Micro Ventures: Launch a Low Code Comic

LiveCode, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has a vision that everyone can code and makes the open source LiveCode platform for building native mobile, desktop and server applications.

They offer a visual development environment to quickly bring an idea to life. The programming language is as powerful and as fully featured as most traditional languages like C and Java, but LiveCode is based on English making it intuitive and quick to learn.

Micro Ventures

A great concept for Low Code-built startups are “micro ventures”, simply meaning very small in terms of scope and expense. An example is ‘micro SaaS‘.

Another great example is this case study of Midnight Rises, a game built on LiveCode and released by Industrial Toys in 2015, what could be described as a ‘digital comic’, as it recreates a comic experience via apps and ipad features.

This Cult of Mac interview provides an insight into the production process, concluding with the point later editions could be purchased for 99c.

The low cost concludes the definition of the micro venture – A product that even one person could create, then sold at a market price point appropriate to that level of micro transaction. Even an ebook sold on Amazon could be considered within this scope, but the key difference is the role the Low Code tool plays in creating a new digital product, like an ebook but beyond it.

As LowCodeCo highlights:

Alex and his team chose LiveCode for its development-speed “We had the idea of the graphic novel app but with all our engineers committed to our 3D game, we could only spare one developer. With just 3 months to complete the app we went looking for a tool suited to the task. LiveCode was perfect, with visual authoring and high level scripting: we were able to work quickly and iterate often.”