Starting Product Tools Newsletter 💼
Empowering thinkers to become doers
During my last 🕕 6 years in the software design/development domain, I’ve seen huge number of cases where a💡thinker and a 🛠 doer struggle to come on same page and the world loses a beautiful product that was about to be born. Another observation is that almost all products that thinkers envision to build online, are some modification or extension of some already built and evolved category of existing technical product. Because of this reason a lot of software engineering time is being used up in building airbinb, amazon, calendly, etc, again and again. And a lot of management/designing time is being wasted coordinating all this.
With this no-code revolution, thinkers, managers and designers are able to build/develop their vision (product) on their own. There’s a platform called zeroquode that is built around similar philosophy. You go to their website and select what you want to build, for example a job board or a an insta-mart and there you go. You’ll have a ready made job board with complete backend/frontend already built. You take the template, apply your branding, customise it according to your idea, launch and all this you can do without writing code. There are hundreds of such products coming out every month, some cater to specific problems, some give a complete packages. With emergence of such innovations, it has become extremely fast and easy for someone to build an mvp 🍥 without writing code 👾 and launch 🚀 their idea. I believe this is not only saving thinker’s and creative people’s time but also saving precious developer time. If creative people can develop basic products on their own, then developers will be able to devote time to solving complex problems and contribute to further advance the software technology.
One example of a situation where I witnessed the power of no-code and how it’s a game changer is phue.in, a beautiful website of my dear friend Panya. She’s a beautiful women 👩🏻💼 (always praise a lady), a great designer 👩🏻💻 and a bootstrapped entrepreneur 🦸🏻♀️ , running a new age apparel brand called PHUE (Power of HUE). I got know last year in January that she has designed a website and is getting it developed with the help of a developer. I again heard about her website a few months laters that it’s still in development stage, developer it soling issues, etc. Then a few days back (which more than a year after I first heard about her website being developed), that she recently developed her website on her own and it took her less than a day and damn! that website looks so good.
With the Product Tools Newsletter and upcoming website, I want to achieve a few things.
Spread a word about no-code 📢 : I will experiment around all known ways to make this reach masses. Here I’ll need you, my lovely readers to help me spread a word to the masses.
List tools 🔖 : A common activity but an important one. This will let people come to producttools.org and discover tools for their particular needs.
Create no-code stacks for different use cases 📚 : I will keep formalising different combinations of tools which can together build a particular kind of digital product. For example Netlify + Startup Builder can be used to easily build and host simple static landing pages and website. So I we keep creating such stacks and workflows. Here you can also help by sharing your experiences about how you built something using no-code.
Connect people 👥 : This one’s universal for me. I always feel satisfaction in making good minds sit together and ultimately build something beautiful. Everywhere I go or everything a I do is a step towards doing this more and more.
At the end I’d like to share a list of my 3 favourite no-code tools.
Startup by Designmodo : The easiest page builder for rapid landing page or marketing website design/development. Comes with lots of ready to use sections. The tool is freemium but I thing you can make a good website by just using the free features. Click to check →
Notion : Notion is a wiki tool with unlimited possibilities. You get to create a database visually and perform 100s operations on it including creating views, automations, integration with third party tools, publishing pages as websites, etc. I believe notion is one hell of a tool worth learning. Click to check →
WordPress : I know WordPress is quite old and everybody knows it but I believe it’s still the king of no-code. It has revolutionised the web development space with no-code even before the term no-code was coined. WordPress is most extendable and most features rich community with one of the biggest developer community in the world. Click to check →
Thank you 🙏🏻 very much for reading through. Please share with people who you think can benefit from this newsletter. Let’s empower thinkers to become doers 🤟🏻