9 Coolest No Code Startups

No Code is being used more and more throughout the world, but can one actually build their business on it? These startups have decided to use the competitive advantage that No Code brings. Because of that, they are able to bring out new versions of their products more quickly than their competitors and adapt well to the ever-changing market conditions.

The list of No Code-based startups is expanding quickly. There are no shortages of ideas and no lack of creativity when it comes to creating these businesses. There is also no need to be writing code.

In this article, we will highlight 9 No Code startups that you should be paying attention to right now. These companies have made a creative leap into a new area in which they can thrive by using no coding at all!

Qoins: Making Paying off Debt Easier

How does it work?

Qoins is an app-based financial platform that helps people pay off their debt more easily and efficiently through automated, personalized ways. Qoins’ features such as payroll deductions and round-ups on everyday purchases automate the process of making payments towards one’s debt.

For example, when you buy a cone of ice cream for $1.75, the app charges you $2.00 instead and sends the $0.25 to your creditors. Easy! Using this app, one can take some of the mental load that comes with being indebted.

Additionally, financial coaches that work for the company provide each user with a personalized savings plan for reaching their financial goals.

Qoins was built with Bubble

Bubble has helped the founders to test their initial idea and iterate quickly on their user interface. Moreover, the team behind Qoins claims that the platform scales even better than they originally envisioned.

As the startup got more traction, Qoins was still using Bubble for major parts of the business, as it has helped them to accomplish things that typically would require a team of developers. Even today, the business is mostly based on Bubble, even though some of its aspects have been redone with traditional code.

Constructing a successful business with Bubble

Some cool facts about what Qoins has achieved so far:

• $12 million of debt repaid through the app
• Raised a funding round of $750,000 in 2018
• Won a $50,000 cash prize at the Fintech South conference (biggest cash (non-equity based) prize for fintech companies in the USA).

According to the founder of Qoins, Nate Washington, the number of businesses based on No Code will only skyrocket in the future.

Comet: Connecting Trusted IT Freelancers with Businesses in Need

How does it work?

Comet is a one-stop shop for tech and data freelancers who want to be able to find work from the comfort of their own home. Not only does Comet provide an opportunity for these talented individuals, it also provides companies with access to some seriously skilled people, which can come in handy if they're looking for engineers or teams on short notice.

Its working principle differs from other freelance marketplaces such as Upwork or Fiverr, as Comet only lists attentively vetted workers, with having gotten several tens of thousands of applicants, but only listing ~1700 of them in 2018.

This approach creates a more welcoming environment for the companies looking, as they no longer need to worry about whether the freelancer they're hiring can be trusted to deliver.

Additionally, it bolsters a sense of pride for the freelancers accepted onto the platform, who now have a showcase for their skills.

Comet can also build you a freelancer-based team for your digital project (a designer, a developer and a manager, for example), which we think is especially cool.

Comet was built with Bubble

Comet scaled to $800,000 of average monthly revenue with a platform built entirely with Bubble. Although it isn't clear what part of the current solution runs on the No Code platform, it is probably still being used for a significant amount of the application.

Whatever the case may be, Comet is a clear example that coding is not absolutely essential to build a successful, mid-sized digital business.

Comet's rise to fame

In 2018, the startup raised a $12.8 million investment round that gave Comet a significant boost. The company is still alive and kicking to this day.

FiveTeams: Anonymous Marketplace for Passive Job Hunting

How does it work?

FiveTeams is a marketplace that connects highly-skilled employees from respected international tech companies and recruiters that are looking to grab these experts for their own firms.

Even though it might sound like any run-of-the-mill recruitment platform, this one has a couple of twists that make it unique.

Firstly, FiveTeams focuses on passive job searching: the professionals that register on the platform are not necessarily tired of their employer but might be willing to change sides if they received a significantly higher salary.

Compensation negotiations are a common pain point in recruitment, but this platform is based on a very simple solution to the problem. Users enter what salary would make them consider a new workplace, while recruiters can adjust what range they are ready to spend.

Secondly, the platform focuses on making the process of recruitment fair by making the user profiles anonymous. Users are suggested to recruiters based on their skills and experience.

