Why No-code/Low-code will SAVE tech entrepreneurs in 2022.
A recession storm is coming in 2023 ..maybe even in 2022 at the rate economic events are unfolding. The Fed is trying to fight inflation and consumers are running out of money to sustain growth. In this article I want to demonstrate how new Low-Code/No-Code platforms and tools used in application development make it significantly easier than ever for tech entrepreneurs to create new digital products and services. And how Low-Code/No-Code may literally save tech companies and allow them to flourish as we face challenges with significant economic slowdown, a need for better ways to develop products and accelerate go-to-market. For a new breed of non-technical tech entrepreneurs (that may sound like an oxymoron but let me elaborate later) this may also contribute to solving the labour shortage in the tech industry and improve tech workers, developers, engineers and web design professionals’ satisfaction in their everyday life.
Entrepreneurs Bringing their ideas to life
I work with several clients in technology and software, and they all seem to share the same challenges: difficulties in finding financing and in assembling teams of developers and engineers to bring their idea to life quickly and cost-effectively. As I was writing this article a friend of mine called to ask if I knew application developers for a new project he is working on. I chuckled and asked him if he had heard of the Great Resignation? What does the Great Resignation and tech entrepreneurs have to do with Low-Code/ No-Code? It is all about resources, talent and the availability of skilled workers across industries and especially in tech. In a world where there are major labour shortages and resources are being stretched Low-code/No-code is a game changer for entrepreneurs to improve and accelerate software and applications production. As a tech entrepreneur I am not talking about doing more with less while using fewer developers and web design professionals but in providing opportunities to do better and more fulfilling work for developers by reducing repetitive and tedious tasks as well as reducing product development cycles.
Ten years ago, most web and mobile application designs depended on developers, who had to work almost around the clock to make their code work. Nowadays anyone with a computer and access to the internet can build a website, app or internal tool using extremely powerful applications using no-code and low-code platforms. And it is not limited to websites and apps: people who don’t have technical skills can run their entire company online, set up an eCommerce business and scale to millions of dollars in revenues.
Low-Code/No-code became a hot search topic but…it has been growing since at least 2015 and has been written about actively in the past 24 months:
Low Code is not new but is more relevant than ever.
The pandemic has taught us many lessons from the importance of e-commerce for even basic supplies (toilet paper on Amazon.com anyone?) to work-life balance and our ability to be as productive working from home as from a physical office. It has also brought to light our dependence on offshore supply chain; while everything seems to be manufactured somewhere in Asia, and especially its limits. It has also created the ”Great Resignation” with millions of workers choosing new careers or reassessing their priorities. The labour shortage in tech has been in the making for years (Forbes Labour shortage) and Low-Code/No-Code may be an answer to two problems: 1) the shortage of skilled tech and development professionals and; 2) actual work satisfaction in tech jobs.
For start-up entrepreneurs it is very difficult to find talented and experienced developers and the costs of such talent has increased significantly. Low-code allows start-ups to develop prototypes and MVPs of complete applications without having to rely as much on a limited labour pool and in many cases allows more experienced developers to use their skills in software architecture rather than in the tedious tasks of coding.
There are a few interesting stats about Low-Code/No-Code:
1. By 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity. (Gartner)
2. The global low-code development platform market is predicted to generate a revenue of $187 billion by 2030, rising from $10 billion in 2019, and is expected to advance at a fast pace, 31% CAGR, during the forecast period. (GlobeNewswire)
3. By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives. (Gartner)
4. 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, up from less than 25% in 2020. (Gartner)
5. IT is the second-largest area for businesses to address potential skill gaps after data science. (McKinsey)
6. Between 2018–2023, more than 500 million apps will be created. That’s more than the previous 40 years combined. (IDC)
7. Nearly 60% of all custom apps are now built outside the IT department. Of those, 30% are built by employees with either limited or no technical development skills. (451 Research)
8. Low code/ no-code solutions have the potential to reduce the development time by 90%. (Redhat)
You read correctly: An astounding 90% potential reduction in development time. And since time is money, you do the math for entrepreneurs wanting to accelerate product development, launch and commercialization.
What is No-code / Low-code?
Technically speaking, it is a method and a movement of programming that does not necessarily involve writing code, but instead works with a Graphic User Interface (GUI), where people can use templates, drag & drop components and logical sequences to bring any digital product to reality. It relates more to visual programming with components already created. Obvious examples of No-code are Shopify e-commerce builders or Webflow web design and include software that allows the user to “Drag-and-Drop” components to build a web site or an application. Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce all offer Low-code tools to design applications.
