This is roughly the workshop about no code. So, Bubble is one of the tools that I’ve been working on for the last four years. That’s where the T-shirt comes from. Actually, I was on the co-living retreat with them. I would say X because I will come back later, but due to some things about the community, I decided to go to another technology, another tool which is called Noodl.
I will talk about it later because this is not also the main focus because we don’t have a lot of time. And this is my Twitter handle, so I tweet a lot about no code and my learning journey because every time when you learn something, it’s good to publish it online whenever you make progress or failure. And you don’t know, but internet is magic. Anyone can help you and that’s the magic of internet. So yeah.
The main reason that no code is starting to be trending, I think it’s one of the skills that really growing during the past three years is because we have around five million of application to be built by 2024, 2025. So it’s kind of a lot. And the problem was mostly because, now how to code, no, not now code, it’s in French, sorry.
So among those 0.3% of the population, only half of us, you code as a professional, means that it’s our daily job. And that’s where we make for a living. So meaning that we are not enough to build website. And that’s mostly because all companies in the world have two challenges for the next 10 years. Ecological transition, meaning that I have to reduce the carbon footprint and everything like that.
And the second is a digital transformation, from the baker, from the restaurant, they all now are digitalized. Whether they want it or not, they can take deliveries from any, I know in Asia it’s maybe grab food or whatever. So every business now is getting digitalized. And you can see that every single restaurant who are not on Google Maps, they won’t get customers. They would have be able to take all the online, not just calling them by phone. That’s what we used to do sometimes.
So every single business will have to be transformed, but it’s not their core business to have developers. I cannot imagine a restaurant having a developer behind to code to take orders and things like that. And this is not their main business. So this comes where, people know Shopify here? Shopify? Yeah, so Shopify is to, if you want to sell clothes online and stuff like that, this is the great place.
I would say don’t code an e-commerce website because back then, like 10, 15 years ago, if you wanted to open a web shop or any blog, you needed to know how to code. You needed to know how to do HTML, for example. And today, you don’t need it. Your focus is to sell a product, to make a good branding, a good brand, and taking care about hosting the server and everything else is not your job. So this is where you can come to focus to the most important point of your business, rather than doing the technical stuff, viable for any single business out there.
Unless you’re doing ChatGPT, of course, you’re selling tech, so it means that you cannot do no code with ChatGPT, of course. I mean, you cannot build a chat GPT with no code. So no code is not new. In the 90s, if you know Microsoft front page, I was born in 88, so I was two years old, I couldn’t know that, but I heard about Dreamweaver. It’s like, anyone heard about ever use Dreamweaver? I don’t know.
Okay, so I was too young. I could barely walk, so not typing on the keyboard, sorry. And so I heard about it, but no one really, like all the developers, oh, you know, Jim River and stuff like that, and it was pretty bad image back then, because maybe these people who didn’t know how to code, I didn’t know that. I started to know around WordPress. I think I hosted one website on WordPress, but I ended up coding my own because I didn’t like it. Yeah.
But still, I think there’s a stats, I won’t say any mistake, but 60% of the web is running on WordPress, on website of an email address. So it’s really like, it’s in here, if you’re building a blog or anything, it’s really nice. But it’s just like, it’s gonna take maybe more time to like customize it and everything. It doesn’t maybe have the new control on modern website, you know.
2010s Shopify weight plus pain. This is where I started actually. This is my first website build up. So basically what I like about it, it was like Squarespace, the good thing was it was making websites better than what I would do on my own. And I would be way faster. And it was really good. Because I was a developer, mostly when I made a website, it was black and white with inputs and buttons. So I was trying to ask Google.
So really, it was one of my first experiences on every night adjust the few things without coding and click on publish and it was online. Because before that I would have to purchase a server, deploy it, etc. etc. And I would take just like three days to set up my server. So that’s what I like about SquarePlanet. It was one of my favorite experiences. There’s no code that didn’t work like that.
