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Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?

183 points by akudha 5y ago

SaaS, productized service, freelance - anyone doing it successfully with no-code, low-code tools?

linseed_213 5y ago
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 https://bubble.io/showcase
- akudha 5y ago
  Thank You. I am a programmer, I did try bubble - it is quite powerful, but the UI is a bit...weird. Are you allowed to share links to their businesses?
warent 5y ago
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.
judohacker 5y ago
OkieFoodTrucks.com is a SaaS for event organizers to find/book food trucks, built entirely on no code. You can read more about how it was built here:. https://www.foxy.io/blog/how-okiefoodtrucks-is-using-foxy-webflow-to-change-the-food-truck-industry/ https://www.foxy.io/blog/how-okiefoodtrucks-is-using-foxy-we...
codingdave 5y ago
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.
- rock_hard 5y ago
  Friend of mine has been thinking to start a no-code engineering school to teach people the skills required to build no-code products for exactly that reason
  - akudha 5y ago
    Like makerpad? There are a handful like it, there is space for more I guess
smoldesu 5y ago
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.
- lostgame 5y ago
  Couldn't agree with this sentiment more. It's always going to be a money and time pit when you need to outsource to fix any problems. If you don't know code, hire someone on your team who does. :)
  - codingdave 5y ago
    > when you need to outsource to fix any problems. Yeah, but that would be a pretty crappy low-code platform if when things went wrong, they did not handle it, and instead told their customers to go hire coders.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Someone's getting paid to fix your program, whether it's a "computer science consultant" or their premium service package (probably $3,995/ticket, if it's anything like how Microsoft/Canonical runs their business).
    - bonestormii_ 5y ago
      It's easy to say that, but what do you expect the platform to provide? If the platform makes operating your business so trivial that they provide all functionality baked into the product, I would suggest that your business may lack novelty, and therefore it may also lack competitiveness. "No code" doesn't mean you don't have to implement things yourself. You are simply limited to the platform's baked in abstractions in exchange for "not having to write code". Your services may eventually not map well to the capabilities of the platform, and it may cause problems. In such cases, the easiest and likely best solution is to offload functionality to a private server running custom code that interacts with the interfaces to the existing platform. The whole "no code" thing is spun as "empowering entrepreneurs", but there is a philosophy underlying it that implementation details don't matter, and programmers aren't needed. It may be true for some businesses who are in non-technical sectors, but if you are selling digital services themselves "no code" will only take you so far.
rokhayakebe 5y ago
I guess any tech content business would count. For example this guy below has both online classes where he teaches others how to ace a FANG interview and he also earns from his YT channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xKdmAXFh4ACyhpiQ_3qBw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xKdmAXFh4ACyhpiQ_3qBw
- cuddlecake 5y ago
  Good thing I knew you're talking about TechLead, so I could avoid clicking the link and poisoning my YouTube recommendations pages
  - headmelted 5y ago
    Would love to hear someone’s take on TechLead, especially someone informed from working inside a FANG. I’m trying to be less judgey generally, but there were a few things in the one video I started to watch that had me giving some wild side-eye so I stopped watching and never went back.
    - bserge 5y ago
      His content is just entertainment, isn't it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  The main part of the video is when he reviews the latest drink he's being paid to drink. The rest is filler for me.
tiku 5y ago
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.
- imperistan 5y ago
  yeah Views is awesome. I've been using Wordpress for years now because that's a requirement for the agency that hired me. But I still haven't found a good replacement for Views.
mooreds 5y ago
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.
dodoworld1 5y ago
yes - built https://blook.io https://blook.io without code (webflow / zapier / memberstack) and scaled to 100k+ year one
- tofukid 5y ago
  That’s awesome. How did you get customers and do marketing? There are so many of these incorporation filing services. What are you working on now?
haolez 5y ago
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.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing which one is it? (an email would suffice ;))
mraza007 5y ago
Has anyone published apps on appstores with no code tools. If you have I would love to hear your experience
- deckard1 5y ago
  I once used Unity to build an Android game. Unity is not entirely no-code, but it comes incredibly close. I'm willing to bet there are a handful of iOS/Android games out there with barely a line or two of custom code written.
Closi 5y ago
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).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 5y ago
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.
- wwweston 5y ago
  Which low-code tools make it easy to get your data out if you decide to migrate? Which make it impossible/expensive? Any domain examples you can share where it's been successful?
