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Will no-code tools replace developers? Doubtful.

Despite the need for less code in some areas, developers remain in high demand and solve problems that machine learning platforms and no-code tools alone cannot.

Budibase 2.0 launched this week and is a supplement to developer expertise. Coding is optional, but doesn’t replace the developer’s role. Instead, it helps developers build internal tools without tedious and repetitive tasks, and shortens dev cycles. The latest version of Budibase allows for building custom components with custom datasources, a plugin repository, and more.

“In every business across the world, there are developers who are under pressure to deliver unique business applications. These applications are tedious to build, incredibly repetitive, and the bane of many developers lives. Our entire founding team experienced this,” said the makers.

With Budibase, developers can build custom business apps, admin panels, forms, and portals. It also offers various templates to shorten the design process. The REST API connector lets devs fetch data, receive form data, and authenticate with external APIs to build even quicker.

If you’re looking for a React-based framework, refine launched this week too. It’s open source and connects to 15+ backends. Refine helps devs build admin panels, dashboards, internal tools, and storefronts for free.

Virtual events can feel like a longshot. You risk technical hiccups and losing out on a highly engaged audience and monetization opportunities.

If Hopin is any indication, the space appears to be slowing down. The unicorn soared during the pandemic, hitting a peak valuation of $7.75 billion. This year it had to lay off 29% of its staff and re-position itself for live events.

While there’s no replacement for live events, we would venture to say virtual events aren’t dead yet. With teams split across distance more than ever, they will likely have a place in our personal and professional ecosystem. And perhaps a team that understands that type of dynamic more than others can deliver a tool that helps such events flourish.

Beams launched yesterday. Maker Egor Zolotukhin and his team started out hosting Dreamers Online Forum 2020, a virtual event of 3,500 participants for startup owners. They went on to organize 50+ international events ranging from big conferences to corporate activities. “We researched the event tech field in detail, understood the problems that participants and organizers had, and found how they could be solved by applying our experience in web products development,” said Zolutkhin.

The new virtual event platform is equipped with live streaming, breakout rooms, networking sessions, surveys, and third-party app integration. Zolutkhin explained to one commenter that it's different from tools like Hopin because it uses one-window technology, which ensures that attendees don’t get lost “in a myriad of rooms or stay alone in a networking zone or exhibition hall.” Also “event activities take turns according to the organizer's scenario, without any click of the participant.”

Event organizers can showcase partners and sponsors, utilize tools like action buttons and interactive links, and use integrated apps to monetize during virtual events. Third-party integrations can boost engagement through video games and virtual office tools like SpatialChat. Users can also host trade shows with unlimited booths and exhibitions.

So far, the response has been pretty positive. “This captures the Zeitgeist of the post covid world so very well!” said one person in the comments.

Still skeptical? Fair. See what others are asking and the makers’ responses.

If your NFTs have taken a nosedive, you may have given up on investing and abandoned FinTok for good.

It’s easy to become discouraged, but makers continue to create products that help individuals start investing, regardless of the negative economic outlook.

As a hybrid between online learning and crypto/NFT platforms, Continuum is one of the more unconventional ways to get started with investing. Users can complete short-form courses on topics like the basics of cryptocurrency and NFTs, and then get paid in crypto and/or NFT rewards. The Continuum team’s goal is to “democratize creative education to create new pathways to financial freedom for all through the pixelated economy.”

Real estate has been a huge topic this year as millennials are starting to purchase homes, though investing is still unreachable for many. Makers Ming Zhu and Jack Donnell picked up on this and created FundHomes to help people build wealth by investing in top-performing Airbnbs. With Fundhomes, you can purchase shares of vacation homes and get returns without the responsibilities of home ownership.

Proptee is an NFT-based real estate investing platform that lets you buy fractionalized NFTs associated with EU, USA, and UK residential and commercial real estate and earn rental rewards for it.

Bloom Stock Market Game is a simulated stock market game that lets you compete with friends by simulating investing in over 4,000 stocks.

With more than half of US households owning stock and 16% of American adults having used crypto before, it might be worth learning how to build your own portfolio.

The road to a healthy lifestyle can get overwhelming— one day it’s “coffee adds 10 years to your lifespan”, the next it’s “coffee drinkers are more likely to develop viruses stored in glacier ice.”

In healthtech, makers are brainstorming solutions that center around the individual and make healthy living a little less confusing. Though VC funding for healthtech startups has dipped this year, the industry amassed a whopping $34B in 2021, with alternative care receiving 38% of that funding. The rise of alternative care aligns with trust in existing healthcare systems being fairly low, especially in Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American populations in the US that continue to experience racism and inequities in medical care.

