Scaling an Emergency Response Initiative with No-code Tools with Vensy Krishna

Hey there and welcome to episode 17 of the podcast. As always thanks for listening in. Today I'm really excited for my conversation with a Vensy Krishna during India's COVID surge in April, 2021, Vensy designed an app to respond to the national emergency, to connect people in need with scarce resources, such as oxygen, hospital beds in medicine.

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The app was highly successful, garnering a hundred thousand users in its first week and currently serves 400,000 users. What's really impressive is Vensy built a volunteer team of over a hundred volunteers to help maintain and run this app. And due to the app success, the government reached out to partner to increase the reach and impact of the apps.

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Since the apps release Vensy has been invited to speak at Google, at the United Nations and has had other opportunities to speak to people about building apps with no code tools, for crisis relief, and to empower teams, to use these tools, to build important systems and applications quickly. And I'm really excited for this episode.

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So let's jump right in to my conversation with Vensy Krishna.

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All right. Hey there. And welcome to the podcast today. I'm here with Vensy, Christina. And Vensy is a lawyer in entrepreneur working at the intersection of law technology and business. She has been an educator in the legal education space in India, since he was a teenager and his coats over 40,000 Indian lawyers through her work at law school, 1 0 1, which she built to be India's premier legal entrance portal.

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She currently works with a Silicon valley based educational company called on-deck building the future of education. Now during India is a COVID surge in April, 2021, Vensy designed an app to respond to the national emergency, to connect people in need that with scarce resources, such as oxygen, hospital beds and medicines, and the app was highly successful at garnering a hundred thousand users in its first week, and currently serves 400,000 users due to the app success.

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The government reached out to partner to increase the reach and impact of the. Fancy is excited to share about her work, scaling a team of three to a team of 100 overnight all while working completely remote. And async meaning no team meetings and knows him calls and using no code tools to build a life saving tools quickly.

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And the lessons she learned in launching in emergency response and this live during a humanitarian crisis. So Vensy, Hey, I'm excited to have you on the podcast today. Hey, Sean, really excited to talk to you about some of the work that we've been doing. One about the COVID resources app that I've built and also just my learning using no code dose.

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Yeah. I'm super excited for our conversation today. We were able to talk a little while ago about what you're doing and since then I've understood. You've had some pretty cool opportunities to speak. I know you spoke at Google recently. Tell us about. That's a great question. So after we launched the app, we started seeing unexpected results, right?

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From day one, the number of users, celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, tweeting support, politicians, sharing our work in India, and two other experiences that were really unexpected for me. But I'm really grateful for is one being invited to speak at Google. To their team. And the second one is actually speaking with the United nations.

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So the thing with Google was that I got an email from them and was actually the first time that I got an email from someone at Google. And initially I thought it was spam. So through the email, I realized that they wanted me to speak to their team, the global team on setting up solutions, that scale basically, and best practices during a pandemic.

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And. How we could scale an emergency response. It was really humbling to be recognized by them, but it was also really promising that such big companies across the world are paying attention to local projects internationally. And they're very excited to learn from people across the world. And I really loved that about the conversation.

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And after this, I was actually approached by the United nations to speak to their team on how no codes specify. No code tools can be leveraged during crises. This was the office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. They are the crisis response team of the United nations that respond during the global emergencies that we're seeing.

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So these were incredible experiences. I'm just really grateful to have had a chance to do the work that we've done. And really the goal was. Number one, do a really good job of what we were doing, but to also document the things that we were doing so that people in different places of the country and the world will be able to replicate that kind of work.

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And so to be able to speak at Google and the United nations, I think that gave me a huge boost in the work that we are doing and inspired me to work. Wow. That's incredible. I imagine both of those experiences were probably pretty surreal knowing that it was only several months ago since you launched this original project.

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And now you're kind of being able to share with it on a really large scale. So I'm very excited and I'm very excited that more people are hearing about the work that you're doing and are being equipped to do things of their own. So let's jump into the podcast today. I mean, I referenced a little bit about this project and this app that you've built.

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But tell us, like prior to launching this app, like, what were you, what were you up to and what were you doing prior to building the app in response to the COVID? I'm actually a lawyer by training and I actually been working in the education space for quite some time now. And before the crisis in India started in until March this year, I was actually leading India growth for the LSCC LSCC is the.

