10 ms·

Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

40 points by bdv500 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
For 4 hour experiments, it sounds like a reasonable strategy; but what happens are your requirements become increasingly complex? Is "Low Code" going to work, for example, if you want to implement A/B tests? Possibly one day.
- loopz 7y ago
  For what should be a prototyping solution: Definately, a resounding Yes!
mscasts 7y ago
As with all titles that starts with a question, the answer is probably no. Sure it may work for some easy cases but most products aren't that simple and as soon as you want to add some extra functionality you basically have to rewrite the application from scratch. I'm happy that it worked for this guy but if I was a betting man I wouldn't bet on "low code".
- blazespin 7y ago
  she is right, but this a terrible example because her idea is weak but her marketing is strong.. the future will likely see apps being built in collaboration with AI.
  - psv1 7y ago
    > apps being built in collaboration with AI Oh please no, that's just so unnecessary.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Real life is imitating art at this point, truly. Saw that whole plot point in the final season of Silicon Valley that was released last month and thought it was one of the most farfetched unrealistic scenarios in the whole show. Looks like I was really wrong.
    - blazespin 7y ago
      Silly, it’s already happening. Some of the auto completion is pretty awesome.
blazespin 7y ago
yeah, she missed the part where she used her network to market.
klodolph 7y ago
Great, you made a location-specific clone of an app that has been made hundreds or thousands of times before. Is this the future? Yes, for people who are pushing out clones of simple, well-understood apps. You can put up a web store in a couple days, or make a first-person shooter, or a dating app.
kyllo 7y ago
For prototyping relatively simple, UI-focused apps, yes, I think low-code and no-code solutions do have a place. The key is having the awareness and discipline, when the prototype is validated and starts to gain traction, to throw it away and build the real production app using what you learned, instead of just accumulating months to years of technical debt and cruft on top of a prototype. If you launch with a "permatype" you will eventually find yourself facing a very expensive and painful "2.0" project.
fxtentacle 7y ago
I feel like this is the self-help hype all over again. People with a network of followers can sell almost any weird stuff. And then afterwards they praise themselves for doing so.
thinkingkong 7y ago
No. But these are not the products of the future. Another way to look at it, is that anything like this might be a more well understood component of another application or product, and the more they're used the easier they'll be to integrate. The products of 2020's will end up being highly specific to some niche / vertical and require lots of industry knowledge.
lalos 7y ago
Low code is definitely the future. Look at all the things you can do by calling the right APIs and/or all the scaffolding available. The clear trend changed after RoR and managed cloud services like Heroku popped up. Now the big players offer cloud services that would take months to code but if you pay up you have access (everything as a service). The lesson for developers is work on tools consumed by other developers and if this is not the case probably someone else is working on automating bits of pieces of your work.
- tguedes 7y ago
  This has literally always been the case for the history of software. Unless you're willing to tell me an operating system is a low-code solution, building software has always been about obfuscating the frustrating parts to focus on the stuff that actually matters. Infrastructure as a service is just the current iteration.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > This has literally always been the case for the history of software. And the code complexity doesn't actually go down; as it takes less code to meet a given set of expectations, expectations expand.
- aries1980 7y ago
  Low code means low expectations. Coding is not the hard part, but to satisfy the end-user or regulatory needs with the positive (or at least minimal negative) impact on the user experience. Complications arise when you think on "what can go wrong" (e.g. you lost a webhook going to your CRM and you want to understand why it happened, how it impacted the user, how can you recover automatically) and start mitigating them.
planetzero 7y ago
"I literally built a business in an afternoon and so can you." Are you charging money and have customers actually paying you? If not, it's not a business yet. It's a website. This barely functions as a website and looks like a few components thrown together using a bootstrap template.
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago
  If they were charging for it, they would have called it "revenue-earning" instead of "revenue-ready". What does "revenue-ready" even mean? They're willing to accept money for it? Really high bar to clear /s
  - uoaei 7y ago
    I'm revenue-ready because I'm capable of holding my pockets open.
    - 1_over_n 7y ago
