yeah yeah so just to give you a sense i built that in less than a month like

  • Speaker #1

    that you know how many people spend hours a day scrolling through and commenting yeah yeah yeah yeah so so it so it takes me now it takes me about like 30 minutes in the morning i'm able to get through 10 keywords that way so yeah so so that's just kind of another that's like i said that's something i just finished on myself so it just made me think of that but but really i hope i'm just trying to give kind of a broad range of the types of things yeah that's wild though that's super cool that you you yeah it's really and like i said the the food truck tracking app was another one where we were able to uh that actually got licensed uh by a food truck association which was my eight-year-old daughter's idea um but you know basically

  • Speaker #0

    food trucks could share the location there was a consumer app to download so that they could always see where those food trucks were it sent them push notifications when they were within a certain radius of their current location this episode is brought to you by key hire solutions where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business are you struggling to find the right talent for your business as a small business owner your time is precious and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business, guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today.

  • Speaker #1

    So again, no code, no code. So it's... There's very little we haven't been able to build. I'm sure we'll encounter it, but so far there's been few that we haven't been able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    Very cool, man.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, that's crazy. So, San, if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, I want to learn more about this or I've had this idea and I want to bounce it off San and see what he thinks. Oh, no, hold on. Before we get to that, the cost savings. Let's talk about that. So, obviously, it's a quick and dirty process compared to typing code. Now, AI is helping with the coding and things, but you claim it's 10% of the cost of traditional. So, how does that work out for you?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, so I can give you kind of real life examples. So that number, you know, our tagline is we've saved our clients over a million dollars in that development cost. So for this full disclosure, those are in the cases where clients have come to us and given us their other estimates that they got prior to coming. Right. So those are numbers where that's coming from. So to give you a couple of hard examples of this, and these are bigger apps, so hopefully I won't. I'll give you a couple of different ranges of maybe smaller apps versus bigger apps. But we've had. two to three in the last few months where they came to us where their existing estimates were in the neighborhood of 400 to 900,000 and it was going to take 12 months or more to build for us it was going to be in the neighborhood of 25 to 50,000 and we probably could build them in two to three months wow so and in the case of the one that was a half a million it was a small company competing against bigger companies right so they were using this technology to kind of disrupt their industry the reality is i think you kind of mentioned a similar case with your friend is that project didn't doesn't happen at a half a million dollars right we ended up doing for about 40k um and so that was a comfortable number for him and so again it really democratizes access to this custom technology and again we've got a few more that are in that 400 to 900 000 range where again we're in that 25

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, for a small business owner, if they have this idea of getting software, no wonder they say like it's prohibitive because $500,000 out of the jeans of a small business doing $10, $12, $15, $20 million a year. Yeah. That could be the entire year's revenue, right? Exactly. You got to wait for a year to get it. And so, you know, $25,000, $30,000, $40,000 is a much more reasonable number. You get it faster.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly. And, you know, we've done smaller apps, you know, candidly, we're moving away from these smaller apps because they end up being a lot of headache, you know, for very little margin. But, you know, on the smaller end, we've done as small as 5K. But I would say probably right now our average is, you know, 15 to 25K, you know, as a range. And they're pretty robust apps. You know, it's not like you're getting. you know, something very simple. I mean, you're, you know, what I will tell you is this is a lot of the functionality we are leveraging what's known as an API or application program interface. So these are third party solutions that do a very specific thing that we're able to integrate with, use that to do that complicated calculation or scrape that data or do things like that. pull that into our app that that kind of third party API is doing the heavy lifting. We're leveraging that to kind of add that functionality to our app. And so that's really that's really key. I think people think, oh, we got to program all of it. No, we're smart about it. We're leveraging people that have built these external products to to do a lot of heavy lifting. And then we're kind of aggregating all that functionality into one. And so that really allows us to to to build these robust apps without having to kind of, you know. to take you know a year to do and i and it doesn't sound like you're you lose any functionality on them at all they're they're just as good and as effective as the 500 000 coded software correct yeah the one thing i will say just kind of for full disclosure now i think the no code tools are getting better at this but we have seen some of the tools where as you scale up to you know more and more users you do see a little bit of lagging in performance but a lot of times it's because you're on a shared server and they do have kind of you know kind of uh dedicated instances where you could pay up for it but yeah but you know that's one thing i do kind of share with people is you know uh no code can and like i said there are some solutions that um that are you know addressing this but but performance can be an issue with no code but again I tell people you've saved so much money that even at a later date, you did have to kind of add coded components to it. It's still worth it. But there's a lot of companies that are, you know, three, four years in and are fine with it. So, you know, I just say that to be.

