The Secret to Launching a Startup Without a CTO

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. As entrepreneurs, we must always keep our eye on future trends, especially related to technologies, because they may cut costs, improve efficiencies, improve profitability, or introduce competitors or opportunities to pivot.

Sean Weisbrot: That's why I decided to invite today's guest, Darian Parrish, the co-founder of Red Seattle, to come on and talk with me about an emerging software trend called No-Code. Red Seattle focuses on advancing underappreciated technologies by identifying new markets, applications, and customers. And before Red Seattle, Darian has co-founded and led multiple companies at the cutting edge of fintech and AI. Specifically, we talk about what is no code, what is the history of no code, and what made it necessary or viable. Are there any live products or platforms using no code? What are the pros and cons of using no code? Are there any no-code frameworks? What exactly do you need to get started? How exactly can you get payments into node code systems now? Will I know code become the norm and what are the next ten years look like for no code? I hope you enjoy the show.

Sean Weisbrot: So, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today about no code. This is a very interesting technological development in recent times, so hopefully the audience can gain some value from it. Thank you for joining us.

Sean Weisbrot: what is it you're doing right now that makes you the right person to talk about no-code?

Darian Parrish: Absolutely. So, at Red Seattle, we're trying to help underappreciated technology companies. And those are normally emerging technology companies at the early stages of the technology adoption lifecycle that there's unrealized demand for, and generally because the consumer is unaware of the use cases of that technology.

Darian Parrish: So, no-code is one of those underappreciated technologies that has a lot of potential to speed up the development process, save on cost, and just solve for the shortage of software developers. In very early innings, and we haven't seen the type of rapid adoption one might expect for something of such value. And so that's what we call something an under-appreciated technology.

Sean Weisbrot: All right. Great. Thank you for the intro. So, what is no-code?

Darian Parrish: So, no code is a way to build software without writing any code. So, anyone from a business background or non-technical background can now build software. And that sounds like magic. Maybe. But it's something that's, you know, slowly unfolding and the capabilities are increasing. You know, , as we go along this journey.

Sean Weisbrot: What's the history of No Code and why did it become something necessary and or viable?

Darian Parrish: Yeah. So, no code has been around for a long time without that name. So, for example, WordPress for building websites is a CMS or a content management system that's been around and actually serves up somewhere around a third or more of the websites worldwide right now. So, there's a lot of people have been using no code without really calling it no code. If we go back even further before the internet, just desktop OS's or operating systems are a version of no code. Whereas before you'd use the command line to interact with a computer, because ultimately you need to be sending those zeros and ones, you know, talking in the machine language. So, every time you abstract and add another layer of abstraction, that's another version of no code. One might call it low code because it just eliminates a certain amount of coding. But any time you still have to do some coding, that would be called low code versus no-code.

Sean Weisbrot: I have to say I'm a little bit blown away because I've used WordPress for many years, and obviously I've used desktop operating systems. I never thought of these things as no code solutions.

Darian Parrish: Yeah, I think that's something that we hear a lot, and it's mainly because they just become such a commonplace, you know, that's what we think will happen with no code as well. Eventually, we'll stop calling it no code. And you know, when Jeff Bezos just retired from Amazon this week, he said some of the innovations that seemed really tough and challenging early on. And like no one understood them. His goal was that someday people would yawn at them. They would just find them, you know, mundane. And that's the way we think. You know, most of these innovations happen is there's a lot of doubters, there's high skepticism.

Darian Parrish: And then over time, people start, you know, using them and you go past those early adopters to majority adopters, then it becomes the norm. And I think, you know, you saw that with operating systems, you've seen that with WordPress. And there's even some other examples, such as Shopify, where you can build an e-commerce site very rapidly. You don't have to write any code to do it. You just drag and drop. And this goes back to, again, the WordPress kind of mentality of the Wysiwyg editor is the what you see is what you get to drag and drop visual editor.

