Building a No code app for a friend's side hustle
One of my friends started baking and selling pizzas during the COVID-19 quasi-lockdown. His way of reaching people consisted solely of a Facebook page and sharing posts on his personal profile and a local Facebook group. People could either contact him on the page, directly on messenger or by calling on a personal mobile number.
All this would, of course, divert his attention from actual pizza-making, so I decided to try and create an easy pizza ordering app on Glide.
Here’s how I approached this app, which is also what I usually do on Glide with other apps:
- Creating a Google sheet
First of all, you have to decide what the app is being built for. In this case, we want people to buy pizza as seemlessly as possible. It is also important not to get carried away with adding options, and keeping the app as simple as possible – an MVP. For this app we just need to display the pizza available, add an image, a name, maybe the ingredients and the price, of course. I usually start off with a few items at first and not list everything in the beginning, then add them as I go along.
2. The Glide app
Then we have to decide on a layout for the home screen. For this app, I was torn between Tiles and Cards, but went with Tiles, as I thought it fits better in this case. Since branding material was already available from the Facebook page, I went ahead and used the logo, the pictures of different pizza, ingredients and prices.
- Extras
For this app I also added an inline list, which shows up when a customer opens one of the pizza tabs, as shown below. This serves as a kind of upsell, and entices the customer to add another pizza for checkout. I also added a ‘favourite’ section, where the customer can favourite a pizza, just by adding a personal email address.
And, that’s it. A pizza ordering app on Glide, created in a few hours. You can check out how it looks by clicking here.