      I honestly feel like these comments are quite elitist. I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. Thats kind of the spirit of (many not all) startups right now. Isn't the magic in figuring out what people are willing to pay for? That's definitely PGs message, along with speak to customers and do things that don't scale. And now someones getting flamed for attempting to do all three (whether it's worth blogging about is another thing). I believe i'm ok to comment here as I have worked at both ends of the scale (B2C super fast and dirty vs super deep scientific medical software with long time line to market).
      - aguyfromnb 7y ago
        >I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. I don't think people are making fun of the "low-code" aspect as much as the "I literally built a business in an afternoon" part. It's a job board, implemented 2 months ago, that has a handful of postings. How is that a business?
gazelle21 7y ago
This a basically a list?
jimbob45 7y ago
I vehemently disagree. To me, this is a classic case of people who believe in YAGNI versus people who plan (sometimes too much) for the future. I've been burned too many times to be able to adhere to the YAGNI protocol. Sure, these low/no-code solutions may work fine for a while but eventually, they'll hit an impassable roadblock and then they're stuck until they either decide that roadblock isn't worth overcoming or put in the time and effort that could have been accounted for at the beginning.
omarhaneef 7y ago
The criticism -- almost all the other comments at this point -- focuses on one aspect of the low-code app: It has to be re-written once it grows. * While this is true, I don't think Bethan or any other low code advocate would dispute that. The question is: can you get test an idea with low code. The answer to that might be a trivial yes, but if you had asked me what that means, I would guess a team of 3 people could prototype an idea in about a week. I did not expect a single person to be able to test an idea in 4 hours. That is the real insight here. * Not all the criticism. One person points out that calling it a business is overblown till someone pays for it.
- zitterbewegung 7y ago
  Low code already happens. Now I think it’s just getting popular . “Groupon was originally run on WordPress because they only needed to test one thing: will local small businesses provide discounts in exchange for being introduced to potential new customers.” And yes it is an example of that it has to be rewritten. From https://bigthinking.io/the-mindset-for-innovation-everything-is-an-experiment/ https://bigthinking.io/the-mindset-for-innovation-everything...
  - kyllo 7y ago
    Yeah, it's not really new. A few years back, I interviewed at a startup that was close to two years in, and they described their app as "the most overloaded Drupal installation in existence," and were in the middle of migrating it to Rails.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  If people got limited feedback, prior to wider distribution, they could re-work their articles so 95%+ of the discussion isn't centered around one superficial point, but rather the bread-and-butter of the article's point: as you mention, 1-person & 4 hours vs. 3-people & 1-week. Big difference between the two!
- falcolas 7y ago
  > That is the real insight here. To me, the insight is that the less you care about the future of your "product", the less time you have to put into it. I look at the linked site, and all I see is "Minimal". I don't see any viability, I don't see a product (identifying what's being sold takes a few clicks). I also see a bevy of GDPR violations. I see an ADA (or the EU equivalent) liability. I, as a security conscious developer, forsee a disaster of a security story. I see human scaling issues, as everything slightly out of the ordinary that happens requires an email to an address which is on the surface completely unrelated to the site itself. I also see 842 social media trackers blocked with standard FireFox settings (though I guess that falls in with GDPR violations). I also see some potential legal liabilities, as all of the agreements are between the users and "Bethan Vincent". That lack of separation could put the owner in a lot of hot water should any of the above liabilities become a reality. Most of these won't - can't - be solved with a technological re-write. A lot of them will require a fair bit of re-writing the entire business model.
carapace 7y ago
As a programmer, I kinda don't want it to be, but I acknowledge that as short-sighted. In general, "low code" should be the future: because efficiency, and maturity of available libs/components. What i'm saying is that this should be seen as a win.
stephc_int13 7y ago
I don't see any added value here. Only a weak attempt at self-promotion in a kind of bait-click way.
codegeek 7y ago
Being the critical HN person, I would say that "revenue ready" is a fancy term for "I built this website/app and now need to get clients". So revenue ready = just a website/app.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, and it's most definitely a long way away from being something that could be properly called a "business".
- imtringued 7y ago
  That's an amazingly low bar. Preorders and crowd funding exist. You don't need a product to ask for money.
