My former colleague reached me out recently with offer to join his startup to build MVP of no-code web development platform. Such products might look interesting at the beginning, but I'm sure many tried and many failed, hence I want to understand:<p>1. Who are the customers of no-code products?<p>2. Do these customers stay in the long-term?<p>3. What are the top challenges that killed such startups?<p>4. In 5 years time, would we have more and significantly successful no-code products?<p>5. At what extent a customer might prefer a no-code tool over signing a contract with consultancy?
I don't have any experience working with them, but have been a user of them. I co-founded a disaster relief non-profit a few years ago which was a good use case for rapid in-house tool development.<p>When your window of opportunity is 3 or 4 days, there's not any time for design meetings. You build what you can build in a couple of hours and move on to the next thing.<p>Based on that, I looked at a lot of the options out there and ultimately didn't find anything better than IBM's free tool Node Red, coupled with API gluing services like Zapier and Integromat.<p>I could see in-house tools being a market for them, I know there's at least one other one that specifically integrates with Postgres via the PostGrest API project but can't remember the name offhand.<p>Then again, if someone knows enough to use such a tool, they probably could be using Django in a couple of months of learning basic Python, so I'm not sure there is such a market, honestly.
maybe check out this and other forums do get an idea of what people are looking for if there's a market etc.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/nocode/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/nocode/</a><p>just in my quick look there seems to be a market for business lead projects in the enterprise, but the suggestion was use Gardener's top right quadrant.