  - akudha 5y ago
    With tools like Airtable, you could simply export your data to CSV, though you'd lose the relationships. There are tools like bildr, appgyver etc that let you export at least the HMTL/CSS (depending on the pricing tier).
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Hence 'beware the lock-in'.
sbacic 5y ago
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.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  I think libraries are complicated so that they can be flexible and support many different use cases. You could release one library for authentication that works for one specific use case, but it would be useless for all others.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    As far as I have seen, so far in my career, this is all 'not invented here' stuff. Most things, like auth go from 'oh no mate, we need 10000x more complicated stuff, that Keycloak thing will never fit!' and then, 6 months later there is something like keycloak but worse, far less features, more complex but replacable in no time by keycloak without touching the keycloak (no customizing) sourcecode. But we cannot because we now invested 6000 hours into it. So now it is ours and we will continue to say it is very complicated and so nothing fits our complicated use case. Alternatively, tell me your complicated auth flows that will not have users running away screaming and are, therefor, bad ideas and should be replaced by cookie cutter stuff. Because that is where all of these things end up.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      A number of Ruby on Rails applications use Devise for basic account management and authentication. It's about as close as you can get to a cookie-cutter experience. As long as you follow the workflow, it's pretty straight forward to handle. Drop in the plugin you want, configure the API keys, and then wire it into your User model. Then you can customize the urls, views, and emails. You still have to read a fair amount of documentation and a lot of developers don't like the extra up-front work and reinvent the wheel because it's "simpler".
anmolparashar 5y ago
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 https://useCastup.com
ericwood 5y ago
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.
alberth 5y ago
The customer sites of Webflow and Bubble is probably what you’re looking for https://webflow.com/customers https://webflow.com/customers https://bubble.io/showcase https://bubble.io/showcase And if you want to go back 20 years, here’s a link of sites built with Microsoft Frontpage :) https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Frontpage https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Frontpage
christpetron 5y ago
Some good examples of businesses built with no-code on nocodestartupideas.com
kaetemi 5y ago
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. :)
tabtab 5y ago
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.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
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.
- theshadowknows 5y ago
  "We're going to build a universal lightening component that all of our orgs can use! It'll be easy!"
querulous 5y ago
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
- rpastuszak 5y ago
  Care to share who they are? This would make for a very interesting case study
mikewarot 5y ago
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.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  I was (well, not sure, have not tried recently) a very experienced Delphi coder and if it is low code or not depends on your VCL palette. Most would not be: you could drag and drop screens fast but it took a lot of code beyond the very basics. However, there were a few, especially Russian and Ukraine VCL libs which had you just mess around with Properties and that was enough to create pretty complex applications. Most companies I worked with did not allow and/or wanted to pay for those.
gervwyk 5y ago
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 https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy
- nyellin 5y ago
  I tried out Lowdefy recently and it was too much yaml so in the end I just wrote my app with Vue and Buetfy. If you had a visual editor that was good I would have used and paid for that.
  - gervwyk 5y ago
    This is interesting feedback. Thank you! I would love to ask you a few questions about this, if you do not mind, please reach out gvw[at]lowdefy.com A visual editor is definitely on our roadmap. Our strategy is to make the schema easy to read, write and understand. We want to ensure the dev experience of working with the Lowdefy schema is first class so that change review and version control can be as productive as possible. Adding a visual dev interface is resource intensive can easily distort the schema quality. We figured by first maturing the schema and making sure it works well with dev tooling, we can add a visual dev interface on top as Lowdefy becomes more popular.
    - talolard 5y ago
      I made a dev tool into a small business. Came hear to rant: invest in ui upfront. At the end, customers visit your site and you have very little time to make them go wow. Your spending a lot of attention capital when you don’t have much
harrisreynolds 5y ago
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/ https://www.sbaloanshq.com/ Lots of opportunity with these tools and platforms! [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com
mrjivraj 5y ago
