“Students are such an underutilized resource today, and companies have a lot to gain from tapping into this market when recruiting. Through my own experiences, I saw that I could deliver value to the business industry as a student while also gaining relevant experience in return,” says Jakob Erikstad, managing director at StudMatch.

He saw that the problem organizations often face is that they don’t know where to begin when looking for student interns, or how to implement a structured set-up for onboarding and training in order to provide good follow-up and relevant tasks.

“It’s also important to define what the organization wants to gain from hiring students. Some are interested in the results of the work produced by their students, others are interested in finding candidates they can recruit full-time. It’s important to combine the organization's goals with providing the students the opportunity to learn relevant skills,” Jakob says.

Today, they have several successful projects on the books, ranging from small start-ups to large corporations.

Eliminating development error

After having tried out various no-code solutions such as Monday and Airtable, they decided to look at no-code to build their platform as well.

“The value proposition of no-code is very strong. We could build a solution way faster than with traditional coding, and the risk of development errors was almost eliminated,” Jakob says.

“Many are also too concerned about the potential limitations of no-code, thinking that you’ll sacrifice functionality and room for opportunities down the road. With Appfarm you have the ability to do the necessary changes to the code if you wish to. And even if you end up facing limitations, it is the perfect tool for prototyping and iterating.”

Jakob also brings up another aspect that many fail to recognize: how no-code enables more roles to take part in the actual development process.

“People with an understanding of business development and other important aspects when creating a product, can now also be able to actually develop the technical solution.”

No-code opens up for one common language

UX designer Herman Ikhsani agrees that no-code has enabled a completely different way of working and developing.

“Having strict, standardized roles when working on a project often leads to communication problems. Designers live in a fairytale world where anything is possible and the UX is everything. Developers think more realistically and have a deeper insight into what's actually possible. It turns into a very isolated way of working,” Herman says.

Working with no-code, both Herman and Jakob are able to take an active role in the development, working efficiently together despite having different backgrounds.

“When the syntax and development language is replaced with something visual, it enables me as the designer to work with and understand the technical developers. The simple fact that we can speak the same language and have everyone be part of the production process, rather than giving instructions back and forth, is invaluable,” Herman says.

Herman found it easy to understand and learn the platform. He made good use of the available learning resources and the online Appfarm Community.

“After only two weeks I had mastered the platform and could set up different data models and objects. That speaks volumes, considering my technical background. It’s all very intuitive,” he says.

The road ahead for StudMatch

The start-up has big plans for the future and is looking to expand the platform to make it more scalable.

“Now we’re hoping to receive funding from Innovation Norway and bring in investors so we can recruit more full-time people to the team. We want to make the solution available to more users. We are very excited to begin a scalable journey,” Jakob Erikstad finishes.