#16 DIY Technology tools - Empowering a new generation of makers
I strongly believe that building a strong tech company goes beyond knowing how to code.
You must identify the right problems and find innovative ways to solve them, you need to be great at team building. You need to understand deeply who is your customer and what truly delights them.
Coding/Tech skills are nice to have - but should not be a roadblock for you to build what you want to build. I love to see what is happening around with the rise of No-Code tools. It doesn't mean that technical coding will disappear. It just means that the development process can now happen 10X faster and hopefully at 1/10th of the cost!
As a founder of a deep tech learning startup, I have enabled over 100,000 learners across the globe to pick up coding, machine learning, NLP, CV, and apply it to real-world problems. However, I love how today NoCode tools are crashing all barriers to entry tech learning for everyone.
We have recently brought NoCode into our programs and improve our internal processes significantly with these NoCode tools. Here’s how we are doing it
No Code ML - Obviously.AI -
A few months back, we started a 5-day Data Science workshop for folks who had no prior tech background. The objective was very simple - Let people experience how real-world business problems, solving happens with Data Science. We would take 1 end to end use case and showcase - how a business problem is broken down into a data problem, how to look for the right data and formulate a data science problem, Build an initial hypothesis, perform exploratory analysis, clean the data, build models and share back results with the stakeholders.
We saw an interesting trend - 60% of learners joining us for this workshop had experience of 10 years or more, and had not coded in the recent past!
We did not want to start with Python as the first thing for them - and overwhelm them with syntax when they were excited about problem-solving. That’s when I started looking out for No Code ML tools and found Obviously.ai
The total process of building ML algorithms, explaining results, and predicting outcomes in one single click - was amazing! We connected with Nirmaan and seamlessly integrated the product into our learning experiences. Thanks, Nirmaan for all the support
Our senior executive learners loved it and it was a great way to get them started. 6 months into the program - we gave folks an option to do their Hackathon on AzureML cloud or Obviously.ai versus Python code - unbelievably 80% of learners chose python at that point!
In this case, a NoCode tool proved to be a great starting point in the learning journey! It’s not going to replace everything that’s later there in the program - but it definitely eased people in!
Custom App with Airtable
As a Business owner at GreyAtom, I work day in and out on learner programs, getting them jobs, elevating their experience, pushing them to complete the learning journey, and driving engagement.
A lot of this happens via our homegrown learning platform - Glabs built by our in-house engineering team - 13+ team members at its peak. Getting learners a career pivot has been our ultimate goal and I had this vision of a Job Board within the product - but somehow we were never able to prioritize it. It’s a tough act to prioritize product requirements across Growth, Activation, and Retention.
Recently, one weekend, I happened to start exploring Airtable use cases deeply and it occurred to me that the job board use case was a perfect candidate to be solved with Airtable.
I spent half a day building out a skeletal structure and a POC on Airtable, bringing in the key features I wanted our learners to have
Learners can view All Active Jobs
Learners get notified each time a GreyAtom hiring partner puts up a job on the Job Board
Learners can Apply to All Active Jobs
Greyton Career Coach can see the applications
An Applicant view can be generated for GreyAtom hiring partners
I showed what I built to my team, and they loved it! We took forward and they finished what I had started. Everything happened in less than 15 days. We connected AirTable and Zapier for our workflow automation. Both learners and partners are super happy with the new app and internally cut down the efforts of our career team by at least 6 hours a week! We now have a roadmap for this standalone app!
Had I tried to put this into a development sprint and build cycle - there is no way we could have moved so fast!
Online Learning Community with Mighty Networks
Last week I wrote about the importance of learning communities - https://shwetadoshi.substack.com/p/online-communities-part-1-people
In a nutshell - I strongly believe that the communities will disrupt standalone online education.
Alumni, Personal Stories will grow the community and not pure marketing messages. Peers & Alumni will look at your work more closely than in colleges. They will give references, introductions, recommendations which will act as better credentials than a degree.
The need for online communities and better tooling for community leaders is more intense than it was before.
As I started looking out for ways to build our online community - again, whether we go for an extension to our existing learning product or build a new app, came across a fantastic No Code platform - Mighty Networks where we could start building our community of lifelong learners. Events, Online courses, Discussions, blog - all under 1 product. We got set up in less than 1 week and our community https://g-tribe.greyatom.com/ is less than 45 days old. We are at 1000+ members, growing at the rate of 25 members every day, and have a fantastic line up of events and a great engagement going on.
Again - something I wouldn’t have dared to build myself from the ground up!
Howie Liu for Airtable, Nirmaan Dave for Obviously.ai, Gina Bianchini for Mighty Networks - Thank you for building products that are so impactful !! You are cutting down the build cycles and are making amazing experimentation possible.
With these 3 use cases that have worked so well for us - I am not going to stop at this. And also, I am not going to limit this to myself. I am already starting to think of ways in which thousands of learners who take up our coding programs can benefit from these tools and be even more effective at what they do! It doesn't mean people will stop coding, it doesn't mean we will no longer need any developers. It just means that sometimes, even before we write a single line of code, we test out our hypothesis. Sometimes we write code and sometimes we just integrate with an existing no-code solution.
"We often perceive things that are hard to do as better. Sometimes that’s true. But as these “no-code” tools advance, it will be silly to do it the old way. As creating things on the internet becomes more accessible, more people will become makers. It’s no longer limited to the <1% of engineers that can code resulting in an explosion of ideas from all kinds of people", says Ryan Hoover, founder @ProductHunt and I can’t agree more! We are getting more inclusive.
With No Code - the only thing that stops you from building what you want - is your own imagination. I am looking forward to this new wave of MAKING!! An interesting revolution is about to unfold! Some more tools I am going to try over next few months
Beautifully responsive CMS-driven site using Webflow
Ecommerce shop with Shopify
Web app using Bubble
Mobile app with Thunkable
Internal dashboards and tools with Retool , we currently use Zoho Analytics for most bit
PS: I just have a suggestion - can we call these tools “ DIY Tech tools” vs No Code :)
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