The no-code era 👩🏻💻
Coding or no-code?
A little bit of boring history ⏳,
At times where developers were the best-paid employees of the any-sized company, startup, or big conglomerate, they were rare and very expensive. But, anyway, everybody needed one killer ass kick back-end developer to launch an app, sell products online, launch a startup, or even connect your robot to an AI. Almost as sudden as UX/UI (inside joke 🤪), the no-code attitude became a thing! Coders would code a web app enabling anybody to design an app, website, startup, or anything really overnight. Not a single line of code or any specific skill to launch her/his idea. Just a few integrations and an incredible sense of management 🔦. I guess, a real entrepreneur.
Trendy as f***
Everything is co-connected, as Leonardo DiCaprio said. The no-code era bootstrapped on so many levels by different macro trends. Some are obvious, some I may forget to tell you about (there are so many, you have no idea how life works 🧠)
Internet, IOT if some experts are reading this. Yes, the internet helped to work with online tools, especially with recent RAM explosions. Think internet, think cloud spaces too! ☁️
🛒 Shopping online! Yes, you are able to buy any kind of product online through e-commerce, recommence, or marketplace just because designing it became so easy.
🧳 Nomadism. Being a nomad helped greatly with this hipster life of working remotely and travel the world.
💻 Sharing your screen. Yes, working on synchronized screens helped during remote meetings with investors or CEOs.
😷 Covid19. Akh… not again! These types of viruses, omnipresent since the end of 2019, contributed to the trend to explode. Staying home and doing nothing boosted productivity by 18%.
😏 Learn by doing. People learn by themselves, they are autodidact. Whether we talk about Airtable or Workflow, no need to learn the basics. There is no basics. The only thing you need to do is fail by trying and learn some tips, here and there. Check this out, it’s a really cool FREE web application to learn a skill by achieving quick and simple crash courses.
⛓ Blockchain. Blockchain is, by definition, open-source (don’t worry, this macro trend is gonna be covered in one of my next episodes). Soon, very soon, you’ll be able to create your personal blockchain, overnight, with 2 lines of code. Welcome to the 2-line-code era 😍.
🚀 Startups. Solving a problem is a trend itself! We’ll go over this MVP thing later but the growing number of +39% startups in a year sounds promising, especially for the no-code giants.
MVP: from startup to growth mode 🚀
First, what is an MVP? MVP stands for the minimal viable products (MVS for service 😉). To be simple, Uber’s MVP is calling for a taxi 🚕. No app or ratings.
Designing an app, “MVP style” is famous among startups. Using a no-code way of thinking would speed up the launch by 20 months, according to a study by McKinsey, but who’s counting? Create the killer pitch deck of yours, design an app (the UX of it I mean) on Figma and go one, show that MVP version #1 to your investors. Once you get their money 💸, hire a bad-ass developer, and connect all your workflow between your CRM, chatbot, and email provider to launch this startup of yours!
Two weeks to launch an app, made by yourself versus six months of product development between Indian developers and 120 emails of bullshit.
What’s better? You tell me…
The big actors
To name the few,
💯 Airtable is quite something in the no-code scene. It became THE reference of the trend, almost giving hope to some others (Fibery, Google tables, Notion…)
🕸 Designing a website is not just HTML and Javascript. It’s also an incredible UX experience. Webflow is obviously the monopole in this industry followed by his many rivalries: Too heavy to be WordPress, too amateur to be Wix, too commerce to be Shopify, too low key for a Squarespace.
Selling products online takes incredible design and marketing skills. Well, Sharetribe, Kreezalid. For that less computer savvy, there are Instagram, Facebook, or eBay platforms that let you sell products with ZERO code skill.
✍️ Say website, say blogs. Blogging about everything and anything became freedom on the internet. Medium and Substack is here to help you achieve the best content out there (don’t forget, Evernote disappeared 📢) So many customizable ways of beating suppression and your love of writing amazing stuff to the best readers. #freedomofspeech to that!
🎨 Editing tools are many to combat. The best, in my opinion, is the unbeatable Figma with its millions of ways of beating Adobe. Canvas is here too but doesn’t get me wrong, not as powerful! The new arrival is Makerpad.
📱 Designing an app is not as complicated as it seems. Obviously, you won’t be able to design the next Uber app with no-code but still, amazing results get out of Bubble, Glide, Ottho, Adalo, and Tabbli.
📡 Now, for the illegal stuff, this article will not be sponsored. Scrapping emails or contact addresses are 100% legal if, and only if, the page you are “stealing” data from is public. Octoparse, Web scrapper, and Phantombuster are cool to play around with.
I talked about integrations without defining it. Simple as that, every time you visit a website, there is a little cookie that pops up and tells you that “you have been tracked down”. Two days later, an ad on Instagram is on your wall offering you 50% off these beautiful recyclable Adidas. Well, integrations are a great way to connect 2, 5, 10, or millions of actions at the same time, enabling you to automize all your workflow. Zapier is properly the best tool ever for that, but tray.io and automate.io do the trick. A new actor in the market is emerging, meet Alfred Unito or Cloudcanal.
Designing a platform is a trend itself. Designing it with style is cooler. Think AWS, Heroku.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE WEEK 🥁
No-code is here to stay, for very long!
You think that you don’t need a developer to launch your app on the app store (Android store for losers), well think again. In the next 3 years, no-code is gonna become THE skill to have. It’s gonna be a language itself. Not javascript or HTML, just no-code.
🎉 BONUS
Great tools, no-code style
Coronaparty - the virtual party, love the name BTW!
Buildbox - design, build and publish your 3D & 2D mobile game without coding
Desk - Time management app
Cool resources to get you going ✈️
Le chantier - the best French-speaking maker community
Hood maps - the TripAdvisor of no-coders and nomads
Supertribe - Connect with other gamers, if you are one 🎯
Everything You Need to Build Web and Mobile Apps Without Code.
Ottho est le leader de l’apprentissage pour créer votre application sans code
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