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Body that hosts the Elsa worldwide, that was helping them with India. In March, actually I applied to on deck and started my job there. I started working in the candidates team as a candidate operations lead, and I basically lead the candidate cycle for about half of our programs. And now I'm leading the sector's program.

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So I'll talk to you a little bit about what on deck is later, but this is what I was doing when the crisis hit. I was one month into my job. And, but died before the job, I had also done a no-code fellowship at on-deck, which actually exposed me to a bunch of no-code tools and gave me a little bit of insight on what tools were good for what?

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And so, even though I hadn't really extensively built an app or a project using these tools, I knew that capabilities. So this was where I was positioned right before the crisis hit in April. And then in April, what happened with. The number of cases, COVID cases in India started rising exponentially because of course we know now that it was the Delta Radian that caused it.

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And because of our crumbling infrastructure, we lost access to oxygen and life saving resources almost overnight and across the country, it was not limited to different pockets. So what happened after that was people was. So, of course, if you needed oxygen, you would, you would expect to get it in the hospital, but no hospital had it anymore.

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So people started circulating lists of providers, of manufacturers directly of oxygen. And these are important medicines that hospitals no longer had a stock. And these lists were essentially in the form of. Google sheets and, uh, mostly, and then of course there were a bunch of WhatsApp shares and all of this started happening in April.

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And the reason that was really important for me and I was keeping a close eye on that. Exactly around that time. My mom felt sick with the virus and she was not asymptomatic. So my mother and my brother both got it. My brother was largely asymptomatic. My mother's lungs were severely infected and it was around the time that hospital beds were disappearing across the country.

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And so the, the tough decision was that she would stay at home. Big the medicines at home and hope that everything would be okay. And fortunately for us, she did respond to the treatment and she did get better over the next few weeks. But when the crisis was unfolding, I was keenly aware that we were one of the fortunate few and, uh, was paying attention to what was happening.

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I realized that the situation was bad because the hospital beds were scarce in April. To see everything crumble almost overnight, or a span of like two days that was horrifying to watch. This was my life right before the app was launched before died. Before we started working on the app. Hello, what you said about, at least you even had just an, a working knowledge of these tools.

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You didn't necessarily have the experience of building in one of these apps, but I love hearing that you just knew of the capabilities of specific ones. Yeah. It almost was like you had, uh, some, some tools around you that you knew were available and then in the wake of a crisis and emergency both very close to you, right.

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With your family, but then around the, around your city on India, they were able to respond. Tell us about. This kind of culminates in an evening, right? Where you're sitting in front of a, I'm assuming a laptop or a computer, and you're seeing these Google sheets fly around. And these WhatsApp chats, it seems to be some discontent that this isn't, that's not the solution, right?

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Like these are helpful, really, you know, people are taking time to put together these resources, but it seems like you understood, there was something else that needed to be done. Tell us about that night that you. Great question. So we launched the app in like two hours. That's that's the time that it took for me to design it and publish it.

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I believe that was the first version that was launched. So what happened on April? That's what started happening on April 19th, 20th? That those couple of days is that the number of Google sheets and the lists and these forwards and huge number of pleas and requests. They were increasing and because I was already in a really bad place until then, my response was to sort of like tune it out because.

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You know, there's this, what can I do about it? And okay, can I, can I help my mom in the best way possible? So until then, my mental state was, I'm not sure what I can do about this. And I hope that everyone gets better soon, but to see the number of lists asking for the same medicines that I was seeing get scarce, because my mom was using some of them to see the same hospital beds that we were struggling.

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At a thousand struggled with the same thing that we struggled with. So something changed in those two days because I realized that this was not a problem. Anyone was a crisis and that it was going to shape millions of people across the country for a very long time to come. So that realization really hit in those two days, because that was exactly the week in which our healthcare collapsed all the hospitals and all the resources.

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Started, um, getting evaporated by the minute. And then there was nothing that the government could do to help. So we started hearing some nightmare stories. It was really bad until then, but it took a whole new Dawn in those two days. That was when I started paying a little more attention. Do I, to just understand what was the extent of the problem.

