Ask HN: What are some hacks of real founders who did things that don't scale?
We prototyped <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moonlightwork.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moonlightwork.com</a> without code.<p>Here was our basic workflow:<p>1. Marketing site set up using Squarespace<p>2. Developers apply using Typeform. We add them to a Google Sheet with Zapier.<p>3. New jobs submitted through Typeform, which triggers an email to us<p>4. We manually set up a new Google Form to collect proposals. We send the results google sheet to the client.<p>5. We manually search for developers that match the skills of the project and email them all manually to ask them to submit a proposal using the Google Form.<p>6. Project owner selects a developers. We docusign a contract to both parties.<p>7. We send a google sheet to the developer to log hours<p>8. Every week we go through the developer timesheet and manually issue an invoice using PaidLabs.com (with Stripe at backend)<p>9. When the payment gets deposited, we pay the developer (wire transfer outside USA, Payable.com inside the USA)<p>We slowly automated each step with a web app, which was published part-by-part as we finished automating a particular step. We did about $100K GMV with this no-code stack before we completed the end-to-end web application.<p>Today, Moonlight is profitable and bootstrapped. We still manually prototype things. For example, we came up with the idea of a subscription product on Tuesday last week. We had a client agree to it, so we issued an invoice through Stripe Invoices on Friday, collected the money, and are now starting to build subscriptions into the app.