  • Speaker #0

    transparent about it but um but yeah i mean that that's one thing that we have seen in some cases but but generally speaking no code can handle a lot of what they need to i got to assume it's evolving because it was probably meant to be cost affordable for smaller operations but now people are like oh this works and now like bigger companies are doing it so they

  • Speaker #1

    kind of have to play catch up because it wasn't built for that kind of volume right that's exactly right and that's where you are starting to see like more enterprise level uh no code tool so well but yeah that's just kind of one thing i just

  • Speaker #0

    tell people to just make it aware and and we walk them through kind of how to address that super cool all right so now man if people want to get in touch with you we're going to put matt to work here uh how can how can they reach out if they want to learn more about what you do or talk about some software yeah

  • Speaker #1

    absolutely so the best thing is uh our website our website is uh drivephase.co so it's d-r-i-v-e-p-h-a-s-e dot co um And the easiest thing to do is on there, there's a link on whether it's about 50 links on there to schedule a free consultation. And, you know, that is what it is. I mean, we don't do a hard sell. We just basically walk through, OK, what are you trying to do? A, can this be done in no code? And then, you know, if they want to kind of move towards a more full on estimate, then we that typically takes another session where we start that scope of progress, which can be pretty, pretty intense. But. but yeah that's really the best way to do it like i said you know we do these free consultations and we had some other other places to reach out matt what do you got your youtube station youtube at drive phase co instagram they're

  • Speaker #0

    all pretty much the same handles facebook yeah it's consistent throughout yeah there you go there you are on linkedin cool hey man thanks so much this has been super cool i learned a ton from it and i appreciate you taking the time to come and chat with us

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, thanks for having me, Corey. It was a pleasure.

  • Speaker #0

    All right. We'll talk soon. There you go. San Hong. That was a very cool and interesting conversation. I'd like to thank you for tuning into the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. If you got value out of the episode today and you want to keep up to date on our new content, make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, leave a comment, even let us know if there's topics you'd like us to discuss on the show for you. If you prefer to listen to your podcast, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform by searching the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Corey Harlock. And until next time, stop grinding, start growing.

Description

In this episode of The KeyHire Podcast, host Corey Harlock sits down with Xan Hong, Founder and Principal Consultant of Drive Phase Consulting, to explore how small businesses can leverage no-code software to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and build custom tools without the need for a developer.


Xan shares real-world insights on how no-code solutions empower business owners to take control of their processes, reduce costs, and scale smarter. Whether you're looking to automate workflows, manage data more effectively, or create custom apps tailored to your needs, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways.


Tune in to learn how no-code technology can be a game-changer for your business.


Learn more about Xan: https://www.drivephase.co


Check out our sponsor: https://bit.ly/CS-KeyHire

Be KeyHire's Next Success Story: https://bit.ly/KHSuccess


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    I hear a lot about software and the challenges that come along with software. Integrations, cost, user ability, all that fun stuff. I actually have a client right now who wants to implement a new software, but it's cost prohibitive for him at the start of the year and with all the crazy stuff going on with the economy. Today, we're going to talk about a concept I've never heard of before, and it's called no-code software. Welcome to the KeyHire Small Business Podcast, where we cover the issues that help owners scale their small business. I'm Corey Harlock, creator of KeyHire, and I'll be your host. Our guest today is San Hong. He is a consultant and owner of Drive Phase Consulting, where they transform ideas into reality with no-code solutions. A couple of interesting things about San. He's helped his clients save over a million dollars in app development. Uh, he first learned no code because, uh, uh, his daughter, uh, over the pandemic wanted to, uh, go to the ice cream truck and get some ice cream and she kept missing it. So he built an app to track the ice cream truck, which I think is good dad stuff and also pretty cool. And former athlete used to be a sprinter at university of Pennsylvania and he's a good golfer, 16 handicap. Matt, let's bring in Sam. Hey man, how you doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Good. How you doing Corey? Thanks for having me.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, no worries. 16 handicaps. So that means you shoot in the 85 to 90?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I would say like low 80s to high 80s in that range.