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And that was when I saw these Google sheets. So until then it was largely WhatsApp forwards. And you know, that you need to tune out WhatsApp at some point in your day. I mean, whether there's a crisis or not. Right. But when I started seeing the Google sheets, that is when it hit me, because through my fellowship, like I said, there were a bunch of tools that I saw that I was familiar with as to what they could do and what they were capable.

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And I knew of tools that would easily sort of convert a Google sheet into an app now by easy. I mean, They don't take too long. They do not need you to code and they are cheap. And those are all the requirements that I had as a non-coding. And I have no traditional experience or training in, in, in, in tech or coding.

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And therefore there was no way in which I could contribute to this crisis except through no-code because it empowered me to create these solutions quickly. And quickly being the keyword right now, because that was, that was what people needed. Very quick responsive solutions on the ground. This was what was going on in my mind.

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The moment I saw that Google sheet, I realized that it could be made into an app. Number one, that I could do it. And number two, that I should do it because I was empowered with this knowledge in the last few months. And then I knew that I had to use it. So one was that it could be done in a much better way.

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It could be made more efficient and more user-friendly and really like help people that we could reach. The other thing was that I realized that I was uniquely positioned to do something like this, that other people might not have been able to do. So it felt really like I was put in that position because if the same crisis had happened a few months before, I know that I could not have responded in the way that.

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So it just felt serendipitous that I had this opportunity of like stepping in and probably creating a solution that could scale in that moment. I just knew that I had to act, I did not know if people would adopt it. I did not know if it would get used. I just knew that the solution that was being rolled out was not working.

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It would not work. It was not scalable and that it could be made more efficient than that because I knew how to do it. I had to do it. So the problem with Google sheets really is that number one, they, they're not meant to be used. For like, as a call to action, it's like they can be incredibly cluttered.

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The designer's not very pleasing. And the more important thing here is that the number of records, the number. Items on these lists would be more than hundreds for each city. Right. And some of them were verified, some of them were fake. So there is no meaningful way in which you could really like make sense of all of this data, especially during a pandemic, an emergency situation when people do not have the time to.

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Thinking on, you know, whether it's right or how, how can they reach all these hundred people? You can expect them to ring every one of those numbers and, and hope that they could get those resources. Right. So that is a normal problem at Google sheets is that it's not meant for solutions like this. That's number one.

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And number two is that there needs to be, uh, I believe. The users. And on the time like this, I believe that user experience was extremely critical and providing the right kind of response and answers and resources to the people in need. And Google sheets is not meant for it. It's not cut out for it, any list-making tool for that matter, even notion I love notion, but there are limits to what notion can do.

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So there was a better way in which we could provide user experience and. The tool of my choice. I chose blight. So glide apps is actually the tool that, um, I'm I basically use in all my no-code workshops. I actually host workshops where I teach people to get started with no code. And I helped them build a very first app in one hour and launch it at the end of the workshop.

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So that is actually how I came across glide. So I had, no, I did not have any experience. Launching any app on glider at that point of time, it was my first ever glide app, but I had actually taken a workshop a few weeks before the crisis and introducing a us Canadian university to no-code and helping those students actually design an emergency response app.

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And then during that workshop, I chose. And that workshop was actually about human trafficking. It was not about the pandemic or health necessarily, but it was about how we could use the power of no-go to respond to like real social issues. So that gives me a very little insight on how. It could be done in terms of how the data could be structured.

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So I had a very vague outline, but more importantly, I knew that that tool would be like the best solution right now. So I chose glide and we built that app. We built our app on lighten and we still continue to use it. It's killed really well. So on day one, we had 20,000 users. The moment I saw that I was definitely identified because it was a no-code solution and had no idea if glide was going to be able to support us or not, but it's scaled.

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So we'd never had any issues with any of our users using this particular app. Now a little bit more about what, what, what, what was going on during the first day? So there was one list of. Xcel. So on, on Google sheets, that is, that was being circulated for my city. And I knew the person who had designed it.

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So all I did was I texted her and uninstall saying, Hey, I'm using your data. I'm actually designing an app. I promise you, it's going to be, it's going to look much better than the Google sheet. So I told her that and essentially built the app one second. So I built the app into ours, connected it to this Google sheet.

