Thread by @drsimonlandry

1/ Here is how I built an Amazon review and rating tracker MVP that provided a daily report of a skill developer’s skills. using #nocode and #lowcode tools.

I hope this inspires your non-coders to build whatever you’ve got on your mind!

2/ Every Amazon product, including skills, has a 10 character Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). With your ASIN, you can find your skill’s page for all international markets:
🇺🇸 amazon.com/dp/ASIN
🇨🇦 amazon.ca/dp/ASIN
🇬🇧 amazon.co.uk/dp/ASIN
Etc…

3/ I started this whole thing with a Google Sheets with the ASINs and all of their associated URLs. This is a list of all the URL for all skills in all of the markets.

4/ I used the Wordpress plugin Ninja Tables from @WPManageNinja to dynamically display the URLs on my site. This means I could make changes to the ASIN sheet and it would be reflected on the site. The table displays each row and url in HTML, which is essential for the next step.

5/ I used @WebScraperIO’s cloud tool to go to each URL and scrape the data I needed. I used their parser tool to format it in a way that I could use it. The scraper was scheduled to run the same time everyday and a CSV file was saved automatically on my Dropbox.

6/ I had a @zapier set up so that every time the daily file appeared in a specific folder in my Dropbox, Zapier would format the CSV file and paste the data into a “data” tab in my Sheet (always below the previous day’s data). This effectively became the tool’s database.

7/ Data from the “data” tab then went to a “process” tab (I needed to add this step for whatever reason) before making its way to a pivot table. The pivot table essentially organizes the data chronologically and is essential to the whole thing. Pivot tables rule btw.

8/ I was able to manipulate this more structured data to figure out the daily change (Δ). I then assembled all the relevant data (locale, rating, #reviews, #ratings, and any Δ between parentheses) for each skill for each international market in a single cell.

9/ I then combined individual international cells from the previous step in a “block” in a new cell for each skill. There’s probably a more elegant way of doing this, but this was all I could figure out with my lowcode skillz.

10/ The last step in Google Sheets is to combine all the individual skill data into one cell containing each of the developer's skill in every international market. Thank you JOIN function!

11/ I set up a Zap that would send an email every time there was a change to the big cell from the previous step. In other words, if there was a change to any skill’s rating, number of reviews, or number of ratings, the cell in twee 10 would change and it would send an email.

12/ The email is pretty barebones, but it works (It’s also nicer on mobile because the emojis actually show up)! I was also able to use a similar zap to send an update to a Slack channel.

13/And that’s how I built an MVP for a pretty neat tool using only #nocode and #lowcode! As long as I didn’t touch anything, it worked fine.

I shopped this tool around to people I thought might pay for it. The goal was to make something that could generate passive income.

14/ People were curious, but ultimately, I was still some ways from something profitable/hands off. It would have taken more time/money to take it to the next step, so I decided to shut it down.

Hope you found this motivating/informative! Let me know if you have any questions!