No Code SaaS - Is It Real or All Hype?

in this video I'm going to talk through no code SAS is it real or hype I'm going to talk through the pros and cons of no code then I'll go through a couple of SAS examples that were built with no code and if you stick around to the end I'll talk through the specifics of what no code is great for and some examples of things you probably shouldn't build with it I had someone who I would consider a world expert on no code header on the podcast startups for the rest of us Tara Reid has educated 160 000 people on building no code apps and she's built no code apps herself she is the founder of apps without code which does several million a year in Revenue so the pros and cons I'll be running through today are both from my list and then augmented by Tara's comments I'm Rob Walling I'm a Serial entrepreneur I've written four books on building startups and invested in more than 125 companies some examples of tools that help you build no code apps are things like zapier bubble airtable softer and glide I've even heard Squarespace called No code because you can essentially build a website and a shopping cart without coding okay so I have three pros today the first is you don't have to learn how to code to build no code this might be obvious but it opens up the world of building technical things to hundreds of millions of people who would not otherwise have the opportunity and that is incredible that is a groundbreaking aspect of no code the second Advantage is speed you can quickly build things you can quickly test ideas we have applications internal to microconf and tinyseed that we have built to help with the production of things like this YouTube channel so it's a workflow manager that we call that that stands for video airtable because it's video production based on airtable I know I know it's not the best name but we also have one called Pat which is our podcast airtable and producer Ron was able to build this in a matter of two weeks three weeks and he doesn't know how to code and so it's fascinating to think that 10 years ago we would either have used a generic project management system that wouldn't have been as good as patent vat or we would have paid a developer to spend several months to be honest of of person hours to build what we have so the ability to do this so quickly and to be able to test ideas is pretty incredible and when I brought up this point Tara added this might be the most important Advantage it's super important to not lose momentum especially as an entrepreneur and the ability to build quickly and iterate quickly is perhaps no code's greatest advantage and then the third Advantage is I view bootstrapping and Entrepreneurship and oftentimes technology as this great equalizer that anyone should be able to do as an entrepreneur if you're able to solve a problem that people are willing to pay for you can make money and have your own business and no code allows many many more people to potentially be able to do that on the internet all right now for the cons there's four of them the first one is scale and realistically if you were to build a high Scale app that needed to process millions and millions of transactions per day today no code can't really do that there's a brittleness to it and there are are limitations in some apps like airtable I believe has a row limit and there are limits of how quickly you can process things and so sometimes just getting down to the bare metal and writing code is needed at high scale the second con is there are limitations on what you can build so I brought up with Tara the example of drip which was my last SAS app that I exited in 2016. it was an email service provider it's big it's complicated and there's a lot of scale to it there it needs to be performed it needs to send a lot of things and you just couldn't build that today with no code and Tara Reid actually brought up several other examples that I wasn't aware of that today would be difficult to build with no code she said there's decent no code software for building AR augmented reality software but there's nothing in no code that would allow you to build VR headset software very well she also talked about HIPAA compliance being tricky something about not being able to alter the Emojis on a keyboard I wasn't quite sure about this but there are there are still edge cases is the bottom line right there are certain things that you can't build with no code and so to today that you know that is a con even though we know people are expanding on these no code tools to allow you to build more and more every month that goes by the third con is I found the user interface and the user experience to be a little lacking at least in the tools that we've used and what Tara told me was that airtable is one of those pieces of software that maybe doesn't have as good of UI as something like softer or Glide and so the UI ux does depend on the tool but in general you don't have as much control and so going back to the example I mentioned earlier of Pat and Pat the interfaces are perfectly serviceable for an internal application that's used by half a dozen people but I would have a tough time releasing this as a paid subscription app as a full-blown SAS app because you just can't make it look great so again it works and it's serviceable but it doesn't give you that amazing ux feel that you can get with custom code the fourth and final con before I dive into some examples of no code SAS apps is platform risk if you build your entire business on on Bubble or air table you are at their Mercy for them to raise prices for them to just change aspects of their system that break your application for them to kick you off I haven't heard of anyone doing that but you are beholden to that platform we often talk about platform risk being something like I'm built on Facebook or I'm in the Shopify Marketplace and they could easily kick me out or Facebook could cut off my API access but it's interesting to think about if you build inside another application again bubble softer air table these are all SAS apps themselves that you're basically paying to build within you do have some platform risk I haven't heard of there being issues yet but I imagine over time some of these will shut down and maybe leave some people hanging who've invested a lot of time in building on that platform so now let's go through three no code examples before we dig in to my conclusions we looked far and wide for actual SAS examples built in no code and it turns out there's a ton of software built with no code but very very little of it is SAS and very little of it is making money in production so we would find job boards built with no code which really isn't SAS it's a two-sided Marketplace we actually found a lot of two-sided Marketplace kind of things built with no code and that's a great application of it but SAS apps where you are selling a software tool for someone to solve a problem are actually quite difficult to find one that we found on the bubble dot IO blog is teal teal started as a way to manage your job search but they actually became almost an education company and they built teal on Bubble type form HubSpot zapier airtable I mean they used a