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While I really admire, and often use no-code/low-code tools, it's hard for me to see a clear and sizeable target audience. Often, it's some sort of variation o

by drorco 4y ago

While I really admire, and often use no-code/low-code tools, it's hard for me to see a clear and sizeable target audience. Often, it's some sort of variation of a very technically-savvy intra/entrepreneur that has limited dev resources, there aren't many like that. Coders usually stay away from these kind of solutions because they're often not as flexible as writing code, and force you to work in a method that has to also fit less-technical users. I was using Zapier a ton and I loved it, but I'm a jack of trades entrepreneur, getting other people on my team to use it was much harder.

rubenfiszel 4y ago
For coders that would stay away because of those limitations, we built Windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill) as an OSS low-code builder allowing you to define flows (sequence of scripts essentially) made out of arbitrary code in Deno or Python. You can use it as a self-hosted AWS Lambda if you need to but can gradually leverage all the convenience of low-code builders when you feel ready to, and start reusing modules made by the community on https://hub.windmill.dev https://hub.windmill.dev . You can see it as an open-source alternative to Pipedream which is very different from what Tooljet is doing. So hoping I am not hijacking too much the post as the tools have very different scope and are more complementary than competing.
- newusertoday 4y ago
  why did you chose rust for backend instead of say python or js/ts which have wider developer audience?
O__________O 4y ago
Googling “no code market size” pulls up number of different sources saying it’s roughly $10-20 billion dollar market. Zapier itself has a multi-billion dollar valuation.
- drorco 4y ago
  Zapier is definitely one of the most successful ones, although, I'll take anything about market-size and valuations with a grain of salt, especially considering these are pre-2022 numbers. The beauty with products like Zapier is that they have a very clear idea of what you can do with it: "connect product X with product Y". Many of the other no-code/low-code products are very much open-ended and leave a lot of freedom to the user, on paper this sounds great, but when you try to explain your finance admin how they can build an app that will reduce 90% of their workload, they just got no idea what to do with it and keep on doing manual work.

by drorco 4y ago

rubenfiszel 4y ago

For coders that would stay away because of those limitations, we built Windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill) as an OSS low-code builder allowing you to define flows (sequence of scripts essentially) made out of arbitrary code in Deno or Python. You can use it as a self-hosted AWS Lambda if you need to but can gradually leverage all the convenience of low-code builders when you feel ready to, and start reusing modules made by the community on https://hub.windmill.dev https://hub.windmill.dev . You can see it as an open-source alternative to Pipedream which is very different from what Tooljet is doing. So hoping I am not hijacking too much the post as the tools have very different scope and are more complementary than competing.

newusertoday 4y ago
why did you chose rust for backend instead of say python or js/ts which have wider developer audience?

O__________O 4y ago

Googling “no code market size” pulls up number of different sources saying it’s roughly $10-20 billion dollar market. Zapier itself has a multi-billion dollar valuation.

drorco 4y ago
Zapier is definitely one of the most successful ones, although, I'll take anything about market-size and valuations with a grain of salt, especially considering these are pre-2022 numbers. The beauty with products like Zapier is that they have a very clear idea of what you can do with it: "connect product X with product Y". Many of the other no-code/low-code products are very much open-ended and leave a lot of freedom to the user, on paper this sounds great, but when you try to explain your finance admin how they can build an app that will reduce 90% of their workload, they just got no idea what to do with it and keep on doing manual work.