  • Speaker #0

    God, I hate guys like you.

  • Speaker #1

    I play with a lot of guys that are crushing me. So I hear you.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. I think the best round I ever shot was a 91 or a 92 and I blew my elbow out. And then I had kids and they got old and into sports and no time for golf.

  • Speaker #1

    I hear you. It's tough.

  • Speaker #0

    So you're sitting in Delaware, you said?

  • Speaker #1

    That's correct, yep.

  • Speaker #0

    How's the weather up there? Cold?

  • Speaker #1

    It was 60 for a hot minute, and we're back down to 30s, so a little bit all over the place, so hard to dress for, but not bad.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, 77 and sunny here in South Texas.

  • Speaker #1

    You're such a jerk.

  • Speaker #0

    I know, sorry, man. I'll be right back. So the format of this podcast, you know, this is such a cool concept, and I remember when we first connected on this, I was... um it was it was really interesting because i'd never heard of it myself and i'm sure there are people out there who have but this concept of no code uh software development um so we always like to start with a definition you know what is no code solutions

  • Speaker #1

    or software development yeah great question um so I refer to it. And by the way, you're not the only one that hasn't heard of it. I'm always shocked because I'm in the world. So I expect everyone to realize it, you know, know what it is. And there's so many that it sounds like such a cool,

  • Speaker #0

    simple thing. Right. Like, why don't we all know about this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no. So so basically the way to think about it is it's visual programming. So, you know, it first started with websites. And I heard you kind of talking on that earlier. So so that drag and drop concept for websites. Right. You know. with WordPress and Wix and things like that, where you could drag elements on, you know, kind of what you see is what you get. But no code app development is taking that a step further, where you're actually using kind of prebuilt workflows to build the engine behind that, that front end, right. And so you can now kind of create workflows to automate processes in the back end. And so I tell people all the time, if you look at a basic business application, they're all kind of doing the same. thing in a nutshell i mean there's certainly ones that are more complicated but in a nutshell you're creating data you're reading data you're updating data you're doing calculations you're displaying data kind of in a unique way and so you can take these pre-poll elements and and build pretty complex apps without writing a line of code and really again the most important thing to take away from it is um that in general you know we can build an app probably five to ten times faster than traditional code. Now, AI code is a little bit different, but five to ten times faster than traditional code, which adds up to, you know, most of your cost in an app development is developer time. Right. So so that that directly correlates to cost savings.

  • Speaker #0

    OK, so I have two questions around this. Number one, is AI a part of this no code development? Are they interlinked or are they separate?

  • Speaker #1

    They are separate, but merging. Right? So AI generated code. So generated code is you put prompts in and AI actually generates code to write an app. No code. The interface is not a prompt. but you're actually using visual drag and drop elements to build the workflows, build the elements, build the app. Now, what you're seeing is a lot of no-code apps are incorporating AI. So now you've really got kind of the merging of two really disruptive technologies where now we can build apps even better. Now, what I will tell people is, at the end of the day, AI generated code still generates code. So if you're a non-technical person, If you don't know code, it then becomes very difficult for you to maintain that app. Versus if it's built in no code, a non-technical person can learn that platform and then maintain that. So I really like the combination of AI and no code because you kind of get the best of both worlds. You get the speed, but then you also have a non-technical person that can still kind of maintain and iterate on that app.

  • Speaker #0

    That's cool. So I guess if you build it through AI and it's actually giving you code and you get a glitch. you need to have some savvy to be able to go in there and figure that out. Where with no code, it's limited or you pull that out and drag a new one in and it should self-correct. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    exactly. It's just a little bit easier for those that are non-technical. So generally speaking, if you have a coding background, you'd probably love AI code. If you don't have a coding background, kind of the no code still is a benefit. And with a lot of the platforms, they're incorporating AI into their platform. So you're really getting the best of both worlds in a lot of cases.

  • Speaker #0

    Attention business owners, are you tired of wasting valuable time hiring for associate level positions only to have them not work out or show up? Let me introduce you to CareerSpring. CareerSpring connects first generation and low-income college students with employers like you for those crucial early career roles. Many of these graduates had to balance a full-time job and a full-time course load to achieve their college dreams. They understand the value of hard work and overcoming obstacles. And here's the best part. CareerSpring is free for employers. Yes, you heard that right. As a nonprofit organization, CareerSpring offers their services at no cost to you, making it easy to find and hire these incredible future leaders. They work with students all across the United States, from trade programs to Ivy League schools and everything. in between. If you're ready to make a real difference and connect first generation potential with future opportunities, click the link in the show notes below and learn how you can transform your business and support these exceptional students. This episode is brought to you by Key Hire Solutions, where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business. Are you struggling to find the right talent for your business? As a small business owner, your time is precious, and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business. guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today. Okay, now you're really going to learn how non-techie I am. So you refer to it as an app. And I know in our previous conversation, we talked about building software. Are they the same thing? Is this an app that holds the software that sits on your computer? Or how? And just so people are wondering, like, I don't need an app for my business, but I need a CRM or I need a way to track my logistics or something.

  • Speaker #1

    um are we talking about two different things can it do both of those i just kind of trying to understand the um yeah yeah so when i say app i'm referring to an application i think uh to your point i think when most when i say app a lot of people not coming from a technical background associate that with a mobile app so yeah like the thing on my phone right yeah exactly exactly when i say an app i'm referring to either a web application that could be like a a sas type product that you log into on the internet like a cloud-based cloud-based solution okay yeah exactly and or via mobile app as well and with a lot of no-code platforms you're building in the same way like you know this is changing there's some platforms where we don't have to do this but to build a mobile app in a lot of no-code platforms we're building a web-first, web-based application. What we do is then we put a wrapper around it that allows us to submit it to the app stores. And so it gives the feel of a native mobile app. But we're literally building a web app that we're putting a wrapper around. So, but yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    So if I were to build a no code, I'll just use CRM for easy kind of thing, easy example. And I got you to build that. You would build a cloud-based solution. That would be my CRM. That would be the application that I would get on my computer. I would sign into it and it would be hosted in one of the many server farms all over the country. And it wouldn't be hard data on my computer.

  • Speaker #1

    It would be most likely cloud-based, correct.

  • Speaker #0

    Got it. Okay. I'm glad we clarified that because I'm like app software. Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    No, you're not the only one. Yeah, I have to kind of watch myself.

  • Speaker #0

    Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    So,

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, the... the tagline was, you know, get custom software for 10% of the cost. And you said it's, you know, 10% of the time to build, to use code to build software versus no code. So let's kind of now maybe, like I said, I have a client out there who's talking about doing a conversion to one of these big players out there to, he's got a warehouse and logistics business. And he's like, man, I'd love to do it, but it's just so freaking expensive. So what are some of the. mistakes. And I guess we can frame this in a few ways because there are a lot of big players out there that own certain spaces, right? Like Salesforce or ADP, right? These guys own these spaces and maybe it doesn't make sense to build custom software to do what they do because they do it really well. So what are the mistakes around building custom software applications for your business? Do people miscast them? Do they think of it incorrectly or are there any? I mean, maybe I'm going down the wrong road, Sam, but tell me what mistakes have you seen business owners make when they come to you and say, OK, we want to either A, I can't afford to do software or B, here's what we want to do with our software. And you're like,