I hacked together this spreadsheet to help me better visualize my investments in a different manner: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8oiEp9ctPMU9DAgerltYHGVeg/edit#gid=1660889064 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.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  I have a similar 'VC-style' portfolio.
  - mrjivraj 5y ago
    that's cool - do you write about it anywhere?
- rootsudo 5y ago
  You can do powerbi and a dashboard or probably similar in google spreadsheets I'd figure with external data source. You should also include a general net worth, daily net gain, weekly net gain on 7 day lag, and monthly/quarterly to see how you're really doing. Just the number and a basic chart can do so much more to clear it up. Etsy and BTC, congrats, same here too. What I did was create a general dashboard, of my daily net worth and also gone as far as see my daily spend - I setup email alerts on my credit card, withdrawls and used O365 flow to capture the number and append it to a spreadsheet which then is pushed to the dashboard on a hourly cadence. Bank accounts value Stocks Crypto Housing equity (this one is static, just took value and apply a custom appreciation rate, low, but figue if 3% annual is correct, just divide by 12, and do it monthly) Gross Revenue/Paycheck income. Daily Spend Daily spend average. But I admit it is different from just tracking investments, hopefully this post makes sense, I feel like I went off quite a bit.
  - mrjivraj 5y ago
    Congrats to you as well! I'll look into powerbi - thanks for the suggestion. It sounds like you're using it to track your budget & net worth. I actually disagree with tracking my investments this granularly. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. I find it's better to zoom out when it comes to investing and let time & compounding work for me. If it was granular to the day, I think I'd drive myself crazy! :)
willyg123 5y ago
Dru from Trends.VC compiled a list [1] of businesses that run on no-code tools but you have to be a subscriber to see all of them. [1] https://trends.vc/trends-0063-micro-saas/ https://trends.vc/trends-0063-micro-saas/
rodolphoarruda 5y ago
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.
corobo 5y ago
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
- tchock23 5y ago
  I was thinking the opposite - that using no code would actually be easier with GDPR. You essentially have one sub-processor (the platform). The well-funded no code platforms have established DPAs that make compliance a bit easier, and adhere to things like the SCC to safeguard data transfers across borders. Of course, your app’s individual privacy policy and practices will ultimately determine whether you’re compliant, but that’s the same case regardless of the approach you take…
  - corobo 5y ago
    How do you keep up with their policies, and updating every user if you decide to ditch Zapier and use Integromat? What happens if airtable or whatever you're using sells to Facebook? It's more keeping track of the replaceable moving parts and keeping your users in the loop plus what complying with consents they've given than data storage I'd imagine having issues with. I could very well be wrong, it just sounds like more work than getting someone to code you up something. I could also care too much, worst case you'd get a slap on the wrist for a first offence (although I personally follow GDPR for moral reasons as well as legal, I am aware others don't care haha)
grumblepeet 5y ago
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.
arey_abhishek 5y ago
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 https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
neighbour 5y ago
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?
krishvs 5y ago
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.
- akudha 5y ago
  What tools do you use the most?
  - krishvs 5y ago
    Low-code: Outsystems, appian, Apex, odoo(not really low-code for the most part) RPA: robotframework - along with python+java Also upgrades need to be carefully planned when using low-code tools as we have seen more breaking changes when compared to popular opensource frameworks.
artur_makly 5y ago
https://POPteam.io https://POPteam.io Woocommerce + a POD plugin/partner + Trello *all designs are hand custom-made however until we launch our Ai powered version.
alfiemarsh 5y ago
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 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.
dqdo 5y ago
Yes. Lots of people have built successful businesses with just a phone.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I would love to hear more about this.
bentossell 5y ago
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/ https://www.makerpad.co/
hardyian 5y ago
Yes, I've used some free website builders for creating websites but now I started learning html through https://www.cronj.com/frontend-development/html.html https://www.cronj.com/frontend-development/html.html.
jamexcb 5y ago
Yes we have! And our costumers too. We develop and sell: https://www.kalipsostudio.com/ 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://www.sysdevmss.com/ https://sysdevdcapp.com/ https://sysdevdcapp.com/ https://www.syslogmobile.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.
neurofuturo 5y ago
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 https://www.woondlab.com
iamnazzty 5y ago
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.
npv789 5y ago
notion+mailchimp+zapier. NO-CODE takes over
actfrench 5y ago
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.masteryhour.org/ , https://www.modulo.app/ https://www.modulo.app/, http://schoolclosures.org/ 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 https://modulolearning.typeform.com/to/VBJmkLTu

