Anyone built a business with no-code tools?
SaaS, productized service, freelance - anyone doing it successfully with no-code, low-code tools?
I think that the whole discussion around low-code is missing a pretty fundamental issue: most programming libraries suck.
If I need, say, authentication, why do I need to install a library and then read a bunch of documentation on how to use it? Why can't I simply plug it in (just like low-code!) and have it automatically work?
I think there is a lot of room to improve developer tooling and that the effort spent there would produce much greater rewards than developing a higher level abstraction, such as a pluggable authentication widget aimed at non-programmers.
We are! We started Lowdefy [0], co-founder here shameless plug, by building apps for customers. Our model is to build their back-office apps for them with no up-font dev charge, we just agree on a monthly fee. This monthly fee includes any changes and reporting in the future at no additional charge, as long as the scope remains the same. And they own the data in their database of choice.
The model is not perfect and does not work well for every type of process, but we have a few very satisfied customers. Just enough success to slowly grow our business and buy us enough free time to build and improve Lowdefy.
Currently it's working really well, like one gear turns the next. The apps we sell help us test and improve our low-code platform. The more apps we sell the more we invest in our platform and as a result all our apps get better, more feature rich and easier to maintain. Hopefully next, by building an open-source community around Lowdefy we can accelerate this cycle.
[0] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy
Sure, look at any low-code platform that has an ISV partner program. You'll find plenty of success stories. My company even started that way, and ended up growing over 15 years and getting bought out before we even looked at going full-stack for our products. We're just shy of 20 years since our initial launch, and just now finally coding at our first full-stack version.
To be fair, we did start adding custom code after the first few years, but we went a really long way before losing the last of the low-code platform.
Hmm, I’m a Salesforce developer and I’d say most companies I’ve worked with have used Salesforce’s no-code tools, most very far to the core. Power retailers, broadband, banks, just about every big company. It’s an absolute mess at some point tho, but it does work.
I've had 2 friends start revenue generating MVPs on Bubble.io
One is a Cameo-like platform for LatAm, the other is a TikTok like short-form audio app .
I've been incredibly impressed by the platform and extensibility. If you have basic coding skills I think it's much more powerful than Webflow or other platforms.
https://bubble.io/showcase
I believe for the case of SaaS, at worst it's just not possible, and at best the odds of identifying and building a successful SaaS tool with no code is probably orders of magnitude lower than otherwise.
That being said there are many people who have built businesses around helping companies with setting up WordPress and Shopify sites, which are all about navigating their admin panel, dashboards, etc. You would not be the first person to help set up websites with no code.
Don't do this. I know that sounds like bad advice, but if you aren't comfortable working with lower-level design paradigms, who's going to fix things when something goes wrong? You'll eternally be in debt to engineers who are happy to take your rudimentary API contracts and make free money. Trying to be an entrepreneur in an area that you don't have experience in is a money pit.
I used to work at a startup that utilized Webflow heavily for the frontend. The CEO was a designer by trade and very good with it, so he would build out all of the pages there. We'd then adapt the markup into Rails views and include the stylesheets Webflow generated and boom, working product.
It was extraordinarily fast for static content, although forms and controls were a bit more difficult. We ended up building out some primitives using Stimulus and ActionView Components to make life easier, and overall it was a surprisingly nice workflow.
Would I recommend it to others? Possibly. It worked really well for our situation where time and agility were valued above all else, but I attribute the success there in part to the way the team worked and the fact that our founder was so proficient with it.
Not really low/no-code but the Views module in Drupal lets you build very nice simple tools for customers with just a few clicks.
I've built webshops with it.
Kind of. I've seen a startup go pretty far (series A, at least, with thousands of customers) with Google Sheets + low code integrations with those sheets.
Yes we have!
And our costumers too. We develop and sell: https://www.kalipsostudio.com/. It's a RAD tool low-code call it what you want. And we "Sysdev" use Kalipso internally to develop and sell (with local partners) 3 final products.
MSS, DCAPP, SYSLOG (in Portuguese)
https://www.sysdevmss.com/
https://sysdevdcapp.com/
https://www.syslogmobile.com/
MSS has more than 15 years on the market. So it's a lot of people relying their sales on a software that was build with a RAD tool.
Our costumers are manly 3 types: Consulting companies that resell MSS/DCAPP or use Kalipso to create their own solution.
