# The SaaS Founder's Guide to No-Code

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLSZ1OIYMiI
Duration: 22 min
Language: English
Words: 4360
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/qLSZ1OIYMiI

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[0:00] so i'm gonna be running through um i mean this would be 15 minutes ish and i really wanted to get my head around you know i've had obviously experience with no code um and in fact when producer sandra and i were kind of hashing out of like i was like well you know i kind of i know what no code is when i see it i think like doesn't it involve zapier and and he was like we have no code you know running all kinds of processes for microconf that folks who run sas apps can also use and so that's what i wanted to dig into was

[0:32] trying to solidify my thinking around the definition of no code the pros and cons of it um and maybe make you know a couple predictions as well so sass founders guide to no code let's dive in so i'm going to be covering three things i want to give a quick definition and as you'll find out defining no code is not the easiest thing to do i think there's still conversation online and discussion about what it actually is and is not talk about the pros and cons of it briefly and then talk through a few predictions so to define no code um i actually went oh at the end i'll give some sources i

[1:07] have like five or six uh kind of articles um that i had read through and referenced i read through 15 20 articles to kind of solidify my thinking but there were a few that were really good and the definition is not standard across all of them so i'm going to give you my definition based on my experience and and what i'm seeing so i think that no code is using using no code using xero code to accomplish something that used to require code i think that's an important piece of it and then usually it involves linking multiple tools together now there are exceptions to that and we'll look at a

[1:41] couple of those um in the next section actually tools like squarespace are considered a no code website builder which makes sense it makes sense because you don't need to write code to do something you usually need to write code to do right back in the 90s we had to build all the websites by hand so it's not always the linking of multiple tools but i think that's been a pretty heavy heavy part um of for you know in the in the research and the experience that i have um oh a couple examples so how where i asked producer xander like how are we using it you know with microconf

[2:18] and basically two things you'll be familiar with one is our mastermind matching microconf masterminds.com is where we match up i don't know we've matched literally hundreds and hundreds of founders together in these masterminds and we we're getting great feedback about people um finally being able to you know mastermind we have these had you know we've had the question uh for a decade since i started talking about startup masterminds where can i find one and then that's what we do now um a few times i think it's once a quarter we do matching and basically we have a type form on the front end and then that

[2:48] you know pumps in it might even go through zapier actually this may not be 100 correct but it pumps to air table and to drip and it pumps it to drip so we can communicate and it pumps to air table and you'll see the nice little uh screenshot that's not the actual screenshot of matching but um producer xander then gets in and runs some his unique proprietary micro matching algorithm and matches folks up and so he you know if you think about doing this 15 20 years ago we would have had to write some code to do this it would have been we would have had to

[3:17] i mean i remember building forms by hand with html and then either put storing it in a database or sending an email and someone have to copy paste out you know the the magic of type form into air table just that simple thing that we take for granted these days used to be a lot of time and effort and and cost right for a developer another example of how we're using uh no code is the registration process for this very event we used stripe payment links which allows you to basically set up a whole payments page with you know zero code and then we pipe it into zapier and then that also pipes

[3:52] into drip and then into squarespace um to allow us to give you access and you know obviously drip is to allow us to communicate with you and there are going to be many other examples of interesting workflows and interesting no code setups that you're going to see from these awesome speakers here over the next three days this afternoon uh in about what an hour i guess um nico is going to be joining us here and then there were the rest of the folks the other days and we're going to be talking about seo about uh automating a sales when you call that reach in a sales process about

[4:28] building an audience there's tons of things that are applicable to sas founders one question i kept coming you know this is still on the definition but one question i kept coming across was is no code the future of app development in other words the question is well are we gonna need code in five or ten years you know or is it just gonna basically be um replaced by no code and so the thought experiment i went through is i think back 20 years when we had to hand code every website and then wordpress and squarespace and wix came along we still needed code but you didn't need

