An Ode to No Code.md

An ode to no code

There is a persistent myth(at least getting persistent me thinks) that no code is here and here in a big way. No doubt, Webflow, Airtable etc are great products. But I think there is a big challenge here

They are being presented as a solution to a completely different problem. The problem of creating actual prototypes.

Note we use the word prototype here as opposed to a demo These are different things. One will lead to the other, ideally in an iterative fashion. Demos have several use cases, two of them being

• Showing off the concept to a potential investor
• Gauging market interest and runnign some ads maybe

However, these are very different from building a proper product foundation. Please note, we do not mean this to the classic over optimization problem We are not advocating choosing complicated options. Rather, we are advocating to use your technical skills (or the ability to hire such skills) to use the set of tools that are now polished enough that beginners can use them. A classic example here is Airtable vs MongoDB+S3 combo Many startups are turning to Airtable as their primary and only DB to start with. That might be OK to have a basic collaboration enabled option. However, it is in the middle.

First, lets talk data.

It does not offer what an opensource CMS like Strapi offers. Strapi takes one click to deploy on Heroku. Then there is Mongo, that comes default too with this.

Second, lets talk analytics

Here too SaaS is much better than No Code. You want to use standard off the shelf analytics SDKs here like Amplitude or one of the many others. Just get the instrumentation correct and you are done.

Third, lets talk Identity management next.

Simple, Firebase. End to end, complete Authentication, User Management and every single security detail you might want. In this case you get standard JWT based interfaces and a fully Federated ID management system complete with Phone Number based verification and account recovery.

Finally, we need to discuss places where no code simply does not exist. One example of this is the classic fall back, deeplinking, attribution use cases where you have to include an SDK like Branch's.

So, all in all, No Code(Whatever that means to you) is OK to start with, as long as you realize, this is not the pattern to scale on. The real challenge though, is when you try to move off no code. That is a much harder story and can be a 1000 cuts type scenario. Be careful and make the right (not expensive but still the right) choices.