Low code is the way to go for most future development capability

World’s leading analytics company Gartner expects that in 2025 70% of new applications developed for enterprise purposes will be built with Low code frameworks. 70%, in just over two years from now. That’s massive.

As someone who’s been building software for more than 20 years, this has been a long time coming, but I was still caught slightly off guard by the speed of the adoption of low code platforms. For the past couple years, we’ve built Fingertip using Microsoft’s Power Platform, one of the most powerful low code solutions on the market. Our Microsoft Teams -based solution is the #1 Power Platform solution in terms of utility and features, and I was asked by Microsoft to present my thoughts on Low code and Power Platform in Slush 2022. The synergies for startups with these tech ecosystems built by global enterprises, which enable scalable growth through their distribution channels. These thoughts I want to share with you as well here.

Teams as the platform of choice

Why Microsoft Teams and Power Platform? Well, the choice wasn’t obvious a couple years ago, when Teams was struggling to gain a foothold on the industry, but that all changed with Covid. Suddenly, everyone needed an online collaboration platform, and conveniently most had access to Teams with their Microsoft subscriptions.

In the following pandemic years, Teams saw its popularity surge 10-fold to more than 270 million monthly active users. Microsoft CEO has dubbed Teams as important as an internet browser or operating system, and with good reason. It is the most convenient way for most organizations to lead their business over the internet and adopt new practices.

For us at Fingertip , it also offers the security built in the Microsoft ecosystem, scalability and go-to-market benefits invaluable to startups like ours. Microsoft wants its ecosystem to grow with them, and we’ve been lucky enough to be one of the first to take them up on the offer. Power Platform itself also offers massive development benefits, but I’ll talk about that a bit later.

Disrupting expectations with Fingertip

After focusing on Microsoft and Power Platform, we’ve been able to push the boundaries and disrupt the expectations of enterprise clients. SaaS products are often seen as slow to adopt and become profitable, while being mighty expensive with a high risk of failure. Fingertip’s adoption rate and time to reach profitability at the customer are unheard of, while being super simple to adopt via Teams. The impact our clients experience and their response to that is extremely promising.

Fingertip provides a leadership layer to the well adopted communication platform, making the discussions and decisions stick, and creating actionable and measurable follow-up. This enables alignment and leadership of operations in a fully digital environment. That results in less waiting, less switching between apps, and less badly managed or misaligned work. We’ve measured at least an hour per day saved for each user with these improvements.

For leaders, Fingertip provides a fully digital and transparent way to communicate, plan and complete work, measure progress, make decisions and organize productive meetings. It generates a leadership system that is visible, collaborative, accountable and well documented. It follows the end-to-end delivery of external and internal requests faster, higher quality and more reliable.

Bottlenecks for enterprise solutions

One of the trends these past fifteen years amidst the rise of the smartphone, has been the rise of apps. At first, they were few and far between, mostly games and novelty apps. Nowadays everyone from FIFA world cup to McDonald’s has an app. It’s not a differentiator anymore and can’t be the only basis of successful startups. It’s the quality and speed of app development that makes the difference now.

New concepts and features need to be developed in lightning speed to attract investors. Active paying user counts need to explode to be attractive to VC money. Simultaneously, integrations take up a huge amount of time in the development process, while being mere qualifying factors for enterprise consideration. To be scalable, apps need a distribution channel, connectivity, and ease of adoption.

All of these are present in Low code ecosystems. Microsoft’s Power Platform apps are easily distributed in organizations via Teams, and easy to adopt with familiar UX design. Connectivity with Microsoft’s other apps is a guarantee, and many apps have their own connector templates in Power Platform to integrate further. That’s how Power Platform will win over the enterprise market.

Low code is just better

Low code in general has proven to be a fantastic way to spur fully functional features from concepts and ideas at the required lightning speed. At first Low code’s main application was creating partly automated workflows for individuals to reduce work repetition. In the next generation came the companies offering custom solutions for company-wide solutions, and now in the third wave, we’re generating complete products using Low code platforms.

Fingertip was one of the first scalable products in the Microsoft ecosystem built in Power Apps, and we’ve been the first to reap the rewards: We estimate, that time-to-market for new features is one quarter that of old way of working, and the costs of product development have decreased at the same rate. Our experience shows that Power Platform development is up to 5 times more productive than traditional means, while the cost to maintain and scale are way smaller. The enterprise level security that a startup can promise is an added plus.

We love Power Platform, so should you

To wrap it all together, we truly believe Low code and the Power Platform are the way to go for startups in the SaaS market space. Low code is just better in the most impactful ways, providing a framework for app development far better than what I could ever have imagined. Our state-of-the-art leadership app Fingertip has been built for Microsoft Teams using the Power Platform, which has meant an unprecedented speed and quality of development, while providing a credible and secure distribution channel. Truly a match made in heaven.