I can remember the first time I used WordPress in 2005. It was such a joy to move from uploading individual HTML pages to a server via FTP, and simply hitting publish to see content go live.
As I entered the premium WordPress market in 2008 as an entrepreneur, the idea was always to empower non-technical writers and other content creators to do more with their websites without code. Eventually, our design framework Genesis became widely accepted as the way to build WordPress sites quicker and easier.
Now, the idea of “no code software creation is gaining more and more traction. In other words, we now have software that allows us to make all sorts of other software without being a coder.
This empowers creative people to make things that were once impossible — at least without knowing how to code or hiring a developer. And that means a new generation of entrepreneurs are able to create powerful 7-Figure Small businesses that sell software and software-based services without investors and even employees.
Ben Tossell is a vocal proponent of the “no code” and “without code” movement. His company Makerpad teaches non-technical founders and makers to use the powerful tools that open up an entire new avenue of product creation.
Listen in to hear more about what “no code can mean for your business. If you’re able to solve an audience problem with a software solution, you could be on your way to creating a product you never imagined you could on your own.
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Transcript
How the “No Code Movement Allows for Software Development by Non-Technical Entrepreneurs
Jerod Morris: Welcome to 7-Figure Small, the podcast that brings you the stories and strategies that are driving the growing number of solo businesses achieving seven figures in revenue, without investors or employees. Here is your host for this edition of 7-Figure Small — serial digital entrepreneur, Brian Clark.
Brian Clark: Hello and welcome to 7-Figure Small, the official podcast of Unemployable.com. I’m your host, Brian Clark, and today we’re talking about product development. More importantly, we’re talking about creating software-based products that most non-technical people would think they could never make themselves.
I can remember the first time I used WordPress back in 2005. It was such a joy to move from uploading individual HTML pages to a server via FTP, and simply hitting “publish to see content go live.
As I entered the premium WordPress market in 2008 as an entrepreneur, the idea was always to empower non-technical writers and other content creators to do more with their websites without code. Eventually, our design framework Genesis became widely accepted as the way to build WordPress sites quicker and easier.
Now, the idea of “no code software creation is gaining more and more traction. In other words, we now have software tools that allow us to make all sorts of other software without being a coder.
This empowers creative people to make things that were once impossible — at least without knowing how to code or hiring a developer. And that means a new generation of entrepreneurs are able to create powerful 7-Figure Small businesses that sell software and software-based services without investors and even employees.
Ben Tossell is a vocal proponent of the “no code and “without code movement. His company Makerpad teaches non-technical founders and makers to use the powerful tools that open up an entire new avenue of product creation.
Listen in to hear more about what “no code can mean for your business. If you’re able to solve an audience problem with a software solution, you could be on your way to creating a product you never imagined you could on your own.
This episode is brought to you by Freshbooks, easy-to-use cloud accounting software for people just like you. They’re offering a 30-day, unrestricted and no credit card required, free trial to listeners of the show. To claim it, just go to freshbooks.com/unemployable and make sure to enter UNEMPLOYABLE in the “How Did You Hear About Us? section.
Ben, thanks so much for being with us today. How are you?
Ben Tossell: I’m good. How are you?
Brian Clark: Doing okay, doing okay. It’s a little bit different time of day over there in London compared here to early morning in Colorado, but it is very good to talk to you.
What is Your Background?
Brian Clark: Why don’t we get started with a little bit about your background? What led you up to the point where you’re at today?
Ben Tossell: Yeah, so straight out of university, I moved to London and landed myself a job as a social media analyst. It was just basically setting up Twitter and Facebook ads for large companies in an agency. Throughout my time there, I was always thinking, “I’ll start my own business. One day I’ll figure that out and I’ll be a successful millionaire CEO, all this sort of stuff, in the future. I’m sure that’s on my path somewhere. And that’s sort of how I thought about things.