Sean Weisbrot: So, I guess for the purposes of this episode, I'd like to talk about no code beyond the operating system, beyond the WordPress, but rather into the development of actual platforms and applications. So, we'll get into that in a little bit. But first, I want to ask, what are the pros and cons of using no code within that context, and obviously not the WordPress and the other, the more advanced things that are coming up.

Darian Parrish: You know, that's where I'm most excited as well, Sean, is on the application builders. So, you can actually build software with these no-code platforms. And that's more interesting because it enables people to work on all types of technical projects. Whereas, you know, WordPress was just one subset of technical challenges, and that was building a website. Now we want people to build internal tools. We want them to be able to launch an entire business and manage the whole tech stack and end. And so that's something that Low-code is enabling.

Darian Parrish: So, one of the pros of that is being able to be an entrepreneur or startup and be able to do that as a non-technical founder, and non-technical co-founders. Whereas traditionally you'd have to go out in search of a CTO or a technical founder or co-founder. And this actually applies also not just to startups, but as you get in the larger orgs, there's been a real struggle for talent right now. There's, you know, massive shortage of software developers.

Darian Parrish: For context, in the US, there's about, you know, 4 to 5 million college graduates each year and only about less than 5% or 250,000 of those might have a CS degree or a computer science education. You know, the problem is there's nearly 400,000 new jobs. And so, there's no shortage of at least 150,000in the recent years. So that's you know, one of the pros of no code is you're enabling the shortage to be solved in a way where folks that are not traditionally trained in computer science, maybe just having more of an analytical mind can solve the logic. Kind of like the if and statements you know, that you would do when you were writing code. You do it in a visual way instead in a logical editor.

Darian Parrish: And so that's one of the main pros on the cons side. Really the only con is, is functionality and what the capabilities are. You know, certain things can't be done in no code, and it might be a decade before they can be done in no code. So that might be some of the really heavy traffic loads that you would have at a social network like Twitter or Facebook, or if you're very large, org and you have some pretty sophisticated network or even specific solutions to your organization that wouldn't be in a generalized application otherwise, you know, the pros outweigh the cons.

Sean Weisbrot: You had said in our intro call that there was a clone of Twitter made using no code. So, if you said that this is more of a future application where it's high traffic if it's been designed, why can't it be used at scale?

Darian Parrish: So, one of the challenges with that is just the teams behind these application builders getting sufficient size and funding to be able to make it scalable in that capacity. So of course, they can deploy on AWS or a public cloud, Azure, or Google Cloud as well. But one of the challenges is building for something that's that scalable. When the majority of their users are small businesses or startups, it takes a lot of resources and money to commit to solving that problem.

Darian Parrish: So, I would imagine that these application builders like bubble and others until they raise tens of millions of dollars more, which companies like Web Flow for websites has done now they're able to get scalability. Some of the bigger projects we'll need, but it's just unrealistic for such a small company to be able to build in that scale at this stage.

Sean Weisbrot: So, you're talking about Bubble. What was the name of it?

Darian Parrish: Correct. That's sort of the largest general-purpose application builder at the moment. They were founded in 2012, really launched in about 2015. They have over 400,000 users. And, uh, one of their biggest customers has processed $1 billion of loans on their platform, a fintech company. That's their claim to fame right now, at the moment, being sort of the first mover. One of the challenges with Bubble is that they're to use the software. It's fairly difficult. Um, there's a steep learning curve.

Darian Parrish: And that's one of the hurdles that most pessimists see is something that has to be overcome is some of these are would say that it's almost as difficult to use this as just writing code. Now, I've used these tools and I've written code, and I know that not to be true. Um, it's still there's still a very steep learning curve to bubble, but it's not like having to learn a programming language. So, it's um, going in the right direction on the spectrum of high level of difficulty and, uh, time consuming to learn versus being a little bit faster and easier to learn.

Sean Weisbrot: When I think of a no code application builder like you mentioned just now, bubble and I, I've never looked at one. I've never used one. So obviously I don't know. So, my question is based on assumption, is it like having a variety of different like UI components, like buttons and things and you just say, oh, I want a button that's, you know, with this hex code, or I want a button of this pixel size, like, how exactly does it enable you to not code, but still have the versatility that you want?

