Is No-Code the revolution it claims to be?

No-code web and mobile app development tools have made a huge splash over the last year. However, as many of you know, they are nothing new.

No-code origins

I don't plan to spend time discussing when and where the terms low-code and no-code originated or even go into too much detail about the difference. The essence is all in the names: low-code requires some low-level knowledge about basic coding principles, while no-code requires none of that.

In my experience, low-code usually requires much more advanced coding skills than they claim. Yes, you write less code, and a bunch of functionality is abstracted, but you still need to understand how programming works on a conceptual level. And this is much harder than it looks.

On the other hand, no-code aims to be an actual drag-and-drop experience where you rely primarily on pre-built functionalities and find creative ways to use these pre-defined blocks to build what you want.

In my honest opinion, no-code development is probably around 40-50% trying to figure out how to circumvent a dumb limitation the developers left in there. But then again, most traditional developers spend at least half their time researching and googling stuff, so I am trying not to get frustrated with no-code development.

Then what is the main reason I am doing my best to enjoy no-code? It's simple. I love the concept behind it. Ever since high school, I've been coding as a hobby, and I've built numerous prototypes/MVPs over the years, primarily for personal use or to play around with new tech.

And why do I love the principles of no-code? Well, the first native mobile app I ever built was an iOS app to track daily tasks and progress toward goals. I wrote it in the back then very hot Swift 2 programming language and used the lovely Parse backend by Facebook (sadly no longer available). It took me about 6 months to learn Swift and XCode and to build the app. I think I got pretty stuck on the 2-way sync between local storage and the parse backend, as I wanted the app to be usable offline.

What if I wanted to build the same project leveraging no-code app builders? Three hours in Glide if I give up on the local storage functionality, about 1-2 weeks in a more robust platform like bubble.io. And that's magical for non-technical people like me who want to build stuff but can't code.

Is no-code a new concept?

Most definitely not. We can look at WordPress (the most popular website builder in the world, with more than 50% of webpages built on it globally), the OG no-code web builder, introduced by Matt Mullenweg in 2003, 20 years ago. Granted, any custom extension of functionality requires you to code or hire someone to do it for you, but as more and more templates and plugins became available, it became more and more faithful to the concept of no-code.

We can look even earlier at Macromedia Dreamweaver (before Adobe acquired Macromedia). It was a horrible WYSIWYG editor, but it also offered some almost no-code functions within. It really was groundbreaking, and it worked like sh*t.

Now, let's move to more recent times. No-code, even in its modern, more refined way, is nothing new. Webflow and Bubble.io have been around for 10 years... you get the point.

Why now?

So what's with the recent explosion in the popularity of no-code tools?

I believe there is a particular reason for the rise of no-code in 2023, primarily fueled by advancements in ML/AI, namely the LLM democratization that OpenIAI started earlier this year with ChatGPT. We've had LLMs for a few years, which were pretty good, but with ChatGPT, OpenAI opened the door to everyone. Each citizen developer (non-technical developer using no-code tools to create software) can now build robust AI-powered apps. And that's precisely what they've been doing.

YouTube is full of tutorials claiming that you can use a simple no-code builder like Softr.io, fine-tune a GPT model with as little as 100 data points, link it to your site, and start charging people to use it.

Needless to say, it's not as simple as that. And even if it was in the beginning, I am pretty sure we have more than enough vanilla GPT text generators.

My journey

For quite some time, I fully believed that no-code is a hype movement and won't grow that much. Not that I ever questioned WordPress, Webflow, and the like. But all the promises of building a SaaS web app in 1 week and retiring after selling it 6 months later made zero sense to me. Honestly, it still reminds me a lot of the online MLM get-rich-quick schemes that were all the hype when I first got internet access back in the day.

However, my view on the subject has dramatically changed over the past few months.

You see, I am one of 2 co-founders of a cloud-based FP&A platform for SMBs and individual business owners (no sales pitch coming, promise!). We are still in the early stages of gaining traction and proving Product-Market Fit. Still, essentially, we are looking to build a SaaS that hooks up to your company data and provides valuable financial insights.

It was a fun weekend passion project that we started 3 years ago. We never thought about doing it full-time, raising capital, etc.

Back then, I had a financial ratios analysis Excel template that I sold to clients for a nice chunk of money, and then it took me 2 hours to update it with their data. I thought, why not turn this into a website and charge a small amount so businesses can do it independently at scale? And that's how the initial idea behind Magnimetrics was born.

The problem? My co-founder/CTO and I (CEO) had no idea how to start a company, let alone validate our idea and ensure we were building something people wanted before spending months on development.

Over the next 2 years, we spent countless hours on weekends and nights after work building the Magnimetrics platform. We were so excited that we kept piling on feature after feature.

Then, we launched our beta. We quickly learned that people didn't want all our features in the clunky format we had them, and we were losing their interest with our slow onboarding experience.

We ended up switching gears a bit and reworking our key offerings, but that's not the point I am trying to make.

I wasted a few minutes of your time telling you this story to make the following point.

My point

We should have grabbed my Excel sheet and hardcoded the same analysis in a website where users can upload their financials in Excel or type them directly into the platform. That's an MVP, not what we did. Doing so would've allowed us to get in front of users in 3 months instead of 2 years, which would've helped us understand the SMB/solopreneur needs much sooner. Now imagine we also had to hire people for all the development. It would've been a complete disaster in financial terms as well!

That's where I see no-code making a considerable impact.

Using Bubble.io, or even a smart collection of Make.com/Zapier automations and a much faster and simpler to learn and develop no-code builder like Softr.io, I can now churn out an MVP based on my Excel file in 2-3 weeks. And that's the beauty of no-code.

Succeeding with a company has little to do with the tools you use to build your product. Few end customers would care if your SaaS is hosted on AWS or built on Bubble.io. Succeeding takes a lot more than building the product. And that's why I don't think no-code tools would help us build better businesses.

The beauty of no-code is that it allows everyone to fail much faster.

Instead of spending 3-6 months to create your MVP just to find out people love it but won't pay even $5 a month to use it, we can now build the MVP in 2-3 weeks utilizing no-code and then start putting it in front of users to validate our idea.

Why am I sharing this?

Now, this is a topic I've been thinking and talking about a lot recently.

So many people are preaching no-code lately that I want to try it properly. I plan to try to fail faster with 2-3 small app ideas. Over the next few months, I plan to spend 5-10 hours a week (nights + weekends) to build MVPs for three vastly different app concepts.

My goal is to answer the following three questions:

1. Is it possible to do it in a few weeks while still spending most of my energy, time, and effort working on our existing startup?

2. Is it true that no-code micro-SaaS apps run independently, requiring zero to minimum involvement once everything is set up (quite skeptical here)?

3. How big of a difference does it make to be able to ship an MVP fast?

Remember that I won't be prototyping (what literally 100% of YouTube tutorials show). Instead, I plan to release a fully functional MVP, share it with people, and see if there are interested users. If, by any chance, one of the three ideas I have started to pick up, I will most probably exit it immediately; if one turns out to be very promising, I might even try to sell it on acquire.com, but that's another story for another time.

I will keep you posted on how this experiment progresses, so subscribe to see where it goes.

Thanks for reading my first newsletter issue 😊

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