If an employer is interested in a candidate, the latter can then choose if they want to reveal themselves and start a conversation with that particular company.

With a process like this, there is a lesser chance of discrimination in terms of age, race, gender, etc.

Companies start campaigns to poach passive talents which are then displayed to suitable candidates in a matter of seconds.

The platform's average time to first application is under 6 minutes.

FiveTeams was built with No Code

The recruitment platform was built with a relatively wide stack of No Code tools:

• Webflow for the landing page and the content management system
• Bubble for the recruitment web app itself
• Twillio for real-time SMS outreach to talents
• A combination of Sendgrid and Mailerlite for transactional emails
• Zapier for process automations
• Algolia for searching and processing of complex data
• Stripe for payments

Receiving state funding for a No Code business

At the end of 2020, the startup was given the Berlin Startup Grant, which is backed by the city of Berlin and the European Union. The aforementioned programme is an early-stage startup accelerator.

Currently, the FiveTeams boasts more than 10.000 talents signed up on their platform, with the number increasing by about 10% on a weekly basis.

Lambda School: An Online Coding School Based on No Code

How does it work?

Lambda School is an online coding course provider that claims to be somewhere in between a simple bootcamp and a full-fledged university program.

The value proposition is quite simple - an online way to learn coding which would provide more practical skills than a coding degree or a bootcamp, with the price and duration being somewhere in the middle.

There is a very cool catch though - you do not have to pay anything upfront. The price of a Lambda School program can reach $30,000, however, a graduate will only have to pay after they get signed for a job in IT that pays more than $50,000/year.

Once the graduate is employed, they will pay up to 17% of their income for two years (or shorter, if they cover the cost of the course).

We believe that this principle is excellent, as it rewards high performers who try their best while protecting those who are less fortunate.

If graduates get a well-paying job or a promotion, they can pay off their debt more quickly, but if their income falls below $50k, their payments are paused.

The No Code foundation of Lambda School

Lambda School was built on a variety of No Code tools:

• Typeform for student applications that require conditional logic, in the form of a quiz
• Calendly for scheduling entry interviews easily
• Zapier to send data about the applicants to SalesForce and power automated emails according to the status of the prospective/accepted student
• Wordpress with the Learndash plugin to make the website and the actual coding courses work

The fact that a coding school that's set up solely with No Code makes us feel like both No Code and traditional coding have a place in the 21st century and both are here to stay.

A multi-million No Code-based company

Just last year, in 2020, the company raised a new investment round of $74M.

Even though has not been publicised how much the company is valued at, it is certainly more than the $150 million that it was worth in 2019.

Last year, the company had ~3000 students enrolled that were taking live classes. Even though that might not seem like a lot, the fact that the classes are live and not on-demand makes the whole venture more difficult to scale.

Lambda School is reported to have had around 150 employees as of last year.

Rebel Book Club: A Worldwide Book Enthusiast Club

How does it work?

Rebel Book Club is a planet-wide, subscription-based book club that operates on a combination of offline and online interaction between its members.

Upon signing up, members can vote on a non-fiction book that the whole club will read for the upcoming month. After reading the book, they're free to discuss it with other members through various channels.

The club also hosts events (both offline and online) where the members can engage in networking, find like-minded people and take part in creative workshops.

No Code tools that make Rebel Book Club possible

The Rebel Book Club platform is built with a number of No Code tools:

• Strikingly for making the website
• Typeform for the process of signing up new members
• GoCardless for orchestrating member subscription payments

How successful is Rebel Book Club?

The club currently has 950 active members and generates £10,000 of monthly recurring revenue.

Incomee: Easier Accounting and Billing for Freelancers

How does it work?

Incomee is an invoicing and accounting platform for freelancers. No need to stress about confusing, cluttered spreadsheets.

With a simple design, Incomee does it all:

• Track what you earn in payments from multiple clients in only a few minutes of work
• Manage your freelance business processes on one dashboard across invoices and proposals, quotes, expenses and receipts
• Send visually pleasing invoices

Bubble as the basis of Incomee

Not all of the founders of the firms mentioned in this article are new to software development.

