Ask HN: Which successful startups use 'no code'?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765071

by nomilk • 5 years ago

13 7 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It's claimed that with no code, you can:

build a complete Airbnb web app in just 8 hours [1]

This is about 100x faster than traditional approaches, which take around 1,000 hours [2]

If 'no code' really produces production grade software so rapidly, we should expect to find some successful startups using no code -- where are they? (i.e. can we name some?)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGzWotyveks&t=709s

[2] https://www.codica.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-marketplace-website/

bumpkinjunkie• 5 years ago

In my limited experience, no-code tools are really great for idea validation & prototyping because you can get to the core of your value proposition faster than starting from scratch. As things scale, maybe you can't rely on V1 as much, but that can be a good problem to have.

One company that started on Bubble is Qoins. https://bubble.io/blog/bubble-app-qoins/

Qoins have raised $2.3m according to Crunchbase https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qoins/company_financ...

nomilk• 5 years ago

Very interesting. Qoins app seems non-trivial, in that it interacts with the user's bank and arranges payments on the user's behalf.

Great point about making a V1 quickly.

tluyben23• 5 years ago

I thought it would be EU were open banking (psd2; and most we integrated have easy read/write) is mandatory, but this seems US. Bubble allows easy API integration, but programming low level banking messages would be painful with Bubble (maybe impossible) so I would assume they did that with a microservice or something, exposing a REST API for Bubble.

Our biggest competitor bought a nocode provider so their banking software is easier to customize.

tluyben23• 5 years ago

Not sure if you meant this, but I think a lot of no/low code products can fill most propositions however the costs are prohibitive. Currently Bubble, Adalo, Airtable etc would bankrupt me fast if I ran off them (I mean; they are free or cheap to get going but when you gain traction, the price flies up). I cannot build scale or momentum with their pricing. There is also the problem that it is not open tech, but that is more a personal thing, not a financial or tech problem.

If they were open source, I probably would build 90% of whatever I am doing in them, but now it is more like 1% and indeed for demos only and that is 100% price, for me. The open source solutions are not good enough. I understand that; only techies care about open source and they can program. This is another market.

speedgoose• 5 years ago

I recently got a quote from a big no-code company, for the yearly price they asked for a few thousand users I could hire two competent full time developers.

fish45• 5 years ago

An interesting example is hollow knight. It’s one of the most successful indie games of all time and it’s almost entirely coded visually: https://unity.com/madewith/hollow-knight

Anecdotally it makes my fans spin really fast for a 2D game but that might be because of the fancy shaders

Ask HN: Which successful startups use 'no code'?

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