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That was created. And all I did had no time for branding had no time for design couldn't be done. So all I did was I bought the domain. That was all I did. And I also set up a Google analytics integration because I wanted to see. What Peter's people were coming back to so that we could focus a little more on that data.

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Right. So I thought that I wanted the app to be data-driven. So those are the only two things I could do. I had no time whatsoever. And I set that up. Took the whole process, took two hours. The first version, essentially, I think it has, it had three pages, not much information at all, three pages and the domain.

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No promotion just shared it on my Instagram and she had it on Twitter. That's all we did. So just amongst family and friends really, Hey, there's a, there's an app that we built. Wanna check it out. And I took a nap because I was working all night at that point at work. And I took a nap for a few hours. The moment I woke up, we had 10,000 users.

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That was when I realized that my life was not going to be the same for awhile. And that, that there's a huge number of people who needed help. And they were relying on this app for answers and help and comfort. At a time of serious need. So that was the day that I knew that this app was going to need a lot of more work, a lot of more people to support the users and user experience.

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So this was how the app started. Yeah. I imagine you waking up from that nap, you must've felt like equally satisfied in some way that, Hey, this is working and it's being useful. And then like that. We have a lot more work to do. Well, honestly, the predominant emotion that I had when I see, when I saw that number on screen was off, I was terrified that VR was my predominant emotion, because I had no idea what to do in a very real sense, because I mean, I had not.

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Uh, project, which exploded in that way before, especially during an emergency. Right. And that the fact that thousands of people relied on a solution that I built and with no programming experience and, you know, I'm, I'm essentially a new gooder. And so I, it was probably motivated by sort of an imposter syndrome of like, am I supposed to be the person doing it?

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But it was, it was, it was terrifying. It sort of still. Right now the search has sort of like died down and we can take a break right now. We did work on it for like a good three months continuously. And it was a source of terror to realize every day that there were thousands of people who are relying on this work on this little app that was launched with no expectations, but just to help me be a few people and to realize that they started to rely on us in.

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Deep way. That was really scary. But also at the same time, I was grateful to be doing that work because I knew that somebody had to step up. Somebody had. Pick up the work that we were doing and just really grateful that I got a chance to work on it with my team. Yeah. So before we jump into kind of how you empowered others to come alongside you and work on this together, and even, you know, support the other cities in India that were saying, Hey, we, we actually, we need this help as well.

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Tell us a little bit about, like, I imagine you're beginning to hear stories of how. People were using this app to access medicine, hospital, beds, resources, vaccines. What kind of stories were you hearing about at this time? And you know, how are you beginning to realize the impact of the app? So when we launched the app, it was primarily focused on a limited number of resources.

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So we've, we launched it with oxygen, hospital, beds, pharmacies, and ambulances. That was, it was a very limited list. But right from the first few hours, uh, it became clear that people were not only using up these resources, but also they needed much more support in the form of people we're running out of.

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They wanted to know where to get their food from. There were huge lockdowns in various parts of the country. So everything was frozen for awhile. So one was the wanted sources to get food from because they were too sick to cook for themselves in their homes. So we had to add meal services. We also added a of.

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Free meal service providers because they were these amazing people who stepped up at are at around the time and started making free meals for people who were affected by COVID or had loved ones who were affected by COVID and they just started distributing meals for free. So we had an entire section listed, especially for them.

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And then there were these people who are just making extra meals while they were cooking for themselves at home. And they started. Uh, just using our app and list their services. And they started distributing free food as well. This is one way in which people were using the app. So one was that users were benefiting from some of these resources, but on the supply side, many people stepped up and listed their services, like volunteering efforts to help people in need the other set of things that we started at.

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Laid up in the next few days while quantum bean centers for people who wanted to stay away and squatting themselves in a different place from them than their homes providing so services that we're providing at home care for elders and sick people then came a request for a whole new set of service providers.

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So people were suffering. Extremely from all the news and all the horror stories of what was happening and nobody's mental health was okay. And so mental health practitioners and therapists started volunteering, volunteering their services, and they, a bunch of them came to us and requested us to list them on the app.

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So we built a mental health section, then a bunch of people who were. Offering pet boarding services for animals whose parents, whose pet parents were affected by COVID and couldn't couldn't take care of them for awhile. So they stepped up and they volunteer their services and the most depressing service that we had to list.

