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

I studied economics (B.S., M.S.) and started my career as an economic consultant. I didn't like consulting and took a chance on a career change into software, going to work as an early employee at a young enterprise software company. I'm about a decade in and still do it full-time, my primary responsibilities being in product management.

It started out of a personal need. My wife needed a new website for her acting career. I could code well enough to build it on my own, but I wanted to do something quickly and of higher quality than I could produce with code. I didn't want to use Squarespace or Wordpress, so I started Googling alternatives and found Webflow. About a week later, we had ivymeehan.com! This inspired me and my wife, who also has a marketing background, to reach out to family and friends who owned small businesses to see if they needed help with their web presence or other digital small business problems.

What no code tools do you use when working with companies to automate their processes?

Parabola, Zapier, Integromat.

What's an example of a recent project you worked on to automate tasks within a company?

I built an automated Google Analytics report that gets emailed to a client weekly. I wrote about it on my website.

How do you attract clients?

Word of mouth and references.

What are the biggest challenges you've overcome building Twindeavor?

Figuring out how to balance full-time work while running and scaling a side business.

What's your advice for employees inside a company who want to automate aspects of their job?

Learn how to work with data and spreadsheets. The goal of automation is to move information from one place to another, and that information is often in the form of structured data. Organizing that information before it's moved is key.

What are your future plans for Twindeavor?

To be completely honest, it's not to grow into a very large agency. We want to continue to help small, local businesses get very high-quality digital solutions at an affordable price. It's one of the wonders of no-code solutions. From there, we want to find common problems that these businesses face and figure out if there's a unique software product we can build to solve them.

How do you think the rise of no code tools will impact small businesses?

By allowing them to have affordable, high-quality software solutions for their needs.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

We also started a podcast called Local, which highlights small business owners and their stories. Check it out at localpodcast.show!