Well, I didn’t know what the code was, but mostly those two I know. And then, because of where we are at today, I’m… Oh, I broke something. Okay. No code must be broken. And so, mostly what has changed… Wait, let’s wait a minute. What has changed between this era and now… So now there should be…
AI too, because AI mentioned a little feature. We have two things that came up into this equation. Cloud, everyone heard about cloud, when you don’t have physical servers now, your data on Instagram is somewhere in the world, spread everywhere, it’s everywhere and nowhere, you don’t know where they are. So there’s cloud and APIs. So APIs means that we can connect each other between them the apps can talk between them. So those two things make that, those tools.
I think that’s a good guess. So without knowing it, you guys are already using your good tools. And I will try to make some categories to know where in the category, which tools are for which usage. Do we have any questions so far?
So it’s not new, it was even before I was born, almost. And it will still go, I think, for the purpose of AI and everything. And the tools that we know of today, so we own those spreadsheets, Google Docs, Photoshop, and you can see that the tools that are being replaced with like, basically, Atego is really, actually it’s not really replacing because you know, if you’re making complex business.
But you can see the structure is the same as rows and columns. Notion. What about notion? Everyone is going to notion today. So crazy. I was among the first people on my planet. I was on the table with us. And I said, oh, you guys, check it out. There’s notion. I said, what? You told us it’s about two days ago. Now you’re talking about notion. But now I’m sticking with notion. But it depends on your needs, of course. But notion is really like the place that you put everything and you can share from there.
You can even create a website option. So basically that’s what I did for the agency because I was too lazy to do a new website and do the design and I wanted to focus on content. So basically the agency websites, that’s all.
This is built on Notion actually. Whenever this is available and then they have some CSS to customize it, whenever I update or add a recall to my Notion on the other side, it will just update the content. So you can build the whole website out from Notion and having it rendered to your domain. So it’s called SuperSoap. SuperSoap, like so.
And I don’t have any commission related stocks in those companies, I’m just sharing it. So yeah, if you like motion and you want to display like written content that you have, this is the fastest way to launch a public face on top of…
So I will have a lot of back and forth because and then, well, Figma, maybe if there’s more developers, you know what knows. Figma, so Figma is basically, this is where, today, before I make a website, developers will ask you for Figma, because this is, we need a design. Like, we know how to implement, but we’re not ready enough to. So, for example, I will show you one of this project.
So designers do the Figma, developers look at the Figma and they run it and pixel it perfectly. A lot of people also create their websites or their ID into a Figma and make it a demo so they can create it to investors because it’s really always easier for investors to look at your app and say, OK, he understands the value proposition of what you’re trying to solve or issue. And you can make it clickable. Actually, this one is clickable.
It’s not a website, it’s just a thing that the designer draw. Basically like photoshop. And he makes a few paths that is clickable. And this is the shot of the slide.
Yeah, so this is the kind of thing that it’s easier for even for us developers to understand what feature we’re going to implement rather than just having some text.
Okay, it changed the blocks. This is the mapping. I will try to zoom in.
But I can say it to you later. So, there’s a new tool every single week or whatever. It’s really hard to keep up. And then, I think in the end, you would use not more than three or four. So you have the one that you know, Lotion has an integral. So they call that base blocks. So basically, when you create data and stuff like that.
It’s AirTable, Google Sheets, they are in the same category. And then you have the rest function. I can’t find the rest function, but it should be somewhere up here. And then for me, the most important one that I use every day is database and spreadsheet, the connectors, because you want to connect the apps between them and the web is basically the one that you use for your training.
But you have people who are not into web, don’t want to cover, and want to automate process within a company or within a school, they would be really efficient in database and connectors. That works fine too. Because before, if you want to automate a process, you need engineers to build the website and everything. But today, you don’t know, so you can just use tools. And it’s like Lego, you know, you plug them in from there and then it’s just automating a lot of internal processes.
So that’s kind of the name for this job, it’s a website apps, it’s for operations. And for developers, like normal developers, they’re the ones who are building website apps and whatever. So whenever you are in this mapping, you will find a place because there’s two. Any tool for anyone, even for gaming, voice, scrapping. Scrapping is like stealing data from websites. Ah, yeah.
Any question on the mapping? There’s a lot of tool, it change a lot. One of my favorites is Antigromat, but now it’s called Make. It’s one of the most powerful one to connect apps within them. And to be honest, sometimes I’m really lazy to code and just open Antigromat and put my scenario. I can show some demo later. And this will be one of our first exercise to automate one of the use case that we want.
