Wearing a technologist hat along with being an entrepreneur brings in a lot of contradictions when someone starting up comes and asks for tech development. Usually, this leads to a “hot lead” turning into a “dead lead” – rather quickly (I will come back to this point later in this article), but having burnt my fingers multiple times using this approach, it would be safe to say that we are saving the lead from a potential failure.

Do you actually need a kickass tech stack to succeed?

Let me try to explain why hiring a tech team or a technologist should not be the first thing on your agenda:

1. You probably do not need complicated technology to get started – You should be using technology to scale your business or build custom processes or plugin information leaks. This only becomes important when you have a business model, which sort of works, and now you need to grow. Always remember that technology is the enabler.

2. Technology is expensive – During the work from home phase during COVID, we have seen the salary differences owing to different demographics have reduced. A good developer in India can command US developer salaries (and in some cases, even more). With developers, we have managers, quality control/assistance, and a bunch of other roles opening up. Without prior knowledge or experience, it is like opening a can of worms. Not knowing the timing of building your technology stack can kill your startup.

3. Mistakes will and should be made – As you figure things out, there will be multiple mistakes that will be made and if you have a tech team supporting you to build things out, then these mistakes will become very costly.

4. Fail Fast – Time is your biggest asset when you are building a startup but you are always running against it. Initially do not be too driven around processes and releases. They will slow you down. This is a mistake that I have personally made multiple times owing to the” can’t give up” ego trip that we owners usually have.

Great, now that I have given you enough reasons to not hire a technologist (and the team that follows), let me tell you how you can bypass this and actually move real fast – on your own!

No code (and a bit of Low Code) and of course – Excel

What is No Code?

You would be surprised to know that many startups are following this approach now. Before I give you some examples of No Code solutions, let me try to explain what No Code solutions are. These essential plugs and play, drag and drop tools “can” get a lot of heavy lifting done without writing even 1 line of code. There are tools that help in creating trigger-based workflows between different applications.

To understand the first part, you can look at this tool https://bubble.io. When I tried it for the first time, I kicked myself for not having explored this option before. You can create a responsive website, add various plugins to and also you can add other 3^rd party tools/plugins to convert this into a mobile app. I would have perfectly fit my use case where I was trying to create a custom tinder-like interface for an education-based app.

To understand the second part, look at this https://www.integromat.com. This works like a charm when you have to integrate one app with another. Consider the example, that as soon as someone fills information in your form, an SMS is sent to the user, you get a copy of it, or an email, along with that it gets entered into your CRM or a custom Google Sheet – without you having to write even 1 line of code.

No code solutions can be very powerful if your use case fits the architecture. You get a high uptime and a managed service for a fraction of the cost.

Low code solutions

On the other hand, need some expertise and offer more flexibility than no-code solutions. A lot of companies are working on providing low code solutions for different sectors – https://appian.com is one of the leading companies in this space.

Excel

No matter what people say, excel is the best friend you will have in your professional/corporate/startup life. There is a whole world in excel beyond VLookups. There is enough information around excel so you do not have to ask anyone for help, just a google search will work just fine. Did you know that the Indian Unicorn Meesho was initially set up using only Google sheets! Hope that helps you understand the power of keeping things simple.

Now coming back to the part where I talked about “dead leads” – After having animated discussions with these to-be founders, I have noticed that about 25% of them actually follow this advice and get their products off the ground. How do I know that – We helped them scale when they reached the upper limits of the managed solutions!

If your business has reached the zone where no code/low code solutions are unable to take care of the load and/or you want to scale up real fast, then please do get in touch with us and we can discuss in more detail.