Freelancers that use Kalipso to create their own solutions and bespoke programs to costumers.
And big companies with an IT department that use Kalipso internally.
MSS/DCAPP is manly for Portuguese/Spanish language countries.
Kalipso is used everywhere from Argentina to Vietnam.
And we ha no idea how many apps are out there build because we don't have royalties and we don't collect any data.
Here's a few companies built only on no-code/low-code products:
1. Makerpad
2. Lambda school
3. Ondeck
There are a lot of consulting services exclusively focused on building for Outsystems, Mendix, Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, Wix.com, IBM Apex, Appsheet, and Shopify platforms.
The number of entrepreneurs building on low code/no code platforms probably runs into hundred of thousands. Maybe even more if you count the consulting businesses built for the Salesforce Lightning platform.
I run an open source low code platform to build internal apps called Appsmith[0]. We know dozens of consulting companies who've built Appsmith apps for their clients. I bet every fast growing low code/no code product has small businesses built on it because the tech consulting market is just so huge.
[0]https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
i was an adviser for a startup that never moved past using email, slack, excel, ifttt and a little bit of cloudformation for all it's "code". they always intended to build out a "platform" but the tooling they had scaled fine and took them right to acquisition ~2 years after launch
Do VB6 and Delphi count as low code tools? If so, there are tons of people out there who got lots of things done with them 20 years ago.
Everything starts as low code, but complexity always creeps in. It's like Factorio, the code will grow.
If you want some great material on no code I'd check out Makerpad.co, I just came across this community and its awesome.
For myself, I just built a website with UMSO, newsletter with GetRevue, and public knowledge base with Notion and Super.so
My newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/alfiemarsh
My website: www.alfie-marsh.com
Public knowledge base: i actually stopped using Super.so because it didn't show databases well - product still has some work to do
I'm also looking into Circle for a membership community and Bubble to create apps.
Yes - over the past 2.5 years. We have built products for customers that handle 100s of millions of dollars in transactions using low-code tools along with RPA.
While its really great to get started..roadblocks tend be major when compared to opensource frameworks like rails or spring boot.
At some point the low-code became more-code than our usual spring boot/rails approach. Integrations with libraries that the platform does not contain functionality for is a major headache.
I think a sweet spot would be a low-code/no-code platform with minimal abstraction built on top of currently popular web frameworks.
I built a company on No-code called VentureBasecamp which was an EduTech product to help entrepreneurs at incubators become more investable. I was heading the product and decided against hiring devs to save the cost and built the whole product myself using Bubble.io, Bridge LMS, Typeform, Auth0 and a few other tools. We launched our beta within a few months and the program was so successful that we got mentioned in a UN report in the MENA region as a best practice in incubator training. We even won an Indian Govt tender against large established giants in the ecosystem including large universities with age old entrepreneurship cells to train the Govt’s 101 incubators. Eventually, we got acquired by Wadhwani Foundation and became their current Venture Fastrack program, all through the speed of experimentation and iteration through no-code which helped us focus on other parts of the business. In terms of scalability, we load tested a simple API call to our web app and clocked 3000 users/sec before it broke.
PS: I don’t work there anymore as I am now building a No-code SaaS company called Heyflow.app right now.
Now that I have your attention, let me tell you that critics of no-code and low code think about it wrong. It is not a silver bullet for the whole product. Think of your product as modules/micro services not as a monolith (VPs of Engineering reading this and saying Duh!). Some modules can use No-code, some low code, some NodeJS scripting depending on the use case and keeping them all loosely coupled allows to make future changes easily. No-code is another tool in Batman’s belt, not the whole belt.
Yes, so many and I got invited to pitch at NY tech meetup (twice) and got into Techstars with companies I hacked together with tools. It's a really great way to test an idea quickly and iterate without much funding. Be warned, at a certain point it gets tricky to scale and data transfer can be a nightmare esp if you have complex payments, so take the time you need with that. You can build an MVP of almost anything with squarespace + typeform. My go-to tools for building a startup over-night are squarespace commerce, typeform, calendly, zoom, google spreadsheets, mailchimp, fullstory, google analytics, intercom. With squarespace, don't change the design templates too much or it starts to look ugly. Typeform just added advanced logic so you can really do a lot with it. Here are some no-code projects I built with these tools. They are at the point right now where we've got thousands of users with no code, but we need developers to take them to the next level. Here are examples https://www.masteryhour.org/ , https://www.modulo.app/, http://schoolclosures.org/ (served 100k families so far) and a new one I'm especially proud of with a ton of advanced logic built in. It's very much a work in progress but pretty intelligent given it's just a form https://modulolearning.typeform.com/to/VBJmkLTu
yes - built https://blook.io without code (webflow / zapier / memberstack) and scaled to 100k+ year one
I hacked together this spreadsheet to help me better visualize my investments in a different manner:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o...
