How do you sell no-code?
My sister has been recently doubling-down on no-code. It's pretty cool to see how tooling has matured in recent years to make this kind of skill-set highly valuable.
However, how do you take that skill-set to market?
In general, the market isn't looking for no-coders the same way it looks for, for example, app developers. The solution-set of no-code isn't mature enough for the market to look for it.
Whether it's job roles or service offerings, how can no-coders position themselves?
Is "App/web/system development - but without code" the best option there is right now? Effectively overlaying "no-code" on top of pretty traditional service offerings?
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I think it depends on who you're selling to. Generally speaking I'd use No-Code solutions for MVPs but once the rubber hits the road you might start to translate the No-Code solution into one with "real code".
Given that I'd sell my No-Code skills as someone who can crank out an MVP pretty quckliy.
If you're selling your skills / services and not applying for a No-Code job at a company you're essentially selling the outcome and not the specific skill (and based on my experience that's what a lot of companies are after). The outcome in this case would be the MVP.
Of course you should be open that you use No-Code solutions to deliver that outcome.
I agree you are selling the outcome. But I think the principles of no code and fast iteration are a valuable skill set to have in a product team to learn and fail fast.
I think it depends if you are working on a established product with more known variables or a pre seed start up with many more unknowns. I think a good question to ask is when does a company stop needing MVPs. In my experience having run my own B2B marketplace and SaaS businesses for 10+ years these MVPs don’t stop when you are an ambitious and growing company. We recruited a x2 growth hacker roles around 5years ago (when it was trendy). These have been some of the most valuable positions at the company.
These roles were responsible for all of our growth tactics and MVPs. With the goal of the MVPs to de-risk any project and avoiding the development team becoming distracted by side projects that could be built and tested by the growth hackers.
From my experience a role of “No code MVP specialist” or “growth hacker” (for want of a better name) is a valued role in early stage start ups and ambitious lean companies a like.
Most people outside of tech industry don't really care what something was built on. Bubble or React - it's all the same to them, as long as it solves the problem they have.
I recently founded Dev Shopper, a free platform for matching people with top dev shops for their software projects within 48 hours. What I've learned from all the projects posted to the site so far is that our users who are open to no-code solutions instead of traditional custom web development always make that clear by themselves. An actual example from one such project: "I'm open to a web app like Bubble or Native App, but all users will be on their phone".
Bonus plot twist: Dev Shopper itself is a no-code app. (It was actually featured as the Bubble App of the Day yesterday.) Most of our customers don't even notice and those who do couldn't care less. It looks like any other web app they've ever used, shields them from cold outreach, and provides them with bids from top service providers within hours. In other words, it does what they came for - and that's literally the only thing that matters, as it should be.
So, my advice to your sister would be: don't sweat it. If you are great at no-code, there's probably no need to find an angle. Just sell it as software development services and explain to your customer what sort of approach you take to solve their problems. Chances are, most of them will be like: "yeah, sure, whatever, let's discuss the budget".
For me as a designer who never learned to code properly, I think marketing no-code is about other things. To a certain degree it's speed and cost, but also giving a greater degree of control to the client when the product is finished.
For example, many no-code web builders are easy to update/maintain if the client is so inclined. Either that or they can go the more "traditional" route and have the designer or agency update it for them.
Startups are always particularly sensitive to cost and speed and while I'm not saying that we shouldn't charge what we're worth, the difference between a $100.000 traditional agency build and a $20.000 no-code agency build is a no-brainer for most (made these figures up of course :)
I've recently launched a design and "dev" service 100% focused on no-code solutions for startups (web only right now). Interest is there but it will be exciting to see how it develops over the months to come. Take a look if you like: https://getsocialdesign.com/
@pmuens @TimWright @chaostorm
Thanks for chiming in all! Sorry it's taken me a few days to reply.
The sentiment for leaning towards outcome rings true for me. The challenge being plenty of other dev shops/agencies/consultants are outcome-orientated, so differentiation could hard. The speed-to-market being where I think the opportunity is.
The "Growth Hacker" thought is a good one! I didn't think of that. A few years older than no-coding style concepts, but the industry sort of picked it up and it's stuck.
If I had to coin a term that was something similar, something like Operations or System Hacker kinda works.