So yeah, that’s pretty, I don’t do a lot of mobile. I think I tried Bravo, but I’m sticking to web. I don’t know why, but mobile has a lot of things to do. Like there’s so many people, everyone has a phone, not everyone has a computer or laptop, but mobile apps is getting huge. And I think especially in Asia, like everyone has a phone actually, a smartphone at least. So yeah, any questions? Can we go?
Next. Okay. So this is about the numbers. I don’t really like to show that because it’s just that Webflow is one of the… Okay. Webflow is becoming the leader. It’s replacing Squarespace because in terms of webflow is built really for front website. Let’s say you’re making, I don’t know, Airbnb or Uber. Uber, Uber is a good, Grab, Grab is a good example. Grab have a front website when explains what it does, et cetera, the teams, the contact, the carrier, et cetera. And then when you try to log in, they will send you to a page where it’s more like the apps, the core of the business. I think we can try Twitter. Twitter should be a good, no.
Twitter should be a good example. Oh, sorry, it’s not Twitter, no, it’s X. So, like you see this page, it could be like, if they were, well, they don’t need to present it, but you know, the privacy policy, cookie policy, to be honest, all those things can be done by non-developers people. For a developer to update your privacy policy every time is really annoying or changing the color of your button. This is when NoCode was created for.
If you want to change the color of the button, you don’t want to send an email to your developer on Friday and then he fix it by the next week. You want it to be like changed right away because it’s more like a marketing stuff and then you won’t waste his time. So this can be like what we call like a front website. And he’s usually built with Webflow, which is one of the leader because it’s really stable, it’s really SEO efficient.
And to be honest, it’s quite… That’s not a good example to show code. I think it’s more for web designers, because it looks a lot like Photoshop, actually, if you look at that. But it’s really powerful because you can make any transition animation that you want. And one of the best examples is someone make Webflow, PlayStation… Let me see. Yeah.
They build the interface of the PlayStation. So this is a good example of, I would suggest that every tool that you use, you try to look at what have been built with the tool. So this can give you an idea of what’s achievable or not. And so. Welcome to PlayStation. Maybe there’s some sound.
Okay, so this has been built with Webflow, basically. But I think the guy behind that is really good.
Like you see, this is impressive. I wouldn’t be able to do it with code, to be honest, because I’m not enough skilled, front-end, speakingly. I don’t know if I can start again, but I think there would be video playing.
And I think they should, yeah, you know.
But in this case, you’re kind of pushing the limits of Webflow. You see, those animations, the high definition and stuff like that. So. It’s part of the fix efficiency to mobile. That’s a good question. Let’s try to.
Yeah. I don’t think they thought about that. Let me, I don’t know, I can open live website. Hopefully it’s still the live website, yeah.
So what you’re talking about is responsiveness, meaning that when you’re on the phone, does it resize correctly?
Let’s try. Did you do a good job?
No.
Well, you cannot play PlayStation on your phone, sorry.
What’s the difference between the two? It’s not too strong? No, I don’t think. If he didn’t do it on this one, he wouldn’t do it on… It’s kind, but it’s broken. But still, he did a good job with that. But yeah, Webflow is responsive, and as you could see on this video, you have a lot of tools that would have this kind of screen, so you can directly see on the tablet, see on the computer, laptop, and phones.
So you can try it out. Yeah, this is the magic. You just click publish and poof, it’s online. You just need to buy your domain name.
Any questions on Webflow or what we saw recently?
Okay, I will pass the number, but Webflow for frontend website and Bubble, mostly for everything that needs to be smart. For example, I can use my use case. Why did not I show the website I built?
Okay, sorry it’s in French, I tried to switch to English. English.
Okay, so this is my first like Bubble apps. So you can see the front is in Bubble because back then I didn’t know. Well, it was fine for me because I didn’t have a lot of traffic basically. It’s really like you have to think about what you really need and what’s your problem. Sometimes you can use two tools, sometimes one is better because you can go quicker. So this is basically Hacker House, the co-living spaces for entrepreneurs, like developers, et cetera.
