No-coders: Constraints Are There To Help You

If I could deliver only a single message to founders building businesses with no-code tools, it would unequivocally be:

Constraints are there to help you. Don’t resist them—embrace them.

I’m not talking to developers or even the advanced no-coders here—I’m talking to the builders who don’t consider themselves particularly technical. The founders with domain expertise in some area, who are working to change their lives by building a business supported by no-code tools.

No-code is an enabling technology—it’s allowed a whole new category of founders to build digital businesses that they never could have previously. You no longer need to understand the underlying technology concepts that were previously required to build a digitally enabled business. The constraints of the tools at your disposal are actually guardrails that will help you have more success, more quickly. And these constraints actually help you keep your eye on what actually matters—the delivery of value to your customers.

I see far too many founders become obsessed with offroading instead of driving down the perfectly paved highway in front of them.

If there’s a trait common to the most successful no-code founders I’ve worked with, it’s that they lean into constraints at every opportunity. And if there’s a trait that runs through those that inevitably fail to launch, it’s that they become obsessed with trivial minutiae. They try to bend no-code tools to their vision of reality, spending countless hours pulling their hair out over things that simply don’t matter.

This is a fundamental difference between coders and no-coders—developers typically have the technical skillset to build what they envision. Whether it makes sense for them to do so in the context of an early stage business is another matter, but the point is they are capable. No-coders often simply don’t possess the skills to create what they want to; in trying to do so they are fighting a pointless battle with two hands tied behind their back.

A founder wastes months on trivial problems

I recently had a customer reach out—she wanted to build a site where she sold “packs” of digital downloads—for example, you could download up to 15 PDFs for $100 per month. She was clearly exasperated and told me she’d been looking for a solution that would enable her to do so for months.

This is absolutely something you can build with Outseta, but it’s not functionality that we offer out-of-the-box. You can sell downloadable PDFs—no problem. But the logic to recognize when 15 PDFs have been downloaded and disable the ability to download more is something that adds technical complexity to the project—complexity beyond this person’s skill set. And ultimately complexity that cost this person months.

When situations like this arise, I’ve now learned to gently ask—”Why?”

In this case, why did the customer want to sell bundles of downloadable PDFs? The more I dig, more often than not I discover that there’s no real business reason to do what the customer is trying to do. It almost always boils down to “I guess that’s just how I envisioned this working.”

And that’s almost never a good reason!

The most successful entrepreneurs are quick to realize when their vision is in conflict with their best interests. This person could have been selling individual PDF downloads months earlier. Heck, they hadn’t even proved that there was a market for what they were selling yet.

A founder circumvents any obstacle without a second thought

On the flip side, we have Justin Welsh. Justin has grown into one of the most successful creators on the internet, literally making millions. When he was getting started, a simple Carrd website and Outseta were two of Justin’s primary tools. As I watched him bring his business to life, it was immediately apparent that he’s an incredibly capable entrepreneur. But Justin would be quick to tell you that he’s not particularly technical; much of his capability comes from his mindset. He would absolutely steamroll any obstacle that presented itself. If he got stuck or didn’t know how to do something, he immediately found the fastest way around the issue.

For example, Justin used a lead capture form as an application to join his community. Once he decided to accept someone, he sent them a link to sign up for a paid membership to his community. Both his application form and his membership sign up form asked the user to enter their email address so the submitted data could be tied back to their CRM record (based on the email address submitted).

Not a great user experience, right? He was asking the user to enter redundant information—their email address—on both forms.

While that’s certainly true—and while you definitely can build a workflow that doesn’t require this double data entry—it’s more complex to do so. Justin didn’t waste a minute wrestling with this.

Do you think this suboptimal user experience cost him customers? Or do you think the additional time he was able to spend interacting with his community members was a better investment of his time?

If you’re honest, you know the answer. In fact, I would bet that not a single community member even noticed that they’d been asked to input their email address on two separate occasions.

I see non-technical founders get hung up on such trivial things all the time.

Let no-code tools help you

My call here is not for people to stop learning, and it’s certainly not for people to build suboptimal stuff. My call is for you to focus your time on the work that actually matters—the work that will dictate the success of your business.

As entrepreneurs, we’re all trying to bend the world to our liking to some extent—it’s part of our DNA. But is that what you’re actually doing? Or are you kidding yourself into feeling like you’re making progress on your business simply because you’re wrestling with technology?

As a no-coder, wrestling with technology is very rarely time well spent—embrace the constraints of whatever tools you choose to work with. You’d be shocked at how many best practices are actually built into the out-of-the-box functionality of the tools that are at your disposal. Lean into them!

If you can’t sell something or build something with a simple model, no level of complexity is going to save you. Funnel your world-bending, uncompromising energy for solving the problems that your customers actually care about.