He Built a No Code SaaS Over $1M / Year, Here’s How...

0:00yeah so two years ago we went from five years of custom code to no code on bubble and I'm I'm never going back we have been able to replicate fir years of custom code in a year and then in the following year build incredible new features and now we're doing $1 million in recurring annual revenue and the business is doing better than ever if you're considering no code for your business you don't want to miss this interview today I talk with Chad sakik the founder of better legal better legal helps new business business file their formation documents with the state get their Ein in addition to several other

0:34services Chad's the first person I've met who's made what some might see as a counterintuitive move from a traditional code stack to no code and during that process they crossed a million dollars in ARR it's the it's the threshold so many Founders dream of and if you stick around till the end you'll hear his advice for anyone who's trying to launch their first app on Bubble so to kick us off can you tell us a bit about better legal and what problem you solve for your customer yeah so better legal it's not a brand new problem that we're solving there are much bigger competitors that have been

1:07out there for a long time what we are actually trying to do is remove the kind of Matrix of options of or of of upsells really where it's like if you're starting a business there are three things that you need you need your state filing you need your EIN and you need your legal documents in order to open a bank account instead of going through this kind of Gauntlet of options where it's like do you need an EIN do you need a legal document we just say it's one price and you get everything for that single price same speed as the state provides instead of trying to upsell you

1:40a different speed unless you know if if you don't pay them the extra $100 it takes 30 business days which is actually 6 weeks so we're trying to do is just make things way simpler and and just remove any options that you don't need to think about anyway because you're already thinking about all this weird stuff you're having to do to run your business we want to make make that as easy as possible for you if you take us back a few years how did you come up with the idea for better legal and how did you find early customers I started with an attorney friend he left his law

2:10firm and he went to be a solo practitioner and he was trying to get as much business as he could so he was on up Council in AO trying to get uh LLC formations from people because if he got that business then he would likely get more business for writing contracts reviewing contracts things like that so it was a good entrance point or a lead magnet for him as an attorney but he was charging $1,500 and he was telling me that he wasn't getting that much business or he was losing a lot of business after talking to people and I said why are you charging $1,500 and he said well $300

2:42goes to the state for the filing fee and then 4 hours at $300 an hour is the other $1,200 and I was like well why what takes you 4 hours and the reality is a a legal document that he downloaded from Westlaw from a c course uh was basically manual data entry essentially paying an attorney $300 an hour to do manual data entry into a 50-page document that someone else wrote and so I basically told him I could simplify that and automate it and I built a little process uh and it took this 4-Hour process down to 10 minutes and we just started selling it through his Law Firm solely

3:24for an entire year we sold about 50 of those because he was doing so much business at the $5.99 including the $300 filing fee that we realized that we had something and then we just took some of that money put it into Google ads got basically spent $1,200 for two sales and got $600 back and that's when we knew that we had something and technically can you give us an idea of how you built better legal including your unusual transition from code to no code so was actually no code to no code to code to no code so there have been four major releases of better legal internally on

4:00our internal app the first one was just type form zappier uh web merge and assana and all of it just kind of cobbled together the second version replaced assana with salesforce.com where we could basically edit the information before we generated the legal document uh the third version was we really wanted to provide a portal and we couldn't do that with Salesforce even if we used Heroku once you get to 10,000 rows it's called for pricing so we were like well you know if we hit any kind of scale this we don't know what Salesforce is going to charge us so we decided to just build it all on custom

4:38code and we spent five years building out this thing on custom code and then after that uh I I really just kept butting heads with our front-end developers our backend developers were always awesome but our front-end developers were just always wanted to go for the new JavaScript framework refactoring to make it 10 milliseconds or 100 milliseconds faster all while ignoring actual necessary features that we needed and so moving to Bubble allowed us to get a developer at the same rate but work 10 times faster and so we went from code where we were literally just for an entire year treading water just trying to keep up

5:18with the features that we had already released and then you know packages uh breaking or or the server being overloaded and crashing and so all of these devops things that we felt like we didn't need to worry about they didn't help us be better at business they weren't our secret sauce being able to go to Bubble where it was everything that we needed all packaged into a wizzywig interface and let's be let's be honest no code is just a new term for wizzywig right so we all did we all use Dream Weaver and all of these types of drag and drop interfaces back you know 10 20 years ago and then everything kind

5:54of went to code because the do com boom and everything happened and so now we're moving back back forwards uh drag and drop interfaces where the reality is we already designed registration forms signup forms uh a forgot passwords uh logins we've all of these things are just elements and so instead of hand coding this you have all this packaged in drag and drop and you can make these workflows in a visual way it really is like moving from a manual Loom to an automated Loom and anybody that's not moving that direction is is just going to get left behind in my opinion and so it sounds like the to summarize the

6:30reasons it's uh maintainability so you don't have all this devops and all this refactoring having to go on and then speed of deploying new features does that that sound about right yeah it it took us about it took us a few months to duplicate 5 years worth of custom code in bubble and then we basically ran them in parallel and just did nightly syncs between the databases and so we let the team use the new version and then revert to the old version if they needed to and then we just filled in the gaps because there were a lot of these edge cases little features that we had forgotten

7:02about so that took another probably 3 to six months and then we just ran the new version what we call bl4 on bubble and then once we stopped getting bug fixes and we didn't have people reverting to the old version we just Sunset the old version and and yeah so it took so it took us less than a year to launch everything that we had on custom code plus replacing AA we built our own task management system that worked with our data that was deeply integrated with our data within bubble um and then we spent the next year or last year developing completely new features that made us way