Havoc 7y ago
Don't think so. I'd say easy code (think python and garbage collectors) plus easy scale (think cloud and apps and serverless) is where the easy wins are. People have been trying to do point and click IDEs for ever. It's always a shit show and I see no reason to believe it'll change shortly
meredydd 7y ago
So, this is where the founder of a "low-code" startup pops up to confirm it: "Low code" is mostly a false promise. We have been programming computers for most of a century: 71 years this year. And in all that time, nobody has come up with a better way of telling a computer what to do than writing text in a programming language. People keep trying, of course, with endless permutations of flow-charts and rules. But sooner or later, you'll find yourself either: (a) unable to express what you need to express, or (b) tangled up in Cthulu's own flow-chart, barely accomplishing something that you know is a three-line `for` loop in Python. And the thing is, anyone calling their system "low code" (rather than "no code") knows this. They know that the shiny demo can't actually do all you need. The moment you want to build something they haven't already imagined, you fall off the edge of the world. That's why they hedge, and say "sure, you might write a little code". Then the trap-door opens underneath you, and you go straight from a click'n'drag flowchart to writing a React component (or worse). Not fun. I cofounded Anvil (https://anvil.works https://anvil.works), and if you squint hard you could call it a low-code platform for web apps. But many valuable apps are a fifteen-line Python script surrounded by fifteen tons of JS framework. The problem here isn't the application logic - it's everything else! So build a drag'n'drop designer, and a VB/Delphi-like component UI, then get out of the way and let the author write their app logic in peace. When your users try to do something you haven't thought of (and they will!), they'll have an industrial-strength toolbox to deal with it. But to tell someone that they can build substantial apps without writing code is to invite them to drive at speed up a blind alley.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Today I'm working on a project in which I was brought in late to rescue it, where they're extracting data from BIM software (which fits the definition of a no-code database-backed GUI app) using (low-code) MS Access and pushing it into (low-code) QuickBase, and all 3 pieces were set up by people who (yay) didn't need to understand code but (boo) really could've used a few lessons in best practices. So I agree with your rant, though in principle and in my most idealistic moments I'm still interested to see where the whole low-code "movement" goes.
- lubujackson 7y ago
  "No code" is always only "less code": look at the complexity of Excel spreadsheets by non-coders. But it is a "singularity event of sensible defaults" that allows useful things to be built before the first whiff of code. What is exciting is that simple web/apps are getting to that same place that spreadsheets were at and where blogging was at. People already have a clear idea of what they need most of the time: "fill out this form, send it in a email, put in a spreadsheet, load it on this page with an image", etc. Provide sensible defaults and let the CRUD apps flow.
azinman2 7y ago
So, basically nothing particularly noteworthy about the actual product as it was built by 1 person in 4 hours. For this type of business the hard part is the network effect, so in effect the journey is barely begun.
mharroun 7y ago
If it's possible to prototype or test a potential new product or feature with little to no engineering effort... that is the only responsible thing to do. I've seen many cases where their were easy non custom solutions to test a first version of a product/feature I have refused to custom build until tested...where then shown ineffective. Buy over build until it cannot scale (often the scale is cost not growth).
oh_sigh 7y ago
The problem is this MVP doesn't even fit the objective that the author lists in the beginning. They stated: > It’s also extremely important to me that an employer has a positive attitude towards diversity and actively encourages candidates from under-represented groups. This is a hard thing to tell from Indeed or a job aggregate site. But their MVP does nothing at all relating to inclusiveness. It's just a job board CRUD app just like all the other job boards.
stareatgoats 7y ago
Yep, we're doomed (sooner or later this will take over)
aries1980 7y ago
I'm always curious what's the point of such articles? It is as useless as a programming language benchmark on "Hello, World!" and "Number of empty HTTP request/sec". I am able to install a vanilla Drupal-based forum with all these integrations in the fraction of that 4 hours (working with Drupal for 15 years certainly an edge here), which I think can scale much better for less than your solution up to a certain point, but certainly fits to a York-scale. But would this prove it is a great business? Not really. Would this change if it was NodeBB, Wordpress or any other technology? Not at all. Would I hate working on something that is super boring to me just to earn money? Absolutely.