lot of different things and they actually raised a five million round of funding with a no code Tech stack and I've heard rumors that I haven't been able to confirm that they have since Rewritten their stack in code now you know used a typical web framework to build it but it's a pretty cool story to imagine you bootstrapped this business and you don't have to pay developers to build the platform that that you're bootstrapping that's one of the biggest benefits I see to no code second example is userloop.io it's a Shopify app built on Bubble we actually reached out to the founder he was kind enough to privately share his mrr with us we're not going to share it in this video but we confirmed that it's a great step one lifestyle SAS and he built it on bubble with no code what it is is an e-commerce survey platform that collects customer feedback at every stage of the funnel and I think this is a great example of a good use of no code where you build a relatively small self-contained thing it doesn't need to scale because it's not a standalone SAS app and you can make money from it and my third and final example is betterlegal.com better legal has grown to two and a half million dollars in annual revenue and 700 000 of that is recurring Revenue better legal is super interesting they help you get up and running fast to set up a business so you can use it to form your like a business entity and then you can use it to manage documents and do stuff beyond that so while a big chunk of it is obviously not SAS because SAS would be subscription and only 700k ARR is subscription they do have a SAS app and this is a pretty impressive project that these folks were able to put together with no code what I don't know is since then have they Rewritten it into code and really does that matter because if they got this far and then they rewrite it that's okay like this is one of the things that no code is good at before I dive in to my conclusions I want to let you know about startups for the rest of us I mentioned episode 642 where I spoke with Tara Reid but every week I'm shipping 30 to 35 minutes of tasty audio goodness all about building launching and growing SAS apps you should check it out it's available in Spotify Apple podcast or startups for the rest of us.com so conclusions is no code SAS real or hype and like most things no code SAS is a land of contrast it's great for some things and other things you shouldn't build with it and knowing the pros and cons and what you should and shouldn't build with it I think is the point of a conversation like this and each of us should be keeping ourselves educated on what we can do with a tool like no code or AI or web3 many of these tools and platforms that come out they do get this big hype cycle and so you can either jump on that train or you can dismiss it but the real answer is usually somewhere in between so I have five things I think no code is great for building the first one is internal applications I talked about Pat and vat above where it's used by six people within a single company and even if it's not perfect it doesn't really matter because it makes our world so much easier the second thing I think no code is great for is building an early prototype or MVP much like a couple of the examples of no code SAS that I gave earlier third thing it's great for is a step one business a simple business that's usually built in an app Marketplace this is what user Loop is I gave that example earlier but step one businesses I think are a really great opportunity folks to build their no codes the fourth thing no code's great for is This Acronym swas I think Dan Ian from the tropical MBA came up with it but it's not software as a service it's software with a service and that's actually how I view better legal and teal the examples I gave earlier is there is software but the real value is in the legal advice or in the career advice in this case you're not actually selling it you don't really need it you can almost do this via email with PDF attachments but the software just helps make things more efficient it isn't the actual thing people are paying for so I think building swas with no code is interesting and the fifth and final thing we see a lot of no code Builders making are marketplaces so these are things like job boards or you know local matching where it's I'm trying to match cleaners with folks who need their house cleaned it's pretty easy to build a marketplace with the no code tools today and actually the sixth one that I'm just thinking about wasn't even in my outline is iOS apps or mobile apps in general I think there's some pretty good builders for building basic mobile apps that frankly used to you know you think about building a mobile app 10 15 years ago and you would pay someone fifty thousand dollars it was super expensive and the fact that you can go in and do it yourself today I think is pretty incredible so where are the limitations with no code I've talked a bit about these I only have two on this list they're pretty broad though first one is building a full-blown SAS app like an email service provider like drip you just can't do that with no code if you were to try to build Savvy cow which is scheduling software you couldn't do it Beyond where it's 3D visualization software for transportation projects or how about sinewell which is electronic signature postpone which is Reddit post scheduling squadcast podcast recording etc etc right there there's just a good chunk of SAS apps like the full-blown major SAS apps that are getting into the six seven and eight figures where the tool is actually what's being sold not a service along with a tool are not ideal for no code especially if they need to scale or there's a lot of complexity or customization that's needed I think to conclude I haven't seen evidence that you can build a no code SAS that's not with a service the swas Beyond a few thousand dollars a month and frankly that's okay like the promise of no code and the ability for millions and millions of people to be able to use it is incredible on its own the fact that maybe you can't build drip or Savvy cow or Beyond wear with no code is fine just realize going in that it's going to be amazing for certain use cases and then the more complexity and the more scale you run into you're gonna run into edge cases and You're Gonna Wanna dig into code whether you learn to do it yourself or you hire someone to help you if you enjoyed this video I'd love it if you'd hit that like button and subscribe to the channel every week we have another video coming out just like this one covering all things SAS building launching and growing your company see you next week [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: MicroConf

Views: 60,713

Keywords: MicroConf, Saas, no code app builder, no code saas, saas business, no code, no code startup ideas, no code app development, no code startups, saas startup, software as a service, no code saas ideas, no code app, no code tools, no code ai, no code saas builder, no code saas examples, no code saas business, no code saas idea, no code saas ai, no code saas tutorial, no code app examples

Id: 0pDiboyl26w

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023