No-code = code from another person
The inner system effect.
No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#22No-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.
Wait a minute, I thought software was the one emulating grunt worker functionality this whole time!
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#23I 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 spec…
That's always the case though. The reason why we use programming languages is because we need the expressiveness they offer. Attempting to simplify it any further severely limits the type of applications you can build. And so you end up with cookie cutter apps. It might be fun, it might even be useful for some back office tasks, but if the marginal cost to produce a thing goes to near zero, it would imply the supply of apps competing for that category would explode.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#24The 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-cod…
As I remember it, POF was just a side project intended to self-learn Asp.Net.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#25No-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…
Totally agree on the MVP front. The term "no-code" may be annoying or way too "buzzwordy" to some, but I think that really misses the point.
These tools (WordPress, Zapier, Launchrock, etc.) can be used to get something out in the world quickly and figure out if it's worth investing time/money into.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#26This post makes no-code feel like an MLM. Half of the highlighted startups are no-code startups founded to teach about no-code.
This is the vibe I regularly get from Indie Hackers. So many start-ups exist to serve the start-up/SaaS industry. Every second day there's a "SaaS that helps you create a SaaS that sends Emails for SaaSes" start-up posted there.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#27The title is just extremely wrong and clickbait. There's no content or data about "rise". If anything, the default founder is no-code outside of SV. There's a sharp rise of coding-founders, just because basic coding is becoming "basic knowledge" and taught in highschools now. I won't click these clickbait indiehackers links again.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 spec…
That's always the case though. The reason why we use programming languages is because we need the expressiveness they offer. Attempting to simplify it any further severely limits the type of applications you can build. And so you end up with cookie cutter apps. It might be fun, it might even be useful for some back office tasks, but if the marginal cost to produce a thing goes to near zero, it would imply the supply…
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 anything more than endless streams of crud apps, and that is where these tools shine. You (and many of HN) might work in the b2c market, but where I work, people do not care much about how things look or ux; they care if they work just a little better than the sap or oracle interfaces they had before. Actually, this goes for many (most?) b2c products as well; most (traditional; challenger banks are a lot better) banking or airline apps I know look like bad template barf-ups (many are indeed that, bought from the same cooking cutting companies) and yet people use them. Would it be better if they were custom designed with money spent on actual ux and design? Sure, but apparently not enough to matter to the company commissioning it.
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 and they are fairly popular (so much in fact that they cannot find enough ‘devs’ for their clients).
These systems have their place; it is just (much) faster (some boring things in regular environments are just a few clicks with these tools) for some x% of applications while another y% you cannot do with them or is very difficult; I would still do the x% in such a tool as thinking ‘we might need x+y later on’ is premature usually and in my experience does not pan out. We have programmed applications ‘created for expansion’ 15-20 years ago that run to this day which would have fit in the x%; aka we wasted time and money while the expansion was never realised by the client.
Edit;
> it would imply the supply of apps competing for that category would explode.
And that is a very consumer centric approach; we are not all making fitness apps or something; these apps would all look (more or less) the same but work on different APIs and data; that is fine for almost everything; not only some internal stuff. It helps companies a great deal to just have something their clients can use vs nothing, even if the cost is close to zero; and they cannot be the same as they talk with different systems and different data. Even creating partner dashboards more efficiently than slinging code is something people do all the time and you cannot ‘just copy paste that’ to another company.
These products are not generally meant to build ‘the next whatsapp’. But you can prototype it with them and show investors; I agree with you there though; wrong tool for the job.
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#29PG’s Viaweb was a “no-code” startup for making web stores, that eventually became Yahoo Stores, before “no-code” was a thing, in the late 90s
Re: No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money?
#30I find it odd that the article's topic is literally "the surge of people taking a shot at building a business with no code products", but the author then goes on to be really surprised that so many people in this group are trying to build a business compared with "developers in general".
Well if you interview developers who represent their startup product i guess you might end up with similar figures of "wants to be an entrepreneur"?
It's missing the point that devs might have a number of incentives in building tools outside of a business scope, but when someone sets out to build a product even when it's not their job & passion "anyway", it pretty damn sure aims to make money