Darian Parrish: Yeah, that's exactly it, Sean, is there's components in some would view this as building blocks that you can drag and place, almost like a set of Legos. Now the challenge is once you build those visual elements. Sometimes there's default functionality built into them. For example, a button. It's going to have all the properties that say on hover, you know, it shows that your mouse is over it. If you click it, it's going to go somewhere, but then it's on the developer to decide what happens when that button is clicked. So where does this take the user? What is the what is the workflow here if you will?

Darian Parrish: And so, for Bubble, they call them developers because you actually do have to come up with the logic. And there's even a database component that's again simplified in no code format. But you have to say what is the data type and the data field that I want to return. When someone clicks submit, I need to return them a message. And where is that live. So, there is that kind of logic. And that's why I mentioned you do want the user to have or the developer will be consistent here, uh, to have a creative or an inquisitive mind to, to want to follow the logic and workflow.

Darian Parrish: And the reason why we call it like it's still appropriate to call them developers is they do develop software. They are just someone who's developing on Bubble, they're developing. They're just not writing code. So, you wouldn't call them a coder, but you still call them a developer because they're building an application on top of no code. That's one of those things where you just got to dive in and try it. Um, some of them have a slightly different working model for what the visual programming is before no code, the term no code folks used to call these visual program editors. That's because you just do things visually. You drag and drop.

Darian Parrish: So, some have even simplified it further, where you upload a PowerPoint or something, and that turns into an application. It's just a set of slides and maybe that turns into swipes on a screen of a phone. The other option that's common is you connect it to a spreadsheet, whether it's Google Sheets or, uh, Microsoft Excel, that enables it to have some sort of flow where you can group buckets of data, and those will show in different, you know, areas on the site. Um, that simplifies it as well, because you don't need to control the database. The spreadsheet is essentially the database behind there.

Sean Weisbrot: So, this sounds really interesting. And it's cool that there's frameworks like Bubble. And I think frameworks are really cool. And it's something that I'm trying to instill in the development of my own product, kind of how to create something that is so versatile that anyone can take it and make it what they need it to be. So I love that this has risen up. For those of us who are a little bit more shy, I guess, about getting their hands dirty. What exactly do you really need to know technologically to get started with a framework like Bubble? You mentioned business logic. What is business logic? How do you make decisions based on this?

Darian Parrish: Yep. So, what I would say is to start, if you are a business user, the best no-code tool would be like an analytics platform. That is no code. So that would somewhat guide you through the data types that you could import. And then it would automatically generate, you know, graphics or something somewhat even call something like Tableau a bit of no-code type of analytics platform, although they have very sophisticated functionality. One of the things that I think will help the no-code space, and this is to your question of how does someone who's really non-technical know technical background, strictly a business user.

Darian Parrish: How do they get started the way some of the companies building these know code platforms are thinking about it is they want to decide whether their identity is on the limited functionality side, but very simple and easy to use from a user experience perspective. Or do they want to be able to be a full-scale, you know, generalized application builder, which provides that increased functionality but is also very complex and difficult to use? So, what I would say is you really don't go to bubble and expect to crank something out really quickly.

Darian Parrish: For something like Bubble, you would go there and say, I'm going to spend two weeks going through all their tutorials and really get to know how to use this platform. And the benefit is, two weeks is still a lot shorter than a four-year college degree in computer science. And so that's why it's so powerful. But if you want to get started in a couple of hours and be on your way, you would go to something like glide, which can be connected again to a Google Sheet or a dollar, which is meant to be more like a slide deck that helps build the application. And so those types would be for purely business users.

Darian Parrish: And all you would want to understand is what is the application trying to accomplish, and how am I going to guide the user of this application throughout those steps. And so again thinking in the slide example, you'd say what's the first thing they're going to do. Let's call that slide one. And that'll be page one. And then all I need to do is have a transition. Or a button click that takes them to that next experience on slide two. And so really, there's not a whole lot of thought that has to go into that logic. And that's why, you know, picking the right tools of critical importance to the no-code space. And sometimes, you know, the space has been challenged just because it can't get out of its own way.

