Muzammil is the Global Head of Strategy and Corporate Finance at Acies. Where he is responsible for driving Acies’ strategy for the firm and its businesses and working with the Acies global and regional leaders to enhance the Acies global footprint. He also heads the Consulting business at Acies where he works closely with leading financial institutions and corporate clients, providing advisory and technology solutions to deliver transformation programs that address their regulatory and business challenges. Over his career, Muzammil has worked with regulators and industry bodies as an advisor to help formulate the supervisory framework for high-priority areas in the risk management space, such as liquidity risk, intraday liquidity, and commodity price risk management.
Startups are born with an idea and a dream. Unfortunately, many dreams and ideas either don’t see the light of day or get extinguished before they can become marketable products. 42% of startups fail because they fail to understand the market need accurately. More specifically, they fail to pivot quickly without incurring significant costs on adapting their technology. 29% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Most of that cash is spent on building a minimum viable product or MVP, leaving almost nothing to sustain and take the product to market. In a world where every startup strives to deliver their product or service through technology, the cost of technology and the murky world of technology choices overwhelms most entrepreneurs and blunts most game-changing ideas. No-code platforms are the answer that startups are seeking to address both their existential needs and the dream with which the idea took birth. No-code platforms allow entrepreneurs the freedom to make mistakes at low cost, refocus attention on the entrepreneur’s domain skills and tenacity, and most importantly, remove the burden of technology from the entrepreneurial dream.
Freedom to make mistakes
Most ideas that give birth to a startup are revolutionary. However, the market need rarely is. Market needs tend to be more evolutionary, and this requires startups to keep testing the waters, course correcting and learning from their mistakes. However, each learning comes at a cost and most of that cost is attributable to technology re-design, re-orientation, or revamp. No-code platforms allow startups to start from scratch each time without incurring back-breaking costs of course correction. The fact that there is virtually no coding involved and the entire effort is directed primarily at front-end configuration reduces the cost of each change dramatically. This allows startups to explore different theories, business models and product designs, test them, seek feedback from the market and re-orient till they reach the point of product match to market need.
Dependence on the CTO dissipates
One of the most significant challenges for an entrepreneur today is finding a capable co-founder CTO. With the dearth of quality technology talent and the inability to screen for quality in a CTO, entrepreneurs spend months zeroing in on a worthy co-founder. Many outsource development to third parties who have no skin in the game. Many entrepreneurs lose control over their intellectual property as they engage with third parties who may seek to replicate parts of the flow, idea or thought process with other customers. No-code platforms allow entrepreneurs to start converting their idea into applications without waiting for a CTO to come onboard. It allows them to build and try their idea and preserve their intellectual property without dependence on third parties. No-code platforms fundamentally free the non-tech entrepreneurs from the clutches of technology dependence.
Pivot very quickly as customer needs change and are understood better
Volatile markets and changing customer behaviors pose a serious threat of product redundancy even as a product finds its niche. The inability to change quickly due to the existing technology architecture or time taken to deliver features impacts the ability to compete in the marketplace. No-code platforms allow startups to innovate at a rapid pace, keep launching new offerings, and create newer market niches and revenue streams.
Focus on the business model and not technology
Most new-gen startups are forced to spend inordinate amounts of time focusing on their technology infrastructure and architecture. While the proliferation of cloud services has reduced the bandwidth consumed on technology, significant bandwidth is still consumed on technology architecting. More importantly, a number of tweaks to the business model become necessary due to cost of technology or technology constraints. True no-code platforms are pre-architected and enterprise-grade, thereby allowing startups to focus on the business model and make no compromises because of technology constraints.
Move to being a truly digital business
A number of startups are only front-end digital businesses. This means that all the focus on digitalization is on the customer experience and interface. Post the customer engagement, delivery, fulfilment, and administration are still done in a traditional and heavily manual way. This builds in significant inefficiencies into the delivery model. Ironically, while startups try their best to give their customers the best digital experience possible, they rarely benefit from the digital experience themselves. No-code platforms allow for an integrated service delivery model that is digitalized front to back at a fraction of the cost. It prevents breakages in customer delivery and fulfilment and keeps costs do to the bare minimum.
Minimum viable product doesn’t drain time and resources
The focus on an MVP drains resources and bandwidth of entrepreneurs. MVPs are seen as the gateway to serious funding. What most startups realize the hard way, is that MVPs consume almost all initial capital and the need for funding becomes an existential crisis once a startup reaches that stage. What most startups also realize the hard way, is that existential funding requirements lead to significant dilution of promoter stake at an early stage. No-code platforms ensure that minimal monetary resources are consumed while building and testing the MVP. This allows entrepreneurs to work with more options while seeking fund raise and it gives them a better platform to choose to bootstrap.
No-code platforms are already changing the enterprise software landscape. The ability of startups to be nimble and not be constrained with legacy software puts them in the best place to leverage no-code to preserve value for the entrepreneur and bring the most innovative solutions rapidly to market.