👋 Hello and welcome, each week I put a spotlight on an emerging company and demonstrate how you can prototype their product using no-code tools. I’ll show you learn practical steps to bringing ideas to life and strategies to validate and experiment with your ideas fast!

Founded in 2023, JENA provides a full suite of business tools integrated into a single application for retail business owners. This includes a booking system, website development, payment processing, CRM and marketing tools.

Check them out at: https://www.jena.so/.

In this week’s edition, I’ll demonstrate how to build a booking app for a retail business without writing any ‘code’ on Adalo. I’ll call my nail paint retail business Clous (nails in french). So lets dive in!

Here is my landing page - created in less than 30 mins on Canva. You can visit this on minimumviableeverything.my.canva.site/clous.
You can copy this landing page from my website template.

You can play around with demo app on Adalo previewer. Use [email protected], password client for signing in as a customer. Use [email protected], password admin for signing as staff.

Adalo is no-code platform where you can drag and drop elements to build mobile and web apps. I typically use Adalo to quickly launch a MVP for a mobile app that can be launched to iOS or Android. Adalo integrates with Stripe for payments and has a Zapier integration - which gives you freedom to hook into third party services such as a CRM or email marketing etc.

To create the screens of the app, we need to first start thinking about the user interactions and create user flows for them. Once you have those user flows, you can build individual screens such as ‘Book or view appointments’, ‘My profile’, ‘Edit service’ flows.

We also need to create tables to store data that will be displayed on the screens and modified by the users. In my app I have the following tables: Users, Bookings, Service, Services (grouping of service). These tables are linked. For example, the User table has a one-to-many relationship with Booking table, many Bookings are linked to one Service etc. Adalo uses these relationships to power the data that is displayed on the screens, such as display all bookings for a users. So create relationships (de-normalised tables) and use them to your advantage!

Database is probably the most challenging area to building an Adalo app. If you’re not familiar with databases, then you should definitely read the docs for databases: https://help.adalo.com/database. My suggestion is to start with a basic core use-case to get some experience.

Each screen is built from components. These screens are then connected via actions, for example clicking the sign up button takes you to the client signup screen. See how ‘My appointments’ screen has a list component which displays the user’s bookings by linking the bookings table and filtering by the logged in user.

Learn more about adalo components here.

Once you get some experience, creating a map of screens that link to one another is relatively easy. Keep it simple, focus on the MVP and build only what is necessary.

Adalo natively supports adding payment using Stripe. You can add the Stripe payment component to you screen and take payments. I haven’t tried, but the docs make it look pretty easy to introduce - treat it like any other button.

Lastly, Adalo integrates with Zapier. This means we can pretty much integrate with any other third part service. Some examples are integration with square, integration mailchimp for building a subscribers list and email marketing, integration with Zoho crm for your crm needs.

That brings us to the end of this week's newsletter. I strongly suggest using Adalo for your next MVP that requires a mobile app. Not only is it user-friendly, but it also comes with robust integrations that can streamline your product development process and bring your idea to market faster.

Happy reading, and thank you for being part of the Minimum Viable Everything community! See you next week 🚀

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