40 points by bdv500 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

For 4 hour experiments, it sounds like a reasonable strategy; but what happens are your requirements become increasingly complex? Is "Low Code" going to work, for example, if you want to implement A/B tests? Possibly one day.

loopz 7y ago
For what should be a prototyping solution: Definately, a resounding Yes!

mscasts 7y ago

As with all titles that starts with a question, the answer is probably no. Sure it may work for some easy cases but most products aren't that simple and as soon as you want to add some extra functionality you basically have to rewrite the application from scratch. I'm happy that it worked for this guy but if I was a betting man I wouldn't bet on "low code".

blazespin 7y ago
she is right, but this a terrible example because her idea is weak but her marketing is strong.. the future will likely see apps being built in collaboration with AI.
- psv1 7y ago
  > apps being built in collaboration with AI Oh please no, that's just so unnecessary.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Real life is imitating art at this point, truly. Saw that whole plot point in the final season of Silicon Valley that was released last month and thought it was one of the most farfetched unrealistic scenarios in the whole show. Looks like I was really wrong.
  - blazespin 7y ago
    Silly, it’s already happening. Some of the auto completion is pretty awesome.

blazespin 7y ago

yeah, she missed the part where she used her network to market.

klodolph 7y ago

Great, you made a location-specific clone of an app that has been made hundreds or thousands of times before. Is this the future? Yes, for people who are pushing out clones of simple, well-understood apps. You can put up a web store in a couple days, or make a first-person shooter, or a dating app.

kyllo 7y ago

For prototyping relatively simple, UI-focused apps, yes, I think low-code and no-code solutions do have a place. The key is having the awareness and discipline, when the prototype is validated and starts to gain traction, to throw it away and build the real production app using what you learned, instead of just accumulating months to years of technical debt and cruft on top of a prototype. If you launch with a "permatype" you will eventually find yourself facing a very expensive and painful "2.0" project.

fxtentacle 7y ago

I feel like this is the self-help hype all over again. People with a network of followers can sell almost any weird stuff. And then afterwards they praise themselves for doing so.

thinkingkong 7y ago

No. But these are not the products of the future. Another way to look at it, is that anything like this might be a more well understood component of another application or product, and the more they're used the easier they'll be to integrate. The products of 2020's will end up being highly specific to some niche / vertical and require lots of industry knowledge.

lalos 7y ago

Low code is definitely the future. Look at all the things you can do by calling the right APIs and/or all the scaffolding available. The clear trend changed after RoR and managed cloud services like Heroku popped up. Now the big players offer cloud services that would take months to code but if you pay up you have access (everything as a service). The lesson for developers is work on tools consumed by other developers and if this is not the case probably someone else is working on automating bits of pieces of your work.

tguedes 7y ago
This has literally always been the case for the history of software. Unless you're willing to tell me an operating system is a low-code solution, building software has always been about obfuscating the frustrating parts to focus on the stuff that actually matters. Infrastructure as a service is just the current iteration.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > This has literally always been the case for the history of software. And the code complexity doesn't actually go down; as it takes less code to meet a given set of expectations, expectations expand.
aries1980 7y ago
Low code means low expectations. Coding is not the hard part, but to satisfy the end-user or regulatory needs with the positive (or at least minimal negative) impact on the user experience. Complications arise when you think on "what can go wrong" (e.g. you lost a webhook going to your CRM and you want to understand why it happened, how it impacted the user, how can you recover automatically) and start mitigating them.

planetzero 7y ago

"I literally built a business in an afternoon and so can you." Are you charging money and have customers actually paying you? If not, it's not a business yet. It's a website. This barely functions as a website and looks like a few components thrown together using a bootstrap template.