[5:02] to then hand code every marketing website like we used to then you couldn't accept payments online right you used to have to write back-end code to accept that we forget this but uh you know without tools like shopify stripe gumroad sandal et cetera et cetera these tools didn't mean oh we don't have to write code anymore it just means we don't have to spend a bunch of time writing the same code i cannot tell you how many shopping carts that i built from 1999 to 2002 and it was just e-commerce shopping carts over and over we just had a you know we used the same data model and i would

[5:34] write it in php or i'd write it in asp or i'd write it in net and it was because there was no good shopify there was yahoo stores which was yeah it was kind of meh but um these things didn't mean no code it meant oh now if we have shopify now we can actually focus on the things that really matter um which are things like you know uh maybe back end order fulfillment and and writing code to tie inventory to something you know there's always something else to do and then remember when you couldn't connect to apps without code i mean you literally had to send a web hook and and

[6:07] um you know and catch it on the other end and of course now we have zapier and there's if this than that and there's uh there's another tool there's a zapier competitor i don't remember the name of it so these things don't replace app development but what they do is they handle more and more use cases as time goes on and i'm a believer that there will always be a need for developers because going deep deep deep into a sas app and building all this custom stuff we build um i can't imagine that will ever be replaced but these tools and this no code allows us to take

[6:38] first its two percent of the code we write and put it into no code and then it's five percent and then it's ten percent will it ever get to 100 i don't believe it will but will it get to 10 or 20 of the code we used to write i do i mean a lot of the code that we used to write if you think back 20 years was hand coding websites and building e-commerce you know e-commerce functionality and we don't have to do that now we can build focus on the things that matter the no code landscape this is i love this diagram i found in one of the

[7:04] articles i'll reference it later but um this is cool because they break it up into 12 areas right 12 categories and you see website build i'm not going to talk through all of them but there's website builders there's app builders like mobile there's web app builders and there's internal tools there's workflow automation like each of these kind of gets your head around okay so no code it can do a lot of things but it's kind of there's these 12 buckets mostly right um there's and and when i look through this i was like yeah these are all the areas that i've heard people using like data

[7:40] visualization these are all the areas i've heard people using them um and so this is kind of a cool thing to reference for kind of your own notification of thinking about which areas you know could i feasibly automate or use no code in so let's talk briefly about pros and cons before i get into wrap up with a few predictions so the pros and cons in both in my experience and from talking to a couple founders who use no code actually there's several founders i know who do and uh in in my online research um no code is so fast to build like to hook up a zapier uh essentially a web hook

[8:18] and to pipe it into to drip or something else is so much faster than cranking up code to hit an api in addition as long as things don't get too complex they are pretty easy to maintain because they're visual and you walk in and you look at this app or you look at the setup and you can figure out what's happening oftentimes with code that may or may not be may not be the case um and frankly no coding skills required that's the obvious thing but it's an obvious statement but there are things that folks on my team who don't know how to code there are things that they are doing like the

[8:53] registration setup for this like the mastermind matching that we would have had to hire a developer to do or um frankly had to hire developer to do you know 10 years ago i mean that it really is i can't overstate how important that is especially in an organization i think if you're a developer we take things for granted that we can always you know automate things using code and think of like non-profit orgs where they don't have a ton of budget or think about at a large company where development resources may be reserved for building product or for doing other things and someone in marketing wants to

[9:34] quickly hack something together it really that that's the use case like these are the use cases that i think are are fundamentally going to change it's part of my predictions i guess i'm giving away my predictions but it's fundamentally going to change things moving forward all right uh yeah yeah so no code is great for build if you want to build an mvp uh for building simple crud apps um the app builders are actually pretty decent but they're but they're limited right they limited to the widgets that you can drag around when you hit the you know hit the limit of that then um you do

[10:05] have to dip into code they're great for internal tools line of business apps and automating simple tasks um as well as back end i've heard a couple productized service folks who use notion and airtable as essentially their operating system for their productized service right it's how they automate everything and you can build um someone literally had a half a million dollar a year productized service just running on no code tools um which is which is really cool so the cons or the challenges with no code are it is it is tough to scale um if you've ever had a zap hooked up and sent a lot of volume through it um

