Codeless Coding Part I: The Rise of the Citizen Developer
By: Amy Wang
The term “disruptive” is used quite liberally in venture, especially when it comes to next generation, up-and-coming infrastructure tech or software applications. But in reality, while most new tech does drive incremental improvements on how we operate, build or interact, only a small subset of these technology innovations would grow to truly disrupt the way people, organizations, and entire industries operate. Low-code / no-code applications could become such a gamechanger.
What is no-code / low-code and how does it work?
No-code / low-code is a relatively new class of software that enables everyday individuals, AKA “Citizen Developers”, to create custom applications for their organizations. With little to no technical knowledge, this is possible through abstraction layers: abstraction layers are a way of hiding the inner working details of a subsystem to make interacting with the programming interface more digestible for the end-user / programmer (i.e. programming something with Java instead of coding in hexadecimal). No-code / low-code technology is built on a high-level abstraction that simplifies user-level program interactions even further, so the end-user doesn’t interact with any coding syntax (i.e. the rules that define the structure of a programming language) at all. Instead, the user simply moves around “Lego blocks” of code to build an application. Each of these Lego blocks operates as code.
Market growth and drivers
Versions of low-code technology has been around since 1985, when Microsoft released Excel to allow users to manipulate and analyze data with simple functions. True no-code technology came about in the early 2000’s with platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify, which empowered users to create websites without writing a single line of code. These were still specialized for specific functions.
In recent years, as software adoption has grown, organizations have added numerous software platforms to their stack which increased functionality but led to multi-step processes. The need for connectivity between applications and desire for more streamlined workflows has fueled demand for no-code / low-code.
As a result, we are seeing an increasing number of businesses embrace no-code / low-code solutions as they look to increase speed, efficiency, time to market and cater to user needs. Forrester estimates 75% of enterprise software will be built with low-code technology by the end of 2021, driven by internal applications for workflow automation. From a revenue standpoint, it’s predicted that the market is growing at a high clip with an estimated CAGR between 26–43% for the 2020–2027 forecast period. This is considerably higher than the 10–18% benchmark for the SaaS market as a whole.
The key driver behind this growth is efficiency. Organizations have quickly realized no-code / low-code software enables applications to be built much faster than traditional processes (4–10x faster, depending on the source). This increases speed of deployment, saves valuable developer time, and saves organizations money. More importantly, it empowers business users to take control of their process automation needs instead of relying completely on IT departments.
How is no-code / low-code affecting change?
No-code / low-code is becoming widely adopted, and its rise in popularity will fundamentally change the way individuals interact with software development and directly impact organizations as well as the overall labor ecosystem.
1. Individual Impact:
The expansion of computer science (“CS”) education has skyrocketed over the past decade. But, as technology evolves so rapidly, traditional CS education can be slow to adapt. Although many states are implementing CS education mandates at public schools, there is a shortage of quality CS instructors which leads to a lack of accessibility to comprehensive CS education. This causes learning to become self-serve for many students. However, it’s difficult for students and corporate learners to dive straight into traditional programming languages with no computer science background. No-code / low-code serves as a stepping-stone for students and adults learning how to code for the first time, as it still trains and tests logical abilities without the additional hurdle of learning coding syntax.
As a student, I started learning on a no-code platform called Scratch, a high-level, block-based visual programming language tailored for CS education, which built the logical foundation for me to move onto learning Scheme, a high-level functional language with minimalist syntax. This paved the way for me to progressively learn traditional programming languages such as Java and C without diving in head-first into something more complex.
Additionally, no-code / low-code applications are democratizing application development. Developers traditionally had to go through rigorous CS education to build solutions, but with no-code / low-code, business users without a technical background can do this as well.
On a foundational level, the rise of no-code / low-code is empowering all individuals to leverage technology to its fullest potential by enabling them to build and develop applications autonomously and in a simple and effective way. A small business owner today can quickly build a site and start transacting online using Shopify. A mom can build a nice event site for her summer gathering using Splash. A trainer can leverage Passion’s mobile application builder tailored for creators to make an interactive fitness program to stream videos and communicate with clients simply and quickly. A college student can create a website using Wix for a school project without writing a single line of code.
2. Organizational Impact:
No-code / low-code technology has seen its adoption rise across both business users as well as technical users within organizations. This is not a surprise especially as companies became increasingly focused on improving efficiency and leveraging automation across business units. Business and technical users need the ability to quickly build and deploy specific applications and leveraged available low-code / no-code tools to do that.
