# Quickly Build Feature Requests Using No Code

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXn6KaD5TEU
Duration: 25 min
Language: English
Words: 4479
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/iXn6KaD5TEU

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[0:00] quickly delivering feature requests using no code this is from jessica malnick she's a community builder content strategist and a copywriter her writing has appeared on the next web social media examiner semrush cmx hubspot convince and convert among many other sites she can be talking today about prioritizing implementing feature requests can be a major drain on time an alternative is to use no code to quickly build and deploy new features she's going to walk through an example that she's helping us with she uh is helping microconf develop our community wiki and um her stack she's going to dive into air table zapier softer slack phantom buster and drip so let's give a

[0:44] warm microconf welcome to jessica malnick hey jessica hey how are you thank you for having me absolutely so i'm gonna head backstage and let you take it from here absolutely cool so hi guys today i am going to be talking specifically about how you can quickly deliver both feature requests as well as like internal tools using no code um so a little bit of background about me and why you should even care about this presentation for starters i'm a marketer and the community manager i'm definitely not a developer so if i can figure out how to use these narcade tools pretty much anyone can and some of the benefits of using no

[1:32] code in particular is you can get a lot faster build times to get a working mvp uh it tends to be a lot cheaper when you're not a developer like me it means you're gonna have more control over the final product and the features uh in the future that you're building and what this is a big feature request in internal tools that you're building um it's also a really great way to be able to deliver on customer promises quicker um and with fewer resources especially if you know you're in marketing or support and you kind of interact with customers on either customer interviews or on support

[2:08] calls and you notice like features that are coming up all the time you can get you can use no code tools to deliver some of those feature requests as an mvp and get feedback and really wow um customers and finally it's a really really good and useful for automating repetitive or tedious tasks so those are some of the benefits of no code um and in particular it kind of correlates with a larger trend that i think many of you have probably seen within news articles and blogs where it's like the rise of this role called the director of automation which is one of the which um probably is

[2:43] going to be one of the most hired roles in the next decade and it's all about either building feature requests or internal systems and tools within like companies like mid-size to large companies and even the fact that nokia tools can play a huge part in that um and just this has already kind of been come up a few times yesterday as well as today but the no code and the loco tool secret system is absolutely massive from website builders to app builders to integrators um and so forth there are literally hundreds of tools to choose from that kind of meet that no code or logo tools

[3:19] so chances are like there's a really really good chance that what you're trying to build can be done with no code tools um and this is an example of what this actually looks like in this particular talk i'm going to talk about a very specific feature request within micrograph connect um and kind of do a little bit of working in public but there's so many things you can build of no to no code tools including sales crms employee directories customer directories job boards editorial calendars event calendars internal wikis that's kind of the example i'm showcasing uh client and customer portals training portals for employees lms systems for courses and the list goes on

[4:00] and on you're basically just limited by based off of your own imagination um so in particular when to use no code tools as i kind of said before you can pretty much use it for almost anything but it tends to in my experience uh work the best when it's either looking to kind of speed up a repetitive or very tedious uh manual process so like you know first thing that kind of comes to mind there is like a client portal or customer support billing um getting like a really quick mvp up to kind of gauge if customers even want this or what they're really looking for

[4:36] as well and another use case that i won't really get into here but you can and i have seen using nokia tools to give like a really good working vp to like your product engineering team to kind of speed up development so this brings me to what the crux of this talks is about which is how i am using nokia tools to build out this community wiki within microsoft connect um and one of the kind of the whole origin story behind this is it really is trying to solve three key point key point key pain points within the community one if you're in slack you kind of know

[5:12] that it can be kind of hard to search for content in slack their search functionality leaves a lot to be desired in addition all content kind of disappears after 10 000 messages um so you know and the more activity there is in slack um especially when there are a couple thousand members in the community the faster that content goes away so this community wiki is really going to be designed um as a way to kind of be able to search kind of the best of evergreen content in one place that any community member can find so for the actual tech stack that is being used for this wiki um it's

