As you know, our tech plans had some setbacks. So we decided to build our own tech to automate the borrowing process.
Since none of the team members were techies or have working knowledge on programming or coding, we had to build it using no-code tools. For our first iteration, we used the following tools:
- Google Sheets – as the database to collect book requests and messages from users
- Google Forms – to collect book loan requests, manage the book list, and to start the conversation between the book borrower and lender
- Telegram – where all the conversations takes place
- Integromat – an automation tool that connects everything , similar to Zapier. This will help to put everything together
It took us about 3 – 4 hours to setup something that could work. It isn’t the best looking setup but it works. The most important thing is that the borrowing process would be automated! The UX of it can be improved later on when we have a proper dev team to build it properly.
Once this has been polished & tested. Our next step would be to grow it. Get as many people as possible from free marketing.
This is a huge achievement – we managed to build the whole setup without a tech team. Alhamdulillah, I’m happy. Hopefully it works well and enough to keep us going for awhile before we have to fix something again.