#1 Mistake No-Code SaaS Founders Make - Don't Build Without THIS

0:00no code is an amazing tool whether a developer who just wants to be a little more efficient and build something that takes less effort to maintain or you're not a developer you want to build that mvp the first version of your product without learning to code it's an incredible tool and we've talked about it several times on this channel but as with any technology there are always risks when you choose to use that technology to build upon and one of the biggest if not the biggest single risk to no code is platform risk not considering platform risk associated with building any SAS is a mistake but

0:32with no code the risk is substantially worse does that mean you should avoid no code at all cost maybe maybe not that's what I'm going to explore in this video building no code and ignoring platform risk is a big mistake that could kill your SAS before you even get started so in today's video I'm going to dive into platform risk and look at four elements of platform risk that you'll want to know about before you choose a no code platform to build your SAS I'm Rob Walling a Serial entrepreneur with multiple exits I've written four books on entrepreneurship and I'm invested in more than 150 startups to get started

1:05let's look at a quick definition of platform risk in case you've never heard that term before platform risk is when you build your company on a particular platform if that platform makes changes or experiences difficulties that can be the end of your business or it can just be a minor speed bump along the way now every SAS application has platform risk if you host on Amazon ec2 servers there's obviously risks that Amazon could 5x their pricing tomorrow that they could go out of business that they could have a week-long outage but the risks of those are very very low extremely low versus something like hosting with a local web host provider

1:44that has a half a dozen servers in a closet somewhere and a fiber connection the platform risk of them disappearing going out of business having a week-long outage are substantially higher than something like Amazon or Google's Cloud offering or Microsoft Azure and there are other other kinds of platform risks that have a much higher risk to you as the founder imagine building a Shopify app having it in the Shopify app store and then having them come knocking when you get big and saying you need to give us 30 of your top line revenue or we'll just lock you out of the App Store and it says we can do that in our terms of

2:17service or sometimes it's more accidental where they just build the exact same feature set you have they build it into the core platform and they give it away for free all of these things are things that you as an entrepreneur should be thinking about and the higher up the chain you go from your bottom line hosting infrastructure there's some risk but it's relatively low and it's really hard to get around that if not impossible up to where you're building on other SAS platforms that are making their money in kind of the same way you are that's when you start seeing more risk so with that in

2:46mind let's take a look at four elements of platform risk that specifically threaten no code and can be a major impediment to keeping your business alive the first one is something that happened recently and it's something that I hinted at that Amazon ec2 could potentially 5x its pricing but they won't because migrating to Google cloud or Microsoft Azure or to another provider is something that anyone could do and the competition in that cloud space keeps competition low but recently one of the leading no code providers Bubble at bubble dot IO dramatically increase their price and in fact they've done this twice now in the past 18

3:21months and the bubble Community has pushed back on them so hard that they had to retract the first one with the second one they offered an 18-month transition time and eventually made changes to the new pricing model to reduce the impact but the problem with no code is that it's so proprietary to their platform because it's all drag and drop you can't just take your code and move elsewhere see if I have Ruby code written on Rails I can host that on almost any Linux server in the world similar to PHP with laravel now it's a pain to move yes there is switching costs but it's still quite possible with

3:53no code you've bought into a proprietary platform where trying to move from Bubble to airtail notion you know any whoever the big competitor of bubble is is virtually impossible so you have to rebuild that on the new platform so basically you either take that price increase on the chin or you rebuild from scratch elsewhere and if we take a look at this tweet from abadvani where he Compares bubbles workflow execution costs versus competitors and he looks at the old versus new it's pretty dramatic the price increase for some people their pricing is going up 10x pretty painful when you think about it now since then bubble has made changes but this really

4:30illustrates the Frailty of building on someone else's no code platform and it is a substantially higher risk than if you had code that you could migrate to a new host a second element of platform risk specifically with no code is something that we have experienced at microconf and at Tiny Seed we have four or maybe five depending on how you count full-blown SAS apps that are built in no code on airtable or bubble or softer and what we've noticed is that about every four or five mods air table specifically pushes out a big user interface change that we can't get around so they recently moved our top navigation to a

5:09side navigation and it doesn't work very well with what we've built and we have no way to undo it and no way to work around it because it's a no code platform so we have to work within the constraints that they give us for us these are internal apps that we use to produce this YouTube channel to produce podcasts to handle incoming applications to the tiny seat accelerator so we just deal with them but if I had an MVP or even a version 1.0 that was serving customers and suddenly my UI changed in a way that I couldn't control or wasn't notified about it can really upend your

5:40business and I would have a tough time not having that much control over how my users experience my software a third risk that I would put under platform risk is the platform you're using shuts down or goes out of business or gets acquired there are a lot of things that can happen with these startups if you think about no code they they are still startups all of them and one might say well if you're hosting at Amazon or Google or Microsoft or wherever you're hosting those are startups too and they're not right these are 20 30 40 year old companies the odds of them shutting down tomorrow or of selling or

6:14of shutting down their web hosting features is almost zero versus if you're talking about a startup that is still early in its life cycle it hasn't gone public yet it is ripe for acquisition as these markets mature consolidation happens and you see larger players gobble up the smaller ones in no code there are what 50 100 200 300 depends on how you count there are a lot of players that's not going to be the case in five years it is inevitable that these smaller ones shut down Aqua higher get Acquired and get shut down you know there's a lot of things that can happen with them and as that happens you're

6:47either gonna have to shut down your app or you're going to have to rebuild somewhere else which is going to be extremely time consuming as I already talked about earlier and the fourth and final element of platform risk that we've seen with no code is the limited cost customization and control so depending on the platform we see it with airtable you might face limitations in customizing certain aspects of your SAS application to meet unique requirements or to differentiate your offering and that lack of control over the underlying platform can hinder your ability to deliver a tailored experience to your customers the bottom line is if you

7:20build your app on a no code platform at a certain point it's very likely you are going to outgrow it and at that point what do you do do you start over from scratch building it in code that might not be a bad idea actually and that's the beauty of no right the the not platform risk element is that how far can you get without having to write all the code without having to learn to code without having to find a technical co-founder or pay someone to write the code but then the downside is once you get to that edge where you can't continue to innovate and you can't

7:50continue to build your product the way your customers want to it's a pretty big reset that I think folks should be aware of when they start that the lack of customization and control of a good chunk of the platforms is not all the platforms I would admit but all the ones that we have used may get to the point where you do have to leave that platform for something else in a second I'm going to tell you the next video you should watch on this channel if you want to dig more into no code but before I do that I want to tell you about microconf connect

8:15it's our always-on slack Channel where we have more than 5 000 bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap SAS Founders who are building launching growing and supporting one another in their Endeavors head to microcompconnect.com to learn more about it and sign up now having said all of that do I think no code is a complete farce that you should run away from I don't I think in the right situations no code is the best tool to get you off the ground and in this next video I dive into many of the nuances that you need to know before trying to build your SAS on no code thanks for joining me this week see you

8:49next time