I wasn’t technical, I couldn’t code, I couldn’t build anything myself. So this was one of those off into the distance dreams. And just with my sort of interesting, “Oh, one day I’ll start my own Internet business, I came across Product Hunt and found a community sort of mesmerizing a bit where there was just tons of people making things every single day.
And through skimming around Product Hunt and talking to some people, I fell into some Slack communities. There were people talking about startups, talking about their new ideas, and I was that annoying person trying to say hi to everyone and trying to be helpful in whatever way I could, talk about ideas and things I could do, basically hoping that one day someone would pay it forward and help me build something. Because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it myself.
So I was that ideas guy, trying to work my way in somewhere and try and trick some poor developer to build me a product one day. I was hopping around in these Slack communities for — that must have been a year or so. Essentially I was being a community manager. I was just being there for people, trying to help and everything else.
And that caught the attention of a few people at Product Hunt, including Ryan. He reached out to me and said, “It looks like we should have a chat. And I thought, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this. This is like a Silicon Valley startup that is a real thing. This is where all the new startups go to launch. And I jumped at the chance.
So I became a community manager at Product Hunt and basically just helped people launch their new thing. Then I got introduced to people who were launching YC-funded companies. They were big companies like Slack doing new product features or new launches. And I was just sort of a victim to my surrounding.
I think I saw like 80,000 products launch for the time I was there. I was there just over two years or just under two years, I don’t remember. And it just spurred me on more and more to think, “I want to launch my own thing. I want to build my own thing, and everything else.
Luckily, whilst at Product Hunt, I managed to see websites and products like Bubble, Webflow, Carrd which were sort of — they’re website builders, but with a bit of a rocket fuel, I’d say. They really brought the barrier down for someone like me, who could not do anything technical, and allowed me to build a website or build something that felt a bit more than just a landing page. And that became my entryway into, “Okay, I can build some things and make things look and feel like it’s not just one person who can’t code.
So I started doing that and I just got the bug for that and it sort of took its own course from there. I became this sort of “no code maker. And then I just kept on building different things.
I left Product Hunt and one of the early things I tried to do after I left was build MVPs for people with some of these “no code tools and use a Carrd landing page and add Zapier and do a few things to make it feel like there’s some functionality there. You pay and have a membership site or something similar to that.
I was trying to basically sell these MVPs. I was building up interest. The people saw me do this without code and found it interesting and people were signing up for a newsletter and everything else.
The day that I launched it, or the week I launched it, not a single person bought anything. And I thought, “This is not how this whole career was supposed to go. And I sort of went back to the drawing board and thought, “Well, why were so many people interested, but then did not pull out their credit card and actually pay for this thing?
I realized that the whole time everyone was asking me how I was doing these things, no one necessarily wanted the final end product, which they knew was not necessarily a fully functioning weber, but something sort of stuck together. They were interested in the process and what the behind the scenes looked like. So that’s where I thought, “Okay, maybe there’s something in teaching people how to do these things.
Skip forward a little bit, and basically, that is what Makerpad, my current company, now does. We teach people how to build things without code. We say, “We teach you how to build and operate businesses without code. So whether that’s generating and sending a sales document for a new client automatically, or whether it’s building a freelance marketplace without code. We do all sorts of fun and wonderful things that push the boundaries of some of these tools. But that’s the gist of it.
What is a “Maker?
Brian Clark: Yeah, you used the word “maker when you were talking about both yourself and others. And it’s an interesting term. I was reading a document called The State of Makers: “No Code is About to Take Makers by Storm. What’s a “maker? And how is that different from, say, just an entrepreneur?
Ben Tossell: I think actually in that report, I think if I remember correctly, at the top of the actual page I think it says, “Makers, Creators, Builders… It has a few different terms, because I think it’s Hiten Shah, who I know very well. When he was writing that, I think he does lots of good product research and he’s had his own blog and everything about this, which is just a great read.
