Build your own TrumpText in less than an hour
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Create a tool without any code to send your frenemies unlimited Donald Trump quotes from a random phone number. As seen in KanyeText.com
About 2 years ago we built a website called KanyeText.com, it let you send up to 100 Kanye West quotes to your friend via text messages from a random number. It was the stupidest thing we have ever made, but what a lot of people don’t realise is that we built it in less than 24 hours without a single line of code.
KanyeText.com was a pivotal moment for us because we realised that you could build full prototypes without needing a developer. After seeing teams, and people get stuck on finding a co founder we launched a website and YouTube channel called CodeWithoutCode.com. Without KanyeText I don’t think we would have started to explore what else could be done.
Built in 24 hours without a single line of code, and has now sent 10,000 kanye west quotes
In Feb 2016 we wrote a medium article (see below) where we explained why we built KanyeText, and during that process, we even suggested that we could build one for Donald Trump.
Looking back on it now, maybe we would have sent more quotes if we had done Donald Trump, and perhaps our lives would have been different.
Everytime we talk about KanyeText.com — someone inevitably says “You should do one for Donald Trump!” and we had considered it, as we have improved the way we build these kinds of tools a lot in the last two years. It takes us much less time to create and can spin one up very very quickly. But we have never been able to think of a unique angle to create Trump Text.
The making of TrumpText
TrumpText uses a similar process to KanyeText, and the video below goes through a step by step guide on how to build it, it takes 54 minutes and if you go to the template link below, we already have the quotes for you.
Sign up someone to TrumpText
The output of creating this page is that we now actually have TrumpText, so go onto the page and sign up a friend for a few dollars.
https://codewithoutcode.com/TrumpText
The 54 minute step by step guide
If you just want to build your own, follow the video below. The build has three parts. The first one triggers the second step, and then the second steps plays over and over until completed. The steps are:
- Taking payments and a new order
- Looking up the quote and sending the text message
- Accepting a text message reply
The diagram below shows you roughly how the first two steps work.
When creating this process the most time consuming part is setting it all up. So If you want to save your self some time go to http://codewithoutcode.com/TrumpTextBuild and we will send you
- Google sheets template for Trump Text, with all columns ready to go
- Quotes for KanyeText
- Quotes for Donald Trump
- Quotes for Seinfeld
As you can see above TrumpText is built using a handful of tools. The backbone of it all is Zapier, which allows us to string together workflows. You can pretty much do anything and I find the Prototype stack below helps understand how they can be linked together.
The video goes into each little step and explains how it works, so if the images below aren’t enough, please watch the video.
Step 1: Payments & taking orders
The first step is how we accept payment. There are lots of different ways to do it, but we have chosen on this version to use wordpress,gravity forms and stripe.
Ultimately this step could be anything, all you need to get is the phone number to send the text messages. However, we also like to receive a payment (as it does cost to send messages) and some details of the person to let them know the order has sent.
The tools that we use for this step are
- Zapier
- Stripe
- Wordpress
- Gravity Forms
- Typeform — alternative to using gravity forms + wordpress
Step 2: Looking up the quote and sending it via a text message (loop)
This most important part of the TrumpText, as this step will:
- Look up a quote (which appears to be random)
- Find the friends phone number
- SMS that quote to the friends’ number
- Then delay for a random amount of time, before going back to number 1 .
Using the sent message number above, zapier then randomly picks a or b, and we pull the number of sent messages and A/B to form something that looks like: 2b or 4a. Then that is the number that is looked up from the left column, and then the quote is pulled from column D.
Step 3: Accepting a text message reply
Just for some fun we like to share the replies we get straight to our twitter account. We also can send the replies to the person who originally signed up that phone number.
The tools we use for this are pretty straight forward, accept a reply in Twilio which feeds to zapier and then posted out via Twitter.
Time to build your own
Using this guide I hope you can go ahead and build your own version of TrumpText, please comment below with the URL of one if you make it.
If you want to see how we build other prototypes and string them all together we are starting a YouTube Channel Code Without Code. So please subscribe.
Our plan is to build out MVP’s and builds like this for a number of different startup categories. Not that TrumpText is one, but it is a good entry point to see that you can build products without knowing how to code.
Please visit http://codewithoutcode.com/TrumpTextBuild and put in your email address and we will send you:
- Google sheets template for Trump Text, with all columns ready to go
- Quotes for KanyeText
- Quotes for Donald Trump
- Quotes for Seinfeld
You can find me on twitter at
Comment below with the text message bot that you are going to make?