  • Speaker #1

    let's rethink that. So first off, I'll tell you, this is when clients come to us, believe it or not, the first thing I'll do is, hey, let's just make sure there's not an existing solution that meets your needs. you know, as much as I would like to generate income, I always try to do the best for the client. And existing solutions are always going to be more cost effective. That being said, where if there is an existing solution, what I also tell people is you don't want to change your processes to meet the tool. You want your tool to kind of match your processes, right? And so what typically happens is if there is an existing tool, they'll come to me like, well, it just doesn't fit what we're doing. And so that's where custom software. kind of doesn't make sense, right? So then kind of, you know, going down the path of where you're going as far as, okay, what are the common mistakes I see is the first one we see is the first, you know, there's a term we use in software development, MVP, which is minimal viable product, right? And so that's kind of what we define that as is the minimal amount of features that you can do to accomplish your goal. And in developing software, One of the biggest mistakes I see is in that first version, trying to do too much with it, right? Inevitably, whether it's no code or code, your first version is going to have bugs in it. You're going to have, you know, there's just too many things you're trying to do. And so when you try and do too many things with that first version, I feel like it's almost trying to fight too many battles on too many sides, right? And so we try and prioritize, like, what's the most important thing you're trying to do first? Let's build that version, nail that, and then incrementally add the other features that you want once we nail that. Where we've seen the best results is when we've done that. Where we've seen kind of clusters is when we've tried to build just this Cadillac right off the bat. And it's just trying to debug all those things. And everyone gets frustrated. Users get frustrated. Clients get frustrated. And so we've learned to really try and simplify. So a lot of times when I meet with clients and they're like, hey, I want this, I want this, I want this. I try and back them down like, hey, let's start with this, get that nailed down. And then adding on, you know, incrementally once we built that initial product becomes a lot easier than trying to build all the pieces at once. Does that make sense?

  • Speaker #0

    So let me let me. So I'm a visual thinker. So let me tell you what I was thinking while you were talking. It's like doing a reno and you have a. $200,000 budget and while they're in there they're like well we found this and we found that and you're like yeah fix that fix that fix that and then your budget you end up spending 400k right yeah they try to kind of once you get in there and you're working the brain trust starts having well what if we got to do this and got it to do this and then they over complicate the the original one and then i guess what i heard you say was build it like you know you build your business you you do your main software and then add bolt-ons right you're going to go now the next module we want to add to this let's have it do this so you're kind of playing in it and then thinking okay well the next logical now that we're in it because i i have a feeling a lot of people have all these great ideas and then when it's built it it doesn't flow or the things they need aren't there when they need them so if you start with a basic version and you're like you know what if we had this come in at this part of the process that would be really helpful so then we build that module and bolt it on no a thousand percent and as you're talking through that i'll actually mention kind of the one of the other mistakes that we see and candidly we learned ourselves was

  • Speaker #1

    we have learned over the years and it's exactly for one of the reasons that you just mentioned is we used to kind of jump right into building the app What we've learned is we always now, especially if it's a bigger app, sometimes if it's a small app, we can get away with not doing it. But it's rare is we'll start with what we call wireframes first. So if you're not familiar with wireframes, it's basically kind of all the major screens in your app. We graphically design them first. Yeah. Usually the tool that we use is Figma. So we'll design them through. Sometimes we'll do what's called a clickable prototype where it's almost like, you know, you can click to the next screen and it actually, you know, kind of. Right. You can kind of. uh experience what that what that experience would be but what we've seen is when we don't do that there's a lot of people just like you that are visual and so they come and say here's what i want and then we start designing it and they're like oh well no we actually really want this right and so so we just screw ourselves and screw them because you know even though it's no code it's much more flexible it still is

  • Speaker #0

    adding cost if we're changing directions multiple times throughout the process of course yeah and yeah and that wireframe's like a 2d version of what they're going to get right it's like not the living breathing version it's just the the 2d version but doing that process we've seen over and over again it forces the client to make decisions that they hadn't thought of right yeah i think it's the way to go i mean even even in my business you know uh my assistant and our the designer we use i'll give them an idea and they'll say well how do you want to look i'm like i don't know i need you to come up with the concept and then i'll be able to pull it apart and kind of move things around but if you're asking me i can see it in my brain but if you tell me to explain it to your write it down on piece of paper just it's gone you know so and you're better at this stuff than i am so you start and then i'll jump in and kind of collaborate exactly exactly so yeah no that that's kind of another big lesson that we lesson that we've learned so what are what are maybe another is there any other mistakes that we're missing i mean is is there a wrong application for software where people want to try to automate things that just generally you can't or i remember years ago i wanted to do software and a friend of mine who's also a business consultant he said you know the worst investment you can make for your business is developing software i think ah yeah so