[5:52] sappier air table softer and a phantom buster and of course drip um and the crux of this tool is being built in air table and softer air table being the quote unquote backend database encode um and software kind of being what any microsoft connect member is going to interact with on the front end um and zapier is actually kind of the glue and quote unquote the duct tape that kind of pulls everything together from all of the tools um side note i personally think zapier at some point in time should just should nickname themselves the duct tape of the internet because they kind of are that um and then i use a tool called

[6:34] phantom buster to pull in specific uh youtube videos it's really similar to if you were listening to andy's talk earlier um it has a lot of similar functionality to hexmatic um diving right in so it can be really tempting to immediately go into all these nokia tools with an idea and just immediately start tinkering around and i would strongly strongly strongly recommend not doing that um in particular because um when you are trying to do that you're going to waste a lot of time and oftentimes you're not going to necessarily get the best results so what i've done and what i would recommend and you'll do is start from mockup this

[7:20] could be as low tech as sketching out what you want to what you want this feature request to be on a pen and paper um or in like a white board in your office or it could be using um tools um like a digital whiteboard tool or wireframing tool it can be as fancy or as low tech as you want in my particular case i used a tool called miro um to be able to build up mockups and i literally just went through and figured out okay what do i want this what should the wiki look like and then i literally just did a mock-up of every single screen on

[7:55] there um so you can kind of see like you know the first thing someone's going to interact with is the member login screen i'll get into a lot of details on why that's really really important um and then you can kind of be able to map out the crux of it and you really can't see it right here but you can kind of map out the hand of the crux of like how people are going to be able to search for content um both based off of like individual channels within slack or became categories within the wiki um as well as being able to pull in additional content like all of

[8:25] the microconf video vaults while videos um and there's also plans to add in additional blog posts and essays as well so that's kind of the crux of it is this make sure that you don't eliminate that mock-up stage um and this kind of gets into the meat of it which is pretty much everything within this wiki um and in all of the quote-unquote back-end code um is done with an airtable and you can kind of see here there's a bunch there's like there's actually two bases one basis for users which you can't see here um and that's gonna power and that powers the login um and the ability to

[9:02] candidate content within software and then all of the actual content is being done within airtable directory so there are tables for all of the community threads within slack um filtered in a very specific way um to all the video content so the first thing that had to happen to get to even make this happen at all is to figure out how to actually get the content out of slack in a usable format so that i can even go into software for this wiki um and for that i use slack um and zapier well excuse me i use zapier and integrated zapier between airtable and slack um one thing if you haven't used

[9:41] airtable before which i suspect most people listen to this help um their table of zapier integration is probably one of the best i've seen um and i've used a lot of them in the past and i've set it up in a way where it's formatted so that you even have nested comments within the air table i'll walk through exactly how i did that in a second um and then the other part of this was actually adding in blog posts and videos from like the microcomp site as well as the video vault within youtube and for that i actually used a tool called phantom buster which extracts all of the

[10:18] essentially can extract all of the video content in a format in a csv file and then automatically upload it into airtable super useful tool um would definitely recommend it so a little bit more details about what because air table is basically the crux of all the content there's a specific specific fields that are particularly useful um the one is like using linked records and lookup fields is basically what powers and formatted all of the data so that it's actually going to be so that it displays within the actual wiki in a way that's actually usable definitely recommend that um and the second one is air table automations

[10:57] which is basically there if you've used a zapier as well this is basically zapier with an air table so for example i used it to set up specific records that match a very specific condition like profile photos and then use that to be able to create additional records within different um views within the base and within different tables within a base so you can set up a lot of different things um with an air table to really structure the data that you're using in a way that's going to make the most sense for how you want people to interact with that content so that brings me to the front on front

[11:38] end code and air quotes um and this was all done within software so you can kind of so for example you know you could technically be like hey everything's in our table you can send that to anyone you want but there's many reasons why that's probably not going to be a great idea for one you have limited ability to get content um you can't give people different layers of access that easily um it's not really a great like it's a step above searching for something in slack but it's still not a great ui or you actually send somebody at basically a stair a spreadsheet on steroids