7:39more uh productive and uh just new new entirely new uh AI enabled features new products so yeah it it was a net win by like 100x and in terms of Revenue can you give us an idea of where better legal stands yeah so we've been doing a a between two and $2.5 million for the past couple of years um but we've we've really started focusing on our SAS part of our business whereas like two years ago we did you know about $25 million a vast majority of that was onetime revenue and now we've kind of flipped it to where it's about 5050 uh we've done 1

8:16million ARR uh in December of 2023 and we're really just accelerating that and especially with our new AI contract analysis tool which is usage pricing or subscription pricing that really is just going to excel right and you know you mentioned that bubble makes up the core of better legal are you also interjecting additional code or customizations to make it work for you like you know there's no code there's low code and then there's code like how much actual code or low code is is being injected to make better legal work I don't know the there's no exact percentage but but that's kind of like the secret right is that no code really

8:53isn't no code it's no code until you need something bespoke and then you go find code or you find code behind an API and you inject that into your no code so we have tons of little scripts and stuff that do various things uh like like creating a customer and stripe things like that that are very custom that is like a small part of it and that's what really makes the business unique and so I think anybody building on no code is going to get to a certain point and then you just go find like any amount of code or something custom is just an API away

9:26so like build on no code till you get to a point and then figure out how to you know host some code somewhere and just build your own API or find someone that built something custom and then call them the an API and are there any performance or scalability issues that you run into since the migration to Bubble not really at times it's slow but the fact is bubble is hosted on AWS anyway so it's either me and my team building on AWS and trying to do optimizations or the bubble team building on AWS and doing the op optimizations and that's something that I feel like I shouldn't have to worry

10:02about so really by me using bubble I'm just Outsourcing the AWS optimizations to them and let them worry about it and then I just pay my my usage based fees you know it's a tiered level where I pay uh x amount and then if I go over the workload units I pay overages just like I would pay AWS if I was running like Lambda or serverless or something like that got it and so you haven't seen any big surprise bills come where you're like oh my gosh we ran we we twox our bill in a month for uh for overing no but we do a lot of testing and I have

10:32seen some horror stories where people have accidentally done something but the simple fact is that you would do that on AWS anyway uh we we had those issues with AWS where we had you know $10,000 bill overage than what we are used to paying and no matter who you use if you're doing a usage based model that is going to happen regardless how about any hard one lessons that maybe you'd pass on to developers who have an app that's starting to gain traction and they find themselves a little overwhelmed uh you know keeping up with with coding like you've obviously been through this journey for several years across

11:07multiple platforms so what advice would you have don't worry about scaling until you have to worry about scaling so the number one issue that I see and and you know i' I've followed bear from legology for for years and and we've talked several times and he preaches this and he put it the most elegant way which is why are you worried about maintaining a million customers or or 100,00 concurrent users when you literally don't have a single paying customer so before you worry about a 100 paying customers worry about the first 10 customers if you have to worry about scalability issues at 10 customers or 100 customers that's a fantastic problem

11:43stop the signups or charge double and then focus on that problem when it becomes a problem too many people worry about the wh ifs about what might happen and then try to solve that problem for the future when in reality it's very unlikely it's going to happen all of these no code platforms are built on very big infrastructure anyway and it's their job to help support you so if you run into any issues reach out to their team and see about getting help and how you can optimize with tips and tricks versus just worrying about something that probably isn't going to become an issue anyway in a minute we'll hear

12:19Chad's advice for people who are looking to launch their first app but first I want to invite you to microcom remote which will be focused on early stage SAS sales microcom remote is March 12th and 13th we have four Keynotes filled with practical tactical advice on how to improve your sales game speakers include Rachel Leo of fuse inventory Craig huitt of Casto Daniel Eber of sales MVP and Sam Howard who focuses on sales messaging after the Keynotes we have founder by founder sessions where you'll get to chat with other attendees tickets are really inexpensive it's an online event and even if you can't attend videos will be available afterwards get

12:56your ticket today at microcom remote.com so if an entrepreneur were to come to you and say investors are asking us to write code for our app and and we're leaning towards no code but really undecided what what would you advise them so I I see I see everywhere this kind of you know if you if you write code you own it if you do no code you don't own it I I'm I'm into the stock market a lot and I listen to these large Fortune 500 companies do you know what I never ever hear a Institutional Investor ask on an earnings call is how come you're using

13:30salesforce.com instead of writing your own code salesforce.com is the original no code tool and it is a hundred billion doll or 10 billion doll company and it and it produces uh software for cocacola Walmart every huge company all of our competitors Legal Zoom Zen business that are you know have raised hundreds of millions or worth billions of dollars every single one of them uses salesforce.com and that costs $125 per user per month build annually and they prefer you to sign a three-year contract then you've got force.com which is like $15 per user per month build annually but then you've got bubble which is basically what force.com should have

14:15been if force.com wasn't trying to chase the mrr per seat um greed machine bubble instead is a tiered level it's you know $30 a month $60 a month whatever and and then you pay for overages with uh usage so if your investors are asking you know why don't you use code ask them why why these large companies use salesforce.com instead of writing their own code even if you write your own code who is actually writing the code you're using a library you're downloading it from GitHub from somewhere else someone else is writing that code you are basically getting free labor from someone else and you're installing their

14:55package and some later uh some later uh update might break your entire system and then you got to go back and fix everything if you use something like bubble yes you kind of have some form of lockin but you have lockin no matter what are you using stripe okay you know you've got a thousand subscribers move those thousand subscribers somewhere else you can't do it you're locked in your your internet who's providing your internet you're locked into whoever you're paying for your internet so there's lock in no matter what pick the most reasonable option that is that is a high quality responsible option uh and and and go from there Chad thanks so

15:37much for joining us on uh the Youtube channel appreciate it yeah my pleasure thanks to Chad for joining me and sharing his experience if you're considering no code for your app you should watch this video next make sure you're subscribed to see more videos like this every single week thanks for watching