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

I don’t really understand what “no code” is. You can put up a storefront and conduct business without writing a line of code, simply by adding plug ins to Wordpress, calling out to stripe etc. The result is somewhat templatized and slightly generic looking but that’s great: your value comes from the content, as the author correctly describes, and the visitor will presumably understand navigation etc.<p>This kind of process has decades of predecessors, from dbs like Delphi, Excel, to Emacs in the ‘70s to (so it was claimed at the time) FORTRAN.<p>Is “no code” meant to somehow imply something more?

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

No-code platforms have always been a great way to put a MVP together. MVPs help you vet the idea before pouring real dollars into it. They are not meant to be the foundation for the product itself; those thinking otherwise have a very expensive refactor ahead of them!<p>I hear MVP thrown around like candy in the consulting I do. I _wish_ they started with no code!<p>Didn&#x27;t some now-unicorn start its life as an email distribution list or spreadsheet?

&gt; No code<p>Sounds like a fancy (actually more like crappy) buzzword for using SaaS products as part of your website&#x2F;business.<p>Source: reading <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.makerpad.co&#x2F;stories&#x2F;mitchell-wright-how-lambda-school-grew-with-no-code-tools" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.makerpad.co&#x2F;stories&#x2F;mitchell-wright-how-lambda-s...</a>

The first real low-code solution was a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were what drove businesses to buy PCs in the early 80s.<p>In the 90s, CASE (computer-automated software engineering) was a big thing. Powerbuilder was huge. Novell had one where you could draw a flowchart and fill in dialogs to make client-server apps... UI builders became common as language vendors added graphical IDEs to their game.<p>In the 00&#x27;s we had a lot of visual development tools for websites. Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc...<p>In the 10&#x27;s we had Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo&#x27;s pipes.<p>Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code.

They&#x27;ll find some success, the same way that visual editors for desktop applications, and visual editors for web pages, found some success. In the end, these tools all require you to drop the facade once you want to do something too advanced.<p>I personally don&#x27;t see how these companies can be worth much. Just as with visual web editors, they started out charging a lot but over time the price floored out to zero. Now there are dozens of websites that give away their &quot;no code&quot; editors, with the hope that you&#x27;ll pay them to host your site forever.

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

No-code is a funny term and I&#x27;m not sure what it means. I would understand if it was non-dev or something similar. But most &quot;no-code&quot; people I know who work on side projects can edit basic javascript&#x2F;etc, but couldn&#x27;t write much from scratch.<p>I&#x27;d imagine this group is the subset the author is looking at. If you want to look at people who actually can&#x27;t code, they are likely non-technical, and not using a tool like zapier. They&#x27;re startups probably look very different (consulting, etc).

I find it odd that the article&#x27;s topic is literally &quot;the surge of people taking a shot at building a business with no code products&quot;, but the author then goes on to be really surprised that so many people in this group are trying to build a business compared with &quot;developers in general&quot;.<p>Well if you interview developers who represent their startup product i guess you might end up with similar figures of &quot;wants to be an entrepreneur&quot;?<p>It&#x27;s missing the point that devs might have a number of incentives in building tools outside of a business scope, but when someone sets out to build a product even when it&#x27;s not their job &amp; passion &quot;anyway&quot;, it pretty damn sure aims to make money

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

No-code = code from another person

The title is just extremely wrong and clickbait. There&#x27;s no content or data about &quot;rise&quot;. If anything, the default founder is no-code outside of SV. There&#x27;s a sharp rise of coding-founders, just because basic coding is becoming &quot;basic knowledge&quot; and taught in highschools now. I won&#x27;t click these clickbait indiehackers links again.

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

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

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

A great example of the no-code system might be something like Power Automate&#x2F;Power Apps&#x2F;Power BI from Microsoft.<p>It&#x27;s pretty painful to use when you want to do something simple in code like explode an array, take a few of the values from that and implode back into an array again.<p>Things like AWS Quicksight or Google Data Studio might be in the same sort of world too.

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

I feel someone should mention The Last One, from 1981, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Last_One_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Last_One_(software)</a>

so, the big question for me is: these tools generally package a lot of functionality in their &quot;no-code&quot; wrappings, otherwise they would be near useless (for example see LabView and Co, which are painful to work in and interestingly seldom marketed as &quot;no-code&quot;...).<p>So what&#x27;s technically the difference to a high-level API? History tells us (from Fortran to Emacs to TeX to R&#x2F;Keras&#x2F;...) that these tools generally last _a lot_ longer than any of the non-spreadsheet no-codes. While at the same time being much more flexible.

So basically the &quot;no-code&quot; founders that are making money are the ones building &quot;no-code&quot; tools for people who can&#x27;t code and those teaching people to start &quot;no-code business.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t imagine you can build or even conceive a complex app without understanding the technicalities of how it all works. It seems to me majority of the no code tools are used for content websites with payments.

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

Why though? 13 year-olds can learn CSS&#x2F;HTML for their neopets, I get it&#x27;s scary but this stuff isn&#x27;t poison.

I think the future will be in &quot;low-code&quot; rather than &quot;no-code&quot;.<p>For example, Looker has LookerML which while it isn&#x27;t full blown programming, it allows for a lot of customisation and far more complex use cases when compared with &quot;no-code&quot; alternatives like Tableau.

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

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

Would you consider something like Collibra <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.collibra.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.collibra.com&#x2F;</a> to be no-code? They seem to be exploding at the moment.<p>How about SAP or Salesforce?

in architecture it is grasshopper for rhino, in sound it is puredata or max&#x2F;msp, in business SAP is pushing this since the 90s. with the idea to enable business to implement things w&#x2F;o the need of developers: (1) brf+ to implement business logic, (2) the new integration product &quot;cloud plattform integration&quot; to integrate via flows (3) sap crm aet to create crud functionality. in some way it always fails. the best thing about having code is the versioning, the things you can automate.

Betteridge&#x27;s Law would have saved me some time. The answer is no, not really; the only company doing well according to the article is Lambda School, and as we&#x27;ve explored here before, their money-making schemes have nothing to do with no-code tools and everything to do with scamming students.

Making ? Surely you meant raising.

Grasshopper in Rhino3d is pretty rad. Visual coding of algorithmic designs.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rhino3d.com&#x2F;6&#x2F;new&#x2F;grasshopper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rhino3d.com&#x2F;6&#x2F;new&#x2F;grasshopper</a>