  • Speaker #1

    What I will say, and I guess it's really more of a startup type of concept than anything, is like people that come to us and they have this idea for the next billion dollar startup. Right. And they come to us and they want to just, you know, they're usually the ones I want to design the Cadillac. And again, you know, what I'll tell them is you want to validate that what you're building is tackling a problem that's big enough that someone will pay for a solution. And I tell people, you don't validate that by asking, will you pay for this? You validate by making them pay something, whether it's like kind of early access or kind of, you know, sometimes I even tell people I started as a consulting service and kind of learn the problem by dealing with the customers, understanding what their true pain points are. And then what I've even seen and what we've done ourselves in a startup that I was in is in that consulting service, we built an internal tool. where we use the internal tool to deliver that service more efficiently. And then we transition that into like an external SaaS type solution, you know, and we were kind of our own first beta tester. So it's a little bit of a different mistake, but one that we have seen a lot. And again, I tell people if I don't think they've truly validated it, I'll tell them to go validate it before we go and build something. Because again, I mean, as much as we like to generate revenue, I don't like to generate revenue when someone walks away kind of frustrated. Sure. And so I want to make sure they're building something that is going to be successful for them as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    I can't imagine you get very many people that come to you and thinking they have the next billion dollar startup idea.

  • Speaker #1

    No, we do. And more importantly, they usually want us to work for free. And they'll give you a percentage of that billion dollar.

  • Speaker #0

    VC alive and well, you know, you can get in on the ground floor, son.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    Cool. All right. Well, let's move into maybe some pieces of advice. And one thing I do want to talk about, I don't want to not talk about. is the cost aspect of this, because you said it takes about 10% of the time of regular coding. So maybe walk us through, well, let's bunch it all together. So what pieces of advice would you give someone? And we've touched on some of that stuff already, but, and then maybe when we're done that, we can talk about the process, what it looks like and how it's, how you save the time and where you save the time.

  • Speaker #1

    Sure. Sure. So where do you want my start? Sorry.

  • Speaker #0

    let's start with advice the top three to five pieces of advice if someone's listening is thinking man i i've had this problem and i've been thinking about getting some software made and this sounds like the right idea for me you know what what what should they be doing to get this yeah so i

  • Speaker #1

    would say the more they come to us or whether it's us or or if you want to build yourself you know what i would say is the more you can define what we call the user journey journey So one of the most important things we can do before we get started is define, A, what type of users are going to use the app, right? Is it going to be a consumer? Is it going to be a salesperson? In one case we're working on right now is an estimator. Is there going to be an admin user? So number one, you want to define, OK, what types of users are going to use it? And then as much as possible, kind of storyboard out what do you want each of those user types to do? from the time they log in to the time they log out right and we can typically help a client through that but the more that someone can come to us with that information kind of fleshed out as much as possible then i think the smoother the process will be so i think that's a really important one um because and then then it comes down to thinking through okay do i want this to be a web-based app or do i want a mobile app right or you know will this be used primarily and and this is a different decision because you could have a web-based app that's primarily on mobile it doesn't necessarily need to be a mobile app so is this going to be primarily used on mobile tablet or desktop right because those things will affect maybe what no code platform we use right so the more you can kind of figure out those things out um you know it just makes our job a little bit easier it allows us to kind of guide you down the right you know path a little bit better very cool

  • Speaker #0

    think through those through think those through the better it will be so i always i never want to kind of bury the lead and i always try to think about what questions people would have out there and i just realized we haven't really outlined what you could use this for okay what as a business owner what are some of the applications i could have you build something for me to do or what are you seeing commonly or or what what efficiencies are you able to build into businesses with this?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. So it's run the gamut. So I'll try and kind of group them into themes as much as possible.