Darian Parrish: You know, they try and do too much with the tools, trying to do too much. It doesn't help that the first, you know, major one was sort of a generalized one and didn't keep it simple enough. Now quite a few have cropped up. There's one called v1, v.1, and that's sort of like a play on the version. One of, you know, for a startup, almost like just making an MVP. And so, the idea is to make it so simple that they even automate the deployment to the App Store. So, you know, if you're totally non-technical, you can come in there, build something, get it on the App Store, and do that all in a day or two.

Sean Weisbrot: So, you mentioned that Bubble has a client that is processed a billion dollars-worth of payments through this no-code application that they've built on. Bubble. Did bubble have these components that enabled payments, or did they have to come in with some third-party system and integrate it with the no-code application they built in order to support payments? Because there's no reason to build anything for a business unless you're going to make money from it. So how easy is it to actually connect payments and facilitate payments using these systems right now?

Darian Parrish: Yeah, that's a great question. So, most of it is done via API. So, if someone wants to process payments probably not. In this loan case, you wouldn't use stripe. But let's just say you have a merchant, you know type of business. Use the stripe API on bubble and then you hand handle it the way you would with WordPress. The way you would with web flow is you just integrate the stripe API and your set in WordPress. You normally do that through ten lines of code that you copy and paste. And in Bubble, it's you just click a button and say, you know, give my stripe account access.

Darian Parrish: And so, APIs have even been no codified in no code platforms where the API is sort of handled on the back end for you and you don't implement it like a developer, you just click a button and say connect. And so that's been very useful. And I think, you know, that's how you would normally process payments. To be honest, I don't know exactly how this specific company, uh, processed their billion in payments. Um, but I would imagine, you know, they did it through an API. And I think Bubble, one of the co-founders, Emmanuel, did mention that initially, they didn't have, uh, what this client needed. And they were, you know, they built it for them just because they knew they were going to be a showcase customer.

Sean Weisbrot: I saw a video of an AI, and I think there's a demo you can use as well where you say out loud or you type what you want and it will it'll build a visual for you and it's clickable. You can use it.

Darian Parrish: So, there's one called Voice Flow. We're pretty, uh, interested in that specific technology in with the new, uh, natural language models that are coming at DeepMind and as well as OpenAI. There's really no reason why that can't be possible. Um, the challenge is when there's something that's misinterpreted, you need a human there to, uh, catch that. And that's just the normal quality assurance or, uh, that would be done in any software process. But I think that's very powerful.

Darian Parrish: Um, again, this is going to be one of those things where when you look at the spectrum of limited functionality to high functionality, it's got to start on the limited functionality side, because people can only talk in such specificity at the moment unless they're, you know, maybe they're reading it and they've had it scripted, but then you're typing it out anyways. You might as well, you know, put it in. But I think it's very powerful. Probably first for brainstorming, maybe not even the MVP level, but just the idea phase. Where I can talk and I can see things happen. And maybe that's, you know, spurs something in my mind that helps me be creative.

Darian Parrish: But if I'm going to read a set of instructions so I can be very detailed, um, you know, I'm writing that down. Anyways, it might be easier for me to just do it by hand. So, some people would say, that's just really novel. You know, that's sort of flashy. It might get some more people interested and engaged. And I think, you know, that's all the better if it does. But for the most part, until we can really solve the problem of, you know, thoughts being coherent and not needing to write them down and really, you know, technical way, I don't see it solving a huge challenge near term. Um, now, when you use something like Neurolink where you can just plug into your brain, then that might get interesting because then it then, you know, there's not this pathway of, of mind to speech that sometimes ambiguously this happens. I think it'd be better maybe a couple of decades or maybe even just one decade down the road. But I'm definitely interested in that technology.