Guglielmo Pardo, the maker of Incomee, has worked as a front-end developer and a product designer. This SaaS platform is one of his projects.

Mr Pardo was looking for a No Code platform that would enable him to quickly build an MVP and allow him to customise both the front and back-end of it. Bubble was exactly what he needed.

Incomee as a bootstrapped business

As of July 2020, the platform had 1000 free and 20 premium (paid) users.

Guglielmo takes pride in the fact that he and his team are building the tool by themselves. They are independent of outside investors and promise to stay that way.

Dividend Finance: Simplifying the Financing of Home Improvements

How does it work?

The main concept of Dividend Finance was to digitalise loan application for people who want to modernise their homes, by cutting down on red tape and making the whole process more convenient for all.

The company provides its services in almost all of the United States, with the 5 exceptions being Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska.

Making $1bn of transactions yearly with No Code

Using the Bubble No Code tool, Dividend Finance had initially built a business on two different digital solutions.

On one side, they made a solar panel financing platform for homeowners wanting to make their houses more sustainable, and on the other side, a CRM for the companies that install the financed panels. (The company has expanded into other types of home improvements over the years).

Having secured various funding deals with banks such as Citibank and Credit Suisse which raised the company over $330 million, Dividend Finance have processed over $1 billion in loans through a solution built with Bubble.

Divident Finance is the only company in this list that haven't built their digital solution themselves, relying instead on AirDev, a No Code agency.

Plato: Training Your Employees Online

How does it work?

The final No Code startup that will be featured here is Plato.

Plato is an online platform for employee development. It connects specialists of various technical fields like engineering, software development, etc., with mentors from world-class companies.

Plato does more than provide a match. They create meaningful matches that address certain challenges or problems and deliver goal-orientated outcomes.

The mentors focus on helping with specific challenges that the novice specialists face.

Employers, on the other hand, can track the progress of their team members that are taking part in the mentorship programme.

Plato's Bubble-built foundation

Plato has been using Bubble for a long time - their back office, progress tracking system and event-determined landing pages are powered by it.

No Code in YCombinator

The company was taken on by YCombinator 2016, one of the most famous startup accelerators out there.

A year later, Plato was officially founded. The new venture got $13 million from YCombinator to launch their operations.

The platform hosted over 20,000 mentorship sessions in 2020.

Can You Build a Successful, Scalable Business With No Code?

We hope that the stories of these notable startups that have built either a part of or their entire business on No Code platforms will serve as a confident "Yes, you can!".

Some of the 9 ventures we featured are more successful, some less, but they all demonstrate the potential that No Code has for serious success.

The owners of these companies chose No Code for the ease of software development and the speed at which updates can be released. They no longer need a team of developers to build one, or even multiple versions of their products with No Code-based tools and platforms like Bubble.

The No Code tools that these startups are built on are often multi-million dollar businesses themselves.

The next generation of successful ventures will be built by people with no technical expertise at all (even though it still helps a lot).

By having a competitive advantage that No Code brings, companies both big and small can break into new, untapped markets faster than their competition.

With the ability to adapt quickly as market conditions change, these startups will only grow stronger in the future.

Are you ready to be like the ventures mentioned in this list? Let's get in touch and start working on your No Code startup!

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References

Cover Image: Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Intro Image: Photo by Proxyclick Visitor Management System on Unsplash

Image #1: Photo by Lambda School

Outro image: Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash

Bubble App of the Day: Qoins. Bubble.io

Comet grabs $12.8 million for its engineering freelancer platform. Tech Crunch

Investing in Bubble startups. Bubble.io

Bubble App of the Day: Nóz Delivery. Bubble.io

Lambda School raises $74M for its virtual coding school where you pay tuition only after you get a job. Tech Crunch

9 Examples of Successful No-Code Projects In 2021. Kibi.One

Magic Numbers. Rebel Book Club

Bubble App of the Day: Incomee. Bubble.io

The 10 Most impressive startups built with no-code. No-code.ch

2021: What Happened in the No Code Industry This Year? Code or No Code