You can already envision it. You have a great idea for an app, and after your launch growth will skyrocket, your product will become well known, and you’ll sell for a sizable sum.
If only all start-ups had an Instagram-like storyline. Anyone who has ever let their entrepreneurial spirit fly knows the challenges that fledgling businesses face.
While launching a web business has become easier than ever with platforms like SquareSpace and Shopify, mobile apps to date have been much more challenging to develop.
With mobile app usage making up nearly half of all internet traffic, this makes mobile first businesses inaccessible to many aspiring entrepreneurs. App developers charge $10,000 and higher for decent mobile apps.
If you don’t have the budget to hire an app development team, what do you do? Fortunately savvy entrepreneurs are looking to no-code platforms, like Appypie and others, to get their mobile first businesses off the ground.
1. Lower costs
Let’s say you’re a newly minted fashion design graduate and want to forge your own career path by starting an online consignment boutique. You have an idea where you can use a community based approach to curate dresses, skirts, tops, and accessories with just a smartphone camera.
Although you think you can attract customers through a web gallery and blog-style video tips, you realize that your company will need a mobile app to truly engage with prospects.
But how can a cash poor college student build an app without hiring an expensive development team?
No-code platforms are a great solution. Through a selection of templates, you can build a mobile app on your own to materialize your vision. Thousands of dollars of investment can become just hundreds of dollars.
Your app doesn’t have to be simple either. Some no-code platforms like Airtable also include database features. You can easily build functionality to save customer clothing preferences and send alerts when similar items become available. With an app development team, needless to say, this could be outside your budget.
2. Faster time to market
To continue with our example, let’s say fashion curation is becoming increasingly popular. More and more businesses are entering the market, but there seems to be a gap in the high-end shoe category.
It’s safe to assume other players are thinking about this space and how to enter it. If someone beats you to the punch, they can potentially take all the critical press and awareness momentum that comes with it, which can give a meaningful boost to organic growth and search discoverability.
As a result, you’ll have to work even harder to market your business.
To get a leg up, and to capture the benefits of being a first mover, no-code apps are a great solution. By using a no-code platform to develop your company app, you by-pass lengthy analysis, back and forth sessions, and scope creep with high-dollar developers to create an app. Instead, you can translate your vision for your app directly into a no-code platform, focusing on key features that you think will drive the most value.
In effect, even though it might not be perfect, you can get your product to market much faster to capture initial mind share.
3. Reduce opportunity cost
As an entrepreneur, your time is one of your most valuable assets. Launching a business takes effort and time.
The catch is, no matter how much you plan, you have no idea if you’ll achieve product market fit. Odds are stacked against you, and chances are you’ll have to spend time iterating on your concept to figure out the business opportunity.
A major key to success is getting your product out in the market as soon as possible, so you can start learning where your product needs to go. No-code apps allow you to do that. What used to take months, can now take weeks.
You might learn your mobile app idea isn’t a great one, in which case, you’ve only lost a few weeks of time, and you can move on to your next idea.
4. Minimal training needed
You might think that learning how to use a no-code platform can also be an investment. Similar to being an Adobe Photoshop user, you might have to invest time learning the bell and whistles to use a no-code platform.
While this isn’t wrong, the alternative can be much worse. Learning to code can take you years, and working with a development shop can easily be a 6 month process that will take more time than learning to use a no-code platform.
Moreover, no-code platforms use intuitive point-and-click functions with the goal of making the user experience as easy as possible, and they will only continue to get easier.
5. Easy to manage, update, and iterate
When you hire a development team to create a custom app from scratch, you then have to rely on that team to manage the app and make updates to it. Besides being expensive, having developers update a mobile app leaves a company dependent on the development team’s schedule.
If they have other projects, your minor update may not be completed quickly.
With a no-code platform, on the other hand, you can manage app features and make updates in real time yourself.
When you’re launching your business for the first time, this is critical. It’s very unlikely you’re going to get the product right the first time. No-code platforms enable you to take customer feedback and make quick updates to get your product to the point where it really solves your user needs.
Start building
If you have a great mobile app idea, and want to dip your toes in entrepreneurship, consider using a no-code platform. There are a number of high quality ones to choose from. Using one of them will almost certainly improve your chances of success.
I’m the cofounder of SOTA Partners, where we invest in companies changing the future of work and food. We also rapidly experiment and incubate new business ideas.
I’m the cofounder of SOTA Partners, where we invest in companies changing the future of work and food. We also rapidly experiment and incubate new business ideas. Previously, with a friend, I built an education software business without investment called Imagine Easy Solutions that reached 30M users yearly. I sold the business to a NYSE public company called Chegg, where I was in a leadership role for three years. From being a scrappy entrepreneur to an executive within a public company, I’ve had my share of failures and wins that has given me insight into what it takes to drive a business forward.