Sean Weisbrot: So why don't you talk a little bit more about the detail of what the next five years looks like, if this industry, and then we can get into the ten you're talking about with Neurolink?

Darian Parrish: So, the next five years I think looks a lot, a lot of the same other than, you know, slowly increasing adoption. One of the things we talked about on our last call was that there's certain catalysts that come in there, often some large event for remote work tools. It was the pandemic. It wasn't orchestrated by someone in a startup. You know, if something doesn't happen in the next five years, that's a major event that serves as a catalyst. The onus will be on the community of no code to help drive that forward, and sometimes that's just having a presence to get adoption. There are a few no-code communities. There's a maker pad, no code founders, no code CEO, no code HQ. Those are all no-code communities that generally the list, all the tools, they'll have some sort of a chat, whether it's a slack channel or a circle community where people can come get help with the challenges they're working on.

Darian Parrish: So that's, I think, one of the things that helps propel things forward in the next five years. Another thing is there's a lot of agencies that are being built around no code, just like there would be, you know, around traditional software development. Um, when some folks are looking to have an app, you know, develops, they'll, they'll find an agency and they'll get a quote and they'll be, you know, 10 to 20 agencies all trying to fight for the business, you know, that helps drive costs down. Similar things happening with no code is that for the platforms that are a little more complex, like Bubble, you might, you know, Sean, show up and say, let me consider bubble for my product and say, you show up and say, well, my problem is that bubble is still too much. You know, I'm not seeing it. It's going to take me two weeks. I don't have two weeks. I host a really great podcast and I need to, you know, continue to focus on that and build the business channels out. I'm not going to learn bubble.

Darian Parrish: And so, you would go to an agency and they might say, well, we'll charge you, but it's going to be one-tenth of the cost of hiring another software team to build this from code in the ground up. And so that's the value to you. And they'll say, not only is it only going to, you know, we're going to give you 70, 80, 90% off on the cost. We're going to get it to you maybe ten times faster. We'll get it to you in two weeks rather than the six months you'd normally expect. And so that that's what you're going to see happening in the next, you know, five years where where there's opportunity, there will be businesses formed. That's the agency model around no code. Seeing that disconnect where there's people who want to use these no-code platforms because of the cost benefits because of the time savings, but they're not ready to invest their time in learning the platforms, or they run into challenges and just would rather to pay someone else to do it. And so that's another trend we think will be happening and continue to grow in the next five years.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you think there would be value in creating a website that has some sort of. AI based quiz that allows people to tell it what they want to do, and then it will tell them no code is good for you, and if so, you should use this platform. Or no code is not good for you. You should go build it natively. Or have you seen anything like that? And if not, is that a good idea?

Darian Parrish: I haven't seen anything like that in Sean. That's a great idea. In fact, you know that that might be something I get to work on in the coming weeks because I think we've sort of been asking that to the companies themselves. You know, what is your value proposition to customers? What can and can't they do? This is where it gets really I don't want to say personal for the founders, but they have this vision, right? And this goes back to, you know, decade long or however long a vision of a founder might be.

Darian Parrish: We don't want to try and get in the way of that and sound like we're questioning it. We just want to understand where they sit in the mix, because the reality is there's other players, there's alternatives. They're not always direct substitutes, but there are other players in potentially better options based on fitment for that customer need. And so, I think it would be a great, you know, idea what you're suggesting. And then it could even, you know, suggest the appropriate tool, not just say is this possible in no code or not likely the case is.

Darian Parrish: Most of the small projects will be possible in. No code question is which is the correct tool? And that's not something I've seen on any of these sites I've mentioned. They generally just have a very large list. Most of them are searchable. So, you could say I need database. I want to link it to a spreadsheet and that will pull up some of them. In that sense, it's kind of like the survey you can put in some of the criteria, but it's not as robust as really making sure there's tool and customer need alignment.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, if you build the tool, don't forget to have a Powered by Sidekick or something over there.

Darian Parrish: Absolutely.