[12:15] and um it makes it harder to you know and if by having another table it makes it way too easy for say someone to get access to the content you shouldn't have access and one of the big reasons why software was being used in this particular case is getting the content so only microsoft connect members can see it based off of their email address um that they use within slack is the same email address that they're going to have access to this wiki when it starts to roll out uh within the next month um so this kind of brings it to the login screen within the wiki so when you

[12:50] first join the wiki um you get to add in your email address and your password standard login experience and this is just a way to be able to kind of get all of the content um so that it stays there conversations that are happening within the slack community stay within the slack community ecosystem uh in addition this is kind of some work in public showcasing exactly what some of this is going to look like so you can kind of see here within the wiki you can search based off of a specific conversation or you can actually hit any one of these uh buttons at the top which is basically

[13:27] different categories and these categories correspond to specific channels within select so you can basically pull up and say if you want to look for you know videos if you're looking for the best video screen sharing tool um you can search it and you'll see results like this and that is an example of one of the results so if john's actually in here um congrats you're the example uh within this um for this presentation you can also search for individual video and blog content this is actually pulling into i mentioned it before but pulling in stuff from within fit and buster um to be able to pull in all of the

[14:07] youtube videos all the video vault videos so you can listen to any of the talks and there's a lot more that's going to be pulled in in the future which i'll get to you in a future slide um and then with the whole theme of working in public um this is going to be rolling out in the next month or so um but some there's a lot of additional features within this individual feature request um like adding in some ability to have you know leave reactions and comments within the wiki directory so you know especially since most of the content in the wiki is content that you know has

[14:43] disappeared quote unquote from slack and there's also the ability to um pull in additional content types whether it's blogs and essays yeah um and i won't get into all the details but that's kind of all in the slide um and kind of the final piece of the puzzle when it comes to building feature requests in no code is it can be really tempted to try to skip the processes that your developer development team is probably used to of qa definitely don't recommend that um just because you might be building a feature request mvp or a feature request or an internal tool doesn't mean you should skip the qa process so at the

[15:22] very very bare minimum make sure it's working across different browsers whether it's safari chrome firefox edge um you know tablets iphones android device devices make sure that you're not just relying on you who's building this feature to actually test and qa this but also some ideally at least one person if not multiple people who haven't worked on the build before um to actually go through and literally click on every single link in every single screen and see what happens and then because there's guaranteed to be some bugs and basically record every single issue so you can prioritize and work through them um you can even use

[16:03] air table for that i know i've already mentioned the sponge and that is everything any questions comments yes there are questions coming through thanks so much jessica all right first question and obviously if you are in uh gather right now you can ask it in the chat and producer xander will make them appear fancy like up here on the screen so the first question for you jessica is what types of features can you build with no code tools great question so the first thing is you're basically limited by your imagination you can pretty much if you want to there are hundreds of no-code tools out there so if you want to and you have it

[16:49] mapped out you can pretty much build almost anything however there are certain features that i probably wouldn't recommend building for example if it's super super super tied to a whole bunch of proprietary algorithms within like your software and it's going to need to be pulling in a whole bunch of complex data and a whole bunch of complex security things maybe not the best feature to try to build a no code however if you're trying to automate a repetitive process maybe you have like a macro set up for something in excel using something like that would be a really good example of how to build a feature request within no good tools

[17:28] next question is what should you consider when choosing your no code tools stack another great question um the first thing kind of really goes back into what are you trying to build um and also building out some sort of mock-up to really go through what does this thing need to fill out and then look for the tools that are going to make sense so for example for a wiki or any sort of directory sort of thing obviously a database component and having some sort of way to put in a ton of different records and a ton of different data is going to be useful so a tool like air table makes a

[18:05] ton of sense for something like that um and given that software is basically a layer on top of air table that's one of the reasons why that was chosen for this wiki however you're really trying to look through what is the functionality that needs to be in there and also going after after what is your skill set um so if you need something a little bit more complex than using a tool like bubble um there's also really great communities obviously asking microcomp directly um but there's also tools like makerpad that are like designed specifically for no code what are the advantages of using no code tools to build feature requests

