The trick of being an entrepreneur is to extend your runway long enough to become profitable. If you haven’t nailed product-market fit by the time you run out of cash, the jig is up.
This makes constant experimentation a basic requirement. After all, no startup comes out of the gate with a final product that users love. Iteration is always needed.
The caveat is that if you spend too long iterating, without bringing in enough revenue, you die.
Rapid Experimentation
A rule of thumb is that 90% of startups fail.
The successes all have one thing in common: Rapid experimentation. The opposite — slow, or no, experimentation — is like a plane going too slowly to ever lift off. It’ll just reach the end of the runway and crash.
By constantly experimenting, you can find what works, and what doesn’t. A failure to rapidly experiment underlies all major reasons for startup failure, as outlined by CB Insights below:
There was no market need? A rapid experiment testing your hypothesis that your product is valuable would have revealed that before it was too late.
Ran out of cash? Your experimentation wasn’t fast enough.
Outcompeted? Your competitors experimented more quickly, iteratively adding value to the market faster than you.
How No-Code Can Help
Building ideas from scratch is slow, expensive, and complicated. Re-building the wheel, unless you have a surplus of resources, is going to end poorly.
This is why leaders in the space, like YCombinator, urge founders to just get something out into the market. It won’t be perfect, but that doesn’t matter — your goal is to get feedback.
In fact, YCombinator CEO Michael Seibel says this:
“If it takes more than a month to build, it’s not an MVP.”
Think about how long it would take to code a website from scratch (e.g. in HTML, CSS, and JS), versus using a no-code builder (e.g. Wordpress, Wix, Webflow). The former could take weeks for a simple design, while the latter enables a cutting-edge design in minutes.
One of the first articles written on no-code, in late 2014, already saw the impact no-code had on saving time and money:
“It’s now possible for employees to develop their own Cloud-based business applications, eliminating much of the time and expense associated with software development.”
In short, no-code lets you test your value proposition with a lot less risk.
No-Code in All Areas
No-code goes beyond designs, websites, newsletters, and even product-building.
For instance, no-code analytics tools make everyone a data scientist, letting teams of all sizes and skill levels easily visualize and predict data.
This means that virtually any entrepreneur can use no-code to be more efficient, saving both time and money.
Conclusion
Rapid experimentation is a must-have, and no-code tools enable faster experimentation than ever before. Saving time and money in building an app, conducting analyses, doing marketing, and more can help your startup succeed.