[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?
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Ask HN: Anyone built a business with no-code tools?
SaaS, productized service, freelance - anyone doing it successfully
with no-code, low-code tools?
Author : akudha
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-06-22 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
| tiku wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dodoworld1 wrote:
| yes - built https://blook.io without code (webflow / zapier /
| memberstack) and scaled to 100k+ year one
| Closi wrote:
| 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]
| tabtab wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "We're going to build a universal lightening component that all
| of our orgs can use! It'll be easy!"
| mooreds wrote:
| 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.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| 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.
| ericwood wrote:
| 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.
| anmolparashar wrote:
| 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
| judohacker wrote:
| 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-we...
| mrjivraj wrote:
| I hacked together this spreadsheet to help me better visualize my
| investments in a different manner:
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o...
|
| Been contemplating whether to leverage no-code tools to help
| level-up the functionality and visualizations
|
| Would appreciate any pointers as appropriate. Thanks.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I have a similar 'VC-style' portfolio.
| linseed_213 wrote:
| 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
| akudha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| arey_abhishek wrote:
| 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
| querulous wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Care to share who they are? This would make for a very
| interesting case study
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| runako wrote:
| I disagree strongly with this as blanket advice. A large number
| of SaaS apps are primarily CRUD apps where outputs are database
| updates and/or API calls. No-code platforms could support many
| of these quite well through the first $1m + of revenue.
|
| And I can't believe this needs to be said, but yes it can be
| smart to hire programmers to build 5% of your system instead of
| 100%.
|
| > Trying to be an entrepreneur in an area that you don't have
| experience in is a money pit.
|
| Y Combinator exists as an explicit bet against this
| proposition. (They publicly said they wanted to find the
| youngest age where entrepreneurs could be successful.) To take
| another, AirBnB is a good counter-example. Should the founders
| have been experts in programming? Data science? Recommendations
| engines? Hospitality? If you erect enough artificial barriers,
| nobody will launch anything.
| mbesto wrote:
| 100% disagree, and I've built, managed, sold, advised, etc.
| etc. 100's of tech companies.
|
| Starting a tech business on a low code environment is a great
| idea. In fact, is probably the best idea since it means
| iterating fast, easy to identify functional requirements and
| gets you to market fit ASAP without breaking the bank.
|
| Running a tech business at scale on a low code environment is a
| whole another topic (the OP explicitly mentioned "built").
|
| TL;DR - Unless you're building hard tech (AI platforms, VR,
| etc.), then low code environments are great ways to build
| businesses.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > then low code environments are great ways to build
| businesses
|
| Eeeehhhh - it depends on where and how your business delivers
| value. As others have said, the problem with low-code
| platforms is they're generally proprietary, which means it's
| much harder to wean yourself off once you get started -
| though that's not my main concern: my main concern is that
| low-code platforms _necessarily_ mean ceding control over
| your product 's E2E: if you accept that for the productivity
| gains from not having to get bogged-down in the details, sure
| - but for a lot of stuff it's a very limiting factor.
|
| My current company's focus is a small suite of domain-
| specific line-of-business SaaS apps - nothing special there.
| It does mean that our entrenched and incumbent competitors
| built "unsexy" ASP.NET WebForms (ew) pages over a decade ago
| and haven't maintained them - or they're relatively modern
| but built on-top of heavy SPA frameworks that ultimately
| detract rather than benefit the E2E UX (an egregious example
| is a competitor that has a traditional SSR web-app, except
| they load Angular2+ in every single page-load... it's stuff
| _like that_ which makes users develop negative sentiment
| around a web-application.
|
| Another anecdote is a simple reporting system built-in to one
| of our products: again, it's nothing special: just a data
| warehouse in Azure with some clever hand-written SQL queries
| to populate some simple HTML tables with ChartJS thrown-in
| for good measure - and one of our biggest customers' buyers
| was completely floored by our demo - I thought he was being
| sarcastic or facetious in the meeting but it turned out that
| they were using another of our competitors who built their
| similar reporting functionality using a low-code-ish platform
| where the web-service is a dumb store of data and the client
| JS code has to retrieve and process all the data itself...
| (with no multi-tenant access-controls either) so it took 30+
| seconds (and thousands of AJAX requests) for their report to
| load.
|
| ...now you can argue that my anecdotes concern companies that
| either let their product go stale or had an incompetent (or
| under-funded and over-worked) development team - but that
| doesn't detract from my point that low-code tools and
| platforms make it very difficult, if not impossible, to root-
| out E2E issues. Having an app with poor performance is bad
| enough, but having an app where the low-code platform you
| built-on makes it _impossible_ to address some core user-
| experience fault is why I have a hard line against low-code
| in principle. Another example of this is this one particular
| low-code web-app platform (no names please) which hard-codes
| in some old version of jQuery which then precludes bringing
| in other client-side libraries or third-party widgets (think:
| stuff like ZenDesk chat support, and their widget 's bad
| enough already).
