Ok, so I’ve been mulling an idea for some time now and anyone i mention it to says i should go and build it. Easier said than done. I’m low on disposable income at the moment, so can’t invest in development. Maybe nocode could work. And i need your help to figure out what tools to use.
Also, I’m sorry for the post length, but I assume you would appreciate as much detail as possible for all the technical needs instead of a post that just says - i want to build this, what should i use, without any context. Also, I apologize in advance for not writing out the entire idea. It’s so (deceivingly) simple that my paranoid brain believes someone could beat me to it - i know, not likley, but I’ll sleep better like this. Once i have something sketched out I’ll move to the idea validation part of the forum to see what you guys think 
Let’s call it a delayed journaling website. This is the general idea. A person would sign up to the website, a paid service with a low yearly subscription, and would then be provided with an email address unique to them. From there they would be able to send emails to this address (ideally, they could also do this through sms and chat apps, but this is not important to start with) whenever they want, with text, videos and photos. All of this data would then be delivered at a later date to an email or emails specified by the user - i know it doesn’t make much sense, but think of it like a journaling service that would remind you of all of your memories in a decade or two…
Yes, the description is vague, but i thing you get the idea. If something is not clear, let me know and i can go into some more detail.
Ok, so I want to build a no-code MVP for this project. I have experience building wordpress sites, so i should be able to catch on quick, but I would love to keep it as simple as possible. If the MVP proves viable and starts bringing in revenue, the entire app would have to be reworked by a developer from scratch in order to meet some criteria I have, but that’s a thread for another day.
Here are the pieces i need to build:
- A landing page for the project with a way to sign up for a membership, pay for it (i’m guessing stripe or paypal/braintree) and a simple user dashboard individual to each user to manage basic info, emails where the info will be delivered (no need to see all the entries that sent in by mail in the dashboard, although it would be a perk)
- A way to automate assignment of an email address to a user so they can send the entries. I have no idea how to go about doing this… I was thinking, maybe instead of assigning them an unique email address to just have a Gmail account setup as a catchall and then maybe have Zapier parse that email, recognize who the sender is and then stick the info into a database based on the sender’s email… however, worried that this would drive up my Zapier costs as i’m not sure whether it counts each email as a separate action, resulting in potentially thousands of actions per parse, or is just the one parse an action…
- A way to store the data coming in, linked to each user and Ideally not visible to me at all. I mean, it could just be an email inbox if there’s no better solution… Also, two things are very important - the security of the data, can’t afford for it to be lost, and, even more importantly, it has to be easily transferable to another technology later on as i decide to move out of the MVP into a robust and developed platform that will have to keep the data for years, even decades
- Perhaps a way for a user to download all the data in a raw format - just the text, photos and videos, without any special formatting, separated into folders by date. This bulletpoint will mostly depend on the way i store the data, i guess.
Everything else can be built later, as we move out of the MVP. There will be no delivery of this data for a couple of years, so this buys me time to develop a proper service to deliver the data in a pretty way.
Here are the ideas i considered:
- Try and build the entire thing in Bubble. There seems to be a consensus this is the ultimate no-code builder and I’m pretty sure this would be doable. Will take time to learn Bubble, but I’m sure i could do it. Although, i would love get this out as soon as possible, without having to do months of development. However, even with some research I’m still not sure how to store the data into a database, especially for each use individually, with me being able to extract it later
- Maybe use a simpler page builder like Webflow or even Wordpress to handle the landing page and sales. But i have no idea what to do with the user then - how would i assign them an address to use, how would i give them a user profile to log into and edit (not sure if these two options would support something like this at all)
- If i were to use a simple frontend builder like webflow or wordpress, then maybe i could somehow make use of zapier, not really sure if it could do this - take the info that a new account was created, create an email alias for that user with their username, create an airtable, have it scan the email aliases and fill the tables… complicated…
- Just do everything manually? Create a simple website, keep the user on hold until i create an email for them, find a good email service that would take in all of their entries (maybe just have the gmail thing mentioned above). I could then deal with extracting them later, when the fully developed version is created, as the info will not have to be delivered to the users util years later
As you can see, it’s a deceivingly simple problem - take some info people email you and stick it into a database and deliver it back at a later date. But for the love of me, I can’t wrap my head around how to do it. Help me, please!