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I'm interested to see AppNowGo (private beta, so I can't see it yet). That's something I've thought about building, but it seems like a very hard problem. Any

I'm interested to see AppNowGo (private beta, so I can't see it yet). That's something I've thought about building, but it seems like a very hard problem. Any solution that's doesn't require programming is going to have constraints. So even if the platform is fine for building v1, if they keep adding to it, eventually they're going to hit a wall where they must add feature X, which is impossible to do with the programming-free platform. And then what? They'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, I guess. And somehow get their data. So I think you pretty much need to let them export their data. Better yet would be letting them export the actual app they've built where they get PHP or Rails code. But then you stop making money off of that person. I guess you could charge for the code export so that you at least get one last lump sum before they leave, but it seems dirty to charge people to leave your platform. Another option would be to somehow allow programming as an advanced feature in such a way that they could do almost anything, but that would be pretty difficult to do, and you'd need some kind of sandbox to keep them from breaking your servers.

mboyle 16y ago
Hey all, I'm one of the developers at AppNowGo. All good points here. In the short term we're focusing on servicing customers with simpler data-driven app needs, e.g. member directories, job listings, knowledge bases, recipe books, etc. Applications in this class don't require any custom programming to fulfill their requirements and most of the customer discovery we've done so far indicates these are the types of apps that most people are looking to build. It's the old 80/20. Data exporting is going to be available at any time; you'll be able to export data from the application in a variety of formats (spreadsheet, csv, xml, etc) and even re-import it with new/updated data to update your apps. We've also kicked around the idea of exporting an application's entire schema in some sort of format that other "application builders" could presumably read. Openness and portability are important to us. The front end of AppNowGo that you'd use to build your applications is built entirely on top of our APIs and we're dedicated to making them very powerful. It's possible a lot of the custom programming needs power users might have could be solved with some creative use of the APIs; if anyone would like to chat more about what they'd like to see along those lines I'd be happy to start a dialog. If anyone in here would like to check out the beta, fill out the form here: http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/ http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/ and mention hacker news; I'll make sure you get an invite ASAP. Also, please feel free to email me at mike-at-appnowgo.com with any questions or comments.
- adelevie 16y ago
  AppNowGo is stunningly amazing. I played around for about 15 minutes and built a simple app to keep track of my textbook sales. It's like Wufoo on steroids with a dash of Smartsheet. Suggestion: add support for select APIs. For example, you could let creators add a button for submitting a book as an Amazon listing. You could also support the twitter api and let creators pull in tweets into their applications. I see a ton of potential here. Just my $0.02.

mboyle 16y ago

Hey all, I'm one of the developers at AppNowGo. All good points here. In the short term we're focusing on servicing customers with simpler data-driven app needs, e.g. member directories, job listings, knowledge bases, recipe books, etc. Applications in this class don't require any custom programming to fulfill their requirements and most of the customer discovery we've done so far indicates these are the types of apps that most people are looking to build. It's the old 80/20. Data exporting is going to be available at any time; you'll be able to export data from the application in a variety of formats (spreadsheet, csv, xml, etc) and even re-import it with new/updated data to update your apps. We've also kicked around the idea of exporting an application's entire schema in some sort of format that other "application builders" could presumably read. Openness and portability are important to us. The front end of AppNowGo that you'd use to build your applications is built entirely on top of our APIs and we're dedicated to making them very powerful. It's possible a lot of the custom programming needs power users might have could be solved with some creative use of the APIs; if anyone would like to chat more about what they'd like to see along those lines I'd be happy to start a dialog. If anyone in here would like to check out the beta, fill out the form here: http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/ http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/ and mention hacker news; I'll make sure you get an invite ASAP. Also, please feel free to email me at mike-at-appnowgo.com with any questions or comments.

adelevie 16y ago
AppNowGo is stunningly amazing. I played around for about 15 minutes and built a simple app to keep track of my textbook sales. It's like Wufoo on steroids with a dash of Smartsheet. Suggestion: add support for select APIs. For example, you could let creators add a button for submitting a book as an Amazon listing. You could also support the twitter api and let creators pull in tweets into their applications. I see a ton of potential here. Just my $0.02.