No Code Movement Blog

Small Businesses are Taking Tech Automation into Their Own Hands with the No Code Movement, Are You?

“If your time to you is worth savin’…the times they are a-changin”

Mr. Bob Dylan certainly had no intention of crafting the perfect quote for the no code movement when writing his powerful political movement song of the 60s, but it’s the perfect description of what No Code can do for small businesses.

The No Code (also Low Code) movement is for people who know nothing about building and integrating software, but are tired of duplicating their efforts when using multiple software solutions. Think about the times you’ve had to re-key something into several solutions and all that wasted time and human error that could have been avoided if your software solutions just ‘spoke to each other’. Every small business owner has thought to themselves “there must be a better way, but I don’t know what it is!” No Code is the better way, allowing your data to move between systems and anyone can do it! You no longer need to hire an expensive developer just to populate a pdf, move data into your CRM, automate emails, and so, so much more. The majority of the software you use today can be integrated using No Code solutions and drastically reduce the time you spend on mundane tasks.

Here are two of the more popular use cases I’ve applied to our processes in the past.

Simple example:

1. Initial application completed via webform on a website
2. Data moved into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool
3. Team member notified
4. Confirmation email sent to applicant with next step details

Comprehensive example:

1. Lead collection via Webform on your website > CRM
2. Send a confirmation email to Lead with a pre-populated attachment for e-signature
   1. Notify you when the attachment is returned, create a new folder if necessary, and put the file in the correct folder
3. Generate a Task in your Project Management or CRM solution for your team to follow-up
4. Automatically book a meeting in your calendar with the Lead based on their availability

You can customize this process based on the data collected so you can tailor your emails and internal processes based on the responses or based on your internal requirements.

Not only does No Code allow you to send data between systems, you can also filter, create, delete and save data between systems. At the NOIC, we rely heavily on No Code to manage our BTIF and CTAF grant programs integrating Outlook, Excel, Word, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Podio (CRM) to automate our outreach and document creation processes. This drastically reduces the time we spend on mundane administration of the program, allowing us to support the program participants even more.

For those of you wanting to build apps, No Code is great way to shorten the MVP timeline and prove a concept with initial ROI estimates, before developing a standalone solution. It’s incredibly powerful.

How do you get started? Well, there are a lot of No Code providers out there and the list is going to keep growing as this field matures. Big players like Microsoft and Amazon are starting to build their own Workflow solutions into their applications as well. If you’re just getting started, then the best place to start is with the solutions you already use. A quick Google search will tell you if your applications have any built in Workflow capabilities. When you’ve exhausted the built-in tools, then I would look at Zapier which has a free tier. I’ve also had success with Integromat (free tier as well) as an alternative, but Zapier was the easier tool to get started with. These tools support 1000s of different applications, so you’ll probably have luck finding yours, and Zapier makes it easy to understand what they can do for you based on the apps you want to connect.

“Your old road is rapidly agin’...For the times they are a-changin”

I promise you that the time it takes to learn and use these tools will be returned 100x…seriously 100x. As you become more familiar with No Code, you’re only going to find more and more steps to automate, allowing you to focus on your business, rather than re-keying data. Good luck!