No-Code Is Eating Software

There’s a good chance that you have heard of Marc Andreessen’s famous Software Is Eating the World thesis. If you spend any time around venture capital or startups, you have probably heard of Andreessen, the former wunderkind, turned successful founder, turned investor, turned thought-leader. There are not many VC-famous people that are on the same level as Marc, and his main thesis is a good reason for that. He was and continues to be dead on - software is eating the world and the rise of venture capital has a lot to do with it (or maybe it’s the other way around).

But I think at this point, most people have accepted that fate. They see the world digitizing and welcome it with open arms. Sure there are other innovations that are occurring and the world is not yet completely eaten, but software investing is bigger than ever. It’s important to understand that it’s not just about software being a big deal - the introduction of software into every day life has expanded what we thought was originally possible with a computer and the internet.

One of the outcomes of a world swallowed whole by software is the rise of No-Code. This might also be semi-obvious at this point, but No-Code is a critical component of the innovation economy and will likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But what exactly is No-Code? A no-code platform is a development platform that allows the user to develop software applications through interfaces such as drag-and-drop or other simple, logic-based use-cases. Some refer to no-code development tools as visual development, because it replaces with lines of complex code with visual tools that are easier to understand - they are more intuitive.

Beyond that, no-code isn’t really something that is clearly defined, however. It is more about the development of developer tools that are easier and easier (and easier) to use. No-code tools are generally seen as a step function improvement in the accessibility of developing software. If you wanted to create a website - any website - in 2004, you had to know some basic coding requirements and language. Yes there were some services that made it easier than others, but, at the end of the day, you still needed to crack open lines of code to make that happen. Now, there are tools like Squarespace (shout-out to this blog) that make the creation of websites very easy. So easy that even a luddite like myself (can’t you tell based on how this article is written) can manage and maintain the website. That is no-code.

The rise of no-code is enabled due to pre-built modules. But that is the status of the current no-code experience - in the past, no-code has taken on a variety of other shapes and sizes. It’s important to understand that most software developer tool products over the past 30-40 years have in some way, shape, or form been a part of the no-code movement. As we progress, we are slowly (or rapidly, depending on your perspective) moving toward a less and less code-necessary development environment. (I do want to note that, for the sake of simplicity, I am not breaking out the differences between no-code and low-code - that’s a blog for a different day).

The best example of this historical progression of code to no-code is within Microsoft’s original no-code platform, Windows. It originally started out as a project with Microsoft called “Interface Manager” (how no-code can you get!?). Windows was originally a shell that was built on top of MS-DOS, Microsoft’s original operating system, in order to make MS-DOS more usable and accessible for anybody… just like every no-code platform in the market today. For those of you who don’t remember MS-DOS (*raises hand*), below is a screenshot of what it used to look like for anyone to use a computer.

So, in other-words, the no-code revolution, if there even is one, has been going on since 1985, when Windows was first released, and really even before then if you account for a variety of other advancements. At it’s heart, no-code is just another iteration of the idea of making building stuff in software programs easier. People have been trying to figure ways out of doing this since computers were invented, and they aren’t going to stop anytime soon.

So why is no-code taking off right now? For starters, computer engineering / software engineering talent is not super easy to come by. It is particularly expensive and not a ton of people know how to really, effectively build product in a professional setting. In 2018, it was estimated that there were approximately 4.4 million computer engineers in the United States. So what is the response to this skill shortage? Find ways to make it easier to manage products and software, hence no-code. If you can teach your accounts payable manager how to deal with your backend payments infrastructure, then you don’t have to pay an additional person to maintain a critical piece of your business. The easier the tool is to use, the better off you are when implementing new technologies into your business.

There are fewer and fewer jobs that don’t require employees to know how to manage software products. It used to be just that certain jobs had to know certain skills, like financial analysts digging around through excel (low-code!). But now we are seeing customer support roles needing to be fluent in customer-support centric software (Crisp, Collect Chat); marketers needing to know the ins-and-outs of marketing tools (salesforce, topvisor); and product managers need to know how to use tools like Zapier to make all of their other products talk to each other. This is only just the beginning. This is what the future of work really looks like - taking complex problems and processes, and finding ways to make software automate them for you. And the worker of the future will be helping to design, maintain, tweak, monitor, and update that technology.

But it’s not just the worker of the future, it’s a lot of the workers of today. Code has, in most ways, always gotten easier and more intuitive. That is the general trend line that we mentioned above. Software has eaten the world - and now we all must know how to code in order to maintain this software. But the reality is, that might be too much to ask. Knowing how to code entirely just for a piece of you business can be a big lift for some professions. Anything that makes that easier is important and worth the price.

And as software solutions become more and more niche, there will be more and more customization required for each product.

It’s not just within large companies that more no-code software is going to be enabled. More software companies are going to be able to get their start using no-code platforms to develop MVP’s and early versions of their products, better testing for product-market fit and figuring out what their product really needs to work effectively. This is going to, hopefully, increase the amount of startups that get off the ground successfully without suffering from technical execution risk. It will also open up the doors to entrepreneurship to a much wider audience, which everyone should agree is a good thing.

And it’s not as if this trend is going to get rid of software engineering jobs or software companies altogether. This is going to pave the way for more software companies to be started that are building no-code tools. No-code platforms have traditional code backing them up and they need engineers to build and maintain them too.

No-code is going to make work-life easier, and it’s just getting started.