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Really, I think we did that on day two or day three was after death services because of how many people were dying. There was just not enough place in India. We usually cremate them burial cremation. Common than burial here. So there was not enough. Crematoriums all the machines that we use to cremate bodies.

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They burnt up because of how many people died and they weren't working anymore. And so we needed a bunch of people to volunteer services. To help the afters that process. And of course that meant burial cremation and all of that, but also offering support to their loved ones in the form of counseling, grief, counseling, and also other matters of will and succession that, that kind of thing.

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So that was the most depressing section. Really is a star. The toll, it took on our team to build all of this, I think was 50% on the, after that services, just because of how depressing all of that work was. And it went on for weeks. And I can tell you that none of our mental states on the team were okay for, for many months after that I can imagine, or I can't imagine.

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So it took, it's pretty clear. Go ahead. Set of people that we managed to help and managed to adapt to support or so we added a section called women child and LGBTQ support. So this, this one, a set of people and government agencies who stepped up. To support members of marginalized communities while honorable communities who needed a little more help and support during a crisis like this on the children's side, what was happening was that there were parents who died of COVID and somebody needed to adopt them.

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And a bunch of it was very messy at that time. And of course, women were facing increased, increasing domestic abuse. So while honorable jobs needed a little more help and. In a couple of weeks, we started supporting that kind of work as well. Wow. Yeah, it sounds like your team was, had to be very, very acutely aware and sensitive to all of the needs surrounding the virus.

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And so tell us about how you built this team, especially a team that was asynchronous and all leaning in to support this in various ways. How did you essentially said overnight, you had to go from you to a team of a hundred. Tell us about that. How did that, how did that happen? How did you empower these people and how did you work together to really continue to develop and build this app?

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Yeah. So on day one, when I look at the numbers of how many people were using the app, that became very clear to me that this effort needed to serve more people. And to serve them in more ways than in the ways that I might've anticipated initially and therefore needed a bigger team that could do everything that was needed.

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The interesting part about it was that I did not exactly. Usually an app that has so many users and so much, so many demands you'd expect that it would need a technical team. You want a tech team leading the build and the growth and everything. That's the interesting part about it is that because it was primarily no code.

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We did not need a team of engineers or developers to step in at all. So the way that I was looking at it was so even when I chose blind, the reason I. Lied specifically was because it was linked to Google sheets. And that meant that not only was it easy to work with quick to launch new versions and quick to update, but the other factor there was that it was also accessing.

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That meant that I didn't like anybody on the team, not just me, but even if we scaled to like a bigger team, I did not imagine that we would go to a hundred people. Definitely. When I launched it, I thought it was like two or three more people joined the team. Then they should be empowered to edit the app without having to wait.

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Without having to wait for a tech team, right? I did not want a specific person or a set of people to have monopoly over the apps development or the apps features. And so that was an important reason why glide worked perfectly was because anybody can use Google. Right. And anybody can make sense of how that app would be structured because we ended up creating like a very, very complex build.

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It probably might not have been very intuitive on how the Google sheets were structured because we had like 20 or 30 different tabs in that Google sheet. But if somebody needed to update the app quickly with like new information from on the field, they could do that from the. Right. And it will show up on the app.

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You'll all the thousands of users that instantly, instantly. Exactly. And nobody had to like click on update now or go to the app store and update the app. None of that had to be done. It was a progressive web app. So it was easy for the users. To update data to get read real time data. It was also easy for the team to update it themselves without having to wait for a team to approve changes or like wake up and like sit and like make all those updates.

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It won't happen in real time. And that was the most important reason why I believe no code scale. During emergencies, especially is because people who are otherwise not empowered to build solutions can now step up and create their own answers to problems that are plaguing them locally. So the way we went about scaling the team was so technical expertise was not a barrier.

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Anybody could. And so we were already, because so many celebrities had already tweeted and shared about us on Instagram. At that point, we were already getting a lot of interest from people who wanted to come and support us. They were like, we've linked to in a suffocated, sitting at home, not being able to do anything while our people suffered.

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Could we help you in any way? And so. I realized that that was the best way of going about it is that we expand the team, train them on how this is done. And so they could step up and they could contribute in any way they can at any time they could and definitely come up with new ideas that they could build on themselves.