Sean Weisbrot: You were talking about agencies growing up around the idea of developing no code projects for companies at a fraction of the cost, but if the goal of an agency is to maximize profit, then why would they choose to charge somebody a 10th of the price when they could charge 80% of the price and still present value?

Darian Parrish: Yeah. Great question, Sean. And initially, you're absolutely right. I've looked at some of these agencies in the prices are quite high. And I think one of the reasons being is because, like you said, they have this spread that they can, you know, take essentially as much of the spread as they want before the customer becomes aware that they're sort of not getting as good of a deal as they expect. This is what we see in most developing markets where, you know, if you think about the financial markets, you need a market maker that helps decrease the spreads by taking either side of the trade. And that's something that we need to see happening here. It won't be quite like a market maker, but with increased competition where that tends to close the spread a bit. I think we'll see that, mainly because of how easy it is for some folks to learn this tool and become a developer on Bubble, let's say, or a dollar or the one, uh, all these know code tools or even just become, um, when I haven't mentioned yet is Zapier, which is very useful for workflows and integrations.

Darian Parrish: That's something where I've started to see just freelancers. All they do is set up Zapier for customers, as people are finding out how relatively easy it is to learn these tools. That's why I think there'll be so, so much supply on the agency side or on the freelance side because again, you don't have to go through a four-year degree. You don't have to go get a graduate degree. Even, you know, some of these things that normally you're stuck ten years of schooling with a lot of debt that can be bypassed, you can come out of high school and already start making six figures. And that's something that, you know, has been very hard to do before and has never been easier with no code.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I've definitely seen this around Microsoft Teams. For example, I'm actually going to be interviewing someone tomorrow. Uh, but his company creates apps for the Microsoft Teams marketplace. There's people that do these for slack and for Salesforce, for example. Any platform that comes out that says, hey, you know, we're we're open, you can build on top of us. There will be companies that are developed to make plug-ins or make things easier for you. Where these companies decided it wasn't necessary for them to develop these functions natively.

Darian Parrish: Yeah, I think that makes sense. It's just the natural life cycle. And, you know, it's not always clear the duration, but it's something, you know, we got to let it run its course.

Sean Weisbrot: So, I would say for everyone listening, another piece of advice I could give you is. Look for future potential trends and wait for it to start. And the minute it starts, build a company surrounding providing services to the companies that want to be a part of that industry because nobody else knows it. It's like I've said this before, when you look at the gold rush, there were people who were going and they were trying to pan for gold in the rivers and all that. But the people who made the most money were the ones like Levi's, who were creating the clothing for those people to wear. Right. The people selling the shovel.

Darian Parrish: That's another story from finance that everyone likes to tell because there's a lot of such businesses in the B2B space. Or you think about semiconductors, do you need to own the N.D.P.? Do you need to be an Intel and AMD and Nvidia, or do you want to be an Applied Materials or Lam research that have the machines for wafer fabrication? Do you want to sell to everyone? Um, that's rushing in to the sort of competitive crowded market. And sometimes it's a great place to be. But now in a world with a lot of brand power, it's you know, sometimes it's actually good to be in touch with the end user. So, I think there's some validity to, to both sides of the coin.

Sean Weisbrot: So, let's look out 5 to 10 years from now. What is no code look like then?

Darian Parrish: Yeah. So, 5 to 10 years. Um, you know the further out the harder it is to predict. Um, you know, I might sound like that gentleman who is talking about flying cars being around now, and I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of what he was saying he got. Right. Um, you know, it's from the book. Weren't there any flying cars? You know, he talked about our data being stored in a centralized location, underground, you know, in a temperature and humidity-controlled area a lot. You know, like describing a data, a modern data center to some extent. And the most are not underground. You know, when I, when I look out 5 to 10 years, I would say there's certain things that I have a little higher level of confidence in. And that's just that we're going to be using no-code tools.

