Part 2: The LCNC Landscape in 2020
Technical definitions and segmentations of LCNC
Welcome to the LCNC Landscape in 2020! Start here, then read Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3
Before we can go any further, I have to apologize. As I’m sure you noticed, I glossed over the technical definition of a low code, no code tool in the first part. And that’s because it’s really difficult to find one.
The one I saw cited the most comes from Forrester. They define the category as:
“…platforms that enable rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand-coding and minimal upfront investment in setup, training, and deployment.”
This is confusing and seemed really vague, so I read a lot of things including this dope paper, a particularly good Forrester report, and this post from Dark to gain some clarity. In order to foundationally understand LCNC, we need to draw evident boundaries around the space.
Drawing Boundaries
Firstly, all these tools must be related to application development. Broadly speaking, apps follow this delivery cycle: design, build, deploy, host, manage, and iterate.
Full code, low code, and no code are just three ways of increasing abstraction to follow this cycle and produce a functioning application. It’s like a pudding cup made of layers of abstraction.
Layer 1: Full Code — the no-abstraction layer
Most apps are currently built using full code, the traditional application development process. It requires the user to hand code all the parts of the app delivery life cycle. This is done via a team of highly trained, highly skilled, and likely, hard-to-find engineers.
They might not hand code every single part. They are likely to use 3rd party solutions to manage parts of this cycle like JFrog Artifactory, Jenkins, or Atlassian BitBucket (only the tip of the iceberg…trust me: this was my iceberg). However, the user must configure all the parts to work with each other, wire the parts together, and then maintain all the parts separately. It’s clunky, often requires hacks for full functionality, and is a massive waste of time. We covered this in part 1.
*note, there are significantly more companies in the full code, developer productivity segment
Layer 2: Low Code — the some-abstraction layer
The key differentiator here, is that the tools that operate in this stratum provide an abstraction layer for the full app development pipeline, or a significant part of it. This is instrumental to the “rapid delivery” and the “upfront investment in setup, training, and deployment” pieces of the Forrester definition.
The abstraction must streamline enough of the app development cycle to minimize both time-to-functionality and hand-code required by the user. For example, repl.it provides a very cool language agnostic development environment in the cloud (and finished a $4.5M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2018). This abstracts IDE + package management, hosting, deployment, and code sharing
But it does not eliminate all hand coding. Eventually the user directly interacts with the code produced by the system. This gives them the power to customize the application as needed.
Note that visual programming (think drag-and-drop) is nowhere in the definition of a low code tool. That said, many low code tools do abstract logic using visual modeling. For example, in 3D game dev platform, Unity, developers can create a flow chart to trigger event-based logic. Others might work through configuration or scripting languages like Dark Lang.
Layer 3: No Code — the total-abstraction layer
With these tools, the user never directly interfaces with the code. Rather, they’re interacting with it via a visual layer, commonly, drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editors. Ultimately, they produce fully functioning apps they would not have been able to produce otherwise. For example, Webflow is a drag and drop editor for building hosted websites that traditionally require code to build.
Segmenting LCNC further
I’ve distilled LCNC buzzwords down to the key terms that segment the market further. As you can see in the visuals, these are vertical segments, intersectional with the abstraction layers. Skip to the LCNC appendix in part 3 for a full list of companies in these segments.
Segment 1: Developer Productivity
Segment 2: Citizen Developer
Segment 3: Business Process Automation
Segment 4: Robotic Process Automation
Segment 5: Artificial Intelligence
sources and acknowledgements
This investment thesis is an evolving labor of love and I have the following non-exhaustive list of people and sources to endlessly thank. Without them, there would be no thesis. Hopefully this is just the beginning of my exploration of the space and this list will continue to grow. Please reach out if you would like to collaborate!
sources (sorted by relevance) | Forrester 2018: The State of Low-Code Platform Adoption, 2018 | Forrester 2019: Software for Digital Process Automation for Deep Deployments, Q2 2019 | Gartner 2019: The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms | Emmanuel Straschnov, Co-CEO and Founder, Bubble, 2015: You Shouldn’t Have to Learn to Code | Paul Biggar, CircleCI, 2016: It’s the Future | Forrester 2019: Predictions 2020: More Changes for Software Development | Quick Base 2018: A Brief History of Low Code Development Platforms | Hackernoon 2016: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 | Quick Base 2017: Myth-busting 4 Common Misconceptions About Low-Code and No-Code | James Currier, Managing Partner, NFX: The Next 10 Years Will Be About “Market Networks” | Declarative Assembly of Web Applications from Predefined Concepts. Perez De Rosso, S.; Jackson, D.; Archie, M.; Lao, C.; and McNamara III, B. A. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software, of Onward! 2019, pages 79–93, New York, NY, USA, 2019. ACM | Paul Biggar, Founder, Dark, 2019: What is Dark? | Steve Krouse 2019: The Whole Code Catalog | Hackernoon 2018: Low Code Like a Pro | Forbes 2017: The Low-Code/No-Code Movement: More Disruptive Than You Realize | InfoWorld 2018: 4 essential features of modern low-code development platforms | BMC Software 2018: Low Code vs No Code: Is it The Future of Coding in the Enterprise? | Appian: Low Code Guide | Ryan Hover, Founder, Product Hunt, 2019: The Rise of “No Code” | Sedat Kapanoglu 2020: How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? |
acknowledgements | Jeff Bussgang, HBS, General Partner and Co-Founder, Flybridge Capital Partners | Allison Mnookin, HBS, Former CEO, Quick Base | Ellen Chisa, CEO and Co-Founder, Dark Inc | Emmanuel Straschnov, Co-CEO and Founder, Bubble | Jesse Orshan, Co-Founder, WayScript | Patrick Leonard, CEO and Co-Founder, Sopris Health | Kevin Zhang, Partner, Bain Capital Ventures | Ali Rahimtula, Partner, Cue Ball Capital | Virtually every EC in the VCPE club at HBS, countless VC professionals who have come to campus, my one sectionmate who did the same type of VC I want to do, and my sweet family | thank you |