No-code / low-code software is a relatively new type of software that allows non-technical entrepreneurs to design custom apps for their businesses through Abstraction layers. Abstraction layers are: …” a technique of masking the inner working aspects of a subsystem to make engaging with the programming interface more digestible for the end-user / programmer with little to no technical knowledge”. No-code / low-code technology is based on a high-level abstraction that further simplifies user-level programme interactions, so the end-user is not exposed to any coding grammar (i.e. the rules that govern the structure of a programming language). Instead, the user constructs an application by moving “blocks or components” of code around. Each of these blocks acts a computer programme.
No-code and low-code tools and solutions are viewed as the future of software development. This has significantly changed the industry that was based completely on developers. Most providers offer advanced platform-as-a-service cloud capabilities, use visual programming interfaces to solve business problems faster and more effectively than traditional software development methods.
Low-code development platforms do the heavy lifting to reduce the long hours of coding, fixing bugs, learning the latest programming framework, running multiple tests, looking over changelogs, etc. Bringing these features to the table these platforms become the solutions to various developers’ problems and limitations like reducing boilerplate code, easy handoff to your team, integrating at ease, accelerating development with integrations and webhooks, etc.
You can also automate and optimize multiple stages of the development lifecycle with Low-code. As a result, the tools reduce the amount of traditional hand-coding, allowing for accelerated delivery of business applications. As it’s low entry-level, a wide range of skill levels can contribute to the development of the application — not just coders.
Why will Low-Code save tech entrepreneurs in 2022?
The multiple advantages of Low-code allow tech entrepreneurs to bring their product vision to life faster and cheaper. As the economy slows down so will financing sources and VC money. It is already happening with VC money dipping by 10% in April alone. And VCs may be looking are reducing their risk by investing in companies that are more advanced in product market fit testing through better prototyping.
Low-code can save significant development and operational costs in the following ways:
· Do more with relatively less efforts: Low-code tools make it possible to build and automate processes quickly at scale without having to spend a lot of resources. Entrepreneurs can build prototypes and Minimal Viable Products
· Iterations: Using low-code tools, you can create improved versions of your product quickly, while coding it on your own takes extensive time and is prone to errors. You can test new versions and add features and test with potential clients. This method also reduces the risks inherent to product design. The faster and cheaper you can develop a V1.0 of your idea the faster you can validate your assumptions
· Decreased maintenance: Low-code tools automate and help various aspects of the development process and thus reducing the maintenance process.
· Adapt to change: The digital age demands a transformation. By leveraging low-code benefits, organizations are better able to adapt and respond to ever-changing business conditions.
As an entrepreneur any tool that would allow me to bring my product to market faster and cheaper would be welcomed. In the context of an economic slowdown and investors running to the sidelines the pressure to bootstrap projects will be even more intense.
Low-code solutions offer an economical and operational alternative to move forward on application development projects without extensive funding and to bring to market; and generate revenues earlier.
How different is No-Code
No-code as the name suggests gives the user complete freedom from writing codes. Its interface allows users to easily create applications using “Drag and Drop” components of the software. This results in a relatively more intuitive way of creating web applications and especially web sites to non-tech users.
With No-code, you don’t need any technical skills to build platforms. Applications without codes can also be a great way for non-technical people to prototype what they need before taking their ideas forward. In no-code solutions, you get pre-built pages you can use to launch a business in minutes, somewhat like e-commerce website design companies.
In contrast to low-code platforms, No-code platforms are primarily aimed at business decision-makers or other IT industry workers who may not know any coding languages but need to develop an application for a specific purpose such as solving a specific problem. These applications are relatively easy to use for people who don’t have programming skills or experience.
On the other side, as well as being open and extensible, Low-code platforms also enable developers to script or hand-code, allowing them to have the best of both worlds in terms of development speed without the need for constant replication of the underlying code
Low-code or No-code?
Even the most powerful platforms require some level of coding to provide some level of functionality during the application development and deployment process, so no-code is viewed by many technology analysts as part of the low-code market.
Alternatively, No-code suits developers who need to automate their processes and develop simple applications without complex requirements. The two minimal-code and no-code development platforms offer developers a visual environment for creating applications without having to write thousands of lines of code.
Low-code tools allow you to quickly develop a working prototype, but they do not work well for business applications. Using low-code and no-code platforms, developers can quickly produce the core-functionality apps, then add additional features to make them more valuable, or spend more time developing custom apps or other initiatives that give their organizations a competitive edge.
The use of Low-code and No-code platforms reduces the need for coding skills and changes the way business units collaborate with IT, development teams.
SMBs are finding multiples reasons to use Low Code-No Code platforms. Nearly half of small and medium businesses (SMBs) say they use low-code/no-code (LCNC), according to new research from Accenture.
Market growth and drivers
Since Microsoft released Excel in 1985, market growth and drivers have been available to manipulate and analyse data with simple functions. In the early 2000s, no-code technology was created by platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify, which allowed users to create websites without writing a single line of code. These platforms were first created for specific purposes. Although their use has expanded in recent years, organisations have incorporated several software platforms that offer increased functionality in their stacks, creating multi-step processes. Connectivity between applications and demands for more streamlined workflows have driven demand for No-code/Low-code solutions.
