No-code application development tools evaluated in a race to go-live

Creating no-code custom apps for marketing your engineering services is the cutting edge of cutting through. Two ways I have seen this used are in proposals and estimation.

In the first case, a written proposal was supported by an interactive micro-website featuring talking CVs. The second application was a scenario tool that allowed the customer to adjust project variables/scope and instantly see the impact on cost and timelines.

Both of these examples were with IT consultants I know, but really, engineering firms could be doing exactly the same kind of thing. With the rise of no-code programming, it's easy to create apps in just a few hours for less than US$40, the cost of a monthly subscription to a no-code tool.

So I decided to bite the bullet and teach myself how to create my own apps, something I had been putting off for a while. But what tools to use? I knew of Lovable and Replit, the initial darlings of the no-code scene. But as an engineering marketing consultant, I needed to advise my clients on which ones to use.

So I decided to benchmark them. I would put in exactly the same prompts in each tool and see which one got me to a usable application I could share first. For good measure, I searched and found two other options that claimed to do the same thing - Boltstack and Googles AI Studio. (If I had more time, I would have included the various options with Anthropic's Claude Platform.)

As a test subject, I decided to create something personally useful - an App for keeping track of my teenage daughter's multiple school and extracurricular activities. The core function was to take either pasted text or an image from the multitude of emails, newsletters, websites, social media messages, etc., and simply copy and paste into the App. AI would extract the important information and generate calendar appointments and tasks that I could export to my Google Calendar/Tasks, where they would appear alongside my other daily activities. My daughter's name is Olivia Kannegieter, so I called the app OK Pilot (pictured above).

So I started the race with all four running in parallel, using their one-month free trial. I have of course learned a lot about how these tools work, and this is not the place to share them. But the short story is that both Loveable and Replit produced working apps, albeit buggy, with an hour of starting from zero knowledge, the other two had problems I can't begin to descibe and so I dropped them.

I then started refining the Loveable and Replit versions, fixing bugs and adding new features I hadn't considered initially as I trialled the prototypes. In the end, Replit got there first and with a much more reliable output, that I was able to share within my family.

The point about this story is that engineering firms can and should be exploring innovative new ways to cut through. I earlier shared a post "Everything works - you jut have to cut through" (pic below). Custom apps for specific business development tasks are a good example of the "innovative formats" discussed in that article.

As always, imagination is the limit. What Apps will be genuinely impressive and useful, and which will be perceived as a gimmick is entirely contextual. However, what I do know is that it will be increasingly hard to cut through in the future and engineering firms really need to experiment with these kinds of approaches.

I highly recommend just jumping onto a no-code app-building tool and having a go. Learn how it all works, work out the security and other considerations, brainstorm ways to cut through, then start using it in your marketing and business development.