So I think it’s one of those self-identifying terms that people just latch onto if it makes sense to them. And it may mean one thing to one person, but another thing to another. I sort of use “maker to encapsulate the whole “you build stuff. So it’s like a sexy word saying you build stuff.
It could be an entrepreneur, but it might not be. You might just build a small tool to help you in your day-to-day work. Or you’re trying to help your family organize a Christmas shopping list, like a little app or something for that, which is not a business.
I think that would be the distinction for me for the entrepreneur side is that you’re trying to make a business out of this thing that you’re making. Whereas a “maker to me could be someone who’s just tinkering and trying stuff out and doing stuff for fun and doing things on the side. But the reason I think that I use “maker the most is because at Product Hunt, the people who made the products that were on there, the term for them on that site was “maker.
So the two years of my life, I was just associating people building with the word “maker. And then, I forget now looking back that sometimes when I used to say “maker, people would be like, “How’s that? And then now, I think I’ve just forgotten that people sometimes don’t identify “maker with what I think it means.
Brian Clark: Yeah, because I’ve heard the term “maker used in the 3D printing space, like the Etsy craft space, so it is a very broad term. But it’s really about the act of creation. And in this context, it’s about non-coders, non-technical people, whether they are trying to build a commercial product or just something to get a job done. That’s really the key element, the act of creation.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, “creator would be a simpler word for it. I think the way I have used it now — and my company is obviously called Makerpad — is we try and encapsulate the non-technical people, but a quarter of the community are engineers and there are probably more engineers that are makers than there are non-technical people who are makers. So, yeah, it’s a very broad term. I think it depends on who you ask, I guess.
How Recent is the “No Code Movement?
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let’s talk specifically about the whole “no code or “without code as a variation I’ve seen you use. My background, the two lines of business we sold in the last couple of years, I mean, it was always about making websites without code, because I’m also a non-technical founder, and I wanted to do certain things with WordPress, for example, way back in 2008. And that’s how the first design framework was created.
Then we went onto Genesis and themes and plugins. And then on the Rainmaker side, it was all about creative people building websites, whether it’s a membership site, landing pages, all that stuff. So that’s near and dear to my heart, obviously. But I don’t think we ever thought of it in the context of a movement such as “no code.
Is this fairly recent or has it been going on in back channels for quite a while?
Ben Tossell: Yeah, so I think this is, again, one of those opinion matters where people who were building sites in Dreamweaver way back when were technically sort of “no code makers in today’s terms.
But I think what’s happened with putting these developers over the last few years of the whole startup world, I feel like tech startups had a huge sort of upcoming over the last few years that everything sounds more sexy. And there are all these huge funding rounds and all this massive stuff.
That drips down into, “Okay, well, to get there, you’ve got to be a developer. And that’s just been the thing that you just had to do. You had to have a technical cofounder or be a developer, learn to code yourself to be able to ever really make a mark in the startup world and all this sort of stuff.
But I think that as these tools, these sort of “no code tools, or these tools that allow you to create things without having to code, as these have grown and become more mature and have more functionality and there are different things and integrations you can do with them — this has sort of brought people together who are like, “Actually, I’m not technical, but I can build something that is a membership site without code.
It’s a strange one, because I don’t like the term “no code, because obviously, all the tools I use have been built with code. So it’s not that I’m using “no code. It’s just the abstraction that I am currently interacting with to build the things that I’m building require me to know no coding knowledge, which has then meant that me and 99% of the world could then access that and build their own things.
It’s something like 1 in 400 people who can actually code. So the other 399 people in that, they could build their own things if they wanted to without needing to code.
But, yeah, I think it’s a shame that it’s called “no code. But I think it’s that one term that has caught on and it’s catchy and people have just sort of identified and said, “Yeah, ‘no code.’ I don’t code. I just click, drag, and stuff, and make this thing, but I don’t do any coding. So that’s where it’s sort of latched on a bit, I think.