  • Speaker #0

    Sorry. I kind of surprised you.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, no, no, no. You're good. So one is kind of, you mentioned it, like a CRM type of app, where, but more so the CRM, it's the automation workflows behind it, right? So Yeah. A lot of business applications are some sort of variation of a CRM. And for those that are also customer relationship management system, where you're storing all your customer lead information and you're, you're kind of driving workflows and automations off of that. Right. So we have one right now we're working on where I can't give all the, all the details, but it's, it's basically the CRM tool combined with an estimation tool in the consultant. cool all right so they're combining it into one where they can create the lead and then assign the estimation process that estimator can go then there's a mobile app component where they can kind of do what they need to to uh to take the measurements to to do uh that sounds like a chunky piece of software like that's that's not as that's that's pretty yeah it is a piece of software and that's one where it's almost kind of hard you know i know but break break one of the first pieces of advice i gave but it's almost kind of hard to to break so we are starting as simple as possible but we're you know the the estimation piece is the the chunkier piece of that but we do have a simple crm to begin with so so that's kind of one example of one um so another one is kind of a customer facing piece uh you know there's some e-commerce brands where we kind of simplified the buying process through an e you know through a custom mobile app right okay and so that's been another one that we've done i'm trying to think of some other ones obviously ai has been a big one recently. I just built one for myself. So I was actually trying to learn a new no-code platform. And in my head, if I'm going to take the time to do that, I'm going to build something that could be useful. So I built a social listening app that I use for my own lead generation. So basically, I put in keywords and I have different integrations that I've done where based on the keywords I put into my system, it'll go and get... mentions on right now, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn that have those keywords in it. It pulls it into a dashboard and then I kind of filter through it. I have AI kind of evaluate, is this kind of a high intent for my business or not? And then I actually have an AI component that will respond to that post. And it's been actually a pretty valuable tool for me to go and generate leads because basically we're targeting people on social media that are looking for the services that we provide. So that took up a lot of integrations that we had to set up. But, you know, that's just another example of something we were able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    So let me get this straight. You built an app that will go on social media platforms and find people talking about, I need to build a website or I'm looking to build an app. Does anyone have any ideas? It'll prioritize those in terms of it'll score them, lead score them for you. Yeah. yeah and then it will generate a response from you saying hey we can help you with that yeah basically yes yeah yeah so just to give you a sense i built that in less than a month like

  • Speaker #1

    that you know how many people spend hours a day scrolling through and commenting yeah yeah yeah yeah so so it so it takes me now it takes me about like 30 minutes in the morning i'm able to get through 10 keywords that way so yeah so so that's just kind of another that's like i said that's something i just finished on myself so it just made me think of that but but really i hope i'm just trying to give kind of a broad range of the types of things yeah that's wild though that's super cool that you you yeah it's really and like i said the the food truck tracking app was another one where we were able to uh that actually got licensed uh by a food truck association which was my eight-year-old daughter's idea um but you know basically

  • Speaker #0

    food trucks could share the location there was a consumer app to download so that they could always see where those food trucks were it sent them push notifications when they were within a certain radius of their current location this episode is brought to you by key hire solutions where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business are you struggling to find the right talent for your business as a small business owner your time is precious and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business, guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today.

  • Speaker #1

    So again, no code, no code. So it's... There's very little we haven't been able to build. I'm sure we'll encounter it, but so far there's been few that we haven't been able to build.

  • Speaker #0

    Very cool, man.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, that's crazy. So, San, if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, I want to learn more about this or I've had this idea and I want to bounce it off San and see what he thinks. Oh, no, hold on. Before we get to that, the cost savings. Let's talk about that. So, obviously, it's a quick and dirty process compared to typing code. Now, AI is helping with the coding and things, but you claim it's 10% of the cost of traditional. So, how does that work out for you?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, so I can give you kind of real life examples. So that number, you know, our tagline is we've saved our clients over a million dollars in that development cost. So for this full disclosure, those are in the cases where clients have come to us and given us their other estimates that they got prior to coming. Right. So those are numbers where that's coming from. So to give you a couple of hard examples of this, and these are bigger apps, so hopefully I won't. I'll give you a couple of different ranges of maybe smaller apps versus bigger apps. But we've had. two to three in the last few months where they came to us where their existing estimates were in the neighborhood of 400 to 900,000 and it was going to take 12 months or more to build for us it was going to be in the neighborhood of 25 to 50,000 and we probably could build them in two to three months wow so and in the case of the one that was a half a million it was a small company competing against bigger companies right so they were using this technology to kind of disrupt their industry the reality is i think you kind of mentioned a similar case with your friend is that project didn't doesn't happen at a half a million dollars right we ended up doing for about 40k um and so that was a comfortable number for him and so again it really democratizes access to this custom technology and again we've got a few more that are in that 400 to 900 000 range where again we're in that 25