183 points by akudha 5y ago

SaaS, productized service, freelance - anyone doing it successfully with no-code, low-code tools?

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 https://bubble.io/showcase

akudha 5y ago
Thank You. I am a programmer, I did try bubble - it is quite powerful, but the UI is a bit...weird. Are you allowed to share links to their businesses?

warent 5y ago

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.

judohacker 5y ago

OkieFoodTrucks.com is a SaaS for event organizers to find/book food trucks, built entirely on no code. You can read more about how it was built here:. https://www.foxy.io/blog/how-okiefoodtrucks-is-using-foxy-webflow-to-change-the-food-truck-industry/ https://www.foxy.io/blog/how-okiefoodtrucks-is-using-foxy-we...

codingdave 5y ago

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.

rock_hard 5y ago
Friend of mine has been thinking to start a no-code engineering school to teach people the skills required to build no-code products for exactly that reason
- akudha 5y ago
  Like makerpad? There are a handful like it, there is space for more I guess

smoldesu 5y ago

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.

lostgame 5y ago
Couldn't agree with this sentiment more. It's always going to be a money and time pit when you need to outsource to fix any problems. If you don't know code, hire someone on your team who does. :)
- codingdave 5y ago
  > when you need to outsource to fix any problems. Yeah, but that would be a pretty crappy low-code platform if when things went wrong, they did not handle it, and instead told their customers to go hire coders.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Someone's getting paid to fix your program, whether it's a "computer science consultant" or their premium service package (probably $3,995/ticket, if it's anything like how Microsoft/Canonical runs their business).
  - bonestormii_ 5y ago
    It's easy to say that, but what do you expect the platform to provide? If the platform makes operating your business so trivial that they provide all functionality baked into the product, I would suggest that your business may lack novelty, and therefore it may also lack competitiveness. "No code" doesn't mean you don't have to implement things yourself. You are simply limited to the platform's baked in abstractions in exchange for "not having to write code". Your services may eventually not map well to the capabilities of the platform, and it may cause problems. In such cases, the easiest and likely best solution is to offload functionality to a private server running custom code that interacts with the interfaces to the existing platform. The whole "no code" thing is spun as "empowering entrepreneurs", but there is a philosophy underlying it that implementation details don't matter, and programmers aren't needed. It may be true for some businesses who are in non-technical sectors, but if you are selling digital services themselves "no code" will only take you so far.

rokhayakebe 5y ago

I guess any tech content business would count. For example this guy below has both online classes where he teaches others how to ace a FANG interview and he also earns from his YT channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xKdmAXFh4ACyhpiQ_3qBw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xKdmAXFh4ACyhpiQ_3qBw

cuddlecake 5y ago
Good thing I knew you're talking about TechLead, so I could avoid clicking the link and poisoning my YouTube recommendations pages
- headmelted 5y ago
  Would love to hear someone’s take on TechLead, especially someone informed from working inside a FANG. I’m trying to be less judgey generally, but there were a few things in the one video I started to watch that had me giving some wild side-eye so I stopped watching and never went back.
  - bserge 5y ago
    His content is just entertainment, isn't it?
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robertlagrant 5y ago
The main part of the video is when he reviews the latest drink he's being paid to drink. The rest is filler for me.

tiku 5y ago

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.

imperistan 5y ago
yeah Views is awesome. I've been using Wordpress for years now because that's a requirement for the agency that hired me. But I still haven't found a good replacement for Views.

mooreds 5y ago

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.

dodoworld1 5y ago

yes - built https://blook.io https://blook.io without code (webflow / zapier / memberstack) and scaled to 100k+ year one

tofukid 5y ago
That’s awesome. How did you get customers and do marketing? There are so many of these incorporation filing services. What are you working on now?

haolez 5y ago

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.

moralestapia 5y ago
Would you mind sharing which one is it? (an email would suffice ;))

mraza007 5y ago

Has anyone published apps on appstores with no code tools. If you have I would love to hear your experience

deckard1 5y ago
I once used Unity to build an Android game. Unity is not entirely no-code, but it comes incredibly close. I'm willing to bet there are a handful of iOS/Android games out there with barely a line or two of custom code written.

Closi 5y ago

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).

