No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money? • Hacker News Board

Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?

#121

Post by pchristensen » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

parallel wrote: post #12

nunez wrote: post #6

No-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.

Groupon began as a collective action site called ThePoint - think love child of Kickstarter and Change.org. It was built out and functional but not getting traction. They shifted to using that platform to market deals at local businesses and it took off from there. It was code from the start. However, as it grew there were thousands of sales and editorial employees turning customer contacts into sales campaigns, but that's not really something that code could replace.

Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?

#122

Post by spderosso » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

woeirua wrote: post #93

They'll find some success, the same way that visual editors for desktop applications, and visual editors for web pages, found some success. In the end, these tools all require you to drop the facade once you want to do something too advanced. I personally don't see how these companies can be worth much. Just as with visual web editors, they started out charging a lot but over time the price floored out to zero. Now t…

> I personally don't see how these companies can be worth much. Just as with visual web editors, they started out charging a lot but over time the price floored out to zero. Now there are dozens of websites that give away their "no code" editors, with the hope that you'll pay them to host your site forever.

I agree. It seems like almost every day a new no-code platform crops up. Eventually, competition should bring prices down and hurt margins, right? What's the economic moat here?

For example, do you want to build a website or app from a spreadsheet? There's plenty of options and they all look very similar.

I am more bullish on the no-code solutions that target a niche/vertical, like forms (typeform) or member sites (memberstack) because you can offer complementary services (like Shopify does for shopping) and the niche is understood well enough that you can get close to covering 100% of use cases.

I would guess that a horizontal no-code company would have a harder time maintaining a competitive advantage.

Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?

#123

Post by contravariant » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #110

contravariant wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cuelang looks interesting, but also seems like a language with a very specific use case. I don't understand Dark Lang's reasoning for using a custom language when they could have made an IDE.

What very specific use case? I have found Cue to be versatile and usable anywhere yaml / json / config is used or needs to be validated. I'm mainly focused on code generation with Cue as the input. https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

I'd consider a situation where you've got a human readable (?) data format that needs to be validated a rather specific niche for a domain specific language. All I'm aware of in that area is XSD and DTD for XML (and maybe some recent efforts to make schemas for JSON but those aren't too flexible).

I'm happy someone is trying to fill that niche though, I'll remember cue for when I run into such a scenario.

Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?

#124

Post by AlchemistCamp » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #39

tluyben2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot nocode or lowcode tools are visual programming languages; they are in fact just programming tools but look (and often are) simpler to start off with. But when you need more, you are in fact programming with code, just via a visual interface. Which indeed can (will) become painful for many tasks. Then you are using the wrong tool for the job. Thing is, and this differs per market; most companies do not need anyt…

> When companies I work with look for no/low code, the only reason they will not use it is vendor lock in; if they cannot run on premise and/or ‘eject’ the code, they will not use it. Several products allow this What nocode tools don't have lock-in? The ones I know which are open source still have these proprietary add-ons for important stuff like authentication or connecting to other systems.

WordPress

Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?

#125

Post by eru » Fri, May 01, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #49

eru wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historical note: Viaweb was the baby of our host Paul Graham and his cofounders.

Historical note: Viaweb was written in lisp, so most of the users had a hard time customizing it (I heard of one book on modifying Viaweb, but have never actually seen it.) Yahoo eventually re-wrote it in another language.

You are mixing up two layers. Viaweb was written in Common Lisp, but the end users used RMTL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTML).

Whether you implement RTML in Python, Unlambda, Common Lisp or Rust doesn't make a difference to the user.

Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?

#126

Post by fock » Fri, May 01, 2020, 10:06 AM UTC

so, the big question for me is: these tools generally package a lot of functionality in their "no-code" wrappings, otherwise they would be near useless (for example see LabView and Co, which are painful to work in and interestingly seldom marketed as "no-code"...).

So what's technically the difference to a high-level API? History tells us (from Fortran to Emacs to TeX to R/Keras/...) that these tools generally last _a lot_ longer than any of the non-spreadsheet no-codes. While at the same time being much more flexible.