Digital MBA - How to build successful apps for your Business 2022 Edition
by Thom Lamb •
Here’s why. The Tech sector has made some massive improvements to how people conduct business online. Platforms like Uber Eats allow restaurants to sell and deliver food by simply downloading an app and setting up a profile. Anyone can create a Shopify store to sell their inventory all over the world. There are hundreds of platforms you can use to make money online.
These platforms are known as No-Code solutions, which means that you can create an online business without needing to know anything about coding. Which has, in fairness, been a huge improvement for small business owners, who would no longer need to hire a specialist to set up and maintain their online presence.
But they come with some disadvantages. You can’t always RUN your business the way you want to. You have to use the platform the way it’s built, and that usually serves the interests of the owners of the platform, first and foremost. Your customization and individualization options are limited to what the platform offers to *all* its customers.
You also don’t get the tools to acquire much information about your customers, which can make it difficult to learn how to improve your marketing and to really connect with your client base.
These platforms also come with a cost. Sometimes they can take a large margin out of your sales, which can be tough in businesses like restaurants where margins are already tight.
Finally, and I think this is most important, you didn’t decide to make the brave step of starting your own business, to free yourself from having a boss always telling you what to do, only to be stuck relying on a platform that basically… tells you what to do.
Not exactly a great deal for most small businesses.
Luckily there have been other developments in tech that CAN offer Small Businesses a chance to enter the digital economy, not as indentured servants, but as true citizens and owners.
Instead of having to rely on (and contribute financially to) someone else’s platform with its rules, limitations, and fees, you can build your own.
Building custom software has traditionally been considered to be too pricey for a small business to afford. If a company was going to build its own solutions it was either an established enterprise company with a huge budget, or a tech start up that needed to raise millions of dollars to do so.
But over the last 10 years, software has evolved a great deal. In order to build many of the platform providers mentioned above, tools and frameworks were developed along the way to decrease the total cost of building new software. Many of these tools are open sourced, which means that they are free to use for anyone.
A new paradigm of software development now exists between the no-code platforms of big tech, and fully customized software development.
This is known as a Low-Code solution. Agencies can use tools and frameworks to build an application that is custom-tailored to your needs, without having to write ALL the code from scratch.
This Low-Code paradigm is what this guide is all about. CodeBusters uses a more advanced approach to it, which we call FlowCode (more on that later) to significantly lower the cost of app development. In this guide we explain how we do that, and how you can leverage this paradigm shift to wrest the creative control of your digital business from the Big Tech monopolies, and place it back into your own hands.
We at Codebusters believe that this isn’t just important for your business, it’s actually incredibly important for everyone.
It’s great that companies like Uber Eats, Shopify, AirBNB and Netflix exist. They solve real problems. But we don’t want them to become monopolies; we want consumers to have real choices, beyond simply choosing which pad thai place on the app they’ll order from, or which chair they’ll buy off Amazon.
We want small businesses to create unique experiences that will compete for market share against these companies. If we can’t do that, the massive corporations will make all the money, and our choices as consumers will remain depressingly limited.
Monopolies are a scourge on our economy. A business that owns that much of the market has no concerns about raising prices, lowering quality, or changing how they conduct business to serve their own interests and increase their profits. Consumers are left powerless if they have no alternatives to choose from.
In short, if Big Tech actually does eat the world, it would be a pretty uninspiring and drab place..
And so, dear small business owner, this is your clarion call. The marketplace needs you to step up, and figure out how you can stand apart. After all, isn’t that WHY you started your own business in the first place ? You know you have something special to offer, and you know you could get customers to see that value, if only you could reach them and make their consumer experience as simple and rewarding as the big corporations can offer. You know you can make a living doing this, you simply need to connect with other people who will share your vision and values, and who will hook you up with the tools you’ll need to succeed.
Sounds good? Ok, let's get started!
