'Low code' is the trend towards building software with a minimal amount of code.

It's more prevalent than you might think. For example, Xcode, the iOS development platform lets you see the canvas you’re building for. You can drag-and-drop the UI components you need directly. When you're trying to visualize what 'Low Code' is, this is a pretty good mental model:

Low Code is a way to turn a business process into a competitive advantage. Here's what I mean by that:

Have you ever been to one of those mini-conferences where the speaker promises to teach you how to make money in real estate by profitably flipping houses? No? Just me? It's ok, let me save you $2,000. The main advice is:

This is actually pretty good advice for people as well as companies. It jives pretty deeply with with one of my personal values: Lifelong learning.

Working on automating processes helps you keep pushing your life/business forward because you:

1) Learn to do something new

2) Then learn how to automate it so you can free yourself up to:

3) Do step 1 again

Low Code is a way to turn a business process into a competitive advantage because if you invest the time to build a machine that solves your problem for you, you can move on to solve harder problems, while your competitors are stuck a couple steps back solving the same problem over and over again.

Low Code is actually a long-term approach to problem solving. It's long-term because the thing you're always tempted to focus on right now is the current problem. You actually have to sacrifice the short-term for a couple of iterations so that 5 steps down the line you can step out of the process and let it run without you.

Building a tool that builds the tool you need is inherently meta.

It goes another step meta when your business IS helping other businesses automate their business.

And that is what Appian does. $APPN .

This is a powerful business model, because as Appian helps its customers gain a competitive advantage, those customers are able to accelerate their business and... use Appian more to automate their next project.