Betteridge's Law would have saved me some time. The answer is no, not really; the only company doing well according to the article is Lambda School, and as we've explored here before, their money-making schemes have nothing to do with no-code tools and everything to do with scamming students.
No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
11–20 of 126 posts
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#12No-code platforms have always been a great way to put a MVP together. MVPs help you vet the idea before pouring real dollars into it. They are not meant to be the foundation for the product itself; those thinking otherwise have a very expensive refactor ahead of them! I hear MVP thrown around like candy in the consulting I do. I _wish_ they started with no code! Didn't some now-unicorn start its life as an email dist…
You might be thinking of Groupon, from memory their origin story involves emulating software functionality with spreadsheets/email lists/much manual grunt work.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#13I don’t really understand what “no code” is. You can put up a storefront and conduct business without writing a line of code, simply by adding plug ins to Wordpress, calling out to stripe etc. The result is somewhat templatized and slightly generic looking but that’s great: your value comes from the content, as the author correctly describes, and the visitor will presumably understand navigation etc. This kind of pro…
No code is a signal of bullshit for a company who claims software development as their competitive advantage but in truth the core competency is something else or doesn’t exist at all. Wework is a good example.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#14The no-code solutions are enabling a digital sort of business that is distinct from their analog counterparts. Their examples - teaching, online job-board, courses for sale - are digital upgrades to teaching, newspaper classifieds, and books.
You can stitch together a useful business with these tools. But you won’t build a pure software business. They are just entirely different things. Building the so-called “no-code” technology is the software play.
As an aside, “Plenty of Fish” 1.0 was built with an off-the-shelf website builder. You don’t need to be a pro-coder to provide value.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#15I don’t really understand what “no code” is. You can put up a storefront and conduct business without writing a line of code, simply by adding plug ins to Wordpress, calling out to stripe etc. The result is somewhat templatized and slightly generic looking but that’s great: your value comes from the content, as the author correctly describes, and the visitor will presumably understand navigation etc. This kind of pro…
>> Is "no code" meant to somehow imply something more?
In a way it's less. The products you list are much more capable developer products. These are more in the direction of the FileMaker or Access level of constraint, but implemented in a more modern way which means they can be fairly effective.
Using "no code" is just branding that hasn't been used broadly until now. Maybe it has, but it probably isn't well known enough to be unusable. I'd have called these "4GLs" perhaps.
Lots of companies are getting in on the act to create a market for this. All of the established companies making business software have some no/low code solution. Then there are newer companies like Zapier who do automation and are trying to be a connector between these apps.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#16No-code = code from another person
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#17I don’t really understand what “no code” is. You can put up a storefront and conduct business without writing a line of code, simply by adding plug ins to Wordpress, calling out to stripe etc. The result is somewhat templatized and slightly generic looking but that’s great: your value comes from the content, as the author correctly describes, and the visitor will presumably understand navigation etc. This kind of pro…
From what I can tell yes. It’s intended to imply something more.
See bubble for example - https://bubble.io . It’s basically “visual” Rails. The intention is to allow users to build complex, interactive software visually, without having to write code.
Webflow has a ton of plugins that can get you something similar. You can have a user model (memberstack.io) with authentication and even the ability to create user specific content. I was able to create a fairly complex user dashboard that had real time charts pulled from an Airtable database that was synced automatically with user interaction using Zapier.
...but, here’s the issue. You just can’t do enough. I made it about a week before I abandon the idea and went back to Rails.
I’m still bullish on the idea of no code though. The tools are there. They just need more functionality.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#18A great example of the no-code system might be something like Power Automate/Power Apps/Power BI from Microsoft.
It's pretty painful to use when you want to do something simple in code like explode an array, take a few of the values from that and implode back into an array again.
Things like AWS Quicksight or Google Data Studio might be in the same sort of world too.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#19This post makes no-code feel like an MLM. Half of the highlighted startups are no-code startups founded to teach about no-code.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#20I don’t really understand what “no code” is. You can put up a storefront and conduct business without writing a line of code, simply by adding plug ins to Wordpress, calling out to stripe etc. The result is somewhat templatized and slightly generic looking but that’s great: your value comes from the content, as the author correctly describes, and the visitor will presumably understand navigation etc. This kind of pro…
>> Is "no code" meant to somehow imply something more? In a way it's less. The products you list are much more capable developer products. These are more in the direction of the FileMaker or Access level of constraint, but implemented in a more modern way which means they can be fairly effective. Using "no code" is just branding that hasn't been used broadly until now. Maybe it has, but it probably isn't well known e…
Access was one of my favorite Microsoft products of the late 90s. As a high school kid learning C, VB6, and Linux I came across access and really liked that it let me make easy forms. If you knew how to do DB design access was a great tool. I made a grading system for a teacher and several other teachers adopted it. They used it for almost 8 years before moving on. I was just a curious high school kid able to make useful software with a little persistence. It still feels like that level of accessibility in terms of software tooling does not exist in modern dev. It’s all watered down and abstracted in ways a simple Desktop app is not.