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jacquesm 5y ago

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.

wwweston 5y ago
Which low-code tools make it easy to get your data out if you decide to migrate? Which make it impossible/expensive? Any domain examples you can share where it's been successful?
- akudha 5y ago
  With tools like Airtable, you could simply export your data to CSV, though you'd lose the relationships. There are tools like bildr, appgyver etc that let you export at least the HMTL/CSS (depending on the pricing tier).
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Hence 'beware the lock-in'.

sbacic 5y ago

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.

bostonsre 5y ago
I think libraries are complicated so that they can be flexible and support many different use cases. You could release one library for authentication that works for one specific use case, but it would be useless for all others.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  As far as I have seen, so far in my career, this is all 'not invented here' stuff. Most things, like auth go from 'oh no mate, we need 10000x more complicated stuff, that Keycloak thing will never fit!' and then, 6 months later there is something like keycloak but worse, far less features, more complex but replacable in no time by keycloak without touching the keycloak (no customizing) sourcecode. But we cannot because we now invested 6000 hours into it. So now it is ours and we will continue to say it is very complicated and so nothing fits our complicated use case. Alternatively, tell me your complicated auth flows that will not have users running away screaming and are, therefor, bad ideas and should be replaced by cookie cutter stuff. Because that is where all of these things end up.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    A number of Ruby on Rails applications use Devise for basic account management and authentication. It's about as close as you can get to a cookie-cutter experience. As long as you follow the workflow, it's pretty straight forward to handle. Drop in the plugin you want, configure the API keys, and then wire it into your User model. Then you can customize the urls, views, and emails. You still have to read a fair amount of documentation and a lot of developers don't like the extra up-front work and reinvent the wheel because it's "simpler".

anmolparashar 5y ago

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 https://useCastup.com

ericwood 5y ago

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.

alberth 5y ago

The customer sites of Webflow and Bubble is probably what you’re looking for https://webflow.com/customers https://webflow.com/customers https://bubble.io/showcase https://bubble.io/showcase And if you want to go back 20 years, here’s a link of sites built with Microsoft Frontpage :) https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Frontpage https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Frontpage

christpetron 5y ago

Some good examples of businesses built with no-code on nocodestartupideas.com

kaetemi 5y ago

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. :)

tabtab 5y ago

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.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

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.

theshadowknows 5y ago
"We're going to build a universal lightening component that all of our orgs can use! It'll be easy!"

querulous 5y ago

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

rpastuszak 5y ago
Care to share who they are? This would make for a very interesting case study

mikewarot 5y ago

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.

tluyben2 5y ago
I was (well, not sure, have not tried recently) a very experienced Delphi coder and if it is low code or not depends on your VCL palette. Most would not be: you could drag and drop screens fast but it took a lot of code beyond the very basics. However, there were a few, especially Russian and Ukraine VCL libs which had you just mess around with Properties and that was enough to create pretty complex applications. Most companies I worked with did not allow and/or wanted to pay for those.

gervwyk 5y ago

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 https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

nyellin 5y ago
I tried out Lowdefy recently and it was too much yaml so in the end I just wrote my app with Vue and Buetfy. If you had a visual editor that was good I would have used and paid for that.
- gervwyk 5y ago
  This is interesting feedback. Thank you! I would love to ask you a few questions about this, if you do not mind, please reach out gvw[at]lowdefy.com A visual editor is definitely on our roadmap. Our strategy is to make the schema easy to read, write and understand. We want to ensure the dev experience of working with the Lowdefy schema is first class so that change review and version control can be as productive as possible. Adding a visual dev interface is resource intensive can easily distort the schema quality. We figured by first maturing the schema and making sure it works well with dev tooling, we can add a visual dev interface on top as Lowdefy becomes more popular.
  - talolard 5y ago
    I made a dev tool into a small business. Came hear to rant: invest in ui upfront. At the end, customers visit your site and you have very little time to make them go wow. Your spending a lot of attention capital when you don’t have much

harrisreynolds 5y ago

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/ https://www.sbaloanshq.com/ Lots of opportunity with these tools and platforms! [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com

mrjivraj 5y ago

I hacked together this spreadsheet to help me better visualize my investments in a different manner: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8oiEp9ctPMU9DAgerltYHGVeg/edit#gid=1660889064 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.

