What does this mean for dev shops, freelancers, & consultants?

Even If your main value-add to a customer is ‘we’re a dev agency’, at the end of the day, that's not what you're selling. You're not saying selling code. What you're selling is we're going to give you a website, a product or a service, or a mobile app or whatever, that's what you're selling. So no-code helps you get to that much faster.

What we see along among freelancers & agencies especially is that they're able to sell the same value. Which means that they're usually charging the same exact price as the same agency if they have a dev in house or not, because they're providing the same value to the customer. Customers no longer care how it was created.

For non-dev consultants, they can move much faster. They’ll use no-code in the same way they use Excel as a powerful tool. It really speeds up their ability to present something to the client and deliver value.

I think you can just do more things, like you can do more things faster, cheaper, it's more available, you have more people that are capable of doing it. You can solve more different types of problems and enables everybody to go faster. So, to me, it's sort of like a superpower where you can just help more folks get things done. I think it enables a whole new set of knowledge work.

The speed with which we're able to build out apps for clients, and the price point we're able to do it at are going to change really dramatically. I think that we'll probably see traditional developers move a lot more slowly to adopt it. But I think we'll see new types of development shops, as well.

I think one of the common misconceptions about the no code movement is that we will no longer need code or we will no longer need traditional development. I think that it'll stay in place. But I think that those sorts of shops, those sorts of people, who are doing that freelance work will start to see clients come in to them that are a little bit further along because they've made version one of the product.

For non-dev consultants, I think that they have so much from a resource perspective in terms of hiring developers that I think that we probably will see them maybe later on, jump on to this just from an urgency perspective and a need perspective.

Yeah, I think that dev shops, rightly so, should have a bit of a shakeup. They can't charge $100,000 to build an app like they do today. Hopefully these prices normalize a bit so people aren’t spending their life savings on something that may or may not work.

For freelancers, now we can offer automation services, or we can now, like, not just design your website, but we can build a functional website with Webflow and whatever else.

In the consulting world, it's going to be another skill that people add to their roster and use that to their advantage. So it'd be interesting to see how we educate people as well as these companies because it's so easy that you can do it yourself. So yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.

I believe the services that we see typically within this group, being like a design, web development shop is going to change. So I believe you'll actually see more traditional creative shops, or you're going to see technical dev shops that are more data driven, that help brands kind of take the data that they have within these applications and build out either product roadmap or data automation and workflows to third party software. So that way, they can do cool things like email and whatever.

For non-dev consultants, I believe we're gonna see a rise and I believe this goes back to entrepreneurs, too. I believe more people are going to become consultants and feel confident that they can actually not just create a strategy, but also execute on it. I believe non-dev consultants will be able to create better strategies that actually get executed and see an ROI much quicker.

I think that we've already seen a lot with what are the “new” no-code agencies, so that's a new thing that's already sprouted up. I think for existing dev agencies, they will often want to leverage this as much as possible, because it's a question of, how can I do something as cheaply as possible and still charge the same amount, right?

I think the design guys are a little more interesting. It's TBD what will happen there, but I think there's an opportunity for them to kind of go upstream and do more of the development themselves.

I think that there's a lot of things where consultants are supposed to solve some of some specific initiative, and they have a limited amount of time to do it and a limited amount of resources. And so a no-code tool is a perfect way to prove something out and show that it's possible. I think no-code will start to be super, super popular within the Accenture's and those kinds of companies.

I think bad dev shops will fade away. I think good dev shops, good agencies, good consultants will be building more, better, faster with these tools.

The dev shops that just bill you based on hourly — those are actually staffing firms. And I think those things will go away because no code will just eat into their ability to overcharge you for a billable hour of an engineer’s time.

On the other hand, I think there's a ton of small agencies and companies with very creative people, or very smart consultants who know a specific industry, who will be empowered to build their own tools and platforms instead of contracting with others. And I think they become better consultants and better agencies when they directly build what they want.

We've already seen huge interest and huge spikes in terms of freelancers and consultants, starting with voice. I think that the consultants and the freelancers that get on the space now are going to be in that sweet era that happened with mobile not too long ago, we're going to see more and more that the early time they spend in the space now is going to pay massive dividends later.

The freelancers are definitely going to probably benefit the most, in some capacity. I mean really, from their standpoint, once they learn these tools and they have access to find clients that need help, the potential is limitless there. The only thing really holding them back is just, yes, finding the clients, but then also just like, literal time in a day.

The broader idea is all of a sudden they have a new set of services that they can tout on their website that they offer. I feel like a lot of agencies, not not every agency, but a lot of agencies — again, they just want to help clients with whatever so — they'll probably take on most any project and then say, if they don't do something in-house, they'll farm it out and get somebody that does. I feel like, because of no-code, those non-dev consultants do have, you know, some new muscle to flex now they can do so without talking like, they're just making things up but ultimately gonna have to farm it out completely, because they don't know what's going on.

[Matt] I think dev shops will start to hire no-code specialists for their team to take some of these projects on that they're getting like that. And for the agencies and freelancers part, like, to me the whole thing here with these three groups is like you get a bigger piece of the pie. You know, like you don't have to outsource, you can handle it yourself.  I think we're gonna start seeing more of these groups, including consultants just like start to adopt the technology because it just works better for you.