How ApeForge Builds Client Apps in Days With Adalo

Matt Sanchez runs a three-person creative agency called ApeForge. Last year, his team moved 619 projects (branding, websites, and apps) through the shop. Most of the apps were built on Adalo. And almost nothing about how ApeForge operates looks like a typical agency.

They don't run big ad campaigns. They hand every project over to the client with full ownership from day one. And instead of quoting months of development, they'll often sit a client down and build a working MVP in a single day, with that client in the room the whole time.

We sat down with Matt to understand how a small team ships that much real software, why he treats marketing like a campfire instead of a fireworks show, and where a no-code app builder fits into running an actual business.

Meet ApeForge: A Three-Person Full-Stack Agency

ApeForge calls itself a full-stack creative agency. That means everything from brand conceptualization and design to the deployment of websites and apps, plus digital marketing, photography, and videography. Three people handle all of it, from the nuts and bolts to the final deliverable.

Matt wears every hat. He's the creative director, the developer, and the owner. That last role shapes every technical decision he makes.

"When it comes to the business end of everything, I'm very conscious of how much is this going to cost and how fast can we deliver on what we're building. When finding different platforms to build with, that was always the question. How can we build something in a way that we can do it fast, almost shooting from the hip style, and when it comes to the deliverable, what does it look like for us to continue hosting and maintaining it?"

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

There's one principle Matt treats as non-negotiable, and it's the thing he says sets ApeForge apart from other shops: the client owns what they pay for, completely, starting on day one.

"We don't own anything that we make. We are the hands and feet that get to make that thing. So the owner or the client should have full access to whatever that is."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

That's part of why Adalo fit. As his team builds, they can invite the client straight into the project to preview it, get hands-on, and react to real screens instead of mockups.

The Expedition: Building an MVP in a Day, With the Client in the Room

ApeForge's signature service is something they call an expedition. Instead of months of back-and-forth, the team knocks out an MVP in a day or two while working live, on screen, with the client.

Matt warns clients up front that parts of it will be boring, because he needs their input the entire time. Do you like how this button looks? No? Great, changing it. Your notes say a dropdown, but in practice this should be a radio. That constant, fast feedback loop is the whole point.

"They walk away with a finished product rather than 'imagine this, but with your logo on it.' It's literally, this is your logo, this is your operational piece of software that is ready for deployment. You ready? Now."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

Keeping the ball in the client's court is what makes that speed possible. And it's not a fluff piece at the end. It's working software the client can actually deploy. A recent expedition for a Montana business called Fly Paws, a service that helps pet owners handle certifications, vaccinations, and logistics to fly their animals safely, produced a brand, a logo, and a website in a single day.

"She made it easy because she trusted us, and we trusted her and what she was telling us."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

600+ Projects a Year With a Team of Three

Because ApeForge runs its own operations on an Adalo app, Matt can pull the exact number: 619 projects moved this year, spanning branding, websites, and app builds. That's a dramatic jump from where the agency was two years ago, and Matt credits the increase to a sharper process rather than more hours.

Every engagement starts with a conversation he calls the campfire. On the surface it's a casual chat. Underneath, Matt is asking questions designed to surface who the client is, how they'll be to work with, and what the project actually needs to accomplish.

A hamburger shop that exists because the owner learned to grill with their dad has an emotional story worth building a brand around. A hamburger shop that exists purely because the margins were easy is a different client with different priorities. The campfire tells Matt which path he's on before a single screen gets designed.

From there, work falls into one of three shapes: a hike (a few hours of hourly work), an expedition (a full-day build session), or a journey (month-long creative support when the budget calls for a slower pace). The bigger shift, though, was what ApeForge decided it was actually selling.

"Instead of selling websites, instead of selling an app, we are selling the process. When we pivoted the agency from selling websites to selling process, that is what exponentially exploded us in a way that made everything make sense finally."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

That volume comes with restraint. Matt says the process is just as useful for identifying the projects ApeForge shouldn't take on yet: clients who aren't ready financially, or whose idea already exists or isn't fleshed out. He even gives those clients a free document he calls the app blueprint, so they can pressure-test the idea before anyone spends ten or twenty thousand dollars building the wrong thing.