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So this was how it started. And because we'd already had a bunch of interest on Instagram saying that they were interested in joining. I actually am incredibly grateful for the one month of work that I had done that on deck at that point of time, because that was the best model that I saw of running a remote team across different time zones.

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Completely. Right. So I learned the best practices on how to do it from our slack, from our notion and essentially in the way our team operated everyone respects everyone's time. Everyone works asynchronously. And I know that that is not probably very common in different teams, but we get a bunch of stuff done every single day without any meetings at all.

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Right. So I knew that that was possible. And because. So many people in me, it was important that we onboarded and every volunteer that we could get and that they, because they had a full-time job, they could not do this full day. They had to be empowered to contribute in that. Time and in the, in their own way.

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So it was very important that the work was very clearly defined. We had a very clear cut information, Vicky knowledge base, and then we also had a bunch of videos explaining on how different stuff is done. So when they wanted to do it, they all, they had all the information that they needed. They had all the resources and tools they needed to get the job done.

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So I learned all of that from my diamond. And I'm a huge notion fan. I'm also a notion ambassador incidentally. And so by that time, I had been using notion, put a bunch of projects already. And so notion was my tool of choice for the knowledge base, everything that I had done to build that app. I sat like I spent many hours.

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Additional hours just documenting it in the first week. That is what helped us scale. So those additional couple of hours, when I was doing stuff, I just recorded myself using Lou and I made documentation so that the next set of people who would come onto the team would be able to use them going forward.

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So I recorded a bunch of long videos, wrote a few textual information points, key points, and I put it up on notion, designed a workspace and essentially. Set up an onboarding system on air table using Zapier. So this was our no-code stack and we started triggering. So whenever somebody applied as a volunteer, that was a Google form that would come onto our ed.

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And then we would trigger emails to them and give them details on how they could join the team and what work they could do. And so that was how we set it up. It took like three days for me to set it all up because I wanted it. I wanted, I wanted it to, I wanted to get it right. And I wanted to make sure that everyone was empowered starting day one.

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If he wants time would be used efficiently. So, uh, spend about two or three days actually building the no-code infrastructure to support such a huge team and such a huge Endiva. And then all we had to do was onboard them. So overnight our team scaled to a hundred people and we did not have any zoom meetings.

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We did not have any team calls. Everyone had their own teams. Every team had their own leads. So the oxygen was a category that was headed by someone ambulances, mental health, all of these categories had their own two or three team leads and they were leading their teams of 10 to 15 people. So it all came together and we would all working remotely and asynchronously.

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Okay. So, yeah, it's absolutely incredible. I think just to. Really or reiterate, essentially, you're building a system with a stack of tools that probably cost roughly under a hundred dollars. Right. You know, you're mentioning glide notion, irritable, Zapier, and the tech them out, some of these things and you are.

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Essentially empowering a team of 100 people to work asynchronous asynchronously without a development team that could potentially hold up or delay any of these, these things. I think this one makes sure we all hear that. So I think there's people listening who may have ideas, right? And they're thinking there are probably a million things that are getting in the way of me getting that thing across.

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And I think it's important to see. These ideas that are probably more possible than you think they are. And especially from a cost perspective, there's very little barriers to here aside from using, using these tools creatively. So in the no-code space, I hear one of these notorious things that I hear is like documentation is usually lacking when it comes to building solutions, either for clients, for yourself or teams.

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And you kind of put together as really well document. System tell us about, I know other people began to reach out in terms of other cities out, outside of your own, looking to implement some of these solutions. Tell us a little bit about that. I mean, I imagine you have this, you know, library of documentation that you're using for your team and that made it very, uh, very, not easy, but it presented an opportunity to train and teach others.

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Because of how much attention we were able to garner in the first few days, there was huge interest from different buyers of our country, reaching out, asking us to scale to other cities like Bangalore and Chennai Mumbai. We got so many requests from so many different villages and towns across the country.

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And. Right from day one. However, it was very clear to me that I wanted to limit the scope of the project that we were doing. So, like I said, the first thing that I wanted to make sure that we did was we did what we did really well. It was going to be limited, but we're going to give it our best shot. And we were going to do the best job that we could in the limited scope that we had defined for ourselves.

