Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

indiehackers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 126 posts

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

#51

Post by PopeDotNinja »

gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

When you say it like that, I'm pretty impressed that I ran a successful no-construction business by renting an office in an existing building :)

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

#52

Post by steve_taylor »

gumby wrote: post #5

I 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” in this article refers to founders who don’t code.

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

#53

Post by alexgmcm »

I think the future will be in "low-code" rather than "no-code".

For example, Looker has LookerML which while it isn't full blown programming, it allows for a lot of customisation and far more complex use cases when compared with "no-code" alternatives like Tableau.

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

#54

Post by celloductor »

gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

yea building complex, polished apps using no-code tools is arguably more harder than just writing code and using frameworks. it's a different set of skills, albeit still a skill so i don't get why programmers are feeling threatened by it.

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

#55

Post by PeterisP »

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.

Conceptually some no-code tools work essentially as glorified editors or code generators for a particular subset of a mainstream programming language. In this case, at any point you can abandon the no-code tool for a project or part of it and continue maintaining and developing it as an ordinary bundle of code.

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

#56

Post by jstanley »

ryanSrich wrote: post #17
gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

> I’m still bullish on the idea of no code though. The tools are there. They just need more functionality.

Maybe, but I think the idea of setting up a SaaS business without writing any code just won't work.

If the tooling is simple enough that a non-coder can get it to work, then the no-code SaaS business is providing very little of value. The user could just do the job themselves using the same no-code tools.

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

#57

Post by pydry »

tluyben2 wrote: post #28
chrisco255 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyt…

>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.

IME at least 20% of the needs of these companies are not met by "basic CRUD app programming" which is why these no-code things never really take off despite often appearing quite impressive. 80% is not enough.

Basic CRUD also implies an understanding of domain modeling and normalized relational db design. In practice these are uncommon enough skills among developers never mind users of tools like these. That's half the reason why spreadsheets business users want turned into apps are so horrendous - it's not even intrinsically a problem with excel, it's just that the relationships between the domain objects are usually confused and the data is in a mess.

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

#58

Post by ozim »

celloductor wrote: post #54
gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

yea building complex, polished apps using no-code tools is arguably more harder than just writing code and using frameworks. it's a different set of skills, albeit still a skill so i don't get why programmers are feeling threatened by it.

I feel threatened by it in a very specific way. There are pointy haired bosses who will order that: "now we will do low code". When they bump into obstacle that is not doable in low-code they will be angry at the developers that cannot deliver what customer wants. Where with just normal development you would not run into such issues.

As a developer I have some power to say no to such thing but marketing people at low-code can promise everything without ever providing what they promised.

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

#59

Post by BerislavLopac »

ryanSrich wrote: post #17
gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

I think this fits here perfectly: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensiv...

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

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

coverup wrote: post #22
parallel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

No, with the AI hype, emulating software with people is all the rage once again!
Post reply on HN