Brian Clark: Yeah, and it makes sense. It’s much catchier here and it is something that catches people’s attention, especially a lot of creative people in the world who are not coders. The irony for me was I did partner with developers in order to build apps, so other people wouldn’t have to code. But, yeah.
What Can Be Built with “No Code Tools?
Brian Clark: Okay, so we’re really talking about web applications here. I mean, I don’t think people think this way, but a website is a web app, a membership site for sure is.
Can you give us some examples of what people can build with these “no code tools that are maybe a little bit beyond, say, a membership site? Are there some good examples of cool stuff that people have been able to build?
Ben Tossell: Well, there’s a guy I know called Connor Finlayson. He’s in New Zealand and he’s built a freelancer marketplace, like an Upwork or Fiverr or one of those types of marketplaces where you can go and hire a web designer, an SEO person. He’s basically built it with Webflow, Airtable, Zapier and MemberStack.
So you go onto the site and you can browse for some professionals. You can click on their profile, you have a look at their availability, their skills, etc. Then you send them a message and that message goes through the process of Zapier, Airtable, and things get logged basically in Airtable. Airtable is the database layer for this and Zapier sort of the glue. MemberStack handles payments and showing you things on the site as a paying member versus a non-paying member. And the site is built with Webflow.
So there are things like that where I think Connor’s making a few thousand dollars a month with maybe two hours a week, a month or something like that. Just having to manage it to make sure that things are working and ticking along. But that’s a really sort of a low-end one.
I think something that surprises a lot of people is that Lambda School, which is essentially a code school is (or has been) built mostly on “no code tools. We did an interview with one of the growth guys at Lambda. They’ve raised like $48 million and a lot of their stuff on the back end was built without code. Not because they couldn’t code, because obviously, it’s a code school.
But I think they just thought they can get these things up and running. They do the jobs that they need them to do. It’s just sort of now where these tools are breaking slightly for them, because they’ve pushed them to their absolute limits and they’ve got thousands and thousands of students and got all sorts of processes going on. I think they must’ve had full time employees managing their “no code stack.
But these products are not just MVPs or first prototypes. I think that’s one of the big questions: does this scale and what happens when you build your prototype?
If I get those questions in a workshop that I’m doing or whatever it is, then I find it frustrating. But the person who’s asking it, it’s not their fault. It’s because we haven’t done a good enough job yet of showing off what the capabilities are and how big these things can go.
Makerpad, essentially, is a membership site, so we have a similar stack to the marketplace — Webflow, MemberStack, Airtable, Zapier. And we’ve just recently got over 200k in the first year of revenue.
We have things like you can hire an expert on there, you can message them, and that’s all automated. You can post tutorials, you can post in projects, you can interact in loads of different ways, which may surprise some people that it’s just all built without any sort of developers on the back end.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. If you think of something like a freelance marketplace and Upwork, I’m sure they spent many, many of their millions that they raised developing that platform. And yet, you’re saying this guy runs a similar site with a couple of hours of work and did not obviously have that massive development expense upfront.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s what one of the big benefits of this “no code movement is in my eyes. Previously, when you’re thinking, “Okay, I want to build an Airbnb for dog homes, then you’re thinking, “Okay, right, so I will need a couple of developers to start building out this thing. It’ll take us 9 to 12 months to build out something that’s working and works to the point of what we are happy with — we can go out there and start speaking to dog owners and all this sort of stuff.
But if you come through this “no code angle, you can go, “Okay, hang on. I can build something to look exactly like — not exactly, but I mean 80% plus – of the way that Airbnb looks like using Glide apps. It’ll be strictly on phone. People can download the app and it would be able to let you browse locations, rate locations, book locations, pay for them, contact the owners. And you could do all that.
Glide apps, it’s just a tool that you use, which runs on top of a Google sheet. So, essentially, your whole thing is on a Google sheet. That’s where you can manage everything. The design of the app is through Glide, but essentially, you’ve got your own Airbnb in your pocket within an hour or two.
