Nocode: how to become as agile as a startup

Startups envy large corporations for their market share and large corporations admire startups efficiency when launching products and scaling up.

Where does this agility come from? What if an accessible technology could make it possible to have a work organisation as flexible as start-ups have?

Nocode is the answer

(as you might have guessed 😉 ).

If you log into Teams for business management and organisation, hand-write (or rather ⌨️) hundreds of rows on Excel every week and store your company's most important information in workbooks, you're unlikely to be in a tech startup.

Beyond dematerialization, there is a way of operating specific to so-called " pure player " companies that lightens their internal processes and accelerates their " time to market " or launch time.

What are the secrets of success for these agile companies? 

The first general observation is that the mastery of agile tools concerns all teams. Thus, the business lines are also trained in all kinds of Nocode tools such as Notion, Webflow, Make, Zapier, Airtable, etc.

We will focus here on three main families of tools that enable such work agility.

To mention a few: Nocode CRM and organisation tools, automation programs and front and backend authoring software.

Notion and Airtable: the core stack of agile businesses 📚

Notion has a great advantage: it always creates pages that are pleasant to read. And this, even if you are not an expert in design.

With Notion, you can create an internal" Wikipedia " for your company.

With a customisable tree structure and pages accessible according to the permissions granted. 

By centralising your organisation's data on Notion, you ensure that your entire team has easy access to all the information they need via an intuitive interface.

Three reasons to switch to Notion or Airtable

📣 Managing projects with agile and visual databases

Airtable and especially Notion allow you to organize information like in a Drive thanks to a content hierarchy, access management and a wide variety of document types (videos, links, pages, images, spreadsheets, etc.). But that's not all!
The main interest of these platforms is that they also allow you to "natively" integrate databases and visualize them in the form of a table, calendar, timeline or kanban.

These tools are particularly appreciated by teams that regularly monitor projects. There are a multitude of formulas, as we know from Excel or Google Sheets, that allow to integrate project KPIs. For example, for a team, the number of days a project is late or the evolution of a budget can be calculated automatically.

To organize the to-dos of the team members, a database can be created on Notion or Airtable and allows to have a view per team member in different forms. Each task can have several fields so that the employee can fill in the most important elements for the follow-up.
Recurring tasks can be scheduled and automated to save time on Airtable.

📣 Internal communication and processes made easy

For more agility in your communication, we advise you to create pages on Notion or tables on Airtable, accessible to all your teams to inform them of new office guidelines, benefits available to them,spending rules and anything else that is useful for the well-being of your employees. We recommend leaving the comments open for everyone to offer ideas and feedback.

So, if one of your employees wants to know more about the tips and rules in force in your company, all they have to do is go to the corresponding Notion page. Time saved for all your teams and more transparent communication within your organization.

In addition, Notion and Airtable simplify the onboarding of new employees. It is sufficient to create homepages or databases by profession summarising all the information needed to start working. For example, for a newcomer to a content writing team, it is possible to create a page on Notion that redirects to the company's Tone of Voice. 

In addition, shared content is collaborative, you have access to completed projects and can easily integrate new collaborators into projects by simply sharing access.

You can complement your onboarding with Typeform forms with questions and multiple choice answers to check that the newcomer has understood the rules. 

You can also set up a Notion page to which he/she will be the only one to have access, which gathers all the tools at his/her disposal, as well as the identifiers and passwords that are assigned to him/her.

✋ Prevent 'fake news'

A company that does not centralize its data on a single platform cannot have agile and clear communication in the eyes of its employees. Your teams risk getting lost in a mountain of contradictory and irrelevant information.

With Notion or Airtable, you can create pages with the latest information and news available to your teams. And with a little automation, you can even effortlessly notify your employees of each new announcement. This way, everyone is aware of the latest news and the data is gathered in one place accessible by everyone 24 hours a day.

Automation = agility + time saving ⚙️

Zapier, Make and n8n are excellent automation tools. Your employees are relieved of recurring, even boring tasks and human errors are avoided. For example, by automating the creation of email addresses, the sending of platforms and identifiers to new arrivals, as well as automatic registration for onboarding workshops according to the profession, everything is simplified and everyone can concentrate on the essential: the growth of the company's activities. At the same time, they gain in serenity, agility and well-being at work.

Three reasons to move to automation

🤖 Customisation in Nocode

By training your employees on Nocode automation tools, you give them the keys to a customized work environment. Everyone becomes capable of creating automation workflows for the tasks they want and that are specific to them. And above all, without the help of a developer or any external support. This will improve the happiness at work of your whole organization, giving you more autonomy, more agility thanks to the infinite customization of automation that these software offer, but above all more free time to work on the most important subjects.

✍️ Avoid human error

Thanks to automation, you avoid the stress generated by human errors. Mistakes become almost non-existent and that changes everything.

In particular, because your teams will no longer have the impression of " spending their day working on Excel ", but on tools that work for you.

Automation allows you to generate regular reports to monitor optimizations and errors to avoid in your processes.

😇 Easy to use

These tools are not intended for professional developers. Your favorite applications (Uber, Deliveroo, Gmail, Discord,...) and your reference office software (Google Sheet, Airtable, Webflow, Shopify, Zoom etc.) are open for connection. This allows everyone, in his personal life, but also professional, to create an interface for his environment.
Numerous training courses exist and automation tutorials flourish every day on the various social networks. Thanks to the " customization " offered by these apps, each employee has a workspace entirely designed and dedicated to him or her.

Workflow, Bubble.io: An idea ? A website. An app. A webapp. 📲

Beware, to be used correctly, these two tools require more training time than those concerning automation. But they allow you to create websites and applications. With a little creativity, the possibilities are endless: landing page, e-commerce page, showcase site, marketplace, internal CRM...

With Workflowand Bubble.io your teams are freed from the technical, learning and budgetary constraints of developers. On their own, they can create all kinds of digital products and services to improve information acquisition, creation and sharing.

Three reasons to use Workflow and Bubble.io to improve business agility

🤯 Unleash your teams' creativity

By cutting out middlemen or developers, your teams build unique products and services on their own without external interference. For external or internal use, you give your employees the flexibility to choose the custom tools they want to work with.

In order not to start from a blank sheet of paper, the Nocode communities regularly post templates already built. There are templates for every use case and every activity. Marketplace for real estate, collaborative workspace for a creative agency, product launch page, newsletter registration site, etc.

💸 More agile applications and lower digital costs

The current market does not allow all companies, especially SMEs, to hire developers to create customized applications to meet the needs of different organizations. Nocode, by its accessibility, offers an infinite field of possibilities and allows to create in-house digital products, until now inaccessible to companies with a limited budget.

Once trained in Nocode, your teams will be able to update and improve the Nocode tools already in place without the help of developers.

💡 Ongoing tests and iterations

Nocode is also a great way to test MVPs or POCs before hiring developers on products whose expected outcome is not certain.

For example, it is possible to quickly create a first version of an e-commerce site to test the market. Then, once the tests are favourable to the launch of a more consequent V.2, you can incur additional costs.

And let's not forget that many communities such as Nocode France on Slack and Discord are open to everyone and allow to help each other or to ask questions related to these tools.

Nocode, with its diversity of tools and the autonomy it provides to teams, is undoubtedly the first piece of the puzzle to improve business agility. Everyone is free to create customized systems, services and products. Communication is facilitated and productivity improved.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of reasons why start-ups use Nocode tools without moderation. 🚀