FINN is a car rental platform founded in 2019 in Munich, Germany. With over 350 employees, 15,000 customers and $900M raised in total, it is one of the most promising scale-ups in the country and the largest company we've met to date at NoCode Series! FINN is present in Germany and is also expanding into the United States, an important market for the company.
👨 Cornelius Schramm is an integral part of FINN's US Ops team. With a degree in economics from the university, Cornelius was taught Data Science and interned at FINN before joining the company full time.
The primary motivation for using NoCode at FINN (which is still the case today) is the ability to move faster and more efficiently on company projects.
And this for a major reason specific to the development process NoCode : one person can define and implement a business process whereas a traditional development approach requires at least two people, which requires alignment of parties and long and costly feedback loops. Moreover, it is no longer necessary to have strong technical skills to create automations with NoCode technologies.
Key Facts: Thanks to the accessibility of the NoCode tools, more than 300 people at FINN use them for internal productivity use cases, which enhances the company's ability to innovate and scale its business. On the NoCode Make platform alone, there are now more than 3,000 active automation scenarios that deliver more than 30,000 executions per day.
FINN's story started with a simple webflow page connected to a Google Sheet: NoCode has been part of the company's DNA since the beginning.
Other tools NoCode were used such as Airtable to allow employees to directly manipulate the company's data with great agility.
Although the V1 version of FINN's NoCode infrastructure allowed the activity to start and the model to be iterated, it had some limitations:
With the exponential growth of the company, the need to build a scalable infrastructure was quickly felt while maintaining the agile DNA of NoCode.
This is how the NoCode FINN 2.0 architecture was born. The major challenge was to benefit from the power of a Postgres database combined with visualization tools (Nocodb + Retool).
The Retool interface is used by many business units in the company (ops, finance etc...).
At the heart of this new configuration is NoCode Make technology to connect tools together and create a variety of robust automation scenarios.
This infrastructure is currently being updated in the US - a new organization is currently under development in Germany (with a more code-oriented approach) but keeping the same fundamentals as version 2.0.
Given the speed of development of the market and the company, the key to FINN's success is speed.
For Cornelius, it is always easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. Giving collaborators as much access and autonomy as possible in the beginning is critical to improving speed (for example, when entering a new market). Thus, NoCode is a real launch pad for launching, testing and iterating new projects, even if version 1.0 is imperfect at first.
On the subject of infrastructure scalability NoCode, Cornelius is convinced that NoCode is capable of scaling - if the architecture is thought out with good practices up to a certain measure of complexity where the code can be more practical especially for maintainability, unit testing and debugging of complex infrastructures.
The editors NoCode are evolving rapidly and will probably offer more solutions in the future to allow developers NoCode to maintain complex applications more easily. Third party solutions also exist and offer essential functionalities to monitor, secure and version your creations NoCode (such as NcScale encountered in the context of NoCode Series).
In any case, Cornelius advocates the benefits of a hybrid vision NoCode + Code in the company, which we regularly observe within mature companies on the theme of NoCode (such as Gojob, Qonto or Beev...) and which have significant internal resources (developers NoCode and Code).
Internationalization, a major challenge for FINN's approach NoCode ?
FINN is growing rapidly and has the ambition to open new countries in the next months. The major challenge is to quickly adapt the process to local constraints and specificities. The NoCode brings convincing answers by allowing regional teams to adjust the process in a flexible way in order to iterate the product to the market challenges. A similar challenge that we have already found at Ornikar.
The success of the NoCode approach at FINN relies on the implementation of rigorous best practices to ensure the scalability of the infrastructure. In particular, these best practices are essential to ensure the proper conduct of automation operations.
Among these best practices, Cornelius shared the following tips:
The skills NoCode have been part of FINN's DNA since its inception. As such, 90% of our internal employees have been taught Make and are able to implement automation scenarios. FINN has integrated the fundamentals of Make into its employee onboarding.
Training is offered internally via videos and written content. FINN has created an Internal Make Academy that provides a maximum of documentation to the teams during their onboarding (How to Do, Do and Don't...).
Cornelius told us that many employees appreciate the tools NoCode for their speed and ease of use: a good example of successful acculturation NoCode internally!
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