jsemrau 5y ago
I have a similar 'VC-style' portfolio.
- mrjivraj 5y ago
  that's cool - do you write about it anywhere?
rootsudo 5y ago
You can do powerbi and a dashboard or probably similar in google spreadsheets I'd figure with external data source. You should also include a general net worth, daily net gain, weekly net gain on 7 day lag, and monthly/quarterly to see how you're really doing. Just the number and a basic chart can do so much more to clear it up. Etsy and BTC, congrats, same here too. What I did was create a general dashboard, of my daily net worth and also gone as far as see my daily spend - I setup email alerts on my credit card, withdrawls and used O365 flow to capture the number and append it to a spreadsheet which then is pushed to the dashboard on a hourly cadence. Bank accounts value Stocks Crypto Housing equity (this one is static, just took value and apply a custom appreciation rate, low, but figue if 3% annual is correct, just divide by 12, and do it monthly) Gross Revenue/Paycheck income. Daily Spend Daily spend average. But I admit it is different from just tracking investments, hopefully this post makes sense, I feel like I went off quite a bit.
- mrjivraj 5y ago
  Congrats to you as well! I'll look into powerbi - thanks for the suggestion. It sounds like you're using it to track your budget & net worth. I actually disagree with tracking my investments this granularly. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. I find it's better to zoom out when it comes to investing and let time & compounding work for me. If it was granular to the day, I think I'd drive myself crazy! :)

willyg123 5y ago

Dru from Trends.VC compiled a list [1] of businesses that run on no-code tools but you have to be a subscriber to see all of them. [1] https://trends.vc/trends-0063-micro-saas/ https://trends.vc/trends-0063-micro-saas/

rodolphoarruda 5y ago

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.

corobo 5y ago

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

tchock23 5y ago
I was thinking the opposite - that using no code would actually be easier with GDPR. You essentially have one sub-processor (the platform). The well-funded no code platforms have established DPAs that make compliance a bit easier, and adhere to things like the SCC to safeguard data transfers across borders. Of course, your app’s individual privacy policy and practices will ultimately determine whether you’re compliant, but that’s the same case regardless of the approach you take…
- corobo 5y ago
  How do you keep up with their policies, and updating every user if you decide to ditch Zapier and use Integromat? What happens if airtable or whatever you're using sells to Facebook? It's more keeping track of the replaceable moving parts and keeping your users in the loop plus what complying with consents they've given than data storage I'd imagine having issues with. I could very well be wrong, it just sounds like more work than getting someone to code you up something. I could also care too much, worst case you'd get a slap on the wrist for a first offence (although I personally follow GDPR for moral reasons as well as legal, I am aware others don't care haha)

grumblepeet 5y ago

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.

arey_abhishek 5y ago

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 https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

neighbour 5y ago

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?

krishvs 5y ago

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.

akudha 5y ago
What tools do you use the most?
- krishvs 5y ago
  Low-code: Outsystems, appian, Apex, odoo(not really low-code for the most part) RPA: robotframework - along with python+java Also upgrades need to be carefully planned when using low-code tools as we have seen more breaking changes when compared to popular opensource frameworks.

artur_makly 5y ago

https://POPteam.io https://POPteam.io Woocommerce + a POD plugin/partner + Trello *all designs are hand custom-made however until we launch our Ai powered version.

alfiemarsh 5y ago

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 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.

dqdo 5y ago

Yes. Lots of people have built successful businesses with just a phone.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
I would love to hear more about this.

bentossell 5y ago

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/ https://www.makerpad.co/

hardyian 5y ago

Yes, I've used some free website builders for creating websites but now I started learning html through https://www.cronj.com/frontend-development/html.html https://www.cronj.com/frontend-development/html.html.

jamexcb 5y ago

Yes we have! And our costumers too. We develop and sell: https://www.kalipsostudio.com/ 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://www.sysdevmss.com/ https://sysdevdcapp.com/ https://sysdevdcapp.com/ https://www.syslogmobile.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.

neurofuturo 5y ago

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 https://www.woondlab.com

iamnazzty 5y ago

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.

npv789 5y ago

notion+mailchimp+zapier. NO-CODE takes over

actfrench 5y ago

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.masteryhour.org/ , https://www.modulo.app/ https://www.modulo.app/, http://schoolclosures.org/ 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 https://modulolearning.typeform.com/to/VBJmkLTu