Apps help you automate the most mundane and repetitive small business tasks so that your team can focus on what truly matters. Internally, they can improve communication, foster workplace collaboration, and make teamwork feel more rewarding. Externally, they can drive sales with ecommerce, offer excellent customer support, and increase awareness about your company and brand.
Unfortunately, finding good small business applications can be harder than you think. Off-the-shelf apps are too generic for most businesses, whereas custom apps can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and deploy.
But there’s a better way. No-code app builders can help you develop your own custom apps for work without knowing how to code or breaking the bank to hire a freelancer or agency. In this article, we go over all the amazing ways that workplace apps built using no-code can help you serve your small business needs.
What Is No-Code?
The no-code movement is a new approach to web and mobile app development that enables people from non-programming backgrounds to build and deploy applications without coding skills.
No-code app builders empower non-developers to create launch-ready web and mobile applications using a graphical interface without resorting to any sort of complicated programming. They help you save time and money by simplifying the development process and making it more efficient.
So, how does it work?
Here’s the thing about coding: it can be pretty repetitive at times. Developers have to spend hours repeating the same pattern of code over and over across multiple projects and iterations. What no-code tools do is automate the process of writing all this repetitive code by translating your input via the graphical interface into a certain programming language.
That means all you have to do is drag and drop certain elements into the interface and the no-code tool does all the programming for you! This results in hours of saved time and allows for an intuitive user experience even for non-developers.
Glide is a great example of a no-code app development tool for web and mobile devices. It turns the data from your spreadsheets into custom apps for work and lets you customize it any way you want using a drag-and-drop editor. With loads of templates and several prebuilt components to choose from, Glide makes app development easy and fun even for non-developers.
Benefits of No-Code Mobile Apps
The benefits of mobile apps built with no-code are many. They can help you reduce expenses on custom software development and drive revenue that you’d have otherwise missed out on. Up next, let’s take a look at the top advantages of mobile apps from generating brand awareness to improving customer engagement:
No-code app development is at least 10x faster than traditional coding. Whereas a custom app development undertaking can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, no-code apps take just a few hours to build and deploy.
Traditional development requires extensive knowledge of programming languages such as Python, C++, HTML, CSS, and PHP. On the other hand, no-code tools enable developers to build apps visually and automatically translate them into platform-specific coding languages.
Custom apps can be a pain to update and maintain. Uploading new iterations of your app and getting approved by app stores can literally take days. No-code platforms handle all updates and maintenance in-house, letting you focus on the features that matter most.
Because no-code platforms enable non-developers to also get involved in the development process, it opens up new opportunities for collaboration and facilitates better use of internal resources from sales to marketing to accounting.
No-code platforms offer an excellent way to optimize internal business processes through automation. With the right tools, every business department can build its own internal apps to drive efficiency and maximize productivity.
6 Small Business Use Cases for No-Code Mobile Apps
With the number of mobile phone users increasing every minute, Android and iOS apps offer an amazing opportunity for small businesses to increase customer awareness, build brand loyalty, optimize internal processes, and drive increased revenue. Here are six examples of no-code mobile app use cases that apply to small businesses of all stripes. We’ve also included recommendations to free no-code templates for each as an added bonus!
Ecommerce Store
Launching an ecommerce store can open up new avenues for drawing customers. Not only do you get to save money on rent and maintenance for a physical store, but you also have the ability to ship globally and accept customers from different parts of the world.
The key to launching a good ecommerce store is to get the basics right. There are plenty of website builders in the market, but you need an ecommerce platform that offers custom tools to help your business grow. Simple Store is a template created by the Glide Community. It helps new users create a launch-ready online store in a few minutes. You can sell anything from t-shirts to e-books using an intuitive interface that’s native to mobile.
Investor Communication
Your investors want frequent updates on what’s going on with your small business. You need to share important metrics that project you in the best possible light, from quarterly turnovers to employee performance.
With a mobile app, you can stay connected with your investors all the time and share important updates in visually-appealing formats from simple graphs to pie charts. Glide’s Investor Updates template can help you keep ensure the funds keep flowing and the investors stay happy 24/7.
Project Management
A proper project management solution can launch your workplace into hyperspeed by enabling workers to automate mundane tasks and eliminate time-eaters. With a custom mobile app, you can also revolutionize the way you perform managerial functions like assigning tasks, managing employees, and evaluating performance.
Company Tasks & Projects is a Glide template that can give any project management solution a run for its money. It lets you assign roles to employees and keep track of progress in the workplace. It’s an excellent tool for fostering collaboration and making communication more efficient.
Property Inspections
Physical offices need to be kept in proper shape. You have to regularly check for compliance with local as well as national regulations. If you’re in the hospitality industry, you may even have an entire department dedicated to property upkeep.
There are lots of tools that can help you do this, but Inspections is a Glide template that offers complete customizability while maintaining your workplace hygiene. You can inspect and grade each room separately based on its maintenance status and hygiene condition. You can even keep track of employees and assign them to specific maintenance jobs.
Issue Tracking
Most entrepreneurs invest in some sort of customer support solution for their small businesses, but you also need a system to keep track of internal complaints. Without a proper way to flag, assign, and track issues related to the workplace, you risk running on faulty systems that create unnecessary friction within your organization.
Off-the-shelf issue tracking systems can help in a pinch, but you also need a long-term solution that’s fine-tuned to the workflows within your organization. That’s where the Issue Tracker template by Glide comes in. It can help you track individual complaints with important details, locational data, and resolution status.
Asset Management
From mobile devices to cloud servers — with the amount of new technology flooding the workplace, you need a good asset management solution to keep track of it all. These tools help you keep track of your company assets throughout the entire lifecycle, from procurement to utilization to disposal.
Equipment & Asset Manager is a Glide template that can help you with all your asset management needs. The template can help you quickly design a native mobile experience for tracking and utilizing company assets without enlisting a mobile app development company.
Glide: The Best No-Code Mobile App Builder for SMBs
Looking for the perfect no-code app development tool for your startup or small business? Glide is an intuitive spreadsheet-to-app builder that turns your databases into powerful apps for work. It’s fully no-code and no-design, meaning that you can create a professional-looking app in minutes regardless of your skillset.
A big part of the offering is the Glide Community, a diverse group of business leaders and product engineers who regularly contribute assets and expertise to make us the vibrant no-code platform we are today. There are hundreds of community-made templates to choose from, not to mention a very active user forum where you can discuss any challenges you encounter.
The core principle behind no-code is to give you all the tools you need to build without railroading your creative process. At Glide, this is the one thing we try to embody in everything we do. Want to give us a try? Sign up for a free trial today!