[10:46] you'll know that you know 1 in 100 gets dropped and so or if you suddenly send 10 000 through like there'll be rate limiting so the scalability of no code is um in certain instances especially in automations is can be tough now is the scalability of building a squarespace website in question no we have a bunch of websites actually the micrograph website tinyc website are all built on uh squarespace and we haven't had um you know issues with those scaling but there's when you hook tools together you start to see you can start to see some issues as you push scale um that you wouldn't see if you you know had hand

[11:21] coded everything in a much more efficient way i also want to remind folks uh if you have questions you can ask them in the chat i do believe we'll have a minute or two um at the end for me to answer them so another con is the brittleness of it and again if you tie a zap to you know something that goes into drip to then a google sheet little things can break and i'll say that the reporting or the error cat error handling is is you know leaves some to be desired oftentimes uh zapier's zaps will break and we just won't notice and we have one no code zap

[11:54] with podcast questions for startups to the rest of us where it goes from um video ask and it uses a zap to send it to a trello board i believe i don't know if that uses email or not but just i was like wow we're really not getting any questions and uh found out like an oauth had failed right but we just we didn't know there's a brittleness to it that um you do have to be mindful of and so um no code is not great in my opinion for large complex systems you still need code for these things systems that need to scale and for the most part and this one's a

[12:29] little tough but i think internal apps it's amazing and i think if you're going to build like an end user customer facing app i would and especially if you wanted to scale i would tend to lean pretty heavily towards you know coding it out now maybe i'd build an mvp using no code um and i'm sure you know i know there are examples of folks who have actually built external facing apps i get it but in my opinion it's it's probably not the first use case that i would be looking to use no code for a couple predictions um and then i will uh dig into the questions looks

[13:02] like i have a couple piling up there um i believe and then some of these are already happening and already evolving but there are and will be no code software companies not just product type service but people who truly build a mobile app or a web app and are able to build a business on it maybe it doesn't become a 10 million business but you know for a lifestyle business um for an amazing 10 grand a month like i think that there is a lot that can be built with no code that you can build an entire software you know essentially a sas uh on is long

[13:38] but it's got to be pretty simple it's got to fit within the paradigm of the existing tools oh there's i should also say you know there's something called low code as well if you haven't heard about this and low code is just what it sounds like it's where you reach the edge of no code and you need a little bit of code but not a ton and that actually can get you um that can get you a lot further there's just a lot you know there's a lot more flexibility if you can dip down into that layer um this is a prediction from an article you see a link down below

[14:07] 80 of tech could be built outside of it by 2024 this one's i think less interesting to us as founders but i think is more interesting to us as um just participants in the economy is i talked about it earlier but you know imagine the the non-profit without the budget or the fortune 5000 company where you just can't get a developer i t your it department won't build things for you but you want or need to improve your process the fact that that venturebeat is predicting that 80 tech this seems really high but um any any amount 20 40 is still a tremendous boon to productivity and it's a boon to the

[14:47] economy um and i actually think it will be an on-ramp for a lot of people to learn how to code i remember people i knew so many developers who especially 15 years ago who said oh yeah i started using excel and i um i hit the edges of it i learned all the formulas so then i dipped into access i learned all the formulas there so then i started building an access app and then i learned asp and then i learned net you know it was like the on-ramp the gateway if you will and i think that no code will be a gateway for a lot of people um

[15:19] who start building a simple tool and will expand into learning low code and then learn new code and i think that's great honestly i think that's great uh no code freelancers i'm waiting for the day and maybe if i went to upwork today and typed in no code you know there's probably a few experts but i think this will be there's opportunity on both sides of this if you're a freelancer yourself and you want to add no code as a skill set i think it's super interesting and i think that there will come a day where you know it isn't producer xander hacking all these things together that

[15:47] we actually hire someone who knows the no code ecosystem enough that we can say bill can you build this with no code yes and here's you know here's how you do it here's how to sign up and um ar vr dev i don't know of anybody that's doing that yet right now right now we have web apps we have websites and we have mobile app builders and there's a lot of automation and data visualization but arvrdev i think is something that is inevitable an ai as well i had another slide but ai and ar vr i think will uh be no coded you know emerging into the no code

