Small teams + AI + nocode = 🤯
Big month: birthday, a sold-out AI + NoCode conference, and new tools proving small teams can do huge things with the right software.
In this article:
- Birthday offer
- Life update
- Software = Extreme leverage 🤯
- Stuff I’ve built recently
It was my birthday last week…
I celebrated with family and then spent the weekend in Barcelona with friends.
A few people have asked me for a discount code recently, so to mark the occasion, you can use the code - BDAY25 - for 25% off my Bullet Launch boilerplate, valid until 27th June.
Despite all the hype around AI generated code, I’m still 100% convinced using a high-quality boilerplate on Bubble is the fastest way to build a production-grade SaaS you can actually understand and maintain.
Life update
The first half of 2025 has been hectic.
We held our second conference in May -Â Create With 2025Â - and it was epic!
Double the size of the previous year (~350 people), more stages, more speakers, more days… more professional in every way.
My biggest takeaways from the conference:
- Even the smartest founders I met can only guess at what the future of software development looks like. The best guess is it will be somewhere in between the restrictive visual development platforms and the currently unconstrained vibe coding platforms. Constraints are important.
- People are extremely interested in AI agents, although likely for their future potential, not their current capability (a bit unreliable in my experience).
- Jonas Templestein, co-founder of Monzo (our keynote speaker) shared some fascinating opinions on “self-driving” startups which operate autonomously, the future of AI agents, his personal AI stack (almost entirely voice input using Wisprflow and GPT o3). His talk will be on our YouTube channel soon.
And of course, aside from all the talk of technology, it was clear that real, human connections are as valuable as ever.
Software = Extreme leverage 🤯
The thing about the conference I find mind-blowing is our core team is only me, James, and Ash, plus two others part-time (Matt and Victoria).
Our combined output is: the conference… plus a weekly newsletter, podcast, tutorials, international meetups, courses and more.
And we’re all doing it part-time.
This is only possible thanks to no-code tools, AI and automations.
Some of the tools we’ve built:
- An n8n agent monitoring AI news for the newsletter
- n8n automations moving and tagging customer data between our Meta ads, our email platform, our Bubble app and other platforms
- A Zapier Agent checking and responding to requests for student discounts
- A custom Bubble app which is our website, course delivery platform, and conference mobile app all rolled into one
Having an entire team skilled with technology is a superpower. I’ve never worked in a team that can ship so quickly.
- James built our entire conference mobile app in a couple of weeks using Bubble’s brand new native mobile editor.
- We’re churning out slide decks and visual assets using tools like Canva, Figma, and Manus.
- We’re building an n8n pipeline which ingests all of our content into a vector database and can be queried by AI agents or us whenever we need.
I think we’re entering a world where small teams with knowledge of these tools are at a huge advantage.
Stuff I’ve built recently
When I’m not building for the conference, clients, or my own projects, I like to… well, build other stuff!
Recently I made AI agent using n8n which reads emails from my daughter’s school and adds relevant events to our family calendar. No more forgotten school trips or dress up days!
I also made a staff headcount calculator (vibe coded with Lovable) for my friend who manages a team of mental health nurses in the UK healthcare service. This took me 30 minutes to build and will probably save her 30+ minutes per week.
Want me to automate your business?
As you can tell I’ve been really enjoying building and automating recently, so much so I’m keen to help others do the same.
If you’re interested in working with me and fit the below criteria, please reach out and let’s chat.
What I’m looking for:
- You’re a small business (any industry) that values time highly
- You feel your processes could be improved/automated but don’t know where to start
What I can do:
- Audit your processes and figure out the parts that can be automated or improved with software
- Build and implement automations and custom apps to streamline your workflows
- Save your team tens of hours per week so they can focus on higher value work
