I believe it’s important to continually work on yourself and improve. The more time I spend building my own companies, I see opportunities all around me, especially in the online/web space. Some of these require coding skills and some of them don’t.
Ecommerce has a low barrier to entry
Two of these (The Daily Wine and Kiki & Co) have been in the Ecommerce sector. When it comes to Ecommerce, it is very easy to to use an off the shelf solution such as Shopify or Woocommerce in order to get these business of the ground.
Very rarely do you need to code something yourself, and most of the time I prefer not to and leave the heavy lifting to the experts who spend all their time optimising online shopping.
Why reinvent the wheel? When you already have awesome tools available at very affordable prices.
Difficult problems, require custom solutions
Sometimes you run into problems/opportunities, where there is no off-the-shelf solution available. Two years ago I realised this, when I started working on Daily Bulk Wine..
Daily Bulk wine is a B2B (Business to Business) platform for bulk wine trading. Basically the platforms connects buyers and sellers of bulk wine together and facilitates the whole process from making a wine request, sample submissions, bidding, contract generation etc.
You can try and find an off the shelf solution to do this, I can guarantee you, you won’t find one.
Which is why I opted to build the platform myself. In 2022, I had some coding experience from my engineering degree, but only the basics. I knew enough, to know that coding can be very difficult and it has a very steep learning curve.
Knowing this, I decided not to code the platform myself, but rather to use a No Code solution called Bubble.io. I considered it more important to get to market quickly, than to build it from scratch.
Last year I decided to do the same thing and use Flutterflow (Low Code) to build GoKiddo. You can read all about that journey here.
No Code & Low Code has hard limits
Each time I have used a no-code or low-code solution to build a application, I have run into hard limits. Which makes sense because:
- These platforms optimise for “user-friendliness”
- They focus on features most people need (not edge cases)
- They lock you into the platform
- Because they charge a monthly fee, which doesn’t seem like much at first, but if you take the total cost over a year or two, it becomes a lot.
No-Code -> Low-Code -> Code
I know it might be controversial, but the more time I have spend using no-code/low-code solutions, the more I gravitate towards actual code.
Why?
- There are basically no limits to what you can build
- You own your code (it’s an asset which is worth a lot)
- Once you get past the intial phase, it’s actually way faster than using the no-code/low-code solutions
- In the intial phase, the hosting costs of these applications are very low or free. And once you start receiving traffic, it’s much less than using another service.
Sharpening my coding axe
In my review of 2023, I made it a goal to sharpen my coding axe in 2024. That is exactly what I have been doing.
- I rebuilt this blog
- I am busy rebuilding Daily Bulk Wine
- And I plan on using what I learn from the above to on all the other opportunities I decide to pursue.
Here is a diagram of my current coding contributions in 2024 so far. There are a few days where I didn’t code, but I think it’s pretty solid so far. 
What language am I coding in?
I am coding mostly in Typescript, HTML and CSS and SQL for the backend.
Luckily it’s not the 2000’s anymore, and there are some very nice coding frameworks available, which makes it much easier do the basics and not re-invent the wheel. Some of them include:
- Remix (for building dynamic web apps)
- Astro (for building static marketing sites)
- TailwindCSS (for styling websites)
- Shadcn UI (pre-built user interfaces)
- Supabase (Database & Authentication)
In Summary
If I have not lost you yet, I would like to encourage you to build a simple website. For example build yourself a blog using Astro (I built this blog myself using it) and I can guarantee you it won’t be as hard as you think it’s going to be.
Astro even has a very easy to follow tutorial on how to do it.
I believe that coding is the single most valueable skill you can learn in the next 20 years.
If you have any questions, please feel free to send me a message and I am more than happy to help.