Using no-code to build your tech for good startup

As tech for good investors, tech is an important piece of BGV’s investment thesis. Increasingly, with a rise of no-code and low-code tools we’ve seen founders from all walks of life with no tech expertise or coding skills getting stuck into building products to address some of the world’s most pressing problems. No-code tools definitely helped to level the playing field for more founders to emerge this way. Over the years, we’ve seen founders emerge and use no-code tools to build their prototypes and MVPs, use it to automate their workflows, and more - all without writing code. This agility in using no-code tools allows them to gain significant competitive advantages as more and more people embark on building tech for good businesses.

As investors in the very early stages of early stage investing, we see so many talented founders with deep understanding of the problems they are trying to solve, but often lack the tools and resources to think critically about validating other aspects of their businesses. We believe in equitable access to capital for founders from all walks of life, and as part of our remit to ensure such access, we ran a webinar on no-code in tech for good to help founders navigate the world of no-code development. Earlier this month we brought an expert panel of no-code agencies and developers, as well as tech for good founders together, to share their insights.

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TL;DR - Key takeaways from the webinar

• Low cost, iterative testing and quicker learning loops: Startups are using no-code tools to either bootstrap and test out their ideas, build a prototype or MVP to gather rapid feedback to learn quickly. It enables them to test multiple assumptions, adapt and quickly iterate before investing more time and more money into further development.
• No-code infrastructure frees up time: Numerous no-code tools help with the automation of tasks (like Zapier, make, and more) and building vital infrastructure like CRMs and databases (eg. Softr, Airtable and many others). In turn this frees up time to speak to customers and investors. ‍
• Getting valuable product experience when you’re not a technical founder: Starting out with no-code allows founders with no technical background to gain significant technical intuition and product experience. This experience with building in the early stages enables them to critically think about product roadmaps for scale.

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No-code resources and tools ‍

‍Tool matching quiz from no-code tech to help you get started in testing which tools to use.

‍Getting started with no-code: a free course from Makerpad and Zapier.

‍Course directory from nocode.tech.

‍Tools for Good - a list of tech for good projects and the tools used to build them.  

‍No Code List - a repository of no-code tools.

‍No Code Examples - a curated collection of 200+ real world products built with no-code.

‍100 days of no-code - start learning to no-code the right way in just 30 mins a day.

‍No-code development: A simple guide to the no-code movement from Webflow.