‍What's your personal background? What motivated you to start your own company?

I wore many hats before starting the UX Writing Hub - a law student, cosmetics salesperson, realtor, graphic designer.

Early in my career, it took me a while to figure out the type of work I enjoyed and what I didn't.

Today, I know that education around new types of innovations excites me the most. This realization clicked really well later on in my journey.

After doing some remote graphic design gigs while working and traveling remotely (back in 2015), I prioritized opportunities that allowed me to work and travel. This was my revelation moment where I realized that most advice I received from friends and family didn't align with what I truly wanted.

Shortly after that, I dropped out of law school and was eagerly focused on my work and travel goal.

It took me a few years to actually build an all-remote company, a concept less common back then.

From there, the transition from graphic design to UX design made the most sense, but my entrepreneurial senses tingled when I noticed that in the product teams I worked with, almost no one was in charge of the words on the interface, also known as "microcopy".

I noticed many similarities in the journey I went through while transitioning from graphic design to UX design, and I decided to help those with a writing background to get into the field of UX Writing, which was really new back then.

Considering myself an autodidact and an early adopter, I learned all of the different shiny tools I could find on Product Hunt and the web to build this venture.

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What no-code tools did you use to build UX Writing Hub and what purpose did each play in the final product?

It started simply with a WordPress website and Kajabi as the course platform. But as the platform grew, I knew I had to scale smartly. So, Airtable and Make helped me to consolidate everything in one place. I also use Softr for our mentors and students platform and will elaborate on that later.

I also use no-code for many operation and marketing automations that lead people back to the platform.

I thoroughly enjoy the process of looking at an existing process and figuring out how to automate it at scale.

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What were the initial costs to get UX Writing Hub off the ground?

A few hundred bucks - mostly for hosting various tools.

What was the process of building your product from idea to launching?

I used Airtable to document all of the data of the students and later on the mentors.

That created a couple of issues:

Too many people were connected to the same Airtable account which made it super pricey, and the UX for the students and mentors wasn't that great.

Then, something magical happened. I learned about Softr, which allowed me to build a UI front end to my existing Airtable database. From there, I’ve built an app that lets me scale the business using only no-code tools.

I mapped the current workflow and then tried to map the desired workflow I wanted to achieve.

It took me a few weeks and 2 - 3 iterations to finalize the product but eventually, it was rolled out well.

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How do you attract customers?

Through content marketing - newsletters, podcast, blog posts, and social media.

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What are the biggest challenges you've overcome building UX Writing Hub?

Maintaining personal attention.

I have ADHD (like many other creators) and I tend to be disorganized and “all over the place”. While it’s great for my creative process, it can be really challenging for other aspects, so staying focused was a significant challenge for me.

There were a lot of enticing ideas and topics along the way that caught my attention, and it was definitely a challenge to keep my focus in one place.

Also, while scaling a company, any lack of attention can impact the team, so it’s really important to work hard to maintain it, not only for you, but for your team and customers as well.

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What's your advice for non-technical people who want to start a company?

The most common advice would be to look for a problem and try to solve it, but there's more to it.

Try to follow your curiosity. As Steve Jobs famously said, try to see how the dots of your journey could connect into a very unique niche.

Based on your life experience, you must have specific knowledge in a topic that most people don’t know about at all.

Look for it, work hard to find it.

Then once you’ve figured out what it is, start building. There are so many tools out there today that you could possibly build anything you’d like. Go wild!

Just Google or use ChatGPT to figure out the technical no-code solution, that’s the easy part. Most of the content related to it is available for free on YouTube or platforms such as No-Code MBA.

Explore your environment and see what works inefficiently today and what you could do to solve it.

It’s not only about making money (although it can be really rewarding) but if you want it to be sustainable, you really need to be curious about the topic you’ve chosen for a long time.

Test different ideas, talk about it with friends, and see how people react.

Unpopular tip: If some people think it’s a really stupid idea, you might be onto something worth exploring.

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What are your future plans for UX Writing Hub?

I believe most companies need to undergo an AI transformation, and UX Writing Hub is no exception.

We’ve started building courses related to Generative AI for UX people, and my goal is to educate UX Writers about the innovations happening in the world right now.

My personal goal is to keep building stuff related to education and innovation.

These days, I'm also launching a new no-code platform named the AI Makers Lab, which is supposed to help governments, businesses, and individuals with their AI transformation process. I believe that companies not undergoing AI transformation will be perceived as outdated as a fax machine in a few years. And who wants to be a fax machine?!

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How do you think the rise of no-code tools will impact entrepreneurship?

No-code is already democratizing the way we build stuff without technical skills. I think that at some point, it’s not going to be called no-code anymore because that would be the standard for people to build things.

I feel like in a few years, the tools that entrepreneurs will have will allow them to do a lot of exceptional things.

Learning about no-code today will future-proof your career for sure.

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Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I think we’ve covered most of it.

Follow my podcast, Writers in Tech: https://open.spotify.com/show/4n6icHZbDEcXRX4DafjtPw