Darian Parrish: We're going to be using more of them. We're going to see more people building on no code just because the technology is there. And there's no reason not to. I think, again, going back to the cons, the only true con we've been able to see so far is the amount of functionality and scalability besides the normal stuff like learning curves, which is, you know, a problem in other areas. You know, training is, is an education's sort of an unsurmountable, you know, hurdle. Um, until we can just, you know, plug in our minds and do a download so we will see more people building on no code tools and, uh, no code tools will be more prevalent.

Darian Parrish: The other thing I would say in the 5-to-10-year range is that we see some of the bigger players in the space, uh, in software in general, whether it's Microsoft, Salesforce, or Google, they will have their own no-code products. And Google, I think they already acquired Appsheet. We've had, you know, a few Salesforce acquire some, some no code companies. And so, we'll see more competition from the majors. That makes a lot of sense because, um, some of the larger institutions only trust them to provide tools. You're a Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan Chase. You already have contracts with, um, Azure, AWS and Microsoft and maybe IBM. You're going to continue to trust them to provide those no-code tools to your team that's for use in the enterprise.

Darian Parrish: So, similar to a startup where the value proposition is save time and cut costs. It's the same thing for internal tools, even if it's just a low code tool, which again, I think that's a natural progression. So, we've talked mainly about no code. No code, but low code. Low code is a nice bridge. It helps solve those more complex problems in larger organizations. But just it helps put the building blocks there so the developers on staff can get there faster. And that means hiring fewer developers within that organization. And then the talent shortage isn't as much of a problem for those high-skilled jobs. So, getting there faster, you know, opportunity cost is one of the biggest things to be focused on in business. That's why I think this has so much traction. And we'll start to see real growth in the 5 to 10-year time horizon.

Darian Parrish: So, to summarize, what I said about 0 to 5 years is it looks very similar. I don't expect us to hit that catalyst event that just has this rocketing growth where you go from seeing, you know, growth rate of X to seeing growth rate of 2 or 3 X like we did with the pandemic. But then again, no one, no one else thought the pandemic was coming absent of one of those events. That's a major catalyst. 0 to 5 years looks very similar to 5 to 10 years. I think it's one of those things where because this is a constant growth rate, that means that in the 5 to 10- year range, you start to see that exponential impact really start to show up, where you get that curve really steepening in nominal values. And so, I think that's why 5 to 10 years is so interesting. And you start to see us move from that early adopter phase on the technology adoption lifecycle to being in that sort of majority adoption right at the top of the Bell curve.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to venture a guess that I, in the next 5 to 10 years, will be good enough that you won't really need humans to create more components for no code framework, so that the AI itself could be versatile enough that you could tell it what you want, and it could just create it for you. And I think that speech to no code with AI will be probably the norm in ten years.

Darian Parrish: I would say that that that sounds about the right time horizon. Just looking at some of the life cycles that we've seen so far, going from GPT two to GPT three. With text generation and how much of a change that was, and being more human-like and being able to generate text. That sounds very human. I think you're right there, Sean. Um, what I would say is that even though we can use voice to no code, we won't be able to use AI to just build the application builder itself.

Darian Parrish: Likely by that point, just because there's a lot of server management logic and stuff like that, that needs to happen on the back end for that support. And I think that's something that, uh, you know, that's where we need AGI or artificial general intelligence to be more prevalent. And that's something that is at least 20 years out for in most people's timelines. Elon Musk puts it maybe, you know, 3 to 5 years out, but he's always a little ambitious on the timelines. I think you're right, Sean. We're going to see, uh, an order of magnitude change. And one more thing I would say on that is that the reason why this is so, just so interesting for no code is that no code really is going to become something that, again, is has the Bezos yawn factor.

