VCs are investing more money in no-code companies

Modern Makers - 16/08/2020

Aug 16, 2020

Modern Makers is a weekly newsletter where I share with you a selection of the best available content about no-code and productivity tools. I hope this content will help you grow your business, launch your project or succeed in your career.

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Hi makers,

This week in the agenda:

💰 Coda and Parabola announced new funding rounds

🇰🇷 Notion is now available in South Korea and is about to launch its API

🔌 Bubble introduces its Airtable integration

Enjoy!

💰 Funding

Coda closes $80M Series C funding! A great news for Coda of course but also for the no-code industry in general. For those of you who haven't heard of Coda yet, this tool wants to revolutionise the way you can manage all kinds of documents in one single space. Based on that description, you can understand that Coda is in direct competition with Notion.

I had the opportunity to do some tests with Coda a few months ago, but having already adopted Notion, I didn't see much point in continuing these tests as the two tools share so many similarities. From what I understand, it seems Coda is more efficient on the database part and already has an API (but Notion is about to release its API, see below in the Product section of this newsletter).

This new funding round will allow Coda to focus on the performance and robustness of its platform to ensure an optimal experience for the 25,000 teams that have already adopted the tool. Coda also wants to enrich its Enterprise offer by focusing on data management, document security and user control levels.

The war between Notion and Coda is only just beginning, as both are financially very strong ($140M raised for Coda against $68.2M for Notion).

Read: Funding the future of Coda

Parabola closes $8M Series A, just over two years after a $2.2M seed round. Parabola is a productivity tool that automates tasks involving data manipulation. With this round of funding, Parabola hopes to improve its product, making it more powerful and even easier to use for people with no technical skills.

Parabola also announced an integration with Shopify. With the current context of COVID-19, Parabola has indeed seen a significant increase in the use of its service by e-merchants.

If you want to better understand what it is possible to create and automate with Parabola, I invite you to visit their Recipes page which presents examples of integration with other no-code tools such as Bubble, Webflow or Airtable.

Read: Why Parabola + exciting news

🧰 Product

Notion is now available in Korean. This launch demonstrates Notion's ambition to become a global company. In an interview with Protocol magazine, Ivan Zhao, Notion's CEO, gave details about the launch of Notion in South Korea and in particular about the many difficulties that such a launch implies. In this interview, we learn that :

The United States represents only 15% of Notion's users
South Korea is the second market for Notion
This launch in Korean will enable Notion to move forward in its other priority markets, including France, Russia, Brazil and Japan
Entire teams are dedicated to improving the mobile experience and developing an offline mode.

Ivan Zhao also announces that the Notion API (eagerly awaited by the whole community) should arrive sooner than expected with a launch scheduled for this quarter!

The other big change coming to Notion will help it localize everywhere: an API. Users have been clamoring for Notion to allow other apps to work within and grab data from Notion, and Zhao said its API is finally coming this quarter

Read: Inside Notion's global expansion plan

Bubble has released its Airtable plugin. You can now connect these two tools together and use directly the data from an Airtable database within an application developed on Bubble. I was able to do a first quick test this week on my side, the integration is very easy to set up, you just need to follow the steps listed in the Bubble Manual.

This announcement comes just a few days after the announcement of the Figma plugin which allows you to import your designs and mock-ups directly into Bubble and thus save a lot of time on the UI part of your applications. Personally, these two plugins have made me want to go back to using Bubble.

Have you been able to test one of these two plugins? I'm interested in your feedback, don't hesitate to leave me a comment!

⚒ Tutorials

Aron Korenblit has published a new video to show us in detail Automations, the brand new feature available on Airtable that was highlighted in my newsletter last week. As a reminder, this is a feature available only to Airtable PRO and Enterprise accounts. This tutorial of Aron could convince you to purchase a PRO plan as the possibilities offered by this new feature are so interesting.

Learn: Livestream #15: Airtable Automations

📦 In other news

Distinguish allows you to have your own domain name for your Substack newsletter as well as to choose among 100 fonts and to change the background of your home page
Glide just introduced Webview, a new Pro component that allows you to embed web pages/assets directly in your app
To celebrate its first anniversary, Stacker had announced to unveil 3 new features every day of this week. The complete list of new features is available on their website
Medium has introduced new publishing tools for content creators
Figma.cool is a collection of designs, plugins and tutorials for Figma