Business automation with Directual: clickworks.io case study

Client

Nuno Poço is Director of Marketing and engineer at clickworks.io—a business automation agency. Clickworks.io helps businesses generate more revenue with bots, internal tools, and other turnkey solutions—all thanks to no code. 

Nuno started his professional journey as a programmer but soon realized that traditional programming wasn’t his cup of tea. He then went into sales, working in various industries like real estate, insurance, and PR, only to complete the loop back in IT. 

Challenge

The most challenging thing in our case is time. Traditional programming takes a lot more time to produce an MVP and ensure product-market fit fast. Our clients are B2B decision-makers focused on results. Technical details are not nearly as important. So long as the no-code/low-code stack can deliver promised results, everyone is happy.

How did you discover Directual?

I discovered Directual through Appsumo.

Technology

• Backend - Directual
• Frontend - Third-party services

I pride myself on choosing the tech stack based on the customer needs and not my personal preference. I’ll learn to use the tool if needed. Whenever high-end UI is needed, a single-page chatbot tool or a form builder is used instead. 

All tools of choice, however, have API in common first and webhooks second. That way it’s easy to integrate them together and work on top of it if needed in the future. 

What did you build with Directual?

Among many other things, we’ve built the first automated real estate investment e-procurement tool in Iberia (that I know of) for andrecasaca.pt.

A part of the project framework built with Directual

This service is designed for sending investment requests with a video intro to selected partners. That allows them to reply with proposals fitting the requirements. Once a proposal is received, we calculate the development costs and ROI in real time. The information is then delivered to the end user.

Frontend for the project built with a third-party tool and connected to Directual

On the administrative side, it saves 2 hours per proposal received. If a new project gets sent each week and gets 10 proposals back, it’ll save 20 hours of specialized work per week.

Why was Directual chosen as a base technology?

Directual has 3 main advantages for this particular project:

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• The ability to function independently of the frontend. We can do the frontend with the help of another tool and set the whole logic, database, and files inside Directual;

• The JavaScript SDK allowed us to convert the business logic from a very complex spreadsheet into javascript instructions, effectively transforming the project into a low-code one;

• Integration with other tools using HTTP requests, like SMS reminders, or natively for Gmail as it was relevant to send personalized emails from the customer’s account.

What could be improved?

A clearer way to set database locks would be welcome. In my project, there are a lot of instructions that change values at the same time. It’s important to lock a resource so that the ROI calculations are properly done, but not lock it for longer than needed. Otherwise, it’ll affect the time we take to deliver real-time results to the user.

Plans ahead

I consider Directual a backend SaaS. I’ll stick to others as frontend tools, but when it comes to backends, that’s where Directual shines, even compared to Backendless or Make + Airtable. 

I’ve seen platforms way cheaper and complicated, costlier and easy, but Directual remains spot-on in the middle, helping to deliver a way to build a backend very quickly and scaling it to a few thousand MAUs if needed. It’ll be my top choice whenever backend logic is complex.

Afterword

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