Darian Parrish: Do you just think it's the norm and you stop thinking about it as no code. It's just the way you build software. And what's interesting is with these startups like Bubble and other up-and-coming companies, is it also provide competition in the cloud space, because right now the public cloud is being used to run most of people's workloads for their applications, the server workloads for the applications. Well, um, these no-code platforms, if you build your entire process and application on these platforms, they now become your public cloud. And I think that's ultimately going to be good for the consumers and the ecosystem where there's, again, competition and alternatives. Whereas now you know you have the majors AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Darian Parrish: Hopefully, over time these can, you know, get enough money put into them and be real competition in the public cloud space. Because, you know, with public cloud being so, so important and running so many systems, we need to get some more diversification there. Probably seen it. Some sites will go, you know, quite a few sites will go down all at once because they're all in AWS or something. If we want to have a more resilient network, we need to think about being a little more decentralized. And obviously that's a value proposition of crypto and that, you know, maybe can align with your thoughts on diversification and the value that a decentralized network brings.

Sean Weisbrot: There's definitely value in decentralization, but the way that blockchains work right now is really not conducive to a large-scale, decentralized application. Now, having a node on your computer and verifying transactions doesn't take much processing power, but also hosting an application across the world, across these decentralized nodes is difficult, and you would have to financially incentivize the user to host the node on their computer rather than using a server.

Sean Weisbrot: Decentralization is a very sticky subject that will need at least another decade to figure out because. The main idea of decentralization is now intertwined with blockchain. Before it was IPFs, and while IPFs is still interesting, people are trying to figure out ways to utilize blockchain in ways in which blockchain is really not suited. And so, I believe trying to pair a blockchain with the decentralization of hosting an application is probably just not a good idea.

Darian Parrish: Yeah, I think I would tend to agree, Sean. And I think at this point I'm generally mentioning that it's more of a diversification approach where it's not truly decentralized, you know, across different nodes. It just lowers the counterparty risk, if you will, because they're more providers. And you can actually maybe even be multi-cloud. It's really more of a counterparty risk type of argument.

Sean Weisbrot: Multi-party deployment is very interesting as well. I hadn't really considered it, but like, yeah, you could say I'm going to deploy to all of the clouds, you know, or all the big three so that I know if AWS goes down my, my backups on Azure and Google Cloud are still working. But I guess, is there a platform that allows you to deploy once to all of the different clouds and manage payments to all of them, but you only manage it on this other platform?

Darian Parrish: There are a few. One is actually produced by Google. It's called Anthos and they call them application meshes or cloud mesh. There's one under development. I don't know if it's been released yet, AWS as well, and there are a few independent ones. I haven't worked with them before, but the idea is a few, uh, scrappy and hungry entrepreneurs have found that you know, that's a problem that a lot of folks have wanted to solve, being multi-cloud and being able to manage it essentially through a single integration hub. So, there are a few layers for doing that in the no-code space that hasn't been popularized yet, just because, uh, they're sort of in such early innings, they got to get running on their own stack to start with. And so, I think that's something that I didn't mention that we'll probably see over the next 3 to 5 years as well, is more optionality for deployment.

Sean Weisbrot: So, that sounds like another business idea. You could start in about 18 months. So, what's something I haven't asked you yet that you wished I would ask about this topic?

Darian Parrish: This is something maybe we haven't talked about this enough from the startup angle. Um, you know, I've mentioned it a few times, but I think that's where it's really powerful. If we're, you know, we're both passionate about the startup space and ecosystem, helping entrepreneurs get started and get started with fewer resources and, uh, getting to MVP faster, getting the customers. Faster. That's just such a strong value proposition that I would say that any startup founders or co-founders or entrepreneurs should be considering no code. It doesn't work for everyone. And again, it's going to depend on functionality and how much time you have to learn the platform.

Darian Parrish: But again, it's going to be faster than learning how to develop software. So, and it's going to be less costly than outsourcing it. So, I think that's something that should be on all founders' minds is how do I leverage no code? And another thing I would say is that I hope that this encourages folks that aren't even looking to start a company at the moment, that aren't entrepreneurs at the moment, but just want a side hustle now. That side hustle can be something much bigger than it was before, because it can be turned into an application. It can be, you know, projected to the masses through a web app, and it's no longer just something you know you're doing in the neighborhood. It's something that can be on the web. It can be on the web, you know, fast for low cost and have, you know, quite strong functionality. So, it's never been easier to start a business.