Six No-Code Tools You can Use for Business

I believe we will see more and more $mn+ companies operating with 1-5 employees in this decade. In fact will not be surprised, if a few of them run multiple such companies.

These businesses will be bootstrapped and profitable.

And apart from getting the idea and timing right, a key reason why they will need fewer employees is due to the growing usage of No-Code tools. And with Artificial Intelligence (AI) based no-code tools like ChatGPT and others, this will perhaps happen sooner than later.

Earlier, if one had to develop a digital product or automate a workflow, it was impossible unless one knew to code.

However, with no-code tools now available for various use cases, you can accomplish a lot without doing actual coding.

At UXHack too, we use quite a few no-code tools almost on a daily basis. The six top ones that we use include:

Airtable:

Airtable doesn't replace the database but you can use it as a database for small MVPs, for data operations, and to build simple dashboards. I have lost count of how many experiments and workflows we use Airtable for. 

To give a glimpse of how we use it. Here are a few examples:

• Our TGIF Quiz's question bank is in Airtable
• Our Curated job posts are first added to Airtable where we do some cleansing before it gets published
• We use it to power few forms where we need to take some inputs from our users (these are not core forms): such as Eldorado Feedback, Weekly Challenge winners
• We use it to queue our social media posts
• We have built a few internal dashboards like Budget & Cashflow, and User Onboarding using their interface feature

Figma:

To be honest, I first thought about why people club Figma as a no-code tool. But then realised, it's not just a static screen you can design, you can really build an interactive prototype using Figma. We use it to design screens both for our clients as well as for the UXHack platform.

It also has a plugin marketplace that can help you make use of Figma more effectively.

And with recent dev mode, it has made the handoff between designers and developers easier.

Gumroad:

I have started doing some early experiments on Gumroad. This is an e-commerce platform that you can use to publish and sell simple Digital Products including UI Kits, Tutorials, E-Books, and more. Some independent utilities I have developed are published on my Gumroad channel.

The best part I like about them is the discovery. Once your product crosses 5 sales, they add the product to their discovery library. And so far in my experience, this has been an effective distribution channel for me.

Make (formerly Integromat):

This is a workflow automation SaaS tool. If you want different disparate systems to talk with each other with some logical checks, data cleansing & extraction, this is one powerful tool. The tool also comes in handy if you want to call webhooks at certain intervals. 

Some of the use cases we use it for:

1. We have built an entire Social Media Publishing tool using Make
2. To run periodic jobs by letting it call UXHack webhooks or Third party webhooks. It is far easier to use this rather than maintaining a Redis and Message Queue type infra on our side. At least for our present use cases
3. I use it personally to fetch specific emails from my inbox and process it. This use case powers the Candidate Management Tool
4. Listen to Airtable and other systems we use like ClickUp and further act on it

Notion:

This is our go-to product for creating internal documentation and pages. So a lot of our documents ultimately have one or more such tables to help us give the content more structure.

We also use this to send UX Audit or UX Feedback reports to our clients. 

Previously, we had also used it for a couple of public pages: Jobs @ UXHack and UX Awards 2021

Tally.so:

A more of a recent find. So far the simplest form builder I have found. Very intuitive to create, almost like how one writes a document say in Notion. It has pre-integrations with most of the popular tools like Airtable. Easy to embed as well and also you can listen to submit events using Javascript. Unlike others, this one feels almost part of the page.

Had tested this recently with a Referral flow on TGIF Quiz.

Hope the above list helps you run your experiments. In case you need any help with the above tools, feel free to connect with me