With all that in mind, here are some recent launches in healthtech that could alleviate some confusion 👇

Joining the list of health wearables is the Ultrahuman Ring, an Oura-esque ring that gathers insights on your metabolic health. Maker Mohit Kumar noticed the vast amount of people struggling with metabolic health disorders and created a solution that can provide you with metrics on movement, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and sleep. “We have always believed in the power of self-quantification to make health optimisation more efficient,” said Kumar.

Oura dropped a new ring last week. The Oura Gen3 Horizon is equipped with the same health-tracking abilities as its predecessor, but has a new “perfectly round” design, which is supposed to deliver on comfort.

If you’re not into wearables, Amazon just released Halo Rise, a bedside health tracker that uses low-energy sensor technology and machine learning to provide personalized sleep analysis.

Guava is a holistic dashboard that helps you manage your medications, symptoms, and health records. It also provides personalized insights and recommendations.

SoundMind helps you work towards mental wellness through audio and visual music therapy.

Time to take more of your health into your own hands (literally)?

In an effort to catch up with Gen Z, Google’s making some changes to its search engine.

At its annual Search On event, Google announced that Google Search is shifting from its traditional list format to a more visual search results page, depending on what you search. For example, if you’re looking for a new vacation destination, Google will present the information using more imagery and short-form video content, including that of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. As you explore information on cities, you may see visual stories and short videos from people who have visited, tips on how to explore the city, how to get there, and more.

It comes on the heels of a recent report showing that Gen Z gravitates towards TikTok for search. “We definitely know that there is a class of user who really does like the results that they see on TikTok,” said VP and GM of Search Cathy Edwards. Though Google won’t exactly mimic TikTok, its shift towards a more exploratory and visual search experience targets inquisitive users that want quicker results. If you don’t know what angle you want to explore, “[Google will] provide keyword or topic options to help you craft your question [as you type],” said Edwards.

Above all, Google wants to ensure that users are finding relevant information, and for some topics, that means presenting them more visually or helping users “search outside the box.”

If you fit in with the visually inclined, here are some recent launches that might be up your alley:

xTiles is a visual workspace for organizing ideas and projects.

Interior Computer uses AI to generate interior design ideas for your home or work place.

Growth Design V2 teaches you product tips in a comic book format.

What’s the difference between an LLC and a C-Corporation? 🙃

If you don’t know, Firstbase does. The YC-backed company is helping makers launch US companies online, all in one platform. Maker Mark Milastsivy started Firstbase three years ago, but it was limited to one product —Firstbase Start— which focused only on incorporating a US company and accessing startup tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and AWS. Today, the platform has multiple products in its offerings.

In addition to helping makers manage legal matters, Firstbase automates your business compliance, creates a physical business address, helps you apply for financial tools, and sets up payroll accounts in any US state. Firstbase Raise helps startups connect their business data to Firstbase and share it with VCs. “Our goal is to make fundraising more data-driven and empower more founders to raise money and build massive businesses,” says Milastsivy.

Firstbase is making an impact across borders. So far, the platform has helped makers in over 160 countries launch their businesses in the US. For Milastsivy, making that kind of impact is personal—"As a foreign-born founder myself, I had to go through many manual processes with banks and lawyers when initially starting a business, and I quickly realized that these situations could be extremely difficult to navigate.”

According to an MIT study, immigrants in the US are 80% more likely to start businesses than American-born citizens. Building companies is no walk in the park, so we love seeing makers come full circle and give back to the community through tools that make the journey easier. Here are some that caught our eyes:

Formance helps you build and track custom money flows.

Lawpath wants to make legal support accessible for small businesses. It helps business owners create legal documents, eSignatures, and manage their legal workflows.

Nanonets automates your financial processes. You can automatically upload invoices, pay and manage vendors, and access real-time expense reports.

Nowadays, practically anyone can develop a SaaS product or an app without any programming experience, and some of the biggest companies continue to roll out DIY solutions.

Two months after the launch of its no-code pricing table, Stripe added to its no-code suite with a new customer portal that lets customers manage their own billing details. Business owners can create a link to a secure, prebuilt customer portal and share it with their customers, allowing them to manage their payment details, invoices, and subscriptions.

The ability to expedite those tedious processes is key— 90% of no-code users attribute faster business growth to the usage of no-code tools and 28% of people say they use no-code tools because it’s the fastest way to get things done. According to a recent report from Gartner, it’s expected that 70% of new applications will use no-code or low-code tools by 2025, up from 20% in 2020.