  • Speaker #0

    I mean, for a small business owner, if they have this idea of getting software, no wonder they say like it's prohibitive because $500,000 out of the jeans of a small business doing $10, $12, $15, $20 million a year. Yeah. That could be the entire year's revenue, right? Exactly. You got to wait for a year to get it. And so, you know, $25,000, $30,000, $40,000 is a much more reasonable number. You get it faster.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly. And, you know, we've done smaller apps, you know, candidly, we're moving away from these smaller apps because they end up being a lot of headache, you know, for very little margin. But, you know, on the smaller end, we've done as small as 5K. But I would say probably right now our average is, you know, 15 to 25K, you know, as a range. And they're pretty robust apps. You know, it's not like you're getting. you know, something very simple. I mean, you're, you know, what I will tell you is this is a lot of the functionality we are leveraging what's known as an API or application program interface. So these are third party solutions that do a very specific thing that we're able to integrate with, use that to do that complicated calculation or scrape that data or do things like that. pull that into our app that that kind of third party API is doing the heavy lifting. We're leveraging that to kind of add that functionality to our app. And so that's really that's really key. I think people think, oh, we got to program all of it. No, we're smart about it. We're leveraging people that have built these external products to to do a lot of heavy lifting. And then we're kind of aggregating all that functionality into one. And so that really allows us to to to build these robust apps without having to kind of, you know. to take you know a year to do and i and it doesn't sound like you're you lose any functionality on them at all they're they're just as good and as effective as the 500 000 coded software correct yeah the one thing i will say just kind of for full disclosure now i think the no code tools are getting better at this but we have seen some of the tools where as you scale up to you know more and more users you do see a little bit of lagging in performance but a lot of times it's because you're on a shared server and they do have kind of you know kind of uh dedicated instances where you could pay up for it but yeah but you know that's one thing i do kind of share with people is you know uh no code can and like i said there are some solutions that um that are you know addressing this but but performance can be an issue with no code but again I tell people you've saved so much money that even at a later date, you did have to kind of add coded components to it. It's still worth it. But there's a lot of companies that are, you know, three, four years in and are fine with it. So, you know, I just say that to be.

  • Speaker #0

    transparent about it but um but yeah i mean that that's one thing that we have seen in some cases but but generally speaking no code can handle a lot of what they need to i got to assume it's evolving because it was probably meant to be cost affordable for smaller operations but now people are like oh this works and now like bigger companies are doing it so they

  • Speaker #1

    kind of have to play catch up because it wasn't built for that kind of volume right that's exactly right and that's where you are starting to see like more enterprise level uh no code tool so well but yeah that's just kind of one thing i just

  • Speaker #0

    tell people to just make it aware and and we walk them through kind of how to address that super cool all right so now man if people want to get in touch with you we're going to put matt to work here uh how can how can they reach out if they want to learn more about what you do or talk about some software yeah

  • Speaker #1

    absolutely so the best thing is uh our website our website is uh drivephase.co so it's d-r-i-v-e-p-h-a-s-e dot co um And the easiest thing to do is on there, there's a link on whether it's about 50 links on there to schedule a free consultation. And, you know, that is what it is. I mean, we don't do a hard sell. We just basically walk through, OK, what are you trying to do? A, can this be done in no code? And then, you know, if they want to kind of move towards a more full on estimate, then we that typically takes another session where we start that scope of progress, which can be pretty, pretty intense. But. but yeah that's really the best way to do it like i said you know we do these free consultations and we had some other other places to reach out matt what do you got your youtube station youtube at drive phase co instagram they're

  • Speaker #0

    all pretty much the same handles facebook yeah it's consistent throughout yeah there you go there you are on linkedin cool hey man thanks so much this has been super cool i learned a ton from it and i appreciate you taking the time to come and chat with us

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, thanks for having me, Corey. It was a pleasure.

  • Speaker #0

    All right. We'll talk soon. There you go. San Hong. That was a very cool and interesting conversation. I'd like to thank you for tuning into the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. If you got value out of the episode today and you want to keep up to date on our new content, make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, leave a comment, even let us know if there's topics you'd like us to discuss on the show for you. If you prefer to listen to your podcast, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform by searching the Key Hire Small Business Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Corey Harlock. And until next time, stop grinding, start growing.

Share

Embed

You may also like