No Code – The Key to Start-Up Dynamism
Zandra Moore, the CEO of Panintelligence, and founder of the No Code Lab initiative reveals how no-code and low-code solutions will help take start-ups further with less time and resource – keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive
So, you’ve got an innovative, marketable idea that will update, disrupt and change the face of an industry, great! Now you just need to build it and get it out to your eagerly awaiting users. This is the part where things begin to slow, things get laborious, not to mention expensive and start to lose their shine.
Development teams can cost thousands, finding a well-versed team is tough and when income is scarce, more often than not, your unicorn is sent to the knackers’ yard before he’s even seen the starting line.
Anyone Can Build
No code and low code options present opportunities that open the door of innovative development to anyone. Many options use a simple drag and drop, turning your entire team into potential citizen developers, reducing the need to hire an expensive development team. Services like ‘Shopify’ and ‘Carrd’ open the floor to almost anyone to build a custom offering. No code tools like these supply millions of e-commerce sellers or allow you to build a custom website where the options are limitless.
Development teams are perfect for building a completely custom product or service, it’s a way to safeguard your intellectual property and start delivering an industry-challenging offering, think Uber or Airbnb. For anything outside of this, development teams could potentially provide a high entry barrier which is inaccessible to many. With the average UK start-up’s budget being less than £5,000, and the average salary for developers being around £55,000, one decent dev, let alone a whole team, is just not a luxury many start-ups can afford.
Look at Budget Meal Planner as a success story, this offering takes simple and easy to make meals and provides the ingredients for less than $5. It works and is efficient. The company built the entire site on a no code platform and with no upfront development overheads the company could compete in an overcrowded market at their $5 price point.
Do it yourself, get it to market, and start solving problems. Entrepreneurial spirit shouldn’t be quashed by the inability to code.
Pivoting
In such an unpredictable market, its vital to remain customer centric, any deviation from solving customer pain points will lead to non-adoption of your idea, as many as 40% of businesses have reported increased sales from pivoting from pre-lockdown. That’s why it’s important to constantly evaluate your offering, even in its conception stages. After evaluation, it’s key to be able to change and adapt your idea to better suit the market.
Recent studies have shown that 1 in 5 businesses have successfully pivoted in their lifetime; this agility gives start-ups a significant market advantage.
With no code, this is a reality. If no code gives founders the option to create an application in a matter of weeks, they can easily and quickly adapt and change the offering without tearing down their build and losing any progress they have made.
One recent example of pivoting with no code comes from New York City, the formally known ‘Museum Hack’ found that their business model was unsustainable due to the pandemic. They quickly shifted focus to provide team building exercises, from guacamole making to virtual S’more making, they did this by investing in a ‘Zapier’ solution, which is a no code platform designed to automate workflow processes; allowing them to build teambuilding.com , a successful start-up from the ashes.
Piquing Investors’ Interest
For many (especially tech) start-ups, investment is key to success. Without that initial cash injection, many would fall at the first hurdle. To properly get their offering out to the market, start-ups may need contacts, mentoring and capital to further develop. Forbes reported that start-ups with mentoring grow 3.5X faster and raise 7X more money.
To get their foot in the door, start-ups need to prove they have a genuine investable proposition. No code solutions give founders the power to build an MVP within a tight budget and get it in front of an investor in weeks, rather than months, while the pain points are still extremely relevant.
No code and low code solutions can be a start-ups’ best friend; a hacked together, no code-based MVP takes an idea from a pretty picture on an investor pitch deck to a real-life, living, breathing product. Although investor interest is important and MVPs are vital for those early stages of business, the no code movement is no longer confined to the regions of ‘low-cost proof of concept’, we’re just scraping the surface of the sheer scope of tech and business applications that this new wave of user-centric solutions have to offer.
