I’m working with a few founders, mostly first-timers, who are going about building the initial experience for their very first customers in an interesting way. Two short tweets:
When it comes to raising capital, being able to demonstrate traction with a few hundred or a few thousand customers quickly is extremely valuable. Ditto when hiring a team or even a technical co-founder.
When it comes to actually going ‘live’, the founder leapfrogs the usual build phase → market phase transition. The founder is both building and marketing simultaneously. It’s a much quicker road to product-market fit.
Finally, when it comes to the actual tech that the founder’s using, a no-code set of tools is typically built by startups building for other small startups. They’re well-thought-out: they make it easy to build visually compelling, data-heavy pages (Notion), they make it easy to ‘glue’ together disparate elements (Zapier, IFTTT), they make it easy to build and engage with an audience (Convertkit), they even make it easy to collect money from that audience (Gumroad, Memberful) – all are things that would otherwise require complicated signup forms, KYC, licensing/commitments, and complicated technical integration.
This tweet captures this dynamic well: