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

180 points by ChanningAllen 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
soared 6y ago
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 zapier. They're startups probably look very different (consulting, etc).
- CSSer 6y ago
  It’s funny to think about the differences in technical ability here. I build stuff for people to edit that our team often ends up editing for them. It’s not a complex CMS. People just get nervous and/or are lazy. Just existing in the digital age is a struggle or an annoyance for them, let alone this. Occasionally I run into someone in Marketing/Sales who is in love with the idea of Zapier. It’s always Maslow’s hammer run amok. My guess is this no-code thing is just taking advantage of the increasingly large, seemingly untapped demographic you mentioned here. They just don’t realize the actual cost they’re committing themselves to.
- david_draco 6y ago
  > No-code is a funny term and I'm not sure what it means. I think it used to be called visual programming.
jdmg94 6y ago
> Just imagine the same being true for coders: that 7 out of every 10 programmers you spotted at developer conferences or in the engineering departments of larger companies were really only making ends meet while starting their own businesses. this is not a great comparison...
- _curious_ 6y ago
  I read this part three times, I do not understand what the point is trying to make?
gumby 6y ago
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 process has decades of predecessors, from dbs like Delphi, Excel, to Emacs in the ‘70s to (so it was claimed at the time) FORTRAN. Is “no code” meant to somehow imply something more?
- gustavo-fring 6y ago
  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 picking up a basic framework, where they aren't limited by someone else. It's not as though they aren't capable.
  - _curious_ 6y ago
    "it seems like a marketing/signaling term that people on places like indiehackers use to market their products" Bingo.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  No code is a signal of bullshit for a company who claims software development as their competitive advantage but in truth the core competency is something else or doesn’t exist at all. Wework is a good example.
- zerkten 6y ago
  >> Is "no code" meant to somehow imply something more? In a way it's less. The products you list are much more capable developer products. These are more in the direction of the FileMaker or Access level of constraint, but implemented in a more modern way which means they can be fairly effective. Using "no code" is just branding that hasn't been used broadly until now. Maybe it has, but it probably isn't well known enough to be unusable. I'd have called these "4GLs" perhaps. Lots of companies are getting in on the act to create a market for this. All of the established companies making business software have some no/low code solution. Then there are newer companies like Zapier who do automation and are trying to be a connector between these apps.
nunez 6y ago
No-code platforms have always been a great way to put a MVP together. MVPs help you vet the idea before pouring real dollars into it. They are not meant to be the foundation for the product itself; those thinking otherwise have a very expensive refactor ahead of them! I hear MVP thrown around like candy in the consulting I do. I _wish_ they started with no code! Didn't some now-unicorn start its life as an email distribution list or spreadsheet?
- parallel 6y ago
  You might be thinking of Groupon, from memory their origin story involves emulating software functionality with spreadsheets/email lists/much manual grunt work.
  - nmyk 6y ago
    Wait a minute, I thought software was the one emulating grunt worker functionality this whole time!
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      No, with the AI hype, emulating software with people is all the rage once again!
  - pchristensen 6y ago
    Groupon began as a collective action site called ThePoint - think love child of Kickstarter and Change.org. It was built out and functional but not getting traction. They shifted to using that platform to market deals at local businesses and it took off from there. It was code from the start. However, as it grew there were thousands of sales and editorial employees turning customer contacts into sales campaigns, but that's not really something that code could replace.
- tlapinsk 6y ago
  Totally agree on the MVP front. The term "no-code" may be annoying or way too "buzzwordy" to some, but I think that really misses the point. These tools (WordPress, Zapier, Launchrock, etc.) can be used to get something out in the world quickly and figure out if it's worth investing time/money into.
sillycube 6y ago
Whether code or nocode, if your solution can solve a valuable problem, u can make money. Nocode tools are just equipments like your screw driver, cutter, etc. This question is like asking whether a repairman can make money. Of course he can!
oefrha 6y ago
> No code Sounds like a fancy (actually more like crappy) buzzword for using SaaS products as part of your website/business. Source: reading https://www.makerpad.co/stories/mitchell-wright-how-lambda-school-grew-with-no-code-tools https://www.makerpad.co/stories/mitchell-wright-how-lambda-s...
nocoder 6y ago
This is really interesting. Are there any good tutorials for someone starting out? I would be interested in playing around with it.
- Torwald 6y ago
  with that username you have to
lidHanteyk 6y ago
Betteridge's Law would have saved me some time. The answer is no, not really; the only company doing well according to the article is Lambda School, and as we've explored here before, their money-making schemes have nothing to do with no-code tools and everything to do with scamming students.
seibelj 6y ago
The no-code solutions are enabling a digital sort of business that is distinct from their analog counterparts. Their examples - teaching, online job-board, courses for sale - are digital upgrades to teaching, newspaper classifieds, and books. You can stitch together a useful business with these tools. But you won’t build a pure software business. They are just entirely different things. Building the so-called “no-code” technology is the software play. As an aside, “Plenty of Fish” 1.0 was built with an off-the-shelf website builder. You don’t need to be a pro-coder to provide value.
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  As I remember it, POF was just a side project intended to self-learn Asp.Net.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > As an aside, “Plenty of Fish” 1.0 was built with an off-the-shelf website builder. From what I read about PoF, it was written in VB. For performance reasons, anything external was gradually rewritten inline. > You don’t need to be a pro-coder to provide value. That definitely doesn't match the story of him spending months in his condo writing PoF.
rafaelreinert 6y ago
No-code = code from another person
- sebazzz 6y ago
  The inner system effect.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  So they're also a computer company after they buy a Macbook?
- aloisdg 6y ago
  Also serverless = server from another person
  - Rury 6y ago
    Aka the cloud.
- contravariant 6y ago
  You wish, usually you still end up programming the thing, just with worse tools.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > You wish, usually you still end up programming the thing, just with worse tools. This, exactly! I once was stuck under a manager that fully bought into the idea that BPMS systems would replace most enterprise development (or at least wanted me to think that way to work on his BPMS project). He said semi-technical BAs would be able to do all the work in the future, blah, blah, blah. It wasn't true: we built what was asked for, but you had to be a developer to get within 10 feet of the thing. There were so many gotchas, and you had to code to implement anything that wasn't a toy. It was basically developed with shitty fake-Java and shitty fake-JSP with a lot of other shitty-fake technologies.
Acen 6y ago
A great example of the no-code system might be something like Power Automate/Power Apps/Power BI from Microsoft. It's pretty painful to use when you want to do something simple in code like explode an array, take a few of the values from that and implode back into an array again. Things like AWS Quicksight or Google Data Studio might be in the same sort of world too.
robjan 6y ago
This post makes no-code feel like an MLM. Half of the highlighted startups are no-code startups founded to teach about no-code.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  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.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    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.
  - csallen 6y ago
    Startup founders often cater to other startup founders, and it seems oddly circular, until you look at more mature businesses and realize the same thing is happening: businesses selling things to help other businesses sell things to other businesses…
- _curious_ 6y ago
  Something seemed off...I couldn't put my finger on it...hearing you put it this way aha I get it now ;)
longtermd 6y ago
The title is just extremely wrong and clickbait. There's no content or data about "rise". If anything, the default founder is no-code outside of SV. There's a sharp rise of coding-founders, just because basic coding is becoming "basic knowledge" and taught in highschools now. I won't click these clickbait indiehackers links again.
jmeister 6y ago
PG’s Viaweb was a “no-code” startup for making web stores, that eventually became Yahoo Stores, before “no-code” was a thing, in the late 90s
krsdcbl 6y ago
I find it odd that the article's topic is literally "the surge of people taking a shot at building a business with no code products", but the author then goes on to be really surprised that so many people in this group are trying to build a business compared with "developers in general". Well if you interview developers who represent their startup product i guess you might end up with similar figures of "wants to be an entrepreneur"? It's missing the point that devs might have a number of incentives in building tools outside of a business scope, but when someone sets out to build a product even when it's not their job & passion "anyway", it pretty damn sure aims to make money
WalterBright 6y ago
I recall some ads from the 1980s saying "No coding required - just use our scripting language!" It must have been a successful pitch, as the ads lasted for years.
seemslegit 6y ago
Making ? Surely you meant raising.
michalu 6y ago
So basically the "no-code" founders that are making money are the ones building "no-code" tools for people who can't code and those teaching people to start "no-code business." I can't imagine you can build or even conceive a complex app without understanding the technicalities of how it all works. It seems to me majority of the no code tools are used for content websites with payments.
GlennS 6y ago
Would you consider something like Collibra https://www.collibra.com/ https://www.collibra.com/ to be no-code? They seem to be exploding at the moment. How about SAP or Salesforce?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I can't tell from the front page but this appears to be a Business Intelligence tool?
  - GlennS 6y ago
    A sort of "build your own metadata database with configurable workflows" tool focusing on data management, provenance, security, privacy etc. Maybe I've gone too far there. Jira has configurable workflows too, and I guess no-one would argue that's a no-code tool. SAP is probably a better example?
  - wenc 6y ago
    Collibra is a data governance platform, which manages stuff like data cataloguing, authorization to data sources, tracing data provenance etc.
- wenc 6y ago
  No, none of those are no-code solutions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- TuringTest 6y ago
  You're missing the part where that's a good thing, that's why you don't get the usefulness of these tools.
alexgmcm 6y ago
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.
- contravariant 6y ago
  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.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    Dark Lang is doing the same, we almost did, but are using Cuelang for our take on this now
    - contravariant 6y ago
      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.
      - verdverm 6y ago
        What very specific use case? I have found Cue to be versatile and usable anywhere yaml / json / config is used or needs to be validated. I'm mainly focused on code generation with Cue as the input. https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
        contravariant 6y ago
        I'd consider a situation where you've got a human readable (?) data format that needs to be validated a rather specific niche for a domain specific language. All I'm aware of in that area is XSD and DTD for XML (and maybe some recent efforts to make schemas for JSON but those aren't too flexible). I'm happy someone is trying to fill that niche though, I'll remember cue for when I run into such a scenario.
_glass 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
abdulhaq 6y ago
I feel someone should mention The Last One, from 1981, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
- zarmin 6y ago
  Too complicated, needs another abstraction layer.
rb808 6y ago
There is something in-between where many engineers end up linking together a bunch PAAS and maybe a bit of front end to come up with a app or website. In the old days you had to understand pointers and backups and efficient joins in your rdbms, the level of abstraction now is much higher.
formercoder 6y ago
Tons of people, the vast majority of entrepreneurs, make money without a single line of code ever being written at their business.
vmchale 6y ago
Why though? 13 year-olds can learn CSS/HTML for their neopets, I get it's scary but this stuff isn't poison.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  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?)
woeirua 6y ago
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.
- spderosso 6y ago
  > 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. I agree. It seems like almost every day a new no-code platform crops up. Eventually, competition should bring prices down and hurt margins, right? What's the economic moat here? For example, do you want to build a website or app from a spreadsheet? There's plenty of options and they all look very similar. I am more bullish on the no-code solutions that target a niche/vertical, like forms (typeform) or member sites (memberstack) because you can offer complementary services (like Shopify does for shopping) and the niche is understood well enough that you can get close to covering 100% of use cases. I would guess that a horizontal no-code company would have a harder time maintaining a competitive advantage.
indymike 6y ago
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.
- _curious_ 6y ago
  Love the historical context here... "Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code." What are some examples?
  - 0x6c6f6c 6y ago
    Were all of the examples leading up to that sentence not enough for you, or did you perhaps skip to the end?
    - _curious_ 6y ago
      Was Powerbuilder, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes made with no/low code?
      - anotheracct_ 6y ago
        They're used to make things with no code.
        _curious_ 6y ago
        Yes and I am wondering per /indyike's statement "Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code." - what are some examples because the product names mentioned were not made with no/low code.
htnsao 6y ago
Grasshopper in Rhino3d is pretty rad. Visual coding of algorithmic designs. https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper
shrimpx 6y ago
Most software engineering is yak shaving in the sense that your high level goal is some business domain feature like “process a payment” but you spend most of your time in far detached language and os primitives, fighting idiosyncrasies in some json parser or UI state update library that has nothing to do with processing payments. Geeks really dig this impedance mismatch because they get to do the “fun stuff” instead of the boring business domain stuff. But a lot of people care only about the business domain stuff and could care less about descending into the catacombs. There will always be a need for point and click application creation and the tendency to want to get rid of the geek middlemen.
fock 6y ago
so, the big question for me is: these tools generally package a lot of functionality in their "no-code" wrappings, otherwise they would be near useless (for example see LabView and Co, which are painful to work in and interestingly seldom marketed as "no-code"...). So what's technically the difference to a high-level API? History tells us (from Fortran to Emacs to TeX to R/Keras/...) that these tools generally last _a lot_ longer than any of the non-spreadsheet no-codes. While at the same time being much more flexible.

