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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?

#91

Post by verdverm »

contravariant wrote: post #88
alexgmcm wrote: post #53

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.

I will never get the rationale behind creating a new proprietary language solely to protect people from 'full blown' programming. Or, in some cases, being able to read/manipulate config files with standard tools.

Dark Lang is doing the same, we almost did, but are using Cuelang for our take on this now

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

#93

Post by woeirua »

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 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.

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

#94

Post by indymike »

The first real low-code solution was a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were what drove businesses to buy PCs in the early 80s.

In the 90s, CASE (computer-automated software engineering) was a big thing. Powerbuilder was huge. Novell had one where you could draw a flowchart and fill in dialogs to make client-server apps... UI builders became common as language vendors added graphical IDEs to their game.

In the 00's we had a lot of visual development tools for websites. Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc...

In the 10's we had Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes.

Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code.

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

#95

Post by wtvanhest »

chrisco255 wrote: post #23
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…

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…

On one hand this is correct, many apps compete only on form function like (Instagram vs snap).

I think there will always be a random form function that captivates (today’s ticktok), but my prediction is that the web will be won less by competing on form factor, and rather won focused on other parts of the user experience.

In a simple example, logistics is an obvious differentiator, 2 day vs 5 day shipping etc.

There are so many dimensions to compete on and app design will contribute to many of those dimensions, but some ways to compete will not involve coding.

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

#96

Post by tannhaeuser »

wolfgke wrote: post #65
Animats wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, the earliest browsers pre-CSS weren't just viewers but had also editing with primitive styling, though it's difficult to imagine in today's CSS-heavy web. Personally, I think adding a complete new item-value syntax and value space on top of HTML/SGML (which already has attributes for exactly this purpose) was completely uncalled for, and to this date we're hearing about the structure/presentation dichotomy which just never made sense as a justification for adding additional syntax.

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

#97

Post by contravariant »

verdverm wrote: post #91
contravariant wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never get the rationale behind creating a new proprietary language solely to protect people from 'full blown' programming. Or, in some cases, being able to read/manipulate config files with standard tools.

Dark Lang is doing the same, we almost did, but are using Cuelang for our take on this now

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.

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

#98

Post by filleduchaos »

vmchale wrote: post #92

Why though? 13 year-olds can learn CSS/HTML for their neopets, I get it's scary but this stuff isn't poison.

Which neopets site would you pay money for?

(Or, child labour laws aside, how many 13 year olds would you approach to build products for you?)

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

#99

Post by pphysch »

dragandj wrote: post #67
redis_mlc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depending on how heavily metaprogramming is relied on, relatively so

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

#100

Post by _curious_ »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #10
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…

Hopefully this isn't ungenerous, but it seems like a marketing/signaling term that people on places like indiehackers use to market their products. If it wasn't labeled as such, a nondescript framework with the plugins + content that you could build for the last 20 years wouldn't stand out. Bothers me that it is something that apparently people are proud of, they'd empower themselves a lot more by sitting down and pi…

"it seems like a marketing/signaling term that people on places like indiehackers use to market their products"

Bingo.

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