So people went out of place to sleep and to work for a month or two months. It’s basically students coming for an exchange, people who are studying an internship and then let’s think they’re like longer than two, three months, or even software engineer who don’t want to live alone and want to be living in a community. So that’s the kind of people that we host. So you can see like a short video of like, what is it to live in a hackers?
This is actually a video from Ikea. I started by a while ago, so maybe we can cut this part. But again, I remember the first website that I built was in Squarespace. I just had a signup form. I didn’t have such, this is becoming a marketplace, actually. People can add their space. They can, for example, if I take the first hacker house, they can add their space, they can choose the kind of bed they want.
They can input the date. So basically it’s like one month minimum. So I have some customization that on Airbnb I couldn’t really do. So you can apply.
Oh, Bobby, you’re here. It’s another Bobby. You know, there’s the rules. Please introduce yourself because you’re not just like, hello, I’m looking for a room. If you say that, we would just like throw your application away. So, and one of the example is where you can build. So this has been built on Bubble and is really, you know, I don’t know if you use Airbnb. So you have a kind of chat with three panels like you have like the threads here, the discussion here and that, and then you can all the discussion that you have here, you can type, add like attachments, and then it’s responsive, but fully, yeah.
Test fast. Don’t fire me. So request money, payments, and everything. So I rebuilt basically this all from scratch, from a blank page. It was really a journey. I think it took me almost three years to go from the website I built with. So before that, I was in basic code. I didn’t say how I jumped into no code.
So when I was running Hacker House, going to IKEA to buy the furniture and at the same time my website I have to take care about like, you know, bugs, fixing, improving and everything and I couldn’t code and run the business at the same time. And it’s the same case at the restaurant. The restaurant wouldn’t have to handle the website and then like serving the customer, right? And I was in the same situation and I throw away my ego and say okay, there was me someone who taught about like creating something that I can just like drag and drop things and then click and then put it alive.
And I was looking and of course one night I stumbled on Bubble and I spent, I think I spent a weekend, the whole weekend learning it and trying to build something. I said wow that’s really cool because I could compare that what if I had to build it with code because I knew how to do it, how much time it would cost me and how much time it is make me more efficient, right? And after that we can say okay, I’m gonna market the whole website.
And in three weeks, I think, I’m going to get to this website. Of course, it didn’t look like that at first. It was really more ugly. But then I think I was among the first ones to say, OK, I’m going to use Bubble just not as a prototype, but as a whole website. And of course, I was taking a risk that if Bubble shut down on anything, I wouldn’t have any website. So I wouldn’t have any application level. So I took this risk to say, OK, I’m just going to migrate and see. Let’s see how it goes. And so far, it’s still working.
And it’s one of the… Oh, I haven’t talked about the pricing though. Um… What is the price? Price is important. And this is why a lot of us developers are leaving bubble because they changed things recently. Um… Okay. One thing I should warn you, I mean, of course, you will take it when you… Because there’s two kind of companies. Companies who are making money and companies who don’t make money. There’s a lot of companies who are not making money but who are really big.
For example, the companies who raise a lot of money but are not profitable or whatever. If you’re not making money, I think if you want to test out an idea, Bubble is great because you can start really quickly. I mean, in terms of like, if you want something quite custom, but you don’t care about performance and stuff like that. So basically if you pay monthly, you start with zero, you can play with it, but actually I think it started around 32. This is the price I still pay today.
So it’s really cheap for having like a technical, it’s basically your technical co-founder. He’s your CTO, he can handle everything. You draw, I saw so many people who didn’t know how to code and making a business. And of course when there’s problem they call me. When I come I’m still impressed by how they are able to output a really good results.
Even if behind is really like dirty, messy, the database design is really bad. You wouldn’t do that at the developer, but it just works. And they do business with that, and that’s fine. I would prefer having someone who is making a living with their business, even if the code is dirty behind, than someone who is coding their website for the past five years and didn’t have a single customer. That was me, basically. That is me. So now I think it’s fine to use whatever tools.
You have to focus on the problem you’re solving rather than the solution. People don’t care about the solution. No one will go there. No one will go to my website and inspect the code source on my website to see which technology is built. Only developers do that. But most of the people, as long as they’re paying for something that you’re making their life easier, that’s the end of the story. And that’s the most important part of the story, remember and keep it, you know.
