#11 : Meeting with iconoClass

This eleventh meeting NoCode Series brings us to iconoClass, the sales school founded 3 years ago by Marie Taquet. Nestled in the heart of the 11th arrondissement of Paris, the company currently has 20 employees and welcomes three classes of students each year (between 100 and 130 people per class).

Thank you to Léonie Hug de Larauze, Head of Product & Operations at iconoClass for welcoming us and sharing her experience!

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iconoClass, the new generation sales school

iconoClass is a school that trains its students in Sales and Business Development. The formula is simple: in 3 months, students are trained through theory and a lot of practice and hired on permanent contracts by partner companies at the end of the bootcamp. Many well-known start-ups and scale-ups have hosted iconoClass students. iconoClass has raised 3 million euros in June 2021 to expand in France and internationally.

Focus on Léonie Hug de Larauze.
Léonie has a long academic background, from university studies to HEC, completed by a web development training at the Wagon. After spending three years as Product Manager at Sipios, part of the Theodo group (which we will visit in a few days), Léonie joined iconoClass to lead the development of the iconoClass LMS that supports their bootcamp and corporate training.

The NoCode, omnipresent at iconoClass

iconoClass is a school that deploys a holistic strategy of NoCode through its various business units. In concrete terms, Léonie has relied on an internal NoCode approach to scale up operations and innovate in a lean manner via the launch of new initiatives.

The choice of NoCode at iconoClass, especially for the LMS platform development project, was justified by the limitations encountered in the use of off-the-shelf tools as well as the lack of interactivity and gamification offered by these technologies. Also, the iconoClass team wanted to quickly launch and monetize the LMS platform while limiting the associated development costs.

At the beginning of 2022 and after 3 months of design and development on Bubble with an agency NoCode, the LMS platform is launched. The bet NoCode proves to be conclusive and the first users are quickly onboarded.

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On the operations side, iconoClass uses NoCode to meet many needs:

• Student recruitment and tracking with Airtable. Teams manage and qualify the application pipeline with Airtable views and tables. Also, the interfaces are used to visualize the main aggregated metrics.
• Collection of student work reports via Airtable.
• BtoB CRM management via Airtable.
• General documentation, sharing of playbooks (with a view to the international deployment of the iconoClass offer) and management of speakers and schedules on Notion.
• Contractualization via electronic signatures with GetAccept and Zapier.

The use of NoCode tools such as Airtable and Notion has brought a lot of value to iconoClass by replacing many of the historical processes that were previously done primarily with Excel.

The latest project NoCode initiated by Léonie consists in offering partner companies a CV library of the profiles of iconoClass students. The front-end platform will use Softr by calling data from Airtable tables.

Soft skills at the heart of competencies NoCode

According to Léonie, it is difficult to answer the question of the ideal profile of the Maker / Developer NoCode. However, it is still possible to highlight some characteristics:

• Curiosity and resourcefulness
• Desire to learn
• Business-oriented
• Willingness to solve problems
• Ability to identify problems and find solutions NoCode

Léonie also says that having Discovery skills (the ability to define prototypes that answer problems) as well as Delivery skills (such as setting up automations on Make or solutions on Bubble or Airtable) is a real plus to bring value with an approach NoCode.

Overall, the vision of the Product Builder and not the Developer NoCode is particularly suited because operational needs at iconoClass are varied and it is often difficult to accurately size ops and app needs on a day-to-day basis.

The NoCode, ideal for bootstrapping, but not only!

iconoClass and Léonie's work perfectly embody the advantages of NoCode to quickly launch and iterate a new product on the market. Thanks to NoCode, the iconoClass team was able to test its LMS platform on the market in record time. Initially designed with a BtoC go-to-market strategy, the market tests led the team to pivot to a BtoB model to offer bootcamp support to start-ups and companies wishing to improve the Sales skills of their internal teams.

At iconoClass, NoCode is not limited to MVPs, but fully addresses the need to scale up applications and operations.

This is also often the case for companies that do not need a large development engineering force but whose success and scaling depend primarily on the quality of their internal operations.

However, Leonie has some limitations in managing, testing and monitoring automation workflows in their growth phase.

A theme that we believe is essential for companies wishing to scale up their strategies NoCode. We had discussed this topic in the NoCode Series GoJob and NcScale meetings.

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