So whether you’re just starting your app or adding to your no-code stack, here are a few of the latest options:

Teta is a no-code tool that allows you to build iOS and Android apps, dark-mode included. Maker Gianluca d’Ottavio says that Teta is not just for design, but is a Flutter-esque, full-stack tool with integrations like in-app purchases with PayPal, in-app subscriptions, Google Maps, and more. It’s also equipped with real-time collaboration abilities and widgets that help with interface-building.

Maker Ufuk Dag and his team wanted to make AI more accessible, so they built Cameralyze. The no-code AI builder helps makers create different types of AI apps, including face detection, face blurring, and object recognition.

WotNot is a no-code bot builder that helps businesses build bots for a variety of use cases like lead-generation automation, customer support, and appointment booking.

If you’re a maker, you’re likely no stranger to the phrases “talk to your users” and “user-centric product.” Though it’s great advice, it also leaves a lot of gray area.

How do you get the insights that you need?

That’s the question maker Thomas Moussafer and his team had when they created Jimo, a user research tool for product teams. It’s all about “helping product teams involve their users at any stage of the product life cycle, via in-app workflows and a dedicated collaborative space,” said Thomas.

Jimo provides product teams with a dedicated portal to share product updates and a public roadmap with their users. With the ability to embed Figma and Maze, you can share prototypes get feedback, and receive a report that sums up user preferences. It also lets you target the right users based on attributes, behavioral data, and momentum “without bugging devs” to do the work for you.

Behind some of the most successful start-ups are teams dedicated to collecting user feedback, so it’s great to see makers building user research platforms that could make life easier for other makers. Betafi, Poll the People, and Cycle are just a few of other options in the space.

As always, let the makers know what you think in the comments (we’re sure they’d appreciate the feedback 😉).

NYC Climate Week took place last week and while critics say there was a lot of greenwashing involved, VCs and politicians alike are betting on the industry. The need to reduce carbon emissions is dire, with global emissions rising 6% in 2021, despite many companies’ commitments to cutting their emissions.

Eyes (and wallets) are on the tech world for assistance—Q2 marked a record $882 million in VC fundraising for carbon-cutting startups and companies like Uber are implementing their own tools to mitigate their impact on the climate crisis. The ride-share company launched a new tool for its business clients at Climate Week, allowing them to track the carbon emissions of work-related rides.

Some in the space fear a 2008-esque industry crash — when the financial crisis hit, funds disappeared. Industry veterans are less worried this time. As the folks at Protocol put it, “it feels like you can’t walk a block without tripping over a climate tech founder or venture capitalist looking for the next big carbon-cutting startup,” while the VCs themselves say “There’s too much vested interest to go back to clean tech 1.0.”

We’re relieved to hear that for mother earth and the new climate tech startups in our community, like Bidi Charge.

The rise of EVs has transformed the car industry and parking lots as we know it. Despite increasing demand, more EV chargers are needed, and Bidi Charge is responding by installing EV charging points in areas requested by users. In the future, the platform will also allow you to crowdinvest in charging points and earn returns on your investment.

Lune is helping reduce carbon emissions too by enabling companies to integrate automated emissions calculations and carbon offsetting into their customer experiences. Companies can allow customers to offset shipping emissions at checkout and choose greener ways to pay.

It’s a tale as old as time – should makers focus on building or on distribution and marketing? It’s difficult to say, but what’s clear is that “build and they will come” doesn’t always hold true. A good marketing strategy helps you establish your brand and grow an audience, but getting there can feel overwhelming. The key is to start small and figure out what works best for your product.

Whether you’ve solidified your strategy or are just now building out your marketing plan, here are some recently launched marketing products to help.👇

Versify is a Web3 customer engagement solution that helps you engage with your customers via NFT collectibles. It’s geared towards makers that are less familiar with crypto and integrates with existing CRM platforms so you can automatically airdrop an NFT to your customers. With Web3 infiltrating the marketing strategies of companies like Starbucks and Nike, it might be worth testing.

Hypotenuse AI can help with your content marketing strategy. It uses AI to generate blog articles, product descriptions, marketing copy, and images.

MeltingSpot is geared towards marketers that are looking to explore user-generated content. As a community platform, it helps you centralize your content and engage with different audiences. You can also host webinars, workshops, and interviews.

Mailmeteor 2.0 lets you send personalized email campaigns and auto follow-up sequences from Gmail. It’s an update to the existing Mailmeteor tool and allows you to add follow-up emails until you get a reply.

Will you add any of these to your marketing stack?