A quick note from my own experience

I launched my very first product in December 2013. I was a young girl, working at my first job out of college and barely earning minimum wage in UK standards. I had just saved enough money to earn myself one shot at doing things right. And because I was shy and I knew my presentation skills were close to non-existent—I knew I had to let my work speak for itself.

I wanted to create a chat roulette site and decided to use WordPress and socket.io. I chose these tools because I was comfortable learning how to use them myself, and I just had enough money to hire a developer to help me with the socket.io integration.

We developed this chat roulette website in less than a month, given we both had full time jobs. We were able to get 80 people into the website within one hour before it completely crashed. And I had people messaging me on Facebook and Yahoo Messenger that I had to fix the site. At that moment I loved that people were complaining. I remember putting all those complaints in my pitch deck—and it was my favourite part of the deck—because it clearly shows market need.

This was the site that crashed all the time and the very first time I pitched back in 2013:

All this work got me my pre-seed funding on my first pitch, because it proved I could execute, that I had a clear market need for the product, and that I was scrappy (in total it only cost me around £800 to do everything). From here, I ended up working on this startup for six years.

When to use No/Low Code

No or low code works best for startups in the following scenarios:

• You don't know what you're building yet. At this stage, you should prioritise performing micro-experiments through easier means before committing to an entire system

• The app/website is not the main product 

• Features aren't very heavy or big. I would never recommend no/low code for consumer chat products, integration/API products, banking and financial products, or some B2B products. Most of these products have sensitive data; additionally it’s highly transactional and you might just end up spending more

• You don't really have anyone to look after code

Examples of these products include:

• E-commerce sites (single and subscription purchase)

• Anything that involves scheduling appointments

• Data dashboards

• Community, news, and resource websites or mobile sites

My recommendations for building:

1. Try do-it-yourself builders like Zapier, Airtable, Hubspot, Buildfire, Squarespace, Webflow, or Shopify, depending on your product category

2. You don't need a developer, but you might need someone technically savvy enough to figure out the ropes of all these apps and website builders—preferably someone who has some UX/UI knowledge

When to use Some Code

Some code works best for startups in the following scenarios:

• You are very clear about the scope of the product and have an initial pool of users. This is for those who feel they’ll have customer interest immediately post-launch of your Alpha or POC product.

• The app/website is the main product with a highly transactional journey. Otherwise it can be hugely frustrating to find that, when you want to change something quickly, the platform may not have certain features or capabilities

• The core of your product/feature is unlikely to change

• You're building features that are likely to change when a customer asks for it. As soon as you paying customers make requests, you’ll end up panicking and changing the tech stack, leaving the customer waiting and hurting your business

• You can allocate at least one person to build this and look after it

• You have very limited capital

Examples of these products include:

• Ordering systems

• Simple AI projects like chatbots

• Anything that requires AI recommendations, image processing

• Community app

• Chat apps

My recommendations for building:

1. Try React, React Native, Flutter or any tech stack with available templates on Code Canyon, Code Market, or the like.

2. Use templates if possible.

3. Look for a full stack developer who you can trust and feel comfortable with, AND who you can afford or convince to work for you given your circumstances and the state of the startup

When to use More Code

You need to really invest in code and developers when:

• The ‘platform’ is the main product. If your value proposition is you’re the only company who can do this, perhaps due to the uniqueness of the technology, then you will need to invest.

• You are building features that handle private customer data. This often requires some custom code, and will require you investing in a good working CTO or development lead

Examples of these products include:

• Machine Learning products that requires you to process multiple insights from different data sources

• Health software that requires regulation and high level data security

• Machine automation like supply chain robotics

• Banking applications, again for regulations and high level data security requirements

My recommendations for building:

1. Find a rockstar working CTO/co-founder

2. Your CTO needs to have the same or aligned vision, purpose and motivations to do this and has the experience building products in your chosen industry

3. You do have to shell out some capital for servers, a lean tech team, etc.