No-Code as a Power-Up in the Infinite Game 🖲 - Issue #27

Hey y'all 👋

Q4 is approaching. Time flies :)

Today we'll talk about a specific cheat code for solo-founders: No-code

No-Code as a Power-Up in the Infinite Game

A couple of months ago I participated in a course about financial fluency.

We talked about the balance sheet, how it ties back into the realities of building a business, and why it is like a canvas of an artist.

The takeaway: the balance sheet tells us about the (creative) decisions of the entrepreneur.

"An entrepreneur is someone with the soul of an artist whose means of expression happens to be business."Bernie Goldhirsh

🤯

Honestly, I was in shock. This quote captures so many things.

• 👷 Entrepreneurship: Going from nothing (0) to something (1). It is the creation of value.
• 🕸 Complexity: Business is an Infinite Game - as per Simon Sinek's definition. You have known and unknown players (= competitors), the rules are changeable (= market dynamics; laws; customer preferences; etc.), and the objective is to keep playing (= staying in business).
• 🎨 Artistry: There are endless opportunities within this complex problem set. How you play them is up to you.

To summarize: Building a business is creative problem-solving in an infinite game.

Problem Solving before 2021: No Code. Eat Shit.

I studied business and marketing. I have no formal training as an engineer or computer scientist.

Up until recently, I would hit a limit of what I could accomplish on my own in the digital world.

I could write. I could market. But I could not build.

...

Yes, you will say that I can Google and try to teach myself how to code. Codecademy, Coursera, etc.

Believe me, I tried at least on 10 separate occasions to pick up the fundamentals of coding. It just didn't click for me.

The learning curve is just too god damn steep. Too many separate buckets of knowledge that you have to master before you can even start thinking about building.

My goal was never to learn a programming language.

My goal was to build projects.

That's why I didn't stick with it and always gave up before I could see results.

...

Then someone told me about no-code. And everything changed ✨

Problem Solving in 2021: Using No-Code as a Power-Up

What is No-Code?

No-code is a category of tools that 'allow even non-technical employees to build and deploy their own applications without writing a single line of code'.

How?

Broadly speaking No-code tools can be split into these buckets:

• 🗄 Databases: A structured collection of all data. Like tables in an excel sheet but with the additional benefit that you can use, manipulate, and work with data from various tables.
• 📊 Visualization: The user interface where people like you and I can interact with the data.
• ⚙️ Logic: A system to implement business logic. Think if IF this THEN that type of rules.
• 🔌 Connectors: The glue. Software that allows you to connect different tools together.

Is it coding?

Some say no: "You don't actually write code"

Some say yes: "No-code is an abstraction similarly to other modern programming languages ... because they are abstracted away from the actual I/O machine code."

...

Whatever you think, it's very useful to people like me.

The Ethos of No-Code: "I Bet I Can Solve This..."

This conversation between a friend and I describes it pretty well 👇

In May I wrote about the notion that online education is like a power-up for life.

Likewise, I would say today that no-code is a power-up for entrepreneurship.

This field is even getting so popular that there is an entirely new category of jobs being created: No-code Operations

If you are looking to upskill. You might want to consider No-code.

How am I using it?

In July I wrote about my marketing funnel automation.

These automations easily save me multiple hours each month. 🤯

Going forward I will experiment with the following:

• 🧮 Accounting: Automated invoice/receipt creation whenever a new sales transaction is recorded + auto-forwarding of PDF invoice to my accounting system
• 📧 Email: Expand email-based course delivery through email + see how I can improve on the customer experience
• 🧰 Product: Build a small-scale product for remote teams (most likely in connection with documentation workflows). If you have any requests/ideas, let me know.

I'll experiment and keep you posted.

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9-minute Podcast About Remote & Documentation

Earlier this month, my friend Reddy asked me to join him for a racket.

What's a racket? A racket is a 9-minute podcast.

The constraint is amazing and makes for a spicy tempo.

Here's the link to the audio recording if you want to get a high-level overview of documentation in the context of remote work 👇

why and how documentation is the key to making remote work 🔑 | Racket

Riffing about 'remote work' with @reddy2go

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Stay healthy, stay happy 🙌

Art