Jacob Klug spent the first two years of his agency taking sales calls with his camera off.
He was 17. He figured nobody would wire tens of thousands of dollars to a kid. So they never saw the kid. They just saw the work, and they paid.
Today he's 20 and his no code agency, Creme Digital, does $100K to $150K a month building apps on Bubble. For Fortune 500 companies. Without writing a line of code.
I found his story on Brett Malinowski's channel and it's one of the cleanest agency playbooks I've heard. Here's the whole interview, and below it, every number and tactic worth stealing.
The kid who couldn't code
Jacob was never technical. His words, not mine.
In high school he watched classmates flip shoes and phones over Snapchat, and thought: this should be an app. He couldn't code, so he Googled his way to Bubble, tinkered for two weeks, and shipped a Kijiji-style buy-and-sell app for his school.
Almost the whole school used it.
That was grade 10. And it came after years of trying everything else: dropshipping, affiliate marketing, SMMA, real estate videos. A different hustle every year. He was lucky to clear $1,000 on any of them.
He'd also decided he wasn't going to college. A friend's mom heard that in the car and told him, more or less, "you're going to be a failure."
(Every founder I interview has a version of that car ride.)
The school app changed his read on the tool. Bubble could carry something real businesses would pay for. So he went all in, made Creme Digital an official Bubble agency, and hired designers and developers.
Camera off, invoices on
The early sales calls are my favorite part of this story.
Jacob got companies on the phone, kept his camera off so they couldn't see he was 17, and closed deals worth tens of thousands of dollars. He says he turned his camera on once in the first two years.
Brett pushed him on the age thing, and Jacob's answer was blunt: it has nothing to do with age. If your cold email gets someone on a call, and on that call you're believable, and your past work backs you up, they don't care when you were born.
The other thing he did early: after the first project, he never built again. He hired a salesperson to take the calls, put Bubble developers on retainers, and moved himself into running the machine.
Delegation at 18, while most agency owners are still the bottleneck at 38. (No shade, I was one once.)
Who actually pays a no code agency
This was the part that surprised me. His clients aren't broke startups.
Two groups keep showing up:
- Fortune 500 companies that need internal tools. Off-the-shelf software doesn't fit their weird workflows, and they don't want to put millions behind something only employees will see. A Bubble build gets them a specific tool, faster and way cheaper.
- Big YouTube creators. Creme got connected with Airrack's team around early 2021 and helped build Creator Now, a six-week cohort program for aspiring YouTubers. It plugged into the YouTube API to verify that members actually completed each week's challenge. The team had a launch date closing in and needed speed, so no code won. Creator Now went on to raise millions.
His sweet spot beyond those: businesses doing $1M to $10M a year that are sick of the Salesforces and Oracles of the world charging them hundreds of thousands a month. Creme builds them something specific for a fraction of that, and Jacob says the finished product is usually nicer than what the enterprise vendor shipped.
And for his productized monthly offer, he targets companies doing $500K to $1M a month in revenue. The pitch writes itself: a full development team for the price of one employee.
None of this requires the founder to be technical. I keep seeing that pattern, same as the story of the non-technical founder who shipped real apps in a year. The tools stopped caring about your CS degree a while ago.
How he gets clients (steal this part)
No magic. Two channels do the heavy lifting.
1. RFPs. Requests for proposal: companies post "we want X built for $Y" and agencies bid. Marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr exist, but RFP boards are where real scopes with real budgets live. Jacob's salesperson watches them daily and answers with personalized outreach, not templates.
2. Cold email. His advice if you're starting from zero: set up an Apollo sequence, pick one industry, go after 100 business owners with one specific problem you can solve. Credibility comes from the work you show, then the call closes it.
He spends nothing on ads. A kid with a portfolio and a decent email got Fortune 500 logos this way, which should make every founder rethink how hard client acquisition actually is.
The economics of a $5K Bubble build
Creme prices on fixed scope, not hourly. They help the client cut the scope down to what actually matters (most first builds are bloated), put a price on it, and go.
Here's the math Brett laid out in the interview, and Jacob didn't argue:
→ Close a $5,000 scope of work.
→ Pay a freelance Bubble developer to build it. Good ones run $30 to $50 an hour, roughly $1,500 for the job.
→ Keep $3,500 for getting the deal and managing delivery.
Jacob charges a bit above the market because Creme sends real designers, and his take on that is worth remembering: you can ship an MVP fast and cheap, but if it looks bad, nobody comes back to it.
Scoping is where he earns the premium. Most clients show up wanting everything in version one. Creme's job is to define what the product actually needs, trim the rest, and quote a number the client can say yes to on the call.
Why he won't stay an agency forever
Jacob is honest about the ceiling. The agency cash is nice and the margins are healthy if you manage it well. But scaling a service business to eight or nine figures means scaling people, and every new dollar stays tied to headcount.
So the long game is SaaS. His logic: software has use, and no code on top of it is double use. You get the scalable asset and you get to build it at a tenth of the usual cost.
His starting advice for a first product is very Jacob: aim for a $10K a month SaaS, pick a local demographic (your own city, so "hi, I'm from here" opens doors), and solve one narrow problem for one type of business. Billion dollar companies operate nothing like $10K a month companies, so don't borrow their playbook on day one.
He also knows what his own unfair advantage is. His first business was making videos, and he's the guy who teaches his friends whatever he's learning, so content comes naturally to him. His advice is to notice what you gravitate toward and build your distribution there instead of copying someone else's channel.
If you want prompts for that first narrow product, I put together a list of no code app ideas you can ship without a developer.
The playbook in five lines
→ Learn one no code tool properly. Jacob's first Bubble app took two weeks, in grade 10.
→ Land the first build any way you can, then show it to everyone. Work references beat credentials.
→ Price on fixed scope. Cut the client's wishlist down before you quote.
→ Delegate the building early. Retainer devs at $30 to $50 an hour free you up to sell.
→ Treat the agency as cash flow, and funnel it into something with use.
FAQ
How much does a no code agency make?
Creme Digital does $100K to $150K a month, give or take, with Jacob at 20 years old. That's an outlier after three years of compounding referrals and Fortune 500 clients. A solo operator closing one $5,000 fixed-scope build a month and subcontracting the work can realistically keep $3,000 to $3,500 of it.
Can you start a no code agency without knowing how to code?
Yes, and Jacob is proof. He describes himself as never technical. He built his first Bubble app in two weeks as a high schooler, and after his agency's first client project he stopped building entirely and hired developers. Selling and scoping matter more than syntax.
How do no code agencies find clients?
Jacob's two channels are RFP boards, where companies post scoped projects with budgets, and cold email through Apollo aimed at about 100 business owners in one industry with one specific problem. Personalized outreach plus visible past work gets the call. Being believable on that call gets the deal.
Is Bubble good enough for serious companies?
Fortune 500 companies pay Creme to build internal tools on it, and Creator Now ran a funded startup on a Bubble MVP that plugged into the YouTube API. For most products under real scale, it holds. When a client eventually outgrows it, that's a good problem and usually a rebuild budget.
Want the longer version of stories like this?
I interview bootstrapped founders every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Real revenue numbers and real pricing decisions, from people a year or two ahead of you. Jacob took calls with his camera off at 17. My guests turn theirs on and walk me through the dashboard.