180 points by ChanningAllen 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

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 zapier. They're startups probably look very different (consulting, etc).

CSSer 6y ago
It’s funny to think about the differences in technical ability here. I build stuff for people to edit that our team often ends up editing for them. It’s not a complex CMS. People just get nervous and/or are lazy. Just existing in the digital age is a struggle or an annoyance for them, let alone this. Occasionally I run into someone in Marketing/Sales who is in love with the idea of Zapier. It’s always Maslow’s hammer run amok. My guess is this no-code thing is just taking advantage of the increasingly large, seemingly untapped demographic you mentioned here. They just don’t realize the actual cost they’re committing themselves to.
david_draco 6y ago
> No-code is a funny term and I'm not sure what it means. I think it used to be called visual programming.

jdmg94 6y ago

> Just imagine the same being true for coders: that 7 out of every 10 programmers you spotted at developer conferences or in the engineering departments of larger companies were really only making ends meet while starting their own businesses. this is not a great comparison...

_curious_ 6y ago
I read this part three times, I do not understand what the point is trying to make?

gumby 6y ago

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 process has decades of predecessors, from dbs like Delphi, Excel, to Emacs in the ‘70s to (so it was claimed at the time) FORTRAN. Is “no code” meant to somehow imply something more?

gustavo-fring 6y ago
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 picking up a basic framework, where they aren't limited by someone else. It's not as though they aren't capable.
- _curious_ 6y ago
  "it seems like a marketing/signaling term that people on places like indiehackers use to market their products" Bingo.
tmpz22 6y ago
No code is a signal of bullshit for a company who claims software development as their competitive advantage but in truth the core competency is something else or doesn’t exist at all. Wework is a good example.
zerkten 6y ago
>> Is "no code" meant to somehow imply something more? In a way it's less. The products you list are much more capable developer products. These are more in the direction of the FileMaker or Access level of constraint, but implemented in a more modern way which means they can be fairly effective. Using "no code" is just branding that hasn't been used broadly until now. Maybe it has, but it probably isn't well known enough to be unusable. I'd have called these "4GLs" perhaps. Lots of companies are getting in on the act to create a market for this. All of the established companies making business software have some no/low code solution. Then there are newer companies like Zapier who do automation and are trying to be a connector between these apps.

nunez 6y ago

No-code platforms have always been a great way to put a MVP together. MVPs help you vet the idea before pouring real dollars into it. They are not meant to be the foundation for the product itself; those thinking otherwise have a very expensive refactor ahead of them! I hear MVP thrown around like candy in the consulting I do. I _wish_ they started with no code! Didn't some now-unicorn start its life as an email distribution list or spreadsheet?

parallel 6y ago
You might be thinking of Groupon, from memory their origin story involves emulating software functionality with spreadsheets/email lists/much manual grunt work.
- nmyk 6y ago
  Wait a minute, I thought software was the one emulating grunt worker functionality this whole time!
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    No, with the AI hype, emulating software with people is all the rage once again!
- pchristensen 6y ago
  Groupon began as a collective action site called ThePoint - think love child of Kickstarter and Change.org. It was built out and functional but not getting traction. They shifted to using that platform to market deals at local businesses and it took off from there. It was code from the start. However, as it grew there were thousands of sales and editorial employees turning customer contacts into sales campaigns, but that's not really something that code could replace.
tlapinsk 6y ago
Totally agree on the MVP front. The term "no-code" may be annoying or way too "buzzwordy" to some, but I think that really misses the point. These tools (WordPress, Zapier, Launchrock, etc.) can be used to get something out in the world quickly and figure out if it's worth investing time/money into.

sillycube 6y ago

Whether code or nocode, if your solution can solve a valuable problem, u can make money. Nocode tools are just equipments like your screw driver, cutter, etc. This question is like asking whether a repairman can make money. Of course he can!

oefrha 6y ago

> No code Sounds like a fancy (actually more like crappy) buzzword for using SaaS products as part of your website/business. Source: reading https://www.makerpad.co/stories/mitchell-wright-how-lambda-school-grew-with-no-code-tools https://www.makerpad.co/stories/mitchell-wright-how-lambda-s...

nocoder 6y ago

This is really interesting. Are there any good tutorials for someone starting out? I would be interested in playing around with it.