The Apps: From Chamber CRMs to Movement-Tracking Health Tech

ApeForge's portfolio shows the range of what a small team can ship on a no-code app builder when they lean into it.

Chamber Edge is one of their largest projects to date. It's a CRM built for chambers of commerce to manage members, run events with RSVPs, and handle billing through Square, Stripe, and a custom integration. It now has more than 8,000 active users, and after this year's official rollout ApeForge is onboarding several more chambers. The first rough draft took three to four days.

"From the initial conversation to a very rough draft version of it was about three to four days. And then from there, it was give a mouse a cookie. Oh, it can do this. Can it do this also?"

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

Playtime is a health app built for Dr. Caroline, a specialist in how the body moves. It digests her written content for patients and, more impressively, uses the device camera to track a person's movement, mapping shoulders, arms, and leg placement, then flagging good form in green and poor form in red. A professional reviews the results, sends feedback, and tracks improvement across follow-up assessments. Because it's used with kids, the system only activates once it identifies an individual and obscures identifying information, and a school district has already expressed interest in bringing it into classrooms.

Monstera is the tool ApeForge built to run itself: project tracking, status updates, a customer portal, invoice payments through Stripe, and file sharing. It worked so well internally that the agency now offers it to other agencies as a simple project management product.

Doggy Door started as a personal project when Matt and his wife adopted their dogs, to track a new pet's activity while it settled in. It grew to several thousand users almost by accident, and then took on a second life as owners came back to log medications and vet visits for aging pets.

"What we really specialize in is taking those complex concepts and saying, I think there's an easy way to do this. We don't want the fluff. And this shouldn't be that expensive to make. Let's just make the damn thing."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

Other projects round out the range: Appian, a quote-and-RFQ platform with nested permissions for buyers and suppliers; Tackbox, a horse-show marketplace; and Haymart, an app that connects people buying and selling hay for their horses, now heading to the App Store.

Pushing Adalo Further: Custom Components and Cloudflare Workers

Matt knows enough code to get himself into trouble, as he puts it, and ApeForge uses that to extend what Adalo does out of the box. The movement-tracking in Playtime, for example, runs through a web embed powered by a Cloudflare Worker, so the heavy processing happens server-side instead of on the user's device, then writes securely back into the Adalo database over the API. The team solved the payment-processing piece of Chamber Edge the same way.

Those solutions don't just stay in-house. ApeForge is packaging several of them as components for the Adalo marketplace.

"We've solved a few issues for ourselves. We have a few pretty interesting tools that I think we're going to be launching soon into that market of, hey, this worked for us, let's throw it out, let other people use it too."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

For automation, Matt reaches for Make.com over Zapier, not because Zapier's native Adalo integration isn't good, but because ApeForge hosts most of its clients' apps and needs predictable, agency-wide costs rather than per-client fees stacking up. He also called out two recent Adalo additions that changed his day-to-day: deep linking, which let Chamber Edge send users straight to the right screen with the right data, and the new in-editor search.

"That new search thing, fantastic. Even when trying to link a button to something, being able to copy an old button's ability to a new button, perfect. What a creature comfort that I didn't know I needed."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

The Anti-Marketing Playbook: Campfires Over Fireworks

Ask Matt how ApeForge markets itself and you get a genuinely contrarian answer. The agency does almost no paid promotion, and it recently pulled back on social media too. His reasoning comes down to a favorite analogy.

"Paid advertising is a fireworks display and organic reach is your campfire. Campfires are places where people want to gather and keep coming back to, whenever, regardless if it's on or not. But fireworks displays are ooh, ah, and as soon as they're over, they're gone."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

The approach is to build the campfire first (genuine relationships and organic reach) and only set off the fireworks when a specific client needs them, not when the agency needs the work. Matt also found that the louder an agency shouts about its client list, the more it can spook the larger clients it wants, who tend to be wary of shops that are constantly parading their work around.

So ApeForge shifted its content from "look what we made" to "here's how we do it." That serves double duty: it's easier content to produce, and it builds authority.

