The rise of the noBackend

Or why it can be the key to success of your startup

Months ago, I started to look at the “noBackend” approach, and I fond in love with the idea. Many people misunderstand it, thinking there will be no more back end.

No, the idea of the NoBackend as I understand it, is to have a back end made for the front end. Coupled with some front libraries, the final developer will only need to code these lines to sign up a new user :

// create new account
signUp(“joe@exam.pl”, “secret”)

Some developers pointed that is too high level of development. Well, that’s true. But consider you have to bootstrap quickly your company (every startup has to be in that case), and you don’t have an army of developer. The only way to success is to code as less as possible.

You can’t handle everything because you need a lot of developers for that and in a startup, you iterate a lot. So having a “stable & mature” architecture which will not be updated within 5 years is just the biggest mistake you can do.

Being fast is one of the keys to success of a startup (maybe the main one). So don’t lose time trying to do everything by yourself. It will be buggy, not well maintained, not secured and not ready to scale.

Define in details the NoBackend is hard. For me, it can be open source or not, hosted remotely or locally but it has to be feature-oriented :

• Send emails
• Save data
• Notify devices
• Manage users (sign up, forget password, social login)
• Call buyers

Before choosing one, there are different criteria that you need to verify:

• Where are hosted my data
• Does it have some lock-in
• How much it costs
• Is it compatible with my technology stack (most of time yes, but in case, verify)

I will make a review of some of them. Stay tune ;)