How No-Code Week built an event app for 150+ attendees, speakers, and partners (without a dev team)

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The Problem

No-Code Week started as a 30-person meetup in 2022. By its fourth edition in Milan in 2025, the event drew 150 attendees, 30 speakers, and 10 partners across five days. Early editions of the event app had a basic program display and barely got used, so attendees defaulted to WhatsApp for everything else. 

The turning point came in year two, when attendance jumped to 100 and the team had to cap workshop capacity for the first time. The event needed a real registration system — one that could manage session capacity in real time and give each attendee a personalized schedule. 

After years of iteration and managing the event, organizer Amandine Dugrain and her collaborator Marine Nicholson from Slituo knew exactly what the app needed:

• Two-way Airtable sync: The team’s Airtable base had 4+ years of structure, automations, rollups, and integrations with Make, Brevo, Weezevent, Framer and Qonto. Anything requiring a data migration was a non-starter.
• Role-based access out of the box: They needed to surface different views of the app depending on whether someone was an attendee, a speaker, a partner, or all three.
• Fast to build, easy for one person to maintain: No Code Week runs on a small team of volunteers and freelancers. There was no room for a dev cycle every time something needed to change.
• Real-time registration: With space-capped workshops and waitlists, a sync delay between registrations and public-facing available spots wasn't acceptable.

The Solution

Amandine and Marine rebuilt the event app in 2025 with Softr, starting from the previous version as a base. It's now the place where every logged-in NCW participant finds what they need before, during, and after the event — attendees, speakers, partners, and hackathon participants each get a tailored experience from a single login. With Softr's PWA feature, the app can be installed as a shortcut on a phone home screen, so it acts like a native app with no URL to remember.

The system covers nine workflows: 

• Role assignment and management: Everyone logs in with a magic link tied to their registered email — no passwords, no manual role assignment. User groups update automatically as people's status changes in Airtable. A single user can belong to multiple groups at once, with the app layering their relevant sections. Editing rights follow the same logic — speakers can only edit their own sessions, everyone edits their own profile, and organizers have admin access across the board. The whole app is gated: the only public page is the login screen.
• Program & session registration: Users can browse all sessions, filter by day and format (Talk, Workshop, Demo, Class, Hackathon), and see live capacity (e.g. 12/18 spots left). Registration comes with two hard rules: no more than 4 sessions per person, and no registering beyond capacity — with a waitlist for full sessions. Session data runs on Softr Databases for real-time updates.
• Attendee directory: Users can browse all attendees with their photo, role, company, LinkedIn, and tool stack, and filter by no-code/AI tool (e.g. n8n builders). 
• Profile management: Users can edit their bio, personal info, and dietary preferences, and browse a curated catalog of ~170 no-code and AI tools, with the option to add tools they think are missing on the fly. 
• Speaker collaboration: Speakers can edit their session title, description, and upload slides from the app, while organizers retain control over time, format, and location.
• Partner management: Partners can manage their own public card on the app (logo, description, website, social links), so organizers don’t have to. 
• WhatsApp community onboarding: Users who haven't joined the WhatsApp group yet see a prompt on the home screen to join, which disappears automatically once they do.
• Event add-on purchases: An embedded Weezevent widget lets attendees purchase participant-exclusive extras without leaving the app.
• Attendee mapping: A Google Maps integration shows users where participants are coming from across Europe.

While the core data lives in Airtable (e.g. people, partners, session info, tools catalog), the team switched over to Softr Databases for session registrations and capacity logic.  

"[Softr Databases] changed the game for our registrations," said Amandine. "No more lag on capacity updates, no more confused attendees.”

The Impact

The app serves 150+ participants across nine workflows and improves with every edition. Two people built it in roughly one week, with the first version out in two days. Amandine and Marine ship improvements themselves between events, without having to rely on a dev cycle or outside help. 

Softr's Vibe Coding Block also gave Amandine the creative control she'd been looking for in other tools. "The design ended up way more polished in a way that really reflects the event," she said.

What started as a program display nobody used has become No-Code Week's operational core — the system a small team relies on to run an event that keeps growing every year.

"We honestly haven't received much feedback, and as a designer, that makes me happy: people never miss an opportunity to complain, so silence means the app was so fluid and obvious they didn't even notice it. That's when you know it's good."