[A12-B]

It is hard to make anything significant without that sort of background though. If your business actually is software, and not just a physical business built on top of software, it's hard to see how you're going to make much money by just gluing canned functions together. Either your own ignorance will do you in, or you'll have to hire someone who actually does understand computer science.

[berkes]

To add to that: if your entire company is "an idea + a week of learning and combining zapier and ITT" it has no sustainable business model.

It may be a neat way to get an MVC or demo out. It may even be the seed to grow from. But you will need to grow beyond this really fast.

Everyone can steal your idea now. And if you can learn+build something in zapier in a week, so can anyone: there is no competitive advantage there at all.

Which does not mean that your product is no good, just that there is no business-model: the product is basically " free as in beer".

The only businessmodel that I can think to service this, is one that makes the "marketing/brand" the competitive advantage. Sell a brand, instead of a product.

I, personally, very much dislike these kind of "products", because I believe they hardly are one.

Ninja-edit: businessmodel, not development model.

[keithwhor]

Building something customers want is a competitive advantage, whether you do that with Python or JavaScript or a low-code tool is irrelevant unless the problem domain specifically requires said tool.

[berkes]

I believe your statement misses a crucial condition:

> Building something customers want, but cannot or should not build themselves, is a competitive advantage,...

With which I want to stress the important part from my comment: it certainly makes sense to build something as quick as possible to assert the market. But if you cannot move beyond that, fast, your business model is risky.

I think in early stages, for example, an "online bike sharing service" that consists of only an excel sheet and a mailbox is by far preferable over a web-app, with stripe integration and a blockchain, microservices or kubernetes cluster or whatever overengineerd paradigm is hot this month.

But if your entire "bike sharing service" is as easy as "getting a mailserver and filling an excel sheet", your business is extremely easy to copy. Anyone with a bigger marketing budget will overtake you in days. Anyone with a larger reach can push you out of business in mere days.

At some point, you'll need to get a competitive advantage, which cannot be copied in hours, or bought with spare change of any of your competitors. Whether that is a full software-suite or kubernetes-hosted microservices with blockchain integration (I hope not) or just a large happy customer base, matters little.

I'm not saying "don't do no/low-code", I'm only putting forward how business might change when anyone can build an online business in mere hours. I'm not a historian, but I certain there are numerous examples of existing fields and niches changing or dissapearing because innovation removed the barrier to entry and anyone could copy the business in hours, that would previously cost months or huge loans to get off the ground.

[keithwhor]

Most of the internet is hastily glued together WordPress pages. People make a lot of money from hastily glued together solutions. In fact, people are making more money from hastily glued together solutions than ever before thanks to companies like Shopify and Stripe, that’s kind of the beauty of it.

[vagrantJin]

A toast to that. Consumers generally dont care about how bad our code is as long as it solves their problem. If theres a price, all the better for it.