You Probably Don’t Need a Developer Yet: No-Code for Founders

Notes from Raise Ventures’ Tech for Non Tech session on automation, no-code and community, and the four-part stack that tests an idea for tens of pounds.

You probably don’t need a developer yet. That is the case for no-code, and no-code was my subject at Raise Ventures’ June Tech for Non Tech session, “Automation, No-Code and Community”. Four speakers, one online event, and an audience of founders with too much to do and not enough time or money to do it.

Raise Ventures event card for Tech for Non Tech: Automation, No-Code and Community, with Niamh McAuley, Ellie McBride, David Shawe and Fajar Siddiq
Raise Ventures’ card for the session.

The line-up

Tech for Non Tech is Raise Ventures’ series for founders who aren’t technical. This one was about the tools that make a small team feel bigger:

  • Ellie McBride of Calibrated Concepts on automation, content creation and scheduling.
  • Niamh McAuley of Purple Dot Media on using video in your marketing.
  • Me, on no-code tools and how to build an MVP fast.
  • Fajar Siddiq, joining live from Singapore, on the maker communities he’s part of and where no-code and Jamstack are heading.

A speaker dialling in from Singapore to a Belfast startup event would have been a budget line six months ago. Now it’s a calendar invite. The whole session is on the Raise YouTube channel; my part starts at 38:25.

The case for no-code

I run design sprints with startups as Invisible Building, and the pattern is always the same. A founder has an idea, a little money, and a quote from an agency for more than the little money. What they need first is an answer: will anyone use this?

You can get that answer without writing code:

  1. A landing page that explains the idea and asks for an email address. If nobody signs up, you have saved yourself a year.
  2. A form and a spreadsheet-database behind it. Most “platforms” are, at the start, a form that puts rows in a table.
  3. An automation that moves things between the two and sends the emails, so it feels like a product to the person using it.
  4. A payment link. The only validation that counts is someone paying.

That stack costs tens of pounds a month and can be built in days. It will creak. It is supposed to creak. By the time it breaks you will know exactly what the real version needs to do, and you will be briefing a developer from evidence instead of hope.

Where no-code stops

It isn’t free of trade-offs. You’re renting someone else’s platform, the costs climb with usage, and anything unusual (real-time features, heavy data, tight security requirements) will hit a wall. No-code is for learning. It is not for ever. The skill is knowing when you’ve learned enough to move on.

Community is the multiplier

The thread through all four talks was that none of this is done alone. Fajar’s maker communities, Ellie’s workshops, Niamh’s thousand-plus entrepreneurs taught to use video. The tools are cheap now, and the hard part is knowing which ones to pick up. That’s what events like this are for, and it’s why I’m glad Raise kept them going when the room closed.

From the archive: written up in 2026 from our notes and records of the time, and dated to when it happened.

← Back to Blog Back to Top ↑

Enjoyed this? Try one of these:

View Full Blog