
No-code founders are on the rise. Are they making money? - ChanningAllen
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/no-code-founders-are-on-the-rise-are-they-making-money-15da743dc3
======
gumby
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.

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.

Is “no code” meant to somehow imply something more?

~~~
ryanSrich
From what I can tell yes. It’s intended to imply something more.

See bubble for example - [https://bubble.io](https://bubble.io) . It’s
basically “visual” Rails. The intention is to allow users to build complex,
interactive software visually, without having to write code.

Webflow has a ton of plugins that can get you something similar. You can have
a user model (memberstack.io) with authentication and even the ability to
create user specific content. I was able to create a fairly complex user
dashboard that had real time charts pulled from an Airtable database that was
synced automatically with user interaction using Zapier.

...but, here’s the issue. You just can’t do enough. I made it about a week
before I abandon the idea and went back to Rails.

I’m still bullish on the idea of no code though. The tools are there. They
just need more functionality.

~~~
wolfgke
> See bubble for example - [https://bubble.io](https://bubble.io) . It’s
> basically “visual” Rails. The intention is to allow users to build complex,
> interactive software visually, without having to write code.

Why the "hate" for code? I immediately understand the problems that typical
programming languages have for people who are not trained in programming. But
there exist good reasons why other approaches like "visual programming" have
failed (except for some niches). So in my opinion the solution is not to
"spread hate" against code for a "stupid" market pitch, but take the time to
develop programming languages that are better suited to the needs of the
customer.

~~~
mettamage
I can think of a few. Most of these things could also be done with text-based
code, but typically aren't when you're just starting out:

\- No set up issues (visual programming is cloud-based)

\- Less of a discoverability issue (visual programming shows a lot of things
all at once)

\- A sense of familiarity (people have seen flow chart like things before)

\- It's easier to see the difference between arguments and parameters

Full disclosure: I have almost never seen visual programming languages, but I
got the idea that there was no devil's advocate present within you. So here I
am ;-) I find it quite easy to think from a beginner's perspective, because in
some sense I can't fathom that I know what I know now since I never thought
I'd ever know this much in my entire life (and I'm only 31, lol).

~~~
wolfgke
> \- No set up issues (visual programming is cloud-based)

Cloud-based has nothing to do with visual programming or no-code (you can also
do cloud-based editing of conventional code if you desire). Counterexamples:
LabVIEW, Simulink.

> \- Less of a discoverability issue (visual programming shows a lot of things
> all at once)

Wasn't "shows a lot of things all at once" actually an argument (marketing
pitch) why conventional programming language overwhelm many people who are not
programmers, and visual programming languages are "thus" better because charts
have a lot less "intellectual density" than computer code?!

> \- It's easier to see the difference between arguments and parameters

What is actually the difference?

~~~
mettamage
I said

> Most of these things could also be done with text-based code, but typically
> aren't when you're just starting out

This means that it all can be done, but isn't. Which means that it's a
cultural issue, not a technical issue.

Also, I was under the impression that discussion was about mainstream
programming languages and mainstream visual programming languages (of which
you said there were none). Here's a workable definition of mainstream: the
Stackoverflow top 10. It doesn't have LabVIEW and Simulink.

When you discount niches for visual programming, then you have to do it with
text-based programming as well, otherwise the argument isn't fair. I presume
that you know this. So I find it peculiar that you don't qualify why you're
using languages that aren't (seemingly) remotely mainstream, or why you're not
using mainstream examples.

> Wasn't "shows a lot of things all at once" actually an argument (marketing
> pitch) why conventional programming language overwhelm many people who are
> not programmers, and visual programming languages are "thus" better because
> charts have a lot less "intellectual density" than computer code?!

I wouldn't know.

I'm quitting this discussion, the exclamation mark + question mark, "what is
actually the difference?" There seems to be no wonder or curiosity from your
side. Instead it seems purely adverserial.

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

~~~
Thorentis
This is the vibe I regularly get from Indie Hackers. So many start-ups exist
to serve the start-up/SaaS industry. Every second day there's a "SaaS that
helps you create a SaaS that sends Emails for SaaSes" start-up posted there.

~~~
jedberg
During a gold rush, it's the tool makers who make all the money. -- Someone
smarter than me.

Startups have been in a gold rush phase for a while. Making tools for startups
was a good idea.

------
nunez
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!

I hear MVP thrown around like candy in the consulting I do. I _wish_ they
started with no code!

Didn't some now-unicorn start its life as an email distribution list or
spreadsheet?