[16:20] scene here soon if it's not already there's obviously um you know a chance it's already happening and i i'm not aware of it and then this one's interesting it's like if you think back 20 years ago web development which was just website building was all from scratch like i've said three times now but when um you know squarespace and woocommerce and uh and wordpress and the other wix and the other website builders came out it it didn't suddenly make you know web development agencies website builders uh obsolete they used it as a as a basis to build on and they could get more done faster now i think app development agencies who

[17:03] are actually building web apps and mobile apps can use and will use no and low code as a starting point so they can get there faster you know so you don't have to build the shopping cart functionality over and over you don't have to build the same chat widget you just you drag it in and you build on top of it these are a few sources producer xander's going to be distributing slides so you will have access to these and now i have time for a question or two all right i will dig in let's see um a comment from spencer a huge company where i t won't build things for you

[17:41] who's quoting me is exactly what my mom experiences at her job now they're teaching her no code that's incredible that's awesome um i'm gonna produce a hinderer sorry i'm bouncing around he's trying to get the questions in i'm gonna do the top question so what's a good resource for a founder to learn more about no code well obviously um this event but beyond this uh the place that i have gone to to learn about is makerpad makerpad.co is a great resource they're actually owned by zapier they were acquired by zapier maybe six eight months ago a good community good online resources um next question i'm a non-technical

[18:17] founder who wants to start a sas should i learn to code or focus on learning no code really interesting question actually um the uh hey there's no right or wrong answer right um and i feel like the hard the complexity of sas there's uh obviously building the software is a big complexity but one the big risk in sas is that no one wants it right it's the market risk um because there's market and there's uh execution risk and i don't know that i would learn to code these days um unless it's well here's the thing if you're interested in learning a code like if you're drawn to

[18:59] it yes you should probably start with no code do some low code and then dive in and learn it but i think that ultimately if you're going to build a sas app and you're willing to find a co-founder but you're willing to validate something first and get you know what if you get a thousand two thousand dollars a month built on no code like that starts to validate an idea to the point where now you can go to that developer you know it's the age-old thing of i'm gonna go to developer and do rev share and that's like the famous developers don't want to do that

[19:27] um and and you don't have to deal with um you know you don't have to deal with uh the i'd say the complexities of building this app up front if you can do no code all right now is two more questions i just recently did an interview with zapier's research team and they were really surprised that we are building in redundancies in our zaps to make sure that failure can be avoided do you think the success rate is high enough in these integrations to warrant that that um that surprise in my experience like the failure rate is um it's enough that it's a problem do i think it'll get better over time i

[20:06] do i mean even web hook failure rates are not great um so yeah if i had something that was mission critical i would absolutely have built in some type of monitoring and some type of redundancy there's just no doubt about it or i'd write it in code and then then build it there all right as a developer last one as a developer i don't really understand the difference between no and low code development is basically just playing legos yeah so between no and low code all right so no code truly is zero code i'm gonna drag some visual things uh a few zapier there's the you

[20:42] know the thing on the left the action and the one of the trigger in the action same in drip like drip is actually as much of a no code tool as a lot of things are and then low code is instead of building it all like imagine you're in squarespace and you drag a widget on it doesn't quite do what you want to do you can then embed javascript on that page or you can dip into javascript and you can write a script to maybe change the behavior of that so you didn't have to build everything you still had this huge basis to work on and i was thinking there's even an

[21:15] example with drip or with zapier where you can set up a trigger and an action and it can hit a generic web hook endpoint to where something happens in zapier and it sends data but you need to just write something to catch that data and you have to do that custom right as fast as it is like json and you just capture it and you process it and there's a little bit of code there but you didn't have to build the whole automation so i in my opinion those would be you know really low code um examples so that's it for uh for my talk thanks so

[21:55] much for um hanging out with me for this first session

[22:04] [Music]

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