So back to Hacker House. So yeah, mostly people can create their listing. I have like a calendar. Oh, I really struggle to make the calendar actually. I use a plugin blah blah blah, but it’s not really pretty but it’s doing the job. Because I just needed to see like, okay, how’s my occupation rate, you know, between the house. So there’s different house. Yeah, but they’re fake house too.
Yeah, so yeah, and then you know I try things who had some like analytics in front of each So it’s really about playing fun because code is meant to be recycled You know you write codes then you throw it away It’s never written on the on the stone and you can not revisit It’s really like you try things you test and learn you fail. I think mostly you fail more than you succeed.
And the most interesting part is the payments. So when the payments come, we take the payments by credit card, and then it splits between the owner and the platform. So this is really like what we call marketplace, meaning that the website itself doesn’t operate the space. For example, Grab, they don’t own the scooter and the driver. They are not the employees. They’re just the middlemen. And then they take a commission out of every transaction.
So yeah, and then you can make fun things like wall of reviews. You can even connect Instagram, so it syncs the Instagram photo on your website. You’re really like free. You have almost like the freedom as a developer to make whatever features come to your mind. If you want to become a host, you click on that. And then I think I didn’t do this feature.
Yeah, somehow like, you know. So yeah. There’s some, oh, it’s in English. That’s why nothing is played, sorry. But it’s fine to have bugs. To be honest, some people wait for the perfect moment to push online. No one, trust me, if there’s bug people and really important bug people, we send you an email and you will fix it. Bugs are faster fixed when it’s live than just on your computer. So don’t be worried to push to deploy your app. So yeah, just keep the market, it’s not important. So the people who use no code, sorry there’s a French part, but I couldn’t remove it. Don’t know why.
You have individuals who want to have like a portfolio of your skills rather just like a CV, curriculum, vitae. Yeah, because it’s way better. I think everyone now in tech have their own website to showcase your past experience, your work and everything. Or run a side project. I think each one of us have a problem to solve, a problem that is not solved yet and you want to solve it. And it’s a really good thing.
Like I prefer someone to work like every single, like maybe one hour, two hours per day, you know, those one or two hours per day in a year makes a lot of things and you’re basically adding, like incrementing your product. So I saw a lot of friends having a side project and quitting their full-time job when their side project was making twice the earnings of their salary. And you’re more like interest, and confidence. Because you are not jumping out like, it’s not like me, you quit your job, you have nothing, and then you have to make money. Otherwise, you would be sleeping on the street, or go back to your mom’s place. So a lot of people start by a side project, making some, it can be earning that, like top up your salary, or some people just replace the salary by their side projects, and so it becomes some side to main project. You have freelancers, basically.
So individuals can be newsletter. A lot of people start to newsletter and they earn a lot of money. You have freelancers like me who are basically, okay, before no code, when someone wanted to build a website, it could cost around 50, $60,000 for a project because developer as I said, it’s expensive. As you can see, only 0.3% can know how to code, unless you’re hiring in India, but then you’re not sure about the results.
Now people can create a website quickly for clients and clients just want something quick. You have startups, startups who haven’t raised money yet but need some proof of concept, who have a few customers who raise some money. This is what changes as well, because if you didn’t have technical co-founder back then, it was impossible for you to build a product. If you are three designers, three sales, or if there’s not someone technical in your team, you couldn’t build anything.
And then SMBs basically, as we talk the restaurant or all those kind of business, and then you have the enterprise who wants their dev team to be more focused on the main job and then having people doing automation on the internal process.
So the first question before going to know code, we need to know how to code. I won’t lie, if you know how to code, it helps. Because I think the most important skill that would be passed along your journey is database. I don’t know if you guys did some SQL or stuff like that, database relationships, stuff like that, but it’s still important. I’m sorry to say that. I didn’t like it SQL, so.
