The downside to this “No Code” fad and lessons from a millionaire

Hey. This is episode four of the Getting To Ramen podcast. So I wanted to talk through some of my thoughts on this whole no code movement. For the most part, I think it's it's awesome. Sorry.

So so to to clarify, the no code movement, there's all these great tools out there like Bubble and Bubble is one of them. And, I mean, Webflow is a good example. These are tools where you you can build out applications or products or whatever, and you don't really need to code. And and I think it's it's great for the most part. But my one the one problem I have with it is is it goes against kind of the the most important part of being an indie hacker or being an entrepreneur.

And and it's and I learned I learned about this most important skill set or exercise from an entrepreneur local here that that here in or in Langley, Canada. This is a guy that I met, and he's very wealthy. He's he's done very well for himself. He's launched he sold his first company and then built used that money to start a company that and I don't even know how much money he he's made, but he used that that first company, the sale, to fund a much larger company. And I haven't talked to him about say anything saying talking about him.

I haven't talked to him about talking about him on this podcast. So I'm not gonna be any more specific than that. But, essentially, he's he's, like, multi multimillionaire. And I got a chance to to just, like, ask him ask him what it took to get there. And what I got from it, what basically, he felt was his superpower was that he was able to learn whatever it took to make to make his company grow.

So at the beginning, it's you know, you start a company, you wear a lot of different hats. He just learned whatever he needed to. And he said that his he said that his dad was not nearly as successful because his pride would keep him from admitting what he wasn't good at. And and so this so so this and and so and so basically, he just said he learned from his dad's mistakes, he decided, I'm gonna learn whatever it takes. And and I think I think that's the difference.

That's the very specific important difference between an entrepreneur or a starter or a maker and managers or CEOs or somebody even someone who runs a business is and sometimes they can be the same person, have the same skill set. But for the most part, the differentiator is if you're starting a company and you're building something from scratch, what you're good at and what you have to be good at is picking up anything, learning anything because you don't have a team. You can't just, you know, especially in a bootstrap situation. You you can't just farm out or delegate out some of the the work that you're not good at or that you don't wanna do. You just have to learn whatever it takes to get your thing off the ground.

And that, feel, is with this whole whole no code thing. I see a lot of entrepreneurs on oh, I just got interrupted with the check-in call from the company I work for. So I gotta get on that check-in. But to wrap up what I was saying, the problem with this no code thing is I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are avoiding having to learn to code. And that's not that's not why that's not why this these tools are so great.

These tools are great because you can prototype, get something off the ground. But if if you're but the mentality of I need to learn whatever it takes still has to be there. And it can't be if you think that if your reason for using these tools is to avoid learning or to avoid to try and get over the hurdle of of whatever whatever it takes. If if it's if it's the avoidance, then you're gonna run into other walls that that these solutions can't fix. And so it's the mindset of I'm gonna learn whatever it takes that's so important for for an entrepreneur or an indie hacker.

So that's my that's my whole thing with the with the no code solution. It's like, use it for prototyping. That's awesome. But it it it's not it's not gonna it's not so that you can avoid doing work or avoid getting your hands dirty or avoid having to learn, you know, whatever. Like, you need to be able to learn.

Because at the next phase, if it is successful, you're gonna have to rebuild it. And you can outsource things. You can outsource work, but if you don't have a deep understanding of how the application is built, that can be difficult. And you may not have the money to outsource it. See, you may need to rebuild it yourself.

Like with Upscribe, I came to I came to an infrastructure issue long before I was making enough money. I'm still not making enough money to work on it full time. But it was only a few weeks before because these the forms that Upscribe builds, they're embedded in an iframe on blogs on Medium. Some of the forms were being embedded by companies that were getting millions of hits. So all of a sudden, my little my dinky little plug in was getting so much traffic that I needed to I needed to learn infrastructure and learn DevOps to keep the servers running on a project that was only making, like, a thousand bucks a month.

And I couldn't I couldn't have done that with a no code solution. It would have just been done. Like, okay. Just can't handle it anymore. I guess it's over.

Start something else. But because I was willing to learn and because I was I knew I had to exercise the skill set of, like, whatever it takes. That's how that's how I was able to get through that. So that was my thing.