The New Startup: No Code, No Problem – Become a Low Code Digital Entrepreneur

As Wired writes enterprising entrepreneurs are turning to Low Code methods as the ideal toolset for rapidly translating their ideas into working digital businesses.

In the opening paragraph they capture the very essence of this new technology trend. Prior, any aspiring entrepreneur without coding skills would need to hire developers, easily costing thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars.

Low Code enables non-technical folks, like entrepreneurs, to create and publish working code. It’s as simple as that.

What is very potent about the Wired case study of Dani Bell, a British copywriter starting out on her own for the first time, is that they explain how she built her online business via a suite of Low Code tools, not just one.

She used Webflow to create the online presence and Airtable for storing details about each job. She also used Google Docs and Slack to manage the sub-contracting of work.

Critically she also integrated these together using another Low Code tool: Zapier. In other words she achieved an entirely end-to-end integrated digital business system, entirely with Low Code, something that only a few years ago would have required a considerable and sophisticated development effort; now it has been abstracted and commoditized to the ultimate level of accessibility.

So this means it isn’t just another iteration of user-friendly web builder tools like Wix or Squarespace, but an expanding evolution of that sector to make enterprise-type Internet technologies both affordable and useable for the smallest of businesses.

In short it has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for digital entrepreneurship for every one. Think of businesses like Uber Taxis or Airbnb, global scale ventures achieved primarily through technology capability, a capability that is now accessible to all, not just highly specialized, expensive developers.

Writing for Forward Partners Louis Rix describes in detail this new model of entrepreneurship, with further info offered by Science Direct in this report and TechCrunch explores the booming investment in the sector.

Model Driven Ventures

Another especially powerful aspect of this trend is a concept we call ‘Model Driven Ventures’. Quite simply this means a template-driven approach to creating new online businesses.

Model Driven techniques have been popular in software development for many years, because the principle is ultra simple: Don’t reinvent the wheel, reuse already developed, proven modules.

We can abstract this principle to a level of business models, highlighting the goldmine that the industry offers. For example Low Code tools provider Bubble offers a catalogue of templates you can easily instantiate and then customize further using their service.

This catalogue is further expanded through their partner community. For example do you have an idea for a startup that is “Like Uber/Airbnb/Twitter, but with a twist of xyz…”, then you can simply buy the associated template for Uber/Airbnb/Twitter and do exactly that. What might have cost Airbnb $ hundreds of thousands you can have for less than $200.

Of course it’s not quite as simple as that, these templates still need customization work and that is still a form of developer cost, but it is still a magnitude cheaper and to the whole point of Low Code, it is work that you can far more easily do yourself.

To speed you on your way, our E-Learning course ‘Low Code Ventures‘ offers documented videos that walk through how to implement these templates.