|
| So yes, it's cliche: but "it's a tradeoff" - but just be
| mindful of exactly what you're trading-away in exchange for
| developer productivity. You're either the kind of company
| that looks at, say, Blackboard and either sees them as a
| success for their large user-base - or you're someone who
| actually used it and consequently will carry that bad-taste-
| in-the-mouth over to _not recommend_ purchasing it if they
| 're ever put a position where they make decisions about what
| software/systems an org buys. My opinion is that the user-
| experience matters, and low-code tools make it easy to ruin
| the E2E UX if you're not careful.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| Name 100 tech companies you've sold.
|
| I'll wait
| mbesto wrote:
| > built, managed, sold, advised
|
| _advised_
|
| Thanks for the snark though.
| lostgame wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bonestormii_ wrote:
| 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.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| In my experience this is the case for every low-code
| platform once you try anything more advanced then their
| most basic tutorials and use-cases.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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).
| corobo wrote:
| 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
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| 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
| cuddlecake wrote:
| Good thing I knew you're talking about TechLead, so I could
| avoid clicking the link and poisoning my YouTube
| recommendations pages
| headmelted wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| His content is just entertainment, isn't it?
| [deleted]
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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.
| grumblepeet wrote:
| 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.
| alberth wrote:
| The customer sites of Webflow and Bubble is probably what you're
| looking for
|
| https://webflow.com/customers
|
| 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
| haolez wrote:
| 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.
| mraza007 wrote:
| Has anyone published apps on appstores with no code tools. If you
| have I would love to hear your experience
| deckard1 wrote:
| 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.
| harrisreynolds wrote:
| We are building packages around WeBase [1]. As an example we have
| a solution for small businesses/startups that includes a
| website/forms/email lists etc all in one... here's a site using
| this solution: https://www.sbaloanshq.com/
|
| Lots of opportunity with these tools and platforms!
|
| [1] https://www.webase.com
| christpetron wrote:
| Some good examples of businesses built with no-code on
| nocodestartupideas.com
| sbacic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sbacic wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy into it - I don't think it's necessary
| that even simple use cases need to be complicated in order
| for the whole to be flexible.
|
| The simple use cases should just be plug and play. If you
| want a different solution: here are the tools, here is the
| documentation, have fun.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| bsid wrote:
| This is what we're trying to solve at Clerk,
| (https://www.clerk.dev) and it's been harder than we've
| expected, especially in regards to local development
| environments. Although we think we've made it seamless! Would
| love your opinion.
|
| However, we're definitely not aiming it at non-programmers. I
| don't think completely general low/no-code solutions will ever
| take off. Everyone wants things far too custom, and at some
| point you won't be able to beat the programming language of the
| time. Companies like retool are doing a great job in specific
| verticals -- and I think it will always stay that way.
|
| I think the next generation of dev-tools are going to be pretty
| impressive, especially with how easy and modular React
| components are -- I'm bullish that React will become "low-code"
| gervwyk wrote:
| 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
| nyellin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| nyellin wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what type of devtool you built?
|
| I'm founder of a startup that develops DevOps tooling and
| we're debating how early to build out the ui. (We have
| the basics down with Vue like I mentioned.)
| sli wrote:
| I can't speak for the GP, but I personally find editing
| code in my IDE to be a smoother and more productive
| process than editing any type of serialization or markup
| format like YAML (or JSON, or RON, or EDN to a _bit_
| lesser extent). This is most likely due to me being so
| used to being on the other side of those formats, or
| generating them with code in the first place, and not
| necessarily because one is "better." My IDE setups will
| reflect that preference, which in turn makes it stronger.
| gervwyk wrote:
| Thanks for the advice. You make a very valid point. The
| first version of Lowdefy had a UI, then every time we
| wanted to make a schema improvement we also had the tech
| debt of adapting the UI. As a result the schema became
| secondary and more and more become unreadable.
|
| So then we really asked how lean can we make this
| platform to keep it agile while experimenting with the
| mechanics of the schema. After more than a year of that
| the experimentation paid off and we now have a very
| flexible, yet understandable schema for building apps.
|
| But yes. Adding a visual editor on top is one of our
| goals - and we are getting closer and closer to making it
| happen.
| nyellin wrote:
| Sure, emailed
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Too much yaml is interesting: it hides a lot (a lot) of
| plumbing: what did you find easier with Vue besides
| 'control'?
| willyg123 wrote:
| 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/
| kaetemi wrote:
| 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. :)
| codingdave wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Like makerpad? There are a handful like it, there is space
| for more I guess
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(page generated 2021-06-22 23:02 UTC)