DISPATCH 22 · FRANKFURT
Darragh McKay, CEO and founder, Noloco
FRANKFURT — At No-Code Week, Noloco's founder traces an arc from 2021 to today: five years of building internal tools on top of other people's data. Along the way, the word "no-code" started to fray at the edges.
On the ground with
Darragh McKay founded Noloco in 2021 after working as a software engineer at HubSpot and a Dublin startup. He saw small and mid-sized teams drowning in spreadsheets and disconnected SaaS tools, unable to assemble the systems they actually needed. Noloco gives them an interface layer on top of existing databases — Airtable, Postgres, MySQL, Google Sheets — without writing code.
What we covered
00:00 Introductions at No-Code Week Frankfurt
01:19 From HubSpot engineer to founder: the thesis behind Noloco
05:46 How Noloco turns spreadsheets and databases into working apps
11:19 A US construction firm that runs CRM, ERP, and project management on one Noloco app
17:58 Five years of evolution — from web app builder, to data-first platform, to AI
23:25 NOLA, the AI agent that helps builders create apps from natural language
32:58 Why "no-code" doesn't hold up anymore, and what might replace it
From the notebook
- Noloco (https://noloco.com)
- Airtable (https://airtable.com)
- HubSpot (https://hubspot.com)
- Lovable (https://lovable.dev)
- Make (https://make.com)
- Zapier (https://zapier.com)
- n8n (https://n8n.io)
- WeWeb (https://weweb.io)
- Bubble (https://bubble.io)
- Glide (https://glideapps.com)
- Softr (https://softr.io)
- Claude (https://claude.ai)
- Cursor (https://cursor.com)
- Retool (https://retool.com)
- GitBook (https://gitbook.com)
Find Darragh
LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/darraghmckay
Next stop
No-Code Week returns next year — whatever it ends up being called.
No-Code World Radio is hosted by Alex. New dispatches from a new city, wherever you listen.
—
Get in touch with Alex on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexiskovalenko/) or by email at alex@hosakka.studio.