Learn how it's done without writing a single line of code and start building your own tech business
Over the past year, I started WYN, a fully automated wine recommendation tool that is personalized towards your unique wine taste. From answering a few fun and easy questions to receiving your personal wine profile with matching wine recommendations, the full customer experience is built without writing a single line of code. Would you like to understand how? This article describes how the workflows for WYN are set up and what tools have been used in order to create this fully automated workflow. No code is written, no engineer is hired.
Before diving into how it’s built, first a quick explanation of what the customer experience looks like. At joinwyn.com, WYN asks you a few basic questions about your taste and preferences. After answering these questions, you receive an email with a unique link that directs you to your personal wine profile, with your name, your wine styles, descriptions of your styles, and wine recommendations associated with your styles.
Now it's time for the fun part; how it's possible to create this automated experience without writing a single line of code.
WEBFLOW — Design, build, and launch websites
The primary no-code tool used for WYN and the centerpiece of the workflows is Webflow. It’s one of my favorite and I believe most powerful no-code tools in the market. Webflow is an easy-to-use website builder and hosting provider with endless opportunities. You can start simply by using a template and building your first landing page. Or you can go wild and use their CMS tool and link it to your own databases to create dynamic web experiences for your customers. The CMS tool is often used to create dynamic portfolio websites. For WYN, I built a CMS within a CMS, a so-called Nested Collection, to not only show your personalized wine styles, but also the related wine recommendations to your styles.
AIRTABLE — Features of a database, applied to a spreadsheet
Another powerful and frequently used no-code tool is Airtable; I like to call it Excel on steroids. WYN uses Airtable for its wine database. By creating relationships between wine grapes, characteristics, regions, and food, this relational database has become the base of the algorithm to define your unique wine taste. Airtable is super easy and can be used for a variety of use cases, including launching projects, planning events, and tracking bugs.
FIGMA — My favorite design tool
Unless you’re using a template to build your website, I highly recommend starting with the design of your web pages in Figma. The design makes or breaks your product and it’s so much easier to decide on the user interface and the look and feel in Figma than in Webflow.
BLUSH — Fully customizable illustrations made by selected artists
A relatively new tool in the market and already one of my favorite ones out there. Blush has an abundance of illustrations to choose from and you can customize it with many variations and your own company colors. For your website, social media posts, or your personal avatar. Blush has your back.
TYPEFORM — Conversational, interactive, engaging form builder
I love Typeform for three reasons:
* Beautiful and personalized design options for your forms
* Integrations with tools like Airtable, Mailchimp, and Slack
* Advanced embed options for your Webflow projects
GOOGLE SHEETS — Who doesn’t love spreadsheets?
Everyone loves Google Sheets, right? As a former business analyst, building WYN’s algorithm in Google Sheets was one of the most fun parts of building the experience. This is the secret sauce of WYN, so I won’t go further into this…
ZAPIER — Connect apps and automate workflows
Many tools have exciting integrations with one another, but sometimes you have to connect tools yourself. This is when Zapier becomes helpful. Think of it as “IF this, THEN that” logic. WYN uses Zapier for the following workflows:
* IF a new user profile is defined in the algorithm in Google Sheet, THEN add personalized wine profile to Webflow CMS (which in WYN’s case is a multi-reference field)
* IF a new user profile is defined in the algorithm in Google Sheet, THEN send an email with Mailchimp to the user with a link to the personalized wine profile
* IF new wine recommendation is added to Airtable, THEN add wine information to Webflow CMS
MAILCHIMP — Customer email platform
Customize and automate your customer emails, including personalized journeys using conditional logic, with Mailchimp. Easy to use tool and free under certain criteria.
I hope this has been helpful and insightful! If you’re new to building with no-code tools, don’t get intimidated by these workflows. It took me a while to build this out over time. Start small and explore how to expand your projects. It’s so much fun to build your own tech platform!Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or requests. Always happy to discuss 🙏