Most people know about tools like Wordpress, Wix.com and Squarespace as these ‘tools’ have changed the coding landscape for static websites over the past decade. Today, anyone can mock up a static website by creating a couple of landing pages without hiring a designer or front-end developer. However, in the past couple of years, there have been a whole variety of no-code tools that have sprung up around all kinds of things (voice products for Alexa, native iOS/Android mobile apps or full-feature web apps. Here is one graphic that shows a few of these new players that compete in this new landscape:
I encourage you all to go and try out tools like Glide, Voiceflow, Bubble.is and Thunkable for 10 mins just to understand how truly powerful this trend can be. Look at some of the templates on Coda and Notion and you’ll realise how a lot of product/project management templates used by large Silicon Valley companies are also freely available.
There is now also a new generation of indie makers rising that are mocking up websites and web apps in days instead of weeks. Eric Ries’ 12-week MVP timeline has shrunk to just a few days. Given that many popular apps (e.g. Uber, Airbnb) are already available as clone-able templates, this will be further compressed in the coming years. It is also worth pointing out that most of the code for popular tools and apps is already available on an open-source branch somewhere on GitHub. Monzo’s entire codebase was available on GitHub for anyone to freely clone for almost 2+ years after their launch.
While this might seem great only for boots trappers and seed-stage startups, it would be foolish for large companies to dismiss this trend. Recent announcements at Apple’s and Google’s 2019 Developer conference show that even Swift and Flutter are going in the direction of less code/more visual development.
Companies must engage with these tools and consider using them as the starting point for future projects. For example with a combination of Webflow, Typeform and Airtable, you could build a full insurance web app with a quote engine (powered by Excel-based logic) in the space of less than a week. Add Memberstack to the mix and you’ve got the ability to offer your customer sign-up/login options. Moreover, since Airtable is cloud-based, what makes this is great is that our back-end is now being hosted on the Cloud. To make things more interesting, we can connect a lot of our workflows to Zapier (which allows you to automate tasks like customer emails or data entries) and you have a green-field insurtech that is quite automated and can be launched for <5k GBP. A price comparison website might also consider building a simple B2B product of such-type (i.e. a basic quote engine with excel based logic) for brokers/new insurtechs and offer it on a freemium basis. Ultimately, the hosting and site generation bit will become commoditized and the real commercial value could come from other add-ons like ‘data insights’ on top of the standard quote engine. And once you integrate CMS hosting into the mix, you likely have the makings of a very happy and very sticky B2B customer.