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Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#61

Post by gervwyk »

talolard wrote: post #53
gervwyk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting feedback. Thank you! I would love to ask you a few questions about this, if you do not mind, please reach out gvw[at]lowdefy.com A visual editor is definitely on our roadmap. Our strategy is to make the schema easy to read, write and understand. We want to ensure the dev experience of working with the Lowdefy schema is first class so that change review and version control can be as productive as p…

I made a dev tool into a small business. Came hear to rant: invest in ui upfront. At the end, customers visit your site and you have very little time to make them go wow. Your spending a lot of attention capital when you don’t have much

Thanks for the advice. You make a very valid point. The first version of Lowdefy had a UI, then every time we wanted to make a schema improvement we also had the tech debt of adapting the UI. As a result the schema became secondary and more and more become unreadable.

So then we really asked how lean can we make this platform to keep it agile while experimenting with the mechanics of the schema. After more than a year of that the experimentation paid off and we now have a very flexible, yet understandable schema for building apps.

But yes. Adding a visual editor on top is one of our goals - and we are getting closer and closer to making it happen.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#62

Post by kayodelycaon »

tluyben2 wrote: post #52
bostonsre wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think libraries are complicated so that they can be flexible and support many different use cases. You could release one library for authentication that works for one specific use case, but it would be useless for all others.

As far as I have seen, so far in my career, this is all 'not invented here' stuff. Most things, like auth go from 'oh no mate, we need 10000x more complicated stuff, that Keycloak thing will never fit!' and then, 6 months later there is something like keycloak but worse, far less features, more complex but replacable in no time by keycloak without touching the keycloak (no customizing) sourcecode. But we cannot becau…

A number of Ruby on Rails applications use Devise for basic account management and authentication. It's about as close as you can get to a cookie-cutter experience. As long as you follow the workflow, it's pretty straight forward to handle.

Drop in the plugin you want, configure the API keys, and then wire it into your User model. Then you can customize the urls, views, and emails.

You still have to read a fair amount of documentation and a lot of developers don't like the extra up-front work and reinvent the wheel because it's "simpler".

Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#63

Post by runako »

smoldesu wrote: post #6

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.

I disagree strongly with this as blanket advice. A large number of SaaS apps are primarily CRUD apps where outputs are database updates and/or API calls. No-code platforms could support many of these quite well through the first $1m + of revenue.

And I can't believe this needs to be said, but yes it can be smart to hire programmers to build 5% of your system instead of 100%.

> Trying to be an entrepreneur in an area that you don't have experience in is a money pit.

Y Combinator exists as an explicit bet against this proposition. (They publicly said they wanted to find the youngest age where entrepreneurs could be successful.) To take another, AirBnB is a good counter-example. Should the founders have been experts in programming? Data science? Recommendations engines? Hospitality? If you erect enough artificial barriers, nobody will launch anything.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#64

Post by mrjivraj »

I hacked together this spreadsheet to help me better visualize my investments in a different manner:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o...

Been contemplating whether to leverage no-code tools to help level-up the functionality and visualizations

Would appreciate any pointers as appropriate. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#65

Post by bsid »

sbacic wrote: post #28

I think that the whole discussion around low-code is missing a pretty fundamental issue: most programming libraries suck. If I need, say, authentication, why do I need to install a library and then read a bunch of documentation on how to use it? Why can't I simply plug it in (just like low-code!) and have it automatically work? I think there is a lot of room to improve developer tooling and that the effort spent ther…

This is what we're trying to solve at Clerk, (https://www.clerk.dev) and it's been harder than we've expected, especially in regards to local development environments. Although we think we’ve made it seamless! Would love your opinion.

However, we're definitely not aiming it at non-programmers. I don't think completely general low/no-code solutions will ever take off. Everyone wants things far too custom, and at some point you won’t be able to beat the programming language of the time. Companies like retool are doing a great job in specific verticals — and I think it will always stay that way.

I think the next generation of dev-tools are going to be pretty impressive, especially with how easy and modular React components are — I’m bullish that React will become “low-code”

Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#69

Post by grumblepeet »

Not a business ~ we’re in Edtech but we produce apps, micro apps really, mostly served up embedded in Microsoft Teams for such tasks as desk and room bookings for example, created Using Microsoft PowerApps. We also use their AI builder tool embedded in model driven apps to read and extract data from invoices and push it into the finance system.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

#70

Post by jsemrau »

mrjivraj wrote: post #64

I hacked together this spreadsheet to help me better visualize my investments in a different manner: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o... Been contemplating whether to leverage no-code tools to help level-up the functionality and visualizations Would appreciate any pointers as appropriate. Thanks.

I have a similar 'VC-style' portfolio.
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