Eric is the founder of a handyman-type marketplace, a startup that will reference electricians, plumbers, etcetera. He is starting to structure the information he'll gather in the ecosystem, from quotations to invoicing. While he tackles that, he is also wondering how to get started with a simple app that can show who is available and where.
Today I’m going to answer a question from Eric, and show you how to build a mobile application within 5 minutes. Eric’s question is...
Before answering this question, let’s add a bit of context.Eric is the founder of a handyman-type marketplace, a startup that will reference electricians, plumbers, etcetera.He is still at the idea stage, but he already has an offline business in this industry. He now wants to set up a new and more efficient way of providing the same services to his end customers.He is starting to structure the information he'll gather in the ecosystem, from quotations to invoicing. While he tackles that, he is also wondering how to get started with a simple app that can show who is available and where.In this video, I’m going to show you how to build an application without any technical skills and in less than 5 minutes.If you’ve watched the last video, you would know that I recommend to start writing your specifications and modeling what data your application will handle with an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet.I’m going to show you mine with the list off all the videos that I have on My CTO Friend and how I transformed that list into a quite beautiful app.I’ve organized information according to several tabs, with lists that are automatically updated with the tool Zapier, which makes it easier to keep my app updated.
Now that I have my spreadsheet ready, the tool I’d like to share with you is Glide app.I was able to create this simple app in less than a day. And most of the time I spent was on setting up all my content in a Google spreadsheet.By the way, this is not sponsored content. I’m sharing these tools with you because I know them, I work with them, and I genuinely recommend them.Let me show you how you can build your own app with Glide app by redoing this one together.Everything starts with my Google spreadsheet, with some tabs dedicated to the Menu and others to content.Now I go on glideapps.com, I create a new app by selecting my document, and automatically, it’s going to represent my data.I select which tabs I want to use in the navigation and set up the screens the way I want them.Pretty straightforward, isn’t it?
So to conclude and answer Eric’s question, structuring your ideas into a spreadsheet is definitely the way to start. Then, you can create a simple functional app quite easily, with just a few tools and tricks.And remember, Google spreadsheet is a tool that can be connected and updated through forms and connecting services like Zapier.This way, you can generate emails, text messages and others, based on people’s interactions on the application.You can even connect reporting, business intelligence or external Web pages to make it even more dynamic.Now if like Eric, you have a specific question for your project, just go ahead and ask on myctofriend.co/ask.I will do my best to answer your question by video or redirect you to any existing content that will answer it.I publish a new video every week, so subscribe now and learn how to be better at tech management and build your startup successfully.Also be sure to go through our other content here at myctofriend.co to learn more from real startup growth experiences.I’ll be waiting for your questions, and I look forward to seeing you in other videos. Cheers.
