Business Opportunities: No Coders

Last week, we talked to some of you and gathered feedback. Thanks to all of you for your input! It is highly appreciated and we encourage sharing more feedback with us. It’s paramount for us to find out what you want to get out of this newsletter since, ultimately, we write this newsletter for you.

Some of you told us that you’d like to learn more about the problems we discovered and less about our proposed solutions. That’s why we introduce an additional format.

We hope you enjoy this report on business opportunities around no coders and we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

❎ Problem Spaces

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” — Intuit

In Problem Spaces, we share — guess what — the most common problem spaces we’ve encountered in our community research. We describe them in-depth and share examples of people who had specific problems within this space. In this format, we focus more on quality than quantity: we will cover fewer problems but describe them in more detail.

Also, instead of providing solutions to those problems, we will ask YOU to share potential solutions with us! We will help you kickstart your solution by pointing you in the right directions through sharing related posts and connecting you to people you should talk to.

For this first issue, we focused on NoCode communities. We studied 18 communities with >120k members and studied >70 problems. Here are the two most common and interesting ones:

🤯 Choosing NoCode stack

Problem: NoCoders don’t know which NoCode stack to choose for building their product.

One of the great things about NoCode is that it lowers the barrier of entry for non-techies to build tech products. However, the amount of available NoCode tools is overwhelming: Bubble, Glide, Adalo, Airtable, Carrd, Zapier … the list goes on! The number of NoCode tools is growing, and so is the level of confusion. “What tools are there?” “Can I build X with Y?” are the most frequent questions we’ve encountered.

Google can quickly produce a list of existing NoCode tools. But NoCoders need more than that: they need answers to highly individual questions concerning their products. One alternative for them is to search the appropriate communities, enter them, ask their questions, and hope for answers. But this takes more time and initiative than most people are willing to invest. And even if they do, great results are not guaranteed. This is especially true since, to our knowledge, there aren’t that many flourishing or vibrant NoCode communities out there.

Quotes:

"I have an idea to build a webapp that helps restaurant managers generate a monthly invoice for all orders received from their customers. What tools should I be looking at?"

"Hi everyone, I'm want to build an MVP for a price comparison website (similar to moneysupermarket.com) and was wondering whether you have any insights into what no-code stack to use and why. I'm still very early on and I'm in the phase of I don't know what I don't know."

"Hello everyone! I would like to build a directory website and looking for recommendations if there is any other tools/web builders that I should check out? I am quite new to NoCode and exploring Webflow."

🛑 Limitations of NoCode tools

Problem: There can be limits to the level of customization that can be achieved with NoCode tools.

NoCode tools can be great for prototyping, but they usually don’t allow for high levels of customization. This means that building standard products is usually feasible. But, the more niche the product, the more difficult it gets. Also, NoCoders don’t have the same options for troubleshooting as regular coders do. Especially because NoCode tools don’t allow accessing or exporting the source code.

These problems can end up costing a lot of time and energy: imagine putting in weeks or months into building 80% of your product with NoCode just to find that you cannot finish building it because your NoCode tool doesn’t include certain key features you need. And, as most NoCode tools don’t allow exporting your product’s code, you won’t be able to build those features in another environment. So, in this case, you’re doomed to start from scratch and write “real” code or hire someone to do that for you.

Quotes:

"No code tools are great until you want to do something even slightly off the standard use-case :("

“I think we were all advertised into thinking that we can build ANYTHING super easy with no code tools, only to discover that it's still hard to build for some niche cases.”

"I've played with no-code tools since late 2019. It's not easy. I think the trap I keep falling into is that it's advertised as quick and easy but it's not trivial. One of the problems is that with code, you generally know it's possible and where to look if something is not working. While with no-code, who knows if you're using the correct component or worse if the platform is even capable. It just introduces other questions beyond how to make it work."