I had a chance to sit down with Ellen, one of the co-founders, and see an earlier beta. Congratulations to the entire team on this milestone; excited to see what you have in store. For context, I used to run a consulting company where I shipped a lot of greenfield software, especially CRUD MVP apps (which I think is a segment you're targeting). So I love folks trying to make this kind of work easier.
I'm curious who you see your audience as. If you look at a spectrum across skill level:
* On the far left you'll have those learning: univ students, boot camper's, technical folks in non-eng jobs (think operations-y people who are zapier+spreadsheet wizards).
* In the middle you'll have junior engineers starting their first or second role.
* On the far right, you'll have senior engineers who are looking at factors beyond functionality like architecture, style, performance, etc.
I think the middle is out. These are folks who've made an investment in their education and are looking to apply it. They're looking to earn their stripes and might trade efficiency for that. There's also secondary effects of using the incumbents like membership into a community (I run the SF Django meetup so I see this up and close).
The far right is out because DL is hiding the complexity they're precisely interested in tailoring (or at the very least, having the optionality to in the future). Additionally, they're very fast at the operations you've optimized for (CRUD) so that's not necessarily a barrier for them. They'll be working with boilerplates that are deployment ready (though not instant like y'all - that's pretty cool!). Yes there's some pain here you're solving. Not enough to justify the switching costs, IMO.
I think that leaves you with the beginner crowd. Zooming in further, I'd exclude students since there is no value for them to invest in something they wouldn't get hired for. There's the casual indiehacker / weekend project person. I think this would work fantastically for them because they just want to spin something up as fast as possible. There's also the operations person who does a lot of ducktaping of airtable+zapier+typeform+etc. I know many people who are doing that and when they hit a ceiling, this could be perfect.
I'm arriving to the following conclusion: though you're not a no-code tool, you share the same target audience. Repl.it is a good comparison here.
Great analysis. I also think you have 'small operators' and 'large operators' in middle and right. Consider a large number of small consultants building small-ish websites with some interactivity and state for small clients. They might use RoR, Django, but have to manage and run the operations and a database, even if they use cloud services. Wouldn't they be better with a integrated solution across coding, building, deploying, etc?
I segmented the beginner crowd into two cohorts: side project folk and operations people ducktaping zapier+airtable, etc. The former does not have budget, the latter does (small businesses, early stage startups).
I'm curious who you see your audience as. If you look at a spectrum across skill level:
* On the far left you'll have those learning: univ students, boot camper's, technical folks in non-eng jobs (think operations-y people who are zapier+spreadsheet wizards).
* In the middle you'll have junior engineers starting their first or second role.
* On the far right, you'll have senior engineers who are looking at factors beyond functionality like architecture, style, performance, etc.
I think the middle is out. These are folks who've made an investment in their education and are looking to apply it. They're looking to earn their stripes and might trade efficiency for that. There's also secondary effects of using the incumbents like membership into a community (I run the SF Django meetup so I see this up and close).
The far right is out because DL is hiding the complexity they're precisely interested in tailoring (or at the very least, having the optionality to in the future). Additionally, they're very fast at the operations you've optimized for (CRUD) so that's not necessarily a barrier for them. They'll be working with boilerplates that are deployment ready (though not instant like y'all - that's pretty cool!). Yes there's some pain here you're solving. Not enough to justify the switching costs, IMO.
I think that leaves you with the beginner crowd. Zooming in further, I'd exclude students since there is no value for them to invest in something they wouldn't get hired for. There's the casual indiehacker / weekend project person. I think this would work fantastically for them because they just want to spin something up as fast as possible. There's also the operations person who does a lot of ducktaping of airtable+zapier+typeform+etc. I know many people who are doing that and when they hit a ceiling, this could be perfect.
I'm arriving to the following conclusion: though you're not a no-code tool, you share the same target audience. Repl.it is a good comparison here.