TheCoelacanth 7y ago
If they were charging for it, they would have called it "revenue-earning" instead of "revenue-ready". What does "revenue-ready" even mean? They're willing to accept money for it? Really high bar to clear /s
- uoaei 7y ago
  I'm revenue-ready because I'm capable of holding my pockets open.
  - 1_over_n 7y ago
    I honestly feel like these comments are quite elitist. I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. Thats kind of the spirit of (many not all) startups right now. Isn't the magic in figuring out what people are willing to pay for? That's definitely PGs message, along with speak to customers and do things that don't scale. And now someones getting flamed for attempting to do all three (whether it's worth blogging about is another thing). I believe i'm ok to comment here as I have worked at both ends of the scale (B2C super fast and dirty vs super deep scientific medical software with long time line to market).
    - aguyfromnb 7y ago
      >I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. I don't think people are making fun of the "low-code" aspect as much as the "I literally built a business in an afternoon" part. It's a job board, implemented 2 months ago, that has a handful of postings. How is that a business?

gazelle21 7y ago

This a basically a list?

jimbob45 7y ago

I vehemently disagree. To me, this is a classic case of people who believe in YAGNI versus people who plan (sometimes too much) for the future. I've been burned too many times to be able to adhere to the YAGNI protocol. Sure, these low/no-code solutions may work fine for a while but eventually, they'll hit an impassable roadblock and then they're stuck until they either decide that roadblock isn't worth overcoming or put in the time and effort that could have been accounted for at the beginning.

omarhaneef 7y ago

The criticism -- almost all the other comments at this point -- focuses on one aspect of the low-code app: It has to be re-written once it grows. * While this is true, I don't think Bethan or any other low code advocate would dispute that. The question is: can you get test an idea with low code. The answer to that might be a trivial yes, but if you had asked me what that means, I would guess a team of 3 people could prototype an idea in about a week. I did not expect a single person to be able to test an idea in 4 hours. That is the real insight here. * Not all the criticism. One person points out that calling it a business is overblown till someone pays for it.

zitterbewegung 7y ago
Low code already happens. Now I think it’s just getting popular . “Groupon was originally run on WordPress because they only needed to test one thing: will local small businesses provide discounts in exchange for being introduced to potential new customers.” And yes it is an example of that it has to be rewritten. From https://bigthinking.io/the-mindset-for-innovation-everything-is-an-experiment/ https://bigthinking.io/the-mindset-for-innovation-everything...
- kyllo 7y ago
  Yeah, it's not really new. A few years back, I interviewed at a startup that was close to two years in, and they described their app as "the most overloaded Drupal installation in existence," and were in the middle of migrating it to Rails.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
If people got limited feedback, prior to wider distribution, they could re-work their articles so 95%+ of the discussion isn't centered around one superficial point, but rather the bread-and-butter of the article's point: as you mention, 1-person & 4 hours vs. 3-people & 1-week. Big difference between the two!
falcolas 7y ago
> That is the real insight here. To me, the insight is that the less you care about the future of your "product", the less time you have to put into it. I look at the linked site, and all I see is "Minimal". I don't see any viability, I don't see a product (identifying what's being sold takes a few clicks). I also see a bevy of GDPR violations. I see an ADA (or the EU equivalent) liability. I, as a security conscious developer, forsee a disaster of a security story. I see human scaling issues, as everything slightly out of the ordinary that happens requires an email to an address which is on the surface completely unrelated to the site itself. I also see 842 social media trackers blocked with standard FireFox settings (though I guess that falls in with GDPR violations). I also see some potential legal liabilities, as all of the agreements are between the users and "Bethan Vincent". That lack of separation could put the owner in a lot of hot water should any of the above liabilities become a reality. Most of these won't - can't - be solved with a technological re-write. A lot of them will require a fair bit of re-writing the entire business model.

carapace 7y ago

As a programmer, I kinda don't want it to be, but I acknowledge that as short-sighted. In general, "low code" should be the future: because efficiency, and maturity of available libs/components. What i'm saying is that this should be seen as a win.

stephc_int13 7y ago

I don't see any added value here. Only a weak attempt at self-promotion in a kind of bait-click way.

codegeek 7y ago

Being the critical HN person, I would say that "revenue ready" is a fancy term for "I built this website/app and now need to get clients". So revenue ready = just a website/app.

JohnFen 7y ago
Yes, and it's most definitely a long way away from being something that could be properly called a "business".
imtringued 7y ago
That's an amazingly low bar. Preorders and crowd funding exist. You don't need a product to ask for money.