"Even if you're like, well, my viewership is down, so what matters? SEO matters. Your authority and what you're talking about matters. So instead of focusing on this channel is for producing leads, think of it as this is the avenue that I get to educate my potential client on."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

The agency's original growth came from being in the right place at the right time. ApeForge launched in 2019 and signed its first office lease in 2020, right as COVID shut everything down. Then the phone started ringing. Every local business suddenly needed to be online yesterday. Getting them there fast is what built the foundation, and it's why speed has stayed central to how the agency works.

Why Adalo Is ApeForge's Primary Build Tool

ApeForge has used Adalo as its main development tool for years, and Matt is direct about why.

"It's the only one I use now, just because it's not pretending to be software. It's actually something tangible and deployable."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

The newest thing he's excited about is Publishing Studio, Adalo's built-in workflow for preparing an app for the stores. As a designer with 15 years in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, Matt has spent countless hours fighting with export sizes and file types just to get store screenshots approved. Seeing that collapse into one place inside Adalo landed hard.

"I don't know if you guys know what you made, but that's amazing. It's like a restaurant that is known for hamburgers that also sells chicken sandwiches. Try the chicken sandwich, dude."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

The part that surprised him most wasn't the screenshots. It was everything underneath: generating an App Store listing, branding assets pulled from the project's colors, even spinning up a hosted privacy policy on a live URL, which is exactly the kind of thing Apple and Google check for and that clients rarely have ready during a build. His one wish-list item: custom font uploads, which he admits is a genuine engineering headache.

Matt's Advice for Agencies and Builders

Matt draws a sharp line between an artist and a designer, and he wants everyone on his team on the right side of it.

"Design is building systems and allowing the message of the client to be represented. You're making the thing, but it's not your property. We have the luxury to build it and show it the love that it needs, but we need to be able to hand it off."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

His single best piece of business advice has nothing to do with software. It's to watch Gordon Ramsay.

"Watch Kitchen Nightmares. It's a painful reminder of, it's not about you. It's not about what you're able to do. It's about how they experience what you're doing. Being okay with you not being the main character makes you do better work and humbles you."

Matt Sanchez, Founder of ApeForge

It's a fitting note to end on, because it's the same instinct that runs through everything ApeForge does: the client in the room during the build, the client owning the result, the campfire before the fireworks. Put the other person at the center, get rid of the noise, and just make the thing.

If you're an agency, freelancer, or founder who wants to build that way, you can start building on Adalo for free, browse the apps other makers have shipped, or find an Adalo expert to build alongside.

FAQ

What is ApeForge?

ApeForge is a boutique, full-stack creative agency run by Matt Sanchez. The three-person team handles branding, design, websites, apps, and digital marketing, and builds most of its client apps on Adalo. The agency moved 619 projects in a single year and specializes in shipping working MVPs quickly with the client involved throughout.

Can you build client apps on Adalo as an agency?

Yes. ApeForge builds and, in most cases, hosts and maintains client apps on Adalo. Clients can be invited into the project to preview and interact with the app as it's built, and they retain full ownership and access to what they pay for. Agencies can also add clients as team members on the client's own Adalo account when the client prefers to manage hosting themselves.

How fast can you build an app on Adalo?

ApeForge regularly builds a working MVP in a day or two through its "expedition" format, with the client giving live feedback the entire session. More complex platforms move quickly too. The first working draft of Chamber Edge, an 8,000-user chamber of commerce CRM, took three to four days before iterating from there.

What integrations and extensions does Adalo support for agencies?

Adalo supports payment processing with Stripe and Square, automation through tools like Make.com and Zapier, deep linking, and custom components. ApeForge extends Adalo further with Cloudflare Workers to run heavier processing server-side and write results back into the Adalo database over the API, and is packaging some of those solutions as components for the Adalo marketplace.

How much does Adalo cost?

Adalo has a free plan that includes 500 records per app, and paid plans start at $36 per month. For an agency hosting multiple client apps, predictable pricing is part of why ApeForge standardizes its tooling the way it does.

What is Adalo?

Adalo is a no-code app builder with a visual, multi-screen canvas and an AI builder called Ada. You can design, build, and publish database-driven web apps and native iOS and Android apps from a single project, then publish to the Apple App Store and Google Play. It's built for founders, agencies, and businesses who want real, deployable software without writing code.