If you are like a lot of people looking to become SaaS founders, you maybe in the phase a lot of non-technical founders struggle with. You have done research on a niche market and talked to potential customers to validate your idea. So far, the feedback has been great and may even have a few potential customers willing to sign up once you bring them an initial product.
You are excited to put together a minimum viable product (MVP) and get a real product in front of your customers. There is just one problem: you can’t code. You also don’t have a technical co-founder or know a developer who can assist you.
So what are your options? Well you probably know how hard it is to find a great technical co-founder. You can go on your own and hire a developer off sites like Fiverr but, if you aren’t sure what you are looking for or how to design your MVP, you may run into some costly mistakes.
So what can you do? Is there a way to successfully build an MVP without having developer or technology skills?
5 Ways To Build A No Code SaaS Product
There are a bunch of tools out there to help non-technical founders like you build their no-code SaaS MVP.
In this post, I will outline five tools you can use to bring your idea to life for many different startup ideas.
Landing Pages
Do you just need a way to capture email addresses or lead information?
Maybe all you want to do is provide a way to stage your idea and see how many people would be willing to submit their email address to get notified when the product is ready.
Maybe your product or SaaS is a manual process, a “concierge MVP” where once people submit their information, you manually perform a service out of just a one page site.
There are a lot of options to accomplish this, but below I have selected two
LeadPages
LeadPages is a leading drag and drop page builder. It’s focused on helping you to build and host a single page or website that helps you capture sales via the web, email, text messages and social media.
Out of the box, LeadPages come withs with hundreds of templates and landing pages that you can customize for your needs, or you can create your own unique page on your own.
Their platform allows you to quickly integrate with sites like MailChimp to help build an email funnel to reach out to your leads.
You may use integrated A/B testing to help test different versions of landing pages to optimize your strategy.
Websites
In some cases, you may need something a bit more than a landing page and an actual website for your MVP. Maybe you need a bit more integration with a backend CRM to capture your customers and
WordPress
WordPress is the worlds most site builder. Their software powers blogs, stores, and websites for small businesses as well as Fortune 500 companies.
Out of the box, WordPress offers a visual builder tool, user management to help capture logins and signups, and a vast ecosystem of plugins that can help you integrate with sites like MailChimp and Hubspot, build a newsletter, provide a starting point for your design, and provide new functions to users. WordPress also has a large network of developers that can help build custom functions and features to help minimize investment risk in a development partner as WordPress is a well known framework
While WordPress can be used in may ways to power your SaaS project, it may be a bit daunting for the non-technical founder. WordPress can host your site and take the work out of managing your own installation. If you want custom plugins and a template that d can take care of the hosting of your site, and the broad number of developers can be found to help you customize on a foundation that can be supported in the future as you grow.
WebFlow
WebFlow is a fully visual way to build dynamic and responsive websites.
You can publish your site in just a few minutes on their network which allows your website to handle high traffic volumes on demand or you can export the website to bring to your developers to give them a real mockup of what you want built and how a website should work.
WebFlow has a built in Content Management System for your website so you can build anything from a blog to a data powered website like Wikipedia.
SaaS Applications
If you want to build a SaaS application, you will need some more functionality. SaaS products at their core provide a basic set of functions. You want the main website to provide information about your product and pricing plans, you need a way for someone to create an account, add their billing information, and subscribe to you to pay to access your product each month or year.
You also will need your product to perform a service for users to solve a problem. For example, allowing a user to add their sales leads and tracking when they were contacted.
Bubble.io
Bubble is a visual web application builder that lets you build your application without any code and are fully usable and responsive on desktop and mobile browsers.
When you start building, you have access to integrations to manage users, send emails, accept payments with credit cards, use social logins such as Facebook, and setup a database and storage.
With the drop in ability to connect your website to other websites via APIs, you can build an all in one product for your users without struggling to code.
Some example applications you can build through their learning tutorials are real-time voting applications, a video sharing social network, a Craigslist style market place, or a ChatGPT powered AI bot that can assist your users with their requests.
Mobile Apps
Sometimes, your product needs to be mobile only. The powerful devices people carry provide access to location data, camera, audio, and an always on data connection to run your app and you need an application that can run on both platforms.
Configure.IT
Configure.IT is a full stack development platform that allows you to build iPhone and Android applications at the same time.
The drag and drop interface allows you to design your mobile interface using a visual tool. Once designed, you can integrate with their backend database to store information and deliver data to your users. They also offer add ons such as push notifications, additional storage, backend jobs, and an API.
The preview allows you to see how your application will work on different devices, and when you are finally ready to deploy, Configure.IT can assist with the build and deployment of your mobile application.