As a result, we are seeing an increasing number of businesses embracing No-code/Low-code solutions as they seek to speed up, improve efficiency, get to market faster, and respond to user needs. The key driver behind the popularity of No-code/Low-code solutions is efficiency, which is why organisations have quickly embraced them.
The key driver behind this growth is cost and operational efficiency. Organizations have quickly realized No-code/Low-code software enables applications to be built much faster than traditional processes (4–10x faster, depending on the source). This increases speed of deployment, saves valuable developer time, and saves organizations money. More importantly, it empowers business users to take control of their process automation needs instead of relying completely on IT departments.
The impact of No-code/Low-code
No-code/Low-code is becoming widely adopted, and its rise in popularity is fundamentally changing the way companies and entrepreneurs interact with software development, and it directly impacts organizations as well as the overall labor ecosystem.
Organizational Impact
Across organizations, both business and technical users have increasingly adopted No-code/Low-code technology. This adoption has risen, especially as companies have become more focused on improving efficiency and leveraging automation across business units. Business and technical users need to be able to quickly create and deploy custom applications, and they can do so with available Low-code/No-code tools.
Business Users
Typically, business teams who need to develop an internal or external tool or application, must revert to their already swamped internal engineering teams for help. Development budgets, release schedule and features are negotiated and eventually the engineering team builds the application.
The engineering team will also have to secure, maintain, support and enhance this application — a never-ending, time consuming and costly effort. No-code/Low-code takes the engineer out of the equation for simple business applications and empowers non-technical users to develop these tools on their own. This considerably shortens time to deployment and increases efficiency of development. This also decreases dependency on internal development teams as well as overall cost and enables business users to continuously enhance and maintain their solution.
We have seen the proliferation of No-code/low-code applications across most, if not all, business functions within organizations including customer support, finance, sales, HR, etc., driving true ROI post-implementation.
Technical Users
Even engineers are choosing No-code/Low-code platforms over writing lines of code in certain cases. While technical users such as application development teams have coding capabilities, there are still benefits for these users to utilize low-code platforms to streamline tasks and processes. An example is the use case for MagicCodeGenerator, a low-code microservice based platform that generates code to create front-end servers (Angular or bootstrap) and back-end servers supporting SQL or MonDB. MCG is an open-source solution accessible through VisualStudioCode Marketplace created by developers for developers. Users define their data and output model and the platform performs the heavy lifting generating 1000s of lines of code automatically. Developers are provided with tools to correct and adjust the code according to their desired output. The main differences with MagicCodeGenerator lie in 2 areas. First the platform avoids vendor lock-in where you have to work withing a certain environment like Outsystems. The second is the flexibility in compatibility with databases for instance. You may start the project with SQL and then decide that MongoDB is better suites to your requirements. MCG allows developers to build scalable solutions while generating 60–70% of the code. But, as a tool built for developers, the MagicCodeGenerator platform allows users to use their own front-end template hence providing full control over the user experience and interface. Interacting with MagicCodeGenerator is significantly faster than coding from scratch while allowing flexibility.
Macroeconomic Impact
The creation of this new class of non-technical developers will help address the current imbalance between the labor market’s supply and demand for software engineers. This issue has been exacerbated by the popularity of no-code/low-code software in recent years, as numerous companies have had difficulty filling open positions in various departments. There will always be a demand for developers, as no-code/low-code software may not always be helpful in building more sophisticated applications. However, non-technical employees will be able to handle simpler applications, allowing engineering teams to focus on more productive and strategic projects. Non-engineers will be able to create more themselves and expand output, resulting in less frustration. By lowering the barriers to entry for non-engineers, no-code/low-code will assist them in dealing with the current shortage of labor. Creating this new workforce of non-technical developers will also help bring equilibrium to the disproportionate supply and demand of software engineers that we observe in the labor market today. This phenomenon has only been further exacerbated by the pandemic, as organizations across multiple industries have had trouble filling vacancies in all departments.
There will always be a need for developers, as no-code / low-code software may not always be helpful in building more complex applications. However, by offloading workload to non-technical teams for more basic applications, every business user will be able to be a developer while engineering teams can focus their energy on more productive and strategic tasks. Teams will be able to build more themselves and increase output, mediating the pain points they are experiencing with the current developer shortage.
No-code / low-code will relieve the stress of labor shortages for non-engineers as well. No-code / low-code technology can automate manual processes, which can save organizations hundreds of hours and increase efficiency across departments.
In conclusion
I am convinced that No-code / low-code will save a number of startups in the next few years and allow others to develop without having to raise millions of dollars to get off the ground with an MVP. We all hope that the next economic downturn will not last but No-Code/ low-code is here to stay as a new way to develop and scale tech companies.