I’m one of the first who didn’t like it. But you realize that it’s everywhere. And it’s even in our pocket because your phone has hundreds of that. Everything is a database. Without database, no data will be stored, I mean, mostly. So knowing how to code helps because you know how to architecture stuff. You know how to find a problem when you have performance or security. And you know how to, I think it’s to learn how to learn.
you know, to learn to learn. Yeah, because the answers usually is between Google and you, or now ChatGPT, but even now ChatGPT, you have to interpret his answer because on the few times I use it, few times he was wrong, but I could tell it because I know how to code, but sometimes you take it as a single source of truth, it can be a problem. And that’s where we’re gonna face the problem, knowing that ChatGPT is the singular source of truth.
So what will happen to developers? Because all of my friends who are developers are worried about their job. I would say ChatGPT have more chance to kill their jobs than NoCode. Because, well, I think you would have developers who are gonna use ChatGPT a lot. They would be way more efficient and faster. Now there’s tools.
No code tools such as Bubble not yet, but Noodl, the one I use, they have a ChatGPT box inside. You say, create me a function that takes an input of that and output a graph, and then poof, he gives you the code, and then you just need to link it in your editor. We still have a long way to go because ChatGPT and no code are not humans, so they are not able to have this empathy of like listening and trying to have this creativity or really learning what you want, but we’re coming. I mean, Child GPT is just not even a year old and every single friends who are building something is on AI because right now if you’ve seen the movie like Iron Man or whatever, you know JARVIS, it’s gonna be the same. Like I think it’s in Black Panther The girl didn’t have like the right sequence for the genetics.
And then she, oh, can you try that? And he recomputes the whole sequence of DNA. And then he said, okay, 70% of chance, you know? So you still have a new man who will give the order or like maybe, you know, the maybe to Chad’s deputies for him to the AI, I would say, to him to find the results. So I would say, there’s someone on LinkedIn who asked me like in five years, where will you be? That’s the question I say, maybe I would earn zero because Chad’s deputies will replace me.
We never know. But again, AI, if there’s artificial intelligence, what’s the use of us? That’s another question. So for now, we have a lot of apps to build. We have a lot of problems to solve. So we still have opportunities.
Well, about the money, I think that’s not the question here because this was also for the computer science school because students, they were more like, okay, will I get how much I will earn when I get out of the school? Basically, the problem is that since you have people who have entry level and they don’t know how to code, the entry level of the salary is really lower than someone who knows how to code. So the range is quite large, actually.
Because for a developer, it’s a bit less because to be a developer, most of them need to do a five years, a master degree. Even if there’s boot camp now, then in nine weeks, but I don’t believe that you cannot be an engineer in nine weeks. But there’s a lot of opportunities. I think for me, I would say to people, I would prefer to be a good no-code developer than rather than an average developer.
And the most important is to have fun, I think. So whatever you use, just have fun building things. And in true world, Snooker is cheaper because the time you launch is reduced, is faster, and I think I have a lot of fun building things. You have an ID at noon, and then by the day after, you can deploy, you can publish.
That’s one of the biggest advantage but also it leads to less customization because on code you can do whatever you want. You are more dependent, meaning that if you want a bubble and if tomorrow bubble close dash up, you’re leaving without anything. And going back to this topic, I think when I started Bubble, I was looking through like can I export the code because when it’s not your code, it’s not really your app, you know, because as I said, if Bubble close or they run bankrupt, that’s the case, that can be possible. Well, your website is down.
So I remember back then someone asked and the founder repounded, oh, if we close, we’re gonna release open source or editor so people can still host their own bubble and run their own website, which is not the case now, I think there was so much money. I mean, I think there was so much money and VCs was really, they were really pushing them to be like more profitable because we are hundreds of thousands of people using.
I don’t know if you are millions, but I don’t know what’s the size of the community, but we are a lot. And some people in the community say, okay, just trash your VCs and we can all put a thousand dollars. And it would be actually million… because they raised a hundred million dollars. So actually. So the problem is to be more dependent. It’s a risk, but actually you’re dependent on anything. But the first thing you have to prove is does your business make money?
That’s the first thing you have to take into account. And the second thing is harder to maintain. I think as your team grows, I think it’s the case for Bubble at least, is that it’s hard to collaborate on a single tool. Sometimes it’s laggy and everything, especially the editor is in the US. So basically if you’re in Philippines, the connection can be a bit slow, you know, and you would have delay.
So yeah, that’s it for me.
