Welcome to 417 members who joined this week 👋

Hey there, I’m Joshua, and welcome to the NCF Weekly newsletter where we share actionable guidance on building a business as a non-technical founder.

Check out our other newsletters: Tiny Empires and Seedstrapped

Sponsored by

Get up to 6 months free of Notion’s Business Plan—including Notion AI—to build, plan, and scale your startup, all in one place.

Notion is an all-in-one AI-workspace for you to build and scale your startup - all in one place.

Thousands of startups (OpenAI, Vercel, Figma…) use it to create and share docs, take notes, manage projects & roadmaps, build CRMs, fundraise and organize their knowledge.

Join the 94% of Forbes AI 50 companies and 50% of YC startups who use Notion to consolidate their tech stack, reduce costs, and collaborate more effectively.

Follow the link & click the blue button “get started free” to redeem your offer.

Fastshot Hackathon Community Spotlight: Niche Quest week two: from prompt to working prototype

Christian Orsos is back with week two of his Fastshot x Adapty Challenge build. Last week he had a prompt and an idea. This week he has a working app.

He walked through the full build process on video, talking to Fastshot's AI the entire time. The tool generated 22 files and a complete navigation flow from his original prompt. Within about 10 minutes he had a testable prototype.

Onboarding works. The app asks you to select your skills, interests, and ambition level, then uses those inputs to drive its niche discovery engine. Christian picked marketing, finance, and analytics as skills, selected SaaS and e-commerce as interests, and set micro-SaaS as his goal.

The discovery engine is functional. He tested it by searching "online course creator machine" and got back a scored result: automated course creation tools, rated high potential, with data on year-over-year growth, competition level, pain points, and monetisation blueprints. You can save results to a library for later.

Some things don't work yet. The trending market cards aren't clickable, so you can't expand on opportunities or save them. He flagged that to Fastshot's AI as a fix for next time.

Monetization is partially wired up. Fastshot prompted him to connect Adapty for in-app purchases. For now he's set a rough pricing model: five free niche reports per month, then $10.99/month for unlimited access. He's the first to say he has no idea if that pricing is right.

Next week he's covering beta testing and getting first users.

Join the hackathon for a chance to win from the $5,000 prize fund. Tag us in your posts @nocodefounders and we'll feature the best stories here every week.

We’re looking for no-code & AI Content Creators.
If you’re fluent with no-code and AI tools, we want you to build real projects from scratch using new tools, and document the process through high-quality content. If that sounds like you, complete this form.

Build a SaaS Dashboard Without Writing a Line of Code (in under 10 mins)

I wanted to test how far AI-powered app builders have come, so I gave myself a challenge: build a full MRR dashboard from a raw CSV file using Macaly, and see how long it took.

The answer was under 10 minutes.

I started with a spreadsheet of SaaS data. Twelve months of customer records, three pricing tiers, churn events, upgrades, and acquisition channels. The kind of messy-but-real data that most early stage founders have sitting in a Google Sheet somewhere.

I uploaded the CSV, asked Claude to write a detailed prompt describing what I wanted, and Macaly built the whole thing. MRR tracking over time, revenue split by plan, customer counts, churn timeline, acquisition channel breakdown, and a sortable customer table at the bottom. Interactive charts with tooltips. A date range filter. Dark theme.

The prompt mattered more than I expected. Vague instructions produced vague results. When I specified exact chart types, named the metrics I wanted in the top row, and described how the data was structured, the output was dramatically better on the first pass. I still had to iterate on a couple of things, but the starting point was solid enough that tweaks took seconds rather than minutes.

If you're tracking revenue in a spreadsheet and want to turn it into something you'd actually want to look at every morning, tools like Macaly can get you there fast. The limiting factor is the quality of your prompt, not your technical ability.

Here’s the live version.

I've shared the exact prompt I used below so you can try it yourself 👇

The Prompt

Build a SaaS revenue dashboard using the attached CSV file (saas_mrr_data.csv).
About the data
The CSV contains monthly transaction-level records for an early stage SaaS business. Each row represents one customer's status in a given month. Columns:

date: first of each month (Apr 2025 to Mar 2026)
customer_name: name of the customer
plan: Starter (£29/mo), Pro (£79/mo), or Enterprise (£149/mo)
mrr_amount: monthly recurring revenue from that customer
status: active, upgraded, or churned
acquisition_channel: Product Hunt, Twitter, Google, or Referral
signup_date: when the customer originally signed up

A customer only appears in a month if they are active or churned that month. If a customer churned in a previous month, they will not appear in subsequent months.
Dashboard requirements
Top metrics row
Display these as large number cards across the top of the page:

Current MRR - total MRR for the most recent month in the data
MRR growth - percentage change from the previous month
Active customers - count of non-churned customers in the most recent month
Monthly churn rate - customers churned this month divided by total customers last month, shown as a percentage
Average revenue per customer - current MRR divided by active customers

Charts
MRR over time (line chart)

X axis: month
Y axis: total MRR in £
Show the trend across all 12 months

MRR by plan (stacked area chart or stacked bar chart)

Break down the monthly MRR into Starter, Pro, and Enterprise contributions
This should make it obvious how the revenue mix shifts toward higher plans over time

Customer count over time (bar chart)

Show total active customers per month
Colour-code or segment by plan tier

Revenue by acquisition channel (donut or pie chart)

Show total cumulative revenue contribution by channel (Google, Referral, Product Hunt, Twitter)
Use the most recent month's data

Churn timeline (small bar chart or timeline)

Show which months had churned customers and how many
Keep this compact

Customer table
Below the charts, include a table showing all customers from the most recent month with columns for: customer name, plan, MRR, acquisition channel, signup date, and months as customer (calculated from signup date to the most recent month).
Sort by MRR descending.
Design

Use a clean, modern dark theme
£ symbol for all currency values
Card-based layout with subtle borders or shadows
Responsive (should work on desktop and tablet)
Use a sans-serif font
Keep chart colours consistent across all visualisations (same colour for Starter, Pro, Enterprise everywhere they appear)

Interactions

Hovering over any chart element should show a tooltip with the exact value
The customer table should be sortable by clicking column headers
If possible, add a date range filter at the top that lets the user narrow the view to specific months

Launch your business faster with Pro Membership

Get full access to all our resources with Pro Membership for a one-time payment of $149.

Sneak peek at what’s included 👇

💰$50k in Perks - Access Exclusive offers from the top no-code tools who have partnered with us. Including $15k waived Stripe fees, $500 Bubble credit + $1000 Coda credit View all

💻 No-Code Operating System - Advanced Notion template that replaces all your productivity tools. Everything you need to launch and manage your business from one page. Learn more

🎓 Course: Tiny Empires Method - Learn how to build a 6-figure business that works around your life and not the other way around. Learn proven frameworks to stop wasting time and start making money. Learn more

🎓 Course: Sales for Introverts (and people who don’t like selling) - Learn how to sell in a way that fits your personality and delivers consistent, reliable revenue for your busines. Learn more

🛠️ 75+ Curated No-Code Courses and Resources - We’ve curated 2000 no-code videos into 75+ easy to navigate courses. Save yourself hours of watching Youtube videos that don’t move your knowledge forward. View all

Keep Reading