[18:44] um i hinted at this a little bit earlier in this presentation but it's a lot quicker to be able to build the things um when you're not a developer like me it gives you a little more control and flexibility so you can kind of get things faster and you're not necessarily having to either hire a developer or you know work with a development team and back and forth you can kind of take some of that ownership over yourself and kind of get at the very least a really really really strong mvp um that's why and let's see it's our last question unless another one comes through here in

[19:21] the next uh 30 seconds or so what are some potent you may have addressed this already but what are some potential drawbacks to using no code tools uh to build feature requests absolutely so the biggest drawback i mean the one of the biggest drawbacks is if you i mean as if you're trying to build something that's extremely complex and extremely tied into either like security or like a whole bunch of complex algorithms within an existing within your existing software probably not a great idea to use no code tools but reality is is the sky's the limit like you can build almost anything and granted i'm not a

[20:02] developer but i think you can build almost anything within the nokia tools especially if you kind of work through and think out okay what needs to happen and at the very least you can kind of get an mvp um that's going to be a lot better than you know a back of the napkin drawing where you can be like hey this is you know this might not be totally automated but like these are like in all the steps and that gives a lot of runway and flexibility that you wouldn't have before all right um if there are any other questions we have time for a couple more i'm curious jessica a

[20:37] question for me um in terms of building out this this wiki you know you showed the process and all the things that went into it what kind of time like overall how many hours approximately have you invested um in in you know this type of project that's a great question um that's a great question um i would say in general the majority like i don't necessarily have a time estimate off the top of my head but uh the majority of that was really in building out like the air table side of things and getting all this getting all of the existing content from slack into error

[21:19] table in a format that's actually readable um and that's actually going to be readable within the within the actual wiki itself so when a member actually logs in and sees it within the wiki was definitely where the majority of the time and the complexity came in like actually adding in the layer and software is actually really easy that's essentially deciding in the sign up form right yeah and that's interesting because obviously you know i am as much as we use no code in we use some tools in microconf and tinyseed obviously our business is not entirely based on it but i am familiar with airtable zapier slack drip but i

[21:55] had never heard of softer and phantom buster um those are funny names how did you how did you find those like were they rec when you when you thought okay so now i need to go scrape stuff did you go search like no code tool to do this did you go into you know a private community slack that you where you know a bunch of people doing no code and ask them like what's what's your avenue for learning about these new tools to accomplish what you need to get done i feel like every single day there's a no new there's a new tool out there yeah um so for software

[22:29] in particular it was literally i first heard about it on twitter um and i heard someone talking about their table and software software and i'm like oh this is a pretty interesting tool i immediately like went to the website did a bunch of digging within google search within google and social media to kind of see and i'm like this looks really really powerful and it's built on air table which is probably one of my favorite no-codes out there just because of how powerful it is um i like to call it like google spreadsheet google sheets on steroids because you can pretty much do anything in it like they have their

[23:02] own like air and air triple automations is a newer feature so like it's basically zapier for air table um and then for phantom buster i don't know how i first heard about it um i want to say i was googling around probably two years ago looking for something completely unrelated to this project um and i found that tool just to be at google all right we have another question from the audience if you're i'm not sure i understand this so let me read it out loud and then and then you can help me interpret it if you were looking for a consult on your stack what type of

[23:36] resources are you looking for do you think they're asking like what type of expert could you hire to help like validate your res you know validate your the the moves you're making are smart i guess that is um a really good question i'm also not sure if i totally understand this but i know and going back to software like i know there's actually experts within their community that are like called software experts obviously um that you can hire to consult for you i'd also say like one probably the best example of this and actually what i've used a little bit in the past um is zapier has a partner

[24:14] program that is pretty massive and with a whole bunch of like experts that you can literally hire and those folks tend to be both coders and no code tool enthusiasts as well that you can actually hire in either an hourly or project basis um to learn a little bit more i've i've never used in particular software's experts but i have actually used a few zapier partners in the past to figure out how to do like more complex things within zapier yeah that's a good point i think makerpad.co is a great community i'm sure you can find someone there and then i would go to upwork i'm imagining there

[24:47] might be someone you know if those other resources don't pan out

[24:57] [Music]

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