No code platforms remove the need for coding to convert any idea into an app by replacing the coding layer with a visual layer of interaction where an app can be built via drag-and-drop components.
No code platforms typically eliminate the need to ‘go under the hood’ when it comes to modifying applications. (Source: prhandout)
Small businesses or SMEs today face a daunting challenge in competing with large enterprises regarding applications tailored for specific use cases with broad customer bases, whether at the B2B level, where enterprises are the customers, or at the B2C level, where individuals are the customers. Founders of small businesses at the start have a novel idea on what the customers want usually based on their domain of experience. However, like any startup or small business, they face the following constraints during their journey of converting that idea into a ready-to-sell application or suite of applications and making it into a sustainable business.
Technology stack – What should be the technology stack to apply that best serves the application’s end purpose and also future-proofs the application (and in return the business) so as to remain competitive at every stage of enhancement of that application? Every part of the stack has a cost involved and a dependency involved, either at a people level or at a vendor level. Most often, founders end up wishing for someone to handle all of this while they focus on building and enhancing their domain-specific application.
Capital and operational costs – Capital is extremely important as it deals with the funds needed to procure each part of the technology stack, hire developers and other technology personnel to run and maintain the application, hosting the applications on one or more cloud providers and a lot more. Again most founders here end up hoping for a single place that provides them with the necessary tools at a competitive price where they don’t need to keep hiring developers and IT personnel but rather use the right people to build and maintain my application/ suite of applications.
Business and administrative operations – Most SMEs focus first on converting their idea to a tangible and saleable technology application/application suite. Only then do they tend to focus on their business and administrative operations for supporting the running of the business. For this, there is a tendency that off-the-shelf applications are procured to automate their operations and efforts are applied to customise such applications to their style or way of running their business operations, which again leads to more costs and additional dependency of technology personnel to customise and maintain these ancillary applications.
The No Code solution
Today, no code tools or platforms are available in the market to cater to each of the above constraints that small businesses or SMEs have when it comes to converting their idea into an application and running the business with these applications at their core.
No code platforms or tools essentially remove the primary need of coding to convert any idea into an app, by replacing the coding layer with a visual layer of interaction where an application can be built using drag-and-drop pre-built components with a great degree of customisation available within each of these components.
Additionally, no code platforms typically provide a ready-to-use technology stack for building and deploying any application with a great degree of customisation – from bringing your own databases and cloud platform providers to embedding specific portions of the application built on the no-code platform as a web-part to the legacy application.
The following are the benefits available for SMEs using no code platforms to build and maintain their core applications/ suite of applications:
Reducing the number of hops from idea to app – Traditionally, enterprises had to add a layer of consultants that were responsible to ‘convert’ the idea or business requirement of the founder or business user to a functionally understandable spec that the IT team understood for developing it into applications. No code platforms eliminate this need by empowering end business users to use pre-built components to directly build the application in a way that any non-technical user understands.
Reducing time to modify apps – No code platforms typically eliminate the need to ‘go under the hood’ when it comes to modifying applications. Instead, applications can be modified from the front-end screens by the same non-technical users. This has greatly benefited SMEs to constantly innovate on their applications. Additionally, this benefit further helps in reducing time to market to launching new features to an application and helps SMEs to remain competitive in the marketplace.
Build for business and build for operations as well – No code platforms can be used not just for creating customer-focused apps but also internal apps that are used to support the operational infrastructure to service the business. No code platforms in such cases can also be leveraged to use similar data sets used by the core applications – for example, a customer seeking to purchase a license to use the SME’s application can have the data linked to the SME to use it for their accounting and finance related apps build on the same platform in the way that the SME prefers.
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