How To Raise Money For a No-Code Startup

I’m not going to talk you out of it, so let’s make sure you take your best shot

OK, so you’ve built an MVP and it’s mostly no-code and low code. Now you want to go out and raise money, preferably from legit investors.

The good news is you’re already on the market, and hopefully generating revenue, which is why you went the no-code MVP route in the first place. The bad news is that in every single investor’s eyes, you’ve constructed a hastily duct-taped together product using someone else’s fly-by-night tech, so you’ve already got two big strikes against you.

Let’s make sure you don’t get that third strike.

First question: Should you raise money?

Like I said, I’m not going to stop you.

I myself am building a no-code MVP, Teaching Startup — a project to make more and better entrepreneurs — and I’ve been able to quickly get to producing revenue, engagement, and growth — both in number of customers and breadth and depth of product features. But I’ve never crossed the streams, so to speak. I’ve never raised money on non-traditional tech, and never built an MVP with the sole intent to raise money from outside investors.

So I spoke with a number of investor friends of mine. Most of them, as you might imagine, are quite bearish on the prospect of funding anything based solely, or even mostly, on no-code (even if it came from me, an aside they were all eager to add).

I have to admit that I agree with them — but that’s more for philosophical reasons than technical reasons. I’ve raised money myself and also with other founding teams, but I’ve always said that raising money should be a last resort, not the first option.

Again. this is why you chose the no-code, low-code, MVP path. If you don’t need outside investment to get to a revenue-producing stage, you’re better off using that revenue to hone the product-market fit, then riding product-market fit to market traction, then building on the product’s traction to start scaling.

But technically, my experience with both MVP strategy and no-code tools has me convinced that raising money for either (or both) will…