Now everyone can code
As I was reading the article about how these two gentlemen built a $2million fintech platform without a single line of code, it struck me, has the lo-code/no-code movement passed its hype cycle and positioned itself; as a mainstream platform? So I turned to Gartner's Hype Cycle, a popular graphical presentation used by researchers alike to represent the maturity, adoption, and social application of technologies.
True enough, Gartner has positioned lo-code/no-code at the "Scope of Enlightenment" phase and predicted that it would reach the plateau in less than two years. While Gartner does not have a specific specification, Citizen developers' reference aptly reflects the area that lo-code/no-code is targeting, which is non-developer. Thus, inching closer to the Hype Cycle's phase of "Plateau of Productivity", it seems that lo-code/no-code is crossing the chasm and set to be adopted by the early majority.
The feat achieved by Qoins is one of the testaments to that. We always maintain that to compete in the competitive market readily, the product that we offer to the customer would need to be tailor-made toward our desire. When Qoins decides to offer their apps that run on a lo-code/no-code platform called Bubble, there are certain flexibilities that they need to surrender to Bubble. Specific risks will hamper their future expansion. Issues such as being locked in a proprietary platform are contentious points organizations try to avoid. Otherwise, it won't be easy to expand as needed. These sorts of challenges are high on the investor's radar. Thus, when Qoins secured their Series A funding, investors were comfortable with their business plan.
At the same time, Bubble has greater interest to ensure Qoins is making it big. The rise of Qoins can be a booster towards Bubble's brand. By ensuring that Qoins received all the help needed technically, Bubble can attract other non-developer to start to innovate on its platform. The consequences of Qoins going down with unreliable platforms can be a major PR meltdown to Bubble.
While Bubble is one of the platforms that provides an easy and intuitive development platform, many more companies have jumped into the lo-code/no-code bandwagon. Names such as Outsystem, Mendix, and Appian are dominating the scene of $11.3billion market share. Big names such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce are aggressive in ensuring they are not left behind. Having dominated the enterprise workspace, Microsoft has developed a comprehensive offering tightly integrated into their office suite, giving them some advantage when enticing the user.
With all these alternatives, users are spoilt of choices. Gartner predicted that by 2024, 65% of applications development would be lo-code/no-code; it is an interesting space to watch where everyone can now code. With that massive jump in the number of citizen developers, what will the future hold for those software development boutique companies?