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That was goal number one and goal number two. Was to essentially empower everyone in any other place across the country or the world to learn from what we did so that they could replicate these solutions for their own cities and towns. So I believe that the best response during an emergency came locally because you are the best person to answer.

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Your local problems, you are the best person who can design solutions that respond to the problems that you and your community are facing. And the problems that I'm actually facing in Hyderabad are not going to be the same that other cities are facing, or maybe there's a different nuanced way in which we approach it.

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But that brings me back to the accessibility of development process, right? The way I was keen on making sure that my team could update the. I wanted to make sure that such solutions were accessible and made sure that they were, they could be updated by people on the ground. So it was very clear to me that the scope of the project that I was leading was going to be limited to Hyderabad.

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We are not going to scale it, but we're going to provide the best damn solution that is to our city. But we're going to show you for free, give you all the resources, all the training, all the skills that you need. To replicate the same model for your city as well. And so all you needed to do is take two hours of your diamond, build it with the team of your own, right?

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So that was the way in which we approached it because the kind of work that we were doing, it was really a huge project that took a huge toll on all of us, but also that has limits to what a team of even a hundred people can do for one. And so it's not practical, practical to expect one team to solve effectively millions of people across the country.

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It was just not practical because we would just not have the bandwidth in the time that was given. So I felt that local solutions to local problems should be encouraged. So what we did there was in the first. In addition to building the app and onboarding the new team and setting up these processes. I also hosted up two, our webinars on exactly how we built the whole thing so that people from other cities could attended and see if they would want to build a team of their own for their own cities.

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Right? 5,000 people attended that. And then a huge number of applications were created after that session. And I documented all of that on my. Was incredible. Um, how many people took the initiative. So just goes on to prove your point, that ideas are, what matter the moment you realize that there are tools that make your ideas possible.

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You're just going to start building you would not need any more. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I think there's definitely people who have the ideas and I think equipped with a few tools that they can leverage. Can really help them make their idea possible. And then on the flip side, people who have a working knowledge of the tools that we're discussing here, and other tools have the opportunity to work on some projects that can really make a big impact around their communities around the world.

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So what opportunities does no code provide for future crises that we see in the world? There's things even this week that are, we're seeing in the. And the news that people are in dire need of support and what opportunities are there for those who are looking to make a social impact. So far the accessibility of knowledge on programming and essentially like tech solutions, building apps and websites and tools for yourself, because it was quite the time.

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And the number of people who knew these programming languages were limited. So the number of social projects that could be addressed that could be started while limited, because the amount of time and money that you spend in learning all of these programming, not these programming languages, you want it to turn on that investment and you're likely to want to monetize it.

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And therefore social projects might not be one of your priorities and that's completely understandable. However, with the advent of no code, what is happening is because this knowledge of building tools and apps is being democratized to people who are otherwise not very much served by tech so far. We are now hearing of problems that we haven't heard of before, because more people like me now have ideas to solve those problems, but also the knowledge to actually implement those solutions.

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So I believe. Not only for crises, but anyone who has an idea profitable or non-profit, there are three important reasons why no, God really changes the game for us. So the first thing is that it is cheap. Like you very likely pointed out our entire tech stack actually cost definitely less than a hundred dollars.

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Our biggest cost actually was our slack plan because of how many people we had. But our biggest expense was. Really speaking, everything else was definitely affordable. I mean, I would say that compared to like hiring an entire team of developers or no-code solution is definitely going to be more affordable for any team, whether it is a social impact team or a for profit company.

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The second thing is that no code is easy by which I mean that it is more intuitive. So when you spend enough name, it's more likely that you will understand. Even if you do not have any background in tech so far, as opposed to, let's say parsing through lines of code and not understanding what it says at all.

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And therefore having to rely on someone to do it for you. So it is easy for non coders because you are able to do things that you've never been able to do before, but even four quarters. It's so easy to set things up. That would have otherwise taken you hours or even days before, because no good is essentially visual development.

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You, it's basically a higher level of abstraction where a blocks of code are already written for you. And you're essentially working on the final logic. You're not spending too much time on the build itself, right. Just focusing, focusing more on the logic and, uh, it is definitely more exciting. And less serious than writing lines of code pages and bales of code that is.