Been contemplating whether to leverage no-code tools to help level-up the functionality and visualizations
Would appreciate any pointers as appropriate. Thanks.
We are building packages around WeBase [1]. As an example we have a solution for small businesses/startups that includes a website/forms/email lists etc all in one... here's a site using this solution: https://www.sbaloanshq.com/
Lots of opportunity with these tools and platforms!
[1] https://www.webase.com
Beware the lock-in and make sure your roadmap is compatible with low/no code. But definitely doable, I know of several really good examples.
I’m working with a startup at the moment that has put all their investment into their customer facing app, but almost everything behind the scenes is built in spreadsheets and low code tools. Can’t spill too much about the company, but think something like “get flowers delivered within 30 minutes via a fancy app”, but not flowers.
Without building in this way there is no way they would be growing at the rate they are - they would still be writing their MVP (they are now valued at >$100m in year 3, and are still supported entirely by spreadsheets as the investment in terms of focus is towards anything customer facing - they know they need to sort everything else out, it’s just everything has to be prioritised). Also their ops are still evolving so quickly that any investment in writing code to support ops is likely to slow down ops change (who need to be able to respond to issues nobody has seen before).
Yes. Lots of people have built successful businesses with just a phone.
I have seen prototypes/MVPs done with lowcode/nocode tools + manual processes (google forms are highly underrated for this type of stuff) but never a full business.
Not using, but building. It significantly lowers the barrier of entry for new customers to use the tech.
What's important for me is that users can ramp up from drag 'n drop to coding by hand. Otherwise they might just end up feeling stuck with the tool.
I'd rather see users use and then discard our tool once they ramped up their skills, in favour of then just writing code using our tech. Much better than getting stuck forever in our competitors' rather limited toy editors. :)
I did (& it’s been brining in good money for the past 2+ years)
I built the Castup[1] website using Webflow, use Outgrow for onboarding, Stripe for payments, Slack for communication. It’s a productized service startup in the podcasting space but I have enough knowledge of no-code tools to build a SaaS as well.
[1] https://useCastup.com
I'm the founder of Makerpad[0] which is built solely with no-code tools, teaching others how to build with no-code tools.
I was full-time on it with a small team for 18 months when we were acquired by Zapier in March this year.
Our revenue was public in 2019/2020-ish and pulled in around $420k/year
[0] https://www.makerpad.co/
Not a business ~ we’re in Edtech but we produce apps, micro apps really, mostly served up embedded in Microsoft Teams for such tasks as desk and room bookings for example, created Using Microsoft PowerApps. We also use their AI builder tool embedded in model driven apps to read and extract data from invoices and push it into the finance system.
Currently advising a friend who is building a business and my approach was for them to go totally no-code. None of the employees at the startup have tech-experience so I've proposed Airtable as the core of the product. It is essentially disability support. Anyone do something similar or have any advice?
I believe no-code is the way to go for non-tech founders to build an MVP. I built a landing page using one of lp builders and deliver the product itself via one of the existing messengers. https://www.woondlab.com
Keep in mind that 2/3 of software costs are in longer-term maintenance. If the results are not maintenance-friendly, it won't be wallet-friendly. As a proof of concept or an emergency rush job, it might be okay, but don't hitch your wagon to it.
Some good examples of businesses built with no-code on nocodestartupideas.com
I'm using Bubble to build a service for independent sales reps wanting to buy qualified leads from the beverages and packaged goods industries. Revenue comes from per-lead payments and monthly plans.
Woocommerce + a POD plugin/partner + Trello
*all designs are hand custom-made however until we launch our Ai powered version.
Has anyone published apps on appstores with no code tools. If you have I would love to hear your experience
notion+mailchimp+zapier. NO-CODE takes over
Honestly I love nocode but only for my own stuff. I wouldn't even want to try mixing nocode and GDPR. It's probably easier to just code the thing haha