Nowadays, you can make good progress in testing and validating your idea without the need for any designers or developers through no-code options. It can be a slippery slope though, as no-code tools can require a big learning curve, and at a time of the beginning of your product journey when your brainpower should go to creating and exploring your idea vs fiddling around on Youtube tutorials learning how to move a button.
To help, we've collated a list of some of the best and easy to pick up no-code tools that we think can help you start building, without the big learning curve required.
At the beginning of your journey, putting together a landing page can be as influental to your thinking as putting together a pitch deck. It helps with defining the most important features of your product, and how you structure your messaging to your target audience to promote those features. It forces you to really think through your unique selling proposition (USP) and to cut any unnecessary features for a first version.
After launching the landing page, it can serve as a home to send people to and for gathering feedback on your idea (even prior to the idea being build). Using the right tools for this first version will allow you to easily tweak sections and copy based on the feedback.
If you're not sure where to get started with a landing page — content or layout wise — Relume can help you put together an initial concept using AI based on a single prompts.
Without any design skills, Framer has a great set of templates you can use as a starting point.
As mentioned, similar to a pitch deck, building a landing page can really help crystallise your thoughts as you'll have to prioritise features & vibes of how your product will jive with your first customers.
Seeing is believing! One of the best ways to formulate your idea is to start putting it into a wireframe. A wireframe is a skeleton of your app that helps you define all the pages you need and how the user will be using the platform without the design details that are not necessary until a later stage.
Although long-term, it might be good to get insights from an expert UX designer to make the tool as user-friendly as possible. Pulling this together will help stimulate your thinking and will highlight gaps in your concept.
You don't need to be a user interface or Figma wizard to get started on this process, tools like UIZard can help you easily pull together (with or without AI) some initial concepts that you can use in pitch decks or to do some user testing.
Bubble
This popular no-code tool is a go-to for entrepreneurs to put together their app without development insight. We were hesitant to include Bubble in this list as although it can garner great results the learning curve to build anything deeper then surface level might end up being time consuming and you'll be locked into using the platform (unless you carry out a migration) as your user's account will be on Bubble's servers.
https://bubble.io/
Outsetta
Looking to launch a community or a SaaS Platform that can scale in any direction and help you long term? Outsetta looks like the place the go, it hooks in nicely with tools like Framer / Webflow or Squarespace when building platforms. As it combines multiple tools in one go (billing, card processing, user accounts, CRM & much more) it can be a great place to start without overcomplicating your initial technology stack.
https://www.outseta.com/
Baserun
Want to play around with some AI ideas but struggling to easily compare different models? Baserun provides a nice playground to test and refine prompts across multiple platforms, to see what offers the best outcome
https://www.baserun.ai/
We'll be building a little helper tool in the near future using these sites to show what the reality is of building on no-code tools.
If you have any questions or need help in the meantime, feel free to reach out to siebe@thisisundefined.com, and I'd be happy to point you in the right direction.