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And finally, no guts makes a lot of things accessible. Things are not, uh, very accessible before, including the programming knowledge itself of how to build the tool, but also things like progress of them apps. When you build these apps in a place like India, which has Android first, we're not apple first.

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It was important for. To work on all devices, whether it was a smartphone or an apple phone or phone that would only support a browser or even a computer. And the progressive web app was the best solution that we couldn't. I was so glad that glide actually offered that exact solution that we needed.

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Right. So I think. In a lot of ways. No good makes solutions accessible. Not only in the, on the developer end for people who had no idea how to build things, but also for users who will now have much better experiences, much better onboarding and user experiences, just because there's so many more people who can build and better solutions now.

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And you're not relying on a very limited set of people who can, who have the knowledge to build these things anymore. So I think those are the two. Opportunities that we have from no-code, especially for social impact, just because it is possible. Now there's also in a place like on deck. We have a huge no-code stack my entire job, in fact, uh, revolves around no-code infrastructure that we use very heavily for our candidates cycles and also internal communications that gives us a lot of opportunities and a lot of things to think about.

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And I'm very excited for the space in the next few. Awesome. Yeah, that's an incredibly well said from every angle. There are, this space is just opening up opportunities for, for people who traditionally were left out of being able to build these solutions. And now they are able to come in and do things that are impressive.

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There are going to impress the development teams, right? How are you able to build this so fast? So affordably there's incredible opportunities here, and I'm excited to see, even in this next, uh, few years to see where this space develops. That's thank you so much for your time. I'm really appreciative that you're able to share these things.

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I know you have a lot going on both with on-deck and with these products that in, in speaking opportunities that you have, is there anything else that you'd like to share? And if someone wants to. Find and connect with you online. Learn more about what you're doing when maybe more about these no code tools and how they can use them.

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Where can they find? I'm a big believer in building in public, which is to say that I document everything that I do publicly and I'm available on Twitter. That's where I'm most active. When it comes to social media, you can search for me on Twitter at Wednesday Krishna. That's my handle. I'm also active on Instagram.

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Same handle when see Krishna. Something I wanted to share with you is that I'm incredibly, so something else that I wanted to share with you was that I love teaching and I love. Talking to people who want to build these things and just get started with no good, because I see myself in them and just the number of opportunities that this field has given me and the kind of projects that I was able to do because of my learning in this field.

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So I do take workshops very regular. For different teams, but to sort of make that knowledge and make those tutorials freely accessible, I've started something called the no-code starter kit. So it's available at no-code starter kit.com. But as I build it, I do post updates and whole lot of information on my Twitter.

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So my Twitter will be like the best place to follow about me and my work and all the projects that are really. Awesome. Very cool. I definitely suggest following Vensy on Twitter. That's how I came across your work and love everything that you do there I'll include all the links that you shared to the no code theater kit, to the projects that you're working on to your social media accounts, as well as on-deck.

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If anyone wants to take a look at on-deck, there's been a few mentions of on back on previous episodes too. So there's a really cool community building there. And that's definitely worth checking out, but Betsy, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It was really a joy to talk to you today and I'm looking forward to seeing what you continue to work on and build.

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Thank you so much for having me, Sean and giving me a chance to talk about the work that I've been doing.

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All right. Well, I hope you liked that conversation with Vensy Krishna. And if you're interested in learning more about what we talked about on this episode, when it comes to building with no code tools, serving your community through these ways, and even building volunteer teams around your apps or platforms to help, you know, respond to crises in ways that kind of Vensy did definitely  connect with Vensy.

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Recently I saw that she has a goal for this last quarter of 2021. And if you're listening. To teach 100 people, no code that to help them launch their first app. It's completely free training. And she'll be able to through this program, walk you through building your first no-code app. So if you're inspired by this episode, this is definitely a really, really good opportunity.

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To learn from Betsy and jump in completely free. So definitely take advantage of that. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you liked what you heard, just hit the subscribe button in your app. I'd love for you to get notified when new episodes are released. And if you've been listening for a little while, it'd be so good.

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If you would leave a review on apple podcasts or iTunes. And let me know what you think of the show that really helps us grow the roots of this show. And we really want to empower more people. Conversations like these, helping them build tools, applications want startups in the social impact space. So that would be really, really helpful.

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But again, thanks for listening and I'll see you next week. .