How We Built a Social App Without Learning to Code (And Hit #2 on ProductHunt!)

Kelley Johnson and I recently launched FreeTime, a mobile-first web application that helps you arrange time to hang out with your friends. We designed, built, and launched the entire thing without writing a single line of code. Here’s how we did it.

Finding a Problem to Solve

Kelley and I were on vacation, taking a walk in a tiny little town in AZ that we love to visit. We’re both product managers at tech companies and we were discussing the possibility of collaborating on a project. When you’re a nerdy product manager, you don’t start with ideas, you start with problems. What problems are we familiar with that we would be interested in solving?

Kelley came up with the winning problem: it’s too difficult to hang out with your friends. Scheduling complications were solved in corporate settings long ago, but there’s still no good tool that helps me tell a friend that I want to hang out with them and coordinates that process, eliminating the endless back and forth (“How about two weeks from Saturday?”) that ultimately leads to you just giving up on even the mere idea of close friendships. Everyone is too busy, why bother?