For me, that’s just a crazy example of how you can break down the barrier of those other previous things that the people would just use as, “Okay, well, we can’t do this, we can’t do that. That’s no longer the issue anymore.
AI and the Future of Coding
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s really amazing. And I’ve got to ask you where you see this going, because, for example, my definitely not technical friends are like, “Should I have my kid learn how to code? And I’m like, “Probably not, because by the time he or she is old enough, AI and machine learning is going to be doing most of the coding. Do you see that as true?
Ben Tossell: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m well-read enough in those areas to comment on what I think will happen there.
Brian Clark: It’s kind of an extension though of the tools that we have now. And you can see them getting smarter, as machine learning becomes more off the shelf. I’m certainly not an expert either, but I’m fascinated by it.
But you could see these tools being infused with capability where it becomes even quicker, as long as you have the right framework in mind, I guess, for what the product is supposed to do.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, I think we’re definitely going to see a way for… like I can go on to Webflow in the next 10 years, or whatever it is, and essentially make a piece of software myself using drag and drop and clicking around on a website using a tool. I think that’s definitely going to be something that happens.
And I think with platforms like Bubble and Boundless, they offer ways to say, “Okay, if someone clicks this thing and this thing happens, then this other thing happens and this other, other, other thing happens. So there are layers there that are happening and I think that’s just going to get easier and easier. But I think we’re always going to need developers.
And I do think quite an interesting point — sometimes, it’s just quicker and easier to build a thing without code to test whether it’s got legs. Like if you had that Airbnb for dogs, you built it without code now and you started getting tens of thousands of users a month, it’s probably likely that you will need to have some engineers then work on a custom platform for that. But I think at least you’ve got to the point a lot further along than a lot of other people where you’ve built something, you’ve validated it, you’ve got payments, and there’s an actual business there.
I think also “no code is actually one of the most interesting avenues into learning to code, which not a lot of people look at. We have a ton of students from Lambda School and other coding boot camps come to us and ask if they can get some student discount and things like that at Makerpad, because they’re in the business of making.
So in this whole “maker term, they’re in the business of figuring out how to build stuff and it could be side projects, it could be stuff for work. Sometimes code is the answer, sometimes it’s “no code. I think that once you get the bug of, “Okay, I’ve done all this ‘no code’ building. I like where this is going, I like doing this. And I want to push this even further, probably further than some ‘no code’ stuff could take me, then where’s my step? And that’s likely learning to code.
I think some of these building blocks of the “no code stack like I said with Airtable being your database and Zapier being your glue. There are similarities in how, as a software engineer, you would build things and look at things, like, “Okay, that’s where the database is. And that’s how that connects with that. I think there are a lot of similarities, and it’s quite interesting to see people do it now.
Is There Pushback from Traditional Developers
Brian Clark: Do you see any pushback from the traditional developer world like, “That’s the kiddie table. That’s not real application building kind of stuff? I can imagine some of that has to go on.
Ben Tossell: Oh, absolutely. There are a lot of developers who may be — this will get some reaction now if I say there’d be impressions about their skill set and their job, saying that “no code could replace some of the stuff that they’re doing. But I think that’s just what it is.
I did a podcast on Indie Hackers quite recently, which was basically code versus “no code. So I was taking the “no code stance and Sahil, who is the CEO of Gumroad, he was taking the code stance. Basically, it was supposed to be a big debate for an hour or whatever it was.
I think if people listen to that, we’re not saying one is better than the other. They’re just different approaches to enable someone to create something. And if you know code, or you want to learn to code, and that’s how your brain works in that way, you get it, and that’s how you like to create things, then that’s fine. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that.
For me, I’ve tried to code multiple times and I just could never get it. I get to a place, I’m stuck, couldn’t figure it out, googled it, Stack Overflow, all the rest of it, and it just could never get further. There was always a point where I stopped. Whereas with “no code, I feel like I can always figure out a way to push it just a little bit further, and that’s the way my brain works. It works as a click and drag and drop type of thing, rather entering characters in a terminal and things like that.