Havoc 7y ago

Don't think so. I'd say easy code (think python and garbage collectors) plus easy scale (think cloud and apps and serverless) is where the easy wins are. People have been trying to do point and click IDEs for ever. It's always a shit show and I see no reason to believe it'll change shortly

meredydd 7y ago

So, this is where the founder of a "low-code" startup pops up to confirm it: "Low code" is mostly a false promise. We have been programming computers for most of a century: 71 years this year. And in all that time, nobody has come up with a better way of telling a computer what to do than writing text in a programming language. People keep trying, of course, with endless permutations of flow-charts and rules. But sooner or later, you'll find yourself either: (a) unable to express what you need to express, or (b) tangled up in Cthulu's own flow-chart, barely accomplishing something that you know is a three-line `for` loop in Python. And the thing is, anyone calling their system "low code" (rather than "no code") knows this. They know that the shiny demo can't actually do all you need. The moment you want to build something they haven't already imagined, you fall off the edge of the world. That's why they hedge, and say "sure, you might write a little code". Then the trap-door opens underneath you, and you go straight from a click'n'drag flowchart to writing a React component (or worse). Not fun. I cofounded Anvil (https://anvil.works https://anvil.works), and if you squint hard you could call it a low-code platform for web apps. But many valuable apps are a fifteen-line Python script surrounded by fifteen tons of JS framework. The problem here isn't the application logic - it's everything else! So build a drag'n'drop designer, and a VB/Delphi-like component UI, then get out of the way and let the author write their app logic in peace. When your users try to do something you haven't thought of (and they will!), they'll have an industrial-strength toolbox to deal with it. But to tell someone that they can build substantial apps without writing code is to invite them to drive at speed up a blind alley.

rdiddly 7y ago
Today I'm working on a project in which I was brought in late to rescue it, where they're extracting data from BIM software (which fits the definition of a no-code database-backed GUI app) using (low-code) MS Access and pushing it into (low-code) QuickBase, and all 3 pieces were set up by people who (yay) didn't need to understand code but (boo) really could've used a few lessons in best practices. So I agree with your rant, though in principle and in my most idealistic moments I'm still interested to see where the whole low-code "movement" goes.
lubujackson 7y ago
"No code" is always only "less code": look at the complexity of Excel spreadsheets by non-coders. But it is a "singularity event of sensible defaults" that allows useful things to be built before the first whiff of code. What is exciting is that simple web/apps are getting to that same place that spreadsheets were at and where blogging was at. People already have a clear idea of what they need most of the time: "fill out this form, send it in a email, put in a spreadsheet, load it on this page with an image", etc. Provide sensible defaults and let the CRUD apps flow.

azinman2 7y ago

So, basically nothing particularly noteworthy about the actual product as it was built by 1 person in 4 hours. For this type of business the hard part is the network effect, so in effect the journey is barely begun.

mharroun 7y ago

If it's possible to prototype or test a potential new product or feature with little to no engineering effort... that is the only responsible thing to do. I've seen many cases where their were easy non custom solutions to test a first version of a product/feature I have refused to custom build until tested...where then shown ineffective. Buy over build until it cannot scale (often the scale is cost not growth).

oh_sigh 7y ago

The problem is this MVP doesn't even fit the objective that the author lists in the beginning. They stated: > It’s also extremely important to me that an employer has a positive attitude towards diversity and actively encourages candidates from under-represented groups. This is a hard thing to tell from Indeed or a job aggregate site. But their MVP does nothing at all relating to inclusiveness. It's just a job board CRUD app just like all the other job boards.

stareatgoats 7y ago

Yep, we're doomed (sooner or later this will take over)

aries1980 7y ago

I'm always curious what's the point of such articles? It is as useless as a programming language benchmark on "Hello, World!" and "Number of empty HTTP request/sec". I am able to install a vanilla Drupal-based forum with all these integrations in the fraction of that 4 hours (working with Drupal for 15 years certainly an edge here), which I think can scale much better for less than your solution up to a certain point, but certainly fits to a York-scale. But would this prove it is a great business? Not really. Would this change if it was NodeBB, Wordpress or any other technology? Not at all. Would I hate working on something that is super boring to me just to earn money? Absolutely.