I believe your statement misses a crucial condition:
> Building something customers want, but cannot or should not build themselves, is a competitive advantage,...
With which I want to stress the important part from my comment: it certainly makes sense to build something as quick as possible to assert the market. But if you cannot move beyond that, fast, your business model is risky.
I think in early stages, for example, an "online bike sharing service" that consists of only an excel sheet and a mailbox is by far preferable over a web-app, with stripe integration and a blockchain, microservices or kubernetes cluster or whatever overengineerd paradigm is hot this month.
But if your entire "bike sharing service" is as easy as "getting a mailserver and filling an excel sheet", your business is extremely easy to copy. Anyone with a bigger marketing budget will overtake you in days. Anyone with a larger reach can push you out of business in mere days.
At some point, you'll need to get a competitive advantage, which cannot be copied in hours, or bought with spare change of any of your competitors. Whether that is a full software-suite or kubernetes-hosted microservices with blockchain integration (I hope not) or just a large happy customer base, matters little.
I'm not saying "don't do no/low-code", I'm only putting forward how business might change when anyone can build an online business in mere hours. I'm not a historian, but I certain there are numerous examples of existing fields and niches changing or dissapearing because innovation removed the barrier to entry and anyone could copy the business in hours, that would previously cost months or huge loans to get off the ground.
> Building something customers want, but cannot or should not build themselves, is a competitive advantage,...
With which I want to stress the important part from my comment: it certainly makes sense to build something as quick as possible to assert the market. But if you cannot move beyond that, fast, your business model is risky.
I think in early stages, for example, an "online bike sharing service" that consists of only an excel sheet and a mailbox is by far preferable over a web-app, with stripe integration and a blockchain, microservices or kubernetes cluster or whatever overengineerd paradigm is hot this month.
But if your entire "bike sharing service" is as easy as "getting a mailserver and filling an excel sheet", your business is extremely easy to copy. Anyone with a bigger marketing budget will overtake you in days. Anyone with a larger reach can push you out of business in mere days.
At some point, you'll need to get a competitive advantage, which cannot be copied in hours, or bought with spare change of any of your competitors. Whether that is a full software-suite or kubernetes-hosted microservices with blockchain integration (I hope not) or just a large happy customer base, matters little.
I'm not saying "don't do no/low-code", I'm only putting forward how business might change when anyone can build an online business in mere hours. I'm not a historian, but I certain there are numerous examples of existing fields and niches changing or dissapearing because innovation removed the barrier to entry and anyone could copy the business in hours, that would previously cost months or huge loans to get off the ground.