31–40 of 104 posts
I’m working with a startup at the moment that has put all their investment into their customer facing app, but almost everything behind the scenes is built in spreadsheets and low code tools. Can’t spill too much about the company, but think something like “get flowers delivered within 30 minutes via a fancy app”, but not flowers. Without building in this way there is no way they would be growing at the rate they are…
Sure, look at any low-code platform that has an ISV partner program. You'll find plenty of success stories. My company even started that way, and ended up growing over 15 years and getting bought out before we even looked at going full-stack for our products. We're just shy of 20 years since our initial launch, and just now finally coding at our first full-stack version. To be fair, we did start adding custom code af…
Friend of mine has been thinking to start a no-code engineering school to teach people the skills required to build no-code products for exactly that reason
It was extraordinarily fast for static content, although forms and controls were a bit more difficult. We ended up building out some primitives using Stimulus and ActionView Components to make life easier, and overall it was a surprisingly nice workflow.
Would I recommend it to others? Possibly. It worked really well for our situation where time and agility were valued above all else, but I attribute the success there in part to the way the team worked and the fact that our founder was so proficient with it.
Don't do this. I know that sounds like bad advice, but if you aren't comfortable working with lower-level design paradigms, who's going to fix things when something goes wrong? You'll eternally be in debt to engineers who are happy to take your rudimentary API contracts and make free money. Trying to be an entrepreneur in an area that you don't have experience in is a money pit.
Starting a tech business on a low code environment is a great idea. In fact, is probably the best idea since it means iterating fast, easy to identify functional requirements and gets you to market fit ASAP without breaking the bank.
Running a tech business at scale on a low code environment is a whole another topic (the OP explicitly mentioned "built").
TL;DR - Unless you're building hard tech (AI platforms, VR, etc.), then low code environments are great ways to build businesses.
And if you want to go back 20 years, here’s a link of sites built with Microsoft Frontpage :)
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Frontpage
What's important for me is that users can ramp up from drag 'n drop to coding by hand. Otherwise they might just end up feeling stuck with the tool.
I'd rather see users use and then discard our tool once they ramped up their skills, in favour of then just writing code using our tech. Much better than getting stuck forever in our competitors' rather limited toy editors. :)