Business Users: Typically, business teams (ie. HR, accounting, sales) who need to develop an internal or external tool or application, must revert to their already swamped internal engineering teams for help. After going back and forth several times, the engineering team builds the application. The engineering team will also have to continuously secure, maintain, support and enhance this application — a less than ideal, never-ending, time consuming and costly effort. No-code / low-code takes the engineer out of the equation for simple business applications and empowers non-technical users to develop these tools on their own. This considerably shortens time to deployment and increases efficiency of development. This also decreases dependency on internal engineering teams as well as overall cost and enables business users to continuously enhance and maintain their solution.
We have seen the proliferation of no-code, low-code applications across most, if not all, business functions within organizations including customer support, finance, sales, HR, etc., driving true ROI post-implementation. Entrepreneur (SMB-focused magazine) was able to increase digital sales by 23% by using Monday.com to build workflow applications to streamline their sales pipeline. Airkit, a no-code customer experience application development platform enabled Reusability (provider of reusable packing programs) to build a digital customer experience flow and automate customer support processes. This resulted in a 2x increase in cases handled per agent, saved an average of 30 minutes per support call, and allowed Reusability to decrease planned call center headcount by 60%. Gympass (corporate wellbeing / fitness platform) was able to run and automate core operations for their sales, customer service, operations, and finance teams on Pipefy, a no-code internal workflow builder. As a result, they were able to save 11K human hours per month while guaranteeing error-free data through conditional logic. Other examples of leading no-code / low-code platforms for non-technical teams include UiPath — robotic process automation for business processes and Workato — integration and workflow automation. [Note: Case studies sourced from above companies’ websites]
Technical Users: Even engineers are choosing no-code / low-code platforms over writing lines of code in certain cases. While technical users such as DevOps teams have coding capabilities, there are still benefits for these users to utilize no-code / low-code platforms to streamline tasks and processes. An example is the core use case for Fylamynt, a cloud workflow automation platform tailored for SRE’s and DevOps teams. Users can visually build complex workflows that consist of a series of operations to navigate large-scale dynamic cloud environments. But, as a tool built for engineers, Fylamynt’s platform allows users to switch between their drag-and-drop, no-code visual interface and coded workflows in Python and JSON without loss of information. For complex workflows, the ability to see a flow rather than coding in a terminal gives SRE’s and DevOps teams visibility and clarity while allowing them to solve mission-critical and time-sensitive incidents quicker. Interacting with Fylamynt’s UI is significantly faster for a SRE than coding a workflow from scratch and it makes it easier to make changes or enhancement as systems requirement change.
3. Macroeconomic Impact:
Creating this new workforce of Citizen Developers will also help bring equilibrium to the disproportionate supply and demand of software engineers that we observe in the labor market today. This phenomenon has only been further exacerbated by the pandemic, as organizations across multiple industries have had trouble filling vacancies in all departments.
There will always be a need for developers, as no-code / low-code software may not always be helpful in building more complex applications. However, by offloading workload to non-technical teams for more basic applications, every business user will be able to be a developer while engineering teams can focus their energy on more productive and strategic tasks. Teams will be able to build more themselves and increase output, mediating the pain points they are experiencing with the current developer shortage.
No-code / low-code will relieve the stress of labor shortages for non-engineers as well. No-code / low-code technology can automate manual processes, which can save organizations hundreds of hours and increase efficiency across departments. Using Airkit as an example, if an organization can automate their call center by building a digital customer experience flow, they will be able to take pressure off call center personnel and allow each employee to address more customer inquiries.
Final Thoughts
No-code / low-code is changing the way we interact with application building. Individuals, organizations, and the overall labor supply will feel the impact of no-code / low-code adoption. We see many innovative startups leveraging this technology for their users in unique ways. I briefly mentioned some interesting no-code / low-code solutions earlier including Airkit, Fylamynt, Pipefy, UiPath and Workato. There are so many more no-code / low-code platforms that are changing the way organizations build and automate. In my next piece, I’ll be landscaping some of my personal favorite platforms in the space and going into more detail regarding their products and use cases.
Amy Wang is an investment associate at Blue Cloud Ventures. At BCV, Amy focuses on infrastructure and business application investing. With a degree in Economics from Northwestern University, she enjoys assessing the broader economic impact of these new software solutions as well. Note that unless otherwise cited, all statements in this piece are opinions.