~~~
parallel
You might be thinking of Groupon, from memory their origin story involves
emulating software functionality with spreadsheets/email lists/much manual
grunt work.

~~~
nmyk
Wait a minute, I thought software was the one emulating grunt worker
functionality this whole time!

~~~
TeMPOraL
No, with the AI hype, emulating software with people is all the rage once
again!

------
oefrha
> No code

Sounds like a fancy (actually more like crappy) buzzword for using SaaS
products as part of your website/business.

Source: reading [https://www.makerpad.co/stories/mitchell-wright-how-
lambda-s...](https://www.makerpad.co/stories/mitchell-wright-how-lambda-
school-grew-with-no-code-tools)

------
indymike
The first real low-code solution was a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were what
drove businesses to buy PCs in the early 80s.

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.

In the 00's we had a lot of visual development tools for websites.
Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc...

In the 10's we had Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes.

Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code.

~~~
_curious_
Love the historical context here...

"Lots of successful products and fortunes made with No Code and low code."

What are some examples?

~~~
0x6c6f6c
Were all of the examples leading up to that sentence not enough for you, or
did you perhaps skip to the end?

~~~
_curious_
Was Powerbuilder, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Zapier, IFTT and Yahoo's pipes made
with no/low code?

~~~
anotheracct_
They're used to make things with no code.

~~~
_curious_
Yes and I am wondering per /indyike's statement "Lots of successful products
and fortunes made with No Code and low code." \- what are some examples
because the product names mentioned were not made with no/low code.

------
woeirua
They'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.

I personally don'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 "no
code" editors, with the hope that you'll pay them to host your site forever.

~~~
spderosso
> I personally don'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
> "no code" editors, with the hope that you'll pay them to host your site
> forever.

I agree. It seems like almost every day a new no-code platform crops up.
Eventually, competition should bring prices down and hurt margins, right?
What's the economic moat here?

For example, do you want to build a website or app from a spreadsheet? There's
plenty of options and they all look very similar.

I am more bullish on the no-code solutions that target a niche/vertical, like
forms (typeform) or member sites (memberstack) because you can offer
complementary services (like Shopify does for shopping) and the niche is
understood well enough that you can get close to covering 100% of use cases.

I would guess that a horizontal no-code company would have a harder time
maintaining a competitive advantage.

------
seibelj
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.

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.

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.

~~~
redis_mlc
> As an aside, “Plenty of Fish” 1.0 was built with an off-the-shelf website
> builder.

From what I read about PoF, it was written in VB. For performance reasons,
anything external was gradually rewritten inline.

> You don’t need to be a pro-coder to provide value.

That definitely doesn't match the story of him spending months in his condo
writing PoF.

------
soared
No-code is a funny term and I'm not sure what it means. I would understand if
it was non-dev or something similar. But most "no-code" people I know who work
on side projects can edit basic javascript/etc, but couldn't write much from
scratch.

I'd imagine this group is the subset the author is looking at. If you want to
look at people who actually can't code, they are likely non-technical, and not
using a tool like zapier. They're startups probably look very different
(consulting, etc).

~~~
david_draco
> No-code is a funny term and I'm not sure what it means.

I think it used to be called visual programming.

------
shrimpx
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.

------
krsdcbl
I find it odd that the article's topic is literally "the surge of people
taking a shot at building a business with no code products", 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 "developers in general".

Well if you interview developers who represent their startup product i guess
you might end up with similar figures of "wants to be an entrepreneur"?

It'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's not their job & passion "anyway", it pretty damn sure
aims to make money

------
rafaelreinert
No-code = code from another person

~~~
contravariant
You wish, usually you still end up programming the thing, just with worse
tools.

~~~
ardy42
> You wish, usually you still end up programming the thing, just with worse
> tools.

This, exactly! I once was stuck under a manager that fully bought into the
idea that BPMS systems would replace most enterprise development (or at least
wanted me to think that way to work on his BPMS project). He said semi-
technical BAs would be able to do all the work in the future, blah, blah,
blah.

