Kausambi Manjita is the Co-Founder & CEO at Mason, a no-code SaaS platform that is helping small businesses to transform their e-retail storefronts. She is an award-winning & venture-capital-backed entrepreneur with 15+ years of Enterprise, People & Product expertise. With a decade of experience, Kausambi brings in unique insights across multiple segments of the industry such as product analytics and management. Having grown up in small towns across India, Kausambi strongly believes in the importance of making access to technology to succeed in the online world.
The Evolution of Technology
In the scale of human history, all disruptive technology started with specialised skills but rapidly moved to no-code & democratic. Think of writing to the first printing press to now Twitter. Or the first computer to the supercomputer inside your little smartphone. When technology gets more democratic, the pace of adoption increases – which in turn leads to exponential progress of human society.
In the early days, developing systems for a business required investment in heavy hardware and expensive consultants to design applications on top of it. Once an application was built out, it was extremely hard to change – the solution was tied to the initial problem, and modifications hard to make. People just had to make do with what was already available.
With the cloud, powerful applications were now available to anyone with an internet connection. Software as a service – or SaaS – grew and exploded. Anyone could now ‘rent’ applications to solve any of their business problems.
Fast forward to Low-Code and No-Code
No-code or Low-code gives companies or individuals the ability to quickly develop, adopt and implement software solutions that solve their complex business needs. In the No-code world, non-technologists become a very active part of the process of solution creation.
When everyone can participate in the creation process, there is no loss during translation or communication. It transforms any small or large business from integrating software into our workflows to embedding our workflows into the software.
In simple words, it makes technology more human.
Benefits of No-Code Applications
- Democratic software
What SaaS did to legacy software, no-code / low-code is doing for technology access.
When technology is more human, the barrier to adoption goes down tremendously. Even solopreneurs or SMBs can now think of creating their own solutions to unique problems that they face today. Customizing existing applications also gets easier.
Teams or individuals can dream of having the same tech-power as enterprises or VC-funded companies have. It levels the playing field for long-term success.
All this means faster growth and a better economy.
- Better designed products
When subject matter experts can themselves design – and create – software, imagine the experience! The software building process is complex and involves pairing the ‘user’ with a ‘designer’ and a ‘developer’ at its very bare minimum. To build anything meaningful, however, it’s not just these 3 individuals, but several individuals who bring in different expertise into the mix – from UX to visual designer, from backend to frontend developer, software testing expert, maybe even a project manager thrown into the mix.
With no code or low code apps, the number of nodes involved in the creation process goes significantly down. That does not only mean faster time to market, but also better designed products where the original idea does not get lost in translation.
- Enhanced customer experience
And of course, better designed products mean better customer experience.
In the startup world, there’s a saying that the best products are built by people who faced a problem and set about solving it themselves.
If a brand manager can herself build an app for other brand managers like her, the solution will mostly likely be the best suited for the particular problem. Users will be more satisfied with the app, leading to happier business folks, and in the end, better experience for their consumers.
Change is Everything
Change is the only constant, even more so in the world of business. From India to SEA to the world, the one common thread that binds all businesses together – whether solopreneur or SMB or enterprise – is change.
Any system or process that requires more time or bandwidth to evolve adds friction to change. If a team or individual cannot react and respond to change fast enough, it can even mean the end of the line. Covid19 exemplified that more than ever before how important it is to change as the world changes.
With no code and low code solutions, change is faster, easier and more focused.
And oftentimes, the only way to grow is to change.
Future is Bright
As Greg Satell wrote in INC. Magazine, the future of technology is always more human.
Pandemic, wider access to the internet, move to remote – all of these are underlying trends that shifted the world in general and e-commerce in specific by a decade. No-code and low-code solutions have helped a lot of the economy sustain and even grow by providing the tools to adapt to these exponential shifts in human behavior.
The future of technology is more human, and no-low-code is definitely a big jump in that direction.