There's little to gain from innovating on the landing page. A slick Wordpress template gets the job done just as well as a tailor-made landing page. Effort is better spent elsewhere (the product).
I picked up React Native and Expo last year for a medium-sized hobby project and found it a better experience than when I developed a Flutter app three years ago.
I have always heard the React Native dependencies were a mess, but I did not have that experience. Things were stable and Expo has pretty good documentation.
> He wouldn't hurt a fly, literally. If he caught a creature inside the house, he would carefully open the window and toss it out. Even when a cobra came out of the grass in the monsoons, he would not let us hurt it. Raised in a strict Maharashtrian Brahmin household and then in the College of Engineering in Pune, he was well-read but hadn't seen much of the real world before entering the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun.
The first three sentences paints a picture of a man of unusual ethics. The tidbit about his Bramhin background explains why he is that way.
An Indian might be able to infer the Brahmin tidbit from the first part. But as an European reader like myself, it is relevant to know that the ethics is rooted in religious upbringing and not just eccentricity (which would be the typical explanation for why a person would behave like that in Europe).
Before corona started, I walked to work every day (1.5 hours in total). It's a habit I've had since I was a student too poor to buy a bus card.
A few months after this I started noticing how just walking the stairs got me tired, and how my general well-being deterioated.
I've certainly never been "fit", but walking to work is a great start. It also does not require much dedication , something which is hard to spare if you have a busy career.
Nothing prevents anyone from being "that asshole" because nobody considers someone an asshole for researching their labor market.
The newspapers publish lists of the richest 100 in each municipality every year. It's a yearly tradition, and there are no significant protests against it.
Every business with a competent marketing department will continuously track and measure the effect of the ads they run, like how many users who click the ads turn into paying users.
My startup has tried a variety of marketing strategies from in-person campaigns on the street, video ads on YouTube, "free" PR through newspapers etc. In order to measure the effect of each approach we only did one at a time.
For us paid marketing on Facebook/Instagram was, unexpectedly, the most efficient form of marketing by far. But I would not assume that applies to all, or even most, businesses. So you should experiment with different strategies for your business.
It's the tracking part here that's hard. How do you know that the FB/IG ad was the first time the converting user heard of your product, or that it was the deciding factor? If you literally have no other way of discovering your product than this works, but it's easy for FB/IG to show your ad to users who were already going to convert and claim the conversion...
I see this so many times. Someone Googles for <product name> and then clicks on the ad for said product instead of their website which is the first organic result. Google claims it’s an ad conversion and gets the money, marketing monkey will happily take this as credit for their work and justification for further ad spend & their own salary, while the truth is that this user already made their decision to use this product (as they’ve searched for it) and didn’t need the ad.
I dislike ads in general. Specially Youtube ads. They are hysterical and for some god knows reason advertisers think its a good idea to repeat ad nauseum the same ad multiple times even on the same video. I end up hating the brand more than having some interest in the product.
(Paid) reviews on the other hand like unboxing, configuring and testing a product that I'm interested in are totally another thing. This applies to furnitures, house appliances, computers and so on. A good example is that I did not knew how much I wanted to build a fully silent computer before watching so many build videos of a certain fanless case that looks like a metal cube.
I found Budibase cumbersome to use. It looks sleek, but the overall usability is worse.
To delete a component you have to find it in the component list, open a hamburger menu and delete. This despite having a panel with component details open with plenty of screen real estate for action buttons.
The API I use outputs data in a nested json ("results: ..."). As such Budi parsed everything into a single column. There was no clear way around it. Automations maybe?
In general there was very little use of the screen with most things being empty. I guess it is earlier in development than Appsmith. I do like the aesthetics and SSO support though. It was also much easier than Appsmith to install self-hosted. I'll keep following the project.
This is fantastic feedback, thank you very much for taking the time to write this up.
We totally agree with the points you have raised - in fact we are in the process of addressing the component deletion problem; providing the ability for users to delete components with the keyboard or use an action bar that will be shown in the preview.
As for mapping data - this is something that is requested a lot and as such is high priority. We will be working on this in the coming weeks, providing full JS support and transformation logic for any source of data that you fetch from your Budibase applications.
Great to hear you had a good experience using Budibase self hosted. We are constantly trying to make the Budibase setup process easier, both through our self hosting setup CLI and through standard deployment configurations that developers are used to - such as docker compose and helm charts for kubernetes. Which method did you use?
Please do continue to follow Budibase - We are confident that you will love the features we planned on our roadmap for the next few months!
Those changes sound great! I'll definitely keep following you.
I use docker compose.
Your product is solving a very real problem that I think is under served. I developed a lot of back office tools in my old job. It was very easy to find good ideas for tools that would improve the workflow and efficiency of our sales, marketing and accounting departments.
I found that rapid prototyping and quick iterations worked great for finding good solutions for non-technical stakeholders. It made it possible to give them something concrete to "touch and feel" after every meeting. It spurred a lot of engagement.
Low-code tools like yours will really aid this kind of process, and I look forward to seeing where you'll go.
I'm a co-founder of Appsmith. Thanks for trying us out.
Would love to know the problems you ran into while self-hosting? We are replacing the install script with a docker compose, so errors should reduce. My email is abhishek@ if you need help.
The port used by the docker container could not be setup during installation. Letting the setup fail and then edit the intermediates (docker-compose.yaml) worked fine but it was not elegant compared to Budibase's installation procedure. It's an issue resolved in 5 minutes though so far from a deal breaker, and with the changed install script it should be gone.
You've made a pretty great product and I look forward to following your journey. We're already using it in production.
I first used my Google account to sign up using my phone, but decided to switch to desktop halfway through the onboarding process. It was then impossible to login because:
"Email ID not registered."
It was also impossible to register because:
"An account already exists for this email address."
I started a new free trial using another Google account.
I tried to add my REST API as a data source, but I had to initialize it with an endpoint that returned some entities. My base endpoint ('/parse') does not do this. Therefore it seems like I need to add a new connector for every API resource I have ('/parse/classes/Dog' etc).
I added a table and hooked it up to the data connector I made earlier, but despite using a previously configured connector I had to re-configure authorization headers etc. Inbuilt pagination was nice.
I clicked "Test&Finish", everything looked alright but the table in the designer did not update. After spending a few minutes trying to figure out what went wrong I tried the play button and it seems like it worked all along, just that the data changes is not reflected in the designer. That kinda ruins the WYSIWYG aspect of it.
I figured I should try one of the templates to see how a real DronaHQ app can be. It seemed to me like DronaHQ can do more complex apps than the two others. I tried the Dashboard template. It had a bunch of filter options, but nothing happened when I clicked on them.
Overall it looks like DronaHQ is more ambitious than the others. But the bugs really needs to be ironed out.
Thanks for sharing your experience @cerebralcerb .
I can understand for first time user playing around with new tool can be daunting.
e.g. there is a small notification on top of Table which highlights that "below is sample data, to view your real data that you bind. Plz go to preview mode"
But these feedbacks encourages the team to smoothen the experience further.
Yes, you are correct the platform is capable of creating quite complex apps too. We have many operational tools built on it by IT and business teams alike.
Thanks again for taking time to share your feedback.