It wasn't true: we built what was asked for, but you had to be a developer to
get within 10 feet of the thing. There were so many gotchas, and you had to
code to implement anything that wasn't a toy. It was basically developed with
shitty fake-Java and shitty fake-JSP with a lot of other shitty-fake
technologies.

------
longtermd
The title is just extremely wrong and clickbait. There's no content or data
about "rise". If anything, the default founder is no-code outside of SV.
There's a sharp rise of coding-founders, just because basic coding is becoming
"basic knowledge" and taught in highschools now. I won't click these clickbait
indiehackers links again.

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

------
jmeister
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

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

~~~
Torwald
with that username you have to

------
Acen
A great example of the no-code system might be something like Power
Automate/Power Apps/Power BI from Microsoft.

It'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.

Things like AWS Quicksight or Google Data Studio might be in the same sort of
world too.

------
rb808
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.

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.

------
abdulhaq
I feel someone should mention The Last One, from 1981,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_\(software\))

~~~
zarmin
Too complicated, needs another abstraction layer.

------
fock
so, the big question for me is: these tools generally package a lot of
functionality in their "no-code" wrappings, otherwise they would be near
useless (for example see LabView and Co, which are painful to work in and
interestingly seldom marketed as "no-code"...).

So what's technically the difference to a high-level API? History tells us
(from Fortran to Emacs to TeX to R/Keras/...) 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.

------
michalu
So basically the "no-code" founders that are making money are the ones
building "no-code" tools for people who can't code and those teaching people
to start "no-code business."

I can'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.

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

------
vmchale
Why though? 13 year-olds can learn CSS/HTML for their neopets, I get it's
scary but this stuff isn't poison.

~~~
filleduchaos
Which neopets site would you pay money for?

(Or, child labour laws aside, how many 13 year olds would you approach to
build products for you?)

------
alexgmcm
I think the future will be in "low-code" rather than "no-code".

For example, Looker has LookerML which while it isn't full blown programming,
it allows for a lot of customisation and far more complex use cases when
compared with "no-code" alternatives like Tableau.

~~~
contravariant
I will never get the rationale behind creating a new proprietary language
solely to protect people from 'full blown' programming. Or, in some cases,
being able to read/manipulate config files with standard tools.

~~~
verdverm
Dark Lang is doing the same, we almost did, but are using Cuelang for our take
on this now

~~~
contravariant
Cuelang looks interesting, but also seems like a language with a _very_
specific use case.

I don't understand Dark Lang's reasoning for using a custom language when they
could have made an IDE.

~~~
verdverm
What very specific use case? I have found Cue to be versatile and usable
anywhere yaml / json / config is used or needs to be validated. I'm mainly
focused on code generation with Cue as the input.
[https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof](https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)

~~~
contravariant
I'd consider a situation where you've got a human readable (?) data format
that needs to be validated a rather specific niche for a domain specific
language. All I'm aware of in that area is XSD and DTD for XML (and maybe some
recent efforts to make schemas for JSON but those aren't too flexible).

I'm happy someone is trying to fill that niche though, I'll remember cue for
when I run into such a scenario.

------
jdmg94
> 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.

this is not a great comparison...

~~~
_curious_
I read this part three times, I do not understand what the point is trying to
make?

------
htnsao
Grasshopper in Rhino3d is pretty rad. Visual coding of algorithmic designs.

[https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper](https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper)

------
GlennS
Would you consider something like Collibra
[https://www.collibra.com/](https://www.collibra.com/) to be no-code? They
seem to be exploding at the moment.

How about SAP or Salesforce?

~~~
renewiltord
I can't tell from the front page but this appears to be a Business
Intelligence tool?

~~~
GlennS
A sort of "build your own metadata database with configurable workflows" tool
focusing on data management, provenance, security, privacy etc.

Maybe I've gone too far there. Jira has configurable workflows too, and I
guess no-one would argue that's a no-code tool.

SAP is probably a better example?

------
_glass
in architecture it is grasshopper for rhino, in sound it is puredata or
max/msp, in business SAP is pushing this since the 90s. with the idea to
enable business to implement things w/o the need of developers: (1) brf+ to
implement business logic, (2) the new integration product "cloud plattform
integration" 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.

------
lidHanteyk
Betteridge'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've explored here before, their money-making schemes have nothing to do with
no-code tools and everything to do with scamming students.

------
seemslegit
Making ? Surely you meant raising.

