No Code MVPs: My BelfastJS Talk, and a Product Built in 24 Hours

How to offend a room of JavaScript developers: build a working product with Typeform, a Google Sheet and a no-code API, live, at the Twelve Talks of Christmas.

Published on January 05, 2022

I thought the best way to offend a room full of JavaScript developers would be to talk about no-code. So that’s what I did. My lightning talk from BelfastJS’s Twelve Talks of Christmas, “No Code MVPs”, is now up on their YouTube channel. Seventeen minutes, one product, built in the 24 hours before I went on.

BelfastJS speaker card for David Shawe at The Twelve Talks of Christmas, 13 and 14 December 2021 — BelfastJS’s card for the talk. The Twelve Talks of Christmas, 13 and 14 December 2021.

The event

The Twelve Talks of Christmas was BelfastJS’s first go at a dozen lightning talks over two evenings, online, on 13 and 14 December. I was on the second night alongside Jim Morrison, Sam Donaghy-Bell, Martin McKeaveney of Budibase, Paul McBride and Chris Laughlin. Thanks to the organisers for having a designer in.

The product: Indy

I’d overheard a couple of people saying they couldn’t find local freelancers, because they didn’t know who was available. So: a list of independent creatives in Northern Ireland who are free for work, that anyone can hire from. I gave myself a day, and spent about four hours of it.

Map it. A FigJam board with the only four things the product needs to know: name, skills, availability, email.
Collect it. A Typeform, built in about five minutes, feeding a Google Sheet.
Find out if anyone cares. I shared the form in the NI creative community, in the NI Facebook group, and by messaging people one at a time on LinkedIn. Ten or twelve sign-ups inside 24 hours, one of them while the talks were on. For a directory, that’s a yes.
Show it. NoCodeAPI turns the Google Sheet into an API. A small React app with Chakra UI, adapted from a tutorial, reads it and lists everyone with an email button. I’m not a React developer; it didn’t matter.
Make it look alive. No photos and no wish to lift anyone’s from the internet, so everyone got an avatar from Ready Player Me, cleaned up with a background remover and Photopea.

The live demo half-worked, which is the correct amount for a live demo.

Is this production?

Someone asked exactly that, and no. It is very much prototyping. But prototyping is the bit founders skip. My view, which I know is a controversial one: it’s all about getting people to use something. If the front end looks like artificial intelligence and the back end is me moving things about by hand, some people will call that a con. I call it validation. Get users, prove the idea, raise a little money, then build the dev team.

I spent about eight years as a front-end developer for agencies here, and three more building emails in tables and inline CSS, so I say this with love: I’ll always be a developer at heart, but I’m a CSS person, and low-code and no-code let me move fast on the parts I don’t know. Automate the hassle. Spend your effort where it counts.

Why I care

I do a lot of work with Raise Ventures, the startup accelerator in Belfast, and I see the same thing again and again: a founder with a product in their head and no developers to build it. They don’t need a dev team yet. They need a form, a sheet, and twenty-four hours.

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