Ask HN: What are some hacks of real founders who did things that don't scale?
We prototyped https://www.moonlightwork.com without code.Here was our basic workflow:1. Marketing site set up using Squarespace2. Developers apply using Typeform. We add them to a Google Sheet with Zapier.3. New jobs submitted through Typeform, which triggers an email to us4. We manually set up a new Google Form to collect proposals. We send the results google sheet to the client.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.6. Project owner selects a developers. We docusign a contract to both parties.7. We send a google sheet to the developer to log hours8. Every week we go through the developer timesheet and manually issue an invoice using PaidLabs.com (with Stripe at backend)9. When the payment gets deposited, we pay the developer (wire transfer outside USA, Payable.com inside the USA)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.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.