No-code is inevitable: a story of how an internal development tool grew into a $16M funded company

When we started EasySend, our goal was an ambitious one: to solve a very pressing problem in the customer experience in insurance and financial services industries - paperwork. At the time, we had no clue as to what this simple idea could grow into. We didn’t realize the sheer magnitude and scale of the problem.

We started by coding forms for our clients. While we have created central libraries to make the process more efficient, EasySend was still a code-based solution at the start.

We wanted to make our lives easier - after all, coding hundreds of forms was a complex endeavor. So, when we started working on the no-code builder, we did it for a very selfish reason - to make our work more accessible and efficient. 

We started small by building a relatively simple PDF rendering engine. Until then, we had to go through a lengthy process to convert our clients’ PDF forms into a web-responsive customer journey. The process was convoluted, to say the least. First, we had to save the PDF in an image format, and then a developer from our team had to search for the exact positions of pixels and start to type them into the code. Now, imagine this done at the scale of hundreds and thousands of PDF documents - not a task you would want your worst enemy to work on. 

So, we decided to make the process more efficient by building an engine to mark fields on PDF documents instead of doing the annotations with code - saving a lot of time. That is how EasySend’s no-code approach was born.

After that, we went on to turn the second step. We created a platform for building complete digital experiences, creating web flows using drag & drop instead of coding.

We later realized that this tool is too great to be hoarding it for ourselves. If we unleash it on the world, we can genuinely change the way enterprises approach their digital transformation.

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From internal tool to a no-code platform for insurance and financial services

The bottom line is - we built a no-code platform for ourselves; but, when we experienced the pain of coding digital journeys first hand, we searched for a solution to make our own lives easier.

However, we quickly realized the immense potential of the tool to make lives easier for our clients and everyone in the industry. By releasing the tool to build and optimize digital customer journeys with a platform instead of using code, we knew we could truly change the face of the industry.

Why is no-code the future?

No-code has few critical advantages that make it objectively better than traditional development projects, especially at scale.

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Saving valuable time

Creating a new online experience on your website in a traditional way is a long project, especially in the enterprise environment where it must involve multiple departments and teams. In large organizations, the front end, backend, and security teams must work together on each digital journey you create.

Ensuring that everyone can work together on the same timeline is complex and, as a consequence, takes an enormous amount of time. That is why such projects in large organizations carry on for months and are often already obsolete on release. In a fast-moving digital world, this simply can’t work anymore.

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Reducing the complexity of the projects

Now let’s talk about the project itself. Every time you release a new customer journey built with code, you are essentially starting all over again. In theory, in mature organizations, there are strict guidelines for creating new customer-facing processes. If that is the case, it is easier to get started because you have a centralized UI library. 

But in reality, a lot of projects are built by different teams, so everything is done from scratch - over and over again. It is difficult for large organizations to have centralized processes, resulting in wasted time and resources.

With no-code, a single person, or sometimes a small team, can complete the entire project end to end. This eliminates the need for synchronizing between so many departments and roles in the organization, making getting started so much easier. 

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Simplifying security audits

Security is another huge problem with code. When processes are built with no-code, no new code is introduced into the environment since the underlying code of any new process you are creating is already running in other processes you already have. Since all processes built with a no-code platform are running on the same underlying code, in essence, you are not adding a single line of code.

From a security perspective, this is huge. You only need to ensure that platform is secured once. You don’t have to inspect the security of every process individually because they all run the same code. There is no risk of specific SQL injection vulnerabilities since all processes run on the same infrastructure. Once you validated that the system is protected, no need to validate every single process. 

This is especially crucial with sensitive data and in regulated industries, such as insurance and financial services.

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Offloading security to the vendor

The no-code vendor is responsible for the security. Here at EasySend, we are constantly improving the security of the platform. So, instead of securing different code written by different teams running on different processes, you offload the security tasks to the vendor. Since this is our bread and butter, we can make it more secure instead of repeating the process multiple times.

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Simplified maintenance and updates

Code is not something that can remain static. Updates to libraries and frameworks are pushed out regularly. When you use libraries such as Angular or React, you have to keep your libraries updated over time or end up with obsolete code that you can’t reuse and maintain. 

EasySend takes care of updating - all your processes are automatically updated once our platform is updated. By using the platform, the responsibility is taken from your organization to our no-code platform that does it one time centrally.

So, not only building the digital process is easier, but maintaining it over time is also simplified. Once your team is synchronized and ensures security, the project itself is also significantly shorter - you use intuition and simple drag & drop to build the process instead of building it with code. To summarize:

• Building the process itself is faster
• The project complexity is reduced
• Maintenance is simplified. Not only maintaining the process itself but also pushing updates or responding to regulatory changes - all is done via simple content editing instead of writing code
• Keeping libraries and frameworks update
• Ensuring security at the platform level

No-code is the future: bringing startup agility to enterprise

Every organization that we are talking to is aware of the no-code revolution to some extent, and in some ways, already using no-code or considering the transition in some capacity. And, it is not difficult to see why. We went through the process ourselves, where we went from coded journeys to a no-code builder and grew it into a $16M company.

It is evident to any organization today that writing customized code for new customer journeys is not how things will be in five years from now. And they are all somewhere in planning or implementing no-code technology digital transformation solutions for customer journeys and internal processes.

Where is your organization headed?