Upzondown helps Amazon sellers increase revenue and improve margins by instantly calculating and visualising the entire end-to-end value chain; from sourcing, manufacturing to delivery. Its sales optimization tool was created using Figma & Buzzy’s No-Code App Engine.
Full, working app with no code
Built at a fraction of the time & cost of traditional development
Founder can adapt and refine by themselves
CASE STUDY: UPZONDOWN
An instant no-code app: how Buzzy's new Figma plugin is empowering designers & entrepeneurs
About Buzzy
“We’ve been enabling business users and entrepreneurs to create web and mobile applications for years”, says Adam Ginsburg, Buzzy founder. “Our tech is robust and traverses both responsive web and native mobile apps. However, sometimes B2B apps aren't the best looking, so we decided to bring this tech directly to designers. Why reinvent the wheel when we can fit in with how designers and startups work today? So we developed our Figma plugin,” he explains.
Cover photo by Aron Yigin on Unsplash
Adam says the Buzzy team were blown away by what Brett managed to do with the plugin: “When we saw what Brett had created with Upzondown… ‘holy crap!!! that’s amazing!!’ It was a complex business process, multi-page form, integrated with back-end services for things like shipping quotes and complex underlying business logic. It highlighted to us how the plug-in isn’t just about simple sites - we’ve got a tool here that can enable design teams and entrepreneurs to bring complex ideas to life at a fraction of the cost/effort,” Adam says.
Where to next? Turn your Figma designs into working apps & sites with the Buzzy plugin for Figma.
The challenge: no engineers available!
"Since COVID, engineers have become like gold. We eventually realised we were going to have to build it ourselves."
Brett Feeney
CEO Founder, Upzondown
Brett decided he should build his own tool and created a prototype using Figma - a market-leading collaborative design platform. But after showing it to a few people, he couldn’t find any available developers to turn his concept into a working app.
Brett Feeney created Upzondown when he wanted to sell on Amazon, but couldn’t find a way to calculate the viability of consignments: the cost of items, the size, the cost of shipping and so on.
"When you ship, especially to Amazon, you can only ship boxes or pallets or containers. You can’t do a mixed consignment or send half a pallet. So you need to figure out exactly how many items to order, based on what sales you expect in a specific sales cycle, how many items will fit in your container, and the shipping costs," Brett explains.
The solution: a DIY no code app builder
Buzzy also gave Brett a huge amount of flexibility with the design process. He re-started from scratch several times. In each case it only took half a day to add the Buzzy markup back to the Figma design.
”I could build it one way, quickly retrofit it and move it around. Doing that myself has saved me a fortune in revisits. I’ve been able to muck around and try different things. The Buzzy guys helped me with pointers and examples, but I essentially built it myself," Brett says.
"Buzzy enabled me to stay in the design tool Figma for longer and iterate faster”.
A friend directed Brett to Buzzy's Figma Plugin - new no-code app-builder, that empowers designers to “make magic” and- to seamlessly turn their Figma designs into beautiful, fully-functional web and native apps without coding. Buzzy is a world-first complete design-to-deployment solution supporting entrepreneurs and designers to deliver products to market faster and cheaper.
By using Buzzy’s new Figma Plugin, Brett was able to finish creating Upzondown "all on my own". When starting, he had no prior experience in either back-end or front-end development, and he was even new to Figma - he originally contacted a designer for that part. But within just a few weeks Brett was able to create a fully working app. He even got to the point where he can tweak the original designs in Figma by himself and then re-publish the app. What used to take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars, Brett was able to do in just a few weeks - while working part time!
The results: an instant working app
Brett also used Buzzy to create a landing page for his website which he had been struggling to get right. After trying out website platforms such as Wordpress and Wix, Brett simply built what he wanted in Figma, exported it and made it his landing page. Any changes can be made on the fly: appearing instantly on a user’s screen without them needing to reload or refresh.
One aspect Brett appreciates is that all the backend is managed by the Buzzy Platform, including all session management, secure data storage, permissions and log-ins. He can also export all data as-needed and integrate it with third party APIs such as Salesforce or Google Sheets. Brett used Buzzy’s ability to integrate with external systems, for example, a tool that gets shipping quotes from different service providers. “It’s a fully-fledged app, not just a recipe app. I was amazed I could do all this with no-code.”
"The front page is essentially a Buzzy app, designed to look exactly how I want it. Buzzy can collect all the emails from people interested, I don’t have to do any of that," Brett says.
