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

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

#61

Post by Ma8ee »

pydry wrote: post #57
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…

>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 modeli…

I've worked for a company that market themselves with "No code". How it worked there was that we spent a lot of time understanding the users need and business domain and modelled a properly normalised db from it. Then came the "no code" part, which was a platform that made it easy and very fast to create the first iteration of the interface from the database. For those things where the mapping to some tables in the database were simple it was just a few clicks. Something like search customer and create/update customer pages takes less than a minute to create.

And you are of course right in that this will only create 80% of what the customer needs. But the marginal cost for us to create those first 80% of the application were almost zero. And since we weren't worse than anyone else with the last 20% we could deliver fast, inexpensive and still have large margins.

The mistake I think many do when they think "no code" is that they think that they can eliminate the developer and let business people just "configure" the new application. But those people have the insulting idea that the only thing that makes programming hard is syntax.

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

#62

Post by wolfgke »

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…

> 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.

Why the "hate" for code? I immediately understand the problems that typical programming languages have for people who are not trained in programming. But there exist good reasons why other approaches like "visual programming" have failed (except for some niches). So in my opinion the solution is not to "spread hate" against code for a "stupid" market pitch, but take the time to develop programming languages that are better suited to the needs of the customer.

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

#63

Post by tluyben2 »

Ma8ee wrote: post #61
pydry wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 modeli…

I've worked for a company that market themselves with "No code". How it worked there was that we spent a lot of time understanding the users need and business domain and modelled a properly normalised db from it. Then came the "no code" part, which was a platform that made it easy and very fast to create the first iteration of the interface from the database. For those things where the mapping to some tables in the d…

> The mistake I think many do when they think "no code" is that they think that they can eliminate the developer

Exactly. No-where did I mention you do not need (good) devs for this. They are just not writing code (in the traditional way). No/lowcode is not saying the same as end-user development, although it gets mixes up quite a bit (also by the companies selling the tools), it is not what I mean when when working with such tools.

And in my experience at least, you can push back closer to the 80% than the 100%, so sure, you don't get that last 20% (or part of it) but maybe I can convince the client they don't need it. And if they do, I would choose (maybe) another tool for the job like I said.

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

#64

Post by mettamage »

wolfgke wrote: post #62
ryanSrich wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

> 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. Why the "hate" for code? I immediately understand the problems that typical programming languages have for people who are not trained in programming. But there exist good reasons why other approaches like "visual programming" have…

I can think of a few. Most of these things could also be done with text-based code, but typically aren't when you're just starting out:

- No set up issues (visual programming is cloud-based)

- Less of a discoverability issue (visual programming shows a lot of things all at once)

- A sense of familiarity (people have seen flow chart like things before)

- It's easier to see the difference between arguments and parameters

Full disclosure: I have almost never seen visual programming languages, but I got the idea that there was no devil's advocate present within you. So here I am ;-) I find it quite easy to think from a beginner's perspective, because in some sense I can't fathom that I know what I know now since I never thought I'd ever know this much in my entire life (and I'm only 31, lol).

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

#65

Post by wolfgke »

Animats wrote: post #42
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…

I don’t really understand what “no code” is. Drag and drop plus lots of options in dialog boxes, looks like. It's been done before. Viamall, (later Yahoo Store) the first online shopping cart system, was very much like that. Totally hosted, updated through the web, pay by the month. When Yahoo bought them, they demanded a cut of revenue, too. Those seem to be the key components of this concept. Other ancestors includ…

> The web was supposed to be WYSIWYG, and that got broken.

The web was never supposed to be WYSIWYG; this rather is/was a marketing claim by vendors of visual tools for generating websites.

What is true is that it was supposed to be very easy to generate websites in HTML.

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

#66

Post by addHocker »

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…

Most companys will only need crud apps at the start, then overload them because behaviour is always not good enough. Then hire some professional to fix the spaghetti mess they made, while demanding low rates and zero hours, cause "its all already there".

Which is why, any self-respecting professional should decline these jobs, and why every manager who wants to prevent double development (which is the endresult), should stamp out these eco-systems with a iron boot.

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

#67

Post by dragandj »

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.

Whereas if they wrote it in C++, the average store owner Joe would have a walk in the park with it?

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

#68

Post by jedberg »

Thorentis wrote: post #26
robjan wrote: post #19

This 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.

During a gold rush, it's the tool makers who make all the money. -- Someone smarter than me.

Startups have been in a gold rush phase for a while. Making tools for startups was a good idea.

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

#69

Post by _glass »

in architecture it is grasshopper for rhino, in sound it is puredata or max/msp, in business SAP is pushing this since the 90s. with the idea to enable business to implement things w/o the need of developers: (1) brf+ to implement business logic, (2) the new integration product "cloud plattform integration" to integrate via flows (3) sap crm aet to create crud functionality. in some way it always fails. the best thing about having code is the versioning, the things you can automate.

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

#70

Post by david_draco »

soared wrote: post #3

No-code is a funny term and I'm not sure what it means. I would understand if it was non-dev or something similar. But most "no-code" people I know who work on side projects can edit basic javascript/etc, but couldn't write much from scratch. I'd imagine this group is the subset the author is looking at. If you want to look at people who actually can't code, they are likely non-technical, and not using a tool like za…

> No-code is a funny term and I'm not sure what it means.

I think it used to be called visual programming.

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