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The Low-Code and No-Code movement has taken the world by storm. Not simply as a new technology but as a true digital revolution. The power to create, iterate, and innovate is now in the hands of every person with access to a computer. While there have been massive strides in education there are still educational barriers for many to enter the traditional development market. This is why the world is embracing such ground-breaking technology.
For those that aren’t aware… the mission of Browse AI is to make the world’s data more accessible. With over 1.5 billion web pages without an API, we want to put that data in the hands of the doers, the builders, and budding entrepreneurs. We aim to democratize data the same way that no-code solutions have democratized the development process.
Why does access to data matter?
Traditional high quality data-sets are expensive. They have been scraped, harvested, and possibly illegally collected by using users as a product (I won’t name the 800lb gorilla). Getting quality data requires buying from list vendors, licensing databases, or paying consultants/freelancers/professional services teams tens of thousands of dollars. After weeks, they get their data file only to have it instantly become out of date. Why? Because collecting data was hard.
Is data important in no-code and low-code development?
Most businesses need data about their market, their customers, or most commonly for their own product/operations. They are offering data as a service, enriching their databases, or simply making educated business decisions in real-time. This is mission critical data-pipeline that must be maintained, enriched, and deeply integrated.
What’s a real example?
Imagine you are very into a new fad diet and you want to know what restaurants serve meals that comply with these new dietary restrictions (think the next paleo). What do you do? You go to your favorite directory and look at menus and search comments. You tell your friends and start sharing so you publish your list online. You start getting people from other areas and cities asking for similar lists… wow maybe you have a business here? So you upgrade your site, you update your list but realize you just can’t go national without a ton of data. What do you do?
What’s a real solution?
Using a web scraper (there are so many great choices) you can start to collect data from all over the web and start building a database. You now have an MVP of a national directory for food fitting your new diet, congrats! But what happens next can destroy your idea. Suddenly your data becomes outdated, menus change, hours change and your user experience falls apart.
What’s a better solution?
With a tool like Browse AI, you can collect the data you want, and also feed it directly into your product with the API, connect it with Zapier, OR integrate it with our native Google Sheet, Airtable, and upcoming Bubble integrations. Why? Because this means you have a direct connection between your live data and the data on the web. By using monitoring you can track these listings and keep your data continuously up to date. This is what we mean by building a no-code data-pipeline. It’s sort of a game changer for non-technical founders.
What kind of data is available?
Any data you can find online is available to you. From contact information, business information, top 10/100/500 lists, structured and unstructured data-sets, Airtables, Google sheets, and so much more. But all of the data you need rarely lives in one place, and getting quality data requires building custom data tables from multiple disparate sources. As the complexity increases the need for easier solutions becomes more and more clear.
What does the future of low-code/no-code data look like?
The future is happening now. You can train a robot in 2 minutes to capture any data you want online. But if we had to speculate, we would venture to guess that you will be able to easily chain multiple data workflows together, manipulate/validate/analyze your data in real-time, and then feed it all into your system of record as production-ready. All of this will be done without a single line of code.
How do I get started building my own data set without code?
We’re biased but we suggest signing up for free at Browse AI.
