Can a No-Code Business Ever Scale?
Lessons learned building a no-code solution that most of my customers outgrew.
A huge problem with no-code is that it’s not scalable.
Sooner or later, a founder comes across a feature their customers need that they can’t build without coding.
I should know. I’ve spent the past 10 years building a no-code marketplace solution with my company, Sharetribe. Almost all our customers eventually outgrew it and moved to custom coding.
But then, coding also has a huge problem. Building products from scratch takes time and skill, and usually, a full-stack tech team. Such a barrier of entry is no longer acceptable.
So, founders without coding skills are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Here’s how they can get out.
Why does no-code not scale?
First, it’s necessary to back up my first claim. Why is it that no-code doesn’t scale?
Ultimately, the reason why no-code rarely takes founders past the first stages is because of three things:
- Even the best no-code builders and platforms will always have limits. Sooner or later, every founder comes across a feature that can’t be built no-code. Or if it can, the product becomes so complex to manage that you’d be better off learning to code.
- No-code platforms have a strong lock-in. When you hit the limit of a no-code tool, you have no choice but to rebuild your product from scratch. You can take your data, but what you built is lost. The platform-specific no-code skills you learned are now obsolete.
- No-code platforms can change their terms at any point. Like Airtable, they might decide to focus on enterprise customers. Or 10x their prices, or sell to Meta or Google. No-code tools are often VC-backed, and VC incentives rarely align with those of solo founders and small teams.
I learned these lessons the hard way.
(Well, luckily not the third point — once we realized the risk, we moved Sharetribe to an unusual structure that prevents our company from ever being sold.)
Thousands of people used Sharetribe’s first no-code product to launch their marketplaces. Everyone who successfully validated their concept eventually moved on to custom-develop their platform — using our developer tools or from complete scratch.
If no-code isn’t a future-proof solution, and coding from scratch isn’t an option, what can a founder do?
In most cases, they should choose no-code anyway.
Choose no-code for adjacent or internal tools
No-code is excellent for building adjacent tools (like marketing websites) or internal tools (think admin dashboards).
If you’re a creator, a freelancer, or a coach, for example, any technology solutions you need are safely built with no-code tools. No-code empowers you to build a website extremely quickly, automate creating, publishing, and distributing content, track relevant data, organize leads, and so on.
There’s really no reason to invest in building such tools from scratch — even if you have the coding skills. The money you spend on monthly subscriptions to no-code tools pays off with more time to grow your business.
In these situations, your software isn’t your main competitive advantage. Even if your newsletter solution or website builder goes out of business or your Zaps break, your core value proposition remains.
Choose no-code for your MVP
No-code is phenomenal for building MVPs (minimum viable products), prototypes, and validating ideas.
I firmly believe that 9 out of 10 times, even skilled developers are better off starting their businesses without coding.
In the first stages of building a business, founders should prioritize speed to market.
I’ve heard countless examples of successful marketplace founders who’ve validated their idea with a no-code marketplace solution, a simple website with a form, or essentially just a spreadsheet.
Another story I often hear is the opposite. A founder spends months and months and thousands of dollars building advanced features — and doesn’t get even close to an MVP that works.
Even if you have development skills, you can save a lot of time — and learn a lot about your target market — by building your first prototype with no-code.
So much money is wasted by building too much too soon.
Choose API-first + no-code when you can
My third piece of advice is to not choose between code and no-code.
With code, there are no limitations. You can always change anything you want exactly how you want. Most programming languages are open-source, not proprietary. And coding skills are transferable.
Some no-code platforms are built in a way that combines these benefits with no-code. I call them API-first no-code platforms.
In the API-first approach, API is treated as the primary product. It’s designed to be robust, scalable, and developer-friendly so it can integrate and interact seamlessly with other tools. Tools like Stripe, Twilio, and Algolia work like this — but require coding skills to integrate.
There’s no reason why no-code tools couldn’t adopt the same approach. They could be built in a way that lets developers easily extend them with code.
We took this approach with Sharetribe, combining our no-code marketplace builder with a developer platform. This allows us to power customers with millions of dollars in funding and hundreds of thousands of users. Shopify is the other notable example of this approach.
Using an API-first no-code tool, a founder wouldn’t have to choose between the benefits and drawbacks of code and no-code. They could build and launch their business fast with the no-code tools, and extend them with development as they scale.
Most early-stage founders don’t need to worry about the scalability of no-code.
Their main product is not the tech, and so complementary tools can safely be built with no-code.
An MVP or prototype can (and, in many cases, should) also be powered by no-code. The point isn’t to build something that will be maintained forever. The point is to learn and iterate to find product/market fit.
When no-code platforms are built API-first, you get the benefits of both worlds. You can launch an MVP extremely quickly without any coding, and you can add custom code when you need to.
There aren’t too many such solutions available yet, but I firmly believe API-first is where no-code is headed. And that this is great news for solo founders and small teams building ambitious businesses.