Torwald 6y ago
with that username you have to

lidHanteyk 6y ago

Betteridge's Law would have saved me some time. The answer is no, not really; the only company doing well according to the article is Lambda School, and as we've explored here before, their money-making schemes have nothing to do with no-code tools and everything to do with scamming students.

seibelj 6y ago

The no-code solutions are enabling a digital sort of business that is distinct from their analog counterparts. Their examples - teaching, online job-board, courses for sale - are digital upgrades to teaching, newspaper classifieds, and books. You can stitch together a useful business with these tools. But you won’t build a pure software business. They are just entirely different things. Building the so-called “no-code” technology is the software play. As an aside, “Plenty of Fish” 1.0 was built with an off-the-shelf website builder. You don’t need to be a pro-coder to provide value.

frequentnapper 6y ago
As I remember it, POF was just a side project intended to self-learn Asp.Net.
redis_mlc 6y ago
> As an aside, “Plenty of Fish” 1.0 was built with an off-the-shelf website builder. From what I read about PoF, it was written in VB. For performance reasons, anything external was gradually rewritten inline. > You don’t need to be a pro-coder to provide value. That definitely doesn't match the story of him spending months in his condo writing PoF.

rafaelreinert 6y ago

No-code = code from another person

sebazzz 6y ago
The inner system effect.
TomMarius 6y ago
So they're also a computer company after they buy a Macbook?
aloisdg 6y ago
Also serverless = server from another person
- Rury 6y ago
  Aka the cloud.
contravariant 6y ago
You wish, usually you still end up programming the thing, just with worse tools.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > You wish, usually you still end up programming the thing, just with worse tools. This, exactly! I once was stuck under a manager that fully bought into the idea that BPMS systems would replace most enterprise development (or at least wanted me to think that way to work on his BPMS project). He said semi-technical BAs would be able to do all the work in the future, blah, blah, blah. It wasn't true: we built what was asked for, but you had to be a developer to get within 10 feet of the thing. There were so many gotchas, and you had to code to implement anything that wasn't a toy. It was basically developed with shitty fake-Java and shitty fake-JSP with a lot of other shitty-fake technologies.

Acen 6y ago

A great example of the no-code system might be something like Power Automate/Power Apps/Power BI from Microsoft. It's pretty painful to use when you want to do something simple in code like explode an array, take a few of the values from that and implode back into an array again. Things like AWS Quicksight or Google Data Studio might be in the same sort of world too.

robjan 6y ago

This post makes no-code feel like an MLM. Half of the highlighted startups are no-code startups founded to teach about no-code.

Thorentis 6y ago
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.
- jedberg 6y ago
  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.
- csallen 6y ago
  Startup founders often cater to other startup founders, and it seems oddly circular, until you look at more mature businesses and realize the same thing is happening: businesses selling things to help other businesses sell things to other businesses…
_curious_ 6y ago
Something seemed off...I couldn't put my finger on it...hearing you put it this way aha I get it now ;)

longtermd 6y ago

The title is just extremely wrong and clickbait. There's no content or data about "rise". If anything, the default founder is no-code outside of SV. There's a sharp rise of coding-founders, just because basic coding is becoming "basic knowledge" and taught in highschools now. I won't click these clickbait indiehackers links again.

jmeister 6y ago

PG’s Viaweb was a “no-code” startup for making web stores, that eventually became Yahoo Stores, before “no-code” was a thing, in the late 90s

krsdcbl 6y ago

I find it odd that the article's topic is literally "the surge of people taking a shot at building a business with no code products", but the author then goes on to be really surprised that so many people in this group are trying to build a business compared with "developers in general". Well if you interview developers who represent their startup product i guess you might end up with similar figures of "wants to be an entrepreneur"? It's missing the point that devs might have a number of incentives in building tools outside of a business scope, but when someone sets out to build a product even when it's not their job & passion "anyway", it pretty damn sure aims to make money

WalterBright 6y ago

I recall some ads from the 1980s saying "No coding required - just use our scripting language!" It must have been a successful pitch, as the ads lasted for years.

seemslegit 6y ago

Making ? Surely you meant raising.

michalu 6y ago

So basically the "no-code" founders that are making money are the ones building "no-code" tools for people who can't code and those teaching people to start "no-code business." I can't imagine you can build or even conceive a complex app without understanding the technicalities of how it all works. It seems to me majority of the no code tools are used for content websites with payments.

