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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

The criticism -- almost all the other comments at this point -- focuses on one aspect of the low-code app:

It has to be re-written once it grows. *

While this is true, I don't think Bethan or any other low code advocate would dispute that. The question is: can you get test an idea with low code.

The answer to that might be a trivial yes, but if you had asked me what that means, I would guess a team of 3 people could prototype an idea in about a week.

I did not expect a single person to be able to test an idea in 4 hours. That is the real insight here.

* Not all the criticism. One person points out that calling it a business is overblown till someone pays for it.

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Low code already happens. Now I think it’s just getting popular .

“Groupon was originally run on WordPress because they only needed to test one thing: will local small businesses provide discounts in exchange for being introduced to potential new customers.”

And yes it is an example of that it has to be rewritten.

From https://bigthinking.io/the-mindset-for-innovation-everything...

Yeah, it's not really new. A few years back, I interviewed at a startup that was close to two years in, and they described their app as "the most overloaded Drupal installation in existence," and were in the middle of migrating it to Rails.

If people got limited feedback, prior to wider distribution, they could re-work their articles so 95%+ of the discussion isn't centered around one superficial point, but rather the bread-and-butter of the article's point: as you mention, 1-person & 4 hours vs. 3-people & 1-week. Big difference between the two!

> That is the real insight here.

To me, the insight is that the less you care about the future of your "product", the less time you have to put into it.

I look at the linked site, and all I see is "Minimal". I don't see any viability, I don't see a product (identifying what's being sold takes a few clicks). I also see a bevy of GDPR violations. I see an ADA (or the EU equivalent) liability. I, as a security conscious developer, forsee a disaster of a security story.

I see human scaling issues, as everything slightly out of the ordinary that happens requires an email to an address which is on the surface completely unrelated to the site itself. I also see 842 social media trackers blocked with standard FireFox settings (though I guess that falls in with GDPR violations).

I also see some potential legal liabilities, as all of the agreements are between the users and "Bethan Vincent". That lack of separation could put the owner in a lot of hot water should any of the above liabilities become a reality.

Most of these won't - can't - be solved with a technological re-write. A lot of them will require a fair bit of re-writing the entire business model.

This sounds like the kind of risk someone running a startup can take.. do you really advocate limiting MVPs due to potential GDPR violations? And English ADA equivalent violations?

He probably should think about all these things, for sure. And maybe have taken more than 4 hours :) , they're not necessary risks for sure, and since you've pointed them out, now he can fix them :)

I guess it really depends. Any risk might be worth it depending on the benefits.

That said, if you're operating out of the EU, and are targeting EU customers, being GDPR compliant seems like a no-brainer. Especially since it can be built in from the beginning with far less effort and money than retrofitting for GDPR compliance later.

The same goes with accessibility. Building with it in mind is cheaper over the long term than fixing it later.

The key is that your business won't just lose customers over these kinds of issues, the business instead gains legal liabilities with attached fines, legal fees, and remediation costs. Even if the goal of a startup is only to be acquihired, the acquired liability might not be worth the gain of an employee or two for a large corporation.

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