#221 — 😶‍🌫️ No-Code and Platform Risk

What's up everybody? This is Lola Ojabowale, founder of lunch pail labs. Welcome back to lunch pail daily, my personal audio diary on building and growing lunch pail labs, a digital product studio based out of Atlanta, Georgia. In today's episode, we're going to jam about no code and platform risk. 

So I think the no code community is a little rattled, given bubbles, recent announcements, they've backpedaled, currently, around the pricing changes and charging for data storage, which used to be unlimited and charging for records which used to be unlimited. And a lot of makers now seeing a massive drop in the potential price that they will pay each month to bubble, which can be scary. And I was speaking to a newish bubbler, who was feeling a little bit discouraged about even investing time and really trying to learn the platform because of the recent platform announcements. And so wanted to jam a little bit about platform risk, how maybe we can think about it, especially for folks who might be first starting out with no code. And also like, you know, what I'm doing at lunch pail labs. So number one, I think when folks are first starting out, it still makes sense to ride the wave. I asked myself, if I was starting again, knowing what I know, 2022 Would I be trying to learn if I like whipped out all of my knowledge. And it would still be learning no code, building on top of successful and growing platforms, I think really is a business cheat code. And I credit a lot of the success so far to lunch pail labs is, hey, we did start a bubble, we got a lot of bubble projects. And it was an approachable entryway where we could finally deliver on problems with software and get paid for it. 

And I think even with some of the recent announcements, I think the major no code platforms are still going to be very viable to build and grow businesses on it for years and years to come. Now Is anybody going to build 100 year business on Bumble, I don't even know that. But I think they're still viable in the medium short term, and are a great entry point for really early people to providing software solutions to clients. That being said, we can't expect the platforms to stay the same forever thing, there are a myriad of SAS examples that have gone all the way up market and become prohibitively expensive to everyone but the top of the market platforms can also be also drastically changed their product, they can close off partners or start to compete with them. A myriad of things can happen to any of these no code tools that start to make them unsavory choices in our specially agency and freelance businesses. And and we also have to recognize most of these tools are venture based backed businesses, which means they have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for their investors. So their businesses like we are businesses, and they are have to try to make as much money as possible. Next, at the end of the day, we service providers are trying to help our clients solve problems, no code is just the sauce. And I keep on reminding myself of that. Like what I'm really selling is software that attracts more customers, helps fix internal flows, brings products to market, like no code is just the sauce, just the mechanism through which those things are possible. And in the future when we're doing something different lunch pail labs still fits. 

I've talked a lot about like my ideas of becoming like a T shaped agency in terms of competency, and how like right now at launch labs, we started delivering with other tools, stacks code and no code and services to and then I guess like my final thing is yeah, like the goal isn't building with bubble live workflow or whichever NoCo tool. The goal is to build usable software that solves problems. And if we remember that, I think that can take the edge off. So that's all I got to say on little bubble pricing fiasco, no code and platform rest TLDR keep I still think no code is awesome. And I hope everyone has a wonderful Monday.