GlennS 6y ago

Would you consider something like Collibra https://www.collibra.com/ https://www.collibra.com/ to be no-code? They seem to be exploding at the moment. How about SAP or Salesforce?

renewiltord 6y ago
I can't tell from the front page but this appears to be a Business Intelligence tool?
- GlennS 6y ago
  A sort of "build your own metadata database with configurable workflows" tool focusing on data management, provenance, security, privacy etc. Maybe I've gone too far there. Jira has configurable workflows too, and I guess no-one would argue that's a no-code tool. SAP is probably a better example?
- wenc 6y ago
  Collibra is a data governance platform, which manages stuff like data cataloguing, authorization to data sources, tracing data provenance etc.
wenc 6y ago
No, none of those are no-code solutions.

deleted 6y ago

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TuringTest 6y ago
You're missing the part where that's a good thing, that's why you don't get the usefulness of these tools.

alexgmcm 6y ago

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.

contravariant 6y ago
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.
- verdverm 6y ago
  Dark Lang is doing the same, we almost did, but are using Cuelang for our take on this now
  - contravariant 6y ago
    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.
    - verdverm 6y ago
      What very specific use case? I have found Cue to be versatile and usable anywhere yaml / json / config is used or needs to be validated. I'm mainly focused on code generation with Cue as the input. https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
      - contravariant 6y ago
        I'd consider a situation where you've got a human readable (?) data format that needs to be validated a rather specific niche for a domain specific language. All I'm aware of in that area is XSD and DTD for XML (and maybe some recent efforts to make schemas for JSON but those aren't too flexible). I'm happy someone is trying to fill that niche though, I'll remember cue for when I run into such a scenario.

_glass 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago

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abdulhaq 6y ago

I feel someone should mention The Last One, from 1981, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

zarmin 6y ago
Too complicated, needs another abstraction layer.

rb808 6y ago

There is something in-between where many engineers end up linking together a bunch PAAS and maybe a bit of front end to come up with a app or website. In the old days you had to understand pointers and backups and efficient joins in your rdbms, the level of abstraction now is much higher.

formercoder 6y ago

Tons of people, the vast majority of entrepreneurs, make money without a single line of code ever being written at their business.

vmchale 6y ago

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

filleduchaos 6y ago
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?)

woeirua 6y ago

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.

spderosso 6y ago
> 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. I agree. It seems like almost every day a new no-code platform crops up. Eventually, competition should bring prices down and hurt margins, right? What's the economic moat here? For example, do you want to build a website or app from a spreadsheet? There's plenty of options and they all look very similar. I am more bullish on the no-code solutions that target a niche/vertical, like forms (typeform) or member sites (memberstack) because you can offer complementary services (like Shopify does for shopping) and the niche is understood well enough that you can get close to covering 100% of use cases. I would guess that a horizontal no-code company would have a harder time maintaining a competitive advantage.

indymike 6y ago

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.

_curious_ 6y ago
Love the historical context here... "Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code." What are some examples?
- 0x6c6f6c 6y ago
  Were all of the examples leading up to that sentence not enough for you, or did you perhaps skip to the end?
  - _curious_ 6y ago
    Was Powerbuilder, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes made with no/low code?
    - anotheracct_ 6y ago
      They're used to make things with no code.
      - _curious_ 6y ago
        Yes and I am wondering per /indyike's statement "Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code." - what are some examples because the product names mentioned were not made with no/low code.

htnsao 6y ago

Grasshopper in Rhino3d is pretty rad. Visual coding of algorithmic designs. https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper

shrimpx 6y ago

Most software engineering is yak shaving in the sense that your high level goal is some business domain feature like “process a payment” but you spend most of your time in far detached language and os primitives, fighting idiosyncrasies in some json parser or UI state update library that has nothing to do with processing payments. Geeks really dig this impedance mismatch because they get to do the “fun stuff” instead of the boring business domain stuff. But a lot of people care only about the business domain stuff and could care less about descending into the catacombs. There will always be a need for point and click application creation and the tendency to want to get rid of the geek middlemen.

fock 6y ago

so, the big question for me is: these tools generally package a lot of functionality in their "no-code" wrappings, otherwise they would be near useless (for example see LabView and Co, which are painful to work in and interestingly seldom marketed as "no-code"...). So what's technically the difference to a high-level API? History tells us (from Fortran to Emacs to TeX to R/Keras/...) that these tools generally last _a lot_ longer than any of the non-spreadsheet no-codes. While at the same time being much more flexible.