# 115: No-Code: An Opportunity to Advance Women Entrepreneurs around the World?
Story behind the Passage
Last week, I attended an online conference on women’s entrepreneurship for international scholars and practitioners (I wrote about it last week). To make a long story short: This contributed to me rethinking the blog. I have been writing mostly for the pleasure of writing. I knew that, since I knew I would be addressing different audiences, I could not write “strategically,” in the sense of continuously building up a readership and growing the range. This is also because I am not using Medium for what online media do best: providing hands-on advice on certain business matters. I am not saying that this is the only thing that Medium and other blogs achieve. Still, my lengthy philosophical or literary reflections are quite opposed to most of this.
Now, I am not saying that I am going to change my writing completely. What I will start doing, however, is write more about (startup) technology that I want to inform non-startup readers about. This will still be difficult because this audience is not reading Medium yet. Still, it might be a way of attracting some new readers. In addition, I will be writing about technology as someone who loves tech and is getting more and more into it. But I am not a professional in this area and therefore will most likely be writing things that are either very superficial or simply wrong if looked upon from the perspective of tech experts.
As to the latter issue: I simply have to take that risk of pissing some experts off. I am writing in order to learn, so I am happy if people find mistakes in my writing. This is not meant as another Ph.D. thesis. I am writing in order to shre my own learning in order to bring the power of tech to people who have no idea about the technology out there. I am doing so because I simply want to create the opportunity for people to check it out, to become curious, and learn about it on their own. Organizational developers, psychologists, or coaches might call this “awareness” raising. Whatever you call it — of course, it does not fix any hands-on business problems right away. Still, learning helps people grow. And that is something that will also benefit your ‘business’ — even if your ‘business’ is not a business at all but you are studying or working somewhere in the public sector or anywhere else.
Whatever it is that you do, today, I want to briefly talk about a ‘technology’ that someone brought to my attention whom I greatly admire. He is a great entrepreneur and visionary. Without him, I would not know anything about the no-code movement. In fact, I still do not know much about it but at least I am determined to research more on it. We have come to a very crucial point in history at which you find technological advancements pushed forward by startups that have not made their way into the research literature yet; at least not under the exact same label. As far as no-code is concerned, I want to change this. But this will take time. If you want to do research on something nowadays, you have to hand in lengthy research proposals. Actually, you do not have to. This is why I have never done so. I prefer doing research or fixing problems right away. But in this case, I think I can help some more people if we get some money and do a project on this together. That makes it worth trying.
What I want to do today is to simply talk about the passage about no-code above as I always used to in my previous posts. The difference is just that I will be choosing web content more often instead of just writing about books. Again, my goal is not to provide summaries of all the phenomena or technologies I discuss because that would simply be redundant. If you want to learn about how no-code is defined exactly, where it originated, etc., you can check it out online. On my blog, the unique feature will remain that I am sharing my particular thoughts about something and my subjective questions. There is no right or wrong ‘thesis,’ there are simply thoughts and you might wonder about them, think about them, or oppose them. Whatever you do with them — as long as you do something with them, I have achieved more than anybody who only thinks to him-/herself and remains silent.
My Learnings
“At the same time, others claim that such tools will assist developers in building and maintaining systems in environments that are increasingly complex and difficult for a single person to master, and that the role and responsibilities of today’s programmers will be limited to supervisory roles.” No-code, the ability of building software — and I mean real software that you can build a company on — without any coding knowledge is at the core of no-code. When I first heard about this, I immediately thought of Wordpress. Actually, the real mechanism behind it is a bit more complicated to understand but the truth still is: You can build software solutions based on modular toolkits.
I have to admit, I still have not tried it personally but I will very soon. The point is: This in and of itself, the fact that I am almost on board already, is something that reveals the potential of no-code for people who are somewhat in-between the analog and the digital business world. I myself think in terms of technological solutions already but I do not have the skills to build my own software yet. There are many people in my position, probably millions. So, what most of them do is hire software engineers. Or, which is worse, they simply do not do anything with technology. The latter issue is the huge problem that I want to increasingly address in order to help change it.
Do not get me wrong, I am not advocating for tech simply because I think tech is the perfect solution to anything. You have to look at each and every problem to find out what exactly is the best, i.e., most feasible solution. But the truth is, if you discover the potential of digital technology, there is hardly any way back. You will usually end up knowing deep down that digital options have much more impact. The problem is just that, if you do not know about this potential, you will be living in the dark and if no one turns on the light for you, until it might be too late already. I am not saying that analog business is not creating value. I am saying that your digital competitors will most likely beat you at some point— not because of your service quality but simply because of efficiency issues.
Efficiency is also the thing that attracts me about no-code so much. You know, I am a “do-everything-yourself” person. This is something that many single entrepreneurs share who always had to struggle and fight for stuff on their own. As we all know: Nobody is waiting for you, nobody will knock at your door asking what you can do for him/her, right? So, the idea of having pre-developed modules that I put together sounds easy — even too easy to be true. It runs counter to my nature, my obsession with creativity and individualism, and my self-trained fighting mode. Still, I am also a lazy and efficiency-obsessed person. The point is: I know that, even if you are creating something very individual, there will be parts which will simply be standard — some major chunks of code that could mostly be labeled “the reinvention of the wheel” if you did it again yourself or if you even hired other people for doing it. So, what I am saying is that there is still much room for creativity and USP, even if you work with modules that are ready to be assembled.
The assembling part is actually what innovation is all about. You do not have to re-invent every tiny part of a product because that is simply impossible anyways (unless you discover some hidden physical particle that no human on earth has ever been able to detect before and you build a new computer with it, of course!). Instead, innovation is about coming up with creative combinations of what is already there. This seems to be exactly the way that no-code works. The major advantage is that this kind of innovation saves you months of time while still giving you all the options of realizing your unique product idea to create value for your customers. Again, I think of my Wordpress example. Even though my website is completely based on everything that is freely available on Wordpress and the available plugins, there is only one website that looks like mine and only one business that offers what I offer. So, why not use this?
Am I writing this in the context of women’s advancement in business because I am implicitly saying that women are the ones who cannot/do not want to code? Am I reinforcing stereotypes here? No, but we do know that there is a digital gender gap and obviously, women still have certain disadvantages when it comes to access to digital education, equipment, and financial resources. So, is it not totally logical to assume that no-code might be a wonderful opportunity for women entrepreneurs to start digital businesses or expand existing businesses without additional financial and time resources? In addition, does it not intuitively feel easier to make use of such a new technology (there are different no-code platforms available now, the most prominent one being Bubble)? Why not use it if it is readily available?
As far as I am concerned, I think, I will use it to build stuff but I will also continue learning to code. This is my personal decision because I simply feel like I enjoy learning to code. In addition, I always have this insane need to feel independent. And, as the Forbes article also explains, there are concerns that are probably very reasonable, i.e., that software based on no-code is difficult to maintain in the long run. So, do not get me wrong, I still see the need for software experts and I do not see that they will lose their jobs that soon. Still, if your only options are: learning how to code or being cut-off from all the advantages that digital business tools offer you — what is the more reasonable and economic choice?
So, let’s no-code, dear ladies!
Reflection Questions
1) How could no-code advance your business/work?
2) Who are three people in your social/professional circle who might benefit from learning about no-code?
3) Was there ever a software project in the past that you did not start/finish because of the lack of coding skills or team resources?