Sid Puri and Aditi Kothari held a masterclass at Razorpay FTX 2021 about no code tools, and
how to use them to your advantage.
One of the key highlights of Razorpay FTX has always been the various Masterclasses conducted in collaboration with industry experts to help build and contribute to FinTech products that solve real world problems. FTX 2021 witnessed 12 such Materclasses spread across a span of 2 days and one of the key sessions conducted was “from Idea to Product and shipping faster using No Code Tools”.
Sid Puri, Head of Growth, Retool, India in collaboration with Aditi Kothari, Product Manager at Razorpay conducted the masterclass where they covered a wide spectrum of details pertaining to the inception, application and adaptation of No Code tools! They spoke about how certain engineering constraints can limit us from converting our ideas into a successful product launch, that we wish to iterate on and how no-code tools helps solve this problem.
Prior to Razorpay and Retool, Aditi and Sid were in the mobility space with Bounce in their product team where they learnt about the true potential of no code tools and unlocked the many possibilities it offered!
As stated by Aditi, “ If you are someone who wants to test an Idea with real users, learn what resonates with your target market and what doesn’t but you have limited resources, then no-code tools is the perfect solution to quickly launch your MVP with very little to no engineering effort!”
A virtual event with over 5.7k viewers for Masterclass, held on the 9th & 10th Of December
How are no-code tools different from Saas?
While Saas is very use case specific, no-code is an evolution of Saas where the tools allow you to build custom products based on your requirements. Hence no code tools offer greater flexibility and freedom to develop MVPs specific to your use case.
When should you use No Code tools?
One of the major problems startups/ tech first companies face is the lack of engineering bandwidth. When you have a lack of engineering bandwidth, and you have to ship at high velocity to deliver a great product, no-code will always come to your rescue.
A virtual event with over 5.7k viewers for Masterclass, held on the 9th & 10th Of December
Possibilities of No Code
What is No code stack and how to choose the best no code tools?
Drawing parallels from how fully functional applications have multiple technologies such as frontend, backend, database, api, etc coming together to make the tech stack, several no code tools working together serving their specific needs comprise the “no code stack”.
Based on your use case you can integrate several no-code tools together to form your own no-code stack, for eg: using zapier to integrate webflow with airtable!
While starting up directly out of college as well, Sid leveraged the power of no code tools using squarespace and typeform whereas Aditi had explored the likes of zapier, integromat and webflow extensively.
Sid also highlighted the fact that while choosing a no-code stack, it’s less about the tools and more about the problem you’re trying to solve.
Abdul, Sid & Aditi kicking off the Masterclass with a quick introduction about their backgrounds.
Bounce Case Study - How Bounce built its entire internal tooling system without a single dedicated engineer
While talking about his stint as a PM at Bounce, Sid mentioned that they were growing fast and had a lean team with around 200 members in the company at the time when they considered using low code for internal tooling. With a projected growth rate of around 100,000 rides per day, there was a serious engineering bandwidth crunch, the primary issue between the customer support and finance team being that of tracking the refunds generated. Retool addressed this use case perfectly, having the right amount of customization in the simplest way to ship the quickest solution.
Sid also mentioned that getting hands on with Retool and solving multiple use cases is what got him interested in Retool as a no-code product and hence led him to exploring further avenues at Retool.
Showcasing Retool and its many offerings to help build no code pages
Retool and what it offers
When being asked why Retool? Sid mentioned that the problem they had to address had a very specific use case of developing an UI over a database and dashboarding the data, thus Retool just provided the perfect fit. Apart from that it’s developer friendly aspect helped a larger team to collaborate and customize effectively.
He also demonstrated another example of how he used Retool to build https://covidfood.retool.com/ where he built a dashboard using the circulating public datasets on covid helplines for food and other essential services.
How CRED, Jupiter, Unacademy use Retool in different ways
On being asked about how the product companies in India are using Retool, Sid gave us a detailed insight on the clients and how their experience using Retool has been. What it also offers is great insights to the Retool team to understand how the clients are customizing as per their needs and that helps them templatize further offerings. Sid mentions the likes of CRED, Sharechat,Unacademy, Clear, Bounce, Practo, Jupiter, suprdaily and many such household fast growing tech startups and how every single one of them are using Retool differently, which only projects the scale at which such low code/ no code tools can be customized based on client demands.
Sid Puri showcasing real examples on Retool
Razorpay Rize Case Study: How the entire website was built using no code tools in just 3 days
On the other hand Aditi gives us an insight into how their team leveraged the power of no-code to build the landing page for Razorpay Rize and the deal book for Rize tools within a span of 3 days with the help of one engineer and one no code tool of choice which was Webflow and the backend for collecting the data was integrated to the Webflow website using a Typeform.
Retool offering at Razorpay Rize
Retool is also one of the coveted partners for Razorpay Rize under Rize tools where they offer an exclusive deal for all Rize founders where all rize inducted startups get 1 year of Retool free along with credits worth $160000 across Retool Partner deals which include the likes of MongoDB, Hubspot, Amplitude, etc.
While concluding the session, Sid emphasized the importance of enabling people across various domains to build and create software because most successful businesses are either moving to or have established a product protagonist mentality where they prioritize building great products. Backing this same exact ideology, Razorpay Rize plans to help the early stage and pre-seed tech-first companies grow by letting you and your team focus their entire bandwidth on core business problems and towards building great products and let Rize take care of the non-core processes.
To know more about Razorpay Rize, hop on to rize.razorpay.com right now!
We believe that Building a Startup is no less challenging than chasing a rare star. Razorpay is here to fuel your journey and help you grow.