What is Makerpad?
Brian Clark: Yeah, I’m with you on that. Let’s talk a little bit about Makerpad specifically, because you have mentioned quite a few tools that may be alien to some of the people listening. Makerpad is a membership community where you’re teaching people how to do various things, various projects with “no code tools. So are you essentially teaching them how to use these various creation platforms?
Ben Tossell: Yeah, so we partner up with a lot of these companies — Airtable, Webflow, etc. We don’t think at Makerpad that you necessarily will go to Airtable to figure out if Airtable is the thing for what you’re trying to build, because you’d need to know about Airtable, you’d need to come across it and everything else.
I feel like people come with the solution in mind. So maybe someone’s thinking, “Okay, I want to build an applicant tracking system. I don’t want to use any of these other platforms, because they cost me thousands of dollars a month. Because it’s high range, they think they can. But I want to build my own simple ATS.
So you can come to Makerpad, go through the hiring vertical that we have and see, “Oh, this is three different ways to build an applicant tracking system. This one takes 30 minutes and it looks really simple. It’s using Notion. This one is using Airtable, Zapier and it’s a bit more advanced, but you can do these extra things with it. That takes me an hour and a half. And then there’s this crazy one that has all these other things. That’ll take me four hours to build. I build it from complete scratch, but I’ll own everything, I know exactly how it all works, etc.
At least that, then, gives someone the option of, “Here are the price differences. Here are the tool differences. You can see the video of, “Okay, that is how I think my brain would work and I would like how Notion uses the blocks feature and things like that. You can see it before you have to go and try and build something.
A lot of these platforms do have their own tutorials or their own videos. But we try and push them and then show you how you can integrate that with something else, which you may need for something like an applicant tracking system.
Brian Clark: Right. So from an entrepreneurial standpoint, it’s been my experience as a non-technical founder, there are lots of ways to get things built — partnering, hiring developers, “no code tools, etc. But it’s quite another thing to build something that people actually want.
Is that part of what you help people with, with Makerpad? Or is it more, “Bring your idea here. We’ll show you how to get it done?
Ben Tossell: It’s more the latter. I think we’ve had a few people recently saying, “Okay, I’ve built this. Now, how do I get my first 100 customers? And I think it’s a fair enough question. People will always want to know that, and that’ll never go away.
And I think it’s almost like the danger that what we’ve created is a way for you to build the actual tool, which would have taken you before a year or so that maybe you stopped halfway through and never got around to it. But with us, it may take you a couple of hours to get from, “This is my idea. Okay, now I’ve got the idea up and running.
So now we’ve set ourselves to be in a position when they’re ready to say, “Okay, now I want users. How do I get those? And I think for us, we’ve got so many things, so many different tutorials to make. We work with so many different types of businesses that we find out what their problems are, how do we put “no code solutions together for them. This is such a big area of things to build that we haven’t even thought of that next step.
It sounds like that’s more of — I think that’s just a different kind of fish. I don’t know that Makerpad will ever be the place where we start trying to teach those things, because they differ so much for so many different companies and so many different ideas and everything else.
There are also marketing courses and things like that out there. I don’t know that that’s where we’ll enjoy spending our time. So, yeah, we’ve left ourselves a bit open there.
Brian Clark: No, that makes sense, because they are two discrete things.
I think you are a good example of spotting the early indications of a movement, getting involved in it, putting in your time at Product Hunt, and then you’ve created your own community. So kudos to you.
Where Can We Find You?
Brian Clark: Tell people where they can find out more about Makerpad.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, so Makerpad is makerpad.co. We’re on Twitter @makerpad. And that’s where we mostly hang out really.
Brian Clark: All right, excellent. Everyone, go check it out. If you’ve got that app idea, but you’re not sure how to get it done, perhaps the “no code approach and Makerpad can help you out with that. Ben, thanks so much for joining us today.
Ben Tossell: Thanks for having me.