A guide on how I created a plateform without skills

In March 2022, I decided to create my own platform, Téco. I'm proud to announce that it's now available as a mobile application in all stores, and as a webapp 🥳!
Téco aims to make small, specialised food retailers more competitive through simple, personalised tools! It brings together two main target groups:

• Independent businesses - 100% free and customisable website and publication of promotions to adapt to a customer base that is increasingly connected.
• Consumers - promos, articles and recipes to find lots of reasons to consume locally and to reduce their impact on the environment.

_From now on, I'll be giving you little pieces of advice that I would have been happy to have had 1 year ago, when I was at the beginning of this whole process.
_But before that, feel free to show your support by downloading the app on the AppStore or the PlayStore and giving it a 5 star rating 🤝 ! 

1/ The Backend: BUBBLE.io 💻

I advise everyone here to use bubble for the backend, in my opinion, it has the best simplicity/price/power ratio among the tools I've used (Xano, Backendless, Airtable), and moreover, you'll always be able to develop a web front-end the day you need it without struggling too much. The progression curve may seem complex, but once you get the hang of it, everything goes faster! The real positives for me are : 

• Plugins for almost everything you might want to do
• Backend workflows
• The documentation
• The community
• 30$/month

2/ The front-end: BRAVO STUDIO 👏 (obviously)

Before using Bravo I tried several tools to create native app no code. Thunkable is way too complex, and the editor is ugly. I lost myself several time using flutterflow. And finally, bubble's wrappers are not powerful, and rather expensive. So I finally turned to Bravo Studio : 

• The interface is simple
• The documentation is complete and
• The tag system is magic.
• It forced me to become a Figma expert (use the auto-layout, it's life changing, really)

3/ Learn JSON 📝

You need to understand how JSON language works. It's not complex at all, it's essential to use Bravo correctly, but also the APIs you'll need. Thanks to this, I was able to integrate thos tools within my app:

• SendinBlue - Automated and personalized mailings + Contacts and list management
• OneSignal - Send automated and personalized notifications
• Tinify - Compress and resize images automatically
• BeaconStac - Custom QR codes generation and management

Oh and if you don't understand where the mistake is within your code, don't hesitate to open ChatGPT and ask him "Where is my mistake", it saves a lot of time, and it will prevent you from spending 30 minutes struggling because of an extra comma (I know what I am talking about 😅)

4/ Some tips 📌

💡Doing no code doesn't mean you are not a developer.

Being a developer is also a state of mind, "how to solve this problem?". There are multiple way to reach your goal, you just have to find the one that is right for you, and for your project.

🧑‍🎨 Doing nocode sometimes also means being more than a developer!

Nobody will create your color palette or your logo for you and nobody will think about the image that your brand wants to send back! That's why I really advise you to take time to define in advance all these aspects. This will save you a lot of time and give you a guideline for your project!

⚖️ Optimize data to reduce page loading time

Bravo does not offer to pass data through pages which forces you to reload the page when it contains data that is going to change (please deploy that feature 😅), that's why if your images are heavy, or you load large lists, the load time is going to be loooong, and in a time where everything is going fast, this is a problem (Use Tinify API for images).

⚒️ Changing tools in the middle of your process is not necessarily a bad idea!

 Most of the tools have a common logic, you will have to learn the interface, but on the bottom, you will inevitably have progressed!

5/ Usefull ressources ⚙️

During my learning process, there were some resources that really helped me improve: 

BEFORE YOU START

• Bravo's tag master list: Read it, in its entirety, to see what you can do and start thinking about alternatives for what you can't do.
• Michael Filipiuk's UI Design Principles e-book: an approx 500 pages book teaching you almost everyhting you need to know about UI. (What's $40 when you want to be an expert?)

WHEN YOU'RE WORKING ON THE APP

• Bravo's tutorials: Especially the one about the instagram clone with XANO. OK it's not bubble, but it works almost the same and it covers a pretty good amount of features
• Buildcamp's Youtube channel to understand how Bubble works and to be able to use it as a backend (and frontend later)
• The ultimate guide to Bubble performance to increase even more the performances of your application, and improve user experience.

That's it!

This could have been three times as long, but I guess it's enough 😅. Hope this will help some newbies like I was few month ago !
I highly encourage you to download my app, and give it 5 stars. If you ever have any questions or want to respond to anything I've said, I'd love to hear from you!