To Code or to Nocode?
Bear with me through this.<p>I&#x27;m a coder who&#x27;s built a lot of platforms for startups from the ground up. I have some scorn for people who are too good to learn the technical; when I hire a roofer, he&#x27;s looking at me like I&#x27;m an idiot, so same goes. But. I always thought, hey, I&#x27;ve got the coding skill so why shouldn&#x27;t I have it <i>all</i> - and be fabulously successful from some good idea I cobbled together with nothing but 1&#x27;s and 0&#x27;s in my free time? So, I built six or seven apps on my own recognizance, none of which took off, but which were all (I think) revolutionary concepts at the time, and each of which took a year or so to be fully functional platforms.<p>The other apps I built in the interim, to make money. These I built as a freelancer for people who were very competent in their particular businesses and were using web&#x2F;mobile apps to basically streamline things and improve efficiency; I would reject anyone coming to me with a job like &quot;I have this idea for an app...&quot; because I have a dozen ideas for apps that are probably better than theirs, and I know how to actually build them, but what I emphatically <i>have never had</i> are a functioning existing business, business model, growth strategy or investment for those things. Ideas are just ideas. <i>Even if you take years to develop the code skills to build them swiftly</i>. In fact, if you do, it&#x27;s even more painful to watch them vanish after a little while.<p>1&#x27;s and 0&#x27;s are just electrons on silicon, after all. We&#x27;re writing in sand.<p>I&#x27;ve come to ...well, not exactly love or respect the fast-talking business guys, but... appreciate that maybe focusing on just <i>how</i> to build things (whether you code them or not) is really not the key. It&#x27;s a necessary ingredient, for sure. But like I said, I&#x27;ve got a dozen good ideas for apps. Non-technical people have like <i>hundreds</i> of <i>bad</i> ideas for apps, and most of them want to catapult themselves to success with neither a good idea nor a functional business model nor existing investment -- they just want to entice someone like me to work for them on faith&#x2F;credit, and it&#x27;s always been this way, for 30 years now.<p>Sorry to rant. But what <i>does</i> work is when people have a successful business already, or the skills to set one up, which I don&#x27;t have. When they have domain knowledge in their field, whether that&#x27;s the food industry or hotels or manufacturing. Then, finding someone to build the software <i>creatively</i> or learning to do it yourself can add a whole layer of value, because you already understand the business logic inside and out.<p>There will be a few unicorn dream startups that exist only 1&#x27;s and 0&#x27;s, in the 2020s... and as sad as I am about how all those things turned out since the 1990s, I&#x27;m not totally closed to the possibility of being at the front of one. But that&#x27;s not where the bulk of wealth will be created. It&#x27;ll be in building usable software that acts as a multiplier for the capacity of ordinary businesses... and not necessarily in the &quot;take a 2.5% cut&quot; way.